Enemies of the Enlightenment Book

The book read like an extended college thesis paper. It had a point to make--that the Anti-Philosophe faction both arose from and was a cause of the revolution--and the author made it. Though I will concede that Anti-Philosophe authors contributed to the vitriol of the revolutionaries, I don't believe that they caused that vitriol. The author also fails to distinguish between the Catholic Church and the Anti-Philosophe writers. He gives Edmund Burke short-shrift, claiming that he merely borrowed from earlier French writers. It seems that he had never read Edmund Burke. Burke went far beyond what the French writers had said. While they merely predicted bloodshed, Burke specifically predicted that the revolutionaries would kill their king (three years before he was dethroned), and that a general would arise to rule over the nation--foreseeing Napoleon's rise ten years before it began!

McMahon's short-sightedness about Burke is symptomatic of the author's overall reductionist tendencies. He reduces the entire Anti-Philosophe movement to an attempt by the Catholic Church to retain its power, though he does concede that many of the writers were men of faith. Nor does he delineate the role of Protestantism during those revolutionary times. I'm certain that a great part of the resistance to crown and church came from Protestant peoples, and not just from secular ones like Voltaire and Rousseau. McMahon does not account for protestant influences at all. He treats the revolution as if it were entirely secular in nature. It is ridiculous to think that while all of Europe had been torn for two centuries by wars between Catholic and Protestant churches that this antipathy played no part in the French Revolution. This subject deserves more from an author.