Explanation:
The Enlightenment was a primarily European cultural and intellectual movement that was born in ... The Enlightenment also bore its own fruits in other European and American places. ... of the Independence of the United States and the French Revolution, as well as the rise of capitalism and the birth of socialism.
Enlightenment thinkers held that human knowledge could combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny to build a better world. The Enlightenment had a great influence on the scientific, economic, political and social aspects of the time. This type of thought spread in the bourgeoisie and in a part of the aristocracy, through new means of publication and diffusion, as well as meetings, held in the homes of wealthy people or aristocrats, in which intellectuals and politicians participated in order to expose and debate about science, philosophy, politics or literature.
The Enlightenment (Lumières, in French; Enlightenment, in English; Illuminism, in Italian; Aufklärung, in German), 6 in the phrase of one of its most important representatives, D'Alembert, “discussed, analyzed and agitated everything, from profane sciences to the foundations of revelation, from metaphysics to matters of taste, from music to morals, from scholastic disputes of theologians to objects of commerce, from the rights of princes to those of peoples , from natural law to the arbitrary laws of nations, in a word, from the questions that concern us most to those that interest us most weakly ». This itself indicates to us that, more than the content of its doctrines, what was original about the movement was the way of thinking and valuing.
Painting by Charles Gabriel Lemonnier depicting the reading of a tragedy by Voltaire, then in exile, The Orphan of China (1755), in Madame Geoffrin's literary salon on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. The most notable characters gathered around the bust of Voltaire are Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, d'Alembert, Buffon, Quesnay, Du Plessis and Condillac. In addition, there are Gresset, Marivaux, Marmontel, Vien, La Condamine, Raynal, Rameau, Mademoiselle Clairon, Hènault, Choiseul, Bouchardon, Soufflot, Saint-Lambert, the Count of Caylus, Felice, the Baron of Aulne, Malesherbes, Maupertuis, Mairan , d'Aguesseau, Clairault, the Countess of Houdetot, Vernet, Fontenelle, the Duke of Nivernais, Crébillon, Duclos, Helvètius, Vanloo, Lekain, Lespinasse, Boccage, Réaumur, Graffigny, Jussieu and Daubenton.
