The Historic Preservationist

Taxes, famine and the enlightenment.

Marie Antoinette, Madame Deficit.

France in the 18th century.

Philosophies of the times.

A brief history of the French Monarchy.

Franklin dealing with; the constitutional convention, paper currency, slavery, inventions, death, legacy, and his will.

Franklins time on Craven Street, difficulties with the Privy Council, back to America and on to France.

Ben Franklin, Penn family, and Great Britain

Discussed are situations Franklin set up; Union Fire Company,American Philosophical Society, oil-lamp,the Franklin Stove, lightning rod,Single Fluid Theory, Bifocal lens, Academy and College of Philadelphia.

Franklin enters into a common law with Deborah Read. With the help of Hugh Meredith Franklin enters into a printing partnership. Franklin sets up the Junto Club and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

We start with Franklin running away from his brothers printing shop eventually ending in Philadelphia. He began working for printers part time.

Marie-Louis leave’s Voltaire, Geneva incited class different regulations, Voltaire suggested that all watchmakers in 1770 come to his property in Ferney and set up their businesses there, hence this was the beginning of the French watchmaking industry that still thrives today. Voltaire entered Paris in 1778 even though he was banned, within a few days he hosted several old friends while seemingly...

Voltaires book Candide is a major Sartre in the enlightenment where he deliberately ridicules fanaticism and religion.

With the advent of Voltaires peers constructing an encyclopedia, he came out of exile to help them write it. After moving to Geneva, he married Marie-Louise and was not allowed to return to Paris by the French Government, for how much he irritated them.

Voltaire was banished to England by King George I for his anti-religious and anti-government propaganda. While in England he honed his style, met a lot of important figures and eventually returned to France.

Voltaires only aspirations is that he wanted to be a writer. He started writing poems and eventually for the theater, but always found himself rubbing the law the wrong way finding himself in prision.

Intellectuals, while the their contributions may have been great to the Renaissance movement, church leaders felt their religious connections to be complete Heresy.

Pseudoscience came into vogue in the Middle Ages, quickly catching up to real scientific exploration which signified the time. Scientists like da Vinci were dissecting human bodies resulting in great physiological advances in medicine.

England lagged behind in the Renaissance but things quickly changed when Henry Tudor became the new king. Theatre’s started to be built in England , and the professions of acting and screenwriting took hold and Shakespeare was part of this.

The slave trade started, Columbus explored, raped, pillaged, killed and claimed , many new lands were discovered with the drop of a flag all of which Portugal was a world leader at this time. For the most part, women of all classes were repressed from education but this did change in the later part of the Renaissance for women of nobility. Galileo a polymath, developed the telescope and microscope...

France was a late comer to the Renaissance, a king and queen are wed and Huguenots were expelled. Art, particularly oil painting migrated to the Low Countries and Classical sheet music was transformed with the printing press. The Medici family fell from grace as leaders of a town they created, Florence.

Copernicus began thinking outside the box, with theory and experimentation causing conflict with the Catholic Church. It then saw the rise Martin Luther with new humanist ideologies

The 17th century brought about artists Jan Van Eyec and Rogier van der Weldon from the Netherlands developing new types of painting pigments. Leonardo da Vinci, a Polymath took paintings to new heights with the new colors and pigments available. Another Polymath, Italian Michelangelo while his preferred medium was in marble, began sculpting fakes from an earlier time.

In the 15th Century scrolls and books began to be produced, leading to the foundation of many universities and colleges. The Medici family became powerful and rulers of Florence, embracing art, while setting up the ledger-system for doing business, they farther stretched their influence by marrying into the French aristocracy.

In Florence in the 13th century, the Renaissance began where the Roman Empire was first conceived. In the 15th century Constantinople was all that remained in the Byzantine Empire, with the Ottomans warring with them until defeated. The invention of the modern printing press was pivotal at this time with the majority of all populations illiterate, once invented the Renaissance developed quickly.