nearer inspection, to be the history of a number of youths who quitted the college of Vannes, in Brittany, to join the army of Bretons, who in March, 1815, opposed Bonaparte's power. At first sight the subject promises little but battles and bloodshed, which, however interesting, are seldom very edifying spectacles; the author, however, has introduced a variety of details on the state of the French Church under Napoleon, and on the religious spirit of the brave Bretons who then took up arms, and thus has rendered his narrative one of the most charming we have met with for a long time. He has invested his young heroes with a romance which carries us back to the age of chivalry; we can hardly believe that, in the nineteenth century, such a spirit should animate a whole country, as to rouse the peasant from his home and the student from his college, to defend the ministers of religion from oppression. The inhabitants of the western part of France, especially Brittany and Poitou, are a singularly religious race; they remain almost untouched by the spirit of the revolution, during the greater part of which they were in a state of warfare with its agents. They were a perpetual thorn in the side of the republic, from which they wrested a toleration of religion which extended nowhere beyond the charmed boundary which these brave men, at the expense of their repose and of their blood, created for themselves. If they gained nothing else, at least this preservation from the contagion of irreligion is the reward of their self-devotion. Religious war seems almost a contradiction in terms; but if it be not absolutely unlawful for a Christian to take up arms, the protection of the oppressed and the defence of the Church are the purest motives for which he can turn soldier. If ever, then, there was a cause for which it was meritorious to fight, it was that for which the Bretons and the schoolboys (for really they were no more) of Vannes encountered all the hardships and dangers of an unequal warfare. It was not a mere caprice which thus led these youths to risk their all in such a cause; it required a settled enthusiasm to endure the pains of a campaign. A soldier's life ne

cessarily implies a severe discipline and strict obedience, lyings on the ground, watchings, cold and hunger, which, strange as it may appear, bear a close resemblance to a monastic rule; and all this, not to speak of the dangers of the field, M. Rio and his companions endured, for the sake of relieving their priests from restrictions put upon them by an usurping government. It is true that they also took up arms for the Bourbons, but the proximate cause which drove them to resistance was, as we shall see, Napoleon's oppressions of the clergy. The principle of passive obedience does not seem, in this case, to come into question at all. It is quite true that the arms of the Church consist in fasting and prayer-her weapons are the keys which her Lord has entrusted to her keeping; the moment, therefore, that she stirs up her sons to raise an arm of flesh against the powers that be, she quits the high vantage ground on which Christ has placed her, and descends to take her place amongst the kingdoms of this world. If a temporal power ordained of God orders a Christian to do what is unlawful, he must patiently abide the penalties which the world chooses to inflict, and refuse to execute the command; in this case passive obedience is unlimited. But the powers which the Vendéens and the Bretons resisted were not the powers ordained of God; the sovereignty of France was vested in Louis XVIII, and his, to all intents and purposes, was the authority which they were called upon to obey. Success alone cannot make a usurper a rightful sovereign; usurpation is a crime, which implies that there is a right and a wrong in the matter, a lawful and an unlawful authority. It is quite true that an usurped power may in time become a rightful one, and it is also true that it is very hard to lay one's finger on the precise time when it does become lawful. But we will venture to say that such was not the case with the government which the Vendéens, and at a later period the students of Vannes, resisted. As for the leaders of the French revolution, with whom the Vendéens waged their noble struggle, it is hard to say in what sense they were a government at all; they were

no more the "powers that be" than a gang of highwaymen, who are certainly the successful party when they stop a traveller on the highway. Napoleon, anointed as he was by the Pope, and recognized at once throughout France, might at one time have made out a stronger case; but at the time of the Breton insurrection, his position was completely changed. First of all he was excommunicated; besides which, scarce a year before he had abdicated his throne, and France had sworn allegiance to Louis XVIII. Again, it should not be forgotten, that in the eyes of the Bretons the Bourbons were not only the recognized sovereigns of France, who had been dethroned by an usurper, but also the family in which the kingdom was vested by divine right. If any reigning house in the world could lay claim to such a title, that of St. Louis was the one; for nearly a thousand years, the line of Capet had possessed the throne in uninterrupted succession, during the course of which it had produced many kings who fully deserved the title of Most Christian. They had been the chief support of the Church during the struggle with the German emperors; three archbishops of Canterbury, St. Anselm, St. Thomas, and St. Edmund, found a refuge with them when all the world had abandoned them; and the race had acquired a new sanctity in the opinion of the faithful Bretons, by the death of Louis XVI. The notion of opposing a lawful authority seems never to have entered into the heads of the people of Brittany and La Vendée; nor can it be said that interested persons excited them to revolt; for the peasants seem uniformly to have been the first to rise, and then voluntarily to put the nobles at their head. These wars were simply the result of the cry of religion within the hearts of a brave and devoted people. This is the great charm of the book now before us; it is the history of men acting, not on calculation, but on the impulse of good and noble motives.

As, however, M. Rio's narrative is but an episode in the wars which so long agitated the western provinces of France, we cannot enter upon the subject without saying a few words on the wars of La Vendée,

where commenced the long struggle of which this insurrection of the students is the termination. The picture which we shall endeavor to draw of the religion which animates the peasantry of those countries would be incomplete without an account of what was called "the Catholic army of La Vendée." In the later rising in Brittany, our author frankly avows the indifference of the generality of the leaders of the expedition to the religious wants of the soldiers; so that the devotional spirit which we have noticed seems to have been almost confined to our friends, the students, and to the peasantry. In the former war, which broke out in 1793, nothing occurs to shock one; the republican historians themselves, though they deplore the mistaken superstition of the Vendéens, bear witness to the purity of their motives and to the devotional spirit in which the war was carried on. One of the oldest of their leaders, of the appears in M. Rio's pages, and seems to have been a special favorite with the students, as he certainly was with the author, if we may judge by the enthusiastic way in which he mentions him. Gamber, though the army was only called "l'armée royale," never forgot that he had belonged to “l'armée Catholique." After the long exercises of the day, his troops might be seen in the evening, ranged along a hedge where they were sheltered from the wind, listening to the voice of the old veteran, who was praying with them. When they were obliged to move on Sunday, Gamber's company might be seen as they marched, telling their beads, which they always wore about them; and the flag which was borne before them was sure to bear a device which carried one back to the time of the crusades. They were but keeping up the traditions which had been taught them in the Vendéen war, which, as we have said before, was not a political contest.

name of Gamber, re

The real name of the country now called La Vendée, is Le Bocage. It is situated to the south of Brittany, on the opposite side of the Loire; as its name implies, it is covered with foliage; not that it can in any sense be called a forest, but each field or small farm is a little patch of ground sur

rounded by rows of trees, which shut it in; so that seen from an eminence, the whole country looks a large wood, with here and there a church spire, or the pointed turrets of a chateau piercing through the screen. Few roads traverse this natural labyrinth, and these in the winter time often become the beds of torrents, and are therefore impassable. The gentry lived in isolated chateaux, and were quite a different order of men from the rest of the French noblesse. They lived amongst the peasantry in the greatest concord; their houses were not surrounded by extensive pleasure grounds, but by the diminutive farms of their tenants, all of whom they knew personally, and whose joys and sorrows they shared. The consequence was that when the National Assembly abolished manorial rights throughout France, the decree was a dead letter in La Vendée, where the peasants continued to pay them as usual. If the Revolution had but let them alone, they might have remained in ignorance of the dreadful scenes which were passing about them; but in its benevolence it was anxious to force its novel blessings of liberty and equality even on those who were bigoted enough to be satisfied as they were. A report, drawn up by a set of commissioners, sent down from the legislative assembly of Paris, speaks with an amusing simplicity on the cause of the troubles in this singular country. "Religion, or at least religion such as they conceive it, has become to this people the strongest, or so to speak, the only moral habit of their lives." "In this country, the difficulty of travelling, the simplicity of a life purely agricultural, the lessons of childhood, and the religious symbols, placed as objects, on which men may ever fix their eyes, have laid open their minds to a crowd of superstitious ideas, which, in the present state of things, no species of illumination can destroy or moderate."

The tide of revolution, which had so easily inundated France, here first found a check; it rolled back broken from La Vendée. Here was a strange phenomenon for the Dantons and Marats of Paris, some

*Thiers, Revolution Francaise, tom. ii. Appendix.

thing quite beyond their philosophy-a whole people so much in love with their religion as to have a strange predilection for paying tithes. The first occasion on which the troubles broke out in La Vendée, was the attempt of the Assemblée Constituante to force the oath to the constitution on the clergy. It will be remembered that by a de cree of the French constitution, the possessions of the clergy were confiscated, and themselves reduced to the condition of the paid creatures of the state; all the old diocesses were broken up or suppressed, and the ecclesiastical division of France made one and the same with the civil, so that the bishop was henceforth to be the mere prefect of the department for religious affairs; above all, connection with Rome was strictly forbidden. Those who refused to bind themselves by an oath to this state of things, were deprived of their sees and cures, and constitutional bishops and priests appointed in their stead; at the same time, saving, of course, that they were expelled from their benefices, the free exercise of their religion was granted to those who would not join this schism, or, in revolutionary language, to "l'église des pretres insermentés." The Assembly did its best to cajole the clergy of France (for so large was the majority of priests who refused the oath that they may be so called) into this new state of things. It appears that by a decree of May 7, 1791, they even charitably allowed them the use of the parochial, that is, of their own churches for the celebration of mass, though they forbade them to perform there any other ceremony; secondly, the same decree permitted them freely to worship elsewhere, if they pleased. How it was met in La Vendée will be seen by a letter of instructions sent to his clergy by the bishop of Luçon, in whose diocess that country is situated; he commands his clergy not to officiate in their own churches, until they were put into their hands, as the sole rightful possessors of them, lest their flocks should by degrees come to consider it indifferent whether they were fed by the hands of intruders or of their own lawful pastors. He next bids them avail themselves of the permission of freely officiating where they pleased. "In

those parishes," he continues," where there are few landed proprietors in easy circumstances, it will, doubtless, be difficult to find a suitable place of worship, to procure the sacred vessels and vestments; in this case a mere barn, a portable altar, a chasuble of chintz or other common stuff, and vessels of pewter, will be sufficient, in case of necessity, for the celebration of the holy mysteries." This extract will give us an idea of the state of the Church in La Vendée at a time when the revolution was inclined to be most tolerant. It seemed, however, as if the poverty of the Church only endeared her the more to her faithful peasantry; the Report to which we have referred complains that nothing was more common than to see in parishes of five or six hundred inhabitants only ten or twelve persons attend mass at the parish church, where it was celebrated by an intruding priest; the rest flocked to their lawful priest, though he officiated at a great distance, in some barn or room, poorly fitted up for the occasion.

The Legislative Assembly, irritated by an opposition which it could not comprehend, proceeded to issue a decree of persecution against all the priests who would not take the oath to the constitution. For some time the king courageously interposed his veto; but after the miserable 10th of August an open persecution commenced, and the refractory priests, as the revolution styled them, were compelled to seek places of concealment. They celebrated the holy mysteries in woods and forests; and the peasants flocked to them in crowds, armed and prepared to defend them to the last drop of their blood. Partial insurrections broke out; and in one place a peasant defended himself most vigorously against the gens-d'armes with a fork; they cried out to him "Give yourself up;" but his only answer was "Give me back my God;" at length he fell, after receiving twenty-two sabre cuts in his body. The immediate cause, therefore, of the wars in the west of France, was the attempt to force an unlawful oath upon the priests; it is curiously illustrative of the unbending temper of the people, that an attempt of a similar kind caused the out

break in Brittany, in which the students of Vannes took part, and which so many years after closed the contest of which the Vendéen war was the commencement. The revolutionary report which we have noticed above acquits the priests of all attempts to raise an insurrection; the peasants themselves took up arms simply to protect the ministers of their religion, without any concerted plan. The nobles of the country who had not emigrated, at their request put themselves at their head, and thus almost undesignedly was formed the Catholic army, which was so long the terror of the republicans at Paris.

The whole of the proceedings of these brave men was marked with the simplicity which characterized the outset of the war. Noble and peasant fought side by side, without distinction of ranks, and the first general-in-chief of the army was the famous Cathelineau, a poor peasant, who for his piety was called the Saint of Anjou. The heroic courage with which they fought had not destroyed that simple good nature, which seems to have been their characteristic national feature. Improved, as it was, by Christianity, this quality appears during the war under the form of a wonderful gentleness, which never forsook them in the fiercest contest. Even in that most trying situation for a soldier, the capture of a town by assault, the houses were not plundered, nor the inhabitants ill treated; on one occasion, the taking of Thouars, we find them rushing at once to the churches to ring the bells and to pray. The name of Catholic, which they assumed, was no empty title; on one occasion two soldiers quarrelled, and drew their swords on each other; one of the officers perceiving it, rushed up and exclaimed, "Jesus Christ forgave his murderers and a soldier of the Catholic army would kill his comrade!" the two men dropped their swords, and rushed into each other's arms. The religious character of the army was not, however, confined to the peasantry; their most famous commander, the Marquis de Lescure, was a man of austere piety, and was called the Saint of Poitou. His courage, when most daring, was never impetuous, and he moved amidst the

thickest of the battle as a man who looks death in the face, and is prepared to meet it. His humanity had something angelic about it; once, and once only, his evenness of temper forsook him when the peasants killed a prisoner whom he had ordered them to spare. The man had discharged a firelock at him close to his body; he coolly beat it aside, and merely said, "Take away that prisoner." His soldiers however, indignant at the man's treachery, killed him behind their general's back. One of the many heroic deeds in the history of the war is too characteristic of both general and soldiers to be omitted. Before the attack on Fontenay, May 24, 1793, the men, at the desire of their chiefs, confessed and received absolution before the action, which was likely to prove dangerous, as they had hardly any ammunition, and were literally obliged to charge the artillerymen and knock them down at the mouth of their guns. They were exceedingly anxious to retake one of their cannons for which the peasants had a peculiar fondness; they had called it Marie Jeanne, and used to throw their arms about it and encircle it with ribands and wreaths of flowers. At the commencement of the action the soldiers wavered, and M. de Lescure advanced singly before them, crying, "Vive le Roi!" to animate them. At that moment a battery of six pieces was pointed to the spot on which he was standing; his clothes were pierced in many places, but by a miracle he was unwounded. "You see," he said, coolly turning to his men, "they don't know how to fire." The peasants were rushing forward with impetuosity, when a large cross, erected in former times by a missionary, caught their eyes; they immediately threw themselves on their knees under the very fire of the cannon. One of their officers would have hurried them on; M. de Lescure said quietly to him, "Let them pray to God." They started up from their knees and rushed forward again; we need not ask if Marie Jeanne was retaken. This great man was afterwards killed in the cause which he had so nobly defended; he lingered long after receiving his mortal wound; and some of his last words are recorded by

his wife, afterwards Madame de Larochejacquelein. He said to her: "I have fought for God, and I die for him; I hope in his mercy. I have often looked death in the face, and I do not fear it; I go to heaven in full trust. All I regret is leaving you; I had hoped to be your happiness; if I have ever given you reason to complain of me, forgive me." Soon after his death the royalist army was defeated and dispersed at Savenay; La Vendée was not, however, yet pacified; both there and in Brittany a desultory war was kept up, which lost to a great extent its religious character, and became a cruel and exterminating warfare. Still, in spite of this unhappy termination of the campaign, these brave men had not shed their blood in vain; in 1799 a treaty was framed, by which the churches were restored to the Catholics in Brittany and La Vendée; and the priests were freed from the obnoxious oath which was the original cause of the insurrection. They obtained, as M. Rio tells us, what had been their ultimate object each time that they took up arms the restoration of the altars and the ministers of Christ.

After this treaty, it appears that these unhappy countries returned for a time to their former peaceful state; the concordat of 1802 tended still more to tranquillize them. It was the interest of Napoleon to appear friendly to the Church, and seminaries were established with the concurrence of the government to supply with new recruits the ranks of the priesthood, which had been so miserably thinned during the revolution. The college of Vannes, which figures so prominently in the annals of "La Petite Chouannerie," was one of these places of education. It appears that Brittany was very little affected by Napoleon's accession to the empire, and all might have remained tranquil, had the emperor but left the Church independent. It however soon became eviIdent that he intended to make her his instrument in enslaving France, and to draw her ministers into the vortex of imperial centralization. We shall at present merely notice those portions of his ecclesiastical policy which roused the indignation of the Bretons, and reserve the general considera