The European Enlightenment

The story

“Dare to know!”

In the 18th century a new way of thinking spread across Europe, which Europeans called the “Enlightenment” (in French, “the Lights”): the idea that the light of reason could brighten the darkness of ignorance and superstition. Enlightenment thinkers believed that every person could use their own intelligence to understand the world, without accepting everything just because an authority said so, whether a king, a priest or tradition. In 1784 the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed it all up in a Latin phrase: “Sapere aude!”, meaning “Have the courage to use your own understanding!”.

This idea grew out of the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Galileo, Kepler and Newton had shown that the universe follows laws that can be discovered through observation and reasoning. The English philosopher John Locke had argued that we are born like a blank sheet of paper, that our ideas come from experience, and that people have natural rights: life, liberty and property. The Enlightenment thinkers reasoned: if reason works to explain nature, why shouldn't it also help to improve society?

The great thinkers

The centre of the Enlightenment was France. Montesquieu, a nobleman and jurist, explained in his book “The Spirit of the Laws” (1748) that to avoid tyranny the power of a state must be split into three parts: those who make the laws, those who carry them out and those who judge, so that no one controls everything. This is the “separation of powers”, still the foundation of democracies today. Voltaire, a brilliant and combative writer, fought for tolerance and freedom of thought. In 1763, in his “Treatise on Tolerance”, he defended Jean Calas, a Protestant unjustly sentenced to death in Toulouse, and managed to have his innocence recognised. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in “The Social Contract” (1762), argued that sovereignty belongs to the people, and that governments must respect the will of the citizens.

Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert edited the “Encyclopédie”, a great work in dozens of volumes that aimed to gather all human knowledge, from the sciences to the trades, and make it available to everyone.

The Café of Milan

Italy had great Enlightenment thinkers too. In Milan, Pietro Verri and a group of friends, among them Cesare Beccaria, founded a newspaper in 1764 called “Il Caffè” (“The Coffeehouse”), named that way because people debated in coffeehouses, the new places for meeting and conversation. They wrote short, clear articles on economics, science, literature and justice, for readers who were not specialists.

In 1764 Beccaria published a book that was to become famous across Europe, “On Crimes and Punishments”. He argued that laws must be clear and the same for everyone, that punishments must be fair and fit the crime, and that torture and the death penalty are cruel and pointless. The idea had an effect: in 1786 the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, led by Peter Leopold, became the first modern state to formally abolish the death penalty and torture.

Salons, coffeehouses, newspapers

Ideas travelled through salons, where nobles, writers and scientists talked and read books; through coffeehouses; through academies and lodges; and above all through books and newspapers, which were printed in ever greater numbers. Many books were banned by governments or by the Church, and were printed in secret or in other countries and smuggled across borders. Some rulers, the “enlightened despots”, such as Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia and the Emperor Joseph II of Austria, read the Enlightenment thinkers and made reforms: schools, kinder laws, religious tolerance, the abolition of old privileges. But they remained absolute rulers.

Limits and contradictions

The Enlightenment was not perfect. Many of its thinkers talked about equality but accepted slavery, or thought women were inferior; some looked down on other cultures. But its ideas were also used to criticise these limits: in 1791 the Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges wrote a “Declaration of the Rights of Woman”, and in 1792 the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft demanded for women the same right to education as men.