Action followed swiftly upon resolve. "They proceeded," writes Mercier in Le nouveau Paris, "to the destruction of everything connected with the old worship, not with the frenzy of zealotry, but with an ironical contempt and uncontrolled mirth which could not but astound the onlooker." The churches were positively ravaged. One troop of its emissaries communicated to the Convention that they had "permitted 'brown Mary' (a certain miracle-working image) to retire, after all the hard work she had had in fooling the world for 1800 years." The altars were plundered for the benefit of the treasury of the Republic. Here is a fragment of a report: "There are no longer any priests in the Department of Nièvre. The altars have been despoiled of the piles of gold which ministered to priestly vanity. Thirty millions worth of valuable articles will be sent to Paris. Two carts laden with crucifixes, gold croziers, and two millions in gold coin, have already arrived at the Mint. Three times as much will immediately follow."
Sometimes the carts stopped at the door of the assembly hall of the Convention, and sacks full of gold and silver were piled up in the hall itself.
Another report is in the ironical style. "I have been unjustly accused of an onslaught on religion. The fact is that I asked most politely before I acted, and three or four hundred saints begged for permission to go to the Mint. The language employed on the occasion was something in this style: 'Ye who have been the tools of fanaticism, ye saints and holy ones of every description, show now that ye are patriots, and help your country by marching to the Mint!'"
In a third report the delegates congratulate themselves on the result of their "philosophic mission" in the Department of Gers. "Public feeling was ripe, and it was decided that the abolition of fanaticism should be solemnly celebrated on the last day of the third Decade. The whole population assembled in a rustic spot to hold the festival of brotherhood. After a Spartan meal they hurried into the town, tore down all the emblems of fanaticism, and trampled them under foot. A scavenger's cart drove up, bringing two miracle-working virgins and a variety of crucifixes and images of saints, to which, but a short time before, superstition had offered incense. All this ridiculous rubbish was piled upon a bonfire, on which already lay a collection of patents of nobility, and burned amidst the rejoicings of an enormous crowd. Round this philosophic pyre on which so many delusions were consumed the carmagnole was danced all night."
In a fourth report we read: "Sixty-four refractory priests were living in a house belonging to the people. I ordered them to be marched through the town to prison. The new kind of monster, which had not as yet been exhibited to the gaze of the public, produced an excellent effect. Shouts of 'Vive la République!' rose from the crowd that surrounded the herd. Have the goodness to let me know what I am to do with the five dozen animals whom I have held up to the ridicule of the multitude. I gave them actors as an escort."
The debates which preceded the proclamation of religious liberty on the 3rd Ventôse of the year III. were all in this same tone. However divided the Convention might be upon other questions, upon this there was absolute unanimity. Marked as is the difference in the nation's frame of mind during, and after, the Reign of Terror, there is no difference in its attitude towards Catholicism. When, as one result of the proclamation of religious liberty, a few churches had been reopened, the fact was announced by the weekly paper Le Décade Philosophique, under the heading "Theatres," in the following terms: "On the 18th and 25th of this month a comedy was played in several parts of Paris. The chief character, in an absurd costume, performed a variety of foolish antics, at which the spectators did not laugh. As we are not in the habit of criticising revived plays when they are neither useful nor instructive, we shall take no further notice of this one."
Mirabeau had said that men's first aim must be "to decatholicise" France. To all appearance this was being done. One Commune after another petitioned to be allowed to change its name, which was almost always that of some saint. Saint-Denis, for instance (whose headless patron never existed), was renamed Franciade. Most of the provinces followed the example of Paris. Nothing that could remind men of the "kingdom by the grace of God" was spared. In 1793 a venerable, white-bearded Alsatian, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, Ruhl by name, managed to get possession of the sacred, miracle-working ampulla containing the anointing oil which a dove had brought down from heaven on the occasion of the coronation of Clovis. Followed by a vast crowd, he bore it in triumph to the great square of Reims, where the magistrates and other public officials had already assembled round the statue of Louis XV. Here he delivered an oration against tyranny and tyrants, and wound up by throwing the sacred vessel at the head of Louis le Bien-aimé with such violence that it broke into a hundred pieces, and the sacred oil trickled once again down the cheeks of the Lord's Anointed.
Events such as these, and language such as the above quoted, show plainly enough how determinedly the Revolution was attacking the principle of authority. It was highly significant that patents of nobility were burned in the same bonfire with the images of the saints, and that disbelief in the sacred ampulla led to the flouting of royalty. From the moment when the authority of religion was overthrown, the magic power of authority in every domain was gone.
It was supplanted by the watchword: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But this watchword contained at least two fundamental principles instead of one. Liberty as a fundamental principle may be regarded as emanating from Voltaire, fraternity from Rousseau. And equality and liberty did not combine well. When, not long before the Revolution, Saint-Martin, the mystic, proclaimed his mysterious doctrine of the Holy Trinity (Ternaire)—liberty, equality, and fraternity, which always had been, and always should be—he did not foresee the possibility of disunion, of conflict, between these principles. Voltaire says somewhere: "It was a wise provision that made of the Trinity one God; if there had been three they would have come to blows." In 1793 Saint-Martin's trinity revealed the contradictions which lay latent in it.
In the month of April the new Declaration of the Rights of Man which Robespierre had drawn up and persuaded the Jacobins to accept as their programme was published, and in the same month, whilst the violent dispute between Robespierre and Vergniaud was going on, there emanated from the opposite camp the plan of a constitution, evolved by Condorcet, Barrère, Thomas Paine, Pétion, Barbaroux, Sièyes, and others, and drawn up by Condorcet.