, his
acceptance of the situation had not involved more than bowing before a
political storm; now the matter was graver, the question was of schism,
and therefore of heresy.

Louis was a faithful believer in the Roman theology, as well as in the
divine right of kings, and he struggled hard to withhold his signature
from the civil constitution of the clergy. And when, after some weeks,
he finally gave in, it was under protest. From that moment he adopted
the attitude of the man acting under restraint who ascribes no binding
force to acts and deeds resulting from compulsion.

The acceptance of the civil constitution of the clergy by the King did
not conclude the matter. Furious protests arose. In the south {104}
of France, bishops, priests and national guards for some weeks
threatened an outbreak of religious war. The assembly met this
disorder more firmly than that proceeding from economic and political
reasons. Towards the close of the year it imposed on the clergy an
oath of adhesion to the civil constitution, and this only four bishops
were found to accept. In January 1791 elections were ordered for
filling the places of those members of the Church who had refused the
oath, and presently France found herself with two bodies of clergy,
official and non-official, constitutional and anti-constitutional.

To close a chapter dealing so largely with the destructive efforts of
the middle-class assembly against the prerogatives of the King and of
the two privileged orders, it may be noted that on the 19th of June,
1790, on the proposal of members of the nobility, all titles were
abolished. Hereafter Mirabeau is Honore Riquetti, the _ci-devant_
Comte de Mirabeau; and Camille Desmoulins, prompt, picturesque and
impertinent, logically applies the process to the King himself and
rechristens Louis, _Mr. Capet l'aine_.

{105}

CHAPTER VIII

THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES

On the 14th of July 1790 was held the first great festival of the
Revolution, the federation of the national guards at the Champ de Mars
in Paris. Federation was the name that had been given all through
France the previous year to district or departmental gatherings or
reviews, at which the newly raised national guards had paraded and,
with great ceremony, sworn patriotic oaths. This was now repeated on a
grander and more centralized scale, to commemorate the fall of the
Bastille twelve months before. On the military exercise ground just
outsi