These suspicions were absurd; there was no one culpable but liberty itself, which is not to be repressed with impunity in a portion of the human race.

It had accomplices in the very heart of the French themselves.
The weakness of the resolutions of the Assembly on the reception of this news proved this.

M.Bertrand de Molleville, minister of marine, ordered the immediate departure of 6000 men as reinforcement for the isle of San Domingo.
Brissot attacked these repressive measures in a discourse in which he did not hesitate to cast the odium of the crime on the victims, and to accuse the government of complicity with the aristocracy of the colonists.
"By what fatality does this news coincide with a moment when emigrations are redoubled?
when the rebels assembled on our frontiers warn us of an approaching outbreak?
when, in fact, the colonies threaten us, through an illegal deputation, with withdrawing from the rule of the mother-country?
Has not this the appearance of a vast plan combined by treason ?" The repugnance of the friends of the blacks, numerous in the Assembly, to take energetic measures in favour of the colonists, the distance from the scene of action, which weakens pity, and then the interior movement which attracted into its sphere minds and things, soon effaced these impressions, and allowed the spirit of independence amongst the blacks to form and expand at San Domingo, which showed itself in the distance in the form of a poor old slave--Toussaint-Louverture.
XIII.
The internal disorder multiplied at every point of the empire.

Religious liberty, which was desire of the Constituent Assembly, and the most important conquest of the Revolution, could not be established without this struggle in face of a displaced worship, and a schism which spread far and wide amongst the people.

The counter-revolutionary party was allied every where with the clergy.