Henryk Hinz THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE POLISH ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS OPPONENTS: THE ORIGINS OF THE POLISH MODERN MIND
Usually
the period of the Enlightenment in Poland is considered to have
coincided with the reign of King Stanisław August Poniatowski, the
last king of Poland (1764-95). In fact, however, some important
antecedents of Polish Enlightenment philosophy had emerged before
1764, and some of its mature products appeared after the third
partition of Poland, or even after 1810.1
One might say that the Enlightenment in Poland was the work of the
generation born about 1750.
In
Polish historiography the Enlightenment has been termed an
"intellectual upheaval"; its essence consisted in a rapid
change in style of thinking and in world outlook. The upheaval took
place in the last twenty years of independence when the Enlightenment
reached its height and gained a predominant position in national
culture. In this period the modern Polish mind was born. The
Enlightenment gave rise to a flowering of Polish national culture
that took place after the state disappeared.
The
Enlightenment in Poland brought a general secularization of the
philosophical image of man, of society, and of the world as a whole,
thus creating the theoretical foundations for a modern attitude of
rational criticism toward all elements of culture. The self-satisfied
particularism of the Polish gentry of the first half of the century
gave way to a universal vision of the world of man which became the
theoretical basis for critical reflection on social and political
institutions. This movement of intellectual emancipation embraced all
possible spheres of action and reflection: science and politics,
metaphysics and history, religion and art, economy and way of life.
The
development of the Enlightenment in Poland was determined by a series
of dramatic events and processes taking place in Poland's last
decades of independence. From the time of the first partition in 1772
the menace of Poland's being wiped from the map of Europe once and
for all became one of the important factors forming the attitudes of
representatives of the Polish Enlightenment. Under the pressure of
this menace the thought of the Enlightenment was infiltrated by the
ideas of nation and historicity, which specifically modified the
character of this formation in Poland.
The
beginnings of the Polish Enlightenment were reflected in Warsaw
periodicals of various kinds: moralizing, literary, and learned ones.
At first the most important one was the Monitor, very much like the
English Spectator, appearing in the years 1763-85. That periodical
appeared under the auspices of the king himself and was originally
edited by Ignacy Krasicki and Franciszek Bohomolec.2
The successful endeavor to re-establish a connection between Polish
culture and the contemporary intellectual life of Europe—France
in particular—was one of the achievements of these periodicals.
Thanks to them the names of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton came into
cultural circulation once again, and Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau,
and Diderot became well known to the readers.
The
Monitor in particular exerted a strong influence on the public
opinion of the day. Its moralizing and didactic writers popularized a
new model of man and citizen; he was to be an individual well brought
up rather than religious, well educated and enlightened, well
qualified to perform the duties of a citizen of gentle birth. Those
new ideals were aimed against Sarmatianism, including its cult of the
"golden liberty" of the gentry, and against the sort of
superficial though spectacular devotion and attachment to the church
fostered by Jesuit influence on educational patterns during the
Counter Reformation.
The
spontaneous development of periodicals in the second half of the
century was a signum temporis: it was the first time that they became
on such a large scale a means of disseminating information,
exchanging opinions, and spreading propaganda; most of their writers
wished to inform, teach, enlighten, and morally improve the society
as quickly as possible.
It
is thus quite understandable that the Commission of National
Education was in the seventies one of the chief manifestations of the
spirit of Enlightenment. The commission was set up in 1773 in
connection with the dissolution of the Jesuit Order, which had played
until then a great part in the educational system in Poland. The
purpose of the commission was to plan and organize a uniform state
educational system—from primary schools to universities. It was
an institutional embodiment of the faith of the Enlightenment in the
transformatory power of education and science. Education was supposed
to change men in the spirit of the new ideals and thus lead to the
salvation of the state, whose very existence was threatened. Reforms
carried out by the commission became the object of argument between
traditionalists and supporters of the Enlightenment; they awakened
fierce resistance from part of the clergy headed by the papal nuncio
in Warsaw and the conservative part of the gentry attached to the
tradition of Jesuit colleges.
Despite
opposition, the commission's intentions were partly implemented and
played an important part in the popularization of the Enlightenment.
The reformist activity in the commission was a sort of school of the
Enlightenment for a number of the most outstanding publicists,
scientists, and thinkers of the day, to mention only Hugo Kołłątaj,
Jan Śniadecki, and F. S. Jezierski. In sharp conflict with Sarmatian
attitudes, they waged the first open battle for the victory of new
ideas, thus developing the assumptions of the new methodology of
science and pedagogy, and the theoretical foundations of secular
morality and of the new philosophical anthropology.
In
the late seventies, there began a period in which the struggle for
social and political reform became the central preoccupation of the
Enlightenment thinkers. Such an evolution of interests resulted from
the disillusionment of some representatives of the Enlightenment with
the hitherto assumed omnipotence of education. They came to the
conclusion that only a profound change of the political system and
social relations would bring about the improvement and further
development of the state and nation.
The
new period opened with a four-year struggle for a codification of
laws (1776-80),3
which was unsuccessful. However, the efforts of the reformers were
renewed in the Four-Year Diet (178&-92), whose main achievement
was the Third of May Constitution (1791). In the course of the
deliberations of the Diet the Patriotic Party was set up. Its dynamic
and radical nucleus was the so-called Kołłątaj Forge—a group of
writers, politicians, and publicists, in which the ideology of Polish
Jacobinism, exceeding the ideological bounds marked by the program of
the Patriotic Party, came into being. The emergence of this group was
conditioned not merely by the internal situation —the growing
spirit of revolt among the peasantry, the development of the
aspirations of burghers, the victory of the Targowica Confederation,
and the defeat of the Kościuszko uprising in 1794—but also by
the strong echoes of the French Revolution that kept resounding in
Poland.4
The
consciousness of participation in the most profound changes in the
contemporary world, so vivid among the Polish Jacobins—changes
which were thought to be the beginning of a new epoch in the history
of mankind—exerted a strong influence on the directions and
themes of philosophical reflection. That consciousness was also
expressed in the opinions of the conservatives for whom, for
instance, the Kościuszko uprising was but a "French piece of
work," whereas the diplomacy of the invading states justified
the partitions of Poland, in the eyes of European public opinion, as
a prevention against the wide-spreading "plague of Jacobinism
and revolution." The drama of the disintegration of the state
was thus fused, in the Polish consciousness, with the fight for
freedom of the peoples of Europe against despotism and feudal
privileges. Such were the real foundations of the integration of
national and universal values in the philosophical culture of the
Polish Enlightenment.
At
the end of the century the men of the Polish Enlightenment, without a
state of their own, faced a Europe which was undergoing "political
earthquakes" (Kołłątaj) originating from France. It was for them
the time of a great confrontation of their philosophy with history,
which revealed a defectiveness and helplessness of the philosophy of
the Enlightenment with regard to the new historical situation. The
periods of the Duchy of Warsaw after 1807 and of the Congress Kingdom
of Poland after 1815 were ones of the continuation of the
Enlightenment and, at the same time, of its crisis and hopeless
attempts to defend it.
In
the middle of the eighteenth century, Polish philosophical culture
was still dominated by scholasticism. It was cultivated in religious
colleges, mostly Jesuit ones, and universities; outside the schools
there was practically no philosophy at all The philosophy syllabus
included logic, metaphysics, and ethics as well as mathematics and
physics. Scholasticism as formed in the Jesuit colleges of the second
half of the seventeenth century became a thoroughly anachronistic and
sterile philosophy based on queer and purely verbal speculations. Its
chief intention was to defend Catholic orthodoxy against true or
imaginary heretics.
In
such an anachronistic shape scholasticism had become, in the
eighteenth century, an obstacle to the development of science and
philosophy. The beginnings of the philosophy of the Enlightenment in
Poland were bound up with the fight against the predominant position
of scholasticism. It is a fact of particular importance for the
understanding of the Polish philosophy of the age, because its
attitude of opposition toward scholasticism—an enemy which had
disappeared from the European philosophical scene as early as the
seventeenth century—was until the end of the century one of the
factors influencing its course.
The
opposition to scholasticism originally assumed the form of the
so-called philosophic recentiorum. Its first center was the school
known as Collegium Nobilium founded by Stanisław Konarski (1740).
Antoni Wiśniewski was,
along with the founder of the Collegium, a well-known spokesman of
the philosophia recentiorum. His lectures and publications—for
example, Propo-sitiones philosophicae ex physica recentiorum
(1746)—became
the target of a loud campaign of polemics led by the defenders of the
scholastic tradition. The philosophia recentiorum in the version
spread by Konarski and
Wiśniewski,
particularly
in the Piarist schools, did not go any further than endeavors to add
more modern works and authors, such as Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and
Locke, to traditional philosophical education. A certain popularity
was gained in that period by the German philosophical school of
Christian Wolff; at the same time the Piarist circles undertook a
timid attempt to popularize the works by French enlightened authors
(for example, Wiśniewski
published
in 1753 a
Polish
translation of Montesquieu's Considerations sur
les causes
de la grandeur des
Romains et
de leur
decadence). Konarski's example was followed by the Faculty of
Philosophy of the University of Kraków,
which
constituted a department of the philosophia recentiorum in 1760.
Along
with the reception of the newer philosophy, the beginnings of the
Enlightenment brought an effort to establish connections with the
tradition of Renaissance culture and philosophy in Poland. It was a
conscious struggle to bridge the gap over the cultural depression
marked by a hundred years of the Counter Reformation, between the
reviving national culture of the eighteenth century and its golden
age at the time of the Renaissance. That is how, after decades of
oblivion, the works of Copernicus, Kochanowski,
and
Modrzewski were,
so to speak, recovered by Polish culture. The feeling of a bond with
the Polish Renaissance became a strong component of the Polish
Enlightenment. Popularization of Copernican astronomy and the fight
led by the representatives of the Polish Enlightenment for an
official and common recognition of the theory of one of the greatest
products of Kraków
University
was a symbol of this bond.
When
inaugurating the Department of Astronomy at the University of Kraków,
Śniadecki delivered
a lecture under the title "Praise of Copernicus." The
lecture, expanded and published as a book, translated into several
European languages, contributed considerably to the removal of
Copernicus's work from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1816).
Copernicus
was, for the representatives of the Polish Enlightenment, a national
model of the scientist free from all conformity to external
authority; he inspired them with arguments against "servility of
the spirit unworthy of a philosopher" (Kołłątaj).
The reform
of the University of Kraków
carried
out by Kołłątaj under
the auspices of the Commission of National Education in the years
1777~82 brought about a final overthrow of scholasticism and created
conditions for a development of sciences which were soon to produce
fruitful results. Scholasticism gave way to mathematics, empirically
oriented natural sciences, and philosophical anthropology based on a
secular concept of the law of nature.
Thus,
paradoxically, the "age of philosophy" culminated in the
educational reform that removed chairs of philosophy from
universities (1782).
In
the field of political philosophy the opponents of the Enlightenment
rallied to the banner of Sarmatianism, which was also reflected in
the Bar Confederation and later on, in an apparent paradox, in the
Targowica Confederation. Sarmatianism was the way of life and, in a
way, an ideology of the gentry. This ideology defended the
traditional institutions of the democracy of the gentry, claiming
them to be exceptional, specific, and superior to all foreign forms
of political life. The philosophy of the Enlightenment rejected this
ideology; its political reflection was based upon the rational law of
nature, identical for all nations (Leszczynski, Konarski, Wybicki,
Jezierski, Koïtatej, Staszic). And yet Sarmatianism specifically
modified Polish political and social philosophy and introduced into
it the universal concept of national independence, an understanding
of specific national peculiarities, and an attachment to the values
of republicanism.
In
the literature on the Polish Enlightenment there is a widespread
opinion that Sarmatianism was the main opponent of the Enlightenment,
while the latter was supposed to be a sort of "Westernization"
of Polish culture. The opinion that Sarmatianism was nothing but a
polar opposite of the Enlightenment became popular as early as the
eighteenth century, particularly in the years 1765-75, and it was, to
a large extent, owing to the writings of Voltaire and those of the
Encyclopedists, let alone of the Western press, inspired and paid by
Catherine II. Those writings were directed against the Bar
Confederation, to which Voltaire himself devoted as many as two
separate publications: the first under the pseudonym of J.
Bourdillon, Essai historique et critique sur les dissensions des
églises en Pologne (Basel, 1767), and the other under that of Le
Major Kaiserlîng au Service du Roi de Prusse, Discours aux confédérés
de Kaminiek (Amsterdam, 1768). In these publications the Bar
Confederation was portrayed exclusively as a rebellion of the
Sarmatian con-servatists and religious fanatics against the best
intentions of the enlightened monarchs from Petersburg and Berlin. It
is well known that some of the representatives of the French
Enlightenment did not share that view; for example, Rousseau, Mably,
and some physiocrats had much sympathy with the tendencies that had
been expressed by the Bar Confederation. Nevertheless, the simplified
view of the "patriarch of Femey" became the prevailing one
on Polish ideological and philosophical conflicts in the period of
the Enlightenment.5
In
fact, the conflicts were much more complicated. For Sarmatianism,
though it was an ideology of resistance against the Enlightenment,
became at the same time one of the sources of the Enlightenment
philosophy. It is true that Sarmatianism was an ideology of the
defense of the particularism of the Polish gentry ; it is equally
true that this ideology supported the dubious political tradition of
the status quo. And yet, thanks in part to Sarmatianism, the ideas of
republicanism and democracy kept attacking the consciousness of the
Enlightenment thinkers in Poland. To this situation one may refer the
words in which the French scholar, Jean Fabre, describes the French
reception of Stanisław Leszczynski's Free Voice of the Citizen (Glos
wolny wolność ubezpieczający, 1749). Having found that the reception
of the French translation of this work in the circles connected with
the Encyclopédie was cool, Fabre concludes:
d'autres
seront mieux prepares à donner un sens aux mots fétiches de la
szlachta: liberté, égalité, fraternité, aux vieux mots de république
et de patrie, à vivifier, à partir de l'exemple
polonais, cette nostalgie de civisme que leur éducation classique,
Tite-Live et Plutarque, avaient déposée en leur esprit.
La
Voix
libre du citoyen trouve ainsi sa place aux origines d'une révolution
qui tournera, vers la fin du siècle, tout autrement qu'on
n'aurait pu l'imaginer aux beaux-jours de Voltaire et de
l'Encyclopédie6
The
language of Sarmatian republicanism, insistently present in the
Polish culture of the eighteenth century, was practically a
ready-made form of expression for the modern republican and
democratic ideas which were gaining such popularity by then both in
Europe and America. In that respect Sarmatianism played a part
similar to that of the French Parliaments about which Professor
Palmer writes: "as early as the 1760's [they] put a good deal of
incipient revolutionary language into wide circulation—citoyen,
loi, patrie, constitution, nation, droit de la nation, and cri de la
nation.7
In such a situation it is understandable that in the political
philosophy of the Polish Enlightenment there was no room for an
ideology of enlightened absolutism. Even if the leading
representatives of the age, such as Kołłątaj and Staszic, sought
salvation of the Commonwealth in the abolition of the magnates'
anarchy and in reinforcement of the central power of the state, it
was a republic of which the king was to remain head, and
republicanism remainedexplicitly or implicitly - the central idea of
their political doctrines.
But
not only did Sarmatianism inspire the political philosophy of the
Enlightenment. Sarmatian particularism and its cult of a specific
individuality and uniqueness of the nation stimulated questions and
investigations concerning the genesis and the character of the
qualitative differentiation of the civilizations of mankind. Interest
in the nation and history was also stimulated, as already noted, by
intense awareness of the menace to the independent existence of
Poland. It was in such an intellectual atmosphere that a new feeling
of history was shaped, thanks to which the Polish Enlightenment
thinking tended to transcend the horizons of the law of nature and
historicism as understood in that age.
As
early as the eighties, the interests of many a Polish writer of the
time were directed on the one hand toward the prehistory of the
nation and the origins of the Slavic peoples, and on the other toward
the most recent history of Poland and Europe. These directions were
not accidental: the "beginnings" were considered to be
important in explaining how the nation and its specific institutions
had come into being; the present, in providing a clue to the future
of the nation.
Among
the most outstanding writers who carried out research in this field
was Jan Potocki (1761-1815), known for his fantastic novel, The
Manuscript Found in Saragossa (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie),
still widely read. After he had published a number of contributions
to Sarmatian and Slavic antiquities he came out with his monumental
Histoire primitive des peuples de la Russie (1802). It was
characteristic of Potocki's historical method to combine an all-round
erudition, both philological and historical, with empirical research
into cultures then considered "primitive." From 1784 to
1806 he made journeys to Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, the Caucasus, and
Mongolia, which he described in published reports. For four of those
years, 1788-91, he was also a member of the Four-Year Diet.
Significant for his method of describing cultures remote in time and
space was the attempt he made to understand them from inside, in
their qualitative and unrepeatable uniqueness; he made a conscious
endeavor to approach them from the perspective of their own ideas and
values, without any Sarmatian or Europeocentric prejudices. It seems
that this kind of approach was, to a certain extent, a paradoxical
product of Sarmatianism. True, Sarmatianism contained a certain
xenophobia, and foreign cultures were for it almost exclusively a
reservoir of illustrations and examples of deviations from—Sarmatian,
of course—"regularity" and "naturality."
And yet such attitudes, inspired by the cult of Sarmatian uniqueness,
gradually produced a sensitivity to all uniqueness and specificity of
culture. In such a way Sarmatianism played an important part in the
development of historical thinking in the Polish philosophical
culture of the Enlightenment.
Thus
the conflict between Sarmatianism and the Enlightenment in the Polish
philosophy of the eighteenth century was not one of absolute
opposition. Neither of these currents appeared in an isolated and
pure form, for the ideas of each penetrated and modified the other.
Such confrontation and mutual interpretation was occurring not only
in the national culture as a whole, but also—more or less
clearly—in the writings of many a philosopher. Such an
opposition imparted an inner dynamism to the Polish mind of the age
and lent color to it.
The
Polish philosophy of the Enlightenment could accept for its motto
those well-known words of Alexander Pope, "The proper study of
mankind is man." Kołłątaj wrote that the main object of
philosophy is man, his vocation, and life in a "free, safe, and
just society."
The
first step taken by the anthropology of the Enlightenment in Poland
consisted in emancipating the study of man from the tutelage of
theology and from the religious world outlook specifically colored by
the Sarmatian version of Catholicism. To man as a "privileged
child of Providence"—more specifically one who was Polish
and Catholic—was opposed a secular perspective of the "human
race" as part of the natural order of the universe. In such a
perspective man was understood to be a natural being in the universe,
one responsible for himself, both exclusively and finally.
In
this connection one may notice a break with the opinions of the
Sarmatian religious tradition. Sarmatian and Catholic particularism
gave way to the vision of man subject to the uniform law of nature on
a world scale, irrespective of social condition, nationality, and
race. Kołłątaj wrote: "Philosophers! You who persecute
fanaticism, you who write against multiple austerities inflicted out
of false or transitory ardor, why do you write so little against the
legal slavery of men who are your equals? What is the subject of any
country ? It makes no difference, slave, black or white, he is a man,
in no way unlike us. In Europe and in any part of the world, he is
our equal, a citizen of the earth" {Odezwa do Deputacji
Konstytucyjnyej, 1790).
The
unity of the "physical and moral order" constituted the
central concept of this vision of man. This concept may be traced
back to French physiocrat ism which was one of the main sources of
the theoretical inspiration of quite a number of Polish thinkers of
the time. Hugo Kołłątaj (1750-1812) was one of the most outstanding
representatives of this kind of philosophical anthropology; his
treatise, The Physical and Moral Order (1810), gave the most
extensive exposition of this doctrine. Along with the "physical
and moral order" there was, however, another pillar on which
Kołłątaj's philosophy of man rested—historicism. When
approaching man, in the categories of the universal, unhistorical law
of nature, Kołłątaj sought at the same time an answer to the question
of how history was possible, history the reality of which is
confirmed by a differentiation of civilizations of the human race,
and, what is more, by the contemporary changes of the character and
essence of the human world, as they are being intensively
experienced.
The
question whether history is possible and what its real substance is
was taken up by Kołłątaj in the treatise The Critical Analysis of the
Principles of History. The work undertakes an interesting attempt at
a coherent solution of the antinomy of the law of nature and
historicism. The conclusions of this solution could be schematically
presented in the following manner: according to necessary natural
law, our planet experiences periodic changes of situation of seas and
lands; out of necessity the changes assumed the form of the violent
submergence of existing lands and the emergence of new ones in the
place of former seas and oceans. As a result of the last catastrophe
of that kind the whole previously existing civilization was wiped
out. The few that survived the "deluge" had to start
everything all over again. The experienced disaster was, for those
rescued, so extraordinary and horrifying that a theocratic political
system alone could enable them to return to life in community and to
rebuild civilization. Theocratic rules—originally useful,
exercised by patriarchs remembering the pre-"deluge"
civilization based on the "physical and moral order"—
were soon abused as instruments of particular interests of the ruling
groups. Such was the beginning of the history of mankind which is
known. Before the "deluge" there was a harmonious
civilization of "physical and moral order" but we have not
and shall never have any empirical knowledge about it. The only
accessible reality of man is the history of man after the "deluge,"
hence, history is, practically speaking, the only reality of man.
That is why man, within the bounds accessible to our knowledge, must
be considered as a historical entity, as a being whose nature is
actually changed and created in history. Hence, the fundamental
postulate of the study of man is historical investigation.
Kołłątaj
believed that in such a way he preserved the internal coherence of
his philosophy of man, for he found a transition from an unchangeable
and necessary human nature to the changeability of the human world.
In fact, however, it can easily be noticed that this doctrine of
anthropology, spread between the poles of natural order and history,
was inclined toward historicism and prepared some methodological and
theoretical premises for romantic histori-osophy. The concept of the
"physical and moral order" was pushed away into an
unempirical and practically chimerical time before the "deluge,"
and the only reality remained a continuing self-formation of mankind
in the empirical time of history. This endeavor reflected the
intensive experience of the concrete historical time, which by the
end of the century brought changes that forced their way into
philosophical consciousness (the fall of Poland, the rise of the
United States, the French Revolution).
The
beginning of the nineteenth century saw a crisis of the philosophy of
the Polish Enlightenment and its last theoretical battle which ended
in defeat. At about that time there appeared in Polish philosophy the
so-called Polish Kantianism (J. K. Szaniawski, Feliks Jaroński, and
others) which became the theoretical starting point for the beginning
of romanticism in Polish culture. The then living representatives of
the philosophy of the Enlightenment (Hugo Kołłątaj, Stanisław
Staszic, Jan Śniadecki, and others) unanimously rejected Polish
Kantianism, considering it to be a return to scholasticism and
idealism. The paradox is, however, that despite Polish Kantians and
their opponents, the development of Polish philosophical culture in
the nineteenth century was an unconscious continuation of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment from which it had arisen.
1.
Hugo
Kołłątaj Porządek
fizyczno-moratny (The Physical and Moral Order) was
published in 1810,
and his Rozbiór
krytyczny osąd historii o początkach rodu ludzkiego (The Critical Analysis of
the Principles of
History), written
at
the turn of the century, appeared in 1842.
Jędrzej Sniadecki's Teoria
jestestw organicznych (The Theory of
Organic Beings) appeared
in 1804-11,
and
Staszic did not publish his Rod
ludzki (Human Race) until
1819-20.
2.
Of
the numerous periodicals that appeared later, one should mention
Zabawy
Przyjemne i Pożyteczne (Amusements Enjoyable and Useful) published
in 1770-77. The periodicals originally assumed a moderately critical
attitude toward ideas of the French Enlightenment This was
particularly visible in the publications directed against deism and
natural religion.
3.
I mean the movement connected with the so-called code of A.
Zamoyski.
4.
These
influences are to be seen in the writings of F. S. Jezierski as
early as the period of the Four-Year
Diet It was not until after the victory of the Targowica
Confederation that the patriotic emigration, when preparing for
armed uprising, established direct relations with the Gironde and
later with the Jacobin dictatorship and the post-Thermidorian
governments. 5.
Among French writers perhaps Jean Paul Marat alone might be believed
to associate a condemnation of the Bar Confederation with a complete
refusal of all
justifications to its enlightened oppressors, his opinion being
expressed in
an otherwise poor roman du coeur entitled Les Aventures du Comte
Potowski, written in 1771 in London.
6.
„...others will be better prepared to make sense of the buzz
words of gentry: liberty, equality, fraternity, the old words
republic and country, to enliven, from the Polish example, the
nostalgia of their civic education classic, Livy and Plutarch, had
filed their minds. Free
Voice of citizen finds its place at the origins of a revolution
which will turn towards the end of the century, everything else we
could not have imagined the fine days of Voltaire and
Encyclopédie. »
Jean
Fabre, Lumières et romantisme (Paris, 1963), p.
140. 7.
R.
R
Patmer, The Age of
the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959),
1:449.
|