The Convention, nourished on the ideas of Rousseau and Mably, comprehended that inequality within the citizen society was the worst enemy of political equality, and dreamed of producing equality by giving property to all. Condorcet wished to devote the funds at the disposal of the state, not to the abolishment of private property, but to the equalisation of any excessive disproportion in the distribution of worldly possessions. Right of succession was to be abolished, the means of education were to be made accessible to all, &c, &c. It was not till the owners of property began, after the fall of Robespierre, to resist the claims of those who owned nothing, that the attack on property as such was made. Babeuf's communistic conspiracy followed. The conspiracy was betrayed and defeated, drowned in the blood of the conspirators without a voice being raised in defence of the ideas which had inspired it. Socialism did no more than put out feelers at the time of the Revolution.
Whilst the Girondists' Declaration of the Rights of Man ensures first and foremost the rights of the individual--freedom of conscience and of thought (_les franchises de la pensée_ was the expression in those days), the inviolability of the home, equality in sight of the law, the proportioning of punishment to crime--the Jacobins in every matter insist upon the responsibility of human beings for each other and the duty entailed by brotherhood.
The Girondists laid down the principle of non-interference. The Jacobins taught: The men of all countries are brothers, and the different nations ought to help each other to the best of their ability, like citizens of the same state. The nation which oppresses another nation declares itself the enemy of all. Those who make war upon any one nation in order to arrest the progress of liberty and abolish the rights of humanity ought to be assailed by all the others, not as ordinary enemies, but as insurrectionary murderers and robbers.
The Girondists opposed every tyranny in human shape, but they seldom tried to protect from the tyranny of circumstances. Their work was for the most part of a negative nature. The Jacobins perceived more clearly the uselessness of bestowing on the sick the right to be cured without curing them, the mockery in solemnly conferring on the lame the right to walk. Yet there was no essential difference between them. Condorcet the Girondist felt as strongly as any Jacobin that free competition was a lie when in the race one man was mounted on an excellent horse while the other had to run barefoot.