Thinkers Timeline

Michel de Montaigne was a French nobleman and writer who invented the modern essay. He was born in 1533 at the Château de Montaigne in southwest France, near Bordeaux. His family had grown rich through the wine trade and bought their way into the minor nobility. His father had odd ideas about education. He sent the infant Michel to live with peasants for the first three years of his life, so the boy would understand ordinary people. Then he had Latin tutors speak to Michel only in Latin, so the boy grew up speaking Latin as fluently as French. The unusual education shaped him. Montaigne studied law and worked for thirteen years as a magistrate in the Bordeaux high court. He served twice as mayor of Bordeaux. He lived through the French Wars of Religion, a long, brutal series of civil conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that killed thousands and produced famous atrocities like the 1572 Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The wars shaped his thinking about cruelty, fanaticism, and the limits of human reason. In 1571, aged 38, he retired from public life. He moved to a tower in his château, lined the walls with about a thousand books, and began to write. He called what he wrote 'essais', from the French essayer, meaning 'to try' or 'to test'. They were attempts to think on the page, not finished arguments. He published the first edition of his Essays in 1580 and kept revising and expanding them until his death in 1592. He never quite finished. The book has been read by every educated person in the West for over four hundred years.

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and religious thinker. He was born in 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand in central France. His mother died when he was three. His father, a tax official and amateur scientist, raised him and taught him at home. Pascal showed extraordinary gifts very early. By the age of twelve, he was working out geometry on his own. By sixteen, he had written a serious paper on conic sections. At nineteen, to help his father with tax calculations, Pascal built a mechanical calculating machine. It was one of the first working calculators in history. He went on to make important discoveries about pressure and vacuums, helping to found modern physics. With the mathematician Pierre de Fermat, he laid the foundations of probability theory, the maths of chance. In 1654, after a near-fatal carriage accident, Pascal had a powerful religious experience. He wrote about it on a small piece of paper that he sewed into his coat and carried for the rest of his life. From then on, he turned more and more to religious writing. He joined the Jansenists, a strict Catholic group, and defended them in his Provincial Letters. He was working on a great defence of Christianity when he died in 1662, aged only 39. The unfinished notes were published after his death as the Pensées (Thoughts).

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a French lawyer and political thinker. He was born in 1689 at the family castle of La Brède, near Bordeaux in southwest France. His family belonged to the lesser nobility. He studied law and worked as a judge in the Bordeaux high court for twelve years. The work was tedious, but it gave him a deep first-hand knowledge of how laws and courts actually function. In 1721 he became famous, almost by surprise, with the Persian Letters. The book is a comic novel about two Persian travellers in France who write letters home about French customs. Through their puzzled outsider eyes, Montesquieu mocked French society, religion, and politics. The book was a bestseller across Europe. Soon Montesquieu sold his judge's office, joined the French Academy, and turned to full-time writing. For the next twenty years he travelled, read, and worked on his great book. He spent over a year in England, watching parliament and the courts. He read history and travel writing from many parts of the world. The result was The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. It was a vast comparative study of government across many cultures and times. The book was banned by the Catholic Church but read everywhere. Montesquieu died in 1755 in Paris. His ideas, especially about separating the powers of government, would shape the United States Constitution forty years later, and constitutional thought ever since.

Voltaire was a French writer, philosopher, and campaigner who became the most famous voice of the European Enlightenment. His real name was François-Marie Arouet. He was born in Paris in 1694 to a middle-class family. As a young man, he wrote sharp poems and plays that mocked powerful people. Twice he was put in the Bastille prison for his words. He took the pen name 'Voltaire' around 1718. In his twenties he spent two years in exile in England. He admired the freer politics, the religious tolerance, and the science of Newton. Back in France, he spent his life writing across many forms: tragedies, histories, poems, novels, scientific essays, philosophical books, and thousands of letters. He wrote so much that his collected works fill more than 70 large volumes. He was always in trouble with the French government and the Catholic Church. To stay safe, he moved often. He spent years at the court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia, then in Switzerland, then in his own large estate at Ferney near the Swiss border. From Ferney, in his sixties and seventies, he became Europe's most famous writer. He defended people wrongly accused by the courts. He campaigned against torture, religious persecution, and superstition. He died in Paris in 1778, at the age of 83, treated like a hero by huge crowds. Eleven years later, his ideas helped fuel the French Revolution.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher and writer. He is one of the most important thinkers of the European Enlightenment. He was born on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, which was then an independent city-state, not part of France or Switzerland. His mother died nine days after his birth. His father was a watchmaker who taught him to read and love books. When Rousseau was ten, his father got into a fight and had to flee Geneva. Young Jean-Jacques was left with relatives. At fifteen, he left Geneva and wandered across Europe. He worked as a servant, a private tutor, and a music copyist. He taught himself by reading. He met a wealthy older woman named Madame de Warens, who took him in for several years. His early life was unstable. He had little formal education. He would later turn this outsider experience into a source of philosophical insight. He moved to Paris in 1742. He made his name in 1750 when he won an essay competition on whether progress in arts and sciences had improved human morals. His answer, surprisingly, was no. The essay made him famous. For the next twenty years, he wrote a series of books that changed European thought. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) argued that civilisation had corrupted humanity. Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was one of the bestselling novels of the 18th century. The Social Contract (1762) proposed a new theory of political legitimacy. Emile, or On Education (1762) proposed a revolutionary theory of how to raise children. Rousseau had six children with his partner, Thérèse Levasseur, and placed all of them in a foundling hospital. He did this against her wishes. The facts are hard to reconcile with his writing on education and family. He spent his final years moving from country to country, often in conflict with authorities who banned his books. He died on 2 July 1778 in Ermenonville, France, aged 66.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French chemist whose systematic use of the balance to measure the weights of substances before and after chemical reactions helped transform chemistry from a largely qualitative study into a quantitative science. He was born in Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family, studied law in accordance with his family's wishes, and then turned to science. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences at twenty-five. To fund his expensive experimental work he became a member of the Ferme generale, the private tax-collecting consortium that gathered certain taxes for the French crown — a position that gave him income and later cost him his life. In 1771 he married Marie-Anne Paulze, fourteen years his junior, who became his essential scientific collaborator, translating English papers into French, drawing apparatus, and keeping laboratory records. Through the 1770s and 1780s Lavoisier carried out meticulous experiments on combustion, calcination, and respiration, eventually showing that combustion was reaction with a component of air he called oxygene. He proposed a new chemical nomenclature and published Traite elementaire de chimie in 1789, widely regarded as the first modern chemistry textbook. In the French Revolution, his membership of the tax farm became a mortal liability. He was arrested, tried, and guillotined in 1794 at fifty, along with twenty-seven other former tax collectors. The mathematician Lagrange remarked the next day: it took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not be enough to produce another like it.