Lumières

The Lumières (literally in English: The Lights) was a cultural, philosophical, literary and intellectual movement beginning in the second half of the 17th century, originating in western Europe and spreading throughout the rest of Europe. It included philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton. This movement is influenced by the scientific revolution in southern Europe arising directly from the Italian Renaissance with people like Galileo Galilei. Over time it came to mean the Siècle des Lumières, in English the Age of Enlightenment.^{[Note 1]}

Members of the movement saw themselves as a progressive élite, and battled against religious and political persecution, fighting against what they saw as the irrationality, arbitrariness,

This intellectual and cultural renewal by the Lumières movement was, in its strictest sense, limited to Europe. These ideas were well understood in Europe, but beyond France the idea of "enlightenment" had generally meant a light from outside, whereas in France it meant a light coming from within oneself.

In the most general terms, in science and philosophy, the Enlightenment aimed for the triumph of reason over

.

Philosophical themes

Scientific Revolution

Advances in scientific method

Charles Nicolas Cochin

.

The Lumières movement was in large part an extension of the discoveries of

pure reason

.

's (1743–1826).

A notable change was the emergence of a

Francis Bacon

with the axiomatic, "pure reason" approach of Descartes.

Belief in an intelligible world ordered by a Christian God became the crux of philosophical investigations of knowledge. On one side, religious philosophy concentrated on

The most famous French natural philosopher of the 18th century,

Individual liberty and the social contract

This effort to research and elucidate universal laws, and to determine their component parts, also became an important element in the construction of a philosophy of

.

In his famous essay

defined the Lumières thus:

Les Lumières c’est la sortie de l’homme hors de l’état de tutelle dont il est lui-même responsable. L’état de tutelle est l’incapacité de se servir de son entendement sans la conduite d’un autre. On est soi-même responsable de cet état de tutelle quand la cause tient non pas à une insuffisance de l’entendement mais à une insuffisance de la résolution et du courage de s’en servir sans la conduite d’un autre. Sapere aude! Aie le courage de te servir de ton propre entendement! Tel est la devise des Lumières. Enlightenment is the release of man from a state of bondage for which he is himself responsible. In this state of bondage he is unable to fulfill his intentions without the help of another. He is himself responsible for this bondage, where the cause is not a lack of understanding but a lack of resolution and courage to use it unguided. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! Such is the motto of the Lumières.

The Lumières' philosophy was thus based on the realities of a systematic, ordered and understandable world, which required Man also to think in an ordered and systematic way. As well as physical laws, this included ideas on the laws governing human affairs and the divine right of kings, leading to the idea that the monarch acts with the consent of the people, and not the other way around. This legal concept informed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of the social contract as a reciprocal relationship between men, and more so between families and other groups, which would become increasingly stronger, accompanied by a concept of individual inalienable rights. The powers of God were moot amongst atheist Lumières.

The Lumières movement redefined the ideas of liberty, property and rationalism, which took on meanings that we still understand today, and introduced into political philosophy the idea of the free individual, liberty for all guaranteed by the State (and not the whim of the government) backed by a strong rule of law.

To understand the interaction between the Age of Reason and the Lumières, one approach is to compare Thomas Hobbes with John Locke. Hobbes, who lived for three quarters of the 17th century, had worked to create an ontology of human emotions, ultimately trying to make order out of an inherently chaotic universe. In the alternate, Locke saw in Nature a source of unity and universal rights, with the State's assurance of protection. This "culture revolution" over the 17th and 18th centuries was a battle between these two viewpoints of the relationship between Man and Nature.

This resulted, in France, in the spread of the notion of human rights, finding expression in the 1789

were held to be fundamental rights.

Social values and manifests

Representation of the people

The core values supported by the Lumières were religious tolerance, liberty and social equality. In England, America and France, the application of these values resulted in a new definition of

. To these values may be added a love of nature and the cult of reason.

Aujourd’hui nous recevons trois éducations différentes ou contraires : celles de nos pères, celles de nos maîtres, celle du monde. Ce qu’on nous dit dans la dernière renverse toutes les idées des premières.
Today we receive three different, conflicting, educations: those of our fathers, those of our masters, and those of the world. It is only when we know the last that we can reject the first two.

— Montesquieu^[7]

Philosophical goals

The ideal figure of the Lumières was a philosopher, a

, "Who concerns himself with revealing error").

The rationalism of the Lumières was not to the exclusion of aesthetics. Reason and sentiment went hand-in-hand in their philosophy. The thoughts of the Lumières were equally capable of intellectual rigour and sentimentality.

Despite controversy about the limits of their philosophy,

.

Encyclopaedic goals

At the time, there was a particular taste for compendia of "all knowledge". This ideal found an instance in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers ("Encyclopaedia, or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts"), usually known simply as the Encyclopédie. Published between 1750 and 1770 it aimed to lead people out of ignorance through the widest dissemination of knowledge.

Criticism

The Lumières movement was, for all its existence, pulled in two directions by opposing social forces: on one side, a strong

movement, critical of the differences between religious theory and practice, which was most manifest in France.

Anticlericism was not the only source of tension in France: some noblemen contested monarchical power and the upper classes wanted to see greater fruit from their labours. A relaxing of morals fomented opinion against absolutism and the Ancient Order. According to Dale K. Van Kley, Jansenism in France also became a source of division.^[10]

The French judicial system showed itself to be outdated. Even though commercial law had become codified during the 17th century, there was no uniform, or codified, civil law.

Voltaire

This social and legal background was criticised in works by the likes of Voltaire. Exiled in England between 1726 and 1729, he studied the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton, and the English monarchy. He became well known for his denunciation of injustices such as those against Jean Calas, Pierre-Paul Sirven, François-Jean de la Barre and Thomas Arthur, comte de Lally.

The Lumières philosophy saw its climax in the middle of the 18th century.^[11]

For Voltaire, it was obvious that if the monarch can get the people to believe unreasonable things, then he can get them to do unreasonable things.^[12] This axiom became the basis for his criticism of the Lumières, and led to the basis of romanticism: that constructions from pure reason created as many problems as they solved.^[13]

According to the Lumières philosophers,^[14] the crucial point of intellectual progress consisted of the synthesis of knowledge, enlightened by human reason, with the creation of a sovereign moral authority. A contrary point of view that developed, arguing that such a process would be swayed by social conventions, leading to a "New Truth" based on reason that was but a poor imitation of the ideal and unassailable truth.

The Lumières movement thus tried to find a balance between the idea of a "natural" liberty (or autonomy) and the freedom from that liberty, that is to say, the recognition that the autonomy found in nature was at odds with the discipline required for pure reason. At the same time, with various monarchs' reforms, there was a piecemeal attempt to redefine the order of society, and the relationship between monarch and subjects. The idea of a natural order was equally prevalent in scientific thought, for example, in the works of the biologist

.

Kant

In Germany, Immanuel Kant (like Rousseau, defining himself among the Lumières) heavily criticised the limitations of pure reason in his work Critique of Pure Reason (German: Kritik der reinen Vernunft), but also that of English empiricism in Critique of Practical Reason (German: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft). Compared with the rather subjective metaphysics of Descartes, Kant developed a more objective viewpoint in this branch of philosophy.

Adam Smith

Great thinkers at the end of the Lumières movement (Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and even the young Goethe) adopted into their philosophy the ideas of self-organising and evolutionary forces. The Lumières' stance was then presented with reference to what was seen as a universal truth: that Good is fundamental in nature, but it is not self-evident. On the contrary, it is the advance of human reason that reveals this constant structure. Romanticism is the exact opposite of this stance.

Aestheticism

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Opéra de Paris by Étienne-Louis Boullée

, 1781

D’une façon générale, la sensibilité des Lumières porte à une sentimentalité morale : le temps de l’ironie voltairienne passé, on veut s’apitoyer, avec Rousseau (la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) et les tableaux de Greuze, chercher le beau et le bon éternels. Plus le siècle s’avance, plus la littérature et l’art répudient la gratuité des formes, la légèreté, regardées comme aristocratiques et mondaines, pour aller vers le sérieux, l’authentique et le naturel, c’est-à-dire vers ce qui est conforme à la morale utilitaire du public bourgeois d’où le goût croissant pour le néoclassicisme, qui met en avant l’antique, non pas l’antique allégorique de l’époque classique mais un antique historique plus sobre, à la façon du peintre David

— Michel Le Moël and Sophie Descat, L'Urbanisme parisien au siècle des Lumières [15]

In its general view, the aestheticism of the Lumières took on a moral aspect, the times of Voltaire's satire had passed, and Rousseau (in

Julie, or the New Heloise of 1776) and the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze sought the beautiful and the everlasting. As the century grew older, more literature and art turned its back on free forms and a lightness of touch, regarding them as aristocratic and worldly. They turned towards the serious, the authentic and the natural, that fit the utilitarian morality of the bourgeois public whose taste was for neoclassicism: still having antiquity as subject-matter, but not the allegorical antiquity; a more realistic, sober antiquity, such as in the works of the painter Jacques-Louis David

.

This resulted in reflections about urbanism. The Lumières' model town would be a joint effort between public provision and sympathetic architects, to create administrative or utilitarian buildings (town halls, hospitals, theatres, commissariats) all provided with views, squares, fountains, promenades, and so on.^[16] The French

.

The

. He drew up plans for parts of the campus based on the values of the Lumières.

The Place Stanislas at Nancy, France is the focus of an array of neoclassical urban buildings, and has been on the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites in France since 1983, as well as several other sites in the town, such as the Place de la Carrière and the Place d’Alliance, the administrative centre of the time.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736 – 1806) was a member of the Académie d'Architecture was without doubt the architect whose projects best represented the utopian, purely rational environment. (That which is rational, and thus based in the understanding of nature, cannot be at the same time utopian.) Starting in 1775 he built the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, a very industrial city in Doubs.

The bourgeoise had learned nothing from the Lumières, even though they saw Rousseau, Montesquieu and Kant as honest men who approved of the "élite": a vague concept, and one of which the Lumières amongst others disapproved.de La Boétie, Étienn. Le Discours sur la Servitude Volontaire.

There was considerable coverage in the English and French Press, but less so in Germany and Italy; in Spain and Russia very few knew about it save a few intellectuals, senior officials and grand families participated in the movement. The mass of the people could not care less: the vast majority of the common people, even in France, had never heard of Voltaire or Rousseau.

Nevertheless, the Lumières had disrupted the old certainties. This did not stop at social and political upheaval: the Enlightenment inspired a revolutionary generation, which is not to say they explicitly encouraged the

.

Key figures

Philosophers

Origins

Adolph von Menzel

. Voltaire is depicted on the left.

The philosophers of the Lumières movement^{[Note 1]} came with many different talents: Thomas Jefferson had had a legal education but was equally at home with archaeology and architecture; Benjamin Franklin had been a career diplomat and was a physicist. Condorcet wrote on subjects as wide-ranging as commerce, finance, education and science.

The social origins of the philosophers were also diverse: many were from middle-class families (Voltaire, Jefferson), others from more modest beginnings (

) or one in the law (Montesquieu, Jefferson).

The philosophers formed networks and communicated in letters; the vitriolic correspondence between Rousseau and Voltaire is well known.^[who?] The great figures of the 18th century met and debated in the salons, cafés or academies. These thinkers and savants formed an international community. Franklin, Jefferson, Adam Smith, David Hume and Ferdinando Galiani all spent many years in France.

Because they criticised the established order, the philosophers were chased by the authorities and had to resort to subterfuge to escape prison. François-Marie Arouet took on the pseudonym Voltaire. In 1774, Thomas Jefferson wrote a report on behalf of the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress, which was convened to discuss the grievances of Great Britain's American colonies. Because its content, he could only publish it anonymously. Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient ("Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who can See") landed him in prison at the Château de Vincennes.^[18] Voltaire was accused of writing pamphlets criticising Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1674–1723), and imprisoned in the Bastille. in 1721, Montesquieu published Lettres persanes ("Persian Letters") anonymously in Holland. From 1728 to 1734, he went to many European countries.

Faced with

. In the 1720s, Voltaire exiled himself in England, where he absorbed Locke's ideas.

The philosophers were, in general, less hostile to monarchical rule than they were to that of the clergy and the nobility.

Notable members

France

• Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

World

• England: Anthony Collins, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, William Godwin, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, Samuel Johnson, James Oglethorpe, William Paley, Joseph Priestley, William Wilberforce, Mary Wollstonecraft
• Ireland: George Berkeley, Richard Cantillon, John Toland
• Germany (Prussia):
  Emmanuel Kant, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn
• Italy: Cesare Beccaria, Ferdinando Galiani, Mario Pagano, Giambattista Vico, Pietro Verri, Alessandro Verri, Antonio Genovesi, Carlo Goldoni, Giuseppe Parini
• Poland: Hugo Kołłątaj, Jean Potocki, Ignacy Krasicki
• Portugal: Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal, Luís António Verney, António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, Francisco de Oliveira, Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo, Matias Aires Ramos da Silva Eça
• Russia:
  Nikolay Ivanovich Novikov, Mikhail Lomonosov
• Romania:
  Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Șincai
• Scotland: James Boswell, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Adam Smith, James Watt
• Spain:
  Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Leandro Fernández de Moratín, José Celestino Mutis
• Switzerland (Geneva): Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• United States: John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, George Washington

Dissemination

The spread of literacy and reading

, with those present giving their opinions on the writings of philosophers. Newspapers and the postal service allowed a more rapid exchange of ideas throughout Europe, resulting in a new form of cultural unity.

Encylopédistes

A second important change by the Lumières movement, looking back to the previous century, had its origin in France with the

.

Salons and cafés

Main articles:

Literary café

At first, literary cafés such as the

(Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles) at the turn of the century.

Talented men regularly decamped there to expound their ideas and test their latest work on a privileged public. Worldly and cultured, the grandes dames who set up these salons enlivened the soirées, encouraging the timid and cutting short arguments. Having strong, relatively liberated personalities, they were often writers and diarists themselves.

This social mixing was particularly prominent in 18th-century France, in the "États Généraux de l’esprit humain" ("General States of Human Spirit") where the Lumières philosophy flourished. Some cultured women were treated as equal to the men on questions of religion, politics and science, and could bring a certain stylishness to debate, for example the contributions of Anne Dacier to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the works of Émilie du Châtelet.

Academies, libraries and clubs

The Académies were

in 1776. Clergy and, to a lesser extent, nobility formed the majority of the membership.

Provincial societies acted to bond together the intellectual élite of French towns. Their social composition shows that privileged men were less prominent than in Paris: 37% from the nobility, 20% from the Church. Commoners represented the other 43%. Merchants and manufacturers were a small minority (4%).

Neighbouring academies, public libraries and lecture halls flourished, often involving the same enthusiastic men of learning. They were often supported by individual rich men, or funded by public subscription. They collected scientific works, the great dictionaries, had a lecture hall and, nearby, a discussion room.

All learned societies functioned as open salons and formed provincial, national and Europe-wide networks, exchanging books and letters, welcoming visiting members, and launching research and teaching programmes in subjects such as physics, chemistry, mineralogy, agronomy, and demography.

In the British

. At the start of the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson had one of the largest private libraries in the country.

Of all the learned societies, the most advanced was that of the

helped to expand on philosophical ideas and the spirit of reform in their political strategies. Intellectual discussion took on an esoteric, or sectarian, nature. Masonic lodges, even more than the Academies, emphasised the importance of equality according to ability rather than privilege by birth.

Hawkers and printers

The spread of ideas of the Lumières relied just as heavily on the actions of travelling traders. As they moved from town to town, they took their ideas and news with them, and could spread it by word of mouth to the

illiterate

.

The Press had helped to spread philosophical tracts (notably Diderot and d'Álembert's Encyclopédie), and encouraged the habit of reflective thought in the populace. In the end, the Press helped form public opinion, in spite of the ever-present censorship. Periodicals included the

. By cataloguing books and with subscriptions to learned societies, a public far from the centre of political activity could keep up with new ideas, discoveries and debates every month, if not every day.

Political influence

By the end of the 17th century, John Locke had defined the

judicial branch

.

In the 1750s attempts were made in England, Austria, Prussia and France to "rationalise" their monarchs and their laws.

The "enlightened"' (

United States Constitution

of 1787.

American Revolution

as Ambassador of the United States to France, and during this time he met many of the Lumières, becoming a frequent visitor to literary salons and bookshops in Paris.

The influence of the Lumières'philosophy is apparent in the Declaration of Independence, with the proclamations that all men are created equal and its opposition to

judicial

branches, which together form the foundations of modern democracy.

French Revolution

As the philosophy took hold in the salons, the cafés and the clubs, the

who saw no future for themselves in reform.

During the

]

The French Revolution in particular represents a violent application of the Lumières' philosophy, especially during the

Jacobins

. Descartes characterised the desire for a "rational" and "spiritual" revolution as one that aimed to eradicate the Church, and Christianity, entirely.

The

See also

• Gazette de Leyde
• Political Spectrum
• Lettres d'une Péruvienne by Françoise de Graffigny
• Modernity
• Rationalism
• Universalism

Notes

References

External links

• "Lumières! Un héritage pour demain". sur expositions.bnf.fr (in French). Bibliothèque nationale de France. Retrieved 29 October 2015. Virtual tour of the French National Library
• "Dossier sur la littérature des Lumières" [Dossier on the literature of the Lumières]. infoplanete.com (in French). 5 January 1983. Retrieved 29 October 2015.^{[dead link]}
• Foucault, Michel. "Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?" [Who are the Lumières?]. 1libertaire.free.fr (in French). Retrieved 29 October 2015.
• Rasplus, Valéry. "Qu'est-ce que les Lumières aujourd'hui" [Who are today's Lumières?]. calle-luna.org (in French). Archived from the original on September 12, 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2015.
• "Littérature des Lumières et Révolution" [Literature of the Lumières and [the French] Revolution] (in French). Bibliothèque André-Desguine. Retrieved 29 October 2015.
• "Textes sur les Lumières" [Papers about the Lumières]. hypo.ge-dip.etat-ge.ch (in French). Archived from the original on May 1, 2009. Retrieved 29 October 2015.
• Israel, Jonathan (2005). "La philosophie, Spinoza et la naissance de la modernité (1650-1750)". wodka.over-blog.com (in French). Paris: Amsterdam. Retrieved 29 October 2015.