large part of the French people.

This gradual but determined change of front, improbable at first, and
evidently impolitic, is the true cause of the disastrous conflict in
which the movement of 1789 came to ruin. Had there been no
ecclesiastical establishment to deal with, it may be that the
development of Jacobin theory, or the logic of socialism, would have
led to the same result. As it was, they were secondary causes of the
catastrophe that was to follow. That there was a fund of active
animosity for the church, in a generation tutored by Voltaire,
Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach, Rousseau and Raynal, none could doubt.
But in the men of more immediate influence, such as Turgot, Mirabeau
and Sieyes, contempt was more visible than resentment; and it was by
slow degrees that the full force of aversion predominated over liberal
feeling and tolerant profession. But if the liberal tendency had been
stronger, and tolerant convictions more distinct, there were many
reasons which made a collision inevitable between the Church and the
prevailing ideas. The Gallican Church had been closely associated with
the entire order of things which the Assembly, at all costs, was
resolved to destroy. For three centuries from the time when they
became absolute the French kings had enjoyed all the higher patronage.
No such prerogative could be left to the Crown when it became
constitutional, and it was apparent that new methods for the
appointment of priest and prelate, that a penetrating change in the
system of ecclesiastical law, would be devised.

Two things, chiefly, made the memory of monarchy odious: dynastic war
and religious persecution. But the wars had ended in the conquest of
Alsace, and in the establishment of French kings in Spain and Naples.
The odium of persecution remained; and if it was not always assignable
to the influence of the clergy, it was largely due to them, and they
had attempted to renew it down to the eve of the Revolution. The
reduction of the royal power was sure to modify seriously the position
of men upon whom the royal power, in its excess, had so much relied,
and who had done so much to raise up and to sustain it. People had
come to believe that the cause of liberty demanded, not the
emancipation, but the repression of the priesthood. These were
underlying motives; but the signal was given by financial interests.
The clergy, being a privileged order, like the nobles, were involved
in the same fate. With the