Religion, Classical Utopias, and the French Revolution: The Strange Career of a Revolutionary Classicist in the Strange Course of a French Revolution

This article begins with an examination of the conflicting trajectories of utopian thinking in nineteenth century revolutionary thought. More specifically, it examines the role played by idealizing images of Classical Greece in French Revolutionary thought, by playing on the double meaning built into the Greek term for utopia: as an “ideal place” or else as “no place.” Viewed as a non-place, we may notice how idealized portraits of Greek antiquity construct a place that never really existed, and paint a picture of an ideal that is defined by nothing so much as its lack of the problems widely associated with Early Modernity. The article turns next to the career of Antoine Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy (1755–1849), perhaps the most famous Neoclassical art historian in the generation after . The article examines Quatremere’s complex revolutionary career as a way to highlight the political consequences of competing ways of imagining the Classical past and the Neoclassical present.