The French Enlightenment was a popular secular reformation embracing the peasant masses

Evidence

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’s framing of secular national ideology foreshadows the ‘imagined community of the nation’ and how a secular bond could replace religious faith.
• QUESTION: This reframing of the Enlightenment as a ‘popular reformation’ reaching peasants is worth chasing — it inverts the usual elite-philosophes picture.