Philosophes Quotes

“To realize the Enlightenment ideals of formal equality, the rule of law, freedom of commerce, and religious toleration, Voltaire and many of the other philosophes looked to absolutist monarchs, whose policies they hoped to influence. The support of the philosophes for the expansion of the monarch's sovereign power was tactical. It arose not out of a principled belief in the throne, but out of the recognition that only a strong monarchy had the power to override the resistance to enlightened legislation by the privileged churches, estates, and corporations that made up continental European society. (p. 45)”
― Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought

“There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.”
― Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature

“The eighteenth century, which distrusted itself in nothing, as a matter of course, hesitated in nothing.”
― Joseph de Maistre, Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions