The French philosophes, who developed and wrote about Enlightenment ideas, inspired the French Revolution. For example, Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws(1753) that a constitutional monarchy afforded the greatest freedom to the people because the power was split between the monarch and the parliament, checking the power of each. The English, he believed, had a superior form of government because the British king was checked by the parliament and the courts....
The French philosophes, who developed and wrote about Enlightenment ideas, inspired the French Revolution. For example, Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws (1753) that a constitutional monarchy afforded the greatest freedom to the people because the power was split between the monarch and the parliament, checking the power of each. The English, he believed, had a superior form of government because the British king was checked by the parliament and the courts. During the early phases of the French Revolution, many leading revolutionaries, such as the Comte de Mirabeau, advocated the creation of a constitutional monarchy, but this did not come to pass. When the French king, Louis XVI, tried to flee to Varennes, it was obvious that he was not interested in sharing power with the legislative branch of government. Therefore, the French Revolution began with a republic rather than a constitutional monarchy.
Rousseau, another Enlightenment thinker, also inspired the French Revolution. His idea of the social contract between the government and the governed was at the root of the French Revolution (and the earlier American Revolution). Many statements in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) are derived from his ideas. For example, "men are born and remain free and equal in rights" in the Declaration of the Rights of Man comes from his statement in the Social Contract that "man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." Rousseau wrote the following:
"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution."
The second article of The Declaration of the Rights of Man reads, "The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression." These ideas are derived partly from Rousseau's idea of the social contract and partly from Locke, who was also an Enlightenment philosopher who believed that the government had the duty to safeguard the life, liberty, and property of the governed. Rousseau's ideas were highly influential in providing the spark that started the French Revolution and that overthrew the French monarch.
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