A study of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, which began in 1776, showed that many of the rebels against British rule in the American colonies - mostly landowners, unlike in Western Europe, where the movement was dominated by urban intellectuals, believed to be members of the wider Enlightenment Republic of scholars.
The enthusiasm of the French for their cause only reinforced this belief: when Benjamin Franklin and later Thomas Jefferson settled in Paris, the philosophers celebrated them more than any Scot or Italian who visited them.
