Where did the Enlightenment take place?
The Enlightenment was centered in France (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot), Britain (Locke, Hume, Smith), and the German states (Kant, Lessing), but spread across Europe and the Atlantic world. Parisian salons, Edinburgh's universities, and American colonial circles all served as hotbeds of Enlightenment thought, making it a truly transatlantic intellectual movement.
The Enlightenment was a geographically dispersed movement with distinct national expressions, though France is most commonly associated with it — the French term 'Les Lumières' (The Lights) is as commonly used as the English 'Enlightenment.'
France was the intellectual center. The philosophes — Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, d'Alembert, Rousseau, Condorcet — dominated European intellectual life from the 1740s to the 1780s. Parisian salons, hosted by educated women like Madame Geoffrin and Madame du Deffand, served as crucial venues for intellectual exchange. The Encyclopédie (1751–1772), edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, was the movement's most ambitious publishing project. French was the lingua franca of educated Europe, which gave French thinkers disproportionate influence.
Britain had its own distinct tradition. John Locke's political philosophy and Isaac Newton's science provided foundational ideas. The Scottish Enlightenment — centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow — produced David Hume (empiricist philosophy), Adam Smith (economics), Adam Ferguson (sociology), and important contributions to medicine, engineering, and historiography. The Scottish emphasis on practical improvement and moral philosophy gave the British Enlightenment a distinctive character.
The German Aufklärung produced Immanuel Kant, whose essay 'What Is Enlightenment?' (1784) provided the movement's most famous definition: 'Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.' Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn contributed to religious tolerance and Jewish emancipation. Frederick the Great of Prussia styled himself an enlightened monarch.
The Enlightenment also had important expressions in Italy (Cesare Beccaria's criminal justice reform), Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia (Catherine the Great's court), and the American colonies (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison). It was fundamentally a transatlantic phenomenon — ideas flowed between Europe and America continuously, and the American and French Revolutions were its most dramatic political expressions.