Conclusion: Did the Enlightenment Matter?

Abstract

Many vociferous reactionary ideologues during the 1790s blamed all the evils of the French Revolution, as they saw them, upon the philosophes. For Burke, as for the Abbé Barruel, the ‘illuminati’ had been visionaries drunk upon reason; their speciously attractive, pseudo-humanitarian projects and facile rhetoric had charmed the impressionable, and fatally undermined the status quo. The antagonists of the Enlightenment could certainly point to erstwhile philosophes who were deeply caught up in French Revolutionary politics. When Condorcet died in the Terror, and the democrat author of The Age of Reason, Tom Paine, narrowly escaped with his life, it was easy to imply that radical chickens were finally coming home to roost.