On June 8, 1794, an enormous crowd gathered in Paris for the Festival of the Supreme Being. The painter Jacques-Louis David had designed the day. A procession wound from the Tuileries to the Champ de Mars, where an artificial mountain had been built, and Maximilien Robespierre, then president of the National Convention, set fire to a cardboard figure representing Atheism. As it burned, a statue of Wisdom was meant to rise from the ashes. Witnesses noted that Wisdom came out blackened by smoke. Seven weeks later Robespierre was dead, sent to the guillotine by the same Convention he had led.
The Cult of the Supreme Being is often described as the moment Deism became a state religion. The description is close enough to be tempting and wrong enough to be worth correcting, because the episode shows what happens when a government decides which beliefs about God are good for the public.
The festival was a reply to something that came before it. In late 1793 a more radical faction had pushed a Cult of Reason, turning churches into Temples of Reason and staging a festival in Notre-Dame. Robespierre thought open atheism was dangerous to public morals and politically useful to the Revolution’s enemies. In May 1794 he persuaded the Convention to decree that the French people recognized the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. A calendar of civic festivals followed, each devoted to a virtue the Republic wanted to teach.
On paper the decree sounds like something a Deist could sign. One God, no priests, no revealed scripture, no church hierarchy. Robespierre had absorbed Rousseau, whose Savoyard Vicar describes a natural religion of conscience, and Rousseau in turn had argued that a republic needed a civil religion its citizens were required to hold. That second idea is what Robespierre carried into law. Rousseau had gone so far as to say that someone who professed the civil creed and then acted as if he did not believe it could be put to death. Robespierre’s speeches drew on that line of thought, and the festival arrived in the same weeks that the Law of 22 Prairial stripped accused prisoners of most of their defenses.
The God of the festival was also busier than a Deist’s God. Robespierre spoke of a Supreme Being who watched over the Revolution, who had set the people’s cause in motion and stood behind its success. That is providence, a God taking a side in human affairs. Neo-Deism holds that God established natural law and does not intervene, which leaves no room for a Supreme Being with a political program. Robespierre needed a God who cared how France turned out. A Deist God offers no such endorsement to any government, revolutionary or royal.
The deepest problem was the compulsion. Deism has always been a religion of private judgment. Its whole case rests on the claim that reason and honest study are the means of understanding God, and that revelation carries no authority. Those are methods each person has to apply alone. A state can teach them, and it can protect the freedom to use them. Once it announces the correct conclusion and organizes festivals to celebrate it, the conclusion stops being the product of anyone’s reasoning. The citizen who bows to the Supreme Being because the Convention said so has made a decision about the Convention and none about God.
One Deist was in a good position to see this. Thomas Paine had been elected to the Convention, had argued against executing Louis XVI, and by the summer of 1794 was sitting in the Luxembourg prison, arrested the previous December as the Terror turned on foreigners and moderates. Before his arrest he had finished the first part of The Age of Reason, which opens with his own profession of belief in one God and adds that his own mind is his own church. Paine had no quarrel with the content of Robespierre’s decree. He had published nearly the same creed. His quarrel was with anyone, priest or legislator, who claimed the authority to make another person’s mind accept it.
The cult did not outlive its founder by much. After Robespierre fell in July 1794 the festivals lost their sponsor and drifted out of use. By the time Napoleon made his Concordat with the Pope in 1801, the Supreme Being was long gone from public life, and the Catholic Church the Revolution had tried to displace was back. A belief that depended on state support disappeared when the support did. That is a fair test of how deeply it had been held.
There is a lesson in this for anyone who wants Deism to have more public standing. It is easy to assume that the problem with official religion was the content of the official religions, and that a reasonable creed in the same position would do no harm. The French experiment answers that hope directly. The creed was about as reasonable as an eighteenth-century government could make it, and it still arrived alongside the Terror and still collapsed when its faction lost power. The harm came from the arrangement more than from any particular doctrine.
The American founders, many of them influenced by the same Enlightenment writers, took the opposite route a few years earlier. The First Amendment barred Congress from establishing any religion, including a rational one. The rights Deists care about most, freedom of conscience above all, are natural rights that belong to people before any government exists. A government that grants a creed has already claimed the power to withdraw it.
Robespierre set Atheism on fire and expected Wisdom to rise clean from the flames. The statue came out scorched. A belief about God reached by one’s own reasoning can survive argument and even persecution. A belief handed down by a committee does not hold up as well, because nobody had to reason their way into it in the first place.