Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  First of all, of course, he was the mother of the Romantic movement. We have seen many others sowing its seed: Thomson, Collins, Gray, Richardson, Prévost, and Christianity itself, whose theology and art are the most marvelous romance of all. Rousseau matured the seeds in the hothouse of his emotions, and delivered the offspring, full-grown and fertile from birth, in the Discourses, La Nouvelle Héloïse, the Contrat social, Émile, and the Confessions.

  But what shall we mean by the Romantic movement? The rebellion of feeling against reason, of instinct against intellect, of sentiment against judgment, of the subject against the object, of subjectivism against objectivity, of solitude against society, of imagination against reality, of myth and legend against history, of religion against science, of mysticism against ritual, of poetry and poetic prose against prose and prosaic poetry, of neo-Gothic against neoclassical art, of the feminine against the masculine, of romantic love against the marriage of convenience, of “Nature” and the “natural” against civilization and artifice, of emotional expression against conventional restraints, of individual freedom against social order, of youth against authority, of democracy against aristocracy, of man versus the state—in short, the revolt of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, or, more precisely, of 1760-1859 against 1648-1760: all these are waves of the great Romantic tide that swept Europe between Rousseau and Darwin.

  Now nearly every One of these elements found voice and sanction in Rousseau, and some support in the needs and spirit of the time. France had wearied of classic reason and aristocratic restraint. Rousseau’s exaltation of feeling offered liberation to suppressed instincts, to repressed sentiment, to oppressed individuals and classes. The Confessions became the bible of the Age of Feeling as the Encyclopédie had been the New Testament of the Age of Reason. Not that Rousseau rejected reason; on the contrary, he called it a divine gift, and accepted it as final judge;77 but (he felt) its cold light needed the warmth of the heart to inspire action, greatness, and virtue. “Sensibility” became the watchword of women and men. Women learned to faint, men to weep, more readily than before. They oscillated between joy and grief, and mingled both in their tears.

  The Rousseauian revolution began at the mother’s breasts, which were now to be freed from stays; this part of the revolution, however, proved the hardest of all, and was won only after more than a century of alternating imprisonment and release. After Émile French mothers nursed their infants, even at the opera, between arias.78 The child was freed from swaddling clothes, and was brought up directly by the parents. When it went to school it enjoyed—more in Switzerland than in France—education à la Rousseau. Since man was now considered good by nature, the pupil was to be viewed not as an imp of the perverse but as an angel whose wishes were the voice of God. His senses were no longer condemned as the instruments of Satan, but as doors to illuminating experiences and a thousand harmless delights. Classrooms were no longer to be prisons. Education was to be made natural and pleasant, through the unfolding and encouragement of inherent curiosities and powers. The stuffing of the memory with facts, the stifling of the mind with dogmas, were to be replaced by training in the arts of perceiving, calculating, and reasoning. As far as possible children were to learn not from books but from things—from plants in the field, rocks in the soil, clouds and stars in the skies. Enthusiasm for Rousseau’s educational ideas stimulated Pestalozzi and Lavater in Switzerland, Basedow in Germany, Maria Montessori in Italy, John Dewey in America; “progressive education” is part of the legacy of Rousseau. Inspired by Rousseau, Friedrich Froebel established the kindergarten system in Germany, whence it spread throughout the Western world.

  Some breath of the Rousseauian afflatus reached art. The exaltation of children influenced Greuze and Mme. Vigée-Lebrun; the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites in England reflected the cult of pathos and mystery. Deeper was the effect on morals and manners. There was some growth in the warmth and fidelity of friendship, in mutual sacrifices and solicitude. Romantic love captured literature and made its way into life. Husbands could now love their wives without flouting convention; parents could love their children; the family was restored. “People had been smiling at adultery; Rousseau dared to make it a crime”79; it continued, but was no longer de rigueur. The idolatry of courtesans was replaced by pity for prostitutes. Contempt for convention resisted the tyranny of etiquette. Bourgeois virtues came into repute: industry, thrift, simplicity of manners and dress. Soon France would lengthen its culottes into trousers and be sans-culottes in pants as well as in politics. Rousseau shared with English horticulture in changing French gardens from Renaissance regularity to romantic curves and surprising turns, and sometimes to wild and “natural” disarray. Men and women went out from the city to the country, and married the moods of Nature to their own. Men climbed mountains. They sought solitude and fondled their egos.

  Literature surrendered almost en masse to Rousseau and the Romantic wave. Goethe bathed Werther in love, nature, and tears (1774), and made Faust compress half of Rousseau in three words: “Gefühl ist Alles”— feeling is all. “Émile and its sentiments,” he recalled in 1787, “had a universal influence on the cultivated mind.”80 Schiller stressed the revolt against law in The Robbers (1781); he hailed Rousseau as a liberator and martyr, and compared him with Socrates.81 Herder, at a similar stage in development, cried, “Come, Rousseau, and be my guide.”82 The eloquence of Rousseau helped to free French poetry and drama from the rules of Boileau, the tradition of Corneille and Racine, and the rigors of classic style. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, fervent disciple of Rousseau, achieved a romantic classic in Paul et Virginie (1784). After the Napoleonic interlude the literary influence of Jean-Jacques triumphed in Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Hugo, Gautier, Michelet, and George Sand. It mothered a brood of confessions, reveries, and novels of sentiment or passion. It favored the conception of genius as innate and lawless, the victor over tradition and discipline. In Italy it moved Leopardi; in Russia, Pushkin and Tolstoi; in England, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; in America, Hawthorne and Thoreau.

  Half the philosophy of the century between La Nouvelle H éloïse (1761) and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) is colored with the revolt of Rousseau against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Indeed, in a letter of 1751 to Bordes, Rousseau had already expressed his scorn of philosophy.83 He based this contempt on what he felt to be the impotence of reason to teach men virtue. Reason seems to have no moral sense; it will labor to defend any desire, however corrupt. Something else is needed—an inborn consciousness of right and wrong; and even this conscience has to be warmed with feeling if it is to engender virtue and make not a clever calculator but a good man.

  This, of course, had been said by Pascal, but Pascal had been rejected by Voltaire, and in Germany the “rationalism” of Wolff was rising in the universities. When Immanuel Kant became professor at Königsberg he had already been convinced by Hume and the philosophes that reason alone could give no adequate defense of even the fundamentals of the Christian theology. In Rousseau he found a way to save those fundamentals: deny the validity of reason in the suprasensible world; affirm the independence of mind, the primacy of will, and the absoluteness of innate conscience; and deduce the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God from man’s feeling of unconditional obligation to the moral law. Kant acknowledged his debt to Rousseau, hung a picture of him on his study wall, and declared him the Newton of the moral world.84 Other Germans felt the spirit of Rousseau upon them: Jacobi in his Gefühlphilosophie, Schleiermacher in his web-weaving mysticism, Schopenhauer in his enthronement of the will. The history of philosophy since Kant has been a contest between Rousseau and Voltaire.

  Religion began by banning Rousseau, and went on to use him as its savior. Protestant leaders joined Catholic in declaring him an infidel; he was classed with Voltaire and Bayle as “spreading the poison of error and impiety.”85 Yet even in his lifetime there wer
e laymen and clergymen who took comfort in hearing that the Savoyard Vicar had accepted with ardor the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, and had counseled doubters to return to their native faiths. On his flight from Switzerland in 1765 Rousseau was welcomed by the bishop of Strasbourg. After his return from England he found some French Catholics gratefully quoting him against unbelievers, and holding hopes for his triumphant conversion.

  The theorists of the French Revolution tried to establish a morality independent of religious creeds; Robespierre, following Rousseau, gave up this attempt as a failure, and sought the support of religious beliefs in maintaining moral order and social content. He condemned the philosophes as rejecting God but keeping kings; Rousseau (said Robespierre) had risen above these cowards, had bravely attacked all kings, and had spoken in defense of God and immortality.86

  In 1793 the rival legacies of Voltaire and Rousseau came to decision in the struggle between Jacques-René Hébert and Maximilien Robespierre. Hébert, a leader of the Paris Commune, followed Voltairean rationalism, encouraged the desecration of churches, and set up the public worship of the Goddess of Reason (1793). Robespierre had seen Rousseau in the philosopher’s final stay in Paris. He apostrophized Jean-Jacques: “Divine man! … I looked upon your august features; … I understood all the griefs of a noble life devoted to the worship of truth.”87 When Robespierre rose to power he persuaded the National Convention to adopt the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar as the official religion of the French nation; and in May, 1794, he inaugurated, in memory of Rousseau, the Festival of the Supreme Being. When he sent Hébert and others to the guillotine on a charge of atheism, he felt that he was following to the letter the counsels of Rousseau.

  The agnostic Napoleon agreed with Robespierre on the need of religion, and realigned the French government with God (1802). The Catholic Church was fully restored with the French Bourbon Restoration (1814); it won the powerful pens of Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Lamartine, and Lamennais; but now the old faith leaned more and more on the rights of feeling rather than the arguments of theology; it fought Voltaire and Diderot with Pascal and Rousseau. Christianity, which had seemed moribund in 1760, flourished again in Victorian England and Restoration France.

  Politically we are only now emerging from the age of Rousseau. The first sign of his political influence was in the wave of public sympathy that supported active French aid to the American Revolution. Jefferson derived the Declaration of Independence from Rousseau as well as from Locke and Montesquieu. As ambassador to France (1785-89) he absorbed much from both Voltaire and Rousseau; he echoed Jean-Jacques in supposing that the North American Indians “enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments.”88 The success of the American Revolution raised the prestige of Rousseau’s political philosophy.

  According to Mme. de Staël, Napoleon ascribed the French Revolution more to Rousseau than to any other writer.89 Edmund Burke thought that in the French Revolutionary Constituent Assembly (1789-91)

  there is a great dispute, among their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble him. … Him they study, him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of Holy Writ; … to him they erect their first statue.90

  Mallet Dupan in 1799 recalled that

  Rousseau had a hundred times more readers among the middle and lower classes than Voltaire. He alone inoculated the French with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people.... It would be difficult to cite a single revolutionist who was not transported over these anarchical theories, and who did not burn with ardor to realize them.... I heard Marat in 1788 read and comment on the Contrat social in the public streets to the applause of an enthusiastic auditory.91

  Throughout France orators quoted Rousseau in preaching the sovereignty of the people; it was partly the ecstatic welcome given to this doctrine that enabled the Revolution to survive for a decade despite its enemies and its excesses.

  Through all the alternations of revolutions and reaction, Rousseau’s influence on politics continued. Because of his contradictions, and because of the force and passion with which he proclaimed them, he served as prophet and saint to anarchists and socialists alike; for both these opposed gospels found nourishment in his condemnation of the rich and his sympathy for the poor. The individualism of the first Discourse, and its rejection of “civilization,” inspired rebels from Paine, Godwin, and Shelley to Tolstoi, Kropotkin, and Edward Carpenter. “At fifteen,” said Tolstoi, “I carried around my neck, instead of the usual cross, a medallion with Rousseau’s portrait.”92 The egalitarianism of the second Discourse provided a basic theme for the variations of socialist theory from “Gracchus” Babeuf through Charles Fourier and Karl Marx to Nikolai Lenin. “For a century now,” said Gustave Lanson, “all the progress of democracy, equality, universal suffrage, … all the claims of extreme parties that may be the wave of the future, the war against wealth and property, all the agitations of the working and suffering masses, have been in a sense the work of Rousseau.”93 He had not appealed to the learned and lofty with logic and argument; he had spoken to the people at large with feeling and passion in language that they could understand; and the ardor of his eloquence proved, in politics as in literature, mightier than the scepter of Voltaire’s pen.

  III. MARCHE FUNEBRE

  Diderot, after seeing Voltaire in 1778, asked a friend, “Why must he die?”94 The funeral march of the philosophes, from the death of Helvétius in 1771 to that of Morellet in 1819, seemed to be a sardonic commentary on vanity and pride, but we might also wonder why some of these men lived so long, inviting all the pains and humiliations of senility.

  The more fortunate among them died before the Revolution, comforted by a hundred signs that their ideas were approaching victory. Condillac disappeared in 1780, Turgot in 1781. D’Alembert reluctantly survived the death of Mlle, de Lespinasse. She had left her papers to his care, and from them it was evident that during the last twelve years of her life her love had been given to Mora or Guibert, leaving for himself only a friendship sometimes tinged with irritation. “D’Alembert is badly hit,” Condorcet told Turgot; “my whole hope for him now is that his life may prove bearable.”95 He returned to his studies, but he wrote nothing more of importance. He attended some of the salons, but the life had gone out of his once brilliant conversation. He rejected Frederick’s invitation to Potsdam, and Catherine’s invitation to St. Petersburg. He wrote to Frederick: “I feel like a man with a long stretch of desert in front of him and the precipice of death at its end, and no hope of coming across a single soul who would grieve if he saw him fall into it, or give himself another thought after he had disappeared.”96

  He was mistaken; many cared, if only those to whom he regularly sent part of his income. Hume, in his will, left £ 200 to d’Alembert,97 confident that it would be spread around. Despite various pensions, d’Alembert lived simply to the last. In 1783 both he and Diderot were stricken with serious illnesses—Diderot with pleurisy, d’Alembert with a disorder of the bladder. Diderot recovered; d’Alembert died (October 29, 1783), aged sixty-seven.

  Diderot had returned from his Russian adventure in October, 1774. The long trip in a confining carriage had weakened him, but he correctly predicted that he had “ten years of life left in his sack.”98 He worked on a Plan of a University for the Government of Russia (which was not published till 1813); anticipating pedagogical developments by 150 years, he advocated predominant attention to science and technology, and placed Greek, Latin, and literature almost at the end of the list, with philosophy between. In 1778 he began an Essai sur les r ègnes de Claude et de Néron, et sur la vie et les écrits de Sénèque. He digressed to beg the victorious Americans, in their new commonwealth, to “prevent the enormous increase and unequal distribution of wealth and luxury, idleness, and the corruption of
morals.”99 And in the section on Seneca he made place for a hot defense of Grimm, Mme. d’Épinay, and himself against the charges that Rousseau had made in public readings of the Confessions:

  If, by a bizarrerie without exception, there should ever appear a work where honest people are pitilessly torn to pieces by a clever criminal [un artificieux scélérat], … look ahead and ask yourselves if an impudent fellow, … who has confessed a thousand misdeeds, can be … worthy of belief. What can calumny cost such a man?—what can one crime more or less add to the secret turpitude of a life hidden during more than fifty years behind the thickest mask of hypocrisy? … Detest the ingrate who speaks evil of his benefactors; detest the atrocious man who does not hesitate to blacken his old friends; detest the coward who leaves on his tomb the revelation of secrets confided to him.... As for me, I swear that my eyes shall never be sullied by reading his work; I protest that I would prefer his invectives to his praise.100

  In 1783 Mme. d’Épinay died. Diderot felt this loss deeply, for he had enjoyed her friendship and her salon. Grimm and d’Holbach were alive, but his relations with them were tepid; each of the three was sinking into the narrow egoism of old age; all they could talk of to each other was their pains. Diderot’s assortment included nephritis, gastritis, gallstones, and inflammation of the lungs; he could no longer climb the stairs from his fourth-floor rooms to his fifth-floor library. He felt lucky now to have a wife; he had reduced his infidelities to wistful memories, and she had worn out her vocabulary; they lived in a peace of mutual exhaustion.

  In 1784 he fell seriously ill. Jean de Tersac, the curé of St.-Sulpice, who had failed with Voltaire, tried to redeem himself with Diderot, visited him, begged him to return to the Church, and warned him that unless he received the sacraments he could not enjoy burial in a cemetery. Diderot answered, “I understand you, Monsieur le Curé. You refused to bury Voltaire because he did not believe in the divinity of the Son. Well, when I am dead, they can bury me wherever they like, but I declare that I believe neither in the Father nor in the Holy Ghost, nor in any of the Family.”101