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

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.

~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,

Zamoyski's ambitious book is a triumph. His sweep encompasses virtually all of Europe and North and South America from the 1770s to the 1870s. His theme is the way in which radicals, nationalists and revolutionaries appropriated religious fervour, rituals and iconography for their own protean causes. We meet an amazing assortment of cranks, would-be messiahs, unfocused idealists, adventurers and imposters. Though the events it describes are sometimes quite tragic, enlivened by Zamoyski's unfailing light touch it is one of the funniest history books I have ever read. 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.