- #Causes of the french revolutionary calendar full#
- #Causes of the french revolutionary calendar free#
Robespierre’s fall was as swift as his rise he was executed in 1794, the same year his religion was established. Robespierre functioned as a kind of mixed political and religious leader, headlining the 1794 Festival of the Supreme Being like a revolutionary Beyoncé at Coachella. The Cult of the Supreme Being became the official civic religion of France as its founder rose to greater prominence in the revolutionary government. The Cult of the Supreme Being took inspiration from deism, an Enlightenment-era belief system revolving around a supreme creator or god that does not interfere in the workings of the universe. Robespierre detested the scandalous and atheistic nature of the Cult of Reason and felt that belief in a god was necessary to achieve republican virtue in France (an idea he borrowed from Voltaire). Churches around the country were converted to temples of reason and new rituals, like the wild Roman-inspired Festival of Reason, took the place of Christian services.īy 1794 the Cult of Reason was replaced by the Cult of the Supreme Being, a brainchild of the infamously guillotine-happy Maximilien Robespierre. The Cult of Reason was supposed to replace Christianity as the new state belief system-hardly true to its professed ideal of secularism.
By November, Notre-Dame cathedral had been converted into “The Temple to the Goddess Reason.” (Interestingly, later in the revolution, Notre-Dame was converted into a wine warehouse.) Unsurprisingly, these sweeping changes evoked strong negative reactions from millions of confused and angry French citizens.Īfter reorganizing and then banning the Catholic Church, revolutionaries set up the Cult of Reason, a new atheistic religion devoted to the ideals of rational thought.
#Causes of the french revolutionary calendar free#
Revolutionaries implemented the metric system and a brand-new calendar, with names free from religious or royal influence: the French Republican Calendar.
In January of that year, King Louis XVI was executed. In 1792, Catholicism was officially banned.īy 1793 the revolution turned more, well, revolutionary. The power of the church in the countryside and the influence of refractory priests was a major problem for the revolution in its early days. In many rural areas of France, parish churches were the major source of authority-a fact that threatened the new republican bureaucracy. Two classes of clergy emerged: those known as juring priests, who took the oath, and refractory priests who didn’t.
In the early years, the newly created National Assembly wrote the Civil Constitution of the Clergy-essentially an oath for priests and bishops to prove their loyalty to the French state over the Vatican. This technically included Black men as well, but no one of the female gender (although many women, like Olympe de Gouges, worked hard to get the right to vote). Born out of a century-long tradition of enlightenment thought, the early years of the revolution promised a more secular, free, and democratic state for men only.
#Causes of the french revolutionary calendar full#
On this Bastille Day, it’s worth exploring one of the strangest aspects of the French Revolution, the coup d’etat that ushered in the Age of Revolution: religion.įor historians, the French Revolution is full of contradictions. For humanists, the French Revolution marks the beginning of a new age of enlightenment, freedom, and rational thought. In the modern American consciousness, the French Revolution might evoke imagery of guillotines, Marie Antoinette, powdered wigs, and lots of angry French citizens. La fête de l'Être Suprême, au Champ-de-Mars (Festival of the Supreme Being) by Pierre-Antoine Demachy, c.
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