Just at the side of Voltaire stood the Encyclopedists, led by Diderot and d'Alembert. The {19} great work of reference which they issued penetrated into every intellectual circle, not only of France but of Europe, and brought with it the doctrines of materialism and atheism. However much they might be saturated with the ideas of Church and State in the Roman-Bourbon form, many of its readers became unconsciously shaken in their fundamental beliefs, and ready to question, to criticize and, when the edifice began to tremble, to accept the Revolution and the doctrine of the rights of the common man. Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, were at heart essentially aristocrats; for them the common man was an untrustworthy brute of low instincts, and their revolution would have meant the displacement of an aristocracy of the sword by an aristocracy of the intellect. Rousseau stood for the opposite view. To him it was only despotism that degraded man. Remove the evil conditions and the common man would quickly display his inherent goodness and amiability; tenderness to our fellows, or fraternity, was therefore the distinctive trait of manhood. The irrepressible exuberance of Rousseau's kindliness overflowed from his novels and essays into a great stream of fashionable sensibility. During the years of {20} terrific stress that followed, during the butcheries of the guillotine and of the Grande Armee, it was the vogue to be soft-hearted, and even such a fire eater as Murat would pour libations of tears over his friends' waistcoats at the slightest provocation. In his _Contrat Social_ Rousseau postulated the essential equality of the governor and the governed. But his sentimental attitude towards man involved a corresponding one towards the Deity; unable to accept Catholicism or even Christianity, he sought refuge from atheism in the arms of the _Etre Supreme_. It was this Supreme Being of Rousseau that was to become the official deity of France during the last days of the Reign of Terror. An influence of a slightly different sort to that exercised by these writers was that of the theatre. The century had seen the rise of the middle-class man, and his attempts at self expression. The coffee-house and the Freemason's lodge gave facilities for conversation, discussion, opinion; and the increasing number of gazettes supplied these circles with information as to the course of political events. But the gazettes themselves might not venture into the danger-marked field of opinion, and for the fast growing public, especially in the {21} city of Paris, there was no opportunity for comment or criticism on the events of the day. In a tentative way the theatre proved itself a possible medium. In 1730, Voltaire produced his tragedy Brutus. It fell flat because of the lines . . . et je porte en mon coeur La liberte gravee et les rois en horreur.