revolt against conscription that cascaded to include other complaints. For a period of several months, control of the Vendée slipped from the hands of Parisian revolutionaries. They ascribed the revolt to the resurgence of royalist ideas: when faced with insurrection of the people against the Revolution of the People, they were unable to see it as anything but an aristocratic plot. Mona Ozouf and François Furet maintain it was not. The entire territory, none of it unified under a single idea from the ancien regime, had never been a region morally at odds with the rest of the nation. It was not the fall of the old regime that aroused the population against the Revolution, but rather the construction of the new regime into locally unacceptable principles and forms: the new map of districts and departments, the administrative dictatorship, and above all the non-juring priests. Rebellion had first flared in August 1792, but had been immediately quelled. Even the regicide did not trigger insurrection. What did was the forced conscription. Although the Vendeans, to use the term loosely, wrote God and King large on their flags, they invested those symbols of their tradition with something other than regret for the lost regime. Genocide controversy The popular historiography of the War in the Vendée is deeply rooted in conflicts between different schools of French historiography, and, as a result, writings on the revolt are generally highly partisan, coming down strongly in support of the revolutionary government or the Vendéen royalists. This conflict originated in the 19th century between two groups of historians, the Bleus, named for their support of the republicans, who based their findings on archives from the Blancs, named for their membership in and support of the monarchy and the Catholic Church, who based their findings on "local oral histories". The Bleus generally argue that the Vendée was not a popular uprising, but was the result of noble and clerical manipulation of the peasantry. One of the leaders of this school of history, Charles-Louis Chassin, published eleven volumes of letters, archives, and other materials supporting this position. The Blancs, generally members of the former nobility and clergy themselves, argue (using some of the same documents as Chassin, but also drawing from contemporary oral histories) that the peasants were acting out of a "genuine love" for the nobility and a desire to protect the Catholic Church. The Counter-Enlightenment interpretation was