This essay examines why France, the intellectual birthplace of Enlightenment philosophy, ultimately failed to translate its own Enlightenment ideals into lasting political and economic progress. Drawing on the works of Montesquieu and Rousseau, it traces the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy and rational governance as they emerged in 18th-century France. The paper then turns to the French Revolution as both the product and undoing of these ideals, comparing France's experience with Britain's successful modernization. Using Barrington Moore's historical analysis, the essay argues that weak class stratification, urban-limited reform, and structural incompatibilities left France economically and politically crippled rather than transformed.
The paper demonstrates the use of comparative historical analysis as an explanatory tool. By pairing France's trajectory with Britain's successful modernization, the writer isolates the specific variables — class stratification, geographic reach of reform, and structural compatibility — that account for France's failure. This technique, drawn from Moore's methodology, shows how juxtaposition can sharpen a causal argument without requiring extensive empirical data.
The essay opens with a broad introduction to the Enlightenment, narrows to France and its philosophes, then presents the theoretical contributions of Montesquieu and Rousseau. The middle section pivots to the French Revolution as the practical test of these ideas. The final movement introduces Moore's comparative analysis to explain why the test failed, closing with a synthesis that ties the philosophical and structural threads together. The structure follows a classic funnel-then-reversal pattern: build up an expectation, then explain why reality diverged from it.
The dawn of the 18th century saw the emergence of a period that eventually determined the future of modern society — the Age of Enlightenment. Under this age, the prevalent ideology held that it is possible for people to formulate and enforce reform and change in society. Social reform was especially significant in the European experience, wherein the rigid and conservative influence of Christianity had led to the development of a society that was characteristically theocentric.
The Enlightenment is characterized by a shift of society's concern toward the natural and social sciences through scientific observation, which necessitated objectivism and rational thinking. These changes in the character of European society were brought about by the rise of modernization, in which agricultural-traditional society — with its norms, rituals, and traditions — was gradually replaced by industrial capitalism, where the division of labor and social structures were clearly defined.
Despite the widespread popularity of Enlightenment thought across Europe, it was in France where it flourished most. In France, the Enlightenment was characterized by a group of theorists called the philosophes — individuals "who were committed to political change in France and they saw themselves as a new class in alliance with the rising bourgeoisie … they adopted an educative role to aid progress … applying the new experimental method to the sphere of the social … [t]hey focused on economic and social history and constructed universal histories of the process of the rise of civilization …" (Preston, 1997:35).
Two philosophes became especially significant to the progress and development of the Enlightenment in France: Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Montesquieu's seminal work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), discusses in detail the reforms he believed were urgently needed in France. These proposed reforms included the thinking that the pursuit of material progress and liberal democracy would determine France's successful future. He acknowledged that different countries possess different material resources, and therefore argued that the route to success lay in identifying the "variables" that would make a country politically and economically successful — that is, examining the socio-demographic, geographic, cultural, and economic structures of a particular country. Analyzing these factors, he argued, would allow the state to become more efficient, thereby ensuring material progress and, eventually, social progress (36).
Rousseau, meanwhile, proposed how liberal democracy could be achieved in French society, elaborating his vision in his philosophical work The Social Contract. In this treatise, Rousseau discusses how the rationalization of society occurs when every individual surrenders part of his rights in order to create the "general will." The general will is the collective expression of civil society's rights, vested in a representative who acts on behalf of the citizenry in the decision-making process of ensuring peace and order. In effect, the social contract becomes the vehicle through which both the state and its citizenship are formed, opening a new avenue through which social reforms may be proposed and enacted (Kagan, 1995:665–6).
It is evident that the works of Montesquieu and Rousseau contain the basic principles that have guided modern society throughout the years: the concepts of liberal democracy and the rationalization of society. Their works reflect the political ideologies that would eventually become what democracy is today, and all of these Enlightenment ideologies were born in France. Looking at the country's history during the Enlightenment, one might reasonably conclude that French society embodied the new modern order — a model that should have become the very picture of an industrialized society.
However, the historical record tells us the opposite occurred: while England and the rest of Europe began modernizing and industrializing, France remained far behind, unable to recover from the political and economic downfall that accompanied the emergence of the French Revolution.
Because the principles and ideologies of the Enlightenment managed to penetrate only the cities and not the countryside of France during the 18th and 19th centuries, the country ultimately failed in its pursuit of social reform. Ironically, French society failed to apply the very framework Montesquieu had identified as essential to successful reform: a careful consideration of a country's economic and political structures before imposing change. Because the reform enacted during the Revolution was structurally incompatible with French society as a whole, France was unable to harness Enlightenment principles toward material and social progress. As a result, it never became one of the prime movers that spurred the economic growth characterizing the Industrial Revolution and the age of modernism.
Kagan, D. (1995). Western Heritage. NJ: Prentice Hall.
Moore, B. (1966). Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Preston, P.W. (1997). Development Theory: An Introduction. MA: Blackwell Publishers.
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