ts
after the Reformation or the English sectaries after the execution of
Charles.

Attention has been called to the disturbances which arose in Auxonne
and elsewhere, to the emigration of the nobles from that quarter, to
the utter break between the parish priests and the higher church
functionaries in Dauphiny; this was but a sample of the whole. When,
on July fourteenth, 1790, the King accepted a constitution which
decreed a secular reorganization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy
according to the terms of which both bishops and priests were to be
elected by the taxpayers, two thirds of all the clergy in France
refused to swear allegiance to it. All attempts to establish the new
administrative and judicial systems were more or less futile; the
disaffection of officials and lawyers became more intense. In Paris
alone the changes were introduced with some success, the municipality
being rearranged into forty-eight sections, each with a primary
assembly. These were the bodies which later gave Buonaparte the
opening whereby he entered his real career. The influence of the
Jacobin Club increased, just in proportion as the majority of its
members grew more radical. Necker trimmed to their demands, but lost
popularity by his monotonous calls for money, and fell in September,
reaching his home on Lake Leman only with the greatest difficulty.
Mirabeau succeeded him as the sole possible prop to the tottering
throne. Under his leadership the moderate monarchists, or Feuillants,
as they were later called, from the convent of that order to which
they withdrew, seceded from the Jacobins, and before the Assembly had
ceased its work the nation was cleft in two, divided into opponents
and adherents of monarchy. As if to insure the disasters of such an
antagonism, the Assembly, which numbered among its members every man
in France of ripe political experience, committed the incredible folly
of self-effacement, voting that not one of its members should be
eligible to the legislature about to be chosen.

A new impulse to the revolutionary movement was given by the death of
Mirabeau on April second, 1791. His obsequies were celebrated in many
places, and, being a native of Provence, there were probably solemn
ceremonies at Valence. There is a tradition that they occurred during
Buonaparte's second residence in the city, and that it was he who
superintended the draping of the choir in the principal church. It is
said that the hangings were