The Rosieres Movement, 1766-1789: A Clerical Precursor of the Revolutionary Cults

Abstract

The religious question during the French Revolution eventually engages the attention of all historians of the Revolution, lay and clerical, liberal and Marxist. Among the longest-running and most interesting debates in this historiography is the one which pitted Alphonse Aulard against Albert Mathiez at the time of the separation of Church and state in 1905. This was, of course, the first round in a heated and often personal intellectual struggle between the two historians; but its pretext remains a subject for research by students who are younger and less heated. What is the reason for the invented liturgies of the Great Revolution? Why these bizarre and often ridiculous cults of Reason, of the Supreme Being, of Theophilanthropy? Was Aulard right when he proposed in 1892 that the first two cults were fabricated to respond to the patriotic passions of a people at war?' Or do we prefer Mathiez, who concluded in 1904 that they were only elementary forms of the religious life which Frenchmen adopted out of nostalgia for the old?2 Recently John McManners has suggested we adopt both opinions as complementary.3 Are they? And is there perhaps another explanation to which the ideas of Aulard and Mathiez are simply first approximations?