It is now fifty years since the brilliant French historian, Paul Hazard, published in 1935 his classic work, La crise de la conscience européenne 1680–1713 (Paris, 1935). In it he propounded a thesis that has admirably withstood the passage of time and been capable of absorbing many, but by no means all, of the historical studies appearing since the Second World War. Briefly stated, Hazard and all subsequent historians have discerned at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries a crisis within the European mind, a moment of profound uncertainty, une zone uncertaine, malaisée. Out of that crisis emerged a new understanding of people and nature, of government, of religion in society which, as he saw it, prepared the way for the French Revolution. At that moment emerged a mentalité discernibly enlightened and modern, one with which Hazard and his generation of liberal French intellectuals could still identify.

Hazard identified one of those extraordinary cultural shifts – simultaneously the decline of traditional religious culture and the rise of a culture discernibly secular – which have so fascinated cultural historians. Helli Koenigsberger speculated about one such transformation within sixteenth-century Venetian culture. Here I seek to explore the nature of Hazard's crisis, accepting his model of its being a critical turning point in European culture but offering a new reading of its origins and resolution.