Chapter 2 - A Great Republic of Cultivated Minds: 1712–1815

Summary

Following the devastating Wars of Religion that had plagued large parts of continental Europe from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new cosmopolitan spirit concerned with putting an end to internecine conflict as well as establishing the idea of a European civilization that was entitled to dictate the nature of any future world civilization. A preoccupation with the idea of Europe ran like a red thread through much Enlightenment thinking, commencing with a tract by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre first published in 1712 on the best means to establish peace in Europe, and including contributions from major writers and philosophers of the period, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Kant. In many respects, the idea of Europe during this period was of French, with the French language being considered the natural European language and French civilization the model for European civilization. Chapter 2 considers the flourishing of the idea of Europe during the Enlightenment, and in particular the way in which it served to a new global vision of civilization. It was in this period that European civilization and values were seen as universal, this Euro-universalism underlying the idea of cosmopolitanism.