Why Revolutionaries would consider the most progressive thinker of the Enlightenment at odds with their liberal values may not seem immediately obvious to us.40 And yet the politically astute leaders of the Revolution realized that there was no better way of dooming the movement than by letting it be contaminated by the atheism that Diderot represented. To do so would deprive the French citizenry not only of a God, but the comforting prospect of some form of afterlife.
