edings of the Assumptionists, a religious order which had
amassed enormous wealth, and which, by the various local editions of its
paper _la Croix_, had organized a campaign of venomous slander and abuse
of the Republic and its leaders.

The Government, having got wind of a project of the conspirators to
seize the reins of power during the Rennes court-martial, anticipated
the act by wholesale arrests on August 12. Jules Guerin barricaded
himself with some friends in a house in the rue de Chabrol in Paris, and
defied the Government to arrest him without perpetrating murder. The
grotesque incident of the "Fort Chabrol" came to an end after
thirty-seven days when the authorities had surrounded the house with
troops to starve Guerin out and stopped the drains.

In November a motley array of conspirators, ranging from Andre Buffet,
representative of the pretender the Duke of Orleans, to butchers from
the slaughter-houses of La Villette, were brought to trial before the
Senate acting as a High Court of Justice, on the charge of conspiracy
against the State. After a long trial lasting nearly two months, during
which the prisoners outdid each other in declamatory insults to their
enemies, the majority were acquitted. Paul Deroulede and Andre Buffet
were condemned to banishment for ten years and Jules Guerin to
imprisonment for the same term. Two others, Marcel Habert and the comte
de Lur-Saluces, who had taken flight, gave themselves up later and were
condemned in 1900 and 1901, respectively, amid a public indifference
which was far from their liking.

Thus the year 1899 had proved itself one of the most dramatically
eventful in the history of the Republic. It was also to be one of the
most significant in its consequences. For the new grouping of mutually
jealous factions against a common danger had, in spite of the fiasco of
the second Dreyfus case, shown a way to victory. And exasperation
against the intrigues of the Clericals and the army officers was going
to turn the former toleration of the "esprit nouveau" into active
persecution, especially as the Socialists and Radicals formed the
majority of the new combination.

In November, 1899, Waldeck-Rousseau laid before Parliament an
Associations bill to regulate the organization of societies, which was
intended indirectly to control religious bodies. The leniency of the
Government hitherto and the commercial energy of many religious orders,
manufacturers of articles varyi