The 18th century to the Revolution of 1789
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
might discuss both his own book Candide and the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
See all videos for this article
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
The Enlightenment
The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, closed an epoch, and thus the date of 1715
is a useful starting point for the Enlightenment. The beginnings of critical thought, however, go
back much further, to about 1680, where one can begin to discern a new intellectual climate of
independent inquiry and the questioning of received ideas and traditions.
The earlier date permits the inclusion of two important precursors. Pierre Bayle, a
Protestant forced into exile by the repressive policies of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, paved
the way for later attacks upon the established church by his own onslaught upon Roman Catholic
dogma and, beyond that, upon authoritarian ideologies of all kinds. His skepticism was
constructive, underlying a fervent advocacy of toleration based on respect for freedom of
conscience. In particular, his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702; An
Historical and Critical Dictionary) became an arsenal of knowledge and critical ideas for the
18th century.
Bayle’s contemporary Fontenelle continued in Descartes’s wake to make knowledge,
especially of science, more accessible to the educated layperson. His Entretiens sur la pluralité
des mondes (1686; Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) explains the Copernican universe
in simple terms. The Histoire des oracles (1687; The History of Oracles) complements this
popular erudition by a rationalist critique of erroneous legends. Fontenelle helped to lay the basis
for empirical observation as the proper approach to scientific truth.
Both Bayle and Fontenelle promoted the Enlightenment principle that the pursuit of
verifiable knowledge was a central human activity. Bayle was concerned with the problem of
evil, which seemed to him a mystery understandable by faith alone. But such unknowable
matters did not at all invalidate the search for hard fact, as the Dictionnaire abundantly shows.
Fontenelle, for his part, saw that the furtherance of truth depended upon the elimination of error,
arising as it did from human laziness in unquestioningly accepting received ideas or from human
love of mystery.
The baron de Montesquieu, the first of the great Enlightenment authors, demonstrated a
liberal approach to the world fitting in with an innovative pluralist and relativist view of society.
His Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters) established his reputation. A fictional set of
correspondences centred on two Persians making their first visit to Europe, they depict satirically
a Paris in transition between the old dogmatic absolutes of monarchy and religion and the
freedoms of a new age. At their centre is the condition of women—trapped in the private space
of the harem, emancipated in the salons of Paris. The personal experience of the Persians
generates debate on a wide range of crucial moral, political, economic, and philosophical issues,
all centring on the link between the public good and the regulation of individual desire.
Montesquieu’s interest in social mechanisms and causation is pursued further in the
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734;
Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire). To explain Rome’s
greatness and decline, he invokes the notion of an esprit général (“general spirit”), a set of
secondary causes underlying each society and determining its developments. Herein are the
seeds of De l’esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), the preparation of which took 14
years. This great work brought political discussion into the public arena in France by its
insistence upon the wide variation of sociopolitical forms throughout the world, its attempt to
assess their relative effectiveness, and its assertion of the need, in whatever form of society, to
maintain liberty and tolerance as prime objects of concern.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide
published in London, 1759.
Discover how Voltaire might present Candide and discuss the Age of EnlightenmentThis
1976 production by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation imagines how Voltaire
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Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), on any count, bestrides the Enlightenment. Whether as
dramatist, historian, reformer, poet, storyteller, philosopher, or correspondent, for 60 years he
remained an intellectual leader in France. A stay in England (1726–28) led to the Lettres
philosophiques (1734; Letters on England), which—taking England as a polemical model of
philosophical freedom, experimental use of reason, enlightened patronage of arts and science,
and respect for the new merchant classes and their contribution to the nation’s economic well-
being—offered a program for a whole civilization, as well as sharp satire of a despotic,
authoritarian, and outdated France. In later years Voltaire’s onslaught upon the power of the
Roman Catholic church became more direct, as he denounced its doctrines and practices in
countless pamphlets and the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), the
vade mecum of Voltairean attitudes. He laboured on historical works all his life, producing most
notably Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV) and the Essai sur les moeurs (1756;
An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV), the latter a world history of a half-million words. Above
all, it was the growth of civilizations and cultures that particularly commanded his attention and
formidable energy. He is best remembered for the tale Candide (1759), a savage denunciation of
metaphysical optimism that reveals a world of horrors and folly. Candide at last renounces the
search for absolute truths as futile and settles for the simple life of labours within his reach,
“cultivating his garden.” The conte (“tale”) called L’Ingénu (1767; “The Naïf”; Eng. trans. in
Zadig, and L’Ingenu [1964]) continued this lesson, with a turn from metaphysics to social satire
on the corrupt French government (which he prudently set retrospectively in Louis XIV’s reign).
Reformist appeals to justice were the main focus of Voltaire’s writings in his last 20 years, as he
protested against such outrages as the executions, motivated by religious prejudice, of Jean Calas
and the chevalier de La Barre.
Another universal genius, Denis Diderot, occupied a somewhat less exalted place in his
own times, since most of his greatest works were published only posthumously. But his
encylopaedic range is undeniable. He was a theorist of the bourgeois drama, the first great
French art critic (the several Salons), a sharp observer of the psychology of repression and its
political function in authoritarian society, and author of the greatest French antinovel of the
century, which, influenced by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, anticipates in its form and
techniques and in its language both 20th-century realism and the mode of the nouveau roman
(Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796; Jacques the Fatalist and His Master]). Diderot seized
on the Spinozist vision of a world materialistic and godless yet pulsating with energy and the
unexpected. Jacques the Fatalist captures the fluidity of a disconcerting universe where nothing
is ever clear-cut or under control, where history, in the form of choices already made by others,
determines any individual’s fate, and yet free will and responsibility are among the highest
human values. The admirable servant Jacques, who sees through yet loyally serves and protects
his bonehead of a master and who establishes and maintains his own humane values, following
his heart as well as his head in a world given over to cruelty and chance, is the model new man
of the Enlightenment.
Diderot’s interest in the plasticity of matter (he reasoned that categories such as animal,
vegetable, and mineral are not as distinct as conventional thought suggested), combined with an
interest in biology and medicine, is nowhere better exemplified than in Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(written 1769, published 1830; D’Alembert’s Dream). This work is written in the characteristic
form of a dialogue, allowing Diderot to range free with speculative questions rather than attempt
firm answers. Other dialogues focus on key contemporary events and explore the philosophical
questions they posed. The Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773; Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century France), for example, takes the great explorer’s landfall in Tahiti to consider the
relativity of sexual mores in different societies and to satirize again politics founded on sexual
repression.
In his own day, Diderot was best known as editor of the Encyclopédie, a vast work in 17
folio volumes of text and 11 of illustrations. He and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert inaugurated the
undertaking, and d’Alembert introduced the first volume in 1751. Diderot edited alone from
1758 until the final volume of plates appeared in 1772. A summation of new scientific and
technological knowledge and, by that very fact, a radically polemical enterprise, the
Encyclopédie is the epitome of the Enlightenment, disseminating practical information to
improve the human lot, reduce theological superstition, and, in Diderot’s words from his key
article “Encyclopédie,” “change the common way of thinking.”
Drama
Tragedy and the survival of Classical form
Classical tragedy survived into the 18th century, most notably in the theatre of Voltaire,
which dominated the Comédie-Française from the premiere of Oedipe (1718) to that of
Agathocle (1779). But even in Voltaire a profound change in sensibility is apparent as pathos
reigns supreme, to the exclusion of terror. Tragedy, in the view of Fontenelle or the Abbé Dubos,
should teach men virtue and humanity. Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732; The Tragedy of Zara) aims to do
just that, through the spectacle of Christian intolerance overwhelming the eponymous heroine,
torn as she is between the religion of her French Roman Catholic forefathers and the Muslim
faith of her future husband, a Turk. No fatality of character destroys her, but simply the failings
of Christians unworthy of their creed, allied to gratuitous and avoidable chance. The great tragic
emotions are replaced by simple bourgeois sentimentality.
