[29] But, in fact and in practice, we will
demolish the laboratory and prevent the drug from being sold; there
shall no longer be any Catholic worship in France, no baptism, no
confession, no marriage, no extreme unction, no mass; nobody shall
preach or listen to a sermon; nobody shall administer or receive a
sacrament, save in secret, and with the prospect before him of
imprisonment or the scaffold. - With this object in mind, we do one
thing at a time. There is no problem with the Church claiming to be
be orthodox: its members having refused to take the oath are outlaws;
one excludes oneself from an association when one repudiates the pact;
they have lost their qualifications as citizens and have become
ordinary foreigners under the surveillance of the police; and, as they
propagate around them discontent and disobedience, they are not only
foreigners but seditious persons, enemies in disguise, the authors of
a secret and widespread Vend?e; it is not necessary for us to
prosecute them as charlatans, it is sufficient to strike them down as
rebels. As such, we have already banished from France all unsworn
ecclesiastics, about forty thousand priests, and we are deporting
those who did not cross the frontier within the allotted time: we
allow only sexagenarians and the infirm to remain on French soil, and,
again, as prisoners and in seclusion; they incur the penalty of death
if they do not of their own accord report to the prisons of their
country town; the banished who return home incur the penalty of death,
and there is penalty of death against those who shelter priests.
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