Revolutionary cult

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The revolutionary cults of the French Revolution , as enlightening or popular forms of belief, together with the revolutionary festivals , formed a civil-religious ensemble that was to take the place of Christianity and especially Catholicism in the socio-political center. The most intensive cultivation of cults coincided with the peak of the de-Christianization 1793–1794. It ended after the separation of Church and Republic in 1795 and came with the Concordat of 1801 between France and the Pope. The Panthéon in Paris goes back to the environment of the revolutionary cults.

Enlightenment Beliefs and the Panthéon

Étienne-Louis Boullée : Cénotaphe à Newton , 1784
Charles de Wailly : Renovation project for the Panthéon , before 1798
The geometry of the afterlife: imagined, but not realized architecture of enlightened republican grave structures.

The revolutionary cults were rooted on the one hand in the scientifically founded skepticism of the Enlightenment towards the traditional creeds. The advocacy of rational thought and action motivated a worldview that, if it did not completely deny the existence of God, saw God as the immanent principle of the omnipresent order established and functioning according to conflict-free rules. This view called for a religion freed from all superstitions and all illogicals, in which a rationalistic piety and the recognition of the laws of nature should prevail. Taken over by large parts of the intellectual and political ruling class, the deistic or theistic piety based on this was expressed after the beginning of the revolution in intellectual forms of faith such as the cult of reason , the cult of the highest being , the cult of the decade or theophilanthropy .

On the other hand, the idols of the Enlightenment often went hand in hand with the rationalized faith: Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were probably the most important . Their veneration found an institutional expression. The National Assembly declared the dome of the Sainte-Geneviève church , which was completed on April 4, 1791 but not yet consecrated, as the Panthéon, a national hall of fame and a necropolis for important French people. In the same year Voltaire was reburied in the Panthéon , Rousseau followed in 1794. With a view to Isaac Newton , who had a special status among scientists because of his fundamental insights into gravity, light and electricity, the early socialist Henri de Saint-Simon spoke of a religion à Newton (Newtonian religion), when he spoke the word of reason in faith in 1802.

Popular beliefs and martyrs cults

The revolutionary cults were underlain by a quasi-religious ritualization of the revolutionary everyday life, which expressed itself in fraternal kisses , the erection of trees of freedom and altars of the fatherland or the taking of citizenship . The popular expressions of the revolutionary cults made it possible to live out religious feelings, which at the same time were entirely under the sign of the republic. Not least, parts of traditional piety persisted in them. Revolutionary " texts of faith" leaned closely on church models, such as a Crédo révolutionnaire français , which was modeled on the Catholic creed ("We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty ..."):

“I believe in the new French Republic, the one and indivisible, in its laws and in the sacred human rights that the French people received from the holy mountain party of the National Convention that created them. The sacred human rights had suffered much in the hands of the traitors, but they fell under the guillotine sickle and were buried. I believe that thanks to this tool, the armed tyrants and their hordes will prostrate themselves to us to venerate the human rights given by the Convention. I believe that the sans-culottes who died for the fatherland and for sacred human rights sit at the right hand of the Father of all living beings and beatify their brothers who are taking revenge on the hordes of tyrants. I believe that the holy mountain party of the French has purged itself of its traitors, I believe that the legislators of the French people will not stop throwing anger at Europe until the tyrants who wage war against us have been crushed. May the European people, rising out of their self-inflicted lethargy, recognize the human rights for which the real children of France have sworn to live and die. "

Daniele Crespi : Pietà , first third of the 17th century.
Jacques-Louis David : The Death of Marat , 1793
Jacques-Louis David took up the Christian motif of the Pietà for his famous painting . It was set up on an altar-like pedestal in the Louvre and, as an engraving, was brought to the public in countless copies.

Especially in the cults of personality for killed revolutionaries, which were very reminiscent of the veneration of saints in the Catholic Church, the religious and political spheres merged. The worship of these people as “martyrs of the revolution” was closer to the population than the abstract cults for reason or a “supreme being”. The execution of the French king in 1793 and the de-Christianization on the one hand legitimized the new revolutionary order, but also left behind spiritual and ceremonial gaps. With the martyr cults - as a secular resumption of the veneration of kings and saints - society and politics took over religious patterns and adapted them to their needs.

The martyrs included Louis-Michel Lepeletier , Joseph Chalier and, first and foremost, Jean-Paul Marat , who, as a self-proclaimed ami du peuple ( friend of the people ), had already worked on his picture for contemporaries and posterity during his own lifetime and worked on it immediately after his murder The cult that began on July 13, 1793 was undoubtedly the most pronounced form of worship of a revolutionary leader. Marat also received a creed written for him:

“I believe in Marat the Almighty, Creator of liberty and equality, our hope, the horror of the aristocrats, who emerged from the heart of the nation and is revealed in the revolution, who was murdered by the enemies of the republic that poured out over us his breath of equality, which has descended on the Elysian fields, from whence he will come one day to judge and condemn the aristocrats. "

Altars were erected for Marat, processions and regular funeral celebrations were held, busts were set up at meeting places, and in his memory a funeral procession led to the Parisian church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle on August 18, 1793 , at which a women's choir performed the psalm O cor Jésus, O cor Marat (Oh Heart of Jesus, oh Heart of Marats) sang. On November 20th , the port of Le Hâvre de Grâce (today Le Havre ) was named Hâvre de Marat or Hâvre-Marat . The Îles de Lérins off the French coast were renamed Îles Marat et Lepeletier . Like Lepeletier, Marat came to the Panthéon as a revolutionary martyr ( November 25, 1793).

Suppression of the revolutionary cults

The cult of martyrs came into the criticism especially of those who represented atheist or deist views; The Hébertists sought to do justice to the need for a “substitute belief” with the creation of the cult of reason. However, there was soon a mixture of beliefs. In the churches that have been transformed into "temples of reason", images of revolutionary martyrs were often put in place of those of saints. After the fall of the Jacobins in the Thermidor , the regulation was passed that portraits of revolutionary heroes could only be exhibited if more than ten years had passed since their death. Due to the political upheaval, Marat's public veneration finally ended in 1795 when he was declared a traitor; the busts were destroyed and his body removed from the Panthéon . The separation of church and state in 1795 deprived the revolutionary cults of their institutional basis; the Concordat with the Pope in 1801 ensured that they were finally suppressed. However, Napoléon Bonaparte reactivated the Panthéon , which had not seen any new graves after Marat was divested in 1795, by having 42 dignitaries of the empire buried here during his imperial reign, thus helping the quasi-religious worship of persons as a facet of the revolutionary cult to continue.

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