Of his colleagues he was in alliance with Jean-François Rewbell and to a lesser degree with Barras, but the greatest of his fellow-directors, Lazare Carnot, was the object of his undying hatred. His policy was marked by a bitter hostility to the Christian religion, which he proposed to supplant as a civilizing agent by theophilanthropy, a new religion invented by the English deist David Williams. The credit of the "coup d'état" of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797), by which the allied directors made themselves supreme, La Révellière-Lépeaux arrogated to himself in his "Mémoires", which in this as in other matters must be read with caution.