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“The Invention of Catholicism: A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780-1849” investigates the intellectual history of European and Latin American Catholicism in the Age of Revolutions through the analysis of the published and unpublished works of a long-forgotten network of Catholic writers. It reveals how Catholicism, confronted with the secularizing impulse of political revolutions that pushed religion toward the private sphere, metamorphosed into a full-fledged ideology—a set of claims about politics and society that could mobilize mass support and compete with other emerging ideologies on the marketplace of ideas.
Beginning with the reaction to tolerance and state-led reform of the Church in the Holy Roman Empire and Tuscany in the 1780s, the study demonstrates how Catholic thinkers interpreted the dismantling of confessional states as a plot against Catholicism and in response began to articulate a discourse that drew on the language of social utility to reaffirm the centrality of Catholicism to the life of states. By the time the Revolution erupted in France in 1789, Catholic polemicists had already spent years rehearsing the arguments they used to counter France’s elected assemblies, which they saw as the continuators of the reformism of the 1780s. Catholic resistance played a paramount role in determining the radicalization of the French Revolution and ultimately its spiraling into the state-sponsored violence and anti-religious persecution of the Terror. Over the 1790s, however, Catholic counterrevolutionaries throughout Europe incorporated the new catchwords of revolutionary lexicon—from liberty and equality to national sovereignty and human rights—into their vocabulary. From Spain to Belgium to the Italian Peninsula, they also began to use the traditional rhetoric of religious war to rally the masses in defense of Catholicism. When, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, most Catholics ultimately came to terms with the demise of confessional states, the counterrevolutionary culture of the 1790s provided them with the tools to reimagine the presence of Catholicism in a world where the hegemony of Catholic values no longer depended on the coercive powers of states, but on the ability of Catholics to gather support and steer society their way. From the Spain of the Peninsular War (1808-14) to revolutionary Latin America and mid- century Ireland, Poland, and Italy, this new Catholic culture birthed forms of Catholic nationalism that were meant to reinscribe Catholicism in the heart of political organisms that might be only nominally Catholic, if at all. In Belgium, France, and some areas of Germany, counterrevolutionary culture also provided the basis for the emergence of forms of liberal and social Catholicism that rejected the extremes of liberal individualism and socialist collectivism and evolved into the first mass-based Catholic movements.