A ceremony of the new Republican Religion of Reason in Notre Dame, Paris, 1793. The effort to destroy the institutions of the Old Regime and create new, rationale, and just replacements was carried into the world of religion and the Church. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790) reorganized the Church, introducing such reforms as the election of priests and, more broadly, the subordination of the Church to the Revolutionary Government. During the Convention the attack on the Church went further into de-Christianization. Churches were renamed temples of reason—or de-sanctified—and a new religion of reason was introduced by the Convention. This “civil religion” was based on the belief in a Supreme Being and secular ethics. This print depicts a ceremony in this new civil religion taking place in the famous cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The policy of radical religious change was not popular and sometimes fiercely resisted in small towns and villages.