June 8

Robespierre & the Cult of the Supreme Being

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It was June 8, 1794 and the guillotine was shrouded in flowers.

In many ways, the outcome was inevitable: the 20th of Prairial in Year II of the French Republic (not coincidentally, the Christian feast of Pentecost) and Paris had staged the most elaborate act of state ceremonial magic in the history of the modern world—not exactly accepted as “mainstream” during the era of Napoleon. A procession of National Convention deputies, dressed in matching sky-blue coats and carrying sheaves of wheat, flowers, and fruit, wound through the streets from the Tuileries gardens to the Champ de Mars. At their head, walked Maximilien Robespierre—lawyer, revolutionary, chief architect of the Terror, and, as of six weeks earlier, the founder and high priest of a new state religion.

As they approached the Champ de Mars, a chorus of 2,500 performers was already singing. The centerpiece was an artificial mountain, constructed of plaster and cardboard, enormous in scale, designed by the painter Jacques-Louis David—and topped by a liberty tree with an antique column bearing the figure of Hercules. Having reached the summit of the plaster mountain, Robespierre delivered not one, but two speeches. One of his deputies was heard to mutter, “Look at the blackguard. It’s not enough for him to be master—he has to be God.”

Unknown to Robespierre, the guillotine, unused and temporarily wreathed in garlands, would soon be put back to work…

A Revolutionary War (on God)

Of course, from its beginning, the Revolution had had a pretty complicated relationship with religion: in 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had placed the French Catholic Church under state authority and required priests to swear loyalty to the Republic; it was a move that split French Catholicism and driven many priests into counter-revolutionary resistance. Within three years, as the Terror accelerated, the radical Jacobin faction known as the Hébertists had moved well beyond mere anti-clericalism into something that looked remarkably like a new religion: the “Cult of Reason.”

By its very nature, the atheistic “Cult” was overtly transgressive. Its elaborate ceremonies involved actresses representing the Goddess of Reason being carried through the streets and enthroned in cathedrals renamed “Temples of Reason.” (Even Notre-Dame de Paris had been temporarily converted, its altar replaced with a representation of a mountain and a torch labeled the Flame of Truth burned at its summit.) Priests had been forced to renounce their vows publicly and their vestments were worn mockingly in the streets; the Church’s treasures had been melted down. The campaign of déchristianisation—de-Christianization—was more than a turnaround in spiritual ideology; taking a rather large cue from the ancients, it was political and extremely violent.

Robespierre was appalled—not because he had any particular affection for Catholicism. Rather, (with a politician’s instinct and philosopher’s intuition) he understood that atheism could prove socially destructive, even chaotic. He quoted Voltaire, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” adding that the Cult of Reason’s “scandalous scenes and wild masquerades” were undermining the moral foundations that the Republic required. His solution? Having the Hébertists guillotined and inventing his own religion.

Architecture of a New Faith

Robespierre based his new theology on the Enlightenment deism of the Rousseauian philosophy, calling it “The Cult of the Supreme Being,” and announced it by decree of the National Convention on May 7, 1794. “The French People recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul,” he remarked at the time.” The “Supreme Being” of Robespierre’s invention was not the God of any existing tradition; this wasn’t the God of the Bible—there would be, as Robespierre explicitly stated at the June 8 festival, “no Christ, no Mohammed.” Rather, he announced deistic God of natural religion: a creator who had established the laws of nature and the laws of morality, who was honored not through sacrament or clergy but through the practice of republican virtue.

In effect, the Republic was the church, and virtue its sacrament. The guillotine, when the flowers were off it, its unofficial altar. (Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” embedded in his educational treatise Emile, had articulated almost exactly this theology: a natural religion of the heart, accessible to all, requiring no priesthood or scripture, and grounded in the innate moral sense that the Supreme Being had planted in every human soul. Robespierre had been a devoted reader of Rousseau since his student days in Arras, and had even paid him a visit at Ermenonville shortly before the philosopher’s 1778 death. In memorial, Robespierre carried a copy of Emile, even through the Revolution itself.)

For anyone familiar with Masonic teachings, the resonances were impossible to miss; in fact, the “Grand Architect of the Universe” was the Masons’ own concept of a divine creator, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Robespierre’s newly-announced “Supreme Being.” And while it remains disputed whether Robespierre himself was a Mason, many of the Revolution’s key figures were.

The “Ritual Theater”

For the “Festival of the Supreme Being,” Robespierre enlisted the aid of artist Jacques-Louis David to act as designer. Considered one of the greatest French painters of his generation, David wasa master of Neoclassicism, and had gained international recognition for such works as The Oath of the Horatii and The Death of Marat. Of equal importance to Robespierre, David was also a deputy to the National Convention and a dedicated Jacobin.

Robespierre and David structured the elaborate ceremony / festival as a two-part initiation rite: the first ceremony took place in the garden of the Tuileries, where Robespierre set fire to a cardboard effigy labeled “Atheism” which burned to reveal a smoke-blackened statue of Wisdom; the procession then moved through Paris, ultimately arriving at the Champ de Mars and the artificial mountain for the remainder of the ceremony. To David’s specifications, the mountain itself was constructed as an enormous work of cosmological symbolism. Whereas sacred mountains such as Sinai, Olympus, Meru, the Druidic mound are among the oldest sites of divine encounter in traditional Western religions, David’s plaster version was devised as a secular equivalent—the place where the French Republic ascended to commune with its deistic creator. At the summit, the liberty tree was planted—the “world tree,” the axis mundi, and the living connection between earth and heaven.

A Rapid Fall

Robespierre’s choice of June 8 as the date for the festival was a deliberate additional act of anti-Catholicism, since it was also Pentecost, celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles—recognized among Christians as the birth of the Church. The Revolutionary calendar, which the Convention had adopted in 1793 to replace the Gregorian calendar and its Christian structure, renaming the months after natural phenomena and beginning Year I from the founding of the Republic, only further solidified his intentions. Every décadi—the tenth day, the Revolutionary day of rest replacing Sunday—was to be dedicated to a specific virtue or natural phenomenon: Truth, Justice, Modesty, Frugality, Friendship—purposely replacing the liturgical year with a republican one. Madame de Staël, who witnessed the events, later wrote: “It was from that day he was lost.”

Whatever Robespierre’s philosophical intentions were, they were largely missed by many in attendance. To some, the festival’s meaning wasn’t just that he had power, but that he believed was entitled to that power by divine intervention—as if he was now presenting himself to the public as form of “High Priest” to a new national religion. Within a week of the festival, “Grand Inquisitor” Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier had used the case of Catherine Théot—an elderly mystic who claimed to be the Mother of God and whose followers included several of Robespierre’s associates—soon began to mock him and his apparent hubris. Her laughter within the chamber signaled his power beginning to crack. He demanded the ensuing investigation against him be stopped, but to no avail. On July 27, 1794, forty-nine days after the festival, Robespierre was arrested; he was marched to the guillotine the following day, without trial.

And so, the Cult of the Supreme Being died with Robespierre. Napoleon formally banned it in 1802, alongside the Cult of Reason, and restored both the Concordat with Rome and Catholicism to the French people. The most ambitious attempt in modern Western history to replace inherited religion with a rationally-constructed alternative had lasted less than two months. It had been undone not by its theology, but by the very same flaw that Robespierre had attempted to end: the conflation of the divine with the personal will of the man who claimed to speak for it.

The guillotine does not distinguish between those who shroud it in flowers and those who put their necks beneath it. Robespierre, of all people, should have known this. He had sent enough people to the blade to understand its indifference.

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