The Cult of Reason (above) was proclaimed in Revolutionary France today in 1793. An atheist riposte to Catholicism, the cult included the transformation of Notre Dame, Paris, into a Temple of Reason, and goddesses of reason being portrayed by women who robed up for the part. One woman was judged by Thomas Carlyle to be ‘one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though her teeth were a little defective’. The cult was replaced a year later by the new, improved Cult of the Supreme Being, until it too was ditched in 1802.
Early this morning in 1938, the organised antisemitic violence that became known as Kristallnacht (‘Night of broken glass’) broke out across Germany and Austria, with the encouragement of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister. In the destruction that followed, synagogues were burned, Jewish shops had their windows smashed and were looted, hundreds of Jewish people were beaten, raped, murdered, died of wounds or committed suicide, and 30,000 people were rounded up and imprisoned in the Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Kristallnacht was condemned by countries around the world, and there was significant resistance to it by the German population. But Martin Sasse, leader of the pro-Nazi German Christian movement, celebrated the moment and linked it to Martin Luther’s antisemitic writings, saying, ‘On 10 November 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany!’
It is Martin Luther’s birthday. The man who accidentally invented Protestantism by trying to reform the Roman Catholic Church was born shortly before midnight today in 1483 in the town of Eisleben, on the edge of the Thuringian forests. His father Hans sent him to a series of Latin schools, intending him to pursue a career in law, but at university in Erfurt he switched to philosophy and theology, which laid the foundations for his life as a theologian and reformer.
Popes Leo I and Paul III both died today. Leo the Great died in 461 having spent his reign in a passionate defence of orthodoxy and in building up the prestige of the papacy. Paul was a 16th century Renaissance Pope who commissioned Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. His contribution to the Catholic Reformation was to appoint reforming cardinals to clean things up… but only after his death, so it wouldn’t cramp his lifestyle too much. He died in 1549.
Today in 1871, the journalist and explorer Henry Stanley finally found David Livingstone, the pioneering missionary to Africa who had lost contact with the outside world for the previous six years. They met near Lake Tanganyika after Stanley had trekked through the tropical forest for eight months. His understated greeting became an instant catchphrase in the English-speaking world: ’Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’