Rousseau and L'Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment (review)

As the Voltairean keyword in the title indicates, this collection of 14 articles (six in French, eight in English) is devoted to Rousseau's attitude and actions regarding religious intolerance. With Voltaire's famous campaign —Écrasez l'Infâme! —as a point of comparison, how is Rousseau's work to be situated within the broader Enlightenment context of the struggle against religious fanaticism? This issue has not been the object of extensive study, as the editors remind us in their preface: 'Rousseau is usually not mentioned in conventional histories of the question of toleration' (p. 10). One thing this volume makes abundantly clear is that, concerning this question, Voltaire and Rousseau deployed 'different and even contradictory strategies' (p. 10), a factor which played no small part in their notorious quarrels. While Rousseau and L'Infâme provides a thorough accounting of the strategy of the 'citoyen de Genève' during the eighteenth-century campaign against intolerance, it also provides some retrospective justification for the relative level of obscurity into which that strategy has fallen. What is noticeable is that, well before he wrote Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, he thought the issue of intolerance through the prism of his own experience, real or imagined: 'Rousseau parle pour lui-même alors que Voltaire défend la famille Calas' (Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre, p. 81). Feeling at once persecuted by religious and civil authorities because of his affiliation with the philosophes and ostracized by the very same group (most tenaciously by Voltaire), Rousseau came to envision his personal situation as prototypical of the end results of fanaticism and intolerance: 'De cas particulier, le cas Jean-Jacques est devenu un cas théorique' (Ourida Mostefai, p. 104). Portraying himself as victimized by both sides, Rousseau nevertheless found ways to express his own forms of religious intolerance. One of the recurring issues addressed in several articles is his well-known animosity toward atheists, who seemed to pose an inherent danger to social harmony: 'According to Rousseau, to have no idea of God will result in violence' (Jeremiah Alberg, p. 193). Indeed, for him, 'Outside the faith, there is no citizenship' (Philip Stewart, p. 237). Since a civil religion was a foundational principle of the Contrat social, Rousseau advocated the banishment and even execution of atheists. As some of the authors somewhat understatedly point out, Rousseau's insistence on mandatory adherence to certain religious principles 'may appal modern readers' (Christopher Bertram, p. 145). As for the punishment to be meted out to atheists in Rousseau's model polity, 'the severity of this sentence still shocks us' (John Hope Mason, p. 245). Unlike many similar collections, all of the articles in this book are insightful and informative. Due to their variety, readers will find analyses of Rousseau's texts from the perspectives of political science, historiographical investigation and comparative stylistics. The polemical context of Rousseau's forays into the issues of fanaticism and intolerance is regularly highlighted. In the process, the level of influence of Locke, Bayle and Montesquieu is discussed, and the evolving positions of Rousseau, Voltaire and the members of the 'coterie holbachique' are delineated.