A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Yet for Rousseau, this primitivist reading was a grave misunderstanding of his work. As the Frenchman observes in outlining Jean-Jacques’s philosophy, “human nature never retrogrades and we can never go back to times of innocence and equality once we have moved away from them; this is one of the principles he most insisted on.” The term rétrograder was unusual in the eighteenth century, and readers of the Discours sur l’inégalité may well have recalled Rousseau addressing them with “Perhaps you would like to be able to retrograde.” What the Frenchman makes clear is that Rousseau never intended this phrase as an invitation to his readers to return to the state of nature. Rather, he sought to instill in them a desire for the state of nature that would serve as an impetus toward forward-looking domestic and political reform. In these two discourses, Rousseau sought to “destroy the illusory prestige” of civilized society, and cultivating readers’ desires for the state of nature was essential to that initial, destructive phase of his philosophical project. But in Emile and the Contrat social (The Social Contract), he offered constructive programs for domestic education and political life that were intended to preserve humans’ natural freedom in society rather than returning them to the state of nature.

  Rousseau did nonetheless insist that he alone among men had maintained a deep connection to the original human nature. According to the Frenchman, it was Jean-Jacques’s solitary life, his taste for reverie, and his habit of introspection that had allowed him to access the original features of natural man: “Only a retiring and solitary life, a keen taste for reverie and contemplation, the habit of withdrawing into himself and searching within in the calm of passions for those first features [traits] that have disappeared for the multitude could allow him to recover them. In a word, it was necessary that a man paint himself to show us primitive man in this way, and if the Author hadn’t been just as singular as his books, he never would have written them.” In an implicit allusion to the statue of Glaucus, the Frenchman suggests that Jean-Jacques may only have recovered an image of natural man rather than the thing itself, an ambiguity nicely captured by the term traits, which means both “features” and “traces.” He also makes it clear that the process of recovery involves not just introspection but also self-portraiture, an act of writing that is necessarily rooted in humanity’s corrupt social state. But his formulation is curious: “it was necessary that a man paint himself to show us primitive man in this way.” Does this mean that any man could have done so, but that Jean-Jacques was simply the first? Or is the Frenchman right to insist on the uniqueness of Jean-Jacques and his books? In either case, it is clear that literature, and specifically self-depiction, has an essential role to play in allowing us to access a lost nature that will become the basis for future social transformations.

  Rousseau began writing an account of his life in response to a request from his editor, Marc-Michel Rey, for a memoir to preface his complete works in 1761. But he did not conceive of the Confessions as we know it until 1764, when Voltaire revealed in an anonymous pamphlet that the author of Emile had abandoned his five newborn children to a foundling hospital. Rousseau’s autobiography was thus first and foremost a response to a public accusation of immorality, all the more damning for an author whose greatest work, in his own eyes, was a treatise on the education of children. The Confessions was written in the aftermath of the condemnation of Emile and the Contrat social in Geneva and Paris and the ensuing warrant for the author’s arrest. These were the darkest years of Rousseau’s life; years of exile and wandering took him from various places in Switzerland (Môtiers, where the villagers threw stones at his windows, and the Island of Saint-Pierre, where he experienced idyllic reveries) to England, where an initially effusive friendship with the Scottish philosopher David Hume degenerated into a violent and publicly aired quarrel. Rousseau suffered from acute bouts of paranoia during these years, believing that his former friends the encyclopedists were engaged in an international conspiracy to destroy his reputation and falsify his life’s works. For all these reasons, the Confessions has rightly been read as a work of personal justification in the face of genuine and imagined persecution.

  But Rousseau’s autobiography can also be read as an illustration of the central tenet of his philosophical system: that “nature made man happy and good but that society depraves him and makes him miserable.” If Emile is “a treatise on the original goodness of man, designed to show how vice and error, foreign to his constitution, introduce themselves into it from the outside and alter it imperceptibly,” the Confessions traces the same process of corruption in the author’s own life. In “the first and most painful step in the obscure and filthy labyrinth of my confessions,” Rousseau reveals that a childhood spanking at the hands of his caregiver, Mlle Lambercier, gave him a lifetime predilection for sexual humiliation and corporal correction. He holds up this episode as a cautionary tale for would-be educators: “How one would change methods with Youth if one saw more clearly the distant effect of this method that is always used indiscriminately and often indiscreetly!” The same corrupting effects of corporal punishment can be seen in the following episode, when the young Rousseau finds himself unjustly accused of breaking a comb and receives a much more brutal (and less desirable) beating at the hands of his uncle Bernard. This injustice marks the end of what Rousseau describes as an idyllic childhood (despite the death of his mother in childbirth and the exile of his father from Geneva), coloring his relationship with his benevolent caregivers and encouraging him and his cousin to engage in rebellious and vicious behavior. As vice enters these previously innocent children from without, even the beauties of nature are obscured:

  That was the term of my childhood serenity. From that moment I ceased to enjoy pure happiness, and I feel even today that the memory of the charms of my childhood ends there. We stayed in Bossey a few more months. We were there as one pictures the first man still in the terrestrial paradise but having ceased to enjoy it. It was in appearance the same situation, and in fact a whole different manner of being. Attachment, respect, intimacy, confidence no longer tied the pupils to their guides; we no longer saw them as Gods who read in our hearts: we were less ashamed to act badly, and more afraid of being accused: we began to hide, to rebel and to lie. All the vices of our age corrupted our innocence and made our games ugly. The countryside itself lost to our eyes the appeal of sweetness and simplicity that goes straight to the heart. It seemed to us deserted and obscure; it was as if covered with a veil that hid its beauties from us.

  This account of Rousseau’s corruption is the reverse image of Emile’s ideal education, which is designed to preserve the natural goodness and freedom of the child while also preparing him for his entry into social life. Unlike Emile’s governor, Rousseau’s caregivers have allowed all the inequities and vices of society to enter his world and person. It is striking that Rousseau does not blame his caregivers for their injustice—the comb was indeed broken, and all appearances pointed to his guilt—even as he uses the episode to illustrate how quickly social injustice can destroy a child’s natural goodness. In a parallel episode, Rousseau unjustly accuses a young servant girl named Marion of stealing a ribbon that he himself in fact stole, allowing his readers to witness the aftereffects of his corruption.

  The theme of unjust accusation that crystallizes in the broken comb and stolen ribbon episodes is inseparable from Voltaire’s public attack on Rousseau for his abandonment of his children. Voltaire wrote his pamphlet, Le sentiment des citoyens (The Sentiment of the Citizens), in the voice of the Genevan citizens to accuse a man who had worn his Genevan citizenship as a badge of moral purity and republican political independence. Voltaire’s citizens do not mince words in accusing Rousseau of the most grotesque hypocrisy and immorality for failing to raise his own children: “We admit with pain and in blushing that this is a man who still bears the fatal marks of his debauchery and who, disguised as an acrobat, drags along with him from village to village and from mountain to mountain the unhappy woman
whose mother he brought to her death and whose children he abandoned on the doorstep of a hospice, rejecting the care of a charitable person who wanted to have them, and repudiating all the sentiments of nature just as he despoils those of honor and religion.”

  Voltaire’s most damning charge was that Rousseau had repudiated the natural feelings of a father in neglecting to care for his children. Rousseau had in fact opened himself to this charge by asserting in Emile that all fathers had a sacred moral duty to raise their own children. In the very same passage, he implicitly acknowledged the deep suffering that his abandonment of his children had caused him: “The man who cannot perform the duties of a father has no right to become one. There is neither poverty nor work nor human respect that dispenses him from feeding his children and raising them himself. Readers, you can believe me about that. I predict to anyone who has a soul [des entrailles] and neglects such sacred duties that he will long shed bitter tears on his fault and will never be consoled for it.”

  To those in Rousseau’s intimate circle who knew the secret of his abandoned children, these lines must have appeared as a clear avowal of his guilt and anguish. But in response to Voltaire’s public attack, Rousseau struck an entirely different tone in the Confessions. Far from seeking to atone for his guilt (as he did in the stolen ribbon episode), he justified his decision to abandon his children as one made with their best interests at heart. In describing his relationship with their mother, an illiterate laundress named Thérèse Levasseur, he claimed that he could not run the risk of allowing them to be raised by her poorly educated family: “This is how in a sincere and mutual attachment where I had placed all the tenderness of my heart, its emptiness was still never filled. The children, by whom it would have been, ar rived; that was even worse. I shuddered at the thought of giving them over to this poorly educated family for them to be even more poorly educated. The risks of an education in the foundling hospital were far fewer.”

  This passage has been read as hypocritical and self-serving by modern readers troubled by Rousseau’s abandonment of his children. The statistics for infant mortality were dire in ancien régime France: Buffon wrote in his popular Histoire naturelle that one-third of infants died within their first year. But survival rates were much worse in foundling hospitals, where the number of deaths was closer to 70 percent. Rousseau was undoubtedly aware of these risks; in Emile, he urged mothers to nurse their infants themselves rather than sending them to wet nurses in the countryside, a practice that in his eyes exemplified social corruption and contributed to the high rate of infant mortality. In the same work, he insisted that it was a father’s sacred duty to educate his own children rather than putting them in the care of a preceptor. How then could he have abandoned his children and forced their mother to go along with his choice? This question has haunted Rousseau’s readers, and it continued to haunt his works until the end of his life, when he again took up the abandonment of his children in the penultimate chapter of the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker). However we judge his moral choice, the terms in which he justifies it in the Confessions are significant, for they mirror his authorial choice to erase Emile’s parents from his narrative and replace them with himself as preceptor. In both cases, the emphasis is on protecting children from the influences of a corrupting education at whatever cost.

  The public did not read Rousseau’s response to Voltaire until after both of their deaths in 1778: the first part of the Confessions was published posthumously in 1782, and the second part appeared only in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. But the work was anxiously awaited across Europe during Rousseau’s lifetime, not just for its personal revelations but also for the damaging secrets it might divulge about his former friends the encyclopedists. In an episode frowned on by literary history, Denis Diderot, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, and Louise d’Epinay edited d’Epinay’s fictionalized memoirs to darken the portrayal of Rousseau, in a preemptive counterattack against the Confessions. During the same years, Rousseau returned to Paris from his years of exile and held readings of the Confessions at the homes of various Parisian notables. D’Epinay was sufficiently well-connected to have the readings stopped by the police, but Rousseau found a way to keep them alive by inscribing them into the work itself.

  The Confessions is in fact structured around two parallel scenes of reading that serve as bookends to the work. Rousseau opens his autobiography with the famous scene in which he presents himself to God on Judgment Day with his book in hand. If the book at first seems strangely superfluous—since God should be able to judge his soul without the intervention of human language—its presence is soon explained when Rousseau imagines a circle of listeners surrounding him for a public reading of the Confessions: “Eternal being, gather around me the innumerable crowd of my fellow men [semblables]: let them listen to my confessions, let them moan at my indignities, let them blush at my miseries. Let each one of them uncover in turn his heart at the foot of your throne with the same sincerity; and then let a single one say to you, if he dares: I was better than that man.” As many readers have observed, it is Rousseau, not God, who stands at the center of this scene, and it is his listeners, not God, who are invited to issue a judgment after hearing his confessions. The scene rewrites John’s parable of Jesus and the adulteress, but in a way that underscores the Confessions’ function as a “first article of comparison for the study of men.” The key term semblables highlights the motif of comparison and raises the question of whether Rousseau in fact resembles other men. If nature broke the mold after forming him, as he claims in his preface, does he have any semblables at all? At the end of his life, when he wrote the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Rousseau no longer claimed to bear any resemblance to the machinelike beings surrounding him. But in the Confessions, he calls on his fellow men to mirror his act of self-revelation in order to bear witness to his essential goodness. In other words, he challenges them to write their own version of the Confessions, lending to his work the originary status he claimed it would never have.

  The motif of public reading resurfaces on the very last page of the Confessions. Once again Rousseau is surrounded by his fellow men, and once again he challenges them to bear witness to his essential goodness. But this time, he recounts an actual reading that took place in Paris in 1771, just before d’Epinay went to the police. In this case, there is no divine presence to sanction the truth of the portrait, and the author’s challenge to his audience has become distinctly threatening:

  I have told the truth. If someone knows things that are contrary to what I have just exposed, were they to be proved a thousand times, he knows lies and impostures, and if he refuses to go into more depth and to elucidate them with me while I am still alive he loves neither justice nor truth. As for myself, I declare openly and without fear: Whoever, even without reading my writings, will examine with his own eyes my nature, my character, my mores, my penchants, my pleasures, my habits and can believe me a dishonest man, is himself a man to be suffocated.

  I completed my reading thus and everyone was quiet. Madame d’Egmont was the only one who seemed to me to be moved; she trembled visibly; but she composed herself quite quickly and kept the silence along with the whole company. Such was the fruit that I drew from this reading and my declaration.

  This conclusion brings the Confessions full circle, giving concrete form to the imagined scene of reading that opens the work. But it unsettles far more than it concludes, ending the work on a failure to vindicate Rousseau and a resounding silence on the part of his audience. It is a silence that threatens not just Rousseau’s personal reputation but his entire philosophical system, raising the question of whether the goodness he perceives in himself is communicable to others and applicable to mankind as a whole. This haunting question fuels the next work of his autobiographical triptych, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, or the Dialogues.

  The silence of Rousseau’s audience at the end of the Confessions sets the stage for the “profoun
d, universal … terrifying and terrible silence” that surrounds him in his most tortured work, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. This is the silence of those who have engineered an all-encompassing plot to destroy his reputation, who secretly accuse him of monstrous moral crimes but deny him, through their silence, any chance to learn the charges or clear his name. Unlike the Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques makes for painful reading. In his preface, Rousseau acknowledges that its “tedious passages, repetitions, verbiage and disorder” reflect a degree of mental anguish that made it impossible for him to undertake necessary revisions. The work has accordingly long been neglected or read merely as a symptom of Rousseau’s acute paranoia in the last decade of his life. But in recent years, it has emerged as a key to understanding his negative appraisal of the “new world” created by Enlightenment philosophy—a nightmarish vision that prefigures the famous critique of the Enlightenment by the Frankfurt school theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—and the stakes of his opposing philosophical project. Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques is also essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the deep connections between Rousseau’s autobiographical corpus and his philosophy of nature, between Jean-Jacques and natural man.

  The work is composed of a preface and postscript, which Rousseau writes in his own name, and three dialogues in which he stages a debate between a Rousseau figure and an unnamed Frenchman about the moral character and works of a vilified author named Jean-Jacques. In his preface, Rousseau explains this bizarre apparatus as a necessary response to his situation as victim of the plot. Since the accusations against him are cloaked in silence, his only recourse has been to imagine the worst possible case against him and say “with what eye, if I were another, I would see a man such as I am.” This exteriorization of Rousseau’s judgment of himself reminds us that the first-person justification of the Confessions has failed, making it imperative that someone other than the author defend his good name. Yet the Rousseau figure seems curiously unsuited to this task, given his uncanny resemblance to Jean-Jacques: it turns out that he too is a victim of social persecution who has retreated to a life of solitude in communion with nature. To the extent that he and Jean-Jacques appear as two figures of the same person, the Frenchman must be called on to provide external confirmation of Jean-Jacques’s goodness.