Cult of Reason (Cromwell the Great)

"The French people recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul"

The Cult of Reason (French: Culte de la Raison) is form of deism established in France as state-sponsored as a deistic and civic religion, intended as a replacement for Roman Catholicism during the French Revolution. during the Directory and Grand-Electorship.

Origins and Establishment
The Cult of Reason was a forced merger of carious forms of Deism, promoted and propagated by the more radical republican elements. Its first establishment as was erratically promoted by local authorities. Later evolving in the most important ones: the Cult of Reason, the Cult of the Supreme Being and Theophilanthropists. All these Deist cults were influenced by British Deism and the Freemasonry.

Atheism was frown has amoral, decadent and aristocratic and contrary to the spiritual and moral renewal of a republican society.

However, as part of the divisions and infighting among republicans many participants were denounced as anti-revolutionaries depending on whose side they were.

Under the Directory the Cult of Reason was promoted as an official policy. Its creed and philosophical tenets were more clearly defined, places of gathering and ceremonies created, authorities established for its direction and manuals published. All other Deist cults were required to join it or be declared illegal.

Under the Grand Electorship the Cult of Reason became a normal part of society and every day life and it took its definitive form. It famously decreed that all cemetery gates must bear only one inscription—Death is an eternal sleep.. The inscription was keep in years to come in all civil cemeteries, the ones used by the majority of the French population.

The Consulate tough, withdrawing official sponsorship, keep it and for some years sustained its worship and as major part of civic education in Schools and it spearhead the legislation for the complete separation of Church and State.

Religious tenets
The Cult of Reason is a natural religion - recognition of the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul - with a a rational worship (institution of feasts devoted to civic virtues) whose aim, is to develop civic republican morality.

Its Diffusion
The Cult of Reason spread among the sister republics, Netherlands , the American republics and Iberia , Scandinavia , Poland-Lithuania and Haiti. It Austria, Prussia and other central European countries its propaganda and practice was forbidden due to its link with Revolutionary France.

In Royalist Louisiana it was explicitly banned and denounced by the Catholic Chirch as immoral and heretical. It received the same treatment as Voodoo-Hoodoo until the establishment of the Republican Louisiana that declared freedom of worship.

In the Commonwealth it was a brief novelty and later practiced by the more educate and skeptical of the National Churches. Besides competing with the Freemasonry that had an important following in aristocratic and oligarchical circles.

However across the Atlantic in Commonwealth America and Mediterranean in gained an important foothold.