Chapter Eighteen - The Festival of the Supreme Being

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Festival of the Supreme Being

BY 1794, ROBESPIERRE had sent priests to the guillotine, crushed Catholicism, and turned churches into storage closets. But he wasn’t an atheist. He just didn’t like competition.

So he created his own.

He called it the Cult of the Supreme Being. It was a state-approved faith built on vague Enlightenment ideals, but with robes, hymns, and theatrical staging. Robespierre declared that the Revolution needed morality to survive. Without belief, he said, people would rot. He just never clarified who got to define what morality was.

Spoiler: it was him.

To launch his new national religion, he staged a massive public ceremony in Paris: The Festival of the Supreme Being. He dressed in sky-blue silk, held a bouquet of flowers, and climbed a manmade mountain in front of thousands of citizens while an artificial volcano smoked behind him.

He didn’t look like a leader anymore. He looked like a prophet.

The crowd didn’t cheer. They stared.

They had watched this man send thousands to the scaffold for being “enemies of virtue.” Now he was talking like he was virtue. And God. And France.

Even his allies started backing away.

The Revolution had been born from the idea that no man should have absolute power. No king, no pope, no god-on-earth. And now here was Robespierre on a paper mountain, glowing in sunlight, preaching about purity while the prisons filled up with the people who used to stand beside him.

The cult didn’t last.
But neither would he.