ABSTRACT
Jonathan I. Israel frames the Enlightenment up to 1750 as a 'dramatic and decisive period of rethinking when the mental world of the west was revolutionized along ratio-nalistic and secular lines'. As to the unfolding of the Enlightenment, Israel argues for three movements in Radical Enlightenment. Jean-Henri Samuel Formey's piety did not stand in the way of extensive collaboration with the project of the Encyclopédie, nor was this so for a number of Catholic intellectuals, including the abbé Jean-Martin de Prades, whose connections to the Encyclopédie project would particularly prompt a polarization in the late Enlightenment. The French Enlightenment had various faces, factions, and disputes in the early eighteenth century, and the polarization that arose mid-century – the creation of a Counter-Enlightenment – had yet to find a dominance. The abbés circulated at the edges and beyond the ambit of Church affairs as official functionaries and less formal administrators.
