Name: The Enlightenment: Crash Course European History #18
Uploaded: 2022-06-04T00:20:07.000Z
Duration: 16 min 23 s
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Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

So far, we've seen a ton of political change and continuing warfare in the midst of the

seventeenth century's little ice age, and history often focuses on these types of political

and military stories, but there were also other changes occurring: shifts in how people

The linking of phenomena like earthquakes and eclipses with human events goes back a

very long way, like to the beginning of our species, as does the belief that supernatural

forces are deeply shaping the lives of individual humans.

For instance, in a previous video about witchcraft, we discussed how earthquake tremors in Istanbul

in 1648 were seen as portents of a sultan's death a few months later.

But a century after that, a huge earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal on All Saints' Day

Tens of thousands of people died, many from a tsunami that followed the quake.

Now, some theologians argued this was punishment from God for the world's sins, but others

pointed out that the earthquake had destroyed a lot of churches while sparing a lot of brothels.

Voltaire wrote a famous poem in response to the earthquake that included the memorable

lines “As the dying voices call out, will you dare respond to this appalling spectacle

of smoking ashes with, “This is the necessary effect of the eternal laws Freely chosen by

The way Europeans were looking at the world had changed between the Istanbul earthquake

and the Lisbon one: The Enlightenment was thriving.

[Intro] So, today we want to emphasize that the Enlightenment

wasn't all high fallutin' calculations of the sun's orbit or theories about the

mathematical laws of the universe or for that matter theories about earthquake causality.

It also considered more down-to-earth situations like how people of different social classes

relate to one another, how trade and manufacturing should function, and what the relationship

of ordinary people should be to their government.

The Enlightenment or Age of Light refers to the belief that the musty old ideas needed

to be exposed to rational investigation to see if they were still valuable.

The bright light of reason needed to shine on tradition.

And this momentous challenge to tradition came about during a time in which Europe was

being completely transformed in many ways that are sometimes forgotten amid all the

So let's go straight to the Thought Bubble today.

Beyond the wars and state-building we've already seen,

2. increasing abundance and novelty was creeping into the everyday lives of Europeans.

Coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, and other commodities led to experimentation.

For instance, one English housewife saw tea for the first time and thought it was meant

A diplomat said that tea and coffee had brought a greater “sobriety” and “civility”

Europe had previously been a land of famine and mere subsistence for essentially all of

But now the cultivation of new foods from the Americas like potatoes and corn,

8. along with literally thousands of other new plants, meant that available calories

And it also introduced the idea that maybe the world didn't have to be perpetually

on the brink of starvation and catastrophe.

Also, by this time, tens of thousands of Europeans had traveled the world, and had experienced

For instance, travelers discovered that people across Asia didn't seem as quarrelsome as

Drivers of carts did not block narrow streets for hours arguing over who had the right of

They politely agreed to let one or the other pass.

They also saw that not all social orders were as hierarchical as most European ones,

15. and that some societies even gave less weight to a person's parentage

16. and more to that person's individual skills and talents.

[[TV-Montesquieu]] One of the first ways writers criticized outmoded ways of life was to make

fun of them...writers like Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu,

(He really was the person to criticize outmoded ways of life because, boy did he have an outmoded

Montesquieu was a jurist who owned an estate near Bordeaux, which still makes wine under

his name, and in 1721, he published the Persian Letters in which Uzbek visitors find Europe

The visitors, for instance, are amazed at the magic of priests who somehow perform the

And although they clearly see the problems in French society, they firmly adhere to the

mustiness of their own ways, such as keeping women secluded in a harem and guarded by eunuchs.

The message was that both easterners and Europeans were imperfect.

The author Voltaire--who, slightly off topic, was very handsome.

At any rate, he had similarly critical and amusing takes; his discourtesy to aristocrats

eventually got him sent to the Bastille prison, in fact.

In many rollicking tales, he made fun of overweening rulers and their endless corruptions.

He valued honesty and those who lived simple lives “cultivating their gardens,” as

he famously put it in his satirical novel Candide (1759), which you can learn more about

Full of horrors and injustice, Candide appeared four years after the Lisbon earthquake, which

Voltaire thought was firm evidence that we did not live in the best of all possible worlds.

To replace the old stuffy ways of monarchs and aristocrats, people needed to learn how

to embrace the newly-desirable traits of the Enlightenment, like being honest, and inquisitive,

Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau had many ideas about education reform, for instance.

He was not a wealthy or titled person but rather was born into a watchmaking family

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The Enlightenment: Crash Course European History #18

eventually

individual

slightly

practical