to the peasants. He managed
so ill that he was arrested at Varennes, and brought back whence he
came, but he lied and plotted still.

Two years had elapsed between the meeting of the States-General and the
flight to Varennes, and in that interval nature had been busy in
selecting her new favored class. Economists have estimated that the
Church owned one-third of the land of Europe during the Middle Ages.
However this may have been she certainly held a very large part of
France. On April 16, 1790, the Assembly declared this territory to be
national property, and proceeded to sell it to the peasantry by means of
the paper _assignats_ which were issued for the purpose, and were
supposed to be secured upon the land. The sales were generally made in
little lots, as the sales were made of the public domain in Rome under
the Licinian Laws, and with an identical effect. The Emperor of Germany
and the King of Prussia met at Pilnitz in August, 1791, to consider the
conquest of France, and, on the eve of that meeting, the Assembly
received a report which stated that these lands to the value of a
thousand million francs had already been distributed, and that sales
were going on. It was from this breed of liberated husbandmen that
France drew the soldiers who fought her battles and won her victories
for the next five and twenty years.

Assuming that the type of the small French landholder, both rural and
urban, had been pretty well developed by the autumn of 1791, the crisis
came rapidly, for the confiscations which created this new energy roused
to frenzy, perhaps the most formidable energy which opposed it. The
Church had not only been robbed of her property but had been wounded in
her tenderest part. By a decree of June 12, 1790, the Assembly
transferred the allegiance of the French clergy from the Pope to the
state, and the priesthood everywhere vowed revenge. In May, 1791, the
Marquis de la Rouerie, it is true, journeyed from his home in Brittany
to Germany to obtain the recognition of the royal princes for the
insurrection which he contemplated in La Vendee, but the insurrection
when it occurred was not due so much to him or his kind as to the
influence of the nonjuring priests upon the peasant women of the West.

The mental condition of the French emigrants at Coblentz during this
summer of 1791 is nothing short of a psychological marvel. They regarded
the Revolution as a jest, and the flight to the Rhine as a picnic. These