Thus it came about from a variety of causes that the existing Government gave dissatisfaction to many of those who took part in it. Even the most cruel and unprincipled of the Montagnards resented their subservient position. The institution of the Worship of Reason gave offence to many of them. The wanton waste of property and destruction of life going on in the chief commercial towns of France, in Lyons, Toulon, Bordeaux, and Nantes, excited disgust if not pity. Now that the country was no longer in any immediate danger of invasion, men, before indifferent as to what was done so long as the enemy was repulsed, awoke to the horror of the scenes that were being enacted round them. The Dantonists sincerely desired to stay the action of the guillotine. Having been pushed aside, since the reconstitution of the Committee of Public Safety in July, by men more fanatic and sanguinary than themselves, they were visited by remorse as they experienced their powerlessness to hold in check passions which they had themselves helped to unloose. ‘I cannot forget,’ wrote Desmoulins, warmly attached to his own wife and child, ‘that the men they are killing by thousands have also wives and children.’ ♦The Hébertists attacked by Robespierre.♦ Besides creating discontent in the Mountain, the ascendancy of the Commune gave dissatisfaction to the Committee of Public Safety, and in particular to Robespierre. Robespierre was opposed to the principles of which Hébert had declared himself the special champion. He put himself forward, indeed, as being as well as Hébert the people’s friend, but between neither the aims nor the characters of the two men did any real similarity exist. Robespierre had no sympathy for a movement which idolised ignorance, rags, and vice, and made the Republic the prey of bands of rapacious and unscrupulous adventurers. While Hébert, by the adoption of rude manners and coarse language, sought popularity, Robespierre always maintained propriety both in language and in dress, continuing even to wear his hair powdered, as had been the custom of educated men under the monarchy. Further, the atheistic doctrines which Hébert professed were to Robespierre essentially repugnant. Robespierre was a theist of the school of Rousseau, and Rousseau had said that men could not be good citizens who did not believe in a special providence and in a future life, and that atheism was the one doctrine the public profession of which no wise legislator would tolerate. In the Jacobins Robespierre attacked Hébert and the Commune on the ground of their intolerance. Those, he said, who persecute priests are more fanatic than the priests themselves. Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is wholly popular. If God did not exist, we should have to invent him.