The Enlightenment
5 Jul 1687 O.S. – 178954 items
early modernphilosophyFrom Newton’s Principia to the Rights of Man
A century of people who thought that reason, evidence and argument in print could remake the world. It begins in 1687 with Newton showing that one law moves the Moon and the tides, and ends in August 1789 with a French assembly declaring that men are born free and equal in rights. Between them come the Encyclopédie, the Paris salons, Voltaire’s campaigns, the Scots, Kant’s Königsberg and Franklin’s Philadelphia.
It was never one city’s. The books were printed in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden and Geneva to get past French censors; the ideas were argued over in Edinburgh, Naples, Milan, Berlin and St Petersburg. And women did more than pour the tea: Émilie du Châtelet translated Newton, Laura Bassi taught physics at Bologna, and the salonnières ran the conversation the philosophes needed.
Two calendars
Both calendars appear here. France and most of the continent counted Gregorian dates, but Britain and its colonies kept the Julian calendar, eleven days behind, until they skipped from Wednesday 2 to Thursday 14 September 1752. So Newton, Locke, Hume and Franklin’s kite carry Julian dates, as they wrote them, and so do Catherine the Great’s: Russia kept the old calendar until 1918. The English also began the year on 25 March, which is why Newton’s tomb says he died in 1726 while the timeline puts it in 1727.
How it is laid out
Periods: the three great Paris salons, the Encyclopédie’s twenty-one years in print, and Voltaire’s homes, from English exile to Ferney. Events that belong to one of them are nested inside it.
Threads to filter by:
salons,censorship,voltaire,science,womenandrights.
Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! — Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”, 1784
Items
Newton’s Principia is published
Locke’s Two Treatises and Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies
Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary
- ≈ 13 years, 2 months
The Spectator brings philosophy to the coffee-houses
- ≈ 10 years, 3 months
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters
Vico’s New Science
Newton dies at Kensington
Laura Bassi takes her doctorate in Bologna
Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters are burned in Paris
Linnaeus’s System of Nature, printed in Leiden
Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature
Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics
Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws
Émilie du Châtelet dies with her Newton finished
Rousseau’s illumination on the road to Vincennes
The king’s council suppresses the first two volumes
Dalibard draws lightning from the sky at Marly-la-Ville
Franklin’s kite
Britain skips eleven days
Edinburgh’s Select Society is founded
Genovesi takes Europe’s first chair of political economy
The Lisbon earthquake
Candide
The Encyclopédie loses its privilege
Jean Calas is broken on the wheel in Toulouse
Rousseau’s Social Contract, printed in Amsterdam
Émile is condemned and Rousseau flees
Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance
Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments
Diderot finds his publisher has censored him
The last ten volumes of text appear at once
Catherine the Great’s Instruction to the Legislative Commission
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
The Declaration of Independence
Hume dies in Edinburgh
Franklin and Voltaire embrace at the Academy of Sciences
Voltaire dies in Paris
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Princess Dashkova heads the Academy of Sciences
Mendelssohn answers “What is enlightenment?”
Kant answers “What is enlightenment?”
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen