If we place these two documents side by side, we have before us in embryo the two ideas which in the future were to struggle for the mastery, namely, the idea of liberalism and the idea of socialism, the former derived from Voltaire, the latter from Rousseau. As the two programmes deal point by point with the same subjects, the difference strikes us here as it does nowhere else.
In the first years of the Revolution there had been no mention of socialism. Men aimed at freeing capital from unjust burdens, not at limiting its power. This is clearly shown by the fact that the first proof which the victorious bourgeoisie gave of their authority after the storming of the Bastille was the publication of a decree that the printers were to be held responsible for every book or pamphlet published by writers without known means of subsistence (sans existence connue). This regulation was published on the 24th of July 1789, exactly ten days after the capture of the Bastille. The bourgeoisie took care, as soon as they had mounted themselves, to draw the ladder up after them. Their first act, when they had won their own place by the aid of the pen, was to take the pen out of the hand of the classes below them.
The Convention, nourished on the ideas of Rousseau and Mably, comprehended that inequality within the citizen society was the worst enemy of political equality, and dreamed of producing equality by giving property to all. Condorcet wished to devote the funds at the disposal of the state, not to the abolishment of private property, but to the equalisation of any excessive disproportion in the distribution of worldly possessions. Right of succession was to be abolished, the means of education were to be made accessible to all, &c., &c. It was not till the owners of property began, after the fall of Robespierre, to resist the claims of those who owned nothing, that the attack on property as such was made. Babeuf's communistic conspiracy followed. The conspiracy was betrayed and defeated, drowned in the blood of the conspirators without a voice being raised in defence of the ideas which had inspired it. Socialism did no more than put out feelers at the time of the Revolution.
Whilst the Girondists' Declaration of the Rights of Man ensures first and foremost the rights of the individual—freedom of conscience and of thought (les franchises de la pensée was the expression in those days), the inviolability of the home, equality in sight of the law, the proportioning of punishment to crime—the Jacobins in every matter insist upon the responsibility of human beings for each other and the duty entailed by brotherhood.
The Girondists laid down the principle of non-interference. The Jacobins taught: The men of all countries are brothers, and the different nations ought to help each other to the best of their ability, like citizens of the same state. The nation which oppresses another nation declares itself the enemy of all. Those who make war upon any one nation in order to arrest the progress of liberty and abolish the rights of humanity ought to be assailed by all the others, not as ordinary enemies, but as insurrectionary murderers and robbers.
The Girondists opposed every tyranny in human shape, but they seldom tried to protect from the tyranny of circumstances. Their work was for the most part of a negative nature. The Jacobins perceived more clearly the uselessness of bestowing on the sick the right to be cured without curing them, the mockery in solemnly conferring on the lame the right to walk. Yet there was no essential difference between them. Condorcet the Girondist felt as strongly as any Jacobin that free competition was a lie when in the race one man was mounted on an excellent horse while the other had to run barefoot.
It was the feeling of duty to society (as defined by Rousseau) which led to Robespierre's significant intervention in the war between the Revolution and positive religion. Once the Revolution had broken into the churches axe in hand, it seemed as if the movement were irresistible. Men mounted on the frailest of scaffolding to scrape from the ceilings of churches portraits of popes concealed by century-old spiders' webs. Images of saints were torn from their niches, and fanaticism destroyed some of the finest works of Gothic art; the emissaries of the Revolution descended even into the vaults, and flashed their lanterns in the pale faces of the dead; fragments of broken-up altars were piled together "like shapeless stones in a quarry." The chairmen of the revolutionary committees wore velvet breeches made out of episcopal robes, and shirts cut out of choristers' surplices. In the end a few atheistic enthusiasts (Anacharsis Clootz, a man of German extraction, Chaumette, and Hébert) made their voices heard, and carried the mob with them in their iconoclastic fury.
Except on this occasion we hear as little of atheism during the Revolution as of socialism. Belief in God and immortality, the common creed of Voltaire and Rousseau, is the creed held unchanged by almost all the chosen leaders of the people. And this same belief pervades all the writings of the period. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason is a good example. Even such a recklessly disreputable poem as Parny's Guerre des Dieux inculcates the same doctrine, Camille Desmoulins writes in a letter: "Mon cher Manuel! Les rois sont mûrs, mais le bon Dieu ne l'est pas encore (notez que je dis le bon Dieu et non pas Dieu, ce qui est fort différent)." This is the standpoint of the age; its task was not to subject the conception of God to criticism, but to free it from the legendary encumbrances of the positive religions. The atheists in the National Assembly led the Revolution beyond its proper goal and instigated excesses which degraded it in the eyes of the contemporary generation.
Clootz succeeded in persuading a bishop, Gobel by name, to write a letter to the Convention, which began: "Citizens, representatives! I am a priest, that is to say, a quack. Hitherto I have been an honest quack; I have only deceived because I myself was deceived." It ended, of course, with the information that he had become converted to philosophy.
Chaumette, an enthusiast, who had procured the abolition of corporal punishment in educational institutions and of legally regulated prostitution, persuaded the Commune to consecrate the cathedral of Notre Dame to "the worship of Reason." Within the church was erected a temple with the inscription À la Philosophie, the porch of which was decorated with busts of the great philosophers. On the dedication day, when the door was thrown open, a young actress, Mademoiselle Candeille, representing Liberty, issued forth, and a hymn to Liberty, written by Marie-Joseph Chénier and set to music by Gossec, composer to the Republic, was sung in her honour. On another occasion Mademoiselle Maillard of the Opera, a stately and beautiful woman, chosen to represent the goddess of Reason, was carried shoulder-high out of the old cathedral in a chair decked with garlands of oak leaves and was escorted by trumpeters, a crowd of red-capped citizens, and a number of members of the Convention, to the assembly hall of that body, whose president solemnly impressed a kiss on her brow. But these ceremonies, innocent in themselves, were degraded by the ribald manner in which they were imitated by the mob. Women of bad character had themselves carried in triumphal processions as goddesses of Reason. Wild revels were held in churches; the church of Saint-Eustache was actually turned into a tavern. The relics of Saint Geneviève were burned, and such a bonfire of wooden images of saints, prayer-books, and Old and New Testaments was lit on the Place de la Grève that the flames rose to the second stories of the houses.