French Revolution Dbq

The Paris Commune and the representatives on mission were not the only ones insistent on creating a more secular and non-Christian society, as the National Convention itself participated in the dechristianization movement as many of its members sided with Chaumette and Fouché during the latter months of 1793. Charles Gilbert Romme, one of the Revolutionaries frequently labeled an atheist by books and websites dedicated to naming influential atheists in history, participated in the Committee of Public Instruction—the agency instrumental to spreading knowledge on how the citizens should react to new laws implemented by the National Convention. He trained as a mathematician and medical doctor, and then travelled to Russia to serve as the tutor

These sanctions were readily accepted by the National Convention. Romme’s suggested curriculum emphasized utility and reason, focusing on language, science, philosophy, and natural history instead of theology.100 Nonetheless, none of Romme’s recorded suggestions or decrees declares religion a falsehood or God non-existent, and as with many revolutionaries of the 1790s, his motivation for promoting anti-Christian measures was as likely based on a desire to break from the traditions of the ancien régime than to formulate the destruction of Christianity or theism.

Jacques-Léonard Laplanche, one of the first “répresentants” to implement acts of extreme dechristianization, utilized the Army of the People to put down any who resisted the dechristianziation movement. Yet only a year before, Laplanche submitted a report to the National Convention

When Marie-Joseph Chénier, a poet and dramatist who wrote an entire book of poetry dedicated to the Cult of Reason, addressed the Convention on November 5, 1793, he did not declare an end to religion, but rather proposed that Catholicism be replaced by a revolutionary cult to be built on “the ruins of fallen superstition.”123 His poems, though dedicated to the concepts of “reason” and “nature,” were filled with allusions to “immortality,” and one even reassured believers that “they never pretended to deny the good people, the existence of the supreme being, supreme engine of all things.”124 Meanwhile, in the department of Haut-Rhin, a pamphlet circulated to explain the actions taken against the churches and priests with a “Jacobin curé” explaining that this was not intended as an attack on God, but rather an attempt to prevent “charlatan abuses of the name of God.”125 Thus, God was not necessarily being rejected, but rather he was being reconstituted as a part of the Republic itself. Instead of a barbarous man in the sky who arbitrarily struck sinners down like a madman, he was reimagined as XYZ. Emulating Émile Durkheim proposition that religion translates human needs and prohibitions, Albert Mathiez argued a century ago that the culte de la patrie, “is a religion without mysteries,