Precursors.

As in other parts of Europe, the Enlightenment in France had been preceded by the publication of a number of works that were critical of the Roman Catholic Church, traditional Christianity, and received wisdom in general. Although the French court had come to be affected powerfully by a renewed sense of piety in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, these years had also seen the publication of a number of works that were to be widely read in the eighteenth century, and to form the basis for the Enlightenment's attempts to establish an "Age of Reason." Newton's ideas of a world held together by the opposing forces of gravity and John Locke's teachings concerning the necessity of liberty in civil societies came to be almost as important in eighteenth-century France as they were in England and America. Yet...