Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  His treatise aroused comment in many countries. Some opponents charged him with having sold his pen to the Jews, but several Protestant clergymen came to his defense. Johannes von Müller, the Swiss historian, supported him, and asked that the works of Maimonides be translated into German or French. The Toleration Patent of 1782 in Austria and the political emancipation of the Jews in the United States (1783) gave impetus to the liberation movement. The French government responded meagerly by removing (1784) personal taxes that had burdened the Jews. The Marquis de Mirabeau shared with Malesherbes in securing this relief; and his son, the Comte de Mirabeau, helped with his essay On Mendelssohn and the Political Reform of the Jews (1787). The Abbé Henri Grégoire advanced the matter with a prize-winning essay, Sur la régénération physique, morale, et politique des Juifs (1789).

  Final political emancipation came only with the Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed by the National Assembly (August 27, 1789) implied it, and on September 27, 1791, the Constituent Assembly voted full civil rights to all the Jews of France. The armies of the Revolution or of Napoleon brought freedom to the Jews of Holland in 1796, of Venice in 1797, of Mainz in 1798, of Rome in 1810, of Frankfurt in 1811. For the Jews the Middle Ages had at last come to an end.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  From Geneva to Stockholm

  I. THE SWISS: 1754-98

  THOSE of us who have enjoyed peace amid the scenic paradise of Switzerland, and inspiration in the courage and integrity of its people, find it difficult to realize that beneath the calm character, patient husbandry, and steady industry that Europe admired then, and does now, there lay the natural conflicts of race against race, language against language, creed against creed, canton against canton, class against class. On their modest scale the Swiss had very nearly realized the ideal pictured by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and dreamed of by Rousseau and Kant: a confederation of states independent in their internal affairs but pledged to united action in their relations with the surrounding world. In 1760 the Helvetic Union (Helvetische Gesellschaft) was formed to promote national rather than cantonal dedication, and to unite the scattered movements for political reform.

  Voltaire, living close by, estimated the population of Switzerland in 1767 at 720,000.1 Most of them tilled the soil or trained the vine, terracing the slopes almost to the mountaintops. The textile industry was growing, especially in the province of St. Gallen and the canton of Zurich; other manufacturing centers were taking form in Glarus, Bern, and Basel; and Geneva and Neuchâtel were the great centers of watchmaking. Agents spreading over Europe from London to Constantinople (which had eighty-eight of them) developed for Geneva an export trade that rapidly enriched the city on the Rhone. Banks multiplied, for the Swiss financiers had won an international reputation for fidelity.

  As everywhere, the majority of abilities was contained in a minority of men, and led to a concentration of wealth. Generally the cantons were ruled by oligarchies, which behaved like any ruling class. The patricians were generous patrons of literature, science, and art, but they resisted every move to extend the franchise. Gibbon, dwelling in Lausanne, accused the Bernese oligarchy of discouraging industry in their dependent provinces, and of keeping down the standard of living there, on the principle that “poor and obedient subjects are preferable to rich and recalcitrant ones.”2 Societies for the abolition of economic or political privilege were repeatedly organized, but were kept in check by state and church allied.3 Class war agitated Geneva, on and off, throughout the eighteenth century. Relative peace prevailed there from 1737 to 1762, but the burning of Émile by the municipal council (1762) set off an agitation for widening the franchise. Rousseau and Voltaire both aided this movement, and after much controversy the patriciate yielded to the middle classes a minor share in the government.

  This left quite voteless three fourths of the population—the natifs, persons born in Geneva but of non-native parents. These were excluded also from most of the professions, from military office, and from mastership in the guilds; and they were forbidden to address petitions to the Grand Conseil and the Petit Conseil that ruled the republic. But they were heavily taxed. On April 4, 1766, a delegation of natifs went to Ferney and asked Voltaire to help them secure the franchise. He told them:

  My friends, you constitute the most numerous class of an independent, industrious community, and you are in slavery. You ask only to be able to enjoy your natural advantages. It is just that you be accorded so moderate a request. I shall serve you with all the influence I have; … and if you are forced to leave a country which prospers through your labor, I shall be able to serve and protect you elsewhere.4

  Aristocracy and bourgeoisie united to resist the appeal of the natifs, and all that Voltaire could do was to welcome into his industrial colony as many of the discontented artisans as came to him (1768). In 1782 the natifs rose in a revolt that overthrew the patriciate and established a representative government. But the aristocrats appealed to France, Bern, and Sardinia; these powers intervened, the rebellion was put down, the oligarchy was restored. The natifs had to wait for the French Revolution to bring them freedom.

  The cantons produced in this third of a century some personages of international renown. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was one of those rare individuals who take the New Testament as a guide to conduct. He agreed with Rousseau that civilization had corrupted man, but he felt that reform could come not through new laws and institutions, but through the remaking of human conduct by education. All through his life he welcomed children, especially the poor and, above all, the homeless; he gave them shelter and schooling, and in their instruction he applied the libertarian principles of Rousseau’s Émile, along with some ideas of his own. He expounded his views in one of the most widely read books of that generation. The heroine of Lionhard und Gertrud (1781-87) reforms an entire village by trying to deal with people as Christ would have done, and by educating her children with patient consideration of their natural impulses and aptitudes. Pestalozzi proposed to give the children as much freedom as the rights of others would permit. Early education should begin by example, and should teach by objects, the senses, and experience rather than by words, ideas, or rote. Pestalozzi practiced his methods in various Swiss schools, chiefly at Yverdon. There Talleyrand, Mme. de Staël, and others visited him, and thence his theories spread through Europe. Goethe, however, complained that Pestalozzi’s schools were forming insolent, arrogant, and undisciplined individualists.5

  Angelica Kauffmann, born in the Grisons canton, rivaled Mme. Vigée-Lebrun as the most renowned woman artist of their time. Even at the age of twelve, besides being a good musician, she painted so well that bishops and nobles sat to her for their portraits. At the age of thirteen (1754) she was taken by her father to Italy, where she continued her studies and was everywhere feted for her accomplishments and her personal charm. Invited to England in 1766, she made a stir by her portrayal of Garrick. Sir Joshua Reynolds became very fond of “Miss Angel,” painted her portrait, and was painted in turn. She joined in the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts, which in 1773 appointed her, with others, to decorate St. Paul’s. In 1781 she retired to Rome, where (1788) she numbered Goethe among her devoted friends. She died there in 1807; her funeral, arranged by Canova, was one of the events of the age; the entire art community followed her to her tomb.

  The outstanding Swiss of the generation after Rousseau was Johann Kaspar Lavater. Born at Zurich in 1741, he became a Protestant pastor, and retained throughout his life the most fervent attachment to orthodox Christianity. We have seen his attempts to convert Goethe and Mendelssohn. But he was not dogmatic; he maintained friendships across religious and national boundaries, and all who knew him respected him; many loved him.6 He wrote works of mystical piety, expounded the Book of Revelations fancifully, believed in the miraculous powers of prayer and Cagliostro, and gave his wife hypnotic treatments on prescriptions by Mesmer. His most characteristic claim was that character can be judged
from the features of the face and the contours of the head. He interested Goethe and Herder in his views, and they contributed articles to his book Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-78). He studied the looks, heads, and figures of prominent individuals, and correlated cranial and facial features with specific qualities of mind and character. His analyses and conclusions were widely accepted but are now generally rejected; his general principle, that psychological qualities share (with air, environment, diet, occupation, etc.) in molding the body and the face, retains a substantial measure of truth. Every face is an autobiography.

  Lavater was part of a Swiss efflorescence which included Rousseau, the poet and scientist Albrecht von Haller, the poet and painter Salomon Gessner, the historian Johannes von Müller, and Horace de Saussure, who started the sport of mountain climbing by scaling Mont Blanc in 1787 after twentyseven years of trying. Meanwhile the cantons felt the winds of revolution blowing across the border from France. In 1797 Frédéric César de Laharpe, who had tutored the grandchildren of Catherine the Great, joined with Peter Ochs, a guild merchant of Basel, in calling upon the French Revolutionary government to help them establish a democratic republic in Switzerland. Local revolts in Bern and Vaud (January, 1798) paved the way; a French army crossed the frontier on January 28; most of the Swiss population welcomed it as a liberator from oligarchy; on March 19 the “One and Indivisible Helvetic Republic” was proclaimed, abolishing all privileges of canton, class, or person, and making all Swiss equal before the law. Zurich resisted longest, and in the turmoil that ensued honest old Lavater was shot (1799). He died in 1801 as the slow effect of the wound.

  II. THE DUTCH: 1715-95

  Everybody liked the Dutch. The Danish dramatist Holberg, who visited the United Provinces (“Holland”) and “Belgium” in 1704, enthused especially over their canals, whose boats, he said, “transport me from one place to another” in dulcet peace, and “enable me to spend every night in a town of considerable size, so that of an evening I have been able to go to the opera or the theater directly upon arrival.”7 Twelve years later Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was similarly pleased:

  The whole country [Holland] appears a large garden; the roads all well paved, shaded on each side with rows of trees, and bordered with large canals full of boats passing and repassing. … All the streets [in Rotterdam] … so neatly kept that … I walked almost all over town yesterday, incognita, in my slippers, without receiving one spot of dirt; and you may see the Dutch maids washing the pavement … with more application than ours do our bedchambers. … The merchants’ ships come [on the canals] to the very doors of the houses. The shops and warehouses are of a surprising neatness and magnificence, filled with an incredible quantity of fine merchandise.8

  But these rosy reports described Holland before she had felt the economic effects of her victory over Louis XIV in the War of the Spanish Succession. Then she had bled her men and money close to exhaustion; her public debt was enormous; much of her carrying trade had been lost to her military allies but commercial competitors—and to Germany. The dividends of the Dutch East India Company fell from forty per cent in 1715 to twelve and a half per cent in 1737, those of the Dutch West India Company from five per cent in 1700 to two per cent in 1740.9 The Seven Years’ War brought further damage. The bankers of Amsterdam grew rich on high interest loans to the warring powers, but the peace of 1763 ended this boon, and many Dutch banks failed, leaving every major business harmed. Boswell, in Holland in 1763, reported “many of the principal towns sadly decayed. … You meet with multitudes of poor creatures who are starving in idleness.”10 Taxes were raised, leading to the emigration of capital and sturdy human stock; now Dutch and German colonists mingled their blood in South Africa, slowly forming the Boers.

  Recovery came through Dutch character, industry, and integrity. A calm, strong, frugal people tilled the land, oiled their windmills, tended their cows, cleaned their dairies, and produced delectable malodorous cheeses; Holland led Europe in scientific farming.11 Delft recaptured its market for porcelain. The Dutch and Jewish bankers of Amsterdam regained their reputation for reliability and resourcefulness; they lent at low interest and risk, received lucrative contracts to pay and provision troops; governments and business applied to Amsterdam for loans, and rarely went away empty; through nearly all that turbulent century the bourse in Amsterdam was the financial center of the Western world. Said Adam Smith about 1775: “The province of Holland, … in proportion to the extent of its territory and the number of its people, is a richer country than England.”12

  What most impressed Voltaire in 172513 was the almost peaceful cohabitation of diverse faiths. Here were orthodox Catholics and Jansenist Catholics (had not Jansen himself been Dutch?), Arminian free-will Protestants and Calvinist predestination Protestants, Anabaptists and Socinians, Moravian Brethren and Jews, and a sprinkling of freethinkers basking in the French Enlightenment.14 Most of the magistrates were Protestant, but they “regularly took money from the Catholics,” says a Dutch historian, “for conniving at their religious exercises, and allowing them to hold office.”15 The Catholics were now a third of the three million population. The upper classes, acquainted through commerce with a dozen faiths, were skeptical of them all, and did not allow’them to interfere with gambling, drinking, gourmandizing, and some discreet adultery in Gallic style.16

  French was the language of the cultured. Schools were numerous, and the University of Leiden was famous for its courses in medicine, which remembered the great Boerhaave. Nearly all towns had art societies, libraries, and “chambers of rhetoric” with periodic contests in poetry. Dutch art dealers had a European reputation for their treasures and frauds.17 The great age of Dutch painting had ended with Hobbema (d. 1709), but Cornells Troost was at least an echo of its glory. Perhaps the most brilliant product of Dutch art in this age was glass delicately stippled, or engraved with diamond points.18 Amsterdam was a nest of publishers, some of them gentlemen, some pirates. Creative activity in literature sank to a low level in the first half of the eighteenth century; but toward 1780 a revival of letters nourished a real poet, Willem Bilderdijk.

  One of Boswell’s friends told him that he would find the Dutch “happy in their own dullness”;19 but Boswell reported from Utrecht: “We have brilliant assemblies twice a week, and private parties almost every evening. … There are so many beautiful and amiable ladies in our circle that a quire of paper could not contain their praises.”20 The most fascinating pages in Boswell’s Holland jottings are those that describe his hesitant romance with “Zélide,” or “Belle de Zuylen”—i.e., Isabella van Tuyll. She belonged to an old and distinguished family; her father, “lord of Zuilen and Westbroek,” was one of the governors of Utrecht province. She received more education than she could hold, became proudly heterodox, and flouted conventions, morals, religion, and rank, but she charmed any number of men with her beauty, gaiety, and exciting candor. She shrank from genteel and dutiful marriage. “If I had neither father nor mother I would not get married.... I should be well pleased with a husband who would take me as his mistress; I should say to him, ‘Do not look upon faithfulness as a duty. You should have none but the rights and jealousies of a lover.’”21 To which Boswell, the most assiduous fornicator in Europe, replied, “Fie, my Zélide, what fancies are these?” She persisted: “I would prefer being my lover’s laundress, and living in a garret, to the arid freedom and good manners of our great families.”22

  Zélide passed through a succession of love affairs that left her single and permanently scarred. Already at twenty-four she was quieting her nerves with opium. At thirty (1771) she married Saint-Hyacinthe de Charrière, a Swiss tutor, and went to live with him near Lausanne. Finding him intellectually inadequate, she fell in love in her forties with a man ten years younger than herself; he used her and left her. She sought catharsis in writing a novel, Caliste (1785-88), which sent Sainte-Beuve into raptures. At forty-seven, in Paris, she met Benjamin Constant, aged twenty, and seduced him with her min
d (1787). “Mme. de Charrière,” he wrote, “had so original and lively a manner of looking at life, so deep a contempt for prejudice, so powerful an intellect, and so vigorous and disdainful a superiority over the common run of men, that, … bizarre and arrogant like her, I discovered in her conversation a pleasure I had not known before. . . We became intoxicated with our scorn of the human race.”23 This went on till 1794, when Benjamin found a fresh intoxication with Mme. de Staël. Zélide retired into a bitter seclusion, and died at sixty-five, having created and exhausted the emptiness of life.

  She could have found food for pessimism in the political history of the United Provinces in the eighteenth century. After the death of William III (1702) the government was monopolized by an oligarchy of business leaders devoted to taxation, nepotism, and intrigue. “The citizens,” complained a Dutch writer in 1737, “are shut out of the administration, … and no advice or vote is asked in affairs of state.”24 The military incompetence of this regime was exposed when Holland entered the War of the Austrian Succession (1743): a French army invaded Holland, and met with little resistance; many towns surrendered without argument; Maréchal de Noailles reported, “We have to do with some very obliging people.”25 Not all; most of the citizens cried out for a martial leader to save the country, as William III had done in 1672; his collateral descendant William IV, Prince of Orange, was made stadholder of the seven provinces, captain of the army, admiral of the navy (May 3, 1747); in October these offices were made hereditary in his family; in effect monarchy was restored. But the fourth William was too much of a Christian to be a good general; he was unable to re-establish discipline in the army; defeat followed defeat; and in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) Holland was lucky to survive territorially intact but again economically desolate. William died of erysipelas at forty (1751); his widow, Princess Anne, served as regent till her death (1759); Prince Ludwig Ernst of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel ruled sternly but ably till William V came of age (1766).