FRANCE: Tensions between the Muslim East and Christian West prompted a major exhibit on the Enlightenment in Paris, writes Lara Marlowe
When the mood is gloomy in France, as it has been for a year now, there's consolation to be found in the glorious past. The 18th century - the age of Enlightenment - is an unending source of pride which nourishes the French tendency to want to enlighten the rest of the world.
Against a backdrop of profound tension between the Muslim East and Christian West, French intellectuals and politicians often refer to the wisdom of the philosophes. During a visit to the United States after the atrocities of September 11th, 2001, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), thought of organising a major exhibition on the Enlightenment.
"We wanted these precious documents ... to serve clear-minded action against dogmatic, irrational and obscurantist thinking, which threaten 18th-century dreams of freedom," Jeanneney explains.
Jeanneney chose the historian and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov as chief curator for "Lumières!". By the time the exhibition closes next week, it will have been visited by close to 30,000 people. For those who've missed it, there's a virtual version on the library's website: www.bnf.fr
The first, most basic trait of the Enlightenment was "the demand for autonomy for human beings", Todorov says. Eighteenth-century thinkers rid themselves of all tutelage, first and foremost of religious authority.
Todorov chose 250 documents, oil paintings and engravings to illustrate the fundamental role of the Enlightenment in creating modern Europe. "Once you start going through the treasures of the BnF, it's endless," he says. "I am awestruck by the score of Mozart's Don Giovanni; it's miraculous. It's a very fragile piece, and I begged them to let me show it."
Todorov and Yann Fauchois, the curator of the department of philosophy, history and human science at the BnF, chose Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the most emblematic figures of the Enlightenment. It was an unorthodox choice, since Mozart was not a philosopher and Rousseau quarrelled with the encylcopédistes.
Yet Rousseau has arguably shaped our mentality more than anyone in modern history. It was Rousseau who invented "the right to happiness" and advocated feeling as a path to knowledge. His only novel, Julie or the New Hélöise was the precursor of Romantic literature, emphasising the divine right of passion over social convention. His Confessions were the first autobiographical novel, and Émile, his treatise on education, prefigured modern attitudes towards breast-feeding and child-centred teaching.
Rousseau's political writings were equally far-reaching. His Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men found property to be the source of inequality and called force the only recourse of the poor. His Social Contract inspired French revolutionaries and the theoreticians of socialism and communism.
Though not a revolutionary, Mozart shared many of the ideas of his period, says Gérard Mortier, the director of the Paris Opera, who has worked with the BnF to integrate celebrations of the composer's 250th birthday with the Enlightenment exhibition.
"Mozart suffered from the privileges of the aristocracy and rebelled against the servile status accorded to artists," Mortier explains. "He joined the Freemasons."
Through the themes of his operas, and the celebration of happiness in his music, Mozart typified the sensibility of the period.
The exhibition reminds us that the Enlightenment was a Europe-wide movement, known as the Aufklärung in Germany, Illuminismo in Italy and Lumières in France. Rousseau and Voltaire, its two great thinkers, took refuge from the French authorities in London.
"For the first time, there was a new concept of Europe that was not inherited from the Romans or the church," says Todorov.
Without the Enlightenment's belief in the equality of man, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and education for all, Europe would not be what it is today.
Contrary to common misconception, the Enlightenment did not constitute a radical move towards atheism. Most of its thinkers were deists, who believed in a beneficent God, but not the Holy Trinity of the Bible. They studied religion as a social phenomenon. The German essayist and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing summarised their attitude thus: "It is enough for men to practise Christian love; it matters little what happens to the Christian religion."
Voltaire spent most of his life attempting to undermine authority so that men could think freely and establish a society based on reason. He often clashed with the Catholic Church, but it is one of his lesser-known works, a play titled Mohamed or Fanaticism, with Voltaire's hand-written annotations, that catches the eye in the BnF.
In 1993 and 2005, Voltaire's play became the subject of controversy in Geneva. In articles in Le Monde this past winter, the theatre director Hervé Loichemol and popular Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan accused each other of intolerance. Loichemol claims that Ramadan and Hafid Ouardiri, the spokesman for the Geneva mosque, got Mohamed or Fanaticism banned in 1993, but failed to do so last December, when the play was read before a full house under police protection. Ramadan says the city of Geneva cancelled the first production because of Loichemol's exorbitant budget.
Under the heading Let's not Snuff out the Enlightenment, L'Express magazine seized upon the BnF exhibition to denounce what it saw as the capitulation of French and European politicians in February over the Mohamed cartoons.
The BnF exhibition does not attempt to resolve this contemporary debate. Todorov, a voice of reason in today's France, can see both sides. "The Enlightenment fought for freedom of expression and freedom to criticise, in particular religion" he says. "In the spirit of the Enlightenment, it is inconceivable that blasphemy be re-established as an offence.
"But at the same time," Todorov continues, "the Enlightenment confirmed the necessity of equal respect for all human beings, and all beliefs. The intention behind the publication of the cartoons was to deride the Muslim population of a country where the populist right has agressed them. The publication of the drawings was intended to show that this population was backward; it was intended to fan animosity. From this point of view, it was not in the spirit of the Enlightenment."