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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Apart from the democratized Catholicism of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790) the French Revolution occasioned four phenomena of novel significance: (a) The so-called “Cult of Reason” established in effect though not in name by decree of the Convention in November, 1793; (b) The nationalist Decadal fêtes, provided for that same autumn, when the church calendar was replaced by the republican; (c) the “Cult of the Supreme Being” originating in legislation of May 1794 and culminating in the Fête of the Supreme Being on June 8 following; (d) the Cult of Theophilanthropism whose prayerbook, called a Manuel at first, was composed in the summer of 1796, printed in the fall, adapted to the needs of public worship as well as domestic in December, and actually used in the former way for the first time on January 15, 1797. Following the precedent of the Abbé Grégoire, whose great History of the Sects of the Revolution appeared in 1814, these four phenomena have been classed together, with the obvious implication that all were tarred with the same stick, the ingredients of the tar consisting of infidel fatuity and political chicanery. Such indeed was the general impression that had already been conveyed by the hostile comments of conservative critics outside France. Consequently it became almost a tradition for decades to consider the four phenomena together as brilliant illustrations of the Deistic philosophy of religion, with the overt or implicit suggestion that they stand as incontrovertible proof of the infatuation of radical doctrinaires and of their folly in supposing that the religious impulse could be suffocated, or that its forms of expression nonchalantly improvised, or its nature changed from that of faith, mystery and revelation to that of reason and morality. Only recently have the researches of Aulard, Mathiez and others served to set before us accurate pictures of the actual ceremonies of these novel cults, as well as careful analyses of the sources and motives of their inception. These researches and revaluations justify a review of the traditional conceptions. Omitting the nationalistic Decadal fêtes as purely secular, our study will be devoted to the Cults of Reason, of the Supreme Being and of Theophilanthropism.
1 Recent eminent works on these specific subjects, distinct from the history of the Revolution in general, are: Mathiez, A., La théophilanthropie et le Culte Décadaire, 1904Google Scholar; Aulard, F. A. A., Le Culte de la Raison et let Culte de l'Ëtre Supréme 1904Google Scholar; Mathiez, , Contributions à l' Histoire Religieuse de la Révolution Française, 1907Google Scholar; Aulard, , Christianity and the French Revolution, 1927Google Scholar; De la Gorce, P., Histoire Religieuse de la Révolution Française, Paris, 1921–1924.Google Scholar
2 The Abbé's attitude is clearly indicated in his Mémoires (1837), II, 85Google Scholar: “toutes ces pantalonnades, inventiés par la haine, soutenues par la persecution …ces folies scandaleuses et dispendieuses….”
3 Quotations from speeches in the Convention are given by Sciout, L., Histoire de la Constitution Civile, (1881), III, pp. 577, 603.Google Scholar
4 A valuable contemporary opinion of the fete is in Révolutions de Paris, No. 215, p. 210Google Scholar (Mornoro?): “Eternal gratitude to Reason! For it is she who has disseminated and brought to blossom in the minds of thinkers the principles of the Revolution…. In celebrating the fète of Liberty and Reason we do not set up the worship of new gods or of abstract beings, but we simply felicitate ourselves upon the advantages which those faculties of human nature regenerate and develop.” Cf. the speech of President Laloi, November 7, following Gobel's abjuration: “The Supreme Being wants no other worship than that of reason.” (Kerr, W. B., The Reign of Terror, 1927, p. 257.)Google Scholar
5 Aulard, , Le Culte, etc., p. 83Google Scholar on. “L'homrnage” is the term constantly used. When a woman did not impersonate Liberty (in Paris, an alleged opera singer, though in the provinces modest and innocent maidens of good family as a rule) statues of Liberty were set upon the altars; a large one in the Place de la Concorde; or Liberty trees were planted and garlanded. The only language I have been able to find savoring of anthropolatry is that of Chaumette before the Convention: “We have abandoned inanimate idols for Reason … this animated image, the chief work of Nature.” (Kerr, , Op. cit., p. 254.)Google Scholar Yet even Chaumette, in a poetic effusion of 1793 speaks of himself as having no divinities “que la Raison, l' Indépendance et la Nature.” (Mathiez, , Contributions, etc., p. 162.)Google Scholar Americans have but to look at their own silver coins, at the dome of the Capital, or the Bartholdy statue in New York harbor to discover significant vestiges of this feature of the cult of Reason — the impersonation of Liberty by a beautiful woman. Yet Aulard constantly, even Dr. Crane Brinton in his recent book on The Jacobins, makes the mistake of referring to goddesses of Reason! (1930, p. 137.)
6 On this point see Aulard, , Le Culte, p. 100 onGoogle Scholar; Christianity, etc., p. 103Google Scholar. Cardenal, L., La Province pendant la Révolution, 1929, p. 314Google Scholar; Dommanget, M., La Déckristianization à Beauvais, ch. 5Google Scholar; Mathiez, A., Autour de Robespierre, p. 86, etc.Google Scholar
7 Aulard, , Le Culte, p. 86 on.Google Scholar
8 A vivid description in Aulard, , Le Culte, p. 52Google Scholar. An account, presumably by an eyewitness, in Revolution de Paris, No. 215, p. 214Google Scholar, where the “prima donna” is repeatedly referred to as “La Liberté.” Although Aulard quotes, p. 83, the interpretation of the fête by the agnostic Hébert in Père Duchésne: “A la place de cette autel on avait construit la trône de la Liberté … on n'y plaça pas une statue mais une image vivante de cette divinité … une femme charmante, belle comme la déesse qu'elle répresentait.” And though Aulard explicitly states (p. 54) that “elle personifie la Liberté,” he and Kerr, (Op. cit., p. 259)Google Scholar repeatedly refer to goddesses of Reason; and this misinterpretation, so vital to a proper understanding of the fête has been followed by many others; even Hazen, C. D., The French Revolution, (1932) II, p. 765 on.Google Scholar
9 Kerr, , p. 259Google Scholar, gives a slightly different reading of this hymn, which includes the phrase “sainte Liberté.” One may see a contemporary woodcut of the fête in Goyau, G., Histoire Religieuse de la France (1922), p. 519.Google Scholar
10 Aulard, , Le Culte, p. 57Google Scholar; his History of the French Revolution (1910), III, p 162 on.Google Scholar
11 Aulard, , Le Culte, pp. 60–68Google Scholar. A more highly colored account in Sciout, L., op. cit., III, p. 603.Google Scholar
12 Révolutions de Paris, No. 215, p. 216.Google Scholar
13 Aulard, , Le Culte, p. 87.Google Scholar
14 Cf. Catéchisme Républicaine (1793)Google Scholar: “Je crois dans un Etre Supréme qui veut honoré par les vertus et non par la fanaticisme … le plus beau culte est celui de la Raison et de la vertu.”
15 On December 5, 1793, Robespierre moved in the Convention for a reply to the “atheist France” manifesto of the Coalition monarchs. (Kerr, , op. cit., p. 367.)Google Scholar Indeed, by the Preface of the Constitution of June, 1793, the Supreme Being was already implicated in the Revolution!
16 The problem of Robespierre's motives and purposes in pushing the establishment of the cult of the Supreme Being has recently been the subject of violent controversy. The views of Professor Aulard are summarized in Chap. IX of his Christianity and the French Revolution. He interprets Robespierre as “almost a worshipper of Rousseau.” The latter's civic faith, virtually a state religion, “Robespierre desired to make into the state religion, himself the pontiff of it.” Hence, he said, he was “not denouncing atheism as a philosopher but as a politician.” Professor Mathiez regards this interpretation as false and unjust and in The Fall of Robespierre, gives his version: “By placing the republican cause under the protection of the Supreme Being, Robespierre was doing no more than interpret public feeling and this was the reason for the enthusiasm he aroused.” (p. 89.) The Report of 18 Floréal in the opinion of Mathiez was not the program of a “would-be pontiff but the testament of a whole generation of those who believed that by the Republic they were regenerating the world.” (p. 95.)
17 See in particular that of November 21, 1793, reported in Aulard, , History of the French Revolution (1910), III, p. 164.Google Scholar
18 Were these professions of faith in the Supreme Being the deep and genuine convictions of Robespierre the man, apart from the statesman? I think so, even though he never tried to prove or to define the Supreme Being. He believed on the witness of his own feelings; it was a “value judgment,” as the following quotation from the Report reveals: “Ah, can such ideas be other than truths? I cannot conceive how Nature can have suggested to Man fictions more beneficent than all realities. If the existence of God, the immortality of the soul be but dreams, they would still be the finest of all conceptions of the human intelligence!” When Mathiez calls this faith in God “a sort of verbal fetish for galvanizing moral ideas'” he fails to do justice to the Kantian sagacity of his hero!
19 “His festivals are the joy of a great people gathered together beneath his eyes in order to draw closer the sweet bonds of universal brotherhood and offer Him the homage of pure and feeling hearts.” (Robespierre's Report of 18 Floréal, Mathiez, , The Fall of Robespierre, p. 104.)Google Scholar
20 Brilliant descriptions of the fête are given by Mathiez, , The Fall of Robespierre, p. 108Google Scholar; Cf. Warwick, , Robespierre (1909), p. 323Google Scholar; Kerr, , The Reign of Terror, p. 335Google Scholar; Aulard, , Le Culte, p. 297Google Scholar. There is considerable divergence on some points.
21 Some report this statue as “Atheism and Vice” (Kerr). Sciout, however, copies an official program where it is described as “L'Athéisme, seul espoir de l'étranger.” The Odes were notable compositions, elevated and moving, as one would surmise from the first line of one of them: “Pére de l'universe, Suprême Intelligence.” That of M. J. Chenier is remarkable for its tolerant and lofty feeling:
“Dieu du peuple, des rois, rtes cités, des campagnes,
De Luther, de Calvin, des infants d' Israël;
Toi que le Guébre adore au fond des ses montagnes,
En invoquant l' astre du ciel;
Tci sont rassemblés sous ton régard immense
De l' empire français les fils et les soutiens.”
Goyau, , op. cit., p. 520Google Scholar, displays a contemporary woodcut of the burning of Atheism.
22 See Mathiez, , The Fall of Robespierre, p. 113Google Scholar for evidence of its striking success. Also Aulard, , Christianity and the French Revolution, p. 129.Google Scholar
23 Recueil d' Hymnes Republicaines à l' occasion dc la fête a L' Ëtre Supréme, et le discours de Maximilen Robespierre (1794)Google Scholar. There is a copy in the New York Public Library.
24 Robespierre, whose single meeting with Rousseau had been invested by his own fervid devotion with almost mystical significance, did not live to witness this tribute to his idol that Couthon had moved in the Convention on 18 Floréal, 1794.
25 Two recent discussions in English of Theophilanthropism are: Thompson, J. M., “Theophilanthropism,” Hibbert Journal, Vol. XXVII, p. 63Google Scholar; Robison, Georgia, La Revellière Lépeaux and Theophilanthropy, University of Chicago M. A. thesis, 1928.Google Scholar
26 For Chemin. Mathiez. La Théaphilanthropie, pp. 79–84Google Scholar. The origin of the movement is described by Chemin in the Preface of the second edition of the Manuel; in a Precis Historique attached to the Code des Adorateurs de Dieu et Amis des hommes (1799), and in a tract, Qu'est-ce que la Théophilanthropie? (1799).
27 There was much projecting of a movement similar to that which Chemin brought into being among republican circles, 1795–6. Newspaper articles, brochures (Cf. Sobry, J. F., Rappel du Peuple Français a la Sagesse, ou Principes de la Morale)Google Scholar speeches (e. g., that of La Révellière-Lépeaux in August, 1796, given in Debidour, , Recueil des Actes du directoire exécutif, III, 315–16 (1913)Google Scholar. When such tentatives were specific, they were incredibly fantastic, as a perusal of some of them in Mathiez, p. 42 on, will disclose. There can be no doubt that all this agitation led Chemin to feel that the time was ripe and the need pressing for the creation of a semi-private Deistic fellowship and service of worship, such as he had long dreamed of. The originality, simplicity and moral earnestness of his modest Manuel confirm his statement in the Preface that the former was composed “in fullfilment of a design long cherished by the author.”
28 Apparently no exemplar of the first edition exists in this country and possibly in England. The third edition, 1797, was a two volume anthology of devotional scriptures from the religious and ethical scriptures of the world, to serve as a Theophilanthropist lectionary.
29 There were but one or two newspaper notices of the new church before May, 1797 (Mathiez, , p. 121Google Scholar; Robison, , p. 9)Google Scholar. The speech is to be found in Larévellière Lépeaux's Mémoires, III, p. 7Google Scholar on. It is amazingly indiscreet. The maxims of Theophilanthropism deserve government encouragement and propagation “par tous les moyens possibles!” Though governmental subvention of any religion whatsoever had been prohibited by the Constitution of 1795, yet from secret funds the Directory made considerable contributions to install Theophilanthropism in the great churches of Paris and La Révellière Lépeaux states (Mémoires, II, 166–7)Google Scholar that after the speech he was visited by certain Theophilanthropist leaders soliciting financial assistance. Of such a delegation we are to regard Valentine Haüy as the head rather than Chemin, for Lépeaux considered the former “le veritable fondateur de ce culte.” Founder, Haüy was certainly not; protagonist of the unfortunate political aggrandizement of the Deistic church he may well have been; indeed, he appears thrice as recipient of government subsidies. Chemin does not appear at all. For his modest, sincere enterprise as originally conceived the Director had no use, politically and in general. Nor has Hazen, apparently, whose account of Theophilanthropism has no mention either of Chemin or Haüy! (op. cit., II, p. 929.)
30 Haüy had been a Robespierrist, had been in sympathy with the Terror, and in the Empire became a Roman Catholic. Chemin all his life was unswervingly a Freemason and a Deist of the type of Franklin, Volney, Condorcet, and Paine.
31 Qu'est-ce que la Théophilanthropie? (1799) Someone, perhaps Chemin, had already disavowed the fallen Director as its sponsor (popularly “pontiff”) in a Declaration and Letter of 08, 1799Google Scholar. (Mathiez, , p. 620 on)Google Scholar. Haüy, no longer interested in Theophilantliropism as a republican catspaw, fades from the scene. It is ironical that in his famous speech to the Institute of May, 1797, the Director had already predicted the effects of his political favoritism upon the movement: “However pure and wise a religious cult may be, when the law recognizes it, it is impossible that it be not deflected from its foundation principles by the ambition of its leaders and that of its adherents themselves!” (Memoires, III, p. 12.)Google Scholar Precisely this had happened because Chemin, in an artless moment, had consented to Haüy's plea for the popularization of the former's “long-cherished design”.of a Deistic church. It had then been possessed, perverted, and exploited by and for political republicanism. Chemin's heroic but futile attempt to repristinate the movement is illustrated by the frontispiece of the “Code” of 1799, where a pére de famille is shown conducting the service amid a group of kinsmen and friends. Compare this with Fragonard's caricature of La Révellière- Lépeaux “pontificating” at a Theophilanthropist marriage in a Paris “temple.” (Réimpression du l' ancien Moniteur, XXVIII, p. 722.)Google Scholar
32 For the suppression of Theophilanthropism, consult Thibaudeau, A., Bonaparte and the Consulate (1908), p. 165Google Scholar. Miss Gibson cites a report to the Prefect of Police, December 4, 1803, noting a reunion of “respected patriots called the Society for Morality; it is for the most part composed of former Theophilanthropists (about 100). The meeting was held in a private house.” (See also Mathiez, , La Révolution Française, pp. 53, 278.)Google Scholar
33 DrBrinton, Crane in The Jacobins, p. 186Google Scholar, dismisses Theophilanthropism as “the odds and ends of eighteenth century thought, associated with La Révellière-Lépeaux.” The inadequacy of such an appraisal is obvious after a first-hand study of Chemin's Manuel, as well as the highly favorable appraisal of Aulard (Christianity, p. 155)Google Scholar and even De La Gorce.
34 See Mathiez, , The Fall of Robespierre, p. 88.Google Scholar
