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French Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was a broad, diffuse movement of reform that swept across the Western world in the eighteenth century. Although it was very much an international phenomenon, it varied in tone and emphasis in different national contexts. In France, the Enlightenment encompassed a somewhat broader range of opinions than in most countries, a breadth that made it particularly diverse and fractious. It was led by a small band of (mostly) Paris-based writers such as Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean d’Alembert, the Comte de Buffon, Claude Adrien Helvétius, the Baron d’Holbach, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and the Marquis de Condorcet, known collectively as the philosophes, a French word that means both a philosopher in the narrow sense and a thinker or ...
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