The Age of Enlightenment is today an essential reference in public discourse when it comes to discussing living together and the values ​​of the Republic. This makes its teaching an exercise that is both difficult and necessary. Because to understand the spirit of Voltaire and Rousseau, it is important to place it in the complexity of its time, and historical research can provide support for finding the right distance.

“We will love science and its controversies. Like you, we will cultivate tolerance […] We will continue, yes, this fight for freedom and for reason […] because in France, professor, the Enlightenment never goes out.” Thus ends on October 21, 2020, the speech given by the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron , on the occasion of the national tribute paid at the Sorbonne to Samuel Paty, professor of history and geography assassinated on October 16, 2020.

Two decades earlier, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, the Enlightenment was also invoked both as an antidote to terror and as a rallying cry for all defenders of freedom.

The National Library of France decided to entrust the essayist and historian of ideas Tzvetan Todorov with the curation of an exhibition entitled Lumières! A Legacy for Tomorrow . In an interview published in Le Monde on March 4, 2006 , Todorov stated:

“There was, at the beginning, a militant intention: recalling the great principles of the Enlightenment seemed essential to us in a historical moment marked by September 11, by the attacks of a certain religious fanaticism against secularism, against the equality of men and women. But we could not limit ourselves to this simple opposition: the Enlightenment is sometimes betrayed by those who claim to be part of it.”

Between these two events, the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo , which occurred in Paris on January 7, 2015, resulted in the return to the forefront of the media scene and to the center of public debate of Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance , an emblematic figure of the Enlightenment (1763), of which more than five thousand copies were sold in a few days .

Three events and, in response, three ways of summoning the spirit of the Enlightenment and embodying it in struggles for freedom, reason and tolerance. However, this systematic reference to the Enlightenment is not an invention of the 21st ^century  .

The Enlightenment is the Republic, the Republic is France

On the occasion of the centenary of the French Revolution (1889), the Third ^Republic  already summoned the Enlightenment to pose as its heir. Conversely, the Vichy regime (1940-1944) did not simply put the French Revolution on trial through the National Revolution ; it expressly went back to the origins of the “French decline”, which it identified with the Enlightenment and its contestation of authority – political or religious – in favor of the spirit of individualism.

The Enlightenment is not neutral and the discourse on it is most often polarized, whether it is praising it or denouncing it.

Teaching them is therefore both an educational and an eminently political issue. It significantly extends beyond the strictly historical field, and also concerns moral and civic education – most often provided by history and geography teachers – but also French and philosophy.

In 2020, Emmanuel Macron’s speech not only evokes the teachings given by Samuel Paty , he also makes the project of the Third Republic his own ^,  expressly citing one of his mentors in terms of pedagogy, Ferdinand Buisson , director of primary education from 1879 to 1896:

“To make a republican,” he wrote, “you have to take the human being, however small and humble he may be […] and give him the idea that he must think for himself, that he owes neither faith nor obedience to anyone, that it is up to him to seek the truth and not to receive it ready-made from a master, a director, a leader, whoever he may be.”

And Emmanuel Macron added: “Making republicans” was Samuel Paty’s fight.

Placing Enlightenment discourses in their historical context

But the Enlightenment proves resistant to any instrumentalization by those who invoke it, or by those who revoke it. Teaching it therefore proves to be a difficult but necessary exercise. Difficult because it is done in the fourth grade for middle school, and in the second grade in high school, therefore relatively early in the training of future citizens. Necessary, because it provides keys to understanding the debates on secularism , science, the place of religions in the public space, or even freedom of conscience.

This teaching must also begin for the teachers themselves with a deconstruction of the discourses on the Enlightenment in favor of their historicization, that is to say, their placing in historical context. Thus, the Sorbonne is a surprising choice to celebrate the Enlightenment and the Republic, because in the 18th ^century  , it was the one that censored books and condemned philosophical writings.

As for the Treatise on Tolerance , it must be linked to Voltaire’s interventions in the public debate in the form of a cry – and not a philosophical treatise – a cry for justice, a cry against the injustice that can strike anyone, and put in mortal danger those whom justice should protect. The exact title is indeed: Treatise on Tolerance, on the occasion of the death of Jean Calas . Voltaire specifies that “the murder of Calas, committed in Toulouse with the sword of justice, on March 9, 1762 is one of the most singular events that deserve the attention of our age, and of posterity.”

In the Age of Enlightenment, the path towards a positive acceptance of tolerance was indeed slow and non-linear. Thus, when Louis XVI (1754-1793) signed the edict of tolerance in favor of reformed Protestants (Calvinists) in 1787, a large part of public opinion was hostile to it. Tolerance was still largely the difficult and temporary acceptance of the other, the time for his identity to fade in favor of fusion into the majority community.

It is here that by mobilizing the skills of literature and history teachers, but also of visual arts and even life sciences, around canonical or lesser-known texts of the “philosophers of the Enlightenment”, it is possible to progressively approach with students issues that are also ours, in particular around living together and building society.

New approaches based on recent research findings

In the same way, the Flame of Equality competition has for a decade already allowed the multidisciplinary mobilization of fourth-year classes around the question of the slave trade. It was the big issue of the 18th ^century  , due to both the millions of victims transported from Africa to America and across the Indian Ocean, but also the rise of the plantation economy, and the debates around the prohibition of the slave trade first, then of slavery.

By combining documentary research, literary and artistic expression, the classes not only document the slave trade routes, the conditions of capture and existence on the plantations but also choose to evoke an individual or collective journey. This approach facilitates a form of appropriation of the subject. In 2024-2025, for the tenth edition of the national competition, the classes are offered the following theme for reflection and study: “Resisting slavery: surviving, opposing, rebelling”.

Finally, by breaking with a traditional approach that saw the Enlightenment born in England with the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) and the origins of a parliamentary monarchy before the France of Voltaire and Diderot took over, by benefiting from the wide diffusion of the French language among European elites, both scholars and crowned ones (the “enlightened despots” Frederick II of Prussia , Catherine II of Russia , and Gustav III of Sweden ), it is now possible to integrate into the classroom the renewal of research in the history of the Enlightenment . This makes it possible to address issues of gender, religious minority, and the plurality of the Enlightenment.

The German Enlightenment was thus predominantly Christian, and if anticlericalism did not frighten them, on the other hand, they distanced themselves from Voltaire’s provocations, and often preferred to contribute to the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon (in the principality of Neuchâtel which belonged to the King of Prussia), which was less polemical, rather than Diderot ‘s Encyclopédie . Similarly, insisting on the Scottish Enlightenment allowed the United Kingdom under construction to shift its focus and not limit itself to London.

Finally, in the era of global history and connected history, questioning the way in which, outside Europe, contemporaries, or former subjects of European colonial powers revisit the Enlightenment, including in a scathing manner by unbolting statues, both literally and figuratively, is also a way of teaching students to open up to the world and to the gaze of others.

The Legacy of the Enlightenment. Ambivalences of Modernity , to borrow the title of Antoine Lilti’s book that announced his future chair at the Collège de France, dedicated since 2022 to a “History of the Enlightenment (18th ^– 21st ^century  )”, is also “The Current State of the Enlightenment” , the title of his inaugural lecture. They therefore deserve more than ever to be taught at a good critical distance, without caricature or excess.

Author Bio: Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire is Professor of Modern History at Côte d’Azur University