The French Enlightenment: An Introduction

Our understanding of the French Enlightenment has evolved considerably over the past several decades. For much of the twentieth century, it was unnecessary to speak of a “French” Enlightenment – the Enlightenment itself was essentially a French phenomenon. And the defining feature of the Enlightenment, on this older view, was the commitment to reason. In this vein, scores of studies were written depicting the Enlightenment as the “Age of Reason”: an age committed to using reason and science to further humankind’s progress and improvement, leading us out of the dark ages of religion and superstition into a bright new future of greater freedom and equality and happiness. The Enlightenment thus came to be seen as the source of the democratic revolutions of America and France and thereby as the wellspring of the ideals of our modern democratic and liberal and capitalist world.

What was particularly striking in this view of the French Enlightenment was that it was shared by both the Enlightenment’s twentieth-century champions (like the historian Peter Gay) and its twentieth-century critics (like the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). Yet for all the vitriol of the twentieth-century’s “Enlightenment wars,” few serious scholars today regard the Enlightenment in such terms. Instead, the past few decades of scholarship have demonstrated that Enlightenment was far from a monolithic enterprise. In this vein, scholars have particularly emphasized the degree to which the Enlightenment took various forms in different national contexts; scholars thus now speak, for example, of the “Scottish Enlightenment” and “German Enlightenment” and “American Enlightenment” (and so on) to distinguish these from the French Enlightenment. And just as scholars have widened the geographical scope of the Enlightenment, so too they have widened their understanding of what should be included among its substantive themes. While still recognizing the centrality of reason to Enlightenment, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this reverence for reason could and did coexist with commitments to sentiment and sensibility and to religion and religiosity. Recent scholars have also taken increasingly broader views of who should be counted as participants in the Enlightenment, leading to greater awareness, for example, of how women in Paris and beyond contributed to the discovery and dissemination of new ideas, and how enslaved peoples in Haiti drew on the moral and political ideals of the French Enlightenment in launching their revolution.

These recent transformations of our understanding of the who and the where and the what of Enlightenment make this an exciting time to be a student of it. And alongside these questions, scholars have also been increasingly interested in the when of the French Enlightenment. In general, the Enlightenment in France is considered to have reached its peak in the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century: a period of time that runs roughly from the Regency of Louis XV after the death of Louis XIV in 1715 to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. But these poles too are debatable. Seventeenth-century France witnessed its own intellectual revolution, beginning with Descartes’s mathematical and scientific discoveries in the beginning of the century and culminating in the golden age of French arts and letters at the end of the century, and it would be impossible to imagine the French Enlightenment taking the form it did without the stimulation given by its most important immediate and wildly popular predecessors, ranging from Bernard Fontenelle’s popularization of scientific principles in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), to Francois Fénelon’s championing of republican self-government in his wildly popular novel Telemachus (1699), to Pierre Bayle’s penetrating valorization of free thinking and religious toleration in his massively influential Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697 and 1702).

These and other late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century thinkers paved the way for the intellectual revolution of the mid-eighteenth century that we associate with the French Enlightenment today. Thus intellectual revolution was all-encompassing and would leave its impact in several fields, including especially natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and economic and political thought. In natural philosophy, a long string of French thinkers built on the intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth-century Cartesians in important and indeed transformative ways. Together these thinkers sought to apply Descartes’s scientific methodologies in ways that privileged observational and experimental approaches in their efforts to extend the boundaries of our collective knowledge of the natural world. Among the most important of these thinkers was Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. Appointed the director of the royal botanical garden in 1739, Buffon was inspired to pursue the writing of a comprehensive encyclopedic work on natural history. First published in 1749, Buffon’s Histoire naturelle would prove to be one of the landmark texts of the French Enlightenment. Alongside Buffon, many French scientists also made lasting contributions to other sciences; especially notable was Antoine Lavoisier, the leading chemist of eighteenth-century France whose discoveries included the role of oxygen in combustion. The French Enlightenment is also notable for being as committed to the popularization of science and the promoting and dissemination of scientific knowledge as it was to the generation of scientific knowledge in its own right. One example of a pioneering thinker who made important advances on both fronts was Emilie du Châtelet, who prepared an important translation of Newton’s famed Principia and also was the author of a celebrated and influential text on physics, the Institutions de Physiques (1740).

The shared desire to expand the boundaries of human knowledge led the thinkers of the French Enlightenment not only to seek ever greater knowledge of the natural world but also to study human nature. One focus of this study was human anatomy and physiology. On this front, several thinkers brought the empirical and mechanical orientations of recent studies of the physical world to the study of human physiology; among the most prominent such studies was Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s book L’homme machine (1747). Studies of the human mind often took a similar bent. Two of the most important epistemological studies of the French Enlightenment include Etienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) and his Traité des sensations (1754). In these influential works, Condillac argued that human minds were shaped entirely by our experience of the world and the information we take in through our senses – a thesis that would be further developed by other prominent French Enlightenment free thinkers, such as Claude-Adrien Hélvetius in his De l’esprit (1758). Yet even on this front the French Enlightenment was hardly monolithic, and alongside the many studies of human minds as self-interested calculating machines, thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (especially in his Emile of 1762) and Sophie de Grouchy (especially in her Lettres sur la sympathie of 1798) developed sophisticated moral psychologies that argued for a central role for the sentiments – and in particular the sentiments of sympathy and pity – in human cognition.

These physiological and epistemic and psychological studies of the human being naturally led many of these same philosophers also to inquire into the nature of human society. As a result the French Enlightenment made important advances in political and economic thought. One of the landmark texts of the French Enlightenment was the Baron de Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748). Montesquieu’s massive book covered topics from law and virtue to the utility of the separation of powers and the effects of climate on national character, and would prove a central to later reflections on politics in France and beyond, shaping the thought of Scottish thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith as well as the American Founders. In France, in Montesquieu’s wake subsequent thinkers would take up his considerations on the nature of the best regime, including Rousseau’s Du contrat social (1762). Montesquieu and other French Enlightenment thinkers also sought to compare French and European modes of social organization to those of non-western cultures and civilizations. The remarkable success of Montesquieu’s first book, the Persian Letters (1721), helped fuel a market for travelogues and other comparative anthropological studies, spawning works of both fiction and non-fiction such as Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters of a Peruvian Woman (1747) and the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1770). One theme common to all of these writings was the importance of commerce and finance in the modern world, and it is no accident that the French Enlightenment, together with the Scottish Enlightenment, was the birthplace of modern economics. Its leading contributions to economics were made by the thinkers associated with the physiocratic school, including François Quesnay, author of the Tableau économique (1758), and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, author of the Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution de la richesses (1766).

Finally, the philosophical ideas of the French Enlightenment would never have had the massive influence they enjoyed were it not for the many efforts made to propagandize and spread them. Some such efforts took the form of social gatherings in which these ideas could be debated and discussed; prominent examples include the philosophical “coterie” or that gathered around Paul-Henri Thiry, the Baron d’Holbach, and the salons sponsored by such prominent hostesses as Claudine-Alexandrine Guerin de Tencin. Madame de Tencin was also the mother of the philosopher Jean d'Alembert, who together with Denis Diderot launched the single most important vehicle for the popularization of the ideas of the French Enlightenment. Published in 18 massive folio volumes between 1751 and 1772, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers sought to provide a comprehensive compilation of information on all of the philosophical and cultural and practical fields of interest to the French Enlightenment. Together with the Encyclopédie, the essays and plays and histories of Jean-Marie Arouet (known by his pen name Voltaire) – and especially his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) – popularized and propagating the French Enlightenment’s commitments to maximizing freedom and equality and hastening the social and intellectual progress of humankind.

Related Links:

Ryan Hanley on the Morality of Markets, a Great Antidote podcast

Amy Willis, #ReadWithMeSeries on Ritchie Robertson’s The Enlightenment at Speaking of Smith

Encyclopedic Liberty: Political Articles in the Dictionary of Diderot and D’Alembert, available in the Online Library of Liberty and at Liberty Fund Books.

Ryan Hanley on Our Great Purpose with Amy Willis, an Ask Me Anything video.