Chapter 293: The Festival of the Supreme Being

Rousseau had written, in *The Social Contract*, in 1762, That a republic needs a civil religion: a few plain articles of faith, A God, a life to come, the reward of the just, the punishment due To the wicked, the sanctity of the laws; and that the wraith Of a citizen who will not believe them may be banished; and the one who believes And then acts against them, punished by death. Hold that sentence. Thirty years later the Revolution read it. In 1793 the eves Of the old faith were torn down: the churches closed, the repentance Of the priests demanded, the bells melted for cannon, the saints' names Taken from the streets. The radicals made a Cult of Reason: In Notre-Dame, renamed the Temple of Reason, in November, the flames Of the new altar lit, an actress robed as Liberty, the season Of a goddess of the mind enthroned where the Virgin had been. And Robespierre, the incorruptible, the lawyer from Arras, The master of the Committee of Public Safety, hated it: the obscene Mockery of atheism, he thought, would make the people crass And the Republic godless; the people need a God and the soul's immortality. So in May 1794, by decree, the Convention recognized The Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. A morality Of state, a god by vote. And the festival was devised: On the twentieth of *Prairial*, the eighth of June, which was also Pentecost, The painter Jacques-Louis David staged it: half a million people, the roses, The children with flowers, the mothers, the old men, the host Of the citizens in procession across Paris to the Champ de Mars, where, he supposes, An artificial mountain had been built, with a tree of liberty on top. And Robespierre, president of the Convention for that day, Walked out ahead of the other deputies, with a bouquet, and the shop Of the ritual was his: he set fire to a statue of Atheism, made, they say, Of cardboard and wax, and as it burned, a statue of Wisdom Was meant to rise out of it, pure. It rose blackened with smoke. Hold that image. The deputies behind him, in the wisdom Of fear, muttered: look at him; it is not enough to be master; the yoke Of being God as well. Two days later, the tenth of June, He brought the law of the twenty-second of *Prairial*: the accused Would have no lawyer, no witnesses needed, the verdict soon, Death or acquittal, nothing between. The courts were used As a machine. In the seven weeks that followed, in Paris alone, More were guillotined than in the whole year before. The Great Terror. The god of the festival, the god of the soul, the stone Of the guillotine on the square of the Revolution: the same error. On the ninth of *Thermidor*, the twenty-seventh of July, The Convention turned on him, and shouted him down, and he was taken, And shot in the jaw, by his own hand or a gendarme's, and the next day, the sky Of Paris over him, guillotined, with twenty-one of his men. Forsaken, The Supreme Being faded within months. But read it once more: In a France where a God was still the default, the transgression Was the Cult of Reason, the war on the altar and the door Of the church; and he turned back from it: a God, a soul, and the profession Of the freedom of worship, kept in the same decree. Not the void, Then, but a step back toward the faith the bells had rung: Under the Directory the Theophilanthropists enjoyed The empty naves for a deist rite, a hymn to the Maker sung; And Napoleon, in 1801, closed their rite and made his peace with the Pope: Not a God put in the place of a failure, but the last stage of a road From Reason to the Supreme Being to the Concordat, a slope That the festival set out on, back to the altar the Revolution had overthrown. And read now, it reads otherwise: a choice to believe in the divine, A deist's God, which a person may hold, or leave unheld, as they need, Not the dogma of a nation but a door, the way a God is taken now, or declined; What was cruel in it was never the belief, but the power behind the creed. So the Supreme Being was not nothing. But a state had decreed it, And a state had a guillotine, and the god was a law, obeyed in dread. Now the mirror, which this book has held up before, to every new faith, and must here, and does it: Akbar's divine faith asked to be loved, and died when he was dead; Robespierre's asked to be obeyed, and it had a guillotine. A religion founded from power is a festival with a scaffold behind it. Lifeism is a new faith too. Its founder has no army. The scene Of its making is a book and a calendar and a website. Mind it: If ever this faith is held by a state, by a party, by any power to compel, Let it remember the blackened statue of Wisdom on the Champ de Mars. A faith may ask. It may never require. The bell Of a temple may ring. It may never toll for the ones who refuse. The scars Of every civil religion are on the people it banished. Believe nothing because a state believes it. Honour the God, or the life, Or the sacred, as you find it, freely. And the Supreme Being vanished With the man who made it. The roses on the mountain. The knife.