In the aftermath of the First World War, there was deep cynicism about “the moralistic idealism” that created the slaughterhouse of the Western Front.89 Modern liberalism had come to regard man’s combative nature as an evil, and the chivalrous sentiment as the “false glamour” of war.90 Even before the Enlightenment, of course, many Europeans (and Americans) had learned to despise the values associated with the medieval world. The forces of democracy, secularism, and feminism would discard them altogether.
