During the long period of 1,260 years God’s two witnesses, the Holy Scriptures, prophesied in sackcloth; the Bible was obscured and misinterpreted, and the faithful servants of God were persecuted. However, the apostate Christianity in that long period did not completely reject the Bible and the Christian faith, at least not nominally. The Bible was still recognized as a source of divine revelation and its religious and moral teachings as interpreted by the mainstream church, were still viewed as binding both on the church and the entire society.

All this was to dramatically change during the French Revolution, particularly in the period known as the “Reign of Terror” (September 1793–July 1794). The two witnesses, as foretold in Revelation 11:7, 8, were “killed,” “and their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.”

The Old Testament often refers to the great cities (like Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon) as the places where God was opposed and His people were oppressed. Further, Revelation contrasts the “great city” known as Babylon with the “holy city” named Jerusalem. It is noteworthy that in the book of Revelation many things come in pairs (two insignias—”the seal of God” and the “mark of the beast”; two resurrections—the first and the second; two mothers—a pure woman and a harlot; and two cities—the “holy city” and the “great city”).

Babylon as a great city refers consistently to the evil power that stands in opposition to God (Revelation 14:8; 16:19; 17:18; 18:10, 16, 19, 21). Opposite to Babylon is the “holy city,” Jerusalem, a city name used to signify first a literal celestial city built by God that will one day descend to this earth: “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). But like Babylon, New Jerusalem also represents a class of people called the Lamb’s “bride” who has “made herself ready” and is “arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints” (Revelation 19:7, 8).

From the foregoing we can clearly see that the phrase the “great city” in the book of Revelation stands for “Babylon.” Babylon in the days of the prophet Daniel (6th century B.C.) was the capital of a mighty empire, but in the days of the apostle John (1st century A.D.), the ancient city of Babylon was a heap of ruins. Therefore, the “great city” or Babylon in Revelation 11:7, 8 cannot refer to the literal city of Babylon. That name is rather a symbol of a vast community of people who, similarly to the ancient Babylon, blaspheme God and persecute His saints. In that sense the “great city” (Babylon), representing the apostate Christianity, is a counterpart of the “holy city” (Jerusalem), representing the true followers of Christ.

But then we are told in Revelation 11:8 that the dead bodies of the two witnesses “shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.” Could the “great city… where also our Lord was crucified” be the literal city of Jerusalem where Jesus was literally crucified, as some Bible interpreters have suggested? We do not think this to be the correct interpretation of the text. In Revelation 21:2 the “holy city” is identified with the “New Jerusalem,” not with the literal, earthly city of Jerusalem. The “holy city” or New Jerusalem of Revelation 21:2 is contrasted with the “great city” or Babylon in Revelation 18:10 (also in 18:2, 16, etc.) which we have seen cannot refer to the literal city of Babylon.

Further, the “great city” is qualified spiritually or allegorically as “Sodom and Egypt.” The biblical city of Sodom was notorious for the luxury, pride, sexual immorality, and vice of its inhabitants. There is ample biblical evidence for this qualification (see Genesis 19:1–4 and Ezekiel 16:49, 50, 56–58). To discover the allegorical meaning of the second qualification of the “great city”–Egypt, we need to understand which negative spiritual qualities Egypt and its rulers had displayed according to the biblical records. The Scriptures are explicit that Egypt oppressed God’s people and that its king denied the existence of Israel’s God: “And Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go” (Exodus 5:2). This Pharaoh’s utterance is patently atheistic because it denies the existence of the true God.

Did the prophecy of Revelation 11:7, 8 find its fulfillment toward the end of 1,260 days? Did the beast coming out of a bottomless pit make a war with the two witnesses, overcome them, and kill them in a great city that is spiritually or allegorically called Sodom and Egypt? Without any hesitation we answer this question in affirmative—Yes! This prophecy found its most striking fulfillment in the traumatic social upheavals of revolutionary France.

Besides Sodom, hardly any other biblical city could more fittingly represent the excessive luxury and vice of European nobility and royalty and the immoral practices associated with the French Revolution. And scarcely any other biblical characters other than the Pharaoh of Egypt so defiantly and boldly challenged the biblical God as did the atheistic ideologues of revolutionary France.

Further, Hebrew 6:4–6 helps us understand that Jesus has been crucified wherever His people depart from the truth that He taught and practiced and His apostles revealed in the Holy Scriptures. When the professed followers of Christ, after being enlightened by the biblical truth, fall away, or commit apostasy, “they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame” (Hebrews 6:6).

We have earlier observed that the first dark force (the apostate church) trampled upon the holy city for 1,260 days or years (a.d. 538–1798). During this period, the two witnesses (the Holy Scriptures and faithful human witnesses) prophesied in sackcloth, or in other words, in sadness and obscurity. At the end of this long period, the second dark force, the atheistic force embodied in the French Revolution crucified Jesus by declaring an open war on Christianity—by carrying out an unprecedented attack on the Bible and the Christian religion.

It is noteworthy that Revelation 11:13 refers to a “great earthquake” during which “the tenth part of the city fell.” It appears that the earthquake’s epicenter was placed in a “tenth part” of the city and that it took place at the close of 1,260 years (sometime in 1790s). If we consider that France was the oldest Christian nation in western Europe (“the eldest daughter of the Church”) and that during the revolutionary period it violently revolted against the dominant church and against Christian religion, we can see how France crucified Christ. On the other hand, it should be noted that the great earthquake affected only a “tenth” of the great city. Therefore, the great city must be larger than France. As noted above, the great city is the entire western European Christendom, and of that larger religious-political community, France makes up only one tenth.

Space does not permit us to plot the history of the French Revolution in greater detail. For a fuller account of this historic event we would refer the reader to any acknowledged historical work on the French Revolution, particularly on the Reign of Terror. We would like to offer here only a summary of some of the most notable acts of the French Revolution that poignantly demonstrate the extreme hostility which Revolutionary France showed to Christian religion.

On August 4, 1789, the newly convened National Constituent Assembly drafted one of its first major documents—the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” The core values of the Declaration were inspired by the Enlightenment philosophers, central to which was the doctrine of “natural right”—rights of man held to be universal. That same day, the Assembly abolished the privileges of the First (clergy) and Second (aristocracy) Estate. Notably, it abolished the tithes gathered by the Catholic clergy, that is, the taxing power of the Church. On October 10, 1789, the Assembly seized the properties and land held by the Catholic Church, the largest landowner in France (owning and deriving benefits from about 10% of all land in France) and decided to sell them as assignats (a kind of paper money used during the French Revolution and backed by the value of properties formerly held by the Catholic Church). From that time onward, France experienced dramatic and quick changes. Over the next year the French society would be completely dismantled and rebuilt from ground up. By June 1790, the Assembly had officially abolished the nobility, and on July 12 it passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This act was to bring the Revolutionary France on a direct collision course with the Roman Catholic Church and gradually unleash a fierce conflict with the Christian religion.

“Cross and Tricolour had become opposing symbols for millions of Europeans by the end of 1793. In France, the fatal split between Church and Revolution, opened wide by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, now seemed unbridgeable.”1

The Civil Constitution essentially attempted to bring the Catholic Church into line with the democratic institutions of the new France. However, in that attempt the state took away from the Church the fundamental right of ecclesiastical self-governance and placed her under the direct authority of the civil government. That meant that Church officers, including bishops, were elected by popular vote, depriving the Pope of the power to appoint bishops, and further, that the number of bishoprics was reduced to the number of existing administrative territorial units or departments (83), that the Church gradually lost its independent source of income making the clergy dependent on the state for their sustenance, and that the clergy were compelled to take an oath of loyalty to the nation of France before any other cause. This last-mentioned government action caused a massive split within the Church into the abjuring priests or jurors known also as “constitutional clergy” (those who took the oath) and nonjuring or refractory priests (those who refused the oath). No wonder that on April 13, 1791, Pope Pius VI issued a bull condemning the Civil Constitution and the French Revolutionary government. The leaders of the Revolution became increasingly suspicious of the clergy and of the Church as an institution. This soon unleashed an open war on the Church and on Christian religion.

The French political, economic, military, and social conditions became increasingly precarious during the year 1792. On September 22, 1792 the Legislative Assembly (National Convention) declared the abolition of monarchy and proclaimed the First Republic, or officially, the French Republic (République française). Sadly, the emerging Republic was rapidly descending into chaos. In the first week of September of 1792, the Parisian mob with the assistance of paramilitary forces broke into prisons and murdered between 1,100 and 1,600 prisoners (September Massacres). Three Church bishops and more than two hundred priests were massacred by angry mobs. Not long thereafter, in December 1792, the deposed French monarch, Louis XVI, was put on trial and convicted. On January 21, 1793 he was executed by guillotine. Facing foreign invasion, food shortages and riots in the spring of 1793, by April 6th, the Convention had created the Committee of Public Safety, an infamous nine-member provisional government (initially led by Danton), that ushered in the Reign of Terror which plagued France until the death of Maximilien Robespierre (July 27, 1794). In the ensuing months, tens of thousands of French citizens became imprisoned or exiled to penal colonies, and thousands of them were summarily convicted of capital crimes and were led to the guillotine. In that period, France turned into a large bloodbath, a merciless slaughterhouse where no one felt safe, and particularly not the Church and her priests and nuns.

The respected French statesman and historian of French Revolution, Adolphe Thiers, in his magisterial opus, The History of the French Revolution, published middle of the 19th century in several volumes, wrote in volume II of his History these sobering lines about the fear that arrested the French nation:

“People dared no longer express any opinion. They were afraid to visit their friends, lest they might be compromised with them, and lose liberty and even life. A hundred thousand arrests and some hundreds of condemnations, rendered imprisonment and the scaffold ever present to the minds of twenty-five millions of French.”2

What took place in the Reign of Terror was a culmination of a process known in history as the dechristianization of France during the French Revolution. The programme of dechristianization of France was initially waged against Catholicism, but it gradually spread over all forms of Christianity. It was a part of a larger process of making a radical break with all traditional values and conventions that were viewed as oppressive, superstitious, and out of harmony with reason and nature.

A. Thiers provides us with a perceptive description of the revolutionary tendency to radically remake the society and redefine the established order. One of the primary objectives of the revolutionary system was to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar. Further, it was part of a larger attempt at decimalization in France:

“It was precisely at this time, when the government was not afraid to do violence to all received ideas, to all established customs, that the plan for introducing a new system of weights and measures, and changing the calendar, was carried into execution. . . . They had already changed the Gregorian era into a republican era, and dated the latter from the first year of liberty. They made the year and the new era begin with the 22nd of September, 1792, a day which, by a fortunate coincidence, was that of the institution of the republic and of the autumnal equinox. . . . The month consisted of thirty days; it was divided into three portions of ten days each, called decades, instead of the four weeks. The tenth day of each decade was dedicated to rest, and superseded the former Sunday. Thus there was one day of rest less in the month. The Catholic religion had multiplied holidays to infinity. The Revolution, preaching up industry, deemed it right to reduce them as much as possible. . . . The last revolution, the most difficult, the most accused of tyranny, was that attempted in regard to religion.”3

Giving the voice to the revolutionary minds of that time, A. Thiers, wrote: “As minds became daily more and more excited, people began to ask, why, when all the old monarchical superstitions were abolished, there should yet be retained a phantom of religion, in which scarcely any one continued to believe, and which formed a most striking contrast with the new institutions and the new manners of republican France.”4

The words and actions that followed this kind of thinking were unprecedented in the history of any Christian nation. The historian Thiers, as well as other noted historians (e.g., A. Aulard, Christianity and the French Revolution. Boston. 1927), provide a shocking account of the extremes to which the godless leaders and populace of the Revolutionary France were prepared to go to get rid of any vestiges of Christianity. Professor J. Walsh of Oxford University summarized the excesses of the Revolutionary France in respect of the Christian religion:

“Helped by troops and local patriots, the representatives stopped the mass, desecrated churches, executed captive non-jurors, and browbeat priests into apostasy or the semi-apostasy of enforced marriage. Christian worship was replaced by a Cult of Reason and the Republic. After the famous Feast of Reason in Notre Dame de Paris (November 9, 1793) the campaign was taken up by the Paris sections, with prompting from the bourgeois anti-clericals of the Commune. As sensational as the violent dechristianization of the Commune was the legislative dechristianization of the Convention. The ancient clerical monopoly of education was swept away, and in October 1793 France deliberately broke with her religious past when the Convention voted the most anti-Christian act of the Revolution, the replacement of the ancient Gregorian calendar, woven intricately into the whole cycle of national life, by the new calendar of the Revolution (Appendix, pp. 691-2).”5

It is important to note that the dechristianization of France during the French Revolution did not do away with every appreciation of supernatural or “divine.” The Christian God, the God of the Bible, was replaced by other objects of worship. Initially it was the patriotic cult (patrie), which expanded into the cult of “Reason,” celebrated in the Christian churches converted into the “Temples of Reason” (e.g., the church Notre Dame in Paris). The worship of “Reason” was taking place not on a traditional Catholic Christian day of worship (Sunday), but on the new day of rest—Dècade—each tenth day of the month (cult of the Dècadi). The first festival of Reason was held with pomp on the 20th of Brumaire (the 10th of November 1793), and it involved a procession featuring a young lady representing the goddess of Reason. The last cult in Revolutionary France was introduced in May 1794 by M. Robespierre and was called the Cult of Supreme Being. That cult represented a form of deism and attempted to form a bridge between theists, Catholic and non-Catholic, in which “without constraint, without persecution, all sects can coalesce in the universal Religion of Nature.”6

Professor Walsh shares with us his insights about the meaning and purpose of the cults in the Revolutionary France: “But even in its destructive aspects, dechristianization was more than a simple Saturnalia of impiety. . . . The cults were to some extent artificial creations. . . . The cults were attempts—somewhat improvised—to replace Catholicism, with its super-natural frame of reference, by a secular religion of humanity which, in various forms, runs through the subsequent history of Europe. . . . [The patriotic cult] had its credo in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, its priesthood in the lawgivers, its baptismal ceremonies in the civic oaths administered at ‘altars of the patrie’, its symbols in the cockade, tricolour and cap of liberty, its hymns, processions and calendar. From its various festivals evolved the revolutionary cults of 1793–1802. . . . In the Cult of Reason (November 1793 to spring 1794) worship of the revolutionary Republic was primary; philosophical rationalism and the worship of nature and reason were secondary.”7

With the death of Maximilien Robespierre on July 27, 1794, the Reign of Terror came to its end, but this was not the end of the French Revolution. The period between the ousting of Robespierre (July 27, 1794) and the inauguration of the French Directory (November 1, 1795), known in the historiography of the French Revolution as the Thermidorian Reaction (or Thermidorian Convention), was marked by gradual relaxation of the most radical policies of the left wing Revolutionaries (Montagnard Convention). Incidentally, the political terms “left” and “right” were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangement in the French Estates General (those that sat to the left, generally opposed the monarchy and supported Revolution and the Republic; those to the right, were supportive of the traditional institutions of the Old Regime).

From November 2, 1795, until November 9, 1799 (the year when Napoleon I seized power, establishing the Consulate, and the French Revolution officially ended), France was then governed by the five-member committee known as Directory (or Directorate). Napoleon Bonaparte was a promising young military commander, appointed by the Directorate in March of 1796 commander in chief of the army in Italy. At that time France was in war with most of its neighbors, including Italy, where the nation scored major military victories. Of interest to students of the Bible prophecies are the France’s relations with the Roman Church and with the Papacy. The historic records indicate that the war against the Church, commenced in 1789 by the French Revolution, was transferred from France to the heart of the Catholic Church:

“Before 1795 the Revolution had threatened the existence of the Roman Church in France and Belgium. When it spilled over into the Italian peninsula it threatened to engulf the heart of Catholicism itself. In February 1797, under the Treaty of Tolentino, France detached the Legations from the Papal States: the murder of General Duphot in Rome in December led to the occupation of the city by General Berthier in February 1798, and to the proclamation of a Roman Republic. In 1799 ‘citizen pope’, Pius VI, was removed to captivity in France, where his death at Valence seemed to portend the dissolution of the Papacy.”8

This historic evidence is of great importance for the fulfillment of the apocalyptic prophecies recorded in two chapters of Revelation—chapters 11 and 13. Our long excursion in the history of the French Revolution has not been without merit. In the first part of this article (see The Reformation Herald, Vol. 61, No. 3), we have stated that the dark force employed by Satan lacks unity and that it typically swings like a pendulum between its opposite poles. One pole is represented by the apostate Christian church; the other pole stands for the secular, humanist, rationalist, and mostly atheistic and agnostic counterpart. In the last quoted reference above, the learned British historian informed us in the last quoted reference that in 1798 and 1799 an impartial observer of the European political and church affairs could not have escaped the conclusion that the Papacy was about to be dissolved. He correctly noted that the humanist, secularist, and liberal political-ideological actor incapacitated his religious, traditionalist, and conservative opponent—the Ancien Régime (the Old Regime) and its loyal patron and apologist—the Roman Church.

The extreme hostility that the French Revolution exhibited toward the Catholic Church and Christianity in general, has in fact fulfilled more than one apocalyptic prophecy. First, the devastating anti-Christian work caused a great damage to the cause of Christ not only in France but all over Europe and wherever European culture and civilization have reached. These effects have been profound, worldwide, and lasting. Second, the unprecedented demolition job which atheistic France executed through dechristianization of its population and its public institutions, permanently injured the French nation and inflicted a “deadly wound” to the Papacy. In the next issue of The Reformation Herald, we will provide scriptural support for these statements by reflecting on these damaging effects of the French Revolution in the light of the Bible.