In the beginning of the summer, the brigands* (as they were called) grew
so numerous, that the government, now in the hands of Robespierre and his
party, began to take serious measures to combat them.
* Robbers--_banditti_--The name was first given, probably, to the
insurgents of La Vendee, in order to insinuate a belief that the
disorders were but of a slight and predatory nature.
--One body of troops were dispatched after another, who were all
successively defeated, and every where fled before the royalists.
It is not unusual in political concerns to attribute to deep-laid plans
and abstruse combinations, effects which are the natural result of
private passions and isolated interests. Robespierre is said to have
promoted both the destruction of the republican armies and those of La
Vendee, in order to reduce the national population. That he was capable
of imagining such a project is probable--yet we need not, in tracing the
conduct of the war, look farther than to the character of the agents who
were, almost necessarily, employed in it. Nearly every officer qualified
for the command of an army, had either emigrated, or was on service at
the frontiers; and the task of reducing by violence a people who resisted
only because they deemed themselves injured, and who, even in the
estimation of the republicans, could only be mistaken, was naturally
avoided by all men who were not mere adventurers.
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