Patrick Stoffel thrillingly recounts for the first time the contested history of the binding forces between nature and humanity, using the Alps as an example. In the 18th century, the Alps, previously avoided as monuments of the Fall from Grace created during the Great Flood, become a rationally organized place for living and education in enlightened Europe. Authors such as Scheuchzer, Vico, Schiller, and Mary Shelley no longer seek their origins in a lost paradise, but in the alpine nature. With Albrecht von Haller's poem "The Alps" or Jean-Jacques Rousseau's epistolary novel "Julie, or the New Heloise" in hand, the enlightened—and simultaneously glorified—European begins to pilgrimage to the mountain peaks to affirm his existence and to have the lesson of living rightly instilled in his heart by the alpine nature. When the French Revolution breaks out in 1789, reason prevails.