Rousseau and Revolution Read online

  On October 18, 1752, through Duelos’ influence, Rousseau’s operetta, Le Devin du village, was presented before King and court at Fontainebleau, and with such success that it was repeated there a week later. A performance for the public in Paris (March 1, 1753) won a wider acclaim, and the retiring author found himself again a celebrity. The little intermède, for which Rousseau had written both words and music, was almost an obbligato to the Discourse: the shepherdess Colette, saddened by the flirtations of Colin with urban demoiselles, is instructed by the village soothsayer to win him back by flirtations of her own; Colin, jealous, returns, and together they sing ballads praising rural as against city life. Rousseau attended the première, and was almost reconciled to society:

  There is no clapping before the King; therefore everything was heard, which was advantageous to the author and the piece. I heard about me the whispering of women, who appeared as beautiful as angels. They said to one another, in a low voice: “This is charming; this is ravishing; there is not a sound that does not go to the heart.” The pleasure of giving this emotion to so many amiable persons moved me to tears; and these I could not restrain in the first duet, when I observed that I was not the only person who wept.89

  That evening the Duc d’Aumont sent him word to come to the palace the next morning at eleven to be presented to the King; and the messenger added that the King was expected to give the composer a pension. But Rousseau’s bladder vetoed the plan.

  Will it be believed that the night of so brilliant a day was for me a night of anguish and perplexity? My first thought was that after being presented I should frequently want to retire; this had made me suffer very considerably at the theater, and might torment me the next day, when I should be in the gallery or in the King’s apartment, amongst all the great, waiting for the departure of his Majesty. My infirmity was the principal cause which prevented me from mixing in polite companies and enjoying the conversation of the fair. … None but persons who are acquainted with this situation can judge of the horror which being exposed to the risk of it inspires.90

  So he sent word that he could not come. Two days later Diderot reproved him for missing such a chance to provide more fitly for himself and Thérèse. “He spoke of the pension with more warmth than, on such a subject, I should have expected from a philosopher. … Although I was obliged to him for his good wishes, I could not relish his maxims, which produced a heated dispute, the first I ever had with him.”91 He was not without some profit from his Devin. Mme. de Pompadour liked it so well that she herself played the part of Colette in its second presentation at the court; she sent him fifty louis d’or, and Louis sent him a hundred.92 The King himself, “with the worst voice in his kingdom,” went around singing Colette’s sad aria “J’ai perdu mon serviteur”—a premonition of Gluck.

  Meanwhile Rousseau prepared articles on music for the Encyclopédie . “These I executed in great haste, and consequently very ill, in the three months that Diderot had allowed me.” Rameau criticized these contributions severely in a pamphlet, Erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie (1755). Rousseau amended the articles, and made them the basis of a Dictionnaire de la musique (1767). His contemporaries, excepting Rameau, rated him “a musician of the very first order”;93 we should now consider him as a good composer in a minor genre; but he was without question the most interesting writer on music in that generation.

  When a troupe of Italian opera singers invaded Paris in 1752, a controversy flared up on the relative merits of French versus Italian music. Rousseau leaped into the fray with a Lettre sur la musique française (1753), “in which,” said Grimm, “he proves that it is impossible to compose music to French words; that the French language is altogether unfit for music; that the French have never had music, and never will.”94 Rousseau was all for melody. “We sang some old song,” he wrote in his Rêveries, “which was far better than modern discord”;95 what age has not heard that plaint? In the article “Opéra” in his Dictionnaire de la musique he gave a cue to Wagner: he defined opera as “a dramatic and lyrical spectacle which seeks to reunite all the charms of the beaux arts in the representation of a passionate action. … The constituents of an opera are the poem, the music, and the decoration: the poetry speaks to the spirit, the music to the ear, the painting to the eye. … Greek dramas could be called operas.”96

  About this time (1752) Maurice-Quentin de La Tour portrayed Rousseau in pastel.97 He caught Jean-Jacques smiling, handsome, and well-groomed; Diderot condemned the portrait as unfair to the truth.98 Marmontel described Rousseau as seen in these years at d’Holbach’s dinners: “He had just gained the prize … at Dijon.... A timid politeness, sometimes … so obsequious as to border on humility. Through his fearful reserve distrust was visible; his lowering eyes watched everything with a look full of gloomy suspicion. He seldom entered into conversation, and rarely opened himself to us.”99

  Having so forcefully denounced science and philosophy, Rousseau was ill at ease among the philosophes who dominated the salons. His Discourse had committed him to the defense of religion. Mme. d’Épinay tells how, at a dinner given by Mme. Quinault, the hostess, finding the talk too irreverent, begged her guests to “respect at least natural religion.” “No more than any other,” retorted the Marquis de Saint-Lambert, lately Voltaire’s rival for Mme. du Châtelet, and soon to be Rousseau’s for Mme. d’Houdetot. Mme. d’Épinay continues:

  At this answer Rousseau became angry, and muttered something which made the company laugh at him. “If,” he said, “it is cowardice to allow anyone to speak ill of an absent friend, it is a crime to allow anyone to speak ill of his God, who is present; and I believe in God, Messieurs.” … Turning to Saint-Lambert I said, “You, Monsieur, who are a poet, will agree with me that the existence of an eternal being, all powerful and supremely intelligent, is the germ of the most beautiful enthusiasm.” “I confess,” he replied, “that it is beautiful to see this God inclining his face to the earth, … but it is the germ of the follies—” “Monsieur,” interrupted Rousseau, “if you say one word more I shall leave the room.” In fact he had left his seat, and was seriously meditating flight, when the Prince de—was announced,100

  and everybody forgot the subject of the debate. If we may believe Mme. d’Épinay’s Memoirs, Rousseau told her that these atheists well deserved eternal hell.101

  In the preface to his comedy Narcisse— which was played by the Comédie Française on December 18, 1752—Rousseau renewed his war on civilization. “The taste for letters always announces in a people the commencement of a corruption which it very soon accelerates. This taste arises in a nation only from two evil sources … : idleness, and the desire for distinction.”102 Nevertheless he continued till 1754 to attend d’Holbach’s “synagogue” of freethinkers. There one day Marmontel, Grimm, Saint-Lambert, and others heard the Abbé Petit read a tragedy that he had composed. They found it lamentable, but praised it handsomely; the abbé had too much wine in him to perceive their irony, and swelled with content. Rousseau, resenting the insincerity of his friends, fell upon the abbé with a merciless tirade: “Your piece is worthless; … all these gentlemen are mocking you; go away from here, and return to be vicar in your village.”103 D’Holbach reproved Rousseau for his rudeness; Rousseau left in anger, and for a year he stayed away.

  His companions had destroyed his Catholicism, but not his faith in the fundamentals of Christianity. His boyhood Protestantism came to the surface again as his Catholicism subsided. He idealized the Geneva of his youth, and thought that he would be more comfortable there than in a Paris that irked his soul. If he returned to Geneva he would regain the proud title of citizen, with the exclusive privileges that this implied. In June, 1754, he took the coach to Chambéry, found Mme. de Warens poor and unhappy, opened his purse to her, and went on to Geneva. There he was welcomed as a repentant prodigal son; he seems to have signed a statement reaffirming the Calvinist creed;104 the Genevan clergy rejoiced in the reclamation of an Encyclopedist to their eva
ngelical faith. He was reinstated as a citizen, and thereafter proudly signed himself “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen”

  I was so impressed with the kindness shown me … by the [civic] council and the [ecclesiastical] consistory, and by the great civility and obliging behavior of the magistrates, ministers, and citizens, that … I did not think of going back to Paris except to break up housekeeping, find a situation for Monsieur and Madame Levasseur, or provide for their subsistence, and then return with Thérèse to Geneva, there to settle for the rest of my days.105

  He could now appreciate more thoroughly than in his boyhood the beauty of the lake and its shores. “I preserved a lively remembrance of … the farther end of the lake, and of this, some years afterward, I gave a description in La Nouvelle Héloïse”. The Swiss peasants entered into the bucolic idyl he was to write in that novel: they owned their farms, were free from poll tax and corvée, busied themselves with domestic crafts in winter, and stood contentedly apart from the noise and strife of the world. He had in mind the small city-states of Switzerland when he described his political ideal in Le Contrat social.

  In October, 1754, he left for Paris, promising to be back soon. Voltaire arrived in Geneva two months after Rousseau’s departure, and settled down at Les Délices. In Paris Jean-Jacques resumed his friendship with Diderot and Grimm, but not as trustfully as before. When he learned that Mme. d’Holbach had died, he wrote the Baron a tender letter of condolence; the two men were reconciled, and Rousseau again sat at table with the infidels. For three years more he was, to all appearances, one of the philosophes; his new Calvinist creed sat lightly on his thoughts. He was absorbed now in seeing through the press his second Discourse, which was to be more world-shaking than the first.

  VII. THE CRIMES OF CIVILIZATION

  In November, 1753, the Dijon Academy announced another competition. The new question was: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?” “Struck with this great question,” says Rousseau, “I was surprised that the Academy had dared to propose it; but since it had shown the courage, … I immediately undertook the discussion.”106 He entitled his contribution Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. At Chambéry on June 12, 1754, he dedicated this second Discourse “to the Republic of Geneva,” and added an address to the “most honorable, magnificent, and Sovereign Lords,” voicing some notable opinions on politics:

  In my researches after the best rules common sense can lay down for the constitution of a government, I have been so struck at finding them all in actuality in your own, that even had I not been born within your walls I should have thought it indispensable for me to offer this picture of human society to that people which of all others seems to be possessed of its greatest advantages, and to have best guarded against its abuses.107

  He complimented Geneva in terms quite applicable to Switzerland today:

  A country diverted, by a fortunate lack of power, from the brutal love of conquest, and secured, by a still more fortunate situation, from the fear of becoming itself the conquest of other states: a free city situated between several nations, none of which should have any interest in attacking it, while each had an interest in preventing it from being attacked by the others.108

  And the future idol of the French Revolution approved the limitations placed upon democracy in Geneva, where only eight per cent of the population could vote:

  In order to prevent self-interest and ill-conceived projects, and all such dangerous innovations as finally ruined the Athenians, each man should not be at liberty to propose new laws at pleasure; this right should belong exclusively to the magistrates.... It is above all the great antiquity of the laws which makes them sacred and venerable; men soon learn to despise laws which they see daily altered; and states, by accustoming themselves to neglect their ancient customs under the pretext of improvement, often introduce greater evils than those they endeavor to remove.109

  Was this only a plea for readmission to Genevan citizenship?

  This aim having been achieved, Rousseau submitted his essay to the Dijon Academy. He was not awarded the prize, but when, in June, 1755, he published the Discours, he had the satisfaction of becoming again the exciting topic of Paris salons. He had left no paradox unturned to stir debate. He did not deny “natural” or biological inequality; he recognized that some individuals are by birth healthier or stronger than others in body or character or mind. But he argued that all other inequalities—economic, political, social, moral—are unnatural, and arose when men left the “state of nature,” established private property, and set up states to protect property and privilege. “Man is naturally good”;110 he becomes bad chiefly through social institutions that restrain or corrupt his tendencies to natural behavior. Rousseau pictured an ideal primitive condition in which most men were strong of limb, fleet of foot, clear of eye,* and lived a life of action in which thought was always a tool and incident of action, and not an enfeebling substitute for it. He contrasted this natural health with the proliferating diseases engendered in civilization by wealth and sedentary occupations.

  The greater part of our ills are of our own making, and we might have avoided them, nearly all, by adhering to that simple, uniform, and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed. If she destined man to be healthy, I venture to declare that a state of reflection is a state contrary to nature, and that a thinking man is a depraved animal [l’homme qui médite est un animal dépravé’]. When we think of the good constitution of the savages—at least of those whom we have not ruined with our spirituous liquors—and reflect that they are troubled with hardly any disorders save wounds and old age, we are tempted to believe that in following the history of civil society we shall be telling that of human sickness.112

  Rousseau admitted that his ideal “state of nature … perhaps never existed, and probably never will”;113 he offered it not as a fact of history but as a standard of comparison. This is what he meant by the startling proposal: “Let us begin, then, by laying facts aside, as they do not affect the question. The investigations we may enter into … must not be treated as historical truths, but only as conditional and hypothetical reasonings.”114 However, we may form some idea of man’s life before the rise of social organization, by observing the condition and conduct of modern states, for “states today remain in a state of nature”115—each individually sovereign, and knowing in actuality no law but those of cunning and force; we may suppose that pre-social man lived in a like condition of individual sovereignty, insecurity, collective chaos, and intermittent violence. Rousseau’s ideal was not such an imaginary presocial existence [for society may be as old as man], but a later stage of development in which men lived in patriarchal families and tribal groups, and had not yet instituted private property. “The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family.”116 That was the time of maximal happiness for mankind; it had defects, pains, and punishments, but it had no laws beyond parental authority and family discipline; “it was altogether the best state that man could experience, so that he can have departed from it only through some fatal accident.”117 That accident was the establishment of individual property, from which came economic, political, and social inequality, and most of the evils of modern life.

  The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes, might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”118

  From that permitted usurpation came the curses of civilization: class divisions, slavery, serfdom, envy, robbery, war, legal injustice, political corruption, commercial chicanery, inventions, science, lite
rature, art, “progress”—in one word, degeneration. To protect private property, force was organized, and became the state; to facilitate government, law was developed to habituate the weak to submit to the strong with a minimum of force and expense.119 Hence it came about that “the privileged few gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude lack the bare necessaries of life.”120 Added to these basic inequities is a mass of derivative iniquities: “shameful methods sometimes practiced to prevent the birth of human beings,” abortion, infanticide, castration, perversions, “the exposure or murder of multitudes of infants who fall victims to the poverty of their parents.”121 All these calamities are demoralizing; they are unknown to animals; they make “civilization” a cancer on the body of mankind. In comparison with this polymorphous corruption and perversity, the life of the savage is healthy, sane, and humane.

  Should we therefore go back to savagery? “Must societies be totally abolished? Must mine and thine be annulled, and must we return to the forests to live among bears?” That is no longer possible for us; the poison of civilization is in our blood, and we shall not eradicate it by flight to the woods. To end private property, government, and law would be to plunge the people into a chaos worse than civilization. “Once man has left it he can never return to the time of innocence and equality.”122 Revolution may be justified, for force may justly overthrow what force has set up and maintained;123 but revolution is not now advisable. The best we can do is to study the Gospels again, and try to cleanse our evil impulses by practicing the ethics of Christianity.124 We can make a natural sympathy for our fellow men the basis of morality and social order. We can resolve to live a less complicated life, content with necessaries, scorning luxuries, shunning the race and fever of “progress.” We can slough off, one by one, the artificialities, hypocrisies, and corruptions of civilization, and remold ourselves to honesty, naturalness, and sincerity. We can leave the noise and riot of our cities, their hatreds, licentiousness, and crimes, and go to live in rural simplicity and domestic duties and content. We can abandon the pretensions and blind alleys of philosophy, and return to a religious faith that will uphold us in the face of suffering and death.