The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  As its title implies, it is a modern retelling of the story of Abelard and Héloïse, involving the passionate love of a tutor for his underage female student in defiance of all social convention. Page follows page of sighing, longing prose and weepy outbursts of frustration interspersed with complaints about being misunderstood by adults and society. The New Heloise is like an extended episode of Gossip Girl. It is in fact the direct ancestor of the Harlequin romance, and spawned a host of imitators. More than any single work, The New Heloise made “I feel, therefore I am” the unspoken motto of adolescence, right down to today.

  That seems a strange achievement for a man who claimed to worship the stoic warriors of ancient Sparta and Rome. However, as he disclosed in his autobiography, The Confessions, Rousseau’s secret was to reveal at length how unhappy everyone is under the stressful conditions of modern society because they aren’t allowed to get in touch with their true “inner voice.” Then as now, this discovery guaranteed a huge teen readership.34

  A typical example was Jeanne-Marie Phlipon. She was a Paris native, and first read The New Heloise in 1772 at age eighteen. It had a powerful impact. “Rousseau became the interpreter of feeling and ideas I had before then,” she remembered later, “but he alone could explain to my satisfaction.”35

  Hitherto she had been an admirer of Voltaire. She quickly dropped him for Rousseau. She immediately read his political works, including The Social Contract. Jeanne-Marie fantasized about becoming a heroic Spartan mother, exhorting her husband and children to great deeds in defense of freedom and liberty. She scorned the social niceties of her middle-class life as petty and artificial. “Let France awaken and come to life!” she would write. “Let man recapture his rights, let justice commence his reign, and from one end of the kingdom to the other let one universal cry be heard—Long live the people and death to tyrants!”36

  In 1780, she married Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière and found a Rousseauian soul mate. As Monsieur and Madame Roland, they dreamed of a society in which men and women would finally be in touch with their inner selves and free from the grip of corrupt institutions like the Catholic Church and the monarchy—a society in which all Frenchmen would live in the bright clear air of freedom.

  They had plenty of company. In the decade after Rousseau’s death, his works inspired an entire generation to purify and simplify their lives by getting in touch with their feelings and coming together to battle corruption and injustice. Young men gave up wearing powdered wigs; young women donned loose-fitting, flowing dresses that made them look like classical Greek and Roman statues. Meanwhile, the most talented painter of the era, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), translated Rousseau’s ideas into a more permanent visual form.

  David’s three most famous canvases were, and still are, masterpieces of political propaganda. Painted in the heady days before the French Revolution, between 1785 and 1788, they self-consciously express the principle drawn from the third book of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland: that if art is to exist in a free society, it must serve the public good by promoting virtue.

  There is The Death of Socrates, completed in the fall of 1787. Rousseau had strongly identified with Socrates, the wise man and seer who endures persecution but whose vision lives on after his death.37 While his followers weep and cannot bear to watch him die, Socrates stoically takes his cup of hemlock and points upward, toward a better world to come. In Rousseau’s terms, this will be not an afterlife, but a new political and social order founded on the great teacher’s words.

  The second, The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, encapsulates Rousseau’s theme of heroic self-sacrifice for the sake of the community. Brutus the republican Roman statesman has sentenced his own sons to death for treason. The return of their bodies to his house for burial prompts typical tears and fainting from the womenfolk, but Brutus sits unmoved beside a statue of the goddess Roma. Like Abraham with Isaac, Brutus chooses to sacrifice his offspring to his deity, in this case civic freedom.

  The third and most famous, The Oath of the Horatii, caused a sensation the instant it was unveiled in 1784. It shows three brothers swearing an oath to defend the Roman republic. Their outstretched arms form an angle of energy like the spoke of a rotating wheel, as their father raises their swords toward heaven with a gesture of benediction. As an icon of ancient virtue and the power of men who unite to face their destiny, the image became indelibly fixed on the French national imagination. The crowds that came to see The Oath of the Horatii strew a carpet of flowers at its feet.38

  Meanwhile, the admiration of Rousseau himself took on cult proportions. After his death in 1778, his house in Ermenonville, where he had retired by the side of a lake to escape the corruptions of modern life, became a shrine to thousands of dedicated pilgrims—“half of France,” according to one astonished observer. The pilgrims included Jacques-Louis David, the Rolands (of course), and a host of young foreign intellectuals, including the future Madame de Staël.

  There was also a fair, rather willowy woman with elegant clothes and a German accent. She, too, was a devoted reader of Rousseau’s works and came to Ermenonville with her two beautifully dressed children in the spring of 1780 to show them the grave of the great man.

  Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii (later-nineteenth-century engraving)

  That day, the boy and girl wandered around the lake under the watchful eye of their nursemaid. They may have thrown stones in the water, until their mother called them back. It was time to leave for home, back to Versailles, where her husband was waiting.

  The woman was the queen of France, Marie Antoinette. She and her husband, King Louis XVI, boasted proudly that their son the dauphin had been raised on the “natural” principles laid down in Rousseau’s Émile.§ Marie Antoinette was so much a fan that she had helped to establish a subscription fund for publishing Rousseau’s forgotten musical works (another subscriber was Benjamin Franklin).39

  Rousseau taught his disciples that the time for talk was over; it was time for action. Don’t accept the world for the corrupt, wicked, exploitative society that it is. Change it into something better, Rousseau had said, by returning humanity to its natural liberty. The royal couple had already shown their support for liberty by backing the American colonists against Britain in the War of Independence. Like so many in the 1780s, the royal couple hoped that by embracing Rousseau’s principles, they could help to do the same for France.

  They did, but not in the way they thought.

  “There will be either a violent crisis which may overthrow the throne, and give us another form of government,” Madame Roland had predicted, “or there will be a state of lethargy similar to death.”40

  In the winter of 1788, the king’s superintendent of finance was sitting at his desk. On it was a sheet of paper with rows of complicated figures. Not good news, he told himself. In fact, the more he looked them over, the more the ball of anxiety in his stomach turned to ice. He was Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop of Sens and a member of the French Academy—and a friend of Voltaire. Brienne represented France’s old regime at its most intelligent and progressive. But even he could see no way out of the catastrophe that loomed ahead.

  In his hand was the balance sheet for France’s annual expenditure and revenues. It was the first annual budget the French monarchy ever prepared—and the last. Brienne’s numbers showed an annual expenditure of 629 million livres (the French equivalent of pounds); they also showed the annual income from all taxes and sources at just over 500 million livres. The shortfall of 129 million livres, he noted with a grimace, was almost equal to France’s entire budget for the army and navy.41

  But that was not all. Louis XVI’s war in support for the American rebels had turned the French Crown’s annual debt into an ocean of red ink. The current debt service alone was costing the French Crown 318 million livres. Brienne made a rapid calculation. That meant more than 50 percent of royal i
ncome. There was no way to make up that difference, especially when the richest sections of French society, the aristocracy and the Church, still paid no taxes at all.42

  David Hume had once said that either a nation must destroy its debt, or the debt would destroy the nation. France was about to put his prediction to the test.

  Indulging the Rousseauian impulse to support natural liberty in America had doomed Brienne’s predecessor, Jacques Calonne. Already the Swiss banker friends of the regime had begun to say they could loan the Crown no more money. Their refusal had cost Calonne his job. Now it was Brienne’s turn. On August 25, 1788, he, too, was forced to step down—but not before he wrung from the king a promise to summon an Estates General, the first in 170 years, to address the debt crisis.

  Meeting in the spring of 1789, it did far more than that. When Louis XVI refused to agree to sweeping political and fiscal reforms, the members of its Third Estate—merchants, doctors, town notables, and lawyers—met separately to swear an oath never to adjourn until France’s long-standing problems were solved, dubbing themselves a National Assembly. When the government tried to arrest them in mid-July, Paris rose up and on July 14 seized the Bastille. Revolution had come to France. The moment the Rolands and their Rousseauian friends had prayed for had finally arrived.

  Many, including a few in the government itself, still hoped to bring reform to France along the lines of the American and British constitutions. They failed to realize that the political systems of those countries succeeded by adopting not Rousseau’s principles, but the enlightened Aristotle’s. Individual liberty and property were safeguarded, not threatened, as matters of natural right. A separation of powers allowed their constitutions to articulate, not flatten, existing social and sectional differences.

  For the French, however, the temptation to act like Platonic legislators was too much. What started as an effort to deal with a fiscal crisis ended up becoming a program for remaking the nation according to the Rousseauian ideal of justice and virtue. “We are an assembly of philosophers,” gushed one member of the new national assembly in 1792, “engaged on preparing the happiness of the world.”43

  As the political ferment in Paris grew headier and more militant, the Rolands’ house in the rue Guénégaud became the staging ground for many of these self-appointed Philosopher Rulers. Like the fraternal brothers in David’s Oath of the Horatii, they saw themselves standing united in order to serve the General Will—and change the direction of human history.

  Rousseau had averred that the man who dares to bring true liberty and equality to a people “must feel that he is capable of changing, so to speak, human nature.… The lawgiver’s great soul is the true miracle that must vindicate his mission.”44 The Rolands’ friend Maximilien Robespierre believed he was such a man. For a time he convinced others as well (Jacques-Louis David served as his de facto minister of propaganda). Robespierre’s goal was to banish tyranny and injustice not just from France, but from the planet. There was no room for compromise or second thoughts. In his grandiose vision, any resistance to the revolutionary regime sprang not from reasonable doubts about whether men could be made good by legislation alone, but from resistance to the idea of virtue itself.

  It’s worth remembering that Platonism lends itself to conspiracy theories.‖ The belief that appearances deceive easily grows into the conviction that they deceive for a reason: that hidden manipulators want to keep us in the cave and want, literally, to keep us in the dark. Rousseau himself suffered from a lifelong fear that enemies were constantly working to undercut his success—the same people who were working to keep the world corrupt and unjust. Robespierre believed the same thing. When the National Assembly abolished the monarchy in 1792 and the rest of Europe turned to put Louis XVI back on his throne, Robespierre’s utopian hopes became fused with Rousseau’s paranoid style. The result would be the Reign of Terror.

  “Citizens, the nation is in danger,” Robespierre proclaimed. “Domestic enemies more fearsome than foreign armies, are secretly plotting its ruin.…”45 In the steamy summer of 1793, Robespierre and his allies warmly embraced the term terreur. If people weren’t willing to sacrifice themselves for the general will, then they would be terrorized into doing it. Sometimes, as Rousseau had warned, men must be forced to be free.

  Not being for the revolution was as evil as being against it. “You must punish not merely the traitors,” Robespierre’s ally Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (another Rousseau devotee) proclaimed, “but even those who are merely indifferent,” since that indifference sprang from a love of self that was the source of all evil—and doom for any radical transformation of modern society.46

  By 1793 most of the Revolution’s real opponents, the royalists, had long since fled abroad. So had most of its moderate voices, like the Marquis de Lafayette. All that were left to punish were those insufficiently committed to the new order and to obeying the General Will. Thousands would pay with their lives for that “indifference.”

  As the guillotine claimed its victims, increasingly whatever was not forbidden was made compulsory. Wage and price controls were imposed; universal conscription sent tens of thousands of unwilling Frenchmen into the army to fight the monarchies of Europe. Churches were closed and Christianity banned, along with the traditional calendar, saints’ days, and seven-day week. Saint-Just spoke of taking children away from their parents at age five and training them, like ancient Spartans, to become workers or soldiers. For the first time in European history, the word communisme floated in the air.47

  Robespierre is the first true modern dictator: the man who rules not as the living image of God, as the kings of old had, but as the living image of the will of the people. His virtue becomes unassailable, since it is identical with that General Will; just as he can have no flaws—Robespierre’s nickname was “the Incorruptible”—so can he have no opponents or rivals. And among Robespierre’s earliest victims were his fellow Rousseauians Monsieur and Madame Roland.

  They had begun to have doubts about where their former protégé was leading the Revolution. In the France of the Reign of Terror, the price of doubt was death. The husband chose suicide. The wife, who had shed tears when she first read The New Heloise, did not. She mounted the scaffold on November 8, 1793. Her fellow Rousseau enthusiast Marie Antoinette had gone to the guillotine a few weeks before. Madame Roland’s final plea, “O liberty! O liberty! what crimes have been committed in your name,” marked her belated realization that the utopian path to man’s freedom had opened the door to its opposite.48

  This was why, three years before, on the other side of the English Channel, the statesman Edmund Burke had dubbed Rousseau “the insane Socrates” of the French Revolution. Even before the Reign of Terror, Burke saw in revolutionary France a tragic playing out of the Platonist temptation to perfect society through reason alone while ignoring human nature as Aristotle and the Enlightenment had defined it, in order to make us into something better.

  “In the groves of their Academy,” Burke wrote, “at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”49 Sadly, it was not the last would-be modern Platonic republic to be adorned in this way.

  * * *

  * Visitors to Paris can still stay in Gabriel’s most famous masterpiece, the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde.

  † This was of course literally true in the Americas, where growing and processing sugarcane employed an African slave labor force that dwarfed anything from the ancient world.

  ‡ Rousseau was a strong advocate of maternal breast-feeding as more natural and healthier for children. He blamed its decline (since his ancient Greek and Roman heroes were all breast-fed by their mothers as a matter of course) on the modern woman’s devotion to dresses with plunging necklines: yet another example of commercial society’s “corruption,” in this case ruining the virtues of motherhood. “When mothers deign to nurse their own children,” he wrote, “there will be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there w
ill be no lack of citizens for the state.”

  § The queen also had a farm built on the grounds of Versailles, where she could practice the simple rustic virtues of milking cows and growing vegetables. Known as le Hameau, or the Hamlet, it still stands today.

  ‖ See chapter 17.

  Caspar David Friedrich (1775–1840), Morning Light

  Twenty-three

  “FEELING IS ALL”: THE TRIUMPH OF THE ROMANTICS

  One power alone makes a poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.

  —William Blake

  A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.… Plato was essentially a poet.

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley

  On October 11, 1794, Rousseau’s remains were interred at the Panthéon in Paris, formerly the Church of St. Geneviève. The crowds cheered and the poets sang:

  To the immortal Rousseau the French people shall excel

  one other in rendering homage to this man,

  to whose wisdom illustrious liberty bears witness

  and who shall be immortal in memory’s temple.1

  Some weeks earlier on July 28, that same crowd had cheered as a horse-drawn cart slowly wound its way through the streets, bearing four men to the guillotine.

  The oldest, Georges Couthon, lay in the straw at the bottom of the cart, his body smeared with manure. The man beside him had been so badly beaten at his arrest that one eye was dangling from its socket. A third, a young man with open shirt and a pale, almost angelic face, stood with his arms tied behind him. A fourth sat with hair askew and a great bandage wrapped around his face. He watched stone-faced as the crowd danced and sang, while women and children spat into the cart. “Go down to hell with all the curses of mothers and wives!”