Showing papers on "Supreme Being published in 1971"

The Philosophes and Religion: Intellectual Origins of the Dechristianization Movement in the French Revolution

Abstract: From Alphonse Aulard to Peter Gay historians have been fascinated with the attitudes of the philosophes toward religion. 1 In the present essay attention falls on a neglected aspect of the question, the impact of the philosophes ' ideas on the dechristianization movement in the French Revolution. Dechristianization means the attempt to suppress Christianity either by legislation or by force. In the Revolution, dechristianization took the following forms: aggressive anti-clericalism, prohibition of any Christian practice or worship either in public or private life, closing of the churches, the formation of a revolutionary calendar to replace the Christian one, and the establishment of new religious cults—the Cult of Reason and the Cult of Supreme Being. It is argued here that a direct influence can be traced from the philosophes to the dechristianizers of the Revolution. The dechristianizer did not belong to any clearly defined sociological group. He was an aristocrat like Anacharsis Cloots, or bourgeois such as Jacques Rene Hebert and Pierre Chaumette. 2 Their ideas were nurtured from the deistic and atheistic writings of the philosophes .