Joseph Waligore

While many scholars have realized that the Enlightenment period was much more religious than previously thought, the deists are still seen as basically secular figures who believed in a distant and inactive deity. This article shows that the hundred and thirteen French Revolutionary deists who wrote prayers and hymns to God believed in a caring, loving, and active deity. They maintained that God wanted people to be free, and so God actively helped the French Revolution by leading the French armies to victory and revealing enemy plots. The majority of these prayers and hymns were said at government-sponsored religious festivals. It is a mistake, however, to dismiss this religious language as being about sacralizing the new nation. Instead, there were places in the festivals where individuals could express their own religious views. Furthermore, most of these prayers and hymns were written while Maximilien Robespierre was pushing his deist civil religion and labelling irreligious people as enemies of the French republic. However, the same views about God were expressed after his death by the Theophilanthropists. Thus, these deists were not merely echoing the party line while Robespierre was alive, but were expressing their true religious feelings.