Charette Is Executed at Nantes

Painting by Julien Le Blant of the execution of General Charette on 29 March 1796: Charette stands alone in a bare square before a firing squad.

WHAT HAPPENED

On the 29 March 1796, François-Athanase Charette de la Contrie was shot by firing squad in Nantes. His death, coming soon after the execution of Jean-Nicolas Stofflet in February, marked the definitive end of the Vendée War that had begun in 1793 and brought its main military phase to a close ^[1].

After the destruction of the main “Grand Army” during the Virée de Galerne ^[2] in late 1793, Charette and Stofflet had kept the rebellion going by carving out near-untouchable fiefdoms from which they launched continual ambushes. Their executions removed the last irreconcilable bands that had fought to defend the region, and to avenge it, against the Republic’s repression.

For all their complete military defeat, the near-simultaneous deaths of Charette and Stofflet bound them together in a common tragic fate that counter-revolutionaries would memorialize at length. In later “white” (royalist) historiography, their legends were fixed in place, with Charette especially recast as a flamboyant dandy and peerless master of guerrilla war, set against Stofflet’s reputation ^[3] as a harsh, brutal soldier.

Suffice it to say, as actual human beings, in life, both were more than those stereotypes.

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Notes

[1]The war would continue in other forms until 1832, though increasingly in ways, and for reasons, only loosely connected to 1793. ↩
[2]The ill-fated crossing of the Loire into Brittany and Normandy by the Vendéan army and its dependants followed the crushing defeat at Cholet on 18 October 1793, after which approximately 90,000 people were dead. ↩
[3]The fact that he was merely a gamekeeper, and that he was disliked by the lady who more or less fixed the narrative of the wars, obviously had nothing whatever to do with his subsequent reputation. /s ↩

Related reading

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Timeline context

March 1796 · 1 entry →

7 May 1748Birth of Olympe de Gouges→25 Aug 1767Birth of Saint-Just→29 Mar 1796Charette Is Executed at NantesYou are here

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