The French Revolution and Atheism: An Assessment
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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
IF ANY EVENT signals the dawn of the golden age of atheism in the West, it is the French Revolution of 1789. Generations of accumulated popular resentment and intellectual hostility against king and church could finally be contained no longer. The storming of the Bastille on July 14 of that year was widely seized upon as an icon of liberation, symbolizing the sweeping aside of an old order based on superstition and oppression. A brave new world lay ahead, firmly grounded in nature and reason, and equally firmly committed to the liberation of humanity from “tyranny” and “superstition.” The wisdom of the day was as simple as it was powerful: eliminate God, and a new future would dawn. It was a vision that thrilled many across Europe, drawing aside a curtain from a once-forbidden world, which now seemed about to become reality.
In 1804 the young English poet William Wordsworth penned words that captured something of this contagious sense of optimism and hope amongst the youth of Europe. The French Revolution had shattered the tired old political framework of Europe, sweeping away its outdated, tradition-bound practices and beliefs, and opening the way to a bright new future. A new dawn seemed to be at hand, promising I to usher in an era of hope and opportunity. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” Wordsworth’s feelings were echoed by many young people throughout Western Europe. Here, at long last, was something new, something liberating, which a repressed and disillusioned youth could embrace. The future seemed to belong to them. True, his enthusiasm and faith in human nature were dampened significantly with news of the Reign of Terror—a violent period that the literary critic and commentator William Hazlitt castigated as one of “hatred and scorn.” Yet there is no doubt that many in nineteenth-century Britain believed that the French Revolution opened the way to intellectual liberation, especially in eliminating archaic and oppressive religious ideas.
Atheism suddenly became conceivable, and there were many across Europe who now began to explore its secret byways. Having ventured from the straight and narrow way of Christian orthodoxy, some returned, chastened and appalled by what lay beyond its well-trodden path. Yet others stayed to savor and embrace a brave new world, which they found as exciting as their elders found it shocking. This new world order would owe its origins to that French Revolution, now seen by many as marking a turning point in the history of the world.
So how did this revolution begin? And how did its association with atheism take shape? We may begin our story by considering some of the failings that led many to conclude that the violent overthrow of the past was the only way of securing the future.
Louis XVI ascended the throne of France in 1774 at the age of twenty. He inherited a financial crisis that proved uncontainable. Punitive taxation and the perception of extravagance at court caused a surge in popular anger against the monarch. Things were made much worse by growing hostility toward his queen, Marie Antoinette, who was widely portrayed as sexually rapacious and frustrated by her husband’s sexual incompetence. Unlike her shy, awkward husband, Marie Antoinette was admired for her beauty, grace, and elegance. Where she led, the fashion trends of Europe followed. Yet her extravagant lifestyle and the enormous sums spent on her pleasure palace, the Petit Trianon in the park of Versailles, earned her increasing criticism. She was known as Madame Déficit, plundering state funds while the people starved. Her Austrian origins proved to be just as much a problem as her personal extravagances. The fact that France had been at war with Austria for much of the century did not endear her to the older families of the nation.
The unpopularity of the monarchy reached new heights in the closing months of 1788. The disastrous harvest of that year gave way to the coldest winter in living memory. France was faced with a food crisis severe enough to cause a famine, with a failed economy and a despised monarchy. By the spring it was obvious that something had to give. Things could not go on like this. In desperation, an embattled Louis XVI summoned the Estates General on May 4, 1789. It would prove his undoing.
Traditionally, French society was divided into three estates, which collectively made up the Estates General: the First Estate, consisting of the aristocracy; the Second Estate, made up of the clergy; and the Third Estate, consisting of the middle-class bourgeoisie. The church and monarchy devoted their attention to the first two estates and treated the middle classes with complete contempt. The alienation of the Third Estate was vividly highlighted in 1789, the year of the French Revolution itself, by the clergyman Abbé Sieyès (Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, 1748–1836), when he posed his three great questions: “What is the Third Estate? Everything! What has it been until now at the political level? Nothing! What does it want? To be something!” An alienated middle class—the economic engine of the nation—demanded change. In the end, it obtained a more radical shake-up than it had anticipated.
Yet however much the origins of the French Revolution may owe to widespread disaffection with the monarchy within the middle classes, an equally significant groundswell of opinion was building up within the sophisticated and elegant salons of Paris—namely, that the church was an outmoded institution that rested on demonstrably false ideas. As the church lent religious support to the monarchy, a new interest in undermining its distinctive ideas would have far-reaching implications for church and state. Atheism began to emerge as a worldview capable of challenging the settled world of France.
VOLTAIRE: CRITIC OF A CORRUPT CHURCH
A disgruntled Catholic priest, Jean Meslier (1678–1733), is usually identified as one of the first serious advocates of atheism in France. Meslier served as curé of Étrépigny and But in the Champagne region of France. On his death, Meslier’s Testament was published. This long and rambling work vigorously denounced the church as a complete fraud, maintained only by ludicrous ideas, a totally dishonest priesthood, and a credulous people. On the pretext of helping people to get to heaven, priests and bishops cause them to have a miserable time on earth. The Old Testament is full of nonsense that only a fool would believe. Christianity is morally corrupt, degenerate, and intellectually risible.
Yet was Meslier actually an atheist? While his Testament consists of page after page of denunciation of Christian beliefs and practices, it does so on the assumption that Christianity is a sect that has distorted the true knowledge of God, available to every human being through nature and reason. Meslier appeals to the true God of “natural religion” to overcome the Christian perversion of the true faith of nature and reason: “I shall finish by asking God, if outraged by this sect, to see fit to recall us to natural religion, of which Christianity is the sworn enemy—to that holy religion which God has set in the hearts of all people, which requires of us to do nothing to others that we would not do for ourselves. Then the world would be made up of good citizens, righteous fathers, obedient children, and caring friends. God gave us this religion in giving us reason. May fanaticism never pervert it!”
Meslier’s words are an important reminder that the terms “anti-Christian” and “atheist” are most emphatically not identical, even though the religious situation in eighteenth-century France led to a confluence of their agendas. Both, after all, were hostile toward the French church and sought to undermine its institutions and ideas. The real animus behind Meslier’s hatred of Christianity is his passionate belief that it has corrupted the beautiful and sacred natural religion that God intended for all people, distorting it through false ideas and forcing it to serve the ends of a degenerate institution and its fraudulent priests.
Most radical French philosophers of the eighteenth century are actually to be categorized not as atheists but as Deists—that is, supporters of an ideal philosophical notion of God, based on reason or nature, rather than a more specifically Christian view of the matter. Denis Diderot (1713–84), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), and Voltaire (1694–1778)—all of whom are regularly stereotyped as atheists—are clearly best regarded as Deists. Voltaire regarded atheism with about as much enthusiasm as he did the teachings of the Christian church. In the place of both he urged the reconstruction of religion on the basis of the Supreme Being disclosed in nature. As Voltaire wrote in 1768:
If the heavens, stripped of their noble imprint,
Could ever cease to reveal Him,
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,
Whom the sage proclaims, and whom kings adore.
Many atheist apologists have fallen into the habit of only citing the third sentence of this citation, thus making Voltaire appear as a precursor of Freud’s view of God as wish fulfillment. In fact, Voltaire defended the notion of a supreme being, known through intelligent reflection on the natural world, who has been hijacked and distorted by the world’s religions in general and warring Christian sects in particular. This is clear from his Letter to Uranie (1722; published 1732), in which he offered a strong defense of the existence of a supreme being, who was inadequately and falsely represented by the great positive religions of the world, especially the French Catholic church and its leading representatives. Voltaire’s criticism is directed primarily and vigorously against the French church of his day. His fighting slogan—Écrasez l’infâme (“Eliminate infamy!”)—was directed specifically against the hierarchy, morality, and distinctive ideas of French Catholicism. He justified the belligerency of his approach by insisting that one simply could not tolerate intolerance.
Voltaire was joined in his anti-Catholic crusade by many who were atheists in the strict sense of the term—such as Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709–51), Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Holbach (1723–89), and Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–71). Yet this must not be taken as evidence that Voltaire himself was an atheist. The political realities of the situation were such that a coalition of forces gathered to combat the power and corruption of the church, setting their disagreements over the existence of God to one side in order to focus on the task at hand. Yet, as Voltaire’s celebrated article on “atheism” in the definitive Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers makes unequivocally clear, he regarded atheism and French Catholicism with equal loathing. Is it any wonder, he asked, that there are atheists in the world, when the church behaves so abominably?
Voltaire’s satirical masterpiece Candide (1759) is a witty and powerful criticism of the French Catholic church of his day. He argues that the church has added a series of degenerate notions to a true belief in God. As a result, the church hierarchy has become so busy defending these absurd ideas that it has lost sight of the fundamental belief in God that underlies true religion. Although refraining from any criticism of God in Candide, Voltaire has no hesitation in poking mischievous fun at the Catholic hierarchy. Thus when Candide—the naive antihero of the novel—arrives in the fabled El Dorado and discovers that the local inhabitants are very interested in talking about God, he asks to be introduced to some of their priests. He is informed that there is no need for them. In El Dorado everyone is a priest. Candide is astonished:
“What! Do you not have any monks to teach, to argue, to rule over you, to have intrigues, and to burn people who do not agree with them?”
“We would have to become fools to let that happen,” replied the old man. “Here we are of the same opinion and do not understand what you mean with your monks.”
Voltaire’s critique of the excesses and blatant immorality of the French church of his day was certainly not intended to encourage atheism; indeed, Voltaire’s constant demand, Écrasez l’infâme, can be seen as an attempt to remove the cause of atheism. Eliminate the immorality, power, and corruption of the church, and what reason for atheism remains? Voltaire’s writings are a powerful testimony to the way in which institutional criticism of the church could easily be transposed to criticism of the ideas of the Christian faith—in other words, to atheism. Yet Voltaire, for all his many savage criticisms of the French religious establishment of his day, did not himself espouse atheism. Atheism, for Voltaire, remains an excessive reaction against a corrupt church, not a positive philosophy in its own right.
Voltaire’s insight is of fundamental importance to our study of the emergence of atheism. His argument is simple: the attractiveness of atheism is directly dependent upon the corruption of Christian institutions. Reform those institutions and the plausibility of atheism is dramatically reduced. To explore the relevance of this point, we may ask a very simple question: Why did the American Revolution show no interest in atheism, when its French equivalent did?
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: RADICAL REFORM WITHOUT ATHEISM
One of the most remarkable features of the American Revolution was that the overthrow of British colonial power was not accompanied by any serious move toward atheism. Some of its leading representatives—including George Washington himself—were unorthodox by the religious standards of their day; others were clearly of a Deist, rather than traditional Christian, persuasion. Yet the Revolution lacked the antireligious dimension so characteristic of its later French and Russian counterparts. Why?
Perhaps the most obvious answer is also the most satisfying. Many of the settlers of the Eastern Seaboard of North America were descended from religious refugees from England, especially during the reign of Charles I. Their strong Puritan religious convictions, which were initially the cause of their eviction from England, now became the basis of their individual and corporate life in the New World. They watched with delight as their brethren in England overthrew a tyrannical monarchy opposed to their understanding of the true faith, and with horror as that monarchy was restored under Charles II. The North American colonies, especially in the Massachusetts Bay area, were strongholds of precisely those forms of Christianity that the authorities had tried to suppress in England.
The American Revolutionaries saw themselves as called to break the spiritual and temporal power of the Church of England in America. Like their forebears at the time of the English Civil War, they saw the conflict as a moment of purification, a time in which the true identity of a nation would be shaped. The battle was not between Christianity and atheism, but between a compromised state church and a pure gospel church. It would be a battle for the soul of America. While some Revolutionaries had economic and political goals, others had religious objectives—objectives that demanded the purification of religion, not its elimination. The constitutional separation of church and state can be argued to rest upon a fundamental desire to prevent any specific form of Christianity from defining the establishment, after the manner of the Church of England, which was widely regarded as corrupt and degenerate in American republican circles. Yet political republicanism was not seen as entailing atheism. Was not Calvin’s Geneva, that city of God set upon a hill for all to see and imitate, itself a republic? And might not republicanism and the cause of true religion thus be united, where in England they were seen as divided?
Yet the French Revolution was fundamentally different in character. Instead of throwing off the yoke of a colonial power, the Revolutionaries saw themselves as deposing oppressive institutions within their own nation. For American republicans, Christianity—in various forms—motivated and guided their struggle. It was their ally. The French Revolutionaries saw it as their enemy, a power that gave legitimation and support to those who opposed the will of the people and that claimed divine support for the status quo. It was an institution that had to be neutralized. The great debate of the age concerned how the power of the church might be blunted. It was an old controversy. Yet a new answer now came to be taken with increasing seriousness.
THE RISE OF FRENCH ATHEISM
Voltaire, like many other French writers of the eighteenth century, was able to criticize the many failings of the church without denying the existence of its God. Others, however, were more than content to advance an atheist agenda, where Voltaire and others had held back. The real atheism of this period is to be found in the writings of La Mettrie, d’Holbach, and Helvétius. Whereas Voltaire and his Deist colleagues sought to rearrange existing understandings of the relation of the transcendent to everyday life, these more radical writers sought to eliminate the transcendent altogether.
D’Holbach’s Système de la Nature (1770) illustrates this trend particularly well. The guiding principle underlying the work is that any attempt to understand nature must be based upon reason and experience. On applying these faculties to nature, it becomes clear that there is no reason to propose a God to explain the observed ordering of nature. Whereas Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had argued that the regularity of planetary motions was evidence of divine design and governance of the universe, d’Holbach argued that they could be accounted for on purely materialist grounds. Belief in God is the product of a misguided human imagination, not the rigorous scientific application of the senses. The rigorous application of scientific approach should therefore lead to atheism.
An atheist is someone who destroys human chimeras in order to call people back to nature, experience and reason. He is a thinker who, having meditated on matter, its properties and ways of behaving, has no reason to imagine ideal forces, imaginary intelligences or rational beings in order to explain the phenomena of the universe or the operations of nature—which, far from making us know nature better, merely make it capricious, inexplicable and unknowable, useless for human happiness.
Science liberates humanity from false ideas of supernatural powers or beings. Ignorance of nature gave birth to the idea of God, just as a deeper knowledge of nature allows humanity to destroy this idea and the evils resulting from it. It is in this line of argument that we can discern the development of the more radical form of atheism that dominated the golden age.
THE FAILED PHILOSOPHICAL ATTEMPTS TO DEFEND GOD
Curiously, a significant contribution to the rise of this hard-nosed atheism lay in developments within French religious philosophy during the seventeenth century. Aware of possible threats to Christianity from radical philosophical critics, writers such as Marin Marsenne (1588–1648) and René Descartes (1596–1650) set out to make belief in God invulnerable to skeptical assault. Descartes is a figure of immense importance to our study, as he is widely regarded as laying the foundations for modernity. True knowledge was universal and necessary, capable of being demonstrated with absolute certainty. Having established this criterion of truth, Descartes set out to demonstrate the existence of God with precisely this degree of certainty. To his critics, Descartes merely managed to show that, by his own criteria, God’s existence seemed rather unlikely.
Convinced that the scientific discoveries of their day could be harnessed to serve the needs of the church, Descartes and his colleagues abandoned any appeal to religious experience in their defense of their faith. The secure proofs of religion lay in philosophy and the natural sciences—in the reasoning of this world rather than the intrusion of the next. Philosophy alone could establish the necessity and plausibility of the Christian faith.
With the benefit of hindsight, this was not a particularly wise strategy. The English experience suggested that nobody really doubted the existence of God until theologians tried to prove it. The very modest success of these proofs led many to wonder if God’s existence was quite as self-evident as they had once thought. A well-meaning defense of God ended up persuading people that the case for God was surprisingly uncertain. Descartes’s failed defense of God led to the widespread conclusion that every attempt to prove God’s existence was either contradictory or unintelligible as a matter of principle, because this God simply cannot be related to the world of everyday experience.
Descartes’s was a brave and bold strategy, which backfired spectacularly. Historically, it can be shown that arguments used by French atheists against religion in the late eighteenth century were borrowed from religious writers who had previously sought to eliminate atheism. This hitherto unprecedented denial of God developed out of the very strategies employed to defend Christianity a century earlier. Descartes and his colleagues proposed that a perfect divine being was the best explanation of the universe. Yet by doing so, they opened the way to the response that the universe was perfectly capable of explaining itself, and they also heightened awareness of one of the Christian faith’s greatest vulnerabilities—the problem of evil. If God is supremely perfect, why do suffering and pain exist, causing such distress to humanity? One of Descartes’s most significant achievements was to make what had hitherto been a practical issue of Christian spirituality (how can I cope with suffering?) into a disconfirmation of the faith. How could anyone believe in a perfect divine being, when the world was so clearly imperfect?
The situation was made even worse for faith by the breathtakingly pointless and petty arguments within the French church over the best way of refuting atheism. The pages of such popular learned journals as Journal des Sçavans, Journal de Trévoux, and Nouvelles de la République des Lettres were filled with articles by contentious Christian apologists, each denouncing his rivals with even greater venom than the atheism he meant to combat. The Christian faith could be vindicated in many ways; in their anxiety to demonstrate that their specific technique was the best, Christian apologists began by destroying the defenses erected by others, only to find their own torn to shreds in the next issue of Journal des Sçavans. The curious reader of such works gained the impression that the defenders of the faith were locked in a ferocious self-defeating vendetta, with the “atheism” that was meant to be under sustained assault actually emerging as the covert victor.
Up to this point, atheist writers had made an increasingly good case in arguing that their philosophy was probably true, and that it would undermine the power and influence of a corrupt church and monarchy. Yet might this new philosophy prove as tedious as the rather dull works of theology that it sought to replace? For at least one of its more enthusiastic advocates, atheism had the immense advantage of adding a little spice to some aspects of life that cardinals, monks, and priests were not meant to know about. D’Holbach made atheism credible; the Marquis de Sade made it interesting.
THE MARQUIS DE SADE AND THE ORIGINS OF EROTIC ATHEISM
In 1748, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie published L’homme machine, his best-known work. Its theme is simple: human happiness depends upon the triumph of atheism, which alone can liberate humanity from tyranny, war, and oppression—all of which have religious roots. Although La Mettrie clearly believes that there are excellent intellectual reasons for espousing an atheist worldview, the dominant argument deals with its wider consequences. One of the speakers in L’homme machine represents this view as follows: “If atheism were generally accepted, every form of religion would be destroyed, and cut off at its roots. There would be no more theological wars, no more soldiers of religion—such terrible soldiers! Nature, having been infected with sacred poison, would regain its rights and purity. Deaf to all other voices, tranquil mortals would follow only the spontaneous dictates of their own being, the only commands which . . . can lead us to happiness.” While La Mettrie presumably had political and social emancipation in mind, one of his contemporaries was not slow to note that adopting atheism might have rather interesting consequences in another area of human activity.
As might be expected, one of the more entertaining affirmations of atheism came from the pen of Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade (1740–1814), known simply as the Marquis de Sade. De Sade initially pursued a military career, serving during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). A classic example of the eternal rebel, he went on to lead the life of a libertine, including sexual gratification through the infliction of pain. He was imprisoned at Vincennes, then in the infamous Bastille in Paris, and finally in the insane asylum at Charenton. During his time in prison he wrote most of his more scandalous works, setting out some of the themes of sadism.
Perhaps having concluded that most atheist propaganda of his day was worthy yet hopelessly pedestrian, de Sade decided to liven things up. His Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man invites us to imagine a priest summoned to hear the confession of someone close to death. The priest offers to absolve this sinner, on condition that he repent. A robust theological conversation follows, in which the dying man dismisses belief in God as repressive superstition. Obedience to natural desires is what really matters. The priest has simply invented his god as a means of legitimating his own passions and suppressing those of others. The dying man regards the rejection of God as the first stage in human enlightenment, removing the only barrier that prevents humanity from really enjoying its vices.
Your god is a machine you fabricated to serve your passions; you manipulated it so that it suited them—but the moment it interfered with mine, I kicked it out of my way, and was glad that I did so . . . Nature shaped my soul, which is the result of the dispositions she formed in me while pursuing her own ends and needs. And as she needs vices just as much as virtues, whenever she wanted to arouse me to evil, she did so, just as whenever she wanted a good deed from me, she roused in me the desire to perform one. I just did as I was instructed.
The dying man—who clearly speaks for de Sade himself—insists that abandoning faith in God is the first step to enjoying life. There is no life to come, he argues; only a life in the present, which we ought to enjoy as much as possible.
My friend, sensuality means more to me than anything else. I have idolized it all my life and my wish has been to end it in its bosom. My end draws near. But six women more beautiful than the light of day are waiting in the next room. I have reserved them for exactly this moment. Why not share in this feast with me? Why not follow my example, and embrace them instead of the empty sophistries of superstition? And let their caresses help you to forget your hypocritical beliefs for a while.
So the dying man rings a bell, and is promptly joined by the six ravishing beauties he has promised. The priest proves unequal to the task of resisting them. “After he had been a little while in their arms the preacher became one whom Nature had corrupted, all because he had not succeeded in explaining what a corrupt nature is.”
In 1793 de Sade developed this theme of the sexually repressive effects of belief in God a little further. In his dialogue Philosophy in the Bedroom he asks his readers to imagine a fifteen-year-old nun who abandons faith in God and discovers in his place such delights as sodomy, incest, and flagellation. De Sade intersperses his erotic tableaux with speeches supporting atheism and the ideals of the French republic. The idea of God is firmly presented as an outmoded superstition that merely gets in the way of enjoying life to the full. Admittedly, some just read the book for its dirty bits and skipped the sermonizing. But the link was clear: atheism made sexual experimentation legitimate and interesting.
Yet it was the social and political aspects of atheism that attracted the attention of many French radical thinkers in the 1780s. If there was no God, then there was no limit to human action, no divinely determined social or political order that had to be respected and perpetuated. Without the restraining influence of the idea of God, anything was possible, including the creation of a new society, liberated from the oppressive rule of the Bourbon monarchy and the French church. As Diderot commented, France would not be free until the last of its kings had been strangled with the entrails of its last priest. Atheism promised liberation and encouraged revolution. And it would not be long before promise turned to reality.
THE CRITIQUE OF CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST PHASE
In the 1780s, just prior to the Revolution, there was immense enthusiasm in the Parisian salons for reform, as well as optimism concerning the future. Many intellectuals expected constitutional reform to emerge as a matter of course, and seem to have had no idea of the cataclysmic events that awaited them. The past could be set aside without undue difficulty, and a more positive future created without formidable obstacles. This revolutionary optimism of the immediate pre-Revolutionary period is well caught in the memoirs of Louis-Philippe Ségur (1753–1830): “Without regret for the past or anxiety for the future, we walked gaily on a carpet of flowers that concealed an abyss . . . All that was ancient seemed to us wearisome and ridiculous. The gravity of old doctrines oppressed us. The laughing philosophy of Voltaire amused and entranced us . . . We were ready to follow with enthusiasm the philosophical doctrines advanced by bold and brilliant leaders. Voltaire appealed to our intelligence, Rousseau touched our hearts.”
At the religious level, there was widespread discussion of the issues. One of the more interesting aspects of the French Revolution is that some French Catholic clergy appear to have genuinely regarded it as a divine reform of their church, perhaps along the lines of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Claude Fauchet, for example, preached a sermon at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris on February 4, 1791, in which he declared the Revolution to be a “divine work” that demonstrated the “accord of religion and liberty.” There is no doubt that some clergy believed that the basic structures and beliefs of their church could be maintained; the real problems, in their view, lay in the way in which the church had failed the French people, both morally and pastorally.
Other Christian writers took quite different views. Count Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), a strong defender of both royalism and papal authority in France, increasingly took the view that the Revolution was a divine judgment on a flawed church and corrupt nation. Like many French churchmen at the time, de Maistre was aware of—indeed, sympathetic to—the need for reform within church and monarchy, and initially welcomed the summoning of the Estates General in 1789. But he was appalled by the radical course of events. In his Considérations sur la France (1797), de Maistre construed the Revolution as both a divine punishment and a providentially ordained means for the regeneration of France. On the basis of this theological interpretation of the Revolution, he was able both to condemn the Revolution and the ideas it embodied, and to simultaneously view it as a necessary prelude to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
In any case, Fauchet’s was decidedly a minority view. Two rival viewpoints jostled for dominance in pre-Revolutionary circles. Voltaire and those around him argued that every positive religion—including Judaism, the various Islamic sects, and Christian denominations—had corrupted a pure, rational concept of God, known to every person through nature and reason. The reformation of religion might well focus on the French Catholic church, but it extended far beyond this. A new state religion was required, grounded in the worship of the Supreme Being. It can easily be argued that this radical Deist program of reform was, as a matter of historical fact, fundamentally anti-Christian. Yet the specific animus against Christianity was actually due to its historic position within France, rather than any specifically Christian belief—a matter of historical contingency, reflecting the realities of the situation.
A still more radical view, however, was rapidly gaining support. It claimed that the oppression of the French people by both the court and the church could be put down to a belief in God, including the Supreme Being of Deist writers such as Voltaire. A genuine revolution would therefore necessitate overthrowing this fundamental belief altogether, rather than attempting to reform it. Atheism was the Promethean liberator, which alone could guarantee the initial success and subsequent triumph of the Revolution. Any notion of a transcendent God—whether deriving from Christianity or the “Religion of Nature”—was to be eliminated and replaced with a secular alternative.
At one level, this divergence of understandings was virtually invisible. During the period between the fall of the Bastille and the ending of the monarchy, Deists and atheists collaborated and campaigned for political, social, and ecclesiastical reform. For political reasons, any tensions between them were carefully underplayed. Yet the tension was there, unmistakably, between those who believed that there existed a god, known through nature and reason, who was the ultimate basis of social order and personal morality, and those who enthusiastically secularized any idea of divinity, proclaiming that the true god of the Revolution was la patrie—France itself.
The events of July 14, 1790, did not give any particular indication that a complete social upheaval was about to take place. The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated at the open-air Festival of the Federation, held on the Champ de Mars, directly in front of the École Militaire. Some 150,000 citizens gathered for the occasion. Mass was celebrated by Bishop Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), assisted by sixty Catholic priests. A placard declared the central values of the new constitutional monarchy: “nation, law, and king.” Louis XVI pledged to uphold the ideals of the new republic. A series of measures, presided over by Talleyrand, led to the nationalization of the church and the public appropriation of its assets. Clergy were now required to sign the Civil Constitution, pledging obedience to the Republic.
These measures paralleled events that had taken place earlier elsewhere in Christian Europe. For example, in 1535 the city of Geneva secularized the churches and their assets, transferring them from ecclesiastical to civil control. Around that same time, Henry VIII of England suppressed various monasteries and confiscated or sold their assets, and demanded that the clergy swear obedience to him personally rather than to the pope. In neither case could such events conceivably be regarded as “atheist,” even though they were unquestionably designed to undermine the influence and power of the Roman Catholic church in those regions. After all, Geneva was the city that John Calvin made his highly successful center of operations for the propagation of his form of Protestant Christianity in the 1550s and early 1560s. Even as late as early 1792, the French Revolution could still be portrayed as reforming French Christianity rather than aiming to eliminate it.
But that would soon change. Darker days lay ahead, reaching their climax during the autumn and winter of 1793–94.
INSTITUTIONAL ATHEISM? THE PROGRAM OF DECHRISTIANIZATION
It is tempting to present the French Revolution as institutionally committed to the elimination of Christianity within France. Yet this is difficult to sustain. Studies of the first phase of the Revolution have emphasized its lack of central direction. Without any strong leadership at this early stage, the Revolutionary movement was increasingly subjected to influence by powerful interest groups. Control of the Revolution rested in a series of factions and loose associations, often given to infighting and intrigues, which prevented any centralized control of events and policies. Perhaps the most famous of these factions was the Jacobin Club—more formally, the Society of Friends of the Constitution—which held its meetings at the recently secularized Jacobin monastery in the Rue Saint-Honoré. While it is certainly true that some of the more radical members of these groups firmly supported radical, and occasionally violent, action against the church, this did not initially translate into Revolutionary policy.
Since Jules Michelet’s landmark History of the French Revolution (1847), it has become customary to distinguish two phases in the history of the movement. Just as England had “good” and “bad” kings, so the Revolution had a “good” and a “bad” phase. For Michelet, the good phase of the Revolution was its first, when the people united in 1789 to overthrow tyranny and establish the rule of justice and equality. Its bad phase began in 1793 with the ascendancy of the radical Jacobin faction, which brought about the Reign of Terror.
There was a lingering resentment within Revolutionary circles, occasionally even hatred, toward the church, particularly the monastic orders, as “tithe collectors.” This dislike was fueled by growing fears of foreign intervention and counterrevolution. Rumors of counterrevolutionary coups, plots, and conspiracies were constantly circulated in Revolutionary circles, giving rise to suspicions that even political allies were potential traitors. Mistrust and fear gave rise to a siege mentality, which demanded that any threat to the Revolution—real or imagined—be eliminated immediately. The infamous massacre of prisoners at a Paris jail by a mob in September 1792—one of the most shocking acts of collective violence—can only be understood in terms of this pervasive fear of foreign intervention. There were rumors that foreign agents were among the prison population.
Such fears were far from figments of overactive imaginations. Austria and Prussia, already concerned over events in France in 1791, became involved in military action against France the following year. At home, the first manifestation of counterrevolution occurred in the city of Nîmes as early as 1790; it was supported principally by unemployed textile workers and agricultural laborers living in the city. A series of largely Catholic and royalist insurrections against the Revolution took place in western and southeastern France, often requiring suppression with considerable violence. Popular distrust of the church within Revolutionary circles increased when it was realized that many of those supporting and fomenting counterrevolution were priests. Increasingly, the church came to be viewed as actively involved in supporting foreign intervention and domestic resistance.
There is no doubt that the church was generally hostile to the Revolution and that many of the great Catholic families of France found themselves in a difficult situation. The religious intolerance evident even in the first phase of the Revolution alienated many traditional Catholics, especially in rural areas. The action of the National Assembly in nationalizing church properties was condemned by the pope, who was still regarded as authoritative by many within France. The introduction of a new constitution, which provided for the election of clergy, was seen as offensive to traditional Catholics; their curés would now be chosen by atheists and Protestants as much as by the Catholic faithful. It was natural for France’s traditional Catholics to support counterrevolution at home and welcome intervention from abroad—especially from a traditionally Catholic power, such as Austria, with which France was now at war.
The often extreme violence directed against the church and its priests mirrors a wider use of violence to enforce Revolutionary objectives throughout the Reign of Terror. After the execution of Louis XVI, events began to spiral out of control, as an increasingly radical faction gained power, then sought to retain it by the elimination of opposition. Terror became a tactic by which opposition was crushed, and was by no means limited to legally sanctioned executions. The armées révolutionnaires (basically a “people’s army”), which forcibly dechristianized areas of France at this time, were not subject to significant central control and often acted independently or on the basis of their leaders’ prejudices. The same cannot be said, however, of General Turreau’s twenty-four colonnes infernales, which were directed to undertake a program of extermination of counterrevolutionary elements in the Vendée area in 1794. The defense of the Revolution and of the nation—the two were often conflated in Revolutionary rhetoric—was seen to override all other considerations.
Yet Robespierre and others could see that violence was not going to win the day, especially in relation to the question of religion. In The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, Arno Mayer has drawn attention to the counterproductive impact of antireligious violence: “It is difficult to imagine a more intractable and divisive issue than the abrupt desacralization and laicization of political and civil society. Eventually it engages opposing true believers as it turns into a main battleground between, on the one hand, the religion of revolution and, on the other, first the religion of the status quo and then the religions of counterrevolution and resistance.”
While one strand of Revolutionary thought favored often random acts of violence against Catholicism, others preferred a more sustained and focused program of transformation. Over the period 1790–95, a series of developments shifted France from a constitutional monarchy in which the Catholic church had a continuing role to an apparently atheist republic in which the only gods acknowledged were the ideals of the Revolution and those who supported them. Two of these developments are of particular interest.
First, we may note the decision of September 1792, following the execution of Louis XVI, to mark the beginning of the French Republic by declaring this to be Year 1 of a revised calendar, accompanied by changes in the designation of the months. The traditional Western pattern of dating events from the birth of Jesus Christ was thus abandoned. Was this to be seen as a specifically atheist gesture? Perhaps. But it could equally be seen as a decision to break with every aspect of the past—a trend evident in the adoption of the metric system, devised by the brilliant scientist and social liberal Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. (Lavoisier was sent to the guillotine in 1794. The mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange remarked of this event, “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it.”)
The second development was the establishment of the Panthéon. In 1744, Louis XV had begun to construct a vast church on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. Financial difficulties led to delays, with the result that the huge building was not complete until 1789, the year of the Revolution. After it was secularized by the decree of April 1791, it was designated as a temple de la patrie. Various names were suggested for it, including Mausoleum and Cenotaph. Yet the name finally chosen was of immense significance—the Panthéon. Like the ancient Roman temple of the same name, it would be a place dedicated to all the gods.
But what gods? For some, the answer lay in the divinization of ideas. The French people would worship such ideals as reason, liberty, and fraternity. Perhaps the most celebrated example of this was the Festival of Reason, held inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in 1793, in which celebration of these three ideals was substituted for more traditional Trinitarian forms of worship. Yet as Antoine-François Momoro pointed out at the time, “We must never become weary of telling people that liberty, reason, and truth are only abstract beings. They are not gods, for properly speaking, they are part of ourselves.” We can see here an anticipation of one of the great ideas of nineteenth-century materialism: that human beings create divinities out of their deepest longings and aspirations. It is a theme that demands long and careful consideration.
Yet for many at the time of the Revolution, such antitheological abstractions were of little value. If there is no God, there must be something or someone that can act as a focus of worship or object of inspiration. The Panthéon provided this, in effect becoming a cathedral of the religion of humanity. More significantly, however, it provided a place of burial for the great heroes of the republic. Voltaire’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon from their burial site at Ramilly on July 11, 1791, in an elaborate ceremony, accompanied by an estimated cortège of 100,000 people. To be “panthéonized” was virtually the secular equivalent of the canonization of a Christian saint.
Some contemporary sources went further, and used the term apothéose—a term that has its origins in classical Roman history, referring to the elevation of certain Roman emperors, on their death, to the status of gods. Might this be taken to imply that such Revolutionary heroes as Voltaire were now to be regarded as gods? The best evidence suggests that this was not the case. The term “apotheosis” was robbed of its transcendent elements and reinterpreted as “made immortal.” In other words, an apotheosized hero was one absorbed so deeply into the Revolutionary consciousness that he could never be forgotten. In fact, we can see here one of the most interesting antireligious literary strategies of the late eighteenth century: the use of religious or supernatural language to describe individuals, objects, experiences, and ideas that are known to be purely natural, thus subverting the language of religion by directing it against itself. The attitudes of reverence and devotion that are traditionally associated with religion are thus transferred to the secular world.
A similar practice can be seen in the artistic representations of the American Revolution. For example, consider Constantino Brumidi’s work The Apotheosis of Washington (1865), which adorns the interior of the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. This highly allegorical work depicts Washington sitting in majesty, flanked on his right by the Goddess of Liberty and on his left by a winged figure of Fame sounding a trumpet and holding aloft a palm frond as a symbol of victory. Thirteen female figures, representing the thirteen original states, stand in a semicircle around Washington. On the outer ring of the canopy, six allegorical groupings surround him, representing classical images of agriculture, arts and sciences, commerce, war, mechanics, and seafaring. Washington was most certainly not understood to be divinized or made an object of worship; nor could Washington conceivably be regarded as displacing the Christian God. Brumidi was simply providing a highly visual depiction of Washington’s pivotal role in founding the American republic and in providing for its well-being. The painting dates from immediately after the American Civil War, when fostering a sense of national unity and identity was of paramount importance.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ATHEISM: AN ASSESSMENT
So was the French Revolution fundamentally atheist? There is no doubt that such a view is to be found in much Christian and atheist literature on the movement. Equally, there is evidence that atheism—then seen as novel, exciting, and thoroughly Promethean—was a major driving force for some of those involved in the Revolution, especially around the period 1793–94. Yet the situation is more complex than this crude pastiche suggests. To illustrate how nuanced things were, we may consider one of the more colorful personalities of the period—Baron Anacharsis Cloots (1754–94). Cloots was at the forefront of the dechristianization movement that gathered around the militant atheist Jacques Hébert. He “debaptised” himself, setting aside his original name of Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce. For Cloots, religion was simply not to be tolerated. “We shall, in turn, see the heavenly royalty condemned by the revolutionary tribunal of victorious Reason; for the Truth, seated on the throne of Nature, is supremely intolerant. The star of the day will make meteors and all the flickering lights of the night disappear.” When the light comes, the shadows must disappear—and if they do not disappear by themselves, they must be made to disappear. For Cloots, nature and reason must triumph against both genuine earthly and imaginary heavenly monarchs, both with the capacity to enslave and deceive.
Where Robespierre sought to advocate the religion of the Supreme Being, around which the French people could unite, Cloots vigorously pursued a more atheistic approach. He was an active member of the faction that successfully campaigned for the atheistic “Cult of Reason,” which was officially proclaimed on November 10, 1793. On May 7, 1794, this was abandoned, being replaced by the more restrained Deist “Cult of the Supreme Being.” Robespierre was worried that the program of dechristianization, actively and clumsily propagated by Cloots and Léonard Bourdon, was causing growing resentment and fueling counterrevolutionary sentiment. God required reinstatement—at least, in some modest form. The end of those insisting upon more radical measures was as inevitable as it was unpleasant. Cloots was executed in March 1794. Robespierre himself would soon fall victim to Revolutionary infighting and factionalism. Three months later he followed Cloots to the guillotine.
Inspiring and ennobling, the project of the French Revolution was at the same time brutal and repressive. The same movement that made such a powerful appeal to nature and reason for its justification ended up using systematic violence to subdue those who were unpersuaded of its merits. The movement that gave the world such noble monuments as the Declaration of the Rights of Man also gave it the Reign of Terror. To those who suggest that religion is responsible for the ills of the world, the Revolution offers an awkward anomaly. As the historian Reynald Sécher has shown, pressure from Paris to eliminate counterrevolution in the south of France led to the deployment of Turreau’s colonnes infernales of 1794, whose wholesale destruction of villages and their inhabitants came close to genocide. The new religion of humanity mimicked both the virtues and vices of the Catholicism it hoped to depose. It might well have a new god, a new savior, and new saints. But it also had its own inquisition and began its own particular war of religion.
During the French Revolution, for the first time in modern history the possibility of an atheist state was explored. That exploration was incomplete, inconsistent, and not entirely encouraging. Within a decade, the fledgling French republic found itself overtaken by events, as Napoleon Bonaparte entered Paris and seized power. A new constitution was proclaimed on December 15, 1799, containing the sentence that marked the end of an era: “Citizens, the Revolution is established upon the principles which began it: it is over.” The restoration of Catholicism soon followed.
In one sense, therefore, the Revolution was an experiment that failed. Its ten years did not establish atheism as the self-evident religion of European humanity, nor as the philosophical foundation for modern political theory. Yet the unthinkable had happened—true, only for a short period. What some had thought was a new age in the history of the world turned out to be an interlude. Yet the real significance of the French Revolution to our story lies not so much in what it accomplished in the realm of France, but on the impact it created on the minds and above all the imaginations of many alienated individuals throughout Europe. Seeds were planted, mental horizons were extended, and hopes for change ignited. Might others succeed where the Revolutionaries had failed? Might minds be changed permanently by argument, rather than temporarily by force?
Three giants emerged to lay the intellectual foundations of atheism with a rigor and permanence denied to others. The three great pillars of the golden age of atheism are Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), Karl Marx (1818–83), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who between them turned a daring revolutionary hypothesis into the established certainty of an age, placing Christianity constantly on the defensive. In what follows we shall assess the contributions of each of these thinkers in creating the mind-set of modern atheism, exploring both their original ideas and how these were received and appropriated in the golden age.