The formation of Pyrénées-Orientales (replacing the province of Roussillon) created a bitter division between Occitans to the north who became an ethnic minority in a Catalan-dominated département. As the news of the fall of the Bastille in Paris reached Perpignan and then the countryside, Old Regime institutions disintegrated with the roussillonnais directing their anger against the customs and tax systems. Offices were ransacked, records destroyed, customs barriers torn down and officials chased out. Later efforts to re-impose fiscal order were resisted, often violently. Religious identity remained the key to determining support or rejection of the Revolution in French Catalonia as elsewhere in France. The overwhelming majority of Catalan-speaking clerics and their parishioners rejected the Revolution’s religious policies. Political fault lines opened up not only over matters of faith. In Perpignan, the discovery of counter-revolutionary conspiracies within the military radicalised politics. Reactionaries were driven out of office as patriots and supporters of the Revolution took direct action, threatened as they were by the menace of royalists lurking over the frontier. Patriots in the region became preoccupied with the build-up of resistance to the Revolution particularly in the borderlands where frontier security was being compromised.