Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (review)

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 In the Marxist account, opponents appear as little more than hopeless repositories of outdated views, ready to be swept into the dustbin of history.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

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

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

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

The arrival of revolution in 1789 proved to the anti-philosophes the truth of all of their arguments. Virtually without exception, the anti-philosophes attacked the revolution as the result of a conspiracy whose outlines they had long foreseen. McMahon shows how in these circumstances his protagonists worked to support the king and church. Sometimes, they were so rigorous in this pursuit that they opposed the actual efforts of those to whom they were dedicated. More generally, they assaulted the revolutionaries, particularly the Jacobins, as corrupt fanatics, infected with individualism and a love of luxury. In this, they sounded exactly the same as when the radicals attacked them. The Terror...