Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XXV

But such a reasonable and moderate policy was impossible on two accounts. In consequence of the thirteenth of Vendémiaire, the radical party still survived and controlled the machinery of government; and, in spite of the seeming supremacy of moderate ideas, the royalists were still irreconcilable. In particular there was the religious question, which in itself comprehended a political, social, and economic revolution which men like those who sat in the Directory refused to understand because they chose to treat it on the basis of pure theory.[65] The great western district of France was Roman, royalist, and agricultural. There was a unity in their life and faith so complete that any disturbance of the equilibrium produced frenzy and chaos, an embattled strife for life itself. It was a discovery to Hoche, that to pacify the Vendée brute force was quite insufficient. The peasantry were beggared and savage but undismayed. While he used force with nobles, strangers, and madmen, his conquest was in the main moral because he restored to the people their fields and their church, their institutions somewhat modified and improved, but still their old institutions. No man less gigantic in moral stature would have dared thus to defy the petty atheistic fanaticism of the Directory. France had secured enlightened legislation which was not enforced, religious liberty which could not be practised because of ill will in the government, civil liberty which was a mere sham because of internal violence, political liberty which was a chimera before hostile foreigners. Hence it seemed to the administration that one evil must cure another. Intestine disturbances, they naïvely believed, could be kept under some measure of control only by an aggressive foreign policy which should deceive the insurgent elements as to the resources of the government. Thus far, by hook or by crook, the armies, so far as they had been clothed and paid and fed at all, had been fed and paid and clothed by the administration at Paris. If the armies should still march and fight, the nation would be impressed by the strength of the Directory.