As such quasi-Christian sects and societies burgeoned, Byron spoke in 1818 of the Italian yearning for the ‘immortality of independence’. The English poet went on to become a pied piper, seducing bored men into dreams of private glory. He drummed up support for Greek independence among secularized Europeans brought up on a heavy diet of antipathy to Ottoman Turks and reverence for ancient Greece (and himself died, as Alexandre Dumas put it in the overblown style of the age, ‘for the Greeks like another Jesus’). Germans responded to the new Crusade in Greece with particular eagerness, and, like many others, were disillusioned, if not dead, soon after arriving in the land of their dreams (H?lderlin’s 1797 novel Hyperion anticipates their crushing disappointments).
There were rebellions in Spanish American colonies in which the new vocabulary of equality and liberty played a central role. Restless young men from virtually every European country travelled to South America in search of suitably chivalrous and uplifting causes (and usually ended up sacrificing their lives to such fiascos as Simón Bolívar’s attempt to unite the Continent). John Keats was among those tempted to fight in Venezuela. Even John Stuart Mill, emerging from a breakdown, found that Byron’s ‘state of mind’ was too disturbingly like his own, exposing the good life in prospering England as a ‘vapid, uninteresting thing’. Mill later projected his own fear of debility and boredom to modern society as a whole, warning against the dangers of spiritual stagnation.
Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity (1802) had tried to renew the appeal of Catholicism for a new generation. But a return to traditional religion was unlikely in post-Enlightenment France – Voltaire’s scoffing had taken care of that possibility. Robespierre, a priest manqué (in Condorcet’s words), with his religion of the ‘Supreme Being’ had, however, broadened the scope for pseudo-religions; and France, struggling with let-down after the adventures of the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, produced some ambitious schemes for secular salvation in the period between 1815 and 1848.
The most influential of these figures, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, who in 1825 came up with a new universal religion, le Nouveau Christianisme, voiced a general suspicion that the Rights of Man had proved to be deeply inadequate. Society had now to be organized and regenerated in ways other than through the principles of ‘individualism’ – a word to which the Saint-Simonians gave wide currency through their criticism of the crisis of authority in France. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine, writing a hagiography of Joan of Arc during the bleak days of the Bourbon Restoration, hoped for a new spiritual community. Charles Fourier, a travelling salesman, claimed to be the new Messiah, who had unlocked the secret to universal harmony. Saint-Simon’s secretary, Auguste Comte, floated a religion of Positivism. Defining human progress as the transition from theological and metaphysical ways of thinking to the scientific or ‘positive’ one, and outlining a grandiose role for experts, Comte achieved widespread fame, and such unlikely disciples as Turkey’s modernizing autocrat, Atatürk.
*
The scope, opened up by the Enlightenment, for social engineering by rational experts was broadened as the scientific ‘value-neutral’ approach and technocratic ideas began to enter the political realm; they were helped by breakthroughs in modern medicine, which, improving everyday life, made progress seem automatic, and such effective advocates as Saint-Simon, who blended a passion for science and technology with the existing cult of emotion.
Saint-Simon’s disciples, who inherited and expanded a lexicon of pseudo-religious high-mindedness (‘creed’, ‘mission’, ‘universal association’, ‘humanity’), turned out to be a diverse and prominent lot; they ranged from people hailing Jews for creating ‘industrial and political links among peoples’ and India’s sensuous goddesses and androgynous gods to Pierre Leroux, who inaugurated modern ideological journalism with his newspaper, The Globe. Another Saint-Simonian, Suzanne Voilquin, a working-class woman, travelled in the 1830s to Egypt (where she assumed Arab male dress), America and Russia with her message of female empowerment.
The French revolutionaries had done little for women; their general attitude was summed up by the leading radical newspaper Les Revolutions de Paris, which advised women to stay home and ‘knit trousers for our brave sansculottes’. But revolutionary feminists were well represented among the followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon; the sheer novelty and audacity of their claims made them seem ultra-radical. George Sand, probably the most influential European woman of her age, offered a romantic version of female emancipation, basing it on the rights of the heart. But this was also the time when even the most modulated demands for female liberty were met with furious sexual epithets from men in public life, attesting to a profound anxiety about their own muddy self-definition.
Napoleon’s martial ethos and brazen misogyny were largely responsible for this (unsurprisingly, France did not give women the vote until after the Second World War). Asked by Madame de Sta?l, his most tenacious and influential critic, who he thought was the greatest woman in history, Napoleon replied, ‘The one, Madame, who has the most children.’ On another occasion he examined her décolletage and asked her whether she breast-fed her children; he also pulped Madame de Sta?l’s book on Germany, declaring it to be anti-French.
Even the sophisticated Tocqueville couldn’t hide his condescension for George Sand. ‘She pleased me,’ he declared after a meeting with the writer. Hoping to revitalize hopelessly bourgeois French males through imperial expansion in Africa, he couldn’t help adding, ‘I loathe women who write, especially those who systematically disguise the weaknesses of their sex.’ Unsurprisingly, Sand was depicted in popular caricature as a virago, holding a whip. The cult of passion and sexuality she promoted did have some takers; and her idealized images of workers and peasants turned the nineteenth-century’s serialized novel into effective socialist agitprop. A visit to Sand in 1847 turned Margaret Fuller, a cautious feminist in New England, into a revolutionary in Italy. Dostoyevsky and Herzen both credited Sand with stimulating their social conscience.
*
The cult of the nation, however, grew faster in France and elsewhere among insecure men who dominated the public sphere. Its leading exponent was a Catholic priest, the Abbé Félicité de Lamennais, who believed that God, working through the people, had caused the French Revolution. His 1834 book Words of a Believer, one of the most widely read books of the nineteenth century, offered an apocalyptic vision of oppressed humanity, and its global salvation. It was Lamennais who tried to establish a precise relationship, subsequently insisted upon by nationalists in India as well as Italy, between the ‘motherland’ and the isolated individuals who voluntarily ‘penetrate and become enmeshed’ with it.