Pinkerton: Pope Leo Targets the Roots of Left-Wing Radicalism in France

A brief act of remembrance carried significant historical, moral and political weight.  

During his visit to France, Pope Leo XIV paused to pray before a staircase in the Garden of the Carmelites at the Catholic University of Paris.  The four stone steps bear the Latin inscription Hic Ceciderunt—“Here they fell,” referring to those who were killed.  Flowers surrounded the weathered memorial as the Pope stood in silence and cameras captured the moment.

The memorial recalls the bloodshed of September 1792, three years after the French Revolution began. The uprising targeted not only the monarchy of King Louis XVI, but also the Catholic Church, which revolutionaries viewed as a central pillar of the old order.  

In their most radical efforts to reshape society, revolutionaries even created a rival faith known as the Culte de la Raison, or Cult of Reason.  Its formal ceremonies were short-lived, though critics argue that secular humanism continues to function for some as a belief system with quasi-religious characteristics. 

There is a clear boundary between introducing a new set of beliefs and using violence to eliminate people who follow another faith. Once a movement adopts that logic, it enters the same dangerous territory associated with the Khmer Rouge and other murderous systems.  

Historian Christopher Hibbert described the violence commemorated by Pope Leo in the Garden of the Carmelites this way: 

A group of armed men stormed the garden of the Carmelite convent off the Rue de Vaugirard, where roughly 150 priests had been imprisoned for two weeks and were being held under guard. The attackers demanded to see the Archbishop of Arles. One priest stepped forward and called for a fair trial for himself and the other prisoners. A gunshot shattered his shoulder.  After briefly kneeling in prayer, the archbishop approached the mob. “I am the man you are looking for,” he said. A sword struck him across the face, and as he fell, a pike was driven through his chest.

The remaining clerics were then killed, their bodies left in a heap. For Catholics, it offers some consolation that the Church later beatified these victims as martyrs.

On one level, Pope Leo’s prayer at the Carmelite memorial was a straightforward act of Christian remembrance: he was honoring believers who died for their faith.

But the gesture also carried a political challenge to the French state.  Even after the Revolution’s violence subsided, France’s leading political forces remained deeply hostile toward the Catholic Church. That opposition intensified through legislation enacted in the early 20th century, as the government moved to restrict religious influence. The state had stopped killing priests, but it sought to prohibit many of their public activities.

That approach, associated with laïcité, or secularism, has largely remained in place.  In American political terms, it might be compared to an ACLU-led system supervising churches and religious communities.  The comparison is controversial, particularly because both the French state and the ACLU are often viewed as more accommodating 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.