The French philosophers of the Enlightenment Era didn't play an active role in the events

of the revolution, but their ideas inspired the revolutionary movement. The main
philosophers were Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Montesquieu.

MONTESQUIEU

Montesquieu (18 January 1689, La Brède, Gironde – 10 February 1755), was a French
social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment. He is
famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in
modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout
the world. He was largely responsible for the popularization of the terms feudalism and
Byzantine Empire.

Montesquieu's most influential work divided French society into three classes (or trias
politica, a term he coined): the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons.
Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing: the sovereign and the
administrative. The administrative powers were the executive, the legislative, and the
judicial. These should be separate from and dependent upon each other so that the
influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two, either
singly or in combination. This was radical because it completely eliminated the three
Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the people at
large represented by the Estates-General, thereby erasing the last vestige of a feudalistic
structure.

Likewise, there were three main forms of government, each supported by a social
"principle": monarchies (free governments headed by a hereditary figure, e.g. king,
queen, emperor), which rely on the principle of honor; republics (free governments
headed by popularly elected leaders), which rely on the principle of virtue; and
despotisms (enslaved governments headed by dictators), which rely on fear. The free
governments are dependent on fragile constitutional arrangements. Montesquieu devotes
four chapters of The Spirit of the Laws to a discussion of England, a contemporary free
government, where liberty was sustained by a balance of powers. Montesquieu worried
that in France the intermediate powers (i.e., the nobility) which moderated the power of
the prince were being eroded. These ideas of the control of power were often used in the
thinking of Maximilian Robespierre.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Jean Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a major Genevois philosopher,
writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy heavily
influenced the French Revolution, as well as the American Revolution and the overall
development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.

Perhaps Rousseau's most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis
for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published
in 1762, it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the
Western tradition. It developed some of the ideas mentioned in an earlier work, the article
Economie Politique (Discourse on Political Economy), featured in Diderot's
Encyclopédie. The treatise begins with the dramatic opening lines, "Man was born free,
and he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains
more of a slave than they."

Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or
morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation. As
society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to
adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to be in
frequent competition with his fellow men while also becoming increasingly dependent on
them. This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to
Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and
abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and
remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people
as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and
also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the
law.

Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in
the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the
government. The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing
and enforcing the general will. The "sovereign" is the rule of law, ideally decided on by
direct democracy in an assembly. Under a monarchy, however, the real sovereign is still
the law. Rousseau was opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty
via a representative assembly (Book III, Chapter XV). The kind of republican
government of which Rousseau approved was that of the city state, of which Geneva, was
a model, or would have been, if renewed on Rousseau's principles. France could not meet
Rousseau's criterion of an ideal state because it was too big. Much subsequent
controversy about Rousseau's work has hinged on disagreements concerning his claims
that citizens constrained to obey the general will are thereby rendered free.

DENIS DIDEROT

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and
writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best-known for
serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie.
André Le Breton, a bookseller and printer, approached Diderot with a project for the
publication of a translation of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary
of Arts and Sciences into French, first undertaken by the Englishman John Mills, and
followed by the German Gottfried Sellius. Diderot accepted the proposal. During this
translation his creative mind and astute vision transformed the work. Instead of a mere
reproduction of the Cyclopaedia, he persuaded Le Breton to enter upon a new work,
which would collect all the active writers, ideas, and knowledge that were moving the
cultivated class of the Republic of Letters to its depths; however, they were
comparatively ineffective due to their lack of dispersion. His enthusiasm for the project
was transmitted to the publishers; they collected a sufficient capital for a more vast
enterprise than they had first planned. Jean le Rond d'Alembert was persuaded to become
Diderot's colleague; the requisite permission was procured from the government.

In 1750 an elaborate prospectus announced the project to a delighted public, and in 1751
the first volume was published. This work was very unorthodox and had many forward-
thinking ideas for the time. Diderot stated within this work, "An encyclopedia ought to
make good the failure to execute such a project hitherto, and should encompass not only
the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human
knowledge." Upon encompassing every branch of knowledge this will give, "the power to
change men's common way of thinking." This idea was profound and intriguing, as it was
one of the first works during the Enlightenment. Diderot wanted to give all people the
ability to further their knowledge and, in a sense, allow every person to have any
knowledge they sought of the world. The work, implementing not only the expertise of
scholars and Academies in their respective fields but that of the common man in their
proficiencies in their trades, sought to bring together all knowledge of the time and
condense this information for all to use. These people would amalgamate and work under
a society to perform such a project. They would work alone to shed societal conformities,
and build a multitude of information on a desired subject with varying view points,
methods, or philosophies. He emphasized the vast abundance of knowledge held within
each subject with intricacies and details to provide the greatest amount of knowledge to
be gained from the subject. All people would benefit from these insights into different
subjects as a means of betterment; bettering society as a whole and individuals alike.

This message under the Ancien Régime would severely dilute the regime's ability to
control the people. Knowledge and power, two key items the upper class held over the
lower class, were in jeopardy as knowledge would be more accessible, giving way to
more power amongst the lower class. An encyclopedia would give the layman an ability
to reason and use knowledge to better themselves; allowing for upward mobility and
increased intellectual abundance amongst the lower class. A growth of knowledge
amongst this segment of society would provide power to this group and a yearning to
question the government. The numerated subjects in the folios were not just for the good
of the people and society, but were for the promotion of the state as well. The state did
not see any benefit in the works, instead viewing them as a contempt to contrive power
and authority from the state.

Diderot's work was plagued by controversy from the beginning; the project was
suspended by the courts in 1752. Just as the second volume was completed accusations
arose, regarding seditious content, concerning the editors entries on religion and natural
law. Diderot was detained and his house was searched for manuscripts for subsequent
articles. But the search proved fruitless as no manuscripts could be found. They were
hidden in the house of an unlikely confederate–Chretien de Lamoignon Malesherbes, the
very official who ordered the search. Although Malesherbis was a staunch absolutist-
loyal to the monarchy, he was sympathetic to the literary project. Along with his support,
and that of other well-placed influential confederates, the project resumed. Diderot
returned to his efforts only to be constantly embroiled in controversy.

These twenty years were to Diderot not merely only a time of incessant drudgery, but
harassing persecution and desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical party detested the
Encyclopédie, in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophic enemies. By
1757 they could endure it no longer. The subscribers had grown from 2,000 to 4,000, a
measure of the growth of the work in popular influence and power. The Encyclopédie
threatened the governing social classes of France (aristocracy) because it took for granted
the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the value of science and
industry. It asserted the doctrine that the main concern of the nation's government ought
to be the nation's common people. It was believed that the Encyclopédie was the work of
an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held
were made truly formidable by their open publication. In 1759, the Encyclopédie was
formally suppressed. The decree did not stop the work, which went on, but its difficulties
increased by the necessity of being clandestine. Jean le Rond d'Alembert withdrew from
the enterprise and other powerful colleagues, including Anne Robert Jacques Turgot,
Baron de Laune, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired a bad
reputation.

Diderot was left to finish the task as best he could. He wrote several hundred articles,
some very slight, but many of them laborious, comprehensive, and long. He damaged his
eyesight correcting proofs and editing the manuscripts of less competent contributors. He
spent his days at workshops, mastering manufacturing processes, and his nights writing
what he had learned during the day. He was incessantly harassed by threats of police
raids. The last copies of the first volume were issued in 1765. At the last moment, when
his immense work was drawing to an end, he encountered a crowning mortification: he
discovered that the bookseller, fearing the government's displeasure, had struck out from
the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he considered too
dangerous. The monument to which Diderot had given the labor of twenty long and
oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced. It was 12 years, in 1772, before
the subscribers received the final 27 folio volumes of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers since the first volume had been published.

François-Marie Arouet better known by the pen name Voltaire was a French
Enlightenment writer and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil
liberties, Voltaire had an enormous influence on the development of historiography,
through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past. His best-known histories
are The Age of Louis XIV (1752), and Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations
(1756). He broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and
emphasized customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. The Essay
on customs traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context, thereby
rejecting both nationalism and the traditional Christian frame of reference. Influenced by
Bossuet's Discourse on the Universal history (1682), he was the first scholar to make a
serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and
emphasizing economics, culture and political history. He treated Europe as a whole,
rather than a collection of nations. He was the first to emphasize the debt of medieval
culture to Arab civilization, but otherwise was weak on the middle ages. Although he
repeatedly warned against political bias on the part of the historian, he did not miss many
opportunities to ridicule the Catholic Church. Voltaire advised scholars that anything
contradicting the normal course of nature was not to be believed. Although he found evil
in the historical record, he fervently believed reason would lead to progress.

In his article on "History," in Diderot's Encyclopédie, Voltaire explain his historiography:

"One demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise
dates, more attention to customs, laws, mores, commerce, finance, agriculture,
population."

Voltaire's histories imposed the values of the Enlightenment on the past, but he helped
free historiography from antiquarianism, Eurocentrism, and a concentration on great men,
diplomacy, and warfare