CHAPTER 6
Religion
THE FRENCH and Russian revolutions originated and unfolded in countries in which a monopolistic official religion and church permeated every aspect of civil and political society. There was no carrying through consequential reforms, let alone revolutionary transformations, without significantly changing the relationship between, on the one hand, the political, social, and cultural spheres and, on the other, the ecclesiastic sphere. Since criticism of church and, to a lesser degree, religion was central to the enlightenments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is hardly surprising that after 1789 and 1917 there should have been a drive for disestablishment, followed by willful secularization, even in the absence of a grand plan. In the face of stubborn but unexceptional resistance, the separation of church and state became increasingly confrontational. It spilled over into an assault on religion, intensely radicalizing the opposing camps. In its uphill battle to desacralize the hegemony of throne and altar, the revolution eventually spawned a secular or political religion of its own. This bid for a substitute religion intensified the founding violence attending the drive to restore a single political sovereignty, which involved mastering the dominant church’s schism over its place in tomorrow’s world.
It is difficult to delineate the defining characteristics of the religious phenomenon. In the present context religion may be taken as “the human enterprise” of establishing and administering “a sacred cosmos.” This self-enclosed system entails or implies the “dichotomization of reality into sacred and profane spheres”: the one is pure and noble, inspiring respect, love, and gratitude; the other impure and ignoble, arousing contempt, hatred, and horror. This antinomy of the “sacred” and the “profane” is coupled with that of “chaos.” Indeed, the sacred cosmos, which “emerges out of chaos,” aims at allaying humanity’s fear of being “swallowed up” by the forces of anomie. In its “world-maintaining” guise, religion legitimates political, social, and cultural relations and institutions. Revolutionary epochs are forcing houses for the subversion of this religious legitimation.1
Starting with the Enlightenment, and until recently, by and large, the terms “religion” and “religious” assumed ever more negative connotations in modern political and historical discourse. To be religious was to be reasonless, dogmatic, intolerant, superstitious, and fanatical. And not unlike the peasantry and petite bourgeoisie, religion was expected to languish before collapsing into the dustbin of history. In turn, as a politicizing and socializing agency, the church tended to be seen “as a monolithic entity invariably championing the interests of stability, social integration, and the status quo.” In actual fact, religion is a vast mansion with ever so many rooms. There are, to be sure, religions of the status quo. But there are also “religions of resistance, revolution, and counterrevolution,”2 and all three play an important role in times of foundation.
In the struggle for foundation the French and Russian revolutions developed a secular religion, the Russian Revolution using the French as its model. They meant to endow their respective Enlightenment and Socialist projects with a religious aura by forging a belief system and liturgy; designing and staging public ceremonies, including cults of martyrs; and adopting new calendars and fixing new holy days. This invention and instrumentalization of a new prophecy was intended to “religionize” the foundation of a heavenly city on earth much as the old regime had “politicized” church and religion to bolster its temporal power. In both revolutions, a would-be religion emerged “to close the gap, in favor of human hopes, between what men are and what they would like to be, at least in [their] youthful, fresh, and active phase.”3 But no doubt there was a prosaic reason for this studied emergence as well. As Machiavelli argued, religion is an indispensable governing agency, to be valued for its political effectiveness rather than theological and clerical correctness. Indeed, especially the rulers of a new regime have to enlist the “fear of the gods” along with military force if they are to secure ascendancy—and legitimacy—over both the people at large and political adversaries.4
On the eve of 1789 and 1917 the practice of the Gallican Catholic and Russian Orthodox religions, respectively, was an integral part of the everyday life of the vast majority of men and women in France and Russia. In both countries, in major respects, villages and small towns vastly outweighed cities, as attested by the bulk of the population living and laboring in rural areas. Particularly the mostly illiterate peasants and muzhiks were pious and under the influence of official churches, which winked at magic and superstition. Even in the allegedly impious cities, religious faith and practice was steady among not only the masses but the classes, and the established churches had enormous political, cultural, and social sway, with repressive consequences for religious and ethnic minorities. To reform or revolutionize French and Russian political and civil society meant challenging what were, in effect, religions and churches of the status quo. There was no breaking the cake of custom, for which they provided the lifeblood, without curbing religious leaders, institutions, and rituals. Quinet rightly emphasized that “alone among modern nations France made a political and social revolution before having consummated its religious revolution,” and added that it was this peculiar sequence in the reordering of state-church relations which accounts for the Great Revolution’s “originality and monstrosity, immensity and implacability.” To a degree this insight is valid for Russia as well, as is Quinet’s axiom that it is difficult, if not impossible, to “revolutionize society without revolutionizing the church.”5 In any event, the separation of state and religion was “the great problem” of modern Europe, and it was the “logical consequence of the idea of religious toleration, one of the strongest convictions of our time.”6
This separation was a formidable and forbidding undertaking, and, except in very vague terms, it had been unthinkable even for the philosophes of the eighteenth century. Their successors of the nineteenth century were barely better prepared, although their critical reflections on church and religion were at once more radical and studied. For Feuerbach and Marx, as well as for Nietzsche and Freud, religious doctrine and practice was a conduit for the expression and evacuation of illusions, fantasies, and obsessions fired by the agonies of everyday life. With understanding for the functions of religion, Marx considered it at once an expression and a defiance of “real distress.” But he conceived religion, above all, as the “sigh of the oppressed creature” in a “heartless world,” as well as “the opium of the people.”7
Whereas Marx, like Voltaire, banked on reason and the rational mind, Freud focused on the subconscious. But not unlike for Marx, for Freud, the last great philosophe of the European Enlightenment, religion enabled human beings, collectively, to “secure a certain happiness and protection against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality.” He postulated that religion “depress[es] the value of life and distort[s] the picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence.” By forcing individuals into “a state of infantilism and drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis.”8
In any case, the revolutionists of 1789 and 1917 gradually assumed the heavy task of organizing the removal of critical spheres of polity, society, and culture “from the domination of religious institutions and symbols.”9 Having decoupled state and church and desacralized political power, they proceeded to extricate education, the civic register, and social welfare from clerical control.
It is difficult to imagine a more intractable and divisive issue than the abrupt desacralization and laicization of political and civil society. Eventually it engages opposing true believers as it turns into a main battleground between, on the one hand, the religion of revolution and, on the other, first the religion of the status quo and then the religions of counterrevolution and resistance. Whereas in the time of the Reformation the struggle was between two “revealed” religions, in the time of the French and Russian revolutions it was between timeless revealed religion and embryonic political or secular religion. The French Revolution pioneered in “laicising the religious passion and transferring it from the ecclesiastical to the political arena.” Its counter-religion forswore intervention by superhuman and supernatural agencies as well as preoccupation with “matters of ultimate concern,” such as the nature and fate of humankind. But the alternative religion was no less religious for that. Jacobins and Bolsheviks “religionized” politics by way of doctrine, myth, and ritual, at the same time that they generated a millenarian ambience charged with a mixture of faith, intolerance, and fanaticism pregnant with violence and terror. They secularized and politicized millenarianism, determined “to change things, not just to convert people.”10
Both revolutions took root in and fired “an age of faith as well as reason.” In retrospect it is hard to understand and explain what “sustain[ed] this childlike faith, what unexamined prepossessions enable[d] the Philosophers to see the tangled wilderness of the world in this symmetrical, this obvious and uncomplicated pattern.” This incongruence may have been due, in part, to their having been “not professional philosophers sitting in cool ivory towers but crusaders” with a dual mission: to destroy “false doctrines” that had “corrupted and betrayed” humankind; and to put forward “another interpretation of the past, the present, and the future.” In challenging “the doctrines of Christian philosophy,” the philosophes “substituted the love of humanity for the love of God … [and] the self-perfectibility of man for vicarious atonement.” This alternative teaching, which was soon perceived and represented as having “culminated in the great Revolution, … gave an emotional and even a religious quality to the conviction that the future … would be infinitely better than the present or the past.”11
Much the same can be said about the démarche of the Socialists who before and after 1917 replaced “the love of God” with the love of humanity’s underclass. Indeed, Marxism, not unlike the Enlightenment, had its millenarian, Promethean, and redemptive cogency. While in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers Carl Becker explored the blinding faith of the French Enlightenment, in The Origin of Russian Communism Nicolas Berdyaev discussed the faith of Russian Marxism. In Berdyaev’s view, Marxism was “a doctrine not only of historical and economic materialism … but of deliverance, of the messianic vocation of the proletariat, of the future perfect society.” Indeed, in addition to being “a science and a politics” Marxism was “a faith, a religion.” It fitted conditions in the tsarist empire all the better because Russian Marxists took revolution to entail “not merely a conflict concerned with the social and political side of life, but a religion and a philosophy” bearing on “totality, entireness, in relation to every act of life.”12
Berdyaev held that by giving prominence to its “messianic myth-creating religious side” Lenin Russified Marxism, incarnating it in a particular social carrier. Bolshevism transformed the failing “myth of the peasant people into the myth of the proletariat,” so that despite the shift from an organic to a class-conflict postulate, the myth of the Russian people “arose in a new form.”13
The secular millenarianism of the French and Russian revolutions rallied true believers, whose “spiritual intensity … [and] militance” were of the order of “the Crusades or the Wars of Religion.”14 Unlike soldiers, who are drafted and “ordered to launch an attack,” revolutionaries are “volunteers who answer an inner calling.”15 This also means that their adversary is not a foe but an enemy of infidels or traitors.
Although strongly marked by national (and nationalist) singularities, the secular millenarianisms of 1789 and 1917 had, as noted before, a universal vocation and reach. In particular Marxism won countless partisans far and wide whose conduct was very much that of religious disciples or converts, not a few of them ready to make sacrifices of conscience and person. But there is also one striking difference between the believers of secular and revealed religion: the former are much more readily and rapidly disabused and disenchanted than the latter. Everyday experience shows doctrine and cause to be flawed and compromised, with the result that disenchanted revolutionaries defect or rebel. Charging the apostles of their chosen religion with cunning and hypocrisy, they make a pretense of having been duped as they forswear The God That Failed, some of them to become heretics, others renegades.16
Both the French and Russian revolutions secularized the religious passion once their drive to disestablish the official church ran into predictably stiff resistance. This showdown over the church question unwittingly but also inevitably escalated into a religious contest, both domestic and international, thereby intensifying and polarizing the larger struggle into which it was grafted.
Burke was among the first to speak of the events in France as a “total … [or] compleat revolution” giving rise to a “new species of Government” based on “new principles.” In his view, formulated well before the crescendo of violence, this incipient new regime, whose chief actors, with “Condorcet … at their head,” were “sworn enemies to King, Nobility, and Priesthood,” foreshadowed “a real crisis in the Politicks of Europe.” Burke likened this crisis to that of the Reformation and the wars of religion, Europe’s “last Revolution of doctrine and theory.” Neither narrowly political nor territorial, the affairs in France were like the heresy which had given rise to the great schism in Western Christianity: it was “a Revolution of doctrine and theoretick dogma,” involving changes “made upon religious grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part.” Both then and now the “effect was to introduce other interests into all countries, than those which arose from their locality and natural circumstances.” Similar to the doctrine of “Justification by Faith and Works,” the republican doctrine had a universal compass, with its “theoretick truth and falsehood governed by [neither] circumstances … [nor] places.” Due to “a system of French conspiracy,” everywhere Europe “was divided into two great [doctrinally informed] factions,” so that states were no longer simply “alienated” from each other but also “divided” internally, within themselves.17
Troubled that the longer the “present system exists, the greater … its strength” and contagion, Burke proposed to rally international support to contain or crush the French Revolution, convinced that there could be “no counterrevolution from internal causes solely.”18 He conceived the upcoming struggle with an impious and fanatical France as “a religious war” in which religious factors would outweigh “every other interest of society.”19 Convinced that Christianity was the bedrock of Europe’s civil societies and a major fount of its civilization, Burke reproved any diminution of the Catholic Church and religion in France.
Whatever their philosophic differences, Maistre shared Burke’s preoccupation with the Revolution’s religious kernel, making its success contingent on “the scope and energy of its spirit, or of what might more appropriately be considered its faith.” Viewing the Jacobins as the chief apostles and carriers of an unprecedented and unique secular providence, Maistre grudgingly admired them for their “infernal genius” at the same time that he cursed them for their “satanic character.” Like Burke he considered the Revolution a divine punishment or vengeance for the transgressions of the Enlightenment, destined to end with the restoration of a regenerate Catholic monarchy.20
The religious homology, however, is not the monopoly of fiery conservative and counterrevolutionary thinkers and public intellectuals. Tocqueville, paragon of mid-nineteenth century liberal conservatism, wove it into his contemplation of the logic of revolution. There is no missing the heuristic force of the title of the third chapter of his The Old Regime and the French Revolution: “How and Why the French Revolution Was a Political Revolution Which Proceeded in the Manner of a Religious Revolution.” Tocqueville, inspired by Burke and Maistre, suggests that a study of the practices of religious revolutions of the past might help throw light on those of the French Revolution.21 Like them the French Revolution, contrary to all previous “civil and political revolutions,” was without “a land of its own” and virtually “wiped all the old borders off the map.” Wherever there were insurrections against the old world, the zeal for liberty was quickened by impatience with the heavy hand of church and religion. As in the time of the Thirty Years War, after 1789 foreign and civil war became inseparable, and so did issues of “principle” and “interest.” In Tocqueville’s construction, one of the important defining characteristics of religious revolutions is that by virtue of considering humanity “in the abstract, independent of place and time, … they rarely confine themselves to the territory of a single people or even to a single race.” The French Revolution offered the new spectacle of a political revolution seeking to regenerate not France but humankind, using “preachment and propaganda … to inflame passions and inspire conversions.” It eventually “assumed those features of a religious revolution which so frightened contemporaries” even though it was an “imperfect religion without ritual, without God, and without promise of an afterlife.” Despite these deficits this peculiar religion, “like Islam, flooded the world with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”22
Even if Tocqueville judged the French Revolution to have been futile and hence pointlessly destructive, like Burke he saw it as a “compleat” revolution, seeking to both change the old form of government and abolish the old form of society. The attack on the Catholic Church was part of this expansive project, which did not, however, include an assault on religion as such. In line with the writings of the philosophes, the Revolution turned its furor less against Catholicism’s “religious doctrine” than against its “political institution” whose dignitaries were strategic members of the economic and social establishment.23 As it turned out, with the consolidation of the Revolution in major spheres of political and civil society, the profane reasons for battling the church vanished. Ever attentive to the overlap of continuity and change, Tocqueville contraposed the permanence of certain radical political and social changes to the transience of “irreligious” passions and actions. As the old religion renewed its ascendance and unbelief receded, the church recovered lost ground “wherever men [of property] felt threatened by popular disorder and feared lurking revolutionary perils.” In Tocqueville’s estimate, “the most irreligious class before 1789, the old nobility” was in the vanguard of the return to religion after 1793, followed by the bourgeoisie.24 Evidently, he meant to make a distinction between, on the one hand, the religious characteristics and dynamics of revolution and, on the other, the interpenetration of declericalization and dechristianization.
Contemporaries of Tocqueville, Michelet and Quinet, both sworn republican freethinkers, also placed religion at the center of their reflections on the French Revolution. Of course, the two historians disagreed about its inner nature.25 Michelet saw the Revolution as Christianity’s “heir as well as adversary,”26 although it spelled a radical incompatibility between the religion of divine grace and the promise of justice and law grounded in human values. Quinet, for his part, drew a sharp distinction between Christianity and Catholicism, between the Gospel and the Church. In his view, 1789 opened a breach for the reclamation of such great Christian virtues as equality, fraternity, and universality, forever violated and perverted by the Catholic Church, in league with the sanctified monarchy. Here was an opportunity to renew the “golden age” or the “first hours” of primitive Christianity by way of radical reform in both state and church, “political and religious revolution … being inseparable.” But presently, with the nation becoming “more and more democratic,” the Gallican Church, backed by the Apostolic See, became uncompromising. According to Quinet, despite the best efforts of the “lawmakers, Girondins, and Montagnards the hostility between the old and the new spiritual power went from bad to worse,” with the opposing sides increasingly “hating, lacerating, and lifting the sword against each other.”27
Despite their differences as to the weight or purchase of France’s long-lived religious past, as “brothers in heart and thought,” Michelet and Quinet converged in their analysis of the role of church and religion in the revolutionary process. Michelet was mainly concerned with explaining the bearing of religion on the crescendo of the terror. For him the Revolution was both a religion and a church. Sacred and redemptive, it had its own deities, articles of faith, rituals, and sacraments. Indeed, in Michelet’s view, whereas the counterrevolution, swearing by the “old faith,” remained “discordant” and never jelled as a religion, the Revolution became “more and more concordant” and increasingly “revealed itself to be the religion that it really was.”28
Although Michelet, following others, stressed that the French Revolution, like Christianity, “disregarded space and time” to the point of “eliminating geography,” unlike Tocqueville he explored the domestic rather than international dynamics and consequences of this impetus. Like Quinet, he saw a continuity in the struggle between the principle of violence and the precept of charity, with the former almost invariably stealing the march.29 Michelet singled out the Inquisition for being most revealing of Christianity’s ingrained violence, which left such a deep and fatal mark on Europe and now resurfaced in the guise of the revolutionary terror. The spirit of the Spanish Inquisition’s torture, auto-da-fé, and death by fire was the same as that of the Committee of Public Safety’s revolutionary tribunal. As for the scale of victims, there was no common measure between their respective hecatombs: the Great Terror of 1793–94 claimed “sixteen thousand victims” in all of France compared to the “20,000 victims burned at the stake in just sixteen years in a single province of Spain.” To be sure, as a historian of his time, as well as a fervent anticlerical, Michelet uncritically embraced the tendentious nineteenth-century conception that the Inquisition had disastrously savaged and terrorized Spain. But he fastened on the Inquisition also because the war against misbelievers on the Iberian peninsula was of a piece with the war against “the Albigensians, the Vaudois of the Alps, the beggards [pseudo-mystical beggars] of Flanders, the Protestants of France, … the Hussites, and so many other peoples the Pope had agreed to have put to death.” Taking the long view, for over six centuries the old system of linked religious and political power “had strangled, strung up, and dismembered millions of men and women whose flesh was pyramided for burning to glorify the kingdom of heaven.” Convinced that ordinary killing and death were too profane and clement, the medieval Church had “exhausted itself inventing” tortures to heighten the suffering of the victims and the cathexis of the spectators.30
Michelet anticipated Marc Bloch’s and Walter Benjamin’s concern about historians writing from the perspective of the victors, half-deaf to the humanity and agony of the victims. He was troubled by the difficulty of “chronicling the atrocities … of our enemies” who made a point of covering their tracks, “throwing away the ashes” of their burned victims, including their “calcinated bones.”31 This unmastered past, by crying out for vengeance, may have contributed to disposing the Jacobins to issue and execute their warrant for terror.
Michelet invoked religious attributes in accounting for the Revolution’s exceptional and unexpected material and spiritual force. He noted that the melting away of class, social, and party differences quickened the birth of a well-defined community of new believers rallied around the idée patrie. Erstwhile enemies, including members of opposing sects and faiths, became reconciled, with Catholic priests and Protestant pastors showing the way by attending each other’s church services. This coming together was reflected in the nationwide but Paris-bent Federation movement which was the first crystallization of the new religion of the patrie and of humanity. To bolster this incipient faith, in the provinces as in the capital “the rituals of the old and artificial church … were adapted and enlisted for the purpose of consecrating the festivals” of the new: traditional processions were refitted, while oaths and baptisms were administered at ageless altars on which the “Holy Sacrament” was embodied and displayed in the form of the “decrees of the Assembly.”32
Nonetheless, Michelet considered it one of the French Revolution’s great shortcomings that it failed to realize that “it carried the embryo of a religion and … was itself a church.”33 Even Robespierre and Saint-Just never “dared touch religion and education” and—unlike Marat—were circumspect on “the subject of property.” Indeed, “the Revolution was vacuous without a religious revolution,” and without a “social revolution” it lacked “support, strength, and depth.”34 Although it was “fertile” in forging new institutions and laws, it remained “sterile” in the matter of infusing them with a distinct ethos. To prosper, the Revolution needed to nourish the “national soul” by showing the political and social project of the Enlightenment, as well as its religion, to be for the benefit of all, regardless of social station. As it turned out, the Revolution faltered in two vital respects: “it … closed churches without establishing [new] temples; it cleared the way for property to change hands without … breaking the rules of property.”35
Quinet shared Michelet’s interest in the religious lineaments and vectors of the Revolution, as well as his concern with the way in which these influenced the Terror. He held that during the Terror the Jacobins, whom he likened to latter-day Jesuits, resorted to practices reminiscent of the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages and of the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe, guided by the reason of state. Starting with Pope Gregory VII, the Holy Fathers developed the principles and practices of proscription, excommunication, and liquidation which by way of the Crusades were applied in distant lands before being adapted for use inside Europe, with the throne gradually gaining ascendancy over the altar.36 According to this reading, the Jacobins did not pioneer a new theory and practice of enforcement terror but inherited and modernized an old one, capped by a “rhetoric of fire.”37
The Revolution “fell back on the violent methods of the sixteenth century,” including the fiery “temperament of Catholicism,” to create a new world “in less than seven days.”38 There was something ironic about “the sword of Saint Bartholomew’s Day becoming the chosen instrument” of Rousseau’s sentimental logic, with the masses resorting “to the violence of the Middle Ages with an eye to rushing headlong into the future.”39 Indeed, the stake and the guillotine bore resemblance, and so did Saint Bartholomew’s Day and September 2.
The “revolutions” in England, the American colonies, and the Dutch Netherlands were spared the Furies because they were grounded in, respectively, “the Anglican Church, … the Presbyterian traditions, and … the new Calvinist faith.” By contrast, Quinet argued, the Reformation having bypassed France and the absolutist royal power having crushed the Protestants, the Revolution had “neither crown nor church” to build on, facilitating philosophy’s emergence as an essential founding stone. Whereas heretofore the ideas of the Enlightenment had “fertilized and stirred the minds of individuals,” they now “set in motion the streets … either to transform the old religion or to crystallize into the religion of a new people.”40 Not surprisingly, France having missed the Reformation’s religious quarrels which elsewhere had encouraged a “spirit of analysis and discussion,” even mild dissent was perceived and represented as heresy. Presently the “intolerance” of Saint-Just resembled that of any Pope, and the Convention bade fair to turn “Paris into a new Rome with a spiritual authority on the order of the Vatican.”41
While Michelet faulted the Jacobins for not realizing that the Revolution was a political religion and church, Quinet scorned them for not being fit to carry out their religious mission. In his judgment they naively assumed that debate and persuasion could dissolve an age-old church and belief system. The revolutionaries continued to hesitate between toleration and proscription until well after it was clear that, in the words of Saint-Just, the “two opposing cities” were irreconcilable. Even the ultra-Jacobins kept trying to win over the priests without making a concerted effort to “emancipate” their parishioners, who were their lifeblood and raison d’être.42 But above all, with the possible exception of Robespierre and Saint-Just, they lacked the “fiery … and icy temperament” and the “carnivorous instinct” of the religious fanatic and executioner, perhaps because they fell short of the “mystical exaltation … and creative audacity” of the Reformers of the sixteenth century.43 Not even the most impassioned revolutionary tribunes had any of the “thunder and fury” characteristic of Huss, Luther, or Zwingli.44 By and large the Jacobins “trembled at what would have made Luther laugh,” so that unlike their counterparts of the sixteenth century, who “emancipated half of Europe from its medieval religious institutions, they … failed to extricate a single village from them.” The Jacobins might have been more forceful in deracinating the old belief system had they known how to create “a nation without a religion, without a cult, and without a God.”45
It is striking that several of the incumbents and close associates of France’s distinctive Chair of the History of the French Revolution, established at the Sorbonne to coincide with the Revolution’s first centennial, took a keen interest in the ecclesiastical and religious question. But each of them did so from a different perspective, making for considerable discordance. Although Alphonse Aulard, Albert Mathiez, Marcel Reinhard, and Albert Soboul were confirmed republicans and secularists, they were not only at variance about the nature of the Revolution’s would-be secular religion. They also differed about the respective weight, in its gestation and practice, of intention and contingency, authenticity and imitation, profanity and sacrality, spontaneity and organization. Even so, all four postulated that this religion had many of the defining characteristics of religion in general: belief system, catechism, martyr, priest, altar, cult, rite, and hymn. Alone Reinhard wondered whether the sacred ever crystallized sufficiently for the Revolution’s would-be religious cults to be considered genuine religions.
The interpretation of Aulard, the first holder of the chair from 1891 to 1923, is ingenuously functionalist. In his reading—as in that of Michelet and Quinet before him and Mathiez and Soboul after him—in 1789 no one had called for an assault on either the Gallican Church or Catholicism. Until late 1792 the members of the major political factions in the legislative assemblies were at once tempted by an indeterminate Enlightenment and respectful of the old faith. All this time the mass of the people, particularly the peasants, “instinctively continued to practice their hereditary habits.”46 In his day Aulard still needed to insist that the attempt to de-Christianize France and establish first the Cult of Reason and then the Cult of the Supreme Being “originated neither in a preconceived philosophic idea nor a reasoned … or fanatical belief system.”47 To be sure, select circles entertained certain theoretical constructs, such as Rousseau’s idea of civil religion. But ultimately, according to Aulard, the Revolution’s new-model religion was a “necessary and essentially political consequence of the state of war into which the resistance of the ancien régime … had plunged the Revolution.” Specifically, “the enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre-Dame [in November 1793] or the glorification of the God of Rousseau on the Champ de Mars [in June 1794]” had, above all, a political rationale. For the zealots of 1793–94 such moves, along with other expressions of symbolic and verbal violence, were essentially “defensive.”48
Aulard considered the Revolution to have “made the mistake” of forcing refractory priests to swear an oath to the secular republic with a view to “nationalizing Catholicism.” This oath became both the “reason and pretext” for the clergy’s unholy alliance “with the enemies of the patrie,” as expressed in its incitement of opposition to the military draft in early 1793. Indeed, the shift from fighting the Church to attacking the Catholic religion did not get under way until the second half of 1793, when the Revolution had to do battle in the Vendée and against Europe. It was in this moment of peril that a few fiery spirits, in their iron “resolve” to save the nation, wildly imagined that they “could overnight destroy an age-old religion and improvise a new and powerful” ersatz belief system.49 This entailed “substituting new dates and festivals for Catholic ones, abolishing the Christian Sunday in favor of a Republican sabbath, replacing the names of saints by those of ‘objects which are truly representative of the essence of the nation.’ ”50
In Aulard’s analysis the two major would-be secular religions—the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being—made few converts in the provinces and countryside, where “the popular masses ignored or scorned” them, their hearts being unmoved by “cerebral ceremonies.”51 Although he loathed Robespierre, Aulard all but endorsed his charge that the rabid de-Christianizers damaged the revolutionary regime by offending not only the silent majority in France but also “popular sentiments and governments” throughout Europe. In his self-possessed speech of November 21, 1793, Robespierre denounced fanaticism for being “both ferocious and capricious,” and warned against fomenting “a new fanaticism to fight the old.” He was particularly troubled by those making “the battle against superstition a pretext for turning atheism into a religion” and the Convention into the fountainhead of a “metaphysical system,” at odds with popular religion.52
Mathiez, like his teacher Aulard, treated the religious phenomenon in essentially political and social terms. For both historians the search for an alternative religion was a matter of political expediency in the face of mounting resistance at home and abroad. Mathiez saw the creed of the Revolution’s embryonic cult generating love and reverence for France’s new political institutions and principles with a view to “regenerating not only the French people but all humanity.” In contrast to Catholicism’s mystique and promise of salvation in the hereafter, this cult held out the hope of progress in this world. For Mathiez the clash between these two precepts for redemption fired an inherently religious struggle.53
On one point Mathiez marked himself off from Aulard. Inspired by Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion, he held that the “specifically religious characteristics” of the inchoate revolutionary cults were defined more by their rites and symbols than their doctrines.54 There was, to be sure, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which emerged as the virtually unspoken “national catechism.”55 But especially in the cities, the faith of the converts was stoked above all by secular ceremonies and festivals which effectively imitated and rivaled those of the Venerable Church. Mathiez meant to demonstrate, over against Quinet, that “in religious sincerity, mystical exaltation, and creative audacity the men of the Revolution barely lagged behind the men of the Reformation.”56
To summarize, in Mathiez’s own words: the Revolution’s religion had “its binding dogmas (the Declaration of Right, the Constitution); its symbols wrapped in a venerable mystique (the national colors, the liberty trees, the altars of the patrie, etc.); its ceremonies (the civic festivals); its prayers and chants.” In late 1792, in order to “change into a genuine religion,” it still needed to “become conscious of itself, by breaking with Catholicism, from which it was not yet completely extricated.”57 The defiant opposition to the civil constitution of the clergy triggered this rupture, which was pressed for and instrumentalized by true believers, some of whom were “frenzied and fanatical” in their war against the “beliefs, symbols, and institutions” of the old religion “they meant to suppress and replace.”58
Soboul went beyond Aulard and Mathiez by exploring the “specificity” as well as the “ensemble” of the religious phenomenon in the revolutionary process. He shifted the focus from the Faustian cults of Reason and of the Supreme Being, which were the “official and … artificial productions” of revolutionary leaders, to major “popular cults,” which were “expressions of the religious spontaneity of the revolutionary masses,” the bulk of participants in public ceremonials. In addition, instead of pointing up the “break between the traditional and new religion,” Soboul explored their interpenetration. As he saw it, the new popular cults were intrinsically syncretic, although in form and practice they remained “very close to Catholicism.”59
The cults of Lepelletier, Marat, and Chalier, the three most prominent “martyrs of liberty,” best reflected this skewed syncretism. Many of the ceremonies took place on Sundays and not a few were held in churches. Soboul also notes the “ambiguity” of words like martyr, saint, and deity “taken over from Christianity’s religious vocabulary” and likely to foster mental contagion in favor of national or revolutionary rather than personal salvation. Funeral processions were “modeled on the Catholic processions which were now forbidden.” In the untried ritual observances “the draperies, candelabra, and sarcophagi were taken from traditional religious ceremonials, while the national colors replaced the black color of mourning.” Altars were adapted for patriotic rites, “the statue of Liberty supplanted that of the Virgin,” and “wreaths of cypress leaves and inscriptions” evoked memories of the birth of freedom in the ancient world. A distinct ceremonial symbolism gradually crystallized, composed of “elements borrowed from the Catholic cult and Antiquity,” and syncretized with revolutionary ingredients.60
Soboul, like Aulard, was attentive to social variants: whereas “militants of petty bourgeois and middle class background who had a modicum of classical culture … and disbelief hearkened to memories of antiquity, the sansculottes, … doubtless immersed in the traditional religious environment, borrowed elements from the Catholicism in which they were raised.”61 But whatever the “lineaments” of the new cult, its manifestations and intentions were “essentially political,” and Soboul’s fundamental question remains unanswered: “to what extent did a [deep-seated but not immutable] religious sentiment … [and] fervor heighten the exaltation of the civic spirit?”62
The works of Aulard, Mathiez, and Soboul prompted Marcel Reinhard to raise some fundamental issues of interpretation in his courses at the Sorbonne. His starting premise was twofold: the inherent difficulty of “creating a religion, ab origine and out of thin air”; and the “failure of this effort” in 1789–94.63 To be sure, Reinhard mapped the advance from spontaneous practice to deliberate construction. All along he wondered, however, whether this religion-cum-church-building was ever driven by a genuine “desire to found a religion,” or whether at bottom it was simply a matter of “political tactics.”64 At the outset there were, to be sure, deputies who “considered themselves priests” of the Revolution, among them Barnave, who actually proposed that the Declaration of the Rights of Man be proclaimed France’s “national catechism.” There were, in addition, hymns to martyrs as well as to patrie, liberty, reason, and nature. Eventually elements of these paeans were integrated into the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being, which had their altars, vows, and rites. But Reinhard stopped to ask whether their principal “traits” were not “more of the domain of ritual than religion”65—in other words, that they may have been more in the nature of civic and patriotic “festivals which in the final analysis were not a religion [capable of] replacing” the established but contested church and faith.66
Reinhard also dismissed the Cult of Reason as an eclectic syncretism trapped in “memories of Christianity” even as it embodied the resolve to “substitute something new for them.”67 A confluence of “popular and sansculotte currents” combined with a current that was “bourgeois, enlightened, and deist,” the Cult of Reason was an amalgam of a “cult of great men, of the Patrie, and of Liberty.”68 As for the Cult of the Supreme Being, which “oscillated between atheism and theism,” it was every bit as syncretic as the Cult of Reason. Both had multiple components, but those of the latter had a more “human” inflection than those of the Cult of the Supreme Being, which was more “transcendent.”69
Among historians of the French Revolution, Reinhard stands out for postulating the sacred as an essential defining characteristic of religion. For him, the revolutionary cults lacked a distinctive and authentic sacred attribute or core. Reinhard ascribed this deficit to the religion-makers’ “astonishing ignorance” of the religious phenomenon and of essential “psychological and sociological factors” which he traced to the “revolutionary personnel being cut off from the people at large.”70 With commendable caution Reinhard concluded that on the whole, there “were very few genuinely religious elements,” certainly as compared to “pride,” which was profane: “pride in being a revolutionary, pride in serving a new ideal, and pride in fighting for it … at the risk of one’s life.” As for God, he was “called to witness rather than invoked or implored.” There being no signs of “humility, even among those of humble station,” there was “neither supplication, nor fear of the sacred.” To the contrary, the call(ing) was “for confidence, courage, and bravery to the point of fearlessness.”71 Evidently Reinhard—not unlike the revolutionaries—took the Christian religion as his archetype, probably excessively but also instructively so.
In Russia, as in France, public intellectuals and political objectors could not avoid addressing and debating the role of religion in state and society. Of course, in the late eighteenth century the link between the Bourbon absolute monarchy and the Catholic Church had been perfectly normal. A century later, however, the symbiosis between the Romanov autocracy and the Orthodox Church made Russia old-fashioned in comparison with most other European nations. But this very backwardness made preoccupation with the question of church, state, and society all the more acute for Russia’s reformers and revolutionaries. Especially after 1905–6, not only did several idealists among the intelligentsia delve into “God-building” or “God-seeking,” but so did prominent Marxist Socialists, much to the dismay of their fiercely godless colleagues.72 To be sure, during this same period in France, Jean Jaurès suggested that the socialist movement was a “religious revolution.”73 But this train of thought was rare to the west of Russia.
In any case, the discussion in Russia was marked by Marx, whose thought and political engagement, like Voltaire’s, transcended national borders and was distinctly pan-European, indeed universal.74 To be sure, Voltaire had been glaringly French while Marx was anything but Russian. Also, whereas Voltaire had sought to influence and advise Europe’s crowned heads, Marx proposed to dethrone them. Still, they were analytically at one in stressing that church and religion were essential bulwarks of the established order: without reducing or transforming them it would be difficult, if not impossible, to improve the human condition. Marx might as well have been speaking of Russia when he held, intemperately, that because religion “was one of the chief pillars of the Prussian state … it had to be knocked away before any political change could be thought of.”
For Marx religion was not pure and indeterminate irrationalism. Like politics and culture, it was conditioned significantly by exploitative social and economic relations. As noted above, Marx conceived religion as a consequence, symptom, or reflection of a wrongful society or world. It was “an expression of the reality of poverty” as well as a “protest against it.” Central to the culture of the masses, not the classes, religion was at once a “sigh of the oppressed” and an “opium” intended to help them compensate for or sublimate their misery. Unlike Ludwig Feuerbach and the left Hegelians, Marx could not conceive challenging religion without probing its social foundations. In his view “religion does not make man … [but] man makes religion,” and man does so as member of a specific “state [and] society.”
Clearly, Marx considered the critique of religion and the battle against it an integral part of the critical analysis of the existing world and the struggle to change it. In a particularly striking formulation Marx called for “ criticism of heaven to turn into criticism of the earth, criticism of religion into criticism of law, and criticism of theology into criticism of politics.” Ultimately he believed, of course, that scientific progress would dissolve the fallacies of religion, to be replaced by enlightened secular attitudes, values, and moral principles consistent with the class struggle and the construction of a new order. Meanwhile, however, critical intellection and politics would hasten this process of unmasking the religious pretense.
Marx’s view of religion was particularly telling for a broad range of Russian Socialists embattled in a country of great oppression whose official church was deeply anchored in the worldview and beliefs of the masses, yet also closely linked with the political and social order of tsarism. Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, perhaps the leading Menshevik intellectual, treated religion, in the Marxist manner, as a web of superstitions, prejudices, and misconceptions correlated with grinding socioeconomic conditions. Although he agreed with Marx that in the long run religion would vanish with the march toward socialist modernity, Plekhanov made a point of asking how this process should or could be accelerated, above all by education.
For Lenin, unlike Plekhanov, religion was less an “intellectual error [than] … a social and moral outrage” rooted in rank exploitation. Rather than leave de-faithing and de-churching to gradual self-liquidation aided by small doses of enlightenment, Lenin advocated making the attack on church and religion central to the revolutionary project: one of the main reasons for a Marxist party in Russia was “to carry on the struggle against all religious bamboozling or stultification of the workers.”75
But notwithstanding this interpretive and tactical discord, Lenin and Plekhanov pulled together in the battle against religion. In 1902, mindful of the struggle over church and religion during the French Revolution, they pressed to make religion a private affair, to separate church and state, and to secularize education. Lenin proposed that all state funds for the Orthodox Church and clerical institutions be ended as an essential precondition for “wiping out the shameful and accursed past, in which the Church was the slave of the State and Russian citizens, in their turn, the slaves of the Church, when medieval inquisitional laws tyrannized over the conscience of men.”76
But starting with the fin de siècle, with the issue of forcing the course of history increasingly agitating and dividing Russian Socialists, other Marxists made a point of insisting that it was neither desirable nor possible to extirpate the religious temper. Often their unorthodox interventions involved rethinking Marxism itself, which they identified as a religious phenomenon in its own right. Anatoli Vasilyevich Lunacharsky’s critique of Plekhanov is emblematic of this turn.77 Of course, he agreed that the old religion served to relieve popular fears of mysterious natural forces and that its doctrine and church were meant to keep in place the underprivileged in favor of the ruling and governing classes. But Lunacharsky challenged the idea that religion had always and everywhere been a repressive force, insisting that in the past it had intermittently inspired or mobilized popular protests against injustice and inequality. Unlike Plekhanov, whom he considered a latter-day philosophe trusting in human reason and education, Lunacharsky called attention to the non-reasoning, not to say irrational impulses driving humanity’s permanent if unsteady religious quest, culminating in socialism, the “religion of mankind.”78 In his reading, in addition to being a social theorist, Marx was a moral philosopher and prophet in the tradition of Isaiah, Christ, and Spinoza—a combination that was “Judaism’s precious gift” to the family of man.79 Lunacharsky argued that by confining his exegesis to the rational and scientific facets of Marx’s theoretics, Plekhanov missed their intense emotional and moral charge. As “the most religious of all religions”80 socialism was inseparable from a latent collective fervor, peculiar to Russia, waiting to be aroused and harnessed, for “without enthusiasm it is not given to men to create anything great.”81 The assignment, here and now, was to generate myths and rituals, faith and communion, without lapsing into god-worship, mysticism, and otherworldliness. Lunacharsky wanted the Bolsheviks to “propagate Marxism as an anthropocentric religion whose God was Man, raised to the height of his powers, and whose celebration was revolution—the greatest and most decisive act in the process of ‘God-building.’ ”82 Even if he does not say so explicitly, there is reason to believe that Lunacharsky’s thoughts turned to God-building once he discerned the inertia of peasant Russia.
If even hardened Russian Marxists stressed the quasi-religious sides of their project, it is hardly surprising that left-idealists like Berdyaev should have done so as well. Berdyaev considered himself a “radical Christian” or “religious … and collectivist revolutionary” distinctly understanding of Marxist socialism, even if “deeply hostile to its authoritarian implications.” He and Lunacharsky were aware of each other and basically agreed on the potential of emergent religious-like belief and purpose for the revolutionary movement.83 A true but disenchanted Christian, Berdyaev blamed the Russian Orthodox Church—as Michelet and Quinet had blamed the Gallican Church—for “failing to carry out its mission,” occupying “a conservative position in relation to state and social life,” and acting as a “slavish subject to the old regime,” thereby preparing the ground for “the false religion of communism which aimed to take the place of Christianity.” In addition, conditions and traditions in Russia were not favorable to a “liberal bourgeois revolution,” the liberal movement being anchored in the Duma and Cadet party, which lacked popular support and “inspiring ideas.” Accordingly, in the Romanov empire the revolution “could only be socialist … and totalitarian,” leavened by a “spiritual turn of mind” peculiar to Russia. Not surprisingly the country’s intelligentsia was tempted by the left in general, which understood revolution as “both a religion and a philosophy,” and by Marxism, which was “a faith, a religion, in addition to being a science and a politics.”84
Whatever their differences, Plekhanov and Lenin were at one in opposing the idealist as well as the Marxist or materialist enchantment with the mystique and spirituality of revolution. Lenin might as well have spoken for both of them in November 1913, when writing to Gorky, who himself was not above hearkening to the religionist Siren: there was no greater difference between “god-seeking, god-building, god-creating and god-making” than between “a yellow and a blue devil, … [and] to talk about god-seeking without declaring against all devils and gods … and to prefer a blue to a yellow devil was a hundred times worse than not saying anything about it at all.”85 Of course, Plekhanov and Lenin were, in the first instance, troubled by discordant voices in their own camps. Plekhanov scorned Lunacharsky, berating him as a “hayseed” and a “God-composer” or “God-spinner.”86 And Lenin criticized him for unwittingly lending support to reaction. Reiterating Marx’s condemnation of religion as an “opium,” Lenin called it “spiritual booze or schnapps in which the slaves of capital drown their … demands for a life in some degree worthy of man.”87 In this way, Plekhanov and Lenin both upheld the orthodox Marxist conception of the nature of religion, as well as the orthodox Marxist interpretation and projection of itself as the most powerful form of secular rationalism. Their views aligned them with many outside the Marxist movement and made them all the more dangerous to the tsarist regime inasmuch as intense criticism of the Orthodox Church, often combined with militant religious disbelief, reached beyond the radical left to the loyal opposition, and it was widespread in the intelligentsia.
Clearly the divisive urgency of the ecclesiastical and religious question during the French Revolution and its immanence in the old Russia combined to precipitate its theoretical discussion by radical members of the latter-day Enlightenment in the late Romanov empire. Not even Lenin could have anticipated that the religious question would soon have to be confronted in a Russian revolution at the same time that this revolution would become the primary host of Marxism, a messianic secular religion whose social catechism would have an even greater echo than the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Indeed, “perhaps not since Christianity was founded” has the world seen “a doctrine combining as much proffered hope with as much militance and zeal … as the message offered the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the disinherited by Marx and his followers.”88
NOTES
1. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 25–27, 35, 39, 80, 100; and Roger Caillois, L’homme et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), pp. 17–23, 37, 42. Both Berger and Caillois take Emile Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) as their starting point.
2. Bruce Lincoln, “Notes Toward a Theory of Religion and Revolution,” in Lincoln, ed., Religion, Rebellion, Revolution: An Interdisciplinary and Cross-cultural Collection of Essays (New York: St. Martins, 1985), pp. 226–92, esp. p. 282.
3. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1957), p. 194.
4. Machiavelli cited in Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyranny from Plato to Hannah Arendt (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), p. 136.
5. Edgar Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1984), pp. 229–45. Before Quinet, Hegel had argued along similar lines. See Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982); and Werner Berthold “Weltgeschichtskonzeption und Stellung zur Grossen Französischen Revolution,” in Manfred Kossok and Editha Kross, eds., 1789: Weltwirkung einer grossen Revolution, vol. 2 (Liechtenstein: Topos, 1989), esp. pp. 618–27.
6. Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1978), p. 118.
7. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 129–42.
8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in James Strachey, ed., The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 57–145, esp. p. 81 and p. 85.
9. Berger, Sacred Canopy, p. 107.
10. Brinton, Anatomy, p. 194 (italics in text).
11. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 8–9, 46, 122–23, 130, 138–39.
12. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937/1948), p. 98, p. 100, and p. 105.
13. Ibid., pp. 106–7.
14. Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 265.
15. Eugen Rosenstock, Die europäischen Revolutionen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1931), pp. 66–67.
16. Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Harper/Bantam, 1952).
17. Burke, “Thoughts on French Affairs” (1791), in Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 340–42 (italics in text).
18. Ibid., p. 340.
19. “Remarks on the Policy of the Allies” (1793), in ibid., p. 485.
20. Joesph de Maistre, Écrits sur la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1989), esp. pp. 91–217 (“Considérations sur la France”). See also Richard A. Lebrun, “The ‘Satanic’ Revolution: Joseph de Maistre’s ‘Religious’ Judgment of the French Revolution,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 16 (1989): pp. 234–40.
21. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime et la Révolution (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), bk. 1, ch. 3, pp. 105–6. Carl Becker called attention to Tocqueville’s religious analogy in Heavenly City, pp. 154–55.
22. Tocqueville, L’ancien régime, bk. 1, ch. 3, pp. 106–8.
23. Ibid., bk. 1, ch. 2, pp. 102–4.
24. Ibid., bk. 3, ch. 2, p. 245.
25. See François Furet, La gauche et la Révolution française au milieu de XIXe siècle: Edgar Quinet et la question du jacobinisme, 1865–1870 (Paris: Hachette, 1986), passim.
26. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Laffont, 1979), vol. 1, p. 54.
27. Quinet, Le Christianisme, pp. 181–82, 231, 233–34.
28. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 317.
29. Ibid., p. 51, p. 54, and p. 60.
30. Ibid., pp. 61–62.
31. Ibid., p. 62.
32. Ibid., pp. 323–40 and p. 43. See also Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, 1838–1851, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 223.
33. Michelet, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 308.
34. Ibid., vol. 2, bk. 14, ch. 1.
35. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 616.
36. Quinet, Le Christianisme, esp. chs. (lectures) 6 and 8.
37. Ibid., p. 239.
38. Ibid., p. 242.
39. Ibid., p. 240.
40. Quinet, La Révolution (Paris: Belin, 1987), pp. 150–51 and p. 168; and Christianisme, p. 234.
41. Quinet, Le Christianisme, pp. 240–41.
42. Quinet, La Révolution, p. 176.
43. Ibid., pp. 511–17.
44. Ibid., p. 173.
45. Ibid., pp. 471–74, 482–83, 493.
46. Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la raison et le culte de l’être suprême, 1793–1794 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1892), p. 17.
47. Ibid., p. 199.
48. Ibid., p. viii.
49. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
50. Ibid., pp. 34–35.
51. Ibid., p. 200.
52. Ibid., pp. 210–17.
53. Albert Mathiez, Les origines des cultes révolutionnaires, 1789–1792 (Paris: Société Nouvelle, 1904), p. 9 and pp. 15–16.
54. Mathiez, Les origines, pp. 10–12.
55. Barnave cited in ibid., p. 22.
56. Ibid., p. 13.
57. Ibid., p. 62.
58. Ibid., p. 35 and p. 38.
59. Albert Soboul, “Sentiments religieux et cultes populaires pendant la Révolution: Saints, patriotes, et martyrs de la liberté,” in Archives de Sociologie des Religions 2 (July–December 1956): pp. 75–77.
60. Soboul, “Sentiments,” pp. 78–80.
61. Ibid., p. 84.
62. Ibid., p. 80 and p. 87.
63. Reinhard, Religion, révolution, et contre-révolution (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1960), fasc. 2, p. 178.
64. Ibid., p. 167 and p. 169.
65. Ibid., p. 164.
66. Ibid., p. 174 and pp. 178–79.
67. Ibid., p. 178.
68. Ibid., pp. 174–75.
69. Ibid., p. 162 and p. 164.
70. Ibid., p. 162.
71. Ibid., p. 182.
72. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1948), esp. pp. 156–66; and Christopher Read, Religion, Revolution, and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and Its Intellectual Background (London: Macmillan, 1979).
73. Jean Jaurès, La question religieuse et le socialisme, ed. Michel Launay (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1959).
74. All citations in the following three paragraphs are drawn from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (New York: Schocken, 1964), with an introduction by Reinhold Niebuhr; and Nicholas Lobkowicz, “Karl Marx’s Attitude toward Religion,” Review of Politics 26 (1964): pp. 319–52.
75. Cited in George Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 142. See also Erwin Adler, Lenins Religionsphilosophie (Munich: Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSR, 1964), pts. 2 and 3.
76. Cited in René Fulop-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia (New York: Putnam, 1927), p. 242. See also Adler, Religionsphilosophie, pp. 81–86.
77. Read, Religion, pp. 79–85.
78. Cited in Kline, Thought in Russia, p. 117.
79. Cited in ibid., p. 118.
80. Cited in ibid., p. 122.
81. Cited in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 4.
82. Ibid., p. 4.
83. Read, Religion, esp. pp. 57–59, 77, 88.
84. Berdyaev, Russian Idea, pp. 246–49. See also Marie-Madeleine Davy, Nicolas Berdiaev ou la révolution de l’esprit (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), esp. pp. 25–26, 55.
85. Cited in Read, Religion, pp. 91–92.
86. Cited in Kline, Thought in Russia, p. 118, n. 5.
87. Cited in ibid., p. 142.
88. Nisbet, Social Philosophers, pp. 222–23.