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Napoleon had popularized the word, which had first been used by the French philosophe Destutt de Tracy, whom Jefferson had read and admired enormously.

In his political savvy he tempers the ideals of the philosophe with the no-nonsense intelligence of a Don Corleone: “Independence of the press is the most important, indeed the essential, ingredient of liberty.”

Adam, perhaps the novel’s only personable creation, is a kind of demiurgic naïf, somewhere between a wide-eyed ingénue and an Enlightenment philosophe.

The philosophe handed her a feverish memorandum for reform, covering everything from rhubarb cultivation to vocational schooling.

His friendship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which lasted for nearly twenty years—longer than almost anyone else sustained a friendship with the ornery and paranoid Swiss philosophe—began when they met drinking coffee and playing chess in the Café de la Régence, one of the cafés clustered around the Palais Royal, in Paris, where the real reservoir of Enlightenment social capital was produced.