Cross and Tricolour had become opposing symbols for millions of Europeans by the end of 1793. In France, the fatal split between Church and Revolution, opened wide by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, now seemed unbridgeable (see Vol. VIII, Chapter XXIV). In 1790 it had seemed self-evident to the Constituent Assembly that the Gallican Church should be reorganised and brought into line with the democratic institutions of the new France, that her officers should be elected by the people, and be independent of alien control. But this had raised the crucial question of competence and authority. What right had even a national assembly so drastically to reorganise a branch of a Catholic Church? Tragically, the first principle of the Revolution, the sovereignty of the people, was pitted against the basic conceptions of catholicity and tradition which Rome considered fundamental to the very essence of the Church as a spiritual society. Belatedly, Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution. The clergy who refused the oath to it were proscribed, driven into exile, or to a clandestine ministry, and often into furtive and provocative counter-revolution. In their turn too, the ‘patriotic clergy’, the Constitutionals who took the oath, fell foul of the Revolution, especially after it swung to the left on 10 August 1792. Many resented the relentless demands made on their conscience: the introduction of the état civil, the encouragement of clerical marriage, the execution of the king. On the other hand, the revolutionary leaders grew more disillusioned with the results of the Civil Constitution, which had disrupted the patriotic cause and issued in schism and public disorder.