The Austrians, strongly reinforced, attacked this line, and carried the heights of Mont Saint Jacques; and Kellermann, after a vain attempt to regain that point of his position, retreated to the line of defence more westward, which rests on Borghetto. Kellermann, an active and good brigade officer, but without sufficient talent to act as commander-in-chief, was superseded, and Scherer was placed in command of the army of Italy. He risked a battle with the Austrians near Loana, in which the talents of Massena and Augereau were conspicuous; and by the victory which ensued, the French regained the line of Saint Jacques and Finale, which Kellermann had been forced to abandon; so that in a general point of view, the relative position of the two opposed armies was not very different from that in which they had been left by Buonaparte.[93] [Sidenote: THE POPE.] But though Scherer had been thus far victorious, he was not the person to whom the Directory desired to intrust the daring plan of assuming the offensive on a grand scale upon the Alpine frontier, and, by carrying their arms into Italy, compelling the Austrians to defend themselves in that quarter, and to diminish the gigantic efforts which that power had hitherto continued with varied success, but unabated vigour, upon the Rhine. The rulers of France had a farther object in this bold scheme. They desired to intimidate, or annihilate and dethrone the Pope. He was odious to them as head of the Church, because the attachment of the French clergy to the Roman See, and the points of conscience which rested upon that dependence, had occasioned the recusancy of the priests, especially of those who were most esteemed by the people, to take the constitutional oath. To the Pope, and his claims of supremacy, were therefore laid the charge of the great civil war in La Vendée, and the general disaffection of the Catholics in the south of France.