Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1975. The French Revolution generated a wave of popular piety and religious excitement in both France and England, where millenariansprophets of the millenniumattempted to interpret the Revolution as the fulfillment of the predictions of Daniel and St. John the Divine. This study discusses the millenarian ideal in the context of the intellectual and religious attitudes of the time. Rejecting interpretations of millenarianism that chalk it up to class struggle or mass hysteria, Garrett stresses the interaction between politics and religion, viewing the phenomenon as the interpretation, by a varied assortment of individuals, of coincident political events in eschatological terms. Faced with a change as significant as the French Revolution, people found in the prophetic books of the Bible an understanding of what was happening to them. If the Revolution was God's will, if its development had been foretold, then surely the final outcome would be beneficial, at least
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction. Historians and the Millennium
Chapter 1. Millenarian Currents in Eighteenth-Century France
Chapter 2. A Prophetess in Perigord
Chapter 3. A Respectable Folly
Chapter 4. The Popular Piety of Catherine Theot
Chapter 5. The Mystical International
Chapter 6. The Millenarian Tradition in English Dissent
Chapter 7. The Land of the Learned Pig
Chapter 8. A Methodical Madness
Chapter 9. Brothers, Southcott, and the "Chiliasm of Despair"
Conclusion
Index
