Ideas have consequences. The ideas or concepts of the Scientific Revolution influenced the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment impacted the American and French Revolutions, and later enabled the Industrial Revolution. They all gave birth to the modern age in which we live today.
There is a major concerted effort to erase this seminal history from colleges and universities in the United States and Europe. This must not be allowed to happen.
The Scientific Revolution is a concept used by historians to describe the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. The scientific revolution took place in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance period and continued through the late 18th century, influencing the intellectual social movement known as the Enlightenment. While its dates are debated, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) is often cited as marking the beginning of the scientific revolution. Major persons involved with the scientific revolution include Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei.
The Age of Enlightenment was preceded by and closely associated with the Scientific Revolution. Earlier philosophers whose work influenced the Enlightenment included Francis Bacon, René Descartes, John Locke and Baruch Spinoza.
The Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason); was an intellectual and philosophical movement which dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century.
The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy—and came to advance ideals like liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state. In France, the central doctrines of the philosophes were individual liberty and religious tolerance in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.
French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715 (the year that Louis XIV died) and 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution). Some recent historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. Les philosophes (French for “the philosophers” ) of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffee houses and printed books and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church—and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The major figures of the Enlightenment included Cesare Beccaria, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Some European rulers, including Catherine II of Russia, Joseph II of Austria and Frederick II of Prussia, tried to apply Enlightenment thought on religious and political tolerance, which became known as enlightened absolutism. Benjamin Franklin visited Europe repeatedly and contributed actively to the scientific and political debates there and brought the newest ideas back to Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson closely followed European ideas and later incorporated some of the ideals of the Enlightenment into the Declaration of Independence (1776). One of his peers, James Madison, incorporated these ideals into the United States Constitution during its framing in 1787.
The most influential publication of the Enlightenment was the Encyclopédie (Encyclopaedia). Published between 1751 and 1772 in thirty-five volumes, it was compiled by Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert (until 1759) and a team of 150 scientists and philosophers. It helped spread the ideas of the Enlightenment across Europe and beyond.
The French Revolution was a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France that lasted from 1789 until 1799, and was partially carried forward by Napoleon during the later expansion of the French Empire. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy, established a republic, experienced violent periods of political turmoil, and finally culminated in a dictatorship under Napoleon that rapidly brought many of its principles to Western Europe and beyond. Inspired by liberal and radical ideas, the Revolution profoundly altered the course of modern history, triggering the global decline of absolute monarchies while replacing them with republics and liberal democracies. Through the Revolutionary Wars, it unleashed a wave of global conflicts that extended from the Caribbean to the Middle East. Historians widely regard the Revolution as one of the most important events in human history.
Major events concerning the Revolution include the meeting of the Estates General on 5 May 1789 at Versailles; the National Assembly taking the Tennis Court Oath; the storming of the of the Bastille on July 14, 1789; On August 26,1789 the National Assembly ratified and published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; the Women’s March on Versailles on October 5. 1789; the Fête de la Fédération on July 14, 1790 celebrated the establishment of the constitutional monarchy; on August 10, 1792; the Paris Commune stormed the Tuileries Palace and killed the Swiss Guards; the September Massacres were a wave of killings in Paris and other cities in late summer 1792, during the French Revolution; the execution of King Louis XVI; the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette and the beginning of the Reign of Terror; the genocidal War in the Vendée; and the execution of Maximillian Robespierre ending the Terror.
Major persons associated with the events of the French Revolution include King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (later known as Philippe Égalité), Maximillian Robespierre, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just; Georges Jacques Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Charlotte Corday, Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Gilbert du Motier (Marquis de Lafayette), Jacques Pierre Brissot, Nicholas Bonneville, Claude Fauchet, Sylvain Maréchal, “Gracchus” Babeuf, Goupil de Préfeln, Camille Desmoulins, Bertrand Barère, and the Marquis de Condorcet.
The Society of the Friends of Truth (Amis de la Verité), also known as the Social Club (French: Cercle social), was a French revolutionary organization founded in 1790. It was “a mixture of revolutionary political club, the Masonic Lodge, and a literary salon”. It also published an influential revolutionary newspaper, the Mouth of Iron.
Here are the crucial primary and secondary documents I recommend which present this historical portrait: Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, by James H. Billington; Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, by Terry Melanson; The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Ritual and Doctrines of the Illuminati, edited by Josef Wäges, Reinhard Markner and translated to English by Jeva Singh-Anand; Philo’s Reply To Questions Concerning His Association With the Illuminati, by Adolph Freiherr Knigge and translated to English by Jeva Singh-Anand; Illuminati Manifesto of World Revolution (1792): L’Esprit des Religions, by Nicholas Bonneville and translated to English by Marco di Luchetti Esq.; Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism: A Translation from the French of the Abbe Barruel, by Augustin Barruel; The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, by Robert Darnton; The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, by Robert Darnton; Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, by Robert Darnton; Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, by Reinhart Koselleck; and The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti, 1761-1837, by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein.
12:23 pm on November 2, 2021
