The philosophes, in France and elsewhere, were seldom content to chat about these ideas among themselves. They were out in the public arena agitating for change.
This led to an important political debate, especially in France. In France the gap between the claims of the state and its feeble powers was large. French progressive thinkers were challenged in a way that their English counterparts were not. And the intense debate in Paris and elsewhere was very influential throughout continental Europe, as foreign intellectuals faced similar if not worse problems of backwardness in their own countries.
All the philosophes had a roughly similar diagnosis of the political and social problems they faced in France; all shared in admiration for progressive England. But when it came to building a free society at home, there were disagreements.
One prominent and early philosophe, Montesquieu, for instance, saw a too-strong monarchy as the cause of France's problems.
His Spirit of the Laws , (1730s), argued that a good constitution must be a balanced one: no single body or institution could rule well. It was the balance that Montesquieu thought he saw in England, and which was lacking in France, that he envied and promoted. Later, influenced the American constitution's writers.
It is interesting that most of the philosophes disagreed strongly with Montesquieu. Montesquieu, who was himself a member of the nobility of the robe, the families that had been ennobled by holding office, might think that it would be good to have the aristocracy take a greater role in the government. Other philosophes saw the privileges of this group as being a big part of the problem, and in no way a solution. It was the structure of privilege itself that had to be dismantled.
How to do this? The obvious answer was reform from above. France needed a strong legislator, an absolute king, who could introduce and enforce the reforms so desperately needed.
Example: Voltaire's history of Louis XIV. He wrote a history of the Sun King's time, and throughout the book, royal, even absolute power was viewed positively. When Louis went wrong, it was because he misused his power, or refused to use it. Those who resisted Louis were almost entirely despicable. [Peter Gay]
A similar attitude was shown by the physiocrats. The physiocrats were a school of economists who not only said that statecraft could be a science, but also claimed that they had already invented it. Their scheme depended on an absolute ruler to put it into action. As Du Pont de Nemours said, "The idea of several authorities in the same state suggests nothing less than absurdity." [Bruun 35]
To such people the 18th c. French monarchy was a grave disappointment. Frustrated, disappointed French philosopes sometimes found it easy to believe that distant rulers were models for the enlightened monarchs to come.
The eighteenth century was an era of improving monarchs, especially in Eastern Europe. This was a matter of practical politics. The three realms that dominated the eastern half of the continent, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, were ramshackle and economically backward. In such places monarchs had to be energetic just to hold his or her realm together.
Thus eastern rulers had common problems and common interests. They wanted to transform their heterogenous possessions into powerful and docile states.
It was quite possible to become an improving monarch without being influenced in the slightest by the Enlightenment. Peter the Great of Russia is the best example. Peter died in 1725 and thus lived and ruled before there was a recognizable Enlightenment. He was a ruthless pragmatist with little formal education and not a trace of liberalism or human sympathy, but he worked strenuously to destroy a backward, traditional set of values and substitute up-to-date values that would make Russia a military and political power truly subject to his will.
But Peter cut a fine figure because he was successful, making Russia a real force in Europe. Nor was he only a warlord. Peter had a keen appreciation of the need for economic progress. A pragmatic man like this attracted a certain admiration from the philosophes.
Voltaire, in his history of the Swedish king Charles XII, compared the warlike Charles unfavorably to Peter: Peter, thought Voltaire, knew how to build up a country, not just how to fight. He was also an example of how a strong executive could cut through the weight of tradition to make practical improvements.
Similarly Maria Theresa of Austria a conservative Catholic, but a pragmatic reformer.
Yet there was a connection between the political theories of the philosophes and the practice of eighteenth century rulers. It was not a simple one perhaps: and it was definitely a two-way street. Philosophes admired some of the stronger rulers of the day and urged them to adopt their program. So-called enlightened despots appealed to current ideas of progress and to individual thinkers to justify their actions, and once in a while actually did adopt enlightened prescriptions as policy.
Perhaps the three most important enlightened despots were:
Catherine was even better:
In the years after 1760, it seemed like the whole world was gradually following the path laid down by the philosophes.
But both despots and agitators were soon disappointed with each other. The philosophes were better at laying down broad principles than at devising practical plans.
Note the exchange quoted by Geoffrey Bruun between a leading physiocrat [Mercier de la Rivière] and Catherine the Great (in lecture).
His advice boiled down to this: a ruler was to study the laws God "has evidently" -- that is, obviously -- "engraved in the very organization of man." [Bruun 35 from Higgs, The Physiocrats 88] Not a very satisfying answer, really little different from what Thomas Aquinas might have said in the 13th century.
The philosophes for their part became disillusioned with both the persons and the policies of their supposed champions, who often enough were, strange to say, despotic.
Skepticism was warranted. If liberation and not merely rationality was important, then the enlightened despots were antithetical to nlightenment.
Frederick never pretended to have any faith in the human race, and his committment to progress implied no belief in freedom. Joseph II complained when he met opposition to his plans; his response was to step up the censorship that he had so recently relaxed. Other examples in lecture.
Thus the philosophes began to detect a problem that would haunt the makers of the French Revolution well before the revolution broke out. How does one create a free society? New ideas of freedom were resisted not welcomed, even by those who would benefit. Could one force men to be free? Could an enlightened despot remained enlightened?
Some still believed this: Turgot, when he took charge of Louis XIV's government in the 1770s, prayed, "Give me five years of despotism and France shall be free." [Bruun 97] Was this actually possible?
It would be wrong to say that the ideas of the enlightenment had no practical effect on the politics of Europe. It made a difference, I think, that the new bunch of absolutists appealed to natural law rather than to God to justify their power, that even a good Catholic Hapsburg could attack monasteries as a drag on society.
Other, more immediate and practical changes inspired in part by the Enlightenment, lay in the field of justice. Ideas about the role of punishment were changing. In many places, torture as a tool of state control was eliminated or curbed, and that was an undoubted advance.
Third, the very idea of privilege came under a forceful attack. As Bruun has said, "these reforming monarchs taught contempt for privilege and tradition." This is not to say that they eliminated privileges in any systematic way. Often they guaranteed them in exchange for political support. But political expectations had been changed.
Until things began to go badly wrong in Paris in 1791, the philosophes and those they had taught were not unduly discouraged. For there was one place where all the promise of Enlightenment seemed to have been fulfilled. That was America, where something really new had happened, a new society had been created explicitly on the best philosophical principles. If enlightened ideas could actually be implemented there, then things were not hopeless elsewhere. This bright expectation is an important part of the background of the French Revolution.
Peter Gay The Enlightenment: An Interpretation vol 2, The Science of Freedom
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