Two years had elapsed between the meeting of the States-General and the flight to Varennes, and in that interval nature had been busy in selecting her new favored class.  Economists have estimated that the Church owned one-third of the land of Europe during the Middle Ages.  However this may have been she certainly held a very large part of France.  On April 16, 1790, the Assembly declared this territory to be national property, and proceeded to sell it to the peasantry by means of the paper assignats which were issued for the purpose, and were supposed to be secured upon the land.  The sales were generally made in little lots, as the sales were made of the public domain in Rome under the Licinian Laws, and with an identical effect.  The Emperor of Germany and the King of Prussia met at Pilnitz in August, 1791, to consider the conquest of France, and, on the eve of that meeting, the Assembly received a report which stated that these lands to the value of a thousand million francs had already been distributed, and that sales were going on.  It was from this breed of liberated husbandmen that France drew the soldiers who fought her battles and won her victories for the next five and twenty years.

Assuming that the type of the small French landholder, both rural and urban, had been pretty well developed by the autumn of 1791, the crisis came rapidly, for the confiscations which created this new energy roused to frenzy, perhaps the most formidable energy which opposed it.  The Church had not only been robbed of her property but had been wounded in her tenderest part.  By a decree of June 12, 1790, the Assembly transferred the allegiance of the French clergy from the Pope to the state, and the priesthood everywhere vowed revenge.  In May, 1791, the Marquis de la Rouerie, it is true, journeyed from his home in Brittany to Germany to obtain the recognition of the royal princes for the insurrection which he contemplated in La Vendee, but the insurrection when it occurred was not due so much to him or his kind as to the influence of the nonjuring priests upon the peasant women of the West.

The mental condition of the French emigrants at Coblentz during this summer of 1791 is nothing short of a psychological marvel.  They regarded the Revolution as a jest, and the flight to the Rhine as a picnic.  These beggared aristocrats, male and female, would throw their money away by day among the wondering natives, and gamble among themselves at night.  If they ever thought of the future it was only as the patricians in Pompey’s camp thought; who had no time to prepare for a campaign against Caesar, because they were absorbed in distributing offices among themselves, or in inventing torments to inflict on the rebels.  Their chief anxiety was lest the resistance should be too feeble to permit them to glut themselves with blood.  The creatures of caste, the emigrants could not conceive of man as a variable animal, or of the birth of a race of warriors under their eyes.  To them human nature remained constant.  Such, they believed, was the immutable will of God.