Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss the continued fall of France.
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The French Revolution occupies a sacred place in the contemporary narrative as the dawn of liberty and human rights. The storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the French aristocratic regime were the necessary ruptures that birthed the modern world.
It was a good thing, actually, to murder the ruling class, defile churches, and kill tens of thousands of clergy and other innocents. The dechristianization campaign, aimed to replace Catholicism (the soul of France for over a millennium) with civic cults, was simply France’s big glow-up.
I wonder if the revolutionaries could have seen what France would become, how many would have stopped the Reign of Terror from ever happening, throwing their own necks into the guillotine.
What happened in 1793 is happening again in 2026, just with a new coat of paint and a different slogan.
During the revolution, Église Saint-Laurent, an ancient parish church with roots dating to the 6th century, was one of many Catholic churches violently seized and replaced by the Cult of Reason, which placed so-called liberty and state worship at the forefront of its religious orthodoxy. The cult transformed the church, which had served pilgrims and the faithful for centuries, into a “Temple of Reason.”
Today, the same sacred space faces another invasion by a successor cult: a far-left orthodoxy centered on LGBTQ ideology, identity politics, and secular hedonism. France has allowed it to be repurposed as a stage for the Nuit Blanche festival’s ideological performance, directed by LGBTQ activist Barbara Butch.
During Nuit Blanche, Paris’s all-night art festival, Église Saint-Laurent hosts Sous la peau du ciel (”Under the Skin of the Sky”), an immersive sound installation of people’s desires for love, diversity, and inclusion.
If that name rings any bells, Butch played a central role in the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, where she presided as a DJ over the now-infamous deliberate parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper featuring drag performers, dancers, and a near-naked figure evoking Dionysus. Butch herself admitted at the time by posting (then deleting) a comparison on social media with the caption referencing “the new gay testament.”
Butch embodies the evolution of the revolutionary spirit. Where the Jacobins sought to replace Christian ritual with civic cults, today’s cultural figures like her seek to infuse historic religious sites with a hyper-secular vision of “love” that has very little room for traditional Christianity.
The worst part about this is that, apparently, the priests and the diocese responsible for protecting Saint-Laurent signed off on the festival’s use of it.
The revolution marked not France’s ascent but its fall, a self-inflicted wound whose effects are seen in the country’s current struggles. Nothing is more emblematic of this than reports of six Catholics being arrested while praying outside Église Saint-Laurent while protesting the festival.
A group of Catholics gathered in front of Église Saint-Laurent to oppose the event. They peacefully prayed outside its doors, bringing awareness to the profanity taking place inside a consecrated church. Of course, left-wing French media, ever subservient to the new revolutionaries, framed the protesters as being linked to the far-right.
Christianity has long been removed as the state religion of France, so anyone can elevate oneself to the level of deity. During the revolution, man’s reason, liberty, etc., became god. Today, it’s man’s sexual identity that takes the throne. There are other sects of this same radical orthodoxy. For example, immigrants, sexual deviants, gender non-conformists, and Muslims can all practice their religions publicly in the street, no matter how violent, disruptive, or hedonistic they are. But peaceful Catholics praying outside their own historic church? Handcuffs.
I’m not saying pre-revolutionary France was some golden age. There was poverty, injustice, and corruption. But before the revolution, France was able to develop a culture that produced cathedrals, saints, and thinkers who shaped Western civilization. Spiritually, it hollowed out the country. France went from “Eldest Daughter of the Church” to one of the most aggressively secular nations in Europe. And Saint-Laurent has been a quiet witness to all of it.
The same thing happened here in the U.S. under the sexual revolution. We removed our Christian identity, elevating sexual pleasure and physical openness. What was born out of this is children being taught about adult sexual practices in elementary school.
I read the other day about a conversation a woman overheard between her daughter and her friends. The children had no idea what a priest or pastor was, who Jesus was or why he was important. Even if you aren’t Christian, there is a simple understanding of Him and these terms. We’ve returned to first principles, even here in the U.S.
The reality is that the wounds of revolution never fully heal. The cycle of desecration and loss will keep going because the revolutionary impulse repeatedly seeks to repurpose rather than receive its inheritance. And even if by some miracle a part of their inheritance survives the terror, the people left to rule over the ashes have no idea what to do with it. They will be drawn to it without ever understanding why.
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