Article: Beyond Enlightenment: occultism, politics, and culture in France from the old regime to the fin-de-siecle (1).

FRANCE is often seen as the land of Enlightenment par excellence, the ancestral home of Cartesian rationalism and Voltairean skepticism. While this is no doubt true, the traditional emphasis on France's Enlightenment and Positivist heritage has long obscured a very different, but far from marginal tradition of occultism, made up of a broad range of supernatural beliefs and practices, including astrology, alchemy, divination, prophecy, and spiritism. Far from being banished into the darkness of folk memory by the lamp of Reason, the French occult tradition instead developed parallel to the unfolding of rationalism across the modern age, with peaks in the occult revivals of ...

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