In the eighteenth century, courageous and sharp thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire in France, and Locke, Hume and Burke in England led to the intellectual, scientific and economic leadership of Europe and America in the two centuries to come.
The countries the Enlightenment failed to reach were left behind; it reached Denmark but not Sweden, the Rhineland but not Russia, northern Italy but not southern Italy. Wherever Napoleon went, he brought it with him; the Enlightenment’s blessings invariably outlasted him. (In that sense we must regret that in 1812 he failed in Russia.) It is debatable to what extent Frederick the Great brought it to Prussia, Joseph II to the Habsburg empire. Alas, it failed to reach the Ottomans and Latin America. The Far East managed without.
Quebec, which remained loyal to the ancien regime, chose to reject the enlightening benefits of the French Revolution and had to wait until the nineteen sixties to catch up.
What is the relevance of all this?
That we must hope that the current turmoil in the Muslim world will produce an Enlightenment of its own.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
But is it universal? How does one explain the popularity and strength, even in lands where the Enlightenment took hold, of religious fundamentalism, creationism and other anti-enlightenment belief?
Schiller said: Against stupidity even the gods fight in vain.
I am surprised I have so far not received any indignant blasts about Napoleon’s benign influence, nor any speculation about what would have happened if he had succeded in 1812. (Other than that the Overture would not have been written). Could he have made good what Peter the Great had promised – a westernized Russia?
An interesting coincidence perhaps, I see this as not much more.
Are the phenomena that Horace K mentions widespread in ‘enlightened’ countries outside the United States? One might suggest that a weak public education system might undercut the benefits of enlightenment…
On the other hand, a good public education system in unenlightened countries like Fidel’s Cuba is, alas, not much help.