The War Upon Religion / Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of Anti-Christianism in Europe

by Francis A. Cunningham

WORSHIP OF SUPREME BEING.

In its proscriptive decrees the Convention hitherto had not included the aged and infirm priests; by a decree of Floréal 22, these also were subjected to all exactions imposed upon others. Another decree demanded the accusation of all enemies of the people, and pronounced the penalty of death, without trial or witnesses, upon simple verbal denunciations. The Terror was now in its blindest spasm of madness, and in Paris alone, during three months, more than two thousand victims laid their heads upon the block, including many constitutional priests, who had the good fortune, through the pious offices of the Abbe Emery, to retract their errors and become reconciled to God.

A pall of moral darkness hung over the nation from end to end, a deep silence, full of anxiety and terror, was broken only by the shrieks of the dying and the insane laughter of the murderers. The silence and holiness of the Lord's Day was desecrated by labor and unseemly orgies; the decadi was observed instead of Sunday, and peasants or others daring to work on that day, or daring to rest on Sunday, were treated as suspects and punished with all the violence of irreligious hatred. Throughout the land every symbol and remembrance of religion had vanished: the church steeples had been torn down, the bells no longer called the faithful to divine service, the cross was treated as an object of public shame. Everywhere men and women suspected of fanaticism or denounced as enemies of the Revolution were condemned to death and executed. In the city of Lyons the guillotine severed thirty heads a day; but its work proving too slow for the blood-thirst of the assassins, the victims were ranged in rows, and mowed down by storms of bullets. In this way fully one thousand seven hundred fell in a short period of a few months.

ROBESPIERRE (1758-1794).

In the departments of the Ain and the Saone-et-Loire, liberty was decreed to priests who should agree to marry within a month; the aged were exempted from this law upon the condition of adopting a child of Revolutionary parents, to care for as their own. In Savoy, one thousand two hundred livres was offered as a reward for the arrest of a non-juring priest; all who refused to apostatize, whether faithful or constitutional, were arrested and condemned. At Marseilles and at Avignon, the infamous Maignet emulated his predecessor, Jourdan Coupetete, with the guillotine and fusillade of bullets. In the South, a young girl was arrested and put to death for having crossed over into Spain to confess to a legitimate priest. An aged official was sentenced to imprisonment and a heavy fine for having assisted at the "Feast of Reason" with an air of sadness and arrogance. Six women were guillotined for having assisted at the Mass of a non-juring priest.

In the Vendee one thousand eight hundred persons were murdered within a period of three months. And so the list went on through all the first half of 1794, which has left a record of millions murdered, deported, exiled, imprisoned, or tortured in a thousand and one ways. They were red letter days in the Revolutionary calendar, but the red color was made from the blood of Frenchmen. A mitigation of the horrors of those days came at last when the head of the arch-assassin, Robespierre, rolled away from the block on July 27th, 1794.

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE.

Among the oppressive laws enacted by the Convention, before its final dissolution in 1795, were those concerning education and the separation of Church and State. The decree of October 21st, 1793, decided that primary schools should form the first degree of instruction; therein should be taught all that was rigorously necessary for a citizen to know. Persons charged with instruction in such schools should be known as institutors. The decree determined the number of schools to be founded in each commune, according to the number of its inhabitants, and fixed the programme of instruction.

The children shall receive in these schools the first physical, moral, and intellectual education, the better to develop in them republican ways, the love of country, and a taste for work. They shall learn to speak, read and write the French language. They shall be taught those virtues which do most to honor free men, and particularly the ideas of the French Revolution, which shall serve to elevate their souls and render them worthy of liberty and equality. They shall acquire some notions of French geography. The knowledge of the rights and duties of man and citizen shall be taught them by example and experience. They shall be taught the first notions of the natural objects that surround them, and the natural action of the elements. They shall be exercised in the use of numbers, the compass, weights, measures, etc.