Order Description
The revolutionaries of 1789 were chiefly concerned with the political ills of the Old Regime. Yet within a year of the fall of the Bastille the Revolutionaries had already embarked upon a grand
assault upon organised religion in France, which involved the disestablishment of the French Catholic Church (now described as a ‘cult’), the confiscation of Church lands, and ultimately a radical
dechristianising campaign aimed at the suppression of religious doctrine. Finally, in 1794 the Revolutionaries set about creating new state-authorised ‘cults’ of Reason and the Supreme Being to
replace the so-called ‘cult’ of Christianity.

Why did the Revolutionaries come to regard the Church as such a potent enemy, and why did they become steadily more hostile to religion over time? How should we understand the relationship between
the state ‘religions’ of Reason and the Supreme Being and the Catholicism of pre-Revolutionary France? Are the new ‘cults’ best understood as secular alternatives to religion, or as rival
religions?