The Government, having got wind of a project of the conspirators to seize the reins of power during the Rennes court-martial, anticipated the act by wholesale arrests on August 12. Jules Guérin barricaded himself with some friends in a house in the rue de Chabrol in Paris, and defied the Government to arrest him without perpetrating murder. The grotesque incident of the "Fort Chabrol" came to an end after thirty-seven days when the authorities had surrounded the house with troops to starve Guérin out and stopped the drains. In November a motley array of conspirators, ranging from André Buffet, representative of the pretender the Duke of Orléans, to butchers from the slaughter-houses of La Villette, were brought to trial before the Senate acting as a High Court of Justice, on the charge of conspiracy against the State. After a long trial lasting nearly two months, during which the prisoners outdid each other in declamatory insults to their enemies, the majority were acquitted. Paul Déroulède and André Buffet were condemned to banishment for ten years and Jules Guérin to imprisonment for the same term. Two others, Marcel Habert and the comte de Lur-Saluces, who had taken flight, gave themselves up later and were condemned in 1900 and 1901, respectively, amid a public indifference which was far from their liking. Thus the year 1899 had proved itself one of the most dramatically eventful in the history of the Republic. It was also to be one of the most significant in its consequences. For the new grouping of mutually jealous factions against a common danger had, in spite of the fiasco of the second Dreyfus case, shown a way to victory. And exasperation against the intrigues of the Clericals and the army officers was going to turn the former toleration of the "esprit nouveau" into active persecution, especially as the Socialists and Radicals formed the majority of the new combination. In November, 1899, Waldeck-Rousseau laid before Parliament an Associations bill to regulate the organization of societies, which was intended indirectly to control religious bodies. The leniency of the Government hitherto and the commercial energy of many religious orders, manufacturers of articles varying from chartreuse to hair-restorers and dentifrice, had enabled them to amass enormous sums held in mortmain. The power of this money was great in politics and the anti-Clericals cast envious eyes on these vague and mysterious fortunes. There were in France at the time almost seven hundred unauthorized "congregations." Against the Assumptionists in particular the Government took direct measures early in 1900, such as legal perquisitions, arrests, and prosecution as an illegal association.