executed between January and July 1796. The Vendée still experienced last and brief uprisings with a third war in 1799, a fourth in 1815 and a fifth in 1832, but they were on a much smaller scale. The number of victims is estimated at approximately 200,000 dead, including approximately 170,000 for the inhabitants of the military Vendée, i.e. between 20 and 25% of the population of the insurgent territory. Background In the rural Vendée, the local nobility seems to have been more permanently in power than in other parts of France. Alexis de Tocqueville, of France, noted that most French nobles lived in cities by 1789. An Intendants' survey showed one of the few areas where the nobility still lived with the peasants was the Vendée. In this particularly-isolated feudal stronghold, the class conflict that drove the revolution in Paris and other parts of France was further suppressed by the institutional strength of the Catholic church in alliance with the nobility. Antienlightenment author Francois Mignet argued that when the revolutionaries wanted to reduce the Church's influence, something which the people of the Vendée region considered unimaginable. In 1791, two representatives on mission informed the National Assembly that the Vendée was being mobilized against the democracy, and this news was swiftly followed by the exposure of a royalist plot organized by the Marquis de la Rouërie. Partisans of the Vendée argue that this plotting against the French government was a response to The Terror (a period between 1793 and 1794 where thousands of dissidents were beheaded by guillotine), in opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and the introduction of a levy of 300,000 on the whole of France, decreed by the National Convention in February 1793. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy required all clerics to transfer their allegiance from the monarchy, nobility, and feudalism to the Constitution and, by extension, to the increasingly anti-clerical National Constituent Assembly. All but seven of the 160 bishops refused the oath, as did about half of the parish priests. Reform of the feudal clergy and secularization of citizens triggered the Vendée belligerence; another trigger was conscription to the Republican army. The March 1793 conscription requiring Vendeans to fill their district's quota of the national total of 300,000 enraged the Lords, clergy, and their populace, who took up arms instead as "The Catholic Army", "Royal" being added later, and fought for "above