The Enlightenment

Somewhere in the Procope, the oldest café in Paris, a man in a silk coat is reading a pamphlet aloud to a table of lawyers, a printer, and a physician. The pamphlet argues that the king has no divine right to rule. That all men are born equal. That the Catholic Church has retarded human progress for a thousand years. The man reading is not whispering. He is performing. Everyone at the table knows that this pamphlet, if traced back to its author, could mean the Bastille. They order more coffee.

This was the texture of the Enlightenment. Not a revolution in the streets but a revolution in coffeehouses, salons, letters, journals, and books, some published anonymously, some smuggled across borders, many burned by the authorities. The ideas were explosive. The delivery system was paper and conversation. Between roughly 1685 and 1789, a loose network of European thinkers dismantled the intellectual foundations of monarchy, theocracy, and inherited privilege. They did it with arguments.

The consequences were not abstract. Within a generation, those arguments would topple the French monarchy, inspire the American Constitution, reshape legal systems across Europe, and establish principles of individual rights that remain the bedrock of liberal democracies. But in 1750, all of that was still in the future. The philosophes were writing. The monarchs were mostly not reading.