What happens when a country turns away from God, rejects the God-given authority of the Church and acts on the impulses of man? France experienced such a cultural and religious revolution during the 18^th century.

Although King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were very much concerned about justice in France—unlike most of the nobility of the time—they became victims of the French intellectuals who upheld the principles of Liberalism: the beliefs that man is responsible to no authority; that men owe nothing to God; and that the mind and will of man replaces the will of God. These three tenets have been the cause of much suffering throughout Europe from the 16^th century onward, especially in France.

The French Revolution began in July, A.D. 1789 when a mob stormed an old prison named the Bastille. This was more of a symbolic act than anything else. Inside the prison 120 guards were watching over seven prisoners, six of whom were petty thieves, and the other an insane nobleman who had been placed in the prison at the request of his family.

Thereafter civil disorder was a common scene in both the cities and the countryside. There was no law and order in France for the next few years. The French liberals of the Revolution renounced God and issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In this document basic human rights were stated as coming from the state government rather than from God as traditional Catholic France had always believed. The Revolution forced Louis XVI to exchange his crown for a red cap of liberty. The crown had, at least in part, represented the authority of God entrusted to the "Catholic" king. The new liberty cap represented authority handed out from the state government.

The suppression of the Church
In November of that same year all Church lands in France were seized by the National Assembly, the new French parliament, to enrich its members. And in the following year all religious orders and monastic vows were suppressed. In July of A.D. 1790, the National Assembly passed The Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This bill enabled the government to control all religious proceedings. Pastors and bishops were to be elected and paid by the government, and all clergymen were required to take an oath of fidelity to this new Constitution. Those who refused to take the oath were either murdered or were barred from serving the Church in France. Those who took the oath became a part of the false national French Church which was condemned by Pope Pius VI.

Consequently, most parishes stood empty. The faithful Catholics met with "non-juring priests," those priests who had not sworn the oath, in secret underground chapels for Masses and the sacraments. Knowing this to be the case, the legislature decreed that all Catholic priests who had refused the oath were to be arrested. Louis, however, knowing that hatred of Christ and His Church was at the heart of the Revolution, vetoed the decree and became even more despised with the revolutionaries who had seized control of the Church and the State.

The Reign of Terror
Within a short time, the king’s enemies managed to overthrow the monarchy, suppress the Church, and establish a new Republic which had no desire for God. Louis and Marie Antoinette were beheaded and the Revolution established what has come to be known as the Reign of Terror.

A group called The Committee for Public Safety, headed by a man named Robespierre, came to power as the absolute dictatorship of France and instituted communist laws. One of their first acts was to outlaw worship of the true God. In A.D. 1793 Robespierre proclaimed that France was to have a new religion: emanating from his own deistic convictions, the short-lived cult centered about a "supreme being" and was intended to add spiritual content to the otherwise godless principles of the Revolution. The artist, Jacques Louis David designed an inaugural ceremony, in which the statue of Wisdom rose out of the smoke and ashes. Robespierre decreed the existence of the Supreme Being as the basis of rational Republican religion.

In the autumn of A.D. 1793, the new dictatorship instituted a new calendar whose names would more closely correspond to the spirit of the time than the old Gregorian calendar which was based on the liturgical year of the Church. In line with other de-Christianizing acts—many churches had been gutted and converted to Temples of Reason, museums or other secular buildings—the names of days and months were replaced by symbols of nature and other things related to the Republic’s principles. Thus the days were given names such as Lamb’s Lettuce, Plow, Billy Goat, and Spinach; the holidays were known as Opinion Day, Labor Day, and so on.

The new system was implemented retroactively from September 22, 1792, which by coincidence was both the fall equinox and the day the French Republic was created. This calendar was observed by the French until Napolean reverted to the use of the Gregorian calendar in A.D. 1806.

During the Reign of Terror, Robespierre ordered thousands of men to the guillotine. Anyone who had any special talent or made a good wage was seen as an enemy of the Revolution. The country, at that time, was governed by men who respected not even themselves. In a span of only seven weeks during A.D. 1794 they sent 1,376 people to the guillotine, the last of which were the Carmelite nuns of Compiegne. Even Robespierre was eventually executed by his own men.

Effects of the Revolution
The French Revolution finally produced a dictator, Napolean Buonaparte, who, while he was in command of the French army, attempted to conquer all the lands of Europe. For some time he was very successful. He set up his own government in the conquered territory and called it the Cisalpine Republic. In A.D. 1797 he seized control of the French government. Once in control of France he began to appropriate all of Western European culture as French.

"All men of genius are French," proclaimed Napolean, "no matter in what country they may have been born." Napolean’s men studied foreign guidebooks to find the richest treasures of art to steal, selecting the choicest pictures from palaces and churches so that the French public might enjoy the aesthetic pleasures once reserved for the aristocracy and clergy.

The looting of cultural treasures, supervised by the "Governmental Commission for Research of Artistic and Scientific Objects in Conquered Countries" was led by the artist Vivant Denon was placed in charge of the looting.

The value of all the treasures looted by the French during this time is estimated at 100 billion dollars.

"The sovereignty of all the arts should pass to France," declared Napolean, "in order to affirm and embellish the reign of liberty." Inspired by the dictator’s pronouncements such as this, French art commissioners followed the revolutionary armies, systematically looting the art treasures of what is now Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

The Louvre Museum in Paris was established in A.D. 1793 and was dedicated in A.D. 1798 when Italian art and cultural treasures were conducted into the new national museum.

The effect on fashion and mores
"It is impossible to appreciate the state of public depravity," the Paris police announced a few years after the Revolution. Men no longer raised their hats to ladies, obscene graffiti appeared everywhere on the walls, and immodesty in dress became popular. In Paris the "dandies" wore absurd costumes, and the peasants on the farms looked more brutish than ever. With the reform of the calendar from a seven-day week to a ten-day week, the peasant men shaved on every tenth day rather than on Sunday.

After the Reign of Terror, both men and women cropped their hair close to their scalp. Some wealthy Parisian men affected a look of the beggars. They wore broken spectacles, baggy trousers, and shirts that did not fit properly. Women began to dress immodestly; they wore fashions which imitated the thin gowns of the ancient Pagan Greeks. Doctors had to remind these ladies that the climate of France was much harsher than that of Greece, but the French ladies remained slaves to the fashions of the day. It was truly the disintegration of traditional Catholic society.

The effects on future regimes
The French Revolution not only unleashed the Reign of Terror of Robespierre and the dictatorship of Napolean, it served as the grandfather to other evil systems such as Nazism and Communism which also believe that man owes nothing to God or the authority of the Church. These principles of the French Revolution which destroyed society were obstacles in man’s path to Christ through His Church.

More articles on history from Volume VI (1997-98) of the St. Joseph Messenger:

What the Know-Nothings Knew
The Spanish Inquisition
The Bubonic Plague & the Black Death
Our Lady of Fatima
Who Stole the Church in England?
Spain's Twentieth Century Crusade
The Death's of Rasputin
Life in the Catacombs of the Early Church