The mountaineers of these countries felt for their nobles that voluntary and traditional devotion which the Arabs have for their sheiks, and the Scots for the chieftains of their clans.  This respect and this attachment form part of the national honour in these rural districts.  Religion, more fervent in the south, was in the eyes of these people a sacred liberty, on which revolution made attempts in the name of political liberty.  They preferred the liberty of conscience to the liberty as citizens.  Under all these titles the new institutions were odious:  faithful priests nourished this hatred, and sanctified it in the hearts of the peasantry, whilst the nobility kept up a royalism, which pity for the king’s misfortunes and the royal family made more full of sympathy at the daily recital of fresh outrages.

Mende, a small village hidden at the bottom of deep valleys, half way between the plains of the south and those of the Lyonnais, was the centre of counter-revolutionary spirit.  The bourgeoisie and the nobility, mingled together from the smallness of their fortunes, the familiarity of their manners, and the frequent unions of their families, did not entertain towards each other that intestine envy, hatred, and malice, which was favourable to the Revolution.  There was neither pride in the one nor jealousy in the other:  it was as it is in Spain, one single people, where nobility is only, if we may say so, but a right of first birth of the same blood.  These people had, it is true, laid down their arms after the insurrection of the preceding year in the camp of Jales:  but hearts were far from being disarmed.  These provinces watched with an attentive eye for the favourable moment in which they might rise en masse against Paris.  The insults to the dignity of the king, and the violence done to religion by the Legislative Assembly, excited their minds even to fanaticism.  They burst out again, as though involuntarily, on the occasion of a movement of troops across their valleys.  The tricoloured cockade, emblem of infidelity to God and the king, had entirely disappeared for several months in the town of Mende, and they put up the white cockade, as a souvenir and a hope of that order of things to which they were secretly devoted.

The directory of the department, consisting of men strangers to the country, resolved on having the emblem of the constitution respected, and applied for some troops of the line.  This the municipality opposed, in a resolution addressed to the directory, and made an insurrectional appeal to the neighbouring municipalities, and a kind of federation with them to resist together the sending of any troops into their districts.  However, the troops sent from Lyons at the request of the directory approached; on their appearance, the municipality dissolved the ancient national guard, composed of a few friends of liberty, and formed a fresh national guard, of which the officers were chosen by itself from amongst the gentry and most devoted royalists of the neighbourhood.  Armed with this force, the municipality compelled the directory of the department to supply them with arms and ammunition.