Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution
The aim of several policies conducted by various governments of France during the French Revolution ranged from the appropriation by the government of the great landed estates and the large amounts of money held by the Catholic Church to the termination of Christian religious practice and of the religion itself. There has been much scholarly debate over whether the movement was popularly motivated or motivated by a small group of revolutionary radicals. These policies, which ended with the Concordat of 1801, formed the basis of the later and less radical laïcité policies.
The French Revolution initially began with attacks on Church corruption and the wealth of the higher clergy, an action with which even many Christians could identify, since the Gallican Church held a dominant role in pre-revolutionary France. During a one-year period known as the Reign of Terror, the episodes of anti-clericalism became some of the most violent of any in modern European history. The revolutionary authorities suppressed the Church, abolished the Catholic monarchy, nationalized Church property, exiled 30,000 priests, and killed hundreds more. In October 1793, the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoned from the date of the Revolution, and Festivals of Liberty, Reason, and the Supreme Being were scheduled. New forms of moral religion emerged, including the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being and the atheistic Cult of Reason, with the revolutionary government briefly mandating observance of the former in April 1794.
Background
Before 1789
In 18th-century France, the vast majority of the population adhered to the Catholic Church, the only religion officially allowed in the kingdom since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Small minorities of French Protestants and Jews still lived in France. The Edict of Versailles, commonly known as the Edict of Tolerance, had been signed by Louis XVI on 7 November 1787. It did not give non-Catholics in France the right to openly practice their religions but only the rights to legal and civil status, which included the right to contract marriages without having to convert to the Catholic faith. At the same time, libertine thinkers had popularized atheism and anti-clericalism.The ancien régime institutionalised the authority of the clergy in its status as the First Estate of the realm. As the largest landowner in the country, the Catholic Church controlled vast properties and extracted massive revenues from its tenants; the Church also had an enormous income from the collection of compulsory tithes. Since the Church kept the registry of births, deaths, and marriages and was the only institution that provided hospitals and education in most parts of the country, it influenced all citizens.
Between 1789 and 1792
A milestone event of the French Revolution was the abolition of the privileges of the First and Second Estate on the night of 4 August 1789. In particular, it abolished the tithes gathered by the Catholic clergy.The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 proclaimed freedom of religion across France in these terms:
On 10 October 1789, the National Constituent Assembly seized the properties and land held by the Catholic Church and decided to sell them to fund the assignat revolutionary currency. On 12 July 1790, the assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that subordinated the Catholic Church in France to the French government. It was never accepted by the Pope and other high-ranking clergy in Rome.
Policies of the revolutionary authorities
The programme of dechristianization waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included:- destruction of statues, plates and other iconography from places of worship
- destruction of crosses, bells and other external signs of worship
- the institution of revolutionary and civic cults
- the enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 making all nonjuring priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight
An especially notable event that took place in the course of France’s dechristianization was the Festival of Reason, which was held in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November 1793. The dechristianization campaign can be seen as the logical extension of the materialist philosophies of some leaders of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, while for others with more prosaic concerns it provided an opportunity to unleash resentments against the Catholic Church and its clergy.
Civic religions of the French Revolution
The civic religions of the French Revolution were a series of state-sponsored deistic and atheistic belief systems introduced during the French Revolution and intended to replace Catholicism as the new moral and social framework of the French First Republic. Emerging from the radical policy of dechristianization, these religions sought to ground republican citizenship in rational, civic, and patriotic principles.The most prominent of these were the atheistic Cult of Reason, which was succeeded by the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being established by Maximilien Robespierre. During the Directory, these were followed by the semi-official Decadary Cult and the private initiative of Theophilanthropy. These movements aimed to inculcate civic virtue through secular morality, public festivals, and symbolic art. None succeeded in displacing established religious practice, and official support was terminated by Napoleon Bonaparte under the Concordat of 1801.
Rationale
The French Revolution's initial religious policy was not to abolish religion but to subordinate the Gallican Church to the state through measures like the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792, a more radical dechristianization campaign emerged, championed by factions such as the Hébertists. This campaign involved closing churches, destroying religious iconography, and persecuting priests. Public life was systematically secularised through the introduction of the French Republican Calendar, which replaced the Gregorian calendar's system of Sundays and Christian feast days with a ten-day week. In this context, revolutionaries created civic religions designed to provide a new, shared moral framework for the Republic.Civic religions
Cult of Reason
The Cult of Reason was an atheistic and anthropocentric civic creed promoted by radical figures like Jacques Hébert, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, and Antoine-François Momoro. It rejected the existence of a god, venerating instead the abstract concept of Reason as the pinnacle of human achievement. Churches were converted into "Temples of Reason," and its most famous ceremony was the Festival of Reason at Notre-Dame de Paris in November 1793, where an actress personified the Goddess of Reason.The cult was opposed by the deist Maximilien Robespierre, who viewed its atheism as socially destructive and "aristocratic." It was officially suppressed following the execution of its leading proponents in March 1794 and rapidly disappeared from public life.
Cult of the Supreme Being
In response to the Cult of Reason, Maximilien Robespierre introduced the deistic Cult of the Supreme Being. Formally established by the National Convention in May 1794, it was based on the belief in a creator god and the immortality of the soul, which Robespierre considered essential for social order and republican virtue.The cult's sole major celebration was the massive Festival of the Supreme Being, held in Paris on 8 June 1794 and orchestrated by the artist Jacques-Louis David. The event, which prominently featured Robespierre, was seen by his rivals as an attempt to create a personal dictatorship and contributed to his political isolation. The movement was entirely dependent on its founder and was abandoned immediately following his execution in the Thermidorian Reaction in July 1794.
Decadary Cult
Established under the Directory, the Decadary Cult was a secular civic religion designed to structure republican life around the ten-day week of the French Republican calendar. Citizens were legally required to observe the tenth day, the décadi, by attending civic festivals that replaced traditional Christian Sunday worship. These events aimed to instill republican virtues through patriotic ceremonies, readings of laws, and speeches on civic duty.Mandated nationally in 1798, the cult was unpopular and widely resisted by the general populace, who remained attached to the traditional seven-day week and Catholic traditions. It was effectively abandoned after the Concordat of 1801 restored Catholicism's status, and the Republican calendar itself was abolished by Napoleon in 1805.
Theophilanthropy
Theophilanthropy was a deistic creed that emerged during the Directory as a private initiative. Founded by Jean-Baptiste Chemin-Dupontès and supported by the Director Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux, it sought to provide a rational moral framework based on the belief in God, the immortality of the soul, and civic duties. Its simple ceremonies, consisting of moral readings and hymns, often took place during the official décadi observances.As a voluntary, semi-private society, it stood apart from the state-mandated cults. However, it was viewed with suspicion by both Catholics, who saw it as a heretical sect, and radical republicans, who found it bourgeois and sentimental. The movement lost influence after the Concordat of 1801 and was formally prohibited in 1803.