The piece argues that the religious themes discussed by Francesca Sofia for the case of the Risorgimento represented versions of a more general European discussion and intellectual transformations that took place between the end of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. These developments included new conceptions of religion that emerged in the 1780s; the rise of the notion of civil religion that, after the failure of the Jacobin experiment of the Terror, was rethought in new terms; the search for new form of pouvoir spirituel that would replace the Catholic Church, including the Saintsimonian movement and religious ideas of democracy. As was the case with many Risorgimento patriots, Carlyle or Saint-Simon viewed writers and intellectuals as prophets of the nation.