Atheism Having Disappeared, Wisdom Appeared to the French People. Allegory of the Feast of the Supreme Being

Worshippers and acolytes gather around the robed statue of a female figure who brandishes a wreath in her left hand. Some bring offerings, while others bow down in obeisance. All are arrayed across a shallow space, standing like figures in a temple frieze. With its herms and reclining figures that resemble ancient river gods, the scene is a sibling to the sort of neoclassical design that was popular across Europe in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Here, though, instead of being used to illustrate an ancient legend or celebrate royal power, that neoclassical style is put to use to mark the creation of the French revolutionary cult of the Supreme Being.

In 1794 Maximilien Robespierre sought a sort of Enlightenment middle way between traditional religion and the radical atheism of the early years of the Revolution. In May (or Gérminal, according to the Revolutionary calendar), Robespierre promulgated a new cult of the Supreme Being, a sort of Deist civil religion meant to be a rational solution to the question of persistent religious sentiment. In June, every city was ordered to celebrate the inauguration of the new civil religion. This print may be related to the grand, though unbelievably stilted and pompous, celebration held in Paris on the Champs de Mars. (The Paris celebration was choreographed by no less a figure than Jacques-Louis David.) The cult was an immediate failure, not least because Robespierre fell from power the following month and was beheaded, as the Revoution continued to eat its own. This print is a rare survival of that intense and peculiar moment.