Essay - The Enlightenment PDF

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Essay on The Enlightenment...

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Monica Zolczer (mnz20) – Churchill College

Was the Enlightenment in Europe characterised by its national contexts? The traditional way of viewing the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century intellectual movement which dominated the world of ideas in Europe, is to see it as a ‘diffusionist’ phenomenon which originated in the leading Protestant countries of Europe, England and the United Provinces, spilled over into neighbouring countries, and moved into France during the period of the regency of Philip of Orleans. This interpretation would appear to be persuasive, explaining Enlightenment origins and later the key position of France. It is certainly true that almost all the leading figures in early Enlightenment thought were English, Dutch or lived for some time in England or the United Provinces: for example, Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Newton and Bayle. And, with Motesquieu and Voltaire at its head, the French assumed leadership of the movement which they never relinquished. Peter Gay, in fact, sententiously claims that “there were many philosophes but there was only one Enlightenment”;1 the quintessence of this homogenous Enlightenment is presumed to be France. Leonard Marsak thus dubs it “primarily a French phenomenon”.2 However, we must recognise the fact that the Enlightenment took hold in most European countries, often with a specific local emphasis. Scholars such as Martin Fitzpatrick, Alex Murdoch, Jonathan Israel, and Roy Porter emphasise the need to pay attention to national contexts and their role in shaping Enlightenment ideas.3 Therefore, we must move away from the ‘One Enlightenment’ model and attribute more importance to the regional characteristics and features of Enlightenments in various nations. Each European country had its particulars: censorship laws and the availability of books; court nobility and patronage; the reaction from clergy members; places of information exchange; and women as facilitators of, and participants in, the movement. It is, thus, significant to consider every nation in the context of its political, religious, and social environment when comparing the similarities, connections, and disparities between enlightened countries. The social diffusion of the ideas of the enlightenment was controlled in the first instance by the national censorship laws of a European country, which, subsequently, determined the cost of books and range of possible readers. In other words, how far down the social scale the message could be felt as something that mattered depended on national contexts. Norman Hampson, in particular, emphasises this point as essentially configuring the social identities

1 Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1995), p. 3 2 Marsak, Leonard Mendes, The Enlightenment (1972), p. 3 3 Fitzpatrick, Martin, Jones, Peter, Knellworlf, Christa and McCalman, Iain (eds.), The Enlightenment World (2007); Porter, Roy, and Teich, Mikuláš (eds.), The Enlightenment in national context (1981); Israel, Jonathan Irvine‚ ‘Enlightenment! Which enlightenment?’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (3), 2006

Monica Zolczer (mnz20) – Churchill College of those who engaged in enlightenment ideas.4 As an example, the Spanish Church, the main source of such intellectual life as there was, tended to identify foreign with heretical and to wield its effective censorship with efficient thoroughness. The second half of the century was to show that centres of education and Enlightenment did exist, but they were few and scattered and never succeeded in imposing their influence on the whole country. It is for this reason that the Enlightenment did not have much of a footing in Spain; when Newton was ousting Descartes over most of the Continent, Spain was still finding Copernicus too revolutionary. Similarly, substantial French works such as Rousseau’s Émile and the Système de la nature cost about 15 to 18 livres when they could be bought on the open market. Once prohibited by the government, their price might well be multiplied four or five times. AntiChristian pamphlets by Voltaire sold for several pounds each, instead of their normal price of two or three shillings. Malesherbes, who was responsible for censorship in France from 1750 to 1763, believed that the social danger of a book varies inversely with its price. Sympathetically disposed towards a limited freedom of the press, Malesherbes would normally give his tacit consent to the sale of a limited number of copies of a new book. If these did not produce any public outcry, others were allowed to follow. If trouble arose the book was banned, but no unseemly rigour prevented its limited distribution at an inflated price. This practice, thus, restricted the possible readership and isolating enlightened circles of people. Hence, only men of wealth had the leisure to keep abreast of the latest censored works which were the topics of fashionable conversation, besides the means to acquire them. Meanwhile, countries without censorship, such as the Netherlands, were respectful of new knowledge and receptive to new ideas.5 Press freedom, albeit at times haphazard, made it attractive to authors and established the Dutch nation as the intellectual entrepôt of Europe. As Hugh Dunthorne explains, thanks to the uncentralised character of the Dutch state and to the commercial priorities of its rulers, censorship was haphazardly imposed, allowing the press much greater latitude than it had elsewhere in Europe.6 In Holland there were 55 printing presses in 1600; by 1675 this had increased to 203, with more than half of that number in Amsterdam alone. In one respect at least, the printers of the Netherlands and the authors whom they served were unquestionably pioneers. This was in developing, if not inventing, the new medium of the monthly literary and scientific journal, offering critical book reviews, scholarly news and occasional articles, all tailored to an international readership. The earliest of these journals, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres , was founded 4 Hampson, Norman, The Enlightenment (1968) 5 Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Introduction to Part II: Aspects of Enlightenment Formations’ in Fitzpatrick, Martin, Jones, Peter, Knellworlf, Christa and McCalman, Iain (eds.), The Enlightenment World (2007) 6 Hugh Dunthorne, ‘The Dutch Republic: “That mother nation of liberty”’ in Fitzpatrick, Martin, Jones, Peter, Knellworlf, Christa and McCalman, Iain (eds.), The Enlightenment World (2007)

Monica Zolczer (mnz20) – Churchill College in 1684, and others quickly followed. In 1686 Jean Le Clerc and a group of Amsterdam publishers launched the Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique, the journal in which the Locke made his first forays into print. And over the next thirty years a dozen or so similar periodicals appeared in Holland, the majority edited by Huguenots and written in French though several were in the hands of Dutch publishers. The difference in national censorship laws thus was vital in determining whether readers across western Europe could keep abreast of new publications and new ideas. Another feature of society which noticeably affected the reception of Enlightenment ideas in a nation was its court politics, and whether the nobility accepted these novel concepts and disseminated them down the social ladder. Despite the enormous variations within European society, the gentlemen of Europe generally formed a more social club in the eighteenth century than at any time before or since. Court society almost everywhere, and the gentry in the more civilised areas, became the centre of a nation’s taste, manners and ideas, and some of these attitudes would be imitated by the upper servants of the aristocracy. This cosmopolitan society, with its ties of kinship and patronage criss-crossing Europe, afforded infinite possibilities for the communication of men and ideas. Hence historians such as Roger Chartier and Robert Muchembled have examined the penetration of Enlightenment ideas from the elite to the lower classes, from ‘high’ to ‘low’ culture. 7 In particular, some European rulers, including Catherine II of Russia, Joseph II of Austria and Frederick II of Prussia, tried to apply Enlightenment thought on religious and political tolerance to develop more professional forms of government, which became known as ‘enlightened absolutism’. Margaret C. Jacob notes how Philip V, the first Bourbon king of Spain, would follow the example of his grandfather Louis XIV in such matters.8 He established academies of language (1713), medicine (1734) and history (1738). Versailles set the pattern and pace for other rulers, too, for almost all rulers from the highest to the lowest felt that they had to follow Louis XIV and demonstrate their power and significance by living in courtly magnificence. The court set the standard for the elite in society who maintained of the Dutch and English/ British examples, the French pattern of Enlightenment established at the very outset of Louis XIV’s personal reign would eventually become dominant. But, nowhere was the aristocratic character of the Enlightenment so pronounced as in eastern Europe. 9 With the case of Russia, the government actively encouraged the proliferation of arts and sciences in the mid-eighteenth century, producing the first Russian university, library, theatre, public museum, and independent press. And it was the enlightened despot, Catherine the Great, who played a key role in fostering 7 Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (1988); Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750 (1985) 8 Jacob, Margaret C., ‘Polite worlds of Enlightenment’ in Fitzpatrick, Martin, Jones, Peter, Knellworlf, Christa and McCalman, Iain (eds.), The Enlightenment World (2007) 9 Hampson, Norman, The Enlightenment (1968)

Monica Zolczer (mnz20) – Churchill College the arts, sciences, and education. Correspondingly, Peter the Great Peter created new educational and scientific institutions, cultivating mathematics, the sciences, geography, critical text scholarship, western medicine, Latin, and modern languages as well as drastic reform of the country’s existing education system.10 He thought it essential for reorganising Russian society and the state that Latin be taught and cultivated as a vehicle of instruction, reading, and scholarly interaction, thus fostered Latin colleges in Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg, and Novgorod. The national Enlightenment differed from its Western European counterpart in that it promoted further modernisation of all aspects of Russian life and was concerned with attacking the serfdom institution in Russia. The aristocratic characteristic of the Russian Enlightenment further highlights the need to appreciate national contexts. In a pious age, it is crucial to consider the impact of the clergymen in shaping established ideals and contemporary opinion; but, we cannot formulate a simple generalisation to use as a framework for the whole continent because eighteenth-century Europe was splintered after the religious Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For instance, in France, the central doctrines of les Lumières were individual liberty and religious tolerance in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The resistance of the clergy was largely a defensive campaign; in France there appeared 90 books in defence of Christianity in 1770 alone. Robert Palmer has shown how vigorous and effective were the counter-attacks launched by Christian writers against works such as d’Holback’s Système de la nature (1770).11 In Catholic states one of the main factors regulating the spread of new ideas was the effectiveness of the machinery of clerical censorship. Where, as in Spain, this was not seriously in conflict with royal power, resistance could be very strong. Conversely, in other Catholic countries the clergy played an intellectual part second only to that of the Court nobility and proved more receptive to the Enlightenment than might have been expected.12 They had often entered the Church in pursuance of family policies rather than religious vocation, and Mornet quotes several examples of priests who were sceptics if not actual atheists. 13 It is likely that far more effected a compromise between their faith and the new outlook of the philosophes. In the provinces particularly, educated men were interested in the changing ideas of the society in which they lived and concerned to understand these ideas. The lawyer, de Brosses, travelling in Italy in 1739-40, found that priests were the men with libraries, with whom he could discuss Newtonian physics. Mornet refers to a Breton curé whose library of 540 volumes included the Encyclopédie, which cost about £14. The Archbishop of Salzburg had busts 10 Israel, Jonathan Irvine, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (2006) 11 Palmer, Robert R., Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (1939) 12 Hampson, Norman, The Enlightenment (1968) 13 Daniel Mornet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution Française 1715-1787 (1933)

Monica Zolczer (mnz20) – Churchill College of Voltaire and Rousseau in his study and another pair were to be found in a Benedictine monastery at Angers. Many of the writers of the Enlightenment, such as Condillac, Morelly, Mably and Raynal, belonged – however tenuously – to the Church. Integrated with lay society by reason of their functions, friendships and family connections, their intellectual training and concern for general problems made them more receptive to new ideas than the often hidebound and parochially-minded laymen with whom they mixed and were effective mouthpieces for Enlightenment ideas in various European nations. Whilst print was an overt, universal medium of Enlightenment ideas across borders, we can identify a difference between national sites of information exchange as a variety of meeting places were established across European cities. The philosophes of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, masonic lodges, and literary salons.14 The French case is similar in the sense that provincial educated clergy and laity tended to copy the salons of the capital and to establish local centres for the exchange of ideas. The most notable of such centres were the learned Academies, founded in many provincial towns of France during the eighteenth century.15 Daniel Roche estimates that three-quarters of the cities with populations of over 20,000 had academies and that there were roughly 40 cities in the category.16 Elsewhere in Europe they seem to have been mainly confined to capital cities, but there were a score in the French provinces by 1750 and twice that number twenty years later. Their membership would include the names of leading philosophes, and although exclusive (about 6,000 were involved) they would increasingly reach out to the public. This explains why the Enlightenment in Germany reached deep into the middle classes, where it expressed a spiritualistic and nationalistic tone. Whilst in the Scottish Enlightenment, Scotland’s major cities created an intellectual infrastructure of mutually supporting institutions such as universities, reading societies, libraries, periodicals, museums and masonic lodges.17 Masonic lodges formed an alternative meeting-place for the local nobles, upper clergy, professional men and royal agents, and occasionally for men of humbler rank. Great seaports, such as Liverpool, Hamburg, Bordeaux and Marseilles, were also centres of cultural and intellectual activity. As Dorinda Outram argues, these institutions were effective ways of producing unity between elite groups in society, rather than reaching out to other, unprivileged social groups. 18 In eighteenth-century Germany, this was epitomised by the emergence of the Aufklärung group, and, in Britain, extensive literacy and a large and wealthy 14 M. C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (1981); N. Hans, ‘UNESCO of the Eighteenth Century: La Loge des Neuf Soeurs and its Venerable Master Benjamin Franklin’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 97 (1953) 15 Norman Hampson, ‘The Enlightenment in France’ in Porter, Roy, and Teich, Mikuláš (eds.), The Enlightenment in national context (1981) 16 Roche, Daniel, France in the Enlightenment (1998) 17 Robertson, John, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (2005) 18 Outram, Dorinda, The Enlightenment (1995)

Monica Zolczer (mnz20) – Churchill College professional and commercial middle class, produced institutions – such as the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society – which were aimed at the discussion of ideas, and whose membership consisted of local elites. All these groups meeting for discussion and experimentation were new forms of sociability centring on the exchange of ideas, social institutions of the upper class. These different media and social institutions focused on the diffusion and interchange of ideas and together formed what Jürgen Habermas has described as the ‘new public sphere’ of the eighteenth century, which was fundamentally affected by national contexts.19 An important factor to consider when comparing the national Enlightenments of eighteenth-century Europe is the role of women as proponents of the movement, aiding in the dissemination of theories, practices, and principles. However, their extent of participation was largely contingent on national and social particulars such as financial resources. The Italians, for instance, with their partially urbanised society, their proud cultural tradition and famous universities, were active participants in the intellectual and aesthetic commerce of Europe, allowing for female participation. As Paula Findlen’s study reveals, the number of learned women in eighteenth-century Italy was unmatched.20 So well-known was this phenomenon of female intellectual achievement that it became the subject of Germaine de Stäel’s novel, Corinne; or, Italy (1807). Ambitious Italian fathers and enlightened scholars introduced talented women to the pleasures of knowledge, admitting the most successful to their academies and universities. In some cities, women even founded new academies and played an active role in shaping debates about the form that modern knowledge should take. In others, women joined the ranks of the professoriate, teaching such subjects as mathematics, physics, philosophy, and anatomy.21 The presence of learned women in Italy’s academies and universities made them among the most visible emblems of the arrival of modern knowledge. But women were not only patronesses of philosophy, but also as direct public participants in the escalating European war of philosophies.22 As an example, Cristina Roccati (1732-97) of Rovigo was one of the most prolific female natural philosophers of the eighteenth century in terms of intellectual production, albeit mostly unpublished. The profusion of letters, poems, lecture notes, library catalogues, and academy minutes that recount Roccati’s intellectual activities are profound. She spent twenty-six years of her life (1751-77) instructing citizens in Rovigo in physics at the 19 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989) 20 Paula Findlen, ‘A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and science in the Italian Provinces’ in Clark, William, Golinski, Jan, Schaffer, Simon (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (1999) 21 Findlen, Paula, ‘Science as a Carrier in Enlightenment Italy: The Strategies of Laura Bassi’, Isis 83 (1993) 22 Israel, Jonathan Irvine, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (2001)

Monica Zolczer (mnz20) – Churchill College Accademia dei Concordi. Similarly, another woman with a formidable philosophical reputation was Voltaire’s mistress, Gabrielle Emilie, marquise du Châtelet, whom he celebrated in print in 1738, as a paragon of female intellectual power, and a true disciple of Newton. In parallel, the French salons looked outward to a wider audience that included women. These women served as prestigious admirers and spectators whose attention validated the scientific enterprise....