§ 165.14. =The French Contribution to the Illumination.=--The age of Louis XIV., with the morals of its Jesuit confessors, the lust, bigotry, and hypocrisy of its court, its dragonnades and Bastille polemic against revivals of a living Christianity among Huguenots, mystics, and Jansenists, its prophets of the Cevennes and Jansenist convulsionists, etc., called forth a spirit of freethinking to which Catholicism, Jansenism, and Protestantism appeared equally ridiculous and absurd. This movement was essentially different from English deism. The principle of the English movement was _common sense_, the universal moral consciousness in man, with the powerful weapon of rational criticism, maintaining the existence of an ideal and moral element in men, and holding by the more general principles of religion. French naturalism, on the other hand, was a philosophy of the _esprit_, that essentially French lightheartedness which laughed away everything of an ideal sort with scorn and wit. Yet there was an intimate relationship between the two. The philosophy of common sense came to France, and was there travestied into a philosophy _d’esprit_. The organ of this French philosophy was the “_Encyclopédie_” of Diderot and D’Alembert, and its most brilliant contributors, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau. =Montesquieu=, A.D. 1689-1755, whose “_Esprit des Lois_” in two years passed through twenty-two editions, wrote the “_Lettres Persanes_,” in which with biting wit he ridiculed the political, social, and ecclesiastical condition of France. =Helvetius=, A.D. 1715-1771, had his book, “_De l’Esprit_,” burnt in A.D. 1759 by order of parliament, and was made to retract, but this only increased his influence. =Voltaire=, A.D. 1694-1778, although treating in his writings of philosophical and theological matters, gives only a hash of English deism spiced with frivolous wit, showing the same tendency in his historical and poetical works, giving a certain eloquence to the commonest and filthiest subjects, as in his “_Pucelle_” and “_Candide_.” He obtained, however, an immense influence that extended far past his own days. To the same class belongs =Jean Jacques Rousseau=, A.D. 1712-1778, belonging to the Roman Catholic church only as a pervert for seventeen years in the middle of his life. Of a nobler nature than Voltaire, he yet often sank into deep immorality, as he tells without reserve, but also without any hearty penitence, in his _Confessions_. His whole life was taken up with the conflict for his ideals of freedom, nature, human rights, and human happiness. In his “_Contrat Social_” of A.D. 1762, he commends a return to the natural condition of the savage as the ideal end of man’s endeavour. His “_Emile_” of A.D. 1761 is of epoch-making importance in the history of education, and in it he eloquently sets forth his ideal of a natural education of children,