A new class of merchants emerged when the wealth brought back from Asia and the Americas started to attract a bunch of people. These people had their own ideas of how the world should be and they became major agents of change in arts, government and economy. They became so wealthy and powerful that they were able to partially displace the aristocracy’s power that had been rooted in the ownership of land.
During the Renaissance individualism was shown strongly in arts but now the new merchant class, who were naturally convinced that their earnings were the result of their individual merit and hard work, unlike the inherited prosperity of the traditional aristocracy, in a sense spread the idea of individualism also elsewhere than in their own circles and it became a core value in European life.
The Position of State and Church
In the 17th century Europe was strongly dominated by dogma and fanaticism. Protestants and Catholics had turned their guns at each other and people could be imprisoned for attending the wrong church. Censorship was strict and ruled by church and state, often working hand in hand. The despotic monarchs were supported by the doctrine of ‘Divine Right of Kings’, which showed that the revolution was detested by God. Speakers of sedition or blasphemy quickly found themselves imprisoned or even executed. There had been plenty of intolerance and dogma to go around in the Middle Ages, but the emergence of the modern state made its tyranny much more efficient and powerful.
As the churches and state were keeping up with the despotic regime and simultaneously, mainly the churches, fighting against each other it was natural for people to start wondering whether any of them deserved the authority they claimed. That was the beginning for the rebellious change that was to come and take possession of Europe and also America.
Thinkers of the Enlightenment
This same idea of changing the society and the system of government also emerged in the debates of rationalist thinkers such as Voltaire who I mentioned already before. However, it wasn’t totally new to question the authority of for example the church. Already in the 16th century various humanists (who weren’t by the way as anti-religious as the term expresses nowadays) had begun to ask dangerous questions. Francois Rabelais, a rebellious French monk, challenged the church’s authority in his Gargantua and Pantagruel by ridiculing many religious doctrines as absurd.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment wanted to renew the society and base it on common sense and tolerance. They wanted the government to have consent of the people and they wanted it to be devoted to the well-being of the people. They wanted the people to have more individual liberty and freedom of worship.
There were many thinkers and movements in the Enlightenment that split up and ranged widely – they even argued with one another. But still, when it comes to religion, they all participated in one project. They always tried to replace those different traditions and religious beliefs that ruled the mankind with a new moral that had a rational and universal authority. Everybody believed by common consent that the basic values of civilized people were fundamentally equal.
But what they wanted to replace the religion with was science. Science had improved in various areas since the 17th century and it was easier to rely on it now. According to their way of thinking Nature would create a perfect world and human beings should try to interfere as little as possible to what Nature does.
Voltaire
Francois-Marie Arouet, i.e. Voltaire, was, as already said, one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment. His aim in life was to set the European life on a new basis by creating a follower to Christianity. Voltaire’s basic principal was that the command of the church had to submit to the command of the Science. With most of his life-work he did, he concentrated explicitly to inventing a modern religion, even though it remained from time to time in the shadow of his hatred towards the dogmas of Christianity.
Voltaire was an active writer. His writings weren’t anyway original; he mainly applied the thoughts of other philosophers. However, he illustrated and demonstrated the limits and conflicts of the Enlightenment better than any other philosopher at that time.
Voltaire was sent to prison for his writings and he even had to live in exile because neither the church nor the state accepted what he was trying to do. While he was in England in exile he learned a lot from the local thinkers and they exchanged their views of the world. This was one of the ways the English and the French Enlightenment were influenced by each other.
Enlightenment’s Effects on Society back then
Just to summarize, I’ll repeat what the Enlightenment caused back then in the 18th and 19th centuries in case it hasn’t been clearly enough expressed before.
Enlightenment was time of changes. Basically everything changed during the Enlightenment when people started to think for themselves and didn’t just go with the flow. The philosophers and thinkers of Enlightenment only fed the idea that had already been born in the minds of usual town-dwellers.
Church didn’t play that big a role in the people’s life anymore and nor was there a despotic monarch in command of the state due to revolutions.
Revolutions as the Consequences
As the thoughts of Enlightenment spread throughout Europe, they also reached America where many of the intellectual leaders of the American colonies were drawn to the Enlightenment. Thoughts traveled across the Atlantic in both ways: from Europe to America and vice versa.
There was a rather big disagreement about the taxes between the Great Britain and its colonies: this detonated when the Westminster Parliament decided about the new taxes without letting the colonists participate. The rights of the colonists, who were still British citizens, were thereby violated and they decided to break the English monopoly of tea trade. Britain’s counterblow was to occupy the American coast and prevent export or import of any goods. On July 4th the Declaration of Independence was published and it was totally conformable to the Enlightenment-way-of-thinking. Before the Declaration of Independence the Congress, which was a congress formed by the 13 colonies, had declared that they should be independent states and therefore the State of Great Britain should be dissolved. After France and Spain, that were major enemies of Great Britain, had given their military support to the new Republic, Britain had to give in to its independence in 1783.
France’s economic situation had worsened due to its participation in the American War. But the war wasn’t the only reason for their bad situation. Bad harvests in two consecutive years, 1787 and 1788, had caused serious supply problems and the transport of the remaining goods wasn’t easy either, due to the hazardous system of transport. The King Louis XVI was hopeless with the situation and his difficulties caused some serious political problems as well.
In 1789 the King summoned the Estates General, which consisted of the clergy, the nobility and the third estate meaning the bourgeoisie and the peasants. This assembly was supposed to come up with a way to reform the French government. But the nobility and the clergy were not willing for a change, which was quite obvious because they were doing perfectly fine; they had money and they had power. But the third estate, that represented the majority of the nation, meaning basically the poor, needed a change.
The dwellers were getting riotous with the uncertainty and unemployment and on July 14th they attacked the royal prison of Bastille and freed the prisoners. On the following day the King agreed to the tricolor flag and the monarchy was in a sense overthrown.
THE EFFECTS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Why did all that happen?
The eras before the Enlightenment all forecasted a huge change at some point. Already the Renaissance changed a lot but Enlightenment took it to another level. The monarchs and the church had always submitted the people and now they had had enough. Now they were ready to rise against the rulers and say what they had in mind. Along the Renaissance and other changes people had become braver and they had the courage to start imagining the world differently than what it was: without the despotic kings and arbitrary churches. They dreamed of their own liberty and better prosperity. They were open to new situations.
Therefore it’s not such a big surprise that the ideas of Enlightenment were so easily spread among the people – the people needed those ideas. The Enlightenment thinkers just put the dreams of the average dwellers into words and in a sense made them come true.
Enlightenment’s Impact on Today’s Society
If we think about how the way of thinking during the Enlightenment has inherited to the nowadays Europe we might even say that Voltaire, who we had a little closer look at before, succeeded with his project: Christianity no longer forms the basis of the European life. It has been replaced by the faith in humanity, just like the Enlightenment wanted. When it comes to what Voltaire wanted the world to be like, it has not fully come true though. But anyway, the ideology of the Enlightenment has affected on us immensely – it’s nearly in our blood.
In many ways Enlightenment has never been more alive than now. The notions of the human rights are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples everywhere, who appeal to the same notion of natural law as the Enlightenment thinkers did.
The way of thinking inherited from the Enlightenment has become a basic part of our self-concepts and we cannot really deny the Enlightenment without in a sense abandoning ourselves.