Why is France so afraid of religion?

Chapter 1 "The Age of Enlightenment"

That period in which materialist and evolutionist ideas gained widespread acceptance in European society, and influenced it in distancing itself from religion, is known as the Enlightenment. Surely, those who selected this word (that is those who characterized this change of ideas positively as a move into the light) were the leaders of this deviation. They described the earlier period as the "Dark Age" and blamed religion for it, claiming that Europe became enlightened when it was secularized and held religion at a distance. This biased and false perspective is still today one of the basic propaganda mechanisms of those who oppose religion.          

It is true that Medieval Christianity was partially "dark" with superstitions and bigotry and most of these have been cleared in the post-Medieval age. In fact, the Enlightenment did not bring much positive results to the West either. The most important result of the Enlightenment, which occurred in France, was the French Revolution, that turned the country into a sea of blood. For most of the French intellectuals, the Enlightenment meant purging people's minds of every religious and spiritual value. Nearly all the thinkers who lived in eighteenth-century France shared this view. The French Revolution was built on this idea of Enlightenment that held sway in France; it was one of the modern world's most barbarous, merciless and savage revolutions. As soon as the Jacobins came to power after the Revolution, the first thing they did was to bring in the guillotine; thousands of people lost their heads just because they were accused of being rich or religious. One of the leaders of the Revolution by the name of Fouché (his nickname was the Butcher of Lyon) sent a committee headed by three individuals to Lyon to destroy the landed and religious aristocracy there. In a letter he sent to Robespierre, the leader of the Senate, Fouché wrote that the guillotine was operating too slowly and that he was not happy with the slow advance of the revolution. He wanted permission to do a mass cleansing. On the day he received the permission, thousands of people with their hands tied behind their back were mowed down mercilessly by the guns of the revolution.          

Today Enlightenment influenced literature praises the French Revolution; however, the Revolution cost France much and contributed to social conflicts that were to last into the twenty-first century. The analysis of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment by the famous British thinker, Edmund Burke, is very telling. In his famous book, Reflections on the Revolution in France , published in 1790, he criticized both the idea of the Enlightenment and its fruit, the French Revolution; in his opinion, that movement destroyed the basic values that held society together, such as religion, morality and family structure, and paved the way towards terror and anarchy. Finally, he regarded the Enlightenment, as one interpreter put it, as a "destructive movement of the human intellect." 1          

The leaders of this destructive movement were Masons. Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and other anti-religious thinkers who prepared the way for the Revolution, were all Masons. The Masons were intimate with the Jacobins who were the leaders of the Revolution. This had led some historians to the opinion that it is difficult to distinguish between Jacobinism and Masonry in France of this period.          

During the French Revolution, much hostility was evinced toward religion. Many clergymen were sent to the guillotine, churches were destroyed, and, moreover, there were those who wanted to eradicate Christianity totally and replace it with a deviant, pagan, symbolic religion called "the Religion of Reason." The leaders of the Revolution also became victims of this frenzy, every one of them finally losing their heads on the guillotine, to which they themselves had condemned so many people. Even today, many Frenchmen continue to question whether or not the revolution was a good thing.          

The anti-religious sentiments of the French Revolution spread throughout Europe and, as a result, the nineteenth century became one of the boldest and most aggressive periods of anti-religious propaganda.

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