How did the Enlightenment influence the French Revolution?

The Enlightenment influenced the French Revolution in several ways. One is that it called into question many aspects of French society under the Bourbons (the privileges of the clergy, for example.) While not exactly causing the Revolution itself, Enlightenment thought certainly helped to shape its course. The constitutional monarchy designed in the wake of the first phase of the Revolution, for example, owed much to the thought of the Baron de Montesquieu. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued by the National Assembly, was full of Enlightened ideals, including due process of law in court, freedom of religion, free press, and others. Even the Revolution in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety bore the influence of some of the more radical philosophes. Robespierre, the architect of the Reign of Terror, carried out his violent plan out of a desire to create and maintain the kind of republican virtue that, he had read in the writings of his idol Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was essential to the survival of a republic. So while it is not really accurate to say that the Enlightenment caused the Revolution, the Enlightenment certainly provided a language through which the Revolutionaries could criticize the old order, and, for better or worse, an intellectual framework that they could build upon in the Revolutionary state.