s at a stroke to lose all those delights of insolence and vanity which
had made, not the decoration, but the very substance, of his days?

Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-heeled slipper the only
outraged class. The magistracy of the provincial parliaments were
inflamed with resentment against changes that stripped them of the power
of exciting against the new government the same factious and
impracticable spirit with which they had on so many occasions
embarrassed the old. The clergy were thrown even still more violently
into opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for resources, declared
the property held by ecclesiastics, amounting to a revenue of not less
than eight million pounds sterling a year, or double that amount in
modern values, to be the property of the nation. Talleyrand carried a
measure decreeing the sale of the ecclesiastical domain. The clergy were
as intensely irritated as laymen would have been by a similar assertion
of sovereign right. And their irritation was made still more dangerous
by the next set of measures against them.

The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholicism as the religion of
the State; monastic vows were abolished, and orders and congregations
suppressed; the ecclesiastical divisions were made to coincide with the
civil divisions, a bishop being allotted to each department. What was a
more important revolution than all, bishops and incumbents were
henceforth to be appointed by popular election. The Assembly, who had
always the institutions of our own country before them, meant to
introduce into France the system of the Church of England, which was
even then an anachronism in the land of its birth; much worse was such a
system an anachronism, after belief had been sapped by a Voltaire and an
Encyclopaedia. The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit. The
Assembly, by way of retort, decreed that all ecclesiastics should take
the oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the clergy, on pain
of forfeiture of their benefices. Five-sixths of the clergy refused, and
the result was an outbreak of religious fury in the great towns of the
south and elsewhere, which recalled the violence of the sixteenth
century and the Reformation.

Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from its labours, the popular
party had to face the mocking and defiant privileged classes; the
magistracy, whose craft and calling were gone; and the clergy and as
many of the flocks a