By 1790, Protestantism had divided much of Europe into countless sects. Most of France remained Catholic. Many left The Catholic Church for a Rousseau-inspired obsession with self-worship. That was the beginning. God turned His Face from France.
A nausea that can only be appreciated by actually reading Rousseau spread through French cities. Printing presses cranked out pseudo-intellectual thoughts on clouds, water, earth, feelings, and whatever details of Creation the vainest of the vacuous chose to describe. Typical of the Rousseauean emptiness that replaced Catholicism in many pretentious minds: “I may be no better, but at least I am different.”
Even more banal people printed their own, sorrier drivel in pamphlets. Amazingly, people would buy, read, and feel inspired to share their own such thoughts in print. It was The Age of Mental Masturbation. Details became mindless obsession. A “return to simplicity” moved even Royalty to pretend to be milkmaids.
That vanity turned into political activity. Believers in the awful trinity of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity began to organize. Once they achieved critical mass, the most brutal of more easily took control over the centralized government Kings had thoughtfully provided by concentrating power in the Throne.
Cain began killing Abel on a national scale.
As in England, the target was Catholics and The Catholic Church. Thousands of Catholic priests and nuns were killed. So were over half a million loyal Catholics. France skipped England’s Pseudo-Christian, state-church phase and sank straight into socialism. Then, it descended into Napoleonic despotism that killed more than a million Frenchmen.
France never recovered the power and the glory it had when Catholic Kings rules that Catholic nation. God turned His Face so far from France that the remaining French people are in danger in their own nation. Unless France returns to The Church, it is lost.
