The War in the Vendée remains among the most divisive topics in the historiography of the French Revolution, with historians typically strongly supporting the rebels of the revolutionary government. The war's brutal conduct is usually explained either as a necessary reaction to the circumstances of total war, or as an ideological inevitability that can be traced back to 1789. This study seeks to transcend this dichotomy by viewing the Revolution as being driven not by any static ideology but by a nationalism that manifested itself differently throughout the 1790s. While the revolutionary nationalism of 1789 appears relatively benign, by 1793 the government chose to embrace a more extreme form of this ideology. They chose to do so, however, because of the circumstances of total war, vowing to destroy any of France's internal enemies who did not comply with the war effort. They became obsessed with a mythical image of the Vendée as the nexus of all of France's enemies. Thus, I argue that the government from 1793-94 chose to embrace a harsh counterinsurgency policy in the Vendée because they viewed the region as a cesspool of counterrevolution whose mere existence was incompatible with the new French nation which the Revolution sought to establish. Those massacred in the excessive violence should be viewed not as victims of ideological genocide or the unavoidable excesses of civil war, but as the victims of nationalist-driven state terror. By summer 1794, as the politics of the Revolution became more moderate, the Thermidorian regime took a more sensible approach to suppressing the counterrevolution that allowed them to crush the uprising without such excessive violence against civilians.