The Enlightenment in France: The Philosophes, Salons, and the Road to Revolution

The French Enlightenment was the heart of the broader European movement, even if the heart is, in retrospect, the most contested of organs. French was the lingua franca of the educated European public, Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe, and the French philosophes — Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, and a host of others — were the most widely read writers of the century. The French Enlightenment was also the most politically charged, and it culminated in the French Revolution of 1789, the most consequential political event of the eighteenth century. The interesting historical question is whether the Revolution was the Enlightenment’s triumph or its betrayal. The answer, almost certainly, is both.

This article explores the French Enlightenment in its full historical setting. It examines the cultural and institutional context in which the philosophes worked, the major figures of the French Enlightenment, the great collaborative projects that defined the movement, the political and social critique that the philosophes developed, and the long-term consequences of the French Enlightenment for the modern world.

The Setting: Eighteenth-Century France

The France of the eighteenth century was the largest and most populous state in Western Europe, with a population of about twenty-eight million in 1789. It was governed by an absolute monarchy that had been, in the century and a half since the reign of Louis XIV, gradually losing its grip on the levers of power. The paradox of the late Ancien Régime was that the monarchy was, in form, absolute but, in practice, increasingly dependent on the aristocratic and clerical elites whose privileges it could not overturn. The contradiction was, in the end, fatal.

The Ancien Régime

The political and social structure of pre-revolutionary France is usually called the Ancien Régime, the “old regime.” It was a complex system of overlapping jurisdictions, privileges, and obligations that had developed over centuries and that would be swept away by the Revolution.

The king was theoretically absolute, but his power was limited in practice by the rights and privileges of a host of intermediate bodies. The nobility, the clergy, the parlements (sovereign courts), the provincial estates, and the towns all enjoyed various degrees of autonomy. The result was a system that was, in some respects, a maze of contradictory jurisdictions and that made the rational reform of the state extremely difficult. The famous example of the parlement of Paris refusing to register royal edicts — and the king’s response of a lit de justice, in which he forced registration in person — captures the deadlock at the heart of the late monarchy. The system worked, more or less, when the king was strong; it failed visibly when the king was weak.

The social structure was rigidly hierarchical. At the top were the nobility and the clergy, who together made up about three percent of the population but who enjoyed the greatest share of wealth and privilege. Below them were the bourgeoisie — the merchants, professionals, and officials of the towns — who enjoyed some privileges but not those of the nobility. At the bottom were the peasants, who made up the great majority of the population and who bore the heaviest tax burden. The nobility and the clergy were largely exempt from the taille, the main direct tax; the gabelle (salt tax) hit the poor hardest; the banalités (seigneurial monopolies on mills and ovens) and the corvée (forced labor on the roads) were seigneurial exactions that the philosophes attacked in detail. The fiscal system, in short, was a fiscal system designed to protect the propertied, and the burden fell on the unpropertied in a way that was, by the standards of the eighteenth century, both inefficient and oppressive.

The Crisis of the Old Regime

By the second half of the eighteenth century, the contradictions of the Ancien Régime had become increasingly visible, and the details of the crisis are examined in The French Revolution. The state was chronically in debt, the result of a long series of wars — most recently the costly intervention in the American Revolution, which cost France perhaps one billion livres and which was, in the judgment of the more austere financial observers of the time, a financial disaster from the first — and an inefficient system of taxation. The harvests of the 1780s were poor, and the price of bread, the staple food of the French poor, rose sharply. The political system was paralyzed by the resistance of the privileged orders to any rational reform.

The French Enlightenment developed against this background of crisis. The philosophes offered a thoroughgoing critique of the existing order and a program of rational reform that would eventually become the program of the Revolution. The interesting question, in retrospect, is whether the philosophes’ critique made the Revolution possible, or whether the Revolution was going to happen anyway and the philosophes merely provided it with a vocabulary. The honest answer is probably both, and the fact that the philosophes are still being read while most of their political opponents are forgotten is the more durable part of the legacy.

The Philosophes and Their Public

The French philosophes were not a school in any narrow sense. They disagreed on many important questions, and their relations with one another were often contentious. What they shared was a commitment to the use of reason for the improvement of human life, a willingness to challenge established authorities, and an engagement with the great intellectual and political issues of the day. Worth pausing on: their quarrels were, for the most part, the quarrels of a small community of people who all knew each other, met in the same salons, contributed to the same Encyclopédie, and were engaged in the same long struggle with the same censors and the same critics.

The Public Sphere

The philosophes were the protagonists of an emerging French public sphere. The eighteenth century saw a rapid expansion of the reading public in France, the result of rising literacy, the growth of urban centers, and the development of a market for books, pamphlets, and periodicals.

The number of books published in France grew dramatically over the century. The great Parisian publishing houses — Didot, Pancoucke, and others — produced an enormous range of works, from the books of the philosophes themselves to translations, encyclopedias, and popular literature. The provincial cities — Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes — had their own intellectual life, often connected to the great universities and the parlements. The book trade of eighteenth-century France was, in fact, the most sophisticated in Europe; the censors were prolific and the trade in forbidden books was a normal part of the business.

The salons — the regular gatherings of intellectuals, writers, scientists, and aristocrats in the drawing rooms of wealthy patrons — were a central institution of the French Enlightenment. The most famous salons were those of Madame Geoffrin, Madame d’Épinay, Madame du Deffand, and the Baron d’Holbach. They provided a meeting ground for thinkers of different backgrounds, and they were important in shaping the agenda of the Enlightenment. Geoffrin’s salon, in the Place des Victoires, was famous for its rigid separation of Mondays (philosophers) and Wednesdays (artists) — a social fact that captures, perhaps better than any general claim, the texture of the eighteenth-century Parisian public sphere. The salons were not neutral forums; they were governed by the hostesses who ran them, and the salonnières were, in their own right, significant intellectual figures. Madame du Châtelet was, in effect, a hostess-scientist; Madame d’Épinay hosted Diderot and Rousseau simultaneously, in the same period when the two were falling out; the Baronne de Staël would later (a generation on) make the salon into a tool of political opposition.

The Reading Public

The French reading public was larger, more diverse, and more politically engaged than ever before. The provincial academies, which had spread across France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provided a framework for the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. The Masonic lodges, which had grown rapidly in France during the eighteenth century, brought together men of different backgrounds in a common pursuit of moral and intellectual improvement. There were perhaps 700 Masonic lodges in France by 1789, with a combined membership that may have reached 50,000; the lodges were, in this respect, one of the most important institutional carriers of Enlightenment ideas.

The periodical press also grew rapidly. The Mercure de France, the Année littéraire, and the Journal des savants, among many others, provided a forum for the discussion of new books, scientific discoveries, and political events. The Affaire Calas, the Affaire Sirven, and other celebrated cases of injustice were debated in the periodicals, helping to shape public opinion and to create the conditions for the political mobilization of the 1780s. The political press of the 1780s — the Père Duchesne of Hébert, the Vieux Cordelier of Desmoulins — was the seedbed of the revolutionary press, and the fact that there was an audience for this material is the most striking feature of the late Ancien Régime’s information order.

The Major Figures

The French Enlightenment was a collective enterprise, but it was carried forward by a number of remarkable individuals. The following are among the most important. Notice how often these figures — even the canonical ones — were, in their own time, contested, censored, or exiled. The French Enlightenment was not a comfortable doctrine; it was a long fight.

Voltaire

Voltaire (1694–1778) was the most famous writer of his century, a master of every literary genre of his time. His plays — including Zaïre (1732) and Mahomet (1741) — were performed in the great theaters of Paris and the provinces; Mahomet was, in fact, banned by the Paris parlement in 1742 on the grounds that it was an attack on religion. His historical works — including The Age of Louis XIV (1751) and Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations (1756) — established a new model of philosophical history. His philosophical tales — including Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759) — brought Enlightenment ideas to a vast popular audience. His polemical writings — including the Philosophical Dictionary (1764) and the Treatise on Tolerance (1763) — were the great manifestos of the French Enlightenment.

Voltaire spent much of his later life at Ferney, on the Swiss border, where he received visitors from all over Europe. He died in Paris in 1778, and his funeral — the cortège passed the Bastille — was the occasion for a vast public demonstration of grief and admiration. The apotheosis of Voltaire in 1778 is the most important single scene for understanding the political character of the late Enlightenment; the crowds that came out for the funeral were the same crowds that would storm the Bastille eleven years later.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau (1712–1778) was the most original and the most controversial of the great French thinkers. Born in Geneva, self-taught, ill at ease in the fashionable world, Rousseau emerged from obscurity in the early 1750s with a series of works that challenged the assumptions of his contemporaries.

His Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) argued that the progress of the arts and sciences had not improved human morality. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) developed a hypothetical history of the human race in which the development of private property had corrupted human nature. His novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was one of the most widely read books of the century. His Émile (1762) was a treatise on education that proposed a new method of raising children. His Social Contract (1762) was the most influential political work of the century, providing the theoretical foundation for a new kind of democratic politics.

Rousseau was condemned by the Parlement of Paris for Émile, and he spent the rest of his life in flight, taking refuge in Switzerland, in the principality of Neuchâtel, in England, and finally back in France. He died at Ermenonville in 1778, shortly after Voltaire, and his legacy was even more contested than Voltaire’s. The contrast between Voltaire’s triumphant funeral in Paris and Rousseau’s quiet burial in the country is, in retrospect, a metaphor for the two competing visions of the Enlightenment: Voltaire’s, urban, polished, social; Rousseau’s, rural, sincere, solitary.

Montesquieu

Montesquieu (1689–1755) was a nobleman from the southwest of France, a magistrate of the parlement of Bordeaux, and one of the founders of modern comparative politics. His Persian Letters (1721) used the device of letters from two Persian travelers to satirize French institutions and customs; the book went through more than twenty editions in the eighteenth century. His The Spirit of the Laws (1748) was a comprehensive comparative study of laws, customs, and political institutions that established a new model of political science and provided the theoretical foundation for the separation of powers. The Spirit of the Laws is, in many respects, a more remarkable book than the Social Contract; Montesquieu’s empirical sensibility and his willingness to follow the historical evidence into unexpected places made him a more careful thinker than most of his contemporaries.

Diderot

Diderot (1713–1784) was the principal editor of the Encyclopédie, the great collaborative project that aimed to summarize all human knowledge. He was also a novelist, playwright, art critic, and natural philosopher of exceptional range. His philosophical dialogues, including Rameau’s Nephew and Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot, are among the most striking works of eighteenth-century philosophy. The Rêve de d’Alembert is one of the more remarkable anticipations of evolutionary theory; the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) is the founding text of the modern theory of perception. Diderot also wrote the Salons, the most important body of art criticism of the eighteenth century, and the novel Jacques le fataliste, which is a kind of prefiguration of Sterne and a model for the modern novel.

The Materialist Wing

A group of writers associated with the salon of the Baron d’Holbach developed a thoroughgoing materialist and atheist philosophy. La Mettrie (1709–1751), in Man a Machine (1747), argued that the human soul was a product of bodily organization. Helvétius (1715–1771), in On Mind (1758), argued that all intellectual differences were the result of education. D’Holbach himself, in the System of Nature (1770), provided a comprehensive materialist account of the universe that left no room for God, free will, or the immortality of the soul. The Système social (1773), d’Holbach’s political work, extended the analysis to social institutions.

The materialist wing was a minority current within the French Enlightenment, but it was an important one. Its members pushed the implications of the Enlightenment critique of traditional religion to their logical conclusion, and they provided ammunition for the more radical critics of the existing order. The actual numbers are small — d’Holbach’s salon in the rue Royale was the meeting place for perhaps two dozen regulars — but the influence was, by the standards of the period, disproportionate.

The Encyclopédie

The Encyclopédie was the flagship project of the French Enlightenment. It was intended as a comprehensive summary of human knowledge, organized according to a new system that would reflect the structure of the human mind. It was also, inevitably, a political project: by making the new knowledge accessible, the Encyclopédie aimed to undermine the existing order of church, state, and privilege.

Origins and Publication

The project originated with André Le Breton, a Parisian bookseller, who in 1745 proposed to publish a French translation of Ephraim Chambers’s English Cyclopaedia. The project was taken over by Diderot and d’Alembert, who transformed it into an entirely new work. The first volume appeared in 1751, and the last of the original seventeen volumes of text appeared in 1765. The eleven volumes of plates were completed by 1772.

The publication of the Encyclopédie was repeatedly interrupted by censorship and suppression. The first seven volumes were banned in 1752, and the privilège (the official license to publish) was withdrawn in 1759. Despite these obstacles, the work was completed and achieved a circulation of about four thousand subscribers, an enormous number for the time. The fact that the Encyclopédie survived the suppression is, in itself, one of the more remarkable publishing stories of the eighteenth century; the fact that the censors let it survive is also, in itself, a fact about the late Ancien Régime that the standard story of the period does not adequately explain.

The Encyclopedia as a Manifesto

The Encyclopédie was more than a reference work. It was, in effect, a manifesto of the French Enlightenment, in which the entries on politics, religion, philosophy, and science were written or commissioned to advance the cause of reason, liberty, and progress. The most radical entries, including those on “Authority,” “Political Economy,” and “Personal Liberty,” were written by Diderot himself.

D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse (1751) provided a sophisticated philosophical analysis of the structure of knowledge, distinguishing among the sciences of nature, mathematics, and the arts. The entry on “Genius” was a paean to the powers of the human mind. The entry on “Saint Paul” was a thinly veiled attack on religious intolerance. The entry on “Tyranny” was a call to resistance against unjust rule. The entries, in fact, often worked through indirection — by stating the principles of religious or political authority in a way that turned them against themselves. This is the most distinctive feature of the Encyclopédie as a text: it was at once a reference work and a political weapon, and it was the combination of the two that made it dangerous.

The Critique of the Ancien Régime

The French Enlightenment developed an increasingly systematic critique of the Ancien Régime. The critique operated on several levels: political, economic, social, religious, and cultural.

The Political Critique

The political critique of the philosophes was rooted in the natural-rights tradition of Locke and developed through the social contract theory of Rousseau. The philosophes argued that political authority was legitimate only to the extent that it rested on the consent of the governed and that it served to protect the natural rights of the citizens.

This argument had revolutionary implications. If the king ruled by consent and for the protection of rights, then a king who violated these conditions could legitimately be resisted or overthrown. The argument was developed cautiously by Voltaire and Montesquieu, more radically by Rousseau, and most radically by the revolutionary pamphleteers of the 1780s. Sieyès’s Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État? (1789) is, in many respects, the most explicit statement of the political position; the Déclaration des droits de l’homme, drafted later in 1789, is its constitutional expression.

The Economic Critique

The economic critique of the philosophes was directed at the mercantilist system of regulation, monopoly, and privilege. The physiocrats — Quesnay, Turgot, and their followers — argued that the wealth of nations derived ultimately from the productivity of the land, and that the elaborate system of regulations imposed by the Ancien Régime was impeding the development of agricultural productivity. Quesnay’s Tableau économique (1758) is, in retrospect, the founding document of modern economics; the Tableau is, in fact, the first systematic model of the circular flow of income, and it is the ancestor of macroeconomic theory in the Keynesian sense.

The Économistes — the economists — were important forerunners of Adam Smith. The Marquis de Turgot, in particular, served as a reforming minister under Louis XVI, and his attempts to rationalize the French tax system and to introduce free trade in grain were important episodes in the pre-revolutionary crisis. Turgot’s dismissal in 1776 is, in retrospect, the most consequential single political decision of the late Ancien Régime; had Turgot been allowed to continue his reforms, the political history of the late eighteenth century might have been very different. As it was, his dismissal was the proof that the monarchy could not reform itself.

The social critique of the philosophes was directed at the system of privilege that placed the nobility and the clergy above the rest of the population. The philosophes argued that the system of hereditary privilege was unjust, that all citizens should be equal before the law, and that the system of corporate privileges and feudal obligations was an obstacle to the rational development of French society.

The critique of social privilege was closely connected to the critique of political privilege. The destruction of the feudal system, the abolition of serfdom, and the establishment of legal equality became central demands of the revolutionary program. The famous Night of August 4, 1789, when the deputies of the National Assembly abolished the feudal regime in a night of oratorical enthusiasm, was the realization of a demand that the philosophes had been articulating for two generations.

The Religious Critique

The religious critique of the philosophes was directed at the Catholic Church, its privileges, its wealth, and its influence over French life. The Encyclopédie’s articles on religion were a sustained attack on the church’s claims to authority. Voltaire’s campaign on behalf of Calas, Sirven, Lally, and other victims of religious intolerance made the cause of toleration a central cause of the Enlightenment. The cases of Lally (an Irish-born French general who was broken on the wheel in 1766 for having lost Pondicherry to the British) and Calas (broken on the wheel in 1762, posthumously exonerated in 1765) are, in fact, the central cases of the late-Enlightenment campaign for judicial reform, and Voltaire’s role in both was the model for the modern political campaign.

The philosophes were not uniformly anti-religious. Many of them, including Voltaire, were deists who believed in a creator God and a moral order. But they were uniformly opposed to the political power of the church, the corruption of the clergy, and the persecution of religious dissenters. The civil constitution of the clergy (1790) and the subsequent de-Christianization campaign (1793–94) are the political consequences of the religious critique; the Concordat of 1801 is the compromise that ended the revolutionary religious experiment. The compromise is, in many respects, still in force.

The Road to Revolution

By the 1780s, the political crisis of the Ancien Régime and the cultural crisis generated by the Enlightenment converged. The government of Louis XVI, unable to find a solution to the financial crisis and unable to reform the system of privilege, called a meeting of the Estates-General for the first time since 1614. The Estates-General, meeting in May 1789, set in motion the events that led to the French Revolution.

The Pre-Revolutionary Crisis

The 1780s saw a series of financial crises that made reform unavoidable. The cost of supporting the American Revolution, the chronic deficit of the French treasury, and the resistance of the privileged orders to any system of taxation that would require them to contribute to the public burden all combined to make the financial crisis unmanageable. Calonne (Controller-General 1783–1787) attempted to introduce a universal land tax; the Assembly of Notables, called to approve it, refused; the king dismissed Calonne; the new Controller-General, Brienne, attempted another round of reform; the parlement of Paris refused to register the new edicts; the king tried to exile the parlement; the parlement returned in triumph. The political deadlock was, by 1788, total.

The political response to the crisis only made it worse. The king’s dismissal of reforming ministers, the censorship of critical publications, and the resort to a series of expedients all failed to address the underlying problem. The calling of the Estates-General in 1788 was an admission of failure, and it opened a political space within which the critics of the Ancien Régime could mobilize. The decision to call the Estates-General is, in fact, the decisive moment of the Revolution. Once the deputies were assembled, once the cahiers de doléances (the lists of grievances) had been drawn up, once the Third Estate had begun to organize itself as a national political force, the Revolution was already happening.

The Revolution Begins

The Estates-General met at Versailles in May 1789. The Third Estate — the representatives of the commoners, who constituted the great majority of the nation — refused to meet separately from the other orders and declared itself the National Assembly. The Tennis Court Oath, in which the deputies of the Third Estate pledged not to disband until they had given France a constitution, was the founding act of the Revolution. The oath was, in its particulars, a constitutional event; the deputies were pledging themselves to a particular form of political action, and the form of political action was the one the modern world has come to call “constituent power.”

The events that followed — the storming of the Bastille on July 14, the Great Fear of the countryside, the August decrees abolishing feudalism, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen — were a series of improvisations, each of which pushed the Revolution further than its leaders had intended. The moderate constitutionalism of the early years gave way to the radicalism of 1792, the execution of the king, the Terror, and the rise of Napoleon. The Terror of 1793–1794 is the central test case for the political consequences of the Enlightenment: the men of the Terror, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, were, almost all of them, sincere students of Rousseau and the philosophes; they were also willing to use the guillotine to enforce their understanding of the general will. The fact that these two facts can be held together is, perhaps, the most important lesson of the period.

The Long-Term Legacy

The French Enlightenment left a permanent mark on the political and intellectual life of France and the world. The political vocabulary of the modern world — rights, liberty, equality, democracy, constitution, citizenship — is, in large part, a product of the French Enlightenment. The great political documents of the modern era — the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the American Declaration of Independence, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights — all draw directly on the French Enlightenment tradition.

The French Enlightenment also left a permanent mark on French culture. The principle of laïcité — the separation of church and state, the secular character of public life — remains a central feature of French political identity, and it is a direct descendant of the Enlightenment critique of religious authority. The 1905 law on the Separation of the Churches and the State is the most important single piece of French legislation on the question, and the controversies it has provoked in the twenty-first century — over the voile, over state funding of religious schools, over the regulation of religion in public life — are recognizably descendants of the eighteenth-century argument.

The cultural institutions of the French Republic — the public school system, the grandes écoles, the Académie française, the Institut de France — are all products of the Enlightenment project of organizing society on rational principles. The French commitment to public education, to the democratization of knowledge, and to the role of the state as the guarantor of public culture is a direct inheritance of the Enlightenment.

The French Enlightenment also had a more ambiguous legacy. The Terror of 1793–1794, in which perhaps 17,000 people were officially executed and an unknown number died in prison or in summary executions, was a perversion of Enlightenment ideals, and it has cast a long shadow over the history of revolutionary politics. The totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, in their claims to speak in the name of the people and to embody the general will, can be seen as monstrous extensions of tendencies that were already present in the French Enlightenment. The honest position is that the perversion and the ideals were both real, and that the connection between them is the central question for the modern political theory of revolution.

The contemporary debate about the French Enlightenment is thus a debate about modernity itself. The question of whether the Enlightenment was a force for liberation or a source of new forms of domination, whether the rights of man are universal or particular, whether the rational organization of society is a noble aspiration or a dangerous illusion — these are the questions raised by the French Enlightenment, and they remain the central questions of modern political thought.