HOLY MADNESS

Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries
1776-1871

There has been no lack of books on the 'Age of Revolution', on the rise of nationalism and on the birth of the modern world. But they have all been strongly marked by simplistic orthodoxies, such as the Marxist view that revolutions were an inevitable part of a great economic process. Or that upheavals took place because people were poor or hungry or downtrodden. These books resolutely ignore such inconvenient truths as that it was not the poor who made the revolutions. They also ignore any underlying spiritual and emotional forces at work. They make only the most superficial connections with the Romantic Movement in literature and the arts, and do not go into its deeply religious undertow.

       Holy Madness sets out to make some of these connections. It probes into the psyche that was responsible for so many of the founding events of our modern world, and into the instincts that inspired its most generous and most murderous impulses.

       This book explains how the Enlightenment dislodged Christianity from its central position in the life of European societies and how man's quest for ecstasy and transcendence flooded into areas such as the arts, spawning the Romantic movement. The religious themes in art gave way to political and social ones, and art, literature and music became substitute religions, offering solace and the possibility of attaining the sublime. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century this secular quest for salvation also invaded politics, giving rise to a widespread desire to bring into being ideal communities.

       This book traces how worship and dedication originally channelled through the church was refocused on the cause of the people and the nation. This dramatic journey which begins in America in 1776 and goes right up to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, takes in the French revolution, the Irish rebellion, the Polish risings, the war of Greek liberation, the Russian insurrection, the Hungarian struggles for freedom, the liberation of South America, and the Italian Risorgimento. Generations of young men struggled and died in a kind of crusade whose Jerusalem was an idealised nation, death in the service of which brought martyrdom and redemption.

       On a vast canvas, Zamoyski combines a wonderfully illuminating and thought-provoking exploration of this fascinating theme with portraits of the key people involved: Lafayette, Garibaldi, Lamartine, Kossuth, Mazzini, Napoleon, Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Kościuszko, Coleridge, Byron, Mickiewicz, Bakunin, Rousseau, Wolfe Tone, Bolivar, Herzen and many others.