THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOQ
the Church, which was shown in a decree of the assembly, Nov. 29. Priests who had not taken the oath were given eight days' grace in which to take the oath of citizenship; all failing then to do this were to be deprived of their pensions, were to be considered as under suspicion, and were liable to imprisonment; if they were found in a place where trouble occurred, in case this was due to religious causes, they might be removed from the place. The government of each department was charged with the carrying out of these regulations and was to report to the assembly in case further measures ,vere required.
The opposing clergy in Paris, as well as the directorium of Paris, urged the king to veto this bill, which he did on Dec. 19, 1791, moved 5. More also by regret at signing the previous Extreme bills. Now a storm of indignation Anticlerical broke out against the king and mon- Measures. archical institutions: he was called a traitor and the ally of internal and external foes, whose sanction of the laws was not needed. While the resolution of Nov. 29 had not the force of law, proceedings took place in many departments — Toulouse, Nantes, Rennes, Angers — which assumed its binding force, and the nonjuring priests were maltreated and cast into prison. The hate which first was directed against the priests was now turned against the Roman Catholic Church and against religion itself, as was particularly the case in the Jacobin club. Nevertheless, though many showed themselves atheists, the attitude taken by Robespierre indicated plainly that the revolution was not wholly under antireligious influence. Robespierre expressed himself thus: " To call upon divine Providence , not to be willing to lose sight of the idea of the divine Being who influences so essentially the affairs of nations, who appears to me to be in particular watching over the French Revolution — and this last does not appear to me to be too bold a thought — all this is for me a necessity. How could I, relying upon my own spirit alone, have endured all these conflicts which call for more than human strength, had 1 not raised my soul to God? " On Apr. 28 a law was passed abolishing clerical dress, and on May 27 a bill went through directing that at the request of twenty active citizens of a canton the directors of a department should see to the deposition of nonjuring priests as instigators of sedition. The apparent justification of this law lay in the fact that there were rumors at the time of the suppression of a conspiracy in the department of Tarn to kill the Calvinists of that locality. The king delayed ratifying this bill, and indeed finally interposed his veto, a deed which by no means bettered the condition of the priests or enhanced the security of his throne. At first the means of deportation of the priests failed, yet in Lyons, Chalons, Angers, Nantes, and Dijon there were numerous arrests of priests. On Aug. 10 began the close confinement of the king, while the extreme party gained the ascendancy in the assembly. On Aug. 23 a bill passed commanding all nonjuring priests to leave France within fourteen days under penalty of being sent to Guiana. Then came the dark month of September in which so many priests
were slain. Many were brought to Paris to be deported, and on the way to the place of detention in the city eighteen were killed by the mob and sixty more in the courtyard, while later in the monastery of the Carmelites 200 were killed. As a consequence the priests delayed no longer in obeying the law to leave the country, finding refuge in the papal dominions in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, and in Spain. In consequence of this law 40,000 priests were expatriated, and in Protestant England 8,000 found a home.
The next attack was upon institutions which connected civil life and Christianity. A decree of Sept. 20, 1792, transferred the registry of 6. Move- births, marriages, and deaths from the ment Be- Church to the civil authorities. Only comes Anti- a few days earlier, Aug. 30, divorce religious, was made possible by simple declaration only, and on Sept. 20, by common agreement; already for Protestants declaration before a judge had constituted legal marriage. The calendar was changed at this time. Since Sept. 22 they had reckoned from the first year of the republic; on Oct. 5, 1793, an entirely new calendar was devised in which each of the twelve months was divided into three decades, the first of each decade of days taking the place of the Christian Sunday. The five surplus days of the year were made a festal period. The names of the days were taken from natural products of the soil and the like. The national convention which succeeded the national assembly on Sept. 21, 1792, assumed an attitude still more inimical to Christianity. At the instigation of Chaumette, a noted despiser of religion, the Christmas festival was abolished and in its place was installed the "feast of the sansculottes." Attacks upon church rites, dignities and feasts were numerous, and atheistic declarations were frequent. In its earlier days the convention was milder in its dealings with the clergy, declaring the outrages against them punishable. But the harsher side came to be seen before long. Some of the school-children, of course prompted to this course, asked that they be not made to pray in the name of a so-called God, but that they be given instruction in the fundamentals of equality, the rights of mankind, and the constitution; but at the time this petition met with rebuff. Toward the end of the year 1793 atheistic fanaticism gained ascendancy, and on Nov. 1 a delegation from Nantes petitioned for the abolition of Roman Catholic services. On Nov. 7, after the reading of a letter to the convention, beginning: " I am a priest, that is, a charlatan," Gobel. the archbishop of Paris, went to the president's desk and laid his letter of appointment to the post upon the table, saying amid great applause that the will of the people had been his first law, and that from this time on there could be no national worship except that of freedom and equality; he renounced his position as a servant of the Roman Catholic Church. He received congratulations from the president of the convention, and then laid aside his red cap, his cross, and his ring, and his vicars also deposited there the insignia of their offices. But this unworthy act brought Gobel no safety, since five months later he ascended the scaffold on the charge