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Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity

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This book provides an excellent look at how the Enlightenment in France was seen by its enemies. McMahon discusses in detail the arguments made by religious and political thinkers who dissented from the liberalizing currents that swept Europe in the Eighteenth Century. His discussion of the use of invective and paranoid rhetoric by the Right is a worthy companion to Robert Darnton's studies of the same tactics employed by liberal enemies of the Ancien Regieme.

Rick Perlstein theorizes in his recent book "Before the Storm" that the Sixties were as much about the rise of the American Right as they were about the New Left. McMahon makes the same point about the liberalism of the Revolutionary era. The conservative movement defined both itself and the left in reaction to the influx of new ideas. This book is an excellent study of this phenomenon.

It is the most useful value of this book by Darrin McMahon that it shows the fallacy of those assumptions. There is, in McMahon's account a coherent and formidable counter-enlightenmnet ideology. It is not the pluralist and skeptical objections of a Herder or a Hamann, but the authoritarian, deeply Catholic and deeply illiberal world of Gerard, Seguir, Sabatier, Bonald and Barruel. The reader may wonder whose these people are, and in contrast to must recent writing critical of the Enlightenment, McMahon does not find these intellectuals worthy of much sympathy or intellectual admiration. The most famous of these is probably the Abbe Barruel, not for the acuity of his thought, but because he wrote in the late 1790s a book that became the bible of right-wing paranoia. In it he claimed that the French Revolution was a conspiracy of atheists, and Freemasons. As Norman Cohn pointed out a generation ago, this ideology would ultimately manifest itself in the forging of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

McMahon starts off with a chapter on pre-revolutionary Counter-Enlightenment which concentrates on Catholic and Royalist objections to the Enlightenment. He points out that many of them cited Rousseau against the deists and atheists, though later Rousseau would join Voltaire and Diderot as the anti-christ of the Enlightenment. In contrast to Furet he notes how conspiracy theories proliferated on the Counter-Enlightenment before the fall of the Bastille and as the years went on, fears of philosophe and Protestant conspiracies proliferated in the counter-revolutionary press. A particular virtue of McMahon's account is how well-documented it is. Too much revisionist history concentrates on only a few intellectuals, and concentrating on their exegesis. This is true of Keith Michael Baker's Inventing the French Revolution and for scholars such as Mona Ozouf who look at Robespierre and Saint Just, but not Barere or Carnot. McMahon is also useful on how this ideology formed a Counter-Enlightenment international, that spread its influence most in Catholic countries (though Edmund Burke did give Barruel a warm and most undeserved endorsement). Contra Joan Landes he reminds us of the obvious fact the leading supporters of female subordination were on the Counter-Enlightenment Right. He is useful in citing Timothy Tackett on the rise of conspiracy theory paranoia in revolutionary France, as well as Sheryl Kroen's work on the Restoration Regime.

There are some reservations to be made about the book. There is a tendency to over-emphasize the similarities between left and right (especially in these days when the similarities in America between right and center are all too evident). While it is true that the fears of both extremes fed the other, McMahon does not explain why the center failed to hold if its opponents were so patently paranoid. (My answer: arguably they weren't). Nor is McMahon as clear as he could be on the "modernity" of the Counter-Enlightenment. To some extent, describing something as modern is almost tautological. After all the World Trade Center was attacked with airplanes, not torches. How could one live and have an effect on the modern world without sharing some of its modernity? In pointing out that the Counter-Enlightenment wanted a revived Catholicism that was utopian to demand, McMahon does not sufficiently probe whether any political movement could survive without an appeal to something beyond the actually existing. McMahon also spends surprisingly little time discussing Joseph De Maistre, certainly the most important of these intellectuals. Nor is he entirely fair to Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which does explicitly state that Enlightenment is essential to any hope for a better society. Adorno explictly stated that the only cure for the dilemmas of reason were more reason. McMahon cites Robert Darnton's critique. But Darnton fails to mention Adorno's defence of reason, and he makes his cases by citing the "good guys" of the Enlightenment. It is true, and important to remember, that Diderot admired Tahitian society and that Condorcet was open-minded and pluralistic. But it is also true that Hume and Kant indulged slavery and white supremacy and that Bentham was notoriously unimaginative and dogmatic. The scientism of a Teller or a Galton or a Heisenberg may be a heresy, but it is not a minor or incidental one. Notwithstanding these criticisms, however, this is an important book.

It's hard to write about the early history of the right wing because the real right has never been very well represented in the US and because the Enlightenment and the Revolution tend to crowd out the Counter-Enlightenment and Counter-Revolution. McMahon's book is the best there is on this subject in English and I know of nothing better in French or any other language. There aren't a lot of pages but they cover a tremendous lot of ideas and thinkers. Fans of political thought from any wing will be fascinated.

Darrin McMahon has written a well researched and well written book.

However: In general, I found the author to come down on the side of the Jacobins and other French Revolutionaries, and thereby blind himself to the violence of the Terror, almost the philosophy that 'if you want an omellette, you need to break a couple of eggs.' Marx, Lenin and Stalin would agree.

From the evidence McMahon presents, it seems indisputable that the enemies of the [so-called] enlightenment predicted virtually to a T the fact that the writings of Voltaire and company would lead to the violent overthrow of altar and monarchy. Oddly, in some places McMahon mocks these predictions, and in other places reluctantly admits that they were on target.

Another problem i had with the book was its 'loaded language.' Only the Right is called "ultra," which usually has a bad connotation; surely there were some ultra revolutionaries? Paranoia and conspiracy theories are only attached to the thought of the right; surely the Left thought 'everyone was out to get 'em,' as in Catholic priests, royal officials, etc. Regarding paranoia: it is well known that even paranoids have enemies. This is another case where the Left believes that all its positions stem solely from Reason, so therefore anyone who disagrees with them must only be doing so from base emotional reactions, as in 'reactionaries.' Catholics are called "ideologues;" no one the Left were ideologues? Even the title of the book is loaded. "enemies" of the enlightenment; well, enemies are usually considered the bad guys. How about "Restorationists versus those who prepared for the Guillotine?" that's about as fair as the title, but the title is alliterative.

Read with caution, and your red pencil in hand.

McMahon's book comes out of the Keith Baker stable of historiography with its stress on "political culture" rather than on sociopolitical ideas. In that vein, it achieves something useful by offering a synthetic overview of the Counter-Revolutionary culture in late l8c. France. However price of this approach is a rather superficial analysis of many of the thinkers/writers/ideologists it only mentions in passing or intermittently. It is strange, for example, that the author does little with the quite extensive scholarship devoted in recent decades to such major theorists of the Right as Maistre and Bonald. In short, this study is far from definitive and should be supplemented by reading the often deeper exegeses of these Rightists that can be found in the academic periodical literature and in the older studies of Godechot, Gengembre, and Beik, among others.

Opposition to the ideas of the French Enlightenment and it's allies and disciples in other European countries is as old as the movement itself...and did exist.

"Newtonian physics it was believed had achieved such triumphs in the realm of inanimate nature could be applied with equal success to the field of ethics. " Perhaps?

"What the Enlightenment has in common is the denial of the central Christian doctrine of original sin.

Was it indeed about the church vs. The Medici?

Fascinating ideas addressed in this text.

Could have gone a little deeper?