The Vendée rebellion (1793) was a war of secession and national liberation: Rural peasants and locals in western France rebelled against the revolutionary central government’s conscription, anti-clerical policies, taxation, and disruption of local institutions.

The Republic responded with extreme brutality: The regime launched “infernal columns” for a scorched-earth campaign, killing tens of thousands of civilians in what became one of the most violent episodes of the French Revolution’s Terror.

The rebellion paralleled the American Revolution: Like the Americans, the Vendeans sought self-determination and freedom from distant centralized rule, but unlike the Americans, they were ultimately crushed by imperial forces.

In his exhaustive study of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, Murray Rothbard describes the American revolution as the first “successful war of national liberation” and “a people’s war, waged by the majority of Americans having the courage and the zeal to rise up against constituted ‘legitimate’ government, [and throw] off their ‘sovereign.’” How was this liberation to be achieved? Through an act of secession and through establishing new polities that were free of legal and political control from another, larger polity. This was certainly radical—and essentially unheard of—at the time, as historian David Armitage shows:  

The notion that “one People” might find it “necessary” to dissolve its links with a larger polity—that is, that it might legitimately attempt to secede from an empire or a composite state—was almost entirely unprecedented and barely accepted at the time of the American Revolution. … [B]y and large, existing empires and states fiercely resisted movements toward secession and did all they could to suppress them…

The notion that “one People” might find it “necessary” to dissolve its links with a larger polity—that is, that it might legitimately attempt to secede from an empire or a composite state—was almost entirely unprecedented and barely accepted at the time of the American Revolution. … [B]y and large, existing empires and states fiercely resisted movements toward secession and did all they could to suppress them…

Consequently, as Armitage notes, the American Revolution, in the centuries that followed, became the model for other movements for national liberation, from Europe to Latin America and even to Asia.

Among the first to attempt to use the American Revolution to support its own movement were the French Revolutionaries. But there was a problem. The French Revolution was not about liberating one part of France from the metropolis at the center. Rather, as suggested by Ralph Raico and other historians, the French Revolution was largely a battle of one group of elites attempting to seize power from another group of elites. Beyond the very earliest stages of the Revolution, the claims of fighting for freedom were largely window dressing on a fight to continue the power of the central state under new management. 

Ironically, it was counterrevolutionaries who, in some cases, came the closest to emulating the experience of the American revolution in the form of a true fight for self-determination, secession, and national liberation. 

The most notable of these movements was the Vendée rebellion, also known as “The War in the Vendée,” or simply, “the Vendée.” The Vendée rebels were not fighting to take control of the French state, or even to “reform” France. Rather, they fought for self-determination and the right to govern themselves in accordance with long-standing local laws, customs, and property arrangements. They were fighting a war of national liberation against the revolutionary government that was seeking to further centralize political power and seize control over all non-state institutions.

The Context: Centralization of Power under the Revolutionaries

The Vendée rebellion broke out in early 1793 as the revolution was approaching its most radical phase. France had entered war with Austria in the spring of 1792, prompting a radicalization of French state policy against alleged enemies of the Republic. The........

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