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Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War
In this masterful, stylish, and authoritative book, Michael Burleigh gives us an epic history of the battles over religion in modern Europe, examining the complex and often lethal ways in which politics and religion have interacted and influenced each other over the last two centuries. From the French Revolution to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, Earthly Powers is a uniquely powerful portrait of one of the great tensions of modern history—one that continues to be played out on the world stage today.
560 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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599 people want to read
About the author
Michael Burleigh
25 books97 followersMichael Burleigh is a British author and historian.
In 1977 Michael Burleigh took a first class honours degree in Medieval and Modern History at University College London, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer prizes. After a PhD in medieval history in 1982, he went on to hold posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cardiff where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also been Raoul Wallenberg Chair of Human Rights at Rutgers University in New Jersey, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University, California. In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
In 1977 Michael Burleigh took a first class honours degree in Medieval and Modern History at University College London, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer prizes. After a PhD in medieval history in 1982, he went on to hold posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cardiff where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also been Raoul Wallenberg Chair of Human Rights at Rutgers University in New Jersey, William Rand Kenan Professor of History at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University, California. In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
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February 14, 2016
The period covered by Michael Burleigh’s book is a fascinating one. Eric Hobsbawm’s works described it as the Ages Of Revolution, Capital and Empire, reflecting the startling economic, social and political changes of the period. This book zooms in on the conflicts and alliances between politics and religion, and the way that religion was challenged and to some extent usurped by post Enlightenment ideas. There are some fascinating ideas within. The main problems with the book are the sometimes turgid prose, and (perhaps a reflection of the scope of subject) the assumptions of prior knowledge about terms and events which are sometimes not fully explained. Additionally Burleigh does tend to wander around without a central thesis or strong structure, and in a few sections the reader is left wondering how the material relates to the story as a whole.
As Burleigh explains in the introduction the starting point in writing the book was as a study of political religions. Initially he planned to follow the breadcrumbs from the Jacobins of the French Revolution through the rise of Marxism, Bolshevism, Fascism and National Socialism. Somewhere along the way the scope broadened and the discussion of the twentieth century totalitarianisms was deferred to the next volume. Some precursors, in the form of Marxism and the extreme rightists Charles Maurras and Paul Anton de Lagarde.
Burleigh does well in keeping some structure and enough specific interest - often intellectual and philosophical history can be a bit dry. He evokes some of the background of the key individuals along the way which prevents things becoming too esoteric. We learn of Wagner’s “remorseless quest for money, best symbolised by his wife Cosima hauling off bags of coins when banknotes were not forthcoming” and that the abbe Claude Fauchet was the “proud owner of a soutane [a cassock] rent by shot during the storming of the Bastille”. Yet at times the book was hard going. Often issues and events are mentioned with insufficient background. Burleigh claims that “The Chartist crisis contributed to the formation of an Anglican grouplet” without ever explaining what the Chartist crisis was. My Kindle was extremely useful in explaining the wide variety of anachronistic and non-English terms invoked without explanation, however this did disrupt the flow of the book. The main area for improvement in readability would be in trimming and reorganising some of his sentences. Sentences such as “Since Roman Catholics were primarily attached to the universal Church, they had difficulties in regarding the nation as the highest form of human community that God had established, something which they had in common with an Enlightenment belief in human universality, however much they may have despised and feared other aspects of that variegated project” just contain too many ideas. I often had to reread to remind myself where we had started.
I did gain some valuable insights however, and enjoyed Burleigh’s opinion gently sprinkled through the book. He takes a fairly dim view of the reality of the French revolution as well as anticlericalist movements such as the Kulturkampf. His diversion into the sectarian terrorist violence in tsarist Russia has “assumed ghastly saliency in a world where religions fanatics crash hijacked aircraft into skyscrapers”. This diversion - he himself admits that it could be seen as an “eccentric digression” does come across as one. Although the discussion in chapter 7 of Sacred Violence in Russia is fascinating I struggled to find anything especially ‘religious’ or antireligious in the examples in the chapter. I did enjoy his exposition of the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of Russian revolutionaries, mostly evoked by Burleigh through literature. His wonderful quote from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed neatly captures the arrogance of the utopian idealist who wants to overthrow the old order; ‘I am perplexed by my own data,’ he says at one point, ‘and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine.’
The section on the Industrial age is interesting, with discussion ranging from utopian movements such as Robert Owen’s integration of home, spiritual and working life to Methodism (“never simply a creed designed to discipline an industrial workforce, a charge routinely made by modern British academic apologists for a political religion that preferred to discipline workers by means of Arctic concentration camps”). One senses a certain intolerance of Marxism!
One of the central themes of the book is the conflict between Nationalism and the more ‘Internationalist’ Catholicism. Burleigh points out that “Nationalism was the most pervasive and potent Church to emerge during the nineteenth century”. Politics is full of contradictions however. Burleigh states that “since Roman Catholics were primarily attached to the universal Church, they had difficulties in regarding the nation as the highest form of human community that God had established, something which they had in common with an Enlightenment belief in human universality, however much they may have despised and feared other aspects of that variegated project”. Yet often the French republic was very hostile to Catholicism at various parts of the twentieth century. They also suffered at German hands under Bismarck, although that regime had little sympathy for most Enlightenment values.
The book ends with the hideous First World War. This was marked by the invocation of God on both sides. Kaiser Wilhelm had a bizarre belief in his unique relationship with God, while in the UK an Anglican priest pronounced “‘We are fighting, not so much for the honour of our country, as for the honour of God. Not only is this a Holy War, it is the holiest war that has ever been waged…This truly is a war of ideas. Odin is ranged against Christ, and Berlin is seeking to prove its supremacy against Bethlehem.’’
Overall the book provides a sense of the decline in Christianity through the century, especially amongst the new working classes. At times religion is actively suppressed in the name of rationality, or more cynically to suppress any perceived internationalist threat to new nations. Both Germany and Italy feared the disloyalty of those who hearkened to the word of the Pope. Most fascinating are the hints at elements which hinted at the direction of Germany in the twentieth century. Burleigh provides an answer (undoubtedly to be expanded upon in the next volume) to those who cannot answer how Nazism could take root in a supposedly civilised Christian nation. He points out the popularity of individuals such as Adolf Stoecker who exemplified “the extent to which Protestantism had become polluted with antisemitism and chauvinism, at the expense of traditional Christian values”. However even more importantly the middle classes were distancing themselves from the traditional church, leaning towards “a vulgar scientism” and the power of the individual. Even in traditional Germany ruled by a monarchy and by the conservative Bismarck these Enlightenment values gained credence. This undermines to some extent the idea that Germany’s twentieth century fate can be explained by it missing out on the Enlightenment. I look forward to seeing how Burleigh develops his ideas in the next volume Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.
Note on the Kindle edition: annoyingly the illustrations were omitted, and all the footnotes were just numbers, not hyperlinks. Publishers - please up your game!
As Burleigh explains in the introduction the starting point in writing the book was as a study of political religions. Initially he planned to follow the breadcrumbs from the Jacobins of the French Revolution through the rise of Marxism, Bolshevism, Fascism and National Socialism. Somewhere along the way the scope broadened and the discussion of the twentieth century totalitarianisms was deferred to the next volume. Some precursors, in the form of Marxism and the extreme rightists Charles Maurras and Paul Anton de Lagarde.
Burleigh does well in keeping some structure and enough specific interest - often intellectual and philosophical history can be a bit dry. He evokes some of the background of the key individuals along the way which prevents things becoming too esoteric. We learn of Wagner’s “remorseless quest for money, best symbolised by his wife Cosima hauling off bags of coins when banknotes were not forthcoming” and that the abbe Claude Fauchet was the “proud owner of a soutane [a cassock] rent by shot during the storming of the Bastille”. Yet at times the book was hard going. Often issues and events are mentioned with insufficient background. Burleigh claims that “The Chartist crisis contributed to the formation of an Anglican grouplet” without ever explaining what the Chartist crisis was. My Kindle was extremely useful in explaining the wide variety of anachronistic and non-English terms invoked without explanation, however this did disrupt the flow of the book. The main area for improvement in readability would be in trimming and reorganising some of his sentences. Sentences such as “Since Roman Catholics were primarily attached to the universal Church, they had difficulties in regarding the nation as the highest form of human community that God had established, something which they had in common with an Enlightenment belief in human universality, however much they may have despised and feared other aspects of that variegated project” just contain too many ideas. I often had to reread to remind myself where we had started.
I did gain some valuable insights however, and enjoyed Burleigh’s opinion gently sprinkled through the book. He takes a fairly dim view of the reality of the French revolution as well as anticlericalist movements such as the Kulturkampf. His diversion into the sectarian terrorist violence in tsarist Russia has “assumed ghastly saliency in a world where religions fanatics crash hijacked aircraft into skyscrapers”. This diversion - he himself admits that it could be seen as an “eccentric digression” does come across as one. Although the discussion in chapter 7 of Sacred Violence in Russia is fascinating I struggled to find anything especially ‘religious’ or antireligious in the examples in the chapter. I did enjoy his exposition of the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of Russian revolutionaries, mostly evoked by Burleigh through literature. His wonderful quote from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed neatly captures the arrogance of the utopian idealist who wants to overthrow the old order; ‘I am perplexed by my own data,’ he says at one point, ‘and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine.’
The section on the Industrial age is interesting, with discussion ranging from utopian movements such as Robert Owen’s integration of home, spiritual and working life to Methodism (“never simply a creed designed to discipline an industrial workforce, a charge routinely made by modern British academic apologists for a political religion that preferred to discipline workers by means of Arctic concentration camps”). One senses a certain intolerance of Marxism!
One of the central themes of the book is the conflict between Nationalism and the more ‘Internationalist’ Catholicism. Burleigh points out that “Nationalism was the most pervasive and potent Church to emerge during the nineteenth century”. Politics is full of contradictions however. Burleigh states that “since Roman Catholics were primarily attached to the universal Church, they had difficulties in regarding the nation as the highest form of human community that God had established, something which they had in common with an Enlightenment belief in human universality, however much they may have despised and feared other aspects of that variegated project”. Yet often the French republic was very hostile to Catholicism at various parts of the twentieth century. They also suffered at German hands under Bismarck, although that regime had little sympathy for most Enlightenment values.
The book ends with the hideous First World War. This was marked by the invocation of God on both sides. Kaiser Wilhelm had a bizarre belief in his unique relationship with God, while in the UK an Anglican priest pronounced “‘We are fighting, not so much for the honour of our country, as for the honour of God. Not only is this a Holy War, it is the holiest war that has ever been waged…This truly is a war of ideas. Odin is ranged against Christ, and Berlin is seeking to prove its supremacy against Bethlehem.’’
Overall the book provides a sense of the decline in Christianity through the century, especially amongst the new working classes. At times religion is actively suppressed in the name of rationality, or more cynically to suppress any perceived internationalist threat to new nations. Both Germany and Italy feared the disloyalty of those who hearkened to the word of the Pope. Most fascinating are the hints at elements which hinted at the direction of Germany in the twentieth century. Burleigh provides an answer (undoubtedly to be expanded upon in the next volume) to those who cannot answer how Nazism could take root in a supposedly civilised Christian nation. He points out the popularity of individuals such as Adolf Stoecker who exemplified “the extent to which Protestantism had become polluted with antisemitism and chauvinism, at the expense of traditional Christian values”. However even more importantly the middle classes were distancing themselves from the traditional church, leaning towards “a vulgar scientism” and the power of the individual. Even in traditional Germany ruled by a monarchy and by the conservative Bismarck these Enlightenment values gained credence. This undermines to some extent the idea that Germany’s twentieth century fate can be explained by it missing out on the Enlightenment. I look forward to seeing how Burleigh develops his ideas in the next volume Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.
Note on the Kindle edition: annoyingly the illustrations were omitted, and all the footnotes were just numbers, not hyperlinks. Publishers - please up your game!
December 6, 2013
Very Interesting take on the politics of religion and the religion of politics. Smart and original. Unfortunately I couldn't give it a higher rating, because it's a bit biassed. Burleigh is quite the conservative, and his take on Catholicism and liberalism isn't entirely accurate. But still worth reading.
March 20, 2012
Earthly Powers, Michael Burleigh
Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers is a fascinating history of religion and politics from the French Revolution to the First World War. It was published in 2005 and followed in 2006 by a second volume, Sacred Causes, taking the story up to modern times.
Burleigh is an academic who has taught at Oxford among other places. How a non-Marxist like Burleigh ever got a teaching job at modern British university remains a mystery. He is also open-minded and not hostile to Christianity, which adds to the mystery.
For anyone who thinks the culture wars are a modern phenomenon this book will come as a revelation. The culture wars started in earnest with the French Revolution. And raged throughout the nineteenth century. Most bitterly of all in France where anticlericalism became a kind of secular religion, but also in Italy and in Germany and indeed the whole of Europe. The main theme of the book is the rise of secular substitutes for religion, most notably the idea of the state as a focus for religious devotion.
Some religious leaders, most notably some of the nineteenth century popes, fought back, but mostly the nineteenth century saw the Christian religion not merely on the defensive but adopting the kind of defeatist attitudes that have become so characteristic of mainstream Christianity in our own day. Most fatally the century saw Christianity implicitly accepting the new superiority of the state and falling back on a species of vaguely Christian socialism or do-goodism or various other compromises with the rising tide of liberalism.
Bismarck’s war on Roman Catholicism, the kulturkampf, was a key struggle.
The end result was the exaltation of the state as an alternative religion, a development that would have catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century. The willingness of the disciples of Reason to resort to mass murder (a quarter of a million people were slaughtered in the suppression of counter-revolutionary revolts in the Vendée during the French Revolution) was a particularly chilling foretaste of the future.
In the nineteenth century though the culture wars mostly followed the pattern we are familiar with today - bitter struggles to control the education of the young and to undermine the family.
A superb and fascinating book presenting an almost unique view of the history of the nineteenth century as essentially a religious struggle.
Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers is a fascinating history of religion and politics from the French Revolution to the First World War. It was published in 2005 and followed in 2006 by a second volume, Sacred Causes, taking the story up to modern times.
Burleigh is an academic who has taught at Oxford among other places. How a non-Marxist like Burleigh ever got a teaching job at modern British university remains a mystery. He is also open-minded and not hostile to Christianity, which adds to the mystery.
For anyone who thinks the culture wars are a modern phenomenon this book will come as a revelation. The culture wars started in earnest with the French Revolution. And raged throughout the nineteenth century. Most bitterly of all in France where anticlericalism became a kind of secular religion, but also in Italy and in Germany and indeed the whole of Europe. The main theme of the book is the rise of secular substitutes for religion, most notably the idea of the state as a focus for religious devotion.
Some religious leaders, most notably some of the nineteenth century popes, fought back, but mostly the nineteenth century saw the Christian religion not merely on the defensive but adopting the kind of defeatist attitudes that have become so characteristic of mainstream Christianity in our own day. Most fatally the century saw Christianity implicitly accepting the new superiority of the state and falling back on a species of vaguely Christian socialism or do-goodism or various other compromises with the rising tide of liberalism.
Bismarck’s war on Roman Catholicism, the kulturkampf, was a key struggle.
The end result was the exaltation of the state as an alternative religion, a development that would have catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century. The willingness of the disciples of Reason to resort to mass murder (a quarter of a million people were slaughtered in the suppression of counter-revolutionary revolts in the Vendée during the French Revolution) was a particularly chilling foretaste of the future.
In the nineteenth century though the culture wars mostly followed the pattern we are familiar with today - bitter struggles to control the education of the young and to undermine the family.
A superb and fascinating book presenting an almost unique view of the history of the nineteenth century as essentially a religious struggle.
September 15, 2023
Very broad overview, but very tendentious: Burleigh wants to prove at all costs that religion after the French Revolution was not dead. In that sense, this book is laudable as a corrective on the sometimes dominating view, but he neglects a number of other topics (such as the conflictual attitude of religion towards science). In between, there's dismissive comment against politically correct thinking and modernist architecture.
January 6, 2013
This is an uneven and overly verbose book which is unfortunate because the topic of a historical review of religion and secularization is always of interest.
The main focus is on the French revolution and its impact on removing religion and religious orders out of society. It was instructive to learn how some aspects of the French revolution were virulently anti-church – there were pogroms of clerics where priests were butchered and religious property was confiscated by the state. This all had long term consequences, for example France conscripted priests during World War I.
Yet Mr. Burleigh is overly sympathetic to religion. For example, prior to the revolution the Church controlled education – was not education more open after the revolution? Was not France more democratic after the revolution? One could argue that this liberation of the 1790’s led to the expressive and wonderful achievements of French art, literature, and science during the 19th Century. The author seems dismissive of the scientific accomplishments that in part were due to the diminished control of the Church on French society. There is only a cursory treatment of Darwin’s ground-breaking “Origin of Species”.
Mr. Burleigh does score some points in showing how religion is still pervasive – particularly before the outbreak of World War I.
An additional annoyance, when reading, was the constant skipping to and fro between time periods. A chronological approach would have been more logical. Plus the book should have been condensed, making it more lucid.
The main focus is on the French revolution and its impact on removing religion and religious orders out of society. It was instructive to learn how some aspects of the French revolution were virulently anti-church – there were pogroms of clerics where priests were butchered and religious property was confiscated by the state. This all had long term consequences, for example France conscripted priests during World War I.
Yet Mr. Burleigh is overly sympathetic to religion. For example, prior to the revolution the Church controlled education – was not education more open after the revolution? Was not France more democratic after the revolution? One could argue that this liberation of the 1790’s led to the expressive and wonderful achievements of French art, literature, and science during the 19th Century. The author seems dismissive of the scientific accomplishments that in part were due to the diminished control of the Church on French society. There is only a cursory treatment of Darwin’s ground-breaking “Origin of Species”.
Mr. Burleigh does score some points in showing how religion is still pervasive – particularly before the outbreak of World War I.
An additional annoyance, when reading, was the constant skipping to and fro between time periods. A chronological approach would have been more logical. Plus the book should have been condensed, making it more lucid.
June 5, 2025
Michael Burleigh begins this excellent book by explaining that he wrote it to explore the areas where politics and religion intersect, and that after 9/11, this project became increasingly relevant. He characterises the book as "an exploration of the politics of religion, and the religion of politics, broadly construed, in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War...This book is largely about what are called 'political', 'secular' and 'civil' religions, and how these related to Christianity during a time of fitful rather than remorseless secularisation." This takes place during the "modern era in which the divine basis of political power was rejected, and Church and state gradually separated, but which also witnessed the 'sacralisation' of such collectives as race, state and nation. Put differently, medieval Christendom had been superseded by sovereign nations that ceased referring to divine right, while man sought meaning in the world, attaining ultimate knowledge of it through science. However, these new collectivities of race, state and nation also perpetuated the symbolic language that once linked political life on earth with the next world, including such terms as hierarchy and order, the community as 'church', a sense of collective chosenness, mission and purpose, the struggle between good and evil transmuted into secular terms, and so forth. In secularised forms, medieval millenarian Gnostic heresies contributed a narrower set of pathologies that reappeared as totalitarian ideologies and parties."
He begins by outlining the condition of the Catholic church in France and its relationship with the state in the decades leading up to the Revolution. While there had been some internal reform of the church, the Reformation itself had gained little traction in France. Instead, it was secularism flowing from the Enlightenment that had the greatest impact on the French Catholic church (as indeed it would in Protestant England). A recurring theme is the extent to which the emerging secular humanism drew from what had gone before: "What the religious of the time found impossible was to explore what the philosophes owed to the Christian tradition without being conscious of it…The philosophes made large claims to the empirical nature of their philosophical history. But in reality they transposed their own Garden of Eden on to the classical Golden Age, from which a mankind haunted by priests and demons was then expelled into the long night of the Middle Ages. Like the Christians they also wanted a happy ending, but could not believe in a transcendental heaven. In the new religion of humanity, heaven would be the perfect future state that a regenerated mankind would create through his own volition. The ultimate arbiter would no longer be a divine judge, but rather future generations of happier mankind vaguely defined as 'posterity'. Self-fulfilment became a form of atonement, love of humanity a substitute for love of God.” The trauma of the French Revolution led many conservatives to think more about its relationship with the antecedent Enlightenment rather than what it may have owed to religious modes of thinking.
With tensions between church and monarchy high in the pre-revolutionary period, many Roman Catholic officials were initially enthusiastic for revolutionary change. In reality, the Revolution could brook no such rival and turned on the church, as illustrated by a passage whose themes are eerily familiar: "The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy progress, with spirit of persecution according to their means. What was not to be done towards their great end by any direct or immediate act, might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To command that opinion, the first step is to establish dominion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame...These Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct, it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life."
Burleigh develops his hypothesis that the supposedly secular, humanist and scientific worldview proposed by the revolutionaries is best understood as a political religion, as he considers the progress of the revolution itself. One important factor is the matter of oaths, whereby the loyalty of clergy to the new regime was assessed as "a more explicit test of clerical acceptance of the new dispensation…By denying the clergy any collective response to policies that touched on spiritual questions, the Assembly managed to bring about a dangerous religious schism, providing the disparate and incoherent forces of counter-revolution with an issue around which they could gather a genuine mass following." Consequently, the more radical revolutionaries could attach the tag of 'counter-revolutionary' to all clergy, whether they assented to the constitutional oaths or not. Then came "attempts to make the revolution itself a religion. For about the need for a religion there was little or no doubt...Armed missionaries were despatched…to propagate the new tidings as Reason militant went on the march," taking much inspiration from the evangelistic zeal of the early Church. “With its creeds, liturgies and sacred texts, its own vocabulary of virtues and vices, and, last but not least, the ambition of regenerating mankind itself...The result was a series of deified abstractions worshipped through the denatured language and liturgy of Christianity." In place of Dominican friars, the Jacobins became the legislators and enforcers of public morality.
The next chapter examines the restoration period in France, which saw a significant revival of both church and royal authority. The church was content to emphasise that the civil power (personified in the sovereign) derived its authority from God; in return, the position of the church was shored up by the state: “Throne and altar in alliance was to be the foundation of legitimate authority. The revolutionary notion that the state rested upon a contract with the nation was rejected in favour of the restoration of princely dynasties ruling sovereign states.” The alliance of throne and altar was to be “the apex of a hierarchy resting upon strong aristocratic intermediary authorities, religion and the patriarchal family.” While the echoes in the conservatism of our own day are obvious, the contemporary significance was the irony that “Europe’s absolute monarchs had been compelled to mobilise precisely those nationally conscious elements to fight Napoleon that after 1815 they were so concerned to suppress once they had performed this limited objective. They had unleashed forces that they would never be able fully to control, although it would take the rest of the century for that aspect of democracy to become evident.” In England, Establishment ensured that Christianity was formally positioned as the “basis of civil society, and the source of all good, and of all comfort.” This view was often hostile to the continental notion of an ‘alliance’ between throne and altar, as it implied that the two are by nature distinct and independent. Burleigh also points out that the lack of internal machinery for reform under Establishment was a major contributing factor to the explosion in non-confirmity in England in the 18th and 19th centuries: “the Anglican Church was like any old-fashioned corporate monopoly faced with energetic competition from rivals who had a more flexible and imaginative understanding of existing or potential markets within a wider context characterised by tentative religious toleration.” As an evangelical Anglican myself, I find this analysis fascinating. As an ecclesiastical system, Anglicanism is incredibly flexible and able to coherently accommodate a much wider range of theological positions and local cultural expressions than most other streams of Christianity. The fact that this flexibility could be so effectively ossified in Georgian England is a strong indicator of how damaging it is for Christianity to be too closely identified with the state. Christian Nationalism is not a position I have much sympathy for!
In the next three chapters, Burleigh considers two major political religions that emerged in the 19th Century: nationalism and socialism. Nationalism tends to be “constructed, from a selection of pre-existing components, such as institutions, landscapes, language, law and, not least, local experience of the coming of Christianity, as well as the more rehearsed area of myth and memory, that compose peoples’ historical identities.” Using Germany as an example, Burleigh shows that changes in cultural Christianity (a rise in pietistic religion heavily influenced by Romanticism, emphasising feeling over content, heart over head) had a significant influence on the increase of nationalistic consciousness. He concludes that, “Pietism contributed to a spiritual climate in which such collectives as the nation became vehicles of intensified worship…as the ideal medium between individual and humanity, nations were the means whereby the individual achieved fulfilment, their flourishing the route by which humanity would achieve perfection too.” Some of the dark potential consequences of making the nation an end in itself were seen in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and ultimately in the 20th-century European dictatorships. Shifting his focus, Burleigh comments that, “The nineteenth century witnessed several attempts to reconcile religion with the dual imperatives of order and progress, through the medium of a new generation of secular religions…Some, like liberalism, are mercifully still with us, while others - such as scientism and Marxist socialism - have taken a battering.” More pointedly, he remarks that, “The nineteenth-century alternatives to Christianity were not the tranquiliser, shopping mall, soap opera and spectator sports that arch-bishops, moralists and pessimists worry about today, but a quest for a more plausibly up-to-date social religion without which, it was feared, societies would descend into anarchy, barbarism and immorality.” He contends that the debt that Marxist-Socialism and Communism owe to religion has tended to be “under-emphasised by historians who are sympathetic to ‘scientific’ socialism and resistant to the rather separate notion that Marxism was a religiously inspired mythopoetic drama carefully camouflaged within various scientific-sounding accretions.” The last chapter in this section takes a fascinating and quite terrifying look at pre-Bolshevik revolutionaries and terrorists in nineteenth-century Russia. The parallels with explicitly religious and violent fanatics of our day are striking, even where the ideology is framed with secular or pseudo-scientific language. As with Nationalism, when elevated to be an object of worship these ostensibly utopian and humanitarian ideals led their adherents into an orgy of destruction, persecution and murder.
The final three chapters gallop through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the growth of the secular state and especially in the context of the industrial revolution. The final chapter reviews the years leading up to the First World War, and sets the stage for the rise of the European dictatorships, which are the main subject of Burleigh's follow-up, Sacred Causes. He begins by helpfully summarising that, “The nineteenth century commenced with the near universality of the confessional state under which one religion, or Christian denomination, was privileged by the state, while other denominations and religions were tolerated at best. By the century's close, these arrangements had been abandoned, or modified, almost beyond recognition. This was done either to accommodate dissenters and religious minorities, or as a result of sustained assaults from liberal and radical anticlericals, either acting alone as in the French Third Republic or, as in Bismarck's Germany, in temporary alliance with the far from liberal wielder of state power. These clashes, many of which endured for decades, largely established the formal framework within which state and Church, or, to be more punctilious, faith groups, operate in Europe to this day.” Why is this relevant? Simply, because “the consequences are important for understanding how we choose to live now; on an optimistic reading, these developments have enabled Europe's Churches to rediscover their spiritual and social mission within a free market of opinion, while states have been liberated from the sometimes deleterious influences that over-mighty religions exert on semi-formed states elsewhere.” As well as the events in France and Germany mentioned above, Burleugh also examines the (unsuccessful) attempts to disestablish the Church of England and the increasing punctiliousness of the papacy in relation to the new Italian state, most notably with Pius IX declaring a doctrine of papal infallibility in 1864. Generally, despite different notices and methods, European nation states sought to flex their muscles as such and to shake off much of the influence previously exerted by Christian denominations. In parallel, they sought to retain the undoubted benefits of Christianity belief for social stability and civic virtue though increasingly the Christian content was emptied out, leaving behind a husk of humanistic morality. Generally, Burleigh is more favourable in his assessment of the Roman Catholic church during this period, and sceptical of both the sincerity and wisdom of the Protestant denominations. This is undoubtedly an authorial bias, but it doesn’t intrude too much into the flow of his narrative. He drives home his point about political religions by highlighting the often universalistic and morally charged pronouncements of the European nation states, especially in Republican France and in Bismarck’s Germany. Interestingly, this also had an impact on the imperialism of the period: if values such as those of the French Revolution were universally valid then it was imperative to seek “to impose them at home and export them abroad.”
Turning to Germany and looking ahead to the rise of facism, Burleigh asks and answers an important question: “Outsiders, who are routinely deaf to the nuances of religion in Germany, are often perplexed as to how Nazism could have taken root in a Christian nation, without over-troubling themselves with the question whether one part of that proposition is true…the extent to which Protestantism had become polluted with antisemitism and chauvinism, at the expense of traditional Christian values…They were no longer even necessary to the maintenance of external social respectability, which could just as easily be accrued from attendance at a classical concert or public lecture. Enormous credulity was shown towards a vulgar scientism.” Again, he points out that, “the world of socialism was not so free of the grasp of the Churches as it pretended. The guiding vision of the collapse of capitalism and the advent of a classless, ideal society owed a great deal to Christian eschatology…the power of socialism was in no small measure due to the fact that this doctrine is in a position to create a mood, which is similar to the mood in many religious sects, which put all their hopes in a great day of wrath and joy…Aside from the ultimate vision, the comrades' world was informed by a high sense of moral purpose and self-sacrifice, by absolute adhesion to a set of incontrovertible dogmas, as relayed by the Party prophets with the aid of sacred screeds, and by a radical intolerance of any heretical, let alone opposed, point of view.” The hollowing out of residual national Christianity was helped greatly by the experience of the Great War. One British officer spoke for many when he commented that, “The religion of ninety per cent of the men at the front is not distinctively Christian, but a religion of patriotism and of valour, tinged with chivalry, and at the best merely coloured with sentiment and emotion borrowed from Christianity.”
Burleigh closes with an ominous paragraph, foreshadowing the theme of his follow-up volume: “The Great War, the domestic and international civil wars, and economic dislocation that followed it, gave rise to mass despair, to which the solution appeared to be various forms of authoritarianism. In some countries authoritarian regimes were successfully supplanted by sinister movements that tapped into more atavistic levels of the human psyche, although in Italy the transition was from democracy to Fascism. These political religions threatened either to eradicate Christianity entirely, as the Bolsheviks sought to do in Russia, or perhaps worse, offered to accommodate it, within the new dispensations of Fascism and Nazism, which had themselves adopted many of the outward forms of Europe's old religion.”
I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as Sacred Causes: in parts, it was quite stodgy and assumed a lot of knowledge of the period on the part of the reader. I also found the last couple of chapters quite hard going and felt that the book lost some coherence at that point. That said, overall this is an excellent and thorough overview of the rise of political religions in Europe, and provides lots of useful context in thinking through where we find ourselves today in terms of the post-Christian secularised state. Understanding the extent to which such states are dependent on and have grown out of a Christian past is crucial, and much too readily forgotten.
He begins by outlining the condition of the Catholic church in France and its relationship with the state in the decades leading up to the Revolution. While there had been some internal reform of the church, the Reformation itself had gained little traction in France. Instead, it was secularism flowing from the Enlightenment that had the greatest impact on the French Catholic church (as indeed it would in Protestant England). A recurring theme is the extent to which the emerging secular humanism drew from what had gone before: "What the religious of the time found impossible was to explore what the philosophes owed to the Christian tradition without being conscious of it…The philosophes made large claims to the empirical nature of their philosophical history. But in reality they transposed their own Garden of Eden on to the classical Golden Age, from which a mankind haunted by priests and demons was then expelled into the long night of the Middle Ages. Like the Christians they also wanted a happy ending, but could not believe in a transcendental heaven. In the new religion of humanity, heaven would be the perfect future state that a regenerated mankind would create through his own volition. The ultimate arbiter would no longer be a divine judge, but rather future generations of happier mankind vaguely defined as 'posterity'. Self-fulfilment became a form of atonement, love of humanity a substitute for love of God.” The trauma of the French Revolution led many conservatives to think more about its relationship with the antecedent Enlightenment rather than what it may have owed to religious modes of thinking.
With tensions between church and monarchy high in the pre-revolutionary period, many Roman Catholic officials were initially enthusiastic for revolutionary change. In reality, the Revolution could brook no such rival and turned on the church, as illustrated by a passage whose themes are eerily familiar: "The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy progress, with spirit of persecution according to their means. What was not to be done towards their great end by any direct or immediate act, might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To command that opinion, the first step is to establish dominion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame...These Atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk. But in some things they are men of the world. The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct, it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life."
Burleigh develops his hypothesis that the supposedly secular, humanist and scientific worldview proposed by the revolutionaries is best understood as a political religion, as he considers the progress of the revolution itself. One important factor is the matter of oaths, whereby the loyalty of clergy to the new regime was assessed as "a more explicit test of clerical acceptance of the new dispensation…By denying the clergy any collective response to policies that touched on spiritual questions, the Assembly managed to bring about a dangerous religious schism, providing the disparate and incoherent forces of counter-revolution with an issue around which they could gather a genuine mass following." Consequently, the more radical revolutionaries could attach the tag of 'counter-revolutionary' to all clergy, whether they assented to the constitutional oaths or not. Then came "attempts to make the revolution itself a religion. For about the need for a religion there was little or no doubt...Armed missionaries were despatched…to propagate the new tidings as Reason militant went on the march," taking much inspiration from the evangelistic zeal of the early Church. “With its creeds, liturgies and sacred texts, its own vocabulary of virtues and vices, and, last but not least, the ambition of regenerating mankind itself...The result was a series of deified abstractions worshipped through the denatured language and liturgy of Christianity." In place of Dominican friars, the Jacobins became the legislators and enforcers of public morality.
The next chapter examines the restoration period in France, which saw a significant revival of both church and royal authority. The church was content to emphasise that the civil power (personified in the sovereign) derived its authority from God; in return, the position of the church was shored up by the state: “Throne and altar in alliance was to be the foundation of legitimate authority. The revolutionary notion that the state rested upon a contract with the nation was rejected in favour of the restoration of princely dynasties ruling sovereign states.” The alliance of throne and altar was to be “the apex of a hierarchy resting upon strong aristocratic intermediary authorities, religion and the patriarchal family.” While the echoes in the conservatism of our own day are obvious, the contemporary significance was the irony that “Europe’s absolute monarchs had been compelled to mobilise precisely those nationally conscious elements to fight Napoleon that after 1815 they were so concerned to suppress once they had performed this limited objective. They had unleashed forces that they would never be able fully to control, although it would take the rest of the century for that aspect of democracy to become evident.” In England, Establishment ensured that Christianity was formally positioned as the “basis of civil society, and the source of all good, and of all comfort.” This view was often hostile to the continental notion of an ‘alliance’ between throne and altar, as it implied that the two are by nature distinct and independent. Burleigh also points out that the lack of internal machinery for reform under Establishment was a major contributing factor to the explosion in non-confirmity in England in the 18th and 19th centuries: “the Anglican Church was like any old-fashioned corporate monopoly faced with energetic competition from rivals who had a more flexible and imaginative understanding of existing or potential markets within a wider context characterised by tentative religious toleration.” As an evangelical Anglican myself, I find this analysis fascinating. As an ecclesiastical system, Anglicanism is incredibly flexible and able to coherently accommodate a much wider range of theological positions and local cultural expressions than most other streams of Christianity. The fact that this flexibility could be so effectively ossified in Georgian England is a strong indicator of how damaging it is for Christianity to be too closely identified with the state. Christian Nationalism is not a position I have much sympathy for!
In the next three chapters, Burleigh considers two major political religions that emerged in the 19th Century: nationalism and socialism. Nationalism tends to be “constructed, from a selection of pre-existing components, such as institutions, landscapes, language, law and, not least, local experience of the coming of Christianity, as well as the more rehearsed area of myth and memory, that compose peoples’ historical identities.” Using Germany as an example, Burleigh shows that changes in cultural Christianity (a rise in pietistic religion heavily influenced by Romanticism, emphasising feeling over content, heart over head) had a significant influence on the increase of nationalistic consciousness. He concludes that, “Pietism contributed to a spiritual climate in which such collectives as the nation became vehicles of intensified worship…as the ideal medium between individual and humanity, nations were the means whereby the individual achieved fulfilment, their flourishing the route by which humanity would achieve perfection too.” Some of the dark potential consequences of making the nation an end in itself were seen in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and ultimately in the 20th-century European dictatorships. Shifting his focus, Burleigh comments that, “The nineteenth century witnessed several attempts to reconcile religion with the dual imperatives of order and progress, through the medium of a new generation of secular religions…Some, like liberalism, are mercifully still with us, while others - such as scientism and Marxist socialism - have taken a battering.” More pointedly, he remarks that, “The nineteenth-century alternatives to Christianity were not the tranquiliser, shopping mall, soap opera and spectator sports that arch-bishops, moralists and pessimists worry about today, but a quest for a more plausibly up-to-date social religion without which, it was feared, societies would descend into anarchy, barbarism and immorality.” He contends that the debt that Marxist-Socialism and Communism owe to religion has tended to be “under-emphasised by historians who are sympathetic to ‘scientific’ socialism and resistant to the rather separate notion that Marxism was a religiously inspired mythopoetic drama carefully camouflaged within various scientific-sounding accretions.” The last chapter in this section takes a fascinating and quite terrifying look at pre-Bolshevik revolutionaries and terrorists in nineteenth-century Russia. The parallels with explicitly religious and violent fanatics of our day are striking, even where the ideology is framed with secular or pseudo-scientific language. As with Nationalism, when elevated to be an object of worship these ostensibly utopian and humanitarian ideals led their adherents into an orgy of destruction, persecution and murder.
The final three chapters gallop through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the growth of the secular state and especially in the context of the industrial revolution. The final chapter reviews the years leading up to the First World War, and sets the stage for the rise of the European dictatorships, which are the main subject of Burleigh's follow-up, Sacred Causes. He begins by helpfully summarising that, “The nineteenth century commenced with the near universality of the confessional state under which one religion, or Christian denomination, was privileged by the state, while other denominations and religions were tolerated at best. By the century's close, these arrangements had been abandoned, or modified, almost beyond recognition. This was done either to accommodate dissenters and religious minorities, or as a result of sustained assaults from liberal and radical anticlericals, either acting alone as in the French Third Republic or, as in Bismarck's Germany, in temporary alliance with the far from liberal wielder of state power. These clashes, many of which endured for decades, largely established the formal framework within which state and Church, or, to be more punctilious, faith groups, operate in Europe to this day.” Why is this relevant? Simply, because “the consequences are important for understanding how we choose to live now; on an optimistic reading, these developments have enabled Europe's Churches to rediscover their spiritual and social mission within a free market of opinion, while states have been liberated from the sometimes deleterious influences that over-mighty religions exert on semi-formed states elsewhere.” As well as the events in France and Germany mentioned above, Burleugh also examines the (unsuccessful) attempts to disestablish the Church of England and the increasing punctiliousness of the papacy in relation to the new Italian state, most notably with Pius IX declaring a doctrine of papal infallibility in 1864. Generally, despite different notices and methods, European nation states sought to flex their muscles as such and to shake off much of the influence previously exerted by Christian denominations. In parallel, they sought to retain the undoubted benefits of Christianity belief for social stability and civic virtue though increasingly the Christian content was emptied out, leaving behind a husk of humanistic morality. Generally, Burleigh is more favourable in his assessment of the Roman Catholic church during this period, and sceptical of both the sincerity and wisdom of the Protestant denominations. This is undoubtedly an authorial bias, but it doesn’t intrude too much into the flow of his narrative. He drives home his point about political religions by highlighting the often universalistic and morally charged pronouncements of the European nation states, especially in Republican France and in Bismarck’s Germany. Interestingly, this also had an impact on the imperialism of the period: if values such as those of the French Revolution were universally valid then it was imperative to seek “to impose them at home and export them abroad.”
Turning to Germany and looking ahead to the rise of facism, Burleigh asks and answers an important question: “Outsiders, who are routinely deaf to the nuances of religion in Germany, are often perplexed as to how Nazism could have taken root in a Christian nation, without over-troubling themselves with the question whether one part of that proposition is true…the extent to which Protestantism had become polluted with antisemitism and chauvinism, at the expense of traditional Christian values…They were no longer even necessary to the maintenance of external social respectability, which could just as easily be accrued from attendance at a classical concert or public lecture. Enormous credulity was shown towards a vulgar scientism.” Again, he points out that, “the world of socialism was not so free of the grasp of the Churches as it pretended. The guiding vision of the collapse of capitalism and the advent of a classless, ideal society owed a great deal to Christian eschatology…the power of socialism was in no small measure due to the fact that this doctrine is in a position to create a mood, which is similar to the mood in many religious sects, which put all their hopes in a great day of wrath and joy…Aside from the ultimate vision, the comrades' world was informed by a high sense of moral purpose and self-sacrifice, by absolute adhesion to a set of incontrovertible dogmas, as relayed by the Party prophets with the aid of sacred screeds, and by a radical intolerance of any heretical, let alone opposed, point of view.” The hollowing out of residual national Christianity was helped greatly by the experience of the Great War. One British officer spoke for many when he commented that, “The religion of ninety per cent of the men at the front is not distinctively Christian, but a religion of patriotism and of valour, tinged with chivalry, and at the best merely coloured with sentiment and emotion borrowed from Christianity.”
Burleigh closes with an ominous paragraph, foreshadowing the theme of his follow-up volume: “The Great War, the domestic and international civil wars, and economic dislocation that followed it, gave rise to mass despair, to which the solution appeared to be various forms of authoritarianism. In some countries authoritarian regimes were successfully supplanted by sinister movements that tapped into more atavistic levels of the human psyche, although in Italy the transition was from democracy to Fascism. These political religions threatened either to eradicate Christianity entirely, as the Bolsheviks sought to do in Russia, or perhaps worse, offered to accommodate it, within the new dispensations of Fascism and Nazism, which had themselves adopted many of the outward forms of Europe's old religion.”
I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as Sacred Causes: in parts, it was quite stodgy and assumed a lot of knowledge of the period on the part of the reader. I also found the last couple of chapters quite hard going and felt that the book lost some coherence at that point. That said, overall this is an excellent and thorough overview of the rise of political religions in Europe, and provides lots of useful context in thinking through where we find ourselves today in terms of the post-Christian secularised state. Understanding the extent to which such states are dependent on and have grown out of a Christian past is crucial, and much too readily forgotten.
September 6, 2007
When the European Union made its first attempt at creating a constitution a few years ago, the drafters of the document rejected a proposal to make reference to Europe's Christian heritage. Earthly Powers is an exploration of the conflict between religion and secular politics as it played out in Europe from the French Revolution to the First World War, and shows how secular politics came to assume many of the societal roles previously played by the church, particularly in such fields as education.
I found the book challenging: Michael Burleigh presents a wide-ranging survey of European political and social history, and while I am broadly familiar with the period that Burleigh covers, he discusses many individuals and movements with which I am thoroughly unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity probably explains why I struggled with the book initially: I have read Burleigh's previous writings on the Third Reich, and had no trouble with his prose style as he addressed a more familiar set of characters and events. Ultimately, though, I found Earthly Powers to be a satisfying exploration of the subject, and I look forward to his follow-up, in which he takes the story up to the present day and offers speculations on the future of "post-Christian" Europe, including what role religion may have to play.
I found the book challenging: Michael Burleigh presents a wide-ranging survey of European political and social history, and while I am broadly familiar with the period that Burleigh covers, he discusses many individuals and movements with which I am thoroughly unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity probably explains why I struggled with the book initially: I have read Burleigh's previous writings on the Third Reich, and had no trouble with his prose style as he addressed a more familiar set of characters and events. Ultimately, though, I found Earthly Powers to be a satisfying exploration of the subject, and I look forward to his follow-up, in which he takes the story up to the present day and offers speculations on the future of "post-Christian" Europe, including what role religion may have to play.
August 13, 2016
Don't know the original version in English but it's translation to Spanish has the effect of the most powerful sleeping pill ever invented! :)
I gave the book more than 5 chances wondering if it was me already tired after the day's journey but it's definitely not my tiredness. I find the writing unnecessarily complex, un-linear and un-concrete.
I swapped the book for "The birth of the modern world" from C. A. Bayly which covers about the same period in history... Let's see.
I gave the book more than 5 chances wondering if it was me already tired after the day's journey but it's definitely not my tiredness. I find the writing unnecessarily complex, un-linear and un-concrete.
I swapped the book for "The birth of the modern world" from C. A. Bayly which covers about the same period in history... Let's see.
Read
August 3, 2011I found this book quite stodgy. The later chapters were full of details about the protestant and catholic churches accomodations with the state (antidisestablishmentarianism) and social movements and the approach to the First World War and also the more extreme actions of 19th century Russian revolutionaires. But the details didn't appear to congregate to much in a way of an arguement.
November 17, 2013
Having read blood and rage and being struck with a worry that this might be another right wing polemic I am happy to report that Burleigh keeps his hair on and at least maks an attempt to be impartial. The result is an interesting well written account of the interchanging role of religion and politics in the lives of the average citizen of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
October 1, 2025
Although fascinating and stimulating 'Earthly Powers' is deeply, problematically flawed.
"With earthly powers, Michael Burleigh has written a serious, ambitious survey of the complex ways religion and politics interacted in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War. He wants to remind readers of Christianity’s profound influence on the West and to demonstrate that the ideals of the Enlightenment were imperfectly realized by regimes that invoked them. Aghast at the modern record of human cruelty, the British historian thinks religious beliefs and practices make people kinder and less bloody-minded. Of course, religious convictions can and do inform civic conduct, often to noble purpose, but churches themselves are earthly powers, too, supported, organized, and administered by earthly creatures. Burleigh is free to prefer persons who claim supernatural justifications, but he does not demonstrate that they behave better than those who do not.
"Throughout the book, he indulges his disdain for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By beginning in 1789, Burleigh conveniently omits Henry VIII, Thomas and Oliver Cromwell, and Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. Thus, for example, he condemns the French seizure of Church lands without considering whether this redistribution—which in England arguably favored a market economy and representative government—had the same effect in France. And if not, why not?
"In discussing the Revolution, he grievously slights Alexis de Tocqueville, mentioning him only to evoke al-Qaeda. In a chapter in The Old Regime and the Revolution on the universal rights of man, Tocqueville does, in passing, compare the revolutionary armies with the Islamic armies, but a few pages earlier, he had written that the memory of the Revolution will forever trouble the sleep of tyrants. Burleigh says nothing of Tocqueville’s belief that liberty delivers individuals from moral isolation and teaches them to regard others as familiars, as semblables. Nor does he report Tocqueville’s conviction, based on his American travels, that religion flourishes when freed from state sponsorship.
"Burleigh recounts the struggles and accommodations of the papacy with Napoleon and successive French governments, as well as with the Risorgimento whose importunities pain him, and with the countries that would become, in 1914, the Central Powers. He does not conceal or question the Vatican’s willingness to produce an Imperial Catechism and several subsequent catechisms enjoining submission to the prevailing regime. He reports the dismay with which some of the faithful met the Syllabus of Errors and the proclamation of infallibility, but he never criticizes any pope as he does secular leaders. And so, in his account of the Dreyfus case, Leo XIII had “reservations” about the officer’s guilt which led him to tell Le Figaro, “Happy the victim whom God recognizes as just enough to join with His own Son in sacrifice.” Kindly meant, no doubt, but little comfort to a Jew on Devil’s Island. Burleigh insists that whatever the virulently anti-Semitic Assumptionists had to say, “it was not said with the pope’s approval.” But would clerics in holy orders have acted with his disapproval?
"Burleigh is better on Britain and Germany. He sees that England had an established church but de facto religious pluralism, in keeping with competing reforms offered by Tories and Whigs. The Methodist Revival prevented revolution by promising joy in the next world to the poor, as well as by teaching them to address public meetings, form national organizations, and become the Labour Party at prayer. No religion in Britain could plausibly claim a monopoly on truth or charity, inasmuch as countless voluntary associations undertook good works.
"He also understands judiciously the peril of Gott mit uns nationalism. “The authorities of Imperial Germany were not the Gestapo,” he acknowledges. But unlike England’s cleavages, Germany’s divisions did not serve it well. The “marriage of iron and rye” between industrial and rural elites prevented competition for working class allies. Protestants and Catholics, let alone Jews and secular socialists, were in many ways alien to each other. Burleigh recounts that when the Kulturkampf abated, the Center Party—the Catholic party in the Reichstag— “voted for the extension of the defense budget,” but he does not explain the significance. Bismarck wanted to dispense with a yearly vote on military appropriations, and the Catholics supported him. They could not or would not make common cause with liberals and socialists to constrain the executive through the power of the purse. Of course, virtually all parties sought boons from the Chancellor rather than coalitions in the Reichstag, but Burleigh finds no ominous signs here. Yet in March 1933, the Center Party voted en bloc for the Enabling Act, allowing Hitler to rule by decree. In neither case could Catholics alone have thwarted the Chancellor, but Burleigh’s overall argument for the unqualified superiority of Christian over civic virtue again fails to persuade.
"His moral imagination is too limited. Burleigh respects secular ethics in England and Germany, but not in France. He recognizes that many Victorians felt a sense of duty distinct from religion. He honors the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie’s Kantian scruples and even the “high moral purpose” of German socialists. But he has nothing but contempt for French republicans’ pur et dur stoicism or for French socialists, like Jean Jaurès, who saw the rights of man as not diversionary but essential to their purpose. Burleigh judges the French separation of church and state in 1905 to be wholly amoral, writing that “the new law denied that the state existed for other than material goods.” Yet this is simply untrue, as even contemporary Catholics attested. For Charles Péguy, a Catholic dreyfusard, Christianity venerated saints, and republicanism honored heroes, but both traditions could inspire self-sacrifice and love of others.
"The Russian sections of the book are its weakest. Burleigh relies heavily on Dostoyevsky rather than on social or economic evidence. Moreover, he finds it “breathtaking” that Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861—as if poverty or servility could be eliminated by fiat. He contrasts the Tsar’s action favorably with efforts in America, where “slavery, and then racial segregation, lingered…into the 1960s.” He is unaware that a French radical from the Vendée predicted Reconstruction would fail. Georges Clemenceau, in exile in the United States during the Second Empire, reported to incredulous French readers that “all land has been left in the hands of the former rebels.”
"Curiously, too, despite his preference for piety, Burleigh seems uninterested in examinations of religious experience. He dismisses The Protestant Ethic as “self-congratulation,” although Max Weber was genuinely curious about ways in which religion shaped conduct—in this case, why belief in predestination encouraged effort, not passivity. And from Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, a remarkable effort to ground logical and moral categories in shared social experience, Burleigh plucks one word, “effervescence,” “out of which Fascism and Nazism would flow.” He does not see the essential Burkeanism in Durkheim’s idea of a polity where common beliefs are “the result of an immense cooperation” through time and space, in which “a multitude of minds have associated.”
"Ending with 1914, Burleigh utters portentous warnings about “political religion” and the slippery slope from the Jacobins to Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, which he promises to take up in a second volume. In it, one hopes, the author will not overlook the means through which Hitler and Stalin seized and consolidated power. Germany did not succumb to Hitler from an excess of Aufklärung. Nor is Stalin best understood as a zealot for human perfectibility. The Bolsheviks inherited a vast oppressive apparatus from the Tsars whom Burleigh admires, and the Nazis rose through a series of political deals, including accommodations with Catholics. To ignore such continuities would be bad history.
"However well-intentioned, Michael Burleigh fails to see that democratic politics is based in large measure on citizens’ shared principles and memories, which they may interpret differently but which are accessible to all. People may hold religious traditions in common as part of this, but democracies cannot defer to revelation, nor does Burleigh provide any convincing reason that they should."
"With earthly powers, Michael Burleigh has written a serious, ambitious survey of the complex ways religion and politics interacted in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War. He wants to remind readers of Christianity’s profound influence on the West and to demonstrate that the ideals of the Enlightenment were imperfectly realized by regimes that invoked them. Aghast at the modern record of human cruelty, the British historian thinks religious beliefs and practices make people kinder and less bloody-minded. Of course, religious convictions can and do inform civic conduct, often to noble purpose, but churches themselves are earthly powers, too, supported, organized, and administered by earthly creatures. Burleigh is free to prefer persons who claim supernatural justifications, but he does not demonstrate that they behave better than those who do not.
"Throughout the book, he indulges his disdain for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By beginning in 1789, Burleigh conveniently omits Henry VIII, Thomas and Oliver Cromwell, and Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. Thus, for example, he condemns the French seizure of Church lands without considering whether this redistribution—which in England arguably favored a market economy and representative government—had the same effect in France. And if not, why not?
"In discussing the Revolution, he grievously slights Alexis de Tocqueville, mentioning him only to evoke al-Qaeda. In a chapter in The Old Regime and the Revolution on the universal rights of man, Tocqueville does, in passing, compare the revolutionary armies with the Islamic armies, but a few pages earlier, he had written that the memory of the Revolution will forever trouble the sleep of tyrants. Burleigh says nothing of Tocqueville’s belief that liberty delivers individuals from moral isolation and teaches them to regard others as familiars, as semblables. Nor does he report Tocqueville’s conviction, based on his American travels, that religion flourishes when freed from state sponsorship.
"Burleigh recounts the struggles and accommodations of the papacy with Napoleon and successive French governments, as well as with the Risorgimento whose importunities pain him, and with the countries that would become, in 1914, the Central Powers. He does not conceal or question the Vatican’s willingness to produce an Imperial Catechism and several subsequent catechisms enjoining submission to the prevailing regime. He reports the dismay with which some of the faithful met the Syllabus of Errors and the proclamation of infallibility, but he never criticizes any pope as he does secular leaders. And so, in his account of the Dreyfus case, Leo XIII had “reservations” about the officer’s guilt which led him to tell Le Figaro, “Happy the victim whom God recognizes as just enough to join with His own Son in sacrifice.” Kindly meant, no doubt, but little comfort to a Jew on Devil’s Island. Burleigh insists that whatever the virulently anti-Semitic Assumptionists had to say, “it was not said with the pope’s approval.” But would clerics in holy orders have acted with his disapproval?
"Burleigh is better on Britain and Germany. He sees that England had an established church but de facto religious pluralism, in keeping with competing reforms offered by Tories and Whigs. The Methodist Revival prevented revolution by promising joy in the next world to the poor, as well as by teaching them to address public meetings, form national organizations, and become the Labour Party at prayer. No religion in Britain could plausibly claim a monopoly on truth or charity, inasmuch as countless voluntary associations undertook good works.
"He also understands judiciously the peril of Gott mit uns nationalism. “The authorities of Imperial Germany were not the Gestapo,” he acknowledges. But unlike England’s cleavages, Germany’s divisions did not serve it well. The “marriage of iron and rye” between industrial and rural elites prevented competition for working class allies. Protestants and Catholics, let alone Jews and secular socialists, were in many ways alien to each other. Burleigh recounts that when the Kulturkampf abated, the Center Party—the Catholic party in the Reichstag— “voted for the extension of the defense budget,” but he does not explain the significance. Bismarck wanted to dispense with a yearly vote on military appropriations, and the Catholics supported him. They could not or would not make common cause with liberals and socialists to constrain the executive through the power of the purse. Of course, virtually all parties sought boons from the Chancellor rather than coalitions in the Reichstag, but Burleigh finds no ominous signs here. Yet in March 1933, the Center Party voted en bloc for the Enabling Act, allowing Hitler to rule by decree. In neither case could Catholics alone have thwarted the Chancellor, but Burleigh’s overall argument for the unqualified superiority of Christian over civic virtue again fails to persuade.
"His moral imagination is too limited. Burleigh respects secular ethics in England and Germany, but not in France. He recognizes that many Victorians felt a sense of duty distinct from religion. He honors the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie’s Kantian scruples and even the “high moral purpose” of German socialists. But he has nothing but contempt for French republicans’ pur et dur stoicism or for French socialists, like Jean Jaurès, who saw the rights of man as not diversionary but essential to their purpose. Burleigh judges the French separation of church and state in 1905 to be wholly amoral, writing that “the new law denied that the state existed for other than material goods.” Yet this is simply untrue, as even contemporary Catholics attested. For Charles Péguy, a Catholic dreyfusard, Christianity venerated saints, and republicanism honored heroes, but both traditions could inspire self-sacrifice and love of others.
"The Russian sections of the book are its weakest. Burleigh relies heavily on Dostoyevsky rather than on social or economic evidence. Moreover, he finds it “breathtaking” that Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861—as if poverty or servility could be eliminated by fiat. He contrasts the Tsar’s action favorably with efforts in America, where “slavery, and then racial segregation, lingered…into the 1960s.” He is unaware that a French radical from the Vendée predicted Reconstruction would fail. Georges Clemenceau, in exile in the United States during the Second Empire, reported to incredulous French readers that “all land has been left in the hands of the former rebels.”
"Curiously, too, despite his preference for piety, Burleigh seems uninterested in examinations of religious experience. He dismisses The Protestant Ethic as “self-congratulation,” although Max Weber was genuinely curious about ways in which religion shaped conduct—in this case, why belief in predestination encouraged effort, not passivity. And from Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, a remarkable effort to ground logical and moral categories in shared social experience, Burleigh plucks one word, “effervescence,” “out of which Fascism and Nazism would flow.” He does not see the essential Burkeanism in Durkheim’s idea of a polity where common beliefs are “the result of an immense cooperation” through time and space, in which “a multitude of minds have associated.”
"Ending with 1914, Burleigh utters portentous warnings about “political religion” and the slippery slope from the Jacobins to Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, which he promises to take up in a second volume. In it, one hopes, the author will not overlook the means through which Hitler and Stalin seized and consolidated power. Germany did not succumb to Hitler from an excess of Aufklärung. Nor is Stalin best understood as a zealot for human perfectibility. The Bolsheviks inherited a vast oppressive apparatus from the Tsars whom Burleigh admires, and the Nazis rose through a series of political deals, including accommodations with Catholics. To ignore such continuities would be bad history.
"However well-intentioned, Michael Burleigh fails to see that democratic politics is based in large measure on citizens’ shared principles and memories, which they may interpret differently but which are accessible to all. People may hold religious traditions in common as part of this, but democracies cannot defer to revelation, nor does Burleigh provide any convincing reason that they should."
December 6, 2016
I can't say I liked this one. It provides a good history of the century or so between the French Revolution and the Great War, but the tone of the book is often more judgmental than analytical, hinting at the author's biases without providing any explanations for them. His overarching point that nationalistic and ideological movements are effectively religions is, I think, a stretch. Yes, they are religion-like. When they gain power, they exhibit some of the worst characteristics of religions. They become dogmatic. They persecute (and sometimes execute) dissenters. They develop rites, rituals, slogans, and holidays. They indulge in propaganda and indoctrination. They idolize their leaders and honor their martyrs.... But religion requires something in addition to all that. It needs to have some mystical, ethereal, supernatural, magical, or metaphysical aspect. I'm not sure things like the French Revolution or various nationalistic movements have enough of these to qualify.
What is interesting is a point the author does not make. Regardless of how noble, how insightful, or how enlightened the founding principles of a movement may be, when it gains followers and influence, it degenerates to become, well, religion-like. This may be an effect of something inherent in human behavior. People, as individuals, can exhibit clear, logical thinking, at least on specific tasks for short periods. But in groups, and over time, insanity reigns. Despite our pretenses, humans are not rational animals.
What is interesting is a point the author does not make. Regardless of how noble, how insightful, or how enlightened the founding principles of a movement may be, when it gains followers and influence, it degenerates to become, well, religion-like. This may be an effect of something inherent in human behavior. People, as individuals, can exhibit clear, logical thinking, at least on specific tasks for short periods. But in groups, and over time, insanity reigns. Despite our pretenses, humans are not rational animals.
January 24, 2024
interesting and problematic
---
Amazone
Relevant to today
This book gives some insight into how we got to today's political and religious scene. You can even make some parallels showing that we really are not much diffenent that we were 150 to 200 years ago.
George Jensen
.......
Separation of Church and State?
In this book, Burleigh examines the historical relationship between church and state in the context of modern revolution and change. His thesis that the modern state has emerged the dominant political player in society by borrowing from the Catholic Church its religious capacity to appeal to the masses.
Most political movements, from communism to capitalism, carry with them a certain religious value that invokes the assistance of spiritual power in the fulfilment of their mission. This zeal, coupled with the force of nationalism, has allowed the politician, rather than the cleric, to set agendas for war, reform, and cultural re-alignment. In all this, the church has not always willingly gone along for the ride in yielding the field to secularism.
Burleigh seems to think that modern politicos have conveniently developed their own brand of religious politics that extends a minor role to mainline churches as a way of stabilizing society. This is a very readable study that should challenge the reader to revisit the old notion of separation of church and state.
Ian Gordon Malcomson
---
Amazone
Relevant to today
This book gives some insight into how we got to today's political and religious scene. You can even make some parallels showing that we really are not much diffenent that we were 150 to 200 years ago.
George Jensen
.......
Separation of Church and State?
In this book, Burleigh examines the historical relationship between church and state in the context of modern revolution and change. His thesis that the modern state has emerged the dominant political player in society by borrowing from the Catholic Church its religious capacity to appeal to the masses.
Most political movements, from communism to capitalism, carry with them a certain religious value that invokes the assistance of spiritual power in the fulfilment of their mission. This zeal, coupled with the force of nationalism, has allowed the politician, rather than the cleric, to set agendas for war, reform, and cultural re-alignment. In all this, the church has not always willingly gone along for the ride in yielding the field to secularism.
Burleigh seems to think that modern politicos have conveniently developed their own brand of religious politics that extends a minor role to mainline churches as a way of stabilizing society. This is a very readable study that should challenge the reader to revisit the old notion of separation of church and state.
Ian Gordon Malcomson
June 11, 2017
Burleigh expected me to have profound prescience of French national history. To my regret, I don't.
Made this a hard read.
Made this a hard read.
August 1, 2015
Na enkele keren het boek te hebben opgepakt, heb ik eindelijk de tijd gevonden om tot het eind door te lezen.
Eigen aan het christendom is de bekende uitspraak van Christus toen hij werd gevraagd naar zijn houding tegenover de Romeinse overheid: 'Geef wat van de keizer is aan de keizer, en geef aan God wat God toebehoort.'
Eerdere utopische experimenten zoals Campanella, More en Jan van Leiden trachten de hemel op aarde te transponeren. De stap van de studietafel naar de werkelijkheid bleek enkel haalbaar met het nodige geweld.
Verdeeldheid in het christelijke huis door de opkomst van het protestantisme, ondergroeven de positie van de Katholieke Kerk, chronologisch gezien in Engeland, Duitsland en Frankrijk. Vaak wordt ook verwezen naar de rol van de joden en de opkomst van de vrijmetselarij, ideologisch gestut door de Verlichting.
Burleigh schetst bijvoorbeeld de verdeeldheid tussen de jezuïeten en de jansenisten. De Franse Revolutie trachtte met bloed de Kerk in te kapselen in een Frans-republikeinse traditie. Het land werd sindsdien verdeeld tussen links-rechts, katholiek-seculier, monarchist-republikein zonder dat de kampen zo homogeen waren als wordt beweerd. Bonald en Maistre passeren de revue. Langs links werd onder de vlag van de tricolore republiek de macht van de Kerk (onderwijs!) in te perken. De zaak-Dreyfus duikt op, waarbij de schrijver vooral de rol van het leger benadrukt in het anti-kamp, eerder dan de Kerk. Daarna komt ook Action Française om de hoek kijken. De pennen en daarna de zwaarden worden gewet in aanloop van de Eerste Wereldoorlog.
In Engeland is de Katholieke Kerk eerder gemarginaliseerd en geassocieerd met de Ierse aanwezigheid. De Industriële Revolutie en verstedelijking doen de aanwezigheid op de wekelijkse diensten afnemen. Maar dankzij de Victoriaanse periode wordt de moraal (vaak dus ontdaan hun religieuze context) hoog gehouden, zelfs bij socialisten als Robert Owen. En vele sociale initiatieven in de schoot van het Engelse christendom (Leger des Heils en andere) hebben aandacht voor de armoede, in Vlaanderen verbonden met de figuur van priester Daens.
Duitsland was door de Dertigjarige Oorlog zwaar getroffen door de tegenstelling katholiek-protestant. De figuur van Bismarck die het gewicht van het protestantse Pruisen liet doorwegen en het vijandsbeeld van de katholieke Oostenrijk, deden de katholieke Beiers en Rijnlanders in de politieke marge verdwijnen. De zogenaamde Kulturkampf. De wisselende bondgenootschappen (onder andere tegen het socialisme) schiepen kansen. Verbazingwekkend dat op 1914 de keizer iedereen op dezelfde lijn kreeg. Marx en Engels liepen niet ver met hun internationalistische boodschap.
In Rusland was het politieke geweld vanwege anarchisten naar West-Europese normen ongezien. Tegelijk had geen enkel Europees land een sterker cultureel figuur dan Dostojevski in zijn rangen om tegengewicht te bieden aan het opduikende nihilisme. "Boze Geesten" blijft het basiswerk voor wie de gevaren van de politieke revolutie wil leren kennen.
Tussendoor zien we ook het driemanschap Mazzini-Garibaldi-Cavour de strijd aan te gaan met de paus, Frankrijk en uiteraard Oostenrijk. In de poging om het verdeelde land te verenigen. Zelfs in deze kringen trachtte waar mogelijk het katholieke geloof te gebruiken om het nationale gevoel te schragen.
Het vervolg "Heilige Doelen" ligt al klaar...
Eigen aan het christendom is de bekende uitspraak van Christus toen hij werd gevraagd naar zijn houding tegenover de Romeinse overheid: 'Geef wat van de keizer is aan de keizer, en geef aan God wat God toebehoort.'
Eerdere utopische experimenten zoals Campanella, More en Jan van Leiden trachten de hemel op aarde te transponeren. De stap van de studietafel naar de werkelijkheid bleek enkel haalbaar met het nodige geweld.
Verdeeldheid in het christelijke huis door de opkomst van het protestantisme, ondergroeven de positie van de Katholieke Kerk, chronologisch gezien in Engeland, Duitsland en Frankrijk. Vaak wordt ook verwezen naar de rol van de joden en de opkomst van de vrijmetselarij, ideologisch gestut door de Verlichting.
Burleigh schetst bijvoorbeeld de verdeeldheid tussen de jezuïeten en de jansenisten. De Franse Revolutie trachtte met bloed de Kerk in te kapselen in een Frans-republikeinse traditie. Het land werd sindsdien verdeeld tussen links-rechts, katholiek-seculier, monarchist-republikein zonder dat de kampen zo homogeen waren als wordt beweerd. Bonald en Maistre passeren de revue. Langs links werd onder de vlag van de tricolore republiek de macht van de Kerk (onderwijs!) in te perken. De zaak-Dreyfus duikt op, waarbij de schrijver vooral de rol van het leger benadrukt in het anti-kamp, eerder dan de Kerk. Daarna komt ook Action Française om de hoek kijken. De pennen en daarna de zwaarden worden gewet in aanloop van de Eerste Wereldoorlog.
In Engeland is de Katholieke Kerk eerder gemarginaliseerd en geassocieerd met de Ierse aanwezigheid. De Industriële Revolutie en verstedelijking doen de aanwezigheid op de wekelijkse diensten afnemen. Maar dankzij de Victoriaanse periode wordt de moraal (vaak dus ontdaan hun religieuze context) hoog gehouden, zelfs bij socialisten als Robert Owen. En vele sociale initiatieven in de schoot van het Engelse christendom (Leger des Heils en andere) hebben aandacht voor de armoede, in Vlaanderen verbonden met de figuur van priester Daens.
Duitsland was door de Dertigjarige Oorlog zwaar getroffen door de tegenstelling katholiek-protestant. De figuur van Bismarck die het gewicht van het protestantse Pruisen liet doorwegen en het vijandsbeeld van de katholieke Oostenrijk, deden de katholieke Beiers en Rijnlanders in de politieke marge verdwijnen. De zogenaamde Kulturkampf. De wisselende bondgenootschappen (onder andere tegen het socialisme) schiepen kansen. Verbazingwekkend dat op 1914 de keizer iedereen op dezelfde lijn kreeg. Marx en Engels liepen niet ver met hun internationalistische boodschap.
In Rusland was het politieke geweld vanwege anarchisten naar West-Europese normen ongezien. Tegelijk had geen enkel Europees land een sterker cultureel figuur dan Dostojevski in zijn rangen om tegengewicht te bieden aan het opduikende nihilisme. "Boze Geesten" blijft het basiswerk voor wie de gevaren van de politieke revolutie wil leren kennen.
Tussendoor zien we ook het driemanschap Mazzini-Garibaldi-Cavour de strijd aan te gaan met de paus, Frankrijk en uiteraard Oostenrijk. In de poging om het verdeelde land te verenigen. Zelfs in deze kringen trachtte waar mogelijk het katholieke geloof te gebruiken om het nationale gevoel te schragen.
Het vervolg "Heilige Doelen" ligt al klaar...
January 7, 2025
No one can accuse Mr. Burleigh of being light on details although I'm sure that he's accused of many things. (He probably wouldn't have it any other way.) Burleigh sets out to explore the "clash" between religion and politics from the French Revolution to World War I. The clashing often takes the form of strange mash-ups in which religions take on distinctly political forms or issues or when the politics takes on the manifestations of religion.
It's fascinating to see the Jacobins of the French Revolution create their own cleric-free religion handily called "The Cult of the Supreme Being" or a Roman Catholic priest get kicked out of the church for creating a political role for the Holy See. Some of the collisions between religion and politics Burleigh unearths are amusing - like the utopian socialist writer who imagines a world in which "fairies" cure the jilted of their broken-hearts. Others are just plain disturbing. Humans can't live without some sort of religion, Burleigh seems to be saying, even if we have to make up something truly bizarre to fill the gap.
Burleigh has done his research and has his views, some of which had me nodding my head such as "there is surely something mad about all-consuming political passions" and some that had me wondering what planet he inhabits. I don't care what it's "set beside', the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is not a "modest affaire". I don't know why Burleigh felt the need to do the written equivalent of a drive-by in referring to Beatrice Webb as "ghastly" but I admit to being as amused by that as by the phrase "harpy pawnbroker consort". I get the feeling that if someone declared this book "vast in perversity" (to quote the Vatican's description of a work cited here) Michael Burleigh would be pleased indeed.
Burleigh isn't shy about sharing his opinions but his quirky erudition made this worth the ride for me.I disagreed with many of Burleigh's "conclusions" but for me that's part of the enjoyment of reading a book like this - it's like having a debate with a very opinionate acquaintance. This is not an easy read and it is not for everyone. If you're interested in the topic I'd recommend you read a few pages before buying. Burleigh loves obscure verbs and occasionally presents a quote in the original language without providing translation. (Why he does this sometimes and not others in the same language is a mystery.) Hence my 3-star rating: this is an interesting book that does not transcend its topic.
Recommended for those interested in the topic.
It's fascinating to see the Jacobins of the French Revolution create their own cleric-free religion handily called "The Cult of the Supreme Being" or a Roman Catholic priest get kicked out of the church for creating a political role for the Holy See. Some of the collisions between religion and politics Burleigh unearths are amusing - like the utopian socialist writer who imagines a world in which "fairies" cure the jilted of their broken-hearts. Others are just plain disturbing. Humans can't live without some sort of religion, Burleigh seems to be saying, even if we have to make up something truly bizarre to fill the gap.
Burleigh has done his research and has his views, some of which had me nodding my head such as "there is surely something mad about all-consuming political passions" and some that had me wondering what planet he inhabits. I don't care what it's "set beside', the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is not a "modest affaire". I don't know why Burleigh felt the need to do the written equivalent of a drive-by in referring to Beatrice Webb as "ghastly" but I admit to being as amused by that as by the phrase "harpy pawnbroker consort". I get the feeling that if someone declared this book "vast in perversity" (to quote the Vatican's description of a work cited here) Michael Burleigh would be pleased indeed.
Burleigh isn't shy about sharing his opinions but his quirky erudition made this worth the ride for me.I disagreed with many of Burleigh's "conclusions" but for me that's part of the enjoyment of reading a book like this - it's like having a debate with a very opinionate acquaintance. This is not an easy read and it is not for everyone. If you're interested in the topic I'd recommend you read a few pages before buying. Burleigh loves obscure verbs and occasionally presents a quote in the original language without providing translation. (Why he does this sometimes and not others in the same language is a mystery.) Hence my 3-star rating: this is an interesting book that does not transcend its topic.
Recommended for those interested in the topic.
June 24, 2013
I first sensed there was something strange with this book when I read the part where Mr. Burleigh describes the Catholic Jezuit order as being liberal and flexible, not two traits commonly associated with this order. On reading further the Catholic bias only became stronger. Trials, torture and execution by Catholics are described as trivial incidents (including the horrors of the Inquisition) whereas the crimes executed by the revolutionaries during the French Revolution are phrased in words of horror and disgust (as they should be).
On reading several interviews with this writer I found him to be a very conservative Catholic apologist with extreme opinions on the role of Catholicism and Protestantism throughout history. In one interview he goes so far as to say that Catholicism was the defense against fascism during World War 2 whereas Protestants were exceptionally susceptible to the temptations of Fascism. No mention of course of fascism in Catholic countries like Italy and Spain. The widely criticized role of the Catholic Church during this war is dismissed as being the only pragmatic stance possible.
I have no problem with reading works of conservative thinkers (I am an admirer of the books of John Gray - who Mr. Burleigh dismisses as a one-language writer who doesn't know his sources) but this extreme bias makes this book worthless as a work of history. There is no way to know where Mr. Burleigh is accurately describing events and where his personal views distort the picture.
In the introduction the writer quotes his editor as saying that he (the writer) has a problem writing narrative because he write books on ideas. Frankly, the lack of ideas is one of the most striking characteristics of this book. The writing plods from one description to the next in a less than coherent fashion. Burleigh mentions many unimportant details, often with a sort of 'tongue-in-cheek' attitude, especially, I think, to make his 'bad guys' look worse. Well, humor is not this writer's strong point. And really, must we be told that Marat suffered from Psoriasis, three times!
On reading several interviews with this writer I found him to be a very conservative Catholic apologist with extreme opinions on the role of Catholicism and Protestantism throughout history. In one interview he goes so far as to say that Catholicism was the defense against fascism during World War 2 whereas Protestants were exceptionally susceptible to the temptations of Fascism. No mention of course of fascism in Catholic countries like Italy and Spain. The widely criticized role of the Catholic Church during this war is dismissed as being the only pragmatic stance possible.
I have no problem with reading works of conservative thinkers (I am an admirer of the books of John Gray - who Mr. Burleigh dismisses as a one-language writer who doesn't know his sources) but this extreme bias makes this book worthless as a work of history. There is no way to know where Mr. Burleigh is accurately describing events and where his personal views distort the picture.
In the introduction the writer quotes his editor as saying that he (the writer) has a problem writing narrative because he write books on ideas. Frankly, the lack of ideas is one of the most striking characteristics of this book. The writing plods from one description to the next in a less than coherent fashion. Burleigh mentions many unimportant details, often with a sort of 'tongue-in-cheek' attitude, especially, I think, to make his 'bad guys' look worse. Well, humor is not this writer's strong point. And really, must we be told that Marat suffered from Psoriasis, three times!
July 24, 2008
Fascinating history of the relationship between church and state in a Europe between the French Revolution and World War I. The book's subject matter is quite unique, and I felt that the author was very fair to the church, which is a rarity in academic writing. My only complaint is that he didn't give much insight into why different governments treating churches and religion differently, but that may just be the political scientist in me coming out.
October 11, 2009
As I said earlier, I had the same problem with this as I did with Magical Chorus. It was full of interesting information but just didn't have any narrative "pull." I had to push myself to keep reading. The amount of research he must have done is certainly amazing.
Want to read
May 14, 2010
Read
September 23, 2010"Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh (2007)"
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews