This is the eighth essay in my series on cultural wars: its subject is nationalism, considered  from the 1920s on as the prime cause of war in Europe. It follows on from the previous articles on the ideas of race, of the state, and of economics. These three, with nationalism, constitute what I identify as the four riders of the apocalypse that prodded Europe and a large part of the world into the Great War of 1914-1918, a war that lingered on for a further five years, then broke out again, in even more destructive mode, in 1939. In what follows, we look at the source of nationalism, not in the domain of ideas so much as issuing from the competitive structure of Europe, as it developed since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Our main argument is that the years distinguishing the medieval from the early modern world, and that world from the aftermath of the French Revolution, were characterized by profound structural changes, involving fundamental challenges to old ideas and traditions, embedded in the daily practice of life. Those challenges elicited chain reactions, which escalated quickly to war, in the case of the late fifteenth century to nearly 130 years of war issuing in the peace agreements, referred to as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. 

In what follows we sketch the profound structural changes accompanying the challenges to Church authority, and then to royal power; the development of the political idea of nationality; how national consciousness was affected by the easing of religious rivalries; and starting our discussion of nationalism with the case of Italy, and the Papacy- the oldest of all monarchies- over the long nineteenth century. The Papacy emerged from the frontal assaults of revolutionary ideologies on its inherited status, much less bound to the states, so less politically influential, but a centralized and ultra-montane institution. This became immediately obvious as soon as war broke out in August 1914. The portrait is that of l’Abbé Lamennais, one of the leading thinkers about how to adapt the papal monarchy to the ideas of the French Revolution. 

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From dynasty to democracy.

In his inaugural lecture on the study of history, at Cambridge University in June 1895, Lord Acton, the great liberal historian, defined the beginnings of the modern world as located four hundred years previously. ^[1] The defining feature of the modern age, he argued,  was the universal spirit of investigation, which expressed itself in  the search for knowledge about the past. Not content with “clouds of false witness” about the past, generations of scholars devoted themselves to the “the sovereign purpose of detecting error and vindicating entrusted truth. » Nor was this investigation of the past restricted to scholars; it was a near universal activity. “The modern age did not proceed from the mediæval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity. In those days Columbus subverted the notions of the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth and power; in those days, Machiavelli released government from the restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the time that was to come. …. It was an awakening of new life; the world revolved in a different orbit, determined by influences unknown before. After many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society,  and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change. »

With the modern age came  political revolution. The old dispensation had been  that of the Papacy as a universal monarchy of law covering the length and breadth of Europe. The Emperor, the kings, dukes, and barons held their status as exalted peasants, owners of land, transmissible by descent. Like peasants, imperial marriage was designed to augment and transmit property. The inherited social mechanism was thus simple and coherent: simple because status came with gradations of land ownership; and coherent, because the way to get ahead applied from the most humble to the most exalted. As the gospel of St Matthew chapter 23, verse 12 put it, “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. ».  The fundamental equality of all humans was recorded in the burial ceremony of the Hapsburg Emperors: The Grand Chamberlain knocks three times with a silver can on the doors of the Capuchin convent which contains the Imperial crypt. He recites the long list of the names and titles of the deceased emperor. The friar replies: “I do not know you”. The process is repeated but this time the Grand Chamberlain says: “ I am (the name), His Majesty Emperor and King”. Again the friar says “I do not know you”. On the third time, the Grand Chamberlain says: “I am (name), a poor mortal and a sinner”. On this, the Capuchin friar responds: “Enter”, and the doors are opened.

The overarching religious unity of Europe, inherited from the previous millenia and more, was shattered by Luther’s reformation, while leaving intact the existing monarchical powers, which promptly laid claim to supremacy over their local church. In this way, local monarchs claimed powers as absolute rulers, predicated on the legal principle enunciated at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The principle, expressed in the Latin phrase, “cujus regio, ejus religio” stated that the subjects of the prince would follow his religion. This had always been the case, when all acknowledged the spiritual overlordship of the papacy. But it became less obvious, when princes and subjects had a choice between papal authority, the doctrines of Luther or Calvin, or the even the more radical doctrines of Anabaptists. At the time, there was no support for the idea that citizens should chose their own religious law, on the grounds that multiple religions within the state would gravely weaken the powers of the prince. Rather the prevailing rule held that “the will of the prince has the force of law”, in other words that the prince has the absolute power to make or to unmake the law. Absolute power was monarchical, transmitted through descent.

This absolute power is the fundamental attribute of sovereignty, as defined by Jean Bodin, the French political theorist, who wrote his masterpiece,  Six Books of the Commonwealth, published first in 1576: “sovereignty, he wrote,  is that absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth which in Latin is termed Majestas,” the power to make law. The sovereign is above all human law, subject only to the divine and natural law. “It is the distinguishing mark of the sovereign that he cannot in any way be subject to the commands of another, for it is he who makes law for the subject, abrogates law already made, and amends obsolete law. No one who is subject either to the law or to some other person can do this. »^[2] Furthermore, as absolute ruler, the sovereign could tax his subjects;  maintain a permanent army; conduct diplomacy with foreign princes; command an obedient bureaucracy; dispense justice as he saw fit; share his powers with none; and dominate the rival authorities of Church, nobles, city councils or local parlements. These absolutist claims that monarchs enjoyed within their realms – both the secular powers of lordship and also  the authority of popes- laid the foundations of territorial churches. The struggles over the nature and content of these territorial churches fed  the European wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – issuing in the Thirty Years war in Germany and the civil war in the British isles. 

These bloody wars held multiple causes, the most significant of which were religious rivalry; disputes between central and local authority; the intervention of foreign powers, most notably Sweden and France, in what initially were mainly disputes between the German states; the fragmented nature of the German lands, divided into 300 or so different units; the superimposition of the Franco-Hapsburg rivalry on a mainly German civil war; the fortunes of war, disease and impoverishment; and in the case of the English civil war, the struggle between a centralizing monarchy and a parliament which had already acquired considerable tax powers in the preceding century. Lasting for thirty years between 1618 and 1648, the Thirty Years war is remembered in Germany as a disaster, with a population of 15 million in 1618 reduced to 9 million by 1648. ^[3]

These are the figures quoted in the seminal study of Günther Franz, published in 1940. ^[4] They are contested, the method of their compilation criticized, and alternatives suggested. But there is no contestation that “Germany suffered a mortality crisis of exceptional severity”.^[5] By contrast, the civil war which raged across the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland over the course of  the 1640s, proved less sanguinary, perhaps because mercenaries were more abundantly employed in the German lands. Even so, writes Stephen Mortlock, “it is estimated that England suffered a 3.7% loss of population and Scotland a loss of 6%, while Ireland suffered a loss of 41% of its population. This is in contrast to the 3% of the British population that died in the First World War. » ^[6]

The emergence of Europe’s state system 

The Thirty Years war ended in the series of accords collectively referred to as the Treaty of Westphalia.  A cardinal principle of the Treaty was that the political organization of Germany was a European concern. The Germanic lands were not only central to Europe geographically; they were also crucial to its politics. The Reformation began there; the Hapsburg dynasty’s major possessions were located there; the importance of Germany to other European powers ensured that non-Germanic powers were drawn into its  affairs. “Germany, wrote Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1670, is the battlefield on which the struggle for mastery in Europe is fought”. ^[7]

This is what happened in the course of the war, and during the lengthy negotiations leading up to the Treaty. On religion, the principal of cujus regio, ejus religio was reaffirmed, but citizens were given the right to keep their own religion; Catholics and Lutherans were redefined as equal before the law, and Calvinism was recognized as an official religion; the independence of the Swiss confederation, and of the Dutch republic, was confirmed;  France and Sweden were recognized as guarantors of the imperial constitution, with a right to intercede; and the Treaty was given status as a Fundamental Law of the Empire, in other words as a key component of its constitution to serve as “ a perpetual law and established sanction of the Empire”. The Pope called the Treaty “null and void”, but to little avail: by the end of the century, the papacy was fading as a force in European diplomacy. Its religious law was just one among a number, and it was the number that the states had to consider as they calculated their interests in terms of alliances and the balance of power. The nadir of papal power was reached, arguably, in 1773, when Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuit order on the urgent and repeated demands and actions of the Catholic powers, starting with Portugal. In the words of the historians of Latin America, the Jesuits’ “independence, power, wealth, control of education, and ties to Rome made the Jesuits obvious targets for (the Marquis of ) Pombal’s brand of extreme regalism.” ^[8] The absolutist monarchies of the latter half of the eighteenth century tolerated no challenge to their authority, well before the French monarchy was swept aside by revolution.

A second cardinal principle which came to be associated with the Treaty was the balance of power. The balance is not mentioned in the Treaty, but it was often referenced during its negotiations, and is implicit in the Treaty’s terms. Spain had been the hegemonic power in the sixteenth century, but the Thirty Years war confirmed its decline, and the rise of France. In his classical study on international law, Emmerich de Vattel writes that “Europe is a kind of political system, a body where everything is linked through the relations and the diverse interest of (its) nations…It is no longer , as in the past, a messy pile of isolated pieces… The continual attention of the sovereigns at everything that is going on, the Ministers always in office, the perpetual negotiations make Europe a kind of republic, whose independent members, through the ties of common interest, meet for the maintenance of order and liberty. This is what has given rise to that famous idea of a balance of power”. The balance is  “such a disposition of things, as no power is able absolutely to predominate or to prescribe laws to others.”^[9]

The idea came most evidently into play during the war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), where  Queen Anne declared that England went to war in favour of “preserving the Liberty and balance of Europe, and for Reducing the Exhorbitant Power of France”. ^[10] Daniel Defoe, novelist and author of Robinson Crusoe-the most translated work after The Bible- wrote in the same vein: “Every Power, which balances the rest, makes itself a Nuisance to its Neighbours. Europe being divided into a Variety of separate Governments and Constitutions; the Safety of the whole consists in a due Distribution of Power, so shared to very Part or Branch of Government, that no one may be able to oppress and destroy the rest”. ^[11] The concept found its way into the text of Article 2 of the Hispano-British Peace of July 13, 1713- one of the Treaties in the Peace of Utrecht. These are the words of Article 2: “But whereas the war which is so happily ended by this peace, was at the beginning undertaken, and was carried on for so many years with the utmost force, at immense charge, and with almost infinite slaughter, because of the great danger which threatened the liberty and safety of all Europe, from the too close conjunction of the kingdoms of Spain and France. And whereas to take away all uneasiness and suspicion, concerning such conjunction, out of the minds of people, and to settle and establish the peace and tranquility of Christendom by an equal balance of power (which is the best and most solid foundation of a mutual friendship, and of a concord which will be lasting on all sides) as well the Catholic King as the Most Christian King have consented, that care should be taken by sufficient precautions, that the kingdoms of Spain and France should never come and be united under the same dominion, and that one and the same person should never become King of both kingdoms. »

The treaties have been presented as providing the foundations of the post-1945 international system of sovereign states. But this narrative is a myth. ^[12] The myth was created by the proponents of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that Westphalia laid the foundations for what became the global system of sovereign national states. Here is a quote from Hans Morgenthau, a highly influential immigrant intellectual from Germany to the United States in the middle decades of the twentieth century: “”the Treaty of Westphalia, he wrote…made the territorial state the cornerstone of the modern state system”. ^[13] This interpretation of the Treaty was none other than the claims of the anti-Hapsburg participants in the Thirty Years war, with a vested interest in exaggerating the threat of the dynasty to the estates of Germany or the monarchs of Europe. The Hapsburgs were not so much gaining in power, as barely capable of defending their interests. What mattered in the imperial title was the prestige it conferred, and it was this prestige, and its standing with regard to one or other of the Christian denominations, that counted. The Holy Roman Empire was a regime, with a court system, and a complex body of formal laws, traditions and local practices that were justiciable by princes or commoners. What mattered for the standing of the regime was its legitimacy, and as long as the Holy Roman Empire survived, this legitimacy was not counted in terms of the unified and centralized nation-state that came into sight in 1789. It was not Westphalia that laid the ground for the modern state system, so much as the French Revolution and the idea of nationalism. By 1789 furthermore, the diplomacy of the balance of power was definitely embedded in the practice of European politics.

The state system of Europe nonetheless antedates the French revolution. The monarchs claimed absolute powers, and used war as a preferred means to achieve their ambitions. “War made states and states made war”, writes Charles Tilly. ^[14] Once the competition for primacy among them got under way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, states entered an upward spiral of innovation in the raising of taxes and capital, the invention of new technologies, tactics and strategies, and a rapid rise in the size of armies and navies relative to population. For that, they mobilized populations through appeals to patriotism, most notably among the Dutch and the English. 

The political idea of nationality.

In the early middle ages, the notion of nation was limited to those with property. It was the barons who put their name to the Magna Carta of 1215. Famously, its Article 39 determined that “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned…except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the laws of the land”. Free men were those with means, who over the years gradually accumulated rights which became embedded in the English constitution. In 1429, for instance, the right to vote in an election to parliament was granted to men over 21 years of age, owning freehold lands or tenements with an annual net value of 40 shillings. These rights remained in place until the Reform Act of 1832, when they were extended somewhat. Similarly, Luther in his attack of 1520 on “the Romanists” made his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, clearly identifying representation of the German Nation with the aristocracy of landowners. He did not pull his punches: “The Roman See must abolish the papal offices, and diminish that crowd of crawling vermin at Rome, so that the Pope’s servants may be supported out of the Pope’s own pocket, and that his court may cease to surpass all royal courts in its pomp and extravagance; seeing that all this pomp has not only been of no service to the Christian faith, but has also kept them from study and prayer, so that they themselves know hardly anything concerning matters of faith ».  The German Nation suffers from the greed of Rome, Luther thundered, and does so ultimately as equals of the priests. “The only real difference (between spiritual and temporal persons) is one of office and function, and not of estate ». Luther’s reference to the ultimate equality of all Christians thus stands at variance with the actual hierarchy of the time. To make the point Luther quotes the New Testament, Peter Chapter 1 verse 2: “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another.” The French Revolution substituted nation for reference to the body of Christ.

Nationality always held egalitarian connotations. Dante Alighieri (c.1265-1321), called the “Father of the Italian language”, wrote his great poem, La Commedia Divina, in the Tuscan dialect, at a time when poetry was still written in Latin,  thereby creating a  trend for the use of the vernacular across Europe; not one language, but many; not one poetry, but a number; not one sensitivity, but a plurality; not language for an élite, but for the local many.  Giovanni Boccaccio, a great admirer, wrote the  Decameron between 1348 and 1353, after the epidemic of the Black Death, as a series of 100 tales of love told by seven young women and three young men. The format of Boccaccio’s Decameron influenced Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, which were selected in 1475 by William Caxton to be one of the first books to be printed in English. Their ribald language is recognizable in the prologue to the Friar’s Tale:

		Broader than a galleon’s sail.
		Hold up your tail, Satan!” said he.
		“Show forth your arse, and let the friar see
		Where the nest of friars is in this place!”
		And before half a furlong of space,
		Just as bees swarm out from a hive,
		Out of the devil’s arse there were driven
		Twenty thousand friars on a rout,
		And throughout hell swarmed all about,
		And came again as fast as they could go,
		And every one crept into his arse.
		He shut his tail again and lay very still.

Chaucer’s undeferential portrayal of friars was interpreted at the time of the Reformation and beyond as evidence of his being an early critic of the Catholic Church. There is no evidence that this was the case, but it has been argued that he was conscripted in William Thynne’s collection of The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer, published first  in 1532, in the Tudor cause of monarchy, independence and nation.

There can be less doubt about Shakespeare’s trumpeting the Tudor cause. Shakespeare’s ten historical plays, covering the centuries from the reign of King John in the thirteenth century to that of Henry VIII in the sixteenth, have often been seen as Tudor propaganda, showing the dangers of civil war, the near permanent hostility between the monarchs of France and England, and the blessing that befell England through the assumption of the throne by the Tudor dynasty. Much of the background to the plays takes place during the Hundred Years war between England and France in the years 1337 to 1453-years that have often been dated as marking the origin of the national identities of the two rival countries. In fact, the Normans conquered England in 1066, but kept their considerable possessions in France. These were regularly deployed to challenge the powers of the French monarchy. One such incident is recorded in Shakespeare’s historical play, Richard II, composed around the year 1597, in which John of Gaunt utters the following  famous peon to England.  In Act 2, Scene 1, John of Gaunt declaims:

“ This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Again infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world, 

this precious stone set in the silver sea, 

Which serves in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings

Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

For Christian service and true rivalry,

As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,

Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s son,

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement or a pelting farm;

England, bound in with the triumphant sea, 

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ah would the scandal vanish with my life,

How happy then were my ensuing death!”

No less rousing were the “beggar’s songs”, composed at the time of the Dutch war of independence against the dominant Spanish power. The war lasted 80 years, from 1568 to 1648, when Dutch independence was recognized at Westphalia. The Hapsburg dynasty had inherited its lands in the low countries, sought to centralize its powers there, and keep the populations Catholic. The fortunes of war waxed and waned, but the initial incidents which occasioned composition of the songs occurred in  the years 1566-1572, when the Watergeuzen(Sea Beggars) seized several towns in Holland and Zeeland. The song was composed by Arent Vos, a Catholic priest who became a protestant pastor, and wrote this as a passionate charge against Spain and Rome: 

Beat on the drums, like dirre dom deine

Beat on the army drums, like dirre dom deine

Beat on the army drums, like dirre dom deine,

“Long live the geus” is our device!

Those Spanish pistules, like a plague spreading

Those Spanish pistules, cunning and mean

Those Spanish pistules, under the Pope’s robe

Those Spanish pistules, growing non stop.

Spanish Inquisition, in God’s eyes evil

Spanish Inquisition, like dragon’s blood, 

Spanish Inquisition, once will be punished,

Spanish Inquisition, will lose the game.

Long live the Geus, live like a good Christian

Long live the Geus, keep up your courage,

Long live the Geus, God will keep you from sinning

Long live the Geus, all true Christians.

Pope and all papists, God makes you tremble

Pope and all papists, become desperate

Pope and all papists, need an indulgence

Pope and all papists, merciless, cruel.

My Prince, you’re princely a Prince of the Beggars

Princely you reign us in spirit, in truth

Princely we bow in your honour, adore you

Princely your realm will grow and expand.

By the seventeenth century, Europe’s body politic was well along the way of being divided into separate nations, with their own myths, and chosen enemies.  Luther appealed to the German nation by citing the Italianate ways of the Papacy; the Dutch defined their nationhood in opposition to Spain; England’s hostility to the Catholic powers sharpened. The hostility put England at cross purposes with Ireland, which remained loyal to the Pope, but also loyal to its own pre-Christian mythology. “Ireland’s Dirge”(Tuireamh nah Eireann” ) was first composed in the mid-seventeenth century. As Tim Blanning writes, the poem offers a foundation myth, a mythical hero, special assistance from God in the form of St Patrick, cultural achievement in the early monasteries, a betrayer Dermod, and an acute sense of grievance at foreign oppression-all the necessary ingredients of a fully fledged nationalism. ^[15] It was also widely diffused, and as the expert on the subject, Vincent Morley states, “furnished the Catholic population with a narrative summary of Irish history in metrical form that was vivid, lively and inspiring – a narrative, moreover, that could be easily understood, memorized and recited”.^[16]

English nationalism developed its own narrative of subjugation under the Norman yoke. According to Christopher Hill, the theory runs thus:  “Before 1066 the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the country lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions. The Norman Conquest deprived them of their liberty, and established the tyranny of an alien King and landlords. But the people did not forget the rights they had lost. They fought continuously to recover them…and always the tradition of lost Anglo-Saxon freedom was a stimulus to ever more insistent demands upon the successors of the Norman usurpers”. ^[17] As a pamphleteer cited in 1641, at the cusp of the Civil War, “We are all the sons of Adam, borne free; some of them say, … we should all live by the sweat of our browses”. ^[18] That same year, Edmund Calamy, preached his sermon, England’s Looking-Glasse, to the House of Commons on the occasion of a special fast prompted by rebellion in Ireland: “You that are the representative body of this Nation…you stand in the place of the whole Nation; and if you stand for God’ cause, the whole Nation doth it in you. As this is a Nationall Day, and the Honourable Assembly a Nationall Assembly, so this is a Nationall text, suitable for the occasion about which we are not, National Repentance will divert National judgements and procure Nationall blessings”. ^[19] As Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz observed in the 1770s, national pride in England was rooted in pride in its constitution. ^[20]

The affirmation of national identity was not restricted to the Protestant powers.

The Thirty Years War had been fought by the Hapsburgs to impose Catholicism everywhere, but it ended with the institutionalization of Protestantism as a presence in the empire. True enough, the war did witness the roll-back of the Reformation in central and eastern Europe, but the pope’s calls for total Catholic victory fell on deaf ears. What triumphed in the war was the balance of power diplomacy of Cardinal Richelieu, such that the failure of the papacy to achieve peace between the catholic powers, proved, in Eamonn Duffy words, “an ominous indicator of the increasingly marginal place of religious considerations in determining the politics of Europe”.^[21] Not only were the popes sidelined in European diplomacy over the coming century, but their powers to appoint clergy and bishops were whittled away, as were their control over the revenues of vacant bishoprics and benefices. All over Europe, secular rulers set their hearts on controlling their local churches, sponsoring theologies which challenged papal authority, and expounded the rights of princes over national churches. Gallicanism, the term used to describe the powers of the French monarchs, had imitations everwhere. 

Towards the heavenly City.

As Europe’s state system evolved, and national consciousness took root at different paces and intensities, the edge began to come off religious rivalries. Diplomacy was one factor: Catholic France and Protestant Sweden became de facto allies in the Thirty Years war; Catholic France allied with the Ottoman Empire in opposition to the Hapsburg position in the Holy Roman Empire. England then allied with the Catholic Hapsburgs in the war of the Spanish succession, to prevent the French monarchy extending its reach to include the Spanish empire. In 1756, during the seven year’s war, Austria switched from being England’s ally to being an ally of France in what was called “the diplomatic revolution”.  Great Britain transferred its alliance from Hapsburgs to Prussia. But the Franco-Hapsburg alliance, which led to Louis XVI’s marriage to the Hapsburg Marie-Antoinette was never popular among the French population, a resentment that contributed to the ferocity of the French revolution. In other words, by the mid-eighteenth century at the latest preservation of the European balance of power took precedence over older religious affiliations. In diplomacy at least, religion was relegated to an after-thought.

Another was the huge impact of European contacts with distant continents and cultures on European sensibilities. Arguably, the most enduring impact of the rest of the world on Europe was the way that Islam and Christianity interacted following the Ummayad conquest of Spain in 711. Spanish art, literature, architecture and cuisine bear testament to Islam’s influence on Spain. More significantly, Spanish Catholicism absorbed many of the more severe features of Islam over the long centuries that came to be known as the Reconquista- the Christian kingdoms’ reconquest of the whole of the peninsula. The centuries were punctuated by periods of peaceful co-existence and  long periods of war, ending in the fall of Grenada in January 1492, the expulsion of up to 200,000 Jews under the Alhambra Decree, and the series of edicts leading to the expulsion of up to three million Moslems over the coming century. This was the  Christianity that Spanish missionaries exported to the Americas as re-defined at the Council of Trent, which ended in 1563, and occurred at the height of Spain’s imperial power. 

Similarly, the influence of India over the 350 years of British presence there had a huge and cumulative effect on the United Kingdom: these included language, food, sport, literature or politics. Dadabhai Naoroji, for instance, who served multiple times as President of the Indian National Congress, was elected to the Liberal ticket in Finsbury Central in the 1893 general election. In his book, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India,^[22] he argued that the British Raj ensured a drain of resources from India-a position that was in part taken on board in the 1896 report of the  Royal Commission on Indian Expenditure, of which he was a member. Paul Scott, in the opening to The Jewel in the Crown, the initial novel of his Raj Quartet, explains the relations between the peoples of the two nations, “locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety it was no longer possible for them to know whether they hated or loved one another, or what it was that held them together, and seemed to have confused the image of their separate destinies.”^[23]

A central reason for the growth of secularism was the great expansion of the European mind that occurred in the century stretching from 1650 o 1750. These years,  writes Owen Chadwick, were seminal- “ the age of Sir Isaac Newton, and Leibniz, of Fontenelle and Spinoza, of John Locke andDavid Hume, and finally of Diderot and Voltaire. In these years, the Middle Ages ended at last. Here men studied the distant origins of modern science, the beginnings of the idea of progress, the first historical criticism of the Biblical records, the discoveries of the true nature of other great religions and cultures of the world.” ^[24]

The various expressions of the Christian religion have been  always interwoven with the politics of nationality. Europe’s religious map-Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox- only settled into its still recognisable format in the eighteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, swathes of Austria, Hungary and Poland were Protestant, and France held a sizeable Huguenot population. But the Catholic powers, notably the Hapsburgs, recovered populations for the Catholic faith by the sword, the revenge for which came in not so much a repudiation of religion as a rejection of its institutions, particularly the Papacy.  “Many of the arguments brought forth against Christianity, Herbert Dieckmann has written,  have their origin not in the movement of free thought  or in the tradition of rationalistic thinking but in Protestant criticism of Catholic dogma or the Church”. ^[25] Edward Gibbon,for instance,  in his account of the decline of Rome, waxed lyrical about Rome’s history of human fraud and imposture. Gibbon does not repudiate religion,-as numerous commentators later contended;  he just records human depravity, as adumbrated in the story of Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. “The theologian, he wrote,  may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” 

An inverse message, also derived from the Bible, looks forward to the ascent of humankind, facilitated by the faithful who educate tender minds to virtue, point their ambition to moral excellence, rise above criminal passions, assist them in the acquisition of valuable knowledge, and teach them habits of patience, modesty, candour and self government. These are the words of the Reverend Richard Price, preaching in April 1787 to his Protestant audience at the Meeting House in the Old Jewry of London. His sermon- The Evidence for A Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind with the Means of Promoting It, ^[26]  predicts a state of Christianity, lying sometime “between this and the end of time, » during which we can anticipate «  a progressive improvement in human affairs which will terminate in greater degrees of light and virtue and happiness than have been yet known ». The book of Isaiah is called to reference, in which the prophet foretells in the sixth and eleventh chapters “ that under the reign of the Messiah the Lord would create new heavens and a new earth. » Warming to his theme, Dr Price invokes Sir Isaac Newton, as a new Moses,-“the pride and glory of this country, and a name with which no names of kings and princes deserve to be thought of”. “ He extended on every side the boundaries of science, subjected light itself to dissection, and with a sagacity never before known among mortals unfolded the laws which govern the solar system. » We follow in his footsteps by introducing greater “liberality in religion”, “a conviction of the reasonableness of universal toleration “, and support for the experiment now being made  « by our brethren on the other side of the Atlantic ….and to which every friend of the human race must wish success. »  Dr Price goes on to propose the newly independent America as a model for human improvement in civil government, a separation of church and state, and underpinned by a proper education. The present state of the world is better understood than ever, he declares, and  man “is a milder animal than he was, “ while “the world (is) outgrowing its evil, superstition (is) giving way, antichrist (is) falling, and the Millenium (is) hastening”.

When will this new world happen? The good doctor is here judiciously cautious.  “I am growing too tedious », he avers. « I will, therefore, conclude with directing you to carry your thoughts to another world. The period on which I have been discoursing will pass while we are silent in the grave. But through the grace of God in the great Redeemer we shall be raised up from death and enter on a new world. There a brighter scene than this world can exhibit to us in its best state will open upon us. There a government of consummate order will be established and all the faithful and worthy of all religions will be gathered into it. There peace and love will reign in full perfection, and those who, by such exertions as yours, are the means of enlarging the kingdom of Christ and causing the will of God to be done on earth as it is done in heaven, will be exalted to a happiness greater than can be now conceived, and which will never come to an end. To this happiness, may God of his infinite mercy bring us, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. » In short, sometime in the future; the location,  half-way between heaven and earth; possibly on earth, if some rather rigorous pre-condtions are made. 

The closest that humanity had come to creating this paradise on earth, at the time that Dr Price, delivered his sermon in April 1787, was the assertion of American independence in 1776. The Church of England was the official church, and at its head stood the King, who had sworn in his coronation oath to uphold the Protestant religion, in England and Ireland, “and the territories thereto belonging”. George was a firm believer in Christian precepts, took his coronation oath seriously, and felt compelled to uphold the status of England as an Anglican nation. Theologically,  the Church of England was much closer to a diluted Calvinism than to Catholicism which it nonetheless acknowledged in its prayer book. Less demanding than either, Anglicanism’s inherent doctrinal fudges fit comfortably among the varieties of Christian churches , practiced by most early Americans. What divided Anglicans from other American protestants was the presence of bishops as religious leaders. Most reformed Protestant denominations-Methodists, Baptists, Congregational or Presbyterian-were congregational in the sense that they gave authority to individual churches to govern their own affairs, without interference from a central authority, such as the Pope exercised in Rome. Individual Anglican parishes were answerable to a bishop, and so associated with the policy of the state which from the 1750s on sought to strengthen control over the colonies through religious means that involved the Anglican church, and also through financial means to resolve the question of who would carry the tax burden to fund the defence of the huge territories acquired in North America as a result of the successful conclusion in 1763 of the seven years war. 

Archbishop Seeker, the highest ranking cleric of the Anglican church, had shown interest in strengthening the church in North America by appointing its own bishop there.  He supported other actions to improve the church’s situation, such as the establishment of yearly priestly reunions in each colony, starting in 1758 in New Jersey. This together with a renewed push to extend the church’s reach into largely puritanical New England, ignited the suspicions of non Anglicans, who at the time made up 80% or so of congregations in north America. These suspicions merged into the better known opposition to the British government’s tax proposals, but all pointed in the same direction to a severing of links with England. As the American statesman John Adams later wrote, “the apprehension of Episcopacy contributed … as much as any other cause, to arouse the attention not only of the inquiring mind, but of the common people, and urge them to close thinking on the constitutional authority of parliament over the colonies.” ^[27] Had Parliament legislated for a bishop, there would have been no limit on what Parliament could or could not legislate for the colonies. “The opinion, the principles, the spirit, the temper, the views, disigns, Intrigues, and arbitrary exertions of power, displayed by the Church of England, Adams wrote, at that time towards the Dissenters, as they were, contemptuously called, though in reality the Churchmen, were the real dissenters; this ought to be stated, at full length. The truth is that the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, the Anabaptists, the Methodists, or even the Quakers, or Moravians, were each of them as numerous as the Churchmen. Several of them immensely more numerous; and all of them together, more than fifteen to one. »

Anti-episcopal feeling, Adams went on, soon merged with even older and deeper antipapist prejudice, as rumors spread in the late 1760s over the religious plans for Catholic Quebec. As a Roman Catholic bishop arrived there, and later Britain guaranteed Catholic freedom of worship in the Quebec Act of  1774,  non-Anglicans throughout the thirteen colonies came to fear for their own religious liberty. As one pamphleteer wrote, the Quebec Act demonstrated that Britain was implementing “ a settled, fix’d plan for inslaving the colonies, or bringing them under arbitrary government”.^[28] It was therefore not a major step for the signatories to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, three quarters of them being nominal Anglicans, to start the break with the model in the King’s head of England as a uniquely Anglican nation, leading to the establishment of the First Amendment to the Constitution of 1787 confirming freedom of religion, a free press, assembly and the right to petition government for the redress of grievances. The forerunner for the First Amendment was the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drawn up by Thomas Jefferson, also the famed author of the Declaration of Independence, which invokes as highest authority “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.  This is the divinity whom the Founding Fathers invoked, a deity who created the world and Nature, and is the final arbiter of mens’ affairs. This God is also He who gives mankind the freedom to believe or not believe, and is the God of the Christian sects. With this conviction goes the belief in the American colonies as the “new Israel”, and their citizens as His “chosen people”. 

The  American Republic is steeped in religion. It is not secular, as some of its advocates relate. But  the Republic in its origins comprehends religion very differently from Constantine’s legacy since the year 312 AD that Christianity be the religion of the empire. The burden of choice over religion rests not with the President of the United States,  but with each individual. The  Protestant Reformation takes its eventual political shape in the US Constitution of 1787. 

The Papacy, Italy and the long nineteenth century.

This was not at all the spirit moving the French Revolution. The spirit moving the French Revolution was militantly anti-Catholic, with the Papacy soon identified as the black heart of reaction. According to Jules Michelet (1798-1874), author of the History of the French Revolution, history is nothing more than the never-ending struggle against the ancien regime of Nature, understood as female, which is gradually penetrated by man in the creation of a specifically human order. ^[29] At its pinnacle stands the miracle of France, understood as a living person whose moral and material life is conditioned by geography, not an abstract entity, but a living being of flesh and blood to be apprehended with the heart and with the imagination rather than with the intellect. That living entity in 1789 broke the bonds of the past to install a  republic, the culmination of over a millennium of national history. Michelet’s heroes, like Joan of Arc, or Henry IV, are not passive recipients of Grace. They shape the future: “The modern hero, he wrote in 1870, is the hero of action”. This is the Prometheus who builds the future, the very opposite of the Popes whose chosen instruments are  the Jesuits. “Men of Intellect, he writes in his polemic The Jesuit-in which he consecrates his break with Rome in 1843-“you would blush to listen to the popular voice, apply yourselves to science; study and after ten years devoted to history, and the books of the Jesuits, I foretell that you will find in them but one meaning: the death of Liberty”.^[30]  The Jesuits, he insists, are the Counter-Revolution- the Pope’s chosen instrument of  reaction. 

The Papacy’s roots stretch deep into the recesses of Europe’s past; the popes were the most venerable of Europe’s absolute monarchs, their states in central Italy stood athwart the demands of Italian nationalists for national unity; and they excoriated every tenet of the revolutionary movement which had swept Europe: the veneration of science, freedom of opinion and conscience, the idea of popular consent, parliamentary assemblies, the trinity of liberty, equality and fraternity, nationalism. Their popes had been humiliated, stripped of their lands, the rich church of the French monarchy undone, a prostitute posed as the Goddess of Reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame, Italy invaded, and Pope Pius VII scorned in  death. He died in Valence and was registered as “Citizen Breschi, exercising the profession of pontiff”. 

Yet Pius died a martyr, and Napoleon decided that it was worth his while to come to terms with his successor in the  Concordat,  finally signed on July 15, 1801. This Concordat took six months to negotiate,governed relations with France for a century and provided the model for the papacy’s relations with the emerging international order of the nineteenth century. Catholicism was declared to be the religion of “the vast majority of French citizens”; there were to be 10 archbishoprics and 50 bishoprics, in place of the pre-revolutionary number of 135; the new bishops were to be appointed by the First Consul (Napoleon), but along the lines of the Concordat of 1516; clergy were now salaried officials of the state. But the Pope’s charisma was on display at Napoleon’s coronation in Notre Dame in May 1804; when Napoleon called himself King of all Italy, the Pope called for his withdrawal; insisted that he had no rights over the papal states; and refused to fill vacant bishoprics. Pope and Emperor met again in Fontainebleau in 1813, after Napoleon’s humiliating defeat in his Russian campaign. But it was Napoleon who lost his throne, while the Congress of Vienna restored the papal states to the Vatican.

Historians have termed the years from 1814 to the revolutions of 1848 as the time of Restoration. But too much had happened, too much had changed for the Europe of 1789 to be restored. “The revolutionary spirit, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in his review of Leopold Ranke’s The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, in the Edinburgh Review of 1840, , attacked by all Europe, beat all Europe back, became conqueror in its turn, and not satisfied with the Belgian cities and the rich domains of the spiritual electors, went raging over the Rhine and through the passes of the Alps”. Wherever the French armies went, they carried in their knapsacks the Napoleonic code, the ideas of a free press, religious toleration, divorce and equality of all before the law. The distribution of property, the spirit of society, and the subtle balances in Europe, underwent a complete transformation. Napoleon proclaimed a Republic at Milan in 1796, and had himself called King of all Italy in 1805. Next year, the Holy Roman Empire, dating at least to the times of Charlemagne, was pronounced dissolved; the Hapsburgs became merely the Emperor of Austria; and the papacy, as Macaulay reminded his readers, was buried under the great revolutionary inundation. 

For all the changes, the papacy’s deep foundations remained unshaken. None of the popes abandoned one iota of the claims to overlordship of monarchs, churches and morals. In 1789, every Catholic state in Europe sought to reduce the pope’s powers to that of a figurehead. By 1815, they were singing from a very different hymnsheet. Their bard was Joseph de Maistre (1756-1821), adamant advocate of absolutism. .  In his best known book, Du Pape, he asserted that the   papacyhad  created monarchs for a reason. Humanity was fallen, and needed enlightenment. This it received from the papacy. “The French magistrates were in error in positing war between the Holy See and France, which then repeated these perverse maxims to Europe; and there was nothing more false that the clergy of the ancien regime was presented, in general, but especially the sovereign Pontiffs,(as hostile to reason) who were incontestably the preceptors of kings, the conservationists of science and the teachers of Europe”.^[31]

The greatest error of all, De Maistre held, was to predicate law and politics on the presumption of innate human innocence. Fallen humanity needed order. Rousseau had famously argued in the opening sentence of Le Contrat Social, “ Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains”. De Maistre’s response was that freeing men from  their chains was a prescription for indefinite murder. If Nature is the law of Men, “the whole earth (is) steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of all things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death”. ^[32]

To keep fallen men within the law, they had to be terrified into obedience. Enter the Executioner. De Maistre has him  summoned to the public square, where “ a poisoner, a parricide, a man who has committed sacrilege is tossed to him: he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises his arm; there is a horrible silence; there is no sound but that of bones cracking under the bars, and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He puts him on the wheel; the shattered limbs are entangled in the spokes; the head hangs down; the hair stands up, and the mouth gaping open like a furnace from time to time emits only a few blood- stained words to beg for death. His heart isbeating, but it is with joy: he congratulates himself, he says in his heart, ‘Nobody quarters as well as I.’ He steps down. He holds out his bloodstained hand, the justice throws him—from a distance—a few pieces of gold, which he catches through a double row of human beings standing back in horror. He sits down to table, and he eats. Then he goes to bed and sleeps. »^[33]

Prince Metternich – the Austrian Emperor’s Chancellor- was no Executioner. He was however the champion of princely rule in the German lands; the opponent of  liberalism, the scourge of democrats, the champion of the papal states and the inveterate enemy of Italian nationalism. The historiography of  these years correctly records his prolonged rearguard action, confronted by the constant demands for constitutional rights, the widening of the suffrage or the spread of republican values. There was a time at the start of Pius IX’s pontificate (1846-1878), when liberal hopes were raised of a meeting of the minds between papacy and the Italian nationalist cause. The new Pope was identified with the ideas of the priest, Vincenzo Gioberti, who advocated an Italian federation, under the Pope’s presidency, ^[34]  and Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872)-remembered as the chief inspirer of the Italian Risorgimento- welcomed Pius’ election. Mazzini believed a popular uprising would create a united Italy, and favoured “a Humanitarian Catholicism”.^[35]

But in the revolutions of 1848, Pius refused to declare war on Catholic Austria, and sided with France and Austria against the nationalist cause. Mazzini’s brand of revolutionary nationalism lost traction, and the cause of Italian unity fell into the hands of Camillo, Count of Cavour, first minister of Piedmont. He united Italy by diplomacy and war in the years 1848 to 1870, when Rome fell to Piedmont. The  liberal newspaper, La Riforma,  celebrated the event, proclaiming that “ the medieval world has fallen; the modern age stands resplendent on the ruins of theocracy”. ^[36]

The subsequent decades up to the outbreak of the war in August 1914 were rather less resplendent for the new Italian state than the editors of La Riforma had heralded. Already, the church had lost much of its monopoly over education and welfare; religious orders had been disbanded, monasteries and convents closed,  and their functions ceased. The newly united Italian state in the 1871 Law of Guarantees offered to pay clerical salaries, as compensation for the loss of the papal states; papal lands were reduced to the Vatican, the Lateran Palaces and Castel Gandolfo. Meanwhile, Italian politicians settled down to managing the economy, building a military capability, joining in the wider European rush to acquire colonies, seeking greater central control over local administration, and dealing with a central issue across Italy of land ownership. At the time of unification in 1861, Italy had 26 million inhabitants; illiteracy was 78%; life expectancy at birth was just under 30 years, rising to 45 years by 1914. Poverty, particularly in the South, proved endemic, fostering rural brigandage and then mass emigration to the Americas in the early 1900s. Significant industrial capabilities were established in northern Italy, and  Italian per capita income by 1914 was just over 50% of Britain’s. By any reasonable measure, Italy was a developing country. 

Pope Pius proved unrelenting in his hostility to the new Italian state: he forbade Catholics to participate in elections; appointed intransigeant bishops; helped to build up local resistance to the secular state; and created  banks, cooperatives, mutual aid societies and regional oppositions to the state’s centralizing ambitions. He  never set foot outside the Vatican walls, and his successors remained “prisoners” in the Vatican until the Concordat with Mussolini in 1929. As his temporal power waned, his spiritual hegemony over Catholics waxed. With local institutions destroyed, the clergy looked to Rome for protection. The Church’s membership, stretching from the plains of Missouri to Cape Horn, was more numerous than ever. As the papacy took global wing, it also charted a new path towards a democratic conservative order. The champion of this new path was  the Abbé Lamennais (1783-1854)- at one time darling of the papacy, advocate of an early form of Christian democracy, and pupil of De Maistre. His idea was to ally an absolutist papacy to the Catholic peoples of Europe; Daniel O’Connell, the Irish nationalist leader, was a follower. But Lamennais was rejected by the popes of his time, renounced Catholicism and was buried in an unmarked grave. Nevertheless, his idea of  an alliance between pope and people shaped the new papacy that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the reign of Pius IX (1846-1878), the longest reign of papal history. 

By the time that  Pio Nono, as he was called, died in 1878, the episcopate had been entirely renewed; new religious orders had been created; new episcopal hierarchies re-introduced into England and The Netherlands; and the papacy stood at the head  the largest of all Christian denominations.  Doctrine had been more closely defined: Pio Nono declared the dogma of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception; in 1864, he published the Syllabus of (liberal) Errors: Error eighty was that “the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and recent civilization”. In 1870, he summoned the First Vatican Council-the first Council since the Council of Trent- to announce the doctrine of papal infallibility whenever the pope spoke on matters of the Magisterium. In 1885,  the papacy declared that it was not an ally of any one particular form of government, monarchical, aristocratic or republican.  In 1891, Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum,which excoriated free market capitalism, and set up the Church as rival to Marxist socialism. In  1907, Pius X declared war on all modernisms, essentially understood as « a broad and liberal Protestantism ». Society, he declared “was sick”. 

He died on August 20, 1914, when the Great War had already broken out: in the battle of Mons on August 21, the British expeditionary force lost 1,600 killed; the German army lost 5,000 killed; and at Charleroi, the next day, the Germans lost 11,000 killed, and the French army lost the colossal number of 27,000 men. When the new Pope, Benedict XV appealed for peace, none of the chanceries of Europe were listening. In the next chapter, we look at how the Austrian Empire and the Hapsburg dynasty dealt with the phenomenon of nationalism; the debates in Great Britain about the viability of multi-national states in a world where the iron law of politics was the balance of power; the development of nationalism in France, the epicentre of the national revolution; and the transformation of the German public debate in the course of the nineteenth century, up to the time when  Britain went to war in August 1914 in defence of the European balance, which Germany was deemed to have defied by its invasion of Belgium. 

---

^[1]  Reprinted in Lectures on Modern History by the late Right Honourable John Emerich Edward First Baron Acton, by John Neville Figgis, Reginald Vere Laurence, London, MacMillan, 1906, pp. 1-30. https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/acton-s-inaugural-lecture-on-history

^[2] Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, Abridged and translated by N.M. Tolley, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1955. p.28. 

^[3] Quentin Outram, « The Socio-Economic Relations of Warfare and the Military Mortality Crises of the Thirty Years War”, Medical History, 2001, 45: pp.131-184; “The Demographic impact of early modern warfare”. Social Science History. Vol 26, No 2, Summer 2002, pp. 245–272. 

^[4] Günther Franz, Der Dreissigjähre Krieg und das Deutsche Volk, De Gruyter Oldenburg, reprint, 2019 ed.  

^[5] E.A. Eckert, The structure of plagues and pestilences in early modern Europe: central Europe 1560-1640, Basel Klager, p.154. 

^[6] Stephen Mortlock, « Death and Disease in the English Civil War, The Biomedical Scientist, 1 June 2017. 

^[7] Quoted in Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy: 1453 to the Present, London, Allen Lane, p.42. 

^[8] James Lockhart, Stuart Schwartz, Early Latin America. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press 1983, p. 391.

^[9] Emmerich de Vattel, Le droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle, London, 1758. , II, pp.3ç-40. 

^[10] M.van Gelderen, « Universal Monarchy, the Rights of War and Peace and the Balance of Power: Europe’s Quest for Civil Order, in Reflections on Europe: Defining a Political Order in Time and Space, eds H-A Persson, B.Strathh, Brussels, P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2007, pp.49-71. 

^[11] Quoted in Ernst B. Haas, « The Balance of Power: Prescription, Concept or Propaganda”, World Politics 5, 1953, pp.442-477. 

^[12] Andreas Osiander, « Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth”, International Organization, 55, 2, Spring 2001, pp.251-287. 

^[13] Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations : The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6^th ed. Revised and edited by Kenneth Thompson, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1985. p.294. 

^[14] Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1990, Wiley-Blackwell, 1993. 

^[15] Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815. Penguin Books, 2008, p.314. 

^[16] https://www.carpelibrumbooks.com/tuireamh-na-heireann-early-irish-manuscript-with-scribal-provenance

^[17] Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, Panther, 1969. pp.64-65.

^[18] In Sir Thomas Aston, Bart, A Survey of Presbytery, 1641, Sig. 1n 4v. Cited by Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, London, Panther, 1969. p. 59. 

^[19] Zidmun Calamy, B.D. , Englands Looking-Glass, London, I.Raworth, 1642. Cited in Tim Blanning, p.317. 

^[20] Cited in Tim Blanning p. 318. 

^[21] Eamonn Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4^th edition, New Haven Yale University Press, 1997, p. 234.

^[22] Dadabhai Naoroji,  Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, London, Sonnenschein, 1901. 

^[23] Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown, Avon Paperback, 1970. p.9.

^[24] Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19^th Century, Cambridge University Press, 1975. p.5.

^[25] Essays in Comparative Literature, St. Louis 1961, p.6. 

^[26]  Richard Price, The Evidence for A Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind with the Means of Promoting It– Forgotten Books , 17 Dec. 2018.  https://www.constitution.org/2-Authors/price/price_7.htm

^[27] From John Adams, to Jedidiah Morse, December 2, 1815.

^[28] Quoted in Nancy Rhoden, Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy during the American Revolution, New York University Press, 1999, fn 3.p.37. 

1999. Chapter 3, pp.37-63. Fn 3. P.37. 

^[29] Lionel Gossman, Michelet and Natural History: The Alibi of Nature, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 145, No 3, September 2001, p.309

^[30] MM.Michelet and Quinet, The Jesuits,London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, Paternoster Row, 1845, p.3.

^[31] Joseph de Maistre, Du Pape, Paris, Béaucé-Rusand, 1819, p.400. 

^[32] Quoted in Jack Lively, (ed) , The Works of De Maistre, New York, MacMillan, 1964, p.253. 

^[33] Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, from the St Peterburg Dialogues, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, London, Fontana Press, 1990pp.116-117.

^[34] Vincenzo Gioberti, Del Primato morale e civile degle Italiani,Tomo Unico, Capologo, Tipografia Elvetica, 1846. 

^[35] Giuseppe Mazzini, Fede e Avvenire, (1835) Milano , Casa Ed. Leonardo, Stampa, 1944. 

^[36] La Riforma Oct 3 1870, quoed by Christopher Duggan, Francesco Crispi From Nation to Nationalism, Oxford University Press,  2002.p. 328.