The Scientific Revolution: Voltaire's Effect On Government And Society

In the late 16th century through the end of the 17th century, France was afflicted by religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. These feuds would originally turn the French monarchy into something irreversible. The power of the nobility in France started to cause a threat to the monarch. The monarchs over the next half-century sided with either the Protestants or the Catholics in order to keep their own political security and the peace in France. Eventually, these wars would come to an end. The Enlightenment grew as an addition of the Scientific Revolution; during the Scientific Revolution, Europeans discarded traditional morals and began using rationale and actuality to explain the world around them. While the Scientific Revolution focused on the physical world, the Enlightenment attempted to explain the purpose of regulation,

and describe the best form of it.

Along with this came Enlightenment Thinkers; Voltaire being one of them. Voltaire contributed freedom of speech, opposition to the monarchy, and many more ideas up to the plate. Voltaire had a major effect on France’s government and society because he emphasised freedom and justice, he questioned what he knew what was wrong, and he spurred the third estates to revolt.
To begin, Voltaire stuck by the idea of individualism by emphasising freedom and justice. In Voltaire’s book, Candide, it states, “Imagine all contradictions, all possible incompatibilities--you will find them in the government, in the law-courts, in the churches, in the public shows of this droll nation” (52). Voltaire grew up with Absolute Monarchy and thought an enlightened monarchy would be a good type of governing; he wanted to see monarchs treat everyone equally and with justice.

Voltaire was also for individualism and so this caused much controversy for him. He had trouble with the French supremacy for his dynamic pounces on the government and the Roman Catholic Church, which resulted in innumerable imprisonments and exiles across the span of his life (Mastin). Voltaire was neither advocating for atheism nor the overthrow of the regime. All he wanted was religious liberty for those of all religions. In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire said, “If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism; if there were two they would cut each other’s throats. But there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness” (Letter 6). What this evidence shows is that to have no absolute power [despotism], Europe would have to separate church and state. This ideology is credited to the writings of John Locke, another enlightenment thinker. If John Locke did not have Voltaire to back up his ideology, church and state separation wouldn’t have been as widely spread. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing more than 20,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets (Pettinger). So without Voltaire’s mass production of his opinionated writings, not as many people would’ve joined in when it came to the French Revolution.