Pope Leo Takes Aim at the Root of Left-Wing Radicalism in France

A brief moment of prayer carried weight far beyond its quiet appearance, touching history, morality and politics.

During his visit to France, Pope Leo XIV paused at a staircase in the Garden of the Carmelites, located on the campus of the Catholic University of Paris. The four stone steps bear the Latin inscription Hic Ceciderunt—“Here they fell,” referring to those who were killed. As flowers framed the weathered memorial, the Pope bowed his head while cameras captured the scene.

The memorial recalls the violence of September 1792, three years after the French Revolution began. The uprising targeted the monarchy of King Louis XVI, but its increasingly radical campaign also turned fiercely against the Catholic Church.

The revolutionaries even attempted to establish a competing system of belief, known as the Culte de la Raison, or Cult of Reason. Its formal ceremonies were short-lived, although critics argue that modern secular humanism can sometimes function like a belief system of its own.

There is an important distinction, however: forming a new philosophy is one thing; building it through the murder of people who follow another faith is something else entirely. That kind of ideological violence belongs among history’s most destructive political movements, including the Khmer Rouge.

Historian Christopher Hibbert described the bloodshed at the Carmelite convent—the same history Leo encountered during his prayer—in stark detail:

“A gang of armed men burst into the garden of the Carmelite Convent off the Rue de Vaugirard where about 150 priests who had been held prisoner for the past fortnight, were gathered under guard . . . The men advanced upon them, calling out for the Archbishop of Arles. One of the priests went forward to meet them, demanding a fair trial for himself and his fellow-prisoners. A shot was fired and his shoulder was smashed. The Archbishop, after praying for a moment on his knees, then went towards the men himself. ‘I am the man you are looking for,’ he said, and was immediately struck across the face with a sword. As he fell to the ground a pike was plunged through his chest.”

The remaining clergy were then killed, their bodies piled together. For Catholics, there is some consolation in the fact that the Church later recognized these victims as martyrs and beatified them.

On one level, Pope Leo’s visit to the Garden of the Carmelites was an uncomplicated act of Christian remembrance: he was honoring fellow believers who died for their faith.

But the gesture also carried a political message directed toward the French state. Even after the Revolution’s violence subsided, France’s leading political forces continued to view the Catholic Church with deep suspicion. Laws enacted in the early 20th century sought to reduce religion’s public influence. The government was no longer executing priests, but it was placing severe limits on their work and activities.

That approach, known as laïcité or state secularism, has largely remained part of French public life. From an American perspective, it might resemble a system in which organizations such as the ACLU held decisive authority over churches and religious communities. The contrast is especially notable to critics who believe France—and, in their view, the ACLU—has shown greater tolerance toward Islam than toward Christianity.

But now comes the Pope. His whole visit, featuring spectacular pageantry, as well as up-close-and-personal missions, has provided an alternative vision of France, for the French.  A vision of Christianity and its related traditions, not atheism with a carveout of favoritism for Islam. 

And then there’s that homage to the martyrs—a direct rebuke to the murderous antecedents of French President Emmanuel Macron’s government, which today flies the same tricolour flag that inspired the 18th-century assassins. A rough equivalent in the U.S. would be if the Pope had come here and paid his respects at a memorial to the British Redcoats who fought against the Patriots in the American Revolution. 

To drill his implicit critique further, the Pope celebrated a mass at the Place de la Concorde, formerly known as the Place de la Revolution, the very place where, during the revolutionary Reign of Terror, thousands of Christians were publicly executed. 

Leo’s steady dignity, his measured sense of purpose—and okay, his showmanship—recalls his trip to Spain in May, where he was equally correct and resolute in his remembrance of those martyred by that country’s past left-wing terrorists.

Indeed, we might think back further, to Pope John Paul II’s mission to Poland in 1979. Back then, Poland was a captive nation, held in bondage by the Red Army of Soviet Russia.  Yet the Pope’s peaceful pilgrimage to his home country unleashed a tidal wave of sentiment that helped power, first, the anti-communist Solidarity movement of Lech Wałęsa and then, secondarily, the epochal fracturing of Moscow’s evil empire in Eastern Europe.  

To be sure, the French government, and the myrmidon edifice of the European Union, are not as bad as the communism of old. And yet France and the EU are plenty bureaucratic, heading toward stultification and socialism of some kind, and seemingly fully desirous of snuffing out freedom of religion (at least for Christians), albeit on a slower timeline.  

In fact, one contribution of the Trump-Vance administration has been to highlight this planned subversion of ancient rights and rites. Both Donald Trump and JD Vance have broken with past trans-Atlantic platitudes, warning the Europeans that their secular bureaucratic progressivism is, in fact, a threat to liberty, as well as to prosperity. 

The truth is that all moral struggles take place in three time phases: the present day, of course, but also the future and the past. That is, to succeed in persuasion, a protagonist must paint a picture of a better future, and it’s also vital to teach from history, to use past events to illustrate the successes to emulate—or the failures not to repeat.

This Pope knows that the French Revolution is the fons et origo of all left-wing revolutions—from Russia to China to Cuba to Cambodia—in which the faithful, including Catholics, were often the first victims.

Revealingly, here in the U.S., a leading left-wing publication calls itself Jacobin, after the most guillotine-happy faction of the French revolutionists. (And that title serves as a warning: what the hardcore left would do to us if it had the power.) 

So by his quiet actions, Leo is striking at the root of the revolutionary left, undercutting their legitimacy by reminding the rest of us that they are, if they gain the power, murderous.

Why, one could even say that Leo is wielding the sword of the Lord, striking blows for the prayerful victory of righteous memory.