The Early Enlightenment

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The Early Enlightenment

• Mark Knights

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Early Enlightenment

• Set out Enlightenment values
• Examine how far the Enlightenment can be found
  in early modernity. Enlightenment as a
  mentality rather than a period.
• Sketch out how the philosophes saw early
  modernity
• Focus in on public science witchcraft the press
  as case studies of change
• Some historians see these as part of an early
  Enlightenment that stretched back into the
  C17th.

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• Attack on the Ancien Régime
• Bishop Bossuet, Politics drawn from Holy
  Scripture (1709)
• The grounds of authority and the consequences
  that flowed from this
• The Bible and God
• The King
• These ordered society, gender and social
  relations, attitudes to nature, wealth,
  non-Christian cultures, science
• Hierarchical, paternal, sacred power
• Monarchy as the best form of government
• Non-resistance

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Enlightenment values

• So the Enlightenment stressed
• The questioning of all accepted authority and
  assumptions, including the Bible and orthodox
  Christianity
• A review of the nature and basis of civil
  authority
• The pursuit of the good life through reason and
  science
• The inculcation of values such as tolerance,
  civility, sociability, equality, freedom

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Who had challenged the old order before the C18th
and hence had contributed to these values?

• The Renaissance rediscovery of classical
  virtues rational argument but too yoked to
  state and church
• The Protestant Reformation as Voltaire put it,
  when Luther attacked the sale of indulgences in
  1517 a corner of the veil was lifted
• 1751 Encyclopédie

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The influence of the French wars of religion
(1562-1594)

• Development, ironically give that this was the
  type of religious conflict of which the
  Enlightenment thinkers disapproved, of key ideas
  that they found useful
• Contract
• Natural liberty and equality
• Natural law discernible by reason
• Popular sovereignty
• Right of resistance
• Cardinal Bellarmine and Francisco Suarez.

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England and Holland

• But key source for French and German writers in
  the C18th were England and Holland. Why?
• United Provinces struggle with Spain from the
  1560s to 1648 when independence was finally
  recognised.
• England too experienced revolution in fact, two
  of them! 1642-60 1688-9
• The two countries witnessed similar developments
• Rejection of traditional forms of authority
• The introduction of toleration in religion
• A stress on trade to improve wealth of the nation
• A vibrant press
• 1689 saw the Dutch stadtholder William on the
  English throne

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Rethinking Europe

• War 1689-1713 on new scale and scope. 1 million
  dead 1701-1713
• William Penn Essay Towards the Present and
  Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of a
  European Parliament (1693). Resolution through
  dialogue! Pooled sovereignty
• if any of the soveraignties that constitute
  these imperial states, shall refuse to submit
  their claim or pretensions to them, all the other
  soveraignties, united as one strength, shall
  compel the submission and performance of the
  sentence, with damages to the suffering party.
• " if the Turks and Muscovites are taken in, as
  seems but fit and just, they will make ten a
  piece more."

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Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre

• project for perpetual peace 1712
• international confederation as the solution to
  the problem of international disorder and trade
• Advocated a European union permanent and
  perpetual.
• Large influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau who
  summarised his work
• Free public education for women and men

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Voltaires Letters Concerning the English nation
(1733)

• Voltaire fled to England 1726
• The first 7 letters (out of 24) are on Quakers
  and other sects.
• As trade enriched the citizens in England, so it
  contributed to their freedom, and this freedom on
  the other side extended their commerce, whence
  arose the grandeur of the State
• Letters on government and parliament

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Voltaire on the English

• 'The English are the only people on earth who
  have been able to prescribe limits to the power
  of kings by resisting them and who, by a series
  of struggles, have at last established that wise
  government, where the prince is powerful to do
  good, and at the same time is restrain'd from
  committing evil where the nobles are great
  without insolence, tho there are no vassals and
  where the people share in the government without
  confusion'.
• Lettres Philosophique ou Lettres Anglaises (1733)

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Voltaires C17th heroes

• Francis Bacon (Lord chancellor in 1618) progress
  through knowledge, collaboratively produced and
  empirical
• Renée Descartes (1596-1650) resolved never to
  accept anything for true which he did not
  clearly know to be such
• John Locke Contractural version of monarchy
  right of resistance religious toleration
  reason education.

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Isaac Newton

• Newtons Principia of 1687 scientifically
  explicable universe, operating on discoverable
  and rational laws.
• In 1727 Voltaire attended Newtons funeral and on
  his return to France published two works, in 1734
  and 1738, outlining and propagandizing Newtons
  theories about the universe.

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Public Science

• Newtons ideas popularised
• By John Desaguliers (Newtons experimental
  assistant 1713) in Britain, through lectures,
  poems and books
• Physico-mechanical lectures, or, An account of
  what is explain'd and demonstrated in the course
  of mechanical and experimental philosophy. (1717)
• Larry Stewarts The Rise of Public Science
  (1992) Jeffrey Wigelsworth, Selling Science in
  the Age of Newton (2010)
• 1714 Board of Longitude competition prize of
  20k newspaper advertisements 1714-15 promoted
  possible solutions
• 1754 founding of the British Museum

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Voltaires use of English thinkers

• Foil to French society and hence a way of
  criticising it obliquely
• Voltaire and others were disseminating and
  popularising ideas that already existed within
  the ancien régime
• So ancien régime contained within itself a
  struggle between two sets of values and
  ideologies one, epitomised by Bossuets writings
  and another epitomised by the English thinkers
  that Voltaire heroised.

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How do these ideas work out on the ground?

• The End of Witchcraft Prosecutions Changing
  ideologies?

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The chronology

• 3 European countries took legislative action to
  remove witchcraft from statute book before 1750
  eg France 1682 Prussia 1714 GB 1736
• NB these often post-dated end of witch craze the
  last conviction in England was 1712.
• Others followed later in the C18th Habsburg
  empire 1766 Russia 1770 Poland 1776 Sweden
  1779.

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Factors

• 1. Socio-economic factors Poor relief system by
  early C18th was much better decline in
  population pressure
• 2. greater state control over peripheries
• 3. Judicial scepticism and rising legal standards
  of proof
• 4. Science, medicine and reason an early
  enlightenment?
• 5. Religious change decline of religious
  enthusiasm? Changing ideas about God and Devil.

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The Jane Wenham Trial of 1712 (Hertford)

• An extensive print debate took place after the
  trial disputing the science behind the signs of
  witchcraft that had been produced in court.
  Several physicians were involved in this Frances
  Hutchinson author of Historical Essay concerning
  Witchcraft (1718) visited her and explicitly
  related the decline of witchcraft to the new
  science of the Royal Society. Contested science.

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Disparity between elite and popular views?

• Popular belief in witchcraft persisted the
  curate quaking at her funeral and expecting
  trouble. In 1751 at a swimming at Tring (Herts)
  the witch Ruth Osborne drowned and there was a
  successful prosecution of Thomas Colley for
  murder. Distinguish between decline of witchcraft
  prosecutions and end of belief in spirits and
  supernatural. Continuities of popular belief?

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The Public and the Press

• Coffee house culture French café (600 in Paris
  by 1750) and salons
• clubs
• Print culture
• 1695 lapse of press censorship
• 1701 first provincial newspaper (25 by 1735)
• 1702 first daily paper
• 106 journals by 1750
• Literacy increased doubled from its 30 level
  in 1640s by mid C18th
• Latin print culture in retreat
• Rise of new genres eg the novel almost 1000
  published 1700-1750 in France alone
• Moral periodicals The Spectator (1711-12) in
  Germany 1720-50 there were 50 similar periodicals
• Female readerships

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Early Capitalism

• 1720 Stock Market Bubble and crash
• Isaac Newton was reported to have lost the huge
  sum of roughly 20,000 Perhaps apocryphally, the
  astronomer remarked that he could "calculate the
  movement of the stars, but not the madness of
  men."

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Conclusion

• By 1750 had a recognisably modern Europe emerged?
  
• Some parts of Europe more than others?
• Were continuities as important as change?
• What is modern?
• Is the European project, a lesson drawn from the
  hard experience of the horrors of war, worth
  preserving?