"What are the things we value most about our modern world?" "Freedom, to enjoy ourselves, to argue and discuss, to express our views, to find things out, to read and write, and the science and technologies that make these possible." "None of this happened by accident." "These freedoms were won through courage and with vision, in an extraordinary period of human history." "It began in 17th century Europe." "It was called The Age of Enlightenment." "In the space of little more than a century, religious faith yielded to reasoned argument." "And the power of aristocracy gave way to the power of knowledge." "But it was a hard won battle against the fierce opposition of a powerful church and ruthless monarchs." "It laid the foundations for the modern world." "In this program, we tell the story of four great enlightenment innovators." "Isaac Newton, who opened up knowledge to everybody by inventing modern science." "Denis Diderot, who challenged the" "Church's monopoly on knowledge." "The Marquis de Pombal, who built a modern city for the people of Lisbon." "And Erasmus Darwin, who's discoveries deep underground mounted a direct challenge to the Church's claim to truth." "Our story of the Enlightenment beings in England, in the late 17th century with Isaac Newton." "He was the founder of modern science, which was to become the single greatest challenge to the power of the Church." "At the beginning of this period, most people's lives were based on obedience and belief." "They obeyed the church, which told them to obey the king, who, it said, had been chosen by God." "People believed what was in the Bible, not what they found out for themselves." "And the Bible said that the Earth, and everything on it, had been made by God only a few thousand years earlier." "And that the first humans had been thrown out of Paradise for disobeying God's word." "But Isaac Newton declared that knowledge was acquired, not by blind faith, but by observation." "And that it could be found, not just in the Bible, but in the world around us." "He laid down universal rules for what we now call science." "And one of those rules was that it was open to everybody." "There's one thing that everybody knows about Isaac Newton." "That was that he watched an apple fall to the ground." "And in a great flash of inspiration, he suddenly conceived the theory of gravity." "And we can never know if that really happened or not." "But what we do know is that shortly before he died, he told the same story to four different people." "And that suggests that he wanted people to believe that it was true." "And he sat in the orchard, and he sat beneath this apple tree, and he watched an apple fall off the tree to the ground." "Something he'd seen hundreds of times before, but this time was different." "He thought to himself, why is it that the apple always falls down?" "Why doesn't it go sideways or upwards?" "Newton's genius was to see things where most people would see nothing." "Instead of empty space between the apple and the ground," "Newton saw an active force pulling things towards the Earth." "The force of gravity." "Newton said, there's one single force, the power of gravity." "That makes apples fall off the tree in Woolsthorpe Garden, makes the moon go around the Earth, and make the Earth go around the sun." "Newton had discovered a vast and universal law." "But at this stage of his life, in his 20's, he didn't seem to care if anybody else knew about it." "He wrote up his discoveries in Latin, in this book almost nobody could understand." "And he buried himself away at Cambridge University." "He seemed, as far as we can make out, to have been a very withdrawn, difficult, prickly man." "He was an absolutely appalling lecturer." "Some students saw him go by in the street and said, there goes the man who lectures to the walls." "By which he meant that there was nobody in the room at all when Newton was lecturing." "But Newton's discovery, that what happened in nature followed invisible rules, and that those rules operated everywhere, was too powerful to be hidden in a book." "Newton himself didn't have the slightest interest in whether anybody else could understand how gravity works." "But the people who followed him during the 18th century did." "And one of the ways of explaining this was instruments like this one in front of me, this orrery." "The sun is in the middle and then there's five planets." "And the time it takes them in this machine to go around the sun is exactly the same proportions of time as they do up in the heavens." "Lecturers used to take instruments like this, orreries, and go around to different parts of the country lecturing about Newton's gravity, about the laws of mechanics." "These demonstrations even became the subject of paintings." "This painting is quite literally the Enlightenment in a nutshell." "There's a mixed group of people here, men, women, and children." "And they're all gathered around this apparatus to witness the workings of the solar system." "There's a green drape in the top corner, drawn away from the shelf of books, revealing written knowledge, the word." "And the tension in the Enlightenment period itself is beautifully played out by the contrast of light and dark." "On the one hand light, which reveals truth, reveals knowledge." "On the other hand, the very deep shadow of darkness." "And there's a mystery about this darkness." "It conceals." "It doesn't quite tell us everything that we need to know about the world in which we live." "But the idea everybody could understand was a universal law that kept everything in its proper place." "It was even taught to school children, by getting them to act out the orbiting planets in the playground." "Parallels were drawn with human society, in which rich and poor had their proper places." "Like most people at the time, Newton, who was deeply religious, believed that God had set the planet in motion." "And that the whole universe was eternal and changeless." "Even though his ideas were not found in the Bible, the Church endorsed this apparent proof of God's wisdom." "Newton was asking questions about the world around him." "But he wasn't alone." "He was a founding member of The Royal Society, the world's first scientific association, dedicated to spreading the discoveries of the Enlightenment." "Its members believed in the truth of the Bible, but they no longer accepted that it was the only truth." "Traditionally, the way to find out about God was to read the Bible." "This with the book of God's holy word that he dictated to Adam." "But Newton and his contemporaries said, there's a second book that we can learn from." "The book of nature." "And God has written that book in a different alphabet." "And our job is to learn how to read that alphabet." "And it was this book of nature that Newton and his contemporaries started to explore." "Using new, more powerful microscopes and telescopes that they designed themselves, these men opening up an entirely new dimension to the world." "Over the course of his life, Newton seems to have changed his mind about the importance of publicizing his work." "His other great experiment is remembered not just for what he found out, but what he did with the discovery." "Back at his boyhood home in 1666, he began to wonder where the colors in the spectrum come from." "Every year, a fair came to Starbridge and Cambridge." "And one year Isaac Newton went along." "And he bought a prism." "The prisms were being sold for children to use as toys." "People knew that when you throw light through a prism, it makes a spectrum." "But Newton wanted to do something different." "He wanted to know if the colors were already in the light or were put there by the prism." "He made his room completely dark." "He just had a little, teeny ray of sunlight coming through." "And he passed the ray of light through the prism and produced the rainbow on the opposite wall, a spectrum." "He then isolated the red light from that spectrum and passed it through a second prism." "And the light coming out was still red." "He'd proved that the colors came not from the prism, but the light itself." "But that wasn't what mattered most." "Newton had performed his experiment using a child's toy, something anybody could buy." "And having done the experiment, Newton made this sketch of it." "So this is Newton's original sketch." "And then, this diagram was published in English in his book, The Optics." "In the past, you had to be a very specialized scholar in order to understand what was in the Bible, or what was in some esoteric Latin text." "But an experiment like this could be repeated anywhere in the world." "This was a new source of truth, a new source of knowledge." "So ordinary people could use these scientific results to invent things, to make machines, to change the world, to control the world." "So the people who understood and who were clever would take over from the people who had been born into rich, aristocratic, wealthy families." "So one of the very, very important things about the" "Enlightenment, as symbolized by experiments like this, is it's not just about what knowledge was gained." "It's about who controls the knowledge." "Newton had established, for the first time, the scientific method." "How all science is carried out to this day." "That experiments must be published, and must be able to be repeated anywhere in the world." "70 years later, the discoveries of science were to mount a direct and fundamental challenge to the Church's authority." "But at the time, the Church believed that Newton's work endorsed God's power." "And he was buried, with great ceremony, in Westminster" "Abbey, where England honors its heroes." "Newton's funeral was thronged with admirers, including this man, Voltaire." "He was the most fearless and prolific thinker and writer in" "France, a country which, at the time, brutally repressed any freedom of thought or expression." "Voltaire's crusades forced him to spend most of his life in exile, which is why he was in England." "Newton's state funeral impressed him deeply." "In France, only aristocrats were honored in this way." "And scientific investigation was strictly controlled by an intolerant Catholic church." "And this was only one of the freedoms" "Voltaire found in England." "40 years earlier, Britain's absolute monarchy had been forced by its people to concede some elements of democracy and political representation." "The King's powers were limited by Parliament, judges, and civil servants." "In England, Voltaire also found the freedom that, to him, was the greatest of all." "Voltaire dedicated the rest of his life to the crusade for freedom of speech and of the pen, in 20,000 letters and dozens of novels and plays." "But all of this could only be dreamed of in the France of" "Voltaire's day." "Here, subversive ideas about equality, liberty, and freedom of speech had to be exchanged behind closed doors in salons like the one shown here, where the bust of Voltaire as usual, still in exile, was honored with pride of place." "Despite its repressive laws, Paris was becoming a prosperous and exciting city." "A magnet for ambitious young men from the provinces, hoping to succeed by their wit." "One of them was this man, Denis Diderot." "Unlike Voltaire, Diderot wasn't a member of the aristocratic elite." "His great work was France's first encyclopedia, the engine of the Enlightenment." "But he'd barely begun when another of his works was noticed by the King's censors." "But the worst thing about imprisonment for Diderot was that it was keeping him from the great project of his life, the, which he'd barely begun when he was thrown into jail." "His idea was to bring together the finest minds of the day and produce a series of books that would include not only philosophy and ideas, but also craft and trade skills explained in every detail." "Until then, useful knowledge like this hadn't been thought worth recording." "But Diderot and his colleagues sought out the ordinary people, to whom nobody had previously listened." "Even imprisonment didn't discourage Diderot as he planned his." "Nor did it tone down his radical intentions." "But he realized it would outrage the authorities, especially the Church." "With the stakes this high, Diderot had to be ingenious in outwitting the censors." "But right below religion is black magic." "Even the sequence of entries in his held hidden meaning." "His world had no place for belief in any God at all." "He hid his attacks on the church throughout the whole work, even in a system of cross references." "Like one which links the Eucharist with cannibalism." "His wit and daring attracted friends, as well as enemies." "And luckily for Diderot, they included the King's mistress," "Madame de Pompadour." "She was even painted with their own copy of the" "With such friends in high places, after three months in prison Diderot was released." "The King and the censors had realized that Diderot's great project had become an industry in itself, and potentially a very profitable one." "Despite continuing harassment from the church, Diderot and his colleagues were consumed for the next 26 years in bringing their great work into being." "There were 20 million words in 28 volumes." "And every letter of every word has to be set by hand." "Hundreds of typesetters, tanners, printers, and book binders were involved." "Diderot's vast enterprise finally achieved his ambition, bringing respect and recognition to ordinary people." "But most of them had little chance of reading about it." "The was a very expensive book." "It actually cost something like 980." "Which, if you put that into the context of the time, a skilled artisan, if he was lucky, might earn something like 15 in a week." "So he could never have afforded this." "It was mostly bought by members of the social elite, the creme de la creme." "And even for those who could, buying any book remained a risky business." "Something like half the books that were published in France during the 18th century were banned books." "They were sold under the counter, secretly." "And even the was banned for a number of years." "But Diderot said, a book banned is a book read." "Diderot realized that the controversy was helping to publicize the." "And despite the risk, its success started a huge boom in publishing at the time." "The excitement of access to ideas, to information, to the wider world, consumed society at all levels." "As even ordinary people learned to read." "Diderot's great dream of giving all knowledge to the world was becoming a reality." "But the Church was fighting back." "Its supreme leader, the Pope, condemned the and ordered it burned." "He declared that any Catholic who dared to read it would face eternal damnation." "Nowhere was the fight between enlightenment and religion harder than in Portugal." "Here, the Enlightenment only prevailed through an unforeseeable event." "A disaster, which devastated the wealthy capital, and who's wider effects were to threaten the Church's authority throughout the world, right up to today." "In the mid 18th century, Portugal was still the most religious place in Europe." "Enlightenment ideas were barely known here." "Even more than in France, the Catholic church was in control." "The priests told the people that sinners would be horribly punished by God after death." "And a religious court called The Inquisition could condemn people to garrotting, beheading, or being burned alive." "It seemed that nothing could change the order of things, until one day in November 1755." "The capital city, Lisbon, was mostly made up of narrow, crowded streets, all higgledy piggledy on the shores of a big river." "It teemed with a population of 250,000 people." "Lisbon was being struck by a massive earthquake." "As the city collapsed around them, some managed to escape the churches only to be crushed in the streets by other falling buildings." "Those who survived fled for their lives towards the river." "Only to see a huge tsunami bearing down on them." "They drowned where they were." "Then a wildfire swept through the city, adding to the carnage." "Tens of thousands of people died that day." "The people of Lisbon had done what the priests told them to." "They had gone to church, they have prayed." "But dreadful punishment had rained down on them anyway." "They wanted to know why." "One priest, in particular, rallied the people to repent." "Telling them that God had sent the earthquake, fire, and tsunami as punishment for their sinfulness." "But there were no churches to pray in." "Most of them had been destroyed, too." "The earthquake also destroyed the faith of people hundreds of miles away." "The Church's inability to explain any of this sent shock waves all over Europe." "But there was one man who saw an opportunity in this disaster." "The Marquis de Pombal was one of the few Portuguese who'd had access to the new ideas of the Enlightenment." "Here at his once grand estate outside Lisbon, he began to plan to use these ideas to change the city and the lives of its people forever." "For him, the earthquake was a chance to put those ideas into practice, for the benefit of the whole population." "Pombal wanted not just to rebuild the city, but to reinvent it." "He had a vision of doing in stone and tile what Diderot had done in print." "To bring the ordinary people into the Enlightenment and reduce the privilege of church and aristocracy." "Pombal was the king's right hand man, not an atheist like" "Diderot, nor a commoner like Newton." "His plan was to use the king's power to get access to the church's wealth." "Not for himself, but for the people." "But he faced a formidable challenge." "The church and the king monopolized the power here, and the wealth from Portugal's huge empire." "The enormous palace and monastery of Mafra outside" "Lisbon, has almost 900 rooms and took 45,000 men 13 years to build." "The monks also told the people to pray and what to pray for." "The monks who lived here enjoyed every luxury, ate off tables made from rare hardwoods cut by slaves, and walked on marble floors." "Far from Lisbon, their monastery was untouched by the earthquake." "Meanwhile, the people, always poor, were now homeless and starving." "Pombal needed money to feed and house them." "He persuaded the king that funding the rebuilding and modernizing of Lisbon would earn real loyalty from his people." "He also realized that the skills he needed to build it were already at hand." "The proof was in this aqueduct that brought fresh water from 60 kilometers away and stored it for the city." "And it had withstood the earthquake." "To Pombal, the aqueduct represented Newton's science put to practical use to provide a better life for the people." "Pombal realized he could use the same skills to rebuild Lisbon." "He'd replace the chaotic randomness of the old city with the geometric lines of classical architecture, and incorporate the latest technologies." "A new sewage system channeled away waste that had once flowed down the streets." "The first ever anti-seismic structures protected against future earthquakes." "And the urgent need to rehouse the homeless was answered by the world's first standardized building components." "Every window, frame, and balcony the same, so they could be made in quantity." "He gave the city to the people of Lisbon for their own." "A beautiful, public place that belonged not to the church or the aristocracy, but to them." "The success of Pombal's huge rebuilding project undermined the Church's power over the people." "And Pombal had insulted the church directly by replacing the ruling churches with structures that looked like all the other buildings." "The Church's leaders were outraged." "And the Jesuit, Gabriel Malagrida became the rallying point for their opposition to Pombal." "Malagrida embarked on a campaign of furious propaganda against Pombal, writing pamphlets and sending scores of letters to powerful Catholics all over Europe, including the Church's ultimate leader, the Pope." "Pombal was alarmed." "He could not afford to risk the Church regaining its former power." "Confident now of the king's support and gratitude, he took a bold step." "He decided to make an example of Malagrida for a supposed blasphemy and have him executed." "Malagrida was garrotted and his body burned to ashes." "Then Pombal ended The Inquisition forever." "Now, Pombal was finally able to bring to Portugal the wisdom of the Enlightenment." "This beautiful room in the Monastery at Mafara was transformed into a library, full of the revolutionary thinking that had never been allowed before." "Pombal had used the power of an absolute monarch to bring in the Enlightenment to Portugal." "He'd built the most modern city in the world and freed people from their terror of the Church." "Meanwhile in England, the technology embraced by Pombal was already moving the world towards Industrial Revolution." "It began here, in the center of England, in Derbyshire, where the hills concealed a unique treasure trove of the valuable minerals needed for industry and fast flowing rivers provided power." "In 1721, in the quiet town of Derby, the world's first factory was built, a silk mill." "Mass production in factories would make it possible for anybody to become rich." "The Enlightenment triumph of meritocracy over aristocracy was already well underway." "Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, was right at the heart of it." "Born four years after Newton's death, he was a doctor, poet, philosopher, and inventor." "Darwin's wide ranging interests would inspire him to mount the Enlightenment's ultimate challenge to the authority of the church." "He was fascinated by Enlightenment thinking and its application to real life." "Erasmus Darwin was a member of an entirely new class." "Optimistic, passionate, aggressive, and living by their wits." "They hadn't inherited money." "They had to make their living for themselves." "For Darwin, the key was to understand, manage, and direct the rapidly changing world around him." "Darwin's friends were leading lights in natural philosophy, innovation, and industry." "Inspired by them, Darwin recorded his own ideas and inventions in this book." "It's an amazing window, through which we can see what drove him and what he cared about." "These are some drawing that Darwin made of the new weaving machines, which completely transformed the English textile industry." "He isn't just recording what he sees." "He's also trying to work out ways of making them more efficient." "Here we have a new kind of toilet." "One which, as Darwin notes, won't be annoying because it won't smell." "For Darwin, as for Pombal, Enlightenment thinking was fundamentally about progress." "For Darwin and his closest allies, what was happening in" "Britain promised everything." "And the massive improvement in welfare, in population, and above all, I think, in the contentment and happiness of the people." "Darwin's work as a doctor required him to travel long distances to visit patients." "And on one of these journeys, his contacts in industry gave him the chance to make his greatest discovery." "This may look like a rural landscape, but in Darwin's day it was a region of heavy industry." "This was where quarry men and miners dug deep underground through natural caverns to bring out minerals and chemicals that were then going to be used in the industries that Darwin's friends were running." "In pottery, in textiles." "Industries that were driving the industrialization of Britain." "Caverns like this gave Darwin a chance to investigate the biggest of all questions." "How the earth itself, and everything on it, was made." "The Lisbon earthquake and a series of volcanic eruptions after it, including this one at Vesuvius in Italy, had started a worldwide controversy over the Bible's account of creation." "If the church's most important story wasn't true, then its entire claim to authority was in doubt." "And Darwin, a religious skeptic, seized on his chance to gather evidence for himself." "To get into this deep cavern, he had to be lowered on a rope down a shaft, a perilous enterprise." "Darwin was fascinated by the mineral forms he found deep inside these caves." "But what interested him the most were the chemical processes that must be producing them." "Limestone, heat, water, a kind of laboratory of nature." "And then Darwin discovered something even more amazing." "Because here, in the walls of the cavern, were fossilized shells that looked exactly like creatures that live at the bottom of the sea." "And that posed Darwin a great question." "How could these creatures have ended up here, deep beneath the Earth's surface?" "Darwin realized this could only have happened if the" "Earth were in constant motion and millions of years old." "Far older than the bible had claimed." "And that it must once have been entirely covered by oceans." "But Darwin was interested not just in how the creatures had got here, but how they and all life had begun." "Another of his scientific observations gave him the next piece of the puzzle." "This is Darwin's own microscope." "Itself a new piece of apparatus in the 18th century." "And Darwin noticed something quite extraordinary." "By looking at small dead insects beneath the slide, he saw bacteria multiplying, something which had never been seen before." "It was multiplying without any outside help." "And it seemed as though life was making itself." "If life could come about in a warm room, thought Darwin, it could also have happened in the warm oceans." "Darwin put all this together with his belief that things constantly change for the better and wrote an explosive theory of the origins of all life." "70 years before the famous work of his grandson, Charles Darwin." "Here's his description of that great process." ""Would it be too bold to imagine, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, that all warm blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity." "And of delivering down those improvements by generation to it's posterity, world without end."" "Erasmus Darwin's theory of the origins of life in effect declared that everything the Church had asked the entire" "Christian world to believe about how God had made the" "Earth and everything in it was simply untrue." "Darwin had used science to challenge its greatest enemy in unarguable terms." "The Church would never fully recover from Darwin's attack." "From Newton to Darwin, science was displacing God from an active role in the universe and moving man towards the center." "The Enlightenment had flooded the Western world with books full of new ideas of freedom, progress, and reason." "It had declared war on the power and authority of the" "Church, and deployed new technologies to improve the lives of ordinary people." "But absolute monarchies and rich elites were still in control." "The next program will tell the stories of three men who tried to change the societies in which they lived by putting" "Enlightenment ideas into practice." "Through their efforts, the organization of government, the rights of individuals, and the structure of society itself would be changed forever." "The Age of Enlightenment began in Europe in the late 17th century." "It would bring about fundamental changes in the way the world was understood and how societies were organized." "Until then, the church had dictated what to think and how to live." "Dissent was punished, even by death." "But with the Enlightenment, people began to embrace new ideas about freedom of expression and new rational methods to investigate the world." "In England, Newton made the foundations of science as we know it by showing that the universe was governed by physical laws that could be discovered using observation and reason." "In philosophy, Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and" "Diderot argued that man, not God, was at the center of the world." "Ideas were beginning to change, but in the 18th century, most of Europe was still enthralled to absolute monarchs." "Empowered by Enlightenment thinking in both Europe and" "America, people began to demand real change." "How would their rulers respond?" "How would society move forward?" "This is the story of three very different men who tried to put the ideas of the Enlightenment into practice-- in France, Condorcet, a mathematician and philosopher at the center of the French Revolution; in America, the" "lawyer and Congressman Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the blueprint for the first new Republic of modern times; and in Prussia, the king himself, Frederick the Great, an enlightened but ruthless monarch." "This is the palace of Sanssouci in Potsdam, Germany, near Berlin." "It's here that Frederick the Great held court for nearly half a century." "His was a fabulous palace in which the architecture, the symbols of the sun, the geometric order were all specifically designed to embody Enlightenment ideals." "As a crown prince, Frederick dreamed of building such a place." "He had no interest in the affairs of state and would spend time reading the poetry and philosophy of the" "Enlightenment thinker." "He was a man of formidable intellect." "But his country, Prussia, didn't match his ambitions." "It was just a few poor and scattered territories." "When he became King in 1740, he was determined to make" "Prussia into a great power." "In Frederick, Enlightenment beliefs co-existed with ruthless ambition." "The grandeur of Sanssouci's architecture demonstrates these two sides of his character." "To Sanssouci, Frederick invited some of the most brilliant philosophers, mathematicians, painters, and musicians from all over Europe." "Here in the marble room, they discussed the very latest ideas." "And Frederick himself was often seen impressing his guests with his own musical compositions." "He composed more than 100 sonatas and four symphonies." "One of the guests at Frederick's court was the" "French philosopher and writer Voltaire, the best-known" "Enlightenment figure of the day." "Frederick had been corresponding with Voltaire for many years." "He needed Voltaire's intelligence and inspiration." "Voltaire, often in exile, needed Frederick's protection and support for his radical ideas." "Together, they wrote a manifesto for the perfect" "Enlightenment ruler." "It's called the Anti-Machiavel." "The object of a truly Enlightened monarch, as set out in the Anti-Machiavel, is to do his subjects infinite good." "Frederick wanted to achieve that, but he wanted, as an absolute monarch, to do it on his terms." "Enlightenment thinkers thought they found such rulers in" "China, a sophisticated and much older civilization." "That country fascinated both Voltaire and Frederick." "They learned about China through accounts from European missionaries and traders and from the exotic Chinese artifacts flooding into Europe at that time." "To show his enthusiasm for China, Frederick built this elaborate pavilion in the grounds of Sanssouci in 1750." "To Frederick, China was ruled by emperors steeped in the ideas of the philosopher Confucius." "Confucius emphasized the importance of reason, wisdom, benevolence, and meritocracy, ideas Frederick was anxious to embody." "The pavilion helped to build Frederick's reputation abroad." "But the reality of his situation was far from imperial." "Prussia was any one of 300 small German states." "In order to make it into an international power, he needed to expand its territory by going to war on his neighbors." "Here, the ruthless ambition of his character came into play." "Needing a massive army to achieve his goal, he decreed that every boy must be registered at birth for military service and every able-bodied man must sign up." "At any time, 1 in 20 of the population was a soldier." "They filled Prussia's towns and villages." "But as fast as they were built, the quarters were emptied again by casualties." "Even now, Frederick is remembered as a ruthless commander who sacrificed his soldiers heedlessly." "So Frederick always needed more men." "And he realized that every one he recruited from Prussia would empty the towns and villages and weaken his own economy." "But every one he could recruit from abroad would weaken his enemies." "So he sent his officers out with enticing promises for those who signed up." "Frederick, who made a habit of inspecting his troops before breakfast, specified exactly the kind of man who would make an effective soldier." "Frederick's army became the largest in Europe." "His master plan for imperial expansion was working out." "But to house and feed this vast army, much more land was needed." "So he sent his soldiers into battle again, but this time within his own borders and against nature." "He set about turning the vast and largely uninhabited Oder" "Marshes into cultivated land." "The Enlightenment believed that science and technology could be used not just to understand the nature, but to tame and improve it." "The work was dangerous, not least because the swamps were malarial." "But in peace as in war, Frederick's soldiers had no choice." "It took 30 years, but finally it was done." "Enlightenment reason prevailed." "New villages were built alongside fast, new roads, and the traditional fishing villages were replaced with neat rows of houses, flourishing crops, and livestock" "Frederick's vision of utopia." "1,200 new villages welcomed 300,000 settlers, not just from Prussia, but also abroad." "Many of the settlers were religious refugees" "Catholics, Jews, and others who were persecuted in neighboring states." "But they were welcome here." "Frederick's most extraordinary quality for a monarch of that time was his religious tolerance, an important element of Enlightenment philosophy." "He said, "each man must aim for salvation in his own way."" "A great ruler needed to demonstrate this with a great deed." "Prussia was a Protestant state, and yet Frederick built this magnificent Catholic cathedral in the heart of his capital." "Building this cathedral was a gesture unparalleled in the" "Europe of that time." "By now, he'd realized most of his ambitions." "He'd doubled the size of Prussia and turned it from one small state among many into a major European power." "Frederick had indeed become great." "And to demonstrate this, 20 years after Sanssouci, he built himself a new and very different palace." "In the palace's grand, private theater, Fredrick and his court enjoyed the latest plays, including those of his friend and collaborator, Voltaire." "But when Prussia itself became the target of Voltaire's pen, it was too much for Frederick." "The one freedom he wouldn't contemplate was a free press." ""Think whatever you like, but obey," was Frederick's message to his people." "Voltaire's continuing defiance eventually forced him to flee from Sanssouci for good." "Frederick wasn't going to risk any further damage to his reputation." "He made sure that the only portrait his people saw of his was this one, as a simple, hard-working soldier in a blue coat." "To this day, this image is still immediately recognized." "Frederick was a monarch of his time and place." "He admired the ideas of Enlightenment, but not the individual liberty they implied." "He allowed freedom of worship, but not freedom of the press." "He improved the lives of his people, but sacrificed them ruthlessly in battle." "The Enlightenment came to Prussia, but on his terms." "And this complexity is perfectly summed up in the grave he designed for himself at Sanssouci." "It's a plain stone slab for a simple soldier, a practical man of reason." "But on it are carved the words he chose from the start," "Frederick the Great." "On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a brand new country was about to put Enlightenment ideas into practice, but in a very different way." "And at the heart of what would be an extraordinary and radical social experiment was this young Virginian, lawyer, and politician, Thomas Jefferson." "18th century American, where Jefferson grew up and was educated, was made up of 13 British colonies." "Two centuries earlier, settlers from Europe had started to arrive, many bringing radical ideas." "They'd created a thriving rural economy, exporting crops of tobacco and wheat back to Europe." "It was a land of opportunity." "Here in Virginia was the plantation Jefferson inherited from his father." "At its heart is Monticello, a beautiful mansion designed by" "Jefferson himself, based on his study of neoclassical architecture, symbolic to him of" "Enlightenment reason and harmony." "This is the entrance hall at Monticello, and anybody who would come into this room would get a glimpse into the mind of Thomas Jefferson." "And this was an enlightened mind, a very self-consciously enlightened mind." "It's a cabinet of curiosities." "Jefferson is creating an Enlightenment arena, a domain in which people can share in the illumination of his world." "Jefferson had been to Europe, and he brought back 80 crates full of things." "This is the famous clock, which is the latest in modern technology." "The clock was the epitome of Enlightenment mechanics." "This ingenuity, this precision, is something that moves Jefferson." "It's very much his idea how the world moves, with that precision, according to natural law." "That you could capture, in some way mimic, the world was the great project of the Enlightenment." "Once you understood the world, you could improve the world." "His great heroes were Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the great triumvirate who changed the way people saw the world." "And it was Locke who built on the foundation of the new science to suggest a science of man, a science of politics." "And this was the excitement of Jefferson's era in America." "It It was the first great opportunity to apply the fundamental precepts of the Enlightenment to the organization of human society." "The ideas of the British philosopher John Locke were crucial in Jefferson's thinking." "His key thought was that every individual has basic rights which are not given but are inherent from birth." "According to Locke, everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." "In 1776, Jefferson had a unique chance to turn these principles into reality." "It all started with a revolt by the American colonists against increasingly heavy taxes imposed by the British." "Before long, the tax revolt became a political revolt." "Influenced by the European Enlightenment, Jefferson and his comrades began to argue for independence." "In July 1776, in the face of Britain, the most powerful enemy in the world at the time, they created a rebel parliament." "Jefferson, who was only 33 years old, was asked to draft the Declaration of Independence." ""We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life," "Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." "That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." That powerful language in the Declaration of" "Independence-- all men are created equal-- that is the fundamental premise of his political philosophy." "We have a new notion of self-sovereignty-- that power comes out of the individual, and individuals working together could create unprecedented power and opportunity for human flourishing." "Jefferson imagined his new country as a community of free citizens, unlike any other nation of the time." "As his hero John Locke had proposed, the right to own property would be crucial." "Now, Jefferson expanded on this idea." "John Locke wrote about life, liberty, and property in his" "Second Treatise on government." "Jefferson used almost the same language the Declaration, but he substituted happiness for property." "And the idea is that if you own land, you are beyond the influence and control of others." "Property ownership was a means to an end, and the end was human flourishing." "That's what we mean by the pursuit of happiness." "How would these rights of life, liberty, and happiness be guaranteed?" "What form of government would the colonists now choose for their new country?" "Having finally won its war of independence from Britain in 1783, their new task was to design a constitution." "The challenge for the framers of the Constitution was to construct a new regime which would preserve the sovereignty of the people." "It's an elaborate mechanism that would preserve liberty and the rule of law." "Their first decision was that their country would be a republic, the first new republic in modern history." "There would be no king, no emperor." "Instead, America would be headed by an elected president whose residence would be the White House." "At the Congress, there'd be elected representatives from each of the states of the union." "The third branch of the government, the Supreme Court-- housed here-- is made up of the country's most senior judges." "This separation of powers reflected Jefferson's concern to prevent excessive control by any single branch of government." "It was embodied in the design of the country's new capital city, Washington, which he oversaw." "The three branches were separated both theoretically and practically and geographically." "They're located in different spots in the city." "You could even see the American Constitution." "If you look down on the city and saw the map, and you'd see the separate locations of the different branches." "The various components parts of the system would offset each other, would balance and check each other." "This elaborate system is a quintessential product of the" "Enlightenment." "Among Washington's many grand monuments today is this one to Jefferson." "In 1801, he'd become the third President of the United States of America." "Carved here on the walls is his Declaration of" "Independence, inspired by the Enlightenment, facing the famous inscription about Life, Liberty the pursuit of" "Happiness are his lofty words about slavery." ""Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people are to be free."" "But there is a serious limitation in Jefferson's thinking that marks him out as a man not of our time, but of his." "Crucially left out of this quote is the second half of his sentence, "the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government." Nowhere was Jefferson's attitude to black Americans clearer than on his own" "plantation at Monticello." "The clue lies in his famous clock." "Unlike the elaborate face inside the house, the one on the outside has only one hand." "It was for his slaves." "Monticello was a slave plantation." "Monticello depended upon slavery." "During the course of Jefferson's life he owned upwards of 700 people." "At one time, there may be 200 enslaved people here on the mountain." "And they did everything from the agricultural work to building the house." "So it was entwined with the culture totally." "Not only did Jefferson own slaves, but in his personal beliefs, he displayed deep prejudice." "He believed that black people could never be the equal of whites." "Jefferson believed that blacks were inferior because he was watching who were uneducated." "The people in his immediate vicinity, the people who worked on his farms didn't show him-- he thought and according to him-- a spark of intellectual curiosity that he thought that white people possessed." "How could a man who'd enshrined equality, liberty, and freedom as the fundamental principles for America deny them to black people?" "In Jefferson's time, one in five Americans was a slave, working on the vast plantations owned by white farmers." "They were regarded as legitimate property." "Their owners had the right to punish them as they liked, even to kill them without penalty." "One of the things that he said when he was discussing the future is that whites would never give up their prejudices against blacks, and blacks would never forgive white people for what they had done to them." "And so he saw nothing but the possibility of conflict if there was emancipation." "The conflict did come, 70 years later in the bloody civil war that tore America apart and left African" "Americans struggling to assert themselves for generations to come." "Towards the end of his life, Jefferson founded this famous institution, the University of Virginia, as a lasting embodiment of his ideals." "Its purpose was to provide the Republic with enlightened leaders." "In his time, this university was only for the white male elite." "Today, men and women of all classes and colors are graduating here, a vindication in the end of Jefferson's belief that education would guarantee the success of the Republic." "Following America's victory in its War of Independence," "Jefferson came to France, Britain's arch enemy, to raise money and support for his young republic." "France could not have been more different from its new ally, America." "Here at the palace of Versailles near Paris lived the French King Louis XVI, the most absolute monarch in Europe." "With no interest in Enlightenment ideas, he and his courtiers lived in total luxury." "Versailles was the center of government for the whole kingdom." "10,000 people lived in this palace." "It was incredibly expensive to run." "This very room we're in took 800 candles to light every night." "Running the royal court took 5% of the king's annual revenue." "And yet, the king had three more palaces nearly this size, and in 1785, he bought another one for his wife." "Given the state of the royal finances, this was a situation that could not continue." "Louis XVI's support for the Americans against the British had placed additional strain on the King's finance, but it was a source of French pride." "These paintings were commissioned by the French court to celebrate Britain's defeat by" "America with French help." "The women of Versailles showed support in their own way." "One of the ways that the women of court chose to endorse this policy was by making these grand poof hairdos, often including ships that the French navy was sending over to America." "Even though they were trying to support the American cause, the ostentation of feathers and ships in hairstyles couldn't hold up to the living example of the American ministers." "The American revolutionaries in Paris dressed simply and spoke plainly." "Their values were beginning to make a huge impact on French intellectuals." "The French really seized on Jefferson, and is because of this enlightened, philosophical standpoint that he also became a living emblem for the French of the virtues of the new American Republic." "Here at Palais-Royal, the intellectual hub of Paris," "Jefferson would regularly meet this man, Condorcet." "A mathematician, a nobleman, and a passionate advocate of" "Enlightenment ideas, he would exert a great influence on the tumultuous events about to erupt in France." "One of Condorcet's favorite haunts was this restaurant, le" "Procope, where Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and" "Diderot would also visit." "Here, he would debate his belief that it was possible to reform the monarchy from within and that rational mathematical laws could help create a fairer society." "In fact, Condorcet believed that even booking a restaurant was subject to mathematical probability theory." "Probability theory also told Condorcet that the greater the number of people involved in a decision, the better it would be." "This belief in representative government was a direct attack on absolute monarchy." "The Enlightenment thinkers who gathered at le Procope knew that the people of Paris were becoming increasingly angry." "Here at the French National Archives is evidence of their growing frustration at Louis XVI's failings." "Finally, the king ran out of money." "He knew that there was nothing he could do unless he consulted his people and got their cooperation in changing things." "But to do that, he had to ask them what their grievances were." "And traditionally when that happened, people were allowed to draw up cahiers, which are lists of grievances for his consideration." "And this is one typical one." "This is a cahier of Paris." "And in it, you'll see a whole range of issues which are brought up." "There were 50,000 of these drawn up all over the country." "The king had got more than he bargained for-- volume after volume of grievances, complaints, and demands, most of which he couldn't or wouldn't fulfill." "What had been planned as a consultation exercise to extract more taxes, began to backfire on him badly." "The range of grievances was enormous." "But what came out was that everybody expected some sort of constitution." "Everybody expected some sort of equality in taxation." "Everybody expected some diminution of the privileges of the nobility." "When the King failed to respond to any of these demands-- the constitutional reform or the kind of equality in taxation that Condorcet demanded-- for some sign that the King understood the suffering of his people, their patience ran out." "In Paris on July the 14th, 1789, they erupted onto the streets, destroying the Bastille, the royal prison, and releasing its inmates." "The revolution had begun." "Condorcet was jubilant, but also worried that with no political experience, people could be carried away by their pent up anger, that France could be on the brink of anarchy." "So he began to write articles and published journals and have them distributed in the streets." "He believed that with the right information and the right ideas, moderation could still prevail." "Condorcet was taking advantage of the relaxation of censorship in France." "For the first time, he and others could write and print what they liked." "But Condorcet knew that information alone was not enough." "People needed a blueprint of their basic rights, like" "America had, a statement of the rights and freedoms of citizens on which to base a new social system." "He set about writing one and getting it distributed." "Condorcet's simple principles became part of an even more famous text, a text so precious today that it's kept behind six locked doors." "It was drawn up at the request of the people's representatives in the legislative assembly, the" "Estates-General, and put their ideas into simple but powerful words." "The hopes and dreams of the Enlightenment were finally enshrined in law." "This is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen." "It's the founding manifesto of the French Revolution." "Inspired originally by America and Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence advised on the drawing up of this document." "It was designed to be the preamble to the new constitution of France." "So the two things it enshrined are liberty and equality-- liberty meaning no taxation without representation, meaning representative government, meaning freedom of thought and expression; equality meaning equality of rights, equality before the law, equality of opportunity," "equality before the tax man." "These are fundamental elements bequeathed by the" "Enlightenment, and they've become the ancestors of all subsequent declarations of human rights." "The declaration distilled a century of" "Enlightenment thinking." "It told all men that they have rights they went born with, that they were free and equal, and no one could tell them otherwise." "Emboldened by the declaration and frustrated by the slowness of the king's response to it, the people decided to take action again, this time by marching on Versailles." "Over the summer of 1789, the people of Paris began to lose faith in the king." "They no longer thought, as they had at the beginning of the year, that he was on their side." "The beginning of October, the women of Paris marched to" "Versailles." "They took the king and queen prisoner, in effect, and demanded that they go back to Paris with them." "The people could hardly believe they now had the king at their mercy." "But what to do with him was hotly debated." "For some revolutionaries, imprisonment wasn't enough." "They demanded his head." "Condorcet had been recently elected deputy president of the National Assembly, the French parliament." "He was closely involved in deciding the King's fate." "For Condorcet, the mathematician, guilt could never be proved 100%." "The death penalty was sometimes bound to take innocent lives and was therefore wrong." "This document recorded his vote against, a decision based on logic." "But Condorcet was outvoted, and the deputies in the" "National Assembly decided to execute the king." "He was to be among the first victims of the guillotine." "This new, rational technology remained in use until 1977." "It was supposedly painless and could process its many victims much more quickly than other methods." "Most people were overjoyed at the king's execution, but in the political power vacuum that followed, different factions began to turn on each other." "Thousands were arrested and executed it in a bloodbath called the Terror." "Condorcet's worst fears of chaos and anarchy had come true." "In the course of the next 12 months, something like 16,000 death sentences were passed." "The vast majority of the people who were killed were just ordinary people who had got on the wrong side either of laws or who had enemies who were prepared to denounce them for grievances that often went far back into the 18th century." "This was the opportunity." "Someone once said, "the Terror was everyone's revenge."" "Soon, it was Condorcet's to become a victim." "In 1794, he was thrown out of office for having opposed the king's execution." "A warrant was issued his arrest." "He hid here, a tiny, top floor flat in a Parisian house." "Amid the Terror that was consuming French society," "Condorcet wrote a final testament to his belief in" "Enlightenment ideas." "It was called, The Outline of the Progress of the Human Spirit." "Among his last words were these" ""the time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason." He was tracked down, arrested, and died in prison." "His body was never found." "Two centuries after the French Revolution, Condorcet's empty tomb now stands here in the Pantheon, France's memorial to its greatest men and women." "Condorcet wanted the Enlightenment to change society in profound and beneficial ways." "He believed this could be done rationally and scientifically." "In the mayhem of the Revolution, reason and logic were swept aside, and he paid with his life." "But his vision of equality, justice, and the power of knowledge lives on." "We owe the world we live in today in great part to the" "Enlightenment." "Representative government, freedom, equality, and human rights, these are all Enlightenment ideas that people have fought for since the 17th century." "The importance of education has come to be widely accepted, that every child has the right to find out for itself about the world." "It also gave us the belief that through shared knowledge, society can continue to progress." "But today, these ideas and the discoveries of science itself are under attack as growing religious fundamentalism and superstition threaten to drag us back into the past." "By enabling children to understand the achievements of the Enlightenment, we can help to protect and expand its legacy." "Each new generation is our hope for the future."