THE EARTH-SHATTERING WORK of the “natural philosophers” in the Scientific Revolution had affected only a relatively small number of Europe’s educated elite. In the eighteenth century, this changed dramatically as a group of intellectuals known as the philosophes popularized the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and used them to undertake a dramatic reexamination of all aspects of life. In Paris, the cultural capital of Europe, women took the lead in bringing together groups of men and women to discuss the new ideas of the philosophes. At her fashionable home on the rue Saint-Honoré, Marie Thérèse de Geoffrin (ma-REE-tay-RAYZ duh zhoh-FRANH), the wife of a wealthy merchant, held sway over gatherings that became the talk of France and even Europe. Distinguished foreigners, including a future king of Sweden and a future king of Poland, competed to receive invitations. When Madame Geoffrin made a visit to Vienna, she was so well received that she exclaimed, “I am better known here than a couple of yards from my own house.” Madame Geoffrin was an amiable but firm hostess who allowed wide-ranging discussions as long as they remained in good taste. When she found that artists and philosophers did not mix particularly well (the artists were high-strung and the philosophers talked too much), she set up separate meetings. Artists were invited only on Mondays, philosophers, on Wednesdays. These gatherings were among the many avenues for the spread of the ideas of the philosophes. And those ideas had such a widespread impact on their society that historians ever since have called the eighteenth century the Age of Enlightenment.
For most of the philosophes, “enlightenment” included the rejection of traditional Christianity. The religious wars and intolerance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had so alienated intellectuals that they were open and even eager to embrace the new ideas of the Scientific Revolution. Whereas the great scientists of the seventeenth century believed that their work exalted God, the intellectuals of the eighteenth century read those scientific conclusions a different way and increasingly turned their backs on Christian orthodoxy. Consequently, European intellectual life in the eighteenth century was marked by the emergence of the secularization that has characterized the modern Western mentality ever since. Ironically, at the same time that reason and materialism were beginning to replace faith and worship, a great outburst of religious sensibility manifested itself in music and art. Clearly, the growing secularization of the eighteenth century had not yet captured the hearts and minds of all European intellectuals and artists.
In 1784, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (i-MAH-Nyoo-el KAHNT) (1724-1804) defined the Enlightenment as “man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.” Whereas earlier periods had been handicapped by the inability to “use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another,” Kant proclaimed as the motto of the Enlightenment: “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!” The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a movement of intellectuals who dared to know. They were greatly impressed with the accomplishments of the Scientific Revolution, and when they used the word reason – one of their favorite words – they were advocating the application of the scientific method to the understanding of all life. All institutions and all systems of thought were subject to the rational, scientific way of thinking if only people would free themselves from the shackles of old, worthless traditions, especially religious ones. If Isaac Newton could discover the natural laws regulating the world of nature, they too, by using reason, could find the laws that governed human society. This belief in turn led them to hope that they could make progress toward a better society than the one they had inherited. Reason, natural law, hope, progress – these were the buzz words in the heady atmosphere of the eighteenth century.
The intellectuals of the eighteenth century were especially influenced by the revolutionary thinkers of the seventeenth century. What were the major intellectual changes that culminated in the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment?
THE POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE Although the intellectuals of the eighteenth century were much influenced by the scientific ideas of the seventeenth, they did not always acquire this knowledge directly from the original sources. Newton’s Principia was not an easy book to read or comprehend. Scientific ideas were spread to ever-widening circles of educated Europeans not so much by scientists themselves as by popularizers. Especially important as the direct link between the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the philosophes of the eighteenth was Bernard de Fontenelle (bayr-NAHR duh fawnt-NELL) (1657-1757), secretary of the French Royal Academy of Science from 1691 to 1741.
Although Fontenelle performed no scientific experiments and made no scientific discoveries, he possessed a deep knowledge of all the scientific work of earlier centuries and his own time. Moreover, he was able to communicate that body of scientific knowledge in a clear and even witty fashion that appealed to his upper-class audiences in a meaningful way. One of his most successful books, Plurality of Worlds, was actually presented in the form of an intimate conversation between a lady aristocrat and her lover who are engaged in conversation under the stars. What are they discussing? “Tell me,” she exclaims, “about these stars of yours.” Her lover proceeds to tell her of the tremendous advances in cosmology after the foolish errors of their forebears:
There came on the scene a certain German, one Copernicus, who made short work of all those various circles, all those solid skies, which the ancients had pictured to themselves. The former he abolished; the latter, he broke in pieces. Fired with the noble zeal of a true astronomer, he took the earth and spun it very far away from the center of the universe, where it had been installed, and in that center he put the sun, which had a far better title to the honor.
In the course of two evenings under the stars, the lady learned the basic fundamentals of the new mechanistic universe. So too did scores of the educated elite of Europe.
Thanks to Fontenelle, science was no longer the monopoly of experts but part of literature. He was especially fond of downplaying the religious backgrounds of the seventeenth-century scientists. Himself a skeptic, Fontenelle contributed to the growing skepticism toward religion at the end of the seventeenth century by portraying the churches as enemies of scientific progress.
A NEW SKEPTICISM The great scientists of the seventeenth century, including Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, had pursued their work in a spirit of exalting God, not undermining Christianity. But as scientific knowledge spread, more and more educated men and women began to question religious truths and values. Skepticism about religion and a growing secularization of thought were especially evident in the work of Pierre Bayle (pYAYR BELL) (1647-1706), who remained a Protestant while becoming a leading critic of traditional religious attitudes. Bayle attacked superstition, religious intolerance, and dogmatism. In his view, compelling people to believe a particular set of religious ideas (as Louis XIV was doing at the time in Bayle’s France) was wrong. It simply created hypocrites and in itself was contrary to what religion should be about. Individual conscience should determine one’s actions. Bayle argued for complete religious toleration, maintaining that the existence of many religions would benefit rather than harm the state.
THE IMPACT OF TRAVEL LITERATURE Skepticism about both Christianity and European culture itself was nourished by travel reports. As we saw in Chapter 14, Europeans had embarked on voyages of discovery to other parts of the world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the course of the seventeenth century, traders, missionaries, medical practitioners, and explorers began to publish an increasing number of travel books that gave accounts of many different cultures. Then, too, the new geographic adventures of the eighteenth century, especially the discovery of the Pacific island of Tahiti and of New Zealand and Australia by James Cook, aroused much enthusiasm. Cook's Travels, an account of his journey, became a best-seller. Educated Europeans responded to these accounts of lands abroad in different ways. For some intellectuals, exotic peoples, such as the natives of Tahiti, presented an image of a “natural man” who was far happier than many Europeans. One intellectual wrote:
The life of savages is so simple, and our societies are such complicated machines! The Tahitian is close to the origin of the world, while the European is closer to its old age.... [The Tahitians] understand nothing about our manners or our laws, and they are bound to see in them nothing but shackles disguised in a hundred different ways. Those shackles could only provoke the indignation and scorn of creatures in whom the most profound feeling is a love of liberty.
The difficulty is that the Duke of Lorraine claims that he is entitled to sit in an armchair in the presence of Philip and myself because the Emperor gives him an armchair. To this the King [Louis] replied that the Emperor’s ceremonial is one thing and the King’s another, and that, for example, the Emperor gives the cardinals armchairs, whereas here they may never sit at all in the King’s presence.
The idea of the “noble savage” would play an important role in the political work of some philosophes.
The travel literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also led to the realization that there were highly developed civilizations with different customs in other parts of the world. China was especially singled out. One German university professor praised Confucian morality as superior to the intolerance of Christianity. Some European intellectuals began to evaluate their own civilization relative to others. Practices that had seemed to be grounded in reason now appeared to be merely matters of custom. Certainties about European practices gave way to cultural relativism.
Cultural relativism was accompanied by religious skepticism. As these travel accounts made clear, the Christian perception of God was merely one of many. Some people were devastated by this revelation: “Some complete their demoralization by extensive travel, and lose whatever shreds of religion remained to them. Every day they see a new religion, new customs, new rites.”
As Europeans were exposed to growing numbers of people around the world who were different from themselves, some intellectuals also began to classify people into racial groups. One group espoused polygenesis, or the belief in separate human species; others argued for monogenesis, or the belief in one human species characterized by racial variations. Both groups were especially unsympathetic to Africans and placed them in the lowest rank of humankind. In his Encyclopédie, the intellectual Denis Diderot (see “Diderot and the Encyclopedia” later in this chapter) maintained that all Africans were black and characterized the Negro as a “new species of mankind.”
John Locke’s theory of knowledge especially influenced the philosophes. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, written in 1690, Locke denied Descartes’s belief in innate ideas. Instead, argued Locke, every person was born with a tabula rasa (TAB-yuh-luh RAH-suh), a blank mind:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience … Our observation, employed either about external sensible objects or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking.
Our knowledge, then, is derived from our environment, not from heredity; from reason, not from faith. Locke’s philosophy implied that people were molded by their environment, by the experiences that they received through their senses from their surrounding world. By changing the environment and subjecting people to proper influences, they could be changed and a new society created. And how should the environment be changed? Newton had already paved the way by showing how reason enabled enlightened people to discover the natural laws to which all institutions should conform. No wonder the philosophes were enamored of Newton and Locke. Taken together, their ideas seemed to offer the hope of a “brave new world” built on reason.
The intellectuals of the Enlightenment were known by the French term philosophe (fee-loh-ZAWF), although not all of them were French and few were actually philosophers. The philosophes were literary people, professors, journalists, statesmen, economists, political scientists, and above all, social reformers. They came from both the nobility and the middle class, and a few even stemmed from lower origins. Although it was a truly international and cosmopolitan movement, the Enlightenment also enhanced the dominant role being played by French culture. Paris was its recognized capital, and most of the leaders of the Enlightenment were French (see Map 17.1). The French philosophes in turn affected intellectuals elsewhere and created a movement that engulfed the entire Western world, including the British and Spanish colonies in America.
Although the philosophes faced different political circumstances depending on the country in which they lived, they shared common bonds as part of a truly international movement. They were called philosophers, but what did philosophy mean to them? The role of philosophy was to change the world, not just discuss it. As one writer said, the philosophe is one who “applies himself to the study of society with the purpose of making his kind better and happier. “ To the philosophes, rationalism did not mean the creation of a grandiose system of thought to explain all things. Reason was scientific method, an appeal to facts and experience. A spirit of rational criticism was to be applied to everything, including religion and politics.
The philosophes’ call for freedom of expression is a reminder that their work was done in an atmosphere of censorship. The philosophes were not free to write whatever they chose. State censors decided what could be published, and protests from any number of government bodies could result in the seizure of books and the imprisonment of their authors, publishers, and sellers. The philosophes found ways to get around state censorship. Some published under pseudonyms or anonymously or abroad, especially in Holland. The use of double meanings, such as talking about the Persians when they meant the French, became standard procedure for many. Books were also published and circulated secretly or in manuscript form to avoid the censors.
Although the philosophes constituted a kind of “family circle” bound together by common intellectual bonds, they often disagreed. Spanning almost a century, the Enlightenment evolved over time, with each succeeding generation becoming more radical as it built on the contributions of the previous one. A few people, however, dominated the landscape completely, and we might best begin our survey of the ideas of the philosophes by looking at three French giants – Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot.
MONTESQUIEU AND POLITICAL THOUGHT Charles de Secondat, the baron de Montesquieu (MOHN-tess-kyoo) (1689-1755), came from the French nobility. He received a Classical education and then studied law. In his first work, the Persian Letters, published in 1721, he used the format of two Persians supposedly traveling in western Europe and sending their impressions back home to enable him to criticize French institutions, especially the Catholic Church and the French monarchy. Much of the program of the French Enlightenment is contained in this work: the attack on traditional religion, the advocacy of religious toleration, the denunciation of slavery, and the use of reason to liberate human beings from their prejudices.
Montesquieu’s most famous work, The Spirit of the Laws, was published in 1748. This treatise was a comparative study of governments in which Montesquieu attempted to apply the scientific method to the social and political arena to ascertain the “natural laws” governing the social relationships of human beings. Montesquieu distinguished three basic kinds of governments: republics, suitable for small states and based on citizen involvement; monarchy, appropriate for middle-sized states and grounded in the ruling class’s adherence to law; and despotism, apt for large empires and dependent on fear to inspire obedience. Montesquieu used England as an example of the second category, and it was his praise and analysis of England’s constitution that led to his most far-reaching and lasting contribution to political thought - the importance of checks and balances created by means of a separation of powers (see the box on p. 507). He believed that England’s system, with its separate executive, legislative, and judicial powers that served to limit and control each other, provided the greatest freedom and security for a state. In large part, Montesquieu misread the English situation and insisted on a separation of powers because he wanted the nobility of France (of which he was a member) to play an active role in running the French government. The translation of his work into English two years after publication ensured that it would be read by American philosophes, such as Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, who incorporated its principles into the U.S. Constitution (see Chapter 19). VOLTAIRE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT The greatest figure of the Enlightenment was François-Marie Arouet (frahn-SWAH-ma-REE ahr-WEH), known simply as Voltaire (vohl-TAYR) (1694-1778). Son of a prosperous middle-class family from Paris, Voltaire received a Classical education in Jesuit schools. Although he studied law, he wished to be a writer and achieved his first success as a playwright. By his mid-twenties, Voltaire had been hailed as the successor to Racine (see Chapter 15) for his tragedy Œdipe and his epic Henriade on his favorite king, Henry IV. His wit made him a darling of the Parisian intellectuals but also involved him in a quarrel with a dissolute nobleman that forced him to flee France and live in England for almost two years.
Well received in English literary and social circles, the young playwright was much impressed by England. His Philosophic Letters on the English, written in 1733, expressed a deep admiration of English life, especially its freedom of the press, its political freedom, and its religious toleration. In judging the English religious situation, he made the famous remark that “if there were just one religion in England, despotism would threaten; if there were two religions, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty religions, and they live together peacefully and happily. “ Although he clearly exaggerated the freedoms England possessed, in a roundabout way Voltaire had managed to criticize many of the ills oppressing France, especially royal absolutism and the lack of religious toleration and freedom of thought. The criticism of absolute monarchy by Voltaire and other philosophes reflected the broader dissatisfaction of middle-class individuals with their society. In the course of the eighteenth century, this would help lead to revolutionary upheavals in France and other countries (see Chapter 19).
On his return to France, Voltaire’s reputation as the author of the Philosophic Letters made it necessary for him to retire to Cirey, near France’s eastern border, where he lived in semi-seclusion on the estate of his mistress, the marquise du Châtelet (mahr-KEEZ duh shat-LAY) (1706-1749). Herself an early philosophe, the marquise was one of the first intellectuals to adopt the ideas of Isaac Newton, and in 1759 her own translation of Newton’s famous Principia was published. While Voltaire lived with her at her chateau at Cirey, the two collaborated on a book about the natural philosophy of Newton.
Voltaire eventually settled on a magnificent estate at Ferney. Located in France near the Swiss border, Ferney gave Voltaire the freedom to write what he wished. By this time, through his writings, inheritance, and clever investments, Voltaire had become wealthy and now had the leisure to write an almost endless stream of pamphlets, novels, plays, letters, and histories.
Although he touched on all of the themes of importance to the philosophes, Voltaire was especially well known for his criticism of traditional religion and his strong attachment to the ideal of religious toleration (see the box on p. 509). He lent his prestige and skills as a polemicist to fighting cases of intolerance in France. The most famous incident was the Calas affair. Jean Calas (ZHAHNH ka-LAH) was a Protestant from Toulouse who was accused of murdering his own son to stop him from becoming a Catholic. Tortured to confess his guilt, Calas died shortly thereafter. An angry and indignant Voltaire published devastating broadsides that aroused public opinion and forced a retrial in which Calas was exonerated when it was proved that his son had actually committed suicide. The family was paid an indemnity, and Voltaire’s appeals for toleration appeared all the more reasonable. In 1763, he penned his Treatise on Toleration, in which he argued that religious toleration had created no problems for England and Holland and reminded governments that “all men are brothers under God.” As he grew older, Voltaire became ever more strident in his denunciations. “Crush the infamous thing,” he thundered repeatedly - the infamous thing being religious fanaticism, intolerance, and superstition.
Throughout his life, Voltaire championed not only religious tolerance but also deism, a religious outlook shared by most other philosophes. Deism was built on the Newtonian world-machine, which suggested the existence of a mechanic (God) who had created the universe. Voltaire said, “In the opinion that there is a God, there are difficulties, but in the contrary opinion there are absurdities.” To Voltaire and most other philosophes, God had no direct involvement in the world he had created and allowed it to run according to its own natural laws. God did not extend grace or answer prayers as Christians liked to believe. Jesus might be a “good fellow,” as Voltaire called him, but he was not divine, as Christianity claimed.
DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIA Denis Diderot (duh-NEE DEE-droh) (1713-1784), the son of a skilled craftsman from eastern France, became a freelance writer so that he could study many subjects and read in many languages. One of his favorite topics was Christianity, which he condemned as fanatical and unreasonable. As he grew older, his literary attacks on Christianity grew more vicious. Of all religions, he maintained, Christianity was the worst, “the most absurd and the most atrocious in its dogma” (see the box on p. 510). Near the end of his life, he argued for an essentially materialistic conception of life: “This world is only a mass of molecules.”
Diderot’s most famous contribution to the Enlightenment was the twenty-eight-volume Encyclopedia, or Classified Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades, that he edited and called the “great work of his life.” Its purpose, according to Diderot, was to “change the general way of thinking.” It did precisely that in becoming a major weapon of the philosophes’ crusade against the old French society. The contributors included many philosophes who expressed their major concerns. They attacked religious superstition and advocated toleration as well as a program for social, legal, and political improvements that would lead to a society that was more cosmopolitan, more tolerant, more humane, and more reasonable. In later editions, the price of the Encyclopedia was drastically reduced, dramatically increasing its sales and making it available to doctors, clergy, teachers, lawyers, and even military officers. The ideas of the Enlightenment were spread even further as a result.
