Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

Except in age Louis was everything that his wife was not. She was graceful, agile, mobile, playful, impulsive, effervescent, frivolous, extravagant, self-assertive, proud, always a queen; he was clumsy, inert, hesitant, serious, quiet, industrious, thrifty, modest, diffident, every inch not a king. He loved the day, his work, and the hunt; she loved the night, the card table, and the dance.

In this first half of his reign Louis XVI began reforms which, if continued and gradually expanded, might have averted revolution. And it was under this weak king that France, despoiled and humiliated by England under his predecessors, struck boldly and with success at proud Britain, and, in the process, helped to free America.

The French government was made bankrupt by the war, and that bankruptcy led to the Revolution. Altogether France had spent a billion livres on the conflict, and the interest on the national debt was dragging the treasury down day by day toward insolvency.

The monarchy was critically injured, but not the nation; otherwise how could history explain the success with which the economy and the armies of Revolutionary France withstood half of Europe from 1792 to 1815?

It was the final glory, the culminating chivalry, of feudal France that it died in helping to establish democracy in America.

It was a brave hara-kiri. France gave money and blood to America, and received in return a new and powerful impulse to freedom.

In May, 1814, during the Bourbon Restoration, a group of pious ghouls secretly removed the bones of Voltaire and Rousseau from the Panthéon, put them in a Sack, and buried them in a dumping ground on the outskirts of Paris. No trace of them remains.

Whereas Rousseau’s moral influence was toward tenderness, sentiment, and the restoration of family life and marital fidelity, the moral influence of Voltaire was toward humanity and justice, toward the cleansing of French law and custom from legal abuses and barbaric cruelties;

after 1789 Voltaire’s political influence was overwhelmed by Rousseau’s. Voltaire seemed too conservative, too scornful of the masses, too much of the seigneur; Robespierre rejected him; and for two years the Social Contract was the bible of the Revolution.

The Communist crusade under Marx and Engels once more gave the leadership to Rousseau. In general the revolutionary movements since 1848 have followed Rousseau rather than Voltaire in politics, Voltaire rather than Rousseau in religion.

The most profound and lasting influence of Voltaire has been on religious belief. Through him and his associates France bypassed the Reformation, and went directly from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Perhaps that is one reason why the change was so violent; there was no pause at Protestantism.

in England the influence of Darwin and modern biology has overlaid that of Voltaire in impairing religious belief; and in our times the Christian theology suffers most of all from the unparalleled barbarity of our wars, and the victorious audacities of sciences that invade the very heavens that once housed deities and saints.

To Voltaire, more than to any other individual, we owe the religious toleration that now precariously prevails in Europe and North America.

Rousseau, said Mme. de Staël, “invented nothing, but he set everything on fire.”76 First of all, of course, he was the mother of the Romantic movement.

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,

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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;

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.”

he feared that the simplicity of the masses would enable a moneyed minority to indoctrinate them at will, and so create a bourgeois oligarchy behind a democratic front;

The French Revolution had three phases. In the first the nobles, through the parlements, tried to recapture from the monarchy that dominance which they had lost to Louis XIV;

In the second stage the middle classes won control of the Revolution; they had been deeply permeated by the notions of the philosophers, but what they meant by “equality” was the equality of the bourgeois with the aristocrat.

In the third stage the directors of the city populace seized the mastery. The masses remained pious, but their leaders had lost respect for priests and kings; the masses loved Louis...

They could properly say that they had been cruelly misunderstood; but they were responsible insofar as they had underestimated the influence of religion and tradition in restraining the animal instincts of men.

the real revolution was proceeding, as the middle classes, using philosophy as one among a hundred instruments, took from the aristocracy and the king the control of the economy and the state.

FINANCIALLY the Catholic Church was the soundest institution in the country. It owned some six per cent of the land, and other property, valued in sum at from two to four billion livres, with an annual income of 120,000,000 livres.1 It received an additional 123,000,000 in tithes levied on the produce and livestock of the soil.

No class in the cities of France was so disliked by the educated male minority as the Catholic clergy. The Church was hated, said de Tocqueville, “not because the priests claimed to regulate the affairs of the other world, but because they were landed proprietors, lords of manors, tithe owners, and administrators in this world.”

The French Revolution attacked both the monarchy and the Church, and undertook the double task and jeopardy of removing both the religious and the secular props of the existing social order. Is it any wonder that for a decade France went mad?

Mably, addressing to John Adams in 1783 some Observations sur le gouvernement … des États unis d’Amérique, warned him that indifference in matters religious, however harmless it might be in enlightened and rational individuals, is fatal to the morals of the masses.

The philosophers might plead that this amoralism was a sickly non sequitur from their criticism of the Christian theology, and that a sane mind would recognize moral obligations with or without religious belief. Many people did.

Part of mercantile prosperity, as in England, came from the capture or purchase of African slaves, their transport to America, and their sale there for work on the plantations. In 1788 French slave dealers shipped 29,506 Negroes to St.-Domingue (Haiti) alone.

The essential cause of the Revolution was the disparity between economic reality and political forms—between the importance of the bourgeoisie in the production and possession of wealth and its exclusion from governmental power.

The middle classes did not wish to overthrow the monarchy, but they aspired to control it. They were far from desiring democracy, but they wanted a constitutional government in which the intelligence of all classes could be brought to bear upon legislation, administration, and policy.

The Revolution was due not to the patient poverty of the peasants but to the endangered wealth of the middle class.

So, as with most pivotal events in history, a hundred diverse forces converged to produce the French Revolution. Fundamental was the growth of the middle classes in number, education, ambition, wealth, and economic power; their demand for a political and social status commensurate with their contribution to the life of the nation and the finances of the state; and their anxiety lest the treasury render their governmental securities worthless by declaring bankruptcy.

Of the 26,000,000 souls in France, Sieyès pointed out, at least 25,000,000 belonged to the Third Estate—the untitled laity; in effect the Third Estate was the nation.

Mirabeau, anticipating Napoleon’s phrase about “mud in a silk stocking,” described Talleyrand as “a vile, greedy, base, intriguing fellow, whose one desire is mud and money; for money he would sell his soul; and he would be right, for he would be exchanging a dunghill for gold”;

as we followed our studies from century to century we felt confirmed in our belief that historiography has been too departmentalized, and that some of us should try to write history whole, as it was lived, in all the facets of the complex and continuing drama.