Rousseau and the Revolutionary Repertoire

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert provides a detailed account of a spontaneous festival fueled by wine and music that he supposedly witnessed as a child in Geneva during the 1720s. Let me begin by quoting from it at length, because I shall be circling back to the scene as a certain touchstone of historical continuity:

Le Régiment de St. Gervais avoit fait l’éxercice, et selon la coutume, on avoit soupé par compagnies. La pluspart de ceux qui les composoient se rassemblérent après le Soupé dans la place de St-Gervais, et se mirent à danser tous ensemble, officiers et soldats, autour de la fontaine, sur le bassin de laquelle étoient montés les Tambours, les Fifres, et ceux qui portoient les flambeaux. Une danse de gens égayés par un long repas, sembleroit n’offrir rien de fort intéressant à voir. Cependant, l’accord de cinq ou six cens hommes en uniforme, se tenant tous par la main, et formant une longue bande qui serpentoit en cadence et sans confusion avec mille tours et retours, mille espéces d’évolutions figurées, le choix des airs qui les animoient, le bruit des Tambours, l’éclat des flambeaux, un certain appareil militaire au sein du plaisir; tout cela formoit une sensation très vive, qu’on ne pouvoit supporter de sang-froid. Il étoit tard; les femmes étoient couchées, toutes se relevérent; bientôt les fenêtres furent pleines de Spectatrices qui donnoient un nouveau zéle aux acteurs. Elles ne purent tenir longtems à leurs fenêtres; elles descendirent; les maitresses venoient voir leurs maris, les servantes apportoient du vin; les enfans même eveillés par le bruit, accoururent demi-vétus entre les Péres et les Méres. La danse fut suspendüe … Il résulta de tout cela un attendrissement général que je ne saurois peindre, mais que dans l’allegresse universelle, on éprouve assés naturellement au milieu de tout ce qui nous est cher.¹

During the French Revolution, Rousseau’s ideas about the role of music in a democratic community found expression in a variety of popular contexts—in public singing at festivals, in chansonniers that set new song lyrics to well-known melodies for the musically illiterate, and in the mobilization of music toward politically unifying goals. Many of these ideas are set forth in Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l'imitation musicale, a work Rousseau grappled with and rewrote from the 1750s until 1761. Published posthumously in 1781, the work remained largely unexplored until the twentieth century. In the essay Rousseau posits a theory of cultural evolution in which music devolved from a tool integral to the creation of community at some unspecified moment in pre-history to a symptom of the moral decay of contemporary French society, a decay resulting from the combined degeneration of music and language caused by historical progress. Rousseau’s prescriptions for the place of music in politics, as found in this essay as well as his Lettre à d’Alembert, became articulated in revolutionary society even though citizens neither circulated nor discussed the texts, and developments in Parisian popular musical practices from 1749 to 1794 may be seen to shed new light on the living sources for Rousseau’s writing about music.

It has long been acknowledged that Rousseau philosophized from a deeply subjective position, and so his life experiences provide an entryway into his works. Contextualizing Rousseau’s philosophy within mid-eighteenth- century Parisian musical practice illuminates the relationship between musical performance during the Revolution and his political thought. Indeed, what I want to argue is that Rousseau’s political writing actually grew from his lived experience of music as a writer² in mid-eighteenth- century Paris rather than from a utopian community he imagined against the backdrop of an earlier philosophy of cultural acquisition.³ When we examine the role that political opinion plays in French popular song across the century, it becomes evident that Rousseau did not create...