Of the French Revolution Considered
in its Anti-Religious Character –
Digression on Christianity
There is a satanic character in the French Revolution which distinguishes it from all we have seen, and, perhaps, from all we shall see.
Recall the great assemblies! Robespierre’s speech against the priesthood, the solemn apostasy of the priests, the desecration of objects of worship, the inauguration of the goddess Reason, and this host of unheard-of scenes wherein the provinces tried to outdo Paris—all this exceeds the bounds of ordinary crime and seems to belong to another world.
And even now, when the Revolution has lost most of its furore, the great excesses have disappeared, but the principles remain. Have not the legislators (to use their term) made this declaration, unprecedented in history: the nation shall not sponsor any worship? Some men of our time have, in my view, appeared at certain moments to reach the point of hatred for Divinity; but this frightful act is not necessary to annul the greatest creative efforts: the mere neglect of (to say nothing of contempt for) the great Being is an irrevocable anathema on human works tainted by it. All imaginable institutions are either based on a religious idea, or they are merely transient. They are as strong and enduring as they are deified, if we can put it that way. Not only can human reason, or what is ignorantly called philosophy, not supply what is yet more ignorantly called “superstitious” foundations, but philosophy is, on the contrary, an essentially disruptive force. In a word, man can only represent the Creator by putting himself in harmony with Him. How senseless we are! — if we want a mirror to reflect the image of the sun, do we turn it toward the earth?
These reflections are addressed to everyone, to the believer as to the sceptic; it is a fact that I advance and not a thesis. Whether one laughs at these ideas or venerates them, whether true or false, they are no less the sole basis of all enduring institutions.
Rousseau, perhaps the most mistaken man this world has ever seen, has nevertheless hit upon this observation without having wanted to follow its consequences.
The Judaic Law, which remains always in force; that of the child of Ishmael, which for ten centuries have governed half of the world, still proclaim today the great men who laid them down … Proud philosophy or the blind spirit of party sees in them only lucky impostures.1
He had only to draw the conclusion, instead of telling us about that great and powerful genius which presides over enduring institutions: as if this poetry explained something!
When reflecting on the facts attested by the whole of history; when one considers that the chain of human institutions—from those which have marked the ages of the world down to the smallest social organization, from the empire to the brotherhood—has a divine basis, and that human power, whenever isolated, has only been able to give to its works a false and transitory existence; what shall we think of the new French system and the power that has produced it? For myself, I shall never believe in the fecundity of nothingness.
It would be a curious thing to successively delve into our European institutions and show how they are all Christianised; how religion mixes into everything, animates and sustains everything. Human passions may soil, even pervert primitive creations, but if the principle is divine, this is enough to give them a prodigious endurance. Among a thousand examples, we may mention that of military orders; we should certainly not disparage their members in affirming that the original religious object is no longer their first concern: no matter—they remain, and this endurance is a marvel. How many superficial wits laugh at this strange amalgam of monk and soldier! Better to rhapsodize about that hidden force by which these orders have survived the centuries, overcome formidable powers, and mustered the most astonishing resistances in history. Now, this force is the name on which these institutions rest; for nothing is but through the One who is. Amid the general upheaval we are witnessing, the want of education, in particular, arrests the anxious attention of the friends of order. More than once, they have been heard to say that the Jesuits must be restored. I shall not enter here into the merits of this order; but this wish does not suggest deep reflection. Do they mean that St. Ignatius is ready at hand to serve our aims? If the order is destroyed, some of the cooks among the brethren may be able to restore it in the same spirit that created it; but all the sovereigns of the world would not succeed.
This is a divine law as certain and as palpable as the laws of motion.
Whenever a man puts himself, according to his ability, in communion with the Creator, and produces any institution whatsoever in the name of the Divinity; whatever may be his individual weakness, his ignorance, his poverty, the obscurity of his birth, in a word, his absolute want of all human means, he participates in some way in that omnipotence of which he is the instrument; he produces works whose force and endurance astonish reason.
I beg every attentive reader to look closely around him; in even the least objects will he find these great truths demonstrated. It is not necessary to go back to the son of Ishmael, to Lycurgus, to Numa, to Moses, whose laws were all religious; a popular festival, a rustic dance, will suffice for the observer. He will see in some Protestant countries certain gatherings, certain popular celebrations which have no apparent purpose, and which come down from Catholic usages altogether forgotten. These kinds of festivities have in themselves nothing moral, nothing respectable; they derive, though very distantly, from religious ideas, and this is enough to perpetuate them. Three centuries have not been able to efface their memory.
But you, masters of the earth! princes, kings, emperors, powerful majesties, invincible conquerors! try only to bring the people on such-and-such a day each year to a specified place to dance. I ask very little of you, but I dare solemnly challenge you to succeed, just as the humblest missionary will succeed, and will be obeyed two thousand years after his death. Every year, in the name of St. John, St. Martin, St. Benedict, etc., the people gather around a rustic temple; they arrive, animated by a noisy and yet innocent glee; the religion sanctifies the joy, and the joy embellishes the religion: they forget their troubles; they think, on leaving, of the pleasure they will have the following year on the same day, and that day is for them fixed.
Next to this picture, place that of the masters of France, whom an unheard-of revolution has invested with every power, and who cannot organize a simple festival. They lavish gold, they call to their aid all the arts, and the citizen stays home, or heeds the call only to laugh at the organizers. Listen to the scorn of impotence! Listen to these memorable words of one of those deputies of the people speaking to the Legislative Body, in a sitting of the month of January 1796: “What then?” he exclaimed, “men foreign to our customs, to our usages, have succeeded in establishing ridiculous festivals for unknown events, in honour of men whose existence is itself a problem. What! they have been able to obtain the use of immense funds to repeat each day, with a dismal monotony, insignificant and often absurd ceremonies; and the men who have overthrown the Bastille and the throne, the men who have conquered Europe, will not succeed in preserving, in national festivals, the memory of the great events which immortalize our revolution!”
O delirium! O depth of human weakness! Legislators! meditate on this great confession; it teaches you what you are and what you can do. What more do you now need to judge the French system? If its deficiency is unclear, there is nothing certain in this world.
I am so convinced of the truths that I defend that when I consider the general decline of moral principles, the divergence of opinions, the undermining of sovereignties without foundation, the immensity of our needs, and the poverty of our means, it seems to me that any true philosopher must choose between these two hypotheses: either a new religion shall be born, or Christianity shall be rejuvenated in some extraordinary way. It is between these two suppositions that we must choose, according to the position we have taken on the truth of Christianity.
This conjecture will be scornfully rejected only by those short-sighted men who believe only what they see. What man of antiquity could have foreseen Christianity? And what stranger to this religion could have foreseen its success from its beginnings? How do we know that a great moral revolution has not already begun? Pliny, as proved by his famous letter,2 had not the slightest idea of this giant, of which he saw only the infancy.
But what a host of ideas comes to assail me at this moment and raises me to the widest of considerations!
The present generation is witness to one of the greatest spectacles ever beheld by the human eye: it is the fight to the death between Christianity and sophistry. The lists are open, the two enemies have come to grips, and the world looks on.
As in Homer, we see the father of gods and men holding the scales which weigh two great stakes; soon one of the scales will come down.
For the biased man, and especially for the one whose heart has convinced his head, events prove nothing; the partisan having irrevocably taken a side either for or against, observation and reasoning are equally useless. But all you men of good faith who deny or doubt, perhaps this great epoch of Christianity will settle your uncertainty. For eighteen centuries it has reigned over a great part of the world, and particularly over the most enlightened portion of the globe. This religion does not originate even in antiquity; reaching back through its founder, it is tied to another order of things, to a prototypical religion that preceded it. The one cannot be true without the other being so: the one boasts of promising what the other boasts of possessing; so that this religion, by a sequence that is a visible fact, goes back to the origin of the world.
It was born on the day that days were born.3
There is no example of such endurance; and to confine ourselves just to Christianity, no institution in the world can be compared to it. To compare other religions to it is to quibble; several striking characteristics exclude all comparison: this is not the place to detail them; one word only is enough. Let us be shown another religion founded on miraculous facts and revealing incomprehensible dogmas, believed for eighteen centuries by a great part of the human race, and defended from age to age by the foremost men of the time, from Origen to Pascal, despite the utmost efforts of an enemy sect which has not ceased howling, from Celsus to Condorcet.
What a remarkable thing! when one thinks about this great institution, the most natural hypothesis which every probability suggests is that of a divine foundation. If the work is human, there is no way of explaining its success: in excluding a miracle, a miracle is required.
All nations, it is said, have mistaken copper for gold. Very well: but has this copper been thrown into the European crucible, and for eighteen centuries subjected to chemical observation? or, if it has survived this ordeal, has it done so to its credit? Newton believed in the Incarnation; but Plato, I think, thought little of Bacchus’ miraculous birth.
Christianity has been preached by the ignorant and believed by the learned, and in this it resembles nothing else known.
In addition, it has survived every trial. It is said that persecution is a wind that nourishes and spreads the flame of fanaticism. Granted: Diocletian favoured Christianity; but according to this supposition Constantine should have stifled it, and this has not happened. It has resisted everything—peace, war, scaffolds, triumphs, daggers, temptations, pride, humiliation, poverty, opulence, the night of the Middle Ages and the great daylight of the ages of Leo X and Louis XIV. An all-powerful emperor,4 master of the greatest part of the known world, once exhausted all the resources of his genius against it; he spared nothing to revive ancient dogmas; he skilfully associated them with the Platonic ideas which were then in fashion. Hiding the rage which animated him under the mask of a purely external tolerance, he used against this enemy worship weapons which no human work has resisted; he exposed it to ridicule; he impoverished the priesthood to make it despised; he deprived it of all the support which man can give to his works: slanders, intrigues, injustice, oppression, ridicule, force, and skill; all was useless; the Galilean prevailed over Julian the philosophe.
Finally, the experiment is being repeated today under even more favourable circumstances; nothing is lacking that can make it decisive. So pay close attention, all you whom history has not instructed well enough. You say that the sceptre supported the tiara;5 very well! there is no longer a sceptre on the world stage, it is broken, and the pieces thrown into the mud. You wondered at the extent to which a rich and powerful priesthood’s influence could sustain the dogmas it preached; I do not believe in any power to make one believe; but let us pass over this point. There are no more priests; they have been driven out, slaughtered, degraded; they have been plundered: and those who have escaped the guillotine, the stake, the daggers, the fusillades, the drownings, the deportations, today receive the alms they once gave. You feared the force of custom, the ascendency of authority, the illusions of the imagination: nothing of that remains; there is no longer any custom; there is no longer a master: the mind of each man is his own. Philosophy having eroded the cement that united men, there are no longer any moral ties. The civil authority, favouring with all its strength the overthrow of the old system, gives to the enemies of Christianity all the support it once granted to Christianity itself: the human mind takes hold of every imaginable means to combat the old national religion. These efforts are applauded and paid for, and the contrary efforts are crimes. You have nothing to fear from the enchantment of the eyes, which are always the first to be deceived; pompous dress and vain ceremonies no longer impress men before whom everything has been mocked for seven years. The churches are closed, or open only to the cacophonous discussions and debauches of an unbridled people. The altars are overthrown; filthy animals have been paraded in the streets in bishops’ vestments; chalices have served in abominable orgies; and on these altars which the old faith surrounded with dazzling cherubim, naked prostitutes have been mounted. Sophistry therefore has no more complaints to make; all human chances are in its favour; everything is done for it and everything against its rival. If it is victorious, it will not say, as Caesar did: I came, I saw, I conquered; but it will finally have conquered: it can applaud and sit proudly on an overturned cross. But if Christianity emerges from this terrible test purer and more vigorous; if the Christian Hercules, strong in his own power alone, lifts the son of the earth, and crushes him in his arms, patuit Deus [“God has become manifest”]. — Frenchmen! make way for the most Christian King, carry him yourselves to his ancient throne; take up his oriflamme, and let his coinage, reaching again from one pole to the other, carry everywhere the triumphal motto:
Christ commands, he reigns,
he is victor.
1 Contrat social, book I, ch. VIII.
2 [Pliny the Younger, Roman governor of Bithynia, wrote to Trajan ca. 112 CE seeking counsel on dealing with the problem of Christians in the Empire who refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods.]
3 [Racine, La Religion, book III, verse 36]
4 [Julian the Apostate, Roman emperor who, in the wake of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, attempted to restore Roman paganism as the state religion.]
5 [i.e., that the Crown supported the Papacy.]