Many people do not know this but during the French Revolution that started in 1789, the country was facing two different enemies. The first and most threatening enemies were France's neighboring countries; Prussia and The empire of Austria Hungary. The other enemy of France was in the country, they were catholic royalists using peasants to fight for their cause. The neighboring countries wanted to attack France in order to save the King and the Queen and also to stop the spread of French revolutionary ideas crossing their borders. The French nobility (royalist) was arming peasants in the south west of France in a region called Vendee. The French army was fighting on two fronts, internally and externally. This was a difficult situation for the country.The civil war in Vendee lasted from 1793 to 1796, these peasants armies were hard to fight against because of their advantage of the terrain, thus they were using gorilla warfare tactics to destabilize the army. The new government of France was a Republic and did not tolerate anything that had to do with the King and these peasants wanted the return of the King. This Conflict ended up very bloody, more than 600,000 people (women, men, kids, old, young, babies) were massacred in the Vendee region. Robespierre, head of state, asked the French army to kill every single person in that region. He wanted to show other regions of France, what their fate would be if they ever rebel against the government. Not very many history books or even text books address the genocide of peasants in Vendee. When i learned French history in middle and high school, we never ever mention this, however, we did talk about other aspects of the French Revolution. I guess this is a controversial topic in French history, I head about this genocide for the first time in the United States when i took a French Revolution.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J526unuYPP8
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