…or, Why the Rest of Europe Thought the French Were Insane.
by IntrepidCaptain
Got your attention, didn’t it? After a bit of radio silence, the Flâneurs are back and here to tell you aaaaaaaaaall about the wild and crazy times of the French Revolution. Well, not the whole revolution, but just one eensy part that is usually looked over: the experiments in new religions.
Yes folks, the different factions that came to power during the French Revolution each had a bone to pick with the Church. They issued decrees that sanctioned such measures as the confiscation of church property as well as the abolishment of Church-related practices. The official endorsement of these actions soon escalated into a period of some pretty sticky violence. This fervour reached new heights in late 1792 and in 1793, with the establishment of two cults, meant to replace and supplant the Church. One of these two even went so far as to hold worship in Notre Dame Cathedral. That act alone had enormous implications, but the question remains whether this display was meant to be philosophical or political in nature.
After the Girondins, secured power over the Legislative Assembly, the revolutionaries began to seize and redistribute the land and assets of the upper classes. The bulk of this land was, in fact, Church property, as many nobles had already sold off their lands in order to support the lavish lifestyle required of Versailles society. The power and prestige behind the Church protected it at first, until the revolutionary government tried to enforce an oath of loyalty to the new regime upon the priests and Bishops of France. Being unable to do so without papal permission, the oath was sent to Pope Pius VI to review, which was finally rejected after eight months of indecisive answers. Though a significant amount of the clergy did agree to the oath anyway—risking excommunication—many refused, and were imprisoned by the Committee of Public Safety, which had recently secured power. This left the revolutionary government free to exert its dominance over Church property and the spiritual life of France, and set in motion the idea of the Church being an impotent institution.
Although there was an outcry against this, especially in England and Rome, no foreign power immediately moved in to protect the imprisoned clergy, even when three bishops and hundreds of priests and nuns were executed in the September of 1792. The increase in the Committee’s jurisdiction of power only accelerated the practice of confiscating and redistributing the lands and moveable’s of churches among the local population, since all the old owners now came in a two-piece set, if you catch my drift. Along with the redistribution of Church property, was the abolishment of church-related practices, as the new rational age to be ushered in by the revolutionaries needed to have all forms of the illogical and superstitions of the Church erased. Many of these practices didn’t even bear directly on religious life, such as the ringing of church bells to tell time, while other practices, such as the displaying of crucifixes, pissed off most of the rural peasants. They especially took to heart the confiscations of religious icons by the Committee of Public Safety. Most of the precious metals used to decorate churches and holy relics were confiscated and later turned into coin to fund the war effort against England and other countries in Europe.
What had triggered such violent treatment was the view that the Church was full of extravagantly corrupt officials placed there by a foreign power, Rome, which had no regard for the actual people of France. The luxuries enjoyed by these foreign bishops and clerics looked similar to those enjoyed by the residents of Versailles, and seemed worse because of the nature of their position. Officials of the Church had no place in court politics, and had no need of worldly extravagances. While to some degree this view held, the extremes that the revolutionaries in power went to show how far their beliefs took them from rational behaviour. It was this spirit that eventually led to the formation of the first of the revolutionary cults. Before this, however, much more general measures were taken, such as the creation of a new calendar, which employed a six-day week that did not include Sunday, and the replacement of religious holidays with new civic ones.
The very word “Sunday,” banned–yes, banned–in the late 1780s, was not eradicated from the French calendar simply because the officials of the Gallican church were corrupt and foreign. The fervour sewn by a combination of centuries of oppression and the fanaticism of philosophers and their followers, caught up in the new “rational age” led to such extremes. It was this fervour that led to the attempts to completely eradicate the Gallican Church and to create new cults of worship to replace it. The reason these cults would create a more significant reaction on the part of the Christian powers of Europe, was because they were a greater threat then the September Massacres. The founding of a new religion wouldn’t martyr any casualties, and was a greater threat because it didn’t victimize the Church, and rally the common people to it’s aid.
The earlier of the two cults was the Cult of Reason, founded in October 1792, after the September massacres. An atheistic cult, it was more of a philosopher’s forum for scientific exploration then a religion. The men that propagated this cult were such men as Jacques Hébert, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, and Joseph Fouché. While each of these men had their own reasons for creating this new zealous school of philosophy, one point can be made without doubt. This cult was at the forefront of the dechristianization movement that swept cutting-edge reformers of education and society along to a new place on the world stage. It was not the goal, however, to replace the rituals and the ornate displays, but to replace the subject. Catholic ceremony was very similar to the ritual surrounding the worship of rationality and human thought by the Cult of Reason. The reported formality of the ceremonies and feasts of this cult made the crowns of Europe quickly take notice.
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, who had by then risen to the forefront of the Directory, was highly critical of the establishment of this cult. He found it to be extravagant and a mockery of the Catholic faith. What was even more galling was the fact that, while all the trappings and ceremony used made this cult look legitimate, it preached atheism and looked as if it would sew moral anarchy among the people. He feared it would lead the people either to a strange superstition by giving in to this cult, or leading them to fanaticism by clinging more desperately to the old faith in reaction to this new one.
A year later, Robespierre founded a rival cult, which was declared the official religion of the French Republic in 1794. On the 7th of May, Robespierre made an official speech to all of Europe “inaugurating the worship of the Supreme Being”, and advocating the cult’s legitimacy. The Cult of the Supreme Being, as it was called, was a deistic cult, and its theory was much more closely modelled on actual religions than the Cult of Reason. Deism was the belief that G-d, who had set creation in motion, did not and never would directly interfere with it, via miracles or divine inspiration of any sort. G-d was a passive force, and worship was not necessary, only rational, righteous behaviour. Worship was superfluous, as all judgement would happen, if it did happen, after death. All scripture and religious teachings, therefore, were invalid. They were the superstitions of primitives, written down and passed to the present day through an enforcement of belief through fear.
The support of the people was key to the survival of the new government and Robespierre had determined to win that support through a combination of fear, military success, and patriotic zeal. By creating a new cult of worship and endorsing religion, Robespierre believed that he could both gratify the need of organized religion for the masses as well as further unite France in the spirit of civic virtue.
To Robespierre, the establishment of this new cult was the final battle for the ideals of the Republic, and the one that he was staking his career on. In his mind, the Cult of Reason was worse then the previous anarchy, since it meant a formal denial of G-d within G-d’s own house and with G-d’s own sacraments. Catholic had parents raised Robespierre, and it was his strong sense of morality that defined him and his policies throughout his career. It is natural that he would feel so strongly on this subject, and would passionately champion it to the Committee, as reportedly he did when he presented his ‘Report on the Relations Between Religious and Moral Ideas and Republican Principals’.
Soon after, the Cult of Reason established itself as the new residents of Paris’ famous Notre Dame Cathedral. Their rise in power and support culminated in the rituals held to the goddess Reason on the 10th of November. The ceremony itself strongly mirrored the ornate practices of the Catholic Church, and one of the founding members of the religion even preached on the glory of logical thinking in the history of mankind and the virtue of rationality.
Was the ceremony in Notre Dame in November meant to be a political statement, or was it a symbolic triumph for philosophy? The cults themselves were simply the next logical step in the growth of the two schools of thought, which were gaining strength in France at the time. For the members of the Cult of Reason, they had plenty of motivation to celebrate, especially during one of the new civil holidays instated by the revolutionary regime, of which the tenth of November was one. The rationale behind such a display must have been philosophical at the start, but quickly became political due to the political climate of the period. Using such an infamous seat of Christian worship as Notre Dame for the festivities was bound to get the attention of the Christian powers of Europe, which already were voicing opposition to the events in France. Ultimately, it was viewed as a political move by the rest of Europe, and particularly by the Pope.
The repercussions of these events, and what this meant for the French Enlightenment was huge, and reached far beyond what the actual cults could. The cults themselves had a relatively small following, yet their existence and formal acknowledgement had serious implications. Up until this point, the sacred establishment of religion was not directly tampered with. The Church’s theories and structure were questioned, but no nation had seriously recognized atheism or deism as a legitimate organization. Thus, by allowing these new cults to take root in revolutionary France, Robespierre and the Directory had compromised themselves. Before, a foreign power could align themselves with the new French government in an effort to show their support of progressive ideas and a fairer form of society, albeit temporarily unstable progress. Now that the morality of the state of France was in question, no ruler could join with them in good faith. The ceremony on the 10th of November in particular goaded a decisive reaction out of the people of England, Austria, and Rome.
Robespierre’s bid to garner support for the revolution by appealing to the religious sensibilities of the rest of Europe viciously backfired. The foreign reaction to the official recognition of cults who conducted strange rituals in the infamous Catholic cites of Paris, was of complete disbelief. In Rome, the seat of Catholicism, the Pope excommunicated the entirety of the new French government and all Frenchmen that adhered to either of the new cults. The bishops of Austria declared that the barbarism of the ancients was more morally correct and enlightened then this farce, which was beyond all rational behavior.
Meanwhile, the English, under the parliamentary supervision of William Pitt, used the inauguration of the cults of Reason and the Supreme Being to fuel the fire of religious and nationalistic zeal against the threat of republican reform. While the direct involvement in French affairs was slow to form, the shift in opinion of the French Enlightenment that started with the Committee’s abuse of the Church and the establishment of cults had an immediate affect within England. Before, the English had largely been supportive of the French Revolution, and happily praised the new regime and it’s school of thought. However, once the atheists of France rose to prominence and priests were killed, many English politicians looked in fear at what might now happen in England. They had spent a decade allowing republican ideas and revolutionary pamphlets to be set loose among the populace, and this alongside the Sunday School movement, which provided education for the lower classes. But now, many upper class Englishmen feared, the “poor had access to pamphlets as well as the Bible” and could turn against the government in a Jacobin tide.
The rivalry between the two cults can be typified by comparing the differences of religious writings between the deistic and atheistic philosophers of the French Enlightenment. Voltaire, one of the best-known Enlightenment scholars, was a deist. His views on religion were strongly rooted in the ideas that there was a G-d, and that this G-d did not and would not interfere with existence. This philosophy, as it could not rightly be called a religion, was shared in varying degrees by most of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment. The general view was that the existence of G-d would mean that a logical, scientific exploration of the origin of the universe would lead one back to some sort of Divine Creation. However, there was no clear-cut idea of an afterlife, nor was Voltaire particularly interested in one. Another famous philosopher of the period was Holbach, an atheist who also had been a member of the nobility in France. He completely denied the possibility of G-d, and instead turned to a strictly scientific, rational view of the world. One completely denied G-d, and the other insisted there was a point in which scientific explanations ended and G-d began. These two views, when applied to a national religion, would both be in strong opposition to all other accepted organized religions, and threaten the views of the other European powers.
The Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being are some of the purest instances of the application of an idealization of human rationality to social reform seen in revolutionary France. The establishment of these cults was meant to unite the revolutionaries of France into one spiritual expression that had been founded entirely in reason, separate from the superstition of the religion of the Ancien Regime. What it actually did, was stir foreign powers into more decisive action against the French and allowed them to use religious zeal as a tool against the otherwise popular Enlightenment movement.
the past is our present
~your Captain
POST SCRIPT
Want to look further on this? Try checking these books out:
- Liberty and Terror in England by Roland Bartel
- The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment by Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret
- The Ancien Regime by William Doyle
- Church, State and Society 1760-1850 by William Gibson
- The System of Nature by Holbach
- Robespierre Volume II: from the Death of Louis XVI to the Death of Robespierre by J. M. Thompson
- The Important Examination of The Holy Scriptures by Voltaire
(usually) live in the civilized and decadent past, while the Cyberpunks prefer a more rugged, crime-infused world that is either in the future or near future. Key word here? Robotics.
just me or do cyberpunks seem to get a lot of time running about grimy and rain-slicked city streets, getting into motorcycle chases despite the general sedentary nature of the hacker lifestyle? At least that’s what all my friends and I discovered in the 90s, the glory days of cyberpunk.
But let’s look at the basics of cyberpunk for a moment. The main things to get your head around when it comes to cyberpunk is ONE that the internet is everywhere and is the answer to any and all problems, and TWO robots infiltrate and are a part of everything, even human anatomy. And on that topic, 
intrepidcaptain
WickedWickedDandy
B.L.P.L.
