Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Cult of Reason

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

The French Revolution wasn’t just a political revolution where one government was replaced with a new one.  The French Revolution was also a social revolution. The largest social institution in France at the time of the revolution was the Catholic Church.  At the start of the revolution, the revolutionaries attempted to create a new state religion which was quite unlike anything else the world had seen before or since.  Learn more about the Cult of Reason and the attempts of Revolutionary France to create a state religion that wasn’t a religion on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The French Revolution wasn't just a political revolution where one government was replaced by another. The French Revolution was also a social revolution, and the largest social institution in France at the time was the Catholic Church. At the height of the revolution, revolutionaries attempted to replace the church with a new state religion, which was quite unlike anything else the world had ever seen before or since. Learn more about the cult of reason, and the attempts of revolutionary France to create a new state religion that really wasn't a religion at all on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. To understand how the cult of reason came about, it's necessary to understand the conditions in pre-revolutionary France. The French Revolution was a lot more than beheading Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The French Revolution was a revolution against the entire French system, which was known as the Ancian regime. The Ancian regime included not just the monarchy, but the nobility, and perhaps most importantly, the Catholic Church. The Ancian regime established what were known as estates, which were broad categories of social and civil and civilized.

hierarchy under which society was organized. The first estate was the church, the second estate was the nobility, and the third estate were peasants and common people. Despite some activity early in the Protestant Reformation, France remained an overwhelmingly Catholic country. The Edict of Nantes in 1885 codified Catholicism not just as the state religion, but as the only religion allowed in the country. Protestants and Jews were not allowed to practice their religion openly, nor were they given many legal and civil rights. Marriages were not recognized, for example, unless the parties converted to Catholicism. Moreover, the church was the largest single landowner in France. There was a good chance if you were a peasant. Your landlord that you paid rent to was a monastery. On top of that,

there was a mandatory system of tithing, which was in effect a 10% tax on everyone. In the day-to-day lives of most people in France, their lives were more influenced by the church than by the monarchy. So when discontent in France began to grow, it was the entire Ancian regime which was in the crosshairs of the revolutionaries, which also included the church, not just the king. And here I need to give a bit of background as to who the revolutionaries were and what the intellectual environment of the revolution was. The French Revolution, like the American Revolution, took place in the intellectual environment known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is probably worth an episode of its own, but its origins can roughly be traced back to the late 17th century. century with the scientific discoveries of people like Isaac Newton. The discovery of scientific principles encouraged an environment where truth, reason, and liberty were held as the supreme

values. While there was no uniform set of Enlightenment beliefs, many Enlightenment thinkers regularly disagreed with each other, there was a general consensus against revering to tradition and mysticism. Many of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers came from France. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire were leaders in the growth of this school of thought. The French Revolution was, at its core, a revolution fueled by Enlightenment values. When things began to come to a head and the Ancian regime began to institute reforms, many of those reforms had to do with religion. On August 4th, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly, in just a few hours,

managed to completely overhaul many of the laws governing France and the system of the three estates. One of these reforms eliminated mandatory tithes to the church. On August 26th, National Constituate Assembly passed the landmark Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. This was the French equivalent to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. In it were two clauses which were relevant to this episode. Article 4 said, quote, Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others. Thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.

these borders can be determined only by the law. And Article 10, which said, quote, No one may be disturbed for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law. For most people listening to this, these seem like pretty reasonable proposals. You can practice your religion however you like,

just as long as you don't harm anyone else. And this was very much in accordance with the principles of the Enlightenment. On October 10th, they seized all. church property in France and sold the assets to raise money for the government. Finally, on July 12, 1790, they officially made the church subordinate to the government. All priests were now to be employees of the state, and all the clergy were to be elected. And they also had to swear an oath of fealty to the state under penalty of deportation or death. Needless to say, the Pope didn't approve of this and did not allow priests to take the oath.

All of these changes generally fall under the category of freedom of religion, although things like forcing priests to take an oath were a bit extreme. They removed having a state-sponsored church, removed the power of the church over the citizenry, and allowed everyone to practice religion as they saw fit. If this had been the end of the reforms, I would not be doing this episode. However, as the revolution continued, it became more and more radicalized. It wasn't just a matter of freedom of religion anymore in dismantling a state church. It became extremely anti-clerical. On September 2nd, 1792, over 200 priests were killed in a period of five days known as the September massacre. And they were only a small part of the 1,200 to 1,600 people killed overall.

It wasn't just a matter of freedom of religion at this point. There were now forces who were actively seeking to de-Christianize France. One of the major steps was the elimination of the Gregorian calendar, which I've addressed in a previous episode. The new calendar counted its years based on the French Revolution, not the birth of Christ, and changed the name of the days in the months and instituted a 10-day week. However, the thing which really went over the top and was truly radical was an attempt to supplant Christianity with a brand new state religion. This would not be another Christian Protestant church, the likes of which were established in other European countries. This would be a church which was fundamentally atheist, and it became known as the

cult of reason. It's difficult to call an atheist movement a religion, and historians have been debating exactly how to categorize the cult of reason for over 200 years. The supporters of the Cult of Reason were primarily those from the radical exaggerators faction who were the followers of Jacques Ibert. It came to prominence in 1793 during the start of the reign of terror. The advocates for this new church included Antoine Francois Mamorro and Joseph Foucher. Many Catholic churches were converted to temples of reason. All of the Christian symbolism was either removed, destroyed, or covered up, and replaced with symbols representing liberty and philosophy. At Notre Dame in Paris, the altar was removed and replaced with an altar

to liberty. In stone, above the doors to the entrance, were etched the words to philosophy. There was no coherent dogma for this religion, if you want to call it a religion. Every temple of reason just sort of did their own thing. Joseph Foucher, who was one of the chief enforcers during the reign of terror, created his own Feast of Brutus on September 22nd, 1793, and it was pretty much the same as other cult of reason celebrations. But the biggest day for the cult of reason took place on 20 Broomair in the year two. And for those of you who are not fluent in the French Revolutionary calendar, that would be November 10, 1793. It was a nationwide event called the Festival of Reason. Liturgies were held in converted temples of reason all over the country. At the Festival of Reason held in Notre Dame,

an artificial mountain was built in the nave of the church. On top of the mountain was a Greek temple devoted to philosophy with the bus of great philosophers. At the bottom of the mountain was an altar to reason with a torch dedicated to truth. Girls wandered around wearing Roman dresses and sashes in the colors of the French flag, and a woman was dressed as the embodiment of the goddess of liberty. If this sounds just a little bit like a pagan ceremony, you wouldn't be wrong. The reaction to the Festival of Reason was swift and almost universally condemned. It was called licentious and lurid. even Maximilian Robespierre, who was aligned with the radical factions, called the ceremony's ridiculous farces and began to separate himself from its most extreme members. The festival of reason

actually backfired and emboldened anti-revolutionary forces. Rose Pierre particularly disliked the cult of reason. He was a deist. He didn't particularly believe in any religion, but he did believe that some sort of belief in God was necessary for a stable social order. By the spring of 1794, Pierre, who had accumulated an enormous amount of power during the reign of terror, was at the peak of his influence. Jacques Ibert, Antoine Francois Memo, and other leaders of the cult of reason were executed in March, pretty much putting an end to it. Robes Pierre then ushered in his own replacement for the cult of reason, known as the cult of the supreme being. On 18th, Floriel, that would be May 7th, the National Convention passed legislation

making the cult of the supreme being the state religion in France. The cult of the supreme being was pretty much wholly invented out of nothing by Robespierre. The tenants of the church included a belief in a supreme being, an immortal soul, and punishing tyrants. On 20 Prairieal, that would be June 8, he took a page out of the Cult of Reason playbook and held the festival of the supreme being. There were festivities all over France, but the one held in Paris was an extremely well-organized and highly planned event overseen by Robespierre himself.

It went over about as well as the Festival of Reason did eight months earlier. Many people saw the festival as evidence that the revolutionary government had become the very thing that they had been fighting against. Within six weeks of the Festival of the Supreme Being, Robespierre had his own date with Madame Le Guillotine. It's believed that the Festival of the Supreme Being was in no small part responsible for his downfall. With Robes Pierre dead, who was really the only driving force behind it, the cult of the

Supreme Being quickly died out and was forgotten. The entire rise and fall of two French national religions, the cults of reason and of the supreme being, took less than a single year. Both cults were officially banned by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, who, ironically enough in 1804, was coronated Emperor of the French in a Catholic ceremony in Notre Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Pope. While much in France had changed forever, after all the bloodshed and struggle,

France found itself once again a Catholic country ruled by a monarch. The cult of reason and the cult of the supreme being both ended up as nothing but historical footnotes to an incredibly turbulent time in French history. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

Today's review comes from listener Wild Bill A.K. over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, one of my favorites, a thoughtful and interesting podcast. Everything Everywhere is a podcast about just that, everything and everywhere, as seen during Gary Arns travels.

I particularly enjoyed the recent podcast about the United States minor outlying islands, which are a lot like a Seinfeld episode, basically about nothing. Keep up the good work, Gary. I enjoy your podcast very much. Thanks, Wild Bill. Sometimes an episode about something

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