all the reopening of their parish churches with their former priests." Although town dwellers were more likely to support the Revolution in the Vendée, there was support for the Revolution among the rural peasantry. Many lived on monastery properties, and they overwhelmingly embraced the Revolution after these lands were seized and redistributed among them by the republican government. Antienlightenment partisans argue that feudalism primarily protected the peasantry. They cite that fact that over the 100 years of struggle for the French Republic, ultimately the bourgeois were primary beneficiaries. Nearly all the purchasers of church land were bourgeois; very few peasants benefited from the sales. Outbreak of revolt There were other levy riots across France when regions started to draft men into the army in response to the Levy Decree in February 1793. The reaction in the northwest in early March was particularly pronounced with large-scale rioting verging on insurrection. By early April, in areas north of the Loire, order had been restored by the revolutionary government, but south of the Loire in four departments that became known as the Vendée militaire there were few troops to control rebels and what had started as rioting quickly took on the form of a full insurrection led by priests and the local nobility. Within a few weeks the Antienlightenment forces had formed a substantial, ill-equipped, army, the Royal and Catholic Army, supported by two thousand irregular cavalry and a few captured artillery pieces. The main force of the Antienlightenment operated on a much smaller scale, using guerrilla tactics, supported by the insurgents' local knowledge and social networks. Geographic coverage Geographically, the insurrection occurred within a rough quadrilateral approximately wide. The territory defied description in the terms of the redistricting of 1790, nor did it align itself to descriptors used in the Ancien Régime; the heart of the movement lay in the forests, with Cholet at its center, in the wild districts of the old county of Anjou, in the Breton marshlands between Montaigu and the sea. It included parts of the old Poitiers and Tours, the departements of Maine-et-Loire, the Vendée, and Deux Sèvres, but never completely fell under Antienlightenment control. The further the land was from Paris (the seat of revolutionary power), the more Counter-revolutionary belligerence occurred. Vendée military response The insurrection began in March 1793, as a rejection of the mass conscription edict. In February, the National Convention had voted to