The influence of the Enlightenment

What the specification asks for

“the influence of the Enlightenment” — examined through causation and significance. Incandio is aligned to specification 4HI1; it is not published by, endorsed by or affiliated with Pearson.

1 · Understand it

What was actually being argued

The Enlightenment was not a political programme. It was a habit of asking what an institution is FOR and refusing to accept its age as an answer. Applied to the French state, that habit produced three specific claims that turn up almost word for word in the documents of 1789.

Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws of 1748, argued that liberty depends on the separation of executive, legislative and judicial power, and that a monarchy holding all three has no check on it. Rousseau, in The Social Contract of 1762, located sovereignty in the general will of the people rather than in a person, which makes a king an officer rather than an owner. Voltaire spent forty years attacking clerical privilege and judicial cruelty, most famously in the Calas affair, and made the demand for religious toleration respectable.

How ideas reached people who had not read the books

Very few French people read Rousseau. Far more encountered the arguments second hand, through the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, through pamphlets, through provincial academies that set prize essays on public questions, and through the salons and reading clubs of the towns. The mechanism that matters for an examination answer is not readership but circulation: a vocabulary became available in which existing complaints could be expressed as arguments about rights rather than as requests for relief.

That is the change worth naming. A peasant in 1750 who resented the seigneurial dues had a grievance. A cahier de doléances in 1789 that describes the same dues as contrary to natural right has a claim, and a claim can be put to an assembly.

The cahiers de doléances are the best single piece of evidence for this and they are worth knowing. In the spring of 1789 every parish and every corporation in France was invited to draw up a list of grievances for the Estates General, and some sixty thousand survive. Read together they show a country complaining about taxes, dues, tithes and the price of salt in language that had begun to borrow from the philosophes — and almost none of them asking for a republic or for the abolition of the monarchy. A vocabulary had spread much further than a programme had.

The limits of the explanation

The Enlightenment cannot explain why the Revolution happened in 1789 rather than in 1769, because it was constant across both dates. A cause that does not change cannot account for a change, and this is the single most useful analytical point on the whole key topic.

It can explain three other things very well. It explains the FORM the Revolution took — a written declaration of rights, a constitution, an assembly claiming to represent the nation. It explains why the deputies of 1789 believed that a political order could be designed at all, rather than merely repaired. And it explains why the argument moved so quickly from taxation to sovereignty: once the language of the general will is available, a quarrel about a land tax becomes a quarrel about who the state belongs to.

Set against this, several of the philosophes would have been alarmed by 1793. Montesquieu admired the English constitution and defended the nobility of the robe as a check on the crown; Voltaire wanted an enlightened monarch, not a republic. The tendency to read the Enlightenment as a plan for the Revolution reads backwards from the outcome, and the strongest answers say so.

2 · Learn it — the notes

The dates that earn marks

1748

Montesquieu publishes The Spirit of the Laws, arguing for the separation of powers. Why this date: It supplies the constitutional vocabulary of 1791, and its date shows how long the ideas were available without producing a crisis.

1762

Rousseau publishes The Social Contract, locating sovereignty in the general will. Why this date: It is the source of the claim that a king holds office from the nation, which is the argument of June 1789 and of January 1793.

1751–72

The Encyclopédie is published under Diderot's editorship. Why this date: It is the channel through which the arguments reached the professional and commercial classes who would sit in the Third Estate.

The figures, and how far to trust them

• 1748 and 1762 — The two publication dates a candidate must be able to place, twenty-seven and fifteen years before the Revolution.
• Around 25,000 sets — The approximate circulation of the Encyclopédie in its various editions before 1789. (Estimates vary between bibliographers according to which editions and reprints are counted.)

The people to place

• Montesquieu — Argued for the separation of powers as the condition of liberty.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Located sovereignty in the general will rather than in a monarch.
• Voltaire — Attacked clerical privilege and judicial cruelty; made religious toleration a respectable public demand.
• Denis Diderot — Edited the Encyclopédie, the principal channel by which the arguments circulated.

How historians disagree

Attributed interpretations, never voiced — the AO4 seam.

• The 'ideas made the Revolution' reading: The Revolution's documents are Enlightenment texts in legislative form, and no purely economic account can explain why a fiscal crisis produced a declaration of universal rights. Contested by The reading that stresses circumstance — that the same ideas coexisted with the old order for forty years, and that what changed in 1787–89 was the state's solvency and the harvest, not the reading habits of the educated..

What students say — and what is actually the case

Not this: The philosophes wanted a republic and planned the Revolution.

This: Montesquieu defended a monarchy checked by intermediate bodies, and Voltaire hoped for an enlightened king. Almost none of them argued for what happened in 1792, and most were dead before it.

Not this: Ordinary French people read Rousseau and rose up.

This: Direct readership was small and largely urban and professional. The ideas travelled through the Encyclopédie, pamphlets, academies and clubs, which is a different mechanism and a slower one.

Two things students merge

Blurred: A cause of the Revolution and a source of its language.

The distinction: A cause explains why the crisis arrived when it did; a source explains the words used to describe it. The Enlightenment is overwhelmingly the second, and saying so is the difference between a Level 2 and a Level 4 paragraph on this strand.

Blurred: Rousseau's general will and simple majority rule.

The distinction: The general will is what the community wills as a community, which Rousseau distinguished from the sum of individual preferences. The difference matters because it allowed later governments to claim they represented the nation against the votes of actual citizens.

What a Grade 9 answer holds here

A Grade 9 answer uses the Enlightenment to answer a different question from the one it is usually offered for. It does not explain the timing and it does explain the shape: without it the crisis of 1788 produces a negotiated tax settlement, and with it the crisis produces a Declaration of the Rights of Man and a claim that sovereignty had been misplaced for eight hundred years.

3 · How it is examined

This strand is genuinely set through: Paper 1 (a) (6 marks — “What impression does the author give about …? You must use Extract A to explain your answer.”); Paper 1 (b) (8 marks — “Explain two effects of … on ….”); Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii) (16 marks — “'[A statement about the period.]' You may use the following in your answer: • [prompt] • [prompt]. You must also use information of your own. How far do you agree? Explain your answer.”).

What earns marks: The dates of the two texts, used to make the argument that a constant cannot explain a change. It converts a general paragraph about ideas into a piece of causal reasoning.

The cap that bites here: On the 16-mark question, an answer that addresses fewer than three aspects cannot reach the top band, however good the Enlightenment paragraph is.

4 · Prove it — the questions

Answered inside Incandio, where a marker checks what a correct answer must contain and tells you which half was missing. The marking stays in the app; the questions are here.

1. What impression does the author give about the influence of Enlightenment writers in France before 1789? [6 marks · Paper 1 (a)]
2. Explain two effects of Enlightenment writing on French political argument before 1789. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
3. Explain two effects of the publication of the Encyclopédie on French opinion. [8 marks · Paper 1 (b)]
4. 'The Enlightenment was the main cause of the French Revolution.' How far do you agree? [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]
5. 'The ideas of the Enlightenment shaped the Revolution more than they caused it.' How far do you agree? [16 marks · Paper 1 (c)(i) or (c)(ii)]

Carry on through the option

• Next lesson: The impact of the American War of Independence
• Also in this key topic: The Three Estates: duties and privileges · Louis XVI and the unpopularity of Marie Antoinette · Financial problems, Necker and the harvests
• Key topic 1 · The origins of the Revolution, c1780–87 · The French Revolution, c1780–99 · the option's timeline · Incandio History
• The other key topics of The French Revolution: Short-term causes of the Revolution: from Assembly of Notables to Estates General, 1787–89 · Developments 1789–92 · Convention and Terror, 1792–94 · Directory and First Consul – the fall of Robespierre to the rise of Napoleon, 1794–99