Tuesday 25th December 1792 was the first Christmas of the new French Republic. At the Temple prison, Louis XVI spent the day writing his will, prior to his appearance at the bar of the Convention on the 26th. Paris was in a state of security crisis and simmering uprest. The religious policies of the Convention were wracked by indecision, with rationalists like Pierre-Louis Manuel moving towards policies hostile to Christianity without declaring them openly. In the Paris Commune, the ascendancy of would-be dechristianisers was assured by the election on 12th December of Pierre Chaumette as procurateur with Hébert as his substitute.
On 23rd December 1792 the Commune prohibited the celebration of Midnight Mass on the pretext of public order. Crowds gathered in many of the poorer parishes and parish priests were obliged to officiate in open defiance of the commissioners sent by the Hôtel de Ville to enforce the order. The surviving accounts emphasise the role of agitators in orchestrating the movement. The Girondin Patriote française identified them as radical rabble-raisers, whereas Prudhomme’s Révolutions de Paris blames royalist intervention. However, reading between the lines, there seems to have been strong component of spontaneous popular demonstration. The Sections were clearly divided on the prohibition. It is recorded that at Saint-Eustache, the women of Les Halles gathered together with the intention of hunting down and hanging Manuel. A municipal officer Beugnon, a master-mason by trade, who had been set upon by the women, appeared with on guard next morning at the Temple with his face scratched and bruised.
(From “Rodama: a blog of 18th-century and Revolutionary France”, 2016)