The ruling passion flings itself on all obstacles, even those placed by itself across its own track. Through a vast usurpation the minority of non-believers, indifferent or lukewarm, has striven to impose its ecclesiastical forms on the Catholic majority, and the situation thereby created for the Catholic priest is such that unless he becomes schismatic, he cannot fail to appear as an enemy. In vain has he obeyed! He has allowed his property to be taken, he has left his parsonage, he has given the keys of the church to his successor, he has kept aloof; he does not transgress, either by omission or commission, any article of any decree. In vain does he avail himself of his legal right to abstain from taking an oath repugnant to his conscience. This alone makes him appear to refuse the civic oath in which the ecclesiastical oath is included, to reject the constitution which he accepts in full minus a parasite chapter, to conspire against the new social and political order of things which he often approves of; and to which he almost always submits.3352 In vain does he confine himself to his special and recognized domain, the spiritual direction of things. Through this alone he resists the new legislators who pretend to furnish a spiritual guidance, for, by virtue of being orthodox, he must believe that the priest whom they elect is excommunicated, that his sacraments are vain; and, in his office as pastor, he must prevent his sheep from going to drink at an impure source. In vain might he preach to them moderation and respect. Through the mere fact that the schism is effected, its consequences unfold them selves, and the peasants will not always remain as patient as their pastor. They have known him for twenty years; he has baptized them and married them; they believe that his is the only true mass; they are not satisfied to be obliged to attend another two or three leagues away, and to leave the church, their church which their ancestors built, and where from father to son they have prayed for centuries, in the hands of a stranger, an intruder and heretic, who officiates before almost empty benches, and whom gendarmes, with guns in their hands, have installed. Assuredly, as he passes through the street, they will look upon him askance: it is not surprising that the women and children soon hoot at him, that stones are thrown at night through his windows, that in the strongly Catholic departments, Upper and Lower Rhine, Doubs and Jura, LozÈre, Deux-SÊvres and VendÉe, FinistÈre, Morbihan, and CÔtes-du-Nord, he is greeted with universal desertion, and then expelled through public ill-will. It is not surprising that his mass is interrupted and that his person is threatened;3353 that disaffection which thus far had only reached the upper class, descends to the popular strata; that, from one end of France to the other, a sullen hostility prevails against the new institutions; for now the political and social constitution is joined to the ecclesiastical constitution like an edifice to its spire, and, through this sharp pinnacle, seeks the storm even within the darkening clouds of heaven. The evil all springs out of this unskillful, gratuitous, compulsory fusion, and, consequently, from those who effected it.

But never will a victorious party admit that it has made a mistake. In its eyes the nonjuring priests are alone culpable; it is irritated against their factious conscience; and, to crush the rebellion even in the inaccessible sanctuary of personal conviction, there is no legal or brutal act of violence which it will not allow itself to commit.

Behold, accordingly, a new sport thrown open; and the game is immensely plentiful. For it comprises not only the black or gray robes, more than forty thousand priests, over thirty thousand nuns, and several thousand monks, but also the devoted orthodox, that is to say the women of the low or middle class, and, without counting provincial nobles, a majority of the serious, steady bourgeoisie, a majority of the peasantry-almost the whole population of several provinces, east, west, and in the south. A name is bestowed on them, as lately on the nobles; it is that of fanatic, which is equivalent to aristocrat, for it also designates public enemies likewise placed by it beyond the pale of the law.

Little does it matter whether the law favors them, for it is interpreted against them, arbitrarily construed and openly violated by the partial or intimidated administrative bodies which the Constitution has withdrawn from the control of the central authority and subjected to the authority of popular gatherings. From the first months of 1791, the hounding begins; the municipalities, districts, and departments themselves often take the lead in beating up the game. Six months later, the Legislative Assembly, by its decree of November 29,3354 sounds the tally-ho, and, in spite of the King's veto, the hounds on all sides dash forward. During the month of April, 1792, forty-two departments pass against nonjuring priests "acts which are neither prescribed nor authorized by the Constitution," and, before the end of the Legislative Assembly, forty-three others will have followed in their train.—Through this series of illegal acts, without offense, without trial, non-jurors are everywhere in France expelled from their parishes, relegated to the principal town of the department or district, in some places imprisoned, put on the same footing with the emigrants, and despoiled of their property, real and personal.3355 Nothing more is wanting against them but the general decree of deportation which is to come as soon as the Assembly can get rid of the King.

In the meantime, the National Guards, who have extorted the laws, endeavor to aggravate them in their application; and there is nothing strange in their animosity. Commerce is at a standstill, industry languishes, the artisan and shopkeeper suffer, and, in order to account for the universal discontent, it is attributed to the insubordination of the priest. Were it not for his stubbornness all would go well, since the Constitution is perfect, and he is the only one who does not accept it. But, in not accepting it, he attacks it. He, therefore, is the last obstacle in the way of public happiness; he is the scapegoat, let us drive the obnoxious creature away! And the urban militia, sometimes on its own authority, sometimes instigated by the municipal body its accomplice; is seen disturbing public worship, dispersing congregations, seizing priests by the collar, pushing them by the shoulders out of the town, and threatening them with hanging if they dare to return. At Douay,3356 with guns in hand, they force the directory of the department to order the closing of all the oratories and chapels in hospitals and convents. At Caen, with loaded guns and with a cannon, they march forth against the neighboring parish of Verson, break into houses, gather up fifteen persons suspected of orthodoxy—canons, merchants, artisans, workmen, women, girls, old men, and the infirm—cut off their hair, strike them with the but-ends of their muskets, and lead them back to Caen fastened to the breach of the cannon; and all this because a nonjuring priest still officiated at Verson, and many pious persons from Caen attended his mass: Verson, consequently, is a focal center of counter-revolutionary gatherings. Moreover, in the houses which were broken into, the furniture was smashed, casks stove in, and the linen, money, and plate stolen, the rabble of Caen having joined the expedition.—Here, and everywhere, there is nothing to do but to let this rabble have its own way; and as it operates against the possessions, the liberty; the life, and the sense of propriety of dangerous persons, the National Militia is careful not to interfere with it. Consequently, the orthodox, both priests and believers, men and women, are now at its mercy, and, thanks to the connivance of the armed force, which refuses to interpose, the rabble satisfy on the proscribed class its customary instincts of cruelty, pillage, wantonness, and destructiveness.

Whether public or private, the order of the day is always to hinder worship, while the means employed are worthy of those who carry them out.—Here, a nonjuring priest having had the boldness to minister to a sick person, the house which he has just entered is taken by assault, and the door and windows of a house occupied by another priest are smashed.3357 There, the lodgings of two workmen, who are accused of having had their infants baptized by a refractory priest, are sacked and nearly demolished. Elsewhere, a mob refuses to allow the body of an old curÉ, who had died without taking the oath, to enter the cemetery. Farther on, a church is assaulted during vespers, and everything is broken to pieces: on the following day it is the turn of a neighboring church, and, in addition, a convent of Ursuline nuns is devastated.—At Lyons, on Easter-day, 1791, as the people are leaving the six o'clock mass, a troop, armed with whips, falls upon the women.3358 Stripped, bruised, prostrated, with their heads in the dirt, they are not left until they are bleeding and half-dead; one young girl is actually at the point of death; and this sort of outrage occurs so frequently that even ladies attending the orthodox mass in Paris dare not go out without sewing up their garments around them in the shape of drawers.—Naturally, to make the most of the prey offered to them, hunting associations are formed. These exist in Montpellier, Arles, UzÈs, Alais, NÎmes, Carpentras, and in most of the towns or burgs of Gard, Vaucluse, and l'HÉrault, in greater or less number according to the population of the city: some counting from ten to twelve, and others from two to three hundred determined men, of every description: among them are found "strike-hards" (tape-dur), former brigands, and escaped convicts with the brand still on their backs. Some of them oblige their members to wear a medal as a visible mark of recognition; all assume the title of executive power, and declare that they act of their own authority, and that it is necessary to "quicken the law."3359 Their pretext is the protection of sworn priests; and for twenty months, beginning with April, 1791, they operate to this effect with heavy knotted dubs garnished with iron points," without counting sabers and bayonets. Generally, their expeditions are nocturnal. Suddenly, the houses of "citizens suspected of a want of patriotism," of nonjuring ecclesiastics, of the monks of the Christian school, are invaded; everything is broken or stolen, and the owner is ordered to leave the place in twenty-four hours: sometimes, doubtless through an excess of precaution, he is beaten to death on the spot. Besides this, the band also works by day in the streets, lashes the women, enters the churches saber in hand, and drives the nonjuring priest from the altar. All of this is done with the connivance and in the sight of the paralyzed or complaisant authorities, by a sort of occult and complementary government, which not only supplies what is missing in the ecclesiastical law, but also searches the pockets of private individuals.—At NÎmes, under the leadership of a patriotic dancing-master, not content with "decreeing proscriptions, killing, scourging, and often murdering," these new champions of the Gallican Church undertake to reanimate the zeal of those liable to contribution. A subscription having been proposed for the support of the families of the volunteers about to depart, the executive power takes upon itself to revise the list of offerings: it arbitrarily taxes those who have not given, or who, in its opinion, have given too little some "poor workmen fifty livres, others two hundred, three hundred, nine hundred, and a thousand, under penalty of wrecked houses and severe treatment." Elsewhere, the volunteers of Baux and other communes near Tarascon help themselves freely, and, "under the pretext that they are to march for the defense of the country, levy enormous contributions on proprietors," on one four thousand, and on another five thousand livres. In default of payment, they carry away all the grain on one farm, even to the reserve seed, threatening to make havoc with everything, and even to burn, in case of complaint, so that the owners dare not say a word, while the attorney-general of the neighboring department, afraid on his own account, begs that his denunciation may be kept secret.—From the slums of the towns the jacquerie has spread into the rural districts. This is the sixth and the most extensive seen for three years.3360

Two spurs impel the peasant on.—On the one hand he is frightened by the clash of arms, and the repeated announcements of an approaching invasion. The clubs and the newspapers since the declaration of Pilnitz, and the Orators in the Legislative Assembly for four months past, have kept him alarmed with their trumpet-blasts, and he urges on his oxen in the furrow with cries of "Woa, Prussia!" to one, and to the other, "Gee up, Austria!" Austria and Prussia, foreign kings and nobles in league with the emigrant nobles, are going to return in force to re-establish the salt-tax, the excise, feudal-dues, tithes, and to retake national property already sold and re-sold, with the aid of the gentry who have not left, or who have returned, and the connivance of non-juring priests who declare the sale sacrilegious and refuse to absolve the purchasers.—On the other hand, Holy Week is drawing near, and for the past year qualms of conscience have disturbed the purchasers. Up to March 24, 1791, the sales of national property had amounted to only 180 millions; but, the Assembly having prolonged the date of payment and facilitated further sales in detail, the temptation proves too strong for the peasant; stockings and buried pots are all emptied of their savings. In seven months the peasant has bought to the amount of 1,346 millions,3361 and finally possesses in full and complete ownership the morsel of land which he has coveted for so many years, and sometimes an unexpected plot, a wood, a mill, or a meadow. At the present time he has to settle accounts with the church, and, if the pecuniary settlement is postponed, the Catholic settlement comes on the appointed day. According to immemorial tradition he is obliged to take the communion at Easter,3362 his wife also, and likewise his mother; and if he, exceptionally, does not think this of consequence, they do. Moreover, he requires the sacraments for his old sick father, his new-born child, and for his other child of an age to be confirmed. Now, communion, baptism, confession, all the sacraments, to be of good quality, must proceed from a safe source, just as is the case with flour and coin; there is only too much counterfeit money now in the world, and the sworn priests are daily losing credit, like the assignats. There is no other course to pursue, consequently, but to resort to the non-juror, who is the only one able to give valid absolutions. And it so happens that he not only refuses this, but he is said to be inimical to the whole new order of things.—In this dilemma the peasant falls back upon his usual resource, the strength of his arms; he seizes the priest by the throat, as formerly his lord, and extorts an acquittance for his sins as formerly for his feudal dues. At the very least he strives to constrain the non-jurors to swear, to close their separatist churches, and bring the entire canton to the same uniform faith.—Occasionally also he avenges himself against the partisans of the non-jurors, against chateaux and houses of the opulent, against the nobles and the rich, against proprietors of every class. Occasionally, likewise, as, since the amnesty of September, 1791, the prisons have been emptied, as one-half of the courts are not yet installed,3363 as there has been no police for thirty months, the common robbers, bandits, and vagrants, who swarm about without repression or surveillance, join the mob and fill their pockets.

Here, in Pas-de-Calais,3364 three hundred villagers, headed by a drummer, burst open the doors of a Carthusian convent, steal everything, eatables, beverages, linen, furniture, and effects, whilst, in the neighboring parish, another band operates in the same fashion in the houses of the mayor and of the old curÉ, threatening "to kill and burn all," and promising to return on the following Sunday.—There, in Bas-Rhin, near Fort Louis, twenty houses of the aristocrats are pillaged.—Elsewhere in Ile-et-Vilaine, bodies of rural militia, combined, go from parish to parish, and, increasing in numbers in consequence of their very violence until they form bands of two thousand men. They close churches, drive away nonjuring priests, remove clappers from the bells, eat and drink what they please at the expense of the inhabitants, and often, in the houses of the mayor or tax-registrar, indulge in the pleasure of breaking everything to pieces. Should any public officer remonstrate with them they shout, "At the aristocrat!" One of these unlucky counselors is struck on the back with the but-end of a musket, and two others have guns aimed at them; the chiefs of the expedition are in no better predicament, and, according to their own admission, if they are at the head of the mob it is to make sure they themselves will not be pillaged or hung. The same spectacle presents itself in Mayenne, in Orne, in Moselle, and in the Landes.3365—These, however, are but isolated irruptions, and very mild; in the south and in the center, the plague is apparent in an immense leprous spot, which extending from Avignon to Perigueux, and from Aurillac to Toulouse, suddenly covers, nearly without with any discontinuity, ten departments, Vaucluse, ArdÈche, Gard, Cantal, CorrÈze, Lot, Dordogne, Gers, Haute-Garonne, and HÉrault. Vast rural masses are set in motion at the same time, on all sides and owing to the same causes: the approach of war and the coming of Easter.—In Cantal, at the assembly of the canton held at Aurillac for the recruitment of the army,3366 the commander of a village National Guard demands vengeance "against those who are not patriots," and the report is spread that an order has come from Paris to destroy the chateaux. Moreover, the insurgents allege that the priests, through their refusal to take the oath, are bringing the nation into civil war: "we are tired of not having peace on their account; let them become good citizens, so that everybody may go to mass." On the strength of this, the insurgents enter houses, put the inhabitants to ransom, not only priests and former nobles, "but also those who are suspected of being their partisans, those who do not attend the mass of the constitutional priest," and even poor people, artisans and tillers of the ground, whom they tax five, ten, twenty, and forty francs, and whose cellars and bread-bins they empty. Eighteen chateaux are pillaged, burnt, or demolished, and among others, those of several gentlemen and ladies who have not left the country. One of these, M. d'HumiÈres, is an old officer of eighty years; Madame de Peyronenc saves her son only by disguising him as a peasant; Madame de Beauclerc, who flies across the mountain, sees her sick child die in her arms. At Aurillac, gibbets are set up before the principal houses; M. de Niossel, a former lieutenant of a criminal court, put in prison for his safety, is dragged out, and his severed head is thrown on a dunghill; M. Collinet, just arrived from Malta, and suspected of being an aristocrat, is ripped open, cut to pieces, and his head is carried about on the end of a pike. Finally, when the municipal officers, judges, and royal commissioner commence proceedings against the assassins, they find themselves in such great danger that they are obliged to resign or to run away. In like manner, in Haute-Garonne,3367 it is also "against non-jurors and their followers" that the insurrection has begun. This is promoted by the fact that in various parishes the constitutional curÉ belongs to the club, and demands the riddance of his adversaries. One of them at Saint-Jean-Lorne, "mounted on a cart, preaches pillage to a mob of eight hundred persons." Each band, consequently, begins by expelling refractory priests, and by forcing their supporters to attend the mass of the sworn priest.—But such success, wholly abstract and barren, is of little advantage, and peasants in a state of revolt are not satisfied so easily. When parishes march forth by the dozen and devote their day to the service of the public, they must have some compensation in wood, wheat, wine, or money,3368 and the expense of the expedition may be defrayed by the aristocrats. Not merely the upholders of non-jurors are aristocrats, as, for example, an old lady here and there, "very fanatical, and who for forty years has devoted all her income to acts of philanthropy," "but well-to-do persons, peasants or gentlemen;" for, "by keeping their wine and grain unsold in their cellars and barns, and by not undertaking more work than they need, so as to deprive workmen in the country of their means of subsistence," they design "to starve out" the poor folk. Thus, the greater the pillage, the greater the service to the public. According to the insurgents, it is important "to diminish revenues enjoyed by the enemies of the nation, in order that they may not send their revenues to Coblentz and other places out of the kingdom." Consequently, bands of six or eight hundred or a thousand men overrun the districts of Toulouse and Castelsarrasin. All proprietors, aristocrats, and patriots are put under contribution. Here, in the house of "the philanthropic but fanatical old maid, they break open everything, destroy the furniture, taking away eighty-two bushels of wheat and sixteen hogsheads of wine." Elsewhere, at RoqueferriÈre, feudal title-deeds are burnt, and a chateau is pillaged. Farther on, at Lasserre, thirty thousand francs are exacted and the ready money is all carried off. Almost everywhere the municipal officers, willingly or unwillingly, authorize pillaging. Moreover, "they cut down provisions to a price in assignats very much less than their current rate in silver," and they double the price of a day's work. In the meantime, other bands devastate the national forests, and the gendarmes, in order not to be called aristocrats, have no idea but of paying court to the pillagers.

After all this, it is manifest that property no longer exists for anybody except for paupers and robbers.—In effect, in Dordogne,3369 under the pretext of driving away nonjuring priests, frequently mobs gather to pillage and rob whatever comes in their way. . . . All the grain that is found in houses with weathercocks is sequestrated." The rustics exploit, as communal property, all the forests, all the possessions of the emigrants; and this operation is radical; for example, a band, on finding a new barn of which the materials strike them as good, demolish it so as to share with each other the tiles and timber.—In CorrÈze, fifteen thousand armed peasants, who have come to Tulle to disarm and drive off the supporters of the non-jurors, break everything in suspected houses, and a good deal of difficulty is found in sending them off empty-handed. As soon as they get back home, they sack the chateaux of Saint-Gal, Seilhac, Gourdon, Saint-Basile, and La Rochette, besides a number of country-houses, even of absent plebeians. They have found a quarry, and never was the removal of property more complete. They carefully carry off, says an official statement, all that can be carried—furniture, curtains, mirrors, clothes-presses, pictures, wines, provisions, even floors and wooden panels, "down to the smallest fragments of iron and wood-work," smashing the rest, so that nothing "remains of the house but its four walls, the roof and the staircase." In Lot, where for two years the insurrection is permanent, the damage is much greater. During the night between the 30th and 31st of January, "all the best houses in Souillac" are broken open, "sacked and pillaged from top to bottom,"3370 their owners being obliged to fly, and so many outbreaks occur in the department, that the directory has no time to render an account of them to the minister. Entire districts are in revolt; as, "in each commune all the inhabitants are accomplices, witnesses cannot be had to support a criminal prosecution, and crime remains unpunished." In the canton of Cabrerets, the restitution of rents formerly collected is exacted, and the reimbursement of charges paid during twenty years past. The small town of Lauzerte is invaded by surrounding bodies of militia, and its disarmed inhabitants are at the mercy of the Jacobin suburbs. For three months, in the district of Figeac, "all the mansions of former nobles are sacked and burnt;" next the pigeon-cots are attacked, "and all country-houses which have a good appearance." Barefooted gangs "enter the houses of well-to-do people, physicians, lawyers, merchants, burst open the doors of cellars, drink the wine," and riot like drunken victors. In several communes these expeditions have become a custom; "a large number of individuals are found in them who live on rapine alone," and the club sets them the example. For six months, in the principal town, a coterie of the National Guard, called the Black Band, expel all persons who are displeasing to them, "pillaging houses at will, beating to death, wounding or mutilating by saber-strokes, all who have been proscribed in their assemblies," and no official or advocate dares lodge a complaint. Brigandage, borrowing the mask of patriotism, and patriotism borrowing the methods of brigandage, have combined against property at the same time as against the ancient rÉgime, and, to free themselves from all that inspires them with fear, they seize all which can provide them with booty.

And yet this is merely the outskirts of the storm; the center is elsewhere, around NÎmes, Avignon, Arles, and Marseilles, in a country where, for a long time, the conflict between cities and the conflict between religions have kindled and accumulated malignant passions.3371 Looking at the three departments of Gard, Bouches-de-RhÔne and Vaucluse, one would imagine one's self in the midst of a war with savages. In fact, it is a Jacobin and plebeian invasion, and, consequently, conquest, dispossession, and extermination,—in Gard, a swarm of National Guards copy the jacquerie: the dregs of the Comtat come to the surface and cover Vaucluse with its scum; an army of six thousand from Marseilles sweeps down on Arles.—In the districts of NÎmes, SommiÈres, UzÈs, Alais, Jalais, and Saint-Hippolyte, title-deeds are burnt, proprietors put to ransom, and municipal officers threatened with death if they try to interpose; twenty chateaux and forty country-houses are sacked, burnt, and demolished.—The same month, Arles and Avignon,3372 given up to the bands of Marseilles and of the Comtat, see confiscation and massacres approaching.—Around the commandant, who has received the order to evacuate Aries,3373 "the inhabitants of all parties" gather as suppliants, "clasping his hands, entreating him with tears in their eyes not to abandon them; women and children cling to his boots," so that he does not know how to free himself without hurting them; on his departure twelve hundred families emigrate. After the entrance of the Marseilles band we see eighteen hundred electors proscribed, their country-houses on the two banks of the Rhone pillaged, "as in the times of Saracen pirates," a tax of 1,400,000 livres levied on all people in good circumstances, absent or present, women and girls promenaded about half-naked on donkeys and publicly whipped." "A saber committee" disposes of lives, proscribes and executes: it is the reign of sailors, porters, and the dregs of the populace.—At Avignon,3374 it is that of simple brigands, incendiaries and assassins, who, six months previously, converted the GlaciÈre3375 into a charnel-house. They return in triumph and state that "this time the GlaciÈre will be full." Five hundred families had already sought asylum in France before the first massacre; now, the entire remainder of the honest bourgeoisie, twelve hundred persons, take to flight, and the terror is so great that the small neighboring towns dare not receive emigrants. In fact, from this time forth, both departments throughout Vaucluse and Bouches-de-RhÔne are a prey: Bands of two thousand armed men, with women, children, and other volunteer followers, travel from commune to commune to live as they please at the expense of "fanatics." The well-bred people are not the only ones they despoil. Plain cultivators, taxed at 10,000 livres, have sixty men billeted on them; their cattle are slain and eaten before their eyes, and everything in their houses is broken up; they are driven out of their lodgings and wander as fugitives in the reed-swamps of the Rhone, awaiting a moment of respite to cross the river and take refuge in the neighboring department.3376 Thus, from the spring of 1792, if any citizen is suspected of unfriendliness or even of indifference towards the ruling faction, if, through but one opinion conscientiously held, he risks the vague possibility of mistrust or of suspicion, he undergoes popular hostility, pillage, exile, and worse besides; no matter how loyal his conduct may be, nor how loyal he may be at heart, no matter that he is disarmed and inoffensive; it is all the same whether it be a noble, bourgeois, peasant, aged priest, or woman; and this while public peril is yet neither great, present, nor visible, since France is at peace with Europe, and the government still subsists in its entirety.