Nevertheless it is Voltaire who constitutes the destructive principle throughout the Revolution, just as it is Rousseau who is the rallying, uniting spirit. For Voltaire had destroyed the principle of authority by vindicating the liberty of thought of the individual, Rousseau had displaced and superseded it by the feeling of universal brotherhood and mutual dependence. What these two great men had planned the Revolution carried into effect; it was the executor of their wills; the thought of the individual became destructive action, and the feeling of mutual dependence, uniting organisation. From Voltaire came the wrath of the revolutionists, from Rousseau their enthusiasm.
Authority being originally, and in its essence, ecclesiastical and religious, an understanding of the successive developments in the position of the Revolution to church and religion is indispensable to a comprehension of the intellectual reaction which followed. For, as that reaction meant the re-establishment of the principle of authority, it naturally, as well as logically, began with the rehabilitation of the church.
The Revolution was in reality quite as much of a religious as of a political nature. Regarded from one standpoint, it was the practical result of the labours of the great free-thinking philosophers of the eighteenth century. It is to the Revolution of 1789 that we owe the greatest conquest wrested by the human intellect from prejudice and power--liberty of conscience, religious toleration. It is certainly not to the Christian church that humanity is indebted for this inestimable blessing, for the church opposed to the utmost every demand suggestive of it.
At the moment when the Revolution begins, all the preparations for the great encounter between the principle of authority on the one side and the principles of individuality and solidarity on the other are complete. All the leaders, all the knights and squires who are to fight in the great joust, are already at their posts, unknown to each other, unknown to the world, which is soon to ring with their names. They are men with very varied pedigrees and pasts. There are noblemen like Mirabeau, priests like Mauret, Fauchet, and Talleyrand, physicians like Marat, lawyers like Robespierre, poets, philosophers, orators, authors like M. J. Chénier, Condorcet, Danton, and Desmoulins--a whole host of men of talent and men of character. The church rallies all its forces for a desperate struggle, in which it is doomed to be worsted; the Revolution progresses, first hesitatingly, then threateningly, then irresistibly, finally in the intoxication of victory. With the summoning of the Estates the lists are opened; challenges are exchanged; and the great umpire, history, gives the signal for the fray.