The 18th Century To The Revolution Of 1789

The Enlightenment

Britannica Kids
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 centred 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 centre 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.

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 laboured 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 labours 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.

Title page of an early printed version of Voltaire’s Candide published in London,

1759.
This 1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation
imagines how Voltaire might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-
called Age of Enlightenment.
Title page of an early printed version of Voltaire’s Candide published in …
The Newberry Library, Louis H. Silver Collection purchase, 1964 (A Britannica
Publishing Partner)
This 1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation
imagines how Voltaire …
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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.

Britannica Kids
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.”

Drama

Tragedy and the survival of Classical form

Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of
Voltaire, which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe
(1718) to that of Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in
sensibility is apparent as pathos reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror.
Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos, should teach men virtue
and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do just that,
through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous
heroine, torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic
forefathers and the Muslim faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of
character destroys her, but simply the failings of Christians unworthy of their
creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic emotions are
replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.

Marivaux and Beaumarchais

The best of 18th-century drama takes a different course. Pierre Marivaux wrote
more than 30 comedies, mostly between 1720 and 1740, for the most part
bearing on the psychology of love. Typically, the Marivaudian protagonist is a
refined young lady who finds herself, to her bewilderment or even despair,
falling in love despite herself, thereby losing her autonomy of judgment and
action. La Surprise de l’amour, a title Marivaux used twice (1722, 1727),
becomes a regular motif, the interest of each play resting in the precise and
delicate changes of attitude and circumstance rung by the dramatist and the
sharp, witty discourse in which his characters’ exchanges are couched. His
sympathy for the generally likable heroes and heroines stops short, however, of
indulgence. The action is dramatic essentially because the characters’ stubborn
pride, central to their being, has to succumb to the demands of their instincts.
Vanity, in Marivaux’s view, is endemic to human nature. In Le Jeu de l’amour et
du hasard (1730; The Game of Love and Chance), the plot of which is based on
disguise, with masters and servants exchanging parts, Silvia experiences
profound consternation at the quite unacceptable prospect of falling for a valet.
When she learns the happy truth, her relief immediately gives way to a
determination to force her lover Dorante into surrender while he still thinks her
a servant. Many plays deal explicitly with social barriers created by rank or
money, such as La Double Inconstance (1723; Changes of Heart) and Les Fausses
Confidences (1737; “False Confidences”). As the subtlety of Marivaux’s
perceptions and the genius of his language have become better understood, he
has come to be regarded as the fourth great classic (after Corneille, Racine, and
Molière) of the French theatre.

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais is best remembered for two comic

masterpieces, Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage
de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro). Both are dominated by the servant
Figaro, a scheming dynamo of wit and generosity. Some commentators during
the Revolution detected prerevolutionary sentiments in The Marriage of Figaro,
but the evidence is too insubstantial to argue for any intention on the author’s
part. As much as the sharpness of wit and character, the brilliance of structure
wins admiration. All is movement and vicissitude, particularly in The Marriage of
Figaro, with its 92 scenes (about three times the average number in a Classical
play) and profusion of theatrical “business” rising to the magisterial imbroglio of
the final act.

Bourgeois drama

Beaumarchais himself espoused the drame bourgeois (“bourgeois drama” or

“middle-class tragedy”) in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767;
“Essay on the Genre of Serious Drama”). He wrote several drames, among them
the sequel to The Marriage of Figaro in L’Autre Tartuffe; ou, La Mère coupable
(1792; “The Other Tartuffe; or, The Guilty Mother”). The growing importance of
sentiment on the stage had proved as inimical to Classical comedy as to Classical
tragedy. More popular was a type of comedy both serious and moralistic, such as
Le Glorieux (1732; The Conceited Count) by Philippe Néricault Destouches or the
comédies larmoyantes (“tearful comedies”) of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La
Chaussée, which enjoyed great popularity in the 1730s and ’40s. Diderot’s
Entretiens sur “Le Fils naturel” (1757; “Conversations on ‘The Natural Son’”)
gave a theoretical underpinning to the new mood. The author called for middle-
class tragedies of private life, realistic and affecting, able to inspire strong
emotions and incline audiences to more elevated states of mind. The new genre,
reacting against the articulate tirades of Classical tragedy, would draw on
pantomime and tableaux or inarticulate speech rather than on eloquent
discursiveness. Though Diderot’s plays did not live up to his theories, the
emphasis upon middle-class virtuousness was to be made dramatically effective
in Michel-Jean Sedaine’s Le Philosophe sans le savoir (1765; “The Unwitting
Philosopher”; Eng. trans. The Duel). But the success of the drame bourgeois was
short-lived, perhaps because it attempted the incompatible aims of being both
realistic and didactic.

Poetry

The emphasis upon reason, science, and philosophy may explain the absence of
great poetry in the 18th century. The best verse is that of Voltaire, whose chief
claim to renown during most of his lifetime was as a poet. In epic, mock-epic,
philosophical poems, or witty society pieces he was preeminent, but to the
modern critic the linguistic intensity that might indicate genius is missing.

The novel

Despite official opposition and occasional censorship, the genre of the novel
developed apace. The first great 18th-century exemplar is now seen to be Robert
Challes, whose Illustres françaises (1713; The Illustrious French Lovers), a
collection of seven tales intertwined, commands attention for its serious realism
and a disabused candour anticipating Stendhal. As the bourgeoisie acquired a
more prominent place in society and the focus switched to exploring the textures
of everyday life, the roman de moeurs (“novel of manners”) became important,
most notably with the novels of Alain-René Lesage: Le Diable boiteux (1707; The
Devil upon Two Sticks) and especially L’Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–
35; The History and Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane). The latter, a loose-knit
picaresque novel, recounts its hero’s rise in society and concomitant moral
education, set against a comprehensive picture of the surrounding world.
Characterization and the representation of the new ethos of sensibility receive
greater attention in the novels of the prolific Abbé Prévost, author of
multivolume romances but best known for the Histoire du chevalier des Grieux
et de Manon Lescaut (1731; “Tale of the Chevalier des Grieux and Manon
Lescaut”; Eng. trans. Manon Lescaut). In this ambivalent mixture of idealistic
passion and shabby criminality, des Grieux, a young scapegrace but also, Prévost
urges, a man of the most exquisite sentiments, sacrifices a glittering career to his
fantasy of the amoral, delicate, and forever enigmatic Manon. In this tragic tale,
love conquers all, but it constantly needs vulgar money to sustain it. Tears and
swoonings abound, as do precise notations of financial costs, in a blend of
traditional romance and sordid realism.

By contrast, Marivaux as novelist devoted his main energies to psychological

analysis and the moral life of his characters. His two great narratives, La Vie de
Marianne (1731–41; The Life of Marianne) and Le Paysan parvenu (1734–35; Up
from the Country), follow one single character recounting, as in Manon Lescaut,
her or his past experience. But it is the comic note that prevails as Marianne and
Jacob make their way upward in society. Reflection upon conduct becomes more
important than conduct itself; the narrators, now of mature years, comment and
endlessly interpret their actions when young and still in transit socially. The
result provides a rich density of feelings, meticulously analyzed or finely
suggested, in a precise and witty prose. Both protagonists are morally equivocal,
born survivors with an eye for the main chance, representative of a social class
making its way from margins to mainstream; yet they are also attractive, both to
their peers in the novel and to their readership, in their disarming self-
revelations.

Increasingly, from the middle of the century, studies of women’s position in

society, salon, or family emerged from the pen of women writers. Françoise de
Graffigny (Lettres d’une Péruvienne [1747; Letters of a Peruvian Princess]),
Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière use the popular epistolary
form of the novel to allow their heroines to voice the pain and distress of a
situation of unremitting dependency. The processes of modernization were
beginning to bring their own solutions to women’s subordination. The
educationalist Madame de Genlis (Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest), much influenced
by Rousseau, found a Europe-wide readership for her treatises, plays, and,
especially, the novel Adèle et Théodore; ou, lettres sur l’éducation (1782;
Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education), which offered enlightened and
advanced educational programs for children and young women of all classes,
based on the recognition that men engaged increasingly with duties,
responsibilities, and work in the public sphere needed well-educated and skilled
wives at home to manage their households and estates. The subordination of
women to men was still a given in Genlis’s philosophy, and it was a theme
emphasized in the highly popular historical and political romances she would
later write in exile, during the Revolution, and on her eventual return to Paris to
become an ardent spokesperson for all old hierarchies in Napoleon’s restored
court.

Rousseau

The preeminent name associated with the sensibility of the age is that of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau. His work gave rise to the cult of nature, lakes, mountains, and
gardens, in contrast to what he presented as the false glitter of society. He called
for a new way of life attentive above all to the innate sense of pity and
benevolence he attributed to men, rather than dependent upon what he saw as
the meretricious reason prized by his fellow philosophes; he espoused untutored
simplicity and declared the true equality of all, based in the capacity for feeling
that all men share; and he argued the importance of total sincerity and claimed
to practice it in his confessional writings, which are seminal instances of modern
autobiography. With these radical new claims for a different mode of feeling, one
that would foster a revolutionary new politics, he stands as one of the greatest
thinkers of his time, alongside, and generally in opposition to, Voltaire. He
established the modern novel of sensibility with the resounding success of his
Julie; ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Heloise), a novel about an
impossible, doomed love between a young aristocrat and her tutor. He composed
a classic work of educational theory with Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Emile;
or, On Education), whose hero is brought up away from corrupting society, in
keeping with the principles of natural man. Emile learns to prefer feeling and
spontaneity to theory and reason, and religious sensibility is an essential
element of his makeup. This alone would separate Rousseau from Voltaire and
Diderot, not to mention the materialist philosophers Claude-Adrien Helvétius,
Paul-Henri d’Holbach, and Julien de La Mettrie, for whom the progress of the
Enlightenment was judged by the emancipation of the age from superstition,
fanaticism, and the authority of prejudice passing as faith.

The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours
sur les sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more
profoundly elaborated in the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de
l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of
Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality). In the
latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have
allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of
competition, specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that
consolidated the inequitable distribution of property. Further, he states that
elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality is endless posturing, hostility,
injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary implications of these
beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract), with its
examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of
kings, and its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be
established, according to Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have
never yet been divided or corrupted by any form of government, through a social
pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each individual agrees to submit
to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has sovereignty.
This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed.
But such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the
prior existence of the higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help
create and foster. To break the vicious circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce
into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his authority, or the
seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his
newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and
freedoms, he must posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle.
Commentators have differed widely in their readings of The Social Contract as
either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw himself as
unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917,
revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.

Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on

values authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience
and feelings, is continued in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans.
Confessions). Here he suggests that self-knowledge is to be achieved by a
growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the importance of
childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an
anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its
dreams, desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed
further in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries
of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen as foreshadowing even more
strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection of the next
century.

Laclos and others

The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the

tensions and dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—
the Great Revolution to which the modern French state traces its origins—is
dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons
dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account of erotic
psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and
rival, Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society
that illustrates Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a
world of conformist expediency, cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s
novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a dangerous, heartless world; yet he
also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and directs that world’s
viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as well
as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.

By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie

(1788; Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting
of Mauritius, often seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very
different, follower of Rousseauist ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme
Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed chronicler and analyst of
Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had gone
from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises,
novels, and short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of
men and especially women, in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress
of the house to the prostitutes in the street. Along with the work of Louis-
Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89; Panorama of Paris
[selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning
metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human,
social, and political dramas. A very different response to this time of radical
change came from Donatien-Alphonse-François, comte de Sade, generally known
as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the connections of power, pain,
and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures, gave rise to
the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is
not procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The
true libertine must replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total
freedom of individual desire. The language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe
much to the Enlightenment, of which his antisocial egoism is, however, only a
perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les malheurs de la vertu
(1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister,
Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before
that the search for fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the
human psyche. The text he wrote in the Bastille, never published in his lifetime,
Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85, published 1904; The 120 Days of
Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the Surrealists and Georges
Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative forms of
the modern unconscious.