Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  Consequently we must accept religion as, all in all, a vital boon to mankind. Nor need we make much account of the different sects into which Christianity has been torn; they are all good if they improve conduct and nourish hope. It is ridiculous and indecent to suppose that those who have other creeds, gods, and sacred scriptures than our own will be “damned.” “If there were but one religion on earth, and all beyond its pale were condemned to eternal punishment, … the God of that religion would be the most unjust and cruel of tyrants.”76 So Émile will not be taught any particular form of Christianity, “but we will give him the means to choose for himself according to the right use of his reason.”77 The best way is to continue in the religion that we inherited from our parents or our community. And to Rousseau himself his imaginary Vicar’s counsel is: “Return to your own country, go back to the religion of your fathers, follow it in sincerity of heart, and never forsake it; it is very simple and very holy; in no other religion is the morality purer, or the doctrine more satisfying to reason.”78

  Rousseau, in 1754, had anticipated this counsel—had returned to Geneva and its creed; however, he had not kept his promise to come and dwell there after settling his affairs in France. In the Letters from the Mountain which he wrote ten years later he repudiated, as we shall see, most of the faith of his fathers. In his final decade we shall find him advising religion to others, but giving hardly any sign of religious belief or practice in his daily life. Protestants and Catholics, Calvinists and Jesuits, joined in attacking him and his vicarious “Profession of Faith” as essentially un-Christian.79 The education he proposed for Émile shocked Christian readers as in effect irreligious, for they suspected that an average youth brought up to no religion would not adopt one later except for social convenience. Despite his formal acceptance of Calvinism Rousseau rejected the doctrine of original sin and the redemptive role of the death of Christ. He refused to accept the Old Testament as the word of God, and thought the New Testament “full of incredible things, things repugnant to reason,”80 but he loved the Gospels as the most moving and inspiring of all books.

  Can a book at once so grand and so simple be the work of men? Is it possible that he whose history is contained therein is no more than a man? … What gentleness and purity in his actions, what a touching grace in his teachings! How lofty are his sayings, how profoundly wise are his sermons, how just and discriminating are his replies! What man, what sage can live, suffer, and die without weakness or ostentation? … If the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God.81

  3. Love and Marriage

  When Rousseau ended the fifty pages of the Savoyard Vicar and turned back to Émile, he faced the problems of sex and marriage.

  Should he tell his pupil about sex? Not till he asks about it; then tell him the truth.82 But do everything consistent with truth and health to retard sexual consciousness. In any case don’t stimulate it.

  When the critical age approaches, present to young people such spectacles as will restrain rather than excite them sexually. … Remove them from great cities, where the flaunted attire and boldness of the women hasten and anticipate the promptings of nature, where everything offers to their view pleasures of which they should know nothing till they are of an age to choose for themselves.... If their taste for the arts keeps them in town, guard them … from a dangerous idleness. Choose carefully their company, their occupations, and their pleasures; show them nothing but modest and pathetic pictures, … and nourish their sensibility without stimulating their senses.83

  Rousseau worried about the dire results of a practice about which he seems to have had firsthand experience:

  Never leave the young man night or day, and at least share his room. Never let him go to bed till he is sleepy, and let him rise as soon as he awakes.... If once he acquires this dangerous habit he is ruined. From that time forward body and soul will be enervated; he will carry to the grave the effects of … the most fatal habit which a young man can acquire.

  And he lays down the law to his pupil:

  If you cannot master your passions, dear Émile, I pity you, but I shall not hesitate for a moment; I will not permit the purposes of nature to be evaded. If you must be a slave I prefer to surrender you to a tyrant from whom I may deliver you; whatever happens, I can free you more easily from slavery to women than from yourself.84

  But don’t let your associates tease you into a brothel! “Why do these young men want to persuade you? Because they wish to seduce you. … Their only motive is a secret spite because they see you are better than they are; they want to drag you down to their level.”

  It is better to marry. But whom? The tutor describes his ideal of a girl, a woman, and a wife, and strives to imprint that ideal upon Émile’s mind as a guide and a goal in searching for a mate. Rousseau feared masculine, domineering, immodest women; he saw the fall of civilization in the rule of increasingly masculine women over increasingly feminine men. “In every land the men are the sort that the women make them; … restore women to womanhood, and we shall be men again.”85 “The women of Paris usurp the rights of one sex without wishing to renounce those of the other; consequently they possess none in their fullness.”86 They do these things better in Protestant countries, where modesty is not a jest among sophists but a promise of faithful motherhood.87 A woman’s place is in the home, as among the ancient Greeks; she should accept her husband as a master, but in the home she should be supreme.88 In that way the health of the race will be preserved.

  The education of girls should aim to produce such women. They should be educated at home, by their mothers; they should learn all the arts of the home, from cooking to embroidery. They should get much religion, and as early as possible, for this will help them to modesty, virtue, and obedience. A daughter should accept without question the religion of her mother, but a wife should accept the religion of her husband.89 In any case let her avoid philosophy and scorn to be a salonnière .90 However, a girl should not be suppressed into a dull timidity; “she should be lively, merry, and eager; she should sing and dance to her heart’s content, and enjoy all the innocent pleasures of youth”; let her go to balls and sports, even to theaters—under proper supervision and in good company.91 Her mind should be kept active and alert if she is ever to be a fit wife for a thinking man. And she “may be allowed a certain amount of coquetry” as part of the complex game by which she tests her suitors and chooses her mate.92 The proper study of womankind is man.93

  When this ideal of girlhood and womanhood has been fixed in Émile’s hopes he may go out and seek a mate. He, not his parents or his tutor, shall make the choice, but he owes it to them, and to their loving care of him through many years, to consult them respectfully. You wish to go to the big city and look at the girls who are on display there? Very well; we shall go to Paris; you will see for yourself what these exciting demoiselles are. So Émile lives a while in Paris, mingles in “society.” But he finds there no girl of the kind his sly tutor has described. “Then farewell, Paris, far-famed Paris, with all your noise and smoke and dirt, where the women have ceased to believe in honor and the men in virtue. We are in search of love, happiness, innocence; the farther we go from Paris, the better.”94

  And so tutor and pupil are back in the country; and lo, in a quiet hamlet far from the madding crowd they come upon Sophie. Here (“Book V”) Rousseau’s treatise becomes a love story, idealized but delightful, and told with the skill of an accomplished writer. After those long discourses on education, politics, and religion he returns to romance, and while Thérèse is busy with housework he resumes his dreams of that gentle woman whom he has found only in scattered moments of his wanderings; and he names her from his latest flame.

  This new Sophie is the daughter of a once prosperous gentleman who now lives in contented retirement and simplicity. She is healthy, lovely, modest, tender—and useful; she helps her mother with quick and quiet competence in everything; “there is no
thing that she cannot do with her needle.”95 Émile finds reason to come again, and she finds reason for his further visits; gradually it dawns upon him that Sophie has all the qualities that his tutor pictured as ideal; what a divine coincidence! After several weeks, he reaches the dizzy height of kissing the hem of her garment. More weeks, and they are betrothed. Rousseau insists that this shall be a formal and solemn ceremony; every measure must be taken—by ritual and elsewise—to exalt, and fix in memory, the sanctity of the marriage bond. Then, when Émile trembles on the edge of bliss, the incredible tutor, throwing liberty and nature to the winds, makes him leave his betrothed for two years of absence and travel to test their affection and fidelity. Émile weeps and obeys. When he returns, still miraculously virginal, he finds Sophie dutifully intact. They marry, and the tutor instructs them on their duties to each other. He bids Sophie be obedient to her husband except in bed and board. “You will long rule him by love if you make your favors scarce and precious; … let Émile honor his wife’s chastity without complaining of her coldness.”96 The book concludes with a triune victory:

  One morning … Émile enters my room and embraces me, saying, “My master, congratulate your son; he hopes soon to have the honor of being a father. What a responsibility will be ours, how much we shall need you! Yet God forbid that I should let you educate the son as well as the father; God forbid that so sweet and holy a task should be fulfilled by any but myself. … But continue to be the teacher of the young teachers. Advise and control us; we shall be easily led; as long as I live I shall need you.... You have done your duty; teach me to follow your example, while you enjoy the leisure you have earned so well.97

  After two centuries of laudation, ridicule, and experiment, the world is generally agreed that Émile is beautiful, suggestive, and impossible. Education is a dull subject, for we remember it with pain, we do not care to hear about it, and we resent any further imposition of it after we have served our time at school. Yet of this forbidding topic Rousseau made a charming romance. The simple, direct, personal style captivates us despite some flowery exaltations; we are drawn along and surrender ourselves to the omniscient tutor, though we should hesitate to surrender our sons. Having extolled maternal care and family life, Rousseau takes Émile from his parents and brings him up in antiseptic isolation from the society in which he must later live. Never having brought up children, he does not know that the average child is by “nature” a jealous, acquisitive, domineering little thief; if we wait till he learns discipline without commandments, and industry without instruction, he will graduate into an indolent, shiftless, and anarchic misfit, unwashed, unkempt, and unbearable. And where shall we find tutors willing to give twenty years to educating one child? “That kind of care and attention,” said Mme. de Staël (1810), “. . . would compel every man to devote his whole life to the education of another being, and only grandfathers would at last be freed to attend to their own careers.”98

  Probably Rousseau recognized these and other difficulties after he recovered from the ecstasy of composition. At Strasbourg in 1765 an enthusiast came to him bursting with compliments: “You see, sir, a man who brings up his sons on the principles which he had the happiness to learn from your Émile.” “So much the worse, sir, for you and your son!” growled Rousseau.99 In the fifth of his Letters from the Mountain he explained that he had written the book not for ordinary parents but for sages: “I made clear in the preface … that my concern was rather to offer the plan of a new system of education for the consideration of sages, and not a method for fathers and mothers.”100 Like his master Plato, he took the child away from the contagion of his parents in the hope that the child, graduating from a saving education, would then be fit to rear his own children. And like Plato, he “laid up in heaven a pattern” of a perfect state or method, so that “he who desires may behold it, and beholding, may govern himself accordingly.”101 He announced his dream, and trusted that somewhere, to some men and women, it would carry inspiration and make for betterment. It did.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Rousseau Outcast

  1762-67

  I. FLIGHT

  IT is remarkable that a book containing, as did Émile, so open an attack upon all but the fundamentals of Christianity should have passed the censor and been printed in France. But the censor was the tolerant and sympathetic Malesherbes. Before allowing publication he urged Rousseau to delete some passages that would almost certainly rouse the Church to active hostility. Rousseau refused. Other heretics had escaped personal prosecution by using pseudonyms, but Rousseau bravely stated his authorship on the title pages of his books.

  While the philosophes denounced Émile as further treason to philosophy, the prelates of France and the magistrates of Paris and Geneva condemned it as apostasy from Christianity. The anti-Jansenist Archbishop of Paris prepared for August, 1762, a powerful mandemant against the book. The pro-Jansenist Parlement of Paris was engaged in expelling the Jesuits; it wished, nevertheless, to display its zeal for Catholicism; the appearance of Émile offered an opportunity to strike a blow for the Church. The Council of State, at war with the Parlement, and unwilling to lag behind it in zeal for orthodoxy, proposed to arrest Rousseau. Getting wind of this, his aristocratic friends advised him to leave France at once. On June 8 Mme. de Créqui sent him an excited message: “It is only too true that an order has been issued for your arrest. In the name of God, go away! … The burning of your book will do no harm, but your person cannot stand imprisonment. Consult your neighbors.”1

  The neighbors were the Maréchal and Maréchale de Luxembourg. They feared involvement if Rousseau were arrested;2 they and the Prince de Conti urged him to flee, and gave him funds and a carriage for the long ride across France to Switzerland. He yielded reluctantly. He commended Thérèse to the Maréchale’s care, and left Montmorency on June 9. On that day a decree was issued for Rousseau’s arrest, but it was executed with merciful tardiness, for many in the government were glad to let him escape. On that same day Maître Omer Joly de Fleury, brandishing a copy of Émile, told the Parlement of Paris

  That this work appears to have been composed solely with the aim of reducing everything to natural religion, and of developing that criminal system in the author’s plan for the education of his pupil; . . .

  That he regards all religions as equally good, and as all having their reasons in the climate, the government, and the character of the people; . . .

  That in consequence he dares seek to destroy the truth of Sacred Scripture and the prophecies, the certitude of the miracles described in the Holy Books, the infallibility of revelation, and the authority of the Church. … He ridicules and blasphemes the Christian religion, which alone has God for its author. . . .

  The author of this book, who has had the boldness to sign his name to it, should be arrested as soon as possible. It is important that … justice should make an example, with all severity, both of the author and of those who … have shared in printing or distributing such a work.

  Thereupon the Parlement ordered that

  the said book shall be torn and burned in the court of the Palace [of Justice], at the foot of the grand staircase, by the High Executioner; all those who have copies of the book shall deliver them to the Register, to be destroyed; no publisher shall print or sell or distribute this book; all sellers or distributors thereof shall be arrested and punished according to the rigor of the law; … and J.-J. Rousseau shall be apprehended and brought to the Conciergerie prison of the Palace.3

  On June 11 Émile was “torn and burned” as ordered, but by June 11 Rousseau had reached Switzerland. “The moment I was in the territory of Bern I bade the postilion stop; I got out of my carriage, prostrated myself, kissed the ground, and exclaimed in a transport of joy: ‘Heaven, protector of virtue, be praised; I touch a land of liberty!’”4

  He was not quite sure. He drove on to Yverdon, near the south end of the Lake of Neuchâtel, in the canton of Bern; there he stayed for a month with his old fri
end Roguin. Should he seek a home in Geneva? But on June 19 the Council of Twenty-five, ruling Geneva, condemned both Émile and The Social Contract as

  impious, scandalous, bold, full of blasphemies and calumnies against religion. Under the appearance of doubts the author has assembled everything that could tend to sap, shake, and destroy the principal foundations of the revealed Christian religion. … These books are so much the more dangerous and reprehensible as they are written in French [not in esoteric Latin], in the most seductive style, and appear over the name of “Citizen of Geneva.”5

  Accordingly the Council ordered both books to be burned, prohibited their sale, and decreed arrest for Rousseau should he ever enter the territory of the republic. The Genevan clergy made no protest against this repudiation of Geneva’s most famous living son; doubtless they feared that any sympathy shown by them to the author of “The Savoyard Vicar’s Profession of Faith” would confirm d’Alembert’s revelation of their secret Unitarian sentiments. Jacob Vernes, Rousseau’s friend of many years, turned against him and demanded a retraction. “If [Rousseau recalled] there was any rumor amongst the populace, it was unfavorable to me, and I was publicly treated by all the gossips and pedants like a pupil threatened with a flogging for not having recited his catechism rightly.”6

  Voltaire was touched by the situation of his rival. He had read Émile; his comments can still be seen on his copy in the Bibliothèque de Genève. In a letter of June 15 he had written of the book: “It is a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known. … He says as many hurtful things against the philosophers as against Jesus Christ, but the philosophers will be more indulgent than the priests.”7 In any case he admired the “Profession of Faith”: “fifty good pages,” he called them, but added: “it is regrettable that they should have been written by … such a knave [coquin] .”8 To Mme. du Deffand he wrote: “I shall always love the author of the ‘Vicaire savoyard’ whatever he has done, and whatever he may do.”9 When he heard that Jean-Jacques was homeless he cried out: “Let him come here [to Ferney]! He must come! I shall receive him with open arms. He shall be master here more than I. I shall treat him like my own son.”10 He sent this invitation to seven different addresses; it must have reached one address, for Rousseau later expressed regret that he had made no reply.11 In 1763 Voltaire renewed the invitation; Rousseau declined it, and accused Voltaire of having incited the Council of Twenty-five to condemn The Social Contract and Émile. Voltaire denied this, apparently with truth.