State Atheism - French Revolution

French Revolution

During the French Revolution French society considered the prospect of an atheist state. After the Revolution, Jacques Hébert, a radical revolutionary journalist, and Anacharsis Cloots, a politician, both anticlerical and atheist, had successfully campaigned for the proclamation of the atheistic Cult of Reason, which was adopted by the French Republic on November 10, 1793, though abandoned May 7, 1794 in favor of its deistic replacement as the state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being.

Cloots maintained that "Reason" and "Truth" were "supremely intolerant" and that the daylight of atheism would make the lesser lights of religious night disappear. The state then further pushed its campaign of dechristianization, which included removal and destruction of religious objects from places of worship and the transformation of churches into "Temples of the Goddess of Reason", culminating in a celebration of Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral.

Counterrevolution against the persecution rooted in the anticlerical aspects of the Revolution led to a war in the Vendée region where republicans suppressed the Catholic and royalist uprising in what some call the first modern genocide.

Unlike later establishments of anti-theism by communist regimes, the French Revolutionary experiment was short (7 months), incomplete and inconsistent. Although brief, the French experiment was particularly notable for the influence upon atheists Ludwig Feuerbach (who called religion an opiate before Marx), Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. Using the ideas of Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, "communist" regimes later treated religious believers as subversives or abnormal, sometimes relegated to psychiatric hospitals and reeducation.