England is thus the model: the kingdom best controlled Europe, because the citizen is protected there by the law against very arbitrary, because the king respects the law which it did not work out itself, prerogative which belongs to the elected representatives of the nation. For as much, the preeminent role of the nobility in the nation and at the Parliament is not called into question. Montesquieu proposes that in France the “intermediate powers” (legal clergy, nobility, Parliaments) exert a form of control, like natural representatives of the nation, on monarchy: its political liberalism is thus limited to the elites.  

Voltaire, as for him, ends up moving away from the English model, because he does not want to give too many being able to aristocratic and religious elites resolutely hostile with the Lights and progress. He thus prefers for France a monarch and a government forts, but lit, who respect the civil liberties, exclude very arbitrary, and take the advice of the philosophers to modernize the country, of in top.  

Contradictions of the enlightened despotism

Fault of finding sufficient credit within the elites, by mistrust towards a nobility and judged members of Parliament obscurantists, and considering the people too little lit, the French Lights defer their hopes on sovereigns whom they hope to convert with their ideas: it is the “enlightened despotism”. It is a question of subordinating the privileged interests and the habits to the rational system of a supposed State to represent the public property, to support the economic progress and the diffusion of teaching, to fight all the prejudices to make triumph the reason. This enlightened despotism inspired Frederic II in Prussia, Catherine II in Russia, Joseph II in Austria.

But the philosophers who believed to play a positive role by advising the princes, like Voltaire at Frederic II and Diderot at Catherine II, lost their illusions quickly. What they had taken for the advent of the reason and the rational State was actually that of the reason of State, cynical and authoritative. The dead end rises from an insurmountable contradiction: to want to impose the progress of in top, it is to expose itself to authoritarianism. It is necessary to convince the whole company and not only the prince. The enlightened despotism is paradoxical political freedom.

The “social contract” of Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defends of the quite different political designs, radically democratic. Social Contract (1762) constitutes a turning in the political thought. For Rousseau, any human society rests on a contract between the participants, tacit contract or accepted at a given time. Any sovereignty thus lies in the people which accept this contract. This one supposes the civil and political equality of all the citizens who form the nation, the whole of the contractors.

The ideal city of Rousseau, made up of equal and free small holders, thus guarantees the natural rights of the individual; she banishes the injustice and oppression; she founds the democratic idea which will inspire the French revolution.