The Early Enlightenment Mark Knights Early Enlightenment Set

The Early Enlightenment Mark Knights

‘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 C 17 th.

• 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

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

Who had challenged the old order before the C 18 th 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

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.

England Holland • But key source for French and German writers in the C 18 th were England Holland. Why? • United Provinces struggle with Spain from the 1560 s 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

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. "

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

Voltaire’s 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

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)

Voltaire’s C 17 th heroes • Francis Bacon (Lord chancellor in 1618): progress through knowledge, collaboratively produced and empirical • Renée Descartes (15961650): 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.

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

Public Science • Newton’s ideas popularised – By John Desaguliers (Newton’s 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 Stewart’s The Rise of Public Science (1992); Jeffrey Wigelsworth, Selling Science in the Age of Newton (2010) – 1714 Board of Longitude competition – prize of £ 20 k – newspaper advertisements 1714 -15 promoted possible solutions – 1754 founding of the British Museum

Voltaire’s 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 Bossuet’s writings and another epitomised by the English thinkers that Voltaire heroised.

How do these ideas work out on the ground? • The End of Witchcraft Prosecutions: Changing ideologies?

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 C 18 th: Habsburg empire 1766; Russia 1770; Poland 1776; Sweden 1779.

Factors: 1. Socio-economic factors: Poor relief system by early C 18 th 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.

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.

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?

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 1640 s by mid C 18 th • 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

• 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. " Early Capitalism

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?