The Enlightenment, from Newton’s Principia in 1687 to the revolutions of 1776 and 1789, told through the people who made it: Newton, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Émilie du Châtelet, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Mendelssohn, Franklin, Jefferson, Condorcet and Mary Wollstonecraft.
The coffeehouses of London and the salons of Paris, the Encyclopédie and the censors who fought it, the Lisbon earthquake and Candide, Voltaire’s campaign for Jean Calas, Frederick the Great at Sanssouci, Catherine the Great and Diderot in St Petersburg, Beccaria against torture, the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh, Lavoisier’s chemistry, the campaign against the slave trade from Benezet to Equiano, the Haitian Revolution, Olympe de Gouges and the Terror, and what the age left behind in law, science and the idea of rights.
#Enlightenment #History #Voltaire #Philosophy #Documentary
Made with AI: the narration is a synthesised voice, and the research, script and assembly were done with AI assistance. The pictures are AI reconstructions, not records of events, except the photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited with their licences at the end, and the maps, drawn from real elevation data.
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