Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XIX

Robespierre, St. Just, Couthon, and Billaud-Varennes were theorists after the manner of Rousseau. Their new gospel of social regeneration embraced democracy, civic virtue, moral institutions, and public festivals. These were their shibboleths and catch-words. Incidentally they extolled paternalism in government, general conscription, compulsory military service, and, on the very eve of the greatest industrial revival known to history, a return to agricultural society! The sanction of all this was not moral suasion: essential to the system was Spartan simplicity and severity, compulsion was the means to their utopia.[40] The Jacobins were nothing if not thorough; and here was another new and awful thing—the "Terror"—which had broken loose with its foul furies of party against party through all the land. It seemed at last as if it were exhausting itself, though for a time it had grown in intensity as it spread in extent. It had created three factions in the Mountain. Early in 1794 there remained but a little handful of avowed and still eager terrorists in the Convention—Hébert and his friends. These were the atheists who had abolished religion and the past, bowing down before the fetish which they dubbed Reason. They were seized and put to death on March twenty-fourth. There then remained the cliques of Danton and Robespierre; the former claiming the name of moderates, and telling men to be calm, the latter with no principle but devotion to a person who claimed to be the regenerator of society. These hero-worshipers were for a time victorious. Danton, like Hébert, was foully murdered, and Robespierre remained alone, virtually dictator. But his theatrical conduct in decreeing by law the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, and in organizing tawdry festivals to supply the place of worship, utterly embittered against him both atheists and pious people. In disappointed rage at his failure, he laid aside the characters of prophet and mild saint to give vent to his natural wickedness and to become a devil.