Let it be remembered, despite Carlyle’s random arrow at “simple people blown into flame and fury by theological and seignorial bellows,” that the nobles and the clergy, whatever may have been their desire, were too well informed to pit a forlorn corner of France against the united realm. Here, as in Paris, and for rival arguments exactly as apposite, the Revolution was a matter belonging to “the man on the street.” Against what they knew to be the spirit of rapine and injustice, the people, of themselves, arose. Their campaign had no intrigue, no pushing; it had absolute purity of intention. More perfectly than even the American civil war, this of La Vendée was fought on a moral principle, and on that solely, from the start. Every advantage possible was on the side of submission; the peasants would have been let alone and forgotten, presently had they been weaker, and wiser. Unable to foresee the majestic trend of events, not having in their own sore memories the germ of a verdict which was to reverse the world, they hit out, in the dark, against the local and the immediate wrong. Ignorant as they were, they were not ignorant of their jeopardized liberties. They opposed iniquitous laws for the sake of their own commune; their argument had premises impregnably sound. If they were mad, it must be added that they were right, too, in the fullest relative senses of earth and heaven. The titled gentry were compelled to join, in nearly every case, by their vehemence. D’Elbée, Bonchamp, Lescure, La Rochejaquelein, Charette, and many of the minor officers, were drawn from their very firesides, and urged into service. “You are no braver than we, but you know better how to manage,” so the frank fellows explained it to the lords. The priests, also, banished from their sad parishes for refusing the irregular oaths proposed by the Assembly, and cast adrift like the hill-side friars of Ireland, long held aloof from sanctioning the redress of arms. Nowhere, at any time, did they march nor combat with their flocks. When their bodies were found upon the field, it was manifest that they had been shot while ministering to the dying. Such, on this point, was the Vendean sensitiveness, and austere regard for the proprieties, that a young subdeacon discovered in the ranks was angrily and summarily dismissed. Not until the army was at Dol did the pastors ever attempt to “fanaticize” the soldiery by working upon their religious feeling as a means of reviving courage. Nor did the laymen ever waive towards them that which, in Turreau’s phrase, was their “blind and incurable attachment.” At a sign from some active Levite they actually disbanded during Holy Week of 1793. The Republican squadron, sent to quell the revolt, found the villages in dead quiet, and so returned north; but on Easter Monday the roads were alive again.