“But it seems unlikely that Robespierre would have much sympathy for the secular motivations to ban the hijab, any more than he would have sympathy for prohibiting other forms of religious expression. Robespierre was more committed to justice and the oppressed than to mere fidelity to the secular state. Hence his statement that “atheism is aristocratic, whereas belief in a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes the crimes of the oppressor is popular.””
“As Nisbett argues, “[Robespierre] saw atheism not as false, but as a luxury of a privileged bourgeois and aristocratic education and habitus.” The real goal was to establish true popular sovereignty, and that meant respecting the existing religious preferences of the people. For Robespierre, those who hated religion with such ferocity masked their own aristocratic and bourgeois contempt for the poor.”
“Robespierre declared that his fellow deputies and citizens “abandon the priests and return to God.” Public morality was to be equipped with a metaphysical basis, established on “eternal and sacred truths.” The public religion would help to inspire in people “that religious respect for man, that profound sense of his duties, which is the guarantee of social happiness.””
“What we can learn from these figures is not so much the need to institute a new religion, but a very secular lesson about the relationship of belief and popular power. The lesson encompasses the philosophical and moral dimensions of our politics, or how such a morality can be organized to promote the struggles of the oppressed while respecting and tolerating religious beliefs.”
“From the standpoint of politics, what is more important than religious faiths and beliefs is the progressive content of such beliefs, or what Spinoza called the universally true religion of “justice and charity.””