USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -France’s population of 28 million was almost entirely Catholic, with full membership of the state denied to Protestant and Jewish minorities. Being French effectively meant being Catholic. Yet, by 1794, France’s churches and religious orders were closed down and religious worship suppressed.

Detailed explanation-2: -During a two-year period known as the Reign of Terror, the episodes of anti-clericalism grew more violent than any in modern European history. The new revolutionary authorities suppressed the Church, abolished the Catholic monarchy, nationalized Church property, exiled 30, 000 priests, and killed hundreds more.

Detailed explanation-3: -The United Protestant Church of France (French: Église protestante unie de France) is the main and largest Protestant church in France, created in 2013 through the unification of the Reformed Church of France and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of France.

Detailed explanation-4: -Roughly 3% of the French are Protestant, and though a small minority, they are well represented in business and politics, particularly on the left. France’s history of Protestantism is best known for the emergence of the Huguenots in the 1520s, followers of the Protestant thinker John Calvin (d. 1564).

Detailed explanation-5: -Religious practice was outlawed and replaced with the cult of the Supreme Being, a deist state religion. The program of dechristianization waged against the Christian people of France increased in intensity with the enactment of the Law of 17 September 1793, also known as the Law of Suspects.