But even this is nothing. The French Revolution came in 1789. It came
to put an end to a double philosophy,--the spiritual philosophy of
Rousseau's school, founded in reason and religion, the material
philosophy of the school of Helvetius, Diderot, and their disciples,
atheistic and cynical. The thought of the first of these philosophies
was religious at bottom. It consisted merely in freeing the luminous
idea of God from the shadows by which ignorance, intolerance, the
inquisition of temporal dynasties and times of barbarism had falsified
it,--in freeing this idea, debased as it was,--obscured, and enchained
to thrones,--so as to restore reason to its liberty, to inquiry, to
the free conscience of every worship and of every soul; to revive it
in the eyes of the People, by leading them to the broad light of day,
the evidence of nature, the dignity and efficacy of free worship.
But, for this, it was necessary to dispossess the Middle Ages of their
temporal power, of their _mort-main_ possessions, of their civil
jurisdictions, of their exclusive privileges, of their legal
intolerance against all other divine thoughts, and all other individual
or national faith, all other forms of adoration and worship than what
were imposed by the exclusive and established religion. To rally the
people to this work, a work legitimate in itself, a work which the
abuses of a crafty priesthood had made necessary, seven times, and
whose accomplishment they had seven times partially and gradually
undertaken, since the time of Charlemagne,--the philosophers of the
second school, the irreligious school, the atheistic school, of Diderot
and Helvetius, drove the masses from stupidity even to impiety, and the
demagogues of '93 forced them from impiety to Atheism, and from Atheism
to blood. Demagogues, those poisoners of liberty, corrupt every
revolution in which they mingle; they defile every thing that they
touch; they dishonor every truth which they profess, by polluting or
perverting it. The age and philosophy, Heaven and earth, desire what
we too desire,--freedom of conscience, voluntary worship,--liberty of
the human mind in matters of faith,--the fraternity of altars,
invoking, each in its own language, that God whom the whole earth is
spelling out, and who reveals, from age to age, still another letter of
His divine name.
Instead of this, Atheists and demagogues united to persecute religion,
to revenge themselves for the old persecutions of the priesthood. They
profaned the temples, violated conscience, blasphemed the God of the
faithful, parodied the ceremonies, cast to the winds the pious symbols
of worship, and persecuted the ministers of religion.
In the name of the Revolution, and under the menace of terror, they
dragged the People to these Saturnalia. They corrupted the eyes, the
hands, the minds, the souls of the populace. These violences to the
altar were cast back on the religious idea itself. The People, seeing
the temple fall, believed that Heaven itself crumbled; and that,
following the profaned image of a vanishing worship, God himself would
vanish from the world, with conscience, the supernatural law, the
unwritten moral law, the soul and the immortality of the human race!
When the ignorant People no longer saw God between them and
annihilation, they plunged into the boundless and bottomless abyss of
Atheism, they lost their divine sense, they became brutal as the
animal, who sees in the earth only a pasture ground, instead of the
footstool of Jehovah.
But these irreligious abominations, and these Saturnalia of Atheism,
however much injury they inflicted on the religious spirit of the
People, did not effect so much, perhaps, as the reign which followed
this anarchy, the reign of Bonaparte, the so-called restorer of
worship. And how?