# Smile of Reason

• Voltaire - visited England in 1720s as a refuge from persecution.

• 18th Century England were a paradise for amateurs. People rich enough to practice hobbies

  • Inheritors of the idea of the Renaissance ideals of being

• 18th Century England created two worlds, countryside rich vs urban decay

  • Hogarth's midnight conversation

• Salon - gatherings of men AND women hosted by women who were mostly middle-class

  • Hostesses of Parisian salons used tact to get people comfortable
  • Were ascendant for 40 years
  • Success on two accidental factors
    • Court was not in Paris but in Versailles
    • French upper classes were not destructively rich. Most wealth was lost in a market crash

• Encyclopedia - by Diderot

• Authoritarian governments don't like dictionaries and encyclopedias as they define things too well. Encyclopedia was suppressed several times.

• Science was often an "after dinner activity"

• Even Voltaire was only a dilettante - lacked patient realism of the experimenter.

• This is possible only where quick wittiness is less highly valued. This was found in Scotland.

• Industrial revolution was underway before French and American revolutions

• "romance of industrialism" begins to usurp the power of the old regime

• Voltaire lived near the border with Switzerland

• Voltaire was serious about justice

• Thomas Jefferson - religious freedom