The Early Enlightenment
Mark Knights
‘Early’ Enlightenment
• Set out ‘Enlightenment’ values
• Examine how far the ‘Enlightenment’ can be
found in ‘early modernity’. Enlightenment as a
mentality rather than a period.
• Sketch out how the philosophes saw early
modernity
• Focus in on public science; witchcraft; the press
as case studies of change
• Some historians see these as part of an ‘early
Enlightenment’ that stretched back into the
C17th.
• Attack on the Ancien Régime
• Bishop Bossuet, Politics drawn
from Holy Scripture (1709)
• The grounds of authority and
the consequences that flowed
from this
• The Bible and God
• The King
• These ordered society, gender
and social relations, attitudes to
nature, wealth, non-Christian
cultures, science
• Hierarchical, paternal, sacred
power
• Monarchy as the best form of
government
• Non-resistance
Enlightenment values
• So the Enlightenment stressed
– The questioning of all accepted authority and
assumptions, including the Bible and orthodox
Christianity
– A review of the nature and basis of civil
authority
– The pursuit of the good life through reason
and science
– The inculcation of values such as tolerance,
civility, sociability, equality, freedom
Who had challenged the
old order before the
C18th and hence had
contributed to these
values?
• The Renaissance –
rediscovery of classical
virtues; rational argument
– but too yoked to state
and church
• The Protestant
Reformation – as Voltaire
put it, when Luther
attacked the sale of
indulgences in 1517 ‘a
corner of the veil was
lifted’
• 1751 Encyclopédie
The influence of the French wars of
religion (1562-1594)
• Development, ironically give that this was the
type of religious conflict of which the
Enlightenment thinkers disapproved, of key
ideas that they found useful:
– Contract
– Natural liberty and equality
– Natural law discernible by reason
– Popular sovereignty
– Right of resistance
Cardinal Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez.
England and Holland
• But key source for French and German writers
in the C18th were England and Holland. Why?
• United Provinces struggle with Spain from the
1560s to 1648 when independence was finally
recognised.
• England too experienced revolution – in fact,
two of them! 1642-60; 1688-9
• The two countries witnessed similar
developments:
– Rejection of traditional forms of authority
– The introduction of toleration in religion
– A stress on trade to improve wealth of the
nation
– A vibrant press
• 1689 saw the Dutch stadtholder William on the
English throne
Rethinking Europe
• War 1689-1713 on new scale and scope. 1 million dead
1701-1713
• William Penn: Essay Towards the Present and Future
Peace of Europe by the Establishment of a European
Parliament (1693). Resolution through dialogue! Pooled
sovereignty:
• “if any of the soveraignties that constitute these imperial
states, shall refuse to submit their claim or pretensions to
them, all the other soveraignties, united as one strength,
shall compel the submission and performance of the
sentence, with damages to the suffering party”.
• " if the Turks and Muscovites are taken in, as seems but
fit and just, they will make ten a piece more."
Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre
• project for perpetual peace
1712
• international confederation as
the solution to the problem of
international disorder and
trade
• Advocated ‘a European
union’: ‘permanent and
perpetual’.
• Large influence on JeanJacques Rousseau who
summarised his work
– Free public education for women
and men
Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the
English nation (1733)
• Voltaire fled to England 1726
• The first 7 letters (out of 24) are on
Quakers and other sects.
• ‘As trade enriched the citizens in
England, so it contributed to their
freedom, and this freedom on the
other side extended their commerce,
whence arose the grandeur of the
State’
• Letters on government and
parliament
Voltaire on the English:
'The English are the only people
on earth who have been able to
prescribe limits to the power of
kings by resisting them; and
who, by a series of struggles,
have at last established that
wise government, where the
prince is powerful to do good,
and at the same time is
restrain'd from committing evil;
where the nobles are great
without insolence, tho there are
no vassals; and where the
people share in the government
without confusion'.
Lettres Philosophique ou Lettres
Anglaises (1733)
Voltaire’s C17th heroes
• Francis Bacon (Lord
chancellor in 1618): progress
through knowledge,
collaboratively produced and
empirical
• Renée Descartes (15961650): resolved ‘never to
accept anything for true
which [he] did not clearly
know to be such’
• John Locke: Contractural
version of monarchy; right of
resistance; religious
toleration; reason; education.
Isaac Newton
• Newton’s Principia of 1687
scientifically explicable
universe, operating on
discoverable and rational
laws.
• In 1727 Voltaire attended
Newton’s funeral and on his
return to France published
two works, in 1734 and
1738, outlining and
propagandizing Newton’s
theories about the universe.
Public Science
• Newton’s ideas popularised
– By John Desaguliers (Newton’s
experimental assistant 1713) in Britain,
through lectures, poems and books
– Physico-mechanical lectures, or, An
account of what is explain'd and
demonstrated in the course of
mechanical and experimental
philosophy. (1717)
– Larry Stewart’s The Rise of Public
Science (1992); Jeffrey Wigelsworth,
Selling Science in the Age of Newton
(2010)
– 1714 Board of Longitude competition –
prize of £20k – newspaper
advertisements 1714-15 promoted
possible solutions
– 1754 founding of the British Museum
Voltaire’s use of English thinkers
• Foil to French society and hence a way of
criticising it obliquely
• Voltaire and others were disseminating
and popularising ideas that already existed
within the ‘ancien régime’
• So ancien régime contained within itself a
struggle between two sets of values and
ideologies: one, epitomised by Bossuet’s
writings and another epitomised by the
English thinkers that Voltaire heroised.
How do these ideas work out on
the ground?
• The End of
Witchcraft
Prosecutions:
Changing
ideologies?
The chronology
• 3 European countries took legislative
action to remove witchcraft from statute
book before 1750 eg France 1682; Prussia
1714; GB 1736
• NB these often post-dated end of witch
craze; the last conviction in England was
1712.
• Others followed later in the C18th:
Habsburg empire 1766; Russia 1770;
Poland 1776; Sweden 1779.
Factors:
1. Socio-economic factors: Poor relief system
by early C18th was much better; decline in
population pressure
2. greater state control over peripheries
3. Judicial scepticism and rising legal standards
of proof
4. Science, medicine and reason – an early
enlightenment?
5. Religious change: decline of religious
enthusiasm? Changing ideas about God and
Devil.
The Jane Wenham
Trial of 1712
(Hertford)
• An extensive print debate
took place after the trial
disputing the science behind
the signs of witchcraft that
had been produced in court.
Several physicians were
involved in this; Frances
Hutchinson [author of
Historical Essay concerning
Witchcraft (1718)] visited her
and explicitly related the
decline of witchcraft to the
new science of the Royal
Society. Contested science.
Disparity between elite and
popular views?
• Popular belief in witchcraft persisted: the
curate quaking at her funeral and
expecting trouble. In 1751 at a swimming
at Tring (Herts) – the ‘witch’ Ruth Osborne
drowned and there was a successful
prosecution of Thomas Colley for murder.
Distinguish between decline of witchcraft
prosecutions and end of belief in spirits
and supernatural. Continuities of popular
belief?
The Public and
the Press
• Coffee house culture; French café
(600 in Paris by 1750) and salons
• clubs
• Print culture
• 1695 lapse of press censorship
• 1701 first provincial newspaper (25
by 1735)
• 1702 first daily paper
• 106 journals by 1750
• Literacy increased – doubled from its
30% level in 1640s by mid C18th
• Latin print culture in retreat
• Rise of new genres eg the novel –
almost 1000 published 1700-1750 in
France alone
• Moral periodicals – The Spectator
(1711-12); in Germany 1720-50 there
were 50 similar periodicals
• Female readerships
• 1720 Stock Market
Bubble and crash
• Isaac Newton was
reported to have
lost the huge sum
of roughly £20,000
Perhaps
apocryphally, the
astronomer
remarked that he
could "calculate the
movement of the
stars, but not the
madness of men."
Early Capitalism
Conclusion
• By 1750 had a recognisably modern
Europe emerged?
• Some parts of Europe more than others?
• Were continuities as important as change?
• What is ‘modern’?
• Is the European project, a lesson drawn
from the hard experience of the horrors of
war, worth preserving?