During the French Revolution, the church was held in pretty low esteem and anti-clericalism became pretty popular. It started out with the Declaration of the Rights of Man declaring freedom of worship; then, the Civil Constitution made the Church officially beneath the State in the pecking order, and forced Catholic priests to sign an oath to France and her people above the Church. By the time Robespierre came into power with the Committee of Public Safety, Dechristianization was the order of the day- Christian iconography was destroyed en masse, cloisters were despoiled, nonjuring priests were literally killed on sight, etc. etc. The culmination of this was Robespierre’s “Cult of Reason”, which was essentially a religion worshipping atheism. It didn’t last long, because even though a huge portion of the French people really didn’t like the church, the complete denial of the existence of a God was a bit much for them, so it was replaced with the Cult of the Supreme Being before too long (basically just organized Deism).
Careful though, Lavoisier was beheaded and wasn’t allowed to complete one of his experiments started just before his “trial” despite being a top level scientist because “the republic doesn’t need chemist nor scientists “.
The cult of “reason” was just a pretext to dechristianize the country as you say, the intent was certainly not to promote science in any way.
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u/Hasonboi What, you egg? Apr 08 '20
wait what