The French Enlightenment was a popular reformation that grounded the nation

Evidence

It is true that even the Reformation, in its higher phase, necessarily adopted the style of the Renaissance and as such spread even in non-protestant countries where the movement had not had a popular incubation. But the phase of popular development enabled the protestant countries to resist the crusade of the Catholic armies tenaciously and victoriously. Thus there was born the German nation as one of the most vigorous in modern Europe. France was lacerated by the wars of religion leading to an apparent victory of Catholicism, but it experienced a great popular reformation in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, Voltairianism and the Encyclopaedia. This reformation preceded and accompanied the Revolution of 1789. It really was a matter here of a great intellectual and moral reformation of the French people, more complete than the German Lutheran Reformation, because it also embraced the great peasant masses in the countryside and had a distinct secular basis and attempted to replace religion with a completely secular ideology represented by the national and patriotic bond. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1402

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci treating the French Enlightenment as a popular Reformation parallels Benedict Anderson’s imagined community of the nation — a key scaffolding concept for the reader.
• QUESTION: Gramsci’s claim that the Enlightenment ‘embraced’ the peasant masses is contestable and worth probing against standard historiography.