The unprecedented prestige and prosperity of literary men thus brought the recovery of nerve home to i the philosophes in the most intimate manner, and provided them with a secure base of operations. Both as writer and as reformer the philosophe required a wide audience, free expression, and respectable status. The eighteenth century provided him with all three; the growing independence of the literary profession greatly facilitated the philosophes’ self-imposed task to be the preceptors of the modern world. The interests of the republic of letters and the Enlightenment were identical.