involving the
country in a desperate foreign warfare, had shown themselves
incompetent to carry it on. In Paris, therefore, they had to give way
before the Jacobins, who, by the exercise of a reckless despotism,
were able to display an unparalleled energy in its prosecution.
Against their tyranny the moderate republicans and the royalists
outside of Paris now made common cause, and civil war broke out in
many places, including Vendee, the Rhone valley, and the southeast of
France. Montesquieu declares that honor is the distinguishing
characteristic of aristocracy: the emigrant aristocrats had been the
first in France to throw honor and patriotism to the winds; many of
their class who remained went further, displaying in Vendee and
elsewhere a satanic vindictiveness. This shameful policy colored the
entire civil war, and the bitterness in attack and retaliation that
was shown in Marseilles, Lyons, Toulon, and elsewhere would have
disgraced savages in a prehistoric age.

[Footnote 35: The memoirs of Joseph and Lucien,
supported by Coston and the anonymous local historian of
Marseilles, all unite in declaring that the Buonaparte
family landed there; on the other hand, Louis, in the
Documents historiques sur la Hollande, I, 34, asserts
categorically in detail that they took up their abode in
La Valette, a suburb of Toulon, where they had landed.]

The westward slopes of the Alps were occupied by a French army under
the command of Kellermann, designated by the name of its situation;
farther south and east lay the Army of Italy, under Brunet. Both these
armies were expected to draw their supplies from the fertile country
behind them, and to cooeperate against the troops of Savoy and Austria,
which had occupied the passes of lower Piedmont, and blocked the way
into Lombardy. By this time the law for compulsory enlistment had been
enacted, but the general excitement and topsy-turvy management
incident to such rapid changes in government and society, having
caused the failure of the Sardinian expedition, had also prevented
recruiting or equipment in either of these two divisions of the army.
The outbreak of open hostilities in all the lands immediately to the
westward momentarily paralyzed their operations; and when, shortly
afterward, the Girondists overpowered the Jacobins in Marseilles, the
defection of that city made it diffi