From America's fight for independence to the Paris Commune - an exotic collection of fanatics, adventures, poets and thinkers are brought vividly to life. Holy Madness probes into the psyche that was responsible for so many of the founding events of our modern world, and into the instincts that caused its most generous and most murderous impulses. It explains how the Englightenment dislodged Christianity from its central position in the life of European societies, and what inspired the great romantics and revolutionaries of the time. This dramatic journey which begins in America in 1776 and goes right up to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, takes in the French revolution, the Irish rebellion, the Polish risings, the war of Greek liberation, the Russian insurrection, the Hungarian struggles for freedom, the liberation of South America, and the Italian Risorgimento.