The Commune and the Mountain had effected this revolution against the Gironde, and the committee alone had benefited by it. During the five months from June to November, the committee, having taken all the measures of defence, had naturally become the first power in the republic. The actual struggle being, as it were, over, the commune sought to sway the committee, and the Mountain to throw off its yoke. The most intense manifestation of the revolution was found in the municipal faction. With an aim opposed to that of the committee of public safety, it desired instead of the conventional dictatorship, the most extreme local democracy; and instead of religion, the consecration of materialism. Political anarchy and religious atheism were the symbols of this party, and the means by which it aimed at establishing its own rule. A revolution is the effect of the different systems which have agitated the age which has originated it. Thus, during the continuance of the crisis in France, ultra-montane catholicism was represented by the nonjuring clergy; Jansenism by the constitutionist clergy; philosophical deism by the worship of the Supreme Being, instituted by the committee of public safety; and the materialism of Holbach's school by the worship of Reason and of Nature, decreed by the commune. It was the same with political opinions, from the royalty of the _Ancien Régime_ to the unlimited democracy of the municipal faction. The latter had lost, in Marat, its principal support, its true leader, while the committee of public safety still retained Robespierre. It had at its head men who enjoyed great popularity with the lower classes; Chaumette, and his substitute Hébert, were its political leaders; Ronsin, commandant of the revolutionary army, its general; the atheist, Anacharsis Clootz, its apostle. In the sections it relied on the revolutionary committees, in which there were many obscure foreigners, supposed, and not without probability, to be agents of England, sent to destroy the republic by driving it into anarchy and excess. The club of the Cordeliers was composed entirely of its partisans. The _Vieux Cordeliers_ of Danton, who had contributed so powerfully to the 10th of August, and who constituted the commune of that period, had entered the government and the convention, and had been replaced in the club by members whom they contemptuously designated the _patriotes de la troisième réquisition_.