The Martyrs of Compiègne show the dark side of the French Revolution’s liberty slogans and why Catholics should question modern confusion.

On July 17, 1794, near the end of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, sixteen Carmelite women from Compiègne were taken to the guillotine in Paris. Long before 2024, they had already been beatified by Pope Pius X in 1906, which means Catholics attached to Tradition do not need to lean on modern Rome’s judgment in order to honor them. They can be safely remembered as the Blessed Martyrs of Compiègne, victims of the Revolution’s hatred for the Catholic Faith.

Most of us were handed the sanitized classroom version of that Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity—considered the greatest of all virtues and a staple of course in America. Those words were presented as obvious goods, nearly beyond examination, as though the movement that invoked them must be understood mainly as the natural and necessary step forward in human progress.

The historical record, however, particularly for us Catholics, is darker than the slogans. In 1789, Catholicism was still the official religion of France; by 1794, churches and religious orders had been closed and worship suppressed. That is not “woke history” and it doesn’t make me a liberal. It is simply the part of the story many people were not taught to linger over.

That should also give Protestants and Catholics alike a reason to revisit the inherited story, because many of us were taught a version of Catholic history shaped by the very forces that hated and have infiltrated the Church.

For readers who want the deeper historical and doctrinal background, this earlier piece is worth revisiting: Guarding the Deposit: Pius VII, the French Revolution, & the Great Conspiracy

When the Revolution turned against the Church, it did so in the name of its own virtues. The old Catholic order and hierarchy was treated as oppression—and has been framed in that way in classrooms ever since, despite the beauty and power of Christendom and the reality that Catholic monarchy cannot be reduced to the cartoon tyranny many of us were taught. Priests and religious who would not submit to the new revolutionary order were treated as enemies of freedom. In that sense, the Martyrs of Compiègne remain important because they show what happens when political liberty is severed from Christ and then turned back against His Church. We are seeing the disastrous fruits of that today. Liberty without the true God does not remain neutral for long. It often becomes the right of the State to redefine what man is, what religion may say, and what measure of obedience to God is acceptable.

That is why the timing of this feast day sits so uneasily inside the current Catholic moment.

Just this month, the Vatican announced “excommunications” connected to the SSPX episcopal consecrations, with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith saying the July 1 consecrations constituted an act of a schismatic nature. The decree was released July 2, and Vatican News emphasized that the decision came twenty-four hours after the ceremony in Écône. Many Catholics celebrated with strange and chilling vitriol.

The next day, Pope Leo XIV accepted the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal, given in recognition of his work promoting religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and expression. Catholics celebrated that too.

But take note of the juxtaposition. How can anyone of goodwill pass over such a stark contrast, indeed hypocrisy, so quickly?

Moreover, as has been the way of the postconciliar Church, this language often appears diametrically opposed—not merely differently phrased—to what popes, councils, and Catholic teaching presented for nearly two millennia. These things don’t happen overnight, of course, and even so called Old Catholics take the problem back much further, but the juxtapositions are alarming, and any honest Catholic must take inventory of them.

The point is not to sneer at modern Catholics or even religious liberty as a civil concept. The last thing I want is confrontation. My work seeks the salvation of souls. The point is that modern Catholic language around liberty has become so confused that many Catholics, including my own family, no longer know how to distinguish the Church’s historically taught freedom from the Revolution’s freedom. One day, Rome invokes law and authority against traditional Catholics trying to preserve the older sacramental life. The next, Leo is honored for religious liberty and freedom of conscience before a modern constitutional audience. Even if one accepts every premise behind the Vatican’s action, the contrast should be jarring.

For Catholics who have been paying attention, that disorientation is not new. It is the atmosphere of the postconciliar world. We are constantly told that the Church honors conscience, religious liberty, dialogue, synodality, pluralism, encounter, and openness. It is a story we have covered over dozens of articles since late October 2025. Yet when Catholics ask whether these modern formulations can be reconciled with the older teaching, older worship, older condemnations, and older claims of Christ the King, the conversation often narrows very quickly. Suddenly, liberty has limits. Suddenly, conscience has rules. Suddenly, the law rises from the dead. Suddenly, Catholics attached to the very tradition used against Protestants in the comment sections of social media are treated as the problem, are treated as the anathema.

Read the Catechism of Trent when Catholicism was working to survive under philosophical and religious attack. That is part of the Tradition too. And when you read it next to so much modern Catholic language, you begin to see why ordinary Catholics feel as though up is down and down is up.

This is why a better understanding of the French Revolution is paramount in living in America today.

No one needs to pretend the comparison is exact. The modern hierarchy is not marching nuns to the guillotine. But the deeper conflict has not disappeared. The misleading virtues of the Revolution still work by ambiguity, by confusion, by the slow rot of meaning. They take Catholic words and empty them. They take natural goods and humanity and detach them from God and grace. They take freedom and make it mean autonomy from a Christendom that kept the very order for which so many clamor. They take equality and make it mean the flattening of hierarchy and justice. They take fraternity and make it mean brotherhood without the Father or the true divine family.

Then Catholics, having been educated inside that modern atmosphere for generations, struggle to recognize why the older Church spoke so sharply against these errors.

The Martyrs of Compiègne cannot be just figures on a prayer card. They cannot be saints we honor but then desecrate with our diametrically opposite religious views. They must help restore Catholic intelligence because they force us to ask what “liberty” meant to the women who died singing on the way to the scaffold. Their freedom was not the freedom to negotiate with the revolutionary age. It was the freedom to belong completely to Christ.

Their dignity was not granted by the State, as good as one can be. Their conscience was not formed by a constitution, as good as one can be. They knew that a civil order can speak poetry and inspiring speeches while doing abominable things, especially when it decides that Catholic obedience must be subordinated to the political religion of the age.

That is the part traditional Catholics continue to battle and what so many of us are trying to get our family members to see.

And finally, perhaps as a most necessary aside, it is one reason the Hildebrand claim to the papacy becomes harder to dismiss with a mocking laugh. It is another topic that fills the archive if you’re interested. I am not saying that every Catholic must leap instantly to allegiance, but the fact is that we have what Catholic history has faced numerous times: disputed claimants to the throne.

All questions don’t have to be answered this weekend. But when the visible leadership of the Catholic world so often sounds more comfortable with the language of modern liberty than with the old language of Christ’s social kingship, and when that same leadership moves harshly against those preserving Tradition while being celebrated by the modern world for religious liberty, Catholics who spend time bemoaning woke politics have to be honest enough to ask God in prayer whether these are really separate problems, or whether they belong to the same long revolt against Christ’s social kingship.

On July 17, the Church does not merely remember sixteen holy women.

She remembers what false liberty can do when it no longer has to hide what it is.