Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [58]
Fouché happily accommodated him, working day and night for months to annihilate the entire city, saying he was doing it “for humanity’s sake.” Fouché famously proclaimed, “Terror, salutary terror, is now the order of the day here.” He arranged for “batch after batch of bankers, scholars, aristocrats, priests, nuns, and wealthy merchants and their wives, mistresses, and children” to be dragged from their homes and killed by firing squad.22
Fouché personally stripped even the revolutionary bishop, Lamourette, of his fake vestments and rode him through town on a donkey with a miter on its head and a Bible and crucifix tied to its tail, so the rabble could spit at and kick Lamourette. When Fouché was done, he proudly wrote to the Convention that Christianity in the provinces had “been struck down once and for all.”23
Just a year earlier, at the beginning of the new Republic, Lamourette’s idea had been to fuse revolutionary principles with Catholicism, much like today’s pro-life Democrats. Even in the earliest days of the revolution, church property had been confiscated by the state, priests expelled from their posts, and the priesthood put up to popular vote.
But Lamourette thought they could all still get along. And so, prattling about “men of goodwill,” in July 1792 Lamourette had asked members of the Assembly to embrace one another. There was hugging and kissing all around … and, one year later, Lamourette was being ridden through town, like a clown, on the back of an ass. So in addition to “counterrevolutionary” and “vandalisme,” the French Revolution gave us the expression for a false truce: “the kiss of Lamourette.”
Fouché’s siege of Lyon became the revolution’s standard operating procedure in the rest of France.
In October 1793, the powerful Paris Commune decreed that ministers were not allowed to perform religious services or wear religious garb in public, forbade the sale or display of rosaries and other “objects of superstition,” and overturned the blue laws.24 That same month, the Committee of Public Instruction banned priests from being teachers25—nearly two hundred years before our own Supreme Court did.
In lieu of religious holidays—which were banned—the revolutionaries put on “Fetes of Reason” with parades, dances, and public burnings of the symbols of nobility “on a scale as never before.”26 The first and most spectacular of these pagan rituals was held in November 1793, in the Notre Dame Cathedral or, as it was renamed, “The Temple of Reason.” The words “To Philosophy” were carved into the façade of the magnificent Gothic cathedral. Stripped of crucifixes and other religious insignia, its altar was renamed the “Altar of Reason,” decorated with broken crowns and a shredded Bible. It was an ACLU fantasy come true!
As a special highlight, Madame Momoro, a nun turned prostitute, portrayed the “Goddess of Reason” at the pagan festival of reason and paraded through the cathedral for all to worship.27 Four months later, the Goddess of Reason was guillotined.28 Fouché, Saint-Just, Barrere—the very revolutionaries who had propelled Momoro’s ascent as a “goddess” to celebrate an end to religion—were on hand to applaud her beheading.29
At the fetes of reason being held throughout France, mannequins of priests were tied backwards on donkeys and ridden through the street. There were also obscene parodies of the clergy, with performers dressed as priests delivering mock sermons and dispensing scatological communions. “Come receive your God,” they taunted, wiping their behinds with paper “hosts” and throwing the host in a chamber pot. “Here is your divinity. Come adore him for nothing. Here is a present of him.”30
Religious marriages and funerals were discouraged and in some places banned entirely, replaced with civic versions of the same. The already-married were encouraged to remarry in revolutionary ceremonies. One club proposed that eulogies at the civic funerals include attacks on the recently departed, to distinguish them from religious funerals. 31
This was not the American Revolution.