ABSTRACT
When the leaders of the French Revolution canonised Voltaire and Rousseau (by putting them in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1791 and 1794 respectively), counted the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) among their enthusiastic supporters (at least until they sentenced him to be guillotined), and made basic Enlightenment themes such as reason, progress, anti-clericalism and emancipation central to their own revolutionary vocabulary, it was inevitable that a backlash against the Revolution would fuel opposition to the Enlightenment as well.2 By the mid-1790s in Germany the term ‘Jacobiner’ was practically synonymous with ‘Aufklärer’.3 In France, the idea that the Revolution was ‘la faute à Rousseau, la faute à Voltaire’ had become deeply entrenched and widespread among both its advocates and its opponents by the early 1790s, despite the fact that Rousseau admitted to having ‘the greatest aversion to revolutions’ and Voltaire preferred government for the people rather than by the people.4 With the establishment of this link in the minds of so many, the violent excesses of the Revolution tainted the Enlightenment and spawned a new generation of enemies. The advent of what I shall call the ‘continuity thesis’ between the Enlightenment and the Revolution – the belief that they were connected in some intrinsic way, as cause and effect, for example, or crime and punishment – proved seriously damaging to the former as the latter became increasingly steeped in blood.
