![]() ![]() Why did readers take so quickly to the ideas of the philosophes in the generation active from 1740–1770? ![]() For revolutionaries in the 1780s and 1790s to have found inspiration in these books, it is worth asking what made such works so popular when they were first published. As Yale literary historian Henri Peyre said about the French Revolution in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1949, “No question is likely to divide students of the past more sharply than that of the action of philosophical ideas and literary works upon political and social events.” Today, some subfields in eighteenth-century studies are still shaped by this question. While most historians would not claim that the course of the French Revolution directly resulted from the ideas of celebrity-philosophers alone, the relationship between reading and revolution has for generations offered one of the most fertile, yet also most contested, topics of study for eighteenth-century scholars. Revolutionaries looked back to the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Montesquieu either to define political aims or to justify their actions post hoc. Out of the many changes in French society over the course of the eighteenth century that made the Revolution possible, the ideas of celebrated writers known as philosophes remain an important part of the story. ![]()
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