What was it about Great Britain that made the French Enlightenment philosophes so envious of that nation-state? What did Britain have going for it,...

Many of
the French philosophes saw Great Britain as the model for good government.
One thing that they especially liked about Britain was the system of limited monarchy (and
Parliamentary supremacy) that emerged in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. The
Baron de Montesquieu, for example, admired the English Constitution, that set of traditions and
laws that limited the powers of the king. He argued that this system struck a good balance
between liberty and authority, far more so than the French monarchy. Voltaire, too, was a
self-described Anglophile who especially valued the freedom of speech and press afforded to his
fellow writers and intellectuals in Great Britain. In a series of essays called The
English Letters, Voltaire, who actually lived in England for a few years, also
praised the spirit of religious tolerance that prevailed there. He regarded the English as
industrious and business-minded, and attributed their economic success to the spirit of
tolerance that he saw there. Like Montesquieu, he used English society as a model for absolutist
France. Many French intellectuals admired the works of British writers, especially John Locke,
whose theory of the social contract influenced Voltaire, Rousseau, and others in the eighteenth
century. In short, in absolutist France, England was for many a beacon of liberty, of
moderation, and of modernity.

href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montesquieu/
href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1778voltaire-lettres.asp">https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1778voltaire-lettres.asp