Death and the enlightenment : changing attitudes to death among Christians and unbelievers in eighteenth-century France

Death and the Enlightenment is an unusual survey of the daily rituals, customs, and attitudes surrounding death and dying in 18th-century France. Focusing on the tension between the faithful and the growing ranks of unbelievers bred on Enlightenment philosophy, McManners charts the course of pestilence and plague, and examines the terrible fears connected with childbirth, disease, disfigurement, mortality, and the hereafter. He also examines suicide, public execution, and the rites surrounding the deathbed, and demonstrates how the period's ever-present concern with death and dying was transformed into the Romantic cult of melancholy that occupied the creative imagination of generations to come. A Personal View 1 1 Death's Arbitrary Empire 4 2 Defences against Death: Eighteenth-century Medicine 24 3 The Shadow of Death and the Art of Living 59 4 Statistics, Hopes, and Fears 89 5 The Soul, Heaven, and Hell 120 6 The Afterlife: Doubts and Reconsiderations 148 7 Preparation for Death 191 8 Deathbeds 234 9 Funerals 270 10 Graveyards: Patriotism, Poetry and Grim Realities 303 11 Death as an Instrument: The Public Execution 368 12 Suicide 409 13 Living, Loving and Dying 438 References 467 Bibliography A. Eighteenth-century works 569 B. Secondary works Indexes 588 Indexes 605