The months were adorned with festive names taken from Nature; thus Vendemaire, the vintage month; Brumaire, the foggy; Frimaire, the frosty; Nivose, the snowy; Pluvoise, the rainy; Ventose, the windy; Germinal, the month of sprouting; Floréal, the month of flowers; Prairial, the haymaking; Messidor, the time of harvest; Thermidor, the month of heat; and Fructidor, the month of fruit. To obliterate, as far as possible, every Christian idea associated with the days of the year, the new calendar abolished the Christian festivals and substituted strange and uncouth denominations for each successive day. It was a bold stroke, and though the Convention succeeded a few months later in causing its execution throughout the country, nevertheless it was never heartily accepted even by the most radical, and only a favorable opportunity was wanting for its final abolition with the Revolution itself.
DANTON.
On the twenty-seventh of September, the Convention reduced ecclesiastical pensions to 1000 livres, and on October 23rd, it decreed that all who had flown the country were to be considered as banished in perpetuity, and should they return they were to be punished with death. On November 27th, a decree was passed, declaring that if a priest should marry, and be therefore inquieted by the residents of the commune in which he resided, he might retire to any place he liked, and his salary should be paid by the commune which had persecuted him. It was an effort to render the marriage of priests popular, an attempt, however, which always met with failure.
It was during the month of December, 1792, and that of January, 1793, that the trial of Louis XVI. took place. The Convention voted the death sentence, and the crime of regicide against one of the mildest sovereigns of the century was perpetrated January 17th, of that year.
The prescriptive laws against the clergy and the Church went on apace. On January 22nd the constitutional clergy were ordered to disregard all canonical rules in regard to marriage, and to bless the marriages of divorced people as well as those of constitutional priests. On February 14th, a reward of one hundred livres was offered to whoever should cause the arrest of an émigré, or of a priest under sentence of deportation. On March 18th, it substituted for the penalty of ten years for such priests the sentence of death. April 23rd, it put forth the article: "The national Convention decrees that all ecclesiastics, regular and secular, brothers or laymen, who have not taken the oath to maintain liberty and equality conformable to the law of August 15th, 1792, shall be deported without delay to French Guiana."
Immediately on the appearance of this law the sea-ports of France began to witness thousands of captive priests who were placed on board the waiting vessels, ostensibly for transportation to America. As, however, such voyage was at the time impracticable because of danger from the English fleets then patrolling the seas, the victims of proscription were left in the miserable hulks, in some cases for as long as two years. Their sufferings in this regard were extreme. Huddled together in the holds like so many packages of dead merchandise, the bare floor for a bed, covered with rags and devoured by vermin, their torment was truly horrible. Many of them perished; others lost their reason; the survivors bore away with them many souvenirs of physical and moral torture which they carried to the grave. The story of the deportation of priests during the Reign of Terror is one of the ugliest records of the times.
The Convention next turned its attention to the constitutional clergy, whom it compelled by every means of proscription and exaction to dishonor the little remnant of sacred character that still remained within them. Hence the laws of 1793, decreeing deportation for any bishop who should directly or indirectly oppose an obstacle to the marriage of priests, or who should refuse to recognize divorce. It reduced the salaries of the bishops and limited the number of their curates. It, moreover, dismissed from the exercise of their functions all pastors who failed to display a pronounced enthusiasm for revolutionary principles, and put in their stead men whose ignorance was well known, and whose wives were willing to occupy a prominent position in the Church.
