Advocated by radicals like Jacques Hébert and Antoine-François Momoro, the Cult of Reason distilled a mixture of largely atheistic views into an anthropocentric philosophy.

[4] In late 1793, Robespierre delivered a fiery denunciation of the Cult of Reason and of its proponents[5] and proceeded to give his own vision of proper Revolutionary religion.

[9] These beliefs were put to the service of Robespierre's fuller meaning, which was of a type of civic-minded, public virtue he attributed to the Greeks and Romans.

[11] Belief in a living god and a higher moral code, he said, were "constant reminders of justice" and thus essential to a republican society.

The Cult of the Supreme Being was based on the creed of the Savoy chaplain that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had outlined in Book IV of Emile.

[citation needed] Robespierre used the religious issue to publicly denounce the motives of many radicals not in his camp, and it led, directly or indirectly, to the executions of Revolutionary de-Christianisers like Hébert, Momoro, and Anacharsis Cloots.

[4] The establishment of the Cult of the Supreme Being represented the beginning of the reversal of the wholesale de-Christianization process that had been looked upon previously with official favour.

The festival was organized by the artist Jacques-Louis David and François Joseph Talma and took place around a man-made mountain on the Champ de Mars.

[a] Dressed in sky-blue coat and nankeen trousers, Robespierre delivered two speeches in which he emphasised his concept of a Supreme Being: there would be no Christ, no Mohammed.

[23] The deist Cult of the Supreme Being that he had founded and zealously promoted generated suspicion in the eyes of both anticlericals and other political factions, who felt he was developing grandiose delusions about his place in French society.