The Enlightenment

The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715 is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.

The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the 18th century.

Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge, especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.

Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows. Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error, arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human love of mystery.

The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society. His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of correspondences centered on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the freedoms of a new age. At their center is the condition of women—trapped in the private space of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues, all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.

Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734; Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14 years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.

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Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science, and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic, authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He labored on historical works all his life, producing most notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756; An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labors within his reach, “cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign). Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas and the chevalier de La Barre.

Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman (Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others, determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man of the Enlightenment.

Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal, vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert (written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual repression.

In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17 folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from 1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”