Abstract

The appeal of Diderot: "Hâtons-nous de rendre la philosophie populaire" found an immediate echo in Germany, through the voice of the great philologist J.-A. Ernesti. But the German "Popular-philosophy" is meant in terms of education, morality, civic sense, rather than in the sense of a fight against religious and political authoricity. The militant character of the "higher" French Enlightenment is due to the specific conditions of the 18th-century culture. The clandestine print is not intended for mass reading or for the working class, but for the educated bourgeoisie. Robespierre will accuse the encyclopedists of deliberate elitism: although basically unjust, the reproach stresses a typical aspect of the French "philosophie", which had never the popular audience of second rate writers like Knigge, Engel or Hirzel