The infernal columns () were operations led by the French Revolutionary general Louis Marie Turreau in the

War in the Vendée The War in the Vendée () was a counter-revolutionary insurrection that took place in the Vendée region of French First Republic, France from 1793 to 1796, during the French Revolution. The Vendée is a coastal region, located immediately so ...

, after the failure of the Royalist Virée de Galerne. Following the passage on 1 August 1793 and 1 October 1793 by the

National Convention The National Convention () was the constituent assembly of the Kingdom of France for one day and the French First Republic for its first three years during the French Revolution, following the two-year National Constituent Assembly and the ...

of laws, the National Convention stated that the goal was to exterminate "brigands" in the area south of the river

Loire The Loire ( , , ; ; ; ; ) is the longest river in France and the 171st longest in the world. With a length of , it drains , more than a fifth of France's land, while its average discharge is only half that of the Rhône. It rises in the so ...

(the so-called

Vendée Vendée () is a department in the Pays de la Loire region in Western France, on the Atlantic coast. In 2019, it had a population of 685,442. Nicolas Delahaye et Pierre-Marie Gaborit, ''Les 12 Colonnes infernales de Turreau'' (in French), p. 53. The employment and actions of these "infernal columns" continues to be a subject of heated debate, both in France and abroad. French historian Reynald Secher has gone so far as to characterise their operations as a "Franco-French

genocide Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people. Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term, defined genocide as "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" by ...

," while Claude Langlois of the Institute of History of the French Revolution has derided Secher's claims as "quasi-mythological." The debate has become highly politicized. The term 'infernal column' has also been used for a similar movement in the

Voulet–Chanoine Mission The Voulet–Chanoine Mission, also called Central African-Chad Mission (), was a French military expedition sent out from Senegal in 1898 to conquer the Chad Basin and unify all French territories in West Africa. This expedition operated jointly ...

References

External links

www.rembarre.fr.
La Vendée de janvier à mai 1794 (in French).

1793–1993. Un autre bicentenaire (in French). War in the Vendée Massacres committed by the French First Republic {{France-battle-stub

See also

References

External links