Dechristianization during the French Revolution

Background

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed on 12 July 1790, subordinated the Catholic Church in France to the government, made bishops and priests elected, and required an oath of loyalty. It produced a schism between the 'constitutional' (juring) and 'refractory' (nonjuring) clergy, and dechristianization unfolded on that fracture.

Course

The campaign began when the Paris Commune first acted soon after the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792: a ban on wearing ecclesiastical dress outside priestly functions on 12 August, a ban on processions and public religious displays on 16 August, and the requisition of church bronzes for the army on 17 August. Not all of the Commune's decrees were recognized by the Convention or observed in every section.

The campaign was not organized by the central bodies. The Committee of Public Safety and the Convention showed themselves hostile or circumspect toward dechristianization, treating it as disorder or excess; the work was done by the Paris Commune and local surveillance committees.

Symbolic destruction and new cults

Destruction of statues, altar plates and other iconography from places of worship followed, along with the removal of crosses, bells and other external signs of worship and the institution of revolutionary and civic cults. In October 1793 the Christian calendar was replaced by the Republican calendar and Festivals of Liberty, Reason and the Supreme Being were scheduled. The nationwide Festival of Reason, supervised by Hébert and Momoro on 20 Brumaire Year II (10 November 1793), turned churches across France into Temples of Reason, the largest ceremony being held at Notre-Dame in Paris, where the Christian altar was dismantled.

Conflict inside the revolutionary leadership

Dechristianization was championed by radical factions such as the Hébertists, and adherence to the Cult of Reason became a defining attribute of the Hébertist faction. Jacques Hébert, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, Antoine-François Momoro, Anacharsis Cloots and Joseph Fouché promoted the cult. Robespierre and others like him firmly opposed the Cult of Reason and the campaign, terming such festivals 'ridiculous farces'; on 6 December 1793 the Convention decreed by his proposal that freedom of worship was maintained and guaranteed. He denounced the dechristianizers as foreign enemies of the revolution, rejected their atheism as 'aristocratic' and countered it with belief in a Supreme Being. In spring 1794 Robespierre inaugurated the rival deistic Cult of the Supreme Being, and when Hébert, Momoro, Ronsin and Vincent were guillotined on 24 March 1794, followed days later by Chaumette, the Cult of Reason effectively ceased to exist. Georges Danton had earlier warned against the dechristianizers' 'rhetorical excesses'.

Regional variation and coercion

Intensity varied greatly by region and was forced in areas of insurrection. In the Vendée war and the federalist revolts, representatives on mission close to the Hébertists used it as one form of repression: Fouché in the Nièvre and Côte-d'Or and then at Lyon with Collot d'Herbois, and Jean-Baptiste Carrier at Nantes, who carried out mass drownings (noyades) of men, women, refractory priests, Vendéan prisoners and counter-revolutionaries between November 1793 and February 1794.

The geography of communes that renounced the Catholic cult has affinities with that of the 1791 sworn priests and corresponds to regions where detachment from Catholic religion had occurred before the revolutionary period. On 6 November 1793 the Convention granted every commune the right to renounce the Catholic cult, and some communes changed names and closed, vandalized or destroyed places of worship. Monasteries were widely dissolved and destroyed, orders such as the Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans and Carmelites particularly affected; by Easter 1794 few of France's 40,000 churches remained open.

Resistance and end

Local people often resisted dechristianization and forced clergy who had resigned to conduct mass again. By early 1795 a return to some form of religion-based faith was taking shape, and the law of 21 February 1795 legalized public worship with strict limitations, though the ringing of bells, religious processions and displays of the cross remained forbidden. Churches were reopened on 31 May 1795, and the Concordat of 1801 conventionally closed the period. It established the rules for the relationship between the Catholic Church and the French state and is often described as the basis of the later, less radical laïcité settlement.

Historiography

The term 'déchristianisation' was first used by Félix Dupanloup, later bishop of Orléans, in the 1840s. In the 1890s–1900s historians including Albert Mathiez applied it to the anti-clerical violence of 1793–1794, also called 'déchristianisation de l'an II'; it was then taken up by Maurice Dommanget and more recently by Serge Bianchi and Michel Vovelle, as well as by Catholic historiography.

Preservation efforts within the Revolution

Efforts to protect religious heritage against destruction emerged from within the Revolution: in 1794 the revolutionary abbé Grégoire coined the notion of 'vandalism' and presented a report on destruction by vandalism, while the painter Alexandre Lenoir was charged from 1791 with storing rescued religious sculpture, which became the first museum of French monuments in 1795.

Distinction from the 1922 Soviet campaign

This movement is distinct from the 1922 Soviet confiscation of church valuables, in which the Soviet state seized liturgical objects from Orthodox and other churches under the pretext of Volga famine relief. That was a state-directed campaign of repression against the clergy, differing in period, agent and context.