During the late eighteenth century there was a movement common to many European countries towards powerful and efficient central government. This movement was the counterpart of the more spectacular endeavour to increase the liberty of the individual. Thus, the era of the American Declaration of Independence, of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, the charter of economic liberalism, was also the time when the modern state began to consolidate its forces. Just as the thinkers of the Enlightenment attempted to define the nature of the state as well as the nature of man, so their ideas were reflected during the ensuing years in a clearer identity of both. The growth of central authority and individual liberty hand in hand is shown by events such as the destruction of Jesuit power in Spain, Portugal, Austria and France, and the destruction of the power of the church and the nobility in the French Revolution. In France and England, the great social, political and constitutional changes which eventually gave the middle classes control over the central government tended to obscure the growth of bureaucratic power; and the liberal tradition has sometimes led to the belief that during the great age of revolution the state increased in strength only in countries where ‘enlightened despots’ flourished: the Prussia of Frederick II, the Austria of Joseph II, the Spain of Charles III, and the rest. But Henri Pirenne, by his definition of enlightened despotism as ‘la rationalisation de l'État’, diverted attention from the enlightened despots themselves to the nature of their work of reforming the state, which was remarkably similar in its intentions and results to contemporary reform programmes being carried out in England and France.