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Redefining Revolutionary Liberty: The Rhetoric of Religious Revival during the French Revolution

In December 1794, in the midst of the French Revolution, the town officers of St. Bris in Burgundy tried to enforce a departmental decree closing the village church. The Catholic villagers responded by gathering en masse before the church doors and demanding the right to assemble peacefully to pray to the "Supreme Being." When the mayor locked the church, he returned the next day to find the doors removed. A second attempt also failed; the villagers pried off the locks, entered, and began to sing psalms and offices despite the absence of a priest. Next they assembled on the front steps and drafted a petition demanding to benefit from "the decree in which the Convention assured them religious liberty." Finally the mayor threw up his hands in despair and conceded that perhaps his persistent Catholic villagers should be allowed to worship publicly. "It is impossible to close the temples," commented the mayor. "The people have decided."' The activism of the religious protesters of St. Bris was hardly unusual, for in the winter and spring of 1794-95 French Catholics launched an energetic and widespread revival of their religion. After the fall of Robespierre when the thermidorean government partially relaxed the laws restricting religious worship, parishioners throughout France seized the keys to parish churches, sang hymns and offices, and petitioned for the right to practice their religion in public. The revival movement involved a cultural clash between the newly created system of revo-