Page 46 - History 2020

1697. No Hanoverian monarch had the money or the nerve to build an English

Versailles, concentrating royalty, court and government in one magnificent setting,
and this liberated English cultural life from the constraints, and perhaps benefits, of a
dominant source of patronage. The low-key royal presence, scattered among various
residences, including Hampton Court, Windsor, Kew, and houses in London, must
have seemed a great weakness compared with the overwhelming splendours of
Bourbon Versailles; but by preventing royal isolation it turned out to be a strength.”
(“The English and Their History”, 2014).

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France’s 17 and 18 century stability derived from being an absolute monarchy.
Louis XIV (1638 - 1715) created the template, summed up by Louis’ famous phrase,
“L’etat, c’est moi.” (I am the state). Royal power was unrestricted. The King was head
of state and government. The independence of the nobility was curtailed. There was
a parliament (Estates General) but it never met. Louis XIV turned France into an
impregnable and aggressive military power (ironically, this turned out to be its
Achilles Heel; continual wars steadily bankrupted the monarchy).

Yet France did have a story of revolution before 1789; an intellectual revolution: the
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18 century European Enlightenment. Did this contribute to France’s later instability?

1. What was the Enlightenment?
The Enlightenment was not an exclusively French project, but a Europe-wide
movement of writers and thinkers from many countries (British names would include
John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham). However, French

thinkers played a central role; people like Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert,
Montesquieu and Rousseau. Rousseau was Genevan (in modern terms, Swiss) but
wrote in French and also gravitated to Paris, the Enlightenment’s intellectual capital.
The thinkers behind it were known as the “philosophes”, French for “philosopher”,
but better translated as “intellectual”; they did not always “philosophise”, but ranged
widely over the whole range of what we would now call “the humanities”, including

political theory, psychology, sociology, economics as well as philosophy.

Defining the Enlightenment is notoriously difficult. The philosophes gained enormous
cultural and intellectual influence. However, they never agreed on any single political
philosophy, policy or programme. The Enlightenment does not describe a theory,
more the activity of theorizing. Pinning down and summarizing exactly what each of
them said is not easy. They often contradicted each other and even themselves.
Historians are reluctant to generalize about it. Listen to Norman Hampson, an expert
on the Enlightenment: