ROYALIST CONSPIRACIES IN SOUTHERN FRANCE.* Tins volume is but one
of a series of studies by M. Ernest Daudet, who has undertaken the very useful investigation of those counter-revolutions which have modified the course of events in France since the outbreak of 1789. The volumes in which be has examined the conduct of Ministers and personages whose names are familiar to us are, perhaps, more attractive than this minute record of useless and incoherent struggles by the peasants of southern Departments which are little known to travellers ; but we doubt if they are more useful towards the ap- preciation of that dislocated, yet extraordinarily tenacious, sys- tem which we think of, in mingled amazement and curiosity, as the " ancien regime." The greatness of France was in large measure secured by the harmony of classes which, whatever the wars of rival chiefs or the bitterness of sectarian quarrels, kept each commune strong within itself. Until the Court drew the nobles from their homes and demoralised the religious hierarchy, the village units of the provincial life, the provincial units of the national life, were better knit in social bonds than elsewhere in Europe. In face of the increasing antagonism of classes, which is almost as threatening to true progress and prosperity as were even the corruptions and private vices of the old order, the historian who removes some of the false glitter of the Revolution, by which that antagonism has been so largely in- creased, does good service.
M. Daudet's dry record is almost disappointingly impartial. In it are no "whiffs of grape shot," no one "swallows formulas," or "grows shrill." The guillotine is hardly mentioned, and, though the scenes of his Royalist conspiracies are about equally near to Lyons and Avignon, we are spared allusion to the atrocities committed in either city. The book, therefore, is by no means
agreeable to persons who will condone a good deal of inaccuracy if they are properly interested. The sober " cebets " or onion- eating peasants, who were the chief actors in its tale of useless revolt, had no idea of stage effects, and used no tags of Rous- seau or Paine when they were shot or sabred down. Their country was, it is true, full of mountainous hiding-ground, well wooded, and with fair, large pastures, where the best cheese of all the south was made, yet the conditions of their insurrec- tion were inartistic. There were three or four energetic men, notably two priests, to stir up the feelings of the population ; but there were no leaders worth the name, and so loyalty and dislike of the Paris tyranny, which might have created another Vendee in the south, and altered the history of Europe, ended in miserable murders and in abject humiliation to all con- cerned. Concerning the series of Royalist conspiracies which keeps M. Daudet's pen employed through a good octavo volume, Mr. Carlyle only writes two or three scornful paragraphs in his History of the Revolution, or rather concerning its Parisian dramatis personas ; while of French historians, hardly any, including even M. Taine, have given more than passing notice to the deep-reaching, if smouldering and ineffectual, fire that
burned in the heart of Languedoc and the Cevennes. Mistaken
as is Mr. Carlyle's estimate of the forces at work, yet his picturesque presentment of the facts tempts us to quote his account of the confederation of Jales, begging our readers to
believe almost exactly the reverse of his own fancies as to its composition :—
"Royalist Camp of Jalds Jales, mountain-girdled plain, amid the rocks of the Cevennes, whence Royalism, as is feared and hoped, may dash down like a mountain torrent, and submerge France ! A singular thing, this Camp of Jales, existing mostly on paper, for the soldiers at Jales, being peasants or National Guards, were in heart sworn Sans-culottes ; and all that the Royalist captains could do was, with false words, to keep them, or rather keep the report of them, drawn up there, visible to all imaginations for a terror and a sign,--if per- adventure France might be reconquered by theatrical machinery, by the picture of a Royalist army done to the life. Not till the third summer was this portent, burning out by fits and then fading, got finally extinguished,—was the old Castle of Jales, no camp being visible to the bodily eye, got blown asunder by some National Guards."
It would have been well if M. Daudet had given a fuller table of contents, as he had not thought it necessary to index his book. A comparison of the dates of the events he describes
* Histoire des Co
Hachette at Cie. issinep. irations Royulisics du Midi, Par Ernest Daudet. Paris: with those of the Revolution elsewhere, would give more significance to the vacillations at the Tuileries and at Coblentz, which constantly checked the flame of insulted religion, that, after all, was the chief power in the hands of the Royalist counter-revolutionists. The old religious wars had not been so long over, but that the anti-Catholic doings at Paris could rouse quite a different passion in Langue-
doc from any social or political fury elsewhere. And the main-spring of government being broken, there was no au- thority to keep Catholics and Protestants from flying at each other's throats. The new militia organisation, the sudden self- government of the communes, deserted by their habitual lords, gave every man a right of self-defence and enforced self-asser- tion. Fear and hunger, primitive passions, broke down the civilisation of centuries; while a ruediteval fanaticism was roused among the villagers by the humiliation and persecution of their priests, comrades as they were in poverty and labour. Hardly five per cent, of the clergy in the Department of the Lozere accepted the new ecclesiastical laws, and the mass of their parishioners supported them in their refusal. There were, in truth, plentiful materials for revolt against the tyranny of Paris, and the temper of the southern Royalists was at least as ready for civil war as that of the Chouans in the west. But they were without responsible leaders, both to control their effervescent rushes to and from the mountain villages, and to connect them with the efforts of the Royalists elsewhere. The most active of the conspirators were but village cures, and in proportion as they were good ministers of the gospel and respected in their office, in that proportion did they make indifferent chiefs of a_ guerrilla war.
And without determined chiefs and distinct objects, the. ignorant peasants could not but feel how the "public opinion." of 1789-93 was against them. Most of the wearers of broad- cloth, the men who could read the news from Paris, the authori- ties yet remaining, believed that the Revolution "made for righteousness," or, at any rate, was the dawn of a golden age. It is easy to understand how lukewarm the village gentry were, and how an inevitable selfishness continually wore away the constituent parts of the Royalist federation known as the Camp. of Jales. But it is less easy to understand the neglect of se much available loyalty by the intriguers at Coblentz. In- cidentally, M. Daudet throws a side-light on the life of the emigrant colony there, when the Cure Claude Allier and his arrived on foot at the gaudy but bankrupt Court, where every frivolity and vice of Versailles was reproduced in rags. The earnest, ascetic envoy of the Vivarais—a country that earned its name from its ancient motto, " Vivat rex "—of the- Cevennes, yet bearing scars of religious war, and of the wild Gevaudan, found himself in the rival salons *of Madame de Polastron and Madame de Balbi, where the Comtes de Provence and d'Artois were most easily accessible. Both Princes had charming manners and received well, but in return what did they- give to the peasant ambassadors ? Vague hopes of help from Sardinia and Spain ; a General, Irish by descent, the Comte de Conway, and a deputy-general under his orders, the Comte de Saillans ; various volunteers of high birth, and strong advice: to be forbearing and prudent. But the stars fought against all Bourbon schemes, the Generals quarrelled while waiting at. Chambery for the favourable moment to enter France, and echauffourees wasted the strength of the party in mere frothy
ebullition. The Comte de Saillans, acting without orders, almost coerced by the enthusiast Claude Allier, raised the white- standard of the Princes, only to be defeated in nearly every skirmish, with monotonous slaughter of cure after cure. Pillage of the Catholic villages was a necessary result, and wild flight of the Royalists to mountain fastnesses, where they were trapped and murdered as so many wolves; while the old castle of Jales,. the birthplace of the southern conspiracies, was mercilessly wrecked. The Comte de Saillans, taken prisoner, was assas- sinated on the high-road, with the connivance, probably, of his escort ; but Claude Allier escaped, to keep alive the Royalist fire in the mountain districts further east.
In 1792, the Royalist conspiracy seemed all but extinct in the- south, but the death of the King, the further disruption of social ties, the terror that was even then hardly to be borne, again roused the Royalist temper in the hill-country of Languedoc,. and a more experienced leader than any of the enthusiasts of Jai& undertook to guide it. Charrier, generally styled " rin- fame " in the official documents of the day, had been a Conser- vative Deputy in the States-General of 1789. He had taken. a
leading part in the struggles of the minority. When Ver- sailles was flooded by the Paris mob in October, he had been among the defenders of the royal family, and mistaken for one of the King's body-guard, he had barely escaped hanging on the nearest lamp-post. He received a roving commission of c onspiracy from Coblentz. In the prime of life, extremely handsome, not without judgment and prudence, as well as en- thusiastic loyalty, Charrier is a romantic figure ; but it was not within his means to turn back the tide of Jacobin conquest, or to reconstitute the old order. He could not control the untimely zeal of his principal agents, the priests, or the violent counsels of Claude Allier. The rough recruits from the mountain farms were often mutinous and unmanageable, yet he dared not check their zeal by punishment. One decisive action, in which he defeated the soldiers of the Government, relieves the monotony of his discomfiture. Allier had been his evil genius, urging him to premature revolt before the Royalists of the other De- partments had received their orders from Coblentz ; and within a few days he was a solitary hunted man, his thousands of vociferating peasants had fled, each man to his own house, and left him to be betrayed by a Royalist volunteer, who thus bought his own pardon. Partly to gain time, partly in weak- ness—for he loved his wife passionately—Charrier offered to make important revelations, and he was taken to Paris. Every effort was made to work on his feelings, but he recovered strength to make a firm confession of his design to -" re-establish the Catholic Apostolic and Roman reli- gion." His wife was constrained to write to him an appeal to give up his comrades and instigators and save his life ; but Cha.rrier remained firm, and yet not defiant, for he implored, in a touching letter, that the Convention would ex- cuse all who had followed him in his revolt. He committed his wife and children to the Jacobin representative of his Depart- ment, and met his death bravely on July 17th, 1793. It was the time of Girondin discomfiture, and Jacobin terrorism was at its worst. Only the abject hunger and misery of the Royalist mountaineers preserved them from extermination. But the guillotine was busy in the towns, the t«pes-dais had their way in the villages, and outrage and murder that overtook a Reactionist were counted acts of civic virtue. In September the impetuous Cur6 Claude Allier was executed, and with him conspiracy in Languedoc lost its main-spring. Nonjnring priests were slain by hundreds, and the woods were burned in which the wretched peasants concealed themselves. Every sen- timent but terror was suppressed until the fall of Robes- pierre, when some faint rebellion again lifted its head, but in the meaner form of wayside assassination and robbery, of farm- house massacre and the excesses of a people reduced to savage individualism. Of the " Terreur blanche," as it showed itself in the southern Departments between the death of Robespierre and the consolidation of military power by the battle of Marengo, M. Daudet purposes to write another volume. Though the ordinary English reader may not be specially interested in his recital of facts, every one who aspires to a true conception of the action of the Revolutionary forces, and a just idea of the state of the people in whom their leaven worked, should consult these and similar plain statements of facts, as those facts are reported by eye-witnesses and confirmed by official documents. Every year strengthens the true his- torical impression which should be received, and lessens equally the sense of unaccountableness with which we used to read the frantic abuse and frantic panegyrics of that most tragic yet most explicable readjustment of European humanity ; that out- come of error and corruption, which, like a furious flood, swept away so many evil as well as some precious growths ; but from which we will hope the dry land may yet emerge, not unblessed by a -rainbow of reconciliation, and capable of reproducing what deserves respect and admiration in the elder world of Henri IV. and Sully, Bossuet and Corneille.
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