High Tide of Revolutionary Democracy 637
Reinhard, a Catholic himself, sees no difference between the Revolution and the
Counter- Revolution. Indeed he finds that the displaced forces of the Old Regime
were the first to identify their cause with “religion” in their theory of the throne
and the altar, and that the outrages of counterrevolutionary terror were if anything
worse than those of the Terror proper.^48
Zealous republicans favored a form of deism or natural religion, professing a
belief in a Supreme Being and in immortality of the soul, and in a “natural” code
of moral law, in which equality and fraternity were highly esteemed. Attempts
were made to organize religious services for the expression of these principles,
from Robespierre’s Worship of the Supreme Being on through the movement of
Theo philan thropy for several years after his death. Under the sponsorship of
LaRevéllière- Lépeaux, who was one of the French Directors for the unusually
long period of four years, the Theophilanthropists enjoyed a measure of success
in Paris, where they were allowed the use of some of the church buildings. Theo-
philanthropy also attracted a few temporary congregations in the Batavian Re-
public. It was introduced at Milan without success. There was a group calling
itself Theophilanthropist in Philadelphia, led by the well- known American deist,
Elihu Palmer. Probably the feeling in these movements was genuine enough, if
only because new religions and optional cults are less likely to be troubled with
hypocrites. But it was a feeling in which the religious element could hardly be
separated from the political. Theophilanthropy, in Reinhard’s words, was more
anthropophile than theophile. As the Abbé Barruel bluntly put it, the religion of
the Revolution was Man- Worship, and the abbé gave more food for thought as
a theologian than as a historian of the Revolution. There were many Revolution-
ary hymns and prayers, in which, however, God was not so much invoked or
implored as called upon to witness the mighty actions of the day. Far from ex-
pressing any sense of humility, or of man’s littleness and dependence, they struck
a note of defiance and grandeur, of pride in the Revolution and confidence in the
new republican order.^49
In the use made of Christianity by many conservatives there was much the same
subordination of a religious to an essentially political message. There was nothing
“religious,” as most people understand the word, about the future kings Louis
XVIII and Charles X and many other doctrinaires of the throne and the altar. In
England the Anti- Jacobin was very free with the epithet “atheist,” but it was hardly
a journal of religious concern. Its real philosophy appeared in a quatrain:
Let France in savage accents sing
Her bloody Revolution;
We prize our Country, love our King,
Adore our Constitution.^5048 Reinhard, 96–97, 163–85, 220.
49 Ibid., 193; on Barruel see above, pp. 560–61; on Theophilanthropy in France, A. Mathiez, La
théophanthropie et le culte décadaire (Paris, 1903); in Holland and Italy, Godechot, Grande nation, II,
511, 527; in the United States, G. A. Koch, Republican Religion: the American Revolution and the Cult
of Reason (New York, 1933).
50 Anti- Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, November 30, 1797, p. 104. Note that when Canning and his