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Chapter Two Philosophe, Madman, Revolutionary, God The Many Faces of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Introduction It is not now generally disputed that Rousseau gradually became estranged from the enlightened world of mid-century Paris. This is well documented and widely accepted. He became progressively more uncomfortable with the sophisticated society with which he had become so familiar in the French capital over the previous decade, and was genuinely appalled by the drift toward atheism and materialism increasingly evident among many leading philosophes during the second half of the century, particularly in the “côterie holbachique” that he knew so well. Rousseau eventually initiated a personal reform that commenced with a return to Geneva and its national church, shortly after which he retreated to a cottage outside Paris, hoping to escape from what he saw as its artifice and venality. It was here that he produced his greatest works. Soon he fell out with his close friend and confidant Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie, who resented Rousseau’s abandonment of the philosophes in pursuit of his own, independent path to “truth.” “Only the bad man lives alone,” he wrote in his play Fils naturel (1757), alluding to Rousseau.1 He also quarreled with Grimm and wrote a powerful attack on d’Alembert’s proposal for the establishment of a theater in Geneva, which amazed and repelled many philosophes. Voltaire in particular became Rousseau’s implacable enemy from around this time. Eventually, he even alienated “le bon Hume,” universally loved and respected by the philosophes.2 What is unclear, however, is the depth of Rousseau’s rejection of the world of mid-eighteenth century Paris; whether it expressed a clash of temperament and background only, with little relevance to the views actually 29 presented in his works, or indicated a more profound alienation, a fundamental turning against the whole spirit of the Enlightenment itself. For increasing numbers of philosophes, Rousseau’s actions and writings from about the middle of the 1750s were interpreted as evidence of an unsound mind and an unstable, even pathological, personality. This convenient dismissal made the problem of accounting for his defection from their ranks— the first major such defection the philosophes faced—easier to accept. It became a commonplace in the “enlightened” circles that Rousseau had once frequented in Paris that he had, quite simply, gone off his head. While there is some truth to this view, it is far from the whole truth. It overlooks the many principled reasons that Rousseau had for repudiating the enlightened world of the philosophes, which he presented with sufficient rhetorical and argumentative force in a steady stream of books and essays to provoke the encyclopédistes to wage a bitter war against him for over a decade. To Rousseau’s detractors past and present, the many defects of his personality have proved an irresistibly easy and convenient means of neutralizing his influence and arguments.3 This chapter provides some personal background to the clash of ideas between Rousseau and the philosophes that are in the foreground of the rest of my study. I limit myself here to sketching the broad contours of his relationship to the philosophes and to the French Revolutionaries. What I have to say is highly selective as a consequence, with no pretense to providing a complete, detailed picture of Rousseau’s life in general.4 It is intended only to give the reader a general idea of how his personal relations with the philosophes evolved and to highlight some important contextual factors that bear on it. I also offer an account of the posthumous appropriation of his name and reputation by the French Revolutionaries, in order to show how the idea of Rousseau as a leading member of the family of the philosophes became entrenched in the minds of later generations, and how his relationship to the Revolution has eclipsed and distorted our understanding of his relationship the Enlightenment. The popular image of “Rousseau the philosophe” has endured in large part because of the persistence of the image of Rousseau as “father of the French Revolution” to which it is so closely linked. It is therefore necessary to confront a long tradition of Rousseau interpretation that has since taken on a life of its own, “driven by its own logic, obliterating the work from which it has issued, marking it, distorting it, and making it disappear.”5 Rousseau and the Philosophes Rousseau saw his “defection” from the camp of the philosophes as a return to his...

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