Note by John Engelbrecht Aug 27 2016 While gaining more understanding of the French Revolution, guided by Carrol's The Guillotine and the Cross, and also finding reasons that Europeans turned their back on Christianity, it seems important to repeat some of the German experience from the early nineteenth century. This is done by quoting from some Internet sources.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/reason/introduction.htm
German idealism has been called the theory of the French Revolution. This does not imply that Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel furnished a theoretical interpretation of the French Revolution, but that they wrote their philosophy largely as a response to the challenge from France to reorganize the state and society on a rational basis, so that social and political institutions might accord with the freedom and interest of the individual. Despite their bitter criticism of the Terror in France, the German idealists unanimously welcomed the revolution, calling it the dawn of a new era, and they all linked their basic philosophical principles to the ideals that it advanced.
In Hegel’s view, the decisive turn that history took with the French Revolution was that man came to rely on his mind and dared to submit the given reality to the standards of reason. Hegel said that thought ought to govern spiritual reality.
Ever since the German Reformation, the masses had become used to the fact that, for them, liberty was an ‘inner value,’ which was compatible with every form of bondage, that due obedience to existing authority was a prerequisite to everlasting salvation, and that toil and poverty were a blessing in the eyes of the Lord. A long process of disciplinary training had introverted the demands for freedom and reason in Germany.
The remains of feudal despotism still held sway in Germany, the more oppressive because split into a multitude of petty despotisms, each competing with the other. The Reich ‘consisted of Austria and Prussia, the Prince-Electors, 94 ecclesiastical and secular princes, 103 barons, 40 prelates, and 51 Reich towns; in sum, it consisted of nearly 300 territories.’ In sharp contrast to France, Germany had no strong, conscious, politically educated middle class to lead the struggle against this absolutism.
One of the decisive functions of Protestantism had been to induce the emancipated individuals to accept the new social system that had arisen, by diverting their claims and demands from the external world into their inner life.
The ideals of the French Revolution found their resting place in the processes of industrial capitalism. Napoleon’s empire liquidated the radical tendencies and at the same time consolidated the economic consequences of the revolution. The French philosophers of the period interpreted the realization of reason as the liberation of industry. Expanding industrial production seemed capable of providing all the necessary means to gratify human wants. Thus, at the same time that Hegel elaborated his system, Saint-Simon in France was exalting industry as the sole power that could lead mankind to a free and rational society.
The philosophies of the French Enlightenment and their revolutionary successors all posited reason as an objective historical force which, once freed from the fetters of despotism, would make the world a place of progress and happiness. They held that ‘the power of reason, and not the force of weapons, will propagate the principles of our glorious revolution.’ By virtue of its own power, reason would triumph over social irrationality and overthrow the oppressors of mankind. ‘All fictions disappear before truth, and all follies fall before reason.’
https://faculty.unlv.edu/kirschen/2011Fall/ENG232/Enlightenment-voltaire-slideshow.pdf
The outbreak of the French Revolution in the summer of 1789 stirred the imagination of nearly all Europeans. The French revolutionaries, that is those men and women who made conscious choices, sensed in their hearts and minds that they were witnessing the birth of a new age, the dawn of a new era. And if the revolutionaries of Paris, Bordeaux, Lyons or Toulouse knew they were innovating, knew they were helping to usher in the dawn of a New Jerusalem, so too did observers in London, Berlin, Philadelphia, Moscow, Manchester, Geneva, Amsterdam or Boston. New institutions were created on the foundations of Reason and justice and not authority or blind faith.
Enlightenment thinkers reject the idea of the Rule by Divine Right
1807 Hegel writes Phenomenology of Mind
http://philosophy.eserver.org/hegel-summary.html
The Enlightenment demands freedom of reason, freedom to disbelieve in ghosts and goblins, freedom from foolishness and even State foolishness. All else is superstition and should be rejected for the good of all. Its goal is revolutionary, that human reason must win dominance over all nature and all worldly power.
12. In the optimistic utopia of the Enlightenment, people are basically perfect, but the systems of church and state frustrate our basic perfection. Destruction of the state and the achievement of anarchy should result in utopia, because our presumed basic goodness would be free to emerge. John E's note: this is foolishness, the Bible is correct when it says that people are basically bad.
Religion will survive, but it must now take into account the claims of the Enlightenment. Religion must acknowledge theological critique, textual analysis, historical method and archeological reason. In return, the Enlightenment must recognize the important role religion can play in sociological research, analysis of the human condition and social programs.
New Oxford Review March 2017 p. 9 The notion of "spirit" has been recast in our age in god-like attempts to perfect humanity and make man the true master of his destiny. The great Enlightenment project of America, to democratize the world, is but the latest version of the ancient tale of Nimrod building his tower to challenge the heavens or, at the very least, seize the power of the Almighty. Utopianism is about man's perfecting himself by his own hand.