The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of a cultural movement unprecedented in Europe’s history: the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment emphasized the education of all people in order that humanity as a whole might progress to its ultimate fulfillment.
Salons: social gatherings in private homes where participants discussed current issues and new ideas. Salons involved mainly the upper class, while the lower classes participated in discussions in coffeehouses.
Religion in 18th century Europe still revolved around Christianity. However, Christianity had split into various groups:
Most of day-to-day life in the rural areas still revolved around the Church.
The Catholic Church was no longer the primary power in Europe. Most monarchs, such as Louis XIV, chose their own cardinals and bishops and decided for themselves whether or not papal decrees applied in their realms. Most countries maintained state churches and enforced their dominance by requiring active participation in these churches for social and economic advancement. In Britain, the Test Acts prohibited non-Anglicans from attending Oxford and Cambridge, holding military rank, or sitting in Parliament.
Literacy grew in the 18th century, although only a minority of Europeans could read by the end of the century. The Enlightenment could not have succeeded as it did without growing literacy rates.
Philosophes: mainly French thinkers who sparked the Enlightenment and whose ideas were the catalysts for many of the Enlightenment’s philosophies. The concepts included:
The Scientific Revolution laid the foundation for much of the Enlightenment. The discovery of laws of motion and the law of gravity by human reason led thinkers to believe that humanity also behaved according to set laws. All that was required was for someone to discover these laws and apply them to human society.
Natural Law theory was applied to politics by John Locke (of Common Sense fame) and Baron Montesquieu of France. Montesqieu would later develop the theories of government by Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances.
Rationalism became the order of the day: the application of reason to all things. Rene Descartes had advocated universal doubt of everything as early as 1637: everything must be doubted until it can be proved. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant of Germany called the Age “the age of criticism.” Everything was to be examined by reason. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion.” (p. 533).
France became the center of the Enlightenment. The French Encyclopedia of the Arts and Sciences became the vehicle for much of Enlightenment thought. The Encyclopedie was produced by Denis Diderot but was a collaborative work of many philosophes. Although the French government tried to ban the Encyclopedie, it received widespread notoriety and continued to be published after its completion in 1772.
Christianity suffered along with monarchies at the pens of the philosophes. Voltaire wrote a scathing satire of Christianity in his book Candide. Diderot referred to Christianity as “the most prejudicial of all the superstitions of the earth.” (p. 537) Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, stated flatly that Christianity was responsible for the fall of Rome in 476 A.D.
Deism: the belief in a single God who created the universe but does not intervene in it. Most philosophes were Deists at best. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other American thinkers were Deists. Voltaire spread Deism as widely as possible.
The Church, however, did not condemn the Enlightenment wholesale. Pope Benedict XV was a friend of Montesqieu and Voltaire who lifted the ban of Galileo’s work in 1744. In 1757, Benedict stopped enforcing decrees against teaching heliocentrism.
Most of the philosophes risked imprisonment for their attacks on absolutist governments. Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille on at least 2 separate occasions.
The Enlightenment decried absolutism as the worst form of government. The Encyclopedie stated that
...society exists under a civil constitution that invests rulers with their power, but those rulers are “bound therein by the laws of nature and by the law of reason.” (p. 541)
This philosophy directly contradicted the Divine Right of Kings theory.
Montesqieu: Spirit of the Laws: stated
Montesqieu believed that no one person or institution should hold all governmental power.
The American Founding Fathers were profoundly affected by the Enlightenment.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 1712-1778: Franco-Swiss philosophe who demanded the complete reorganization of society to eliminate inequalities based on factors such as rank or race. Rousseau held private property to be the “worst of our institutions.” The Social Contract, 1762: started with the line, “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau believed that no man had a right to rule another man, but firmly opposed democracy except in a society where all people “were Gods.” (p. 543)