Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne: The Historial of the Vendée, Solzhenitsyn's Memorial and Charette's Capture at La Chabotterie

Required Activities

• Work through the ten rooms of the Historial de la Vendée, which set out seven ages of the département over 7,000 years, and pick out which of its seven spaces holds the objects you would come back for — only 3,000 of the museum's 20,000 are on show at a time

• Walk the Chemin de la Mémoire from the Mémorial over the footbridge across the Boulogne, past Pierre Culot's Mur calciné and La Déchirure végétale at the foot of the hill, then climb to the chapel of Petit-Luc and count the 22 marble tables of names of those killed on the night of 28 February 1794

• At the Logis de la Chabotterie, walk out from the 16th-century Bas-Poitou house into the wood and find the cross that marks the spot where Travot's men took Charette on 23 March 1796

• At the chapel of Petit-Luc, work out how much of the old church of Notre-Dame is left — only the choir survived 28 February 1794, and the chapel of 1867 stands on that footprint — and read the quotations from Jean Rivière and Paul Claudel set along the path below it