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majority of clergy, called “nonjurors,” refused to take oaths to the republic. About 20,000 priests did so and another 20,000 left the country. Many ex-priests publicly denounced their religion, swearing they had never believed it, and “vied with each other in ribaldry and blasphemy.”3 Vicar Patin stood in front of a revolutionary club and said the “earmarks” of a priest were: “To bestialize humans in order to better enslave them, to make them believe that two plus one is one and a thousand other absurdities, to enter into a compact with our former tyrants to share with them spoils taken from the people.”4

Revolutionaries smashed church art and statues.5 One explained that he had broken the noses off church statues because they were “hideous apes” that deserved to be crushed and used for pavement.6 At the Cathedral of Notre Dame, hundreds of medieval sculptures of prophets, priests, and kings were yanked from their pedestals and decapitated or hurled in the Seine.7 The cathedral’s priceless thirteenth- and fourteenth-century stained-glass windows were smashed.

Notre Dame fared better than the Third Abbey Church at Cluny, once the most magnificent monastery in the world. Revolutionaries torched the archives and sacked the Romanesque building, leaving behind nothing but a pile of rubble.8

The word “vandalisme” had to be invented to describe the wanton destruction of the abbey church of Saint Denis.9 French mobs defaced the prized Gothic architecture, trashing archaeological treasures dating from the seventh century. They ripped open the tombs and threw the skeletons of kings and queens into lime pits.10

Deeming any gold and silver held by the churches “an insult to reason,” the revolutionaries stole it, either for the “national melting pot” or for their personal use.11 Churches that were not burned to the ground were turned into headquarters for some of the revolutionary clubs,12 much as would happen years later to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where they now worship a giant whale. The revolutionaries shredded sacred books, using the paper as wadding for their cartridges, and burned confessional boxes for fuel. The relics of martyrs were ripped from their sacred resting places and thrown in a common pit, with one revolutionary leering about the bones of a male and a female martyr “making out together.”13

Sacred vessels of the sacristy were thrown to the ground by the French mobs. Church bells, deemed a “relic of fanaticism,” were forbidden from being rung, and were sometimes forcibly removed and melted down for armaments.14 Altars were destroyed or renamed “altars of Reason.” The cross, deemed counterrevolutionary, was forbidden from display, with women being required to remove cross necklaces.15 Street signs, parks, and even cemeteries were stripped of crosses. One revolutionary club proposed outlawing celibacy.16

Joseph Fouché had been the headmaster at a Catholic school, but during the Revolution, he switched sides and became a leader of the de-Christianization campaign. Denouncing religion as “superstitious and hypocritical,” he proclaimed a new “religion of the republic.”17 He traveled from town to town to snuff out any remnants of Christianity, publicly dressing down priests as “impostors who persist in continuing to perform their religious comedy.”18 In September 1793, Fouché actually did outlaw celibacy and gave priests one month to get married.19

In the town of Nevers, Fouché ordered that religious imagery on cemetery gates be replaced with the phrase “Death is an eternal sleep”—a proposal enthusiastically adopted in Paris.20 In Lyon, the archbishop refused to swear allegiance to the republic and so he was removed, replaced by revolutionary bishop Antoine Lamourette.

The people of Lyon responded to the de-Christianization campaign by clinging to their guns and religion. On account of the resistance, Convention deputy Bertrand Barere moved that Lyon, the second-largest city in France, be destroyed, and a monument erected on the ashes that would proclaim: “Lyon waged war against liberty;