The King's signature, a flourish of black ink on vellum in a silent Paris palace, became a brutal reality three hundred kilometers away in the rolling, verdant countryside of Normandy. The Law of Suspect Priests did not descend upon the provinces as a distant political concept; it arrived like a contagion, carried in the saddlebags of express riders, spreading fear and division from town to town.
In the small market town of Vire, Citizen Augustin Hérault, the newly elected head of the district administration, read the decree with a sinking heart. Hérault was a man of the new France, a lawyer in his late forties who believed fervently in the promise of 1789. He was a moderate, a Feuillant, a man who saw the King as the guarantor of a just, constitutional order. He had celebrated the abolition of feudal privilege and had invested his own savings in the new land-backed Assignats. He was precisely the kind of man Louis's regime was built upon.
The decree felt like a betrayal of everything he believed in. It was a blank check for petty tyranny, and he knew instantly who would be the first to cash it.
Two days later, they came to his office. Two brothers, members of the local Jacobin club, their faces flush with self-importance and civic virtue. They were tanners by trade, men known more for their loud political opinions and their long-standing feud with the local parish over a disputed plot of land than for their piety. They laid a formal, written denunciation on Hérault's desk.
They were denouncing Father Michel, the parish priest of their village just outside Vire.
Hérault knew Father Michel. The priest was a man of seventy, with gentle, watery eyes and hands gnarled from tending his small vegetable garden. He had served the parish for forty years. He had baptized the tanner brothers themselves. He was beloved, a quiet fixture of the community. But he was also a man of deep, unshakable, and simple piety. He had refused to take the new Civic Oath, not out of any political conviction, but because he could not in good conscience swear his first allegiance to any power other than God and his spiritual superior in Rome. He had continued to perform mass quietly, avoiding politics entirely. Now, according to the new law, his quiet conviction made him a traitor.
"He preaches against the nation," the elder brother said, puffing out his chest. "He tells the old widows that the Assembly is godless."
Hérault knew it was a lie, or at best a malicious exaggeration. But the law was clear. A denunciation by two active citizens was all that was required. His own personal knowledge, his sense of justice, was irrelevant. He was an official of the state; his duty was to enforce its laws.
The next morning, Hérault rode out to the village with a squad of six nervous National Guardsmen, their blue coats looking alien and menacing against the rustic stone of the ancient church. He found Father Michel in his small presbytery, packing a worn leather satchel. He had already heard the news. There was a look of serene, profound sorrow on the old man's face, but no fear. He held a small, wood-bound breviary in his hands.
"I suppose you are here for me, Citizen Hérault," he said, his voice soft.
As Hérault and the guards led the priest out into the village square, the townspeople began to gather. They emerged from their cottages and shops, a silent, hostile crowd. They did not riot, they did not shout. They were not the fanatics of the Vendée. Their anger was colder, deeper. It was the anger of people watching their world being dismantled by a distant, incomprehensible power. The blacksmith stood with his arms crossed, his massive hands clenched into fists. Women wept silently into their aprons. They stared at Hérault, their faces a mixture of fury and contempt. He was one of them, a Norman, yet he was acting as the agent of this Parisian madness.
Hérault read the official decree, his voice shaking, the legalistic phrases sounding hollow and obscene in the quiet square. "By the authority of the National Assembly and in the name of the King and the Law…"
The priest was helped onto the back of a cart. He did not look at his accusers. He looked at his flock, at the faces of the people he had served his entire life, and he raised a trembling hand, making the sign of the cross in the air. It was a gesture of farewell.
Hérault's journey did not end there. He was tasked with collecting all the 'suspects' from his district and delivering them to the port city of Cherbourg. The cart slowly filled. An elderly monk from a dissolved monastery, a scholar whose only crime was owning books that questioned Rousseau. A fiery young curate who had openly preached defiance. Old men, young men, scholars and simpletons, all branded as traitors, trundling through the countryside they called home.
They arrived in Cherbourg two days later. The city was tense. The port was under the authority of a new, terrifying figure in the revolutionary landscape: a Representative on Mission, sent directly from the radical-controlled Paris Commune. This man was not a local bureaucrat like Hérault. He was a zealot. A Parisian lawyer named Javogues, he was a man in his thirties with eyes that burned with an impatient, righteous fire. He wore a tricolor sash over a plain, severe black coat and kept his hand rested on the butt of a pistol tucked into his belt.
Javogues sneered at Hérault's meticulously prepared legal paperwork, the arrest warrants and signed depositions. "The law is the will of the people, citizen," the Representative said, his voice sharp and dismissive. "And the will of the people is that these traitors be purged. Your paperwork is a relic of a dead world."
He took command of the prisoners. Father Michel and the others were herded from the cart, down the windswept docks, towards the black, rotting hull of a waiting merchant ship, the Citoyenne. The ship was bound for the penal colonies in French Guiana. It was a death sentence, and everyone knew it. They would die of yellow fever, or malaria, or malnutrition in the swamps.
Hérault stood on the quay, the damp sea wind chilling him to the bone, and watched the old priest he had known since childhood being prodded up the gangplank like an animal. He, Augustin Hérault, a man of law and reason, had done this. He thought he was helping to build a new France based on justice and liberty. He now realized with sickening clarity that he was merely a cog in a machine of brutal, arbitrary persecution. His loyalty, his faith in the King's government, shattered.
The scene cut back to the gilded silence of the Tuileries. Louis sat at his desk, a pile of dispatches before him. He picked one up. It was an official report from the Minister of the Interior, a dry, bureaucratic summary of the new law's successful implementation in the northern provinces. The language was sterile and detached. "Counter-revolutionary elements have been identified, pacified, and removed in accordance with the decree. The process has been met with minimal organized resistance. The authority of the Assembly has been successfully asserted." The report framed the deportations as a clean, efficient victory for the state.
Louis read it, his face an impassive mask. But as he processed the words, his HUD translated the bureaucratic euphemisms into the horrifying human truth he had just unleashed.
INTERNAL STABILITY REPORT: PROVINCES (NORMANDY, BRITTANY, DAUPHINÉ)
Refractory Clergy Arrested & Processed for Deportation: 247
Incidents of Local Unrest (Non-Violent): 89 (Spontaneous protests, public mourning, rioting).
Loyalty of Regional Administrators & Judiciary: -15% (Wavering/Compliance under duress).
ANALYSIS: Moderate support for the constitutional monarchy is eroding. Passive resistance is widespread.
PROJECTED RECRUITMENT (Vendée & other insurgent groups): +5,000 (Estimate).
He had solved the immediate problem of the Paris mob by exporting the unrest, effectively seeding thousands of future rebellions across the nation. The report in his hand declared a victory. The data in his head screamed that it was a strategic catastrophe of his own making.
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