Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (95 page)

Déchristianisateurs
regularly employed the rhetoric of la philosophie without being genuine adherents of its message and while carrying it to vituperative and coercive extremes wholly contrary to the tolerance and human rights of the early Revolution. The philosophisme pervading the fanaticism of the Hébertistes and prominent ideologues, like the ex-Capuchin monk Chabot, Chaumette, Cloots, Lequinio, and Harmand, was hence a highly dogmatic as well as disfigured and debased creed designed to cajole women and the illiterate more than others. At the Paris Jacobins on 1 November, Chaumette deplored that French women were mostly still devout, raising their children to believe socially and morally “harmful” doctrines. But de-Christianization was incapable of becoming popular and provoked great opposition, aggravating local resistance in towns and villages throughout France, and introduced a profound split within the Montagnard coalition itself.

After liquidation of the leading Brissotins, the rift deepened and became, along with the suspension of the Constitution and the break with Roux and Varlet, the most divisive issue among the regime’s supporters. On 8 November 1793, Hébert complained that the Jacobins’ periodical, the
Journal de la Montagne
, carried articles about religion and God, “an unknown being,” reaffirming “ces vieilles sottises,” criticism aimed at Robespierre as well as the journal editor now forced to resign, Jean-Charles Laveaux (1749–1827), an eminent Germanist and historian of Frederick the Great. Refusing to apologize, Laveaux declared “atheism” inherently dangerous to republics. Robespierre defended Laveaux against Hébert at the Jacobins on 10 November, weaving his remarks into a general assault on the philosophes as a group, pronouncing them “ennemis du peuple” and hypocrites seeking to divide the Jacobins and undermine the unity of “the people’s will.” If Hébert, Cloots, and Chaumette intended to continue championing philosophes and la philosophie, there was going to be big trouble.
⁵⁴

Numerous nonjuring and constitutional clergy were incarcerated during the de-Christianization phase, with some being guillotined. But fanaticism and vandalism came at a high price. Hébert sensationalized the Gobel episode and defection of other Parisian priests in
Le Père Duchesne
, proclaiming a virulent antireligious fervor. But according to Desmoulins’s
Vieux Cordelier
, his railing against religion proved in every way counterproductive and alienated “a hundred thousand imbeciles” from the Revolution, providing hordes of new recruits for
royalism and priestcraft in Normandy, the Vendée, and elsewhere.
⁵⁵
The “constitutional Church” was decimated through its clergy being forced to resign, imprisoned, or expelled, opening the door more than ever to ultraroyalist rejectionist clergy who eagerly filled the gap, mobilizing religious feeling against the Revolution and against what Desmoulins called “truth and the Rights of Man.”
⁵⁶
Consequently, the ascendancy of the déchristianisateurs proved brief. Robespierre’s personal intervention first slowed and eventually halted both de-Christianization and militant, intolerant philosophisme.

Robespierre, though intermittently inclined to anticlerical views,
⁵⁷
opposed de-Christianization from the outset. He considered it politically ill-advised and wrongly conceived in principle, repression bound to damage the people’s moral fiber. A true disciple of Rousseau, religion to him was the pedestal of the social contract, to be assiduously conserved. Robespierre and Saint-Just opposed the déchristianisateurs, and disagreement about the place of religion became integral to the subsequent strife in particular between Robespierristes and Hébertistes. Professing “profound respect for religion,” and especially popular piety, Robespierre spoke often of “God and Providence,” noted Condorcet, a tendency that supported his claim of being the “friend of the poor and weak” and explained, suggested the philosophe, much of his success in attracting “women and the
faibles d’esprit
” (intellectually feeble minds) to his cause.
⁵⁸
Robespierre remained convinced of the necessity of belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul for upholding the kind of antiphilosophique moral fervor he championed. Danton too showed little enthusiasm for persecuting clergy or Church. That the foremost Jacobins opposed the movement while most Frenchmen remained Catholic (or pious Protestants or Jews) confirms that the Jacobin dictatorship, consolidated in the summer of 1793, rested on a narrow and precarious coalition formed of strikingly disparate elements.

Robespierre first presented his critique in a major speech at the Jacobins on 21 November (1 Frimaire), one of the Revolution’s notable turning points. It was a stinging rebuff to the déchristianisateurs that left Cloots (long detested by Robespierre) squirming in the president’s chair. “Fanaticism” was not the main threat facing the Revolution, averred Robespierre, since Catholic zeal was “expiring.” Catholicism was effectively “dead,” he contended, a claim manifestly untrue given the Catholic revolts raging all over France. By turning “all our attention” against Catholic fervor, theology, and the clergy, “are we not being distracted from the true danger?” Priests were not the menace to the
Revolution Cloots and others claimed. Even the Vendée revolt, contended Robespierre (who had never traveled outside northeast France), fanaticism’s “last asylum,” did not prove traditional faith opposed the Revolution. Rather, the Vendée was a rebellion rapidly collapsing, and with it would subside fanaticism’s last vestiges. Ambitious schemers who insinutated themselves to the forefront of the Revolution, seeking false popularity by distracting true patriots onto entirely the wrong path, were the real danger. Misguided philosophes were sowing discord among the people, disrupting freedom of religion in the name of liberty, and attacking “le fanatisme par un fanatisme nouveau.”

It was imperative the Jacobins stop such types from deriding the simplicity and dignity of ordinary people. Placing everything under the “scepter of philosophy” had to stop. The Revolution must punish those disrupting freedom of religion and attempting to dishonor the Revolution, in the service of foreign courts, by falsely presenting it as “opposed to religion.” Under the pretext of wanting to erase “superstition,” these subversives were making a cult out of atheism when it would be madness to adopt the projects of the materialist philosophers and de-Christianizers in their midst. The Convention, held Robespierre, is not a writer of books or an author of metaphysical systems but a political body representing ordinary people charged with defending the rights and “the character” of the nation. Not for nothing had the Declaration of Rights been proclaimed in the name of the Supreme Being. Some might disparage him as a man of narrow horizons, and call him “un homme à préjugés,” a “fanatic.” (According to Cloots, Robespierre was a total fanatic, and to Mercier, “l’ignorance personifiée.”)
⁵⁹
But, never mind, he refused to expatiate like a
philosophe systématique
. He would speak only as a representative of the people.

“L’athéisme est aristocratique,” intoned Robespierre to furious applause, and so is la philosophie. In the Revolution, what is “tout populaire” alone is legitimate, and what the people believe is that a Supreme Being watches over oppressed innocence and punishes crime.
⁶⁰
Ordinary people embrace the idea of an incomprehensible being they can venerate and who rewards virtue. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. “The common people applaud me” as their defender. The hateful philosophisme abasing ordinary folk was seeking to persuade men the Republic’s founders were mere “valets” of tyranny. In fact, a thorough investigation, “un scrutin épuratoire,” was needed to purge the agents of the philosophisme undermining French society.
⁶¹
Virtue must conquer philosophy and override everything else! In this
way a divide opened within the Jacobin camp in November 1793 that persisted unresolved until April 1794, and around which a remarkable ideological struggle developed. It was a split that could not readily be papered over. Robespierre, who personally instigated the drive against aristocratic atheists within the Revolution, later established his Cult of the Supreme Being as an antidote to both de-Christianization and philosophisme, and a bridge between religion and Rousseauism.

Robespierre’s intervention was echoed by Desmoulins in the
Vieux Cordelier
on 11 December in an article praising Robespierre for his stand. Desmoulins (rather hypocritically) berated the “former baron” Cloots and “his cousin” Proly for their militant “atheism,” as well as proximity to Roland and views about waging war abroad, scarcely distinguishable from Brissot’s.
⁶²
The “Incorruptible” delivered another attack on the de-Christianizers at the Jacobins with Cloots still in the president’s seat on 8 Frimaire of Year II (28 November 1793), deploring the perfidious contre-révolutionnaires masking perfidy with an exaggerated display of antireligious zeal. “Traitors” disseminating reports of persecution and despoliation of churches were undermining the Revolution by helping the émigrés portray it in the eyes of all Europe, Protestant and Catholic, as “irreligious.” “Aristocrats” joined in the attacks on churches, alleged Robespierre, to discredit the Jacobins as “atheists and foes of religion.” The Revolution belongs to the people, emanates from the people, “et ne veut server que le peuple.”
⁶³
The attack gained momentum in December when the Convention, prompted by Robespierrre, forbade using force and menaces “contrary to the liberty of cults” to fight religion, urging Frenchmen to abstain “from all theological dispute” and focus on fighting the common foe.
⁶⁴

On 9 December, Robespierre delivered an extraordinarily violent attack on modérantisme for hampering the Convention and enabling foreigners to undermine the Revolution. A key part of this address resumed his assault on philosophique universalism. He deliberately sought to mobilize ordinary people’s anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and chauvinism against his targets. The next day, in his
Vieux Cordelier
, Desmoulins assailed Cloots as a particularly insidious déchristianisateur and “hypocrite de patriotisme,” an assault astounding in that Desmoulins had earlier been an admirer and propagator of Cloots’s ardent philosophisme and
République universelle
.
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Cloots led a troop of betrayers whose “farces indécentes” presented the French to all Europe “comme un peuple d’athées.” This so-called
ami des hommes
was hardly a friend to the blacks, moreover, since he had supported Barnave against Brissot
in the struggle over the slave trade and emancipating the free blacks. In subsequent weeks, posted up in all the squares of Paris, appeared Robespierre’s famous rubric, “le Peuple français reconnait l’existence de l’Être Suprême et l’immortalité de l’âme,” signs that frequently remained in position long after his execution.
⁶⁶

Until late March 1794, Hébert and Chaumette remained within the ruling coalition, which meant de-Christianization retained some momentum in the Paris sections and many localities beyond, notably now also Marseille. However, in other places, including several departments where representatives close to Robespierre exercised authority, such as the southeastern departments of Var and Alpes Martimes, where his younger brother, Augustin Robespierre, presided, forced resignations of priests ceased already considerably earlier.
⁶⁷
Moreover, while the elimination of Hébert, Momoro, and Chaumette in April 1794 stripped de-Christianization of much of its impetus, it did not completely grind to a halt until shortly before Robespierre’s overthrow. Only in the last weeks before Thermidor, hence very briefly, could Robespierre and Saint-Just fully entrench their ideology of the ordinary man, virtue, and the “tout populaire.” Robespierre eventually halted the organized preaching of atheism and direct attacks on churches. But he did little to curb persecution, imprisonment, and deportation of Catholic clergy. The total number of priests victimized under the Terror was in fact huge. In the district of Auxerre, in the Paris Basin, by July 1794, more than three-quarters of the originally 147 priests had abjured, been imprisoned, deported, or driven to emigrate.
⁶⁸

While de-Christianization continued, it remained impossible to de-couple Jacobinism from the core values of Left republicanism and the Revolution altogether. For there was no rationale for attacking “superstition” and “fanaticism” without enlisting la philosophie. Montagnard representatives on mission leading the anti-Christian offensive, like Chaumette, Lequinio, Dupont, Fouché, Harmand, and Lecarpentier, always recited philosophique arguments to explain what to them was its necessity. As Armand Sabourain, a young philosophe and professor at Poitiers and a disciple of Condillac in epistemology, writing to the Convention, in December 1793, pointed out, it was impossible to explain to country folk how and why a religion they had unquestioningly embraced for centuries is false and harmful, needing to be eradicated urgently, without first undermining the hallowed authority of theology. To prove there is no legitimate criterion of what is true except philosophical reason, one must proclaim that theology contains no truth and
that religious authority is a form of deceit; thus, the people had to be instructed in basic philosophy.
⁶⁹

The masterpiece of la philosophie is the Rights of Man, contended Sabourain, the most beautiful monument reason has erected to humanity. Hence, Robespierrisme—in religious policy just as in education, in its views on women, black emancipation, constitutional theory, press freedom, and individual rights—everywhere clashed fundamentally with the Revolution’s essential principles and, above all, the Rights of Man. Robespierre invariably and uncompromisingly repudiated la philosophie moderne, both in its authentic, tolerant format, projected by Condorcet, the Brissotins, and the Dantonistes, and in its bastardized, militantly de-Christianizing guise favored by Hébert, Chabot, Chaumette, and Cloots.