Battle of La Tremblaye, 1793: the shot that felled Lescure

La Tremblaye was a short fight, and it is remembered mostly for one shot. It came in the week that broke the great Vendéen revolt: two days later the rebel army was beaten at Cholet, and within days its survivors were crossing the Loire. One of the best accounts comes from the woman who nursed the wounded general, his wife, the future Marquise de La Rochejaquelein, whose memoirs were published years later.²

The Vendée in revolt

In March 1793 the peasants of the Mauges and the country around Cholet rose against the levy of 300,000 men decreed by the Convention. They had no uniforms and little training, but they took guns from their enemies, and under leaders such as Cathelineau, Bonchamps, d'Elbée and Henri de La Rochejaquelein their Catholic and Royal Army won a string of victories through the spring, taking Thouars, Fontenay and Saumur.³

Louis Marie de Salgues, Marquis de Lescure, born at Versailles in 1766 according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was a nobleman whose estate of Clisson lay in Poitou. His wife writes that he entered the École militaire at thirteen, lived for piety and study, and never lost his calm. Arrested with his family and held at Bressuire in the spring of 1793, he was free again when the Republicans abandoned the town, and he became one of the rebels' commanders. She adds that in a war where generals fought hand to hand, no man died by Lescure's hand, and that he never let a prisoner be killed or mistreated if he could prevent it.⁴

October 1793: the Republic strikes back

In August the Convention sent against the Vendée the army of Mainz, veteran troops brought from the eastern frontier, with orders to destroy the revolt. Its first steps went badly, with defeats at Coron, Pont Barré and Torfou in September. By October the Republican forces had been merged into a new Army of the West under a single command. It won at Châtillon and moved on to Mortagne, which the Mainz troops occupied on 14 October, then marched for Cholet.⁵

The shot at La Tremblaye

The Vendéen generals planned to catch the Republicans at Cholet, with Bonchamps coming from the direction of Tiffauges and the main army from Mortagne. The Republicans moved more slowly than expected. On 15 October Lescure, at the head of the vanguard, met them in the avenues of the château of La Tremblaye, halfway between Mortagne and Cholet, before Bonchamps could arrive.⁶

In his wife's account, Lescure rode forward with young Beauvolliers, climbed a mound and found a Republican post twenty paces away. "Forward, my friends!" he called. A ball struck him beside the left eyebrow and came out behind the ear, and he fell senseless. His peasants charged past their general without seeing him and pushed the Republicans back, but the boy beside him cried that he was dead, the alarm spread, and a reserve of Mainz troops counterattacked and put the Vendéens to flight.⁷

His servant, Bontemps, found him still breathing. An officer, Renou, tied him onto the horse behind Bontemps, and two soldiers on foot held him upright all the way to Beaupréau through the rout. Because no one saw him again that day, the army believed him dead.⁸

From La Tremblaye to Cholet

The rebels fell back into Cholet and, during the night, marched on toward Beaupréau to rally. Henri de La Rochejaquelein wanted to hold the town, but the men would not stay. A rearguard of cavalry and a few small guns made a show of defending Cholet on the morning of 16 October, and the Republicans entered it cautiously. The Marquise judged that La Tremblaye had been "more of a retreat than a defeat"; the departmental archives of Maine-et-Loire put it among the victories that opened the road to Cholet and the reconquest of the West.⁹

On 17 October the Vendéens came back and attacked the Republicans at Cholet, and lost. Bonchamps was mortally wounded and d'Elbée was hit several times, and the beaten army fled for the Loire. With Henri de La Rochejaquelein, aged twenty, as their new commander, the column of Vendéens, some 100,000 people by the archives' count, crossed the river and set out on the march north known as the Virée de Galerne.¹⁰ › Battle of Savenay, 1793

Lescure's last weeks

Lescure crossed the Loire with the army by boat and was carried on in a cart, then in a carriage. He did not recover. The authority record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France gives his death as 4 November 1793, at La Pellerine in Mayenne. His wife describes his final collapse at Ernée, the decision to carry him on rather than let his body fall into Republican hands, and his last hour in the carriage on the road beyond.¹¹

Why La Tremblaye matters

On its own La Tremblaye was a small action, but it came at the worst moment for the rebels. It cost them one of their most respected commanders two days before their decisive defeat, and it let the Republicans into Cholet, the heart of the insurgent country. According to the history site Histoire pour tous, under the Restoration Lescure became a royalist hero, and in 1818 Robert Lefèvre painted the portrait now in the museum at Cholet, part of a series of Vendéen leaders commissioned by Louis XVIII. On the same date in 1810, on the coast of Spain, a Polish garrison beat a British landing at Fuengirola.¹²