Monarchical Europe, hesitating and divided, did not know what it had to fear, nor what it ought to do.
Such was the political situation of cabinets with respect to France.
But as to ideas, the feelings of the people were different.
The movement of intelligence and philosophy at Paris was responded to by the agitation of the rest of Europe, and especially in America.

Spain, under M.d'Aranda, was become alive to the general feeling; the Jesuits had disappeared; the Inquisition had extinguished its fires; the Spanish nobility blushed for the sacred theocracy of its monks.

Voltaire had correspondents at Cadiz and at Madrid.

The forbidden produce of our ideas was favoured even by those whose charge was to exclude it.

Our books crossed the snows of the Pyrenees.