Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

Holy Madness advances a particular argument: that the century of revolutionary upheaval was the direct result of the waning of religion as a universal human-value system. Post-Enlightenment men and women turned to the ecstasies of patriotism and revolution to fill the void left by belief in God, hoping to construct a paradise on Earth rather than wait for one in heaven. According to this thesis, revolution was a new theology: "The theology may have been shaky, but the new religion did have a god. That god was the sovereign nation, whose service was the highest calling, as countless revolutionary catechisms pointed out." It's an ingenious line, worked through thoroughly, although it doesn't explain everything--for instance, why Britain was almost entirely free of revolutionary upset during the same period. But this is thought-provoking and well-made historical writing. --Adam Roberts, Amazon.co.uk

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"Entertaining and thought-provoking." (Times Literary Supplement)

"Zamoyski skillfully brings together all the strains of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalism, from the American Revolution to the Paris Commune, showing how quasi-religious idealism prepared the way for both fascism and communism. . . . A stimulating and finely written book." (Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad)

From the first shots of the American Revolution in 1776 to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, Adam Zamoyski recreates an era when determined men and women were willing to die for the cause of an idealized nation, and who transformed the society of Europe and its colonies. Moving fluidly through the history of the tumultuous years that embraced the American and French revolutions, the Irish Rebellion, the Polish uprisings, the liberation of South America, and the Italian Risorgimento, Holy Madness captures the passion of revolutionary figures who were caught up in the fervor of the nationalist crusade, while exposing the dangerous fallacies of their idealism.

I'm sure in a book of this scope specialist historians will find minor errors of fact; but general readers should not be deterred. Sometimes the need to simplify matters leads to some questionable interpretations. For example, I thought Zamoyski understated the extent to which the French were duped by Bismark into starting the Franco-Prussian War. I also felt he was running out a steam towards the end, so that his treatment of the Paris Commune was not as rich as one might have hoped.

As someone who has long been baffled by the need for many European and American countries constantly to rehash their foundational myths, I found Zamoyski's good humoured debunking of them hugely enjoyable.

Anyone interested in modern history should read this splendid book as a matter of urgency.


How Love of Country came to replace Love of God   July 19, 2007
MJS (New York, United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

That is Zamoyski's premise: as the Enlightenment loosened the Church's hold on the minds of the intellectual classes in Europe it was replaced for some by a mystic, fanatical love of "country." The entire concept of belonging to a country, of having loyalty to a country, of dying for a country was something of a novelty in 18th century Europe. While people may have been willing to fight an enemy to defend their personal home they idea of having a bond with countrymen - people you have never and would never see - was almost unthinkable in, say, the 14th century. The word "madness" in the title is deliberate. Zamoyski shows that this love of country all to often went over the edge of fanaticism and incorporated many of the worst excesses of religion that the Enlightenment disavowed. In some respects Zamoyski is offering a countering theory to Schama's Citizens in which faith in Science and Progress unleashed the excesses of revolution.

This was the second book I read by Zamoyski (The Last King of Poland was the first) and like the first book this is not a quick read. It requires attention. Zamoyski's chapters in this book often start out slow making the book grind to a near halt on occasion. If you enjoy European History and a distinctive POV stick with it, this book is worth your time.


Romantic revolutionaries and the cult of the nation-state   March 3, 2005
Ryan Setliff (VA, USA)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

~Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871~ is an exploration of the ideologues and revolutionaries behind the great multitude of revolutions that befell Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Zamoyski captures the romantic idealism and quixotic fixations of oft-times crazed revolutionaries who sought heaven on earth. Enmeshed with Rousseau's blissful optimism, the revolutionaries sought to free their nation from the grip of both the church and nobility in a mass rising of peasants and bourgeoisie. They hoped to usher in a glorious new age where the nation reigned supreme. Their quasi-religious idealism invoked crude caricatures of Christian concepts of redemption. They often nostalgically and blasphemously cast their messiah as the nation or the people themselves. Zamoyski also tells the story of more moderate nationalists and revolutionaries who borrowed the idealism of the radicals, and tamed it with a desire for peaceful constitutional and political reform. The cast of characters herein is vast including Rousseau and Robespierre, Bonaparte and Bolivar, and Metternich and Mazzini. Zamoyski captures the cross-currents of the holy madness that reverbrated in violent revolutionary passions as well as harmless romantic sentimentalism and quixotic theorizing by poets and ideologues. Zamoyski takes the reader from the crescendo of the holy madness with a tale of regicide in 1793 to the short-lived Paris Commune in the 1870s. Zamoyski tacitly admits this work might be the bane of specialists (presumably on the subjects of modern Europe, revolutionaries and nationalism) in his introduction. He by his own admission is not at all methodical in its explorations. In my estimation, the book is kind of abrupt in its pronouncements and haphazard in its writing style. The author leaps from point to point without clarity or any set direction at times. On the other hand, some portions are quite stimulating.

The French Revolution was one of the more violent revolutions in this primordial rise of "holy madness." Moreover, 1789 inaugurated a multitude of revolutions, egalitarian fantasies and campaigns of bloodletting throughout Europe. In 1793, King Louis XVI submitted to the guillotine. "When the executioner held up his severed head for all to see," the crowd shouted "Vive la nation!" Quite a few disturbed people took their own lives and drowned themselves in the Seine. The spectacle they beheld was the removal of the "anointed of God" as it was the king that "gave validity to the ideological and cultural compound that was France." Zamoyski avows, "The nation had replaced the king as the sovereign and therefore as the validating element in the state." Beforehand, Europe was a vast multitude of loose confederations, kingdoms, duchies, and fiefdoms. Thus, the medieval nation (natio) was conceptualized as a compound composed of the nobles not the people.

Napoleonic France saw itself as first among the nations, the revolutionary fountainhead of liberty and equality, and cast itself as La Grande Nation. Zamoyski captures the contradictions, chauvinism and selfishness which maligned some national revolutionaries (particularly in France.) While purporting to express fraternity and sympathy for other fledging nationalists, the Napoleonic French embarked on a conquest of imperial grandeur and exploitation under the guise of liberation. With promises of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," Napoleon sequestered property and conscripted great masses of Frenchmen, Poles, and other peoples on a campaign of conquest supposedly against the corrupt old order. Decrying the aristocrats, blue-bloods, and feudal lords of the old order, Napoleon hypocritically garbed himself in the pomp and splendor of a modern-day Caesar. "The manipulation of liberated territories for France was shameless," declares Zamoyski. France hid behind revolutionary platitudes, demagoguery, and egalitarian idealism, and cast her conquests as being pure in motive. In an ironic, twist of fate, as Napoleon was busy being the continental imperator forging his New Order in Europe, nationalist sentiments grew strong, and thereafter national risings sprang throughout Europe borne out of resentment to their "French liberators." National revolutionaries grew tired of expressing solidarity with the French. Likewise, the idea of a secular imperium ostensibly under "benevolent French hegemony" didn't sit well with them. Nonetheless, the Poles found the French to be a worthy ally in liberating her from Prussian and Russian suzerainty as Zamoyski points out. Though, the Poles gave a lot of blood as their soldiers fought in Napoleon's armies and died.

Other revolutionaries like Mazzini and Metternich prophesized universal redemption through an apotheosis of nations. Their influence no doubt brought internationalism to fruition in the twentieth century, as they found common cause in the desire for national liberation and universal redemption for humanity in some unrealized New Order. Moreover, they labored in common cause with other revolutionaries throughout Europe. Profoundly anti-clerical, radically egalitarian, they set the stage for socialist and nationalist movements throughout Europe. Mazzini founded Young Italy and labored with other dispossessed nationalists throughout Europe. The quintessential Leftist, Mazzini had a vision of Italy freed from the thumb of Papal and Austrian domination, and united in fraternal brotherhood as a social democracy. Mazzini founded a National International of sorts in Switzerland in 1834, and it was formally known as Young Europe. Through its sister organizations, it sought to export national revolutions throughout Europe. Mazzini "meditated on the distant promise of universal salvation, Mazzini even contemplated the possibility that the nation might become redundant," notes Zamoyski. Mazzini was appalled at notions of rights and constitutional reform, and was more interested in organic political systems rooted in monism and exaltation of the nation and its people. He spoke he almost blasphemous terms, in declaring, "That which Christ did Humanity can do." The nation was to be a surrogate Christ, for Mazzini, and he saw Italy as a torch-bearer of a new order. Mazzini was eventually martyred for his cause. His compatriots would venerate the bullets he was shot with as holy relics. Shortly thereafter, Springtime came in 1848, and a number of revolutions were sparked throughout central and eastern Europe. These revolutions were a peculiar mixture of anti-clericalism, egalitarian socialism, collectivist folk ideology and nationalism. In that same year, Karl Marx penned his Communist Manifesto borrowing Mazzinni's internationalism while dismissing utopian socialism in favor of his own brand of scientific socialism. In Marx's eyes, the national risings of his times were but a foreshadowing of a greater proletariat rising to come.

I find the book wanting in some areas, as the earlier chapter entitled 'The American Parable' really doesn't have the desired for historicity or make the marked dichotomy that distinguishes the American war for independence from Europe's tumultuous revolutionary tradition. Some European and French Revolutionaries looked with admiration at what was achieved across the Atlantic, and saw the promise of an idyllic New World utopia in the making. They were apt to crudely caricature the so called American Revolution. With admiration born out of ignorance, many European romantics believed they were themselves emulating that Revolution and making a New World for themselves. The 1776 uprising had a conservative sobriety without the egalitarian fantasies. Though the American Revolution was an act of political separation, it was also a contest for the restoration of cherished Anglo-American liberties. The so called 'American revolutionaries' didn't seek to lay waste to the preexisting civil society, they never sought its overthrow, and they had no blissful utopian optimism about the future or rosy views about human nature. Lastly, the American patriots did not seek to reset the calendar to year one and make the world anew.

In précis, Zamoyski succeeds in capturing the fervor and militancy of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revolutionaries. He paints a stark picture of their internecine wars and coups, and he illustrates the consequences of the holy madness wrought out during this time. Such revolutionary vehemence paved the way for the totalitarian incarnations of twentieth-century fascism and communism. In dissecting the revolutionary "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" trinity and its application in the twentieth-century: the fascists lauded the fraternity element while the communists lauded the equality element above all. The fascists saw the nation or volk as the vehicle of deliverance. The Bolsheviks saw a self-conscious proletariat class rising as the means of salvation. Indeed, this holy madness birthed the millenarian religions of communism and fascism. These quixotic totalitarians had their own eschatology (doctrine of last things) where the elect of humanity was to obtain heaven on earth, a new millennium, but it was to only be consummated after a climatic struggle that was paid for in the "cleansing blood" of revolutionaries and dissidents alike. Fortunately, the more liberal-minded among the revolutionaries like Lafayette set the stage for political compromise, constitutional reforms, and thus calm and deliberative parliamentarian campaigns of reforming civil society.

As a Burkean conservative, I realize "our patience will achieve more than our force." This sad state of affairs in European history and elsewhere needs to be understood and studied with much prudence and not blind unflinching sympathy for the revolutionaries that progressives have (nor the utter contempt that reactionaries like de Maistre express.) There were a lot of problems with feudal Europe and the Bourbon absolutism was utterly tyrannical, but the overreaction was even more problematic as Burke surmised in his 'Reflections on the Revolution in France.' Sadly, in liberal academia, most secular humanist historians are blinded by their God of infinite progress, and their objectivity is clouded in dealing with such subject matter. Zamoyski on the other hand does a fair job at presenting the revolutionaries without getting sentimental in his affection for them. Thus, his objectivity is fairly reasonable and to be commended. Anyhow, if this sort of subject matter interests you than you might want to consider _Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith_ by former Library of Congress librarian James Billington. All things considered, this is a fairly good read but not without its weaknesses and I give it a 3.5/5.0 rating.


New history?   January 5, 2005
Jessie Dyess (jacksonville, fl United States)
5 out of 18 found this review helpful

After stating on page 11, that Ben Franklin worked for British intelligence during the Revolutionary War the rest of this author's work is discredited.