Introduction

The "Age of Reason" is a commonly accepted term for the period of Western culture encompassing most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The term aptly expresses a shift of emphasis away from the Reformation's hotly debated theological issues of salvation and sacraments to new questions concerning the physical universe and the human community. "Age of Reason" even more appropriately indicates a significant change in the educated person's approach to investigating or discussing intellectual matters. Instead of turning to Holy Scripture or to the fathers of the church or to other authoritative expressions of Christian faith, scholars of the Age of Reason perfected methods of thinking that they believed would enable human reason to attain truth without any assistance from religion. Enthused by that belief, Galileo and other scientists not only threw a brilliant light on previously unknown areas of physical and human nature, they also overturned a great many traditional assumptions. By the middle of the eighteenth century it was clear that the intellectual basis of established state churches, divine-right monarchies, and other fundamental institutions of the Old Regime had eroded.

The new focus on nature and man and the new scientific methods of reasoning characteristic of the "Age of Reason" rested upon the unproven assumptions that existence is intelligible and that human reason is perfectly adequate to the task of understanding existence. To imply or to assert that these assumptions were self-evident meant to profess a new faith, customarily called rationalism. It was this new, secular faith that dominated thinking in the Age of Reason until, toward the end of the eighteenth century, its assumptions were put in doubt by the rigorous application of its own methods by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and other philosophers, as well as by the revival of traditional Christian perspectives.

Emphasis on science and rational thought during the Enlightenment, although limited at first to an intellectual elite, would soon translate into political action in the French Revolution, one of the world's first great modern revolutions and a model for others to follow. The great upheaval that the French nation experienced in the late eighteenth century clearly exhibits all the phases of a familiar revolutionary cycle. When the French Revolution began, its leaders had relatively moderate aims. They overthrew a bankrupt and obsolete Old Regime and attempted to organize a constitutional monarchy that would secure individual rights. Under pressures generated by a foolhardy war with Austria and Prussia and by ill-considered domestic reforms, the new regime collapsed. The revolutionary movement then passed into the hands of a radical faction, the Jacobins, who applied drastic remedies, including systematic terror, to promote an egalitarian social agenda, as well as to establish a republic and to overcome its domestic and foreign enemies. As Jacobin violence attained its objectives, it became both unnecessary and unpopular among middle-class Frenchmen. A conservative reaction ended that radical phase. The succeeding government known as the Directory continued to be antiroyalist, but it pursued antidemocratic policies. Paying scant attention to popular opinion, it relied heavily on force to retain its power and seemed incapable of providing peace and security to France. Exploiting widespread dissatisfaction with the Directory, a popular, successful general, Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power and brought the revolution to an end. Some of its most noteworthy achievements were incorporated in Napoleon's new social and political system.