The French Enlightenment and the Declaration of War on Christianity
Our journey into the depths of destruction and death that were brought about by those who abandoned the Christian view of reality begins with the philosophers who laid the groundwork for the French Revolution. They built their systems of thought on foundations that rejected much of the Judeo-Christian tradition. These writers preached a materialist worldview, not materialism in the sense of trying to obtain ever more possessions or being greedy, but materialist in the sense that they denied that the spiritual realm is real or knowable. They believed that God and morality, because they cannot be evaluated by the scientific method, must not reveal truth. C. S. Lewis sharply identifies the difference between the materialist and religious views:
Ever since men were able to think they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us. The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another.[1]
C.S. Lewis
The thinkers who spawned the French Revolution had a major influence on communism in both its economic and moral content. Both movements shared certain assumptions and habits of thinking.[2] They undermined many foundational-ideas in Christianity and did so to open the way for their attempts to fundamentally transform humanity. The rejection of Judeo-Christian concepts, such as God’s creating the universe or the fall of humanity into sin, were common. Clearing away these limitations on human capability allowed many of the French thinkers to believe that they could develop a “science of man” that could perfect the evils of their society.
Many French philosophers were agnostic or atheistic. The common consequence of either position was their denial of the biblical God of Christianity. Voltaire was one of the most famous of these philosophers. He poured scorn on Christianity and was a bellwether for the trends that were brewing within the radical French writers. In denying the Creator who actively participated in the world, these writers began to advance the idea that human beings, who were not created in the image of God, only responded to their environment because they were merely subject to the laws of nature. The French philosopher Helvétius argued in his writing that people behave the way they do only out of a desire to avoid pain or feel pleasure.[3] Another writer of the era[4] wrote a book that left little doubt as to his position when he titled his work Man the Machine. One important writer of the era, Baron D’holbac, wrote, “crimes are witnessed on the earth only because everything conspires to render man vicious and criminal; the religion he has adopted, his government, his education, the examples set before him, irresistibly drive him on to evil: under these circumstances, morality preaches virtue to him in vain.”[5] Their aim was to present the people who did wrong in a more humane light by arguing that they were not really responsible for their actions. This provided a more compassionate view of those who committed crimes or lived in poverty, but the corollary was that the people themselves did not have any role to play in making their lives better. In short, individuals were only a machine, and a machine that must be overhauled by people who have progressed further. Thus, while people could be treated with more understanding because it was assumed what they did was not the fault of the individual, the inescapable inference was that the individual could have no impact on their own life through their choices. Everything had to be done for them and so the rights that all human beings are endowed with by their Creator were quietly ignored. D’holbac further illustrated these points when he said that men were put in chains by tyrants and priests. According to his view, nature “does not make man either good or wicked ‘but his actions are predetermined by environmental forces. He “never acts as a free agent” for “even his will is moved by causes independent of himself.” Man was repeatedly referred to by D’Holbac as a “machine”—one with “complicated motion’ ‘ but nevertheless an automatic respondent to external stimuli. Man “is purely passive in the motion he receives “ … ‘It is possible to “engrave ideas on the brain of man’ and “education is nothing more than the agriculture of the mind.”[6] These writers concluded that if there is no God that sets the standards for all human beings then it is reasonable to think that some people can help shape the clay of humanity into a more perfect form.[7] For those certain people, who assume that they have transcended the laws of nature by their intelligence and godlike insight into the world, any choice they make is justified as they make society more efficient, rational, and stronger in their quest for a heaven on earth. In the past, such an ambition, to fundamentally transform politics, economics, and the morality of entire societies would have been recognized as an attempt to play God, but with the denial of God, these thinkers believed that the tools of science and their rationality would give them the power needed for the task. Their idolatrous search for a new absolute led some to make reason their new god, while others made an idol of science.
A chief exponent of the idol of science, Condorcet, the French philosopher and early revolutionary, stated that science would rescue man from his flaws, “foresee the progress of humankind, direct it, and accelerate it.” He stated that one day individuals would no longer live out of self-interest but with that of the community’s interest in mind.[8] Human nature would be changed and everything else would become simple and easy.[9]. He said, “Once such a close accord had been established between all enlightened men, from then onwards all will be the friends of humanity, all will work together for its perfection and its happiness.”[10] Rousseau expressed similar ideas making individual self-interest consistent with the needs of society,[11] an idea he called the “general will.” Marx and Engels would ultimately make the same point in their writings.[12] “Man’s private interests must be made to coincide with the interests of humanity[13]... If man is shaped by his surroundings,[14] his surroundings must be made human. If man is social by nature, he will develop his true nature only in society.” Sin does not need to be taken into consideration, for in this view, it does not exist if the right environment is established.
With the restraint of sin lifted from the human mind and the intoxication of newfound power in science, the French revolutionaries came to see themselves as gods who could save all humanity. The leaders of the revolution took their model of what to do from the ideas of the French philosopher Rousseau. One writer summed up his influence this way, “what happened was the transformation of a theological idea, the general will of God to save all men, into a political one. The general will of the citizen to place the common good of the republic above his particular will as a private self.”[15] While these French Enlightenment thinkers would accuse religion of creating exclusivity and intolerance, this would turn out to be far more true of themselves.[16] They took the salvation of humanity from God and appointed themselves to complete the task. One observer said, “persistent efforts were made to wean men away from the faith of their fathers ... Irreligion became an all-prevailing passion, fierce, intolerant and predatory.”[17] While atheists claim that they are inherently nonviolent, this belief does not match the evidence. Those who worship no God inevitably make a new idol of some kind and demand tribute to their new idol. One of the writers, Denis Diderot, skeptical of Christianity and a relativist, famously said, “that he wished to strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.” [18] . Atheists and those aligned against orthodox Christianity, regardless of what idol they pledged allegiance to, became violent. Contempt for the church often proceeded contempt for individuals and mass murder. One author has done an excellent job of summing up the relationship between the philosophical predecessors of the French Revolution and what their ideas brought about:
The French Revolution was born with a utopian sense of purpose: man would finally be freed of old constraints. Those constraints were not merely political. They were constraints of the soul, chains on human freedom itself. The most obvious chains were those imposed by religion itself, which the French philosophes saw not as the bulwark for Western morality and rationality, but as the chief obstacle to them.[19]
While the United States moved toward the embrace of an Enlightenment based on Locke, Blackstone, Montesquieu, and the Bible—the first meeting of the United States Senate occurred on March 4, 1789—the French Revolution moved toward utopian rebuilding. On July 14, 1789, French citizens stormed the Bastille. And they quickly dethroned the kings and the priests.
The Cult of Reason became the first official religion of the new France: it worshipped “one God only… [the people],” according to revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots … Frenchmen were to celebrate the Festival of Reason. That festival saw churches across France transformed into Temples of Reason, with the chief temple being the cathedral at Notre Dame. There, the musicians of the National Guard and Opera performed hymns to liberty, serving liberty as “a deity; the opening anthem was “Descend, O Liberty, Daughter of Nature.” An inscription “to Philosophy” was placed at the entrance, and the flame of the goddess of Reason was lit on the Greek altar. Maximilien Robespierre, who disdained the excesses of festivals of the Cult of Reason, founded a more sober-minded Cult of the Supreme Being, but it was similarly atheistic, and worshipped similar principles. In March 1794, Robespierre had the leaders of the Cult of Reason executed. The French Revolution also replaced the virtue of the ancients … with the virtue of the collective, or with radical subjectivism, or both. Robespierre defined virtue in a speech extolling the new French republic: it is “nothing else than love of the patrie and its laws.” To defend that virtue required everything up to and including political violence: “If the driving force of popular government in peacetime is virtue, that of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.”“ In July 1794, Robespierre himself was executed.
The leading philosophical twin lights of the Revolution were Voltaire and Rousseau … Fully thirteen years after Voltaire’s death, the famed artist Jacques-Louis David organized a procession one hundred thousand strong to usher Voltaire’s disinterred body to the Panthéon—the rechristened church of Saint Geneviéve, secularized by the revolution. As historian Raymond Jonas writes, “Voltaire’s procession neatly aped the Catholic rituals.” [Further], Rousseau was a key influence on Robespierre particularly—Robespierre wrote of him, “Divine man, you have taught me to know myself.”
It wasn’t until after Robespierre’s execution that Rousseau received the same treatment as Voltaire—but it was glorious indeed. His body was exhumed and then moved from Ermenonville to Paris, his coffin put in public view in the Tuileries and then placed in the Panthéon near Voltaire. A statue of Rousseau came along for the ride, and a copy of The Social Contract was gently cradled on a velvet cushion. All across Paris, his plays were revived, and all across France, similar processions took place.
Voltaire declared before the revolution, that Christianity “is without a doubt the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and the most bloody [idea] to ever infect the world.” However, the reality was that “The French Revolution [itself] was bloody, vicious, and awful. Tens of thousands of people were murdered by the regime between 1793 and 1794, with another quarter million dead in a civil war over a draft designed to fight foreign invasion … The end of the rejection of Judeo-Christian churches in favor of secular churches was the guillotine.”
The revolutionary leadership was just as bloodthirsty as any other group of men who have disregarded the teachings of God found in Christ. Attacking the allies of the king, the commander of the French Revolutionary army said in a letter, “following the orders you gave me I have crushed children under the feet of horses and massacred women. I have no prisoners with which to reproach myself.”[20] This pattern will be observed time and time again in the history that follows. One writer described the revolution’s leadership this way:
The first true precursors of the communist revolutionaries were the bloodthirsty Jacobins who turned the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror in the 1790s. Of the three ideals enshrined in the French Revolutionary motto [liberty, equality, brotherhood] … they, like their Marxist-Leninist admirers in the twentieth century, put all the emphasis on … equality, the communist ideal. And it was a radical equality that soon ran amok, all the way to the foot of the guillotine. I had a professor in graduate school who always referred to the Jacobins as “the first communists,” and not without good reason. They declared war on many of the same targets the Bolsheviks would place in their crosshairs: aristocrats, the wealthy, the religious, their political opponents. And they are best remembered for what communists are always known for: blood.”
The Jacobins used the guillotine for their bloodletting, executing their enemies with an alacrity that would not be outdone until Lenin and the boys arrived on the world scene. They even devised an impressive canal-like drainage system to collect the blood rushing from the severed necks of the victims that served as case exhibits of the human cost of their utopian collectivist fantasy. The fanatics could not run a government, but they could manage the instruments of death with startling proficiency.
The Committee of Public Safety—a perfectly Orwellian name the French revolutionaries came up with a century and a half before Orwell—unleashed the Reign of Terror to enforce their utopian regime of Virtue. Historians estimate that the Jacobins lopped off the heads of forty thousand French men and women in a single year, including the nuns whose hoisted, blood-soaked skulls were a special prize. (Lenin would achieve a similar tally of murders in his first year in power. And both would be outdone by Stalin and Mao, the Kims [of North Korea] and Pol Pot.)
The Jacobins were the first to abolish the Christian calendar and start history over again with year one of their revolution.[21] But they wouldn’t be the last. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini—whose “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” fascism has been branded right wing by the Left, but who was in reality such a perfect disciple of Karl Marx (whom he called “the father and teacher” and “the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence”) that Lenin admired the Italian dictator’s writings—declared a new era fascista beginning with his 1922 march on Rome. And Pol Pot declared his own new year one, after the murderous Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. For the record, the anti-religious Left’s war on the Christian calendar has never ended. Notice how today BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini—in the Year of Our Lord) are being replaced by CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era)?
As another author sums up this pivotal period of intellectual history:
“Where, exactly, did the French Revolution—born with dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity— go so wrong? It went wrong because the Enlightenment of the French Revolution rejected the lessons of the past; it saw in the history of the West mere repression and brutality, and longed for a tomorrow full of visions and dreams based on vague notions of human goodness.”
The rejection of Judeo-Christian values and ancient virtue on behalf of the general will was expressed in glowing terms in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, approved by the National Assembly on August 26, 1789. Unlike the Declaration of Independence—a document expressing a collective desire for individual rights—the Declaration of the Rights of Man expresses the belief that man’s place in the universe revolves around his role as part of a larger collective. Every individual right expressed in the French Declaration is curbed by the collective’s right to overrule that individual. So, for example, the French Declaration states, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” But the second clause renders the first absolutely meaningless—if men are equal in right, how can their rights be subject to the opinions of a majority?
The answer is obvious. In the French Declaration, rights do not spring from God or preexist government: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” All rights come from the state. All rights therefore belong to the state … While the French Declaration pays homage to the nonaggression principle—it explicitly states that “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else. These limits can only be determined by law“—such niceties disappear as soon as the document states that “Law is the expression of the general will.” Religious rights are secondary to “the public order established by law.” Freedom of expression is guaranteed except as “shall be defined by law.” The collective rules the individual, and the general will trumps the individual will.
The man who best critiqued the French Revolution lived just across the English Channel. His name was Edmund Burke … and he was a member of Parliament sympathetic to the American colonists but utterly opposed to the French Revolution. Burke argued that the French Revolution had failed because it had ignored the lessons of human nature, the morality of Christianity, and the traditions of the past. Written at the outset of the revolution in 1789, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” [virtually predicted the violent and hate filled aspects of the French Revolution]. “The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we [give]… congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints,’” Burke wrote. He feared that the revolution had done away with the two foundations of Western civilization: “the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.” He warned that the triumph of supposed rationality over tradition and Judeo-Christian values would turn reason into a mere byword to be vulgarized by political forces: “Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.” And he warned as well that such brutality would extend to seizure of property and life itself.
How did Burke foresee the tragedy? Because he held true to the ancient precepts of Western civilization—Greek telos and Judeo-Christian morality … Burke was correct—but the French Revolution had already initiated a cycle of reaction that would continue for the next 156 years. Its slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fratemity,” had already proved chimerical a mere five years after Burke’s opus. Yet that creed would provide the impetus for a century and a half of political utopianism and its disastrous aftermath. Liberty would collapse into moral relativism and then tyranny; fraternity would collapse into nationalistic tribalism; equality would collapse into a new caste system, with all-wise rulers in control of the commanding heights[22].
Edmund Burke
The mental earthquake of the French Revolution would continue to have aftershocks around the world. Those who shared many of its assumptions would ignore any link between themselves and the deaths and economic decay that came from this mixture of atheism, relativism, philosophic materialism, and socialist economics while happily attacking Christianity at every step. As one observer has said: “Christendom has been broken, and a new spirit, that of emancipated, atheistic, international democracy, is dragging us toward an industrial socialistic future. Liberalism, once professing to advocate liberty, now is a movement for control over property, trade, work, amusements, education, and religion; only the marriage bond is relaxed by modern liberals.”[23] What began as a jumble of ideas was already bringing forth the fruit of destruction and misery, but these had not yet been fully systematized. They were waiting for the likes of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to take their implications to their logical conclusions. Marx’s father knew his Rousseau and Voltaire well and he grew up imbibing many of their ideas. In college he would adopt a materialist philosophy akin to the many philosophers described above. Marx and Engels thought the leaders of the French Revolution made mistakes, but they looked at the French Revolution as the path to the future. Marx and Engels thought their error was an overemphasis on morality and politics and an under emphasis on economics. He would correct the under emphasis and would merge philosophic materialism and economics more forcefully, creating a system that would leave no part of life out of the control of the state. Friedrich Hayek would identify what dangers this would create, “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.”[24] The Soviet Union would be where all of these ideas would leave the minds of individuals and be brought to life:
The communist leadership of the Soviet Union knew that their intellectual forerunners could be found in the French Revolution too. Fellow Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky—Lenin’s closest ally—would compare Lenin to Maximilien Robespierre, the chief instigator of the Jacobin Terror, sensing in his own comrade a closet despot looking to turn the Communist Party into a Russian version of the murderous Committee of Public Safety. He called Lenin’s methods “a dull caricature of the tragic intransigence of Jacobinism, “ whereby “the party is replaced by the organization of the party, the organization by the central committee, and finally the central committee by the dictator.”[25]
[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), pg 22, Kindle Edition. [2] Thomas Sowell, Marxism (New York: Quill, 1985), pg 40-41. [3] Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés (New York: Sentinel, 2012) pg 2, Kindle Edition. [4] Norman Geisler, A History of Western Philosophy Volume 2 (Matthews, NC: Bastion Books, 2012) Location 2513, Kindle Edition. See the section on La Metrie Man the Machine [5] Thomas Sowell, Marxism (New York: Quill, 1985), pg 41. In a similar vein, Vladimir Lenin thought crime would disappear with capitalism. Maxim gorky talked about how human nature would be transformed. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag (New York: Anchor books, 2004) page 84, Epub edition. (purchased through ebooks.com) [6] Thomas Sowell, Marxism (New York: Quill, 1985), pg 40-41. [7] For example, Woodrow Wilson [8] Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati, Condorcet Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) pg 140, Kindle Edition. “the identification of the interests of each with the interests of all “ [9] Ibid, pg 140. “the path of virtue is no longer arduous. “ [10] Ibid, pg 6. [11] Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Unknown Publisher), loc 538, Kindle Edition. [12] Engels cited Rousseau’s discourse on the origin of inequality amongst men. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring (Wallachia Press, 2015), loc 117, Kindle Edition. [13] Thomas Sowell, Marxism (New York: Quill, 1985), pg 44. [14] Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 68, Kindle Edition. [15] Quote is from Patrick Riley quoted in Charles Sherover, Voltaire and Rousseau (Carmichael & Carmichael, Inc. and Knowledge Products, 1996), 45 minutes left in audiobook, Audible Audiobook. [16] Norman Geisler, A History of Western Philosophy Volume 2 (Matthews, NC: Bastion Books, 2012) Location 2548, Kindle Edition. [17] Charles Colson, God and Government (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 2007), location 2276, Kindle edition. [18] Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), pg 116, Digital edition. (purchased through ebooks.com) [19] Ibid, pg 115. [20] Neil Wenborn, The French Revolution in a Nutshell (Germany, Naxos Audiobooks, 2009), 15 minutes left in the book, audible.com audiobook. states 300,000 men women and children killed in the Vendee by the French republican forces. See also The Christian Outlook Podcast, 6/29/2019, 19 minutes into the podcast [21] The Christian Outlook Podcast, 6/29/2019, 14 min into the podcast, “the French revolution redid the 7 day week to a 10 day week to get away from the concept of the sabbath “. [22] Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), pg 41, Digital edition. (purchased through ebooks.com) [23] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Washington DC, Regnery publishing, 2001). Locations 5598, Kindle Edition. [24] F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Loc 3107, Kindle Edition. [25] Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (New York: Alfred K Knopf, 2007) pg 93, ebook (purchased on ebooks.com). Stalin’s roommate at the time of the outbreak of the Russo Japanese war noted that Stalin was reading a book about the French revolution.
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