Chapter 140. Reason Against the Altar: The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Laïcité

The French Revolution was the first time a European state set out to take apart the public power of Christianity and, briefly, to put a religion of its own making in its place. The library’s sources read this break in four ways. For Gustave Le Bon it was a new religion obeying the laws of every faith. For a Catholic-turned-Orthodox polemicist it was the secular offspring of the Reformation. For the Jesuit Augustin Barruel it was a conspiracy. For Mitchell Heisman the whole liberal-secular settlement is disguised Calvinism. This chapter follows the institutional chain from 1790 to 1905, sets French laïcité beside the American and European models, and gives each interpretation in its own words.

From the philosophes to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy

According to the reference shelf, secularism “first took shape in France during the French Revolution”. The abolition of the Ancien Régime in August 1789 ended ecclesiastical privilege. Article X of the Declaration of the Rights of Man held that “no one may be troubled for his opinions, even religious ones, provided that their expression does not disturb the public order established by law” [Wikipedia: History of secularism in France]. Church property was confiscated, and congregations were suppressed on 13 February 1790. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (12 July 1790) redrew dioceses along departmental lines and made bishops and priests elected officials. A clerical oath was imposed from January 1791, and Pius VI condemned these principles in March 1791. From 1792 “refractory” priests were treated as suspects, and under the Terror the constitutional Church was “also severely repressed” [Wikipedia: History of secularism in France].

Frank Schaeffer gives the background from an Orthodox-Christian standpoint. His Dancing Alone survives in the library only in Romanian and is catalogued under his father, Francis A. Schaeffer, although the title page names Frank. He writes that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “certain French philosophers began to ridicule all religion, even the idea that the supernatural exists, replacing such religious concepts with what they called ‘reason'”. He calls the Enlightenment the secularised “illegitimate child” of scholasticism, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which reduced Sola Scriptura to simply “Sola!“. The philosophes, he argues, “borrowed from Protestantism its subjectively utopian expectations” and moved “the idea of heavenly perfection towards earthly expectations of material and political progress”. They also took from the Calvinists “the reductionist-‘scientific’ approach to reality”. Perfection was now to be reached “here, on earth, by any possible means, however bloody” [Schaeffer, Dans de unul singur, #13578, ch. 6 “Iluminismul”].

Dechristianisation and the revolutionary cults

The reference shelf states that the Revolution, though it incited dechristianisation through its representatives on mission, “remained alien to the notion of secularism” and still wanted national unity to rest on a national religion. Hébert’s Cult of Reason “prefigures Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity”. Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being represented the deist tendency: “The idea of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul is a continual reminder of justice; it is therefore social and republican.” Neither cult won popular support. The repression of priests and the execution of the King (21 January 1793) fed the Chouan revolt and the Vendée war [Wikipedia: History of secularism in France]. The Cult of Reason was “France’s first established state-sponsored atheistic religion”. It held sway “barely a year” before the Cult of the Supreme Being officially replaced it in 1794 [Wikipedia: Cult of Reason]. The law of 21 January 1795 brought the first full separation: “The Republic does not pay salaries to any cult… The law recognizes no minister” [Wikipedia: History of secularism in France].

Jeffrey Webb places these years in a culture of suspicion that “eventually climaxed in the Reign of Terror”. He dates the Terror from early September 1793 to late July 1794, when the government “brought to trial and executed tens of thousands of people—including numerous Catholic priests” [Webb, Conspiracy Theories, #62861, “Conspiracy Theories in the French Revolution”].

Three readings: a new religion, a modern paganism, a conspiracy

Le Bon. The Revolution’s violence becomes comprehensible, Le Bon argues, only “if we consider that the French Revolution, constituting a new religion, was bound to obey the laws which condition the propagation of all beliefs. Its fury and its hecatombs will then become intelligible” [Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution, #364372, Part I, Book I, ch. 2 “Religious Revolutions”]. He credits Tocqueville with seeing that it spread “by means of preaching and propaganda” like a religious revolution [ibid., Part II]. For Le Bon the truth of revolutionary ideas is beside the point: “it is quite useless to seek to discuss… the rational value of revolutionary or political ideas. Only their influence can interest us.” He turns the same diagnosis on the anticlericals of his own day. He quotes a portrait of a minister who was a “sectary of the goddess Reason, of whom he has made a Moloch” and concludes: “We must hope for the sake of liberty that these gloomy fanatics will never finally become our masters” [ibid., Part I, Book II, ch. 2 “The Mystic Mentality and the Jacobin Mentality”].

Modern paganism. In The Bioethics of Regenerative Medicine, H. Tristram Engelhardt’s chapter (note 9) states: “The French Revolution produced a major rupture from and turning against Europe’s Christian past (Vovelle, 1991). As such, it was the culmination of the Enlightenment, which constituted a philosophes’ rebellion that issued in ‘a modern paganism, emancipated from classical thought as much as from Christian dogma’ (Gay, 1995)” [Ip (ed.), Bioethics of Regenerative Medicine, #33284, ch. 1]. In the same volume Ping-Cheung Lo follows the next step. He quotes Comte, for whom Positivism “becomes, in the true sense of the word, a Religion… destined therefore to replace all imperfect and provisional systems resting on the primitive basis of theology”. He also quotes Feuerbach: “while reducing theology to anthropology, [I] exalt anthropology into theology” [Lo, in Ip (ed.), #33284, ch. 3, “Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity”].

Barruel. Webb presents Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–1798) as “one of the seminal texts in the history of modern conspiracy theories”. Barruel was a Jesuit who refused the clerical oath and wrote in exile in England. He blamed a “triple conspiracy” of philosophes, Freemasons and Bavarian Illuminati, carried out by the Jacobin clubs, and promised to prove that “every thing was foreseen and resolved on, was combined and premeditated”. In his account the conspirators, “after having sworn to crush Christ and his altars, bound themselves in a second oath to annihilate all regal power”. Webb calls the work “a rather shabby analysis” by modern standards, and “an important starting point” for later Illuminati and Masonic theories [Webb, Conspiracy Theories, #62861, “The Illuminati Conspiracy Theory”; Profiles, “Augustin Barruel”]. (See Chapter 12.)

Concordat, Syllabus and the Separation Law of 1905

Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801 recognised Catholicism as the faith of “the vast majority” without making it a state religion. The clergy were salaried and bishops were nominated by the government. The reference shelf judges it “in many respects… more unfavorable to the Church than the Constitution civile du clergé”. Pius IX’s Syllabus (1864) condemned the proposition that “the Church must be separated from the State”. The Third Republic expelled the Jesuits (1880) and secularised schooling (1882). Under the 1901 associations law, 30,000 of 160,000 religious chose exile [Wikipedia: History of secularism in France].

The law of 9 December 1905 declares that “The Republic guarantees freedom of conscience” (Art. 1) and “does not recognize, salute or subsidize any religion” (Art. 2). René Viviani boasted: “we extinguished lights in the sky that will never be relit.” Pius X called separation “an absolutely false thesis, a very pernicious error” (Vehementer Nos). Alsace and Moselle were German in 1905 and remain under the Concordat [Wikipedia: History of secularism in France]. Kugelmann records Rome’s wider counter-offensive. Lamentabili (July 1907) listed sixty-five condemned propositions, and Pascendi condemned Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies” [Kugelmann, Psychology and Catholicism, #32134].

Comparing the models

Ted Jelen’s encyclopedia entry “Church and State” notes that several democracies “provide government support for religious bodies (such as subsidies for schools or clergy salaries), which would be considered a violation of the establishment clause in the United States. Indeed, several European nations have legally established churches.” He reports the thesis that such support “results in a decline in religious membership and practice, since government support reduces the need for churches to attract support”. In France and Turkey, laïcité “constitutes attempts by the government to reduce or eliminate the presence of religion in the public life of the nation” [Jelen, “Church and State”, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, #5201].

Karen Armstrong holds that “religion played a key role in the creation of the first modern secular republic”. After the American Revolution, however, God was mentioned in the state constitutions “only in the most perfunctory manner” and not at all in the federal Constitution [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. She calls the French Revolution’s legacy “Janus-faced”: liberty, equality and fraternity on one side and “a memory of malignant state terrorism” on the other. Her wider thesis is that fundamentalism “exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism or secularism, and, under attack, invariably becomes more extreme” [ibid.].

Adam Michnik, writing from communist Poland, separates two things that share a name. He sees “a fundamental difference between the aspiration toward a laicisation of public life, that is, a situation in which—from the point of view of the State—religion is a private affair of citizens, and the tendency toward atheisation, that is, the liquidation of religion and the Church”. The communist decrees sought “not the separation of Church and State, but the subordination of the Church by the State… to form an atheist nation” [Michnik, Scrisori din închisoare, #9364]. This is the bridge to Chapters 5 and 141.

Secular faith versus secularised theology

Christopher Hitchens’s subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything, states the militant case. He also corrects the “most popular misquotation of modern times”: Marx, he writes, “took belief very seriously” [Hitchens, God Is Not Great, #65383]. Martin Hägglund argues for a “secular faith”: “Marx emphasizes that the critique of religion must be accompanied by a critique of the existing forms of our life together”. If the poor need God, that is “a reason to abolish slavery and poverty” [Hägglund, This Life, #65982, ch. 6].

Heisman denies that the secular is secular at all. Following John Dunn, he calls Locke, “often… considered the single most important political philosopher behind the ideas of the American Revolution”, “basically a Calvinist natural theologian whose Two Treatises… are built on the axiom that ‘there exists a benevolent God'”. He concludes that “the formal separation of church and state in America is superficial and misleading. Liberal democracy legalized and institutionalized a neo-Christian moral ethos” [Heisman, suicide note, #38252, part 569]. He also argues that “Christianity economized the ethics of the West”, turning “the political arena from the arena of highest human virtue to the arena of the lowest” [Heisman, suicide note, #38252, part 193].

Key points

• The Revolution moved from toleration (1789) to state control of the Church (1790–91), then to the cults of Reason (1793) and the Supreme Being (1794). It first separated church and state in 1795 [Wikipedia: History of secularism in France].
• The Concordat (1801) restored a state-paid Church. The 1905 law ended recognition and subsidy, except in Alsace-Moselle.
• Le Bon reads the Revolution as “a new religion” and warns of secularist “gloomy fanatics” [#364372]. Engelhardt, citing Vovelle and Gay, calls it a rupture issuing in “a modern paganism” [#33284].
• Barruel’s Memoirs (1797–98), as Webb presents them, founded the philosophe-Masonic-Illuminati account of the Revolution [#62861].
• Frank Schaeffer derives the Enlightenment from Protestant utopianism [#13578]. Heisman derives liberalism from Calvinist natural theology through Locke [#38252].
• Jelen contrasts the US establishment clause with European subsidies and reports that state support may depress religious practice [#5201].
• Michnik separates laicisation from communist atheisation [#9364]. Hägglund grounds a secular faith in Marx [#65982].