Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (92 page)

During the years 1788–91, the conflict between Revolution and Christianity, then, remained largely a political struggle that elements among both revolutionaries and constitutional clergy made some effort to confine to the institutional and economic issues dividing Church and state, essentially a contest about the size, power, and wealth of the Church that some revolutionary leaders had no wish to see become a wider ideological, doctrinal, and spiritual clash. But in early 1792, a prolonged intermediate phase began, lasting until mid-1793, in which the spiraling antagonism between Christianity and the Revolution did indeed gradually develop into a broader conflict over religious
authority, values, and doctrine. The impulse to repression and coercion, and threat to freedom of expression and cult, grew and became more obvious. Even so, until June 1793 the fight remained basically a war of words and symbols, a nonviolent cultural struggle. On Easter Day, the day of the Passion, 6 April 1792, the Assembly forbade the wearing of ecclesiastical dress of any kind,
costume sacerdotal
, in the streets or anywhere outside churches, a landmark change and signal blow to traditional culture, plainly aimed at curbing the clergy’s participation and presence, as clergy, in society and everyday life.
⁵

Relentless deterioration in relations and intensification of conflict stemmed from the fact that the early campaign to restructure the Church and regenerate it on a new basis had by early 1792 completely stalled. What had not stalled was the revolutionary regime’s determination to weaken religious authority, and especially the role of religion in politics, education, and daily life. Reflecting increasing frustration with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1791, Feuillants and Brissotins alike added to the mounting impatience and verbal violence typical of this period, albeit still paying fulsome lip service to toleration, individual liberty, and freedom of expression. By voting on 27 May 1792 to banish the most intransigent refractory priests from the country, the Assembly took a step further down the road to open conflict with Christianity and away from the principles of toleration, religious freedom, and peaceful secularization. Additional pressure to further curtail the Church’s power and status during this intermediate phase arose among those charged with directing revolutionary France’s financial and educational policies. In November 1792, Joseph Cambon (1754–1820), a prominent Brissotin deputy from Montpellier and former textile merchant, head of the Comité des Finances, urged the legislature to agree that the costs of maintaining the constitutional clergy (salaries and pensions) should no longer be met by society but rather become the exclusive responsibility of the Catholic congregations themselves, thereby placing Catholics on the same basis as the other religious cults. Expecting society at large to maintain the clergy, after all, infringed the rights of nonbelievers, Protestants, Jews, and other non-Catholics. Why should society maintain the constitutional anymore than the Protestant or refractory clergy? His advice, shelved for the moment, implied the complete overturning of the church settlement of 1790.

This intermediary phase, preceding the turn to de-Christianization proper, still operated on a level that was purely symbolic and verbal. Complaints about the inappropriate public cost of the Church to
society, laced with denunciation of priestly royalist subversion of the Revolution, were loudly voiced by some Brissotin leaders. Denunciation of the priesthood and their influence was still more strident and vituperative in the rhetoric of many Montagnard populists—albeit not Robespierre, who always remained personally antagonistic to the philosophes’ irreligion. In this way, the mounting strife during these months introduced the language of violent suppression and coercion that from mid-1793 was destined to be translated into action. The mathematician Jacob-Louis Dupont (d. 1813), deputy for a Loire constituency in the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, and, like Cambon, among the Convention’s chief financial experts, on 14 December 1792 appealed for a greater effort to overthrow “the altars and idols,” replacing religious education in France with a wholly secular education based on the projected publicly funded and directed primary schools.

In late December 1792, the Paris Commune, now dominated by Pétion and the Brissotins, forbade the “superstitious” practice of midnight mass. On 24 December, Christmas Eve 1792, the Commune announced that the Paris churches would be closed from 6:00
PM
to 6:00
AM
, which provoked outraged groups of the devout to gather at midnight around several main Parisian churches to ensure their curés did open up for midnight mass.
⁶
As this symbolic and verbal strife between militant secularists and Catholic pious intensified in early 1793, not least due to the Vendéean revolt and the Revolution’s military collapse in Belgium, warning signs that in worsening circumstances an active persecution instigated by a pending aggressive de-Christianization campaign could begin became more frequent. Throughout 1792 and early 1793, nevertheless, the Brissotin democratic republican ascendancy continued to rein in anticlercial intolerance, kept the churches open, and broadly conserved religious freedom, respect for “liberty of cult,” and the status of the constitutional priesthood. De-Christianization as such had not yet begun.

Only after the coup of 2 June 1793 and the overthrow of the Revolution’s core values could a violently persecuting, fanatical offensive ensue, and this is precisely what occurred beginning in the late summer of 1793. The turn from a verbal and symbolic war between the Revolution and Christianity to a campaign of violent, coercive suppression was thus very closely and integrally linked, politically and ideologically, to the coup of June 1793 and the ousting of the democratic republicans, for it was this that removed the constitutional and legal barriers that had so far broadly held anticlerical exasperation, hostility, and
intolerance in check. In the late summer of 1793, de-Christianization rapidly evolved into a repressive, vandalistic, inquisitorial movement, albeit essentially local and fragmented, and lacking central direction. In fact, de-Christianization in the French Revolution, though it became systematic in many places, was never a coordinated, nationwide campaign. Its momentum derived mainly from particular Montagnard leaders and political factions. It evolved unevenly, varying considerably in character from area to area, developing at the local level rather than from any comprehensive legislation or concerted initiative authorized by the Convention or revolutionary executive committees.
⁷

De-Christianization as such emanated neither from the top of the group dictatorship nor the sansculotte social base of the new power pyramid, but rather from the revolutionary vanguard beneath Robespierre and Danton orchestrating the sociétés populaires.
⁸
Though strictly a minority movement, de-Christianization was nevertheless part of the urban populist authoritarian upsurge and hence enjoyed sporadic mass support, this aggressive ideology thriving mainly among the hard-liners and political bosses controlling France’s local Jacobin societies and some Paris sections. Among the chief figures of this harsh and violent anti-Christian repression were Chaumette, Hébert, Chabot, Lequinio, Fouché, Desmoulins, Bourdon, Dupont, Fabre d’Églantine, Momoro, Dumont, and Cloots, all declared zealots of atheism. The leading de-Christianizer in Tarbes and the Basque Country, where he provoked bitter local opposition, was Benoît Monestier, himself a former priest and one of the most violent foes of the Brissotins. Chaumette, son of an artisan and former medical student, originally a protégé of Desmoulins later prominent in the Cordeliers (where he had exchanged his Christian first names for “Anaxagoras”), figured among the campaign’s principal activists in Paris where the movement began. Dogmatically intolerant, neither he nor Hébert, claimed the atheist librarian Maréchal later, were genuine philosophique atheists. To Maréchal they were merely unscrupulous, power-hungry “tartuffes révolutionnaires.”
⁹
In the early autumn of 1793, Chaumette, now a leading member of the Paris Commune, accompanied the fiercely anti-Christian zealot Joseph Fouché (1759–1820), a former Oratorian priest and among the Montagne’s best orators, on one of the first large-scale de-Christianizing sweeps in the provinces, in the La Nièvre region of north-central France, while another Montagnard representative on mission, the lawyer André Dumont (1765–1836), initiated systematic persecution of curates and the devout in Abbeville and Lequinio at Rochefort.

Cloots and Maréchal were more serious ideologues than the rest. Chosen president of the Paris Jacobins for the period 11 to 29 November 1793, Cloots delivered an address to the Convention on 17 November (27 Brumaire) that marked the high tide of the de-Christianization movement and the militant atheistic-philosophique cult of reason and nature so detested by Robespierre. On that occasion, Cloots adamantly denounced revealed religion’s “absurdity,” citing the many clashes with religious faith in which he had engaged in the past. “L’explosion philosophique” transforming France was the fruit of fifty years of dogged perseverance in the face of persecution. Conversion of a great people to the “revelation du bon sens” proved the philosophes had not sown in vain. He heavily stressed the ties between the “révolution philosophique” prior to 1789 and the “la révolution politique” commencing in 1789. Early in the Revolution, he had tried to dedicate a new edition of his pre-Revolution, anti-Christian diatribe,
La Certitude des preuves du Mahométanisme
(“Londres” [i.e., Amsterdam], 1780), to the Legislative Assembly, only to find his motion blocked by Fauchet.
¹⁰
But times had changed. Full recognition could now be bestowed on the Revolution’s first great “adversaries of religion.” He proposed the public honoring of Jean Meslier (1664–1729), the intrepid curé of Étrépigny in Champagne whose
Testament philosophique
(composed in the 1720s) insisting on the need to rescue the peasantry from churchmen as part of a more general effort to redeem them from their misery and ignorance was the first summons for a general, unremitting war on religion, as well as on the nobility and clergy. A statue of Meslier erected in the Jacobin Club, he suggested, would fittingly commemorate that writer’s achievement.
¹¹

Heralds of Jacobin persecution of religion claimed to be eradicating “superstition.” They did so by combining vandalism aimed at the symbols and ritual objects of organized religion with harassing clergy and the devout psychologically and physically, and preaching an austere new secular
moralisme
. Fouché, keenly conscious of the refractory clergy’s inciting peasants to violence against revolutionaries (having himself narrowly avoided assassination by insurgents in the Vendée), vehemently condemned “false religion” in La Nièvre department in September 1793, calling for its extirpation in favor of a deistic civic cult. The Revolution proclaimed freedom of conscience, he conceded in a manifesto of 10 October 1793, but authorized no faith other than that of universal morality. Catholicism should be stripped of its special status, and immediately. Crosses and other religious symbols should no
longer be used in funerary rites. This edict initiated a campaign to erase crosses from cemeteries and country roads throughout the department, which soon took hold over large stretches of countryside. Fouché’s fanaticism extended to ordering local cemetery gates to bear the rubric, “death is but an eternal sleep.”
¹²

During late 1793, constitutional clergy strongly committed to the Revolution, such as Grégoire, Fauchet, Coupé, and Lamourette, were still courageously proclaiming the inner compatibility of the Revolution with Catholicism, but found themselves in an increasingly marginalized and untenable position. The egalitarian, tolerant, and democratic principles of the Revolution of 1788–93 were perfectly defensible, they contended, without espousing irreligion, materialism, and anticlerical militancy. These men, eminent and brave, embodied a Catholic Radical Enlightenment that now verged on extinction. Until the late summer of 1793, they backed the revolutionary government as best they could, but they could not avoid publicly waging war on the philosophique roots of the anti-Christian tendency, which eventually pitted them too against the legislature and much of the Montagnard leadership. Having broken with the Cercle Social in the spring of 1791, Fauchet, like Grégoire, ended up becoming hopelessly isolated. Lamourette delivered an address at his episcopal seat of Lyon on 29 April 1793 publicly denouncing what he called the harmful dominance of philosophy in shaping the Revolution. The advance of “cette tenebreuse philosophie,” materialist and atheist (in the style of Diderot, d’Holbach, Condorcet, Volney, and Cloots), was a deadly threat, he admonished, that would blight liberty itself and the Revolution’s promised universal social regeneration, brutalizing the people and extinguishing all principles. In fact, he suggested, this was the real goal behind the verbal attacks on Christianity; the ambitious schemers driving it were deliberately aggravating division and factionalism within the Revolution for their own nefarious purposes.
¹³

Constitutional clergy and those aspiring to synthesize Revolution and Christianity were a fast dwindling force in a fraught context that prevented them from developing a coherent political strategy. In the Rhone Valley, some constitutionals aligned with Chalier’s hard-line Jacobins or remained neutral, but most sided unhesitatingly with the Brissotins. Although more likely than Robespierristes to be philosophical materialists, atheists, and radical secularists, Brissotins were also more genuinely committed to freedom of conscience and basic human rights. The latter included no leading active persecutors. Aggressive
persecution of religion and vandalism was entirely a Montagnard prerogative. This explains the remarkable paradox that Left republicans, Christianity’s main intellectual enemies through the years 1788–93 until eliminated during the autumn of 1793, nevertheless emerged as the main protectors of Christian conscience and freedom of cult. After the toppling of Chalier’s Jacobin despotism at Lyon on 29 May 1793, for example, Lamourette unhesitatingly preached on behalf of the Brissotin faction, battling to save Lyon from the Jacobins. As strife between the Montagne and the Lyonnais escalated, the bishop issued a pastoral letter, dated 14 July, addressing the entire department, denouncing not just Chalier but also the “anarchist brigands” manipulating the Paris sansculottes as a pernicious subversive group knowingly or unknowingly assisting France’s royalists and aristocrats.
¹⁴
The fact that leading constitutional prelates vigorously supported the Left republicans against the Montagne, however, only rendered Brissotins and constitutionals more vulnerable to persecution during the murderous strife soon engulfing the country.