The Enlightenment inspired the French Revolution

The argument

This argument traces the French Revolution to the intellectual movement that preceded it, and does so in three steps: an idea, the class that absorbed it, and the document in which it became a political demand. The idea came from the philosophical movement of the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, which inspired the questioning of authority figures and embraced the view that society as a whole could be improved through rational change. Both halves matter. The first made existing arrangements answerable rather than simply given; the second supplied the belief that they could be redesigned deliberately, so that criticism of the old order pointed toward replacing it rather than merely enduring it. The class that absorbed the idea was the bourgeoisie — the merchant and professional class in France. They were educated and familiar with the writing of Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu, and those thinkers argued against the class divisions of feudalism. The encounter mattered because of who was doing the reading. Those ideas questioned the bourgeoisie's own social and political standing in France, and gave them grounds to question it and to conclude that they could improve their position rather than accept it. The third step made the idea constitutional. The Enlightenment inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted by the National Assembly of France in August 1789. The declaration challenged the authority of King Louis XVI directly and set out a series of individual rights for each person, protected by the law. Rights held by every person and guaranteed by law are incompatible with authority derived from the crown and privilege distributed by birth, so to adopt the one was to reject the other. Ideas, a receptive class and a founding document: on this account the Enlightenment moved the people towards revolution, and so caused it.

Context

The European Enlightenment movement and its idea that the world could be improved brought forward a new phase in society, one in which society's members could question and reason elements that could improve their own lives.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The French Revolution was not about the Enlightenment. There were other more important problems, such as the lack of food and a badly managed political system that worsened the economy of the poor.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Ideas circulating in a period do not by themselves cause events in it. The same writers were read across Europe without producing revolutions in most of it, so the premise cannot distinguish France from the states where nothing comparable occurred. [Rejecting P2] The bourgeoisie's reading is asserted rather than measured, and the philosophes disagreed sharply among themselves — Montesquieu argued for balanced monarchy and intermediate bodies, and Voltaire looked to reforming monarchs rather than popular sovereignty. A body of thought that pointed in several directions is a poor candidate for a single cause. [Rejecting P3] The Declaration is the argument's clearest error of sequence. It was adopted in August 1789, after the calling of the Estates-General, the Tennis Court Oath, the storming of the Bastille and the abolition of feudal privileges — so it belongs among the products of the Revolution rather than its causes. [Rejecting C] The counter-argument on record identifies what the account leaves out: a fiscal crisis produced by war debt and a tax system that exempted the wealthiest orders, and the harvest failure and bread prices of 1788–89. Enlightenment vocabulary supplied the language in which grievances were expressed, which is compatible with the causes lying elsewhere.