EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

"The Marriage of Figaro"

The Enlightenment

The ancien régime in France and elsewhere in Europe was threatened not only by internal problems and tensions but also by new ways of thinking about society and the world. Emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment was both a movement and a set of ideas; it was also called the Age of Reason because of its emphasis on the power of the human mind to liberate the individual and improve society.

Enlightenment philosophers argued that knowledge can be derived only from experience, experiment, and observation. They encouraged people to use their own critical reasoning to free their minds from prejudice, unexamined authority, and oppression by the church or the state. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in 1784 that enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”

“Immaturity,” he wrote, “is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” The motto of the Enlightenment, in Kant’s words, was therefore, “Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding.”3 The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire made a similar point when he wrote, “The most useful books are those to which the readers themselves contribute half; they develop the idea of which the author has presented the seed.” The consequence of this appeal to reason, science, and self-reliance was, of course, a serious undermining of the authority of the established institutions of the old regime, particularly the church and the state.

The principles of the Enlightenment were in some ways a continuation of the discoveries and theories of the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when scientific observation and experiments challenged and threatened the worldview and authority of the church. In the sixteenth century, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a theory of the universe that placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the solar system. In the seventeenth century, the Italian Galileo Galilei constructed an astronomical telescope through which he confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, bringing him into conflict with the church’s Inquisition for his heresy. The English philosopher and mathematician Isaac Newton, in his treatise Principia (1687), derived the principles of gravity and motion; he described the universe as a machine and nature as governed by rational and consistent laws. Geologists in France discovered fossils that conflicted with the time scheme suggested in the Old Testament. All of these men used observation and experiments to draw conclusions that conflicted with the accepted wisdom of the time.

Enlightenment philosophers applied the methods of the Scientific Revolution to the study of society and of government rather than the material universe, believing that natural laws governed human behavior and institutions, just as they governed the universe. The principal forerunner of the Enlightenment was the Englishman John Locke (1632-1704), who first broached the notion that reason and knowledge are derived from experience.

Human nature, Locke contended, is essentially good (unlike the biblical notion of original sin), and human character is a function of one’s environment, upbringing, and education. It is possible, then, by shaping society and the environment and providing good education, to produce a better society. Locke also argued in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) that man possesses natural and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property. He wrote that political communities (i.e., governments) are formed by popular consent, implying a kind of contractual relationship between people and government that flew in the face of the widespread notion of divine right. Locke’s ideas, and even his language, had an enormous influence on other Enlightenment-era political thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson across the Atlantic; these ideas are found later in both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Although the Enlightenment was a Europe wide phenomenon, the movement was dominated by French writers, thinkers, and philosophers, who were referred to as philosophers. The Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), a critic of absolutist government, satirized the reign of Louis XIV, as well as elite society and the church (referring even to the pope as a magician). In his Spirit of the Laws (1748), he argued (in good Enlightenment fashion) that laws are derived from nature; he also developed the idea of the separation of powers-partitioning the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of government into separate institutions-another concept that was picked up by the Americans and incorporated by James Madison in his design of the U.S. Constitution.

Another important French Enlightenment thinker, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), elaborated on some of Locke’s ideas about natural rights and popular sovereignty. “Man is born free,” wrote Rousseau, “and everywhere he is shackled.” Society corrupts and distorts man’s natural freedom and equality, Rousseau argued, but a reformed society and government can restore the balance through civil liberty and equality, negotiated between the people and the government through a social contract. Rousseau described this ideal society in his Social Contract (1762), which, like many Enlightenment publications, was banned in France.

The most important publication of the French Enlightenment was the Encyclopedia, an effort to compile a comprehensive and systematic collection of knowledge, using the new gospel of scientific empiricism. Most of the important thinkers of the time contributed to the encyclopedia, which was published between 1751 and 1765 in seventeen volumes, numbering 16,288 pages. It was principally through the Encyclopedia that many Enlightenment ideas were disseminated; those of Locke and Montesquieu, for example, appeared under entries such as “political authority” and “natural liberty” and encouraged democratic tendencies in France and elsewhere. The coeditor of the Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, was credited with saying that salvation would arrive when “the last King was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” The French government twice attempted to suppress the Encyclopedia, but publication proceeded, and it became a best seller.

One more philosopher must be mentioned, not so much because of his impact on French revolutionary tendencies per se, but because of his broader impact on the development of Europe and the West: the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790). Smith applied Enlightenment ideas about the natural state of things to the economy and the market, arguing that government interference in the economy violated the interplay of natural forces of competition and supply and demand. In his nine hundred-page opus, The Wealth of Nations, Smith discussed how self-interest could work for the common good. By giving free rein to individual greed and the private accumulation of wealth, the “invisible hand” of the market would benefit society in the end, a formula sometimes characterized by the seemingly paradoxical aphorism “private vice yields public virtue.” He argued for a system of laissez-faire (from the French, meaning “let do”) in which the government abstained from interfering in the economy. These ideas shattered the prevalent doctrines of protectionism and mercantilism and became the basis for what would develop into capitalism.

It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, the same year as the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The Enlightenment is often treated as one of the causes of the French Revolution of 1789, but it is important to recognize that it was not the cause of the Revolution. Most of the philosophers should more properly be thought of as reformers than revolutionaries. They were mostly from the upper classes themselves, and although they satirized and criticized old regime society, they mostly favored the creation of an enlightened, or constitutional, monarchy rather than a popular, or representative, form of government. The philosophers themselves did not constitute any political parties or revolutionary organizations; nor did they propose any very specific reform programs or policies. None of them was involved very directly in the revolutionary events of 1789.

Even so, the ideas raised by Enlightenment thinkers were profoundly unsettling and challenging to old regime society and political order. The philosophers attacked the very assumptions on which the ancien régime was built, and they held the existing institutions up to ridicule. Their emphasis on reason and independent thinking undermined the habits of blind obedience to the authority of the church and the state. The assertions of Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau that the ultimate object of government was to promote the happiness and dignity of the individual created a whole new way of thinking about the political world, and not just in France. The very fact that these ideas were being aired and debated gave rise to a new phenomenon-public opinion-and the idea of government and politics as something “public.”

Much cross-fertilization of ideas occurred between America and Europe at this time. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin visited France, read the works of the philosophers, and were much influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Similarly, the examples of the American revolutionaries, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution (1787) inspired both reformers and revolutionaries in France.

The Play That Sparked a Revolution: The Marriage of Figaro

The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is mostly known as a delightful comic opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But the opera was based on a highly successful and controversial play written in 1778, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a man who at various times was a musician, courtier, financier, diplomat, merchant, secret agent, publisher, and, one would have to say, an opportunist and something of a rogue. Even so, Beaumarchais was also a typical Enlightenment intellectual, a member of the nobility who satirized privilege and high society and a reformer, but not a revolutionary. At the time of the American Revolution, he urged the French king Louis XVI (r. 1774–1793) to support (secretly) the revolutionaries against the British and managed almost single-handedly to raise money to purchase and ship enough military equipment to support twenty-five thousand men in the colonies.

In between his many projects and adventures, he managed to write a number of plays, including two whose reputations have lasted mostly through operas: The Barber of Seville (composed by Rossini) and The Marriage of Figaro (by Mozart). In Figaro, the story line is a comic attempt by the title character to frustrate the efforts of the count to exercise his droit du seigneur, the supposed right of the lord of a manor to bed any new bride in his employ. But the play also makes much fun of numerous institutions of the old regime, including social hierarchy, inherited privilege, incompetent officials, censorship, and the courts. When the play was first written, Louis XVI was so appalled by its impertinence that he asserted it could never be performed. However, after several modifications and revisions (including transferring the setting of the play from France to Spain) and numerous additional reviews by the censors, the play was finally approved and performed by the Comédie Française in 1784. Despite its four-and-one-half-hour length, it was enormously popular, ran for sixty-eight successive performances, and became the greatest success of eighteenth-century theater in France.

The revolutionary leader Danton credited Figaro with “killing off the nobility” and Napoleon characterized the play as “the revolution already in action.”