Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/153

Rh heroine of the Gironde, exhorting and stimulating, while the ever-increasing storm lashes the sea, and the wind whisking in the shrouds and rigging foretells a perilous passage. Will they steer the ship safely through, the breakers and whirlpools, those fearless men, singing their "Allons enfants," or will they and that fair woman who is their inspiration founder pitiably in the convulsed elements of the Revolution?

The last months of the year 1791 were crowded with incident. The Assembly, in very self-defence, passed the decree against the emigrant noblesse and the Princes of the Blood, declaring that, unless they returned by the 1st of January 1792, their property should be confiscated and themselves declared traitors to their country. The question had also been mooted and supported of passing a law to stop emigration; but Brissot, with his unflinching love of liberty, had successfully opposed the motion. The decree against the priests, enforcing the civil oath, on penalty of sequestration of stipend and expulsion from the State Church—a measure of far more questionable wisdom—was passed in December 1791. To mix up the social and economic changes with religious ones was dangerously to complicate the situation.

The stumbling-blocks of the Revolution—its deadliest opponents, in fact—were not the King with his veto, nor yet the truculent aristocrats petitioning for invasion, but the priests and the women; so true is it that no great outward transformation can be effectively achieved without a previous inward and spiritual transformation, in which the female part of the population must take an incalculable share. Now, although the women of the upper and upper middle classes were deeply penetrated by the ideas of the eighteenth