Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

Our aim has been to write integral history: to discover and record the economic, political, spiritual, moral, and cultural activities of each civilization, in each age, as interrelated elements in one whole called life, and to humanize the narrative with studies of the protagonists in each act of the continuing drama.

With what simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is by nature good, and that only our institutions have made him bad!62 That last sentence was to be the theme song of his life, and those tears that streaked his vest were among the headwaters of the Romantic movement in France and Germany.

The answer to the question of the learned Academy is that learning without virtue is a snare; that the only real progress is moral progress; that the advancement of learning has corrupted, rather than purified, the morals of mankind; and that civilization is not an ascent of man to a nobler state, but the fall of man from a rural simplicity that was a paradise of innocence and bliss.

Rousseau had expressed a problem that appears in every advanced society. Are the fruits of technology worth the haste, strains, sights, noises, and smells of an industrialized life? Does enlightenment undermine morality? Is it wise to follow science to mutual destruction, and philosophy to disillusionment with every fortifying hope?

Theologians could claim that the “innocence” and happiness of the “state of nature” from which, in Rousseau’s theory, man had lapsed was only the Eden story retold; “civilization” took the place of “original sin” as causing the fall of man; in both cases the desire for knowledge had ended bliss.

Rousseau’s conception of primitive nature was of course a romantic idealization; nature (life without social regulation and protection) is “red in tooth and claw,” and its ultimate law is, Kill or be killed. The “nature” that Jean-Jacques loved, as in Vevey or Clarens, was a nature civilized—tamed and refined by man.

“The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family.”116 That was the time of maximal happiness for mankind; it had defects, pains, and punishments, but it had no laws beyond parental authority and family discipline; “it was altogether the best state that man could experience, so that he can have departed from it only through some fatal accident.”117 That accident was the establishment of individual property, from which came economic, political, and social inequality, and most of the evils of modern life.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes, might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

To protect private property, force was organized, and became the state; to facilitate government, law was developed to habituate the weak to submit to the strong with a minimum of force and expense.

Must mine and thine be annulled, and must we return to the forests to live among bears?” That is no longer possible for us; the poison of civilization is in our blood, and we shall not eradicate it by flight to the woods.

Revolution may be justified, for force may justly overthrow what force has set up and maintained;

Today, having heard all this a hundred times, we sense a certain artificiality in this righteous indignation. We are not sure that the evils Rousseau described arise from corrupt institutions rather than from the nature of man; after all, it is human nature that made the institutions.

The rebel who thought of virtue as the expression of the free and natural man now defines it as “nothing more than the conformity of particular wills with the general will”;139 and he who so recently saw law as one of the sins of civilization, as a convenient tool for keeping exploited masses in docile order, now declares that “it is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty;

he had his doubts of the philosophes and their faith in progress. “The world,” he said, “is made up of nothing but abuses which none but a madman would try to reform.”

The conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism had ended in a stalemate; both sides waited for some turn of chance to renew the Thirty Years’ War for possession of the European soul.

had England not won the Seven Years’ War, North America might have been divided into a New England in the East, a New France in the center, and a New Spain in the West; the divisions and conflicts of Europe would have been reproduced in America.

India and Canada remained, until our own time, two bastions, east and west, of an empire that was built with money, courage, cruelty, and brains, in full accord with the international morals of the eighteenth century.

Politically the main results of the Seven Years’ War were the rise of the British Empire, and the emergence of Prussia as a first-class power. Economically, the chief result was an advance toward industrial capitalism: those Gargantuan armies were glorious markets for the mass consumption of mass-produced goods;

The suffering helped, as well as hindered, religion: if a minority was turned to atheism by the stark reality of evil, the majority was moved to piety by the need to believe in the ultimate triumph of the good.

The triumph of imagination over reality is one of the humors of history.

Paris toward 1770 contained 600,000 of France’s 22,000,000 souls.25 It housed the most alert, the best-informed, and the most depraved people in Europe. It had the best-paved streets, the most splendid avenues and promenades, the busiest traffic, the finest shops, the lordliest palaces, the dingiest tenements, and some of the most beautiful churches in the world.

a hundred restaurants (the word first appears in 1765) offered to restore the hungry;

Here were a hundred printing shops producing books, sometimes at mortal risk; in 1774 the book trade at Paris was estimated at 45,000,000 livres—four times that of London.27 “London is good for the English,” said Garrick, “but Paris is good for everybody.”

Turgot predicted the American Revolution: “Colonies are like fruit, which clings to the tree only until it is ripe. By becoming self-sufficient, they do what Carthage did, what America will sometime do.”

In Morelly’s Code occurs the famous principle that came down to inspire and plague the Russian Revolution: “chacun selon ses facultés, á chacun selon ses besoins”— from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

slaves were lodged and fed all the year round; but in an uncontrolled economy the employer is free to throw his employees into beggary whenever he can make no profit from them; then he makes begging a crime.

he believed that morality cannot be maintained without a religion of supernatural punishments and rewards, for most persons “are condemned to the permanent infancy of their reason.”

Envy, covetousness, and class divisions poison the natural amity of mankind. The rich multiply their luxuries, the poor sink into humiliation and degradation. Of what good is political liberty if economic slavery persists? “The freedom which every European thinks he enjoys is only the freedom to leave one master and give himself to another.”

Democracy is theoretically splendid, but in practice it fails through the ignorance and acquisitiveness of the masses.

Our goal should be not the increase of wealth, nor even the increase of happiness, but rather the growth of virtue, for only virtue brings happiness.

Frenchmen had through centuries relieved monogamy with adultery, as America relieves it with divorce; and in the Gallic view judicious adultery does less hurt to the family—or at least to the children—than divorce.

monogamy ceased to be a badge of shame. Roués, married, rediscovered old pleasures in family life; better to plumb the depths of unity than be forever scratching the surface of variety.

They were chauvinists who could not understand why the rest of the world was so barbarous as to speak any other language but French. Mme. Denis refused to learn the English word for bread—“Why can’t they all say pain?”

The women raised their hair to such elevation that they feared to dance, lest they catch fire from chandeliers. A German visitor calculated that the chin of a French lady lay exactly midway between her feet and the top of her hair.

He did not share Rousseau’s enthusiasm for equality; he knew that all men are created unfree and unequal.

He accepted monarchy as the natural form of government. “Why is almost the whole earth governed by monarchs? … The honest answer is: Because men are rarely worthy of governing themselves.”

In an age when the Russian peasant was so primitive, when the masses everywhere were largely illiterate and too tired to think, it seemed absurd to propose popular rule. Actually the “democracies” in Switzerland and Holland were oligarchies.

Only one force was strong enough to resist the Catholic Church in France, as it had successfully resisted the Protestant churches in England, Holland, and Germany; and that was the state. Only through the existing monarchical governments in France, Germany, and Russia could the philosophes hope to win their struggle against superstition, bigotry, persecution, and an infantile theology.

Voltaire’s politics stemmed partly from a suspicion that many people would be incapable of digesting education even if it were offered them. He referred to “the thinking portion of the human race—i.e., the hundred-thousandth part.”

to Frederick: “When I begged you to be the restorer of the fine arts of Greece, my request did not go so far as to beg you to re-establish the Athenian democracy. I do not like government by the rabble.”

In the long run, he thought, the only real liberation is education, the only real freedom is intelligence. “Plus les hommes sont éclairés, plus ils seront libres” (The more enlightened men are, the more they will be free)

The only real revolutions are those that change the mind and heart, and the only real revolutionists are the sage and the saint.

It is surely barbarous to punish forgery, theft, smuggling, or arson with death. If theft is punishable with death, the thief will have no reason for avoiding murder; so in Italy many highway robberies are accompanied by assassination.

the reforms suggested by Voltaire were a compromise between his middle-class heritage, his hatred of the Church, his experience and investments as a businessman and a landholder, and his sincere sentiments as a humanitarian.

he felt that the Seven Years’ War was merely the sport of kings compared with his thirty years’ war against the Church; and a government that could jail a man for telling the truth could not justly complain if he lied.

He could not forgive the Jews for having begotten Christianity. “When I see Christians cursing Jews methinks I see children beating their fathers.”

He saw in the Old Testament hardly anything but a record of murder, lechery, and wholesale assassination. The Book of Proverbs seemed to him “a collection of trivial, sordid, incoherent maxims, without taste, without selection, and without design”;

He was tolerant of sexual irregularity, but rose in fine fury against injustice, fanaticism, persecution, hypocrisy, and the cruelties of the penal law. He defined morality as “doing good to mankind”; for the rest he laughed at prohibitions, and enjoyed wine, woman, and song in philosophical moderation.

With La Nouvelle Héloïse the Romantic movement raised its challenge to the classic age.

France, which excels the world in style, had never known the French language to take on such color, ardor, smoothness, and rhythm. Rousseau did not merely preach feeling, he had it; everything he touched was infused with sensitivity and sentiment, and though we may smile at his raptures we find ourselves warmed by his fire.