A New Millenarian: Georges Baudot

Abstract

Georges Baudot has written a lengthy book (554 pages) which bears a beautiful and suggestive title: Utopia and History in Mexico. In publishing this work, he seems to have had two very clear purposes in mind. The first is to fill an enormous gap since “strange as it may seem, the authentic sources for most of our knowledge about pre-Columbian civilization in central Mexico have never been studied.” (p. ix) The second, is to demonstrate the grandeur of the Franciscan work in the sixteenth century, impelled by millenarian fervor.With respect to the manner in which Baudot fulfills his first and commendable purpose, there is nothing more to be said after the two articles Dr. Edmundo O'Gorman has published in Historia Mexicana. With regard to the second, I must admit that the reading of the book provoked in me, in almost equal measures, amazement and envy. I will explain. It amazes me (and not just a little) that an author who confronts what is for me, at least, such a difficult topic as Franciscan millenarianism can establish the antecedents of this tendency in only twenty pages (71-90) and utilize for it only a single biblical citation (p. 78, note 14: Revelations XX:4-6). Envy presents itself after concluding that such frugality must be due to the vast culture of the French public to whom the work is addressed.