Johnson’s chapter focuses on the movement of religious orders and refractory priests around the Atlantic world during the revolutionary period, while Carpenter’s work examines the religious lives of French aristocrats in London. While Banks and Smith focus on the French imaginings of far-off religions, Erica Johnson and Kirsty Carpenter explore ways in which French émigrés used space to navigate the revolution. Duperron imagined not the abandonment of religion, but a universal spirituality capable of uniting Catholics and Hindus in a radical new faith. Duperron’s translations of the Upanishads reveal how orientalism could be mobilized to critique the revolution itself. Similarly, Blake Smith’s chapter on Anquetil Duperron considers the ways in which Frenchmen encountered Hinduism as a means to rethink the revolution’s relationship with religion. Revolutionaries imagined the Huguenot diaspora in ways that furthered their universalist claims and tested their relationship with the Catholic populace. Specifically, revolutionaries promised to return Huguenot ancestral lands (provided that they remained in the royal domaines), if they returned to France from the diaspora. Early in the revolution, many sought something like reparations for Huguenots upon their return. How did the transnational religious communities and ideas shape the revolution’s religious policies? Bryan Banks focuses on the role that the Huguenot diaspora played in the rhetoric of the revolutionaries. their politics of religion) are central themes. The ways in which religion influenced the French Revolution and in which revolutionaries mobilized religion (i.e. Instead of viewing the revolution as attempting to replace religion, we argue that religious communities recalibrated and France rechristianized in a revolutionary, religious process. The French Revolution was of “world-historical” importance for religion. The volume’s nine chapters explore the complicated, transnational history of the French Revolution, arguing against the traditional secular narrative, which sees 1789 as the opening up of the anti-religious modern world. The byproduct was a fruitful discussion, which then led to the production of our edited collection, The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective: Freedom and Faith. the Reformation), spread across borders, permeated diverse populations by harnessing the power of pseudo-religious demagoguery, and promised a future of possibilities that challenged Christian eschatology.Īt the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era a couple of years ago, we decided to rethink Tocqueville’s assertion, and examine the French Revolution through both a religious and a global lens. The French Revolution, like the religious revolutions of the sixteenth century (i.e. Such events led Tocqueville to pay closer attention to the “political” nature of the revolutionary movement, but his allusions to the revolution’s seemingly religious methods reflect the broader religious effects of the revolution itself. Surely, the revolution’s affronts to the Catholic Church, the forced marriages of priests and nuns, the resulting renegade refractory priesthood, the counter-revolutionary insurrections like those in the Vendée, and the dechristianization efforts best embodied by the secularization of the French republican calendar or the effacement of the Notre Dame of Paris, to name just a few, emphasize what especially counter-revolutionary figures often construed as the anti-religious character of the French Revolution. Was the French Revolution a religious “revolution”? Such a question is often dismissed and in many ways, rightfully so. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien régime et la Révolution, 1856. The former not only spread beyond the limits of France, but, like religious revolutions, spread by preaching and propaganda. Some further points of resemblance between the two may be noticed. The French Revolution, though political, assumed the guise and tactics of a religious revolution.