Cult of the Supreme Being : definition of Cult of the Supreme Being and synonyms of Cult of the Supreme Being (English) 10 External links Origins The French Revolution had given birth to many radical changes in France, but one of the most fundamental for the hitherto Catholic nation was the official rejection of religion . The first major organized school of thought emerged under the umbrella name of the Cult of Reason . Advocated by extreme radicals like Jacques Hébert and Antoine-François Momoro , the Cult of Reason distilled a mixture of largely atheistic views into a humanocentric philosophy. No gods at all were worshiped in the Cult – the guiding principle was devotion to the abstract conception of Reason . [3] This bold rejection of all divinity appalled the rectitudinous Robespierre. Its offense was compounded by the "scandalous scenes" and "wild masquerades" attributed to its practice. [4] In late 1793, Robespierre delivered a fiery denunciation of the Cult and its proponents [5] and proceeded to give his own vision of proper Revolutionary religion.

Devised almost entirely by his own hand, Le culte de l'Être suprême was formally announced before the French National Convention on 7 May 1794. [6] Inscription on the cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand , saying: "The French people recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul". Religious tenets Robespierre believed that reason is only a means to an end, and the singular end is Virtue . He sought to move beyond simple deism (often described as Voltairean by its adherents) to a new and, in his view, more rational devotion to the godhead . The primary principles of the Cult of the Supreme Being were a belief in the existence of a god and the immortality of the human soul . [7] Though not inconsistent with Christian doctrine, these beliefs were put to the service of Robespierre's fuller meaning, which was of a type of civic-minded, public virtue he attributed to the Greeks and Romans. [8] This type of Virtue could only be attained through active fidelity to liberty and democracy.

[9] Belief in a living god and a higher moral code, he said, were "constant reminders of justice" and thus essential to a republican society. [10] Revolutionary impact Robespierre used the religious issue to publicly denounce the motives of many radicals not in his camp, and it led, directly or indirectly, to the executions of Revolutionary de-Christianisers like Hébert, Momoro, and Anacharsis Cloots . [11] The establishment of the Cult of the Supreme Being represented the beginning of the reversal of the wholesale de-Christianisation process that had been looked upon previously with official favor. [12] Simultaneously it marked the apogee of Robespierre's power. Though in theory he was just an equal member of the Committee of Public Safety , Robespierre at this point possessed a national prominence bordering on the imperial. [13] Festival of the Supreme Being The Festival of the Supreme Being, by Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1794).

To inaugurate the new state religion, Robespierre declared that 20 Prairial Year II (8 June 1794) would be the first day of national celebration of the Supreme Being, and future republican holidays were to be held every tenth day – the days of rest (décadi) in the new French Republican Calendar . [14] Every locality was mandated to hold a commemorative event, but the event in Paris was designed on a massive scale. The festival was organized by the artist Jacques-Louis David and took place around a man-made mountain on the Champ de Mars . [15] Robespierre assumed full leadership of the event, forcefully – and, to many, ostentatiously [16] – declaring the truth and "social utility" of his new religion. [17] Legacy The Cult of the Supreme Being and its much-derided festival can be said to have contributed to the Thermidorian reaction and the downfall of Robespierre. [18] With his death at the guillotine on 28 July 1794, the cult lost all official sanction and disappeared from public view.

[19] It was officially banned by Napoleon Bonaparte with his Law on Cults of 18 Germinal, Year X. [20] See also ^ Hanson, Paul R. (2004). Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution . Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. p. 95. ISBN 0-8108-5052-4 . #v=onepage&q&f=false . "...[T]he Champ de Mars where David had created an enormous symbolic mountain."" ^ Doyle, p. 277: "'Look at the bugger,' muttered Thuriot , an old associate of Danton . 'It's not enough for him to be master, he has to be God.'" ^ Kennedy, p. 345. ^ Kennedy, p. 345. ^ Neely, p. 230: "The fall of Robespierre brought an end to the Cult of the Supreme Being with which he had been closely identified. The new civic religion... had not had a chance to win many converts." ^ Doyle, p. 389.

Further reading The French Revolution and the Catholic Church | History Today The French Revolution and the Catholic Church French Revolution France Religion Gemma Betros examines the problems the Revolution posed for religion, and that religion posed for the Revolution. In 1789, the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution, Catholicism was the official religion of the French state. The French Catholic Church, known as the Gallican Church, recognised the authority of the pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church but had negotiated certain liberties that privileged the authority of the French monarch, giving it a distinct national identity characterised by considerable autonomy. France’s population of 28 million was almost entirely Catholic, with full membership of the state denied to Protestant and Jewish minorities. Being French effectively meant being Catholic. Yet, by 1794, France’s churches and religious orders were closed down and religious worship suppressed. How did it come to this? What did revolutionaries hope to achieve? And why did Napoleon set out to reverse the situation? The Decline of Catholicism? Historians are divided over the strength of Catholicism in late eighteenth-century France.

Some suggest that it was still flourishing after the efforts of the Council of Trent (1545-63) to reform and revitalise the Church, as witnessed by its well-educated clergy, numerous and varied religious orders, and renewed forms of worship. Others trace a period of decline, with a small but noticeable decrease in religious observance in the decades before the Revolution. Regional studies of religious belief and practice reveal significant differences between urban and provincial France, between elites and the rest of the population, and, to a lesser degree, between men and women. What is clear, however, is that the eighteenth-century Church was attracting growing criticism from the philosophes, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment who systematically questioned every aspect of French government and society. The Enlightenment quest to promote reason as the basis for legitimacy and progress found little to praise in the Church. While the philosophes 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. The solemn vows taken by these men and women, binding them to the religious state for life, also led to concerns about individual liberty. Denis Diderot railed against the lifelong nature of these vows, warning about decisions taken too young in life and, in his novel La Religieuse (The Nun), raising the spectre of a young woman forced to be a nun against her will. Although most philosophes promoted reform rather than destruction, their comments gave encouragement to a growing anticlericalism whose spite was sharpened by resentment of the Church’s wealth.

The Church’s revenue in 1789 was estimated at an immense – and possibly exaggerated – 150 million livres. It owned around six per cent of land throughout France, and its abbeys, churches, monasteries and convents, as well as the schools, hospitals and other institutions it operated, formed a visible reminder of the Church’s dominance in French society. The Church was also permitted to collect the tithe, worth a nominal one-tenth of agricultural production, and was exempt from direct taxation on its earnings. This prosperity caused considerable discontent, best illustrated in the cahiers de doléances, or ‘statements of grievances’, sent from throughout the kingdom to be discussed at the meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789. Calls for the reform or abolition of the tithe and for the limitation of Church property were joined by complaints from parish priests who, excluded from the wealth bestowed upon the upper echelons of the Church hierarchy, often struggled to get by. When crowds began to gather in Paris on 13 July 1789, the religious house of Saint-Lazare and its neighbouring convent were among the first places searched for supplies and weapons.

The Catholic Church may have been the church of the majority of the French people, but its wealth and perceived abuses meant that it did not always have their trust. The Nationalisation of Property On the eve of the Revolution, the French state was on the verge of bankruptcy. Repeated attempts at financial reform had floundered but the Revolution opened the way for a new approach that, from the beginning, involved the Church. On 4 August 1789, when the remains of France’s feudal past were abolished in a night of sweeping reforms, the clergy agreed to give up the tithe and allow the state to take over its funding. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, adopted on 26 August, made no recognition of the special position of the Catholic Church. With all authority located henceforth within the nation, the Church now found itself open – and vulnerable – to further reform. On 2 November 1789, France’s new National Assembly, known as the Constituent Assembly, passed a decree that placed all Church property ‘at the disposition of the nation’.

Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun and one of the few clerics to support the measure, argued that all Church property rightfully belonged to the nation and that its return, by helping to bring about a better society, should therefore be viewed as a ‘religious act’. Despite clerical support for the Revolution itself, this decree became the first in a series that targeted the Church in a way that soon cast doubt on the Revolution’s motives. On 29 October 1789, just days before the nationalisation of Church property, the Assembly heard that two women in a nearby convent were being forced into the religious life. A proposal was immediately made to halt the taking of solemn vows. Not only did this development associate the Church with the scheming and corruption featured in the anticlerical literature of the eighteenth century, but it prepared the way for the closure of France’s monasteries and the departure of their inhabitants, decreed on 13 February 1790. It was hoped that the quick sale of monasteries and their contents would help stabilise the nation’s finances. The announcement was met with thousands of letters of protest.

The new French state had not only taken control of the Church’s revenue and property, but, through such radical intervention, seemed to be redrawing the boundaries between church and state. Growing Suspicion Charged with the Church’s financial administration, the Assembly now took the opportunity to reorganise it. On 12 July 1790 the Assembly approved the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, a constitution whose very name reflected the state’s new control of Church affairs. Among the constitution’s reforms, dioceses were redrawn in line with state administrative divisions, clergy were to be paid by the state according to a new salary scale, and priests and bishops were to be elected by citizens. The pope’s refusal to approve the Constitution, together with growing criticism from conservative members of the Assembly, began to cast doubt on the Church’s support. In an attempt to resolve the issue, the Assembly decreed on 27 November 1790 that all clergy must take a public oath of loyalty to the Constitution or surrender their salary and position. As Nigel Aston has suggested, this oath became ‘a referendum on whether one’s first loyalties were to Catholicism or to the Revolution’.

Figures varied considerably between regions, but over 50 per cent of parish clergy swore their loyalty to the Constitution. For others the oath presented a grave matter of conscience eased only on 13 April 1791 when the pope, who had been hesitating, issued his condemnation. Those who took the oath became known as ‘jurors’, while those who refused were labelled ‘non-jurors’ or ‘refractory priests’. A growing number fled overseas, joining those nobles and clergy who had already emigrated rather than live under the revolutionary regime. The French population gradually split between those who supported the ‘Constitutional Church’ and those who remained loyal to refractory priests, initially allowed to continue practising. Rather than confirming the allegiance of French clergy to a state-operated church, the oath had put before them a decision that, by forcing them to choose between the Constitutional Church and Rome, would cause a schism among French Catholics for the next decade and generate hostility towards the Revolution and its aims. Meanwhile, support for the refractory Church became increasingly associated with counter-revolution. Émigré priests and bishops preached against the Revolution from abroad, while the refractories that remained became a focal point for broader resentment of the Revolution.

The suspicion with which many people viewed constitutional priests, especially in parts of regional France, helped create popular support for the counterrevolutionary cause. This association had immediate implications. In the first week of April 1791, the sisters of a Parisian religious congregation were attacked by crowds of women who accused them of teaching ‘false principles’ to children and plotting counter-revolution with refractory priests. Such sentiments found official expression in the debates of the ‘Legislative Assembly’, formed in October 1791 and determined to carry through the policies of the early Revolution. In November it stopped the pensions of refractory priests and prohibited their use of religious buildings. On 6 April 1792 it banned all forms of religious dress, seeking to abolish this visible reminder of the ancien régime and force people to see priests as ‘citizens like any others’. France’s declaration of war on Austria on 20 April 1792 and its early losses cast further suspicion on refractory clergy and their followers, now suspected of plotting with the enemy. The fall of the monarchy on 10 August provided added impetus for the destruction of anything connected with the ancien régime.

The Assembly suppressed all remaining religious orders, including those staffing schools and hospitals, and ordered remaining non-jurors to leave or be arrested and deported. Concern peaked on 2 September when news arrived that the fortress-town of Verdun near Paris had fallen to the allied Prussian forces. Parisians, imagining that imprisoned counter-revolutionaries were preparing to break out and join the enemy, dispensed their own preventative justice when they descended on the city’s prisons and, over the course of several days, slaughtered over 1200 prisoners, including at least 200 priests. The September Massacres made clear the distrust that would prevent any accommodation between the Church and the new Republic proclaimed on 22 September 1792. The new Republican government, known as the Convention, responded to growing civil unrest and the ongoing overseas threat with the Reign of Terror. The Revolutionary Tribunal, established on 10 March 1793, aimed to demonstrate that persons of danger to the Republic were being identified and punished. Laws of September 1793 and June 1794 targeting ‘enemies of liberty’ and ‘enemies of the people’ saw mounting numbers of priests and nuns arrested and placed on trial.

Their charges included not only counter-revolution but ‘fanaticism’ and possession of items used in the celebration of mass, again demonstrating the suspicion now attached to religious worship. Only a small percentage were guillotined, but their trials – designed to set an example – instead garnered further support for counterrevolutionary forces in the Vendée and other parts of western France and drove religious practice underground. Revolutionary Religion Although the Constitutional Church had been permitted to continue its work, the Convention now considered Catholicism in any form suspicious. Its association with ancien régime France, its adherence to values not of the Revolution’s making, and the private nature of worship seemed incompatible with the values of the Republic. From here sprung a movement referred to as ‘dechristianisation’, which aimed to excise religion from French society. Constitutional priests were advised to abandon the priesthood and were encouraged – or in some cases forced – to marry. Any priest that continued to practise, whether constitutional or refractory, now faced arrest and deportation.

In October 1793, 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 harboured so many counter-revolutionaries. Church bells were pulled down and melted, ostensibly to help the war effort, crosses were taken from churches and cemeteries, and statues, relics and works of art were seized and sometimes destroyed. Such iconoclasm caused considerable concern at official levels, not least because of the destruction wrought on France’s artistic and cultural heritage. On 23 November 1793, churches were closed, to be converted into warehouses, manufacturing works or even stables. Streets and other public places bearing the names of saints were given new, often Republicanthemed names, and time itself was recast to further repudiate France’s Christian past. The Revolutionary calendar started with the advent of the French Republic (Year 1). The names of its months reflected the seasons and its ten-day week eliminated Sunday as a day of rest and worship. Although such measures were unevenly applied, and in many cases met with considerable local opposition, they reinforced the message that Christianity had no place in the Republic.

The revolutionary government had learnt, however, that when destroying the past, it was wise to have something to put in its place. The creation of the Republic in 1792 had given rise to ceremonies and festivals that aimed to make a religion of the Revolution itself, commemorating revolutionary martyrs as its saints and venerating the tricolour cockade and red liberty cap as its sacred symbols. Prominent among such revolutionary ‘cults’, as they were known, was the Cult of Reason which recognised no god but instead worshiped the goddess of reason in the former churches, now known as ‘temples of reason’. Robespierre, wary of atheism and the political forces behind certain cults, introduced on 7 May 1794 the Cult of the Supreme Being, which he envisaged as a new state religion. Its recognition of a supreme deity 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 behaviour of the type that would ensure a stable and virtuous Republic.

But the Festival of the Supreme Being, held on 8 June 1794 throughout France and presided over in Paris by Robespierre, provided little beyond spectacle and, like other cults, it attracted minimal interest outside urban centres. Catholicism had been squeezed out of the Republic, but alternatives imposed from above failed to catch on. The fall of Robespierre in July 1794 brought a thaw towards religious practice. Dechristianisation had forced religious observance into the privacy of the home. With the emigration and abdication of so many priests, and the disruption of regular forms of worship, the laity had become accustomed to taking over services, even performing ‘white masses’ when there was no priest available. The Convention, anxious to achieve some form of stability, recognised that somehow it would have to accommodate this private worship. It did so by announcing on 21 February 1795 the formal separation of Church and State. Churches were reopened, refractory priests were released from jail, and both constitutional and refractory priests were permitted to practise on the condition that they promised to respect the laws of the Republic. Yet complete separation proved impossible.

Religion was still considered a threat and subsequent decrees sought to monitor worship and ban outward signs of religion, such as statues or religious dress, from the public eye. Royalist uprisings led to the reapplication of earlier laws concerning refractory priests, as did the coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797), which saw thousands of refractory priests arrested yet again. Like earlier governments, the Directory (November 1795-99) tried introducing alternatives to Catholicism, notably in the new cult of Theophilanthropy. Yet again, these failed to gain popular support. The Directory instead witnessed a religious revival in which Catholic men – and especially women – played an important role in re-establishing their faith around the wreckage left by the Revolution. Any new regime would have to acknowledge this revival and, if it wanted to ensure the loyalty of France’s Catholics, make a place for a Church that could bridge the divisions, confusion, pain, and bitterness of the previous decade. The Return of the Catholic Church Napoleon came to power in 1799 ready to accommodate the continued presence of religious belief and practice in French society, not least in order to dampen counter-revolutionary opposition.

Writings from his youth show that Napoleon had little time for religion but, much like the philosophes, he saw its uses for society. He also appreciated its costsaving benefits, demonstrated by the state-sponsored re-establishment of religious congregations to run hospitals and schools. Above all, Napoleon recognised that if relations were mended with the Church, it could be used to promote and consolidate his rule throughout France. Ignoring objections from revolutionary opponents of the Church, Napoleon set about formalising its place in France in a way designed to ensure that loyal membership of the Church and the state were no longer mutually exclusive. At 2am on 16 July 1801 France signed with Rome a document known as the Concordat, the product of eight months of gruelling negotiations. Catholicism was henceforth to be recognised only as ‘the religion of the vast majority of French citizens’, a description that denied the Church any privileged place within the state, and the Church was to give up all claims to property lost during the Revolution. The Concordat’s most dramatic step, however, was to bring the Church under the authority of the state.

In measures that recalled the Civil Constitution of 1790, all clergy were required to swear an oath of loyalty to the government, their salaries were to be paid by the state, and dioceses were again redrawn and aligned with administrative divisions. In addition, all bishops were to be appointed by Napoleon, further minimising Rome’s authority. This trend was confirmed in 1802 with the addition to the Concordat of the ‘Organic Articles’, 27 articles developed and announced without consultation with Rome. Article One, requiring that all instructions from Rome be approved by the government, suggested that in this new relationship, papal authority meant little. Napoleon’s Church, like the Gallican Church of the ancien régime, had its own national identity. Somewhat predictably, relations with Rome soon deteriorated, culminating in what Geoffrey Ellis has described as ‘one of the most extraordinary conflicts between temporal power and spiritual authority history has ever known’.

Napoleon increasingly sought to associate his personal rule with the Church, insisting on the pope’s attendance at his coronation ceremony in Paris in 1804, introducing a feast day for the rediscovered ‘Saint Napoleon’, and using the Imperial Catechism, recited by children at Sunday School, to suggest that his reign was authorised by God himself. Yet even as he did so, Napoleon’s disdain for Rome became ever more apparent. Not only did he export revolutionary policy concerning religion by closing down monasteries and seizing Church property, but he introduced the Concordat in conquered territories, bringing the Catholic Church in other countries under his rule. Napoleon’s occupation of Rome in 1808 brought the relationship to breaking point and led to the Pope’s decision to excommunicate him. In retaliation, Napoleon had the pope arrested and later taken to France as his prisoner where he remained until 1814. A new concordat, signed at Fontainebleau in 1813, attempted to ‘put an end to the differences’ between the two, but this also failed.

By making the French Church, as well as its spiritual head, so subservient to state authority, Napoleon had created tensions that served over the course of his reign to further divide its members and increase their loyalty to Rome. Conclusion The wholesale destruction of Catholicism had been far from the minds of the nation’s representatives in 1789, but financial concerns, when combined with external and internal threats, eventually made a full-scale attack on the Church and all connected with it a necessity for a Revolution that demanded absolute loyalty. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett see the French Revolution as ‘a watershed for Catholicism not just in France but in Europe more generally’. The French Revolution saw the Gallican Church transformed from an autonomous institution that wielded significant influence to one that was reformed, abolished, and resurrected by the state. In this extension of state control, as well as in the targeted destruction of the Church and religious practice, the Revolution represents a key development in the secularisation that would stretch across Europe. But both revolutionary governments and Napoleon were unprepared for the resentment that met state incursion into spiritual matters and the turn to Rome 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. The consequences of this drastic experiment in the transformation of church-state relations would reverberate in France until the 1905 separation of church and state and are still felt today as states continue to negotiate the sensitive relationship between church, state and religious belief. Issues to Debate How far did the nationalisation of Church property reflect hostility towards the Church? In what ways did the requirement of the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy affect France’s priests and bishops? What did revolutionary governments hope to achieve through the introduction of alternative cults? To what extent did Napoleon’s controlled revival of the Catholic Church reflect the Revolution’s failure to eradicate religious belief and practice? The Cult Of Reason - Less Wrong The Cult Of Reason 1 Post author: Raw_Power 24 November 2010 03:24PM So... while investigating Wikipedia I found out about an actual Cult. Of Reason. Revolutionary France. From the description, it sounds pretty awesome. Here's he link . Is this denomination usable? Is it useful?

Can it be resurrected? Should it be? Is it compatible with what we stand for? Discuss. Also, note that in French "Culte" does not mean "Sect", it means "the act of worshipping". French Revolution: Search The Eighth of Thermidor By the summer of 1794, Revolutionary Tribunals had tried over 200,000 suspects, of whom approximately 20,000 had been convicted of treasonous behavior and sent to the guillotine. Moreover, the work of the Terror was intensifying, although the worst threats to the Republic of invasion from without and anarchy within had subsided. Fear and mistrust were widespread, even within the Convention, the Committee of Public Safety (CPS) and the Jacobin Club. In the excerpt below from the Jacobin Club meeting of 8 Thermidor Year II (26 July 1794), Collot dHerbois, a member of the CPS, questions Robespierres motives, accusing him of seeking to become a dictator.

(Indeed, rumors that Robespierre wanted to become a king were circulating in Paris.) However, Collots speech is poorly received, and those in attendance call for the "conspirators" to be sent to the guillotine. Marats Impeachment A leading voice on behalf of greater popular participation and for social policies that would benefit the poor, the journalist JeanPaul Marat used his radical newspaper The Friend of the People to criticize moderation. On 12 April 1793, the Girondins introduced into the Convention a measure condemning him, but the Jacobins, led by Georges Danton, defended him and used the occasion to portray the Girondins as enemies of liberty and the Republic. In the excerpt below, we see the Girondin view of the matter. "Terror Is the Order of the Day" Responding to pressure from the sections, the Convention voted on 5 September 1793, to declare that "Terror is the Order of the Day," meaning that the government, through internal "revolutionary armies" that were formed two days later,should and would use force against its own citizens to ensure compliance with its laws, including the law of the Maximum.

Chapter 4: Paris and the Politics of Rebellion No social group played a more dramatic part in the Revolution than the workers of Paris. This chapter describes their early activities in 1789, including the attack on the Bastille in July and their October march on the palace at Versailles. The narrative of popular action continues through the end of the Terror in 1794. This chapter also details the heroes and enemies of the working people as well as their clubs and other organizations. Revolution Devours Its OwnLe Vieux Cordelier Despite the consolidation of power in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety and the creation of Revolutionary Tribunals across France to eliminate traitors to the Republic, the Convention continued to worry about conspiracies even among its political allies. By the end of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety feared the activities of those calling for an acceleration of the Revolution, notably followers of JacquesRéné Hébert, as well as those who sought to moderate it, known as "Indulgents" and led by Georges Danton.

This latter point of view was expressed by Dantons ally Camille Desmoulins in the newspaper The Old Cordelier, which made use of Roman history to warn that a republic could be undermined from within by "evil emperors"by which Desmoulins implied the leadership of the Committee of Public Safety. Religion: The Cult of the Supreme Being Adapting the established strategy of staging public pageantry to win support for a political cause, Robespierre organized a "Festival of the Supreme Being" in the summer of 1794. Having recently eliminated his adversaries Hébert and Danton, Robespierre delivered the keynote speech.

In it he explained his idea for a civic religion worshipping a deist "supreme being" while resisting the more extreme tendency of some to eliminate spirituality outright through an atheistic "cult of reason." 9 Thermidor: The Conspiracy against Robespierre This account of the proceedings in the Convention Hall on the 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) describes how Robespierre and SaintJust, facing an organized attack by other members of the Committee of Public Safety, tried one last gamble, appealing to the deputies of the "Right" to come to their aid. These deputies repudiated the appeal, and the Convention unanimously voted for the resolution condemning them. Chapter 7: War, Terror, and Resistance Complicating the controversy over the monarch in 1792 was the beginning of the war between France and the royal heads of state in Europe. Totally unprepared for war, the French immediately suffered losses; the popularity of the government, and indeed of the Revolution, waned. By the summer of 1793, France was increasingly divided between supporters and opponents of the Revolution. This chapter follows the efforts of those who favored continuing the Revolution and their reliance on terror to stay in power.

The opposition to their measures only mounted as the war continued into 1794. But eventually the Terrorists would triumph at home and abroad. This victory in August 1794 relieved the country of the need for such stringent regulation and this powerful government led by Robespierre fell. Over the next four years, France would be consumed by a continuing battle over the course of the country. Karl Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte The German philosopher and founder of international communism, Karl Marx (181883), wrote on many occasions about the French Revolution, which he considered the first stage in an eventual worldwide proletarian revolution. In this relatively early work from 1852, Marx compares the French Revolution of 1789 with that of 1848. Marx considered the French Revolution the classic example of the "bourgeois revolution," in which capitalism overthrew feudalism, creating the legal conditions under which capitalism could flourish. Chapter 10: Legacies of the Revolution Contemporaries saw the French Revolution as an epochal event, and it has still continued to be understood by many as the marker between the traditional and modern periods.

The strong response to the Revolution was immediate and has continued to the present and spread throughout the world. This chapter includes the early AngloAmerican response, conservative reaction, and literary reactions. It concludes with a description of how subsequent historians have understood the Revolution. CORDELIER CLUB A Paris political society that had a more popular orientation than the Jacobins. Officially named the Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and Citizen, it met in a former Franciscan monastery on the rue des Cordeliers. Although expelled from the building, the club kept the nickname. The Cordeliers section, led by Georges-Jacques Danton, Jean- Paul Marat, and Camille Desmoulins, spearheaded democratic agitation in Paris in 178990. When the sections were created, the club soon dominated them. Women played a prominent role in the club. In the summer of 1791, the Cordeliers again championed democratization, this time of the new French constitution. Delegates met with a crowd on 17 July 1791, on the Champ de Mars, but the crowd was dispersed by the National Guard. Subsequent repression focused on the club.

Restored to prominence by the summer of 1792, the Cordeliers were at the heart of the movement that overthrew the monarchy on 10 August, called for the election of the National Convention and the widening of the suffrage to include all men. The Cordeliers also played an important role in the expulsion of the Girondins from the National Convention in MayJune 1793 as they came under the influence of first the Enragés and then Jacques-Réné Hébert. In Ventôse, Year II (March 1794), the club was purged and the Hébertistes sent to the guillotine. The club then submitted to the Jacobins, and a few members continued to meet until the spring of 1795, but by this point the club had little influence. September 28, 1792. Georges Danton, one of the most influential of the revolutionary orators, declares at the Convention that the French Revolution is a revolution against all kings. December 5, 1793. Camille Desmoulins publishes the first issue of Le Vieux Cordelier.

He favors the ideas of Danton, urging peace negotiations with foreign powers and an end to the official Terror. March 29, 1794. The arrest of Danton and the Dantonists ordered by the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. April 5, 1794. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and other Dantonists are guillotined. The Terror - History of the French Revolution The French Revolution 7: The Terror 1793 - 94 History of the French Revolution The Terror. Hulton Archive / Getty Images Previous Page | Contents | Next Page France in Turmoil In July 1793 the revolution was at its lowest ebb. Enemy forces were advancing over French soil, British ships hovered near French ports hoping to link up with rebels, the Vendée was a large region of open rebellion and there were many Federalist revolts. Parisians were worried that Charlotte Corday, assassin of Marat, was only one of thousands of provincial rebels operating in the capital ready to strike down the leaders of the revolution in droves. Meanwhile power struggles had begun in many Paris sections between sansculottes and their enemies.

The whole country was in a form of onion like civil war. It got worse before it got better. While many of the Federalist revolts were collapsing under both local pressures - food shortages, fear of reprisals, reluctant to march far – and the actions of Convention Deputies sent on mission, on August 27th 1793 Toulon accepted an offer of protection from a British fleet which had been sailing off shore, declaring themselves in favor of the infant Louis VII and welcoming the British to port. continue reading below our video Test Your General Science Knowledge The Terror Begins While the Committee of Public Safety wasn't an executive government – on August 1st 1793 the Convention refused a motion calling for it to become the provisional government – it was the closest France had to anyone being in overall charge, and it moved to meet the challenge with utter ruthlessness. Over the next year, it marshalled the nation's resources to meet and defeat the many crises. It also presided over the bloodiest period of the revolution and the one which gives optimists about the revolution the greatest reason to pause and question themselves: The Terror.

Marat may have been killed, but people were still forwarding his ideas, chiefly that only the extreme use of the guillotine against traitors, suspects and counter revolutionaries would solve the country's problems; they felt terror was needed. Not figurative terror, not a posture, but actual government through terror. It was a terrifying conclusion, and leads to the same when considering the human mind long before the events of the mid twentieth century . The Convention deputies were increasingly heeding these calls. There were complaints about a 'spirit of moderation' in the Convention and another series of price increases were quickly blamed on 'endormers', or 'dozer' (as in sleeping) deputies. On September 4th 1793 a demonstration for more wages and bread was quickly turned to the advantage of those calling for terror, and they returned on the 5th to march to the Convention. Chaumette, backed by thousands of sansculottes, declared that the Convention should tackle the shortages by a strict implementation of the laws.

The Convention agreed, and in addition voted to finally organise the revolutionary armies people had agitated for over previous months to march against the hoarders and unpatriotic members of the countryside, although they turned down Chaumette’s request for the armies to be accompanied by guillotines on wheel for even swifter justice. In addition Danton argued that arms production should be increased until every patriot had a musket, and that the Revolutionary Tribunal should be divided so as to make it quicker. The sansculottes had once again forced their wishes onto and through the Convention; terror was now in force. Execution Over the following weeks radical action was taken. On September 17th a Law of Suspects was introduced allowing for the arrest of anyone whose conduct suggested they were supporters of tyranny or federalism, a law which could be easily twisted to affect just about everyone in the nation. Terror could be applied to everyone, easily. There were also laws against nobles who had been anything less than zealous in their support for the revolution. A maximum was set for a wide range of food and goods and the Revolutionary Armies formed and set out to search for traitors and crush revolt.

Even speech was affected, with 'citizen' becoming the popular way of referring to others; not using citizen was a cause for suspicion. It's usually forgotten that the laws passed during the Terror went beyond simply tackling the various crises. The Bocquier Law of December 19th 1793 provided a system of compulsory and free state education for all children aged 6 – 13, albeit with a curriculum stressing patriotism. Homeless children also became a state responsibility, and people born out of wedlock were given full inheritance rights. A universal system of metric weights and measurements was introduced on August 1 1793, while an attempt to end poverty was made by using ‘suspects’ property to aid the poor. However, it is the executions for which the Terror is so infamous, and these began with the execution of a faction called the Enrages , who were soon followed by the former queen, Marie Antoinette , on October 17th and many of the Girondins on October 31st.

Around 16,000 people (not including deaths in the Vendée, see below) went to the guillotine in the next nine months as the Terror lived up to its name, and around the same again also died as a result, usually in prison. In Lyons, which surrendered at the end of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety decided to set an example and there were so many to be guillotined that on December 4th-8th 1793 people were executed en masse by cannon fire. Whole areas of the town were destroyed and 1880 killed. In Toulon, which was recaptured on December 17th thanks to one Captain Bonaparte and his artillery, 800 were shot and nearly 300 guillotined. Marseilles and Bordeaux, which also capitulated, escaped relatively lightly with 'only' hundreds executed. The Repression of the Vendée The Committee of Public Safety's counter-offensive took the terror deep into the heart of the Vendée. Government forces also began winning battles, forcing a retreat which killed around 10,000 and 'the whites' began to melt away.

However, the final defeat of the Vendée's army at Savenay was not the end, because a repression followed which ravaged the area, burnt swathes of land and slaughtered around a quarter of a million rebels. In Nantes the deputy on mission, Carrier, ordered the 'guilty' to be tied up on barges which were then sunk in the river. These were the 'noyades' and they killed at least 1800 people. The Nature of the Terror Carrier's actions were typical of autumn 1793, when deputies on mission took the initiative in spreading the Terror using revolutionary armies, which may have grown to 40,000 strong. These were normally recruited from the local area they were to operate in, and were usually comprised of artisans from the cities. Their local knowledge was essential in seeking out hoarders and traitors, usually from the countryside. Around half a million people may have been imprisoned across France, and 10,000 may have died in prison without trial. There were also lynchings.

However, this early phase of the terror was not, as legend recalls, aimed at nobles, who made up only 9% of the victims; clergy were 7%. Most executions occurred in Federalist areas after the army had regained control and some loyal areas escaped largely unscathed. It was the normal people, killing masses of the normal people. It was civil war, not class. Dechristianization During the Terror deputies on mission began attacking the symbols of Catholicism: smashing images, vandalising buildings and burning vestments. On October 7th, in Rheims, the sacred oil of Clovis which was used to anoint French kings was smashed. When a revolutionary calendar was introduced, making a break with the Christian calendar by starting on September 22nd 1792 (this new calendar had twelve thirty day months with three ten day weeks) the deputies increased their dechristianization, especially in regions where rebellion had been put down. The Paris Commune made dechristianization an official policy and attacks began in Paris on religious symbols: Saint was even removed from street names. The Committee of Public Safety grew concerned about the counter-productive effects, especially Robespierre who believed that faith was vital to order.

He spoke out and even got the Convention to restate their commitment to religious freedom, but it was too late. Dechristianization flourished across the nation, churches closed and 20,000 priests were pressured into renouncing their position. The Law of 14 Frimaire On December 4th 1793 a law was passed, taking as its name the date in the Revolutionary Calendar: 14 Frimaire. This law was designed to give the Committee of Public Safety even more control over the whole of France by providing a structured 'chain of authority' under the revolutionary government and to keep everything highly centralised. The Committee was now the supreme executive and no body further down the chain was supposed to alter the decrees in any way, including the deputies on mission who began to be sidelined as local district and commune bodies took over the job of applying the law. All unofficial bodies were shut down, including provincial revolutionary armies. Even the departmental organisation was bypassed for everything bar tax and public works. In effect, the law of 14 Frimaire aimed to institute a uniform administration with no resistance, the opposite of that to the constitution of 1791.

It marked the end of the first phase of the terror, a 'chaotic' regime, and an end to the campaigning of the revolutionary armies who first came under central control and were then closed on March 27th 1794. Meanwhile factional infighting in Paris saw more groups go to the guillotine and sansculotte power began to wane, partly as a result of exhaustion, partly because of the success of their measures (there was little left to agitate for) and partly as a purging of the Paris Commune took hold. The Republic of Virtue By the spring and summer of 1794 Robespierre, who had argued against dechristianization, had tried to save Marie Antoinette from the guillotine and who had vacillated over the future began to form a vision of how the republic should be run. He wanted a 'cleansing' of the country and committee and he outlined his idea for a republic of virtue while denouncing those he deemed non virtuous, many of whom, including Danton, went to the Guillotine.

So began a new phase in the Terror, where people could be executed for what they might do, not had done, or simply because they failed to meet Robespierre's new moral standard, his utopia of murder. The Republic of Virtue was characterised by power being concentrated at the Centre, around Robespierre. This included the closing of all provincial courts for conspiracy and counter-revolutionary charges, which were to be held at the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris instead. Parisian jails soon filled with suspects and the process was speeded up to cope, partly by scrapping witnesses and defence. Furthermore, the only punishment it could give out was death. As with the Law of Suspects, almost anyone could be found guilty for anything under these new criteria. Executions, which had tailed off, now rose sharply again. 1515 people were executed in Paris in June and July 1794, 38% of which were nobles, 28% clergy and 50% bourgeoisie. The Terror was now almost class based rather than against counter-revolutionaries. In addition the Paris Commune was altered to become docile to the Committee of Public Safety and proscribed wage levels were introduced.

These were unpopular, but the Paris sections were now too centralised to oppose it. Dechristianization was reversed as Robespierre, still convinced that faith was important, introduced the Cult of the Supreme Being on May 7th 1794. This was a series of republican themed celebrations to be held on the rest days of the new calendar, a new civic religion. War, Terror, and Resistance During the French Revolution : Western Civilization II Guides War, Terror, and Resistance During the French Revolution October 14, 2011 | | Comments Off on War, Terror, and Resistance During the French Revolution Anarchy within, invasion from without. A country cracking from outside pressure, disintegrating from internal strain. Revolution is at its height. War. Inflation. Hunger. Fear. Hate. Sabotage. Fanaticism. Hopes. Boundless idealism . . . and the dread that all the gains of the Revolution would be lost. And the faith that if they won, they would bring Liberty, Equality, Fraternity to the world. —R. R.

Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled One fault line that has divided inquiries into the Terror has been its connections to the democracy introduced in 1789. For some, the Terror had to occur, either to sweep away the remnants of the Old Regime or, from a more critical perspective, because the revolutionaries had inadvertently introduced authoritarianism with their seeming democratic principles. Others have seen the revolution simply swept off course, the Terror as result of unforeseen circumstances. But regardless of which position one occupies, one must look to the frantic policies of the period: its ongoing foreign and civil war, multilayered internal political strife, constitutional paralysis, economic hardships, religious conflict, and the innovative nature of revolutionary language. For those who see the Terror as unconnected to 1789, these events are the very things that cause the problems. For the others, these events manifest the solution of 1789. This chapter, then, focuses on this political tornado as an essential part of any explanation. The War Begins Back in 1789, the National Assembly had declared its intentions toward all peoples to be peaceful and had renounced war as an evil wrought by kings. Nevertheless, bellicose sentiments flowed into governmental debates and the press.

Eighteenth-century governments looked upon war as a normal part of power politics, so foreign governments did not hesitate to threaten war with the new, revolutionary government of France. Yet foreign monarchs, while fearing the spread of revolution, were not unhappy with the turmoil afflicting their French rival. Beset by their own problems, the monarchs of Europe were less inclined than some revolutionaries feared to make good on their threats. Creating further anxiety among the revolutionaries were a group of French nobles who had fled France and set up a capital in exile just over the Rhine River in ecclesiastical territory at Coblenz. In this fearful atmosphere, revolutionary activists, notably Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the other Girondins, found that militaristic rhetoric drew ready popular support, and this group’s promises of aggressive confrontation with foreign powers helped them dominate the Legislative Assembly. Once in control, the Girondins rapidly led France into war in the spring of 1792, but this strategy backfired when French forces performed badly for most of that year and as a consequence France was invaded by Prussian and Austrian troops.

These defeats panicked Parisians, contributing to the radicalization that culminated in the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in August 1792. News of the first great French victory at Valmy on 20 September allowed the newly seated deputies of the Convention to declare France a republic. The Girondins used the ongoing war to generate a great outpouring of support for the new republic. However, subsequent military setbacks in late 1792 and 1793 served to heighten factionalism in the Convention, where the radical group of Jacobin deputies known as “the Mountain” and the Girondins blamed each other, each claiming that only they could be trusted to save the now-endangered republic. In Paris, news of this civil war hardened sans-culotte suspicions that the fervor of the defenders of republican liberty had subsided, so they turned for help to radical activists who were willing to mobilize to preserve it. Beginning in 1792, the Mountain had begun to ally with sans-culottes in the sectional assemblies, and together they overthrew the monarchy and the Girondin-led Legislative Assembly.

Sans-culotte fears of the plots of invisible, domestic enemies of the Revolution were further aroused by heated rhetoric during the trial of Louis in January 1793, at which the Mountain depicted the Girondins as moderate defenders of the monarchy and thus de facto protectors of “tyranny.” The alliance between artisanal activists in the sections and the Mountain’s deputies in the Convention was forged around the idea of mutual commitment to dramatic action in defense of the Republic from its enemies, including the Girondin deputies who had been purged by 2 June 1793. The Mountain then assumed control of the National Convention. This process coincided with the outbreak of another form of civil war, inextricably tied to revolutionary politics, in the western region of the Vendée, where peasants, former nobles, and refractory priests coalesced into a guerrilla army that waged a war against the republican government. To explain why this region in particular resisted the authority of Paris—to the point of openly seeking alliance with Britain to restore the monarchy—one must consider the specific conditions that distinguished the west from the rest of France.

It was geographically isolated, more rural, and culturally and religiously distinct (with its own language and many regional saints and holidays) and had a heavier density of nobles and clergy. These factors crystallized in the spring of 1793, when Paris called for 300,000 “volunteers” for the republican army. In response, peasants in the Vendée rejected the Republic’s levy, and local ex-nobles drew on this protest to mobilize a ragtag army and seize control of the region. Not surprisingly, such regional resistance furthered the belief among Parisian radical republicans that the Revolution’s greatest enemies were French “counterrevolutionaries,” who fomented rebellion out of self-interest or an inability to set aside traditional beliefs and adapt to the new order. To defeat this rebellion, the Revolution would have to destroy not only its enemies, but also the reasons for such treachery. The Origins of the Terror The monumental task of governing a country in the midst of revolutionary transformation is a difficult one at best. But with a faction-riven 600-member legislature, it proved nearly impossible.

Recognizing that fact, the Convention, even before the victory of the Mountain, had delegated power to a twelve-member Committee of Public Safety (CPS) created in the spring of 1793. A “Montagnard” Constitution, drafted that summer, set out a plan for democracy and economic equality that was more far-reaching than any earlier project. However, faced with war, internal unrest, and other problems, the Mountain argued that the government must become “revolutionary” (meaning extraconstitutional) if it was to run effectively and also systematically and swiftly confront its hidden, internal enemies. In early September, pushed by the sans-culottes, the Committee of Public Safety led the Convention into what became known as “The Terror.” The Terror as a form of government meant the organized use of state coercive power to ensure compliance with the demands of the government. Those who did not comply faced a revolutionary tribunal, which tried “suspects” for treason and sentenced those it convicted to the guillotine. These suspects included foreign and domestic enemies.

The Terror was also used to enforce wage and price “maximums” that guaranteed affordable provisions as well as more nebulous aims, such as ensuring the “virtue” of all citizens, which allowed the CPS to repress all dissent from its own decrees. From September 1793 through July 1794, the “revolutionary government” of the Terror overwhelmed its enemies and permeated nearly all aspects of life. Yet its very success was a major part of its undoing. By the end of 1793, even some of the most radical Jacobins, notably Georges Danton, began to argue that the violence had gone too far and had become a source of instability in the Republic. His ally, Camille Desmoulins, published Le Vieux Cordelier [The Old Cordelier], an occasional newspaper that criticized the authoritarian tendencies of the Committee of Public Safety. Others censured the CPS for its centralizing tendencies, which dampened popular participation and were not in accord with the Revolution’s announced goal of achieving greater democracy. The Implementation of the Terror The chief target of the Terror was the counterrevolution, which referred to a series of distinct movements that sought to resist the revolutionary government’s authority within France.

In the west, republican forces confronted peasant armies in the Vendée (discussed above) and later another group of peasant insurgents known as the Chouans. In the center and south, government troops laid siege to cities that disputed the Mountain’s hypercentralized vision of revolutionary government and distrusted the sans-culottes. These urban revolts, although they varied somewhat from city to city, appeared to Parisians as a single movement, which they labeled “federalism.” Its proponents—in cities such as Nantes, Toulouse, Lyons, Bordeaux and Marseilles—acted independently and represented themselves as moderate revolutionaries, but leaders in Paris saw them as nothing less than royalists who had to be eliminated. In the most dramatic cases, the Convention sent its deputies as “representatives on mission” to oversee the liquidation of federalist strongholds. The use of the prestige and energy of legislative deputies to enforce the law, mobilize the nation’s resources for war, and quell armed rebellion was a marked feature of the Terror. This tactic allowed the arm of the central government to reach into many nooks and crannies that might have escaped the long arm of revolutionary justice.

The representatives on mission usually were sent out with “unlimited powers” to allow them to accomplish the monumental tasks they faced. Such authority was often abused, and the representatives frequently emerged as the most zealous proponents and executors (literally) of the Terror. For example, on the orders of two leading Montagnard deputies, Lyons was bombarded heavily by government troops. When Lyons fell, it was renamed “the freed city.” At Nantes, another representative on mission ordered that thousands of rebels be drowned on barges sunk in the Loire River. The Convention fought the counterrevolution on another front in October 1793 by trying and executing Marie Antoinette, since they believed her a figure around whom monarchists and foreign powers could rally. The fall and winter of 1793 also saw the revolutionary government pursue its foes abroad, as the armies of the Republic, under new leadership, held the line against the invading Prussians, Austrians, Savoyards, Spaniards, and English. By early 1794, the French armies created through the much-reviled draft had succeeded in defeating the invaders and were beginning to occupy territory particularly along the northern and eastern frontiers.

The Rise and Fall of the Factions With every victory, however, the Committee of Public Safety found itself engaged in another battle for survival in domestic politics. The CPS fought off repeated attacks by both radicals and moderates in the press and in sectional assemblies, but for different reasons. The radicals called themselves “The Enraged” and accused the government of leniency. They demanded a more restrictive price maximum, especially on basic necessities, while self-described “Indulgents” questioned the committee’s extremism, fearing that the constant repression of citizens’ hard-won liberties in the name of “virtue” would undermine popular support for the Revolution. Another major divisive force in contemporary politics was the Convention’s wide-ranging attempt not merely to restrain the citizenry but to transform it into a more rational and secular society. In a far-reaching break with tradition and with Christianity, the revolutionaries inaugurated a new calendar of twelve months, each divided into three ten-day weeks. This calendar eliminated Sunday, the traditional day of markets, of socializing, and of Church attendance in favor of a republican holiday every ten days.

Showing some restraint in its desire to remake time and space, the Convention rejected a proposed revolutionary clock that would have divided each day into 20 hours of 100 minutes each, but commissioned a study that created the metric system for redefining weights and measures. Furthermore, the revolutionaries imagined education as the keystone of the French nation and planned to institute universal primary education. They also wanted to improve secondary and higher education as a means of demonstrating the glory of the French nation and the “enlightenment” of its citizens. These goals were to apply not only to the heartland of France, but also to conquered Italian-, German-, and Flemish- speaking territories. However, most all these grandiose plans were shelved because the war made the more propagandistic ingredients of the revolutionary civic education the only feasible options. Perhaps the Revolution’s most radical and divisive initiative was the move to “de-Christianize” France and institute a civil religion based entirely on “reason.” Inspired by Enlightenment criticisms of the Catholic Church and in many ways embodying the Revolution’s desire to transform French society at the most fundamental level, the Cult of Reason proved highly controversial in practice.

Robespierre himself thought the seemingly atheistic Cult of Reason excessive and counter to the objective of establishing a republic of virtue. Seeking to preserve a religion based on the notion of a higher power that would replace Christianity, Robespierre organized the Festival of the Supreme Being held in June 1794, casting himself in the title role. In retrospect, this attempt to arrive at a compromise between deism and atheism seems to have precipitated Robespierre’s fall and the end of the Terror. Robespierre’s proposed synthesis of Enlightenment views on religion and republican values troubled some, who thought that “The Incorruptible” had now lost all self-restraint and was paving the way for a dictatorship. Others feared that he was abandoning the dechristianization campaign and that their activities would now expose them to the Terror. These fears mounted when two days later Robespierre pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794), which put the apparatus of the Terror directly under the control of the Committee of Public Safety and thus increased the possibility of explicit political prosecutions and executions.

Robespierre justified the new law as a necessary instrument to instill virtue in the citizenry, but these remarks merely persuaded people that he sought to eliminate his opponents and establish a personal dictatorship. By the end of July, Robespierre’s enemies had begun circulating false rumors in Paris suggesting that he intended to make himself king. Even his base of support at the Jacobin Club was eroding because he continued to rely on Terror to achieve his political goals. Those who feared another purge helped his detractors pass a resolution in the Convention condemning him and his followers, which led to their arrest and execution. The leaders of the coup against Robespierre acted to save themselves from the Terror, not to end the Terror as such or to dissolve the Committee of Public Safety. It would take several months before this fear of further purges would bring the authorities to repeal the law of 22 Prairial, emasculate the CPS, eliminate the revolutionary tribunals, and abandon the maximums. By the late fall, however, this transition would be complete and a new era of the Revolution would have begun.

The War from 9 Thermidor to 18 Brumaire Although the revolutionary armies had already turned the tide of battle in the spring of 1794, the resources gained through terroristic methods after 9 Thermidor permitted them to conquer extensive territory. By the fall of 1795, the first coalition of Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Netherlands, and Savoy had been defeated, and France held modern-day Belgium and the west bank of the Rhine River. Once the Netherlands, Spain, Savoy, and Prussia made peace, France could continue on the offensive. In 1796–97, an outnumbered and ragtag army of about 30,000 effective soldiers under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte defeated a much larger Austrian force to conquer the Italian peninsula. There Bonaparte set up a group of “sister republics,” which extended French influence without officially extending French territory. Having defeated Austria and recognizing that an invasion of Great Britain was impossible, the leaders of the French government encouraged the very popular Bonaparte to look for other means of striking at England, in part, just to get him out of the way.

When he suggested invading Egypt as a means of threatening the English position in India, Bonaparte was given permission to push ahead with the idea. In 1798, Napoleon led a sizable army and much of the French fleet across the Mediterranean. Although Egypt swiftly fell to French arms, Bonaparte’s army was stranded there by Admiral Horatio Nelson’s decisive naval victory at Aboukir Bay. Rather than remain sequestered in Egypt, Bonaparte abandoned his army to return to France, where his heroic reputation and military prowess was bolstered by slick propaganda and a considerable amount of war booty. Bringing the Revolution to a Close? After five years of upheaval, the Revolution had left France divided, angry, and distrusting but in need of central authority. In the fall of 1794, the Convention, no longer controlled by the Committee of Public Safety and with the surviving Girondin deputies restored to it, resumed its efforts to draft a constitution. The Convention recognized that the rule of law had to be restored if the authority of the government was to recover from the effects of the Terror.

With the Girondin deputies reinstated, however, there was no question of implementing the “Montagnard” Constitution of 1793. Instead, a new constitution—that of the Year III (1795)—was written. This document clearly intended to preserve the political power of the socioeconomic elite, through the reimposition of property restrictions for officeholding and the suffrage. Social equality was notably absent because Jacobin ideas on democracy were tarnished with the reputation of being inherently dangerous to the rule of law and likely to result in Terror. The new government invested the lion’s share of power in an executive body, the Directory, composed of a rotating committee of five “Directors,” who would preside over a bicameral legislature, an upper chamber named the Anciens (Elders)—all of whose members had to be at least forty years old, to ensure their maturity of judgment—and a lower house known as “the Five Hundred.” The Convention’s distrust of the polity was revealed most clearly in a decree requiring two-thirds of the deputies to the next legislature to be members of the Convention.

Recognizing that this measure would leave radicals in charge of the government, some royalist-influenced sections revolted in Vendémiaire, Year IV (October 1795). The army put down the rising under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte. (This loyal action won him his command in Italy.) Thus the directorial regime came to power with military support and would remain dependent on that support to survive. During its four years in power (November 1795 to December 1799), the Directory consistently faced challenges to its legitimacy, not only from the heirs of the Jacobins on the Left, but also from returning émigré nobles demanding restitution of their property; conservative street gangs known as the “gilded youth,” who were anxious to harass former terrorists; and a revived armed mobilization in the west of Chouans acting in coordination with the English and with other émigré nobles led by the Count of Provence, who now claimed the throne as Louis XVIII.

Yet the most significant threat to the Directory’s stability lay within the framework of the new constitution, as the elections of 1797—the first in which no former Convention deputies would be incumbent for reelection—returned a royalist majority divided between those who favored a constitutional monarchy and those who demanded a restoration of the old regime. The Directors attempted to steer a middle course, believing that their primary responsibility was to preserve a moderate republic, which meant keeping both royalists and Jacobins out of power. Preferring stability to democracy, the Directors annulled the electoral results from the Year V in a coup on 18 Fructidor (September 1797). This same strategy would be used in the Year VI (1798) against the Jacobin movement, which had been permitted to reform political clubs known as Constitutional Circles. A coup of Floréal Year VI (May 1798) showed that the pendulum of political opinion was behaving erratically and could readily shift from radical Left to Right, and vice versa. The Road to Brumaire By this time, international opinion had also become disenchanted with the Revolution.

The experience of the Terror had altered definitively outsiders’ views of France, driving it from sympathy in 1789 to hostility and derision by 1795. Certainly the Terror and the defeat of the pro-French “patriot” movement in England itself emboldened British cartoonists to lambaste the French revolutionaries, particularly their claims of having achieved “liberty” unknown elsewhere in Europe. If the executive council of the Directory remained impervious to both the military and caricatural insults of the British, it faced far more onerous challenges in the arena of domestic politics. The Directory’s continual reliance on military force against its own citizens revealed its instability. Sieyès, as a delegate of the Third Estate in 1789, had been instrumental in initiating the Revolution, but now as a Director in 1799, he would take the lead in ending it because he believed that anarchy would reign unless the government was reorganized. Turning to the most popular figure on the political landscape—General Bonaparte, freshly returned from Egypt—Sieyès arranged for a coup that would consolidate all power in a three-man consulate to include himself, Bonaparte, and Roger Ducos.

With Bonaparte’s brother Lucien manipulating the Council of Five-Hundred into consent, the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) replaced the Directory with the Consulate, a government neither liberal nor democratic. Bonaparte, whose political skills Sieyès drastically underestimated, immediately seized the upper hand and emerged within a couple of months as the real leader of France, taking first the title of First Consul (1799–1802), then Consul for Life (1802–4), and finally crowning himself Emperor (1804–14, 1815). Although the Directory is best known for its activities in war and politics, it was also very busy in other fields. In a number of ways, it pursued the Revolution’s goal of rationalizing everything, from the system of weights and measures to the lay system of free, compulsory, secondary education. Outside its official activities, the Directory achieved notoriety for ushering in a period of excess: the wealthy and fashionable flaunted their riches through ostentatious displays of self-indulgence as a reaction to the Jacobin prudery and sans-culotte economic leveling.

In the most spectacular case, the wife of one of France’s leading politicians, Madame Tallien, went topless, drawing considerable comment and criticism. The multiple directions in which the Directory seemed to move—expanding secondary education while restricting political rights, gaining territory on the battlefield while becoming ridiculed by educated Europeans, assuring the citizens it would defend “republican institutions” while allowing power to be consolidated ever more narrowly—all make this “unheroic” period of the French Revolution difficult to assess. Even scholars have given it relatively little attention. Yet it deserves careful consideration because it consolidated the achievements of the first half of the revolutionary decade and because similar contradictions continue to plague nations to this very day. George Mason University. “War, Terror, and Resistance”. (accessed October 15, 2011). French Revolution: The Reign of Terror French Revolution The Reign of Terror Instead of a democracy the Convention established a war dictatorship operating through the Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security, and numerous agencies such as the Revolutionary Tribunal. Known to history as the Reign of Terror , this period represented the efforts of a few men to govern the country and wage war in a time of crisis.

Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre dominated the new government, with Robespierre gradually gaining over Danton and others. Price and wage maximums were unevenly enforced, and acceptance of the inflated paper currency, the assignats , was made mandatory. A huge number of suspects were arrested; thousands were executed, including Marie Antoinette. A revolutionary calendar, with 10-day weeks, was adopted. The fanatic Jacques Hébert , who had introduced the worship of a goddess of Reason, was arrested and executed in Mar., 1794, along with other so-called ultrarevolutionaries. The next month Danton and his followers, the "Indulgents," who advocated relaxation of emergency measures, were executed. To counter Hébertist influence, Robespierre proclaimed (June, 1794) the cult of the Supreme Being. France's military successes lessened the need for strong domestic measures, but Robespierre called for new purges. Fearing that the Terror would be turned against them, members of the Convention arrested Robespierre on July 27, 1794 (see Thermidor ), and had him guillotined; a majority of Commune members were also executed.

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Question: Which country introduced the 'Cult of the Supreme Being' in 1794, intended to become the state religion?
Answer: FRANCE