POLITICIZATION AND NATURA NATURANS
The Late Enlightenment Question and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime
FROM THE POINT OF view of cultural history, the Late Enlightenment certainly represents the historical moment of hegemony. Over the course of more than a century, the Enlightenment had developed as a cultural revolution directed against the Ancien Régime, and the final decades of the eighteenth century saw the culmination of that profound transformation of Western identity, the legacy of which lasts to this day, albeit amidst fierce debates and controversies.
The crisis of the Ancien Régime proceeded step by step with the late Enlightenment, which therefore had a profound impact on Western identity, because it involved the governments and the élites of all the great European cities and directly influenced every form of knowledge, effectively setting off a process of cultural hegemony such as has rarely been seen in any other time or place.1 This was a historical and cultural phenomenon of great importance, in that it affected virtually everyone who was able to read and write, regardless of class or social standing. In the 1770s and 1780s many of the values, ideas, practices, and specialized vocabularies that had been developed in small intellectual circles in the first part of the century became objects of large-scale cultural consumption in salons, Masonic lodges, universities, academies, and in the courts. These cultural products spread everywhere through gazettes, periodicals, and popular almanacs, and also thanks to the publishing industry, the theatre, literature, painting, music, and the sciences. Although the most innovative elements of this cultural system were often misunderstood, manipulated, argued against, and rejected, they continued to be at the center of every discussion, and were the object of cultural enjoyment and of creative consumption—as Michel de Certeau would put it—to the point of affecting even the way of being and of acting of those who opposed the cultural system itself.2
A case in point is the changed attitude on the part of the Catholic Church at the end of the century when faced with the triumph of the Enlightenment. The Church was forced to acknowledge the growing importance of the public sphere, of book circulation, and of the new means of social and political communication that had been developed by the philosophes in their fight for hegemony. Accepting the challenge, the Church denounced admirers of the Encyclopédie as heretics and dangerous. However, it was itself affected by the new cultural practices and subversive ideas, so that it updated its methods in order to have a better chance of success in the fight against modernity. For instance, it decided to “govern” the practice of reading ad maiorem Dei gloriam rather than forbidding it.3 And indeed it was in those frenzied and fascinating years, and in part due to the Enlightenment’s increasing cultural hegemony, that the Republic of Letters and the new social class of the men of letters became a powerful and influential Ancien Régime corporation. In this regard, we might look at a striking event that took place in Paris on March 30, 1778, in front of the Comédie française. The Comédie had solemnly gathered together en corps and, after a performance of the tragedy Irène, proceeded to publicly and with great fanfare “crown” the writer Voltaire.
Newspaper accounts of the time turned this into a symbolic event of unprecedented magnitude and, by means of detailed articles and well-crafted etchings, ensured that it would become known throughout Europe. In his Mémoires, Fleury describes Voltaire’s return to Paris, at the age of eighty-four and after a twenty-seven-year absence caused by his having suffered persecutions and threats. In Fleury’s account this becomes a triomphe, a true apothéose, which went well beyond the person of Voltaire, being a salute to his work and ideas and to his standing as the recognized head of the philosophes.
I doubt whether the arrival of a king, a hero, or a prophet would have excited greater enthusiasm, than was felt on the appearance of Voltaire in Paris; every other subject of interest was for a time forgotten. Court intrigues, and even the great musical war between the Gluckists and the Picenists, were suspended. The Sorbonne trembled, the parliament observed silence, excitement pervaded the literary circles, and Paris proudly rendered homage to the nation’s idol.4
That March 30th, after receiving “des honneurs inusités” at the Académie Française, Voltaire went to see a repeat performance of his Irène, at which he was acclaimed by the public and by the most important members of the Parisian aristocracy, the government, and the royal family.
At the conclusion of the play, his bust was brought to the front of the stage, and crowned by the actors amidst transports of admiration. Some verses, written for the occasion by M. de Saint Mare, were recited by Madame Vestris. The performers then advanced one by one, and each laid a wreath of flowers beside the bust. Mademoiselle Funier, seized with a fit of ecstasy, threw her arms round the bust and kissed it. So contagious is enthusiasm that we all followed her example, and several persons in the pit climbed on the stage for the purpose of saluting it.5
And it was not over yet. Voltaire’s triumph and symbolic coronation continued, significantly, outside the theatre, with a parade through the streets of Paris, which now saw the population walking beside his carriage:
A vast concourse of persons who had collected in the street, wished to take the horses from his carriage and draw him home. It was with great difficulty they were prevented from doing so, but they followed him to his place of residence, making the air resound with his name and the titles of his principal works; nothing was heard as he passed through the streets, but shouts of Vive Voltaire! vive l’auteur Zaire! [sic] vive l’auteur de l’Henriade! &c.6
Thus, thirteen years before his panthéonisation at the hands of the revolutionaries in 1791, Voltaire, and with him, indirectly, all his comrades in arms were crowned and carried in triumph through the streets of Paris. The same Ancien Régime that had unhesitatingly sent them to the Bastille a few decades earlier had now unexpectedly and at a very early stage turned them into national heroes and fathers of the nation. This was a true sacre de l’écrivain, to rival the celebration of Louis XVI that had taken place in Rheims three years earlier, where among other things the King had solemnly sworn to defend the Catholic Church and destroy all heretics. There could be no better proof of the hegemony achieved by the culture of the Enlightenment at the end of the century. However, the peculiar forms and characteristics of this hegemony still need to be thoroughly investigated.
For instance, it would be a mistake to think of the Late Enlightenment as a tired repetition of ideas, values, and practices developed in a more glorious past. Or as a hegemonic phase built mainly on the publishing, social, and institutional success of a bygone era, like a wave formed in a time long past, whose creative impetus was by now pretty much spent. In fact, according to our chronology, the real apex of the Enlightenment was not reached until the French Revolution. Thus the last few decades of the eighteenth century, and especially the years between the American Revolution in 1776 and the year 1789, were marked by the rise of a generation of brilliant new Enlightenment personalities in every corner of Europe: from Raynal to Condorcet, from Beaumarchais to Mozart, and on to David, Goya, Filangieri, Pagano, Jefferson, Franklin, Lessing, Goethe, Paine, Jovellanos, and Radishchev. Many of them embraced this Late Enlightenment period with passion and great hopes that would be dashed by the tumult and violence of the Revolution and of the Reign of Terror. The work that this generation produced, mostly in the ten years leading up to the Revolution, gave rise to original debates and innovative political theories and solutions. It developed vocabularies and images never before seen or even thought of, whose real meaning was mostly overshadowed by the glaring light of the Revolution itself. And so it will remain, unless we begin seeing it in relation to that precise end-of-the-century cultural context and the two major phenomena that characterized it: the sudden and momentous politicization of the Republic of Letters, and the gradual move towards neonaturalism in every field of knowledge.
These two elements had a huge influence over the Late Enlightenment and thus deserve to be studied closely. As far as neonaturalism is concerned, we should note that the mechanistic universe and physical and mathematical empiricism of Newton, and the deterministic view of the relationship between man and nature within the great chain of being continued to dominate in the scientific academies and universities. However, the view of natura naturans embraced by Enlightenment figures such as Diderot rapidly prevailed in the Republic of Letters and among the artists, men of letters, architects, painters, and musicians. This view became the ideal frame of reference for intellectual life in a large part of Europe. It was a dynamic concept of a nature that existed firmly anchored in time and overflowing with vital energy, and it led everywhere to new reflections and new ways of seeing man’s limits, functions, and potentialities.
In Naples, for instance, this view led to the rise of an evocative philosophy of history as a series of cycles, and of the social development of mankind as subject to a succession of huge natural catastrophes. It was a view that revived principles and images of the Renaissance Hermetic tradition, albeit in new and intriguing forms.7
In Germany this view is found in Lessing and, especially, in the young Goethe.8 Both of these writers were quick to embrace the new concept of a living nature that was finally autonomous, free from under God’s thumb, and in harmony with a pantheistic view that stressed the eternal sacrality and sovereignty of nature as it attempted to redefine aesthetic principles and the artist’s task. Lessing and Goethe were not alone in this. Boileau, a follower of Descartes, had begun his own movement denouncing classical aesthetics as early as the first decades of the century. However, after Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Diderot’s Salons and Essai sur la peinture (1765), and Lessing’s Laocoon (1766), the widespread acceptance of the concept of natura naturans certainly acted as a strong catalyst in bringing about the definitive success of the new concepts of art. It was in just this period of the Late Enlightenment with its radical humanism that a thorough-going renewal of aesthetic theories finally came into its own and began to produce its best results. This encouraged the formation of a modern and cosmopolitan republic of artists and European talents. Evidence is found in Canova’s masterpieces, as well as in works painted before the Revolution by Fuseli, such as the famous 1781 Nightmare, or by Fragonard, Piranesi, Blake, David, and Goya.9 Or it may be gleaned by listening to Mozart, focusing more however on the contents and meanings of Masonic music and on the end-of-century debate about the theatre and opera of the Ancien Régime that engaged Enlightenment circles.10
Nicolas Boileau’s eighteenth-century classicist model had been rigid. The great “législateur du Parnasse” still saw the artistic phenomenon in mechanistic terms, as an objective fact governed by rules that were rational, universal, and above all timeless. The new esthetic theories were now finally taking into account values of an opposite aspect, such as empiricism, experience, and the relativity of taste throughout history. The centrality, or rather the actual enthronement of man and all his faculties as preached by the Encyclopédie and by Enlightenment humanism went hand in hand with the circulation of the new paradigm of a natura naturans. Together, these elements once and for all focused on the subject, the I, and on the individual and particular in human existence, as well as on universal and communal aspects. Feelings, sensibility, and man’s anxieties took their place next to the cult of reason, and deductive and inductive reasoning learnt to coexist with intuition, imagination, and reason of a poetic stamp.
The overall intellectual background rested on a dynamic view of the great chain of being and of a living nature that was full of expanding energy.11 Lessing found the very essence of poetry in movement, action, and life. Diderot looked to the disciplines of psychology and physiognomy when judging the artistic value of the new eighteenth-century portrait painting, which sought to convey the depth of its subjects’ feelings. From now on, the artist’s task was no longer limited to the simple and objective imitation of nature according to merely rationalistic criteria: it was not imitation but, on the contrary, an act of creation itself, an act of man’s intimate and free participation in the development of natural forms and in their powerful and constant change. Hence the amazing vogue for formulations of the theory of genius, and the avid interest in Enlightenment circles in the various interpretations of the concept of the sublime. The latter was most often seen as a breakdown of the deterministic barriers of the finite: a powerful and unstoppable feeling that was capable of fully expressing man’s intimate freedom in relation to destiny and to the objects of nature, and a form of complete and authentic emancipation, and of man’s universal right to the pursuit of happiness. This brought to fruition the most important legacy of the Enlightenment cultural revolution to Western identity; namely, the invention of the modern concept of man’s liberty.12
This modern understanding of liberty did not consist simply in the political acknowledgment of a natural right inherent in man’s very way of being. Liberty was also an attempt to enfranchise oneself from the fixity of species and the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos in general and, above all, from immovable Biblical creationism. This kind of liberty was nothing less than the very definition of the humanity of man, a liberty seen as the common destiny of the free man and of a living nature. And the latter was conceived, in a pantheistic sense, as a being in constant and autonomous transformation, along the lines of a model that reprised and reinforced Rousseau’s famous pronouncement, in his Social Contract, against the Aristotelian theory of the natural slave, which was being revived in the course of the eighteenth century: “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.”13 The politicization of the Republic of Letters took place within this evocative frame of reference and especially against the background of the Late Enlightenment, so that it became one of the period’s specific distinguishing traits as compared to previous phases.
But what do we mean by “politicization”?
As we have already seen, the phenomenon was nothing new for historians. It was denounced both by Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and by Tocqueville in his volume on L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, not to mention Barruel’s farnetications about the political conspiracy supposedly organized by Masonic and Enlightenment figures against the altar and the throne. In this regard, we should also mention Burke’s comments on politicized men of letters in France, and Tocqueville’s remarks on the politicization of literature and its equally dire consequence: the literarization of politics. But these observations, however important, were rather generic with regard to content, to geography (were they really limited to France?) and to the chronology of events (did they embrace the entire eighteenth century?). And they were always arrived at from the perspective of an obsessive search for the ideological causes of the Revolution. It is only recently that we have started to investigate the originality and novelty of this phenomenon, as well as its nature, causes, and above all its vast scale. We have thus been able to pinpoint its precise and autonomous place in Western life in the last quarter of the century, the crucial moment in time that saw the dramatic and momentous explosion of the crisis of the Ancien Régime.14
It all began with the Seven Years’ War; that is, with the start of a major period of reforms from above, which were matched by violent reactions from below on the part of the people—the farmers’ rebellions, the Catalan Revolt, and a series of revolutions from both the liberal and the conservative side.15 These reforms were the brainchildren of sovereigns and princes such as Catherine the Great, Frederick II, Gustav III, and above all Joseph II, rulers determined to assert their power once and for all over the old representative assemblies, over all kinds of parliaments and senates, over farm and urban communities, feudal and aristocratic privileges, corporations and favors, and ecclesiastical demands. Their reforms effectively set in motion the definitive crisis of the Ancien Régime and of the old political order internationally.
The pace of change in this case was quite different from the traditional rhythms that had applied, from the fifteenth century onwards, to that centralization process on the part of monarchical power that had led to the rise of the modern nation-states in Europe under the aegis of absolutism. The end of the Seven Years’ War, which can be considered the first great world war, and the ensuing problems abruptly accelerated the process. An urgent need for change at the political, social, and institutional level was everywhere apparent. On the one hand it was necessary to repair the devastation caused by the war. On the other, the global dimension of future contests for control over international trade and the building of new colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and America demanded the construction of huge fleets and powerful arsenals of technologically advanced weapons. Any nation that wanted to play a primary role in the looming wars was forced to spend astronomical amounts of money on equipping increasingly huge and menacing armies.
In this regard, Gaetano Filangieri was certainly right in denouncing the “military mania” of his time. In the opening lines of his 1780 Scienza della legislazione, he laments, “What are the sole objects that have hitherto engaged the attention of the Sovereigns of Europe? A formidable arsenal, a numerous artillery, a well-disciplined army. All the propositions that have been investigated before Princes, have been merely preparatory to the solution of a single problem: To find the method of killing the greatest number of men in the least time possible.”16 To all this were added the social effects of the rapid economic growth that took place in the course of the century, which caused an urgent need for the State to rationalize and modernize the way in which it governed its territory, by harmonizing and strengthening control of the periphery by the center.
To that end, these reforms from above took a multiplicity of forms, which unleashed angry reactions and responses. For instance, under the Portuguese prime minister Pombal, the process of secularization of the modern State led to the great Catholic monarchies driving the Jesuits away from their territory. This happened, in succession, in Portugal, France, and Spain, and finally led to the order being disbanded. In 1773, by explicit request of the Spanish ambassador, José Moniño, count of Floridablanca, Clement XIV dissolved the Jesuits with the brief encyclical Dominus ac redemptor. After the Seven Years’ War, this reform process underwent an important change in terms of jurisdictional politics.17 Crucial questions that now took center stage included that of the temporal goods of the Church, the autonomy of religious orders, the status of the clergy, and religious toleration. The first to take action was the Republic of Lucca, which in 1764 issued a decree that restricted ecclesiastical mortmain. Other interventions followed across the continent, culminating in Joseph II’s radical reforms of the 1780s, which included the emancipation of Jews, publication of the general Patent of Toleration in favor of Protestants and the Greek Orthodox, the suppression of several religious orders and finally, in 1783, the introduction of civil marriage, and the change of status of parish priests and bishops into salaried officials. It could almost be said that if ever there was a public figure who more or less consciously undermined the very foundations of the religious Ancien Régime, it was Joseph II.
However, the destabilizing and subversive effect of these reforms from above was not limited to the field of religion. The radical version of absolutism, or rather—as contemporaries put it—the “despotic face” of a sovereign right that aimed at leveling everyone before the king, regardless of hierarchies, first developed at the institutional and administrative level, and took mainly the form of an attack on late-medieval particularisms and against the powers and privileges of intermediate bodies and corporations in general. Feudalism was suddenly seen everywhere in Europe as a great problem, mostly from an economic and juridical point of view. It was an obstacle to progress and economic development in the first instance, which inevitably also became a political and constitutional issue.
There were many attempts at reforming peripheral bureaucracies with the aim of finally taking power away from local aristocratic potentates and reasserting the administrative and political primacy of the crown. In France in 1770, Chancellor Maupeou’s absolutist “coup d’état” restored the appointment of members of parliament as a royal prerogative and abolished the sale of titles, which led to a fierce clash between the monarchy and the houses of parliament. Equally dramatic struggles broke out in Denmark following the reforms of Prussian Count Johann Struensee, and in the Sweden of Gustav III, who was determined to thwart any aristocratic claims within the system of representation. In Russia in 1773, the immediate social import of the administrative reform of the empire that had begun with the Nakaz became apparent to all with the peasant uprising led by the Cossack Pugachev and the ensuing bloodbath.
Those communities that were seeing their vital interests jeopardized reacted by claiming back ancient identities and privileges, in the face of an uncertain future and of abstract measures that showed little regard for history and traditions. A few years later the same would happen to Joseph II, who was forced to face what amounted to actual reactionary revolutions in response to his measures that abolished serfdom in Bohemia, Moravia, and Sudetenland. In the first few months of 1789, his final decrees, which suppressed ecclesiastical tithes and the so-called robot (peasants’ corvées) caused widespread malcontent. The Ancien Régime seemed entirely unwilling to accept any variant of even a partial reform: its crisis now appeared irreversible. No appreciable results were achieved by international debates on the liberalization of the wheat trade or on the creation of a modern labor market by doing away with the system of guilds. Equally fruitless were the various calls for the liberalization of the land market and the anti-famine measures applied by governments in Italy, England, and Germany. If anything, these efforts exacerbated feelings and led to uprisings in places such as Paris and Madrid.
What was taking place was nothing less than a profound crisis of a structural, political, and constitutional nature. Its resolution would require an overall cultural transformation capable of redefining the very foundations of the old state order, and the creation of a new civic society based on a new secularized humanism, the emancipation of man through man, and the acknowledgment of man’s natural rights. With events like Pasquale Paoli’s rebellion in Corsica, quashed by France in 1769, and the revolution started in 1776 by American settlers against the British Empire, in this case successfully, the demise of the Ancien Régime was now well and truly underway. None of its protagonists was any longer able to prevent the politicization of the crisis, as the rapid pace of changes provoked unmanageable violence.
It is no longer profitable to ask whether these radical reforms from above were inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, or were instead results of a long-term strategy of dominion and modernization by the absolute monarchies. Whether or not this historical period should be called an era of enlightened despotism is no longer a useful question, and is more likely to confuse the issue.18 It is true that many of those great sovereigns were personal friends of Diderot and Voltaire, and had read and taken on board the works of Montesquieu, Beccaria, Lessing and Campomanes. However, this does not authorize us to confuse the rise of the new political culture ex parte civium, i.e., that republican and constitutional culture advocated in European Enlightenment circles between 1776 and 1789, with the traditional politics ex parte principis that was practiced at court and in the chanceries.
Despite its being part of this wider crisis, the politicization of the Late Enlightenment was a peculiar phenomenon, which had well-defined contours. To a large extent, it was characterized by more than the mere determination to go beyond the organic society of the Ancien Régime. Its main trait was the originality of the solutions deployed in the process that was to lead to the transformation of the cultural politics of the time. In fact, the Enlightenment’s vocation to political action was inscribed in its DNA, and especially in its programmatic development of the new sciences of man as applied to reality. There is no need to resort to Michel Foucault or to the usual considerations on the link between power and the different forms of knowledge in order to trace the rise of the eighteenth-century intellectual as protagonist in the political struggle. If anything, we should make a greater effort at reconstructing the crucial phases and precise modalities that brought the denizens of the Republic of Letters to this stage.
In this respect, there is no doubt that, within the Republic of Letters, it was the proponents of Enlightenment who assigned a political, moral, and social function to the modern “philosopher.” They were thus defining themselves as a “universal class”—as we would say today, in the wake of Marx—and as natural and legitimate representatives of the rights of the whole of mankind. In 1780, Gaetano Filangieri, a major exponent of the European Late Enlightenment, wrote a short appeal that gives us a good illustration of the cosmopolitan vocation and political purposes of philosophers, who were now conscious of their roles. It highlights the profound renewal that had taken place within political language, with the rise of new keywords such as “rights of man,” “liberty,” “happiness,” “citizenship,” “the struggle against tyranny,” against “fanaticism” and against “imposture”:
Sages of the earth, Philosophers of every nation,—O all ye to whom the sacred deposit of knowledge is intrusted, if ye would live, if ye would that your names should remain engraven in the temple of memory, if ye would that immortality should crown your labours, employ yourselves on these subjets, which, over two thousand leagues of space, and after twenty centuries, continue to be interesting! Never write for a man, but for mankind: unite your glory with the eternal interests of the human race […] despite the vain applause of the vulgar, and the mercenary gratitude of the great, the threats of persecution, and the derision of ignorance: boldly instruct your brethren and freely defend their rights. Then shall mankind, interested in the hopes of happiness to which you point the road, hear you with transport; then shall posterity, grateful to your labours, in public repositories distinguish your writings: then, neither the impotent rage of tyranny, nor the interested clamours of fanaticism, nor the sophisms of imposture […] shall avail to bring them into disrepute, or bury them in oblivion: they will pass from generation to generation with the glory of your name; they will be read, and perhaps washed with the tears of those who would never have otherwise known you; and your genius, always useful, will then be the contemporary of every age, and the citizen of every State.19
Current research has shown that the struggle for hegemony on the part of Enlightenment culture took root first within the Republic of Letters and then spread to other sectors—to governments, sovereigns, élites, and finally, directly and as a priority, to international public opinion. The movement used all means at its disposal. It occupied and influenced the life of lodges, academies, and salons. It renewed social communication. It created modern political culture by means of new discourses and theories, and of practices, representations, and vocabularies that were more and more alien and hostile to the Ancien Régime.
In 1760, in the introductory letter to his comedy Les Philosophes, Charles Palissot gave a useful description of the beginning of the process of politicization of the Enlightenment in France. Palissot describes a “secte impériose,” which had formed under the aegis of a work, i.e., the Encyclopédie, and which had extended its dominion to encompass all of the sciences, as well as literature, the arts, and custom. In Palissot’s view, the religious skepticism and anti-religious stance of adherents to the Enlightenment qualified them as a form of tyrannie universelle.20 Those were terrible war years, uncertain times in which, because of their cosmopolitism and their appreciation for enlightened rulers such as Frederick II, the philosophes were being publically accused of betraying their country and of being in collusion with the enemy.21 This led to the need to redefine the very concept of patriotism by giving it new meanings. One’s home country was no longer defined as the land of one’s fathers, an ethnic and historical reality: it was now, instead, a political community of men who were free, equal, and bent on self-government, and on breaking free from the centuries-old dominion exercised by the alliance between the altar and the throne.
Inevitably, this movement was on a collision course with the old Ancien Régime politics of nation-states. Everywhere in Europe, Enlightenment circles were called upon to define their engagement. They reasserted their determination to relaunch the concept of the political that prevailed in classical antiquity, which saw politics as striving towards the common good and a life well lived. Their goal was to reinvigorate this concept on the basis of new ideals and original perspectives, which could be summarized in the apt eighteenth-century formula of a “pursuit of happiness” in both the public and the private spheres.22
Given the challenges posed by absolutism in the second half of the eighteenth century, an appeal to the libertas philosophandi and to the philosopher’s generic moral superiority was no longer enough. Having unmasked the imposture of religions and having reflected on the necessity to build a rational form of morality, it was now necessary to move on to concrete political action, to the reform of laws and institutions, and to the search for a government based on laws. In short, the search was on for a different kind of State, in terms both of its nature and its purposes: a State that respected the autonomy achieved by the modern civil society that the Enlightenment had sought to bring about.
This change of perspective could be summarized as follows. Montesquieu’s objective had been above all to guarantee the freedom of the Estates and to hem in the sovereign’s despotism through intermediate bodies and respect for the principle of legality. As positive models, he pointed to the French administrative monarchy before Louis XIV and the English mixed constitution. However, his overall logic was still that of the Ancien Régime. The international uproar caused by Pasquale Paoli’s anticolonial and republican revolution, and Rousseau’s social contract and reflections on the legitimacy of power opened a new era characterized by the revival of the “republican spirit,” which this time was seen as a rejection of monarchic despotism and an attempt to secure the widest possible participation to the exercise of power and sovereignty. This was a necessary premise for a union between the virtue of the ancients and the richness of the moderns. It was important to maintain strong social and community ties through the exercise of public republican virtues and to achieve different objectives from those that guided the recent past, objectives such as the freedom of the individual and his right to the pursuit of happiness, and equality of rights for all.
The invention and use of the language of the rights of man in the second half of the eighteenth century was certainly a turning point. It constituted a powerful instrument for both the politicization of the Late Enlightenment and for the creation of a modern politics for the emancipation of man such as had never before been seen in the Western world. This language was a result of the translation of the old objective “natural right” into a subjective “political right” within the framework of a thorough-going postmechanistic and neonaturalistic shift that impacted the sciences of man. It allowed the discussion of the future of mankind in universal terms, and made it possible to think finally of politics, religion, morality, and economics from the standpoint of man, seen as the ultimate endpoint rather than simply as a means within a wider eschatological scheme. This language was a hugely effective instrument for bringing together utopia and reform, and it soon came to be used by the Enlightenment in order to intervene in a new and original way in the political debate on contractualism, sovereignty, and representation, and in deliberations on how best to conceive a constitution and a republicanism suited to the conditions of the moderns. All this, coupled with the steady intent of achieving an overall cultural system and civil society openly critical of the Ancien Régime and thus effectively working towards its demise.
Voltaire was among the first to realize the potential of this language for communication and propaganda in the struggle against intolerance and fanaticism that he undertook in his defense of Calas. However, the great European debate on the right to punish that developed after the publication in 1764 of Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments was the beginning of a long process that eventually shifted the focus from the struggle for civil rights to that for political and social rights. In this way the crisis of the Ancien Régime and the attendant politicization of the Late Enlightenment became a powerful laboratory of modernity.
The American colonies’ 1776 Declaration of Independence was a milestone in this process. The open acknowledgment of the natural rights of man on which this text was based became the core of all debate in European Enlightenment circles. American independence asserted, and defended with weapons, the principle that a government could only be considered legitimate if it was born in order to guarantee the inalienable rights of individuals—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This inevitably revolutionized the political culture of the Enlightenment, both from the point of view of discourse and theory and in terms of its vocabularies, representations, practices and symbolism. Far from being an issue confined to dusty and little-read works by political theoreticians, the question of rights was communicated to public opinion at an international level through novels and literature in general, and through theater and other arts, such as painting and music. No form of knowledge or artistic expression remained exempt from it. The new republicanism of rights spread to all sectors, unleashing passions and giving rise to new and original social utopias. The major European gazettes, for example, launched a heated political debate on the issue of representative government and on the need to follow the American example and achieve the constitutionalization of rights within the framework of a new science of legislation. This debate represented the most original theoretical victory of the Enlightenment, and the one that would prove richest in political consequences.
Finally, in a historical context that saw problems acquiring worldwide dimensions and the rise of modern empires, the politicization of Late Enlightenment was profoundly affected by issues such as the legitimacy of colonialism, the slave trade, the universality of rights, and the on-going development of European civilization vs. the lack of development among savage nations. In discussions of these issues, neonaturalism was of course a constant underlying theme. There were constant references to precipitous advances in the sciences of man, which were now set to explore every aspect of the human species—physiological, psychological, social, and political. The traditional horizons of politics were changing. It was no longer enough to accept the concept of equality as a moral postulate, without further discussion, as had the members of early eighteenth-century Enlightenment circles, including Rousseau. New and important works of reference had come into being, alongside those by Cook, Bouganville, Forster, and Raynal’s famous Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes. These new works included studies in medicine, comparative anatomy and zoology, which compared and contrasted monogenetic and polygenetic theories of the origin of human populations. The struggle against slavery and colonialism, based on the thesis of the universal equality of rights for all human beings, had to confront results of research carried out within the Enlightenment environment itself that demonstrated, with uncompromising rationality, the irreducible peculiarities and differences among the peoples of the earth.
Above and beyond important innovations in the field of social communications and in its position in the historical context of the end of the century, Late Enlightenment politics seemed designed to provoke clashes and increasingly clear-cut rifts between moderates and radicals within the Republic of Letters. Was man really free within the great chain of being? Who was actually right: those Enlightenment figures who adhered to Helvetius’ theories on human perfectibility and thus advocated reforms to bring about equality of rights, or those who still believed in the fixity of species, and thus preferred a more limited program of reform, just enough to modernize the Ancien Régime? Was it right to follow a politics based on “having to be” and on reasonable utopia? Or should one rather revisit Machiavelli’s political realism, and examine man scientifically as he actually was, in the light of obvious human inequalities that could at best be minimized, but without entertaining too many hopes of social justice and palingenesis? Hopefully these reflections will suffice to make us realize why it is now more than ever necessary to study the European Late Enlightenment in its autonomy as historical era that was grappling with the crisis of the Ancien Régime. In this way, it may finally emerge from the shadow cast by the French Revolution, which deserves itself to be studied per se rather than as a chapter in certain philosophies of history that were too strongly affected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideologies.