hen one repudiates the pact; they have lost their
qualifications as citizens and have become ordinary foreigners under
the surveillance of the police; and, as they propagate around them
discontent and disobedience, they are not only foreigners but seditious
persons, enemies in disguise, the authors of a secret and widespread
Vendee; it is not necessary for us to prosecute them as charlatans, it
is sufficient to strike them down as rebels. As such, we have already
banished from France all unsworn ecclesiastics, about forty thousand
priests, and we are deporting those who did not cross the frontier
within the allotted time: we allow only sexagenarians and the infirm to
remain on French soil, and, again, as prisoners and in seclusion; they
incur the penalty of death if they do not of their own accord report to
the prisons of their country town; the banished who return home incur
the penalty of death, and there is penalty of death against those who
shelter priests.[2130] Consequently, in default of an orthodox clergy,
there must no longer be an orthodox worship; the most dangerous of the
two manufactories of superstition is shut down. That the sale of this
poisonous food may be more surely stopped we punish those who ask for it
the same as those who provide it, and we prosecute not only the pastors,
but, again, the fanatics of the flock; if these are not the authors of
the ecclesiastical rebellion they are its promoters and accomplices.
Now, thanks to the schism among them, we already know who they are,
and, in each commune, the list is made out. We style as fanatics all who
reject the ministry of the sworn priests, the bourgeois who calls him an
interloper, all the nuns who do not confess to him, all the peasants who
stay away from his mass, all the old women who do not kiss his paten,
and all the relations of an infant who do not wish him to baptize it.
All these people and those who associate with them, whether allied,
close relatives, friends, guests or visitors, of whatever class, either
men or women, are seditious at heart, and, therefore, "suspects." We
deprive them of their electoral rights, we withdraw their pensions, we
impose on them special taxation, we confine them to their dwellings, we
imprison them by thousands, and guillotine them by hundreds; the
rest will gradually become discouraged and abandon an impracticable
cult.[2131]--The lukewarm remain, the sheep-like crowd which holds on
to its rites: the Constitu