Philosophes Sentence Examples
His appointment as minister of the marine on the 10th of July 1774 met with general approval, and was hailed with enthusiasm by the philosophes.
The works of this period are Les Philosophes Salaries, Machiavel juge des revolutions de notre temps (1849), La Federazione repubblicana (1851), La Filosofia della rivoluzione (1851), L' Italia dopo it colpo di Stato (1852), Histoire des revolutions, ou Guelfes et Gibelins (1858; Italian trans., 1871-1873).
It is not in virtue of his great age alone that this can be said of him; he actually had much in common with the beaux esprits of the 17th century, as well as with the philosophes of the 18th.
Received at first in the ranks of the philosophes, he soon went over to their opponents, possibly more from contempt than from conviction, the immediate occasion for his change being a quarrel with d'Alembert in 1762.
His opposition to 'the philosophes had its strongest expressions in Fanatisme des philosophes (Geneva and Paris, 1764) and Histoire des revolutions de l'empire romain (Paris, 1766-1768).
His great literary power, his reputation for benevolence, and his known toleration and dislike of doctrinal disputes caused him to be much more favourably regarded than most churchmen by the philosophes of the 18th century.
Franck, Moralistes et philosophes (1872).
In France the philosophes and the quarrels over the Unigenitus had effectually killed the spirit of religion; nor was the Christianity of other countries at a much higher ebb.
So the Encyclopedie, besides giving a eulogistic article " Baconisme," speaks of him (in d'Alembert's preliminary discourse) as " le plus grand, le plus universel, et le plus eloquent des philosophes."
The bourgeois revolutionists of France had all been philosophes, but their philosophy had at least paid lip-service to " reason "; the Russian revolutionists who formed the majority of the first and second Dumas, as though inspired by the exalted nonsense preached by Tolstoi, 1 subordinated reason to sentiment, until - their impracticable temper having been advertised to all the world - it became easy for the government to treat them as a mere excrescence on the national life, a malignant growth to be removed by a necessary operation.
AdvertisementA striking feature was the preamble, setting forth the doctrines on which the edict was based, which won the praise of the philosophes and the ridicule of the wits; this Turgot rewrote three times, it is said, in order to make it" so clear that any village judge could explain it to the peasants."The opposition to the edict was strong.
The suppression of the Encyclopedie, to which he had been a considerable contributor, and whose conductors were his intimate friends, drew from him a shower of lampoons directed now at "l'infame" (see infra) generally, now at literary victims, such as Le Franc de Pompignan (who had written one piece of verse so much better than anything serious of Voltaire's that he could not be forgiven), or Palissot (who in his play Les Philosophes had boldly gibbeted most of the persons so termed, but had not included Voltaire), now at Freron, an excellent critic and a dangerous writer, who had attacked Voltaire from the conservative side, and at whom the patriarch of Ferney, as he now began to be called, levelled in return the very inferior farce-lampoon of L'Ecossaise, of the first night of which Freron himself did an admirably humorous criticism.
His writings of this kind, though too laudatory and somewhat diffuse, have great merit; they abound in those anecdotal details, natural yet not obvious reflections, and vivacious turns of thought, which made Gibbon style him, with some extravagance certainly, though it was true enough up to Gassendi's time - "le meilleur philosophe des litterateurs, et le meilleur litterateur des philosophes."