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

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. By Darrin M. McMahon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xii plus 262 pp.).

Although the Marxist and revisionist historians have agreed on little else, they have concurred in believing that, for the most part, those opposing the French Revolution were undeserving of study. In the Marxist account, opponents appear as little more than hopeless repositories of outdated views, ready to be swept into the dustbin of history. They briefly emerge as the explanation for the Terror, a period of necessary vigilance to wipe out such recalcitrants. The revisionists led by Furet give such opponents even fewer pages, deeming the actions of the Terror to arise from a delusion of the revolutionaries who imagined an opposition.

Recently there has been a lot more attention paid to those who resisted the revolution. For example, Timothy Tackett in his Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (1996) focused on the resistance by noble legislators as an explanation for the actions of revolutionaries. These aristocrats mobilized to defend their traditional position. Likewise, Barry Shapiro's Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789-1790 (1993) revealed the active plotting of anti-revolutionary conspirators. And as the title of Don Sutherland's France 1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution (1985) indicated, he treated revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries somewhat as equals in his account.

Darrin McMahon's book is an attempt to understand a broad swath of the "other" side of the political equation. Although Jacques Godechot's The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789-1804 (1972) attempted to survey a wide segment of this part of opinion, McMahon has a more extensive time frame, ranging from 1770 through the Restoration. In this chronological span, the author continues a positive tendency to break out of the straitjacket in which the revolution has tended to be considered alone, especially unconnected to the post-Napoleonic world. To be sure, McMahon's topic is narrower than Godechot's, but his approach is more systematic. In fact, while admitting the existence of many versions of conservative or right-wing thought, McMahon concentrates on the anti-philosophes, who in his definition are those individuals whose fundamental premise lay in an opposition to the Enlightenment. This term has greatest familiarity when applied directly to the Old Regime nemeses of the philosophes. Using the same optic, McMahon then examines the succeeding generations who enrolled in these lists.

McMahon discovers that many of the main anti-philosophic arguments throughout this period emerged from the initial group of detractors, most notably the journalist Elie-Catherine Freron who personally focused on Voltaire. These opponents never doubted the existence of the Enlightenment which they defined as anti-Catholic, promoting reason over sentiment and emotion. The philosophes, according to their detractors, "flagrantly celebrated self-love, avarice, ambition, and lust as 'natural' instincts, the motive forces of human grandeur and greatness" (p. 36). The anti-philosophes also focused their ire on imagined republican inclinations of the philosophes. Underpinning all this was a vision of the philosophes attacking God while the anti-philosophes protected throne and altar. One interesting facet was the flirtation by these Enlightenment opponents with Rousseau. The latter's ambiguities, which made him at times alien to the philosophes, could make him attractive to their opposites who, in fact, appreciated hi s critique of reason.

The arrival of revolution in 1789 proved to the anti-philosophes the truth of all of their arguments. Virtually without exception, the anti-philosophes attacked the revolution as the result of a conspiracy whose outlines they had long foreseen. McMahon shows how in these circumstances his protagonists worked to support the king and church. Sometimes, they were so rigorous in this pursuit that they opposed the actual efforts of those to whom they were dedicated. More generally, they assaulted the revolutionaries, particularly the Jacobins, as corrupt fanatics, infected with individualism and a love of luxury. In this, they sounded exactly the same as when the radicals attacked them. The Terror continued this pattern of beliefs except that this strident minority found increasing numbers of adherents, including most notably the turncoat Jean-Francois La Harpe, former organizer extraordinaire of the philosophes.

Through 1799 this book treats the anti-philosophes as something of a movement with core members and core values amidst other anti-Enlightenment and then anti-revolutionary groups. In the section on Napoleon and the Restoration, with most original members deceased, this study seems tacitly to change from focusing on a group with shared ideals to treating anti-philosophic thought as a discourse supporting king and altar to which individuals subscribed. Under Napoleon, some but not all royalists took up this discourse. In the Restoration, however, the anti-philosophes again become a group since the Ultras appear simply as a latter day version of them. Their target became the liberals even as their own rhetoric repeated that of their predecessors. In fact, by charting anti-philosophic thought through the Restoration, McMahon can add to the significance of these beliefs: opponents first of Voltaire and his friends, then a part of the attack on the revolution and Napoleon, and finally the framework for the staunche st monarchists after 1815.

Beyond its chronological breadth and the relative novelty of its subject, this book has much to recommend it. Well-written and deeply researched, it takes up important historiographical questions. McMahon's work answers Roger Chartier's question about whether the existence of the Enlightenment was merely a figment of the revolutionaries' imagination. Apparently, the anti-philosophes would dispute this notion. The struggles among these antagonists suggests that they both had significant existence before 1789. Further, Furet treats the revolutionaries' comprehension of a revolutionary opposition as a phantasmic ploy used to drive forward ever more repressive revolutionary nightmares and schemes. McMahon goes out of his way to dispel this point by showing the way in which the anti-philosophes thwarted the revolutionaries.

And he makes another interesting observation on his own. As the anti-philosophes fashioned their views creatively in response to those of the philosophes, they can be much better understood as "modern" than as collectors and purveyors of tradition. This argument seeks to make conservatism, not retrograde but prescient. Even if the author remains carefully neutral toward the anti-philosophes, he does accord them a measure of respect and rescues them from those who dubbed them residues of a receding past.

The very breadth of this book raises an interesting question. While the work seems straightforward in examining the direct forging of ideas before 1789, it becomes more complicated afterwards. The author then seeks and finds anti-philosophic thought in the absence of its founders or its objects. We see the ideas, but they appear decontextualized because the other views of the new adherents are unexplained. How important were these beliefs to the very people who espoused them? Was anti-philosophism central or peripheral in their thinking? In the Restoration, this question seems to be answered by the Ultras who clearly embrace anti-philosophic notions. But here the question becomes why they took this tack. McMahon implies only that this was an obvious tradition for them to grasp; yet we could use some information on why they embraced these particular notions. This exceptional book has raised important queries for future studies. But none of this detracts from the author's cogent analysis of anti-philosophic thi nking which clearly has resonated ever since its emergence.