Summary Of The Enlightenment Salons

It can me asserted that the Enlightenment thinker’s ideas had the desired effect on France as France became more stable with the emergence of new bodies of power which would enforce just laws, the separation of church and state which would maintain stability within the stat, and the rise of Napoleon who came to save the disembodied France from ruin. The rise of the Jacobin Club and the Reign of Terror was a necessary evil as it revealed the need for a new body of power that wouldn’t allow for such an extremist group to rise and wreak havoc on society. “In addition, the middle-class members of the National Convention wrote a new constitution restricting eligibility to serve as a deputy to men of substantial means. Real power lay with a new five-man executive body, called the Directory. France’s new rulers continued to support military expansion abroad, but war was no longer so much a

← Doyle, William. The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. 2001

“Above all, perhaps, the rationalists of the eighteenth century aroused the social conscience of mankind and stimulated the humanitarianism.” The Enlightenment allowed a period of educational growth to begin. A new love for knowledge and debate sprung up throughout the century. Women joined in with the intellectual banter by starting salons. “If Voltaire transformed the thoughts, and Rousseau the feelings, of the eighteenth century, it was the salons of Paris that the new conceptions of ‘reason’ and ‘nature,’ of ‘free thought’ and the importance of the individual, were sifted, codified, and eventually imposed.” Women played a central role in the organization of these intellectual gatherings, holding them in their homes. They invited prominent, academically inclined men to join together to share ideas, in which the lady of the home regulated with agendas and topics. Women were able to be present when men spoke of the political, social, and

France stood as the center for the Enlightenment because it was in a constant dichotomy between “the desire to censor dissident ideas and the desire to appear open to modernity and progress” (Hunt, 4098). Parliament hindered the monarchy’s reform efforts by using their own words of Enlightenment influence against them. This was a paradox that showed how the Enlightenment affected all levels of French life, but was applied to achieve different results. While the American Revolution and the resulting new republic was regarded as a successful application of the Enlightenment, the unstable, failed attempts at change and reformation in France led to early signs of revolution as revolts “in the name of liberty” from 1787-1789.

The Enlightenment is said to have begun in the 1680’s, the same decade that the “Glorious Revolution” occurred, which crowned daughter of James II Mary and her husband Prince William of Orange Monarchs of England. This turning point in English history can be considered part of the Enlightenment due to the switch from an Absolute Monarchy to a Constitutional Monarchy and the passing of the English Bill of Rights in 1689 after William’s ascension to the throne.

Before the French Revolution began, people were openly expressing their dissatisfaction with French society through written means. The discontent comes from many areas, but a large focus comes from the nobility. Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism, Isabelle de Charrière, The Nobleman (1763), and Nicolas Toussaint le Moyne des Essarts, The Noailles Affair (1786), gives a clear representation of how the nobility is viewed in the second half of the eighteenth century. Writers represented most of French nobility as mainly being only concerned about their family heritage and luxurious privileges, which greatly corresponds with reality as can be seen in William Doyle’s The Oxford History of the French Revolution.

The Enlightenment was rife with skepticism, self-reliance and discovery. Voltaire’s Candide boasts each within its three main themes; the critique of philosophical systems (optimism, pessimism, and empiricism,) along with social criticism, and utopian ideologies. Voltaire viciously attacks the Church, the Aristocracy, and the Military. This was perfectly in line with the core ideals behind the enlightenment, a time where philosophers believed in using reason and scientific experiments in lieu of Christian dogma and tradition. Voltaires Candide perfectly encapsulates the ideology behind the Enlightenment through its’ illustrious acrimony and skepticism against the church, military, and philosophical systems.

The late seventeenth century, when the enlightenment began, was a period of great turmoil, which persisted at intervals throughout the succeeding century. Reason had led many thinkers to the conclusions that kings and queens were ordinary mortals, and that conclusion implied new kinds of uncertainty. Society in this period worked by the means of well-defined codes of behavior. Religion during this period was still very important to many people. Moliere’s “Tartuffe” is a great illustration on how religion affected people at that time. Moliere was very brave to write this story based on how the Catholic Church was influencing and blinding people. Women also played a huge part of the enlightenment period and society during this time. Women of the upper classes occupied an important place in the Enlightenment society, presiding over “Salons,” gatherings whose participants engaged in intellectual as well as frivolous conversation (Puchner 7). In the literature that we have read, society overlook women capabilities and their logic thinking. The story that was a great example of this is “Tartuffe “and “The Love Suicides At Amijima”. Throughout these two text you can easily point out the difference between a man and a woman role in society. In this essay, I will dive into how society played a factor in “Tartuffe” and “The Love Suicides at Amijima”.

As early as 1755 in Madame Geoffrin’s salon, Enlightenment thinkers including Rousseau and Voltaire assemble with elegantly dressed men, presumably the Bourgeois (Doc 5). Hearty reds reflect the exchange of conceptions to the literate Third Estate, listening to their ideas about how an uncensored democracy would function without an absolute monarch. Without effective representation in the French political system, this interaction results in thousands of frustrated commoners craving a system free from excessive labor. On August 26, 1789, King Louis XVI declares in a letter that “the King of France must conserve those privileges for [the clergy and nobility]” (Doc 4), with those luxuries being well-deserved. He refers to the rioting cries of the prevalent people protesting for lower taxes as plundering as if his people would never comprehend the struggles the first two estates experience. With the majority of French land and influence, the rabble still reimburses their habits and fills their banquets. With the slightest amount of Enlightenment ideas from the Bourgeois, peasants can understand what a people-oriented government is akin to, pushing the rift between the king and the genuine French

During the Enlightenment, meetings of Enlightenment ideas were held in France. On visual primary source document 1 and visual primary source document 2 you can see exactly the types of people at the meetings. Most of them were upper-class, aristocratic women. They would meet in salons, which is a large group gathering to discuss Enlightenment ideas. The people attending were not a good representation of the entire

The view that the Enlightenment had directly caused the French Revolution is considered as one of the oldest interpretations. When considering the reliability of this view, one must take into account the possibility that it has been outdated by other historians’ interpretations that have emerged afterwards. Revisionist historians such as William Doyle argue that the Philosophes themselves did not have revolutionary intentions. Doyle questioned the notion that the Enlightenment was the sole cause of the French Revolution by considering that even if the Philosophes had not inputted, the French Revolution might have still happened. (Adcock, 2004, p.27) But before the Enlightenment, inequality had existed under the ancien régime for hundreds of years-the culture of deference was imbedded within law and tradition.

The Enlightenment was a period when clusters of philosophers, writers, scholars, and aristocrats sharply debated standards and assumptions about women's rights in society. Issues that pertained to widening the women's sphere into more than just the household, questioning the ability of women to logic as men, and debating egalitarian co-educational opportunities for both boys and girls. This was a time when women started to come forth as intellectuals in response to the unbalanced status given to the “weaker” sex. Both male and female Enlightenment thinkers had opinions that spanned across each side of the issues. Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who in his novels, such as Emile,

The nobility of the Kingdom of France has been evaluated by various scholars of history. There is something to be said, however, for those who chronicled their impressions while living them in the 17th and 18th centuries. The excerpts of Charles Loyseau’s A Treatise on Orders, written in 1610, and Isabelle de Charriere’s The Nobleman, written in 1763 provide two very different glimpses on the French nobility from differing time periods. From these two accounts, it is clear that there was a marked shift in the way some viewed the nobility and their role in the operation of the French state. While Loyseau praises the nobility nearly wholeheartedly,

Two of most interesting ages in the English literature are the Enlightenment and the Romantic era. They are interesting because the Romantic era followed the Enlightenment era and criticized it.

In this piece I will be showing the role of women in the 18th century