It was the feeling of duty to society (as defined by Rousseau) which led to Robespierre's significant intervention in the war between the Revolution and positive religion. Once the Revolution had broken into the churches axe in hand, it seemed as if the movement were irresistible. Men mounted on the frailest of scaffolding to scrape from the ceilings of churches portraits of popes concealed by century-old spiders' webs. Images of saints were torn from their niches, and fanaticism destroyed some of the finest works of Gothic art; the emissaries of the Revolution descended even into the vaults, and flashed their lanterns in the pale faces of the dead; fragments of broken-up altars were piled together "like shapeless stones in a quarry." The chairmen of the revolutionary committees wore velvet breeches made out of episcopal robes, and shirts cut out of choristers' surplices. In the end a few atheistic enthusiasts (Anacharsis Clootz, a man of German extraction, Chaumette, and Hébert) made their voices heard, and carried the mob with them in their iconoclastic fury.
Except on this occasion we hear as little of atheism during the Revolution as of socialism. Belief in God and immortality, the common creed of Voltaire and Rousseau, is the creed held unchanged by almost all the chosen leaders of the people. And this same belief pervades all the writings of the period. Thomas Paine's _Age of Reason_ is a good example. Even such a recklessly disreputable poem as Parny's _Guerre des Dieux_ inculcates the same doctrine, Camille Desmoulins writes in a letter: "Mon cher Manuel! Les rois sont mûrs, mais le bon Dieu ne l'est pas encore (notez que je dis _le bon Dieu_ et non pas _Dieu_, ce qui est fort différent)." This is the standpoint of the age; its task was not to subject the conception of God to criticism, but to free it from the legendary encumbrances of the positive religions. The atheists in the National Assembly led the Revolution beyond its proper goal and instigated excesses which degraded it in the eyes of the contemporary generation.
Clootz succeeded in persuading a bishop, Gobel by name, to write a letter to the Convention, which began: "Citizens, representatives! I am a priest, that is to say, a quack. Hitherto I have been an honest quack; I have only deceived because I myself was deceived." It ended, of course, with the information that he had become converted to philosophy.