Le Clos Galerne

Henri de la Rochejaquelein was aged just 21 years when he was unanimously elected commander in chief of the Armées Catholique et Royale, the royalist armies based in western France who sought to overturn the new post-Revolutionary order and reinstate the French monarch. Sadly his courage and evident enthusiasm for the cause, exhibited during his participation in a number of victories during 1793, could not compensate for his lack of experience. His election came just three days after this army had been routed at Cholet, after which the army crossed the Loire at Saint-Florent-le-Vieil and headed for Granville in the hope of meeting reinforcements from England. The venture failed, and Rochejaquelein’s forces were hunted down with great loss of life.

The Guerre de Vendée waged by this counter-revolutionary force did much to shape the viticultural landscape of the Nantais and Anjou. Many of the great châteaux of the Muscadet region were ransacked and burnt to the ground, including the original Château du Coing de St-Fiacre today in the hands of Vignobles Günther-Chéreau and Château de Chasseloir, part of the Chéreau-Carré empire. Likewise many of the bridges, embankments and locks which once ran the course of the Layon, which had been canalised during the reign of Louis XVIII (1755 – 1824), were destroyed.

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