It was a century of political revolutions, The American Revolution ending in 1776 in which American colonists waged war for independence from their English forefathers, and The French Revolution, led by Napoleon, against the autocratic regime and conspicuous consumption of King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinnette.

Associated with revolutionary activity were calls for individual human rights, the best known among them being that of Thomas Paine’s (1737-1809) whose ideas appeared in his small and powerful book The rights of man.

It was also a century dedicated to new ideas, to progress, and to the gathering and organizing information about the natural world through scientific experimentation. There was a large expansion in the educated middle class–people who were wanting to learn about the universe and to critique and reflect on what they learned. There was a popular demand at the time for encyclopedias, dictionaries, and detailed surveys of knowledge. The 18th century came to be called by historians the age of enlightenment.

Among the key players in the Enlightenment movement were the French writers and philosophers Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Voltaire (1694-1778), Montesquieu (1689-1755), and Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778). These men were among those called philosophes, whose writings reflected on as well as contributed to their times. Among the most famous of the philosophes’ writings was an encyclopedia, edited by Denis Diderot compiled between 1751 and 1772—a book that contained seventeen large volumes of information about the natural world and its history. The Encyclopedie became a widely read and cited compendium of scientific, technical, and historical knowledge.

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