Enlightment Paris Tour

Enlightment

PARIS

It was in Paris where the different ideas of the renaissance collided to give us what we know call the académie, bureaucracy, and philosophie; reintroducing to the European masses Greek stoicism and the empirical sciences — and thanks to some universités and museums you can go back when the encyclopédie was being edited.

Time period: 1685-1815s

Movie/book: Divine Emilie (2007)/The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Soundtrack: J.S. Beach/Joseph Bologne Chevalier’s music

Fashion:

Budget:

Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier: In the Salon of Madame Geoffrin in 1755; Paris, 1812

This tour would take you through the streets of the Latin Quarter: were intellectuals meander around the 1600-1700s (close to the old University of La Sorbonne); and to the Louvre Museum: the headquarters of the academy. The area is characterized by: classical architecture, rectilinear streets and university campuses. European Society was very childish and tribal during the Medieval times: the guilds kept their artesanal processes and craftsmanship a secret; monasteries kept ancient manuscripts for their own orders; and people on general were dogmatic (diseases were god punishments, the earth was the center of the universe and flat). But everything was about to change thanks to the Renaissance: art became realistic in Florence; Venice got industrialized; and the scientific method was already being used in England — but everything was about to get refined by the French and their age of reason, also known as Enlightenment. In the 1500s Paris slowly took over Venice in book production and by the end of the century there were 75 printing houses (which hired a lot of women) translating ancient Greek/Byzantine books into French. In 1635 Cardinal Richelieu (the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of France) stablished the Académie Française to regulate and formalized the French language. Charles Le Brun along other 22 aristocrats founded in 1648 a school inspired by the florantine Accademia del Disegno: the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture which took over the Louvre palace after the royals left to Versailles. King Louis the XIV appointed Jean-Baptiste Colbert as the First Minister of State in 1661 and with him the modern bureaucracy was born (the hierarchy of roles within the government and procedures they perform). At the beginning bureaucrats were supposed to help the King execute his absolute power but they got corrupted by the bourgeoisie (merchants) and French philosophers with their “new enlightened ideas” (Greek philosophy and stoicism). Voltaire believed in freedom of speech (civil rights), the separation of church and state, and promoted deism (rational view of religion); he was a historian who rewrote the past emphasizing on artistic/scientific achievements, and also a novelist with Candide as his most famous book. Rousseau was the author of the iconic book The Social Contract & General Will; he believed in self education by experience, distinguished between amour de soi (self love) and amour-propre (pride/ego), and advocated for popular sovereignty. The pinnacle of the Enlightment came between 1751 and 1772, wren The Encyclopédie: a monumental 28-volume book-set with around 140 contributors that aimed to democratize knowledge and challenge traditional authority (nobles/clergy) got published. But the rationality of the Enlightment collapsed on its own weight and the utopias it was supposed to create became authoritarian empires due to the human nature. The tour suggests visiting the Catacombs, and the Pantheon during the morning with a picnic at the Luxembourg gardens; walking around La Sorbonne and the Académie de Beaux-Arts in the afternoon; and a late quick visit to the Louvre plus dinner at night.