¹ For the self-definition of the ‘philosophical’ movement, the anonymous tract ‘Le philosophe’ is probably the most useful source. In Robert Darnton's words, ‘Le philosophe’ ‘defined the ideal type of the worldly, witty freethinker, who held everything up to the critical light of reason and especially scorned the doctrines of the Catholic Church’ (Darnton, Robert, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France (New York, NY, and London, 1991), p. 89Google Scholar). The tract originally appeared in 1743, and was later republished in the Encyclopédie as well as being re-issued separately by Voltaire.

² As Darrin McMahon has pointed out in his by now classic study of the French Counter-Enlightenment, opponents of the Enlightenment had warned even before 1789 that ‘the triumph of philosophie augured regicide, anarchy, and the annihilation of religion.’ McMahon, , Enemies of the Enlightenment: the French counter-Enlightenment and the making of modernity (Oxford, 2001), p. 11Google Scholar. However, these claims of course gained much broader currency after the descent of the Revolution into the Terror.

³ On the celebration of the philosophes as republican precursors under the Third Republic, and more generally for an excellent overview of the genesis of Enlightenment studies, see Lynn Hunt, with Margaret Jacob, ‘Enlightenment studies’, in Alan Kors, ed., Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (4 vols., Oxford, 2002), i, pp. 418-30.

⁴ Much excellent work has been produced on the interwar debate about the Enlightenment. See, for instance, on the context in which Cassirer's work took shape: Gordon, Peter, Continental divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 291–300Google Scholar. On Horkheimer's and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment, see Jay, Martin, The dialectical imagination: a history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley, CA, 1973), pp. 253–80Google Scholar. The work of the American historian Carl Becker, who detected a link between the Enlightenment's naïve faith in progress and reason and twentieth-century communist utopianism, needs to be read in the context of this debate as well. See Johnson Kent Wright, ‘The pre-postmodernism of Carl Becker’, in Daniel Gordon, ed. Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: new perspectives in eighteenth-century French intellectual history (New York, NY, 2001), pp. 161–78.

⁵ Talmon, Jacob, The origins of totalitarian democracy (1952; London, 1961)Google Scholar. For an overview of Talmon's intellectual trajectory, see Dubnov, Arie, ‘Priest or jester? Jacob L. Talmon (1916–1980) on history and intellectual engagement’, History of European Ideas, 34 (2008), pp. 133–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Cobban, Alfred, In search of humanity: the role of the Enlightenment in modern history (London, 1960)Google Scholar.

⁷ On Peter Gay's life and career, see Robert L. Dietle and Mark S. Micale, ‘Peter Gay. a life in history’, in Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Dietle, eds., Enlightenment, passion, modernity. historical essays in European thought and culture (Stanford, CA, 2000), pp. 1–23. Dietle and Micale remark that ‘Gay first organized his ideas about the Enlightenment in the 1940s and 1950s; against the backdrop of twentieth-century challenges to freedom by fascism and communism, the Western liberal-rationalist tradition, he believed, very much deserved affirmation.’ Ibid., p. 3.

⁸ In one of his earliest scholarly papers, Gay identified ‘the so-called “New Conservatives” like John H. Hallowell and Russell Kirk’, as ‘the authors most responsible for perpetuating clichés about the Enlightenment’. See ‘The Enlightenment in the history of political theory’, Political Science Quarterly, 69 (1954), p. 375. In his 1964 book, The party of humanity: essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, NY, 1964), Gay went on to criticize Talmon repeatedly while praising Cobban's In search of humanity. See, for instance, his discussion of both historians, pp. 176–7. In this sense, the writings of Talmon and the New Conservatives formed a more immediate context for the genesis of Gay's interest in the Enlightenment than his critique of Carl Becker, even though Gay later came to put more emphasis on Becker as a foil against which his own arguments took shape.

⁹ Gay, ‘The Enlightenment in the history of political theory’, p. 375.

¹⁰ Gay, The party of humanity, p. 176.

¹¹ Gay, The Enlightenment: an interpretation (2 vols., New York, NY, 1966–9), i: The rise of modern paganism, p. 18.

¹² Ibid., ii: The science of freedom, p. 450.

¹³ Voltaire, ‘États, gouvernements’, in Dictionnaire philosophique: comprenant les 118 articles parus sous ce titre du vivant de Voltaire, avec leurs suppléments parus dans les Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, ed. J. Benda and R. Naves (Paris, 1954), p. 188 [ARTFL]. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

¹⁴ Peter Gay, Voltaire's politics: the poet as a realist (1959; New Haven, CT, 1988), p. xiii.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 330.

¹⁶ Gay, The Enlightenment, i: Rise of modern paganism, p. 25.

¹⁷ Gay, The Enlightenment, ii: Science of freedom, p. 563.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 566.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Gay, The Enlightenment, ii: Science of freedom, pp. ix–x. For an influential critique of Gay's methodology, see Darnton, Robert, ‘In search of the Enlightenment: recent attempts to create a social history of ideas’, Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971), pp. 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Bibliothèque bleue, see Roger Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d'ancien régime (Paris, 1987). Jurgen Habermas's 1962 study The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society was translated into English by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA) in 1989 and has exercised a considerable influence on Enlightenment studies in the Anglophone world since the 1990s. See, for instance, Goodman, Dena, The Republic of Letters: a cultural history of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, 1994)Google Scholar. For a more general appraisal of the turn away from intellectual history since the 1970s, see Hesse, Carla, ‘Towards a new topography of Enlightenment’, European Review of History, 13 (2006), pp. 499–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ For instance, John Lough, in his The Encyclopédie (1971; Geneva, 1989), concluded that ‘if one were to seek in the pages of the Encyclopédie the text of the Declaration des droits de l'homme or a blueprint of the limited monarchy set up by the constitution of 1791, one would certainly be disappointed’ (p. 326).

²² One of the first historians to focus on the reformist, rather than revolutionary impulse of the Enlightenment in many European countries was Franco Venturi. See Venturi, Settecento riformatore (5 vols., Turin, 1969–90). Volumes iii and iv of Settecento riformatore, entitled La prima crisi dell’ Antico Regime, 1768–1776 (Turin, 1979) and La caduta dell’ Antico regime, 1776–1789 (Turin, 1984), have been translated into English by the American historian Robert Burr Litchfield under the title The end of the Old Regime in Europe. Today, historians such as Tim Blanning have moved beyond Venturi in that they argue that Enlightenment could also actively shore up the Old Regime ( Blanning, Tim, The culture of power and the power of culture: old regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Oxford and New York, NY, 2001Google Scholar). I would like to thank Gabe Paquette for drawing my attention to the importance of Blanning's work in this context.

²³ David Hollinger, ‘The Enlightenment and the genealogy of cultural conflict in the United States’, in Keith Baker and Peter Reill, eds., What's left of Enlightenment: a postmodern question (Stanford, CA, 2001), pp. 7–18.

²⁴ Darnton, ‘In search of the Enlightenment’, p. 119.

²⁵ Darnton, , ‘The high Enlightenment and the low life of literature’, Past and Present, 51 (1971), pp. 81–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Robert Darnton, The literary underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, 1982), p. 14.

²⁶ Darnton, Robert, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France (New York, NY, and London, 1995)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Darnton, ‘The high Enlightenment and the low life of literature’ (1995 edn), p. 34.

²⁸ As Darnton puts it: ‘L'An 2440 provided readers with a retrospective view of the France of Louis XV, not a preview of the French Revolution, to say nothing of the twenty-fifth century’, Forbidden best-sellers, p. 129.

²⁹ In addition to Furet's own Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978), the most important work to come out of the revisionist school is probably the four-volume collection of essays published to mark the bicentennial, which is tellingly entitled The French revolution and the creation of modern political culture (Oxford, 1987–1994). In the very first volume, editor Keith Baker noted in the ‘Introduction’ that the French Revolution was ‘a radical political invention’ (p. xxiii).

³⁰ Darnton, ‘George Washington's false teeth’, New York Review of Books, 27 Mar. 1997, pp. 34–8. In his excellent overview of Darnton's intellectual trajectory, Jeremy Popkin has likewise pointed out that Darnton's 1997 essay ‘is a declaration of loyalty, not just to any Enlightenment, but to something very similar to Peter Gay's Enlightenment’. See Popkin, ‘Robert Darnton's alternative (to the) Enlightenment’, in Haydn Mason, ed., The Darnton debate: books and revolution in the eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), p. 128.

³¹ Darnton, ‘George Washington's false teeth’.

³² Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikulás, ‘Preface’, The Enlightenment in national context (Cambridge, 1981), pp. vii–ixGoogle Scholar.

³³ Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in Porter and Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in national context, p. 6.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 16. Porter soon received support from one of the most influential intellectual historians of the early modern period: John Pocock. In a speech to the London School of Economics in 1988, Pocock described the British Enlightenment as a ‘conservative’ force, which had ‘less to do with emancipation from tradition, or from previous modes of social power, than with the protection of sovereign authority and personal security against religious fanaticism and civil war.’ See Pocock, , ‘Conservative Enlightenment and democratic revolutions: the American and French cases in British perspective’, Government and Opposition, 24 (1989), p. 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ The original British title of Porter's book was Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world, but it was re-issued in the United States under the title: The creation of the modern world: the untold story of the British Enlightenment (New York, NY, and London, 2000). I have used the American edition while writing this paper.

³⁶ Ibid., pp. 33.

³⁷ See, for instance, the review by Fara, Patricia ‘Enlightenment or Enlightenment?’, Journal of Modern History, 55 (2001), pp. 335–7Google Scholar.

³⁸ On the ‘conservative’ intent of the Enlightenment science of politics, see Robert Wokler, ‘The Enlightenment science of politics’, in Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler, eds., Inventing human science (Berkeley, CA, 1995), pp. 323–46.

³⁹ Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); idem, Enlightenment contested: philosophy, modernity and the emancipation of man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Democratic Enlightenment: philosophy, revolution, and human rights 1750–1790 (Oxford, 2011). Israel has also provided a summary of his arguments for a broader audience in A revolution of the mind: radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modernity (Princeton, NJ, 2010).

⁴⁰ Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, p. 1.

⁴¹ On Israel's critique of the ‘postmodern’ reading of the Enlightenment, see in addition to the quote above: Enlightenment contested, pp. 869–71; idem, Revolution of the mind, p. xiii; and idem, Democratic Enlightenment, pp. 1–2, 23. For his critique of the ‘many Enlightenments’ school as condemning the Enlightenment to irrelevance, see Enlightenment contested, p. 863. Israel has repeatedly depicted himself as following in Peter Gay's footsteps, see Enlightenment contested, pp. v, 10; idem, Democratic Enlightenment, p. 3.

⁴² It should be noted though that Israel's interpretation of Spinoza as the quintessential modern thinker has been questioned. See, for instance, Samuel Moyn's incisive review of A revolution of the mind, ‘Mind the Enlightenment’, The Nation, 12 May 2010.

⁴³ LaVopa, Anthony, ‘A new intellectual history? Jonathan Israel's Enlightenment’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), p. 727Google Scholar. For a similar critique on Israel, see Stuurman, Siep, ‘Pathways to the Enlightenment: from Paul Hazard to Jonathan Israel’, History Workshop Journal, 54 (2002), pp. 227–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Jacob, Margaret, The radical Enlightenment: pantheists, freemasons and republicans (London, 1981), p. 249Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Kors, Alan, D'Holbach's coterie: an Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, NJ, 1976), p. 309Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ This is not to say, of course, that there were no republicans at all in eighteenth-century France. But eighteenth-century French republicanism tended to be classical rather than enlightened. See Baker, Keith, ‘Transformations of classical republicanism in eighteenth-century France’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp. 32–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ It is of course possible to simply bracket this question by using the term ‘Enlightenment’ as a temporal adjective, referring to the eighteenth century, rather than as a well-defined intellectual movement. Such an approach can be very useful in order to broaden our understanding of Enlightenment-era perspectives, as Sankar Muthu shows in his Enlightenment against empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003). Yet, as David Hollinger argues in his ‘The Enlightenment and cultural conflict’, considering the continued importance of the term in contemporary debate, historians ‘should not shy away from constructing the most historically sound Enlightenment we can, and from offering the best arguments we can about its consequences’ (p. 18).

⁴⁸ See, for instance, Sorkin, David, The religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ This is not to say, of course, that the new emphasis on a more ‘reasonable’ faith was merely a response to the challenge posed by deism and other enlightened forms of religious unorthodoxy. Enlightened religious believers, as Helena Rosenblatt points out, were often at least as worried about religious enthusiasm as they were about religious unorthodoxy. See Rosenblatt, ‘The Christian Enlightenment’, in Stewart Brown and Timothy Tackett, eds., Cambridge History of Christianity, vii: Enlightenment, reawakening and revolution, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 283–301.

⁵⁰ Lehner, Ulrich, ‘What is Catholic Enlightenment?’, History Compass, 8 (2010), p. 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and more generally Lehner and Michael Printy, eds., A companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden, 2010). For an excellent overview of the recent debate about the relationship between Enlightenment and religion, see Sheehan, Jonathan, ‘Enlightenment, religion, and the enigma of secularization: a review essay’, American Historical Review, 108 (2003), pp. 1061–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ Edelstein, Dan, The Enlightenment: a genealogy (Chicago, IL, and London, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Edelstein makes this argument more generally, but for his discussion of the distance between the political ideals of the philosophes and our own, see pp. 52–60. Sophia Rosenfeld similarly points out how different the Enlightenment conception of free speech was from our own conception of liberal tolerance. See Rosenfeld, ‘Writing the history of censorship in the age of Enlightenment’, in Gordon, Postmodernism and the Enlightenment, pp. 117–46.

⁵² Gay, The Enlightenment, i:Rise of modern paganism, pp. 18–19.

⁵³ Israel repeatedly includes Boulanger in his lists of radical defenders of materialism and republicanism. See the index to Enlightenment contested, p. 958, which lists six references to Boulanger's ‘egalitarian republicanism’.

⁵⁴ It is worth noting that Boulanger's monarchism differs quite fundamentally from the love of enlightened despotism which has often been attributed to the philosophes by adherents of the black legend. Boulanger in fact made a sharp distinction between despotism, which he, like his maitre à penser Montesquieu, despised, and monarchy, which he believed to be a liberal regime. And again like Montesquieu, Boulanger was able to make this distinction because he believed that monarchy was compatible with a high degree of personal security and individual freedom.

⁵⁵ [Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger], Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme oriental (n.p., 1761).

⁵⁶ Sandrin, Paulo, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger (1722–1759) ou avant nous le deluge, no. 240 in Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century (Oxford, 1986), pp. 43–51Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 50 n. 29.

⁵⁸ Boulanger made no secret of his debt to the Spirit of the laws. He devoted the final section of his book to a eulogy of Montesquieu, who he described as ‘the sublime author of the Spirit of the Laws’, ‘a genius’, ‘that unique human being who stands out among the men of our own time as well as times past’. See [Boulanger], Despotisme oriental, p. 430. On Montesquieu as a defender rather than a critic of the French monarchy, see Spector, Céline, Montesquieu: pouvoirs, richesses et sociétés (Paris, 2004)Google Scholar; Sonenscher, Michael, Before the deluge: public debt, inequality, and the intellectual origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2007)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 2; Cheney, Paul, Revolutionary commerce: globalization and the French monarchy (Harvard, MA, 2010)Google Scholar; de Dijn, Annelien, ‘On political liberty: Montesquieu's Missing Manuscript’, Political Theory, 39 (2011) pp. 181–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 421.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 420.

⁶¹ Franco Venturi already pointed to the importance of monarchy as a political ideal in eighteenth-century Europe in his Utopia and reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971), p. 70; but his book primarily focuses on the spread of republicanism in eighteenth-century Europe. More recently, however, several historians have drawn our attention to the importance of monarchism, both enlightened and non-enlightened, in eighteenth-century Europe. Particularly relevant in this context is the collection of essays edited by Blom, Hans, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonutti, Monarchisms in the age of Enlightenment: liberty, patriotism and the common good (Toronto, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.