It was on this day on the 8th of June, in 1794, with a Festival of the Supreme Being, the state sponsored Cult of the Supreme Being was launched. The cult was to be a new religion. It had been formally established the month before by the decree of Maximilien Robespierre. At the time while legally simply one of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre was functionally dictator of the French Republic.
The Parisian celebrations were immortalized by the artist Pierre-Antoine Demachy, and is pictured here.
The Decree forming the cult also outlined its seven principles.
1. The French people recognise the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.
2. They recognise that the worship worthy of the Supreme Being is the practice of the duties of man.
3. They place in the first rank of these duties [the obligation] to detest bad faith and tyranny, to punish tyrants and traitors, to rescue the unfortunate, to respect the weak, to defend the oppressed, [and] to do to others all the good that one can and not to be unjust toward anyone.
4. Festivals shall be established to remind man of the thought of the Divinity and of the dignity of his being.
5. They shall take their names from the glorious events of our revolution, from the virtues most dear and most useful to man and from the great benefactions of nature.
6. The French Republic shall celebrate every year the festivals of July 14th 1789, August 10th 1792, January 21st 1793, and May 31st 1793.
7. It shall celebrate on the days of decadi festivals to the Supreme Being and to nature, to the human race, to the French people, to the benefactors of humanity, to the martyrs of liberty, to liberty and equality, to the Republic….
Robespierre was attempting to supplant the Cult of Reason, the first state sponsored response to the Catholic Church’s captivity by the royalist system they’d overthrown. He was appalled at the atheistic nature of this first state religion. The Cult of the Supreme Being, while still upholding reason, and of course, revolution, focused on belief in a supreme being, an immortal soul, and a life of virtue. From my perspective the dictator had proclaimed a quasi-Confucianist religion of mutual obligations. Robespierre himself saw it as derived from Greek and Roman principals.
There were detractors from the start. George Danton is said to have declared, “Look at the bugger. It’s not enough for him to be in charge, he has to be God.” But, at least in the first flush, it was received well enough. If nothing else, it was a holiday. And it came with some damn-the-expenses pageantry, at a time where such things were major entertainments.
Beyond the populace’s taste for entertainments, the people in charge were less impressed. In fact Robespierre’s decision to be the head of the cult likely contributed to his downfall. It was seen as a symptom of his over reach in many matters.
The Cult can be said to have functionally ended with Robespierre’s execution, a mere eight weeks after its inception. Whatever might have continued in a shadow half life ended officially when the Emperor Napoleon banned it along with whatever lingered of the Cult of Reason in 1802.
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