After the demise of Louis XIV, the king had left legacy which was a working paradigm of monarchy

that dazzled Europe, and which would remain relatively unchanged up until 1879. Many of the debts

contracted were still being serviced three generations later and were only to be liquidated by the

Revolution1.

During the reign of Louis XV, significant changes would undergo that would allow for the

dissemination of Enlightenment ideas. The stringency of censorship was considerably relaxed by

stages after the end of War of Spanish Succession in 1713. During the last years of Louis reign there

was a post-war influx of foreign visitors and a flurry of printing activity, stimulated by the easing of

supervision under Abbe Bignon. After 1815 there was unquestionably more scope for publishing

philosophically, scientifically, and even theologically controversial books. This was done in the

instituting a middle category of books which were neither licensed by ecclesiastical authorities nor

expressly forbidden. This system of tacit exemption allowed for the proliferation of new ideas which

had been previously suppressed under the reign of Louis XIV. This caused the rise of the educated

reader; this was indicated by the growth in the number, size, and frequency of newspapers and

journals. At the beginning of the century the French periodical press consisted of three semi-official

journals, closely supervised by the government, and several French-language periodicals published

beyond the reach of Louis XIV’s censorship. By the 1745, the number of periodicals published had

risen to fifteen and in 1785 had reached eighty-two. In 1748 the first weekly provincial paper began to

be produced in in Lyons, the survival and prosperity of all these publications showed the growing

markets for what they offered. ‘Gone are the days’, declared the Journal encycolpedique in 1758,

‘when journals were only for the learned…. Nowadays, everybody reads or wants to read about

everything”.

The failure of the monarch to reform the crippling financial system would prove to cause significant

deterioration in royal authority. Philpe Duke d’Orleans the regan ton behalf of the two-year-old king

would make was concerned to undo the. Orleans was concentrated o the internal problems the state

debt of some 2,000 million livres2. The failure of regent in placing his confidence in the Scottish
1
Invalid source specified.
2
(Swann, 1995)
adventurer, John Law. He would establish private bank in 1716 and begin to issue bank which would

be accepted as legal tender. As the paper currency began to circulate it would give inflationary

pressures to the economy, allowing for interest rate to go down. However the attempt to create the

Mississippi company, a monopoly trading company was failure. The attempt to emulate the banking

and commercial venture of the British and the Dutch was overambitious and caused the printing of a

large number of bank notes to quickly outstrip the productive capacity of the economy. The spelative

bubble burst in May 1720. The bubble causing countless victims left “holding a currency not worth

the it was printed on”3.The years of broken promises and created suspicion for the competency of the

operation of a monarchy that bearded no accountability from the people.

His project was built on an impossible need for continual capital gains and represents one of the most

fatal economic management flaws in the period But there are caveats that Law’s scheme, despite its

failure, was, in the long-run successful, reducing state debt expenditures to 30% of revenue 4 via its

inflationary crash – the impact on the general masses was more profound. It would be in the under the

reign of Louis XV that the most seminal works of the French High enlightenment.

It was during the relaxed censorship under Louis XV that most of most of the philosophical treatise

which expounded the ideas of the philosophes – the phiosphers who would be hailed as the

torchbearers of the Enlightenment Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu all produced their mangum

opuses in this time period. They were all convinced of their historical importance 5 but none were

insistent in inspiring a crisis of royal authority. All of the philosophers unified in their desire to

witness a state that espoused values that permitted “freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech,

freedom of trade, freedom to realise one’s talents, freedom to make his own way in the world” 6. They

were on a campaign to modernise the world – that is, to make it more rational and less superstitious,

and in doing so they had undermined the very principles that had sustained the monarch which was

the religious supernatural reverence -- the failure of the monarch to adapt and establish legitimacy

enlightened and secular grounds would only make the monarch a relic and thus the subject of

3
(Swann, 1995)
4
Invalid source specified.
5
(DIJN, 2012)
6
(Gay 1923)
irreverence and slander. When they would the discuss the need to écraser l'infâme, (crush the

loathsome thing), they meant the church, not royal absolutism.

Peter Gay is a German-American prominent intellectual historian known for causing interest in the

study of the Enlightenment with his provocative work appears to be insistent in depicting the

Enlightenment philosophers as the revolutionary radicals that galvanising support for the eventual

1789 crisis in royal authority, that would lead to the toppling of the Bourbon regime. It would be these

thinkers that would have influence beyond continental France and would be the bedrock of the

modern political culture of the West. To Gay, the philosophes were the pioneers that developed the

intellectual foundations oof the liberal Western values that would triumph over the illiberal regimes of

Stalin and Hitler – the latter which his family would escape from in 1938 7. “Gay first organized his

ideas about the Enlightenment in the 1940s and 1950s; against the backdrop of twentieth-century

challenges to freedom by fascism and communism, the Western liberal-rationalist tradition, he

believed, very much deserved affirmation”8. “For him, Nazism was a barbaric negation of everything

the Enlightenment…culture stood for” 9

The thesis of his book The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, entailed that it was these thinkers that it

was not only primary in the crisis of the royal authority in 1789, but for the liberal values that shapes

the modern political culture. I do find the work of Gay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation to be

unconvincing due to it, as described by historian Nicholas Hudson, “a barely disguised defence of

optimistic secular liberalism opposed to…to the rising conservativism” – rising conservatism would

be that of Jacob Talmon who in his landmark work Origins of Totalitarianism, Talmon blames

totalitarianism on the philosophes, and particularly on Rousseau. Gay through his work on the

Enlightenment would successfully rescue the Enlightenment from the, now widely dismissed, notions

of conservatives such as Talmon but in doing so would attaches too much radicalism to the impact of

the philosophes. For example, the rousing vision that the Enlightenment was “united on a vastly

ambitious program” does not seem to fair well with the facts. Many Philosophes, including Gay’s

7
(Evans, 2015)
8
(Dietle, 2000)
9
(Evans, 2015)
own Voltaire, was not all that politically radical. Voltaire might have admired the British

parliamentary regime, but he would point out that he did believe it was suitable for continental nations

like France and would repeatedly express his criticism for democracy. Republics were only for little

peoples, “like rabbits trying to get away from carnivores”. Moreover, it was not a long-term form of

government, for inevitably, those rabbits would be devoured by their monarchical neighbours 10. How

could it be such that Enlightnements thinkers played an pivotal role in the crisis of royal authority in

the 1879 when it was, case that as Darnton outlines, a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers the likes of

Voltaire “Rather than challenge the social order… offered a prop to it” – it is for this reason, in light

of the backdrop of twentieth-century challenges of fascism and communism on the Western-liberal

rationalist tradition, he believe, very much deserved affirmation” of that I find the claims about the

influence of Enlightenment thinkers to be rather unconvincing. The philosopher Boulanger who Peter

Gay describes as one of the lieutenants of the Major Enlightenment figures, shows he was an avowed

monarchist insisted that Monarchy was the only government made for this earth and only this that was

possible in safeguarding happiness and individual liberty. This shows that an influential philosophe

could support monarchy on enlightened grounds. It such philosophes such as Bolaugner that are

consistely ignored dismissed by Gay and Israel.

Robert Darnton, one of the most influential literary historians with the The Forbidden Best-Sellers in

Pre-Revolutionary France has become on the of the most influential, often cited, and studied in his

field. He gives a comprehensive insight into the types of books that must have His work the

culmination of more than 25-years of archival work attended both Harvard University and Oxford

University and wrote a provocative and robust refutation of the work of Peter Gay. In doing so he

would also look for a new Enlightenment that he been “pensioned, petted and completely integrated in

High Society” that “offered a prop” to the prevailing social order – he did not give up identifying the

Enlightenment as being a influential force in the French Revoloution. This was less in the works of

the phisophes who were “integrated into High society” but more the attempted to a locate an

10
(DIJN, 2012)
Enlightenment that could plausibly be casted as a revolutionary force. He identified “the literary

underground” of the Old Regime as he that revolutionary force that would lead the crisis in royal

authority in 1789. The materialism intertwined with sexual escapades, in which Louis XV’s wife as

was describes as having too undue political influence would prove to tear down the sacredness

associated with the Ancien regime – causing the public perceptions of the monarch to shift. I find the

work Darnton to be highly convincing given his additional Roger Chartier stating that “If French of

the late eighteenth century fashioned the Revolution, it is because they had been fashioned by books”.

Books being the intermediary between thought and action: Darnton’s expertise as a literary historian

as to what was read provides an insight that would have causes a crisis in royal authority.

Grub Streets encouraging political slander. Such seditious material according to Darnton “hardly

contained any abstract ideas at all”11 – to say, they lacked the philosophical and abstract jargon of

dense treatise that would have, and according to Darnton that identities this as lending to public

opinion the capacity for a revolutionary fervour. In analysing the popular forbidden best-sellers pre-

Revolutionary, these were the books by a publisher who made it his business the following book his

business to know what eighteenth-century wanted to read, this was under the definition of

“philosophical” we learn that The Nun in a Nightgown, The Woman of Pleasure; The Pastime of

Antoinette (a reference to the Queen). Darnton asserts that “the Enlightenment was a more down-to-

earth affair than the rarefied climate of opinion described by textbooks writers” 12 – this is rather

convincing given the influential French lawyer Gerbier in 1789 when asking “Where does the

agitation come from?” he states that it was “from crown of unknown writers, who would go about

rabble rousing in clubs and cafes.” And it was this that “have forged the weapons which the weapons

are armed with today”13. In his book he dismisses the conclusion of the people like Gay who focus on

the role of hegemonic discourses on the permeation of the Enlightenment. Instead, he emphasises

identifies the illegal literature as it was these books that reveal “that decadence had set in, and that

monarchy had degenerated into despotism”14 (p.242), after the death of Louis XIV. This is convincing

11
(Darnton, 1971)
12
(Darnton, 1971)
13
(Darnton, 1971)
14
(Darnton, 1971)
due to the fact since Louis XIV, this is made evident in the widescreens change in public opinions

would be evident in the consuming of political slander, pornography and utopian fantasies and would

explain the popularity in slanderous Affair of Necklace Scandal

Rousseau’s, which serves as a primary of source, ‘the social contract’ is of minimal value to due to

primarily erudite abstraction and lack of widespread readership. Rousseau was born in Geneva and

was autodidact that taught himself into the advanced intellectual circles of Grimm and Diderot.

Though he had established his reputation in Paris, Rousseau was incapable of becoming an integrated.

Parisian. He found the freedom of Parisian life seemed licentious to a man bought up in austerely

Calvinist Geneva. He found the conversations, books written, the shocking epigraphs and the

frivolous dialectical twists -- that were characteristic of the Salons -- all too repellent to him. His lack

of integration into the Parisan culture allows to understand why Rousseau used “language that is not

conspicuously ‘emotive‘” and used has an argument that “is undeniably abstract and difficult to apply

specific cases”15. This is far from the “rabble-rousing” that would “arm the weapons that the [mases]

would have”. A close analysis of the Social Contract, Enclopyedia, and other prominent

enlightenment works fail to display proof of bearing direct responsibility for the crisis that eroded the

Bourbon monarchy16. The mention of Rousse’s General Will in the Declaration of of Right in 1789 17

Yet such Rousseau language is not enough to make judgement on the value on the Social Contract in

how Enlightenment ideas eroded the royal authority between publication (1872) and 1879, because by

1789 the royal authority had already been eroded. We must analyse further. It is in this book that

Rousseau that writes his most often cited liens: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is chain” 18 and

he additionally states “this right does not come from nature and therefore must be founded on

conventions”19 – words that would have challenged the very ideological legitimacy of the Ancien

Regime, yet to the readership is indicative also. It was this very question that Daniel Mornet set out to

answer at the turn of the 19th century: what did the French people read during leading up to the French

15
(Rousseau, 1762)
16
John Lough concluded that “if one were to seek in the pages of the Encyclopédie the text of the Declaration
des droits de l'homme or a blueprint of the limited monarchy set up by the constitution of 1791, one would
certainly be disappointed”. (Lough, 1985 )
17
“The law is an expression of the general will” - (Lafayette)
18
(Rousseau, 1762)
19
(Rousseau, 1762)
Revolution? What was the la litteruture vecue? Daniel Mornet, analysed a series a total of 20,000

books from pre-Revolutionary libraries and tabulated "titles from five hundred eighteenth-century

catalogues" to and see how many of the Social Contract he could unearthed. Result: out of the 20,000

copies he unearthed there was only one copy of the Social Construct. The book that is lauded as the

Bible of the French Revolution, appears to have gone mostly unread. The crisis in support for the

Bourbon Monarchy was not a la faulte a Rousseau. This leads to us to believe that the Social Contract

is of minimal value, as it appears to have not disseminated widely for it to have shaped the public

opinion. It is such that Daniel Monet describes that it was a “piece of pure theoretical speculation

written to define an abstract an ideal”20 only, as Darnton describes, “for a rarefied climate of opinion”,

but as Darnton quotes in the epigraph of his work cites the quote that “true genius is almost sans-

cullote”21. Booksellers were also publishers, and the euphemism of “philosophical” were often

anything “violently anticlerical and anti-Catholic” 22 , any dangerous thinking and therefore as likely to

mean from anything pornography to scandalous accounts of life at the court.

Robert Darton uses this to substantiate his view to dissolve the relationship to that Here we learn that

the Salons which were instrumental in being the knowledge production that would shape public

opinion, would lay the foundation that made it inevitable for the decline of the bourbon monarchy as

it cured people of the plague of the idea of the divine right of king. Rousseau’s insistence that man’s

social arrangement was the product of human choice, and that society must bear ultimate

responsibility for the society they construct.

20
(Mornet, 1933)
21
(Darnton, 1971)
22
(Furet, 1995)