"Robespierre and the Religion of the Supreme Being"

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

EDIT: Due to the length of this entry, it will be posted in two parts.

In keeping with this month's theme of discussion, I have decided to translate Mathiez' study on the Festival of the Supreme Being for you all. Consider it an early present for the Festival. XD I trust it will prove enlightening and perhaps provoke further discussion.

Robespierre and the Religion of the Supreme Being[1][2]

Albert Mathiez

[Translated from the original French by estellacat]

 

Robespierre’s physiognomy has been so disfigured for the past twenty years by historians that to speak today of the Incorruptible’s religious ideas may seem to be attempting the impossible.

            Robespierre, it is proclaimed, is narrow-minded, a man of the ancien régime, a coldly ambitious man who wanted to reign over France by imposing upon it, by Terror, a false copy of Catholicism, deism established as State religion.

            I cannot consider studying, texts and proofs in hand, all of Robespierre’s politics regarding religion. It will suffice me to take an example, to examine the exact role Robespierre played in the establishment of the Religion of the Supreme Being since this seems to be the essential test used by all his detractors.

            What do the republican historians hostile to Robespierre say? They oppose the Religion of the Supreme Being to the Religion of Reason. The Religion of Reason, which they laud unreservedly, is to have been the particular creation of the Hébertiste party. It is to have been a pantheist or even atheist religion, an instrument of intellectual emancipation. The Religion of the Supreme Being on the other hand is to have been invented wholesale by Robespierre for the satisfaction of his unrestrained ambitions and mystical passions. It is to have been an attempt at political enslavement and intellectual reaction.

            Now the opposition between the two revolutionary religions is no less false for being traditional. Far from having been the invention of a few men: Chaumette, Fouché, Hébert, Cloots, or even of a party, the Religion of Reason was but the outcome of a series of civic festivals whose origin can be found in the great Federation of 14 July 1790.[1] The Festival of Reason resembled all the previous festivals. The same hymns were sung, the same corteges were on display, the same patriotic emotion made hearts beat more quickly in view of the same republican symbols. What was new, 20 Brumaire Year II, day when the Commune and the Convention celebrated Reason in Notre-Dame de Paris, was not even the place chosen for the ceremony, a cathedral—churches had already seen similar scenes unfold within their walls,—what was new was that this festival coincided with the fall of constitutional Catholicism, the disaffection of churches, the abdication of priests.

            But the overthrow of the constitutional Church cannot even be put to the Hébertistes alone, since the Girondins themselves, like Pierre Manuel, like Guadet, like Vergniaud, had worked energetically for it since the Legislative [Assembly].

            The solemn abdication of the archbishop of Paris, Gobel, which gave a shove to the dechristianization movement, was not either the exclusive work of the Hébertistes, since it came from the initiative of Pereira, Proli and their friends, from this party of the Enragés which had its center in the popular societies of the sections and which frightened the Commune and the Convention for a moment, and since the initiative of the popular societies was seconded by notorious moderates like Thuriot, Basire, and Chabot.[2] The truth is that the Hébertistes, Chaumette, Cloots, Hébert simply fit the step to the obscure patriots of the sections, to the anonymous crowd of the Sans-Culottes of the faubourgs.

            Finally, an observation that M. Aulard himself, the personal enemy of Robespierre, has had to make, is that no one waited for Robespierre’s authorization to worship the Supreme Being in the temples of Reason in the same way and at the same time as Nature, Liberty, the Patrie, Reason herself. We have numerous discourses which were pronounced in the temples of Reason. Pantheist declarations and even more strikingly atheist declarations are the exception among them. We cannot pretend to know history better than the contemporaries who made it and lived it and contemporaries did not distinguish between the two revolutionary religions which they called indifferently by the same names. The Religion of the Supreme Being was for them but the reviewed and corrected follow-up to the Religion of Reason. It was the same religion, the same institution, continuing and perfecting itself.

            It is Robespierre’s enemies, former Hébertistes, former Dantonistes who, after the fact, to justify their conduct 9 Thermidor, tried to represent their victim under the caricature of a dictator using the idea of religion as a method of domination. It is them who spoke first of Robespierre’s pontificate. Will the Incorruptible thus always be judged on the testimony of his implacable enemies?

            A simple remark ruins the calumny: never was the pretended dictator more discussed, more combated, more powerless than the day after the establishment of the Religion of the Supreme Being! The day after the Festival of 20 Prairial opposition loomed even within the Committee of Public Safety. The festival itself, by the easy perfidies to which it lent discussion of his intentions, fed that opposition which had other causes than religious disaccords, but causes that this opposition could not completely own to.

            A curious thing! The same historians who only want to see the Religion of the Supreme Being by the eyes of the Thermidorians only see the Religion of Reason with Robespierre’s eyes. Carried along by the ardor of the fight against the Hébertistes, Robespierre had represented their leaders as those who prescribed atheism and he had a horror of atheism, not only because he believed in the social necessity of belief in God, but especially because he feared that this prescription would destroy in a people badly prepared all the way down to the bases of moral life. Robespierre’s fear were exaggerated, his accusations badly founded. The Festivals of Reason were not at all atheist festivals. Their organizers, whose entire ambition was limited at replacing the Catholic mass with a civil mass did not believe that the crowd could do away with religion altogether. They were no more advanced for the most part, no more secular, in our sense, than Robespierre himself. They both felt, at the suppression of all religion, a sort of moral fright, to use the expression of one of them, the Montagnard Baudot.

            The error of the historians holds still to the method, or rather to the absence of method with which they have attempted the study of a question where it already so difficult to be impartial, for it holds fast to our most intimate thoughts, to our own reasons for living; until the present revolutionary religions have been studied from only the political point of view, never from the religious point of view. Historians of right and left have considered the Religion of Reason as but a party enterprise. They have confounded its history with that of the Hébertistes. They have, in the same way, made of the Religion of the Supreme Being a chapter in the history of Robespierre and the Robespierriste party. They have denied to both of these religions the religious sentiment, which animated them at least as profoundly as the fossilized former churches.

            The error of the historians is understandable until a certain point. The revolutionary religions did not resemble other religions. Their essence was not a belief in the supernatural. The religion without mysteries, without sensitive revelation, is a religion without mysteries, without revelation, without fetishes, a religion in which the act of worship, faith, is applied not to a mystical object, but to the political institution itself, to the Patrie as was said, which is to say to the just and fraternal society, regulated by good laws, to the Patrie conceived as a source and instrument of happiness, of moral happiness as of material happiness. Revolutionary faith being linked to the Revolution itself faithfully reflected the entire political life of this tragic time. It is no reason to refuse it a religious character because it was applied, in effect, to a political object. A faith which entirely overtakes a man, which elevates him above the vulgarities of existence to render him capable of devotion and sacrifice is, still when it is applied to a secular ideal, a faith at least as respectable as all those which apply themselves to magical operations.

            I am ashamed to insist upon it. But the opinion according to which Robespierre was the creator of the Religion of the Supreme Being does not resist examination. The essence of revolutionary religion was the worship of the Republic, of Liberty, of Equality, new words whose prestige was still complete; the rest, the metaphysics, was accessory. Doubtless, a certain conception of society does not go without a corresponding conception of the Universe. Political convictions act and react upon philosophical convictions and reciprocally. Now, the great majority of the Conventionnels and almost the unanimity of Frenchmen believed in God. This did not prevent them from believing in the Patrie, the Patrie which was for them much less the national territory than the ideal society where the human race would one day find shelter. Robespierre, in placing the republican religion under the cover of the Supreme Being, was only translating the general sentiment and this was the reason for the enthusiasm he aroused.

            There was in the proposition he submitted to the Convention, 18 Floréal Year II, not the least novelty, part of invention, or even personal initiative. It was not on his motion that the Declaration of the Rights of Man which precedes the Constitution voted in June 1793 had been placed under the auspices of the Supreme Being. Since this date, which is to say for a year, the Supreme Being had been the Constitution. M. Aulard needs all his passion to suppose that André Pomme, the deputy from Cayenne who reclaimed from the month of April 1793 that the Supreme Being be maintained in the preamble to the declaration of rights, that André Pomme was an agent of Robespierre. M. Aulard expresses himself thusly:

            [In April 1793][3] “Robespierre did not yet dare to put himself in front and it was an obscure deputy from Cayenne, André Pomme, who tested the opinion. His failure adjourned the Incorruptible’s design to the moment when he believed his adversaries suppressed or tamed.”[4] André Pomme was so little Robespierriste that he abstained in the ballot by roll call on Marat’s arrest, while Robespierre not only voted against it, but protested at the tribune against the accusation. The hypothesis of M. Aulard is but a pure insinuation denuded of all resemblance to the truth. How can he represent Robespierre as nourishing, from April 1793, not only the design of establishing the Religion of the Supreme Being, but of suppressing the Dantonistes, when at this date Robespierre acted in accord with Danton, when it was still but a question of combating the Girondins? But M. Aulard poses in principle that Robespierre was a Tartuffe, very skilled at hiding his scheme! Who therefore has thus instructed him on Robespierre’s hidden agenda, what seer? For at last the documents tell us nothing of the sort. If the motion of André Pomme was not voted in April 1793, the Convention adopted it in June of the same year, which is to say one year before Robespierre reprised it on his account in Floréal Year II!

            If M. Aulard had been less blind on his chosen position, he would have understood that Robespierre, in Floréal Year II, far from taking a personal initiative, was only translating a wish neatly expressed by the Convention itself, a wish which the political situation demanded in any case.

            In Floréal Year II, the Committee of Public Safety just triumphed, not painlessly, over the double opposition of the Dantonistes and the Hébertistes executed in Germinal. It endeavored to prevent the return of the divisions against which it had had to struggle for several months. It had the ministers suppressed and replaced with commissions placed under its control. It more closely subordinated the representatives on mission to it: “in order,” said Couthon 17 Germinal, “to maintain unity of movements between them and to bring them all back to the center of the government.” It is this unity of action to realize which preoccupies the Committee and the Convention itself. Now, the representatives on mission complained in their correspondence that the measures relative to religions lacked unity and uniformity. They called for a general decree which would regulate the conditions of dechristianization and the establishment of republican festivals everywhere. Unity was not needed solely in the government, but also in the measures of execution, and still more in hearts, in spirits, in the countryside. The Committee of Public Safety decided to make right the desire very often manifested by most of the representatives on mission. 17 Germinal, Couthon—and not Robespierre, but, for M. Aulard, Couthon and Robespierre are one, as earlier André Pomme and Robespierre were one—Couthon announced to the Convention that the Committee of Public Safety would soon propose “a project for a festival each décade dedicated to the Eternal, the consoling idea of whom the Hébertistes have not taken away from the people.” Couthon’s words provoked applause. No one made the least objection.

            To understand the joy with which the Convention welcomed Couthon’s project, it must not only be remembered that the Assembly was in large majority deist, the necessities which the religious situation presented must be taken into account.

            Dechristianization was at this date already quite advanced, but not completed. The representatives on mission had invited the priests to abjure and transformed the disaffected churches into republican temples. They had attempted, with the aid of the popular societies, to replace Sunday with décadi and to make the former mass forgotten by a civic office. Their measures had not been concerted. They were rather different from each other. Here rest on décadi was rendered obligatory under pain of penalties for simple particulars. There rest on Sunday was tolerated. Here décadi was made a public holiday by the cares of the popular society, there the republican religion had for priests the municipal officers. Here, republican missionaries were named to evangelize the countryside, ordinarily in number of twelve, in memory of the twelve apostles of the Sans-Culotte Jesus. There, civic rituals, offices of the décade, patriotic religious weeks (The Décadaire of the Haut-Rhin, The Documents of Reason, etc.) were published.—Here, the martyrs of liberty, Marat, Chalier, Le Peletier, Brutus were worshiped, there, this worship was considered superstitious. Baptisms, marriages, burials were currently practiced with a secular ceremony, but this ceremony varied. They had to make these differences to regulate disappear, to organize the republican religion which had grown up until then at random. They also had to legalize it in some way. The republican calendar, instituted in October 1793, was but a skeleton. They needed to consecrate a particular civic festival to each décadi. They needed to distinguish the national festivals from the simple décadi festivals. It was time to systemize the incoherent and disjointed attempts. They said to themselves that Catholicism would not be definitively vanquished until it was replaced with an equivalent system, as well coordinated, as uniform, as regulated.

            For several months, the Committee of Public Instruction had been invited on several occasions to prepare a project for a decree which would bring to the celebration of civic festivals the order they were missing. The Committee worked on it. In Ventôse Year II, a deputy from Oise, Mathieu, presented in its name a unified work. He proposed instituting on the one hand five national festivals consecrated to recalling the memorable époques of the Revolution: 14 July, 10 August, 6 October, 21 January, 31 May; and on the other, as many special festivals as there were décadis in the year. Each of these décadi festivals would be “placed under the auspices of the Supreme Being and consecrated to a particular virtue.” It would be composed of discourses and hymns executed in “The temples of Reason” and of military and gymnastic exercises. Teachers would be held to bringing their pupils there.

            The Convention heard Mathieu’s report and decided that his project would be sent to the Committee of Public Safety for execution. It was in effect for the government, which is to say the Committee of Public Safety, to pronounce the last word in an affair of this importance. From 17 Germinal, Couthon announced, as we saw, that the Committee of Public Safety was taken with Mathieu’s project and that it was going to seek the methods to realize it.

            This simple historical fact shows us that, contrary to M. Aulard’s affirmations, it was not Robespierre who, on his own initiative, proposed the Religion of the Supreme Being. The resource will remain to Robespierre’s enemies of pretending that the Convention which ordered the Committee of Public Instruction to prepare the organization of décadi festivals, that the Committee which executed this, that Mathieu who set down his report in its name, that Couthon who gave it the Committee of Public Safety’s adhesion, were but marionettes that the Pontiff made move from the shadows!

            For the historian who keeps to the texts and who is not animated by hate, things present themselves in an entirely natural fashion. The Committee of Public Safety charged Robespierre with the report to present on the project elaborated by Mathieu, because for several months, Robespierre had been charged with all the reports concerning general politics.

            Robespierre limited himself to appropriating—changing almost nothing—Mathieu’s project, but he preceded it by a great report wherein he defined and justified the aim that the Republic proposed for itself in the institution of national festivals. Here again he was only recalling, in systemizing them, ideas that were then current, ideas very often put forth since the famous report that Talleyrand had consecrated to public instruction in the last days of the Constituent [Assembly], but he magnified them, these banal ideas, in a marvelous language of an admirable sincerity. Never was he greater. His discourse was listened to with a truly religious attention interrupted only from time to time by frenetic applause. The piece has the value of a testament, but it is not the testament of a man, it is the testament of a generation, of the one that made the first Republic and that believed by the Republic it would renew the world. As such, it merits that we stop an instant.

            The Revolution begins a new era in the history of humanity. There is the idea that Robespierre makes star! He makes of the Revolution at once the result of all anterior progress and that point of departure for all future progress. In a few brief sentences he notes the conquests of the human spirit:

            “The world has changed; it must continue to change. What is there in common between what is and what was? Civilized nations have succeeded savages wandering in the desert: fertile harvests have taken the place of the antique forests that covered the globe. A world has appeared beyond the limits of the world; the inhabitants of the earth have added the seas to their immense domain; man has conquered lightning and conjured it from the sky. Compare the imperfect language of hieroglyphs with the miracles of printing; contrast the voyage of the Argonauts with that of La Pérouse; measure the distance between the astronomical observations of the mages of Asia and the discoveries of Newton, or that between the outline traced by the hand of Dibutade and the tableaux of David.”

            What human reason did for the knowledge and utilization of nature, it must now accomplish for the happiness of societies, for there is a science of politics, like there is a science of the natural world:

            “Everything has changed in the physical order; everything must change in the moral and political order. Half of the world’s revolution is already done, the other half must be accomplished…”

            It is to France that the honor, the mission in some ways, returns to accomplish the political Revolution, to overturn the thrones which are supported by no more than “the line of the rich and of all the subordinate oppressors.” And Robespierre intones an elegy of revolutionary France:

            “The French people seem to have passed the rest of the human race by two thousand years; one would even be tempted to regard them, among them, as a different species. [The rest of] Europe is at its knees before the shadows of the tyrants that we punish.

            “In [the rest of] Europe, a laborer, an artisan is an animal trained for the pleasures of a noble; in France the nobles look to transform themselves into laborers and artisans, and cannot even obtain this honor.

            “[The rest of] Europe does not conceive that one can live without kings, without nobles; and we, that once can live with them.

            “[The rest of] Europe gives its blood to forge humanity’s chains, and we to break them.

            “Our sublime neighbors gravely look after the universe of the king’s health, of his diversions and voyages; they absolutely want to teach posterity at what time he dined, at what moment he returned from the hunt, which is the happy land which, at each instant of the day, had the honor of being tread by his august feet, which are the names of the privileged slaves who appeared in his presence at sunrise, at sunset.

            “We will teach it, we, the names and the virtues of the heroes who died fighting for liberty; we will teach it in which land the last satellites of the tyrants bit the dust; we will teach it at what time sounded the demise of the world’s oppressors.

            “Yes, this charming land, that we inhabit and that nature caresses with predilection, is made to be the domain of liberty and happiness; this sensitive and proud people are truly born for glory and virtue. O my Patrie! If destiny had decided that I be born in a far and foreign country, I would have addressed heaven with continual wishes for your posterity, I would have shed tender tears at the recital of your combats and your virtues; my attentive soul would have followed with an unquiet ardor the movements of your glorious revolution; I would have envied the fate of your citizens, I would have envied the fate of your representatives. I am French; I am one of your representatives… O sublime people! Receive the sacrifice of my entire being; happy is he who is born among you! Happier still he who can die for your happiness!”

            But France will fulfill its mission which is to deliver the world from kings and priests only if it applies the principles of strict justice in its own government. For Robespierre as for the philosophes of the 18^th century, politics is but a branch of morality, but morality in action:

            “The unique foundation of civil society is morality! ... Immorality is the basis of despotism, as virtue is the essence of the Republic…”

            Robespierre then shows that all the crises of the Revolution were caused by the more or less hidden agents of despotism, which is to say crime, by “Lafayette who invoked the Constitution to rebuild the royal power,” by Dumouriez “who invoked the Constitution to protect the Girondin faction against the National Convention,” by Brissot who wanted to make of the Constitution “a shield to fend off the blow which menaced the throne,” by “Hébert and his accomplices who reclaimed the people’s sovereignty to cut the throats of the National Convention and annihilate the republican government,” by Danton “arranging every crime, linked to every plot, promising scoundrels his protection, patriots his fidelity; skilled at explaining his betrayals on pretext of the public good…” Arriving then at his true subject, Robespierre sought ways to make these crises cease, and defining the principles which should guide the Convention and which it should make penetrate into the soul of the French to render them at last insensitive to the traps of despotism:

            “Consult only the good of the Patrie and the interests of humanity. Every institution, every doctrine that consoles and elevates souls must be welcomed; reject all those which tend to degrade and corrupt them. Revive, exalt all the generous sentiments and all the great moral ideas that some wanted to extinguish; bring together with the charm of friendship and the link of virtue the men some wanted to divide…”

            Otherwise stated, Robespierre put the criterion of the social utility of doctrines first and he advised the prescription of deism not so much because deism was a true doctrine but because it was a socially useful doctrine. He finds accents which are not without beauty to vaunt the social largesse of belief in God:

            “You who regret a virtuous friend, you like to think that the most beautiful part of him has escaped demise! You who cry over the coffin of a son or a wife, are you consoled by he who tells you that nothing remains of them but vile dust! Unfortunate who expires under the blows of an assassin, your last sigh is an appeal to eternal justice! Innocence on the scaffold makes the tyrant pale on his triumphal chariot: would this ascendancy be, if the tomb made equal the oppressor and the oppressed? Miserable sophist! By what right do you come to take from innocence the scepter of reason to return it to the hand so crime, throw a funereal veil over nature, make misfortune despair, make vice rejoice, sadden virtue, degrade humanity? The more a man is gifted with sensitivity and genius, the more he attaches himself to ideas which expand his being and elevate his heart; and the doctrine of men of this temper becomes that of the universe. Eh! How would these ideas not be truths? I do not conceive at least who nature could have suggested to man fictions more useful than all realities; and if the existence of God, if the immortality of the soul were but dreams, they would still be the most beautiful of all the conceptions of the human spirit.”

            As if he foresaw that someone was going to exploit against him all adhesion to deism and make a such a state of it as to represent him as a disguised Christian, as intolerant, Robespierre immediately added:

            “I have no need to observe that if it is not a question to put any philosophic opinion in particular on trail, or to contest that a given philosopher can be virtuous, whatever his opinions, and even in spite of them, by the force of a fortunate nature or a superior reason. It is only a question of considering atheism as national and linked to a system of conspiracy against the Republic.

            “Eh! What do the diverse hypotheses by which certain philosophers explain the phenomena of nature matter to you, legislators? You can abandon all these objects to their eternal disputes: it is as neither metaphysicians nor theologians, that you must envision them. In the eyes of the legislator, everything which is useful to the world and good in practice is the truth.”

            This declaration by which Robespierre maintained in principle the rights of free thought was not a pure oratorical precaution. Some days later, 26 Floréal, one of his friends, Julien fils, proposed to the Jacobins to drive the atheists from the Republic, according to Rousseau’s counsels and Robespierre opposed him energetically and with success.

---

[1] This is what I demonstrated in my Origins of Revolutionary Religions, Pars, Cornély, 1904.

[2] See the study on Robespierre and dechristianization in my book: The Revolution and the Church.

[3] [Insertion by Mathiez –Trans.]

[4] The Religion of Reason, 2^nd edition, p. 266.