The Enlightenment took varied forms and proceeded at different paces across Europe, but there is one characteristic that can be recognized in the variegated manifestations of Enlightenment thought: the emancipation from authoritative conceptions of religion, government, and philosophy as they appeared to be incapable of withstanding rational criticism and individual empirical observation. Through the course of the eighteenth century people attached greater and greater value to individual judgment.

Not everyone shared in this development, which, for a long time, remained restricted to an elite of writers and philosophers, but by the end of the century the critique of divine revelation, despotic government, and abstract speculative philosophy had become widely accepted. The trend toward secularization, democracy, and empiricism was openly discussed and led to institutional changes. These occurred slowly in some countries; in France it took place by way of an abrupt revolution in which the banner of liberté, égalité, fraternité was raised and a utopian project was acclaimed that never fully materialized, but has remained an elusive ideal ever since.

Relativism versus utopianism

In contrast to the decades just before the French Revolution, the first half of the eighteenth century was not propitious for writing eutopian narratives. Mandeville, who excused private vices as the unavoidable ingredients of public benefits, had absolutely rejected the endeavor of realizing a eutopia. Swift was skeptical about attempts to design a perfect world. Montesquieu and Voltaire doubted the significance of utopian experiments; they were relativists, not utopianists.

In his Lettres persanes (Persian Letters), published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1721, Montesquieu was critical of the religious and administrative conditions in both Persia and France. One of the early epistolary novels, it has the charm of novelty. Its combination of imagined inside information about Persian customs and Islamic culture with a quasi-outsider’s view of the Roman Catholic Church and French civil authorities, with a special interest in irrational behavior and abuse, was also surprisingly new. It is a great satirical novel, and not a utopian narrative, except for some letters (10 to 14), which go into the question of whether human beings are “happy because of the pleasures and satisfactions of the senses, or because of the practice of virtue” (“heureux par les plaisirs et les satisfactions des sens, ou par la pratique de la vertu” [Montesquieu 1956: 21]).