There the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau were laid to rest with the blessing of the French state.

ECONOMIST: Atheism and the Enlightenment

He was a man of the Enlightenment, a reader of Adam Smith and John Locke as well as of Voltaire and Rousseau.

ECONOMIST: Venezuela's president rewrites the history of his hero

It is a tragedy of history, the author concludes, that Voltaire and Rousseau won the battle of ideas, whereas Diderot was reduced to the rank of editor of the encyclopedia, and Holbach was forgotten utterly.

ECONOMIST: Atheism and the Enlightenment

The eighteenth century was the French century: Rousseau, Voltaire, Versailles and the court of the Sun King Louis the Fourteenth, Buffon and the Jardin des Plantes, Paris buzzing with the discourse of the enlightenment and the new supremacy of scientific method.

BBC: Part Three - France and the World