Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (94 page)

De-Christianization, promoted by representatives on mission and local “popular societies” during the Terror, was linked also to the rapid spread of the “popular societies,” which reflected the fact that de-Christianization was integral to the penetration and extension of the new system of Montagnard despotic power. In Yonne department, the number of societés populaires rose from thirty-seven to more than fifty during the winter of 1793–94.
³⁹
Overt support for revolutionary authority, and participation in the societies and hence in de-Christianizing activities, became a means to promote oneself and one’s family. Purported instruments of the “people’s” cause, actually
the popular societies, were levers of local authority and influence. De-Christianization and politicization of areas that had often been only slightly touched by the Revolution thus far proceeded together. The sansculottes of Avenay, near Épernay in the Marne department, established their société populaire in December 1793 and promised to promote patriotism, safeguard “liberty,” propagate the sacred principles of equality, and wage war on “superstition.” Removing ritual objects and plate, they closed their church. “The sacred principles of nature,” announced their address to the Convention of 4 January 1794, were acquiring deep roots in the Avenay countryside, crushing all fédéralistes, modérés, and
égoistes.
“The tocsin of reason sounds among all peoples”: they have slept too long, but their awakening will be “terrible.” Liberty and Equality were the sole divinities acknowledged by Avenay’s société populaire, although to them these principles chiefly meant proclaiming “the holy Montagne the only rampart of liberty” and reviling the “infamous” Brissotin deputies recently arrested for treason.
⁴⁰

At the little town of Saint-Fargeau, in a forested, thinly populated part of the Paris Basin where the Revolution had so far intruded only lightly, introducing revolutionary authority, crushing dissent, erasing the past’s legal legacy, changing local place-names, and dismantling Christianity were all fused into a single ceremony on 1 December 1793. This occurred not through local initiative but when a gang of activists arrived from nearby Auxerre to overawe local resistance and purge the local Jacobin club. New leaders assumed control, Saint-Fargeau’s name was changed to “Lepeletier,” the church was vandalized, and a vast pile of legal documents were collected by the société populaire; certificates recognizing judges, notaries, and advocates active in the Commune (those until 1792 bearing royal seals), were ceremonially burned on a public bonfire in the town square while the townsfolk sang hymns of liberty. The singing was less than inspiring, apparently, as the société populaire complained to the Convention about the lack in places like Lepeletier of trained musicians to enhance public ceremonies and hymn-singing where new festivities, patriotic poetry, and “leçons philosophiques” needed to be supplemented by singing and music. Republican sentiment among country folk, the Convention was told, could best be inculcated by replacing superstitious old ceremonies with attractive new ones enhanced by music to help laborers relax from exhausting work.
⁴¹

The campaign to change village, district, and street names, meanwhile, rapidly accelerated. The autumn
rage révoluionnaire
of 1793,
besides destroying an immense quantity of sacred images, purged the word “saint” from thousands of street names in capital and provinces alike, rendering the process general and obligatory. In Gard department, in the south, a quarter of all communes changed their names to erase Christian allusion, Saint-Raphael becoming Baraston and Saint-Tropez, Héraclée, while another quarter substituted “Mont” or “Font” for “Saint,” a procedure called
débaptisation
.
⁴²
As more towns and villages divested themselves of Christian-sounding names, the pressure on those not yet debaptized increased. Saint-Omer since 1792 was officially called Morin-la-Montagne. This rendered it harder to resist changing Saint-Malo’s name too, though the Commune there reluctantly agreed only to switch to “Port Malo,” lest a totally unrecognizable, new name blight their overseas trade ties.
⁴³

A visitation of
réprésentants en mission
in October 1793 to Indre department in west-central France, formerly part of Berry province, was the signal for town and village name-changing throughout the department. Châteauroux, the chief town, swapped its ancient name for “Indreville” (and from March 1794 until March 1795, to “Indrelibre”), while the surrounding villages labeled “Saint” adopted alternatives, Saint-Gaultier becoming Roche-libre, and Saint-Genou Indreval.
⁴⁴
Speeches delivered throughout the department proclaimed “the inutility and menace of the sect of men whose egoism and passions had so often exploited talk of the divinity to introduce conflict among peoples.” Sunday observance and churchgoing ceased. “Docile to the voice of nature and religion, town and village inhabitants of Indre,” the Convention was informed, “gathered in the very temples so recently consecrated to error,” to celebrate “le triomphe de la philosophie” with patriotic songs. “The time is not far off,” predicted de-Christianizers, “when reason will secure the suppression of all religious cults.” An earlier order of 20 November 1793 required all the department’s municipalities to remove silver plate and other “useful metals,” supporting the “domination de la secte sacerdotale,” from the churches. Objects formerly serving the “pride of priests” now afforded resources for weapons to “disperse the servile subordinates of the monsters called kings.”
⁴⁵

Church closures and establishing the “festival of reason” in Angoulême (now renamed Montagne-Charente) were directed by représentant Jean-Baptiste Harmand (1751–1816). The citizens, he assured the Convention on 1 December 1793, had joyfully celebrated the triumph of la philosophie and dissipation of the darkness “in which the priests had immersed us the better to keep us under their yoke.” This
transpired in “the temple,” until recently the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, until now a “stronghold of superstition, prejudice, error, and lies” where priests continually admonished the credulous that their hidden God would wreak terrible punishment on revolutionaries. The God of the priests, Harmand assured the townsfolk, is a divinity of cruelty and vengeance, the true God of nature and the Revolution a God of justice and reason, whose desire was the people’s welfare. “The priests could deceive us because we had our eyes closed; let us now open them and the priests shall flee even more swiftly than our political tyrants.” Let them join their “imbecile chief at Rome” (the pope), like the émigrés joined “the tigers of Germany [i.e., the German princes]. Soon we shall have salutary laws, expressing the
volonté générale
.”
⁴⁶

Harmand’s reports are significant because this former lawyer remained strictly neutral between Brissotins and Montagnards (while privately reviling Robespierre). Having opposed Louis XVI’s death sentence, he deferred to the Montagne but only outwardly. Between speeches, fanfares, and hymns recounting how la philosophie liberated Angoulême from ignorance and superstition, the Rights of Man were intoned. If his assessment was a relatively independent one, he flavored it with language the Montagne wished to hear. Angoulême had not expected a representative sent by those disparaged by Brissotin calominateurs as “monsters thirsting for blood,” anarchists without principles, to purify the city and eulogize virtue. Local people now grasped that toppling tyranny meant overthrowing “the lies of the ministers of the altars,” that the Revolution truly wished to establish a morality applying to all, “la morale universelle,” proclaiming men free and equal. Gladly they rejected the “vertus abstractives” propagated by Brissotins, substituting “one aristocracy for another.” The only genuine religious dogmas are liberty and equality. Women, so often profaned by priestly impostors to further their criminal projects, must learn not to be the “passive instrument of imposture.” Women receive Nature’s precious gifts for the happiness of men, not to make them feel culpable. Society needs virtuous wives and tender mothers who are aware there are no mysteries other than those arising from the limits of our rational understanding. There is no other divinity than the truth and the laws. The “martyrs de cette sainte Révolution” (meaning Marat and Lepeletier) were true men of the people venerated by everyone.
⁴⁷

De-Christianization inspired a massive wave of iconoclasm across France, as well as Belgium and the Rhineland, and a new kind of “preaching.” Integral to the process was liquidating celebrated local
relics to prove, notwithstanding centuries of adoration, these possessed no miraculous powers. At Montagne-sur-mer—the new name of the old fortress town of Montreuil-sur-mer—where the local société républicaine’s previous membership of two hundred was now savagely purged to thirty, the church was thoroughly vandalized and all the images removed. The liberation of Toulon (now renamed Port-la-Montagne) from the British, on 19 December 1793, an event celebrated across France (frequently in an explicitly anti-Christian manner), was marked in Montagne-sur-mer by the public incineration of a whole collection of male and female saints in the town square.
⁴⁸
The representative on mission purging the Pas-de-Calais in the autumn of 1793, André Dumont, a brutal functionary esteemed by Robespierre, who assured the Convention he was a “missionaire républicain,” celebrated the defeat of the Brissotins with a public banquet in Boulogne for the six thousand townspeople, organized by the local société populaire in the main square. Some wished to rename Boulogne “Port-de-l’Union.” Planting a “Tree of Union,” and hailing the Brissotins’ destruction, Dumont assured Boulogne’s inhabitants the city was being purged and “purified.” As part of this, the “célèbre et très incompréhensible” black Holy Virgin known as “Notre Dame des Anges,” which, according to local legend, the “English” had repeatedly tried but failed to burn during the Hundred Years’ War due, the superstitious believed, to miraculous divine intervention, would now publicly be burned. “Vive la Montagne!” cried the crowds as this hallowed Madonna was consumed in flames without any miracle occurring.
⁴⁹

Another renowned “Black Virgin,” at Sainte Claire at Le Puy-en-Velay (Haute-Loire), retrieved by Saint Louis on crusade from Egypt—probably ancient Coptic in origin, but locally reputed to have been crafted by Jeremiah himself—was hauled down by réprésentant Louis Guyardin (1758–1816) on 8 June 1794, Pentecost Day. Seated on her throne blindfolded, the Madonna was placed in a cart, conveyed into the town square, and guillotined before the people. The head and headless corpse were then ceremonially burned.
⁵⁰
Discrediting popular relics and the locales of popular cults involved some truly astounding vandalistic outbreaks. At Sainte-Marie Madeleine at Vézelay (Burgundy), a venerable pilgrimage site and outstanding monument of Romanesque art, the entire elaborately sculptured facade of the abbey church was destroyed save for a few fragments, as were the attached Benedictine buildings, gems of early medieval architecture. Inevitably, both the vandalism and antirelic fervor elicited a strongly emotional reaction and
the frequent incidence of yet more “miracles.” Devout women strove desperately to save holy relics. Another Black Virgin retrieved by Crusaders, preserved at Mende cathedral in Lozère department, was hidden by a woman under her clothes and rescued while revolutionaries were distracted wrecking the altar and neighboring chapels. At Cusset, a tenth-century Virgin, among the most venerated miracle-working images of the Auvergne, was incinerated on a public funeral pyre in the town square on 5 December 1793, but not before a baker’s wife salvaged its hands, remnants lavishly adorned with precious stones after the Revolution, and venerated until today.

Another de-Christianizing initiative affecting daily life was the adoption, on 5 October 1793, of the new republican calendar. This innovation, long demanded by Maréchal, Gorsas, Manuel, and other anti-Christian theorists, at once rational and poetic, was composed by Danton’s secretary, Fabre d’Églantine, and the mathematician Romme, the deputy who later curbed the excesses of the Terror at Angoulême, an idealistic, ardently egalitarian philosophe, from June 1793 among the most active of the Comité de l’Instruction Publique supervising the change in the nation’s calendar.
⁵¹
Under the new dispensation, years were no longer counted from Christ’s birth but instead from the advent of the Republic. Sunday observance was forbidden, officially, though it lingered widely despite the authorities’ efforts to enforce cessation. Every month now had the same length, thirty days, comprising three ten-day “weeks,” ending in an official rest day (
décadi
), albeit no one was prohibited from working that day if desired. All public holidays were changed and Christian festivities and saint’s days deleted. To replace the old holidays, five extra days termed “sans-culottides” fell outside the regular cycle of twelve months of thirty days each. These were dedicated to the new national festivals of “Genius,” “Work,” “Virtue,” “Opinion,” and “Recompense.” Every first day of the new “decade,” decreed the Paris Commune’s conseil-général in early December 1793, the mayor and municipal officials had to appear in the “Temple of Reason,” intone the Rights of Man, report the latest war news, and explain new laws introduced over the previous ten days. Afterward, a magistrate would deliver a discourse on republican virtue.
⁵²
Similarly, mayors and municipal officers throughout France were expected to appear every
décadi
in a main church to deliver a patriotic discourse and conduct singing of patriotic hymns. These public ceremonies, led by civic officials, could no longer include clergy or religious rites of any kind. Under the rules adopted in the Channel departments of La Manche and Ille-et-Vilaine
(Saint-Malo), the only symbols to be publicly displayed were the tricolor flag and a pick with a liberty bonnet.
⁵³