The causes of the French revolution : part 2

Abstract

This intellectual movement was another cause, and not the least, of the French Revolution. Mallet du Pan wrote: "Philosophy may boast her reign over the country she has devastated... Her votaries hastened the degeneration and corruption of the French by weakening the bulwarks of morality, by sophisticating conscience and by substituting the uncertain dictates of man's fallible reason, the equivocalism of passion and of selfishness, for the rules of duty proposed by tradition, confirmed by education and secured by habit. They threw doubts on an truths and shook the foundations of whatever had been established and consecrated by time, experience, and by a wisdom saner than their own. Intellectual anarchy prepared the way for social anarchy. Rousseau the favourite author of the middle classes, who was read and commented upon in the streets, misled virtue itself. He taught the nation to receive the dogmas of popular sovereignty and of natural equality as axioms. and deduced from them their most extreme consequences. He was the prophet of the Revolution. and his works were its Gospel".