☆A Cambridge Companion to French Enlightenment

Daniel Brewer(ED)

☆A Cambridge Companion to French Enlightenment

Cambridge University Press 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 15.

☆Charles W. J. Withers, "Space, geography and the global French Enlightenment", pp. 214-232.

 

This chapter explores the terms ‘France’, ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Geography’ and the relationships between them. Rather than see geography either simply as a subject or a set of intellectual practices among the many making up the Enlightenment in France, I want to advance an argument about the importance of thinking geographically, of reading and interpreting the Enlightenment and France – France and its many enlightenments – through a spatial lens. By ‘thinking geographically’, I mean to enquire into the geographical dimensions of the Enlightenment in France, to explore questions to do with how the ideas and practices that made up the Enlightenment there were at work in different places and to consider how notions of Enlightenment varied over space as well as over time and in their cognitive character.

Why should this matter? Our answers must recognize the wider interpretive context in which the question and this chapter sit. To date and in general, historiographical interpretations of the Enlightenment have focused on its temporal dimensions (its ‘when’), its individual personnel and institutional make-up (its ‘who’), and upon the cognitive content, social reach and intellectual and practical consequences of its ideas (its ‘what’ and its ‘so what?’). Thinking geographically addresses the importance of ‘where’ questions. Where were they located, these people who wrote, read and debated works that contemporaries took to be enlightening? How did the Enlightenment’s ideas move over space: as print, in review, in debates in academies and salons, as lecture classes, through the presence in person of the author? What were the Enlightenment’s variations over place within the space that was, and would become, France? How do geography’s analytic languages of place, space and scale aid in understanding the different forms of knowledge that made up the Enlightenment in France?