Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

Voltaire thought in ideas and wrote with epigrams; Rousseau saw in pictures and composed with sensations.

To be emotional, to express emotion and sentiment, became a fashion not only in France but in England and Germany. The classic mode of restraint, order, reason, and form began to fade away; the reign of the philosophes neared its end. After 1760 the eighteenth century belonged to Rousseau.

There is a social contract, says Rousseau, not as a pledge of the ruled to obey the ruler (as in Hobbes’s Leviathan), but as an agreement of individuals to subordinate their judgment, rights, and powers to the needs and judgment of their community as a whole. Each person implicitly enters into such a contract by accepting the protection of the communal laws. The sovereign power in any state lies not in any ruler—individual or corporate—but in the general will of the community; and that sovereignty, though it may be delegated in part and for a time, can never be surrendered.

in The Social Contract he made supernatural belief an instrument of the state, and considered priests to be at best a kind of celestial police. However, he rejected the Roman Catholic clergy as such agents, for their Church claimed to be above the state, and was therefore a disruptive force, dividing the citizen’s loyalty.

Christianity preaches servitude and docile dependence; hence its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that tyrants welcome its co-operation. “True Christians are made to be slaves.”26 Here Rousseau agreed with Diderot, anticipated Gibbon, and was for the moment more violently anti-Catholic than Voltaire.

Rousseau, at least for political purposes, professed the basic beliefs of Christianity, while rejecting its ethics as too pacifistic and international—just the reverse of the usual philosophic procedure of retaining the ethics of Christianity while discarding its theology.

While Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert were curtsying to kings or empresses, Rousseau raised against existing governments a cry of protest that was destined to be heard from one end of Europe to the other. While the philosophes, already embedded in the status quo, called only for piecemeal reform of particular ills, Jean-Jacques attacked the whole economic, social, and political order, and with such thoroughness that no remedy seemed possible but revolution.

we may date from 1762 the turn of philosophy from attack upon Christianity to criticism of the state.

Voltaire marked his copy of Du Contrat social with marginal rejoinders; so, on Rousseau’s prescription of death for active unbelief: “All coercion on dogma is abominable.”

Rousseau himself, after that initial cry for freedom, moved further and further from liberty toward order—toward submission of the individual to the general will.

a man’s ideas are a function of his experience and his years; it is natural for a thinking person to be an individualist in youth—loving liberty and grasping for ideals—and a moderate in maturity, loving order and reconciled to the possible.

Emotionally Rousseau remained always a child, resenting conventions, prohibitions, laws; but when he reasoned he came to realize that within the restrictions necessary for social order many freedoms can remain; and he ended by perceiving that in a community liberty is not the victim but the product of law—

Philosophical anarchists and political totalitarians alike can quote Rousseau to their purpose,37 and alike unjustly, for he recognized that order is freedom’s first law, and the order that he spoke for was to be the expression of the general will.

if I wanted to drive a child crazy I would set him to explain what he learned in his catechism.... No doubt there is not a moment to be lost if we must deserve eternal salvation; but if the repetition of certain words suffices to obtain it, I do not see why we should not people heaven with starlings and magpies as well as with children.

While he continued to condemn intolerance, Rousseau, reversing Bayle, denounced atheism as more dangerous than fanaticism.

Virtue is necessary to happiness; belief in God, free will, heaven, and hell is necessary to virtue; religions, despite their crimes, have made men and women more virtuous, at least less cruel and villainous, than they might otherwise have been. When these religions preach doctrines that seem unreasonable, or weary us with ceremony, we should silence our doubts for the sake of the group.

Without belief in God and an afterlife morality is imperiled and life is meaningless, for in an atheistic philosophy life is a mechanical accident passing through a thousand sufferings to an agonizing and eternal death.

The education he proposed for Émile shocked Christian readers as in effect irreligious, for they suspected that an average youth brought up to no religion would not adopt one later except for social convenience.

Rousseau feared masculine, domineering, immodest women; he saw the fall of civilization in the rule of increasingly masculine women over increasingly feminine men. “In every land the men are the sort that the women make them; … restore women to womanhood, and we shall be men again.”

Rousseau takes Émile from his parents and brings him up in antiseptic isolation from the society in which he must later live. Never having brought up children, he does not know that the average child is by “nature” a jealous, acquisitive, domineering little thief; if we wait till he learns discipline without commandments, and industry without instruction, he will graduate into an indolent, shiftless, and anarchic misfit, unwashed, unkempt, and unbearable.

Rousseau perceived that the Archbishop was particularly offended by the doctrine that men are born good, or at least not evil; Beaumont realized that if this were true, if man is not tainted at birth by inheriting the guilt of Adam and Eve, then the doctrine of atonement by Christ would fall; and this doctrine was the very heart of the Christian creed.

The long quarrel between Voltaire and Rousseau is one of the sorriest blemishes on the face of the Enlightenment. Their birth and status set them far apart. Voltaire, son of a prosperous notary, received a good education, especially in the classics; Rousseau, born to an impoverished and soon to be broken home, received no formal education, inherited no classical tradition.

Voltaire accepted the literary norms laid down by Boileau—“Love reason, let all your writings take from reason their splendor and their worth”;64 to Rousseau (as to Faust seducing Marguerite with Rousseau) “feeling is” all.”

Voltaire was as sensitive and excitable as Jean-Jacques, but usually he thought it bad manners to let passion discolor his art; he sensed in Rousseau’s appeal to feeling and instinct an individualistic anarchic irrati...

Voltaire was the sum of all the graces in society; Rousseau was ill at ease in social gatherings, and too impatient and irritable to keep a friend. Voltaire was the son of Paris, of its gaiety and luxuries; Rousseau was the child of Geneva, a somber and Puritan bourgeois resentful of class distinctions that cut him, and of luxuries that he could not enjoy.

Voltaire thought that the sins of civilization are outweighed by its comforts and arts; Rousseau was uncomfortable everywhere, and denounced almost everything. Reformers listened to Voltaire; revolutionists heard Rousseau. When Horace Walpole remarked that “this world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel,”67 he unwittingly compressed into a line the lives of the two most influential minds of the eighteenth century.

Rousseau spoke of theologians as “gentlemen” who “provide a new explanation of something, leaving it as incomprehensible as before.”

DIVIDED into a dozen jealous states, Italy could not unite for its own defense; the Italians were so busy relishing life that they allowed immature aliens to kill one another for the bitter fruit of politics and the tainted spoils of war. So the golden peninsula became the battleground of Bourbon Spain and France against Hapsburg Austria.

There was nothing puritanic about that religion; it had made its peace with the nature of man and the climate of Italy. It allowed, in the carnivals, a moratorium on modesty, but it labored to preserve the institutions of marriage and the family against the credulity of women and the imagination of men. In the literate classes girls were sent to a convent at an early age—as early as their fifth year—not chiefly for education but for moral surveillance.

The education of women was not encouraged, for many men considered literacy dangerous to chastity.

Whereas in France there was in this century approximately one ecclesiastic for each two hundred souls, in Rome there was one for fifteen, in Bologna one for seventeen, in Naples and Turin one for twenty-eight.

there was Carnival—the Christian legacy from the Saturnalia of pagan Rome. Church and state hoped that by allowing a moral holiday they could reduce, for the remainder of the year, the tension between the flesh and the Sixth Commandment.

History knows of 554 compositions by Vivaldi; of these 454 are concertos. A clever satirist said that Vivaldi had not written six hundred concertos, but had written the same concerto six hundred times;47 and sometimes it seems so. There is in these pieces much sawing of strings, much hurdy-gurdy continuo, an almost metronomic beating of time; even in the famous series called The Seasons (1725) there are some deserts of monotony.

The popes of this period were distinguished by their high morality; their morals rose as their power fell. They were all Italians, for none of the Catholic monarchs would allow any of the others to capture the papacy.

Vico evidently recalled Plato’s summary of political evolution from monarchy through aristocracy to democracy to dictatorship (tyrannis), but he varied the formula to read: theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, monarchy.

He agreed with Plato that democracy tends toward chaos, and he looked upon one-man rule as a necessary remedy for democratic disorder; “monarchies are the final governments … in which nations come to rest.”

Social disorder may come through moral deterioration, luxury, effeminacy, loss of martial qualities, corruption in office, a disruptive concentration of wealth, or an aggressive envy among the poor. Usually such disorder leads to dictatorship, as when the rule of Augustus cured the democratic chaos of the Roman Republic.

The Portuguese thought of the English as damned heretics with a good navy; the English looked upon the Portuguese as benighted bigots with strategic ports.

Bullfights rivaled religion, sex, honor, and the family as objects of Spanish devotion. Like the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, they were defended on two grounds: courage had to be developed in men, and bulls had to die before being eaten.

This was the heroic age of Corsica. That mountainous isle was already surfeited with history. The Phocaeans from Asia Minor had established a colony there toward 560 B.C.; they were conquered by the Etruscans, who were conquered by the Carthaginians, who were conquered by the Romans, who were conquered by the Byzantine Greeks, who were conquered by the Franks, who were conquered by the Moslems, who were conquered by the Tuscan Italians, who were conquered by the Pisans, who were conquered by the Genoese

The power of the Catholic Church rested on the natural supernaturalism of mankind, the recognition and sublimation of sensual impulses and pagan survivals, the encouragement of Catholic fertility, and the inculcation of a theology rich in poetry and hope, and useful to moral discipline and social order.

Pagan beliefs, customs, and ceremonies survived with the genial sanction of the Church. “I have arrived at a vivid conviction,” wrote Goethe, “that all traces of original Christianity are extinct here” in Rome.

The movement against the Jesuits was part of a contest of power between the triumphant nationalism of the modern state and the internationalism of a papacy weakened by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the business class.

The Catholic enemies of the Society did not openly press their chief objection, that it had persistently upheld the authority of the popes as superior to that of kings, but they were keenly resentful that an organization acknowledging no superior except its general and the pope should in effect constitute, within each state, an agent of a foreign power.

For the good of society, said Beccaria, it would be wiser to widen and deepen education, in the hope of diminishing crime, than to resort to punishments that, by association, may transform an incidental miscreant into a confirmed criminal.

Ferocity of punishment breeds ferocity of character, even in the noncriminal public. Torture should never be used; a guilty man accustomed to pain may bear it well and be supposed innocent, while an innocent man with keener nerves may be driven by it to confess anything and be judged guilty.

As political, like religious, opinions can never be completely changed without the use of much violence, so every new government is at first unfortunately compelled to be cruelly stern, sometimes even unjust, so as to convince, or possibly coerce, those who neither desire, understand, love, nor consent to innovations.

Austria, frequently at war, had to be made self-sufficient in necessary goods; free trade, like democracy, is a luxury of security and peace.

It is easier to love Haydn, for here was a man who quarreled with no one but his wife, hailed his competitors as his friends, suffused his music with gaiety, and was constitutionally incapable of tragedy.

Haydn fell out of fashion soon after his death. His works reflected a stable feudal world, and an environment of aristocratic security and ease; they were too gay and self-content to satisfy a century of revolutions, crises, and romantic ecstasies and despair.