Innocent and happy as they were, it may be said of them that they had no history till the insurrection. It broke out in March of 1793, it was over in July of 1795; and those on its soil cannot speak of it yet without a throb of feeling. It was in the main, a religious war; one of the few since St. Louis’ in the thirteenth century, which has not disgraced the name; and the latest, indeed, known to general history. But it has been affirmed too often that the nobles and priests, active here as elsewhere for the losing cause, had roused the masses to revolt. M. Berthre de Bourniseaux, of Thouars, a Republican, says earnestly, that defensive war was produced by three causes, with none of which the influence of churchmen and kingsmen, as such, had anything to do. First, by the execrable tyranny of the Jacobins in worrying an intensely conservative section, which, in the proper Jacobinical jargon, was not “ripe” for the Revolution; second, by the foolish persistent persecution of their old faith in behalf of the goddess Reason--a thing borne long in silence and bewilderment, until the smouldering opposition sprang into the full stature of a blaze; third, by the forced levy of three hundred thousand men. On the twenty-first of January, 1791, Louis, after his usual hesitation, signed the decree authorizing the ejection of those vicars and curates who would not uphold the new civil constitution of the clergy. It may be believed that this stroke of national polity fell heavily in mid-France, where “priestcraft” had never figured as a word in any possible dictionary, and where the Roman obedience had been as perfectly established as the solar system in the popular mind. Says Lamartine: “The Revolution, until then exclusively political, became schism in the eyes of a portion of the clergy and the faithful. Among the bishops and priests, some took the civil oath, which was the guarantee of their lives; others refused to take it, or, having taken it, retracted. This gave rise to trouble in many a mind, to agitation of conscience, and to division in the temple. The great majority of parishes had now two ministers, the one a constitutional parson, salaried and protected by the state, the other refractory, refusing the oath, bereft of his income, driven from his sanctuary, and raising his altar in some clandestine chapel or in the open field. These rival upholders of the same worship excommunicated each other, one in the name of the Government, one in the name of the Pope and the Church.... The case was not actually, as it stood, persecution or civil war, but it was the sure prelude to both.... When war burst out, the Revolution had degenerated.” It was not until August that the report of the uprising in the provinces, and the full sense of its significance, were accredited at Paris. Simultaneously the air thickened with fierce rumors from Austria and Spain, and Dumouriez’s last watch-lights sputtered out upon the frontiers. While the attention of Europe was