How liberalism first failed.
The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce and Crisis
Richard Whatmore
Allen Lane, £30, 480 pages
It is sometimes said that moral philosophers spent the 19th century grappling with the French Revolution (or rather the following Terreur) much as their 20th-century successors did with the Third Reich. That is not to relativise the crimes of the latter but, rather, to help situate the dislocation felt by 18th-century thinkers faced with civilisational breakdown.
Among the most shocking consequences of the Revolution, even to foreign Protestant eyes, was the despoiling of the French Catholic Church: the campaign of “de-Christianisation” which led to the ransacking of churches, the exile of 30,000 clerics and the murder of hundreds more. On 1 November 1793, a “Feast of Reason” replaced All Saints Day in Notre-Dame de Paris.
