HOLY MADNESS: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1776-1871
There has been no lack of books on the 'Age of Revolution', on the rise of nationalism and on the birth of the modern world. But they have all been strongly marked by simplistic orthodoxies, such as the Marxist view that revolutions were an inevitable part of a great economic process. Or that upheavals took place because people were poor or hungry or downtrodden. These books resolutely ignore such inconvenient truths as that it was not the poor who made the revolutions. They also ignore any underlying spiritual and emotional forces at work. They make only the most superficial connections with the Romantic Movement in literature and the arts, and do not go into its deeply religious undertow.
Holy Madness sets out to make some of these connections. It probes into the psyche that was responsible for so many of the founding events of our modern world, and into the instincts that inspired its most generous and most murderous impulses.
This book explains how the Enlightenment dislodged Christianity from its central position in the life of European societies and how man's quest for ecstasy and transcendence flooded into areas such as the arts, spawning the Romantic movement. The religious themes in art gave way to political and social ones, and art, literature and music became substitute religions, offering solace and the possibility of attaining the sublime. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century this secular quest for salvation also invaded politics, giving rise to a widespread desire to bring into being ideal communities.
This book traces how worship and dedication originally channelled through the church was refocused on the cause of the people and the nation. This dramatic journey which begins in America in 1776 and goes right up to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, takes in the French revolution, the Irish rebellion, the Polish risings, the war of Greek liberation, the Russian insurrection, the Hungarian struggles for freedom, the liberation of South America, and the Italian Risorgimento. Generations of young men struggled and died in a kind of crusade whose Jerusalem was an idealised nation, death in the service of which brought martyrdom and redemption.
On a vast canvas, Zamoyski combines a wonderfully illuminating and thought-provoking exploration of this fascinating theme with portraits of the key people involved: Lafayette, Garibaldi, Lamartine, Kossuth, Mazzini, Napoleon, Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Kościuszko, Coleridge, Byron, Mickiewicz, Bakunin, Rousseau, Wolfe Tone, Bolivar, Herzen and many others.
Extracts from reviews of HOLY MADNESS
“Holy Madness is deceptive, a scholarly work written so attractively that it is easy to miss the deep themes which bring unity and purpose to the book.”
Alan Palmer, Literary Review
“Adam Zamoyski has written a history of revolutions, and of the romantic and sometimes ridiculous revolutionaries who inspired them. But because revolution was so ubiquitous an activity in the 19th century what he has actually produced is a comprehensive account of Western civilisation from 1776 to 1871... Zamoyski manages to flesh out these events with well-chosen detail and a fine sense of the touching comic-heroics they often entailed as well as the blood-letting and the horror...this is thought-provoking and well-made historical writing.”
Adam Roberts, Amazon
“Adam Zamoyski's dashing account of the romantic movement, Holy Madness, is bold narrative history at its most imaginative.”
Michael Ignatieff, Observer
“A benchmark that will revise our reading of this vivid period: that between the onset of the two Industrial Revolutions, between Blake and Balzac, which saw the birth and rise, not just of nationalism, but of internationalism.”
Amanda Hopkinson, Independent on Sunday
“Zamoyski is a fluent and entertaining writer, and has been greatly praised for the style, sweep and authority of his previous books...an ambitious and in many ways brilliant book.”
Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph
“Zamoyski's main narrative is a riveting tale of the standard bearers of nationalism from Jefferson to Garibaldi and from the American War of Independence to the Paris Commune of 1871. He achieves striking effects both through antinomy and a quasi-cinematic montage...a page-turner.”
Frank McLynn, Glasgow Herald
“Adam Zamoyski, thankfully, has done [History] a splendid service. In this provocative book he reveals the vitality and importance of the religious impulse in explaining the revolutions, turmoil and nationalism of the years 1776-1871...The scope of Holy Madness extends from America's fight for independence to the Paris Commune. An exotic collection of fanatics, adventurers, poets and thinkers are brought to life...Readers will be moved by Zamoyski's arrestingly written book to admiration for those often deluded Lafayettes and Garibaldis.”
Robbie Millen, Spectator
“Zamoyski is marvellous the way he develops so many ideas, showing the way that the new patriotism replaces religion and develops its own iconography in overtly religious terms, and the way that this revolutionary patriotism becomes, later, the parent to both fascism and communism.”
Antony Beevor, BBC Radio 4
“Zamoyski's canvas is so huge that sometimes he only skims the surface... But there will be few who will not learn much from him, and the elegance of his style makes him a real pleasure to read.”
John Jolliffe, Independent
“Ambitious, stimulating and disturbing....the parade of heroism and folly he presents makes a riveting spectacle.”
Rupert Christiansen, Sunday Telegraph
“Adam Zamoyski's brilliant book will certainly become a classic of its kind. He covers not just France, Italy and Germany, but the whole of Europe – Spain, Poland, Ireland, Hungary, Russia, the Balkans, not forgetting Greece and, most significantly, America.”
Catholic Times
“Splendidly descriptive, full of music and colour...both charming and learned.”
John Lukacs, Times