The Enlightenment

Introduction: Defining the Enlightenment

1) French philosophes – the ‘high Enlightenment’

2) Jonathan Israel and Roy Porter: Dutch and English late 17cy scientific revolutions (Spinoza, Locke and Newton)

National contexts

Global nature (voyages of Cook and de Bougainville)

3) Enlightened Absolutism ‘Enlightenment from above’

4) Robert Darnton ‘Enlightenment from below’

1) The Philosophes

Voltaire (1694-1778)

Toleration

If a country’s religion is sacred (for every country boasts that it

is), a hundred thousand volumes written against it will do it no

more harm than [that done] to rock-solid walls by a hundred

thousand snowballs. The gates of Hell shall not prevail against

it, as you know! How can a few black letters traced on paper

destroy it?

Voltaire, Dialogues between ABC (1768)

Voltaire and religion

• Lisbon earthquake 1755

• Jean Calas case (1762)

• Voltaire: not an atheist, but a deist – religion could be rational

L’Encyclopédie

• Denis Diderot editor from 1751 to 1765

• Contributors: Rousseau, d’Holbach and Buffon – 72,000 articles by 300 writers

• Sold 25,000 copies by 1789

• Acquisition of rational, modern knowledge

Diderot and d’Alembert’s Tree of Human Knowledge

Rousseau and the perfectibility of man

• Born 1712 city state of Geneva

• Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754)

• The Social Contract (1762)

• Emile (1762)

• modern civilization and corruption of man’s innate virtue

Rousseau and the problem of civilization

• ‘Noble savage’ in ‘state of nature’ -solitary, free, self-sufficient

• Society =

dependents

division of labour

envy, pride and acquisition of riches

Solutions to loss of freedom:

1) Social contract: ruled by ‘general will’ citizens would be ‘forced to be free’

2) Emile: moral education

Rousseau and French Revolution

• Rousseau reburied in republican Pantheon in Paris• Robespierre: ‘the morality which has disappeared in most individuals

can be found only in the mass of people and in the general interest’.• Origins of totalitarianism?

2) Enlightened despotism

• Catherine II of Russia (1762-1796)• Reforms:

1764: church lands secularized

1765: survey of landownership

1767: new code of laws drafted, but not implemented

1775: local government reforms (influence of Montesquieu)

• Genuinely enlightened or merely strategic?

Catherine II and Diderot

Maria-Theresa and Joseph II of Austria Hungary

• Maria-Theresa, with chancellors, Haugwitz and Kaunitz, introduced various reforms:

Jesuit influence curtailed (1773)

Civil and criminal law codified (1766)

Church property surveyed

• Joseph II, enlightened not just practical reform:

discrimination against Protestants, Greek orthodox removed (1781-3)

Some Jewish disabilities (eg. Leibmaut) removed but had to speak German in public

Legal reforms, influenced by Beccaria: death penalty abolished (1787), tried and failed to emancipate serfs in 1789

Genuinely enlightened?

Some monarchs influenced by enlightenment ideas but

1) Trying to curtail rival forms of authority

2) New forms of administration could be equally barbaric

3) Enlightenment from below?

1) Rational dissent = alliance between unorthodox religion (Protestant nonconformists eg. Unitarians, Muggletonians) and scientific thinking

Joseph Priestly

Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar Society in Birmingham (Josiah Wedgewood and James Watt)

America: Benjamin Franklin

The public sphere

• New forms of sociability: coffee houses, reading societies, political discussion

• Masonic Lodges

• More accessible and open, but how open?

• Women – salons, masonic lodges Emilie du Châtelet, translator of Newton

• but Enlightenment often denied women’s capacity to reason

• What about the poor and rural population?

The literary underground

• Darnton – in France explosion in literary population, 1750-1790 = ‘Grub street’

• Hostility to literary elite, courtly connections, patronage

• Wrote scandalous libelles against court, church, monarchy

• Chipping away at the legitimacy of court of Louis XVI

• Largely uninterested in philosophy butattracted to Rousseau’s utopianism

• Mercier, L’An 2440 (1771)