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THE 18th CENTURY
The great writers of the Enlightenment are this century’s emblematic figures: |
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Voltaire, the original engagé intellectual, inveterate scourge of the Church and hypocrisy … |
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher of nature and “natural man,” whose hypocrisy and ideas Voltaire despised … |
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Denis Diderot, father of the Enclyclopédie, humanist, novelist, and scientist, the true “universal man” of the three. |
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The Marquis de Sade spent years in Paris, mostly in prison … Jacques Casanova helped make his name here … and “the perverted peasant” Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne boosted the city’s reputation for libertine living … while the randy clergyman Pastor Yorick makes a revealing visit in Lawrence Sterne’s comic novel A Sentimental Journey. |
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, one of the most extraordinary personalities of his time, shipped arms to the American rebels while at the same time writing The Marriage of Figaro, a harbinger of the French Revolution. |
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