I'm pretty sure the maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely was thought up by a conservative and they saw it as relating not to absolute monarchs but the absolutism they saw in demagogues or elections.
Dude, that's Lord Acton, well known for being a Liberal of his day. The statement was made in a letter arguing against the doctrine of papal infallibility:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Then again, he also said:
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Ultimately, the power corrupting argument is one against consolidation of power, be it in a king, emperor or pope. It's also a 19th Century argument, and not so much an Enlightenment one, since, for many, the ideal of the Enlightenment was that power be concentrated in a benevolent enlightened despot. Democracy and representative government were a distinctly English perversion of that idea. It was only later in the Modern Era that these became less about protecting one's rights as an Englishman and more as universal ideals for humanity, mostly arising because of the dominance of the British Empire during that era.
I'm not sure that the enlightenment was automatically about limiting the power of government or anyone else, in fact it sparked of most of the modern political ideologies and a lot of them were very short on limiting themselves, the authorities or others they thought should be invested with power. The enlightenment essentially made mankind over confident and invested it with the belief that there wasnt anything that wasnt knowable or changeable or immune to reinvention, there was a real disabling of consequential thinking for a while too, or at the very least the negative consequences of change where considered less important than the possible positive ones.
The major issue was that the powerful began to believe that everything could be understood through Reason. Empiricism had only secondary importance; what was of primary importance was that everything made logical sense. It was Ti on extreme overdrive. Luckily, Hume and Kant stepped in to knock some sense into the movement and ground it in a more intuitive grasp of reality.
The feminist and other champions of womens and childrens liberation are among the greatest critics of the enlightenment since it was gender blind and paid no attention what so ever to those groups. Its been attacked as an entirely male enterprise which failed to know itself and its prejudices.
This is of course, natural. Women, after all, have typically been the strongest defenders and most stalwart guardians of religion, for they are the ones with the spiritual power of creation within, and the ones with all-powerful, despotic rule over the children. Children have most acutely represented spirituality and faith. It is by faith alone that we connect with our parents, and trust that they will provide for and protect us, while guiding our moral education.
Men grow to separate from that structure and fulfills his duty apart from it in some way. Historically, a woman's growth led to the assumption of power within the structure, and she fulfills her duty within it.
Victor has created his usual goodies vs. baddies dichotomy because he's all set to attack God and any believers who rise to the bait. As usual he's wrong though.
Who knows what Victor is up to?