‘Happiness is a new idea in Europe,’ the austere, implacable revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just wrote in 1791, as events in France were moving swiftly towards the establishment of a republic and the onset of Terror. The French Revolution was (if we prefer not to go back so far as the Renaissance) the cradle of modernity. It carried the aspirations of those reformers who as the 18th century progressed turned their backs on religion and the promise of an eternal afterlife as the hope of sinful man and looked for ways to improve the lot of humanity in the here and now. French philosophes and English Utilitarians made war on superstition and prejudice and sought to promote ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. In the eyes of many observers then and since, the outcome was the emergence of a new religion, the ‘religion of politics’.
That is the starting-point of Michael Burleigh’s book, which examines the working-out of the relationship between politics and religion in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution’s cataclysmic assault on what Voltaire had denounced as ‘l’infame’.
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