French Revolution Enlightenment Essay

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The Revolutionary Time Know as the Enlightenment

The intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment was the spread of ideas that were primarily based upon reason and human behavior. Philosophes, where enlightened thinkers spread their ideas on politics and other issues that pertained to life in the 1700s. The spread of this information was through places such as salons, being privately held by the upper class and also public spheres that were open to all of the society. This made the enlightenment and the ideas of philosophes extremely revolutionary because they changed individual ideas, politics, and society.
A change in individual ideas is what set of the Enlightenment. The idea of many great Philosophes spread through England, France
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Thomas Hobbes’s wrote his ideas in 1651 “ Nature hath mad men so equal in the faculties of body and mind…” this basically says all people are equal but a government is still needed with a definite leader. Although this is not a complete change to the ideas pre enlightenment it does in fact challenge the divine write theory that stated that all power of the king was given to him directly through God. He says a leader is no more than a leader. This is a huge shift in ideal at the very beginning of the revolution, because before this people believed that God gave power to those who led. Baron de Montesquieu later introduces a new idea to government in 1777’s, towards the end of the revolution, that will later lead to the foundation of the U.S constitution. He states, “ In every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative, the executive, in respect to things dependent on the law of he punishes criminals...” Montesquieu is saying that there are three central powers of government that will control the country and this will allow for the distribution of power. This idea shows just how revolutionary the ideas of the philosophes were because before this in history the distribution of power between three branches of government has never been seen. Philosophes such as Thomas Hobbes and Baron de Montesquieu expressed views on government that later developed the foundation of the Untied States

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