Age Of Reason And The French Revolution Analysis

Despite the neglect for the importance of the intellectual origins from the Marxist school, a revolution has to be conceivable before it can take place. The Enlightenment’s critique of society and institutions, especially of despotism and the Church, laid foundations for a new order. Ideas of liberty, equality, the fellowship of man against oppression, democracy as an idealised solution, have all been accorded an important role. France saw even its peasants and artisans, thrown into turmoil by the thoughts of philosophes, making intellectual history a major area of inquiry.

The Link Between the Age of Reason and the French Revolution

When the influence of the Enlightenment on the revolution, is put to question, a tendency to blame the

Daniel Mornet began the modern discussion of the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. While studying hundreds of eighteenth century private libraries, Mornet could only find one copy of the Social Contract. This ineffectiveness of the Enlightenment was demonstrated by Joan Macdonald who published that the readership of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract was limited to only a few thousand people prior to 1789. Although the arguments may seem persuasive, Mornet’s finding have been viewed as inaccurate, therefore, devaluing the findings of Macdonald and other historians because of misleading figures being their

In his Reflections on the French Revolution, he blames the philosophes for their abstract ideologies that were incapable of accommodating the complexity of human nature and their rejection of the divinity of the monarchy that was the foundation of the constitution. Although, its influence over the population is debatable prior to 1789, which saw a publication of the thoughts of philosophes. The periods between the 1748 to 1770 clearly laid the base for a forum to critique traditional institutions but it was not till the collapse of political order that these ideals became widespread. taking Lefebvre’s argument that the Enlightenment had been the ideology of the bourgeoisie, and the evidence that sales of the Encyclopédie were particularly high within the upper classes supports this notion that the bourgeoisie, along with the nobility collectively knows as the ‘notables’, felt with conviction that they had become enlightened and must create a liberal state to promote the individual. This argument is further supported as the readership of the philosophes did not extend to the peasants in pre-revolutionary France and the restrictions on publishing determined the influence of the Enlightenment. The influence of intellectual ideals poses a reconsideration of the Enlightenment, as something that was perhaps more influential than first