A tinted plaster statue of Voltaire, old and seated, by Jean Antoine Houdon
Seated Voltaire, 1778
Marked Paris

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Enlightenment

Writers across Europe and its colonies argued that reason, evidence and debate should guide how people live and are governed. Their ideas about rights fed revolutions, though many left out women and the enslaved.

Place
Paris · Edinburgh · London · KönigsbergEurope, The Americas
Laid out as
A beliefA faith or a way of thinking, from its central idea outwards to its practice and its spread.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. ILocke and the rights of man
  2. IICoffee houses and salons
  3. IIIThe Encyclopédie
  4. IVVoltaire
  5. VMary Wollstonecraft
  6. VIEnlightenment and slavery

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • John Locke
  • Voltaire
  • Émilie du Châtelet
  • David Hume
  • Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Immanuel Kant

Objects

  • The Encyclopédie
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1685 to 1815. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?