t had sent about 1,000 persons to the guillotine;
during the three months of Robespierre's domination it was to send
another 1,600, increasing its activity by hysterical progression. When
Thermidor was reached, about thirty individuals was the daily toll of
the executioner.

Robespierre triumphant immediately revealed all his limitations; he was
not a successful statesman; he was only a successful religionist. His
first care, therefore, was to attend to the dogma of the French people.
He proposed that Decadi should be converted into a new Sabbath; he
caused the dregs of the Hebertists, including Gobel, to be indicted for
{211} atheism when their turn came for the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Robespierre sending a renegade Archbishop of Paris to the scaffold for
atheism marks how very far the Revolution had moved since the days of
the States-General at Versailles.

On the 7th of May, a month after Danton's death, Robespierre delivered
a long speech before the Convention, a speech that marks his apogee.
It was a high-flown rhapsody on civic morality and purism. Voltaire
and the Encyclopedists were bitterly attacked; Jean Jacques Rousseau
was deified. The State should adopt his religious attitude, his
universal church of nature. In that church, nature herself is the
chief priest and there is no need of an infamous priesthood. Its
ritual is virtue; its festivals the joy of a great people. Therefore
let the Convention decree that the Cult of the Supreme Being be
established, that the duty of every citizen is to practise virtue, to
punish tyrants and traitors, to succour the unfortunate, to respect the
weak, to defend the oppressed, to do good unto others. Let the
Convention institute competitions for hymns and songs to adorn the new
cult; and let the Committee of {212} Public Safety,--that harassed and
overburdened committee,--adjudicate, and reward the successful
hymnologists.

The Convention listened in silence, disgust, silent rebellion,--but
bowed its head. The new cult appealed to very few. Here and there an
intellectual Rousseauist accepted it, but the mass did what mankind in
all countries and ages has done, refused to reason out what was a
religious and therefore an emotional question. To the vast majority of
Frenchmen there was only one choice, Catholicism or non-catholicism,
and the cult of the Supreme Being was just as much non-catholicism as
that of Reason.

Robespierre, blind and satisfied, went on hi