This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Historians remain divided over what happened in the Vendee in 1793 and 1794. The historian Reynald Secher has argued the Republic's campaign against the region meets the modern legal definition of genocide, a position the French National Assembly declined to adopt when it was proposed as a resolution, and other historians, including Michel Vovelle and Charles Tilly, have challenged Secher's specific methodology and casualty figures while still accepting that severe civilian atrocities occurred during the infernal columns' campaign. No state or international body has made a formal genocide determination, and this atlas records the toll as debated, between one hundred seventy thousand and two hundred thousand dead, rather than adopting either side's total as settled.
The religious dimension of the rising went beyond its original cause. The Vendee's people rose to defend refractory priests and keep their parish churches open under clergy they recognized as legitimate, but the Republic's later campaign in the region extended past suppressing an armed rebellion to include the killing of priests and religious and the desecration of churches, part of the wider revolutionary program of dechristianization underway across France at the same time. That escalation, from a regional revolt over conscription and clerical oaths into a war reaching into the churches themselves, is why historians read the conflict as a religious war and not merely a peasant uprising against the state.