* 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.  It might likewise be the policy of the government to prefer the services of those, who, having neither reputation nor property, would be more dependent, and whom, whether they became dangerous by their successes or defeats, it would be easy to sacrifice.

Either, then, from necessity or choice, the republican armies in La Vendee were conducted by dissolute and rapacious wretches, at all times more eager to pillage than fight, and who were engaged in securing their plunder, when they should have been in pursuit of the enemy.  On every occasion they seemed to retreat, that their ill success might afford them a pretext for declaring that the next town or village was confederated with the insurgents, and for delivering it up, in consequence, to murder and rapine.  Such of the soldiers as could fill their pocket-books with assignats, left their less successful companions, and retired as invalids to the hospitals:  the battalions of Paris (and particularly “the conquerors of the Bastille”) had such ardour for pillage, that every person possessed of property was, in their sense, an aristocrat, whom it was lawful to despoil.*

* "Le pillage a ete porte a son comble—­les militaires au lieu de songer a ce qu’ils avoient a faire, n’ont pense qu’a remplir leurs sacs, et a voir se perpetuer une guerre aussi avantageuse a leur interet—­beaucoup de simples soldats ont acquis cinquante mille francs et plus; on en a vu couverts de bijoux, et faisant dans tous les genres des depenses d’une produgaloite, monstreuse.”  Lequinio, Guerre de la Vendee.

“The most unbridled pillage prevailed—­officers, instead of attending to their duty, thought only of filling their portmanteaus, and of the means