Question

Why did some people in the eighteenth century Europe think that culture would bring enlightenment and end despotism?

Answer 1

Despotism is a governance system in which absolute power is wielded by an individual, without any legal regulation or checks by Constitution.

• There was a common conviction that books were a means of spreading enlightenment and progress, by the mid-eighteenth century.
• Many believed that books would herald a time when intellect and reason could change the world.
• People believed that books would help in liberating society from tyranny and despotism.
• In eighteenth-century France, a famous novelist named Louise-Sebastien Mercier, declared that despotism will be swept away by the force of public opinion and progress and the printing press is the powerful engine behind it.
• Through acts of reading, the heroes are transformed in many of Mercier’s novels.
• The ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers were popularised by Print.
• Their writings provided a critical commentary on despotism, superstition, and tradition, collectively.
• It was demanded that everything be judged through the application of rationality and reason, they argued for giving predominance to reason instead of custom.
• The legitimacy of a social order based on tradition was eroded when there was an attack on despotic power wielded by the state.
• The sacred authority of the Church was attacked through Print.
• Those who read the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire saw the world through new eyes, eyes that were rational, critical and questioning. Their works were read widely by people.
• A new culture of debate and dialogue was created by the Print.
• Due to more awareness of the power of reason by the public, all institutions, norms and values were discussed and re-evaluated.
• New ideas of social revolution came into being with public culture which understood the requirement for questioning existing beliefs and ideas.
• Against the monarchy, there was a growth of hostile sentiments with the circulation of underground literature.
• Caricatures and Cartoons usually suggested that while the common people suffered immense hardships, the monarchy remained absorbed only in sensual pleasures.
• There came into existence immense amounts of literature that criticised and mocked the morality of the royalthy, by the 1780s. The existing social order was questioned through these processes.