The Associations Bill, pre-eminently an act of oppression and religious persecution, has been rendered doubly odious by the many illegalities by which it has been surrounded, some of which I enumerated in my letter in the _Evening Post_ of May 6th. Not long since, M. Decrais, ex-Minister of the Waldeck-Rousseau Cabinet, was elected by a large majority at Bordeaux, after he had branded the wholesale execution of the religious orders as “a violation of the spirit and the letter of the law of 1901,” and assured his electors that he had not voted with the Government on that occasion. Indeed, these Jacobins seem to revel in illegality for its own sake, and cannot even respect their own enactments.
Civil war on a small scale has been raging since nearly two months in various parts of France. It became quite monotonous to read the recital of all these expulsions _manu militari_ which filled the columns of the daily Press. The programme was almost the same in every case. The crowds varied from three hundred to many thousands, according to the locality, and were more or less violent in their denunciations of the Government; the police and the regular army, employed to surround the convents and disperse the crowds of manifestants, were also more or less numerous, and acted more or less brutally. The troops as a rule left their barracks at night, arrived on the scene at 2 or 3 a.m., and awaited daybreak before surrounding the house. Then, the Commissaires ringing in vain, the doors are battered down, police and soldiers enter the breach and find a few old monks in the chapel, for as a rule the communities had dispersed. The delinquents are marched off between two rows of soldiers, the crowds break out in seditious cries of “Vive la liberté, à bas les tyrans,” numerous arrests of both sexes are made, and the country is informed that, fanaticized by the monks, men and women have assailed the representatives of the law.
It was on one of these occasions that Mlle. de Lambert cried “Capon” to a justice of the peace because he had beaten a hasty retreat when he found, in a cloister, two or three hundred angry men instead of a few old monks. She was condemned to be imprisoned for eight days. On the expiration of her term some five thousand persons went to the prison to give her an ovation, but found that she had been removed.