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Enlightenment

French Literature Companion: Enlightenment

자료: http://www.answers.com/enlightenment

1. General Characteristics

The Enlightenment was an international movement of ideas, well described by Norman Hampson as ‘less a body of doctrine than a number of shared premisses’. Beginning in the late 17th c. and generally reaching a peak in the mid-18th, it took different forms in different countries. Somewhat misleadingly, most historical accounts have focused on France, as in the famous secondary definition in the former edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which reflects 19th-c. anti-Enlightenment thinking: ‘shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc., applied esp. to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c.’

In France, the ‘Siècle des Lumières’ (there is no exact equivalent to ‘enlightenment’) is an essential part of the national heritage, alongside and in some ways opposed to classicism. It has often been associated with the Revolution and the values espoused by republicans and the Left. There is indeed a myth of the Enlightenment, already present in d' Alembert's account of the move from darkness to light in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the bible of Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. The myth has provoked many counterblasts, anticipated in the tirade of Beaumarchais's Bartholo (in Le Barbier de Séville): ‘Sottises de toutes espèces: la liberté de penser, l'attraction, l'électricité, le tolérantisme, l'inoculation, le quinquina, l'encyclopédie et les drames.’

The main thrust of the movement can be summed up in Kant's ‘Dare to know!’, implying both critical and constructive thinking

  • The former had its limits; it can be argued that the philosophes(committed enlighteners) showed a faith in reason, nature, or progress which they denied to existing practices or beliefs. 
  • Generally, however, Enlightenment thinking was inspired by Descartes's methodical doubt: customs, religions, laws, governments were subjected to scrutiny and rejected if found wanting. 
  • Typically, the philosophes only criticized in order to create or reveal an order more in harmony with human nature and desires and therefore more conducive to general happiness. Their preferred values were tolerance, sociability, and freedom
  • Laws, government, and education were to be remade on rational lines. Above all, science, freed from the constrictions of religious dogma, would lead to fuller knowledge of the natural world (which included the human) and to the technical and material progress on which greater happiness depended.
Most of these characteristics were common to Enlightenment thinking across Europe. The French Enlightenment, however, differs from that in Germany, Switzerland, or Scotland by its more radical tone. Where an Adam Smith was well integrated into his society, a Diderot or a d'Alembert, while they had friends in high places, were embattled against a political and religious establishment which used its power to suppress their ideas by censorship, imprisonment, and other penalties. Their position was consequently often more extreme or seditious, particularly in relation to the Church: witness Voltaire's ‘Écrasez l'infâme’. Until the last quarter of the century the philosophes were fairly remote from the actual conduct of affairs, and were thus more inclined to speculate freely and follow ideas to their uncomfortable conclusions.

Enlightenment France was by no means uniformly enlightened. Not only were many members of the privileged classes hostile to the philosophes, but the latter's ideas reached only a minority of the population. Many ‘enlightened’ writers expressed disdain for the dark masses, who continued to live in a customary world of popular culture and ‘superstition’.

2. Historical Development

a. The period between about 1680 and 1715 was described by Paul Hazard as the ‘crisis of European consciousness’. In France it was the time of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which among other things reflected a growing confidence in the new science and philosophy. Fontenelle in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes and Histoire des oraclesBaylein his Pensées diverses sur la comète and Dictionnaire, and Richard Simon in his biblical criticism gave examples of the rational examination of established beliefs. Fontenelle also anticipated the High Enlightenment by popularizing the new science in an attractive, witty manner. In the wake of the libertins of the 17th c. and the early Utopian thinkers, the new Parisian coffee-houses [see Cafés] and circles such as the Temple and the group round Boulainviller were centres for free-thinking on religion and politics; this found expression in the clandestine manuscripts ofFréret and others (the most radical manuscript, however, comes from a different segment of society—the ‘Testament’ of the country priest Meslier). In their different spheres, the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Inscriptions were also beginning to be forces for intellectual change.
b. The years between 1715 and c.1745 are those of the early (or first-generation) Enlightenment. They see the acceleration of scientific enquiry and philosophical speculation, the growing attraction of deism, the radical discussions of the Club de l' Entresol, and above all the emergence of two major figures, Montesquieu and Voltaire. The Lettres persanes of the former anticipates many essential Enlightenment themes and attitudes, while his De l' esprit des lois is one of the great texts of the movement. Voltaire, while at first more poet than philosophe, emerged in 1734 with the Lettres philosophiques as the militant leader of Enlightenment thought that he was to remain until his death 44 years later. It is significant that this work was inspired by Voltaire's stay in England, where he had admired political liberty, religious tolerance, and the work of Newton and Locke. At this time English influence was dominant; it can be seen also in the work of Marivaux, who shared many Enlightenment values; his journalism is directly modelled on the Spectator [see British, Irish, and American Influences].

One of the most important developments of this period is indeed the rise of the periodical press, with the appearance of many journals in which Enlightenment ideas were expressed and criticized. Equally important is the creation of provincial academies; these provided a socially mixed forum in which philosophy and science could be advanced on a broad front. In addition, the major Parisian salons were increasingly permeated by philosophe ideas as the century progressed.
c. The years from about 1745 to 1770 are those of the High Enlightenment, in which thephilosophes form a party around the Encyclopédie; this great production, for all its faults, is the summation of Enlightenment thinking, and its chequered history reflects the battle between thephilosophes and their many enemies (the most prominent of these, the Jesuits, were expelled from France in 1764). This is the most militant period, marked by the materialistic theses ofHelvétius, the anti-religious propaganda of Holbach and his associates, and Voltaire's campaign against the infâme.

The generation of philosophes born between 1705 and 1725 includes some very different figures, ranging from discreet scholars to coat-trailing propagandists; some of the most important are d' Alembert, BoulangerDu ChâteletCondillacDuclosGrimm, Helvétius, Holbach, La Mettrie,MablyMarmontelRaynal, the slightly younger Morellet and Turgot, and the Physiocrats. Three figures stand out: Diderot, whose position as editor of the Encyclopédie made him the leader of the philosophes, although his most important writing was not generally known until after his death; Buffon, who kept his distance from the party, but whose scientific work had great philosophical implications; and Rousseau, who from being a contributor to the Encyclopédieemerged as a paradoxical frère ennemi, denouncing the progressive ideals of his former colleagues, yet offering a more radical critique of the status quo and a visionary ideal.
d. From c.1770 Enlightenment thinking acquired power and respectability. The Encyclopédie was a great success; the Académie Française was infiltrated by d'Alembert; the Physiocrats, in the person of Turgot, were given the official opportunity to try out their theories in the real world. R. Darnton, in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), argues that in the pre-Revolutionary years there was a split between the official Enlightenment, in which figures such as Marmontel, ThomasSuardLa HarpeMorelletRivarol, and even Chamfort could pursue comfortable careers with pensions and sinecures, and a swarming ‘Grub Street’ of pamphleteers, pornographers, and the like, out of which emerge such major figures as Restif or Mercier, as well as many Revolutionary leaders, BrissotMaratHébert, etc.

This thesis remains controversial, but it is certain that the ‘late Enlightenment’ sees an explosion of radical political thought (much influenced by Rousseau), often messianic or Utopian in tone. Enlightenment values become entangled with more mystical currents, which prefigure some aspects of Romanticism, from the theories of Dom Deschamps and Court de Gébelin tofreemasonryIlluminism, and Mesmerism. Nevertheless, the old Voltairean rational influences continue to work, and are superbly incarnated in the work of his editor, Beaumarchais. A different strand of Enlightenment thinking, the materialism of Holbach and Diderot, is pushed to unexpected extremes in the novels and pamphlets of the marquis de Sade. But it is perhapsCondorcet who, in the shadow of the guillotine, produced the best resumé of classic Enlightenment thinking.

3. Significance and Influence

This remains the subject of vigorous debate. The traditional Marxist view was that the Enlightenment represented the values of the rising bourgeoisie, which seized power in 1789; it was thus one of the causes of the Revolution (the same view was expressed by enemies of the Revolution—‘c’est la faute à Voltaire, c'est la faute à Rousseau’). Against this, modern historians have argued that the Enlightenment was a movement within an élite, which included both nobles and bourgeois. It is certainly true that the ‘société des Lumières’, as seen, for instance, in the contributors and subscribers to the Encyclopédie, is drawn from different social groups, including aristocrats, bourgeois, and artisans. On the other hand, it is clear that the values propagated by the Enlightenment—values which later generations take too much for granted—were essentially inimical to the old politico-religious regime.

One might hesitate today before naming the Enlightenment among the principal causes of the Revolution. Nevertheless, while many of the earlier philosophes (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Buffon) were far from revolutionary in their political thought, and while many of their successors (Mormontel, Condorcet, Morellet) fell foul of the Revolution, the Revolutionary leaders themselves were impregnated with various kinds of Enlightenment thinking. Rousseau in particular was the maître à penser of Robespierre and his colleagues. In subsequent years, theIdéologues and the écoles centrales helped to maintain the Enlightenment tradition. Although much attacked by both reactionaries and Romantics, this was to survive and triumph, often in caricatural form, in the progressive, anticlerical republicanism of the later 19th c.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

  • J.-M. Goulemot and M. Launay, Le Siècle des Lumières (1968)
  • P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (1967-70)
  • R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (1981)



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