Introduction

Summary

The Encyclopédie

The reign of Louis XIV, le roi soleil, may have marked the epitome of absolutist government in Europe, but that achievement did not survive him. Although monarchical power, buttressed by divine right, had become unlimited in theory, it was in practice often ignored and occasionally even defied. The separate regions of France preserved their own traditions and administration, while the legal and tax privileges of the hereditary nobility and Church ensured that some of the most prosperous sections of society retained a vested interest in resisting the dominance of the throne. In the eighteenth century, moreover, new intellectual forces appeared which undermined thes piritual and moral authority of the French state. In their battleagainst superstition and intolerance, and by their call for a rational exercise of power, the philosophes of the Enlightenment challenged the assumptions of absolutism and condemned the brutalities of autocraticrule. Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau each championed liberal principles of toleration against religious bigotry and the despotic tendencies of unrestrained government, and they were rightly perceived by their contemporaries as opponents of the same dark forces of prejudice and injustice which still held sway under the ancien régime. Although they envisaged disparate, even in compatible, programmes of reform, they were united in seeing the prevalent institutions of politics, religion and society as corrupt. Each espousedideals of freedom against the despotisms of their day, and at least to this extent upheld a common cause of enlightenment.