Cult of Reason

You know, sometimes you read about a moment in history that’s so perfectly, terrifyingly illustrative of a political truth that it almost feels like it was designed as a lesson. Thinking about one of those tonight: the French Revolution’s bizarre and short-lived "Cult of Reason."

It’s a perfect case study in what happens when state power becomes absolute and gets captured by a totalizing ideology. The most radical revolutionaries in 1793 weren't content just seizing property and power; they decided they needed to seize control of faith itself. It’s the ultimate authoritarian impulse. The Catholic Church, with its ancient traditions and deep roots in society, was an obstacle. So, it had to be eliminated and replaced: not by choice and civil society, but by force.

And what they came up with was the "Cult of Reason." The peak of this, and you really have to try and picture the sheer hubris, was the "Festival of Reason" in Notre-Dame. They literally stripped the cathedral of its Christian identity, built a fake mountain over the altar, and enthroned an actress as the "Goddess of Reason." It's the ultimate expression of the utopian belief that you can just erase a thousand years of culture and replace it with a new, state-approved operating system for the human soul.

Of course, this kind of illiberal madness always eats its own. The project was too much even for the revolution’s chief ideologue, Robespierre. Not because he was a champion of religious freedom, mind you, but because he was a competing authoritarian. He thought pure atheism was bad for social control and decided his own deistic state religion, called the "Cult of the Supreme Being" was the correct liturgy for the masses.

So you had two would-be high priests of the state fighting over which top-down, artificial faith they would coerce the people into accepting.

The whole episode is just this stunningly clear warning. It’s a story about the terrifying endpoint of utopian projects that seek to wipe the slate of tradition clean. And more fundamentally, it’s a lesson about the profound danger of a state that grows so powerful and so arrogant that it believes it has the right not just to govern its citizens, but to define their reality and save their souls.