Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution

The dechristianization of France during the French Revolution is a conventional description of the results of a number of separate policies conducted by various governments of France between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Concordat of 1801, forming the basis of the later and less radical Laïcité movement. The goal of the campaign ranged from the public reclamation of the massive amounts of land, power, and money held by the Catholic Church in France to the termination of Catholic religious practice and of the religion itself. There has been much scholarly debate over whether the movement was popularly motivated.

The French Revolution, particularly in its Jacobin period, initiated one of the most violent episodes of anti-clericalism in modern Europe as a reaction against the dominant role of the Catholic church in pre-revolutionary France; the new revolutionary authorities suppressed the church; destroyed, desecrated and expropriated monasteries; exiled 30,000 priests and killed hundreds more. As part of a campaign to de-Christianize France in October 1793 the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoning from the date of the Revolution, and an atheist Cult of Reason was inaugurated, all churches not devoted to that cult being closed. It was one of history's first examples of state-sponsored atheism.

In 18th-century France, the vast majority of the population adhered to the Catholic Church as Catholicism had been since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the only religion officially allowed in the kingdom. Nonetheless, there were minorities of French Protestants (mostly Huguenots & German Lutherans in Alsace) and Jews still lived in France at the beginning of the Revolution. The Edict of Versailles, commonly known as the Edict of Tolerance, had been signed by Louis XVI on 7 November 1787 and had given non-Catholics in France the right to openly practice their religions as well as legal and civil status, which included the right to contract marriages without having to convert to the Catholic faith. At the same time, libertine thinkers popularized atheism and anti-clericalism.

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