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S N I N E reading IN EXTREMIS: revolutionaries respond to rousseau Carla Hesse One might count the number of references to Rousseau; but would such a count serve to weigh the influence of Rousseau on the [Jacobin] clubs? —crane brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History Concerning the Jacobin Republic, the eminent American historian Robert R. Palmer wrote in 1941,“The new state, so far as it came from books, was to draw its inspiration from The Social Contract.”1 This essay addresses the parenthetical , “so far as it came from books” part of this statement. Studies of the influence of Rousseau’s thought on all aspects of the French Revolution—politics, law, civic ritual, and social moeurs—are too numerous to cite in their entirety. There were already at least three hundred works—taking into account only those written in French—devoted to Rousseau and his ideas published during the revolutionary decade (1789–99) alone.2 A full bibliographic survey of such studies up to the present would run into the multiple thousands. More important , Palmer’s 1941 thesis (already heir to a distinguished nineteenth-century lineage) has been reinvigorated in recent years by a generation of scholars in the orbit of Keith Michael Baker and the late François Furet. And it is generally accepted, now as much as then, that Rousseau (and above all The Social Contract ) “wrote the script” (Keith Baker’s formulation) of the Revolution, or at least the Jacobin version of it.3 My question concerning the Jacobins and Rousseau , then, is not “What did they learn from Rousseau?” (I take this question to have been sufficiently answered; in short, almost everything), but rather “How so?” What I am proposing, to put it otherwise, is a phenomenological, as opposed to a hermeneutical, approach to the problem of revolutionary reading practices, and in particular, the revolutionary practices of reading Rousseau. Let me observe from the outset that the compatibility of reading and revolution is not self-evident, and that of reading Rousseau and revolution even less so. The man who made the greatest leap forward for interiority since Augustine of Hippo, and who (along with Diderot) essentially invented modern self-reflexivity, though very partial to the emphatic, was not at all at home in the imperative. As Robert Darnton so vividly recaptured in his remarkable essay “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” Rousseau, above all other French philosophes , was not only the author of the most widely read books of the late eighteenth-century philosophical canon (La Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile); he was, through these works, also the inventor of a new form of intensive reading —the rhetorical construction of a private communion between two individual souls through the fulcrum of a published text.4 As Darnton observes, it was the Nouvelle Héloïse that most exemplified this new form of intimate communion between reader and writer:“It is thus that the heart speaks to the heart,” Saint-Preux writes to Julie.5 This idealized figuration of intensive, private reading was elsewhere more systematically elaborated and advocated by Rousseau as a path to moral regeneration. “In moral matters,” Rousseau states, “I hold that there is no reading that can be of use to socialites [gens du monde]. . . . The further one moves away from business, big cities, crowded social gatherings , the more the obstacles [to effective reading] diminish. At a certain point, books can have some usefulness. When one lives alone, one does not hurry through books in order to parade one’s reading. One varies them less and meditates on them more. And as their effect is less mitigated by outside influences , they have greater influence within.”6 And this was not merely a theory espoused by Rousseau. As Darnton shows, readers of Rousseau came to feel an intimate connection to the author that was without equal among contemporary writers. In hundreds of letters sent to the author, they poured out their feelings of devotion and admiration for his works, and they sought his advice for the most personal of their struggles. Rousseau’s contemporaries—Chardin and Fragonard, most famously—visually elevated this form of intensive, romantic reading to iconic status.7 And so the question: What happened to these solitary, Rousseauist reading practices after 1789? First, the most obvious change: Reading Rousseau as a revolutionary (rather than as a prerevolutionary, Enlightenment dissident) meant reading him in public rather than in private...

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