This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1922 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IX WOMEN AND RELIGION La fcmme est bien plus que pontife: elle est symbole et religion.--Michelet. In religion, as in every other department of life, the Revolution was a series of experiments. At the outset the Constituent Assembly arrogated to itself the power of determining the national religion; and other Assemblies followed its example. Hence, for twelve years, from 1789 to 1801, we see the French established religion describing a complete circle. It began with the orthodox Church of Rome as it had been constituted in 1516 by the Concordat, between King Francis I. and Pope Leo X.; it passed through the National Church as organised by the Constituent Assembly, in August, 1789, the Worship of Reason, instituted by the Convention in November, 1793, and the Worship of the Supreme Being, inaugurated by Robespierre in May, 1794; it returned to the National Christian Church as restored by the Directory in 1796, and it finally came back to the Church of Rome as established by the Concordat between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII. in 1S01.1 When the men of the Revolution required women to follow them2 in this feverish canter through successive phases of religious experience, from Ultramontanism to Erastianism, from Erastian Christianity See Salomon Reinach, Orpheus, Histoire Ginirale des Religions (1909), pp. 521-23 and 540-41. 'Prudhomme, editor of the influential newspaper Les Rivolutions de Paris, denied women the right to hold any religious opinion of their own. to Atheism, from Atheism to Theism and back to Christianity again, they found some of them lagging behind in the race. Many looked back, like Lot's wife, to the country of Ultramontane Orthodoxy, to the old faith and the old ritual. They fainted and faltered in this giddy spiritual whirl. Not a ...