:"It's this second Enlightenment tradition that Cardinal Ratzinger referred to when he wrote, 'The radical detachment of the Enlightenment philosophy from its roots ultimately leads it to dispense with man.' Actually this transition happened not 'ultimately' but almost immediately. The first instance occurred when Enlightenment worship of abstract 'reason' and 'liberty' degenerated quickly into the mass murders committed during the antireligious Reign of Terror in France. 'Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name', said Madame Roland as she faced the statue of Liberty in the Place de la Revolution moments before her death at the guillotine. She was one of the early victims of a succession of secular systems based on rootless notions of 'liberty', 'equality', and 'reason'.
:"As many historians have pointed out, the atheist regimes of modern times are guilty of far more crimes than any committed in the name of religion. Communist governments alone were guilty of more than one hundred million murders, most of them committed against their own people.|pages=p. 57|accessdate = July 18, 2014}}</ref>
Although Communism is one of the most well-known cases of atheism's ties to mass murder, the French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror, inspired by the works of [[Denis Diderot|Diderot]], [[Voltaire]], [[Marquis de Sade|Sade]], and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]], managed to commit similar persecutions and exterminations of religious people and promote secularism and militant atheism. Official numbers indicate that 300,000 Frenchmen died during [[Maximilien Robespierre|Robespierre]]'s Reign of Terror, 297,000 of which were of middle-class or low-class.<ref name="A Primer of the Illuminati">McIlheny, William H. (June 12, 2009). [https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4660-a-primer-on-the-illuminati "A primer on the Illuminati"]. The New American website. Retrieved on May 22, 2015.</ref> Of the numbers murdered via the guillotine, only 8% had been of the aristocratic class, with over 30% being from the peasant class.<ref name="Operation Parricide">von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik (October 1989). [https://wikispooksweb.comarchive.org/wweb/20050309031846/https://culturewars.com/imagesCultureWars/eArchives/e7Fidelity_archives/Operation_Parricide_Sade_Robespierre_%26_the_French_Revolutionparricide.pdf html "Operation Parricide: Sade, Robespierre & the French Revolution"]. ''Fidelity'' magazine. Retrieved from Culture Wars website on May 22, 2015.</ref>
One of the most well known cases of mass murder during the French Revolution was the [[Vendée rebellion|genocide at Vendée]], which has yet to be officially recognized as genocide. Some estimates indicated that Robespierre and the [[Jacobins]] planned to massacre well over 15,000,000 Frenchmen,<ref name="A Primer of the Illuminati"/> and that he also intended to commit genocide against the Alsace region of France due to their German-speaking populace.<ref name="Operation Parricide"/> Besides the guillotine, the French Revolution also resulted in various other deaths, including trampling children with horses, burning people in ovens, "Republican Marriages" (which involved stripping people naked, tying them together to a log in a suggestive fashion, and then putting them into the water to drown. In the event that there wasn't enough people of both sexes, they also resorted to "tying the knot" in a homosexual manner), cutting recently raped girls in half after tying them to a tree, crushing pregnant women under wine pressers, cutting up pregnant women and using bayonets to stab the fetus inside before leaving her to die, "catching" infants thrown from a balcony with their bayonets, and using shotguns to ensure people bled out to death.<ref name="Operation Parricide"/>