The Enlightenment in France

Home , Frederick the Great, James Madison, Montesquieu, Voltaire

Charles-Louis de Secondat was born near Bordeaux, France, in 1689 to a historically military family that had become part of the nobility during the 1500s. His early education consisted of a combination of homeschooling and attendance at a school in the nearby village. Charles-Louis, at the age of eleven, attended the Collège de Juilly near Paris before enrolling at the University of Bordeaux in 1705 to study law. After receiving his degree in three years, Charles-Louis practiced law in Paris. His father passed away in 1713, which led him to return home. Charles-Louis married around this time and went on to have three children with his wife. In 1716, Charles-Louis’s uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu, died and left Charles-Louis his estate and title. The newly minted Baron de Montesquieu took full advantage of his new position and spent a great deal of time in Paris at the French court. His experiences influenced his writing of The Persian Letters, a commentary on the French government written from the perspective of a Persian visitor to France. Though many knew that it was Montesquieu who had published the often-biting work, he managed to avoid the harsh punishments generally associated with criticizing the French government at the time. Montesquieu’s success with The Persian Letters left him emboldened, and the young noble dedicated much of his time to improving his position at the French court, as well as to advancing his education. In 1728, the Baron de Montesquieu embarked on a three-year tour of Europe, during which he spent time in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Holland, Germany, and England. Upon returning to France, Montesquieu committed himself to studying and writing, and penned numerous works, for which he received minor and major acclaim. One of his most notable works is The Spirit of the Laws, which lauded the limited monarchy in England and made a strong case for the separation of powers in government, an idea that ultimately inspired James Madison and other framers of the U.S. Constitution. In addition to arguing for government reform, Montesquieu was also a staunch opponent of slavery, describing the institution as “the most shocking violation of nature.” Montesquieu lived out the rest of his life in France and died in 1755.

Voltaire

Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet in 1694, was the son of a middle-class family in France. His mother passed away when he was young, and his relationship with his father was often tenuous. This led young Voltaire to form a strong bond with his free-thinking godfather, the Abbé de Cháteauneuf. While studying at the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Voltaire witnessed firsthand the decline of French monarch Louis XIV as well as the religious persecution that ran rampant in France at this time. Following graduation, Voltaire took a position working at the French embassy at The Hague, but would return to France soon after. Around this time, Voltaire embarked on his journey to becoming one of France’s most renowned writers and philosophes, first endearing himself to French society with his clever verses and epigrams. Unfortunately for Voltaire, however, his fun at the expense of the Duc d’Orléans proved offensive to the nobleman and led to Voltaire’s banishment from France and later imprisonment in the Bastille in 1717. Despite his run-in with the law, Voltaire became one of the most prominent philosophes of his age and immersed himself in the writings of other great thinkers of his time, even going so far as to

1 learn English to read the works of John Locke. A quarrel between Voltaire and the Chevalier de Rohan led to Voltaire’s expulsion from France yet again, this time to England, where the young writer had the opportunity to immerse himself in the English Enlightenment. While in England, Voltaire met numerous English thinkers—among them Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift—and reveled in England’s broader freedoms of speech. Voltaire returned to France between 1728 and 1729, this time with enough wealth to assert his independence from patrons, and set about writing plays and histories, including his Histoire de Charles XII, a historical text that read like a novel and was tinged with his philosophical musings. In 1734, Voltaire’s controversial work Lettres Philosophiques precipitated a warrant for his arrest, leading the philosophe to take refuge with Madame du Châtelet, with whom he would embark on a lengthy affair. The couple, though spending a significant amount of time in Champagne, France, would later be forced to move from place to place to avoid various lawsuits and warrants. In 1745, Voltaire was named Royal Historiographer of France. After the woman he loved, Emilie du Châtelet, died, Voltaire moved to Prussia and became a member of Frederick the Great’s royal court, where he played an important role in encouraging the Prussian king’s support of the French military during the War of Austrian Succession. Once again, his writings brought conflict to a royal court, and Voltaire chose to leave Prussia rather than to retract his statements. He fled to Geneva, Switzerland, instead of returning to France. Voltaire wrote Candide, his most important and most famous work, in 1758. That same year, Voltaire bought his estate at Ferney, on the French-Swiss border, where he spent most of his remaining years entertaining guests, so many guests in fact, that he was dubbed the “Innkeeper of Europe.” Voltaire continued to dedicate himself to writing until his death in 1778.