Age of Revolutions: Science, Reason and Rights
From Copernicus and Newton to the Encyclopédie and three Atlantic revolutions, with the question Haiti forced on the age: did the rights of man include enslaved people? The tour ends with the Congress of Vienna.
Start this guided tour on the mapPart 1
In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon of Frombork Cathedral in Royal Prussia, published On the Revolutions, a mathematical model that placed the Sun near the centre of the planetary system. It used geometrical devices found earlier in the work of the Maragheh astronomers in Iran, such as the Tusi couple, though how Copernicus knew of them is debated. For decades few astronomers accepted a moving Earth.
- Nicolaus Copernicus — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Nicolaus Copernicus — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 2
In 1687 Isaac Newton published the Principia in London, with the Royal Society's approval and printed at Edmond Halley's expense. Its laws of motion and law of universal gravitation explained the motions of planets, comets, tides and falling bodies with one set of principles. Critics such as Leibniz objected that gravity acting at a distance was left unexplained, and Newton declined to offer a hypothesis about its cause.
- Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Isaac Newton — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Part 3
From 1751 Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert edited the Encyclopédie in Paris: 17 volumes of text and 11 of plates by more than 140 contributors, giving crafts and machines a place beside theology and philosophy. Its often oblique questioning of religious and political authority led the royal council to revoke its licence in 1759, but printing went on. One article condemned the slave trade, while others repeated the racial hierarchies of the time.
- Denis Diderot — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Encyclopédie — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 4
On 4 July 1776 the Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Declaration of Independence, which held that 'all men are created equal', with rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Independence was won in a war that ended in 1783. The promise did not reach about half a million enslaved people, many held by the signers, among them the Declaration's main author Thomas Jefferson, nor women or the Indigenous nations on whose lands the republic expanded.
- Declaration of Independence — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 5
In 1789 the deputies of the Third Estate declared themselves a National Assembly, Paris crowds stormed the Bastille, and in August the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The monarchy fell in 1792, Louis XVI was executed in 1793, and in the Terror tens of thousands of real or suspected opponents were put to death. Olympe de Gouges, who demanded the same rights for women, was guillotined in 1793.
- French Revolution — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 6
In 1792, in London, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, partly in reply to a French proposal to give girls only a domestic education. She argued that women seemed less rational than men because they were denied education, not by nature, and that a society founded on reason could not shut out half its members. Her reputation suffered after her death in 1797, but later campaigners for women's rights revived the work.
- Mary Wollstonecraft — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Part 7
In August 1791 enslaved people rose against their masters in Saint-Domingue, a French colony where about half a million enslaved Africans and their descendants grew sugar and coffee for Europe. Their war forced French commissioners to proclaim emancipation in 1793, confirmed in Paris in 1794, and under leaders such as Toussaint Louverture they resisted Napoleon's attempt to restore control. Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent on 1 January 1804; Dessalines' forces then massacred most of the French who remained, and in 1825 France forced Haiti to pay an indemnity for recognition.
- Haitian Revolution — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Part 8
From September 1814 to June 1815, Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia, joined by Bourbon France, negotiated a European settlement at Vienna after Napoleon's defeat. They created the German Confederation, placed most of Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw under the tsar as the Kingdom of Poland and restored many dynasties, largely setting aside the national and liberal hopes of the revolutionary years. While the tsar helped redraw Europe, Russia had just imposed the Treaty of Golestan of 1813 on Qajar Iran.
- Congress of Vienna — Encyclopaedia Britannica