Genocide In the Name of Democracy - The French Revolution and the Extermination of the Catholic Vendèe

The justification to single out and exterminate another group of people can come from any group coalesced around any ideological system of belief, be it religious or secular in nature. In Revolutionary France, the secular forces of the newly established French Republic were threatened on all sides by the old system of empire they had just overthrown in the guise of the Christian Empires of Europe, a form of civilization that had repressed the French people for many centuries, as they saw it. However, the Catholic peasantry known as the Vendèe, interpreted current events differently, viewing the French Revolution as the overthrow of a divinely appointed monarch by secular heretics. After a year long war with the Vendèe from 1893 to 1894, when the Vendèe were defeated at the Second Battle of Cholet in October of 1894, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the eradication of the Vendèe in the name of preserving the French Republic.