Official anti-clericalism and state atheism lasted for a very short period of time, not nearly enough to do any damage to the churches save for surface vandalism and pillaging of the statuary, furniture etc.
The great victims of the Revolution are the monasteries and the castles. The monasteries were officially dissolved (in a movement similar to what had happened in England under Henry VIII), their land redistributed and their buildings sold for stone. The same happened to aristocratic holdings and most Medieval castles that somehow managed to survive until then were destroyed over the first half of the 19th c.
That's how we've lost some of the most iconic monuments of Western civilization (I'm in particular thinking of Cluny, whose archives were burnt, manuscripts vandalized and stolen, stones parted out).
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Official anti-clericalism and state atheism lasted for a very short period of time, not nearly enough to do any damage to the churches save for surface vandalism and pillaging of the statuary, furniture etc.
The great victims of the Revolution are the monasteries and the castles. The monasteries were officially dissolved (in a movement similar to what had happened in England under Henry VIII), their land redistributed and their buildings sold for stone. The same happened to aristocratic holdings and most Medieval castles that somehow managed to survive until then were destroyed over the first half of the 19th c.
That's how we've lost some of the most iconic monuments of Western civilization (I'm in particular thinking of Cluny, whose archives were burnt, manuscripts vandalized and stolen, stones parted out).