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In the death of Louis XIV in 1715 until the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, there occurred a profound evolution in the thinking of political philosophers, whose epoch is recognized as The Enlightenment. There were three men whose writings were to be most in charge of this intellectual whirlwind: Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. And there were to be three rulers whose absorption of this new thinking actually resulted in an attempt to place many of those ideas into practice: Frederick the Great of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, and Catherine the Great of Russia. Naturally, there were other thinkers, collectively known as the "Philosophes". And there were other, lesser rulers who would also reflect this new intellectual and spiritual glory. But where achieved it result from? How, in the center of one of the very most corrupt centuries of all time, could a little band of monarchs suddenly become infatuated with the thinking of an even smaller band of eccentric intellectuals? On the face of it, it appears highly improbable. At the start of the 18th century, kings ruled by the divine right of God Almighty, and were answerable and then God. Near the end of the same century, they still ruled by the grace of God...however now these were answerable to the people they ruled. This is the era of the Great Awakening of the common man. The consequences were to be momentous for the entire world. For this was from the works of the Philosophes that the French Revolution would germinate, and it was from the French Revolution that the best Enlightened Despot would emerge...Napoleon Bonaparte.
