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SEPTEMBER

      "The nation that would not have the Bayles, and Claudes, and Saurins of a century before, now cast themselves at the feet of the Voltaires, Rousseaus, and Diderots. Though France would not have the God of the Huguenot's Bible, behold now she accepts the evangel according to Jean Jacques, and a poor bedizened creature, clad in tawdry, is led through the streets of Paris in the character of the Goddess of Reason!
      "But a large number of the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church in France had themselves long ceased to believe in the truth of what they professed to teach. They had grown utterly corrupted and demoralized. Their monasteries were the abodes of idleness and self-indulgence; their pulpits were mute; their books were empty. The doctors of the Sorbonne still mumbled their accustomed jargon, but it had become powerless. Instead of the great churchmen of the past --Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Fenelon, --there were such blind leaders of the blind as ...the Abbe Raynal, the open assailant of Christianity in every form; and Father Lomenie . . .. The avowed atheist.
     "The corrupt, self-condemned institution, became a target for the wit of Voltaire and the encyclopedic philosophy of Diderot. It was next assailed by the clubs of Marat, Danton and Robespierre. Then the unfed, untaught, desperate victims of centuries of oppression and misguidance rose up almost as one man, and cried, "Away with it' --'Ecrasez l'Infame.' The churches were attacked and gutted, as those of the Huguenots had been a century before. The church-bells were cast into cannon, the church-plate coined into money; and at length Christianity itself was abolished by the Convention who declared the Supreme People to be the only God!
     "The Roman Catholic clergy who had so long witnessed the persecutions of the Huguenots were now persecuted in turn by their own flocks. Many of them were guillotined; others, chained together as the Huguenots had been, were sent prisoners to Rochelle and the Isle of Aix. As a body of them passed through Limoges on their way to the galleys, they encountered a procession of asses clothed in priests' dresses, a mitred sow marching at their head. Some four hundred priests lay riding in Aix roads, where the Huguenot galley-slaves had lain before them --'ragged, sordid, hungry, wasted to shadows, eating their unclean rations on deck, circularly in parties of a dozen, with finger and thumb; beating their scandalous clothes between two stones; choked in horrible miasmata, under close hatches, seventy of them in a berth through the night, so that the aged priest is found lying dead in the morning in an attitude of prayer.'
     "Such was the outcome of the Act of Revocation of Louis the Great --Sanscullotism and the Reign of Terror! There was no longer the massacre and banishment of Huguenots, but there was the guillotining and banishment of the successors of the very priests whom Louis had set up. There was another point in which 1793 resembled 1685. The fugitive priests fled in precisely the same direction in which the Huguenot pastors had done; and again the persecuted for religion's sake made for England, to join the descendants of the Huguenots driven out of France for altogether different reasons a century before.
     "But the Roman Catholic priests did not fly alone. The nobles, the descendants of those who had superintended the dragonnades, accompanied them. Never, since the flight of the Huguenots which followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had there been such an emigration of Frenchmen from France. But there was this difference between the emigrations of 1685 and 1793, that whereas in the former period the people who emigrated consisted almost entirely of the industrious classes, in the latter period they consisted almost entirely of the non-productive classes. The men who now fled were the nobles and priests, who had so misguided and mistaught the people entrusted to their charge, that in nearly all parts of France they had at length risen up in rebellion against them.
     "The great body of the people had become reduced to absolute destitution. They had no possession whatever but their misery. They were literally dying of hunger. The Bishop of Chartres told Louis XV that in his diocese men browsed like sheep. For want of food, they filled their stomachs with grass. The dragoons, who had before been employed to hunt down the Huguenots because of their attending religious meetings, were now employed on a different duty. They were stationed in the market places where meal was exposed for sale, to keep back the famishing people. In Paris alone there were two hundred thousand beggars prowling about with sallow faces, lank hair, and hung in rags. In 1789, crowds of them were seen hovering about the Palais Royal --spectral-looking men and starving women, delirious from fasting. Some were said not to have eaten for three whole days. The women wandered about like hungry lionesses, for they had children. One Foulon, a member of the king's council, on being told of the famine endured by the people, said --'Wait till I am minister: I will make them eat hay; my horses eat it.' The words were bitterly avenged. The hungry mob seized Foulon, hanged him a la lanterne, and carried his head about the streets, his mouth filled with hay.
     "From the provinces, news came that the starving helots were everywhere rising, burning down the chateaus of the nobles, tearing up their title-deeds, and destroying their crops. On these occasions, the church-bells were usually rung by way of tocsin, and the population turned out to the work of destruction. Seventy-two chateaus were wrecked and burnt in the Maconnais and Beaujolais alone; and the conflagration spread through Dauphiny, Alsace, and the Lyonnais --the very quarters from which the Huguenots had been so ferociously driven out a century before.
     "There was scarcely a district in which the Huguenots had pursued their various branches of industry, now wholly suppressed, in which the starving and infuriated peasantry did not work wild havoc, and take revenge upon their lords. They had learned but too well the lessons of the sword, and dungeon, and the scaffold, which their rulers had taught them; and the Reign of Terror which followed was but the natural outcome of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the wars of the dragonnades, the cruelties which followed the Act of Revocation, and a long course of like teaching. But the victims had now changed places. Now it was the nobles who were persecuted, burnt out, had their estates confiscated, and were compelled to fly for their lives.
 

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