Fields of Blood (52 page)

As the country spun out of control, the Assembly became more radical. It produced the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that vested sovereignty in the people rather than in the monarch and proclaimed that all men had natural rights of liberty of conscience, property, and free speech and must enjoy equality before the law, personal security, and equal opportunity. Then the Assembly set about dismantling the Catholic Church in
France. As we have seen, the “myth of religious violence” was founded on the belief that the
separation of church and state would liberate society from the inherent belligerence of “religion.” But almost every secularizing reform in Europe and in other parts of the world would begin with an aggressive assault on religious institutions, which would inspire resentment, anomie, distress, and in some cases, a violent riposte. On November 2, 1789, the Assembly voted by 568 to 346 to pay off the national debt by confiscating the wealth of the Church. The bishop of Autun,
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, pointed out that the
Church did not own property in the ordinary way; its lands and estates had been given to it so that it could do good works.
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The state could now pay the clergy a salary and finance these charitable activities itself. This decision was followed on February 3, 1790, by the abolition of all religious orders except those engaged in teaching or hospital work. Many clerics protested vigorously against these measures, and they gravely disturbed many of the common people, but some priests saw them as an opportunity for reform that could return the Church to its pristine purity and even inaugurate a new “national religion.”

The secular regime thus began with a policy of coercion, disempowerment, and dispossession. On May 29, 1790, the Assembly issued the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that relegated the Church to a state department. Fifty sees were abolished, and in
Brittany many parishioners found themselves without a bishop. Four thousand parishes were eliminated, bishops’ salaries were reduced, and in the future bishops were to be elected by the people. On November 26, the clergy were given eight days to take an oath of loyalty to the nation, the law, and the king. Forty-four clerics in the Assembly refused to take the oath, and there were riots in protest against this humiliating order in
Alsace,
Anjou,
Artois, Brittany,
Flanders,
Languedoc, and
Normandy.
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Catholicism was so deeply entwined with almost every detail of daily life that, aghast, many of the Third Estate turned against the regime. In western France, parishioners pressured their priests to refuse the oath and would have nothing to do with the Constitutional clerics sent in to replace them.

The aggression of the secular state soon segued into outright violence. Neighboring monarchies began to mobilize against the revolution. As so often happens, an external threat led to widespread fears of the “enemy within.” When French troops were routed by the
Austrians in the summer of 1792, wild rumors circulated of a “fifth column” of counterrevolutionary priests aiding the enemy. When the
Prussian army broke through the frontier and threatened
Verdun, the last line of defense before Paris, recalcitrant clergy were imprisoned. In September, amid fears of royalist clerics planning simultaneous uprisings, violent mobs descended on the prisons and murdered between two to three thousand prisoners, many of them priests. Two weeks later France was declared a republic.

The French and the Americans had adopted diametrically opposed policies toward religion: all the American states eventually disestablished their churches, but because their clergy were not implicated in a long-established
aristocratic regime, there was no virulent hostility toward the traditional denominations. In France, however, the Church, which had been so deeply involved in aristocratic rule, could be dismantled only by an outright assault.
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By now it was clear that a nonreligious regime had just as much potential for violence as a religiously constituted one. After the
September Massacres, there were more
atrocities. On March 12, 1793, an uprising began in the
Vendée in western France in protest against conscription to the army, unfair
taxation, and above all, the anti-Catholic policies of the
revolution.
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The rebels were especially incensed by the arrival in the Vendée of Constitutional clergy, who had no roots in the region, to replace priests who were known and loved. They formed the Catholic and Royal Army, carried banners of the Virgin, and sang hymns as they marched. This was not an aristocratic uprising but an army of the people, who were determined to retain their Catholicism: over 60 percent were farmers, and the others, artisans and shopkeepers. Three armies dispatched from Paris to quell the uprising were diverted to deal with the
Federalist Revolt, in which moderate provincial
bourgeois and republicans joined forces with royalists in
Bordeaux,
Lyons,
Marseilles,
Toulouse, and
Toulon to protest measures taken in Paris.

Once the Federalists were put down with horrible reprisals, four revolutionary armies arrived in the Vendée early in 1794 with instructions from the
Committee of Public Safety that recalled the rhetoric of the
Catharist Crusade: “Spear with your bayonets all the inhabitants you encounter along the way. I know there may be a few patriots in this region—it matters not, we must sacrifice all.”
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“All brigands found with weapons or suspected of having carried them will be speared by the bayonet,”
General Turreau instructed his soldiers. “We will act equally with women, girls and children.… Even people only suspected will not be spared.”
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“The Vendée no longer exists,”
François-Joseph Westermann reported to his superiors at the end of the campaign. “Following the orders I have received, I have crushed children beneath the hooves of our horses, and massacred women.… The roads are littered with corpses.”
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The revolution that had promised liberty and fraternity may have slaughtered a quarter of a million people in one of the worst atrocities of the early modern period.

Human beings have always sought intensity and moments of
ecstasy that give their lives meaning and purpose. If a symbol, icon, myth, ritual, or doctrine no longer yields a sense of transcendent value, they tend to
replace it with something else. Historians of religion tell us that absolutely anything can become a symbol of the divine, and that such epiphanies occur “in every area of psychological, economic, spiritual and social life.”
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This was soon evident in France. No sooner had the revolutionaries rid themselves of one religion than they invented another, making the nation an embodiment of the sacred. It was the audacious genius of the revolutionary leadership to recognize that the potent emotions traditionally connected with the Church could be just as powerfully felt if directed toward a new symbol. On August 10, 1793, while the nation was tearing itself apart in war and bloodshed, a festival choreographed by the artist
Jacques-Louis David celebrated the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic in Paris. It began at sunrise on the site of the Bastille, where an imposing statue of Nature decanted water from her breasts into a cup held by the president of the National Convention; he then passed it to eighty-six elderly men representing the French
départements
in a holy communion. In the Place de la Révolution the president torched a great bonfire of heraldic symbols, scepters, and thrones before a statue of Liberty, and at the Invalides the public gazed at a giant effigy of the French people as Hercules. These festivals became so frequent that people wrote of “festomania.”
⁷⁰
As the nineteenth-century historian
Jules Michelet explained, the state festivals celebrated the arrival of “a strange
vita nuova,
one eminently spiritual.”
⁷¹

The Catholic Mass had been a central feature of the early festivals, but by 1793 the priests had been eliminated from these national rites. This was the year that
Jacques Hébert enthroned the Goddess of Reason on the high altar of
Notre Dame Cathedral, transforming it into a temple of philosophy. Revolutionary politics was itself becoming an object of worship. Leaders made great use of such terms as
credo, zealot, sacrament,
and
sermon
when describing political events.
⁷²
Honoré Mirabeau wrote that “the Declaration of the Rights of Man has become a political Gospel and the French Constitution a religion for which the people is prepared to die.” The poet
Marie-Joseph Chénier told the National Convention: “You will know how to found on the ruins of dethroned superstition, the single universal religion of which our lawmakers are the preachers, the magistrates the pontiffs, and in which the human family burns its incense only at the altar of the Patrie, common mother and divinity.”
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Because the revolution “seemed to be striving for the regeneration
of the human race even more than for the reform of
France,”
Tocqueville would observe, “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without ritual, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like
Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and
martyrs.”
⁷⁴
It is interesting that he equated this defiantly secular religiosity with the fanatical violence that Europeans had long attributed to Islam.

The “civil religion” described first by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was based on belief in God and the afterlife, the social contract, and the prohibition of intolerance. Its festivals, Rousseau wrote, would create a sacred bond between participants: “Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united.”
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But Rousseau’s loving tolerance did not extend to anyone who refused to obey the precepts of civil religion, and a similar rigor entered the revolution.
⁷⁶
A month after the festival celebrating the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic, the
reign of terror began, when
Maximilien de Robespierre appointed a tribunal to seek out traitors and pursued dissidents with all the zeal of a militant pope. Not only were the king and queen, members of the royal family, and the aristocracy executed, but one group of apparently loyal patriots after another went to the guillotine. The distinguished chemist
Antoine Lavoisier, who had worked all his professional life to improve conditions in French prisons and hospitals, and
Gilbert Romme, who had designed the revolutionary calendar, were both beheaded. When the purge ended in July 1794, some seventeen thousand men, women, and children had been guillotined, and twice as many more had either died in the disease-ridden prisons or were slaughtered by local vigilantes.
⁷⁷

Meanwhile, the revolutionary leaders were waging a holy war against the nonrevolutionary regimes of Europe.
⁷⁸
After the
Peace of Westphalia, the continent had known nearly two hundred years of relative peace. A balance of power kept the sovereign states in harmony. Brutality on the battlefield was no longer acceptable; moderation and restraint were the new watchwords.
⁷⁹
Armies were now adequately provisioned so soldiers no longer had to terrorize the peasant population by foraging for themselves.
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There was greater emphasis on drill, discipline, and correct methods of procedure, and between 1700 and 1850 there were no significant
developments in military technology.
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But this peace was shattered when first the revolutionary armies and then
Napoleon threw these restraints to the wind.

The French state had certainly not become more irenic after eliminating the Church from government. On August 16, 1793, the National Convention issued the
levée en masse:
for the first time in history, an entire society was mobilized for war.

Some 300,000 volunteers, aged between eighteen and twenty-five, brought the French army up to a record-breaking million strong. Hitherto peasants and artisans had been tricked or press-ganged into the military, but in this “Free Army” soldiers were well paid and for the first year officers were elected from the ranks on merit. In 1789 over 90 percent of French officers had been aristocrats; by 1794 a mere 3 percent were of noble birth. Even though over a million young men died in the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars, more were willing to volunteer. These soldiers fought not with professional decorum but with the raw violence they had learned in the revolution’s street battles, and they probably relished the
ecstasy of warfare.
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Because they had to feed themselves, they committed the same kind of
atrocities as the mercenaries in the
Thirty Years’ War.
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For nearly twenty years, the French armies seemed unstoppable, overrunning
Belgium, the
Netherlands, and
Germany and effortlessly brushing aside the
Austrian and
Prussian armies that tried to halt this triumphant progress.

Revolutionary France did not bring liberty to the peoples of Europe, however; instead, Napoleon, the revolution’s heir, created a traditional tributary empire that threatened the imperial ambitions of
Britain. In 1798, to establish a base in Suez that would cut off the British sea routes to India, Napoleon invaded
Egypt and at the
Battle of the Pyramids inflicted a devastating defeat on the
Mamluk army: only ten French soldiers were
killed, but the Mamluks lost more than two thousand men.
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With consummate cynicism, Napoleon then presented himself as the liberator of the Egyptian people. Carefully briefed by the French Institut d’Égypte, he addressed the sheikhs of the
Azhar madrassa in Arabic, expressing his deep respect for the Prophet and promising to free Egypt from the oppression of the Ottomans and their Mamluk agents. Accompanying the French army was a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The ulema were not impressed: “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery,” they said, “to entice us.”
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They were right. Napoleon’s invasion, exploiting
Enlightenment scholarship and science to subjugate the region, marked the beginning of Western domination of the
Middle East.