Expressing one's opinions during the eighteenth century involved considerably more risk in France than in Germany or Britain. In Prussia a king could exile a professor; in England the orthodox could block a promising ecclesiastical career; in France the government could jail, torture, and execute those it disliked. Censors kept a watchful eye on French publications. The standards for licensing were intended to serve the needs of the royal government and the hierarchy of France's Roman Catholic Church. The licensing laws failed, however, to stop the flow of criticism. Attacks on all aspects of the established regime were published anonymously, or outside the country, or inside it with falsifications about the printer. They were addressed to the public at large, not only to the learned. We do not know how many readers they reached. But it seems clear that the more oppressive the political and religious authorities were, the more numerous and vehement became the books denouncing them. Writers went to prison or left the country, but they did not stop criticizing the powers whose threats could literally endanger their lives.

The chief concern of those who wrote about morality in prerevolutionary France was not with theory but with the hope, or threat, of change. In England, Scotland, and some of the German states, clergymen and professors produced original and important moral philosophy.