War perturbed the work of the mind. News arrived late, books no longer circulated, scientific voyages became impossible. Savants who maintained international correspondence were suspected of ‘intelligence with the enemy.’ But the political upheavals also caused exiles which provided the opportunity to meet other thinkers. Thus, to flee the civil war which religious tensions had provoked in England, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes stayed in Paris, where he befriended the erudite priest and mathematician as well as Pierre Gassendi, who was a philosopher, theologian, astronomer and mathematician all at the same time. The first exile of the English philosopher John Locke also led him to France, where he frequented the surviving disciples of the French mathematician, physicist and philosopher René Descartes. The United Provinces also attracted many savants condemned to exile. That was notably the case for Descartes, Locke and the French writer and philosopher Pierre Bayle, a Protestant fleeing religious persecution. Because, in the previous century, Christianity had shattered into pieces. Rejecting the Medieaval tradition which increased the intermediaries between God and humanity, the various Protestants churches developed a more immediate religiosity, having got rid of good works, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the cult of the saints and images. Martin Luther’s Reformation got a foothold in the Germanic Empire and in the Scandinavian countries. The disciples of Jean Calvin imposed their Reformation in Switzerland, in the United Provinces, Scotland, certain regions of Germany and, to a lesser extent, in France, where the ‘Protestants’ were dubbed Huguenots. England took a different path, which led onto a Protestantism under the aegis of the Anglican church.

The religious context weighed heavily on the development of thought. The Catholic Descartes, who resided in the United Provinces, got entangled up with, against his better wishes, the  hornets’ nest of Dutch confessional affairs. Whilst he dreamed of imposing his system in the colleges of Catholic France, he was forced to pitch it to Batavian ‘heretics.’ He tried to prove that his philosophy could explain the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Before him, Galileo, also a Catholic, had supposed, in the same way as the Calvinists, that the divine presence in consecrated bread was symbolic. It was a vexatious problem for Catholic savants, as the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, through the principle of ‘transubstantiation,’ was totally incompatible with the recent advances in science!

At the university, the savants ‘skipped’ their courses!

One thing the major thinkers of the 17^th century had in common was their deep disdain for traditional university education. Galileo, who taught at Pisa and Padua, readily mocked the official doctrine. This would exacerbate his case during the trial he was subject to, in 1633, for having adopted Copernicus’s thesis according to which it is the Sun which is at the centre of the Universe, and not the Earth as the Church professed. Neither Hobbes or Locke proved very diligent at the University of Oxford, any more so than Newton did at Cambridge. They skipped their lessons and spent their time reading, respectively, maps of the sky, novels and works of natural sciences. Disgusted, Hobbes abandoned the ‘Fac’ after having obtained the lower degree. Resigned, Locke and Newton submitted themselves to the totality of the curriculum and began academic careers. But they devoted themselves to scientific research which undermined the basis of the traditional teaching of which they were officially the heralds! Blaise Pascal was more fortunate. His father, already a disciple of the new sciences, spared him a tedious time at the Faculty and gave him a modern education at home.

But why did these ‘enlightened’ minds turn away from the university? It was because the doctrine which was traditionally taught there at the time was scholastics, a Christian adaptation of Ancient Greek thought, and which was established in the Middle Ages as the unique and definitive analytical grid of the physical and metaphysical worlds. This kind of insurmountable horizon attributes a central role to...theology. The humanist savants of the 15th and 16th centuries contested the scholastic hegemony, but the innovations they contributed rarely passed over the doorsteps of the universities.

Lacking institutional anchorage, the intellectuals thus created their own ‘place,’ a sort of virtual society gathering together Western savants within a gigantic community. This Republic of Letters is called thus because this a priori purely literary expression designated up until the beginning of the 19^th century the whole ensemble of scientific disciplines. This community of European ‘men of letters’ claimed to escape the social, national and confessional constraints of the Ancien Régime. Its citizens were placed on an equal footing and only intellectual merit could in principle distinguish one from the other. In this way the sons of peasants, the bourgeois, nobles and even crowned heads fraternized. Hobbes, the son of a destitute, violent and alcoholic parish priest, could rub shoulders with Pascal, the son of a rich stockholder already converted to the new sciences. Descartes corresponded with the Queen of Sweden, who was passionate about philosophy. Divergences of opinion should in principle be settled without bitterness, through harmonious dialogue. But in practice the ‘Republic’ found it difficult to escape religious disputes, during an epoch when theology was still considered as a ‘science’ in its own right, and even as ‘the’ sovereign science, in the eyes of certain people. In addition the community of savants was not hermetically sealed from the national rivalries of this period in which war was still a part of everyday life. The quarrel which for close to twenty years (1699-1716) saw Newton clash with Leibniz over the paternity of the infinitesimal calculus was of a rare violence. The protagonists did not hesitate to mobilise their loyal supporters, who exchanged hardly affable pamphlets. And the quarrel rapidly took on a patriotic tinge, setting the English prodigy against the German genius.