Cult of Reason

Origins

Opposition to the French Catholic Church was integral among the causes of the French Revolution, and this anticlericalism solidified into official government policy in 1792 after the First French Republic was declared. Most dechristianisation was motivated by political and economic concerns, while philosophical alternatives to the Church developed more slowly. The idea of creating a cult to replace Catholicism appeared around October 1793, when the revolutionary Convention had for months pursued dechristianisation while France was at war against most of Europe and faced insurrections such as the Vendée uprising animated by peasants' attachment to their traditional religion.

Composition and character

The so-called Culte de la Raison became defined by radical revolutionaries such as Anacharsis Cloots, Jacques Hébert, Antoine-François Momoro, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette and Joseph Fouché. Considerable debate has always persisted about the religiosity of the Cult of Reason: it was a hodgepodge of ideas and activities, a 'multifarious phenomenon, marked by disorderliness', encompassing anticlericalism, subordination of priests to secular authority, confiscation of Church wealth and doctrinal heresies. It was atheistic but celebrated different core principles according to locale and leadership: most famously Reason, but also Liberty, Nature and the victory of the Revolution. French Wikipedia states the cult was that of 'the atheistic or deistic Hébertists, all anti-Catholic', and that it has often been interpreted as atheistic while the truth is more complex: the speeches and songs mixed atheistic, naturalistic or deistic statements depending on their authors.

Ideas

In Paris the cult was explicitly anthropocentric under Momoro: its goal was the perfection of mankind through the attainment of Truth and Liberty, its guiding principle the exercise of Reason. It encouraged congregational worship of the ideal of Reason while distinguishing rational respect for Reason from veneration of an idol. The overarching theme was summarized by Cloots at the Festival of Reason: henceforward there would be 'one God only, Le Peuple'. The Cult was intended as a civic religion inspired by Rousseau, Quatremère de Quincy and Jacques-Louis David, presenting 'an explicit religion of man'. Adherence to the Cult of Reason became a defining attribute of the Hébertist faction and was also pervasive among the sans-culottes, while numerous political factions and anticlerical events only loosely connected to the cult came to be amalgamated with its name.

Hébertist dechristianisation

Joseph Fouché, as a military commander dispatched by the Jacobins, led a particularly zealous and brutal dechristianisation campaign that helped spread the developing creed. He ordered crosses and statues removed from graveyards, decreed that cemetery gates bear only the inscription 'Death is an eternal sleep', and declared a civic religion of his own at a 'Feast of Brutus' on 22 September 1793. The Cult of Reason was especially hostile to clerics themselves, who were humiliatingly forced to abjure their vows by marrying or to declare themselves charlatans under threat of the guillotine. On 7 November 1793 the Archbishop of Paris was forced to resign and to replace his mitre with a red cap of liberty.

On 17 Brumaire an II (7 November 1793), the Convention president Pierre-Antoine Lalloy responded to constitutional bishop Jean-Baptiste Gobel's staged resignation by declaring that the Supreme Being 'wants no cult but that of reason… and this will henceforth be the national religion', after which Gobel laid down his cross and ring and was capped with a red bonnet, and clerical members of the Convention except abbé Grégoire renounced their ministries that evening.

Festival of Reason

The official nationwide Fête de la Raison, supervised by Hébert and Momoro on 20 Brumaire, Year II (10 November 1793), came to epitomize the new republican way of religion. In ceremonies devised and organised by Chaumette, churches across France were transformed into Temples of Reason, the largest ceremony at Notre-Dame in Paris, where the Christian altar was dismantled, an altar to Liberty installed and 'To Philosophy' carved over the doors.

The 10 November celebration at Notre-Dame followed the evening decision of the Département de la Seine and the Commune de Paris that the next décadi, 20 Brumaire, would be a 'fête de la liberté et de la raison' before the statue of Liberty that had replaced that of the Virgin Mary. The opera actress Marie-Thérèse Maillard appeared as the goddess of Reason, wearing the red bonnet and a blue cloak and leaning on a pike, and the Convention then voted to consecrate the former cathedral as 'Temple de la Raison'. To avoid statuary and idolatry the goddess figures were portrayed by living women; in Paris the role was played by Momoro's wife Sophie.

Spread and end

After the Paris festival the Hébertists controlling the Paris Commune multiplied anti-religious masquerades and parades parodying Catholic ceremonies. On 1 Frimaire (21 November) all places of worship in Paris were closed by a Commune decree, moral courses replaced religious instruction and sermons, and every décadi ceremonies were held in churches turned into temples of Reason with speeches, the Marseillaise, political discussion and pupils' recitations. Parisian churches were closed on 24 November 1793 by the Paris Commune while freedom of worship remained theoretically guaranteed by the Convention.

By late 1793 it was conceivable that the Convention might accept an invitation to attend the Paris festival en masse, but the unshakeable opposition of Maximilien Robespierre and others like him prevented it from becoming an official affair. Undeterred, Chaumette and Hébert proudly led a sizable delegation of deputies to Notre-Dame. Many contemporary accounts reported the Festival of Reason as a 'lurid', 'licentious' affair of scandalous 'depravities', although some scholars have disputed their veracity. These accounts, real or embellished, galvanized anti-revolutionary forces and caused dedicated Jacobins like Robespierre to publicly separate themselves from the radical faction. He scorned the Cult and denounced the festivals as 'ridiculous farces'.

Robespierre, a convinced deist who was reluctant from the outset, intervened to condemn atheism, calling it 'aristocratic', and to defend the existence of God as the source of moral feeling, which became the starting point of the Cult of the Supreme Being. On a pragmatic level he judged that the cult's outspoken aversion to Christianity would further alienate the Republic from potential supporters and allies. In spring 1794 the Cult of Reason faced official repudiation when Robespierre announced his own deistic religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, rejecting the Hébertists' perceived atheism. When Hébert, Momoro, Ronsin, Vincent and others were guillotined on 4 Germinal, Year II (24 March 1794), the cult lost its most influential leadership, and when Chaumette and other Hébertistes followed four days later the Cult of Reason effectively ceased to exist.

The rival deistic Cult of the Supreme Being established by Robespierre was intended to replace Roman Catholicism as the state religion of France and to undermine the atheistic Cult of Reason. It was officially established by decree of 18 Floréal (7 May 1794) and a Festival of the Supreme Being was held on 8 June 1794 on the Champ de Mars. The two new religions, in the provinces often merged into one by local revolutionaries, disappeared in September 1794, two months after Robespierre's fall; that month was the last in which ceremonies were celebrated in temples of Reason. Both the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being were officially banned in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte with his Law on Cults of 18 Germinal, Year X.

The cult spread quickly in the provinces, most intensely in Burgundy, the departments of today's Centre region, the Paris basin, the Lyon region, the Nord and northern Languedoc, organized by representatives on mission often close to Hébertism, while the East, Grand Ouest and Aquitaine (except Lot-et-Garonne) were relatively kept apart; the map has affinities with that of the 1791 sworn priests.