an intensifying reaction.............

   It was not the same Paris that he had known in the crowd-ruled days of '92 and '93.  Ever since the fall of Robespierre in '94 the capital had followed the countryside in an intensifying reaction—religious and political—against the Revolution.  Catholicism, led by nonjuring priests, was regaining its hold upon a people that had lost belief in an earthly substitute for supernatural hopes and consolations, for sacraments, ceremonies, and processional holydays.  The decadi, or decimal day of rest, was increasingly ignored; the Christian Sunday was flagrantly respected and enjoyed.  France was voting for God.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Paris in 1797