What festival did Robespierre organize on June 8, 1794, to celebrate a new deist religion?

Robespierre organized the Festival of the Supreme Being on June 8, 1794, to celebrate the deist civic religion he promoted during the French Revolution.

The festival followed the National Convention’s formal recognition of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul in May 1794. Robespierre opposed the atheistic Cult of Reason and wanted a republican faith that could replace traditional Catholic authority while encouraging virtue, morality, and loyalty to the Revolution.

In Paris, the ceremony was staged on a grand scale and designed by the artist Jacques-Louis David. Robespierre led a procession from the Tuileries to the Champ de Mars, where a huge artificial mountain had been constructed. The event combined political theater, music, speeches, allegorical imagery, and public ritual.

The celebration was not the Festival of Reason, an earlier anticlerical movement, nor the Festival of the Federation, which commemorated the 1790 constitutional gathering. The Supreme Being cult quickly lost influence after Robespierre’s execution in July 1794.