On 30 November 1786 the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold, signed a new criminal code. It abolished torture, ended the confiscation of criminals' property, and did something no modern state had done before: it abolished the death penalty entirely. Leopold had read the Milanese reformer Cesare Beccaria, whose short book On Crimes and Punishments (1764) argued that punishments should be proportionate, certain and no harsher than needed. Tuscany still celebrates 30 November as a regional holiday. The story shows one way Enlightenment ideas reached ordinary lives: through rulers who read the philosophes and decided to act.

Philosopher kings?

Historians use the term enlightened absolutism for monarchs who kept full power but claimed to use it for rational reform. Many philosophes welcomed this. If a king could be persuaded, reform could happen in a single decree rather than through years of struggle. The arrangement also had obvious risks: what one ruler granted, the next could take away, and no one could hold the monarch to account.

Frederick the Great of Prussia

Frederick II, who ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786, wrote poetry in French, played the flute, and corresponded with Voltaire for decades. Soon after taking the throne he restricted judicial torture, and he declared that in his lands everyone could seek salvation in his own way. He called himself the first servant of the state. Voltaire lived at his court from 1750 to 1753, but the friendship collapsed in quarrels, and Voltaire was briefly detained in Frankfurt on Frederick's orders as he left. Frederick also seized Silesia from Austria and fought long wars, a reminder that enlightened rhetoric and power politics lived side by side.

Catherine the Great of Russia

Catherine II, who ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796, read Montesquieu and Beccaria closely and in 1767 issued her Nakaz, or Instruction, a guide for a commission to reform Russian law. It borrowed so heavily from the philosophes that it was banned in France. She bought Diderot's library when he needed money, let him keep it for life, and paid him a salary as its librarian. Diderot visited St Petersburg in 1773 and 1774 and talked with her for hours. Yet the law commission produced no new code, a vast peasant rebellion led by Yemelyan Pugachev was crushed, and serfdom grew harsher and spread to new territories during her reign.

Joseph II and reform from above

The Habsburg emperor Joseph II pushed hardest. His Patent of Toleration of 1781 granted Protestants and Orthodox Christians the right to worship privately, and further edicts eased restrictions on Jews. He abolished serfdom in Bohemia, closed hundreds of monasteries, and tried to standardize administration across his lands. Resistance from nobles, clergy and regions such as Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands forced him to withdraw many reforms before his death in 1790.

Berlin, Milan and Philadelphia

Enlightenment also grew from below. In Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn became a celebrated philosopher, and his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing modeled the wise Jewish hero of his play Nathan the Wise (1779) partly on him. In Milan, Beccaria and the Verri brothers ran a reforming journal called Il Caffè. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin founded a discussion club called the Junto in 1727, a subscription library, and the American Philosophical Society. His experiments with electricity made him famous in Europe, and when he arrived in Paris in 1776 he was greeted as a living philosophe.

Not every reform from above was cosmetic. In Prussia, Frederick's officials drained marshes and settled farmers on reclaimed land, and his successors completed a general law code in 1794. In Spain and Portugal, reforming ministers such as the Marquis of Pombal, who rebuilt Lisbon after the earthquake with wide streets and early earthquake-resistant designs, curbed the power of the Inquisition and expelled the Jesuits. But Pombal ruled harshly, jailing opponents without trial, and he fell from power as soon as his royal patron died. The pattern repeated across Europe: bold reforms carried out by a powerful few, and vulnerable once that power was gone.

Worked example: judging an enlightened despot

Was Catherine the Great an Enlightenment reformer or an autocrat who used its language? Weigh the evidence.

• For reform: she wrote the Nakaz, supported the arts and sciences, founded a school for girls of noble families, and corresponded seriously with Voltaire and Diderot.
• Against: the law code never came, serfdom deepened, and she crushed rebellion and later censored writers who criticized serfdom, such as Alexander Radishchev, whom she exiled to Siberia in 1790.
• The structural question: without independent courts or representative institutions, reform depended entirely on her will.
• A balanced verdict: she took Enlightenment ideas seriously as ideas but applied them only where they strengthened her rule.

The record of enlightened absolutism taught a lasting lesson. Good ideas need institutions that protect them; otherwise they last only as long as the ruler who likes them.