§ 165.15. These seeds bore fruit in the =French Revolution=. Voltaire’s cry “_Écrasez l’infame_,” was directed against the church of the Inquisition, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the dragonnades, and Diderot had exclaimed that the world’s salvation could only come when the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The constitutional National Assembly, A.D. 1789-1791, wished to set aside, not the faith of the people, but only the hierarchy, and to save the state from a financial crisis by the goods of the church. All cloisters were suppressed and their property sold. The number of bishops was reduced to one half, all ecclesiastical offices without a pastoral sphere were abolished, the clergy elected by the people paid by the state, and liberty of belief recognised as an inalienable right of man. The legislative National Assembly, A.D. 1791, 1792, made all the clergy take an oath to the constitution on pain of deposition. The pope forbad it under the same threat. Then arose a schism. Some 40,000 priests who refused the oath mostly quitted the country. Avignon (§ 110, 4) had been incorporated in the French territory. The terrorist National Convention, A.D. 1792-1795, which brought the king to the scaffold on January 21st, A.D. 1793, and the queen on October 16th, prohibited all Christian customs, on 5th October abolished the Christian reckoning of time, and on November 7th Christianity itself, laid waste 2,000 churches and converted _Notre Dame_ into a _Temple de la Raison_, where a ballet-dancer represented the goddess of reason. Stirred up by the fanatical baron, “Anacharsis” Cloots, “the apostle of human freedom and the personal enemy of Jesus Christ,” the Archbishop Gobel, now in his sixtieth year, came forward, proclaiming his whole past life a fraud, and owning no other religion than that of freedom. On the other hand, the noble Bishop Gregoire of Blois, the first priest to support the constitution, who voted for the abolition of royalty, but not the execution of the king, was not driven by the terrorism of the convention, of which he was a member, from a bold and open profession of Christianity, appearing in his clerical dress and unweariedly protesting against the vandalism of the Assembly. Robespierre[496] himself said, “_Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer_,” passed in A.D. 1794 the resolution, _Le peuple français reconnait l’Être suprême et l’immortalité de l’âme_, and issued an order to celebrate the _fête de l’Être suprême_. The Directory, A.D. 1795-1799, restored indeed Christian worship, but favoured the deistical sect of the =Theophilanthropists=, whose high-swelling phrases soon called forth public scorn, while in A.D. 1802 the first consul banished their worship from all churches. But meanwhile, in A.D. 1798, in order to nullify the opposition of the pope, French armies had overrun Italy and proclaimed the Church States a Roman Republic. =Pius VI.= was taken prisoner to France, and died in A.D. 1799 at Valence under the rough treatment of the French, without having in the least compromised himself or his office.[497]