ALFRED GROSSER

Thought I'd share a passage from Alfred Grosser's Vernunft und Gewalt: Die Französische Revolution und das deutsche Grundgesetz heute (Reason and Power [or Violence]: The French Revolution and the German Basic Law Today), Munich, 1989. The translation is mine.

On November 11th, 1793, in the former (and future) cathedral Notre Dame de Paris, the Fête de la Raison, the Festival of Reason, was performed, the high priest of which appears to have been Robespierre. On the 21st, he objected to dechristianization and atheism. On June 8th, 1794, the Fête de l'Etre Suprême, the Festival of the Supreme Being, occured, occasioned by Robespierre and under his direction. Return to a religion without a church, which -- in the manner of Voltaire -- needs a god, demanded and proven by reason, as a principle of explanation for the world and as a ground for morality? Or the mere traditional need to be able to persuade the people to obey and be moral, in the name of a principle that transcends and rules over human beings, while, at the same time, the ability to be directed by pure reason is reserved for those who are educated enough to have advanced toward reason itself? At any rate, the short time span between the two festivals indicates a tension that the Revolution is not alone in experiencing: Freedom of the mind (des Geistes) is not easily compatible with the content of religious belief, but it is nonetheless easier to derive ethics from belief, than it is to found ethics using reason alone. (71-2)