What influence did the Enlightenment and the American Revolution have on the French Revolution?

The French Revolution, like the American Revolution before it, was in large part inspired by the Enlightenment. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Age of Reason’, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that challenged old ways of thinking and inspired revolutionary ideas.

Background

The Enlightenment began in western Europe in the mid-1600s and continued until the late 18th century. It was driven by scepticism about traditional ideas and beliefs, intellectual curiosity and a desire for social, political and technical progress.

Enlightenment thinkers and writers challenged existing knowledge and assumptions, seeking new information and a better understanding of humanity and the natural world.

Most Enlightenment thinkers were empiricists: they expected their new theories or discoveries to meet certain standards of proof and verifiability before they could be accepted as fact. To achieve this, they developed a new system of thinking and investigation, the origins of what we now call the ‘scientific method’.

Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was largely derived from religious teachings, supposition and the writings of ancient forebears. During and after the Enlightenment, knowledge was produced by scientific processes, logic and reasoning.

The Scientific Enlightenment

Today, most people know the Enlightenment primarily for its scientific thinkers and their wonderful inventions and discoveries.

In Italy, Galileo Galilei (1654-1742) developed an improved type of telescope that brought advances in astronomy. In the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) conducted a series of experiments involving electricity, battery power and lightning, the most famous involving Franklin flying a kite in the middle of an electrical storm.

In Britain, men like Isaac Newton (1642-1727) made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and physics. The most memorable of these was Newton’s theory of gravity which, according to legend, was inspired by a falling apple.

Other notables of the scientific Enlightenment included Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Edmond Halley, William Herschel, Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. While they operated in different fields, these men sought scientific explanations to natural phenomena, where previously information had come from religion, folklore and blind theorising.

Society, government and power

The Enlightenment was not just concerned with the physical sciences. While scientists were exploring and questioning the natural world, others questioned the nature of humanity and human society. They gave particular attention to the nature of government and political power.

Previously, rulers had legitimised their power and authority through the doctrine of ‘divine right’. They claimed that political power was a divine responsibility, a gift given to rulers by God. 

In Europe, the Catholic church supported the notion of divine right by including it in church doctrine. Because the power of kings and emperors came from God, it was beyond challenge. To engage in rebellion or disloyalty against one’s king was to disobey the will of God.

The French king Louis XIV (1638-1715), great-grandfather of the doomed Louis XVI, was a significant exponent of this belief. A devoutly religious leader, Louis worked to expand and strengthen the doctrine of divine right in France.

God and the ‘social contract’

Enlightenment thinkers began to question and challenge these archaic political beliefs. Today, we know these figures as the philosophes.

The philosophes were not revolutionaries or radical democrats. They had no wish to destroy the authority of kings and governments or to dismantle or level social hierarchies. Nevertheless, they did not believe that political power emanated from God. In their view, the role of governments was to guard the nation, protect the people and secure their individual rights.

English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was in favour of a strong government and absolutist monarchy. This type of government, Hobbes believed, was necessary to protect its citizens. Another Englishman, John Locke (1632-1704), argued that every individual was born with three inherent rights (life, liberty and property).

These views about the relationship between government power and individual rights formed the theory of a ‘social contract’. In France, the best-known exponent of this theory was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).

The Enlightenment in France

The European Enlightenment differed from country to country and was often shaped by local conditions and grievances.

In France, the Enlightenment began to take shape in the early 1700s, reaching its peak by the middle of the century. French philosophes included Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu[/caption]>Baron de Montesquieu and François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire).

Politically, most of these philosophes were concerned with two issues: how to understand and improve government and how to create a society based on reason, logic and merit.

English models

Some philosophes looked for ideas abroad, particularly in England. Montesquieu’s conception of the ‘separation of powers’, for example, was largely derived from the British political system.

Voltaire spent three years in voluntary exile in England and later praised its democratic processes, its rule of law, its freedoms of religion and speech and its lack of arbitrary arrests and imprisonment.

All this stood in striking contrast to France, where royal power was often used to silence or punish critics, dissidents and free thinkers.

The deists

Voltaire aside, most Enlightenment avoided attacks or sustained criticism of religion. Most philosophes were Christian deists, not atheists. They maintained a belief in God but considered God a more benign figure than the vengeful, interventionist figure of the Old Testament.

The analogy favoured by some deists was God as a ‘cosmic watchmaker’, an all-powerful deity who had constructed the universe but left it to run according to natural laws. This reimagining of God, along with other tenets of the Enlightenment, was criticised by the Catholic church.

Theological opposition to the Enlightenment was hardly surprising. For centuries, the church had served as Europe’s largest repository of wisdom and knowledge. The political Enlightenment challenged the church’s stranglehold over knowledge, information and education. It also threatened the privileges and protections it enjoyed from the state.

A surge in thinking and debate

The Enlightenment had a profound effect on the ideology of the French Revolution. Most notable philosophes were dead long before the 1780s – and some of their writings pre-dated the revolution by decades (Diderot’s first Encyclopedie was published in 1752, Voltaire’s Letters on England in 1734, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1748). None of these Enlightenment texts predicted or suggested a revolution in France.

Despite this, the Enlightenment created an ideological context for revolution. Its political questions triggered a wave of discussion and debate, some of it organised and formalised in France’s salons and circles. This upsurge of political ideas created an environment where questioning and criticising the old order was not just possible, it was expected.

Importantly, the political philosophy of the Enlightenment stripped away much of the magic and mystique of the Ancien Régime. The Bourbon kings were no longer seen as representatives of God; they were simply men. France’s social hierarchies and inequalities were stripped of their ideological defences.

According to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ordinary people were born not only with rights but the right to expect better government. It was on this platform of ideas that the French Revolution was constructed.

A historian’s view: “Historians have long debated the exact relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In the minds of contemporaries, the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the Revolution’s most important ideas and agendas. Within two years of its outbreak in 1789, it sparked radical movements in Britain, Haiti, and finally Ireland and Egypt. The days of the Enlightenment seemed halcyon – a war of words, a battle of books – in comparison with the reality of trying to live in a republic and keep faith with its principles.”

Margaret C. Jacob