Renée Bordereau

Renée Bordereau (born 1770 Soulaines-sur-Aubance - 1824), nicknamed The Angevin, was a French woman who disguised herself as a man and fought as a Royalist cavalier in the troops of Charles Melchior Artus de Bonchamps during the Vendéan insurrection against the French Revolution (in 1793).

She is reputed to have killed some twenty of the opposing revolutionary Bleues with her own hands. A unit led by her threw six hundred Republican soldiers from the heights of Roche-de-Mûrs in the commune of Mûrs-Erigné, south of the town of Angers, Pays de la Loire, into the Louet River below.

Her effectiveness is as a soldier is attested by independent sources, including Madame de La Rochejaquelein, who reported "She was of ordinary height and very ugly. One day at Cholet, they pointed her out to me. 'See that soldier who has sleeves of a color different from his coat. That's a girl who fights like a lion.'... Her unbelievable courage was celebrated throughout the whole army."

Of one of her own experiences, Bordereau wrote: "Arriving near the Loire, I destroyed five of my enemies, and finishing off the day, I broke my sword on the head of the last one... Seeing only one horseman near me, I doubled back to our army. I alone, killed twenty-one that day. I'm not the one who counted them, but those who followed me, and if they hadn't said so, I wouldn't have spoken about it myself."