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 326 A Short History of The World salaries of the clergy made a charge upon the nation. This in itself was not a bad thing for the lower clergy in France, who were often scandalously underpaid in comparison with the richer dignitaries. But in addition the choice of priests and bishops was made elective, which struck at the very root idea of the Roman church, which centred everything upon the Pope, and in which all authority is from above downward. Practically the National Assembly wanted at one blow to make the church in France Protestant, in organization if not in doctrine. Everywhere there were disputes and conflicts between the state priests created by the National Assembly and the recalcitrant (non-juring) priests who were loyal to Rome. In 1791 the experiment of Constitutional monarchy in France was brought to an abrupt end by the action of the King and Queen, working in concert with their aristocratic and monarchist friends abroad. Foreign armies gathered on the Eastern frontier and one night in June the King and Queen and their children slipped away from the Tuileries and fled to join the foreigners and the aristocratic exiles. They were caught at Varennes and brought back to Paris, and all France flamed up into a passion of patriotic republicanism. A Republic was proclaimed, open war with Austria and Prussia ensued, and the king was tried and executed (January, 1793) on the model already set by England, for treason to his people. And now followed a strange phase in the history of the French people. There arose a great flame of enthusiasm for France and the Republic. There was to be an end to compromise at home and abroad ; at home royalists and every form of disloyalty were to be stamped out ; abroad France was to be the protector and helper of all revolutionaries. All Europe, all the world, was to become republican. The youth of France poured into the Republican armies ; a new and wonderful song spread through the land, a song that still warms the blood like wine, the Mar- seillaise. Before that chant and the leaping columns of French bayonets and their enthusiastically served guns the foreign armies rolled back ; before the end of 1792 the French armies had gone far beyond the utmost achievements of Louis XIV ; everywhere they stood on foreign soil. They were in Brussels, they had over- run Savoy, they had raided to Mayence ; they had seized the Scheldt from Holland. Then the French Government did an un- wise thing. It had been exasperated by the expulsion of its re-