Cult of Reason

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Cult of Reason (French: Culte de la Raison) was a creed based on atheism devised during the French Revolution by Jacques Hébert, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and their supporters. In opposition, Maximilien Robespierre, a Deist, instituted the Cult of the Supreme Being.^[1]

The Cult of Reason was intended to complement, in the religious sphere, the radical opposition of the enragés to Robespierre's political project. In particular, Chaumette and Hébert objected to Robespierre's emphasis on the Supreme Being as a back-handed return to theism, and instead advocated the worship of Reason, personified as a goddess. The Cult of Reason enjoyed a certain support among the sans-culottes before the persecution of the Hébertistes drove it underground. Both cults were the outcome of the "de-Christianization" of French society during the Revolution, and suffered during the Thermidorian Reaction and Napoleon Bonaparte's rapprochement with Roman Catholicism.