THE FLEETING BEAUTY OF MASS MURDER:

The Zealotry Of Free Thinkers: Many philosophes ended up gouty and spherical, despite the austerities: a review of A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom (Michael Burleigh, 11/11/10, WSJ)

The radicalism of Mr. Blom's group of thinkers consisted of advocating democracy over monarchy and aristocracy; racial and gender equality; the right to choose one's individual way of life; freedom of thought and expression, including freedom of the press; and, finally, religious toleration, including the right to believe in nothing at all. Most important, they thought there were no fields of human activity that might not benefit from the application of philosophic reason. [...]

As Mr. Blom concedes, the more mainstream Enlightenment thinkers were appalled by the social implications of his radicals' views. And even the radicals themselves seemed to have had their doubts. Voltaire was not alone in wishing dark religion upon his servants, to inhibit their thieving fingers, even though he remained a deist himself. Rousseau was also, rightly, worried about the coldness of a purely material universe. And consider a love letter that Diderot wrote in 1759 to his mistress, Sophie: "If there were a kind of law of affinity among our organizing principles, if we could make up one shared being . . . if the molecules of your dissolved lover could become agitated, move and seek your molecules scattered through nature!" Poor Sophie.

Unfortunately, Rousseau's instrumental view of "civic" religion would lead, directly, to the grotesqueries of the Jacobins' Cult of Reason—personified by the fat actress Désirée Candéille prancing about half-naked as the "Goddess of Reason" in Notre Dame in 1793—and to the state's systematic murder of those who rejected such secular cults, a prefigurement of the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

Mr. Blom seems to be celebrating the thinkers of the radical Enlightenment for positing "a world of ignorant necessity and without higher meaning, into which kindness and lust can inject a fleeting beauty." That view of the world is certainly embraced by their intellectual descendants today. But judging by the crowds of people I recently saw mob Pope Benedict XVI on a grim London public-housing estate, it may take more than Mr. Blom's book to make the radical Enlightenment broadly appealing, especially since the pope's message combines faith, love and reason.