In 1856, the following text from 1784 was found on the steeple-ball on St Mar­garet’s Church in Gotha:

The days we spent on this earth constituted the happiest period of the eight­eenth century. Emperor, kings and princes are philanthropically stepping down from their intimidating heights, disdain pomp and display and become the fathers, friends and companions of their people.

This text forms a succinct contemporary proclamation about the Enlightenment: the ideas of freedom, equality and sense of community and the belief in progress, from the past to the present and from the present to the future.

In a famous book of 1969, Jürgen Habermas pointed to a fundamental change in the public sphere during this period, from the ‘representative public’ of the Middle Ages and the following period to the ‘open public’ of the Enlightenment. In the former, the result of a discussion was determined by the status of the participants, in the latter by rational arguments. In the new public sphere of coffee-houses, news­papers and magazines, status was awarded according to knowledge and argu­mentative skills.² As has often been pointed out, Habermas exaggerates the difference between the two epochs; public discussion can be found much earlier than the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for instance, in the intense discussion during the Investiture Contest.³ Nevertheless, important changes had taken place.

Quantitatively, there were more fora for public debate and a larger debating public. More people were literate and there was now an educated middle class consisting of burghers, civil servants, teachers and free intellectuals who participated in various kinds of debate. Qualitatively, there had been a radical change during the previous centuries. In the Middle Ages, intellectual debate had taken place within the intellectual framework of Christian doctrine and ancient philosophy, notably Aristotle. The discussion within this framework was considerable and many changes had taken place, to the extent that Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century could claim that contemporary scholars had surpassed the ancients in the famous statement that they were dwarves on the shoulders of giants.⁴ However, this only meant a marginal addition to the contribution of the giants of the past. Now the ancients could be shown to have been wrong, not only because they lacked Christianity but also because it could be proved by strict empirical methods that the character of the universe was radically different from what even the greatest ancient philosophers had imagined. The Enlightenment represented the victory of critical thought, the idea that old traditions, the teaching of the ancients or appeals to divine revelation, were not sufficient reason to believe anything but that belief must be based on critical examination of the proposition in question. In a similar way, the scientific discoveries opened up attacks against the Church and Christianity, notably because the churchmen often rejected them.

Whereas with some exceptions, it had been usual to regard the present as inferior to the past, it was now increasingly regarded as better. The Enlightenment intellectuals believed in progress; the backwardness and superstition of the past were about to be surpassed and the future would be better than the present. The great scientific discoveries, the technological innovations and the increasing wealth in many countries pointed strongly in this direction.

Intellectually, the background to the Enlightenment can be traced back to the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the human intellect and criticism of various accepted ideas, held by the Church and other authorities. A particularly important factor was the study of astronomy and the replacement of the geocentric world picture by the heliocentric one through a series of studies by scientists from Copernicus to Newton. In the eighteenth century, several important discoveries were made in electricity, mechanics and other fields which eventually led to prac­tical inventions and in turn to the Industrial Revolution. From a methodological point of view, the scientific discoveries showed the importance of systematic observation and experiment for gaining knowledge, in contrast to speculation. Scientific theories must be based on evidence, which meant a rejection not only of the Aristotelian tradition from the Middle Ages but also of the great systems of Descartes and Leibniz from the seventeenth century.

The Enlightenment is far from being a homogeneous movement; it is a common term for a number of opinions and intellectuals in various parts of Europe. However, despite its late date, the following reflection by Alexis de Tocqueville on his discovery of American democracy in the 1830s expresses some central features of the political attitudes of the Enlightenment:

‘Individualism’ is a word recently coined to express a new idea. Our fathers only knew about egoism... Individualism is of democratic origin and threa­tens to grow as conditions get more equal.

Among aristocratic nations families maintain the same station for centuries and often live in the same place. A man always knows about his ancestors and respects them; his imagination extends to his great-grandchildren, and he loves them. He freely does his duty both to ancestors and descendants and often sacrifices personal pleasures for the sake of beings who are no longer alive or are not yet born.

In democratic ages, on the contrary, the duties of each to all are much clearer, but devoted service to any individual much rarer. The bonds of human affection are wider but more relaxed.⁵

As de Tocqueville points out, ‘individualism’ was a new term at the time, the 1830s. It was also a term coined by its opponents, to whom Tocqueville himself largely belonged. The exact term was first used in 1820 by Joseph de Maistre, a conservative and Catholic opponent of the French Revolution, but it was a common objection to the Enlightenment and the Revolution that these movements celebrated individual freedom at the cost of social order, religion, hierarchy and the common good. Examples of such attitudes are Bossuet’s criticism of the English Revolution and Edmund Burke’s of the French.⁶ By contrast, the adherents of these movements celebrated individual freedom, regarding thought and opinions as well as behaviour, as in the passage in the American Declaration of Independence about ‘life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness’. To the adherents of these principles, there was no opposition between the individual and society. A good society consisted of free individuals; the old society was dominated by elites who suppressed individual free­dom while at the same time manipulating governments in accordance with their own interests. Neither family or kindred nor estates or inherited positions should determine an individual’s position in society; he or she (mostly he!) should be free to make his own choice and pursue a career in society. Moreover, this was not only an ideal; there was now a strong emphasis on the idea that society consisted of indivi­duals who acted according to their own interests.

This also formed an argument for democratic reform, government based on popular election, even, during the most radical phase of the French Revolution, universal suffrage for men. Although there were also movements for the rights of women at the time, the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment did not very much favour women.

Two central and very different political thinkers both take their point of depar­ture in the individual. Thomas Hobbes (1588—1679) rejected Aristotle’s idea of man as a social animal, replacing it with that of original anarchy. Life in the natural condition is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Thus, man is a ruthless pursuer of his own interests, who has to be kept at bay by a strong government.⁷ John Locke (1632—1704), who became the main apologist for the Glorious Revolution,⁸ had an equally individualistic but different understanding of human nature, claim­ing that humans were born without any innate qualities. Individual freedom was no threat to society, whose main duty was to uphold the individual right to property which was the fundamental principle of society and granted by God. Despite the difference between Hobbes’ pessimism and Locke’s optimism, both take their point of departure in the individual. By contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—78) clearly placed society above the individual in his radical theory of pop­ular sovereignty which was taken up by the extreme left during the French Revolution. Society should be ruled by the will of the majority, the individual seeking fulfilment by becoming part of the general will.⁹ At the same time, Rousseau rejected the traditional ties that linked together the society of the ancien regime, estates, kinship and patronage. His individual relates directly to society and realizes his full opportunities by acting politically.

A more moderate approach was represented in the great work by Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689—1755), L'Esprit des lois [The Spirit of the Laws]. Mon­tesquieu still uses Aristotle’s division of constitutions into monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, current from the Middle Ages onwards, and advocates a balance between the three, largely in accordance with the constitution of contemporary Britain. In his work, he combines history with comparative sociology and political thought. He dis­cusses numerous societies in the past and the present and the differences between them, in which he regards climate as an important factor. Montesquieu, like other theorists, was also interested in other civilizations, such as the Ottoman Empire and the newly discovered islands in the Pacific, which they compared to Europe, not only to the advantage of the latter. There were vivid discussions of laws and constitutions and concrete proposals of improvement in various fields.

A similar emphasis on the rational individual is expressed in the fields of law and economy. Cesare Beccaria (1738—94) criticized the contemporary penal laws for their harshness; not mainly for humanitarian reasons, but based on the argument that punishment should serve to prevent crime. Too harsh punishment, such as hanging for petty theft, would not do so, for most people would then not report the criminal in question. Killing people for their crimes was also counter-productive; it would be better to let them work to atone for what they had done. Thus, pun­ishment is no longer a matter of justice or atonement for sin, but an instrument to reduce crime by appealing to people’s self-interest. In the field of economics, the French physiocrats attacked the current theory of Mercantilism, which claimed that the wealth of a country depended on its surplus of gold or silver and that interna­tional trade was a zero sum game, in which the gain of one nation was the loss of another. The physiocrats replaced this with the idea of agriculture as the basis of the economy. This was further developed by the Scot Adam Smith (1723—90), who in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations of 1776, claimed that the wealth of a country did not consist of its amount of precious metals, as the Mer­cantilists claimed, but of the commodities and services produced, not only the agri­cultural production, which meant that there was no limit to growth and the states might as well be allies as competitors. Based on British experience as opposed to the Continental one, Adam Smith developed the theory of free competition as essential for economic growth. The state should not organize or control the economy, but intervene in order to secure free competition — which, in fact, demanded a fairly strong state — and protect the life and welfare of its inhabitants. Here also the start­ing-point is the rational individual. Production is stimulated by self-interest, not by force or decree from the state.¹⁰

The study of history underwent great changes. A more critical examination of the sources had developed during the previous century. The great pioneers in were the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon (1632—1707) in the monastery of St Germain des Pres in Paris and the Bollandists, a group of Jesuits in Antwerp, named after Jean Bolland (1596—1665). Both worked on ecclesiastical sources, notably the lives of saints, and made a great effort to trace the original versions and eliminate later distortions and fictions. In the eighteenth century, the study of history was increasingly based on the idea of progress, showing the emergence of the present enlightened age or, alternatively, recovery from a period of decline, such as Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, describing the whole period from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance as a deterioration of conditions from the second century ad, ‘the happiest period in the history of mankind’. The typical example of a period of decline was the Middle Ages; the term itself became current in this period as the expression of the idea of a dark period between Classical Antiquity and the present. The origins of the division into three periods can be traced back to Leonardo Bruni in the fifteenth century and later to Machiavelli, but the term itself only became current with its use in a text­book by Michael Cellarius in 1688.¹¹

In accordance with the development of political and economic thought, histor­ical writing developed in a more sociological direction, aimed at understanding the different development of various countries and civilizations. Thus, Montesquieu compares constitutional and social conditions all over the world, tries to explain their origins and discusses their merits. Gibbon’s work has similar features and is far more than a lament on the fall of the Roman Empire. Similar attitudes characterize the historical works of David Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and others, many of whom show great interest in societies outside Europe and are critical of the slave trade and other examples of European imperialism.¹²

Generally, the Enlightenment is characterized by a clear idea of how society should be organized and concrete proposals for reform, largely based on John Locke’s theory of the human mind as a ‘tabula rasa’ that can be developed in any direction. Thus, during the French Revolution, there was a strong will to create, not only a new society but a new kind of humans. The Enlightenment was often critical of the Church and religion, notably in France. The best-known French intellectual of the period, Voltaire (1694—1778), believed in God but despised established Christianity, notably the Catholic Church, and used all his considerable wit to ridicule it. However, the strong connection between Enlightenment and anti-religious attitudes was mainly a French phenomenon. Doubt about the dogmas of the Church and outright rejection of them were to be found in other countries as well, but usually in a less aggressive form.¹³ On the other hand, greater literacy and the increase in the production of books and papers also increased the amount of religious literature, and attempts to abolish or change traditional reli­gious expression often met with strong popular protests, like Joseph Il’s religious reforms in Austria. Moreover, religion and the Enlightenment were not incompatible.

The authority of the king and the state was based less on religious arguments than previously. When Louis XVI became king in 1774, there were some sugges­tions about omitting the coronation. Although Louis was crowned, less people attended the ceremony than usual. Admittedly, as the example of Spain shows, the absence of a coronation is not necessarily evidence of lack of belief in the divine origin of kingship. However, there is no doubt that the religious legitimation of monarchy became less prominent in the eighteenth century, in France, as well as in other places, and was largely replaced by practical arguments about the necessity of a strong government. There was also a clearer distinction between the state and the king and a preference for using the former term instead of the latter. A French prelate even commented that it was no longer possible to say that one served the king, for then one would be taken for one of the chief valets at Versailles; it was therefore necessary to say, ‘I serve the state.’¹⁴

Whereas the development of these ideas was the result of the scientific revolu­tion and the philosophical thought based on it, an important factor in spreading them was the printing press. Admittedly, this was not a new invention in the eighteenth century, but books had now become cheaper and were produced in larger numbers, while at the same time a larger percentage of the population was literate. During the first decade of the sixteenth century, around 400 titles were published in Britain, a number that increased to 6,000 in the 1630s, 21,000 in the 1710s and 56,000 in the 1790s. There is less data on statistics from other parts of Europe, but the growth is likely to have been similar. In France, the number of titles seems to have been doubled between 1750 and 1789 and continued to rise in the following period. In the German world, around 175,000 titles were published during the eighteenth century, two-thirds of them after 1760. In addition, there were newspapers and magazines. A German periodical from 1780 reports that 60 years ago, only academics bought books, but ‘today there is hardly a woman with some claim to education that does not read’.¹⁵ Of course, these books not only contained the latest ideas of the Enlightenment; they also included novels, practical handbooks and, not least, religious literature. Newspapers and magazines also became more widespread and important. The first newspapers had already appeared in the early sixteenth century, but they just contained a few pages, mainly of announcements. In the eighteenth century, they had become important sources of information and discussion. Some of them, like The Times (founded in 1785), has had a continual existence since the eighteenth century.

Finally, one of the most important ways the ideas of Enlightenment were spread was the great Encyclopedie, edited by Denis Diderot, assisted by the better-known and prominent Jean le Rond d’Alembert,¹⁶ and published in 17 volumes of text and 11 of pictures and paintings between 1751 and 1772. Its aim was to summarize all knowledge in a form that might be understood by the ordinary, non-profes­sional reader. Moreover, the idea was not only to present what was usually regar­ded as knowledge, but knowledge gained by critical examination and intelligent understanding of nature and society. This meant that it attacked a number of ideas officially acknowledged in contemporary France, notably religious ones. Not sur­prisingly, the editors ran into trouble with the censorship, but the publication nevertheless continued. Altogether, the Encyclopedie sold 22,000 copies before the Revolution, about half of which were outside France.

In addition, the number of public meeting-places increased in the form of salons and coffee-houses, where people met for discussion and entertainment.¹⁷ The aristocratic salons, which were particularly prominent in France, above all, in Paris, but were also imitated in other countries, were very often run by women. They were important expressions of the fact that women now to a greater extent took part in intellectual life and they stimulated friendship and conversation between married men and women without any sexual implications. They also contributed to a less professional and learned intellectual culture, conversations and writings in the vernacular, in contrast to the earlier view that serious knowledge had to be transmitted in Latin. The fact that women did not normally have access to the learned culture contributed to this change. On the other hand, women’s involve­ment in this kind of intellectual culture may also be regarded as a compensation for the restrictions to which they were subject. Although some women did publish books and journals, this was not considered appropriate and might have bad con­sequences for their reputation.

This form of intellectual life was particularly prominent in the larger cities, like Paris, Vienna, Berlin and, above all, London, by far the largest European city in the eighteenth century, with more than one million inhabitants. In London and to some extent in Paris, it was possible to live from books and publications as a free intellectual. This was more difficult in Germany, with smaller towns and a smaller public for books and magazines. On the other hand, many German principalities, notably Prussia but also others, had well-educated bureaucrats and good schools and universities whose employees participated in an extensive literary production, which made the eighteenth century, notably its second half, the golden age of German culture and literature.

The spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment of course implies a rise in the rates of literacy, of which there is clear evidence. In France, the literacy rate is estimated to have increased from 29 per cent to 47 per cent for men and 14 per cent to 27 per cent for women between 1680 and 1780. These numbers hide great regional variations, with much higher rates in the north and around Paris. In Amsterdam, 87 per cent of Protestant men and 69 per cent of Protestant women could sign their names in the marriage register. The corresponding rates for Catholics were 79 and 53. Literacy rates are usually believed to have been higher in Protestant than in Catholic areas, which may be true on average, but the geographical differences were more significant. Literacy was most widespread in northern and western Europe, regardless of confession; in Catholic areas, it was particularly high in northern and eastern France, Belgium, the Rhineland and parts of northern Italy. However, there was no general agreement that common people should learn to read. A pastor in Scania in the seventeenth century complained that the peasants had been taught to read in order to learn religion but used their skills to read the ordinances about land lease, so that they became impossible to deal with. The writer Bernard Mandeville put the problem like this in The Fable of the Bees: ‘If a horse knew as much as a man, I would not sit on it.’

These latter observations point to the social and economic background of the Enlightenment. As indicated by the comparison between East Asia and Europe, there was some improvement in living conditions in the eighteenth century. There was less war and greater protection of the civilian population in war, an increase in population and somewhat higher living standards, some slight improvement in health care, including vaccination against smallpox, better education, an increase in literacy and the number of professions and thus the emergence of a more numer­ous and wealthy middle class. From a modern point of view, the changes were not dramatic; they were less from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century than from the eighteenth to the nineteenth. Still, they were important enough to produce the expression of optimism quoted above.