<DIV>France in the eighteenth century glittered, but also seethed, with new goods and new ideas. In the halls of Versailles, the streets of Paris, and the soul of the Enlightenment itself, a vitriolic struggle was waged over the question of ownership?of property, position, even of personhood. Radical mystics, philosophical materialists, and revolutionaries unleashed successive assaults on the equation of "being" with having a "self." This book traces the far-flung sparks of anti-individualism that permeated theology, philosophy, and politics throughout the period. Fired by the notion that the self was a fiction, men and women joined illicit mystic cults that engaged in shocking rituals of physical mortification and sexual abandon, committed suicides out of materialist fatalism, sought to induce consciousness-altering dreams to satisfy their lusts for scientific and carnal knowledge, railed against the degrading effects of luxury consumption, and even renounced the feudal privileges that had for centuries defined their social existence. The explosive denouement was the French Revolution, during which God and king were toppled from their thrones.<br><BR>We credit the French Enlightenment with the formal recognition of autonomous individualism, and the Revolution with inscribing the individual's rights into law. As <I>The Virtues of Abandon</i> demonstrates, however, these rights arose as much out of calls for violent self-sacrifice and self-immolation as they did for the individual pursuit of happiness. Another misconception is to think of the French Enlightenment as avowedly secular from the outset. Yet this book reveals that the Enlightenment has radical religious origins precisely where scholars are least likely to look for them: enfolded in its radical, materialist, atheistic wing. The occurrence of these paradoxical cultural schisms, little recognized until recently, necessitates a fundamental reassessment of the long eighteenth century. <br><BR></DIV>