348 Ch. 9 • Enlightened Thought And The Republic: Of Letters
The philosophes’ belief in human dignity led them to oppose all forms of
despotism. Most spoke out against religious intolerance, torture, and slav
ery. (Yet an effective campaign against slavery, launched by the English
abolitionists of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787,
stood independent of the Enlightenment). Furthermore, some Enlighten
ment thinkers and writers recognized that contemporary assertions about
the inequality of women contradicted their understanding of nature.
Some philosophes had strong reservations about the ability of individuals
to develop equally. “As for the rabble,” Voltaire once said, “I don’t concern
myself with it; they will always remain rabble.’’ Those with power and influ
ence first must be enlightened, they reasoned, so that eventually everyone
could develop through education. However, Diderot, Montesquieu, and
Voltaire supported the right to divorce, but also opposed equal status for
women.
In their commitment to individual freedom the philosophes influenced
the subsequent history of the Western world. Whereas most people in the
eighteenth century still considered the monarchy to be the repository of
the public good, the philosophes proclaimed that the public had rights of its
own and that freedom was a good in itself. Enlightenment thought helped
create a discourse of principled opposition that would shake the founda
tions of absolutism. If the philosophes themselves were not revolutionaries,
many of their ideas in the context of eighteenth-century Europe were
indeed revolutionary.