Perhaps the man who had sinned most in this respect was Marshal Ney, who in a personal interview asked of the King as a personal favor to be placed in command of an army corps and to be sent against the Emperor, pledging himself to bring Napoleon in chains before his throne. Louis granted the Marshal’s request, but instead of capturing the Emperor, Ney went over to him with his entire army corps and fought at Waterloo again as the “bravest of the brave” in the imperial army. In vain he sought death on the field, when he saw that the battle was lost; it was reserved for him to die by French bullets in the Luxembourg garden of Paris, fired by royalist officers, disguised as common soldiers. From party hatred, these men had volunteered to act as executioners of one of the greatest military heroes of revolutionary France. Labédoyère and other famous generals who were traitors to Louis were executed; others saved their lives by flight. The great Carnot and other Imperialists were banished from France.
The impression made upon the ultra-Royalists by these severe measures against men who had shed lustre upon France, was in the highest degree deplorable. These fanatics supposed that the Bonapartists and Republicans of the whole kingdom were utterly at their mercy. They secretly organized a special government, under the presidency of the Comte d’Artois, at the Pavilion Marsan for the purpose of bringing to justice all those who had participated in the Napoleonic _coup d’état_ or in the Revolution of 1789. A new era of terrorism was organized by these “white Jacobins,” as they were significantly called, and the most cruel excesses were committed in the provinces. La Vendée, which had fought so heroically for the Bourbon dynasty, treated the Imperialists and Republicans generously; but in the South, where religious fanaticism added fuel to the flame of political hatred, the most atrocious excesses and murders were committed. Avignon, Nîmes, Montpellier, Toulouse and other cities of the South were disgraced by the butchery of hundreds of Protestants; in some of them the victims of religious and political persecution died at the stake. At Avignon the famous Marshal Brune was assassinated; at Toulouse, General Ramel; at Nîmes, Count de la Garde. Wholesale assassinations and butcheries were organized; armed bands, fanaticized by the priests, roamed through the country, and butchered the Protestants _en masse_. Ten thousand of the unfortunates fled to the mountain recesses of the Cevennes, choosing rather to die from hunger and cold than to be tortured to death. Juries composed of the most intolerant Royalists lent their aid to these outrages, by condemning the Protestants to death and acquitting the assassins. The veterans of Napoleon’s army and forty thousand officers, many of whom had served with distinction under the imperial eagles, were driven from their homes and wandered from village to village begging for bread and shelter. The northern provinces were spared these outrages, but the one hundred and fifty thousand foreign soldiers stationed in their towns and fortresses were terrible reminders of the humiliation and shame which the restoration of the Bourbons had brought upon France.