ABSTRACT
In the climate of opinion in the 1760s, to be in the good books of the philosophes was to be on the side of the angels. Throughout Europe, rationalism was gaining ground, together with such concepts as ‘Natural Religion’, the rights of man, and the Social Contract. Men were seeking to find a humane and reasonable basis for the social order. As the educated classes aspired to influence and political power, so was absolutist and theocratic rule on the Bourbon model held up to execration, even by members of the ruling classes themselves. The ideas of Montesquieu and Voltaire were all the rage, and a woman likes to be in the fashion. Not that Catherine’s enthusiasm for the ideas of the Age of Reason was insincere. She was a clever woman, to whom brilliant and daring ideas made a genuine intellectual appeal. What is more, an alliance with the French Free-thinkers had political uses.
