at war with nearly all the world. The reforming Girondists
had created the situation, and the Jacobins, with grim humor, were
unflinchingly facing the logical consequences of such audacity. Carnot
had given the watchword of attack in mass and with superior numbers;
the times gave the frenzied courage of sentimental exaltation. Before
the end of 1793 the foreign enemies of France, though not conquered,
had been checked on the frontier; the outbreak of civil war in Vendee
had been temporarily suppressed; both Lyons and Toulon had been
retaken.

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--Hebert 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 Hebert, 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 d