On July 17, 1794, sixteen Carmelite nuns were taken through the streets of Paris to the guillotine. Their crime was fidelity to their religious vocation. Expelled from their monastery, they had continued living their rule as best they could. When the revolutionary authorities finally arrested them, they were condemned and executed. They sang hymns on their way to the scaffold.
On September 25, 2026, Leo XIV stood in the Élysée Palace and praised France’s revolutionary motto, liberty, equality and fraternity, declaring that its principles find inspiration and fulfillment in the Gospel. He also credited the French Enlightenment with important advances in human rights, particularly religious freedom.
The contrast deserves disgust.
The French revolutionary authorities who persecuted the Church confiscated ecclesiastical property, suppressed religious communities, subordinated the clergy to the state and prosecuted priests who refused to submit. Revolutionary propaganda even displayed the extended slogan, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—or Death. A surviving example appears in the Musée Carnavalet’s collection.
Nearly two and a half centuries later, a man claiming the succession of the popes who condemned those revolutionary principles stood before the government of France and offered its national motto praise.
He did so without confronting the historical context that his predecessors considered indispensable.
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