The inhabitants of La Vendée, about 800,000, were well-to-do, and had suffered less from degenerate feudalism than the east of France. They lived on better terms with the landlords, and had less cause to welcome the Revolution. Therefore, too, they clung to the nonjuring clergy. At heart, they were royalist, aristocratic and clerical, uniting anti-revolutionary motives that acted separately elsewhere. That is the cause of their rising; but the secret of their power is in the military talent, a thing more rare than courage, that was found among them. The disturbances that broke out in several places on the day of enrolment, were conducted by men of the people. Cathelineau, one of the earliest, was a carrier, sacristan in his village, who had never seen a shot fired when he went out with a few hundred neighbours and took Cholet. By his side there was a gamekeeper, who had been a soldier, and came from the eastern frontier. As his name was Christopher, the Germans corrupted it into Stoffel, and he made it famous in the form of Stofflet. While the conflict was carried on by small bands there was no better man to lead them. He and Charette held out longest, and had not been conquered when the clergy, for whom they fought, betrayed them.
The popular and democratic interval was short. After the first few days the nobles were at the head of affairs. They deemed the cause desperate, that one of them had promoted the rising, scarcely one refused to join in it. The one we know best is Lescure, because his wife's memoirs have been universally read. Lescure formed the bond between gentry and clergy, for the cause was religious as much as political. He would have been the third generalissimo, but he was disabled by a wound, and put forward his cousin, Henri de la Rochejaquelein, in preference to Stofflet. We shall presently see that a grave suspicion darkens his fame. Like Lescure, d'Elbée was a man of policy and management; but he was no enthusiast. He desired a reasonable restoration, not a reaction; and he said just before his death that when the pacification came it would be well to keep fanatics in order.
Far above all these men in capacity for war, and on a level with the best in character, was the Marquis de Bonchamps. He understood the art of manoeuvring large masses of men; and as his followers would have to meet large masses, when the strife became deadly, he sought to train them for it. He made them into that which they did not want to be, and for which they were ill-fitted. It is due to his immediate command that the war could be carried on upon a large scale; and that men who had begun with a rush and a night attack, dispersing when the foe stood his ground, afterwards defeated the veterans of the Rhine under the best generals of republican France. Bonchamps always urged the need of sending a force to rouse Brittany; but the day when the army crossed the Loire was the day of his death.