François de Charette, Vendée Wars, 1793-1796

François-Athanase de Charette de La Contrie, or simply François de Charette (Couffé, April 21, 1763 – Nantes, March 29, 1796), was a French general and politician. He opposed the Republic, fighting in his home region of southern Brittany and in the Vendée.

He was one of the most important military leaders of the insurrectionary movement that fought in the Wars of the Vendée. He was called “The King of the Vendée” (in French, Le Roi de La Vendée).

The Wars of the Vendée were a series of civil conflicts that erupted during the French Revolution and continued during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy.

They saw the people of the Vendée, deeply Catholic and fiercely loyal to the king, and other neighboring departments rise up against the revolutionary government, seeking to reestablish the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons and oppose the restrictive measures imposed on Catholic worship.

The First and Second Wars of the Vendée are usually grouped into a single period spanning 1793 to 1796.

The insurrection began in March 1793, when the National Convention ordered the conscription of 300,000 men to the front. It continued for the next three years, with brief truces during holidays such as Christmas and Easter.

The most intense period of fighting, in which the insurgents often defeated the Republican troops, ended with the latter’s victory in the Battle of Savenay.

The repression carried out between the summer of 1793 and the spring of 1794 – by regular republican troops and volunteer units – was particularly ferocious and would constitute, in the opinion of some historians, the first genocide in contemporary history.