II.

Historical and Political Setting

To set a precise date on an intellectual movement is impossible, but most important events of the Enlightenment took place during the 100-plus years from the 1680s to the 1790s. The movement’s beginnings were marked in Great Britain by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This bloodless overthrow of King James II provided a constitutional arrangement that effectively abolished the line of Stuart monarchs and ushered in religious tolerance and a strengthened Parliament. The dawn of Enlightenment thinking in Great Britain was heralded by two publications. The first was published in 1687, Newton’s Principia, which used mathematics to explain observed phenomena such as gravitation. The second, Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690), emphasized formulating ideas through experience.

Two milestones signal the beginnings of the movement in France. First, in 1685 King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted limited tolerance to French Protestants in 1598. The second milestone was the writings in the late 1680s of religious skeptic Pierre Bayle and scientist Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Both authors questioned the prevailing religious attitudes in styles that would become characteristic of the Enlightenment movement.

The end of the Enlightenment is best linked to the realization of its ideals, which occurred in the revolutionary fervor that swept through America and France in the last quarter of the 18th century. These ideals, in turn, gave rise to a move toward romanticism in art and literature. It also provided the basis for the political liberalism and spirit of reform that spread throughout the 19th-century Western world.

The events of the 1680s provide glaring evidence of the different settings for Enlightenment thought in France and Britain. Religious tolerance and freedom of publication generally flourished in the liberal atmosphere of Augustan England. This period, characterized by literary grandeur under the restored monarch Charles II, earned its name for its resemblance to imperial Rome under Augustus. In France, on the other hand, Louis XIV dealt a ringing blow to religious tolerance in 1685 when he revoked the Edict of Nantes. The revocation ushered in a century of oppressive and absolute rule in France, with first the persecution and then the flight of the French Protestants, known as Huguenots. Further, royal and clerical control and censorship of publications led to the arrest of Voltaire and other writers. Before long, the works of Diderot, Montesquieu, Claude Helvétius, and Paul Henri d'Holbach were condemned and suppressed. Finally, the Encyclopédie itself was banned in 1759.