The Companions of Jehu were formed in the Lyon region of France in April 1795 to hunt down Jacobins implicated in the Reign of Terror. It is possible that they were founded by The Marquis de Besignan, who also founded royalist underground groups in Forez and Dauphiné with the Prince of Condé in 1796. Their victims are believed to have numbered at least in the hundreds. They were made famous by the 1857 novel The Companions of Jehu by Alexandre Dumas which presented a highly romanticised account of them.