It is interesting in the footnotes that it indicates the name originally doens't have the negative connotations it seems to have in english<p>``` The word "cult" in French means "a form of worship", without any of its negative or exclusivist implications in English; its proponents intended it to be a universal congregation.
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It seems profoundly weird to me, though this might just be due to not understanding the sociology of the time and place, to actively attempt to force a belief in reason through coercion. It seems self-defeating. I can understand a longing for reason to spread and gain acceptance... but to conclude that this desire justifies overriding the individual thinkers freedom to decide for themselves would be an unsupportable argument. The furthest I could see going would be to forbid indoctrination of the youth in unreasoned ideologies since children have limited ability to challenge what they are being taught (at least they did at the time). But if you are 'persuading' people to believe in ideas which claim objective, reasoned basis through abandoning reasoning with them and resorting to force, it would be right for all to reject you as a hypocrite.
>Many contemporary accounts reported the Festival of Reason as a "lurid", "licentious" affair of scandalous "depravities"...<p>Sounds a bit like Burning Man
I studied the Revolution as part of the national curriculum of 1st year of HS, and this "religion" was as crazy as the description of it sounds, and part of the ambient madness of the following years.
It seems to me to be more the expression of collective madness than Lumières's ideals.
Thomas Paine also started a deistic religion during the French Revolution-<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophilanthropy" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophilanthropy</a>