ers had been saved and
the risings in the provinces put down. There were, however, two parties
who took the literature of the century in earnest; they thought that the
hour had struck for translating, one of them, the sentimentalism of
Rousseau, the other of them, the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot,
into terms of politics that should form the basis of a new social life.
The strife between the faction of Robespierre and the faction of
Chaumette was the reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, of
the great literary strife of a quarter of a century before between Jean
Jacques and the writers whom he contemptuously styled Holbachians. The
battle of the books had become a battle between bands of infuriated men.
The struggle between Hebert and Chaumette and the Common Council of
Paris on the one part, and the Committee and Robespierre on the other,
was the concrete form of the deepest controversy that lies before modern
society. Can the social union subsist without a belief in God? Chaumette
answered Yes, and Robespierre cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau in
thinking that any one who should refuse to recognise the existence of a
God, should be exiled as a monster devoid of the faculties of virtue and
sociability. Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romilly
in 1783 that belief in God, as well as submission to kings, would be at
an end all over the world in a very few years. The Hebertists might have
taken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if they could have
known it, about using

Les entrailles du pretre
Au defaut d'un cordon pour etrangler les rois.

The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of them
accepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed legislator
to impose any belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at his
feet. The theism or the atheism of the new France depended, as they
thought, on the issue of the war for authority between the Hebertists in
the Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of Public Safety. That
was the religious side of the attitude of the government to the
opposition, and it is the side that possesses most historic interest.
Billaud cared very little for religion in any way; his quarrel with the
Commune and with Hebert was political. What Robespierre's drift appears
to have been, was to use the political animosity of the Committee as a
means of striking foes, against whom his own animosity was not only