Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (93 page)

The fanaticism and vandalism of organized de-Christianization collided head-on with the fervent religious zealotry everywhere driving France’s rebel Counter-Enlightenment, and together the unstoppable force and unmovable object pulverized the openness and liberty of cult prevailing earlier, during the years 1788–93. Once de-Christianization set in, it rapidly gained traction in Paris and the northern and central provinces, followed by the southwest. Within weeks of the June 1793 coup, the Parisian section assemblies had closed down most of the capital’s churches, and by December all, including the university chapels,
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albeit in this respect the capital preceded the rest of France. In Bordeaux, by December 1793, only four churches remained open for Christian worship, the rest having been closed or put to alternative uses, among them the cathedral of Saint-André, now converted into a storage depot (with the surrounding Place Saint-André renamed the Place de la Montagne). In much of the country, closing churches was slower and more sporadic. In Marseille and most of the south, few churches were closed before January or February 1794, and even after that many remained open. Even so, by Easter 1794, the great majority of France’s roughly forty thousand churches had been closed for Christian worship.
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Wherever churches were shut, major and minor edifices alike were allocated new names and functions and were being used as public stores, workshops, meeting halls, barracks, and stables. Often, former Catholic sanctuaries, tombs, and chapels became mausoleums
and commemorative temples.
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The vast premises of the Abbey de Saint-Germain-des-Près in Paris, now renamed the Maison de l’Unité, became one of the capital’s main prisons, with part of it becoming a saltpeter works. In August 1794, fire broke out in this refinery, consuming much of the abbey’s priceless library, though the irreplaceable medieval manuscripts were largely saved thanks to volunteers rushing to fight the flames.
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Despite restricted popular support, de-Christianization proved perfectly capable of recruiting street gangs and orchestrating group vandalism. During late summer and autumn 1793 in the Paris sections and other main cities, and eventually in smaller places, demolition committees and teams set to work erasing religious symbols and images from everyday life. Effigies and names of saints disappeared from streets and church buildings, numerous Christ figures were decapitated, and the Virgin Mary was everywhere disfigured. Bells and belfries were pulled down, religious paintings trampled to shreds. In Notre Dame and Saint-Germain in Paris, anti-Christianizers risked their lives climbing makeshift scaffolding to smash saints, angels, and popes carved in upper niches, sometimes scarcely visible at all from below.
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Religious images were then frequently replaced by busts of the Revolution’s chief “saint” Marat, or that of his only near rival in popularity, Louis-Michel Lepeletier. A wealthy magistrate among the first Estates-General nobles, joining the Third in 1789, on the very evening of 20 January 1793 after he voted for Louis XVI’s death sentence, Lepeletier was stabbed to death by a former royal guard while dining in a Palais-Royal restaurant.
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David depicted this in a painting, just as he had Marat’s death. Both paintings were then hung in the entryway to the Convention’s meeting hall.

In timing, motivation, and context, de-Christianization was integrally linked to the violence, mass intimidation, and repression of the Terror.
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On 6 November 1793, Lequinio presided over a ceremony before the entire population of Rochefort, gathered in the main parish church—now renamed the Temple de la Vérité—to watch eight Catholic priests and one Protestant pastor renounce their vows and holy orders in the name of philosophy.
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On 7 November 1793, the elected constitutional bishop of Paris, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Gobel (1727–94), pressured by Chaumette, Cloots, and Léonard Bourdon, appeared with eleven renouncing priests before the Convention and ceremonially resigned his see and priestly status. This occurred four days after Bourdon, a fierce pursuer of the Brissotins, close to Hébert but at odds with both
the Énrages and with Robespierre (who greatly scorned him), had delivered a long tirade at the Jacobins, demanding that the priesthood be compelled to admit that they were all either “imbeciles or deceivers”: “oui, let us call them before the tribunal of the truth!”
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During the ceremony, Gobel, stripping off his episcopal garb and insignia, donned a red cap of liberty, proclaiming the only true religion to be that of liberty and equality, confessing his previous life of faith one of “imposture.”
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Before long, the Paris Commune attempted to replace Christianity with “le culte de la Raison sans prêtres” throughout the capital, replacing Christian rites with republican ceremonies at which public authorities assumed the lead and republican hymns were sung.

This deistic public cult was formally inaugurated, with Chaumette presiding, on 10 November 1793 (20 Brumaire) with a grandiose public ceremony at Notre Dame, now renamed the Paris “Temple of Reason.” Republican hymns, specially composed by Marie-Joseph Chénier, were recited by a girls’ choir. The goddess “Reason,” descending from her temple, lit by the flame of truth, to receive the congregation’s homage, was represented by a leading opera singer, Mademoiselle Maillard. Numerous “temples of reason” displaced Christian churches in both Paris and, more sporadically, provincial centers, and soon also in villages. Street parades and “festivals of reason” created an elaborate new quasi-religious festival culture with Reason invariably represented as a female deity, mostly by a young woman from among the sansculotte leadership. Mme. Candeille, for example, wife of the Cordeliers orator Momoro, prominently performed this role, surrounded by dancers, musical fanfares, and entourages of priests and priestesses of Reason. Wine and feasting invaded the churches, and amid this strange mix of fanaticism, idolatry, intolerant deism, and carousing also occurred, reportedly, much erotic coupling in darkened chapels and niches.

The fast dwindling remnant of priests still frequenting the Convention in late 1793, including Alexandre-Marie Thibault (d. 1812), bishop and deputy of the Cantal, mostly followed Gobel’s example and resigned from the priesthood by the end of the year. Before long, the Abbé Grégoire, constitutional bishop of Blois, found himself the last remaining deputy wearing ecclesiastical dress in the Convention. He too came under pressure to renounce but resisted, stubbornly affirming the oneness of Christianity and the Revolution.
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The same could not be said for the Loire town of Blois, of which he was nominally bishop, since he was forced to boycott his own diocese. The ironic assurance of the local société populaire that “the saints” of Blois were coming to
the defense of the patrie, signified that the town’s numerous relics, crucifixes, and church bells were being removed for melting down and recasting into cannons, its large crosses replaced with liberty trees, and confessionals turned into sentry boxes. Blois cathedral, the société assured the Convention in late November, had been replaced with a temple dedicated to reason, while la philosophie was progressing triumphantly even in the countryside, where everything savoring of “superstition” was being eradicated. Blois Jacobins requested the Convention to appoint “patriotic and enlightened” commissaires to carry “the light” throughout their department and on to the Vendée.
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Resignation from the priesthood under, and sometimes not under, pressure became an established revolutionary ritual, involving a formal certificate of demission termed an “acte de déprêtrise.” In November, and through December 1793, thousands of former Catholic priests, some addressing the Convention, renounced their vows, profession, and salaries, declaring before “all France they no longer wished to acknowledge any cult except that of reason and liberty, a cult destined to conquer the globe and break the chains of all peoples.”
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Paul Roland, sixty-year-old curé of Binos in the remote district of Saint-Gaudens (now renamed Mont-Unité) in the Haute-Garonne, village priest for forty years, resigned the priesthood forever in the name of reason, in a missive read to the legislature on 10 November. Justice is the “only true religion” and no other cult is required on earth “but that of virtue”: “I believe also that Heaven is nothing other than the happiness of having been virtuous.” Repudiating priest’s garb and pension, Roland pledged himself henceforth exclusively to “la triomphe de la philosophie.”
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Public staging of forced priestly resignations and forced marriages of former ecclesiastics became favorite devices of many representatives on mission.
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Pressured by Fouché, the curé Pascal-Antoine Grimaud (1736–99) renounced the Church on 14 November and resigned, hoping he had never misused priestly authority to “arrest the progress of liberty, equality, philosophy or democratic government.”
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The société populaire of Moncontour in Vienne department assured the Convention on 29 December that their village, scorning aristocratic prejudices and “tired of the charlatanisme of priests,” had informed their curé he was now just a simple citizen and must renounce the clerical state. The village church was immediately stripped of its plate and objects “used to feed superstition and fanaticism.”
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Constitutional priests in and around Saint-Malo mostly abjured their faith in December, among them Charles
Caron, curé of an outlying locality who had already been married two months when publicly renouncing. Caron had ardently supported the Revolution since 1789 with “all his heart,” in the name of la philosophie and public peace. Such sentiments were decidedly not those of the town more generally. The Saint-Malo area was more distant from Paris than geography would suggest, complained Jean-Baptiste Lecarpentier (1759–1829), the people’s réprésentant, especially in its “rapports philosophiques.” Lecarpentier, who “republicanized” Saint-Malo by installing busts of Marat and Lepeletier everywhere he went, regretted that religion and tradition still retained an unfortunately strong hold on its inhabitants.
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By summer 1794, more than 20,000 constitutional priests, the great majority of the Church’s priesthood, had formally resigned—and more than 6,000 had also married.
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In the southeastern part of the Paris Basin around Auxerre and Sens (department of Yonne), where support for the Revolution remained solid (as throughout the Paris Basin) and more than 90 percent of clergy swore the 1791 constitutional oath, outward harmony between Revolution and faith persisted promisingly until late 1792. The middle stage of growing verbal violence was characterized here by increasing refractory influence and numerous retractions of the constitutional oath, a defiant attitude “incivique et contre-révolutionnaire,” which, however, only seriously stirred the laity against the Revolution when the department’s army recruiting drive intensified following the Republic’s disastrous military defeats of March 1793.
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In April, the revolutionary regime reacted to this growing, religiously sanctioned obstruction by arresting forty-eight clergy at Sens and thirty-six at Auxerre. Yet, however drastic such action, this was primarily still retaliation for disobedience to the civil authority rather than systematic persecution as such. The intermediate period, though one of sharply deteriorating relations between clergy and regime, still differed markedly from the post-June 1793 de-Christianization proper.
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Organized, systematic de-Christianization gripped the Yonne department from late 1793 to summer 1794, spurred chiefly by the sociétés populaires. Images of saints toppled in the hundreds. Churches were closed. The nonbelieving departmental bishop, Loménie de Brienne, was arrested in November 1793. The constitutional clergy, even in small villages, were bullied into renouncing the priesthood and some into marrying. Fights erupted in several places between villagers and missionaries of militant anti-Christianity known as “apostles of reason.” Finally, in February 1794, Auxerre and Sens cathedrals were closed.

Leaders of the de-Christianization movement depicted Christianity and its advocates as an additional layer of tyranny to be stripped away. Announcing the approaching triumph of la raison universelle over religion and the “fédéralisme des sectes politiques,” Cloots assured the Paris Jacobins that “every idol overthrown by
la philosophie
is a victory gained over tyrants.”
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France had groaned under tyrants for centuries, claimed an address delivered by commissaires from the department of Charente before the Convention on 20 December 1793, until “la philosophie et la raison,” reviving man’s “natural energy, enabled him finally to understand his power and rights, break his chains” and initiate “une grande révolution … Vainly do creatures of the imbecile Pius VI threaten us with a terrible God in whom they themselves do not believe.”
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Small communes, no less than major cities, suffered such systematic stripping away of spiritual and physical “tyranny.” “Regeneration” of Gagny, a municipality of the Seine-et-Oise department, was supervised by a member named Sarrette, of the Comité de Surveillance, of the Paris section Brutus, sent by the Comité de Sûreté Générale with a group of sansculottes to “take the measures necessary for the regeneration of the commune.” He was instructed to lend assistance to oppressed patriots, extend
la Terreur révolutionnaire
to the ill-intentioned and “aristocrats,” and “bring the light of truth to those misled.” Convening Gagny’s primary assembly in the town’s main church on 28 Frimaire (19 December 1793), Sarette converted the church, now abandoned by its curate, into a “temple of reason,” instituting a public festival venerating “the martyrs of liberty,” Marat and Lepeletier, whose busts he installed. Amid cheers of “Vive la République!,” the people, in a “spontaneous movement,” stripped all the “relics, images and books from their church, heaped them up in front of the town’s Liberty Tree, and burnt them.” The church plate was remitted to their district’s chief commune for melting down.
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