A scornful laugh echoed from the tribunes of the Assembly to the populace.  The proces-verbal of this sitting was ordered to be sent to the eighty-three departments.  Next day the Assembly reconsidered this, and negatived its vote of the previous evening; but publicity was still given to it, and it echoed through the provinces, carrying with it the disquietude, derision, and hatred attached to the Royal Veto.  The constitution, handed over to ridicule and hooted in full assembly, had now become the plaything of the populace.

For many months the state of the kingdom resembled the state of Paris.  All was uproar, confusion, denunciation, disturbance in the departments.  Each courier brought his riots, seditions, petitions, outbreaks, and assassinations.  The clubs established as many points of resistance to the constitution as there were communes in the empire.  The civil war hatching in La Vendee burst out by massacres at Avignon.

VI.

This city and comtal, united to France by the recent decree of the Constituent Assembly, had remained from this period in an intermediary state between two dominations, so favourable to anarchy.  The partisans of the papal government, and the partisans of the reunion with France, struggled there in alternations of hope and fear, which prolonged and envenomed their hate.  The king, from a religious scruple, had for too long suspended the execution of the decree of reunion.  Trembling to infringe upon the domain of the church, he deferred his decision, and his impolitic delays gave time for crimes.

France was represented in Avignon by mediators.  The provisional authority of these mediators was supported by a detachment of troops of the line.  The power, entirely municipal, was confided to the dictatorship of the municipality.  The populace, excited and agitated, was divided into the French or revolutionary party, and the party opposed to the reunion by France and the Revolution.  The fanaticism of religion with one, the fanaticism of liberty with the other, impelled the two parties even to crimes.  The warmth of blood, the thirst of private vengeance, the heat of the climate, all added to civil passions.  The violences of Italian republics were all to be seen in the manners of this Italian colony, of this branch establishment of Rome on the banks of the Rhone.  The smaller states are, the more atrocious are their civil wars.  There opposite opinions become personal hatreds; contests are but assassinations.  Avignon commenced these wholesale assassinations by private murders.