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118 q Chapter 4 Dijon Revisited Rousseau’s First Discourse from the Perspective of the Concours Académique It is easy to understand how the appeal of success and the criticism of bad writers threw me straight into a career [in letters]. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Malesherbes, 12 January 1762 I have read the discourse of Rousseau, of Geneva , which has just won the Academy of Dijon’s prize....He should expect a lot of criticism. —Marquis d’Argenson The controversy with Rousseau on the sciences and letters could last as long as the siege of Troy. —Mémoires de Trévoux (December 1751) Countless historians have considered what the concours académique—and particularly the prize contest of 1749–1750 at the Academy of Dijon—meant to the intellectual development of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.1 Yet virtually no one has ever inverted the question to consider what Rousseau might have meant to the concours académique. Almost overnight ,a newly established and relatively unknown academy in Burgundy had catapulted a provincial hack into the upper stratosphere of literary celebrity. What does this say about academic prize competitions in the mid-eighteenth century? And how did Rousseau’s phenomenal success affect the role of academic prize competitions in French intellectual life? This chapter situates Rousseau within the cultural and intellectual context of the concours académique. Instead of explaining, yet again, the place of the First Discourse in the oeuvre of Rousseau, the idea here is to understand the ways in which an academic contest could boost the reputation of a previously unknown savant;Rousseau simply happens to fit the bill. Indeed,Rousseau offers the most striking example of an ambitious and relatively young DIJON REVISITED 119 writer who rode a victory in the concours to a career in letters; Jean-Jacques embodies, better than anyone else, the very real promise of a participatory Enlightenment. For that reason alone, his story requires a detailed investigation . Furthermore, this chapter will provide an answer to a mystery that has long vexed Rousseau’s biographers and other historians of the eighteenth century:why did the Academy of Dijon reward an essayist who essentially attacked the academies? This chapter will show that while Rousseau’s adversaries cared fundamentally about his arguments, the judges at Dijon ultimately concentrated on his eloquent prose. That Rousseau had won an competition in eloquence has somehow been lost on subsequent generations of historians, although it was quite clear to his contemporaries. Moreover, the bitter disputes that arose in the aftermath of Rousseau’s victory—disputes that centered on the highly controversial ideas that Rousseau promoted in his essay—also require an examination. The controversy that erupted after (and even before) the publication of the First Discourse helped transform the place of the academies in French intellectual life. The attention that the affair received in the literary world pushed the concours académique to the forefront of public consciousness. Of course, prize competitions had been a central feature of the scholarly world since the late seventeenth century. The concours had never been an obscure scholarly practice blocked off from the central currents of thought that ran through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the debates that raged within the strict confines of the academic prize competitions often poured out into the wider world of letters. Yet no prize competition or contest submission,before or after Rousseau,ever came close to generating the kind of passionate dialogue or media hype that surrounded the First Discourse. The publicity garnered by the Rousseau affair,however,also highlights the ambiguous position of the academies and their concours. The academies of the eighteenth century occupied a difficult place within society; on the one hand, they were the cornerstone of the intellectual establishment, and on the other, they became vessels for critical dialogue. As the First Discourse sent shock waves through the Republic of Letters, the Academy of Dijon, despite the obvious benefits that it garnered from the publicity, found itself thrust into the unlikely role of defending the sciences and belles-lettres against its own concours laureate. The Academy was highly uncomfortable with losing control of the debate after it spilled over into the printed word. It was even more uncomfortable with the way that Rousseau’s critics had a tendency to denounce the academic judges along with the essayist himself. In a way, the Rousseau affair revealed some of the inherent ambiguities that came with prose competitions. Did the persuasiveness of the argument...

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