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Under the guidance of Rousseau's ideology, the leaders of the French Revolution
proclaimed a secular jihad against Christianity - first by seeking to abolish revealed
religion in favor of the worship of disembodied "Reason," later by contriving a cult
of the "Supreme Being" - which included mandatory worship of nature - as an
ersatz religion.
Clerics were compelled - upon pain of death - to swear an oath to the "Civil
Constitution of the Clergy," which made the church an appendage of the divine
state. Those who refused to take that oath were assigned the status of
"refractories," persecuted, and often killed.
One region of France, the Vendee, was singled out by the revolutionary
government as a hotbed of "refractory" thought; it was populated by traditional
Catholics who clung' to their traditional beliefs and refused to recognize the
religious jurisdiction of the state. Accordingly, the central government sent the
revolutionary army in force to subdue what it conside:red a stronghold of heavily-
armed, fanatical fundamentalists.