In the late 18th century when the French Revolution began, Roman Catholicism was the dominant religion in France--Protestants and Jews were essentially second-class citizens. The Catholic Church was quite wealthy and was closely tied to the French monarchy. However, the Catholic Church had begun to come under attack. As Gemma Betros writes in "The French Revolution and the Catholic Church," (see here) which appeared in the December 2010 issue of History Today:
The [18th Century] Enlightenment quest to promote reason as the basis for legitimacy and progress found little to praise in the Church. While the philosophes [Enlightenment philosophers} appreciated the value of religion in promoting moral and social order, the Church itself was condemned for its power and influence. The scandal surrounding the divisive theological movement of Jansenism, exacerbated by the heavy-handed treatment of its followers earlier in the century, furnished one reason for attacking the Church’s authority and its close links with the monarchy. France’s lack of toleration for religious minorities provided another. Although the philosophe Voltaire managed some praise for the young nuns who devoted their lives to caring for the sick and poor, the clergy were seen as less useful. The writer Louis-Sebastien Mercier complained in 1782 that Paris was ‘full of priests and tonsured clerics who serve neither the church nor the state’ and who were occupied with nothing but ‘useless and trifling’ matters. Criticism was specifically directed at monasteries where monks and nuns spent their days in prayer, much to the ire of philosophes who thought they should instead be reproducing for the good of the nation.
Thus, in light of this growing hostility toward the Catholic Church--at least among the intellectual elite of France--it is not too surprising that one of the earliest moves by the French revolutionaries was to nationalize Church property. Next, monasteries were ordered closed, and a Civil Constitution of the Clergy was enacted, under which Catholic clergymen were to be paid by the State and priests and bishops were to be elected by the citizens, rather than being chosen by the Church's hierarchy. Then, on November 27, 1790, the French National Assembly decreed that all members of the clergy had to take an oath in support of the country's new constitution or forfeit their salaries and position. Many priests took the oath, but a large number refused. Consequently, Catholicism became increasingly connected in the minds of supporters of the Revolution with counter-revolution. Betros notes that "in October 1795, public worship was forbidden, and over the next few months all visible signs of Christianity were removed, a policy pursued with particular enthusiasm by revolutionary armies eager to seek revenge on the institution that harbored so many counterrevolutionaries." Churches were closed and converted into warehouses, factories, and stables, and a new calendar was promulgated to "further repudiate France's Christian past."
The next stage in the process was to create a new system of belief to replace Catholicism. There was an effort to "make a religion of the Revolution itself," and churches were converted into "temples" for the worship of "Reason." The revolutionary leader Robespierre went so far as to institute a "Cult of the Supreme Being, which envisioned as a new state religion. Its recognition of a supreme being would, it was hoped, attract and harness the persistent desire for religious belief and worship among French men and women while its proclamation of the soul's immortality would encourage moral behavior of the type that would ensure a stable and virtuous republic" (Betros). However, this substitute religion failed to gain acceptance among many of the French, and there was even a Catholic revival in the late 1790s.
When Napoleon Bonaparte took power in France in 1799, essentially bringing the Revolution to an end, he sought an accommodation with the Catholic Church via an agreement with the Pope known as the Concordat. However, Napoleon, insisted that the French state continue to remain in control of the Catholic Church, which led to increasing tensions with the Church, culminating with Napoleon's excommunication by the Pope and Napoleon's subsequent arrest of the Pope. A few years later, Napoleon fell from power.
Betros concludes that the French Revolution's "extension of state control" and "targeted destruction of the Church and religious practice" helped promote a process of secularization that would spread across European society. However, "both revolutionary governments and Napoleon were unprepared for the resentment that met state incursion into spiritual matters the turn to Rome [i.e., the Catholic Church] that followed it. The removal of Catholic institutions and their personnel simply forced religious worship into the private sphere and increased the involvement of the laity, trends that would also mark the religious revival that took place in France in the nineteenth century."
It is interesting that, as I noted at the beginning of this post, the pattern followed by the French Revolution--first, efforts by the new regime to co-opt religion, then to suppress it and replace it with a new system of belief, ending in a failure to eradicate religion--would be repeated in many subsequent revolutions. For example, in China, upon coming to power, the new Communist regime attempted first to bring various religions (including Buddhism, Islam, and Catholic and Protestant Christianity) under the control of the State. Then, during the so-called Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s, there was an effort to totally eliminate traditional religious belief and replace it with what was essentially the worship of Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party. After Mao's death, however, it became evident that the Communist regime had failed to destroy religious belief, despite considerable success in promoting atheism. Even today, the Communist Party is struggling to keep religion under its control. Perhaps China's Communists should have learned a lesson from the experience of the French revolutionaries.
Image of the storming of the Bastille from Wikimedia Commons