Two months before this, the municipality of Besancon, putting its own interpretation on the decree which allowed nuns to dress as they pleased, enjoins them all, including even the sisters of charity, to abandon their old costume, which few among them had the means of replacing .-- Helplessness, indifference, or malevolence, such are the various dispositions which are encountered among the new authorities whose duty it is to support and protect them.

To let loose persecution there is now only needed a decree which puts the civil power in conflict with religious convictions.

That decree is promulgated, and, on the 12th of July, 1790, the Assembly establishes the civil constitution of the clergy.
Notwithstanding the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, and the dispersion of the monastic communities, the main body of the ecclesiastical corps remains intact: seventy thousand priests ranged under the bishops, with the Pope in the center as the commander-in-chief.

There is no corporation more solid, more incompatible, or more attacked.

For, against it are opposed implacable hatreds and fixed opinions: the Gallicanism of the jurists who, from St.Louis downwards, are the adversaries of ecclesiastical power; the doctrine of the Jansenists who, since Louis XIII., desire to bring back the Church to its primitive form; and the theory of the philosophers who, for sixty years, have considered Christianity as a mistake and Catholicism as a scourge.