Battle of Savenay, 1793: the end of the Virée de Galerne

Savenay was the end of the most desperate episode of the war in the Vendée. The army that fought there was no longer really an army but the hungry, exhausted remnant of a whole people on the move, so ragged, the Marquise de La Rochejaquelein remembered, that its people could hardly recognize one another. Its destruction was followed by the mass execution of prisoners.²

Who won the Battle of Savenay and why?

The French Republic won. Kléber and Marceau's Army of the West caught what was left of the Vendéen army, by then less a fighting force than a starving crowd of soldiers, wounded men, women and children, penned in a small town with its back to the Loire marshes, and broke it on the morning of 23 December.³

Background: the rising and the Virée de Galerne

The rising in the west began in March 1793. On 24 February the Convention had decreed a levy of 300,000 men for the armies on the frontiers, to be filled by lot wherever volunteers were lacking, and when the drawing began on 10 March the peasants of many villages rose against the officials sent to supervise it. Armed bands formed around leaders such as d'Elbée, Cathelineau, Bonchamps and Charette, and the massacre of republicans at Machecoul, south of Nantes, made the Vendée the Republic's enemy number one.⁴

By autumn the Republic had brought in the veterans of the garrison of Mainz, the Mayençais, with Kléber among their generals. On 17 October 1793 the main Vendéen army was crushed at Cholet, where its two ablest leaders, d'Elbée and Bonchamps, were mortally wounded. The historian H. Morse Stephens, writing in the 1880s, credited the Republican victory mainly to the Mayençais, their generals and the energy of the representatives on mission who marched with them.⁵ › Battle of La Tremblaye, 1793

What followed is known as the Virée de Galerne, the turn to the northwest. Several tens of thousands of Vendéens, women and children among them, crossed the Loire and, joined by the Breton chouans, marched through Maine and Brittany to the Channel coast, hoping to meet an English fleet at Granville. The town held, defended by the representative Lecarpentier, and no English fleet came. The Vendéens turned back in a series of very bloody battles.⁶

Armies and commanders

On the Vendéen side the leaders were nobles and peasant captains who had survived Cholet, among them Henri de La Rochejaquelein, Stofflet, Lyrot and the chevalier des Essarts. They no longer led a field army so much as a moving crowd of soldiers, priests, wounded men, women and children. Early in December they tried to take Angers and failed; their peasants, the Marquise wrote, had never learned to storm even the smallest fortification, and they would not go forward under the guns.⁷

By the end of November François Séverin Marceau, a young general, was at the head of the Republican troops, as both Kléber's memoir and Westermann's report show, and Kléber led his own division beside him. Kléber wrote that his friend would undertake nothing without consulting him, that he himself, the cooler of the two, was there to restrain Marceau's dash, and that they pledged not to part until they had brought victory back to their flags.⁸

From Le Mans to Blain

On 12 December the Republicans caught the Vendéens at Le Mans. That evening Westermann's cavalry and infantry stormed the barricades and drove the defenders back to the town square, and the firing went on all night. Westermann boasted of a horrible carnage; Kléber blamed the confusion of that night on generals who rode away from their own routed column and left his staff to rally it. The Marquise de La Rochejaquelein, who escaped in the crowd, called it simply the rout of Le Mans.⁹

The survivors marched day and night for the Loire at Ancenis, hoping to cross back into the Vendée. Henri de La Rochejaquelein and Stofflet got over to the far bank with a small party, but the army could not follow, and it lost its general. How many crossed is disputed: the Marquise wrote that very few men got over, while Westermann and Decaën, sent ahead to stop the crossing, reported five or six hundred over on rafts and a second load as large drowned.¹⁰

On 21 December Kléber, by his own account, found the Vendéens drawn up in front of Blain and planned to attack from three sides at dawn, but a downpour slowed the brigade that was to turn the town. At midnight, in cold rain, the Vendéens slipped away toward Savenay; both the Marquise and the Vendéen officer Gibert describe the night march.¹¹

The commanders' decisions

For the Vendéens Savenay was a trap they could see closing. The town stands on a ridge above the marshes north of the Loire, and once the Republicans held the heights there was nowhere left to go. On the evening of 22 December, the Marquise recalled, Marigny told her that resistance was impossible and that within twelve hours the army would be exterminated, and urged her to flee in the night. She left with her mother; the leaders stayed to fight.¹²

On the Republican side the question was when to strike. Kléber recalled that the representatives on mission Prieur of the Marne, Bourbotte and Turreau arrived at nightfall shouting for an immediate attack, and that Westermann offered to storm the town in the dark. Kléber refused, Marceau backed him, and the army spent the night closing a crescent round the town. The Vendéen account agrees that no serious attack came that day.¹³

The battle in phases

22 December. Westermann's cavalry caught the Vendéen rearguard outside Savenay and skirmished with it for hours, as both Westermann's report and the Marquise's memoir describe. When the Vendéens came out of the woods in front of the town to drive the horsemen off, Kléber, by his own account, sent three hundred grenadiers and a gun against them from two sides, and the Vendéens fell back into the town.¹⁴

The night. Kléber had his division in line by midnight. Westermann reported that he brought a gun up to the advance guard and cannonaded the town through the night, and that the Vendéens answered; inside the town, the Marquise remembered, the musketry began as soon as the gates were shut.¹⁵

Dawn, 23 December. After a reconnaissance at first light Kléber, by his own account, sent the columns in: Canuel on the left, Marceau in the center, himself on the right. In his memoir, when grenadiers in the advance guard fell back crying that they had no cartridges, he reminded them that they had agreed to finish the enemy with their musket butts, and sent them back with a battalion in support. The Vendéens fought back hard before their line gave way.¹⁶

Turning point: the town falls

Then the line broke. Kléber describes the columns crossing the town, the Vendéen gunners cut down at their pieces and the pursuit fanning out in every direction; Westermann, in his report, called it a horrible butchery and wrote that the last guns fell into Republican hands.¹⁷

The fugitives had nowhere to run. Kléber and Westermann both report that many drowned in the marshes and that those who hid in the woods and villages were hunted down, and both list the Vendéens' last guns, wagons and baggage among the spoils.¹⁸

Counting the losses

No one counted the dead with any precision. Martin, in the Encyclopaedia Universalis, speaks of several thousand Vendéens killed near the town; Westermann reported that more than six thousand were buried in the area around Savenay alone. Many more were taken prisoner. Kléber admitted to a few men killed and many wounded on the evening of the 22nd.¹⁹

Aftermath

The Catholic and Royal Army that had crossed the Loire in October no longer existed. Kléber wrote that the prisoners were judged by revolutionary tribunals on the orders of the representatives, and that Nantes was the scene of atrocities his pen refused to describe. There the representative Carrier emptied the prisons by shootings and drownings that killed several thousand people. Stephens judged that even royalist historians had to admit that the columns that followed under General Turreau destroyed fewer lives than Carrier and his tribunal.²⁰

In January 1794 General Turreau, brother of the representative of the same name, divided the army into columns that marched through the rebel country burning villages and killing their inhabitants, the infernal columns. Stephens compared the ravages to Turenne's devastation of the Palatinate; Martin notes that some generals kept to purely military operations while others burned, raped and killed.²¹

The war went on in other forms under Charette and others, and it ended only in early 1796. Martin puts the loss of life across the whole Vendée region at about 200,000 people, from one cause or another; the Loire-Atlantique département's heritage notes speak of more than 200,000 dead.²²

Legacy and memory

Savenay closed the Vendée's great war in the field. The Loire-Atlantique heritage notes call it the battle that put an end to the Wars of the Vendée, and Martin observes that before their destruction the Vendéens had terrified the region and the whole of France and revived the chouannerie.²³

The war became a symbol almost at once. The revolutionaries made the Vendée an emblem of counter-revolution as early as 1793, Martin writes, which helps explain the exceptional violence of the fighting and the lasting traces it left in collective memory. For the Vendéen side the Marquise de La Rochejaquelein's memoirs, in their third edition by 1816, made Savenay the tragic last scene of the march north of the Loire.²⁴