This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In March 1793 the Vendee region of western France rose against the Revolutionary government, provoked chiefly by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which had required parish priests to swear allegiance to the revolutionary state rather than to Rome, and by a mass conscription levy ordered the same month. All but seven of France's hundred sixty bishops had refused the oath, as had roughly half the parish clergy, and the Vendee's people took up arms in defense of the refractory priests who had stayed with them and against the levy that fell on the same villages. Organized as the Catholic and Royal Army under leaders including Jacques Cathelineau, Henri de la Rochejaquelein and Francois de Charette, the rising fought Republican forces commanded by generals including Lazare Hoche and Jean Baptiste Kleber through 1793 and into 1794.
The Republic broke the Vendean main army at the Battle of Savenay in December 1793, and the so called infernal columns then carried out a scorched earth campaign across the region in early 1794 that killed civilians alongside combatants and included the closure and desecration of churches. Negotiated peace agreements, chiefly at La Jaunaye in February 1795, ended most of the fighting, though sporadic royalist uprisings recurred as late as 1832, and the Directory formally declared the war over in July 1796. The Concordat of 1801 later restored Catholic worship across France, addressing the grievance the rising had originally taken up arms over.