The Gaining of Intelligence 

Although serious doubts were raised about the Enlightenment prior to the 1790s, the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment, which many writers blamed for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained the ancient regime, thereby fomenting revolution. Counter-revolutionary writings like those of Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre and Augustin Barruel all asserted a close link between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, as did many of the revolutionary leaders themselves, so that the Enlightenment became increasingly discredited as the Revolution became increasingly bloody. That is why the French Revolution and its aftermath was also a major phase in the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought. For example, while Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) contains no systematic account of the connection between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, it is heavily spiced with hostile references to the French revolutionaries as merely politicised philosophes. Barruel argues in Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) - one of the most widely read books of its period - that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons.