revolution_fr | And Part Three (Reply)

M. Aulard wants to think that Robespierre in presiding over this beautiful festival “really believed that he inaugurated a new religion.”[1]

M. Aulard is however obliged to admit that contemporaries did not at all have this impression. He knows that people did not with for 18 Floréal or 20 Prairial to celebrate the Supreme Being. He even remarks that in Lunéville the Jacobins had organized the Religion of the Supreme Being, “before even the proclamation of the Religion of Reason,”[2] as if there had been an official proclamation of the Religion of Reason! He himself cites many testimonies establishing that the decree of 18 Floréal was welcomed in the provinces “as the consequence of the ceremony of 20 Brumaire,” which is to say the consequence of the Festival of Reason. M. Aulard even admits that “in fact, a large part of France seemed to be unaware of the religious revolution attempted by Robespierre.”[3] A singular religious revolution unseen by contemporaries, but that M. Aulard has been able to discover thanks to Thermidorian pamphlets!

The truth is that there was no religious revolution at that moment. The religious revolution had taken place in Brumaire when the priests abdicated. In Floréal, Robespierre offered his services to consolidate this religious revolution on the way to completion, quite far from provoking another. We know the object for which he offered his services by the discourse that he pronounced 18 Floréal and that we analyzed earlier. We also know it by a letter that Robespierre’s friend Payan, national agent of the Paris Commune, wrote him the day after that same 18 Floréal: this decree, Payan said, “will rally the patriots of uncertain and divided provinces to the same doctrine: it does not create a religion and priests, but proves that the legislators do not want to take from the people the consoling dogma of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.” To rally the divided patriots around a common doctrine and around the government was the premier object for which Robespierre offered his services as a simple organ of the Committee of Public Safety and the Convention itself. The patriots were divided or rather disoriented by the double execution of the Dantonistes and the Hébertistes; it was necessary to make their doubts, their hesitations cease, they needed to be offered a rallying point. How? On the one hand, in proving to the most determined of the dechristianizers that the reign of the priests was past and well past, that the national festivals now organized were going to definitively replace the abolished Catholic offices; on the other hand, in making citizens, still Catholic yesterday, forget their former religion through festivals which would overtake the Catholic ceremonies in esthetic magnificence as in moral virtue.

Robespierre’s friend Payan put this double aim in perfect relief in an address presented to the Convention in the name of the Commune, 25 Floréal:

“It is not a religion that you have created, but simple, eternal principles that the recent memory of the superstition of atheism put you in the place of recalling to men… It is in vain that spite will endeavor to persuade that your innocent decree will make the hideous monster of fanaticism leave its bloody tomb; the legislator who proposed it has, in his report, likened the priests to kings. According to this quite fair idea, there will not be a great number of citizens who might desire to be priests today. Who is he who does not prefer simple, eternal principles like nature to a mystical, inexplicable religion? A just and generous God to the God of the priests…”[4]

Otherwise stated, for Payan, a faithful interpreter of Robespierre’s thoughts, the decree of 18 Floréal sounds the death-knell for Catholicism. The system of national festivals it puts in their place is not, properly speaking, a religion, for there will be no republican priests to celebrate the décadi offices; what the Convention institutes is but a political and social morality, but a sublime morality which keeps all the good effects of religion without the vices.

Robespierre could believe he had obtained the object he had proposed: to rally the Catholic patriots and the philosopher-patriots in the same worship of the Republic and of God. Felicitations flooded the Convention. The Commission of dispatches that received the addresses declared that the decree of 18 Floréal “excited the universal acclamations of the people.”[5]

The most violent of the dechristianizers were not the last to applaud. Lequinio, who had, in Rochefort, in Brumaire, denied the afterlife, now fervently praised Robespierre’s report. “He was,” he said, “applauded at each phrase. We would have liked to applaud him every time he imprinted elevated sentiments worthy of liberty in our souls.” The poet Sylvain Maréchal, one of the most determined atheists of the time, spoke forceful elegies of the festival of 20 Prairial.[6]

If the dechristianizers thus congratulated themselves, it was not, as is insinuated, by flattery for the dictator: they had serious reasons to be satisfied. Dechristianization continued with a heightened vigor. It rather seemed that the reminder of freedom of religion inserted into the decree of 18 Floréal had but the value of principle, of expectation. It is after 18 Floréal that “they preceded to the closing of the greatest number of churches.” M. Aulard observes this, and we can believe it of him.[7] “The forced defrocking,” he repeats, “became in some places more frequent than in Hébert’s time.”[8] It is true that M. Aulard adds that it was despite Robespierre that these churches were closed, these priests defrocked, but as usual, he gives not the least beginnings of proof to support his insinuation. If Robespierre was really the dictator, the pontiff that he depicts, he would have doubtless prevented, hampered the irremediable fall of Catholicism. If he did not do this, it is because either he was not a dictator or he did not wish to. We have no reason to doubt the sentiments of aversion he expressed so highly and so often in regard to priests. He was not one of those anti-clericals who eats the priest with his words after drinking and then helps himself to his ministry. He had not practiced since collège, to the great scandal of his cassock-wearing teachers. One cannot reproach him, as one can Danton, with not having put his life in accord with his principles.

What is true is that Robespierre blamed useless and disastrous violence. What is true is that he tried to rally Catholics to the Revolution and that he succeeded there in large measure. His friend Payan said, the day after the festival of 20 Prairial, before the Paris Commune: “All citizens were satisfied by the simple and natural religion rendered to the Supreme Being, they regretted neither their priests, nor their superstitions, they promised to cherish virtue and liberty; they believed their debt toward the Divinity and the Patrie satisfied. The sentiment of fraternity united every heart…” Other testimonies prove that this union, this reconciliation that Payan observed in Paris, was also produced in the rest of the country. In Lyon, the pious city, the festival was celebrated with general enthusiasm. It was the same more or less everywhere.

Far from having favored Catholicism, the decree of 18 Floréal seemed to have brought the last blow against it and completed the work commenced in haste 20 Brumaire. The foreigners were not mistaken. The royalist pamphleteer Mallet du Pan wrote in his Memoirs: “The Festival of the Supreme Being produced an extraordinary effect outside: it was truly believed that Robespierre was going to close the abyss of the Revolution.”[9]

Alas! If Robespierre had been able to gather the majority of Frenchmen in the same patriotic sentiment, this instant was brief and his triumph short-lived. Calumny, envy, fear, and crime were going to ruin his work and the Republic itself.

The corrupt members of the assembly that he had had recalled from their missions in the departments and who threatened or importuned his rigid probity saw a way to cast ridicule upon the just one whom they feared and hated in the Festival of the Supreme Being. They were no less deist for the most part than Robespierre himself and, after they had overthrown him, they were well wary of revoking the decree of 18 Floréal and repudiating the Supreme Being. Many ended up in the exact position of repented and zealous religious men. But, in the meantime, they spread the rumor that Robespierre was nothing but a disguised Catholic, that he aimed to reestablish the constitutional clergy and make an instrument of domination out of it. They treated him among themselves as a pontiff. Some of them, like Bourdon de l’Oise and Lecointre, even quietly hissed abuses at him at the festival of 20 Prairial. The members of the Committee of General Security mounted the war machine called the Catherine Théot Affair a few days later, in hopes of compromising Robespierre with an old inoffensive religious woman.[10] In short, they launched the legend which has had but too much luck, since it is repeated today by historians judged accredited.

The legend can now be appreciated. I will be paid for my pains, if I have convinced some of my readers that it is time to rehabilitate the statesman who, from the beginning to the end of his political career, had but one passion, that of the public good and who approached the high ideal he had fixed for himself with an admirable and comforting rectitude of thought and action. Robespierre loved the people, the true people with calloused hands and warm hearts, with a profound and disinterested love. He loved them even as far as their weaknesses, their prejudices. He understood that to elevate the Revolution and detach them from their superstitions, they needed to not strike head-on with a secular mentality, to shake their fundamental beliefs with one blow. He strived to present the necessary emancipation in the least troubling form in their understanding. He spoke to them in the only language which was accessible to them.

One can think what one likes of Robespierre’s deism. Let it be found outdated, worn-out; I do not contradict this, but he facilitated the passage between exclusive and tyrannical Catholicism and free thought. He was a necessary step. What injustice as well to reproach Robespierre for his deism when the same reproach is not addressed to his adversaries, when for these, notably for this so difficult Danton, every indulgence is given. One cannot make it a crime for Robespierre to have been of his time. One must take into consideration, a very great consideration for the fact that he always subordinated his religious ideals to his social ideals. He loved God less than the people and he only loved God because he believed him indispensable to the people.

[1] The Religion of Reason, p. 323.

[2] Ibid., p. 333.

[3] Ibid., p. 346.

[4] AULARD, The Religion of Reason, p. 286.

[5] 14 Prairial (The Monitor, XX, 633). Cf. also 7 Prairial (The Monitor, XX, 573).

[6] In his Tableau of Revolutionary Events, published in Year III.

[7] Political History of the Revolution, p. 480.

[8] The Religion of Reason, p. 353.

[9] Cited by Hamel, History of Robespierre, t. III, p. 544.

[10] I studied the Catherine Théot Affair in my Contributions to the Religious History of the Revolution, Alcan, 1906.