The Eve of the French Revolution

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The period of Rousseau's life in which that lady was the ruling
influence lasted ten or twelve years. The situation was one from which
any man of manly instincts would have shrunk, a condition of dependence
on a mistress, and on a mistress who made no pretense of fidelity. In a
desultory way Rousseau learned something of music at this time, and made
some long journeys on foot, one of them taking him as far as Paris. This
man, morally of soft fibre, was able to endure and enjoy moderate
physical hardship; and from early education felt most at home in simple
houses and amid rude surroundings. At last, disgusted with the
appearance of a new rival in Madame de Warens's changeable household,
Rousseau left that lady and drifted off to Lyons; then, after once
trying the experiment of returning to his mistress and finding it a
failure, to Paris.

For more than eight years after his final separation from Madame de
Warens, Rousseau did nothing to make any one suppose him to be a man of
genius. He obtained and threw up the position of secretary to the French
ambassador at Venice; he supported himself as a musician and as a
private secretary; he lived from hand to mouth, having as a companion
one Therese Levasseur, a grotesquely illiterate maid servant, picked up
at an inn. Their five children he successively took to the Foundling,
losing sight of them forever. To the mother he was faithful for the most
part, although not without some amorous wanderings, for many years.

Up to 1749, then, when Rousseau was thirty-seven years old, he had
published nothing of importance. He had, however, some acquaintance
with literary men, being known merely as one of those adventurers
without any settled means of existence, who may always be found in
cities, and with whom Paris at this time appears to have been
over-furnished. In features he was plain, in manners awkward; much
given to making compliments to women, but generally displeasing to
them, although at times interesting when roused to excitement. The
Swiss Jean Jacques had little of the sparkling wit which the Frenchmen
of his day rated very high, but he had much subtlety of observation
and many ideas. He constantly applauded himself in his writings on
being sensible rather than witty. In fact he was neither, but very
ingenious and eloquent. In character he was self-indulgent but not
luxurious, sensitive, vain, and sentimental. To this man,--if we may
believe his own account, and I think in the main we may do so,--there
came by a sudden flash an idea which altered his whole life, and which
has materially affected millions of lives since he died. The idea was
an evil seed, and it found an evil soil to grow in.

The summer of 1749 was a hot one. Diderot, just rising into notice as a
man of letters, had been imprisoned in the Castle of Vincennes, for his
"Letter on the Blind," and his friends were allowed to come and see him.
Rousseau used to visit him every other afternoon, walking the four or
five miles which lie between the centre of Paris and the castle. The
trees along the road were trimmed after the dreary French fashion, and
gave little shade. From time to time Rousseau would stop, lie down on
the grass and rest, and he had got into the habit of taking a book or a
newspaper in his pocket. It was in this way that his eye happened to
fall on a paragraph in the "Mercure de France," announcing that the
Academy of Dijon would give a prize the next year for the best essay on
the following subject: "Whether the Progress of the Arts and Sciences
has tended to corrupt or to improve Morals."

From that moment, according to Rousseau, a complete change came over
him. Struck with sudden giddiness, he was like a drunken man. His heart
palpitated and he could hardly walk or draw breath. Throwing himself at
the foot of a tree, he spent half an hour in such agitation that when he
arose he found the whole front of his waistcoat wet with tears, although
he had not known that he was shedding any. Thus did his great theory of
the degeneracy of man under civilization burst upon him.[Footnote:
Rousseau, xviii. 135 (Confessions, Part. ii. liv. viii); xix. 358
(Seconde Lettre a M. de Malesherbes). Exaggerated as the above story
probably is, we may reasonably believe that it comes nearer the truth
than that told by Diderot in after years, when he and Rousseau had
quarreled. In that version, Rousseau, desiring to compete for the prize,
consulted Diderot as to which side he should take, and was advised to
assume that which other people would avoid. Diderot, Oeuvres, xi. 148.
Rousseau's thoughts had been wandering into subjects akin to that of the
prize essay before he had seen the announcement in the Mercure de
France. Musset-Pathay, ii. 363. Moreover, if Rousseau was imaginative,
and not always to be believed about facts, Diderot was a tremendous
liar.]

The very question asked by the academy suggests the possibility of an
answer unfavorable to civilization, but Rousseau's treatment of it was
such as to form the beginning of an epoch in the history of thought. It
is under the rough coat of the laborer, he says, and not under the
tinsel of the courtier, that strength and vigor of body will be found.
Before art had shaped our manners, they were rustic but natural, and
men's actions freely expressed their feelings. Human nature was no
better, at bottom, than now, but men were safer because they could more
easily read each other's minds, and thus they avoided many vices. The
advance of civilization brings increase of corruption. Constantinople,
where learning was preserved during the dark ages, was full of murder,
debauchery, and crime. Contrast with its inhabitants those primitive
nations which have been kept from the contagion of vain knowledge: the
early Persians, the Germans described by Tacitus, the modern Swiss, the
American Indians, whose simple institutions Montaigne prefers to all the
laws of Plato. These nations know well that in other lands idle men
spend their time in disputing about vice and virtue, but they have
considered the morals of these argumentative persons and have learned to
despise their doctrine.

"Astronomy is born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred,
flattery, and lying; geometry of avarice; physics of a vain curiosity;
all, and morals themselves, of human pride. The arts and sciences,
therefore, owe their birth in our vices; we should have less doubt of
the advantage to be derived from them if they sprang from our virtues."
... "Answer me, illustrious philosophers, you from whom we know why
bodies attract each other in a vacuum; what are the relations of areas
traversed in equal times in the revolutions of the planets; what curves
have conjugate points, points of inflection and reflection; how man sees
all things in God; how the soul and body correspond without
communication, as two clocks would do; what stars maybe inhabited; what
insects reproduce their kind in extraordinary ways,--tell me, I say, you
to whom we owe so much sublime knowledge--if you had taught us none of
these things, should we be less numerous, less well-governed, less
redoubtable, less flourishing, or more perverse?"

This is the theme of the First Discourse, a theme most congenial to the
nature of Rousseau. His ill-health, his dreamy habit of mind, his
vanity, all made him long for a state of things as different as possible
from that about him.

"Among us," he says, "it is true that Socrates would not have drunk the
hemlock; but he would have drunk from a more bitter cup of insulting
mockery and of contempt a hundred times worse than death." Such
sensitiveness as this belongs to Rousseau himself. With what disdain
would the healthy-minded Socrates have laughed at the suggestion that he
was troubled by the contempt or the mockery of those about him. How
gayly would he have turned the weapons of the mockers on themselves.
Rousseau had neither the sense of humor nor the joy of living, which
added so much to the greatness of the Atheman. His theories are
especially pleasing to the disappointed and the weak, and therein lies
their danger; for they tend, not to manly effort, for the improvement of
individual circumstances or of mankind, but to vain dreaming of
impossible ideals. There is a luxury that softens, but there is also a
luxury that causes labor. A nation without astronomy, or geography, or
physics, is generally less numerous, less redoubtable, less flourishing,
and sometimes less well governed than a civilized nation. It is true
that in the arts and sciences, in the deeds and in the condition of men,
there is an admixture of what is base; but there is no baser nor more
dangerous habit of mind than that which for every action seeks out the
worst motive, for every state the most selfish reason.[Footnote: Long
after the publication of the First Discourse, Rousseau insisted that he
had never intended to plunge civilized states into barbarism, but only
to arrest the decay of primitive ones, and perhaps to retard that of the
more advanced, by changing their ideals. Oeuvres, xx. 275 (II.
Dialogue); xxi. 34 (III. Dialogue). Rousseau's writings generally must
be taken as expressions of feeling, quite as much as attempts to change
the world. They are growls or sighs, rather than sermons.]

While Rousseau's First Discourse is pernicious in its general teaching,
it is rich in eloquent passages, and it contains some of those sensible
remarks which we seldom fail to find in its author's works. At the time
of writing it, as later, he was interested in education,--the subject on
which his influence has been, on the whole, most useful.

"I see on every side," he says, "enormous establishments where youth is
brought up at great expense to learn everything but its duties. Your
children will be ignorant of their own language, but will speak others
which are not in use anywhere; they will know how to make verses which
they will hardly be able to understand themselves; without knowing how
to distinguish truth from falsehood, they will possess the art of
disguising both from others by specious arguments; but those words,
magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, courage, will be unknown to
them; that sweet name of country[Footnote: Patrie,--a word seemingly
necessary, but which the English language manages to do without.] will
never strike their ears; and if they hear of God, it will be less to
fear Him than to be afraid of Him. `I would as lief,' said a sage, `that
my schoolboy had spent his time in a tennis-court; at least his body
would be more active.' I know that children must be kept busy, and that
idleness is the danger most to be feared for them. What, then, should
they learn? A fine question surely! Let them learn what they must do
when they are men, and not what they must forget."[Footnote: Compare
Montaigne, i. 135 (liv. i. chap. xxv.).]

The First Discourse not only took the prize at Dijon, but attracted a
great deal of notice in Paris, and immediately gave Rousseau a
distinguished place among men of letters. Controversy was excited,
refutations attempted. In 1753 the Academy of Dijon again offered a
prize for an essay on a subject evidently connected with the former one:
"What is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and whether it is
authorized by Natural Law." Again Rousseau competed, and this time the
prize was given to some one else, but Rousseau's essay was published,
and takes rank among the important writings of its author and of its
time. In the Second Discourse we see the development of the ideas of the
First. Rousseau composed an imaginary history of mankind, starting from
that being of his own creation, the happy savage. He thinks that man in
the primitive condition, having no moral relations nor known duties,
could be neither good nor bad; unless these words are taken in a purely
physical sense, and those things are called vices in the individual
which may interfere with his own preservation, and those are called
virtues which may contribute to it. In this case, Rousseau believes that
he must be called the most virtuous who least resists the simple
impulses of nature; a mistake surely, for what natural impulses are more
simple than those which turn a man aside from all sustained exertion,
and what impulses tend more than these to the destruction of the
individual and of the species?

Rousseau's savage has but few desires, and those of the simplest, and he
is dependent on no one for their satisfaction. In him natural pity is
awake, although obscure, while in civilized man it is developed, but
weak. The Philosopher will not leave his bed although his fellow-beings
be slaughtered under his window, but will clap his hands to his ears and
quiet himself with arguments. The savage is not so tranquil, and gives
way to the first impulse. In street fights the populace assembles and
prudent folk get out of the way. It is the rabble and the fishwives who
separate the combatants, and prevent respectable people from cutting
each other's throats.[Footnote: Rousseau says in his Confessions
(Oeuvres, xviii. 205 n. Part. ii. liv. viii.), that this heartless
philosopher was suggested to him by Diderot, who abused his confidence,
and gave his writings at this time a hard tone and a black appearance.
The abuse of confidence is nonsense, but the comic picture of the
philosopher, with his hands on his ears, may well have come from
Diderot. Rousseau was always in deadly earnest.]

Love, he says, is physical and moral. The physical side is that general
desire which leads to the union of the sexes. The moral side is that
which fixes that desire on one exclusive object, or at least that which
gives the exclusive desire a greater energy. Now it is easy to see that
this moral side of love is a factitious feeling, born of the usage of
society, and vaunted by women with much skill and care in order to
establish their empire, and to give dominion to the sex which ought to
obey. This feeling is dull in the savage, who has no abstract ideas of
regularity or beauty; he is not troubled with imagination, which causes
so many woes to civilized man. "Let us conclude that the savage man,
wandering in forests, without manufactures, without language, without a
home, without war, and without connections, with no need of his kind,
and no desire to injure it, perhaps never recognizing one person
individually, subject to few passions, and sufficient to himself, had
only the feeling and the intelligence proper to his state; that he felt
only his real needs; he looked only at those things which he thought it
was for his interest to see, and his intelligence made no more progress
than his vanity. If, by chance, he made some discovery, he could not
communicate it, not recognizing even his own children. The art perished
with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress; the
generations multiplied uselessly; and, as all started from the same
point, the centuries went by with all the rudeness of the first age; the
species was already old, and man still remained a child."

Inequalities among savage men would be small. Those which are physical
are often caused by a hardening or an effeminate life; those of the
mind, by education, which not only divides men into the rude and the
cultivated, but increases the natural differences which nature has
allowed among the latter; for if a giant and a dwarf walk in the same
road, every step they take will separate them more widely. And if there
are no relations among men, their inequalities will trouble them very
little. Where there is no love, what is the use of beauty? What
advantage can people who do not speak derive from wit; or those who have
no dealings from craft? "I constantly hear it said," cries Rousseau,
"that the strong will oppress the weak. But explain to me what is meant
by the word "oppression." Some men will rule with violence, others will
groan in their service, obeying all their caprices. This is exactly what
I observe among us; but I do not see how it could be said of savage men,
who could hardly be made to understand the meaning of servitude and
domination. One man may well take away the fruit that another has
picked, the game he has killed, the cave that was his shelter; but how
will he ever succeed in making him obey? And what can be the chains of
dependence among men that possess nothing? If I am driven from one tree,
I need only go to another; if I am tormented in any place, who will
prevent my moving elsewhere? Is there a man so much stronger than I, and
moreover so depraved, so lazy, and so fierce as to compel me to provide
for his maintenance while he remains idle? He must make up his mind not
to lose sight of me for a single moment, to have me tied up with great
care while he is asleep, for fear I should escape or kill him; that is
to say, he is obliged to expose himself willingly to much greater
trouble than that which he wishes to avoid, and than that which he gives
me. And after all, if his vigilance is relaxed for a moment, if he turns
his head at a sudden noise, I take twenty steps through the forest, my
chains are broken, and he never sees me again as long as he lives."

Rousseau recognized that his state of nature was not like anything that
had existed on our planet.[Footnote: This concession probably took the
form it did, partly to satisfy the censor, or the Academy of Dijon,
jealous for Genesis. "Religion commands us to believe that God himself
having removed men from the state of nature, immediately after the
creation, they are unequal because he has willed that they should be
so." Such remarks as this are common in all the writings of the time,
although less so in those of Rousseau than in those of most of his
contemporaries. They are evidently intended to satisfy the authorities,
and to be simply over looked by the intelligent reader.] But that
consideration troubled him not at all. Let us begin, he says, by putting
aside all facts; they do not touch the question. This is the constant
practice of the philosophers of certain schools, but few of them
acknowledge it as frankly as Rousseau. Had the facts of human nature and
human history been seriously considered, we should have no Republic of
Plato, no Utopia of More; the world would be a very different place from
what it is; for these cloudy cities, the laws of whose architecture seem
contrary to all the teachings of physics, yet gild with their glory and
darken with their shadows the solid temples and streets beneath them.

In the second part of his essay, Rousseau follows the development of
human society. "The first man," he says, "who, having enclosed a piece
of ground, undertook to say, `This is mine,' and found people simple
enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many
crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror would not he have
spared the human race, who, pulling up the stakes or filling the ditch,
should have cried to his fellows, `Beware of listening to that impostor.
You are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all, and the land
to none.'"

But this benefactor did not make his appearance. Soon all the land was
divided among a certain number of occupiers. Those whose weakness or
indolence had prevented their getting a share were obliged to sink into
slavery, or to rob their richer neighbors. Then followed civil wars,
tumult and rapine. At last those who had the land conceived the most
deliberate plot that ever entered into the human mind. They persuaded
the poorer people to join with them in establishing an association which
should defend all its members and ensure to each one the peaceful
possession of his property. "Such was the origin of society and laws,
which gave new bonds to the weak, new strength to the rich, irrevocably
destroyed natural liberty, established forever the laws of property and
inequality, turned adroit usurpation into settled right, and, for the
profit of a few ambitious men, subjected thenceforth all the human race
to labor, servitude, and misery."

But on the whole the stage of development which seemed to Rousseau the
happiest was not the state of complete isolation. He supposes that at
one time mankind had assembled in herds, and had made some simple
inventions. A rude language had been formed, huts were built. Men had
become more fierce and cruel than at first. The condition was
intermediate between the indolence of the primitive state, and the
petulant activity of self-love now seen in the world. This, he thought,
was the stage reached by most savages known to Europeans; it was the
most desirable; and he remarks that no savage has yet adopted
civilization, whereas many Frenchmen have joined Indian tribes, and
taken up a savage mode of life.

In closing the Second Discourse, Rousseau thus sums up his conclusions.
"It follows from this exposition that inequality, being almost nothing
in the state of nature, draws its force and growth from the development
of our faculties and from the progress of the human spirit, and becomes
at last stable and legal by the establishment of property and the laws.
It follows also that moral inequality, authorized by positive law only,
is contrary to natural law whenever it does not coincide in the same
proportion with physical inequality; a distinction which shows
sufficiently what should be thought in this respect of the kind of
inequality which reigns among all civilized nations, since it is
manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a child
should command an old man, a fool lead a wise man, and a handful of
people be glutted with superfluity, while the hungry multitude is in
want of necessaries."

The Discourse on Inequality was sent by Rousseau to Voltaire, and drew
forth a characteristic letter from the pontiff of the Philosophers. "I
have received, sir, your new book against the human race. I thank you
for it. You will please the men to whom you tell disagreeable truths,
but you will not correct them. It is impossible to paint in stronger
colors the horrors of human society, from which our ignorance and
weakness promise themselves so many consolations. No one ever spent so
much wit in trying to make us stupid; when we read your book we feel
like going on all fours. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years
since I lost the habit, I am conscious that it is impossible for me to
take it up again, and I leave this natural attitude to those who are
more worthy of it than you and I. Nor can I take ship to go out and join
the savages in Canada; first, because the diseases which bear me down
oblige me to stay near the greatest physician in Europe, and because I
should not find the same relief among the Missouris; secondly, because
there is war in those regions, and the example of our nations has made
the savages almost as cruel as we are." Voltaire then goes on to
complain of his own sufferings as an author, but to vaunt the influence
of letters. It is not Petrarch and Boccaccio, he says, that made the
wars of Italy; the pleasantries of Marot did not cause the massacre of
Saint Bartholomew's Day; nor the tragedy of the Cid produce the riots of
the Fronde. Great crimes have generally been committed by ignorant great
men. It is the insatiable cupidity, the indomitable pride of mankind,
which have made this world a vale of tears; from Thamas Kouli-Kan, who
could not read, to the custom-house clerk, who only knows how to cipher.
[Footnote: August 30, 1755. Voltaire, lvi. 714.]

This letter is neither very complimentary nor very conclusive in its
treatment of Rousseau's position, but it may be said to mark his
official reception into the guild of literary men. He was presently
engaged in new work. He wrote an article on Political Economy for the
great "Encyclopaedia," in which, reversing the teaching of the Second
Discourse, he maintains that "it is certain that the right of property
is the most sacred of all the rights of citizens, and more important in
some respects than liberty itself; either because it more closely
concerns the preservation of life, or because, property being easier to
take away and harder to defend than persons, that should be most
respected which is most easily ravished; or again, because property is
the true foundation of civil society, and the true guarantee of the
engagements of the citizens; for if property did not answer for
persons, nothing would be so easy as to elude duties and to laugh at
the laws."[Footnote: Rousseau, _Oeuvres_, xii. 41.] And further
on, in the same article, he calls property the foundation of the social
compact, whose first condition is that every one be maintained in the
peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him. We must not wonder at seeing
Rousseau thus change sides from day to day. A dreamer and not a
philosophic thinker, he perceived some truths and uttered many
sophistries, speaking always with the fire of conviction and a fatal
eloquence.

It is needless to enter into the detail of Rousseau's life at this
time, the time when his most remarkable work was done. Labor was
always painful and irritating to him, and it was perhaps the
irksomeness of his tasks that drove him into something not unlike
madness.[Footnote: There is little doubt that Rousseau was at one time
really insane, subject to the delusion that he was being persecuted.
His insanity did not become very marked until the time of the real
persecutions undergone after the publication of _Emile_. See his
Biographies and _Le Docteur Chatelain, La folie de J. J. Rousseau_,
Paris, 1890. He was, of course, always eccentric and ill balanced; and
was often rendered irritable by a painful disease, caused by a
malformation of the bladder. Morley, _Rousseau_, i. 277, etc.
_Oeuvres_, xviii. 155 (_Conf._ Part. ii. liv. viii.).]

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