War_in_the_Vendée The War in Vendée (1793 to 1796) was a civil war and counterrevolution in Vendée between Royalists and Republicans during the French Revolution. Some scholars consider the killing of the hundreds of thousands of Catholic Vendeans by the anticlerical French state at the end of the war to be the first modern genocide. Vendée is a coastal region, immediately south of the Loire River in west central France.