10 - The end of the Enlightenment: conspiracy and revolution?

Summary

The empire of ignorance and superstition was moving closer and closer towards its collapse, the light of Aufklärung made more and more progress, and the convulsive gestures with which the creatures of the night howled at the dawning day showed clearly enough that they themselves despaired of victory, and were only summoning up their reserves for one final demented counter-attack. Then the disorders in France erupted: and now they again reared their empty heads and screeched at the top of their voices, ‘Look there at the shocking results of the Aufklärung! Look there at the philosophers, the preachers of sedition!’ Everyone seized this magnificent opportunity to spray their poison at the supporters of the Aufklärung.

In 1789, France entered a period of revolutionary change which was to see the complete restructuring of the state, the collapse of the monarchy, and its replacement by a republic. By 1793, France was riven by civil war and factional struggles and had also opened hostilities upon several neighbouring states. At home, political dissent and economic collapse were repressed by the use of political terror. For many contemporaries, as for later historians, the connection between these events and the Enlightenment was highly problematic. How could an era which had seen so much struggle for the rational reform of society, government and the individual have ended with such turmoil and violence? Was the Revolution caused by the Enlightenment, or was it a repudiation of it? Did it happen because Enlightenment had been pursued too strongly or not strongly enough? Was Revolution always implicit in Enlightenment, or had the Revolution in France only occurred because of much more contingent, short-term factors? In particular, was the violence of the Revolution, which traumatised contemporaries, an inevitable outcome of the intense political stresses of a revolutionary situation after 1789, or was it generated by the ideas of the Enlightenment, ideas in which the men of the Revolution were thoroughly steeped? The answers to these questions were to be of decisive importance in assessing the importance of both Enlightenment and the Revolution itself in the nineteenth century.