Late in the year the national Convention took steps unlikely to retain traditional Catholic support, including, notably, the institution of a new calendar. The Decadi (every tenth day) replaced Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, and Catholic saints’ days were merged into a new nomenclature. Given the need for agricultural and arms production in the new era of mass warfare, the Decadi’s implementation was intended to meet the dual purposes of upping wartime productivity as well as comprising a major part of what historians have called the “‘de-christianising’ campaign of 1793.”

The French Revolution began in 1789 but two years later seemed to be at a standstill. In 1791, the king, Louis XVI, and his family were arrested as they attempted to flee to Austria, perhaps the major step toward ending the monarchy in favor of republicanism. In January 1793 the king and queen went to the guillotine. Within months, the Jacobins, the most radical of the revolution’s factions, ascended to prominence, facilitated by the crises of war with England and economic distress at home. The recently-formed Committee of Public Safety began to exercise its despotic powers. In July, a thirty-five-year old provincial lawyer, Maximilien de Robespierre, was elected to the committee and quickly became its figure-head. Robespierre revealed much of the essence of his philosophy in a speech in which he stated the aim of the revolutionary government:

It is the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, and the reign of that eternal justice whose laws are engraved . . . in the heart of every man. . . . Virtue is the natural quality of the people. . . . If the basis of popular government in time of peace is virtue, its basis in time of revolution is both virtue and intimidation – virtue without which intimidation is disastrous, and intimidation without which virtue has no power.[1]

In August 1793, the leading “patriot” general, Lazare Carnot, declared, “the republic is a great city in a state of siege; France must become one vast camp, and Paris its arsenal.” At about the same time the Committee of Public Safety passed a law against the hoarding of food and a plan for accumulating food stocks.[2]

The revolutionary government’s policies toward the Catholic Church were implemented inconsistently throughout the country, and, at times, governmental purposes seemed to be divided. By 1793, much anti-clericalism remained but Robespierre was among those leaders who valued “the support of the Catholic countryside” and rejected European-style atheism. Nevertheless, late in the year the national Convention took steps unlikely to retain traditional Catholic support, including, notably, the institution of a new calendar. The Decadi (every tenth day) replaced Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, and Catholic saints’ days were merged into a new nomenclature. Given the need for agricultural and arms production in the new era of mass warfare, the Decadi’s implementation was intended to meet the dual purposes of upping wartime productivity as well as comprising a major part of what historians have called the “‘de-christianising’ campaign of 1793.”[3]

Amazingly, from today’s perspective, four decades later leading churchmen who resided in the United States – an ocean away – wrote of the Sabbath’s abolition in France. The occasion was a brief and little-known reform effort around 1830 in which citizens in communities nationwide sought to persuade the U.S. Congress to alter that portion of the postal law that required post offices to be opened for business on every day of the week, including the Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s day. Many Presbyterians and Congregationalists as well as some Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and others – not all of whom were affiliated with churches – petitioned the Congress to repeal the one section of the law that mandated a violation of the weekly rest day by postmasters and postal workers, and thus brought the national government as well as many individuals under divine disapproval for the breaking of the Fourth Commandment.

While such concern may elicit yawns from readers today, considering the words of several church and benevolent reform leaders (circa 1830) on the matter provides another window into the arguments and practices of Christians examining, praying about, and responding to governmental examples of immorality, then or now. The Western Luminary was the oldest religious periodical published west of the mountains (in Lexington, Ky.). The weekly paper was the organ of Kentucky Presbyterians. Its editor was Thomas T. Skillman, a Presbyterian elder and a manager of the Kentucky Bible Society. In April 1829, Skillman published an article by “A lover of civil and religious liberty” which was entitled, “Sabbath Mails.” The writer referred to France four decades earlier, as follows:

Who is there that would wish to see the bloody tragedy of the French revolution acted over again? – let him release the obligation of observing the Sabbath, and this will effectively pave the way to infidelity, and absence of all moral obligation and religious influence; without which, the immortal Washington has said, no government can exist.[4]    

The writer’s releasing of the Sabbath’s obligation alluded to the national postal law of 1810 which, arguably, had done the same thing for American postmasters as for Frenchmen a generation earlier. In Jacksonian America, postmasters were respected local officials and in many cases were the community’s lone representative of the federal government.

One year later, among many articles that addressed the Christian Sabbath – not all of which dealt with the controversial postal issue – editor Skillman published another piece that harkened back to revolutionary France. Reprinting an article written by a firsthand observer in France during 1793, Skillman warned his readers:

The great bulk of France was infidel, – the rulers of the day were bent upon overthrowing the Christian religion altogether. How did they proceed? Not content with individually neglecting the Sabbath, they entirely abolished it by law, and appointed Decades, the tenth day in place of the seventh, and this, not for a day of worship, but for a day of pleasure! Having gone thus far, they next invited the people to a grande assemblee, to give their consent to the shutting up of their churches. I was in France at the time, I saw the meeting.[5]

The unidentified writer, first published in the London World, went on to make clear he viewed the poor Sabbath observance he had seen outside of France – presumably in England – perhaps as trending toward – or as the evidence for – the loss of the Christian faith, which was often termed “infidelity” in that era: “Here, Mr. Editor, may thousands who boast of Christianity, and even call themselves Christians, yet shamelessly break down one of Christianity’s best and strongest bulwarks, see the beginning, the progress and the end [result] of infidelity.”[6]

The above comments from nearly two centuries ago might encourage some readers of Dr. R. Scott Clark’s excellent piece on the Christianity Today-Trump-support controversy (The Aquila Report, Dec. 24, 2019) to refocus their attention upon their own views and practices, and those of their churches, relative to the bulwark of the Lord’s day.[7]

In early 1831, the Luminary published a piece entitled, “Political Atheism,” based upon a recent lecture by Dr. Lyman Beecher, a leading Congregationalist minister and moral reformer. Beecher addressed

The difficulties of sustaining a republican government over our vast extent of territory, and with a population which multiplies with amazing rapidity. . . . the experience of forty years shows, that our fathers had cause to tremble for its perpetuity. No patriot of the revolution has died in the full assurance of hope that our republic will be perpetual; and none of the remnant who survive . . . indulges that unwavering confidence now.[8] 

One of the great benefits of history is in seeing that the dangers and trials of one’s own day are not as unprecedented as we are prone to consider them – even while taking them seriously. Beecher’s next phrases might have been from last week:

At the present time clouds are over us, and the aspect of things was never darker. If it is difficult to preserve the political ship when it is conducted by a wise and faithful commander, and manned by a crew of truehearted men, what shall we do when other men gain the ascendancy, who come in with the avowed purpose of making shipwreck of the whole? The atheists do not conceal their object, but carry it on their flag; and is there no danger, if you put the helm into their hands?[9]

Lyman Beecher was dealing with issues broader than just the Sabbath as a pillar of civil and religious liberty. In particular, he was responding to charges made by some on the political left that a Christian political party threatened the liberties of the citizenry: that long-dreaded bugaboo in American politics, a supposed union of Church and State. In this lecture, Beecher did not address the Sabbath specifically as a part of his argumentation. But he spoke of the French and their revolution in no less than three places in the text, as when he declared the “books and papers” of the American political atheists “are as full of malignity and bitterness, as any which appeared in the bloodiest days of the French revolution.” As he well knew, it was during those very days that the Christian Sabbath had been abolished by the government of which Robespierre was the figurehead. Moreover, in 1828 Dr. Beecher had given the opening address at the formation of the national organization known as the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath. Beecher’s view was widely shared, and rarely was the Sabbath and its importance to civil and religious liberty found to be very far from his thoughts.[10]

One also recalls R. Scott Clark’s recent piece with this observation: Lyman Beecher did not appear to be guilty of an error of many professing Christians today, that of equating the United States of America with the kingdom of God. In short, Beecher viewed the republic’s survival as dependent upon the citizenry’s deep attachment to the Bible. Today, Christians genuinely concerned with atheistic political (or civil) trends as well as with advancing God’s kingdom will do well to consider the role of the Lord’s day, or Christian Sabbath, in both the civil and religious spheres – as did Beecher and countless lesser-known pastors and churchmen two centuries ago.[11]

The Western Luminary of Kentucky Presbyterians was only one of many instruments that recalled the sad spectacle of France in 1793 regarding the Sabbath’s abolition. On December 25, 1831, in backwoods Greene County, Alabama, Presbyterian pastor Joseph P. Cunningham preached a sermon entitled, “Man’s Interest in the Sabbath.” In a section of the sermon dealing with how the Sabbath “affects man in his social character, as a subject of law and civil government,” Cunningham declared,

The Sabbath is pre-eminently the patron of genuine liberty. It tends to enlighten men in their duty to God and their fellow-men; to inculcate virtue, sobriety, and moderation. . . . The Jewish nation soon sunk into vice, when the Sabbath was lost; and was carried into a miserable and protracted captivity . . . expressly for this offence. . . . How is it with those Christian countries where the Sabbath has been either virtually or really nullified? Look at Spain, as it now is; or France, as it was in the Revolution. Look at those parts of our own happy country, where the Sabbath is but little regarded. The traveller, as he passes over them, trembles for his safety.[12]

The fact that Cunningham’s published sermon included an appendix addressing the Sabbath mails controversy showed that the above line of thinking was inseparably linked with that ongoing civil and moral-religious issue in the United States.

In the 1830s, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Methodists were represented in the Virginia Society for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath. At the society’s fourth annual meeting, in 1834, the report affirmed the Sabbath and marriage as the institutions that “lie at the foundation of all social and personal happiness. The enemies of both have ever shown themselves the enemies of God and man. Every attempt to dispense with either, has been attended with consequences the most disastrous. The result of the experiment in France, is well known.” A passing reference was all that was required to make the point.[13]

And in 1836, the Virginia Society’s annual report included this warning:

A formal conspiracy was once entered into against the Sabbath. It was abolished by law, by a nation, but it put the match to such a train of iniquity as blew up the conspirators themselves, and twelve months had not elapsed before the history of the wrath of God was written in characters of fire, and of blood, and the terrible warning recorded that there is a point where nations must stop.[14]

As seen in this brief selection from the 1830s, a number of church and other local leaders from Kentucky to Alabama to Virginia – indeed, the sentiment was nationwide – believed the government of these United States to be dangerously close to following in the footsteps of France’s Jacobins of 1793, specifically with respect to the foundational institution of the Christian Sabbath. Were they wrong?

While the extent to which Robespierre and his fellows succeeded in practicing both virtue and intimidation [terreur] may be debated, in any case they sent thousands to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794). In July of 1794, Robespierre himself met the same dreadful end. Because his virtue was not grounded in the Bible, it was a fraudulent virtue; a phenomenon seen even today. For many American churchmen in the 1830s, the spectacle of France’s Reign of Terror four decades earlier served as a chilling reminder of divine wrath upon a nation that abolishes, or perhaps even undermines, the Christian Sabbath. May that dark episode from France’s brief Jacobin era lead many Christians at the start of 2020 to consider anew the remembering of the first day of the week, to keep it holy, acknowledging its indispensable nature as “the patron of genuine liberty” – first personally, and then in their households, churches, and beyond.

Forrest Marion is a ruling elder in Eastwood Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Montgomery, Ala.

[1] J. M. Thompson, Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: English Universities Press Ltd, 1952), 58, 61, 65-67, 108.

[2] Thompson, Robespierre, 92, 101.

[3] Thompson, Robespierre, 102-103, 121-22.

[4] Western Luminary (Lexington, Ky.), April 1, 1829 [emphasis in original]. The Oct. 5, 1831, issue identified the paper as “the oldest religious periodical west of the mountains” and as “decidedly Presbyterian.”

[5] Western Luminary, April 14, 1830 [emphasis in original].

[6] Western Luminary, April 14, 1830.

[7] R. Scott Clark, “Is it Sin to Vote for Trump or How Understanding the Twofold Government Helps,” The Aquila Report, December 24, 2019.

[8] Western Luminary, January 12, 1831.

[9] Western Luminary, January 12, 1831.

[10] Western Luminary, January 12, 1831.

[11] Clark, “Is it Sin to Vote for Trump,” The Aquila Report, December 24, 2019.

[12] J. [Joseph] P. Cunningham, Man’s Interest in the Sabbath. A Sermon, Delivered in Concord Church, Greene County, December 25, 1831 (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Robinson & Hampton, 1832), 9-10 [emphasis in original].

[13] “Fourth Annual Report,” Southern Religious Telegraph (Richmond, Va.), April 11, 1834 [emphasis added]; Forrest L. Marion, “‘All That is Pure in Religion and Valuable in Society’: Presbyterians, The Virginia Society, and the Sabbath, 1830-1836,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 109, no. 2 (2001), 187-218.

[14] “Sabbath Society,” Southern Churchman (Richmond, Va.), April 15, 1836 [emphasis in original].