As the feeling of horror and shame produced by the Reign of Terror, when it was past, turned the thoughts of many Frenchmen once more in the direction of monarchy and the royal house, so the cruel persecution of religion awoke ardent sympathy for the church and its priests.
In Belgium (now incorporated with France), where there had been wholesale banishment of the clergy, insurrections had broken out all over the country. To quell them it had been necessary to burn numbers of villages and kill several thousand peasants. In France there was now not only one Vendée; every province had its own. In 1800 the royalist and church party had the upper hand almost everywhere in the country communes of the twelve western departments; they had 40,000 men under arms. Even the men whose interests bound them most closely to the new order of things, the men who had acquired the confiscated property of the church, were not happy in their new possessions. The land of the new owner had formerly belonged to the priest, the hospital, or the school. These had been plundered, and he had become rich through their impoverishment. The women of his household, his wife, his mother, were uneasy and often depressed, and when he himself was ill he felt the stings of an evil conscience; he trusted that the priest would grant him absolution at the last moment, but was tormented by the fear that he might not. (Taine, _Le régime moderne_, i. 134, &c.)
All this was a good preparation for the rehabilitation of religion. And we must not forget the intellectual force, the valuable ally, which the church gained by suddenly, as it were, finding itself able to appropriate the fundamental principle of the Revolution, and in its name win new supporters. The whole situation was altered from the day when the church, hostile to liberty up to the last possible moment, finally, vanquished by necessity, inscribed liberty on its banner. Oppressed, and feeling the need of liberty for itself, it now spoke in the name of liberty, and that so touchingly that all who heard the crocodile weep took it to be a defenceless creature. Liberal Catholicism--how the words jar!--came into being. The church wrested the best weapon of the Revolution out of its hands, and put it into those of her own adherents--only temporarily, of course, until she had reconquered her old power; then, alas for liberty! But in the meantime the Pope had suddenly become _liberal_--religious liberalism, they called it. When the order of the Jesuits was reconstructed, even the Jesuits declared that their desire was "good, true liberty."