I am going to try to erect a fragile scaffolding - thin lines connecting the points as I now see them. This is meant to serve as a learning tool, not as a definitive essay by one who has mastered the material. However frail and imperfect, it is a skeleton on which I will hang the muscle, nerve and blood of real learning - a decades-long process. The skeleton will change, no doubt, the way a broken bone reorganizes as it heals, contouring its lines according to the stresses it bears. This is how learning begins for me. Hopefully, at some point in the future, one will recognize a virile understanding. French society between Candide and 1789 was impossibly complex, but it is a storm I would try to look into and perhaps name some of the forces.
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Christian tradition and judeochristian revelation had been discarded, and with these the authority which had governed much of society. The convenient replacement was the new philosophy, simplified and organized for the citizenry. The newly realized power of a popular press added to the intrigue and hastened the transition - once again the word spoke to men's hearts and bid them follow, but now it was a word safe and small and something the pamphleteer could place directly into the commoner's hand. Diderot's Encyclopedia, or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts became emblematic of the new authority of Reason. Materialism, whatever it was, became the basis for the new morality, and in its vague and malleable forms citizens at every level of society discovered the irresistible systematics of payback.
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