In 1789 a change occurred in France that would alter her history for all time. The people overthrew the previously powerful French monarchy in a bitter revolt. How could this come to be?

        The aristocracy resented the absolute rule of the Bourbons.  Many of the noble families were wealthy and even related to the Bourbons and felt they did not get the appreciation for the part they play in maintaining the monarchical functions of the Bourbon family.  A new class also began to emerge in France at this time.  A middle class, made wealthy from trading, particularly overseas trading with the West Indies, and baking were town dwellers and became a powerful and numerous people in eighteenth century France.  They were known as the Bourgeoisie.  These people were neither nobles nor peasantry.  In a way, with their emergence the distinction between town and countryside deepened.  “The peasant frequently resented what he saw as exploitation by the town.”[3]  Services, such as charitable organisations, reasonable loan interests, medical facilities, and others, were much more readily available in the town.  Yet, in times of food shortage it was not those in the countryside, those who produced the food, that had plenty, but it was those in the town who rarely needed to worry about their next meal.  “The worst examples of widespread malnutrition were in the countryside”.[4]  These distinctions as well as the middle classes virtual exclusion from any political power clearly led to many tensions in pre-Revolutionary France.  It seemed that the poor would continue to get poorer and it would be the aristocrats, and the new bourgeoisie who would benefit from any progress that occurred in France.  “Perhaps most debilitating of all, however, was not poverty but insecurity and the universal assumption that the poor, acting independently, could achieve nothing.”[5]

        “Changing social mores marked the beginning of the Enlightenment, as individualism and rationalism gained widespread adherence in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Exploration, the weakening of traditional religion, and the decline of monarchical rule. All of these trends served to prepare Europe for the Enlightenment period “[6] The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement.  It began in the early 1700’s and continued to develop and progress through the century, reaching its height in the 1760’s and early 1770’s.  The Enlightenment can be said to be “a style, a set of attitudes, much more than a systematic body of doctrine”.[7]  Enlightenment thinkers believed that irrational religious influences and ideologies, antiquated laws and bad government were the obstacles to man’s happiness.  “Few thinkers of the period had any naïve belief in the inherent or absolute goodness of human nature.”7  However, the hope existed that through science, good government, the right educational climate and the rebuilding of human society through reason, the imperfect human could be capable of opening their mind and achieving great things.  The theories of the Enlightenment were complex and tended to differ, on varying levels, from philosopher to philosopher.  Writers such as Voltaire and Diderot published a number of texts, which encapsulated the thoughts behind the intellectual movement.  Voltaire’s texts included “Micromegas” (1752) and the “Dictionnaire Philosophique” which he published in 1764, at the height of the Enlightenments popularity.  Voltaire was opposed to conventional thinking, particularly the traditional “religious beliefs and prejudices….No one did more than he to spread the ideas of ‘natural religion’ and deism” [8]  Denis Diderot was another influential figure of the French Enlightenment.  In 1751-52 the “Encyclopédie: ou dictionnaire méthodique des sciences, des arts et des métiers” was published.  This text, published in twenty-eight volumes, was mainly due to the work of Diderot.  Its aim was to portray the full extent of human knowledge at this time.  It’s effect, as propaganda was powerful, as it popularised the radical ideologies of the French Enlightenment.  It was an enormously popular publication in Europe as a whole.  Diderot was completely against despotism, in all its forms, even among those that held the aura of enlightened despots.  Many other writers focused their writings and theories on other subjects; Holbach was anti-religion to the point of extreme atheism, Malby’s “De la Legeslation”, which he published in 1776 exemplified the “visionary and utopian aspects implicit in the whole system of ‘Enlightened’ ideas”.[9]

        Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an exceptionally unconventional thinker of the Enlightenment in France.  Through his theories he identified a new ideal of the state.  He claimed that it was the very essence of man living in a society, in a community that was also a state that sets human kind apart from the animals.  His most famous work is the “Contrat Social” (1762).  His Ideal for state was that of a General Will, whereby the wants of certain sectors of a community were set aside for the benefit of the community as a whole unit.  Whereby each and every individual in the state had an equal right to benefit the society.  He placed some heavy burdens of functionality upon his ideal stat, which he admitted could only ever operate in a small geographical areas with coherent societies, these functions for the state included:

• “Enforce a high degree of economic quality between individuals
• determine the education they received
• be supported by a state religion systematically preaching patriotism and civic virtue.”[10].  

Strictly supervised economic controls along with extreme patriotism featured highly in Rousseau’s ideal state.  Montesquieu, another French philosopher of the age held with the idea of a government where one power balanced another and no power had the authority to take total dominance.  “The monarch must be limited in his actions and by laws he could not override…to him despotism was the supreme evil.”[11]

        So the thinkers of the Enlightenment sought for a better society, with better government and a better standard of happiness and life for all peoples of the nation.  The Enlightenment was at its pinnacle some twenty years before the Revolution that brought the death knell to the Old Regime in France.  How much of an impact could it possibly have had on the developments of 1789?  Without the thinkers of the Enlightenment the Revolution would not have sought the ideals of fraternity, liberty and equality.  The Revolution in France took place on the wake of the American War of Independence.  Breaking from, former insufficient ways of rule – for the Americans, their position as a British colony; for the French the tyrannical despotism of Louis XVI and his predecessors – was in the air in a way never before seen or experienced.  The Declaration of the Rights of Man even resembles in its tone and content the Americans Declaration of Independence.  The dissent among the peasantry at the way they were treated in society, the nobles distaste for absolutism offered as a way of rule by the King, and the newly wealthy and educated Bourgeoisie all contributed to the outbreak of Revolution in 1789.  The destruction of absolutism in France marked a new departure for the world, and aided the beginning of the end for despots across Europe.  Without the discontent that existed among the population of France, no Revolution could have occurred, but without these great minds that hoped for a better life for men, the radicalism could not have grown into the refusal to yield that it became.  Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and those like them can truly feel that they made an impact on the world.