ROMAN-CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE CHALLENGES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
ROMAN-CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE CHALLENGES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Summary/Abstract: The French Revolution was one of the great events that marked the history of humankind. The Romanian historiography presented especially its ideological and political part, but in the West the historical research did not forget its religious component. Communism used the French Revolution which it presented as one of its roots, arguing its atheism through the rationalism of the French Enlightenment, forgetting to mention the formation of a religious ideology fully manifested in France during the last years of the 18th century. This is why I shall present in this study some of the phases of the French Revolution which marked the Catholic Church in one of its greatest trials. Although anti-clericalism characterised only the French revolutionary society, the ideas of Enlightenment spread all over Europe and even further on, till America, bringing about deep changes in the mental of the society and little by little a new political thought.

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