by Ian Mortimer
At the heart of the Enlightenment was the 28-volume Encyclopédie, edited in Paris by Denis Diderot andJean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert. This work, which was in the press for nearly twenty years (1752–71), was like an eternal flame around which the butterflies of genius fluttered – among them Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Turgot and Louis de Jaucourt (who wrote a quarter of the Encyclopédie single-handedly). But the whole project was much more than the sum of its parts: it was an attempt to realign mankind’s relationship with the natural world exclusively along the lines of reason, without recourse to magic, superstition or religion. Dividing all knowledge into three branches – memory, reason and the imagination – the editors created a taxonomy that left no room for matters such as divine will or spiritual intercession. Their purpose can be summed up in the single thematic heading to which they subjected the entire work: understanding.
Underpinning the ambitions of the editors and contributors was a self-perpetuating concept of social progress. Turgot explained this in his Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind in 1750. He started off with the premise of deism: that God was the ‘prime-mover’ of the universe – a concept that Thomas Aquinas had originally offered in the thirteenth century as part of his proof for God’s existence. In the language of the Enlightenment, God was the great clockmaker who had simply set the world going and then left it alone. Slowly humanity had emerged from its state of nature and passed through three stages – hunter-gatherer, pastoral and agricultural – until finally arriving at the fourth and final stage, the commercial. Along the way, the ability to generate ever greater agricultural and manufacturing surpluses had facilitated the transition from one stage to the next. For Turgot, the evidence that this was indeed ‘progress’ lay in the fact that mankind was constantly adding to the existing body of knowledge. Thus humanity would continue to advance forever more, he reasoned, on account of it being in our nature to enquire into things.
Progress could also be applied to political history. Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau were all heavily influenced by the constitutional monarchy that had been established in England in 1688–9. Voltaire spent three years as a political exile in England, during which time he learnt English and developed a deep fondness for the country. ‘How I love English boldness!’ he declared in a letter about Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704). ‘How I love those who say what they think.’16 Unfortunately for him, he was so much in favour of the English theory of government, and so keenly opposed to the French absolutist monarchy that, after he returned to France, a copy of his Lettres Philosophiques (1734) was burnt by the royal hangman. Voltaire took the hint and left Paris for a second time. Thereafter he acquired a reputation as an intellectual maverick and a rebel – despite a stint as the official royal historiographer in the 1740s. From 1760 he took up the causes of various victims of state oppression, publishing essays and tracts in defence of those unjustly tortured and killed by the state. These acts of moral outrage, coupled with the phenomenal success of his novella Candide (1759), in which he satirised the optimistic philosophy of Leibniz’s Théodicée and heavily criticised both the Church and the government, made him a champion of liberty and a national celebrity.
The inequalities of society were even more sharply criticised by Voltaire’s contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Hobbes and Locke in the previous century, Rousseau’s starting point in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men (1754) was mankind in a state of nature. Unlike Hobbes, who believed that natural Man was unable to comprehend morality and therefore had to have been wicked, Rousseau argued that in a state of nature, Man was neither moral nor immoral but essentially good because the evils that arose from society were not there to tempt him. Rousseau’s natural Man did not have the language to express hatred. He was interested only in his self-preservation and in securing enough food, sleep and female companionship. He could not comprehend death. Rousseau’s natural Man thus strikes the modern reader as a happy-go-lucky chap. But adversity forced him to guard against poor weather and the threats of wild beasts – not only for himself but on behalf of his fellow men. As Rousseau concluded:
From the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.17
In his most influential work, The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau set out to understand the limits of freedom within society. The book starts with the famous lines: ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.’ Rousseau goes on to argue that a state is unjust if it unduly represses the freedom of the individual. For a state to be legitimate it must be composed of two elements: a sovereign power, representing all the people to express the general will and devise the laws; and a separate agency, the government, which enforces those laws and the general will. For Rousseau it was important that people should participate in the government of the state, not merely be represented by it. Whatever might be required of an individual by the state should be performed immediately and without question, but nothing can justly be asked of a person unless it is in support of the general will. Ownership of property is granted back to its apparent owner by the state as a right. The book had a huge impact. Rousseau’s and Voltaire’s works provided intellectual arguments for liberalism and democracy and thus the strongest theoretical justification for the French Revolution. Fittingly, the two authors died within a few weeks of each other in 1778, Voltaire on 30 May and Rousseau on 2 July.
Part and parcel of the social theory of the Enlightenment was the conclusion that society should be less intolerant of dissent. We need to remember that at the start of the century the persecution of minority religions was still increasing. The Edict of Nantes (1598), which had allowed French Protestants to worship freely, was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685. All the Huguenot churches were pulled down and their schools closed; hundreds of thousands of people were forced into exile. The Toleration Act of 1689, by which non-conforming English Protestants were allowed to worship in their chapels, was followed by a series of harsher measures against Catholics that same year, ensuring that they did not reside within ten miles of London. More English anti-Catholic measures were passed in 1700. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, with the arguments of Voltaire, Rousseau and Turgot enjoying popular support in France and further afield, the tide began to turn. Louis XVI finally granted freedom of religion to all Frenchmen in 1787. Four years later, Catholics were permitted to practise their religion in Great Britain. They still weren’t allowed to hold offices or attend university, but it was a start.
Another indicator that liberalism was gradually permeating society was a changing attitude towards extramarital sex. Although the restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660 had seen the abolition of the legislation that required the death penalty for adulterers, prosecutions for illicit sexual acts continued well into the eighteenth century. Adulterers, fornicators and prostitutes were flogged publicly in London, carted around the city and shamed by being named on posters or ‘black lists’ put up in their parish of residence. On Sundays, clergymen would read out the names of offenders in church and force them publicly to confess their sexual transgressions. Some were sentenced by magistrates to do hard labour. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, over a thousand prosecutions a year were brought by societies established to police the morals of the city.18 But gradually the fury abated. Not only could the London societies not keep up with the growth of the capital and its exponentially increasing appetite for sex but such prosecutions came to be regarded as unfair because action was only taken against the poor.19 The idea of liberty added fuel to the debate. Could a prosti
tute be arrested for soliciting? No: as soliciting was not against the law, locking her up would be contrary to the terms of Magna Carta. And what about adultery? Was it against the natural law, and thus beyond the limits of tolerance? Or did it simply contravene the law of the Church, and was thus something for which the Enlightened response was laissez-faire – leave it be? Locke himself had been of the opinion that if a man had children with one or more women outside wedlock, it would not be contrary to natural law, but he was careful not to say so in public. The debate was most neatly resolved by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), where he noted that lust was an appetite and ‘confinement of the appetite was not natural’.20 Indeed, procreation was the very basis of society.
By 1750, the idea that men and women were free to do what they wanted with their bodies in private was beginning to enjoy widespread support. The literary evocation of this principle can be seen in the novels that were published in England in 1748–9. These included Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, both of which play with sexual themes outside wedlock. The same year saw the publication of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, an overtly pornographic novel in which almost all the non-bestial sexual vices appear. The equivalent visual stimulus was provided in France after 1740 by Boucher in his paintings, which were unashamedly erotic pictures of naked pretty young women in provocative poses. For those who wanted actually to partake of the pleasures of the flesh, prostitution became more obvious than it had been for the previous two centuries. From 1757 the names and services of all the good, bad and really bad prostitutes in the fashionable West End of London were published in a directory, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. The royal tradition of taking mistresses, so dutifully observed by Charles II and Louis XIV, and shared by many members of the aristocracy on both sides of the Channel, was happily adopted by the emerging middle classes for whom sex was just another commodity. Southern European countries had always been somewhat more sophisticated when it came to sexual behaviour. The Catholic city state of Venice had always been comparatively tolerant of illicit love affairs but you could argue that it too became more liberal in the eighteenth century – it produced Giacomo Casanova.
Liberal ideas were also to be seen in the spread of humanitarianism. Elizabeth, empress of Russia, abolished the death sentence in 1744, much to the displeasure of most of her countrymen.21 In Italy Cesare Beccaria published On Crimes and Punishment (1764), in which he argued that there was never any justification for the state to take a life; life imprisonment was a far better deterrent, he argued, because of its long duration. Leopold II of Tuscany abolished the death penalty accordingly in 1786. Voltaire introduced the French edition of Beccaria’s work in 1766 and it appeared in English in 1767. Even those countries that retained the death penalty reduced the frequency of their judicial killings. The execution rate in Amsterdam declined by a sixth; in London it went down by about a third.22
The effect of Enlightenment liberalism is even more noticeable when considering legal cruelty. Agonising punishments and officially sanctioned torture now seemed to say more about the tyranny of the state than the malice of the offender. In England the prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ in the Bill of Rights (1689) meant that customary sentences such as loss of a hand or limb fell into disuse. The pillory was less frequently employed from 1775, the whipping of women was discontinued from about the same time, and branding was replaced with a fine in 1779. The last woman burnt in England for petty treason (the murder of a husband or employer) was incinerated in 1784, and the last woman burnt for high treason met a similar fate in 1789. Long before burning at the stake was finally abolished in 1791, humanitarian concerns led to an unofficial arrangement whereby condemned women were mercifully garrotted by the executioner as soon as the fire was lit. Some women were acquitted simply because juries felt that such a horrifying punishment was disproportionate to their crime. The same can be said for many men who would otherwise have been hanged. Englishmen were increasingly transported to America (until 1776) or Australia (from 1787) rather than being sent to the gallows. In the 1770s, John Howard campaigned for the reform of Britain’s prisons, regarding imprisonment itself as a cruel and degrading treatment. In France too, the cruelty diminished. The last Frenchman to be burnt alive for consensual sodomy died in 1750 and the last for male rape in 1783. There was even a move to abolish the death penalty altogether in France in 1791. Unfortunately, any aspirations Revolutionary France had to create a more tolerant state went out of the window shortly afterwards. All things being considered, however, the cruelty of the French Revolution should be seen as an exception to the general trend of humanitarianism, not the end of it.
Economic theory
Until the late eighteenth century most European nations followed a series of economic principles that are collectively labelled mercantilism. The basic thinking was that there was only so much wealth in the world, and that the more of it you could amass, the less there was for your rivals. Governments therefore sought to limit the money available to foreign powers by preserving a positive balance of trade; at the same time, they looked to enrich themselves by profiting from their own citizens’ trading activities. Ministers created monopolies and franchises – the monopoly on trade in the East Indies, for example – and then granted or sold those monopolies to companies, which sought to profit from the exclusive rights they had acquired. Domestic trade was exploited in a similar way, through the levying of tolls and customs. The system reached its apogee in France, where, prior to his death in 1683, Jean-Baptiste Colbert presided over a vast bureaucracy intent on exacting charges and fines, effectively milking every trade by means of regulation. Shortly afterwards, people started to voice criticism of such restrictive economic policies. In the 1690s the seigneur de Belesbat proposed that rather than spending valuable resources fighting the Dutch to capture their trade monopolies, the French should compete with them commercially – a radical new approach, in which liberty and private investment rather than state control were the platforms for success. Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert, similarly argued for free trade and the limitation of government interference. However, mercantilism remained firm. The idea of pursuing economic growth through a policy of encouraging free trade remained beyond the grasp of most political leaders.
Cracks finally began to appear in this economic stone wall in the early eighteenth century. One was the ability to increase the money supply through the creation of paper money. Another was inflationist theory – the belief that more money circulating in the economy was better for all. The combination of the two could have dramatic results. A Scottish inflationist, John Law, was appointed head of the French central bank in 1716, with responsibility for paying off the French national debt. Using his position as head of the new Mississippi Company in America, he issued banknotes guaranteed by the vast tracts of land waiting to be claimed in the New World. In this way he was able to flood the economy with cash, which in turn should have helped the government pay off the national debt. So huge were the sums held by investors as a result that a new word, ‘millionaire’, was coined to describe them.23 However, schemes based on unrealisable assets are doomed as they depend on unshakeable confidence and infinite naivety. Law’s system crashed in 1720, the same year as a similar share-based scheme in England, the South Sea Company, collapsed. The immediate consequence of these events was, of course, to scare off speculators, but others could see that economic theory should have had a part to play in limiting the damage. It became more important to understand what was going on in the economy.
This growing interest in economics was accompanied by the rise of statistics. By 1600 the English government had started collecting data on the number and causes of deaths in and around London, in order to quantify the effects of the outbreaks of plague. These figures were published, annually, and in 1662 John Graunt used them to produce the first work of statistical analysis, Natural and Political Observati
ons Made upon the Bills of Mortality. At the same time, a government minister, Sir William Petty, who had been a personal secretary to Thomas Hobbes, wrote several economic treatises in which he pioneered his ‘political arithmetic’, as he called it, or arguments based on ‘number, weight and measure’. Not only did he start accounting for the national income, he also developed a primitive version of the quantity theory of money, which tries to explain the relationship between changes in the money supply and prices. Petty sought to establish the economic potential of a limited amount of cash and decided that its effectiveness depended on how quickly it changed hands. His statistical methods did not convince everyone: Jonathan Swift famously satirised the approach in his A modest proposal (1729), in which he calculated in Petty-like arithmetical language how the poor people of Ireland could make enough money to feed themselves by annually breeding and selling 100,000 surplus children to be eaten by the rich. Nevertheless, Petty indicated that by adopting a mathematical approach, an astute economist could calculate the path to national prosperity as surely as astronomers could compute the future position of the planets. In 1696 the statistician Gregory King went a step further when he drew up a detailed and surprisingly accurate compilation of the nation’s wealth according to class and region. Parts of this appeared in print in Charles Davenant’s Essay upon the balance of trade in 1699. It marks the first serious attempt to account for the wealth of a nation.