Isis of the Bastille was naked from the waist up, her large breasts intended to evoke the idea of fertility and regeneration for the new republic of France. From her nipples gushed out water into a pool, and the people made their way to drink the ‘water of regeneration’ while an orchestra played popular revolutionary tunes.
Jacques-Louis David, who masterminded this curious festival, had been a hero of the people from the very start of the Revolution. Many of his paintings – depicting heroism and republican virtues – were treated as objects of worship by the Parisian crowds. A zealous revolutionary himself, David was famous not only for his art by also for the eloquent philosophical speeches he gave at the National Assembly. He had been the most outspoken participant in the ‘Tennis Court Oath’ and had been among those who had loudly demanded the death sentence for Louis XVI in December 1792. Some of the more radical revolutionary factions, such as the sans-culottes (‘without culottes’), even regarded him as some sort of latter day messiah come to regenerate the spirit of France – a role which David took most seriously.78
Closing down the Church
The year before the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, the ultra-radical faction within the Revolution had begun a campaign to rid France of Christianity – the latter seen as an undesirable aspect of the Old Regime and thus unfit for the new Republic and its ideals.79 The full meaning of this initiative was felt in October 1793, when priests and nuns all over France were forced to ‘defrock’ themselves in public while the assets of their churches and monasteries were taken over by the state.
The ultra-radical group within the National Convention – the new name for the 600 or so members of the National Assembly after it had been reshuffled in September 1792 – were called the Hébertists.80 It was they who most directly and most often fanned the flames of de-Christianisation. Principal amongst them were Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, a prominent member of the Commune de Paris, and the eponymous Jacques-René Hébert, a popular journalist.
Hébert ran a radical newspaper, called Le Père Duchesne (‘Father Duchesne’), which enjoyed a wide circulation during the Revolution. Both Hébert and Chaumette were staunch Freemasons.81 In August 1792, Hébert had become the leader of the ultra-radical Club des Cordeliers – previously controlled by Maximillien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat and Georges Danton, the so-called Triumvir.
It seems that radicals like Chaumette and Hébert not only wanted to replace the ‘head’ of France, so to speak, but also the nation's very soul. An interesting account of these events is given by the 19th century author, the Baroness ‘Emmuska’ Orczy, made famous by her books The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Elusive Pimpernel. And although Orczy was a novelist, her stories are nonetheless based on historical accounts and succeed marvelously in capturing the mood in France during the Revolution: Paris 1793: … On! Ever on! In that wild, surging torrent; sowing the wind of anarchy, of terrorism, of lust of blood and hate, and reaping a hurricane of destruction and of horror. On! Ever on! France, with Paris and all her children still rushes blindly, madly on; defies the powerful coalition – Austria, England, Spain, Prussia, all joined together to stem the flow of carnage – defies the Universe and defies God! Paris this September 1793! … Paris! a city of bloodshed, of humanity in its lowest, most degraded aspect. France herself a gigantic self-devouring monster … That is thy reward, oh mighty, holy Revolution! Apotheosis of equality and fraternity! Grand rival of decadent Christianity …
The man-eating tiger for the space of a sigh licked his powerful jaws and pondered! Something new! Something wonderful! We have had a new Constitution, a new Justice, new Laws, a new Almanack! What next? Why, obviously! How comes it that great, intellectual, aesthetic Paris never thought of such a wonderful thing before? A new religion!
Christianity is old and obsolete, priests are aristocrats, wealthy oppressors of the People, the Church but another form of wanton tyranny. Let us by all means have a new religion. Already something has been done to destroy the old! To destroy! Always to destroy! Churches have been ransacked, altars despoiled, tombs desecrated, priests and curates murdered; but that is not enough. There must be a new religion; and to attain that there must be a new God. ‘Man is a born idol-worshipper.’ Very well then! Let the People have a new religion and a new God. Stay! – Not a God this time! – for God means Majesty, Power, Kingship! Everything in fact which the mighty hand of the people of France has struggled and fought to destroy. Not a God, but a goddess. A goddess! An idol! A toy! …
Paris wanted a new religion … and grave men, ardent patriots, mad enthusiasts, sat in the Assembly of the Convention and seriously discussed the means of providing her with both these things which she asked for. Chaumette, I think it was, who first solved the difficulty … it was Procureur Chaumette who first discovered exactly what type of new religion Paris wanted just now. ‘Let us have a Goddess of Reason,’ he said … ‘Let the People rejoice and dance around that funeral pile, and above it all let the new Goddess tower smiling and triumphant. The Goddess of Reason! The only deity our new and regenerate France shall acknowledge throughout the centuries which are to come!’
Loud applause greeted the impassioned speech. ‘A new goddess, by all means!’ shouted the grave gentlemen of the National Assembly, ‘The Goddess of Reason! … The goddess must be beautiful … not too young … Reason can only go hand in hand with the riper age of second youth … she must be decked out in classical draperies, severe yet suggestive … she must be rouged and painted … Aye! The feast should be brilliant enough! Gay or horrible, mad or fearful, but through it all the people of France must be made to feel that there was a guiding hand which ruled the destinies of all, a head which framed the new laws, which consolidated the new religion and established its new goddess: the Goddess of Reason: Robespierre, her prophet!’
In those terrible years of 1793 – 4, all around France churches and cathedrals were violated and desecrated and, to the utter horror of the pope in Rome, the buildings were converted into ‘temples’ for the new Culte de la Raison (‘Cult of Reason’), who was also called ‘Liberty’ or ‘Nature’. Author Kathleen Jones, in her book Women Saints, gives a detailed account of these events: In ‘the Terror’ … priests and nuns went in danger of the guillotine, and many died when they refused to take an oath of loyalty to the new regime and to abandon their vocations. Churches were closed by troops who removed church bells, smashed altars and crucifixes, and made bonfires of vestments and confessional boxes. A popular spectacle was that of a priest abjuring his vocation, and a ceremony of ‘debaptization’ was invented for the laity. All public and private worship was forbidden. On 10 August 1793 the artist Jacques-Louis David, a strong supporter of the Revolution, organized a secular ceremony for the acceptance of the new Constitution. An enormous statue of the goddess Nature [Isis], spurting water from her breasts into a pool, was erected on the site of the Bastille, which had been razed to the ground. There was a new calendar, which began not with the birth of Christ but with the proclamation of the Republic. The months had new names [now surviving only on the names of Paris Metro stations] and there was a 10-day week, the decadi.
Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the harvest festival, together with saints’ days, were abolished. In their place were substituted thirty-six new festivals, one every decadi, celebrating reason, courage, motherhood, temperance, hatred of tyrants, and similar ideals of the regime. On 10 November a great Festival of Reason was held in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where sixteen Louis Capets had walked to their coronations as kings of France. The secularized Notre Dame was re-named the Temple of Liberty.
The rest of France varied in its expression of the new system: local administrators organized events varying from mildly pagan ceremonies to the active stirring-up of public hatred against religion of any kind. In Le Havre a girl of good morals was made the goddess Reason for a day, with floral tributes and dances; in Poitiers, farther south, there were grotesque ceremonies in which people dressed as
sorcerers, priests, popes, monks, angels, and nuns were chased through the church of Saint-Porchaire.82
Cybele-Isis
Professor François Victor Alphonse Aulard (1849 – 1928), a highly respected historian of the French Revolution, somewhat downplays these events by arguing that the anti-clerical movement was not as pronounced and as radical as most historians would want us to believe.83 But Aulard was himself militantly anti-clerical which may have blurred his judgement of the evidence under examination. There are other French historians and specialists of the Revolution such as Michel Vovelle, director of the Insitut d’Histoire de la Révolution in Paris, who have a completely different view: Between October 1793 and June 1794, a multi-faceted attack was mounted in France to eradicate [the Christian] religion. The goddess Reason triumphed: temples were opened to her, represented by living persons … In tens of thousands the priests abdicated their sacerdotal role and many of them even married …84
But by June 1794 the whole business of de-Christianisation had run completely out of control. Even the revolutionary leader Robespierre was horrified by the chaos and sought an alternative to this degrading carnage and mess. France was witnessing obscene pagan-like processions organized everywhere, often parading voluptuous women dressed as ‘Liberty’, ‘Reason’ or ‘Nature’ wrapped in blue and white veils and wearing the little red Phrygian cap (see Chapter One). The ‘goddesses’ were followed by wild crowds chanting and dancing, all very reminiscent of the ancient Greek Bacchanals, the Roman Hilarias and the Isiaic processions. The image of these processions of ‘goddesses’ wearing the Phrygian cap also brings to mind the great pagan processions of the Phrygian mother goddess, Cybele, which took place in ancient France before the advent of Christianity. Cybele was often linked to Isis, as authors Anne Baring and Jules Cashford explain in their excellent book The Myth of the Goddess: Under the [Roman] Empire, the cult of Cybele became part of the Roman state religion. It existed side by side with the cult of Isis … and both spread all over the Roman Empire … An interesting image to follow through different civilizations is the ‘Phrygian cap’, which was worn by … the priests of Cybele. This distinctive cap first appears in Crete … Later, in Greece, it is worn by Hermes, messenger of the Gods … Today similar caps are worn by the Sufi dervishes … Mary was worshipped at sites once sacred to Cybele and Isis.85
In his book Cybele and Attis, the scholar Maarten J. Vermaseren gives a description of Cybele which clearly shows how this goddess was seen as the embodiment of Nature and all the cosmos: It is not only Nature that the goddess rules: her power reaches much further. She stands in the center of the Universe of Time, Sun and Moon, Earth, Water, the Sea and the Seasons. In front of her chariot stands the Tree of Life, stylized as an obelisk and entwined by a serpent …86
The French scholar Jurgis Baltrušaitis in his book La Quête d’Isis, demonstrates the great extent to which Cybele and Isis were perceived as being the same entity by 17th century French historians. Baltrušaitis reports that in 1675 a priest called Berrier, while digging in the garden of the Saint-Eustache church, discovered a bronze statue of a female deity wearing a strange tower on her head. Details of this discovery were published in 1683 by Claude du Molinet, canon of the St. Genevieve church in Paris. Here is how Molinet describes the deity: The goddess that the Greeks called Io and the Egyptians called Isis is the same as the one the Romans honored under the name of Cybele, identified to the Earth or Nature, and the same as the Egyptians had married to Osiris …87
Baltrušaitis goes on to say that the iconography of the Cybele and Isis figures that were found in France were ‘identical … Cybele is crowned with a tower; Isis also had a tower on her head …’88
Cult of the Supreme Being veiling Isis again
By the end of spring 1794, Robespierre, now the undisputed leader of the National Convention in Paris, had began to turn against Hébert and Chaumette. Soon enough he accused them of being ‘enemies of the Nation’ and arranged their appointments with madame guillotine. He then decided to introduce his own idea of a ‘republican religion’. This he named the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’. Its symbol was the ‘eye in the pyramid’, and Robespierre issued a decree stating that ‘the French people recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul’. The ‘Supreme Being’ cult was largely modeled on the ‘natural’ philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who Robespierre idolized.
It is clear that Robespierre considered the de-Christianisation of France as inevitable but that he also repudiated atheism and the wild excesses that had accompanied the Cult of Reason. What Robespierre sought to create was a new deist cult based on republican virtues to replace the spiritual vacuum left by the intense de-Christianisation activities of Hébert and Chaumette.
On 4 June 1794 Robespierre was elected president of the National Convention. He at once began to work closely with the artist Jacques-Louis David to prepare a grand celebration for Paris on 8 June 1794, the day of the Pentecost. The purpose of the celebration was to install the Cult of the Supreme Being as the new religion for France.
This curious event began in the Tuileries Garden in front of the Louvre, with Robespierre himself, draped in blue, standing next to a statue of the ‘Supreme Being’. A huge makeshift amphitheatre was erected in order to seat the members of the National Convention. In front of the amphitheatre had been prepared a bonfire upon which, according to the programme written by Jacques-Louis David, were ‘gathered all the enemies of the felicity of the people’. The ‘enemies’ were symbolized by a statue called ‘Atheism’ supported by figures called ‘Ambition’, ‘Egoism’, ‘Discord’ and ‘False Simplicity’.
All over Paris houses were decorated with garlands and tricolor flags, and the streets through which the procession was to pass were lined with flowers. Pretty girls in white frocks carrying bouquets were placed along the quays of the Seine. The members of the National Convention, fully attired in their official costumes, filled the amphitheatre, each carrying a small bundle of wheat-ears, a symbol that Freemason and astronomer Jérôme Lalande associated at the time with the ‘virgin’ goddess Isis.89 Lalande, as the reader will recall from Chapter One, was a prominent member of the Nine Sisters lodge in Paris and had been instrumental in introducing the new Republican calendar based on the Egyptian solar year which, in ancient times, was calibrated on the heliacal rising of the star of Isis, Sirius. Earlier, in 1731, Lalande had written: The Virgin is consecrated to Isis, just as Leo is consecrated to her husband Osiris … The Sphinx, composed of a lion and a virgin, was used as a symbol to designate the flow of the Nile … they put a wheat-ear in the hand of the Virgin, to express the idea of the months, perhaps because the sign of the Virgin was called by the Orientals … epi or wheat-ear.90
The Nine Sisters lodge was founded by Lalande and the Abbé Cordier de Saint-Firmin, the godfather of Voltaire, in 1776 – the same year as the signing of the American Declaration of Independence. The following year, 1777, Benjamin Franklin, the most senior of the signatories to the Declaration, was appointed Grand Master of the Nine Sisters lodge in Paris. We'll return to this intriguing connection in Chapter Eighteen. Meanwhile let's continue to follow the progress of the Supreme Being on that balmy day of 8 June 1794.
Robespierre, with his hair powdered white and his whole body wrapped in a blue-violet mantle, delivered a prayer to the crowds from a high altar: ‘The whole Universe is assembled here! O Nature, how sublime and delicious is your power!’ He then evoked the Supreme Being and asked the congregation to pay homage to Him. But at the end of his very long sermon, rather than promise an end to the carnage or offer new hopes for curbing the excesses of the Revolution, Robespierre delivered instead a chilling warning to his political opponents: ‘Tomorrow, when we return to work, we shall again fight vice and tyrants!’ Then the large choir, brought from the national opera, sang a hymn by François Joseph Gossec entitled ‘Father of the Universe, Supreme Intelligence’. Finally Robespierre stepped towards the veiled e
ffigy representing ‘Atheism’ and set fire to it. Jacques-Louis David had designed it such a way that when the veil burnt a stone statue of ‘Wisdom’ was revealed beneath it, modelled on the ancient goddess ‘Sophia’ and meant to emerge ‘like a phoenix from the flames’.
Widely used as a symbol in Freemasonry, Sophia has frequently been associated with Isis. According to the poet Gérard de Nerval, the statue that Robespierre ‘unveiled’ on that day was, in all probability, an effigy of Isis. In his book, Les Illuminés published in 1852, Nerval speaks of the ceremony performed by Robespierre and compares it to ‘a remembrance of the practices of the illuminés’, pointing out that the ‘Veiled Nature’ used for the 8 June 1794 ceremony was ‘a statue covered with a veil which he [Robespierre] lit up and which represented either Nature or Isis.’91
At last when the effigy was revealed to the people and all the chanting stopped, Robespierre led a cortege at the helm of a massive chariot carrying the goddess and towed by eight oxen, their horns painted in gold. The cortege passed through the Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde), Les Invalides and finally came to rest at the Champs de Mars where more celebrations, speeches and chanting took place.92
Notre Dame, Temple of the Goddess
Contemporary records confirm that the attacks on the clerical establishment in 1793 – 4 were not mere acts of sporadic ‘revenge’ against individual members of the clergy but rather a well-organised and systematic de-Christianisation campaign which resulted, in a matter of months, in the wholesale ‘voluntary abdication’ of some 20,000 Catholic priests, many of whom then gladly embraced the cult of the revolutionary goddess.93