The Democratization of Anti-Religious Thought in Revolutionary Times: a Transnational Perspective

Abstract

This article focuses on an important cultural aspect of secularization in the French revolutionary period: the circulation of sceptical free-thinking outside the circles of the cultivated few; that is, the democratization of critical knowledge through translations and migrations of texts toward historically new audiences. Examples are given to show what an important political stake this was, even after Bonaparte's Concordat, for many French revolutionary intellectuals, including women writers like Marie-Armande Gacon-Dufour. The article's perspective is transnational: I argue that cultural tradition had always been typically cosmopolitan. And, though the most visible political outcomes of the Revolution were nationalisms, what is more interesting to us today is its cosmopolitan legacy, in its broadest, inter-cultural sense: the way revolutionary culture and authors crossed not only national boundaries, but social and gender barriers as well. The main example here is a case study on the multiple versions of a radical text which appeared in English, French and Italian over at least three generations, from the 1740s to the 1820s. In Italy, a local anti-religious, materialist current emerged publicly for the first time at the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to the partial freedom of expression of the Cisalpine Republic, which gave rise to a series of publishing projects, including both original works and translations. Tracing the story of the translations of Peter Annet's History and Character of Saint Paul Examined, before and after the 1790s, allows us to contextualize the Italian version, based on d'Holbach's French adaptation of the text. The annotated work of a translator calling himself ‘citizen of the world’, it was published in 1798 in Milan, the capital of the Cisalpine Republic, with the eloquent heading ‘Democracy or Death’.