Brissot attacked these repressive measures in a discourse in which he did not hesitate to cast the odium of the crime on the victims, and to accuse the government of complicity with the aristocracy of the colonists.

“By what fatality does this news coincide with a moment when emigrations are redoubled? when the rebels assembled on our frontiers warn us of an approaching outbreak? when, in fact, the colonies threaten us, through an illegal deputation, with withdrawing from the rule of the mother-country?  Has not this the appearance of a vast plan combined by treason?”

The repugnance of the friends of the blacks, numerous in the Assembly, to take energetic measures in favour of the colonists, the distance from the scene of action, which weakens pity, and then the interior movement which attracted into its sphere minds and things, soon effaced these impressions, and allowed the spirit of independence amongst the blacks to form and expand at San Domingo, which showed itself in the distance in the form of a poor old slave—­Toussaint-Louverture.

XIII.

The internal disorder multiplied at every point of the empire.  Religious liberty, which was desire of the Constituent Assembly, and the most important conquest of the Revolution, could not be established without this struggle in face of a displaced worship, and a schism which spread far and wide amongst the people.  The counter-revolutionary party was allied every where with the clergy.  They had the same enemies, and conspired against the same cause.  The nonjuring priests had assumed the character of victims, and the interest of a portion of the people, especially in the country, attached to them.  Persecution is so odious to the public feeling that its very appearance raises generous indignation against it.  The human mind has an inclination to believe that justice is on the side of the proscribed.  The priests were not as yet persecuted, but from the moment that they were no longer paramount they believed themselves humiliated.  The ill-repressed irritation of the clergy has been more injurious to the Revolution than all the conspiracies of the emigrated aristocracy.  Conscience is man’s most sensitive point.  A superstition attacked, or a faith disturbed in the mind of a people, is the fellest of conspiracies.  It was by the hand of God, invisible in the hand of the priesthood, that the aristocracy roused La Vendee.  Frequent and bloody symptoms already betrayed themselves in the west, and in Normandy, that concealed focus of religious war.

The most fearful of these symptoms burst out at Caen.  The Abbe Fauchet was constitutional bishop of Calvados.  The celebrity of his name, the elevated patriotism of his opinions, the eclat of his revolutionary renown, his eloquence, and his writings, disseminated widely in his diocese, were the causes of greater excitement throughout Calvados than elsewhere.