The Revolution Revisited

Stephanie Mann writes of the Vendée.

Although the French Revolution’s ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood (Liberté, égalité, fraternité) seem laudable, in practice they were combined with a program of dechristianization. The revolutionaries were acting on the Enlightenment philosophes’ verbal attacks on the Catholic Church, regarding it as an ally of the old regime. The National Constituent Assembly of France seized all Church property, suppressed convents and monasteries, and forced priests to serve as employees of the State, swearing an oath to the Revolution while denying loyalty to the Pope. The Blessed Sacrament was desecrated, church furnishings and artwork wrecked, and churches destroyed in a massive campaign of iconoclasm. More than 200 non-juring priests and three bishops—those who would not take the required oath—were brutally massacred in Paris on September 2 and 3, 1793. Priests and nuns were also tied together and drowned in what revolutionaries called “Republican Weddings” in Nantes and Lyon. The Ursulines of Valencienne, the Carmelites of Compiegne, and groups of nuns from other religious orders were guillotined.

The final steps in the dechristianization of France were to eliminate the Gregorian calendar, the seven day week, the Sunday day of rest and worship; change any street or city name with a religious reference; and ban holy days and saints’ feasts. Robespierre, the leader of the Committee for Public Safety, instituted and led ceremonies in the new Cults of Reason and the Supreme Being. Churches and cathedrals, like Notre Dame de Paris, became Temples of the new cults. A new calendar began with Year I of the new Republic. (Read entire article.)

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