century-the Paris Commune, the impact of the Commune upon the International, the German socialists, the growth of a revolutionary party in Russia-which appeared to confirm that what it said was true, but because it too offered a version of the afterlife: revolution, following which justice and bliss would be restored to the world. In offering a secular afterlife, Chadwick argues, Marxism produced an unintended spin-off: socialism and atheism became linked, and religion was politicised. But Marx was not alone, not by any means. In his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 , Engels reported 'almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc.... '26 Outright atheists were never very common but, in the middle 1850s, across Britain, the first 'Secular Societies' were founded. Paradoxically, there was a puritan streak in these groups, many of which were linked with the temperance movement. This appears to have peaked around 1883-1885, one reason being that atheists were given the right to sit in Parliament.27 Another general factor in creating a more secular world was urbanisation itself. Statistics from Germany and France show a fall in church attendance down the decades, with the greater falls occurring in the larger towns, and a parallel fall in ordinations.28 This may have been nothing more than an organisational failure on the part of organised religion but it was important-for it revealed an inability of the churches to adapt themselves quickly enough to the towns. 'The population of Paris rose by nearly 100 per cent between 1861 and 1905, the number of parishes by about 33 per cent, the number of priests by about 30 per cent.'29 The view that we now have about the Enlightenment, that it was 'a good thing', a step forward, a necessary stage in the evolution of the modern world, was not the nineteenth-century view.30 For the Victorians it was the age which ended in the guillotine and the Terror. Thomas Carlyle was just one who thought that Voltaire and his deism were 'contemptible'. For him, Napoleon was the last great man and Carlyle was proud that his own father had 'never been visited by doubt'.31 Throughout the Napoleonic period and well on into Queen Victoria's reign, 'Men thought the Enlightenment a corpse, a cul-desac of ideas, a destructive age overthrowing the intellectual as well as the physical landmarks by which human society may live as a civilised body.'32 Opinions didn't begin to change until the 1870s. In fact, the very first time that the English word Enlightenment was used to mean Aufklarung dates from 1865, in a book on Hegel by J. H. Stirling. But even here the word is pejorative-and it did not gain a fully favourable meaning until 1889, in Edward Caird's study of Kant, where there is the first use of the phrase, the 'Age of Enlightenment'.33 But the man who really rescued the Enlightenment and its secular values from the negative territory to which they had been consigned, was John Morley, a journalist for the Fortnightly Review . It was Morley (who was also an MP) who felt that the British reaction to the excesses of 1789 had been generalised to the philosophes , and that the romantics' passion for the inner life had combined in what he called a form of philistinism to obscure the real achievements of the eighteenth century. He was stimulated to act, in a series of articles, because he saw about him the church trying to stifle positive science.34 There was a parallel change in France. That country had had its equivalent of Carlyle in Joseph de Maistre, who wrote: 'To admire Voltaire is the sign of a corrupt heart, and if anybody is drawn to his works, then be very sure that God does not love such an one.'35 Napoleon, whose attitude to the church was erratic, nonetheless is said to have ordered his ranks of tame writers to attack Voltaire. Then came Jules Michelet, the historian. In the early 1840s, together with a group of friends-Victor Hugo and Lamartine among them-Michelet attacked the church head-on. Catholicism was unforgivably narrow, he said, celibacy was an 'unnatural' vice, confession was an abuse of privacy, the Jesuits were devious manipulators. These broadsides were delivered in a series of intemperate lectures at the College de France and, unlike elsewhere, the focus of his offensive was not science but ethics. Ironical, of course, since Voltaire had been fanatically opposed to the fanaticism he himself sparked. Michelet bombarded the
churches 'in the name of justice and freedom', and it was as a result of these sorties that Voltaire became the focus of a vicious war of ideas in France.36 For example, on Louis Napoleon's accession in 1851 libraries everywhere were compelled to remove the volumes of Voltaire and Rousseau from their shelves. To give another example, an otherwise respected scholar, editing Voltaire's papers, warned his readers that Voltaire had 'caused' 1789 and the Terror of 1793.37 Matters came to a head in 1885, when rumours began to circulate in Paris that the remains of both Voltaire and Rousseau were not in the Pantheon, where they should have been, as the resting place of the illustrious.38 It was alleged that, in 1814, a group of royalists, unable to stomach these remains in a sacred spot, had removed the bones in the dead of night and disposed of them on waste land. The rumours were not based on anything other than circumstantial evidence but they were so widely believed, and so outraged Voltaire's supporters, that in 1897 a government committee was appointed to investigate. The investigation went so far as to have the tombs reopened and the remains examined. They were declared to be those of Voltaire and Rousseau.39 People realised at last that this dispute had gone far enough and the bones were reinterred where they belonged. Following this all-round embarrassing episode, attitudes about the Enlightenment began to change, more or less to the view that we have now. George Eliot, as we have seen, was influenced in her beliefs by David Strauss's book on The Life of Jesus , but she was not entirely typical. A more common reaction was that of the Swiss, whose threatened riots caused Strauss to be released from his professorship before he had even started. Most of the books of the nineteenth century that we now regard as important in bringing about a decline in religious belief did not usually act directly on the vast mass of people. The general public did not read Lyell, Strauss or Darwin. What they did read, however, were a number of popularisers-Karl Vogt on Darwin, Jakob Moleschott on Strauss, Ludwig Buchner on the new physics and the new cell biology. These men were read because they were willing to go a good deal further than Darwin, say, or Lyell. The Origin of Species or the Principles of Geology did not, in and of themselves, attack religion. The implication was there, but it was the popularisers who interpreted these books and spelled out these implications for a wider readership. 'Religion is a commoner interest of most of the human race than is physics or biology. The great public,' says Owen Chadwick, 'was far more interested in science-versus-religion than in science.' It was these popularisers who alerted the Victorian middle classes to the idea that alternative explanations for the way the world was were now available. They did not immediately say that all religion was wrong but they did cast serious doubt on the accuracy, veracity and plausibility of the Bible.40 The greatest of the popularisers was Ernst Haeckel, a German who in 1862 published The Natural History of Creation . This, a very readable polemic in favour of Darwin, just three years after the Origin and spelling out its implications, went through nine editions by the end of the century and was translated into twelve languages. DieWeltratsel , translated into English in 1900 as The Riddle of the Universe , and which explained the new cosmology, sold 100,000 copies in German and as many in English.41 Haeckel was far more widely read than Darwin, and became for a time equally famous-people flocked to hear him talk.42 The other populariser, who did for Strauss what Haeckel did for Darwin, and became just as famous in the process, was Ernest Renan. Originally destined for the priesthood, he lost his faith and put his new conviction into several books, of which the Life of Jesus (1863) was by far the most influential.43 Though he said different things at different times, it seems that it was the study of history that destroyed Renan's faith, and his book on Jesus had the same effect on others.44 The book had the influence it did, partly because of its exquisite French, but also because it treated Jesus as a historical figure, denied his supernatural acts, presented in a clear manner the scholarship which threw doubts over his divinity, and yet showed him in a sympathetic light, as the 'pinnacle of humanity', whose genius and moral teaching changed the world. It seems that Renan's evident sympathy towards Jesus made the shortcomings he highlighted more palatable. At the same time, he dismantled the need for churches, creeds, sacraments and dogmas. Like Comte, Renan thought positivism could be the basis for a new faith.45 He underlined that Jesus was a moral leader, a great man, but not in any way divine-organised religion, as it existed in