War in the Vendée was not until the social unrest and the fear of The Terror (a period between 1793–94 where tens of thousands of people were beheaded by use of guillotine) combined with the external pressures from 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, that the region erupted. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy required all clerics to swear allegiance to it and, by extension, to the increasingly anti-clerical National Constituent Assembly. All but seven of the 160 bishops refused the oath,
Political terror scale successful at oppressing their citizens or who have committed acts of violence in the past to deter resistance generally do not have to commit many acts of violence in order to maintain control. For example, the former USSR would score low on the Political Terror Scale and that score would not reflect the overall level of oppression present in that society. Political terror scale Political Terror Scale is a yearly measure of state inflicted political terror. It was developed in the early 1980s by researchers at Purdue University and is currently managed by Mark Gibney of the University of North