1748
Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws
The Baron de Montesquieu, after twenty years of work, published his masterpiece in Geneva. Governments, he argued, suited climates; power should check power; legislative, executive, and judicial functions should be separated. Thomas Jefferson would read it and underline. James Madison would take it into the Constitutional Convention forty years later.
Pompeii Rediscovered
Bourbon workmen digging near Vesuvius, ten years after Herculaneum, struck the walls of Pompeii. Unlike its neighbor, Pompeii had been buried in ash and was far easier to excavate. Within a generation its frescoes, its bodies in the ash, and its erotica would transform European art, design, and imagination from Robert Adam to Winckelmann.
Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume, disappointed by the reception of his Treatise, rewrote its epistemology for a general audience. This time the book was read, the causal argument debated, the miracles chapter banned in Catholic countries. A young Immanuel Kant, a continent away, would later say that reading Hume interrupted his dogmatic slumber.
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle
The War of the Austrian Succession ended with almost all conquests returned. Prussia kept Silesia. Britain gave back Louisbourg to the fury of New Englanders. Maria Theresa swore revenge. The peace, said everyone, would not last. It did not; seven years later the whole continent would be at war again.
La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine
The French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie, exiled to Berlin by Frederick the Great after his writings scandalized Paris, published a book arguing that human beings were entirely material, thinking machines, no soul required. Even atheist philosophes were alarmed. La Mettrie drank himself to death on a pheasant pate within three years.