Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
5
t
he
n
ew
c
hRistianity
Descend, O Liberty, daughter of Nature;
The people, recovering thy immortal power,
Upon the stately ruins of old imposture,
Raise once again thy altar!
Come, conqueror of kinds, Europe's example;
Come, over false Gods complete thy success!
Thou, Saint Liberty, inhabit this temple,
Be of our nation the Goddess!
—Marie-Joseph Chénier
Commissioned for the November 1793 “Festival of Reason and Liberty”
orchestrated by various members of the Convention, this hymn was chanted
as a Paris actress, playing the part of the goddess Reason who was serving,
for the moment at least, as the new sacred emblem of the French Republic,
was carried into the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. As poem and rite
all too clearly evince, while these acts were certainly part of a revolutionary
effort to undermine the hold of Catholicism, they could not help but also
emulate it. The festival was the ceremonial climax of a process that had
begun four years earlier with the seizing of church property. The prohibi-
tion of monastic vows soon followed in 1790 when the National Assembly's
Civil Constitution of the Clergy
gave it administrative control of all religious
institutions. Now, on the eve of the festival, the republic was in the process
of
becoming
the church. Only a month before it had replaced the Gregorian
calendar with one that substituted the birth of the French Republic for the
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