Historically, Poitou was ruled by the
count of Poitou, a continuous line of which can be traced back to an appointment of
Charlemagne in 778. A
marshland called the
Poitevin Marsh (French
Marais Poitevin) is located along the
Gulf of Poitou, on the west coast of France, just north of
La Rochelle and west of
Niort. At the conclusion of the
Battle of Taillebourg in the
Saintonge War, which was decisively won by the French, King Henry III of England recognized his loss of continental
Plantagenet territory to France. This was ratified by the
Treaty of Paris of 1259, by which King Louis annexed
Normandy,
Maine,
Anjou, and Poitou). During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Poitou was a hotbed of
Huguenot (French Calvinist Protestant) activity among the nobility and bourgeoisie. The Protestants were discriminated against and brutally attacked during the
French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Under the
Edict of Nantes, such discrimination was temporarily suspended but this measure was repealed by the French Crown. Some of the French colonists, later known as
Acadians, who settled beginning in 1604 in eastern North America came from southern Poitou. They established settlements in what is now
Nova Scotia, and later in
New Brunswick—both of which were taken over in the later 18th century by the English, (after their 1763 victory in the
Seven Years' War). After the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in 1685, the French Roman
Catholic Church conducted a strong
Counter-Reformation effort. In 1793, this effort had contributed to the three-year-long open revolt against the French Revolutionary Government in the Bas-Poitou (Département of
Vendée). Similarly, during
Napoleon's
Hundred Days in 1815, the Vendée stayed loyal to the Restoration Monarchy of King
Louis XVIII. Napoleon dispatched 10,000 troops under General
Jean Maximilien Lamarque to
pacify the region. As noted by historian Andre Lampert: "The persistent Huguenots of 17th Century Poitou and the fiercely Catholic rebellious Royalists of what came be the Vendée of the late 18th Century had ideologies very different, indeed diametrically opposed to each other. The common thread connecting both phenomena is a continuing assertion of a local identity and opposition to the central government in
Paris, whatever its composition and identity. (...) In the region where
Louis XIII and
Louis XIV had encountered stiff resistance, the
House of Bourbon gained loyal and militant supporters exactly when it had been overthrown and when a Bourbon loyalty came to imply a local loyalty in opposition to the new central government, that of
Robespierre." ==In fiction==