How did the Enlightenment influence the Age of Revolutions?

The relationship between Enlightenment philosophy and the revolutionary movements of the late 18th century is one of the most direct connections between ideas and political action in world history. Enlightenment thinkers provided the intellectual ammunition that revolutionary leaders used to justify the overthrow of established authority.

The American Revolution drew explicitly on Enlightenment thought. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was essentially a condensed version of John Locke's political philosophy — the 'self-evident' truths about equality, natural rights to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' and the right to alter or abolish governments that violated these rights. The Constitution's separation of powers came directly from Montesquieu. Benjamin Franklin and other founders were deeply engaged with Enlightenment circles in France and Britain.

The French Revolution was even more consciously Enlightenment-driven. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) was a programmatic statement of Enlightenment principles — natural rights, popular sovereignty, equality before the law, freedom of expression, and property rights. Revolutionaries saw themselves as implementing what Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu had theorized. Rousseau's concept of the 'general will' was invoked (and distorted) during the radical phase to justify the Terror.

The Haitian Revolution took Enlightenment principles to their logical conclusion. If all men were truly born free and equal, then slavery was an intolerable violation of natural rights. Toussaint Louverture and other Haitian leaders used the language of the French Revolution — which France had conspicuously refused to apply to its enslaved colonial subjects — to justify their revolt. The Haitian Revolution exposed the Enlightenment's central contradiction: its failure to extend its own principles to non-white, non-European peoples.

The pattern repeated across Latin America, where Simón Bolívar and other liberators drew on both the Enlightenment and the examples of the American and French Revolutions to justify independence from Spain. The Age of Revolutions demonstrated that Enlightenment ideas were not merely academic — they were a political force that could topple empires.