History of the Catholic Church in France the peasants, who clung to their religion and faith, and the fanatics of the Revolution, who, in the name of patriotism threatened, as they said, by the priests, were overturning the altars. According to the locality in which they happened to be, the propagandists either encouraged or hindered this violence against religion; but even in the every bitterest days of the terror, there was never a moment when Catholic worship was suppressed throughout France. When Robespierre had sent the partisans of Hébert and of Danton to the scaffold, he attempted to set up in France what he called la religion
Irreligion in France of Public Safety through their execution of Hébert and several of his followers on 24 March 1794, having ascended just seven months earlier. Even after the Thermidorean Reaction ended the revolutionary anti-clerical manifestations, the movement for secularization continued during the Napoleonic era and onward. French atheists participated in the increasingly popular political movements which sought for greater economic and political parity in society, the most notable being the French Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. In 1877, the Grand Orient de France (GOdF), the largest Masonic body, at the instigation of the Protestant priest Frédéric Desmons, allowed