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In the 1700s, Europe remained predominantly rural and predominantly devoted to agriculture -- except for the more commercially advanced Dutch. But by 1700, in parts of Europe, religious and other warfare had made people more fearful of passions and chaos. Fanaticism was more feared, and intellect was more respected as a barrier to fanaticism. In England, restraint in the expression of passion had become more of a mark of a gentleman and good manners had become more valued as a barrier against conflict. As had happened among the Dutch, shifting religious beliefs and rising commerce, especially among the British, was accompanied by a decline in demand for religious uniformity -- a step away from the belief, prevalent in the Middle Ages, that those with views different from one's own were evil.
The orderly cosmos described by Isaac Newton in the late 1600s was seen as a model for government organization. With Copernicus, Galileo and Newton a new optimism about the benefits of learning had arisen among an intellectual elite, in conflict with the old and common belief that the world was a mystery never to be fathomed by humanity. Many continued to believe in God's interventions, including people who believed in science, but the belief that the world functioned solely by God's magic was starting to decline, as was the belief that all humanity needed to get by was spontaneity and proper religious attitude. In the 1700s, a growing minority of people believed in science and disciplined reason. They were examining the world with less dogma and preconception. Personal correspondence and other forms of writing were on the rise. Literate folks gathered in groups interested in science or literature. A variety of learned journals were published. Book production increased, and so too did newspaper distribution. More people believed in the efficacy of literacy. In Scotland in 1700 around 45 percent the population could read, and by the end of the 1700s it would rise to 85 percent. England's literacy rate in this period would rise from 45 to 63 percent.
Europe's universities remained conservative, as many professors remained devoted to Aristotle. But there were rival scientific academies. One had been founded in 1660 in England and another at Paris in 1666. A scientific academy arose at Berlin in 1707. One arose in 1724 at St. Petersburg, in 1737 at Stockholm and one in 1745 at Copenhagen.
Beginning among the Dutch, a rise of intellectual life and curiosity had brought an improvement in agriculture. It had been common for harvests to fail every eight or nine years, with people surviving by gathering nuts, stripping bark from trees and eating grass and dandelions. The improvement in Europe's agriculture came with rotating crops rather than rotating which fields were to lie fallow. Grains exhausted the soil, and growers had been leaving fields in fallow to allow for soil recovery. Planting peas, beans, turnips, potatoes and clover, it was discovered, rejuvenated exhausted soil (by restoring nitrogen)
The building of more roads in Western Europe improved the shipment of emergency supplies of food when crops failed in an area. The centralized storage of food increased. And with the introduction of the potato from the Americas, a food rich in calories, carbohydrates and vitamins A and C, spreads through Europe.
More swamps were drained and the number of insects reduced. And with the more enlightened view, societies were improving their water supplies. Ignorance continued to plague the medical profession. Faith healing was still widespread, but more was known about the body, including circulation of the blood, discovered in the 1600s. Europe was turning into world leader in public health.
And the Europeans were lucky. Plague arrived by ship at the port of Marseilles, France, in 1720, but it was the last of the great bubonic plagues in Western and Central Europe. The black rat, which had been host to the kind of flea that carried the plague, was losing territory to the brown rat, which did not have this kind of flea. And there was more use of the quarantine at Europe's Mediterranean ports and along the border with the Ottoman Empire.
Seeing progress, more Europeans believed in it. The old pessimism had new competition in the expectation that life on earth could be improved.
Until the 1720s, England's population growth was held in check by periodic harvest failures and by diseases such as influenza, smallpox, dysentery and typhus. At around 5.25 million in 1720, England's population would be around nine million at the end of the century. [note] London's population in this period rose from around 700,000 to over one million. [note] This was larger than Paris, despite France having more than three times England's population. With the rise in Britain's commerce, London had become busier place and had been gathering more people from England's rural areas and from Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And London also had migrants from Germany, Holland and France. London had become a great center for the arts and fashion.
Early in the century Thomas Newcomen created a steam driven piston in a cylinder, used for pumping water from mines. However, Britain remained largely unadvanced in technology. Watches, for example, were still inaccurate curiosities. People kept time by the ringing of church bells. And more importantly, Britain was still dependent on waterpower. But in the 1700s, productivity and real wages were inching upwards. People's lives were improving materially. They were able to get more in return for their labor. Britain was exporting more grain than it was importing. Britain was a big producer of woolen cloth, and it led the world in maritime trade.
Class privilege remained. A few owned much of the country's agricultural land. Some others owned small farms. Some people rented land from the big landowners, giving the landowner a share of the wealth they produced. And many others labored for wages on the landowner's property and were able to graze a pig or a cow on the village common.
The king of England still exercised executive powers. His ministers gained powers in the 1700s, the king seen as a unifying force while parliament was torn by conflict between Tories (conservatives) and Whigs (liberals). Queen Mary II had died in 1694 and her husband William II in 1702, leaving Mary's sister, Anne, as queen of Great Britain and Ireland and as governor of the Church of England. And when Anne died in 1714 her Catholic half-brother, James, was passed over in favor of a distant Protestant relative -- in keeping with Parliament's requirements. The new king was a Lutheran from Hanover, Germany, and held onto his rule there while taking on his duties in Great Britain as king George I. A rebellion by supporters of James -- called Jacobites -- was crushed. George I ruled to 1727, never having learned English, and he was succeeded by his more Anglicized son, George II, who ruled to 1760, followed by his grandson, George III.
Religion remained an issue as Great Britain moved into the 1700s. The dominant religious body remained the Church of England (the Anglicans), which conservatives considered the orthodox faith. The Church of England was favored by England's landowning elite, and parliament's House of Lords was an Anglican preserve. Referring to the Church of England, the conservative political party, the Tories, was also called the 'Church' party.
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers were called Dissenters. In England in 1689, religious pluralism had been legalized, but the Blasphemy Act of 1698 had made denial of the Trinity punishable by imprisonment. Denying that Christianity was the truth or denying the authority of the Scriptures was also made illegal. But these laws were rarely invoked. In England, the last execution for heresy had been in the early 1600s, and the last to have been executed in Scotland for heresy was a nineteen year-old student at Edinburgh in 1698.
From 1710 to 1714, conservatives tried to revive the union between the state and the Church of England. They feared that if people were left free to choose their religion there would be a dramatic spread of Dissenters. Also they thought that religious disunity was an affront to God, that it threatened the salvation of individuals and national security. Some Anglican conservatives also blamed crime and vice on religious disunity. But the conservatives failed to pass their legislation. In the 1720s they also failed in their effort to strengthen the laws against blasphemy.
To the surprise of the conservatives, the number of Dissenters remained stagnant. The Church of England remained dominant in rural England, in the universities and in grammar schools, while the Dissenters remained strongest in the cities and with the middle class. And from the Anglicans a small new denomination emerged. Two Anglicans at Oxford University, John Wesley and George Whitefield, started a movement dedicated to nurturing spirituality through prayers, devotional readings, self-examination, fasting, frequent communion and good works, which won them the nickname of Methodist.
Catholics remained a persecuted minority, largely clustered in remote parts of the country, as Protestants remained fearful of plots to bring Catholicism back via England's enemies abroad -- Spain or France.
Protestant "dissenters" continued to be able to run for a seat in parliament, but their representation there was small, and Dissenters did not enjoy legal equality with the Anglicans. A law passed in 1753 held that only marriages performed by an Anglican clergyman were legal. Dissenters might be denied the right of burial in a churchyard. They might receive discriminatory consideration in a court of law. And Dissenters had to pay a special tax.
People in Britain drank, gambled and fought duels. Moralists worried about the rise in sexual promiscuity and a decline in family values. They preached on the need of women to resist men inflamed by libertine principles and pornographic literature and the need of women to remain virgins until marriage. Prostitution was rampant. A German visitor to London complained of passing a "lewd female" every ten yards on a December evening along Fleet Street, including girl prostitutes as young as twelve. [note]
Crime was increasing with the advancing economy. In London were habitual offenders and gangs of delinquent youths. Responding to crime, politicians made more offenses punishable by death. Capital crimes numbered in the dozens, including horse and sheep stealing and shoplifting to the value of five shillings. But rather than being hanged, many deemed guilty of a capital crime were sent to the Americas.
English law had been created across centuries. It was a gathering of complexities and contradictions -- void of elegant simplicity. The influence of Roman law on English law remained a rumor -- Roman law used only occasionally as a mere ornament to the considerations of jurists. Law in England was drawn from English experience, and it was criticized for its anomalies, complexity, uncertainties, its slowness, its tedious forms, its confounding of simple matters into confusing language that helped enrich lawyers at the expense of honest people.
In the mid-1700s, a lawyer named William Blackstone made a name for himself writing and lecturing in praise of English law. And in writing about the law he improved it. He tried to bring the law into conformity with science and the age of reason. Blackstone mapped the law's tortuous complexities and depicted the nation's constitution and laws as a reflection of the natural order of the cosmos and the nation's development across history. British law and liberty he wrote was the "noblest inheritance of mankind."
Blackstone approved of law which held that husband and wife were one person and that the husband was that person. In other words, Blackstone approved of law that held that a wife had no right to own property in her own name and that the wages she earned belonged to her husband.
Blackstone was not without his contradictions. He claimed that the power of parliament was absolute and elsewhere in his work that the legislature could not destroy human rights. But he advanced the use of such phrases as crimes and misdemeanors, ex post facto law, due process, and judicial power. Blackstone denounced slavery as inimical to "natural rights" and to British law. He advanced the idea that the instant any slave landed in England he or she was free. And acting on general principles of "God-given right," English law, he claimed, protected "a Jew, a Turk or a heathen as well as to those who press the true religion of Christ." He described freedom of the press as "essential to the nature of a free state." And trial by jury he called the "glory of the English law."
Among British intellectuals, John Locke's ideas still had respect, including his abhorrence for fanaticism and the passions of common folks, a view that added to a devotion among the upper classes to a Christianity that was calm. Britain's bourgeoisie debated religion and politics in coffeehouses, clubs, salons, literary societies and academies. Mostly intellectuals favored the existing constitutional monarchy -- as had Locke. But England still had its republicans and people dissatisfied with liberal revolution of 1688 -- the so-called Glorious Revolution.
It was Britain's Whigs who supported a limited constitutional monarchy and government based upon the consent of the governed. They also believed that revolution - such as the Glorious Revolution -- was justified in attaining such a government. Among the Whigs were wealthy businessmen and a few progressive aristocrats. In the area of religious faith, some Whigs saw themselves as having a view of God more progressive than the views of the established religions. Among the Whigs were pantheists, believing that God was everywhere. The pantheists were responding to Newtonian physics, seeing the universe as having spatial dimensions and as mechanized, working without interventions from spiritual forces, with nature not being apart from God or God apart from nature.
Another group with a point of view, was Britain's Freemasons. They were a society with secrets, but they did not try to keep secret their society's existence. The Freemasons had origins as a craft guild and had grown to a fraternity of progressives that included men of the middle and upper classes. Their meetings and banquets were egalitarian, and they were unconcerned about religious affiliation. Not belonging to or attending a church, their local lodges provided them with a substitute sense of community. They described themselves as men of charity and reason against all that burdened rather than liberated their fellow human beings. And they claimed to be neutral in politics.
Britain's radical intellectuals admired the writings of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), a French philosopher and academicians who had been exiled to the United Netherlands. Bayle advocated religious toleration. He questioned Christian traditions and derided superstitions. His writings stimulated interest in science applied to medicine -- a return to Hippocrates of ancient Greece.
The rise in interest in scientific medicine was accompanied by an inoculation controversy. The wife of the ambassador to Ottoman capital at Constantinople, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, learned of the success of inoculations by medical professionals there. In 1718, she returned to Britain with this knowledge and spoke out. Some traditionally-minded people denounced inoculation as unnatural and impious, but inoculations were begun in London.
In philosophy, after John Locke came an Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (pronounced BARKley). He, like Locke, believed that knowledge arose from the senses, but this simple empiricism had become complicated. Newton's discoveries involved a lot of mathematics. Berkeley addressed the question how it was that signals arising from outside a person's brain were transposed into knowledge. Berkeley took the position that defied common sense. He concluded that we cannot claim that what we see is actually connected to a world outside our mind. With this arose the amusing suggestion into the twenty-first century that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, the event did not occur. But Berkeley believed that all reality was idea and that idea was God. He believed that whatever existed did so because God perceived it.
Following Berkeley in philosophy was a Scot from Edinburgh: David Hume (1711-1776). He was another of those youngsters accepted at a university while still a child: he started attending Edinburgh University at the age of twelve. It was the kind of intelligence that had often been lost to society because of poverty and failed recognition, but Hume had been born into a family with something other than the most humble means and connections. He was urged to study law, during which he preferred broader reading, and he had a nervous breakdown from which it took a few years to recover.
Like many others, Hume was influenced by the science of Newton and by the epistemology of Locke, and in his early adulthood Hume wrote essays. He wrote a large work entitled the History of England, attempting impartiality and more than the deeds of kings and statesmen. He addressed economic issues and wrote of money as only a means of exchange rather than wealth itself. Wealth, he said, existed in commodities -- things sought and traded. Nations were poor, he claimed, because they did not produce enough that could be traded.
While living in France, Hume wrote his Treatise of Human Nature, the first two volumes of which were published in 1739 and the third in 1740, when he was not yet in his thirties. He had wanted literary fame and had hoped for vehement attacks, but only a few were aware of his work, and he went on to obscurity and simple jobs to make a living. But by the 1660 he would be known to those few people in Western Europe who called themselves philosophers (philosophes).
Hume differentiated between matters of fact and matters of value. Moral judgments, he held, were matters of value because they were above sentiments and passions. He denied that there was a moral standard outside our heads and suggested that the universe outside ourselves does not care about our preferences and troubles.
Hume saw humanity as more inclined to emotion than to reason. In his own effort at reason he worked on the problem of the connection between the senses and knowledge, and rather than attempt to resolve the problem, as Berkeley had attempted to do, he chose to leave the matter unexplained. Hume was a skeptic, which separated him from those still trying to create a large, comprehensive system of thought. He was as absolute in his skepticism as the ancient Macedonian skeptic, Pyrrhon, had been. He believed that one either knew or did not know something. In Hume's time, truth as approximation -- the accepted method of science into the 21st century -- was not commonly recognized among philosophers as a valid point of view. .
Hume, like Pyrrhon, had opinions despite his skepticism. Regarding race he too was a man of his time. He wrote:
There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences.
He described the accomplishments of a black he had heard about in Jamaica, as "slender," as "like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly." [note]
France was large in territory. In population it had around 19 million in 1700 -- more than three times the population of England, perhaps six times the population of the United Netherlands, and six times the number of Finns and Swedes ruled by the king of Sweden. And the greatness of France benefited from Italy and Germany being divided lands, and from Spain's decline as a great power.
France had a lot of land suitable for farming, but the yield from its crops would continue to be only little higher than the productivity of the farm lands of ancient Greeks or of France in the 1200s. France's farms were producing about one eighth the per-acre harvests that would be produced at the end of the 20th century. In France one bushel of seed produced only five or six bushels of grain.
After the overthrow of James II in Britain in 1688, Britain and France had again become adversaries, and they remained so through the 1700s. The two countries were rivals for supremacy in the world of trade and empire. They were rivals in North America, and in India in addition to Britain being Protestant and France being Catholic.
The Catholic Church in France supported the idea that the king's power was derived from God rather than the will of his subjects. The Church still controlled education in France, including its universities, and the Church officiated concerning births, deaths and marriage. But its influence was declining -- slowly.
Common people in France remained largely illiterate, especially in the rural south, but, among the literate reading had become a fad, accompanying fashions such as shaving and the wearing of wigs by both men and women. It was new ideas that attracted people, works that were sensational by being irreverent, something to talk about with friends. Publishing books had been growing with commerce, and books were the leading media of the day. Printed material from Holland was easily smuggled into France. The writings of Pierre Bayle were widely read, as in Britain. And soon after, the writings of Montesquieu became popular.
Baron Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755) had an inherited fortune and time to write. And he mixed with Parisian higher society, where he was a celebrated conversationalist. He satirized French society. He criticized France's monarchical absolutism and the Church, offending authorities but adding to his popularity. He was a Catholic who believed that people should think for themselves.
Montesquieu traveled through much of Europe to observe people and political constitutions. He stayed in England for eighteen months and praised Britain's constitutional monarchy. He was opposed to republicanism and disliked democracy, which he saw as mob rule. He saw government as benefiting from the knowledge of society's elite rather than a knowledge of breadth of experience drawn from the many. He saw common folks as unfit to discuss public affairs. The masses, he believed, were moved too much by emotion and too little by reason.
History in France was still being described as it had been in Medieval times, with supernatural causes, and Montesquieu defied this tradition. He was hopeful that reading history would divest readers of their prejudices and contribute to improvement in contemporary society. He wrote an essay entitled Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness and Decline of the Romans, which described Rome as the product of social, political and geographic conditions.
Montesquieu admired England's John Locke -- the famous liberal and empiricist of a preceding generation. And he was influenced by Newton's physics and believed in a god that had made the laws that governed the physical world. But humanity, he believed had a free will and God did not direct human affairs. A god who directed people as if they were puppets, he believed, would not have produced human intelligence.
Montesquieu believed that where government was more liberal and where people thought independently, society would be less devoted to religious ritual and more devoted to morality. Pope Benedict XIV respected Montesquieu, but various bishops did not, and they placed on the Church's index of forbidden books Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws, published in 1748. But independence of thought prevailed and the book was a success, going into 22 editions.
François Arouet, who became known as Voltaire (1694-1778), wrote poetry and plays, and for expressing his opinions he was twice sent to prison. He was sent into exile for three years -- to England from 1726 to 1729 -- and, like Montesquieu, he developed an admiration for British institutions. Voltaire admired Britain's Tolerance Act of 1689 and the absence of censorship in Britain. He saw benefit in variety, claiming that if England had but one religion it would still be despotic, that if England had just two faiths those faiths would be at each others throat. But with thirty different religious groupings, he claimed, Britain lived as a happy land where the spirit of Greece lived on.
Voltaire had also been influenced by Newton and Locke. He disliked theories not supported by observation and experiment. But he spun such theories himself. In arguing against the Great Flood described in the Old Testament, he attempted to explain the presence of sea shells on Mt. Cenis in the Alps. He claimed that "the earth has always remained as it was when it was first created" but that collectors of sea shells could have put the shells there, that small farmers could have dumped the shells with their loads of lime to fertilize the soil, or that the shells might have been badges that had dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way to Rome.
Voltaire was awed by the grandness of the cosmos and saw the cosmos moved by immutable laws that could not be altered by prayer. Voltaire was a deist, and in one of his attacks on conventional religion he wondered why the God of the Old Testament had created humans with a capacity for pleasure and then damned them for using that capacity. He wondered why Jehovah had created humans and then drowned them in His flood. He attacked the idea of original sin, wondering in print why children should be punished for the sins of their first father, Adam.
Rather than excuse human behavior on the grounds of original sin, Voltaire was annoyed with common humanity. In his novel Candide, he mentioned people massacring each other and described people as liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken , grasping, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical and silly. He too feared the passion of common people, and he too disliked democracy. But he also ridiculed the hauteur of aristocrats, and he thought himself the friend of peasants and serfs. He spoke with admiration for William Penn and the Quakers. He opposed all forms of slavery. He hoped that enlightened monarchs would rule above class interests and keep a firm but tolerant reign on society for the sake of all. He was too pessimistic about humanity to formulate a utopia. He argued that the world could be improved by education and by replacing ignorance and superstition with more knowledge, reason, sympathy and tolerance. But it was not the poor and unskilled laborer who Voltaire wished to educate; it was the middle class. "When the populace meddles in reasoning," he wrote, "all is lost." The lower classes, he believed, needed religion and needed to be preached to about virtue.
In 1731 Voltaire's History of Charles XII was published, a book that tried to explain that Swedish monarch. In 1743 Voltaire was elected to England's Royal Society. In 1746 he was admitted to the French Academy. In 1751 his book The Age of Louis XIV was published. In 1756 he wrote his "Essay on the Manners and Spirit of the Nations." And in1759 Candide was published.
Voltaire liked recognition and associating with celebrities and the powerful. Despite his belief in tolerance he railed against the Roman Catholic Church, describing it as the fountainhead and bulwark of evil. He felt that no change of the kind he wanted was possible without undermining the power of the Church. Then later in his life, to advance his career, he started a campaign to endear himself to Pope Benedict XIV. The Pope had respect for advances of the Enlightenment, especially tolerance, and he brought a storm of protest upon himself by his friendly response to Voltaire, including his calling Voltaire his "dear son" and sending him his "blessing."
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is best known for his line about people being born free but finding themselves in chains. His mother had died a few days after his birth. His father abandoned him when he was ten, leaving him with relatives and friends. He was brought up a Calvinist, and although he had no regular schooling he was encouraged to pursue his precocious taste for reading serious books. At sixteen he began wandering and living a homeless and precarious existence. In the 1740s and in his thirties he appeared in Paris as a writer of poetry, opera and comedy, and he made friends there with a few other writers, including Denis Diderot.
In 1750 Rousseau won a prize, offered by the Academy of Dijon, for an essay on the question whether the arts and sciences had conferred benefits upon "mankind." His essay claimed that people were good and innocent by nature and had been corrupted by the arts and sciences. It expressed some of the values of his religious heritage and his dislike for the upper classes. Letters and the arts, he claimed, were the worst enemies of morals, for they created wants. Science and virtue, he wrote, were incompatible. Science, he wrote, had ignoble origins. Physics, he said, had risen from vain curiosity, and ethics had its source in human pride. Eloquence, he claimed, came from ambition.
Rousseau ignored his own opinion about the arts and continued writing. In 1754 his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality was published, in which he described the invention of private property as a fateful moment in human history. He preferred the sharing that had existed among Stone Age communal societies, and he lauded the relative equality and the greater bond of affection with which he believed these people regarded each other. He recognized that modern societies would not return to the simple, smaller societies that had existed before civilization, and his novel Emile, and in his work entitled Social Contract, both published in 1762, he tried to explain how civilized society could be improved. Rousseau opposed slavery. He believed in Locke's social contract, and he was most radical in that he believed in democracy. But he put himself on the side of social revolution. Liberty, he wrote, was not to be found in any form of government. It was, he wrote, in the hearts of free men. He described laws as "always useful to those who own and injurious to those who do not." And such laws, he wrote, "give the weak new burdens, the strong new powers and irretrievably destroy natural freedom." In a society not based on private property, he claimed, individuals could join together to make laws that give expression to a "general will," uniting people who share a sense of social responsibility. Instead of wanting to return to a Stone Age tribal society he wanted to create a civilization that was democratic and communal, a society worthy of humanity which would appeal to humanity's better nature and make humanity worthy of civilization.
Rousseau gave a boost to romanticism in the arts, believing as he did more in the emotions of the unlearned than in the reason of intellectuals. He had no use for Plato, Aristotle or the scholastics. He was for action rather than what the well-to-do called reason. With Voltaire he was for a time friendly, but Voltaire was anti-Romantic, and he criticized Rousseau's admiration for Stone Age tribal society, writing to Rousseau that after reading his work, "one feels like crawling on all fours."
Rousseau had an independent approach to religion, and Calvinists and Roman Catholics saw him as a "freethinking" heretic. Rousseau believed in a personal god, in divine providence and the immortality of the soul. He saw morality and virtue as rising from the faith and hope of religious people. He differed with most Christians in his belief that it was not Original Sin that troubled humanity. He wanted to create a natural religion that rises from instinct, a religion that returns people to nature, with no intermediary priesthood between people and their god. He claimed that Jesus Christ was not the Redeemer but was a model for the recovery of one's nature. And rather than religious tolerance he proclaimed that whoever dared to say that outside his church was no salvation "ought to be driven from the state."
In 1762, Rousseau was driven into exile -- to Switzerland and England. In 1763, his book The Social Contract, made the Catholic Church's index of forbidden books, and an order went out for his arrest. He was well received in London, but there he was overcome by feelings of persecution, and in 1767 he fled England, returning to France -- where he was still wanted by the law. In France the authorities ignored him, and he died the following year, at the age of sixty-six.
In 1751 the first part of a new encyclopedia was published -- subjects that started with the letter A. The two men most responsible for the work were the writer Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert (pronounced zhan dah-lemBEAR), a respected scientist and mathematician. The two men believed that knowledge would bring people more happiness, and they wished to combat what they believed was the ignorance, myth, dogma and superstition inherited from the Middle Ages. Some of their writing on subjects beginning with the letter "A" offended government and Church authorities. The government banned the book, and the Church placed the book on its index of forbidden books and threatened excommunication on all who read or bought it.
In 1765 the encyclopedia was completed. It was twenty-eight volumes with hundreds of thousands of articles by leading scientists and famous writers, among them the Marquis de Condorcet, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. And it included an article by Diderot against slavery and the slave trade.
In the 1770s, Diderot wrote an article on the Tahitians, drawing from a description written by the French explorer Louis Bougainville, who had visited Tahiti for ten days. Bougainville's comments about the Tahitians living together freely provided Diderot with an opportunity to criticize the institution of marriage. Diderot looked with disdain upon the morality of France's elite. He called the marriage he saw around him in France as immoral because it reduced women to the status of possessions or objects. Attitudes among the French towards marriage and women, he held, gave rise to two unnecessary conditions: the plight of the fallen woman and the plight of the illegitimate child.
Despite the ban on the encyclopedia it was widely read and became an influence through much of Western Europe.
Louis had set the fashion at his court. Nobles at his court balls were expected to move with a grace that reflected their superiority over common people. Dancing at court was frequent and dancing well was necessary for a nobleman if he were to rise or maintain his status. Those who were awkward went out of favor. Louis had taken the lead. He had invented ballet and was its first star, dancing as the ancient Greek sun god, Apollo.
Louis was also tough and had taken his kingdom into numerous wars, which cost France economically and created hardship. In 1715, when Louis XIV died, much of France thanked God and expressed delight. But, of course, the monarchy lived on as before. The five-year-old great grandson of Louis, -- a member of the Bourbon family -- became Louis XV. The duke of Orleans ruled as regent for Louis XV for a number years, while Louis demonstrated no exceptional abilities. Louis was taught that he was better than other boys -- necessary instruction for someone who was to rule as God's appointed authority over the masses.
Louis married in 1725, at the age of 15, and in the years ahead his wife, the Queen, bore him seven children, while Louis, in the fashion of monarchs, was openly involved with several mistresses. He kept a private brothel of teenage girls, believing that if he repented at death his lifestyle would be a trifling matter. Also he was served by 2000 courtiers, whose main job was to keep him from becoming bored, and he bored easily -- and lost his temper readily.
Not unlike various monarchs in China's past, Louis XV was more interested in his personal pleasures that he was in running the affairs of state. He fell under the domination of one of his young mistresses, Jeanne Antoinette Pompadour - after whom a hair style was named. Jeanne Pompadour was of middleclass origin and owed her success to her above average intelligence as well as what was thought to be her beauty. She had been married while seeking to become the king's mistress. At a ball she dropped her handkerchief next to the king and he picked it up - a gentile way for a woman to approach a man not to continue into the 21st century. She left her husband. Louis gave her an estate a new title of marquise, and she became his official mistress.
Jeanne Pompadour tried modesty in an effort to win the acceptance of people around the king, while dislike for her remained because of her success and her bourgeoisie background. She kept king Louis amused with intimate parties and suppers and with outings to the theatre. Madame Pompadour became known as a patron of the arts and literature. She had a huge library of thousands of books, and she patronized the writer Voltaire.
In 1750, when Jeanne was 28 and Louis 40, their relationship became one of mere friendship, but with Jeanne Pompadour playing a larger role in running the affairs of state. She demonstrated her power over the king by removing her enemies from office and bringing her friends into government. She played a major role in aligning France with the Habsburgs of Austria, ending a 250-year feud between the Bourbon family and the Habsburgs. The treaty between France and the Habsburg queen, Maria Theresa was signed on May 1, 1756, contributing to the Seven Years' War, with Britain and Prussia on one side and France, Austria, Sweden and Russia on the other.
The war was a disaster for France. France lost its hold on what would be Canada, and to the British it lost its presence in India. This helped spread dislike for Madame Pompadour, who received blame for all of France's misfortunes. Despite widespread opinion, Louis kept her at his side, until she died in 1764, - at the age of 42. She was replaced in 1769 by a 23-year-old: Jeanne du Barry. Madame du Barry was less active politically than Pompadour had been, but still Louis only pretended to rule.
High society -- nobles and high clergy -- led frivolous lives at the royal court in Versailles (pronounced Vair-sEYE), and on the streets of Paris the elite enjoyed showing off their status -- nothing like the wealthy young women wearing jeans as in the United States after 1945. Elaborate dress and huge and elaborate hairdos were the fashion.
Many of the upper nobility were absentee landlords living in great homes in Paris. They could be seen riding in their carriages through the streets of Paris, their footman running in front of their carriage to clear the way. Some nobles were poor and lived in the country, and some whose heritage was doubtful but who had sufficient money were paying fees to be included on the official list of nobles. Officially the nobility was supposed to be those who had most distinguished themselves in the king's service, supposedly people of merit. France's upper nobility had come to believed -- as did Voltaire -- that a monarchical system of government needed a nobility to serve it.
France's nobles, including wives and children, have been estimated at around 600,000 at mid-century, when the nation's population was around 22 million. Often, France's upper nobility sent a son into the upper clergy. Often they sent a son as an officer into the military (where the higher ranking officer positions were preserved for the upper nobility), the young men holding that it was an honor to serve the king and to die beneath his flag on the field of battle. And high positions in the king's civil service was also reserved for the upper nobility. High government officials were almost a closed cast and not necessarily bright. Promotion in the civil service often depended more on acquaintance at court than on merit. Middleclass men of talent in government were frustrated and resented the system that left them out.
The nobility considered pursuit of commercial activity as demeaning. They looked with contempt upon concern with money, and they described concern over debts as living like a bourgeois. Nobles also tended to see marriage for affection as a bourgeois attitude. Some young noblemen married women from bourgeois families, happy to acquire the wealth that came with their wife. On the other hand, young men from bourgeois families who married women from noble families were often ridiculed for having married someone of pedigree but no money. And those daughters of the nobility that no one married were usually destined for a nunnery.
In France were class tensions that no longer existed in England. The nobility enjoyed tax exemptions, and much of the tax burden was falling upon the peasants, who, with common townspeople, were siding with the bourgeoisie. And adding to the displeasure of the bourgeoisie and commoners was a lack of civil rights. The king could have anyone arrested without reason and imprison him as long as he wanted. The kingdom of King Louis XV had no uniform system of law.
But it was not so much the king that the average French person feared. People across class lines revered their king. When Louis XV returned to Paris his appearance delighted the crowds. But common folk easily lost their temper, as the riots of 1750 when the rumor had spread that children were being seized for transport to the Americas. The rumors described the police as in on the kidnappings, and violence of the mobs was directed against them.
But mostly it was criminals that the French feared. French society was filled with swindlers, thieves, beggars, thieves and vagabonds, and the average Frenchman delighted in witnessing their punishment. Justice was administered in police courts in the name of the king -- the king reserving to himself the right of pardon, which King Louis XV rarely used. Some punishments were inflicted in public, for the pleasure of seeing criminals suffer -- not unlike the Roman spectators at the arena. Sometimes those deemed guilty of minor crimes were locked in place with a placard describing their crime. The guillotine had not yet been invented, and executions were done by hanging or by splitting a body into parts -- by drawing and quartering or by breaking people on a wheel. The executioner was elegantly dressed, including a powdered wig, and he conducted himself with great airs, before large crowds.
Capital punishment was still seen as the solution to crime -- a view held by Montesquieu. Many convicted of petty crimes were sentenced to death. And torture was still being used to draw confessions. A common form of torture was pouring water slowly down a suspect's throat. Another was tying the suspects feet together and driving his knees apart with a wedge. Voltaire protested, claiming that torture should be used only when the safety of the state was at stake.
The Church had grown in wealth and land, benefiting from tithes on harvests, parish fees, investments, their ownership of lands, donations and bequests. The Church continued to keep the records of births, marriages and deaths. Its charities were widespread. The Church dominated education, including the universities. And it tried to keep the nation on the right path. But newspapers could be secretly distributed and were not easily suppressed. Suppressing printers and the opinions of authors proved futile. The Church tried condemning the theater, and excommunicated leading actresses. But the theatre went on as before, high society and the court ignoring Church admonitions. And the Church remained displeased by their libertine attitudes.
By mid-century in France, monasticism was on the decline, as was respect for the Church among intellectuals. The church, meanwhile, had its own intellectuals, and they were absorbing some of the Enlightenment. Parish priests, living in modest circumstances, were highly respected in France -- even by Voltaire -- for their community work. And a few of these priests had grown skeptical of magic and claims of miracles. Some of them were troubled by popular religious culture. One described parishioners as being more superstitious than devote and appearing to be baptized idolators. [note] One attempted to abolish pilgrimages to a local spring, reputed to revive dead babies long enough to be properly baptized. There was criticism of bonfire ceremonies during Lent, with young men jumping over fires so that crops would grow and they would be protected from illness. The efforts of the reformist priests went little rewarded. Caution was taken not to alienate the devout. Pilgrimages, processions and devotion to saints, images and relics remained, as did the view that an energetic ringing of church bells protected a village from hail and thunderstorms.
Parish priests were displeased by the ambition, indifference and vanity of the upper clergy. The ecclesiastical nobility was living in opulence and putting on airs as great if not greater than the rest of France's upper nobility. France's lower clergy resented the authority over them by the higher clergy, and among them was an identity with commoners against the nobility in general.
Enlightenment had reached the town of Leipzig, in Saxony, where Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the son of a university professor, invented infinitesimal calculus independent of Newton. He developed an understanding of Newton's new physics, and like Newton he tried to put the new physics within traditional Christianity. Regarding John Locke's ideas, Leibniz objected to morality being reason applied to sense experience rather than from God. God, he believed, had made this the best of all possible worlds -- a view that Voltaire was to satirize in his little novel, Candide, with Leibniz as Dr. Pangloss.
To Protestant Germany also came a belief in Deism, but to only a few. At the beginning of the 1700s, most people in Germany remained illiterate or uninterested in new ideas, and their rulers were not interested in having them educated. Among those who could read, the dominant trend was Pietism, a movement that sought truths from a literal interpretation of the Bible. Pietism was against the authority of clergy between God and the faithful and believed in the unostentatious living of earliest Christianity.
Recommended Books
Madame de Pompadour: Mistress of France by Christine Pevett Algrant, 2002
Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France, by Lisa Silverman, University of Chicago Press, 2001
Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660-1815, by Wilfred Prest
Christianity: a Social and Cultural History, by Howard Clark Kee, et al, 1991
Sir William Blackstone, by David A Lockmiller, University of North Carolina Press, 1938
Lichtenberg's Visits to England, edited by M Mare and W H Quarrel, 1938
Eighteenth-Century Europe, Tradition and Progress, by Isser Woloch, W W Norton, 1982
The Ancient Regime in Europe, by Neville E Williams, 1970
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