by Will Durant
Today, having heard all this a hundred times, we sense a certain artificiality in this righteous indignation. We are not sure that the evils Rousseau described arise from corrupt institutions rather than from the nature of man; after all, it is human nature that made the institutions. When Jean-Jacques wrote his second Discourse the idealization of the “friendly and flowing savage” had reached its peak. In 1640 Walter Hamond had published a pamphlet “proving that the inhabitants of Madagascar are the happiest people in the world.”125 Jesuit accounts of Huron and Iroquois Indians seemed to bear out Defoe’s picture of Robinson Crusoe’s amiable man Friday. Voltaire generally laughed at the legend of the noble savage, but he used it gaily in L’lngénu. Diderot played with it in the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. But Helvétius ridiculed Rousseau’s idealization of the savage,126 and Duelos, though a faithful friend of Jean-Jacques, argued that “it is among savages that crime is most frequent; the childhood of a nation is not its age of innocence.”127 All in all, the intellectual climate favored Rousseau’s thesis.
The victims of Rousseau’s invective calmed their consciences by representing the Discourse, like its predecessor, as a pose. Mme. du Deffand openly called him a charlatan.128 Skeptics laughed at his professions of Christian orthodoxy, at his literal interpretation of Genesis.129 The philosophes began to distrust him as upsetting their schemes to win the government to their ideas of social reform; they were not in favor of appealing to the resentments of the poor; they recognized the reality of exploitation, but they saw no constructive principle in the replacement of magistrates with mobs. The government itself made no protest against Rousseau’s denunciations; probably the court took the essay as an exercise in declamation. Rousseau was proud of his eloquence; he sent a copy of the Discourse to Voltaire, and anxiously awaited a word of praise. Voltaire’s reply is one of the gems of French literature, wisdom, and manners:
I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race. I thank you for it. You will please men, to whom you tell truths that concern them, but you will not correct them. You paint in very true colors the horrors of human society; … no one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on four paws [marcher à quatre pattes]. However, as it is more than sixty years since I lost that habit, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it. . . .
I agree with you that literature and the sciences have sometimes been the cause of much evil. … [But] admit that neither Cicero, nor Varro, nor Lucretius, nor Virgil, nor Horace had the least share in the proscriptions of Marius, Sulla, Antony, Lepidus, Octavius. … Confess that Petrarch and Boccaccio did not cause the intestine troubles of Italy, that the badinage of Marot did not cause the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and that Corneille’s Le Cid did not produce the wars of the Fronde. The great crimes were committed by celebrated but ignorant men. That which has made, and will always make, this world a vale of tears is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable pride of men. … Literature nourishes the soul, corrects it, consoles it; it makes your glory at the same time that you write against it. . . .
M. Chapuis informs me that your health is quite bad. You must come and restore it in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me the milk of our cows, and browse on our herbs. I am, very philosophically and with the tenderest esteem, Monsieur, your very humble and very obedient servant.130
Rousseau replied with equal courtesy, and promised to visit Les Délices when he returned to Switzerland.131 But he was deeply disappointed by the reception of his Discourse in the Geneva to which he had dedicated it with such ingratiating praise. Apparently the tight little oligarchy that ruled the republic felt some of the barbs of that essay, and did not relish Rousseau’s wholesale condemnation of property, government, and law. “I did not perceive that a single Genevan was pleased with the hearty zeal found in the work.”132 He decided that the time was not ripe for his return to Geneva.
VIII. THE CONSERVATIVE
The same year 1755 that witnessed the publication of the second Discourse saw the appearance, in Volume V of the Encyclopédie, of a long article by Rousseau—“Discours sur l’économie politique.” It requires note because it diverged from the earlier discourses in some vital particulars. Here society, government, and law are honored as natural results of man’s nature and needs, and private property is described as a social boon and a basic right. “It is certain that the right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizenship, and even more important in some respects than liberty itself. … Property is the true foundation of civil society, and the real guarantee of the undertakings of citizens”;133 i.e., men will not work beyond the provision of their simplest needs unless they may keep the surplus product as their own, to consume or transmit as they may desire. Now Rousseau approves the bequest of property from parents to children, and cheerfully accepts the class divisions that result. “Nothing is more fatal to morality and the republic than the continual shifting of rank and fortune among the citizens; such changes are both the proof and the source of a thousand disorders, and overturn and confound everything.”134
But he continues to inveigh against social injustice and the class favoritism of the law. Just as the state should protect private property and its lawful inheritance, so “the members of a society ought to contribute from their property to the support of the state.” A rigorous tax ought to be laid upon all persons in graduated proportion to their property and “the superfluity of their possessions.”135 There should be no tax on necessaries, but a heavy tax on luxuries. The state should finance a national system of education. “If the children are brought up in common [in national schools] in the bosom of equality, if they are imbued with the laws of the state and the precepts of the general will, … we cannot doubt that they will cherish one another mutually as brothers, … to become in time defenders and fathers of the country of which they will have been the children.”136 Patriotism is better than cosmopolitanism or a watery pretense of universal sympathy.137
As the two earlier discourses were overwhelmingly individualistic, so the article on political economy is predominantly social-istic. Now for the first time Rousseau announces his peculiar doctrine that there is in every society a “general will” over and above the algebraic sum of the wishes and dislikes of its constituent individuals. The community, in Rousseau’s developing philosophy, is a social organism with its own soul:
The body politic is also a moral being, possessed of a will; and this general will, which tends always to the preservation and welfare of the whole and of every part, is the source of the laws, and constitutes for all the members of the state, in their relations to one another, the rule of what is just or unjust.138
Around this conception Rousseau builds the ethics and the politics that will henceforth dominate his views of public affairs. The rebel who thought of virtue as the expression of the free and natural man now defines it as “nothing more than the conformity of particular wills with the general will”;139 and he who so recently saw law as one of the sins of civilization, as a convenient tool for keeping exploited masses in docile order, now declares that “it is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty; it is that salutary organ of the will of all which establishes, in civil right, the natural equality between men; it is the celestial voice which dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason.”140
Perhaps the harassed editors of the Encyclopédie had cautioned Rousseau to moderate, in this article, his attack upon civilization. Seven years later, in The Social Contract, we shall find him defending the community against the individual, and building his political philosophy upon the notion of a sacred and supreme general will. Meanwhile, however, he continued to be an individualist and a rebel, hating Paris, asserting himself against his friends, and making fresh enemies every day.
IX. ESCAPE FROM PARIS: 1756
His closest friends now were Grimm, Diderot, and Mme. d’Épinay. G
rimm was born at Ratisbon in 1723, and was therefore eleven years younger than Rousseau. He was educated at Leipzig in the closing decade of Bach’s life, and received from Johann August Ernesti a solid grounding in the languages and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Coming to Paris in 1749, he learned French with German thoroughness, and was soon writing articles for Le Mercure. In 1750 he became private secretary to Count von Friesen. His love of music attached him to Rousseau, while a deeper hunger brought him to the feet of Mlle. Fel, a singer at the opera. When she preferred M. Cahusac, Grimm, says Rousseau,
took this so much to heart that the appearances of his affliction became tragical. … He passed days and nights in a continued lethargy. He lay with his eyes open, … without speaking, eating, or stirring. … The Abbé Raynal and I watched over him; the Abbé, more robust than I, and in better health than I was, by night, and I by day, without ever both being absent at one time.141
Von Friesen summoned a doctor, who refused to prescribe anything except time. “At length, one morning, Grimm rose, dressed himself, and returned to his regular way of life, without either then or later mentioning … this irregular lethargy.”142
Rousseau introduced Grimm to Diderot, and the three dreamed of going to Italy together. Grimm absorbed avidly the stream of ideas spouting from the cornucopia of Diderot’s mind; he learned the language of the irreverent philosophes, wrote an agnostic Catéchisme pour les enfants, and advised von Friesen to take three mistresses at one time “in memory of the Holy Trinity.”143 Rousseau was irked by the growing intimacy between Grimm, whom Sainte-Beuve was to call “the most French of Germans,” and Diderot, “the most German of Frenchmen.”144 “Grimm,” Jean-Jacques complained, “you neglect me, and I forgive you for it.” Grimm took him at his word. “He said I was right, … and shook off all restraint; so that I saw no more of him except in company with our common friends.”145
In 1747 the Abbé Raynal had begun to send to French and foreign subscribers a fortnightly newsletter, Nouvelles littéraires, reporting events in the French world of letters, science, philosophy, and art. In 1753 he turned the enterprise over to Grimm, who, with help from Diderot and others, carried it on till 1790. Under Grimm the letters had many distinguished subscribers, including Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden, former King Stanislas Leszczyński of Poland, Catherine II of Russia, the Princess of Saxe-Gotha, the Prince and Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar. Frederick the Great held back for a time, having several correspondents in France; finally he consented to receive the letters, but he never paid. Grimm’s first number (May, 1753) announced his plan:
In the sheets which are requested of us we shall not spend time over the brochures with which Paris is daily inundated; … rather we shall seek to give an exact account, a logical analysis (critique raisonnée) of the books which deserve to hold the attention of the public. The drama, which constitutes so brilliant a part of French literature, will be a considerable part of our report. In general we shall let nothing escape us which is worthy of the curiosity of other peoples.146
This famous Correspondance littéraire is now a chief and precious record for the intellectual history of France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Grimm could be forthright in his critiques, since these were not known to the French public or to the author discussed. He was usually fair, except, later, to Rousseau. He made many judicious judgments, but misjudged Candide as “unable to bear serious criticism”; this, however, was without prejudice, for he described Voltaire as “the most fascinating, the most agreeable, and the most famous man in Europe.”147 Voltaire returned the compliment in his impish way: “What is this Bohemian thinking about, to have more wit than we?”148 It was Grimm’s Correspondance, more than any other writings except Voltaire’s, that spread through Europe the ideas of the French Enlightenment. Yet he had his doubts of the philosophes and their faith in progress. “The world,” he said, “is made up of nothing but abuses which none but a madman would try to reform.”149 And in 1757 he wrote:
It seems to me that the eighteenth century has surpassed all others in the eulogiums that it has heaped upon itself.... A little more, and the best minds will persuade themselves that the mild and peaceful empire of philosophy is about to succeed the long tempests of unreason, and to establish forever the repose, the tranquillity, and the happiness of mankind. … But unluckily the true philosopher has less consoling but more accurate notions.... I am a long way from believing that we are approaching the age of reason, and I lack but little of believing that Europe is threatened by some fatal revolution.150
We catch here a hint of the pride and vanity that sometimes irritated Grimm’s friends. More Gallic than the Gauls, he spent hours on grooming himself, powdering his face and hair, and so sprinkling himself with perfume that he was nicknamed “the musk bear.”151 His Correspondance shows him scattering compliments with expectant hand. Frederick the Great made it a condition of subscribing to the letters that Grimm should “spare me his compliments.”152 Such flattery, of course, was part of epistolary style in the Old Regime.
Grimm, usually cold and calculating, caught the attention of Paris by almost dying for Mlle. Fel, and fighting a duel for Mme. d’Épinay. Louise-Florence Tardieu d’Esclavelles was the daughter of a Valenciennes baron who died in the King’s service in 1737. Eight years later Louise, aged twenty, married Denis-Joseph Lalive d’Épinay, son of a rich tax collector. They came to live in the handsome Château de la Chevrette, nine miles from Paris, near the Forest of Montmorency. Her happiness bubbled. “Will my heart ever be able to endure such happiness?” she wondered. She wrote to a cousin: “He was playing the harpsichord, I was sitting on the arm of his chair, my left hand resting on his shoulder, and my other hand turning over the leaves; he never missed kissing it each time it passed in front of his lips.”153
She was not beautiful, but she was charmingly petite, très bien faite (she tells us);154 and her big black eyes would later ravish Voltaire. But “always to feel the same thing” is soon “the same as to feel nothing”;155 after a year M. d’Épinay no longer noticed those eyes. He had been promiscuous before marriage, he became so again. He drank heavily, gambled heavily, and spent a fortune on the sisters Verrières, whom he installed in a cottage near La Chevrette. Meanwhile his wife bore him two children. In 1748 he returned from a trip in the provinces, slept with his wife, and infected her with syphilis. Broken in health and spirits, she secured a legal separation from her husband. He agreed to a generous settlement; she inherited the fortune of her uncle; she kept La Chevrette; she tried to forget her unhappiness by caring for her children and helping her friends. When one of these, Mme. de Julli, fell mortally ill of smallpox, Louise went to nurse her, and stayed with her to the end, running the risk of an infection that might have killed her or disfigured her for life.
All her friends agreed that she should take a lover. One came (1746), that same Dupin de Francueil who gave employment to Rousseau. He began with music, and ended with syphilis; he was soon cured, while she continued to suffer.156 He joined her husband in sharing the Desmoiselles de Verrières. Duelos told her bluntly, “Francueil and your husband have the two sisters between them.”157 She fell into a delirium that lasted thirty hours. Duclos sought to take Dupin’s place, but she sent him away. To these misfortunes another was added. Mme. de Julli, dying, had given Louise a batch of papers revealing her amours, with an earnest request to burn them. Louise did. Then M. de Julli accused her of having knowingly burned the certificates of her own indebtedness to him. She denied the charge, but appearances were against her, for it was known that despite separation she was giving her husband financial help.
It was at this juncture that Grimm entered the drama. He had been introduced to Louise by Rousseau in 1751; the three had several times played or sung music together. One evening at a party given by Count von Friesen, a guest expressed conviction of Mme. d’Épinay’s guilt. Grimm defended h
er; argument rose to the point of honor; accuser and defender fought a duel; Grimm was slightly wounded. Soon afterward the lost documents were found; Madame was exonerated; she thanked Grimm as her preux chevalier, and their mutual esteem ripened into one of the most enduring loves of that fitful age. When Baron d’Holbach sickened with grief over the death of his wife, and Grimm went off to take care of him in the countryside, Louise asked him: “But who will be my knight, monsieur, if I am attacked in your absence?” Grimm answered: “The same as before—your past life.”158 The reply was not beyond cavil, but it was beyond praise.
Rousseau had met Mme. d’Épinay in 1748 at Mme. Dupin’s. She invited him to La Chevrette. Her Memoirs describe him fairly:
He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he is without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages of society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He has a brown complexion, white eyes that overflow with fire and give animation to his expression. … They say he is in bad health, and endures agony which he carefully conceals.... It is this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of sullenness.159
His picture of her is not very gallant:
Her conversation, though agreeable enough in mixed company, was uninteresting in private.... I was happy to show her little attentions, and gave her little fraternal kisses, which seemed not to be more sensual than herself. … She was very thin, very pale, and had a bosom like the back of her hand. This defect alone would have been sufficient to moderate my most ardent desires.160