The official nationwide Fête de la Raison, supervised by Hébert and Antoine-François Momoro on 20 Brumaire, Year II (November 10, 1793) will come to epitomize the new republican way of religion.
In ceremonies devised and organized by Chaumette, churches across France were transformed into modern Temples of Reason.
The largest ceremony of all is at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
The Christian altar is dismantled and an altar to Liberty is installed and the inscription "To Philosophy" is carved in stone over the cathedral's doors.
Festive girls in white Roman dress and tricolor sashes mill around a costumed Goddess of Reason who "impersonated Liberty".
A flame burns on the altar, which is symbolic of truth.
To avoid statuary and idolatry, the Goddess figures are portrayed by living women, and in Paris the role is played by Momoro's own wife Sophie, who is said to have dressed "provocatively" and, according to Thomas Carlyle, "made one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though her teeth were a little defective."
Before his retirement, Georges Danton had warned against dechristianizers and their "rhetorical excesses", but support for the Cult will only increase in the zealous early years of the First Republic.
By late 1793, it us conceivable that the Convention might accept the invitation to attend the Paris festival en masse, but the unshakeable opposition of Maximilien Robespierre and others like him prevent it from becoming an official affair.
Undeterred, Chaumette and Hébert proudly lead a sizable delegation of deputies to Notre Dame.
It is here that Fouché gives “the most famous example of its [dechristianization] early phase."
Ironically enough, it was only a year previous that Fouché had been "an advocate of the role of the clergy in education," yet he is now "abandoning the role of religion in society altogether in favour of 'the revolutionary and clearly philosophical spirit' he had first wanted for education."
Overall, the dechristianization movement "reflected the wholesale transformation that Jacobin and radical leaders were beginning to see as necessary for the survival of the Republic, and the creation of a republican citizenry." (David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 239.)
