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Enlightenment: French Revolution
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The Enlightenment was an international movement of ideas, well described by Norman Hampson as ‘less a body of doctrine than a number of shared premisses’. Beginning in the late 17th c. and generally reaching a peak in the mid-18th, it took different forms in different countries. Somewhat misleadingly, most historical accounts have focused on France, as in the famous secondary definition in the former edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which reflects 19th-c. anti-Enlightenment thinking: ‘shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition, etc., applied esp. to the spirit and aims of the French philosophers of the 18th c.’
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Many proponents of the Enlightenment were not philosophers in the commonly accepted sense of the word; they were popularizers engaged in a self-conscious effort to win converts. They liked to refer to themselves as the “party of humanity,” and in an attempt to mold public opinion in their favor, they made full use of pamphlets, anonymous tracts, and the large numbers of new journals and newspapers being created. Because they were journalists and propagandists as much as true philosophers, historians often refer to them by the French word philosophes.
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One might hesitate today before naming the Enlightenment among the principal causes of the Revolution. Nevertheless, while many of the earlier philosophes (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Buffon) were far from revolutionary in their political thought, and while many of their successors (Mormontel, Condorcet, Morellet) fell foul of the Revolution, the Revolutionary leaders themselves were impregnated with various kinds of Enlightenment thinking. Rousseau in particular was the maître à penser of Robespierre and his colleagues. In subsequent years, the Idéologues and the écoles centrales helped to maintain the Enlightenment tradition. Although much attacked by both reactionaries and Romantics, this was to survive and triumph, often in caricatural form, in the progressive, anticlerical republicanism of the later 19th c.
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[T]hat the public should enlighten itself is more likely; indeed, if it is only allowed freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. For even among the entrenched guardians of the great masses a few will always think for themselves, a few who, after having themselves thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will spread the spirit of a rational appreciation for both their own worth and for each person's calling to think for himself. But it should be particularly noted that if a public that was first placed in this yoke by the guardians is suitably aroused by some of those who are altogether incapable of enlightenment, it may force the guardians themselves to remain under the yoke--so pernicious is it to instill prejudices, for they finally take revenge upon their originators, or on their descendants. Thus a public can only attain enlightenment slowly. Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.
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