“They’ve chased God from Notre-Dame. That huge, hollow barn is to be regarded now as a Cathedral dedicated only to REASON. Is there an irony there? I don’t know.
Reason sits in God’s vacant throne while we celebrate The Red Mass of Saint Guillotine.
People are Mad.
See there, above the lintel :
‘Death is a Sleep Forever.”
Heaven is abolished and in it’s place they’re promising UTOPIA here on Earth.
Jesus! How many heads must we strike off? How big must the Mountain of Corpses be before we can glimpse utopia from it’s peak?
The official nationwide Fête de la Raison, supervised by Hébert and Momoro on 20 Brumaire, Year II (10 November 1793) came to epitomize the new republican way of religion.
In ceremonies devised and organised by Chaumette, churches across France were transformed into modern Temples of Reason.
The largest ceremony of all was at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
The Christian altar was dismantled and an altar to Liberty was installed and the inscription "To Philosophy" was carved in stone over the cathedral's doors.
Festive girls in white Roman dress and tricolor sashes milled around a costumed Goddess of Reason who "impersonated Liberty".
A flame burned on the altar which was symbolic of Truth.
To avoid statuary and idolatry, the Goddess figures were portrayed by living women, and in Paris the role was played by Momoro's own wife Sophie, who is said to have dressed "provocatively" and, according to Thomas Carlyle, "made one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though her teeth were a little defective."
Before his retirement, Georges Danton had warned against dechristianizers and their "rhetorical excesses", but support for the Cult only increased in the zealous early years of the First Republic. By late 1793, it was conceivable that the Convention might accept the invitation to attend the Paris festival en masse, but the unshakeable opposition of Maximilien Robespierre and others like him prevented it from becoming an official affair.
Undeterred, Chaumette and Hébert proudly led a sizable delegation of deputies to Notre Dame.
“The French people recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul” (printed in 1794)
