N 1762, the Parlement (law court) of Toulouse, in France, convicted Jean Calas of murdering his son. Calas was Protestant in a region where Catholic-Protestant tensions ran high. Witnesses claimed that the young Calas had J wanted to convert to Catholicism, and the father had killed him to prevent this conversion. Following French law, Jean Calas was tortured twice: first to force a confession and, next, to identify his alleged accomplices. His arms and legs were slowly pulled apart, gallons of water were poured down his throat, and his body was publicly broken on the wheel, each of his limbs smashed with an iron bar. Then the executioner cut off his head. Throughout the trial, torture, and execution, Calas maintained his innocence. Two years later, the Parlement reversed its verdict, declared Calas not guilty, and offered the family a payment in compensation.
Franpois Marie Arouet, also known as Voltaire, was appalled by the verdict and punishment. At the time of the case, Voltaire was the most famous personality in the European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Prolific and well connected, Voltaire took up his pen to clear Calas’s name. He hired
THE CRUEL DEATH OF CALAS. This print, reproduced in a pamphlet that circulated in Britain in the late eighteenth century, portrayed the French Protestant Jean Calas as a martyr to his beliefs and directly implicated the Roman Catholic Church in the cruelty of his execution by placing an enthusiastic priest prominently at the scene. The pamphlet may also have sought to reinforce anti-French sentiments among an increasingly nationalistic British population. ¦ How might Enlightenment authors have used such a scene to promote their message of toleration? ¦ How might Church officials have responded to such attacks?
Lawyers for the family and wrote briefs, letters, and essays to bring the case to the public eye. These essays circulated widely among an increasingly literate middle-class audience. For Voltaire, Calas’s case exemplified nearly everything he found backward in European culture. Intolerance, ignorance, and religious “fanaticism” had made a travesty of justice. “Shout everywhere, I beg you, for Calas and against fanaticism, for it is this infamy that has caused their misery.” Torture demonstrated the power of the courts but could not uncover the truth. Secret interrogations, trials behind closed doors, summary judgment (Calas was executed the day after being convicted, with no review by a higher court), and barbaric punishments defied reason, morality, and human dignity. Any criminal, however wretched, “is a man,” wrote Voltaire, “and you are accountable for his blood.”
Voltaire’s writings on the Calas case illustrate the classic concerns of the Enlightenment: the dangers of arbitrary and unchecked authority, the value of religious toleration, and the overriding importance of law, reason, and human dignity in all affairs. He borrowed most of his arguments from others—from his predecessor the Baron de Montesquieu and from the Italian writer Cesare Bec-caria, whose On Crimes and Punishments appeared in 1764. Voltaire’s reputation did not rest on his originality as a philosopher. It came from his effectiveness as a writer and advocate, his desire and ability to reach a wide audience in print.
The emergence of this wide audience for Voltaire’s writings was just as significant as the arguments that he made. The growth of European cities, the spread of literacy and new forms of social interaction at all levels of society helped fuel the Enlightenment’s atmosphere of critical reflection about religion, law, the power of the state, and the dignity of the individual. The fact that a writer such as Voltaire could become a celebrity showed that a new kind of literate reading public had developed in Europe. Enough people who read and had income to spare on printed material created a market for newspapers and novels, which in turn showed the emergence of a new kind of consumer society. The works of writers like Voltaire and his peers were discussed over sweetened caffeinated drinks in coffeehouses and cafes where ordinary people gathered to smoke and debate the issues of the day. (Coffee, sugar, and tobacco all came from the Atlantic colonial trade.) Similar scenes took place in the homes of aristocrats. The Enlightenment was thus not only an intellectual movement—it was a cultural phenomenon, which exposed an increasingly broad part of the population to new forms of consumption, of goods as well as ideas.
PROSPERITY, COMMERCE, AND CONSUMPTION
The Enlightenment’s audience consisted of urban readers and consumers who were receptive to new cultural forms: the essay, the political tract, the satirical engraving, the novel, the newspaper, theatrical spectacles, and even musical performances. Clearly, such developments could only occur in a society where significant numbers of people had achieved a level of wealth that freed them from the immediate cares of daily sustenance. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, this level of wealth had been achieved in the cities of northwestern Europe. The North Atlantic economies of France and
Britain, in particular, made these two countries the preponderant powers both in Europe and the wider world.
Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Rapid economic and demographic growth in northwestern Europe was made possible by cheaper food and declines in mortality from infectious disease. In Britain and Hol-
Land, new intensive agricultural systems produced more food per acre. Improved transportation and new farming methods resulted in fewer famines and a better-nourished population. New crops, especially maize and potatoes from the Americas, also increased the supply of food. Infectious disease continued to kill half of all Europeans before the age of twenty, but plague was ceasing to be a major killer, as a degree of immunity (perhaps the result of a genetic mutation) began to emerge within the European population. Better diet and improved sanitation may also have
POPULATION GROWTH C. 1600. ¦ Where did the population grow more rapidly? ¦ Why were the largest gains in population on the coasts? ¦How did urbanization affect patterns of life and trade?
Reduced infection rates from typhoid, cholera, smallpox, and measles.
Northwestern Europe was also increasingly urbanized. The total number of urban dwellers in Europe did not change much between 1600 and 1800. At both dates, approximately 200 cities in Europe had a population of over 10,000. These cities were increasingly concentrated in northern and western Europe, however, and the largest experienced extraordinary growth, especially those connected with Atlantic trade. Cities such as Hamburg in Germany, Liverpool in England, Toulon in France, and Cadiz in Spain grew by about 250 percent between 1600 and 1750. Amsterdam, the hub of early modern international commerce, increased in population from 30,000 in 1530 to 200,000 by 1800. Naples, the busy Mediterranean port, went from a population of 300,000 in 1600 to nearly 500,000 by the late eighteenth century. Spectacular population growth also occurred in the administrative capitals of Europe: London’s population grew from 674,000 in 1700 to 860,000 a century later; Paris’s went from 180,000 people in 1600 to more than 500,000 in 1800; and Berlin’s grew from 6,500 in 1661 to 140,000 in 1783.
The rising prosperity of northwestern Europe also depended on developments in trade and manufacturing. Improvements in transportation led entrepreneurs to produce textiles in the countryside. They distributed, or “put out,” wool and flax to rural workers who spun it and wove it into cloth on a piece-rate basis. The entrepreneur sold the finished cloth in a market that extended from local towns to international exporters. For country dwellers, this system (sometimes called “protoindustrialization”) provided welcome employment during slack seasons of the agricultural year. The system also allowed merchants to avoid expensive guild restrictions in the towns and reduced their production costs. Urban cloth workers suffered, but the system led to increased employment and to higher levels of industrial production, not only for textiles but also for iron, metalworking, and even toy and clock making.
Some cities also became manufacturing centers during the eighteenth century. In northern France, many of the million or so men and women employed in the textile trade lived and worked in Amiens, Lille, and Rheims. The rulers of Prussia made it their policy to develop Berlin as a manufacturing center, taking advantage of an influx of French Protestants to establish a silk-weaving industry there. Most urban manufacturing took place in small shops employing from five to twenty journeymen working under a master. But the scale of such enterprise was growing and becoming more specialized, as workshops began to group together to form a single manufacturing district in which several thousand workers might be employed to produce the same product.
Techniques in some crafts remained much as they had been for centuries. In others, however, inventions changed the pattern of work as well as the nature of the product. Knitting frames, simple devices to speed the manufacture of textile goods, made their appearance in Britain and Holland. Wire-drawing machines and slitting mills, which allowed nail makers to convert iron bars into rods, spread from Germany into Britain. Techniques for printing colored designs directly on calico cloth were imported from Asia. New and more efficient printing presses appeared, first in Holland and then elsewhere.
Workers did not readily accept innovations of this kind. Labor-saving machines threw people out of work. Artisans, especially those organized into guilds, were by nature conservative, anxious to protect not only their rights but also the secrets of their trade. Governments would often intervene to block the use of machines if they threatened to increase unemployment or create unrest. States might also act to protect the interests of their powerful commercial and financial backers. Both Britain and France outlawed calico printing for a time, to protect local textile manufacturers and importers of Indian goods. Mercantilist doctrines could also impede innovation. In both Paris and Lyons, for example, the use of indigo dyes was banned because they were manufactured abroad. But the pressures for economic innovation were irresistible, because behind them lay an insatiable eighteenth-century appetite for goods.
In the eighteenth century, a mass market for consumer goods emerged, concentrated at first in northwestern Europe. Houses became larger, particularly in towns; but even more strikingly, the houses of middling ranks were now stocked with hitherto uncommon luxuries such as sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, newspapers, books, pictures, clocks, toys, china, glassware, pewter, silver plate, soap, razors, furniture (including beds with mattresses, chairs, and chests of drawers), shoes, cotton cloth, and spare clothing. Demand for such products consistently outstripped the supply, causing prices for these items to rise faster than the price of foodstuffs throughout the century. But the demand for them continued unabated. Such goods were indulgences, of course, but they were also repositories of value in which families could invest their surplus cash, knowing that they could pawn them in hard times if cash was needed.
The exploding consumer economy of the eighteenth century also encouraged the provision of services. In eighteenth-century Britain, the service sector was the
TOPSY-TURVY WORLD BY JAN STEEN. This Dutch painting depicts a household in the throes of the exploding consumer economy that hit Europe in the eighteenth century. Consumer goods ranging from silver and china to clothing and furniture cluttered the houses of ordinary people as never before.
Fastest-growing part of the economy, outstripping both agriculture and manufacturing. Almost everywhere in urban Europe, the eighteenth century was the golden age of the small shopkeeper. People bought more prepared foods and more ready-made (as opposed to personally tailored) clothing. Advertising became an important part of doing business, helping create demand for new products and shaping popular taste for changing fashions. Even political allegiances could be expressed through consumption when people purchased plates and glasses commemorating favorite rulers or causes.
The result of all these developments was a European economy vastly more complex, more specialized, more integrated, more commercialized, and more productive than anything the world had seen before. These developments necessarily affected the way people thought of the world and their place in it—above all, people in the Enlightenment shared a sense of living in a time marked by change. Many Enlightenment thinkers defended such changes as “progress.” Others were more critical, fearing that valued traditions were being lost. Such debates lay at the heart of Enlightenment thought.
The Foundations of the Enlightenment
Enlightenment thinkers did not agree on everything, but most shared a sense that they lived in an exciting moment in history in which human reason would prevail over the accumulated superstitions and traditions of the past. Enlightenment authors believed themselves to be the defenders of a new ideal, “the party of humanity.” The confidence that Enlightenment thinkers placed in the powers of human reason stemmed from the accomplishments of the scientific revolution. Even when the details of Newton’s physics were poorly understood, his methods provided a model for scientific inquiry into other phenomena. Nature operated according to laws that could be grasped by study, observation, and thought. The work of the Scottish writer David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739-40, and the Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 1748) provided the most direct bridge from science to the Enlightenment. Newton had refused speculation about ultimate causes, arguing instead for a precise description of natural phenomena (see Chapter 16). Hume took this same rigor and skepticism to the study of morality, the mind, and government, often drawing analogies to scientific laws. Hume criticized the “passion for hypotheses and systems” that dominated earlier philosophical thinking. Experience and careful observation, he argued, usually did not support the premises on which those systems rested.
Embracing human reason also required confronting the power of Europe’s traditional monarchies and the religious institutions that supported them. “Dare to know!” the German philosopher Immanuel Kant challenged his contemporaries in his classic 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” For Kant, the Enlightenment represented a declaration of intellectual independence. (He also called it an awakening and credited Hume with rousing him from his “dogmatic slumber.”) Kant likened the intellectual history of humanity to the growth of a child. Enlightenment, in this view, was an escape from humanity’s “self-imposed immaturity” and a long overdue break with humanity’s self-imposed parental figure, the Catholic Church. Coming of age meant the “determination and courage to think without the guidance of someone else” as an individual. Reason required autonomy, and freedom from tradition.
Enlightenment thinkers nevertheless recognized a great debt to their predecessors, especially John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. Enlightenment thinkers drew heavily on Locke’s studies of human knowledge, especially his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690).
DIVINE LIGHT. The frontispiece for Voltaire's book on the science of Isaac Newton portrays Newton as the source of a divine light that is reflected onto Voltaire's desk through a mirror held by Emilie du Chatelet, the French translator of Newton who also was Voltaire's lover. Newton's clouded throne and the adoring angels holding du Chatelet aloft were familiar motifs from earlier generations of religious paintings, but the significance of the carefully portrayed ray of light is recast by the books, inkwell, and precise scientific measuring tools surrounding Voltaire. ¦ What does this image say about the relationship between religious thought and Enlightenment science?
Locke’s theories of how humans acquire knowledge gave education and environment a critical role in shaping human character. All knowledge, he argued, originates from sense perception. The human mind at birth is a “blank tablet” (in Latin, tabula rasa). Only when an infant begins to perceive the external world with its senses, does anything register in its mind. Education, then, was essential to the creation of a good and moral individual. Locke’s starting point, which became a central premise for those who followed, was the goodness and perfectibility of humanity. Building on Locke, eighteenth-century thinkers made education central to their project, because education promised that social progress could be achieved through individual moral improvement. Locke’s theories had potentially radical implications for eighteenth-century society: if all humans were capable of reason, education might also level hierarchies of status, sex, or race. As we will see, only a few Enlightenment thinkers made such egalitarian arguments. Still, optimism and a belief in universal human progress constituted a second defining feature of nearly all Enlightenment thinking.
Enlightenment thinkers sought nothing less than the organization of all knowledge. The scientific method, by which they meant the empirical observation of particular phenomena to arrive at general laws, offered a way to pursue research in all areas—to study human affairs as well as natural ones. Thus they collected evidence to learn the laws governing the rise and fall of nations, and they compared governmental constitutions to arrive at an ideal and universally applicable political system. As the English poet Alexander Pope stated in his Essay on Man (1733), “The science of human nature [may be] like all other sciences reduced to a few clear points,” and Enlightenment thinkers became determined to learn exactly what those few clear points were. They took up a strikingly wide array of subjects in this systematic manner: knowledge and the mind, natural history, economics, government, religious beliefs, customs of indigenous peoples in the New World, human nature, and sexual (or what we would call gender) and racial differences.
As one can see from these examples, the culture of the philosophes, or Enlightenment thinkers, was international. French became the lingua franca of much Enlightenment discussion, but “French” books were often published in Switzerland, Germany, and Russia. Enlightenment thinkers admired British institutions and British scholarship, and Great Britain produced important Enlightenment thinkers: the historian Edward Gibbon and the Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith. The philo-sophes considered the Americans Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to be a part of their group. Despite stiffer resistance from religious authorities, stricter state censors, and smaller networks of educated elites, the Enlightenment also flourished across central and southern Europe. Frederick II of Prussia housed Voltaire during one of his exiles from France, and he also patronized a small but unusually productive group of Enlightenment thinkers. Northern Italy was also an important center of Enlightenment thought.
Although Enlightenment thought was European in a broad sense, France provided the stage for some of the most widely followed Enlightenment projects. For this reason, Enlightenment thinkers, regardless of where they lived, are often called by the French word philosophes. Hardly any of the philosophes, with the exceptions of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, were true philosophers, in the sense of being highly original abstract thinkers. Most Enlightenment thinkers shunned forms of expression that might seem incomprehensible, priding themselves instead on their clarity. Philosophe, in French, simply meant “a free thinker,” a person whose reflections were unhampered by the constraints of religion or dogma in any form.
The best known of the philosophes was Voltaire, born Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1778). As Erasmus two centuries earlier had embodied Christian humanism, Voltaire virtually personified the Enlightenment, commenting on an enormous range of subjects in a wide variety of literary forms. Educated by the Jesuits, he became a gifted and sharp-tongued writer. His gusto for provocation landed him in the Bastille (a notorious prison in Paris) for libel and soon afterward in temporary exile in England. In his three years there, Voltaire became an admirer of British political institutions, British culture, and British science; above all, he became an extremely persuasive convert to the ideas of Newton, Bacon, and Locke. His single greatest accomplishment may have been popularizing Newton’s work in France and more generally championing the cause of British empiricism and the scientific method against the more Cartesian French.
Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters (“Letters on the English Nation”), published after his return in 1734, made an immediate sensation. Voltaire’s themes were religious and political liberty, and his weapons were comparisons. His admiration for British culture and politics became a stinging critique of France—and other absolutist countries on the Continent. He praised British open-mindedness and empiricism: the country’s respect for scientists and its support for research. He considered the relative weakness of the British aristocracy a sign of Britain’s political health. Unlike the French, the British respected commerce and people who engage in it, Voltaire wrote. The British tax system was rational, free of the complicated exemptions for the privileged that were ruining French finances. The British House of Commons represented
VOLTAIRE'S CANDIDE. Voltaire's best-selling novel gently mocked the optimism of some Enlightenment thinkers. The young Candide's tutor, Pangloss, insisted on repeating that "this is the best of all possible worlds," even as he, Candide, and Candide's love, the beautiful Cunegonde, suffered terrible accidents and misfortune. In the scene shown here Candide is thrown out of the castle by Cunegonde's father, with "great kicks in the rear" after they have been caught kissing behind a screen. This mix of serious message and humorous delivery was quite common in Enlightenment literature. ¦ How might this combination of humor and philosophic meditation have been received by the educated middle-class audience that made up the readership of works such as Candide?
The middle classes and, in contrast with French absolutism, brought balance to British government and checked arbitrary power. In one of the book’s more incendiary passages, he argued that in Britain, violent revolution had actually produced political moderation and stability: “The idol of arbitrary power was drowned in seas of blood. . . . The English nation is the only nation in the world that has succeeded in moderating the power of its kings by resisting them.”
Of all Britain’s reputed virtues, religious toleration loomed largest of all. Britain, Voltaire argued, brought together citizens of different religions in a harmonious and productive culture. In this and other instances, Voltaire oversimplified: British Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews did not have equal civil rights. Yet the British policy of “toleration” did contrast with Louis XIV’s intolerance of Protestants.
Revoking the Edict of Nantes (1685) had stripped French Protestants of civil rights and had helped create the atmosphere in which Jean Calas—and others—were persecuted.
Of all forms of intolerance, Voltaire opposed religious bigotry most, and with real passion he denounced religious fraud, faith in miracles, and superstition. His most famous battle cry was “Ecrasez I’infdme!” (“Crush this infamous thing”), by which he meant all forms of repression, fanaticism, and bigotry. “The less superstition, the less fanaticism; and the less fanaticism, the less misery.” He did not oppose religion per se; rather, he sought to rescue morality, which he believed to come from God, from dogma— elaborate ritual, dietary laws, formulaic prayers—and from a powerful Church bureaucracy. He argued for common sense and simplicity, persuaded that these would bring out the goodness in humanity and establish stable authority. “The simpler the laws are, the more the magistrates are respected; the simpler the religion will be, the more one will revere its ministers. Religion can be simple. When enlightened people will announce a single God, rewarder and avenger, no one will laugh, everyone will obey.”
Voltaire relished his position as a critic, and he was regularly exiled from France and other countries, his books banned and burned. As long as his plays attracted large audiences, however, the French king felt he had to tolerate their author. Voltaire had an attentive international public, including Frederick of Prussia, who invited him to his court at Berlin, and Catherine of Russia, with whom he corresponded about reforms she might introduce in Russia. When he died in 1778, a few months after a triumphant return to Paris, he was possibly the best-known writer in Europe.
The Baron de Montesquieu (mahn-tuhs-KYOO, 1689-1755) was a very different kind of Enlightenment figure. Montesquieu was born to a noble family. He inherited both an estate and, since state offices were property that passed from father to son, a position as magistrate in the Parlement of Bordeaux. He was not a stylist or a provocateur like Voltaire but a relatively cautious jurist, though he did write a satirical novel, The Persian Letters (1721), as a young man. The novel, which he published anonymously in Amsterdam, was composed as letters from two Persian visitors to France. The visitors detailed the odd religious superstitions they witnessed, compared manners at the French court with those in Turkish harems, and likened French absolutism to their own brands of despotism, or the abuse of government authority. The Persian Letters was an immediate best seller, which inspired many imitators,
MONTESQUIEU. The French baron's Spirit of Laws (1748) was probably the most influential single text of the Enlightenment. Montesquieu's suggestion that liberty could best be preserved in a government whose powers were divided among executive, legislative, and judicial functions had a notable influence on the authors of the U. S. Constitution.
As other authors used the formula of a foreign observer to criticize contemporary French society.
Montesquieu’s treatise, The Spirit of Laws (1748), may have been the most influential work of the Enlightenment. It was a groundbreaking study in what we would call comparative historical sociology and very Newtonian in its careful, empirical approach. Montesquieu asked about the structures that shaped law. How had different environments, histories, and religious traditions combined to create such a variety of governmental institutions? What were the different forms of government: what spirit characterized each, and what were their respective virtues and shortcomings?
Montesquieu suggested that there were three forms of government: republics, monarchies, and despotisms. A republic was governed by many individuals—either an elite aristocracy of citizens or the people as a whole. The soul of a republic was virtue, which allowed individual citizens to transcend their particular interests and rule in accordance with the common good. In a monarchy, on the other hand, one person ruled in accordance with the law. The soul of a monarchy, wrote Montesquieu, was honor, which gave individuals an incentive to behave with loyalty toward their sovereign. The third form of government, despotism, was rule by a single person unchecked by law or other powers. The soul of despotism was fear, since no citizen could feel secure and punishment took the place of education. Lest this seem abstract, Montesquieu devoted two chapters to the French monarchy, in which he spelled out what he saw as a dangerous drift toward despotism in his own land. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu admired the British system and its separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of government. Such a balance of powers preserved liberty by avoiding a concentration of authority in a single individual or group. His idealization of “checks and balances” had a formative influence on Enlightenment political theorists and helped to guide the authors of the U. S. Constitution in 1787.
The most remarkable and ambitious Enlightenment project was a collective one: the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia claimed to summarize all the most advanced contemporary philosophical, scientific, and technical knowledge, making it available to any reader. It demonstrated how scientific analysis could be applied in nearly all realms of thought, and it further aimed to encourage critical reflection of an enormous range of traditions and institutions. The guiding spirit behind the venture was Denis Diderot (1713-1784). Diderot was helped by the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717-1783) and other leading men of letters, including Voltaire and Montesquieu. Published in installments between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopedia ran to seventeen large volumes of text and eleven more of illustrations, with over 71,000 articles.
Diderot commissioned articles on science and technology, showing how machines worked and illustrating new industrial processes. The point was to demonstrate how science could promote progress and alleviate human misery. Diderot turned the same methods to politics and the social order, including articles on economics, taxes, and the slave trade. Censorship made it difficult to write openly antireligious articles. Diderot thumbed his nose at religion in oblique ways; at the entry on the Eucharist, the reader found a terse cross-reference: “See cannibalism.” At one point, the French government revoked the publishing permit for the Encyclopedia, declaring in 1759 that the encyclopedists were trying to “propagate materialism” (by which they meant atheism) “to destroy Religion, to inspire a spirit of independence, and to nourish the corruption of morals.” The volumes sold remarkably well despite such bans and their hefty price. Purchasers belonged to the elite: aristocrats, government officials, prosperous merchants, and a scattering of
TECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRY. This engraving, from the mining section, is characteristic of Diderot's Encyclopedia. The project aimed to detail technological changes, manufacturing processes, and forms of labor-all in the name of advancing human knowledge.
Members of the higher clergy. That elite stretched across Europe, including its overseas colonies.
Although the French philosophes sparred with the state and the church, they sought political stability and reform. Montesquieu hoped that an enlightened aristocracy would press for reforms and defend liberty against a despotic king. Voltaire, persuaded that aristocrats would represent only their particular narrow interests, looked to an enlightened monarch for leadership. Neither was a democrat, and neither conceived of reform from below. Still, their widely read critiques of arbitrary power stung. By the 1760s, the French critique of despotism provided the language in which many people across Europe articulated their opposition to existing regimes.
INSTRUMENTS OF TORTURE. A man being stretched on the rack (left) and a thumbscrew (right), both from an official Austrian government handbook. By 1800, Beccaria's influence had helped phase out the use of such instruments.
MAJOR THEMES OF ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT
Enlightenment thinkers across Europe raised similar themes: humanitarianism, or the dignity and worth of all individuals; religious toleration; and liberty. These ideals inspired important debates about three issues in particular: law and punishment, the place of religious minorities, and the state’s relationship to society and the economy.
The Enlightenment beliefs about education and the perfectibility of human society led many thinkers to question the harsh treatment of criminals by European courts. An influential work by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), On Crimes and Punishments (1764), provided Voltaire with most of his arguments in the Calas case. Beccaria criticized the use of arbitrary power and attacked the prevalent view that punishments should represent society’s vengeance on the criminal. The only legitimate rationale for punishment was to maintain social order and to prevent other crimes. Beccaria argued for the greatest possible leniency compatible with deterrence; respect for individual dignity dictated that humans should punish other humans no more than is absolutely necessary.
Above all, Beccaria’s book eloquently opposed torture and the death penalty.
Public execution, he argued, was intended to dramatize the power of the state and the horrors of hell, but it dehumanized the victim, judge, and spectators. In 1766, a few years after the Calas case, another French trial provided an example of what horrified Beccaria and the philosophes. A nineteen-year-old French nobleman, convicted of blasphemy, had his tongue cut out and his hand cut off before he was burned at the stake. The court discovered the blasphemer had read Voltaire, and it ordered his Philosophical Dictionary burned along with the body. Sensational cases such as this helped publicize Beccaria’s work. On Crimes and Punishments was quickly translated into a dozen languages. Owing primarily to its influence, most European countries by around 1800 abolished torture, branding, whipping, and mutilation and reserved the death penalty for capital crimes.
Humanitarianism and Religious Toleration
Humanitarianism and reason also counseled religious toleration. Enlightenment thinkers spoke almost as one on the need to end religious warfare and the persecution of heretics and religious minorities. Most Enlightenment authors distinguished between religious belief, which they accepted, and the Church as an institution and as dogma, which they rebelled against. It was in this sense that Voltaire opposed the Church’s influence over society. Few Enlightenment authors were atheists—a notable exception was Paul-Henri d’Holbach (1723-1789)—and only a few more were agnostics. Many, including Voltaire, were deists, believing in a God that acted as a “divine watchmaker” who at the beginning of time constructed a perfect universe and left it to run with predictable regularity. Enlightenment inquiry proved compatible with very different stances on religion.
Nevertheless, Enlightenment support for toleration was sometimes limited. Most Christians saw Jews as heretics and Christ killers. Although Enlightenment thinkers deplored persecution, they commonly viewed Judaism and Islam as backward, superstitious religions. One of the few Enlightenment figures to treat Jews sympathetically was the German philosophe Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781). Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (1779) takes place in Jerusalem during the Fourth Crusade and begins with a pogrom—or violent,
LESSING AND MENDELSSOHN. This painting of a meeting between the philosophe Gotthold Lessing (standing) and his friend Moses Mendelssohn (seated right) emphasizes the personal nature of their intellectual relationship, which transcended their religious backgrounds (Christian and Jewish, respectively). The Enlightenment's atmosphere of earnest discussion is invoked both by the open book before them and the shelf of reading material behind Lessing. Compare this image of masculine discussion (note the role of the one woman in the painting) with the image of the aristocratic salon on page 570 and the coffeehouse on page 571. ¦ What siwilarities and differences wight one point to in these various illustrations of the Enlightenment public sphere?
Orchestrated attack—in which the wife and children of Nathan, a Jewish merchant, are murdered. Nathan survives to become a sympathetic and wise father figure. He adopts a Christian-born daughter and raises her with three religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. At several points, authorities ask him to choose the single true religion. Nathan shows none exists. The three great monotheistic religions are three versions of the truth. Religion is authentic, or true, only insofar as it makes the believer virtuous.
Lessing modeled his hero on his friend Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), a self-educated rabbi and bookkeeper (and the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn). Moses Mendelssohn moved—though with some difficulty— between the Enlightenment circles of Frederick II and the Jewish community of Berlin. Repeatedly attacked and invited to convert to Christianity, he defended Jewish communities against anti-Semitic policies and Judaism against Enlightenment criticism. At the same time, he also promoted reform within the Jewish community, arguing that his community had special reason to embrace the broad Enlightenment project: religious faith should be voluntary, states should promote tolerance, humanitarianism would bring progress to all.
Government, Administration, and the Economy
Enlightenment ideas had a very real influence over affairs of state. The philosophes defended reason and knowledge for humanitarian reasons. But they also promised to make nations stronger, more efficient, and more prosperous. Beccaria’s proposed legal reforms were a good case in point; he sought to make laws not simply more just but also more effective. In other words, the Enlightenment spoke to individuals but also to states. The philosophes addressed issues of liberty and rights but also took up matters of administration, tax collection, and economic policy.
The rising fiscal demands of eighteenth-century states and empires made these issues newly urgent. Which economic resources were most valuable to states? In the seventeenth century, mercantilists had argued that regulation of trade was necessary to maximize government revenues (see Chapter 15). In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment economic thinkers known as the physiocrats argued that real wealth came from the land and agricultural production, which prospered with less government interference. They advocated simplifying the tax system and following a policy of laissez-faire, which comes from the French expression lais-sez faire la nature (“let nature take its course”), letting wealth and goods circulate without government interference.
The classic expression of laissez-faire economics, however, came from the Scottish economist Adam Smith (17231790) and his landmark treatise, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith disagreed with the physiocrats on the value of agriculture, but he shared their opposition to mercantilism. For Smith, the central issues were the productivity of labor and how labor was used in different sectors of the economy. Mercantile restrictions— such as high taxes on imported goods, one of the grievances of the colonists throughout the American empires—did not encourage the productive deployment of labor and thus did not create real economic health. For Smith, general prosperity could be obtained by allowing the famous “invisible hand” of competition to guide economic activity. Individuals, in other words, should pursue their own interests by buying and selling goods and labor freely on the open market without interference from state-chartered monopolies or legal restraints. As Smith wrote in his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), self-interested individuals could be “led by an invisible hand. . . without knowing it, without intending it, [to] advance the interest of the society.”
The Wealth of Nations spelled out, in more technical and historical detail, the different stages of economic development, how the invisible hand actually worked, and the beneficial aspects of competition. Its perspective owed much to Newton and to the Enlightenment’s idealization of both nature and human nature. Smith thought of himself as the champion of liberty against state-sponsored economic privilege and monopolies. And he became the most influential of the new eighteenth-century economic thinkers. In the following century, his work and his followers became the target of reformers and critics who had less faith in the power of markets to generate wealth and prosperity for all.
The colonial world loomed large in Enlightenment thinking. Enlightenment thinkers saw the Americas as an uncorrupted territory where humanity’s natural simplicity was expressed in the lives of native peoples. In comparison, Europe and Europeans appeared decadent or corrupt. European colonial activities—especially the slave trade—raised pressing issues about humanitarianism, individual rights, and natural law. The effects of colonialism on Europe were a central Enlightenment theme.
Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that the “discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events,” he continued, “no human wisdom can foresee.” Smith’s language was nearly identical to that of a Frenchman, the abbe Guillaume Thomas Franpois Raynal. Raynal’s massive Philosophical and Political History of European Settlements and Trade in the Two Indies (1770), a coauthored work like the Encyclopedia, was one of the most widely read works of the Enlightenment, going through twenty printings and at least forty pirated editions. Raynal drew his inspiration from the Encyclopedia and aimed at nothing less than a total history of colonization: customs and civilizations of indigenous peoples, natural history, exploration, and commerce in the Atlantic world and India.
Raynal also asked whether colonization had made humanity happier, more peaceful, or better. The question was fully in the spirit of the Enlightenment. So was the answer: Raynal believed that industry and trade brought improvement and progress. Like other Enlightenment writers, however, he and his coauthors considered natural simplicity an antidote to the corruptions of their culture. They sought out and idealized what they considered examples of “natural” humanity, many of them in the New World. What Europeans considered savage life might be “a hundred times preferable to that of societies corrupted by despotism,” and they lamented the loss of humanity’s “natural liberty” They condemned the tactics of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru, of the Portuguese in Brazil, and of the British in North America. They echoed Montesquieu’s theme that good government required checks and balances against arbitrary authority. In the New World, they argued, Europeans found themselves with virtually unlimited power, which encouraged them to be arrogant, cruel, and despotic. In a later edition, after the outbreak of the American Revolution, the book went even further, drawing parallels between exploitation in the colonial world and inequality at home: “We are mad in the way we act with our colonies, and inhuman and mad in our conduct toward our peasants,” asserted one author. Eighteenth-century radicals repeatedly warned that overextended empires sowed seeds of decadence and corruption at home.
Such critiques did little, however, to check the growing importance of colonial commerce in the eighteenth century. The wealth generated by colonial trade tied the interests of governments and transoceanic merchants in an increasingly tight embrace. Merchants engaged in the colonial trade depended on their governments to protect and defend their overseas investments; but governments in turn depended on merchants and their financial backers to build the ships and sustain the trade on which national power depended. As this colonial trade grew in importance, no issue challenged Enlightenment thinkers as much as the institution of slavery, which was central to the Atlantic trade.
Slavery and the Atlantic World
The Atlantic slave trade (see Chapter 14) reached its peak in the eighteenth century. European slave traders sent at least 1 million Africans into New World slavery in the late seventeenth century, and at least 6 million in the eighteenth century. Control of the slave trade became fundamental to great power politics in Europe during this period, as the British used their dominance of the trade to their advantage in their long-running competition with France.
World History
