Christopher Clark (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)
The Culture Wars of modern Europe
The consolidation of nation-states in nineteenth-century Europe was accompanied by heightened conflict over the place of religion in public life. Schooling, marriage, burial rites, the confessional mobilization of women and the religious use of public space became bones of contention in an all-encompassing battle of words, laws and images that contemporaries rightly called a 'culture war'. This paper examines the relationship between secularizing enterprises and the waves of religious revival that swept nineteenth-century Europe. Can we really separate processes of secularization from the waves of revival that swept the European continent, or were they two faces of the same phenomenon?
