Bastille Day

Today is Bastille Day, and so thoughts turn -- naturally! -- to the Terror, the September Massacres, the "Temple of Reason," the suppression of religious orders and the confiscation of church property, and the genocide in the Vendee.  (Here is a recent essay, by Sophie Masson, "Remembering the Vendee," that might be of interest).  And also, maybe, to some recent, relevant thoughts of Pope Benedict XVI:

Although the Holy Roman Empire had been in decline since the late Middle Ages, and it had faded also as an agreed-upon interpretation of history, it was not until the French Revolution that the spiritual framework it provided—and without which Europe could not have been formed—would shatter in a formal sense. This process had a major impact on both politics and ideals. In terms of ideals, there was a rejection of the sacred foundation both of history and of the state. History was no longer measured on the basis of an idea of God that had preceded it and given it shape. The state came to be understood in purely secular terms, based on rationalism and the will of citizens.

The secular state arose for the first time, abandoning and excluding any divine guarantee or legitimation of the political element as a mythological vision of the world and declaring that God is a private question that does not belong to the public sphere or to the democratic formation of the public will. Public life was now considered the realm of reason alone, which had no place for a seemingly unknowable God. From this perspective, religion and faith in God belonged to the realm of sentiment, not of reason. God and His will therefore ceased to be relevant to public life.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a new schism thus developed, the gravity of which we are only now grasping.