A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Enlightened Ideas 323

traveled beyond the country, its pattern of distribution in the 1770s and
1780s reflected the success of the enterprise (see Map 9.1). The Encyclope­
dias prospectus and booksellers’ advertisements assured potential buyers that
ownership would proclaim one’s standing as a person of knowledge, a
philosophe. In northern Germany and Scandinavia, customers were described
as “sovereign princes’’ and “Swedish seigneurs.” A few copies reached African
settlements, including the Cape of Good Hope. Thomas Jefferson helped
promote the Encyclopedia in America, finding several subscribers, among
them Benjamin Franklin. King Louis XVI of France owned a copy. There
was an Italian edition, despite the opposition of the Church. However, in
Spain, Inquisition censorship frightened booksellers and buyers alike, and
in Portugal only a few copies got by the police.
The Encyclopedia implicitly challenged monarchical authority. Jean­
Jacques Rousseau wrote enthusiastically about representative government
and even popular sovereignty, and came close to espousing a republic. After
initially tolerating the project, French royal censors banned Volume 7 in
1757, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Louis XV. Diderot,
whose first serious philosophical work had been burned by the public exe­
cutioner, was briefly imprisoned. In the 1770s, the French state again tol­
erated the Encyclopedia, which it now treated more as a commodity than
as an ideological threat to monarchy or Church. The small subsequent
skirmishes fought over the volumes had more to do with rivalries between
publishers, between those privileged with official favor and those without.
In this way, Diderot’s grand project symbolized the ongoing political strug­
gles within the French monarchy itself.

Rousseau

The place of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778) in the Enlightenment is

far more ambiguous than that of Diderot and his Encyclopedia. Rousseau

embraced human freedom, but more than any other of the philosophes,

Rousseau idealized emotion, instinct, and spontaneity, which he believed

to be, along with reason, essential parts of human nature.

The son of a Geneva watchmaker, Rousseau, a Protestant, went to Paris

as a young man in the hope of becoming a composer. The arrogant, self­

righteous Rousseau received an introduction into several aristocratic Pari­

sian salons, informal upper-class gatherings at which ideas were discussed,

where he became friendly with Diderot. In 1749, the Academy of Dijon

(an academy in France was a regular gathering of people to discuss ideas,

and, as we shall see below, a way that enlightenment thought spread) spon­

sored an essay contest on the question of whether the progress of science

had strengthened or weakened morality. Rousseau’s first-prize essay con­

cluded that primitive or natural humanity had embodied the essential

goodness of mankind and that for humanity to be happy, new social and

political institutions would be necessary.