16. Sur l'intelligentsia des Lumières

Abstract

16. Eric Walter : On the intelligentsia of the enlightenment. Recent progress on the road towards a social history of culture in 18th century leads one to reformulate the terms of the problem of the condition of intellectuals during the Enlightenment. Collective research on this theme could make use of the methodological findings of the sociology of culture, of the analysis of " discours " and of the Marxist theory of ideology. To give an account of the situation of the intelligentsia, must one, as a controversy at present raging would have us believe, reconsider the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution ? And, in any case, should one substitute a conceptual frame of the " elites " for the study of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and aristocracy ? The critical examination of J. Proust's research bearing on the group of the Encyclopedists, of D. Roche on the provincial Academies, of R. C. Darnton on the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, followed by an analysis of the texts of d'Alembert on the rapports between men of letters and the nobility, leads one to reject hasty solutions of a sociological type. Finally is it not necessary to avoid the excessive use of a syncretic notion ; that of " thought of the Enlightenment " in favour of a distinction between " culture of the Enlightenment " and the antagonistic ideologies which coexist with and confront one another on the field of this culture ? As far as this global question is concerned, the study of a precise problem : the place of the man of letters in society as defined in the texts of 1750-1780, affords a tentative answer, though calling for new research.