The indefatigable genius who was the acknowledged leader in the intellectual attack undoubtedly partook in a measure of all the four elements just mentioned, and his true glory is that, throughout the whole range of his varied work, this enthusiasm of humanity glows constantly aflame and warms his zeal. The almost unexampled versatility and fecundity of Voltaire's mind gave his contemporaries the impression of a far larger genius than the test of time has been able to concede him.
His merit has been said to lie in a most extraordinary combination of secondary powers, no one of which was precisely of the highest class. He was neither one of the great poets, or observers, or philosophers, or teachers of men, though he wielded, and for a longer time, the most potent literary power of which history tells. Although of the four main schools into which the eighteenth century movement may be grouped, Voltaire was especially marked out as the leading spirit of the intellectual attack, he did not a little to stimulate the constructive task, both in its philosophical and in its social side. It is from Voltaire's visit to England in 1726 that we must date the opening of the grand movement of '89. The accumulating series of impulses which at last forced on the opening of the States-General at Versailles began with English ideas, English teachers, and English or American traditions private tour istanbul.
Place Venddme
At the same time (1724-1731) was formed in the Place Venddme with the aid of Lord Bolingbroke, the confraternity of reformers, to whom he gave the English name of club. This was the first appearance in France of an institution which has played so large a part in the history of Europe, which is destined yet to play an even larger part. The Abbd Alari, the Abbd Saint-Pierre, the Marquis d'Argenson, and their companions in the Club de 1'Entresol were already, sixty years before the opening of Revolution, covering the ground of the social ideas of '89, in a vague, timid, and tentative manner, it may be, but withal in a spirit of enthusiastic zeal of the better time they were not destined to see.
Of this group of premature reformers, of these precursors and heralds of '89, none is more illustrious than the Marquis d'Argenson, nor is any book more memorable than his Reflections on the Government of France (1739). Here we have the germ of the democratic absolutism which has again and again reasserted its strength in France: here are the germs of the local administration; here is the first proposal for the symmetrical system of eighty-six departments which since 1790 replaced the ancient provinces with all their anomalies. Here also is the repudiation by an illustrious noble of the privileges of nobility, the condemnation of local restrictions on trade, and the dream of a new France where personal equality should reign, and where the cultivator of the soil should be lord of the land he tilled.
No comments:
Post a Comment