What Art Form Practiced by Louis Xiv Influenced Seventeenthcentury Developments in French Opera?
The French Revolution, similar the American Revolution before information technology, was in big part inspired by the Enlightenment. Sometimes referred to equally the 'Historic period of Reason', the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that challenged old ways of thinking and inspired revolutionary ideas.
Groundwork
The Enlightenment began in western Europe in the mid-1600s and continued until the late 18th century. It was driven by scepticism virtually traditional ideas and beliefs, intellectual curiosity and a want for social, political and technical progress.
Enlightenment thinkers and writers challenged existing knowledge and assumptions, seeking new information and a improve agreement of humanity and the natural globe.
About Enlightenment thinkers were empiricists: they expected their new theories or discoveries to meet certain standards of proof and verifiability before they could be accepted every bit fact. To achieve this, they developed a new system of thinking and investigation, the origins of what we now call the 'scientific method'.
Before the Enlightenment, cognition was largely derived from religious teachings, assumption and the writings of ancient forebears. During and after the Enlightenment, cognition was produced past scientific processes, logic and reasoning.
The Scientific Enlightenment
Today, most people know the Enlightenment primarily for its scientific thinkers and their wonderful inventions and discoveries.
In Italy, Galileo Galilei (1654-1742) developed an improved type of telescope that brought advances in astronomy. In the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) conducted a series of experiments involving electricity, battery power and lightning, the nigh famous involving Franklin flying a kite in the middle of an electrical tempest.
In Great britain, men like Isaac Newton (1642-1727) made pregnant contributions to the fields of mathematics and physics. The most memorable of these was Newton'due south theory of gravity which, according to legend, was inspired by a falling apple.
Other notables of the scientific Enlightenment included Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Edmond Halley, William Herschel, Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. While they operated in different fields, these men sought scientific explanations to natural phenomena, where previously information had come up from religion, sociology and blind theorising.
Order, government and power
The Enlightenment was non just concerned with the concrete sciences. While scientists were exploring and questioning the natural earth, others questioned the nature of humanity and human gild. They gave item attention to the nature of government and political power.
Previously, rulers had legitimised their power and authorisation through the doctrine of 'divine right'. They claimed that political power was a divine responsibility, a gift given to rulers by God.
In Europe, the Catholic church supported the notion of divine right past including information technology in church building doctrine. Because the power of kings and emperors came from God, it was beyond claiming. To engage in rebellion or disloyalty against 1'due south king was to disobey the will of God.
The French male monarch Louis Xiv (1638-1715), nifty-granddad of the doomed Louis XVI, was a significant exponent of this belief. A devoutly religious leader, Louis worked to aggrandize and strengthen the doctrine of divine right in France.
Enlightenment thinkers began to question and challenge these archaic political beliefs. Today, nosotros know these figures equally the philosophes.
The philosophes were non revolutionaries or radical democrats. They had no wish to destroy the authority of kings and governments or to dismantle or level social hierarchies. Nevertheless, they did not believe that political power emanated from God. In their view, the role of governments was to baby-sit the nation, protect the people and secure their private rights.
English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was in favour of a strong authorities and absolutist monarchy. This type of regime, Hobbes believed, was necessary to protect its citizens. Some other Englishman, John Locke (1632-1704), argued that every private was born with three inherent rights (life, liberty and property).
These views about the human relationship between government ability and private rights formed the theory of a 'social contract'. In French republic, the best-known exponent of this theory was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).
The Enlightenment in French republic
The European Enlightenment differed from state to state and was ofttimes shaped past local conditions and grievances.
In French republic, the Enlightenment began to accept shape in the early 1700s, reaching its peak past the middle of the century. French philosophes included Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Businesswoman de Montesquieu[/caption]>Baron de Montesquieu and François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire).
Politically, most of these philosophes were concerned with two bug: how to sympathize and amend government and how to create a society based on reason, logic and merit.
English models
Some philosophes looked for ideas abroad, specially in England. Montesquieu's conception of the 'separation of powers', for example, was largely derived from the British political system.
Voltaire spent 3 years in voluntary exile in England and after praised its democratic processes, its rule of law, its freedoms of religion and spoken communication and its lack of arbitrary arrests and imprisonment.
All this stood in hitting contrast to France, where royal power was oftentimes used to silence or punish critics, dissidents and gratuitous thinkers.
The deists
Voltaire aside, nearly Enlightenment avoided attacks or sustained criticism of religion. Well-nigh philosophes were Christian deists, not atheists. They maintained a belief in God but considered God a more than benign figure than the vengeful, interventionist figure of the Old Testament.
The analogy favoured by some deists was God as a 'cosmic watchmaker', an all-powerful deity who had synthetic the universe simply left it to run according to natural laws. This reimagining of God, forth with other tenets of the Enlightenment, was criticised past the Catholic church.
Theological opposition to the Enlightenment was hardly surprising. For centuries, the church had served equally Europe's largest repository of wisdom and noesis. The political Enlightenment challenged the church'due south stranglehold over cognition, information and education. It as well threatened the privileges and protections it enjoyed from the country.
A surge in thinking and debate
The Enlightenment had a profound outcome on the ideology of the French Revolution. Well-nigh notable philosophes were expressionless long before the 1780s – and some of their writings pre-dated the revolution by decades (Diderot'southward start Encyclopedie was published in 1752, Voltaire's Letters on England in 1734, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws in 1748). None of these Enlightenment texts predicted or suggested a revolution in France.
Despite this, the Enlightenment created an ideological context for revolution. Its political questions triggered a moving ridge of word and contend, some of it organised and formalised in France's salons and circles. This upsurge of political ideas created an environment where questioning and criticising the quondam order was not merely possible, it was expected.
Chiefly, the political philosophy of the Enlightenment stripped away much of the magic and mystique of the Ancien Régime. The Bourbon kings were no longer seen every bit representatives of God; they were simply men. France's social hierarchies and inequalities were stripped of their ideological defences.
According to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ordinary people were born not simply with rights merely the correct to expect better government. It was on this platform of ideas that the French Revolution was synthetic.
A historian'due south view:
"Historians have long debated the exact relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In the minds of contemporaries, the Enlightenment laid the background for the Revolution's nearly of import ideas and agendas. Within two years of its outbreak in 1789, it sparked radical movements in U.k., Republic of haiti, and finally Ireland and Egypt. The days of the Enlightenment seemed halcyon – a war of words, a boxing of books – in comparing with the reality of trying to live in a democracy and keep organized religion with its principles."
Margaret C. Jacob
one. The Enlightenment was a long period of intellectual curiosity, scientific investigation and political debate. Information technology began in western Europe in the mid 17th century and connected until the terminate of the 18th century.
2. The Enlightenment was marked past a refusal to accept old knowledge, ideas and suppositions. Enlightenment writers and thinkers preferred to use logic, reason, experimentation and observation to reach conclusions.
three. The political Enlightenment examined the nature of human society, authorities and power. It also questioned the human relationship between the state and individuals, who were causeless to be built-in with natural rights.
4. In France, the Enlightenment emerged in the early on 1700s and was driven past writers and intellectuals called philosophes. Among their number were men like Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.
5. The philosophes of the French Enlightenment were mostly dead by the late 1700s so did not play a direct role in the revolution. Their ideas and writings lived on, however, stimulating word, sparking curiosity and creating an environment where revolutionary ideas could emerge and flourish.
Citation information
Title: "The Enlightenment"
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/enlightenment/
Date published: September twenty, 2020
Date accessed: April 14, 2022
Copyright: The content on this folio may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, delight refer to our Terms of Employ.
Source: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/enlightenment/