ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT is usually characterised as having a drive to secularism, most obviously in the writings of those anti-clerical French philosophers – Voltaire, Diderot – who redrew the era's intellectual maps. The 1780s were a decade in which Enlightenment was as widely and explicitly pursued as it ever would be, before the implosion of the French Revolution turned secularism into an aggressive ideology determined to throw out old institutions and overthrow old class relations. What, then, is the significance of descriptions of aeronauts as gods? Is it a way of instating classicism as an alternative to clericalism? Is it a lightly allusive language that playfully creates a category of social actors for whom there needs to be distinction? Is it a carry-over from the ancient world, one of many that Enlightenment revivified, in which mythology appeals because it provides an explanatory system that is both secure and remote? What sort of ironies are at work in the metaphor? And how does the idea of aeronauts as gods fit with belief in God, which was upheld by much Enlightenment activity even as rationalism loosened the grip of piety for many? Why too did people evoke gods when they had a perfectly serviceable alternative, both classical and contemporary, in the term heroes?

Some light is shed by comparison to the language used about aeronauts in a later period. It has been suggested by a scholar of Victorian balloonists, Elaine Freedgood, that ballooning provided an escape from ‘the new social world created by industrial capitalism with its suddenly too-numerous and too-contingent object relations’, and that by the mid nineteenth century ballooning offered a way to enjoy silence and space, increasingly rare commodities. What she describes as ‘a necessary pause from the tearing pace of productivity and progress’ could equally apply to the 1780s, which felt hectic to people at the time. Even after fifty years of ballooning, the exceptionality of aeronauts was remarked on: ‘A person who makes an ascent in a balloon will become, at least in his own estimation, a person of consequence.’