A New Iconoclasm

Gallicanism actually began with Louis XIV in the 17th century, when Louis took control of the French church, while maintaining ties with Rome. From the National Catholic Register:

A new iconoclasm exploded in Paris in 1789 in the French Revolution, an event that on both sides of the Atlantic was a welcomed embrace of democracy and Enlightenment. Yet this was also the same revolution that saw the public beheading of the French Catholic monarch, King Louis XVI, and his wife, Marie Antoinette. Churches, their reliquaries, and liturgical items were destroyed without a second thought. Archives and ancient treasures were forever discarded; dioceses and cathedrals were shuttered; monasteries, the lifeblood of France’s ardent faith, were plundered, property confiscated, and wiped from the map. 

A “de-Christianization” permeated throughout France. At the center was nothing less than a wholesale suppression of Catholicism as it had been known since Charlemagne, and in many ways that goal was achieved. Priests were either forced to assent to the Civil Constitution that demanded religious men and women obey not Rome but the French state, or face certain death if found. This was known as Gallicanism, the idea that civil authority was preferable than the rule of the Pope. 

The great Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris was reappropriated as a Temple of Reason. In the suppression of Christianity, the atheistic regime under Maximilian Robespierre and his Reign of Terror replaced the liturgy with their own type of worship, known as the Cult of the Supreme Being. Instead of worshipping the Holy Trinity, their gods were liberté, égalité, fraternité — the revolution motto, “liberty, equality, fraternity.” In Notre-Dame, as in other cathedrals, the “Goddess of Liberty” replaced images and statues of the Blessed Mother. Stunning high altars were dismantled. Feasts, festivals and homilies honoring “liberty” replaced the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and reflections on the Gospels. Those who kept the faith bided time underground, and when the storm of revolution inevitably passed, the faith remained in France. But it was never the same as before the revolution. 

All this does not mean that aspects of the French church were entirely innocent in the time leading up to the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. We turn again to Pope Benedict, who called the spirit of the revolution a “false progressivism,” one that also affected Church clerics. “[A] bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain.” We also see mirrored in those heady days a rampant desire to erase and rewrite history, invariably one with no place for the God of Jesus Christ. (Read more.)

From Intellectual Takeout:

Bastille Day, by contrast, celebrates a bloody slaughter by a mob. On July 14th, 1789, a mob of angry Parisians stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison in the heart of Paris. This event ignited the French Revolution. After they took the fortress, they captured the governor of the fortress and brutally killed him, as described by a Paris newspaper:

"De Launey [the governor] was struck by a thousand blows, his head was cut off and hoisted on the end of a pike with blood streaming down all sides." 

This massacre is what the French people commemorate (and celebrate) every year on July 14th. (Read more.) 

From The Epoch Times:

There is an apocryphal story about Mao Zedong that when he was asked about whether the French Revolution had been successful, he replied that it was too early to say! That is always the danger in assessing contemporary or more recently historical phenomena; we have a sort of proximity bias. Because it is near us, therefore it must be important. We cannot turn on the news today without learning that some woman winning a tennis match is a historical moment or that some man running a tenth of a second faster is making history, or that a rock band is getting together again after 20 years, and this too is a history-making moment.

But Bastille Day truly is a history-making moment; one has to go back as far as the Reformation in Europe to think of something as significant. And bizarrely, perhaps the only contemporary event that matches it is—paradoxically—its opposite: The American Declaration of Independence. This is strange because the American Revolution is often seen as the precursor and inspiration for the French Revolution, as if one were the offspring of the other. And in some ways, of course, they are deeply connected. For example, the crushing debt the French government incurred supporting the American rebellion led quite directly to popular discontent at home because of its oppressive and iniquitous taxation system. (In passing, one notes that taxation, too, sparked the revolt of the colonies.) (Read more.)

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