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

to Paul Stroganov, before returing to Paris in 1788 to become a politician. Romme sponsored many of the anti-Christian measures recommended by the Committee, including rules to suppress the recruitment of priests by the Church, the shutdown of theological schools, and the removal of priests and nuns from the educational system.

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

suggesting religious toleration and separation of Church and state, rather than the elimination of religion in its entirety. “Ultimately, citizens,” he wrote, “consider that the Catholic religion, no longer existing within the government, would become necessarily a religion out of the law. Its ministers would no longer be hidden as agents, and therefore very dangerous agents.”94 History knows the infamous Claude Javoques as one of the most violent perpetrators of the Terror, who once railed against theistic policies of the Committee of Public Safety. I do not understand the proclamation of the Committee of Public Safety, which can only slow down the progress of the Revolution. Apparently Couthon needs some sort of religion in order to hold up the reign of the swindlers. Talking about civil wars of religion is the best way to encourage them. The chameleons who call themselves apostles of different sects will evade all the various coercive measures that you take against them. It would be much simple just to shoot them.95 Nevertheless, Javogues hardly hesitated to tone down his rhetoric when the political tide turned against him, subsequently confessing his faults to the very Couthon whom he lambasted within a year.96 Cobb lists these men, as well as Mallarmé, Châles, Dartigoëyte, Baudot, Isabeau, Tallien, Vadier, Collot, and Albitte as all being significant contributors to the violence and destruction aimed at religion, but although he notes that some may have been atheists, he argues that others may only have been individualists and anarchists. He never indicates which labels applied to which men—it would have been an impossible task.
The next several months after the Festival of Reason were marked by constant assaults on the Catholic Church, its priests and followers, and the basic tenants Christianity and religion. Churches in many cities across France closed, sans-culottes murdered priests, and zealous revolutionaries established their own temples of reason. Oaths to the republic declared there to be no religion other than nature, and prayers and catechisms mimicking those of Catholicism instructed the people in the doctrine of republicanism and patriotism.119 The Popular Society of Blois, for example, inaugurated its own Temple of Reason and wrote to the National Convention that its people now found religion to be “silly and full of absurdities,” and that they no longer wanted “steeples, processions, and other signs of the Catholic religion.”120 The citizens of Rochefort put on their own Festival of Reason and composed a letter to the Convention to praise the “victory of eternal morality over superstition and tyranny as light takes advantage over the priests,” and declared a “religion of liberty and fraternity.”121 In places that resisted, the armées revolutionnaire—the people’s army of the Revolution—enforced attacks on Catholicism and religious institutions across the nation, despite the fact that they were “neither philosophers nor theologians and had little concern for literature; their enthusiasm seems rather to have come from a very widespread anticlericalism and a marked hostility to the Catholic religion.”122 Dechristianization, and whatever atheism did exist within the boundaries of its influence, was certainly not restricted to the city of Paris.
Despite these attacks on the Church and many of the basic tenants of Christianity itself, many of these radical revolutionaries did not reject “religion” so much as redefine what it meant.

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,

without revelation, and in which the act of adoration or faith is not applied to a supernatural object, but to a political institution, namely, the Nation, conceived as the source of moral happiness as well as material happiness.”126 The government and even the dechristianizers retained the fundamental activities of religion— namely the concepts of hymns, “religious” art, and festivals to encourage the community. This “church of the Nation,” however, also retained much of the language of religion—continually referring to patriotism and the Revolution as being “eternal,” “divine,” and “sacred.” So in a sense, the “mysteries” essentially remained, as the Revolutionaries continued to view their new “religion” as being the ritualistic worship of something immortal and omnipotent. Instead of focusing on “God” as the sacred, however, many of these Revolutionaries centered their concept of “sacred” on the French state, the people, and the ideals of the Revolution itself. Although they did not understand modern conception of “culture,” they instinctively recognized the connection between the customs and behaviors of the people of France and the need to cultivate a unified identity to support the laws and activities of the new government. Theoretically this left the existence of God open to the individual participants—a theist could worship God as the ultimate creator of the culte de la patrie, while the agnostic or atheist could ignore the deity, distant and unnecessary to the ritualistic festivals and activities involved with the promotion of liberty, equality and fraternity. Behind the absurd and wretched political hypocrisy, mass violence, government betrayal, and bloody rebellion was a reasonably sound proposition.