V.

The 18th Century (Age of Enlightenment)

The 18th century in Europe saw the flowering of the Age of Enlightenment. This period of intellectual curiosity and experimentation was based on an abiding faith in the power of human reason to unlock the mysteries of nature and society. One manifestation was a confident belief in the steady advance of civilization through scientific progress. The desire for improvement of the general human condition through tolerance, freedom, and equality was expressed by French writers and thinkers who came to be known as les philosophes (the philosophers). They devoted their attention more to useful thought than to abstract thought and speculation. The most ambitious project of the century was also the most representative of this new way of thinking. This was the publication of the 35-volume Encyclopédie (1751-1772, with supplements in 1776 and 1777, and an index in 1780; The Encyclopedia), a project headed by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. Specifically designed to be practical and useful, the Encyclopédie brought together advanced opinions of the time on philosophy, politics, religion, and other subjects. It also examined less exalted topics in articles on things such as fairs and watch-making as well as on the practical matters of political economy and civil law.

One result of the newfound intellectual energy in France was a questioning of authority of all sorts, including the absolute monarchy. In the last years of the reign of Louis XIV, who died in 1715, up until Louis XV took the throne in 1723, France went through a period of crisis. This period was marked by conflict between the French king and the pope; the prohibition of the Jansenist sect at Port Royal; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, resulting in renewed persecution of Protestants; and the increased suffering of the lower classes. The political turmoil and consequent weakening of royal power made possible stronger expressions of dissent and of doubts about the established culture and government. The culmination of this dissent was the French Revolution at the close of the 18th century.

Changes in French society were reflected in changing literary preferences. Just as society was influenced by an ever-growing and increasingly prosperous middle class (the bourgeoisie), so the traditional hierarchy of literary genres was altered by newly elevated forms. The lowly prose novel and short story, favored by this emerging bourgeoisie, became significant genres. The most important philosophes—Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot—all wrote fiction as well as nonfiction essays on a variety of topics. They shared an unshakable belief in the use of reason and scientific method to draw conclusions from observations, a process that leads the observer from particular facts to general laws. These thinkers also believed in the popularization of ideas among the people in order to promote progress and improve society and individual lives. In support of these beliefs, the philosophes were hostile to thought based on authority (medieval scholasticism and excessive reverence for the ancients), prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and the assumption that one principle can explain all.

Montesquieu is perhaps best known for De l'esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws), the first great work of political sociology. In this work he examines the three main types of government (republic, monarchy, and despotism) and states that a relationship exists between an area’s climate, geography, and general circumstances and the form of government that evolves there. His literary masterpiece is Les lettres persanes (1721; The Persian Letters), fictional letters exchanged between two Persians visiting Paris and their correspondents in Persia. Montesquieu used this device to satirize contemporary French society and its institutions, including the king himself. The themes of visitors from other lands, European visitors in foreign lands, and even visitors from outer space were popular throughout the 18th century and expressed the interest of the time in differences between cultures.

Voltaire experienced cultural differences firsthand as a young man when he was exiled to England for three years after a quarrel with an illustrious French family. He was impressed with the English constitutional monarchy and with English liberalism and tolerance. In his Lettres philosophiques (1734; The Philosophical Letters), Voltaire admired English customs and institutions while attacking their French counterparts. Voltaire is also known for his attacks on religion and is usually called a deist (someone who believes that God created the world and its natural laws but takes no part in its further functioning). This belief is reflected in his masterpiece, the philosophical tale Candide (1759), which depicts the woes heaped upon the world in the name of religion.

Voltaire created a new genre in writing his philosophical tales, and his contemporary Denis Diderot also experimented with literary forms. The most subtle thinker of the philosophes, Diderot wrote an epistolary novel (a novel written in the form of a series of letters) called La religieuse (written 1760, published 1796; The Nun). This work vividly represents and criticizes life in a convent. Diderot’s Neveu de rameau (written 1761-1774, published 1805; Rameau's Nephew) follows the uncommon form of a dialogue. The two speakers, moi (me) and lui (him), represent Diderot and the nephew of French composer Jean Philippe Rameau. The book captures the discontinuity, unpredictability, and fragmentation of life and thought. Jacques le fataliste (1796; Jacques the Fatalist) is a novel in the form of a series of dialogues between an author-narrator and the reader, and, within the story, between Jacques and his master. The book illustrates the problems of freedom, fatalism, and the relationship between the two. In his works Diderot alternates between the fear that emotions might take over human action entirely and the certainty that pure reason by itself is blind and arid. The nature and relationship of the human head and heart preoccupied many thinkers of the time.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also concerned with human sentiment and human intellect, but he generally opposed the critical and atheistic outlook of the philosophes and their belief in material progress. Rousseau believed in God, thought that human nature was inherently good but that society corrupted it, and preached a return to nature and to the simple rustic life. His treatise Le contrat social (1762; The Social Contract) helped provide a philosophical basis for the French Revolution. In this work he asserted the rights of equality and of individual liberty for all people and proposed a democratic means of government in which power would rest with the governed.

Like the philosophes, Rousseau also wrote novels. His La nouvelle Héloïse (1761; The New Heloise), a lengthy epistolary novel, dramatizes the struggle of the characters Saint-Preux and Julie, who live under the same roof as Julie’s husband, to transform their passionate love into a platonic friendship. The novel was enormously successful, especially among the French upper classes, who were moved by the frustrated passions and tearful sensibilities of the characters. In his autobiographical Confessions (1781, 1788; The Confessions), Rousseau describes his battle with his own emotions and his lifelong struggle to protect, nurture, and express his individual genius. Rousseau’s writings had an enormous influence on the romantic movement in the early 19th century.

Works by Alain-René Lesage, Pierre Marivaux, and Abbé Prévost revealed other possibilities for the novel. Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715-1735), which recounts the adventures of a Spanish rogue, was an early and influential realistic novel. Other realistic fiction of the 18th century includes Marivaux’s La vie de Marianne (1731-1741; The Life of Marianne) and Prévost's Manon Lescaut (1731). The 19th-century novel owed much to these 18th-century precedents.

Toward the end of the century, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Liaisons) appeared. It is a witty, scandalous story of intrigue that depicts a corrupt aristocracy ripe for a fall. Pierre Beaumarchais presented much the same idea in his play Le mariage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro), which features a servant more intelligent than his master, symbolizing the decline of the old regime. The greatest lyric poet of the 18th century was André Chénier, whose fate dramatized the difficult position of writers during the French Revolution. Chénier sung the praises of the early Revolution, but after he criticized its later violence, he was put to death by guillotine.