Book 1.2: The Paper Age
Background
The Enlightenment had begun a century earlier, but with the ascension of Louis XVI its ideas gained a new social prestige. They were sexy at the court; Voltaire and Franklin were the pride of Paris, once even meeting together on stage and sending the women into a frenzy. It was a time of nice anecdotes, bon mots, and ideology unmitigated by practical experience and unencumbered by a particularly deep conception of human nature.
French thought has always been particularly interested in political questions, a characteristic which has persisted. From French Social Romanticism to French Postmodernism, if the French are particularly to blame for the damage their philosophy has done to political life, this is partially because their thinkers have been so consistently dedicated to politics.
The French thinkers of the period were diverse (yada yada), with Rousseau even going against the Enlightenment in his belief in the deleterious effect of social institutions on the noble savage. But they all shared one fundamental belief. In the words of Tocqueville:
However much the authors of the time eventually diverged from one another, all started from the same place: all believed that it was proper to replace the complex traditional customs that governed the society in which they lived with certain simple, elementary rules, which could be deduced from reason and natural law.
The process by which this replacement takes place will be what Carlyle calls “Victorious Analysis”.
The philosophes achieved their first meaningful political representation in the person of Turgot, the man Louis XVI appointed to Controller General of Finances in 1774. We will see that he quickly found himself in an unfortunate position that most philosophes managed to avoid — he had to apply his theories. His first implementation of physiocracy, an ideology which bridged mercantilism and the economic liberalism that is coming, was met with up to 300 riots when it led to price gouging in the grain market.
But this was a small hiccup in the march of reason, which notched a major victory with the success of the American Revolution, which birthed new stars like the Marquis de Lafayette. French optimism was tempered only by the increasingly disastrous state of the royal finances. The problem will prove a sticky one.