“The Fork in the Road” — Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Two Enlightenments
SELF-EVIDENT The Road to 1776 Article 15 of 22
I address myself no longer to men, but to you, God of all beings, of all worlds, and of all times … may all men remember that they are brothers. — Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance, 1763¹
Toulouse
On the morning of March 10, 1762, a cloth merchant of sixty-three was brought into the place Saint-Georges, tied to a cartwheel, and had his arms and legs broken with an iron bar. The executioner then strangled him, and the body was burned. He had been asked, under torture the day before and again on the scaffold, to name his accomplices. He said that there had been no crime and therefore no accomplices, and he went on saying it until he could not speak.²
Jean Calas was a Protestant in a Catholic city. His eldest son, Marc-Antoine, had been found hanged in the family shop on the evening of October 13, 1761. Suicide was a crime in French law, punished on the corpse: the body of a self-murderer was dragged face down through the streets and hung by the feet. The family, wanting to spare him that, first said an intruder had killed him. The story collapsed, and the city supplied a better one. The father had murdered the son to prevent his conversion to the Catholic Church.
There was no evidence for it. There was a crowd outside the house, a rumor that hardened within hours, and a city that kept an annual procession commemorating the deliverance of Toulouse from its Protestants two centuries earlier. The lower court convicted. The parlement of Toulouse, sitting as the appellate court, voted to condemn on March 9, and the sentence was carried out the next day. The property was confiscated. The daughters were placed in a convent. The surviving sons got out to Geneva.³
Twenty miles from Geneva, at a house called Les Délices and then at an estate at Ferney, a writer of sixty-eight heard the story and did not believe the family. His first assumption was that the father was guilty and that Protestant fanaticism had killed the son as readily as Catholic fanaticism killed anyone else. He said so in his early letters. Then he interviewed one of the surviving sons, then a traveler who had been in Toulouse, and then, working through correspondents and intermediaries, he helped arrange for Calas’s widow to be represented in Paris.
What he found was a case born in the rumor of a crowd and carried to execution without reliable direct proof. He spent the next three years on it. He wrote to a duke who had the ear of the ministry. He wrote to the chancellor. He printed briefs at his own expense and distributed them across Europe, and he wrote, in 1763, a book about religious persecution that took the case as its occasion and the history of Christendom as its subject. On June 4, 1764, the Royal Council annulled the judgment of the parlement of Toulouse. On March 9, 1765, three years to the day after the vote to condemn, a panel of masters of requests declared Jean Calas innocent. The confiscated property was restored and the king sent money to the widow.⁴
That is what one writer accomplished against a court, with pamphlets, money, correspondence, and a name that ministers answered.
The same writer, in a pamphlet published anonymously in Geneva in the last week of December 1764, destroyed the private life of another writer by revealing that the author of a celebrated book on the raising of children had left five of his own at a foundling hospital. And the same writer produced, over decades, pages about Jewish persons that cannot be read without discomfort.
Voltaire did all of it. The writer he exposed was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They loathed each other, they died within five weeks of each other, and a revolution neither lived to see buried them a few yards apart. Americans read both.
A Country Where Books Were Burned
France in the 1750s and 1760s ran a licensing system for print, and it leaked at every seam, which is the first thing to understand about it. Manuscripts went to censors; approved books carried a royal privilege. Between approval and prohibition sat a wide middle ground of tacit permissions and quiet tolerations for books the administration would not endorse and did not intend to pursue. What could not be managed that way was printed abroad, at Amsterdam, Geneva, and Neuchâtel, and came back across the border in crates under other titles, or was run off quietly at Rouen, and everybody from the booksellers to the officials who seized the crates understood the arrangement. Condemnation in Paris could raise the demand for a book everywhere else.
The condemnation was not a formality for the author. The sovereign courts could order a book torn and burned by the public executioner, and did. The crown could issue a lettre de cachet, an order under the king’s private seal committing a named person to prison or exile without charge, trial, or stated term. It required no court and admitted no appeal. A writer who had annoyed the wrong minister could be in the Bastille within the week and released without ever learning the accusation.
The men who wrote under those conditions are called the philosophes. It does not mean philosophers in the academic sense. It means a loose and quarrelsome set of writers — Diderot, d’Alembert, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Turgot, Voltaire, Rousseau — who shared a conviction that established authority should have to justify itself at the bar of argument, and who agreed on very little else. Their monument is the Encyclopédie, twenty-eight volumes of text and plates issued between 1751 and 1772, suppressed twice and completed anyway.⁵
One more institution needs naming, because Rousseau signed his books with it. Geneva was not a Swiss canton and not a French city. It was a small independent Protestant republic, governed by councils drawn from a narrow class of citizens and bourgeois, with Calvin’s church establishment still in place and a consistory that supervised conduct. To be born into its citizen class was to hold a political status that most Europeans had no equivalent for, and a man who had that status and lost the city’s favor had something specific to lose.⁶
The previous article in this series left France by way of a magistrate who wrote about how offices should be arranged so that power would be stopped by other power. Two writers of the next generation asked a different question, and gave answers that have been set against each other ever since: not how a government should be built, but what a government may do to a person, and where its authority comes from in the first place.
The Advocate
François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694, the son of a treasury official, educated by the Jesuits at Louis-le-Grand, and sent to study law, which he abandoned for verse. He took the name Voltaire in his early twenties, around the time he spent eleven months in the Bastille for satirical poems about the Regent. That was the first imprisonment. The second came in 1726, after he answered an insult from the chevalier de Rohan and was beaten in the street by the chevalier’s servants while the chevalier watched from a carriage; when he sought a duel, the family had him arrested. He was released on condition that he leave the country.⁷
He went to England, and stayed about two and a half years. He learned the language, read Locke and Newton, watched dissenting congregations worship under a statutory toleration, licensed and hedged with civil disabilities but real, of a kind no French Protestant had, and observed that a country could contain many sects and no civil war. The book he made of it appeared first in English, in London in 1733, as Letters concerning the English Nation, and then in French in 1734 as the Lettres philosophiques. It describes Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, the Royal Society, inoculation against smallpox, and the fact that a merchant in London might be as useful a man as a lord.
The French edition was condemned. On June 10, 1734, the parlement of Paris had it burned by the public hangman as scandalous and contrary to religion and good morals, a lettre de cachet was issued for the author, and his lodgings were searched. He had already gone. He spent most of the next fifteen years at Cirey in Champagne, at the château of Émilie du Châtelet, who translated Newton and with whom he studied physics.⁸
What the book had done was to describe one country in order to indict another, and to do it by reporting rather than arguing. That method — go and look, then let the comparison make the case — is the method he used for the rest of his life, and it is the reason the Calas affair became what it became.
What Toleration Meant, and What It Did Not
The Traité sur la tolérance, published in 1763 while the Calas case was still open, is not an argument that all religions are equally true. Its author did not think that. It is an argument that no religion is entitled to use the civil power against those who reject it, and it makes the case on four grounds, three of which are historical.
The first is that persecution does not work. The second is that Christian antiquity did not practice it, and that the Church of the first three centuries asked for the toleration it later refused to give. The third is that the Roman Empire, which Christians remembered as the great persecutor, in fact tolerated a great many cults and suppressed few, and that the martyr literature had inflated the record. The fourth ground is the one that carries: persecution requires a certainty about another person’s soul that nobody possesses.⁹
The book closes not with an argument but with a prayer, addressed past the reader to God, asking that the small differences among men not become pretexts for hatred, and that those who light candles at noon to worship should bear with those who are content with the light of the sun. It is a frequently quoted passage, and it is a petition rather than a proposition.¹⁰
Alongside the book ran the slogan. Écrasez l’infâme — crush the infamous thing — appears in his correspondence from the 1760s onward, often abbreviated, sometimes as a signature. The phrase is slightly more nuanced in French than in English. He attached the adjective to specific nouns: infamous superstition, infamous persecution, infamous fanaticism. Scholars differ on whether he meant the Catholic Church as an institution, revealed religion generally, or the persecuting temper wherever it appeared. What can be said without dispute is that he was not an atheist and said so repeatedly, that he argued with the atheists in his own circle over it, and that he held a designing intelligence to be the most probable account of the world.¹¹
The campaign did not end with Calas. He took up Pierre-Paul Sirven, another Protestant accused of killing a daughter to prevent her conversion, and got the sentence reversed. He took up the chevalier de La Barre, a young nobleman tortured and beheaded at Abbeville in 1766 on a cluster of charges of blasphemy and sacrilege, among them impious songs, mockery of religious rites, and a failure to uncover before a procession; a copy of Voltaire’s own Dictionnaire philosophique was found among his books and burned with his body. He failed. He wrote a commentary on Beccaria’s book against torture and capital punishment. By the end of his life the estate at Ferney had become a destination, and the man there had a title nobody conferred: the patriarch, to whom Europe wrote when a court had done something monstrous.¹²
He was no democrat. He doubted the capacity of most people for public judgment, preferred an enlightened monarch who would reform from above, and spent three years at Frederick’s court trying to be that monarch’s tutor before courting a second sovereign by post. But the flat claim that he had no use for republics is wrong, and the evidence against it comes out of the Genevan dispute. In a pamphlet published anonymously in late 1765, written after Geneva burned Rousseau’s books, he argued that no government is perfect and that a republic comes nearest to natural equality, defended the liberty of publication as the basis of the rest, and supported a wider voice for the citizens of Geneva — a voice restricted to men of property, which is the measure of how far he was willing to go.¹³
And the sentence everyone knows is not his. The declaration about disapproving of what you say while defending to the death your right to say it was written in 1906 by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, publishing as S. G. Tallentyre, as a summary of his attitude toward the burning of a book by Helvétius. She put it in quotation marks, a magazine reprinted it as a quotation, and it has been attributed to him ever since. She said plainly, when asked, that the words were hers.¹⁴
The Citizen of Geneva
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. His mother died within days. His father, a watchmaker, fled the city after a quarrel when the boy was ten. He was apprenticed to an engraver, beaten, and at sixteen found the city gates shut against him after an evening walk and simply kept going. He converted to Catholicism in Turin at a hostel for converts, worked as a servant, a music copyist, a tutor, and a secretary, and spent the better part of his twenties in the household of a woman thirteen years older who was his patron and then his lover. He was thirty-seven before he wrote anything anyone remembers.
In October 1749, walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, he read a prize question in a journal: whether the restoration of the arts and sciences had improved morals. He said afterward that the answer arrived all at once and left him unable to breathe. The essay he wrote said no. It won the prize of the Academy of Dijon in 1750, and it made him famous for saying, in the middle of a century that believed in improvement, that improvement had made people worse.¹⁵
The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality followed in 1755. Julie, or the New Heloise, a novel in letters, appeared in 1761 and sold as few books of the century sold. Then, within two months of each other in 1762, came Du contrat social in April and Émile in May.
The reaction took six weeks. On June 9, 1762, the parlement of Paris condemned Émile and ordered its author arrested; he was warned in the night and left France the same day. On June 19 the Small Council of Geneva ordered both Émile and the Social Contract burned and issued its own warrant. In August the Archbishop of Paris published a pastoral letter against Émile. What drove the Paris condemnation was not the politics. It was the profession of faith of a Savoyard vicar, forty pages inside a book on education, which argued for a religion of conscience without revelation, without miracles, and without a church, and which managed to offend Catholics and Calvinists alike within the same summer. Geneva went further. It condemned both books, and Rousseau recorded that the charge against them was an attack on Christianity and on all governments together.¹⁶
He settled at Môtiers, in a Prussian principality, under the protection of a king he disliked. In May 1763 he renounced his Genevan citizenship. In 1764 he published a defense of the Social Contract against Geneva. In the same year, the pamphlet appeared that told Europe about his children. In September 1765, after the local minister preached against him, the villagers stoned his house at night, and he left. In 1766 he accepted David Hume’s invitation to England, and within a year had convinced himself that Hume was the agent of a conspiracy against him and broken with him in public. He returned to France, wrote the Confessions, and died at Ermenonville on July 2, 1778.¹⁷
The General Will
The Social Contract opens with the sentence that everybody knows and almost nobody finishes. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains; one believes himself the master of others, and is more a slave than they. Then the turn that matters: how did this change come about? He does not know. What can make it legitimate? He believes he can answer that.¹⁸
The problem the book sets is precise. Find a form of association that defends the person and goods of each member with the whole common force, and under which each, uniting himself with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before. That is the puzzle. Not how to limit a government. How to be subject to law and bound to nobody.
His solution is that each person gives himself entirely to the whole and to no particular person, so that there is no master to have a master over. What the citizens constitute in doing so is a body whose will he calls the general will, and the term is the argument, so it needs defining carefully for a modern reader.
The general will is not a tally of private preferences. Rousseau distinguishes it explicitly from what he calls the will of all, which is the sum of those preferences and which a show of hands may perfectly express. Voting is not the enemy of the general will in his scheme; under the conditions he lays down it is the procedure by which citizens try to identify it. The general will is the will the citizens have insofar as they are asking what the law of their common life should be rather than what each of them wants out of it. A unanimous assembly can fail to express it, if every member is voting his own advantage. A man can be outvoted and still learn from the count that he was mistaken about it.¹⁹
Two consequences follow, and both are in the text.
The first is that sovereignty cannot be represented. A people that elects representatives to will on its behalf has given up the thing that made it free, and he says of the English, with some relish, that they are free only during an election and enslaved the moment it is over.²⁰
The second is the sentence that has cost him the most. Whoever refuses to obey the general will, he writes, shall be constrained to it by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free. In his own terms this is not the paradox it sounds. A citizen who wants the benefit of the law and exemption from its burden is a man with two wills, and the community that holds him to the law he himself helped make is holding him to his own. In practice the sentence hands a claim to whoever can persuade himself that he speaks for the whole.²¹
He does set limits, and they should be stated because he is regularly accused of setting none. A chapter of the second book is titled for them. Sovereign power cannot exceed what the general conventions cover, and beyond that line a man disposes of his goods and his liberty as he pleases. An act of sovereignty must bear on citizens as a class and on actions in general, never on a named person or a particular case; the moment it does, it is not an act of sovereignty at all. The sovereign may not impose a burden useless to the community, and may not charge one subject more than another. Legislating is also distinguished from governing and from judging, and the last two belong to a government that the sovereign appoints and can dismiss.²²
He also supplies machinery, and it is worth being exact about what the machinery is for. The danger he builds against is the government — the magistrates who execute the law and who will always drift toward working on their own behalf. One chapter of the third book is titled for the means of preventing precisely that. The people are to assemble at fixed intervals and put two standing questions every time: whether it pleases them to keep the present form of government, and whether it pleases them to leave administration in the hands of those who now hold it. While the assembly sits, the government’s jurisdiction lapses entirely and the least citizen is as inviolable as the first magistrate. A later chapter offers a tribunate, a body belonging to no branch, which can enact nothing and prevent anything, and which exists to keep government, people, and sovereign from encroaching on one another — protecting the sovereign against the government, or the government against the people, or holding the balance between them.²³
What none of that settles is who applies the limits of the second book, and here his answer is definitional rather than institutional. Where a question turns on a particular man or a particular fact that no general convention already covers, he says the dispute has neither a law to govern it nor a judge to decide it, and that putting it to the general will would be absurd, since the public is one of the two parties. What follows is not a remedy but a reclassification. A people that issues particular decrees — naming and dismissing officers, honoring this man, penalizing that one — has, in his account, stopped acting as sovereign and begun acting as a magistrate, and what it produces is a decree rather than a law. The Athenians, he says, did this continually.
The distinction is clean on paper. What he does not establish is who administers it. The tribunate defends the laws and can block what it dislikes, so the answer is not nothing; but he does not constitute it as a court for measuring acts against the second book, and on the separate question of which services matter enough to be demanded of a citizen he makes the sovereign the sole judge. An assembly that has ceased to be sovereign in Rousseau’s sense, without ceasing to be the same room of the same men, is told what it has become. It is not told who will tell it.
Behind that sits the reason a guarantee was thought unnecessary at all: the sovereign is composed of the individuals who make it up, cannot have an interest contrary to theirs, and owes them no security. A reader coming to this book from the previous one in this series will notice what is missing, and the absence is not an oversight. It follows from the design. A power divided against itself is, in Rousseau’s terms, a sovereign that does not fully will, and a sovereign that does not fully will is not sovereign.
Two further chapters matter. In the second book he introduces the legislator, an extraordinary figure who frames the founding laws of a people, holds no office and no vote, and must persuade without argument and lead without force — a man, he says, who would need to be a god to do the job properly, and who therefore attributes his own wisdom to the gods.²⁴ In the fourth he proposes a civil religion: a short set of dogmas, a providence, an afterlife, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws, and the exclusion of intolerance. The sovereign may banish anyone who does not believe them, and, he adds, may put to death anyone who has professed them publicly and then behaves as though he does not believe them.²⁵
What the Second Discourse Actually Says
The Discourse on Inequality is the book usually summarized as the noble savage, and both parts of that summary are wrong.
The phrase is not his. It entered English in a play of John Dryden’s from 1672, and it does not occur in Rousseau’s writing at all; the association was fastened onto him in the nineteenth century, largely by people who were arguing about something else.²⁶
The idea is not his either, in the form usually reported. He is not offering a straightforward empirical history of an early condition of humanity. He says so, in the opening paragraphs, in terms as explicit as a writer can manage: let us begin by setting the facts aside, since they do not bear on the question. The state of nature is a hypothesis, constructed to isolate what in a human being is native and what has been added by living with others. He says other writers have reasoned about savage man and described social man, having smuggled into their starting condition the very traits they meant to explain.²⁷
What emerges from the exercise is not a paradise. Natural man in the second Discourse is solitary, idle, without language, without foresight, and without attachments. He is not good in any sense that requires a moral choice; he is simply not yet in a position to do the specific harms that require society. The two things Rousseau grants him are self-preservation and a reluctance to see another creature suffer.
The famous sentence opens the second part. The first man who enclosed a piece of ground and thought to say that it was his, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society — and what crimes and wars and murders would have been spared the human race if someone had pulled up the stakes and shouted that the fruits belonged to all and the earth to no one.²⁸
That sentence has been read as a demand to abolish property. It is not, and the book does not end there. What follows is an account of how the acquisition happened anyway, why going back is neither possible nor desirable, and how the inequality that resulted was ratified in law. When Rousseau writes about property in the Social Contract, he treats it as secured by the community rather than dissolved by it. The dispute among his readers about what he wanted done is older than the French Revolution and has never been settled.
Voltaire read the second Discourse and wrote to thank him for it in terms that set the tone for everything afterward: nobody had ever used so much intelligence to make us into animals, and reading the book gave one an urge to walk on all fours.²⁹ They never met.
The Reception
What Americans made of these two men is a smaller story than the influence literature suggests, and a better documented one.
Voltaire reached them early and reached them as a historian and a dramatist more than as a philosopher. His histories were in colonial libraries; his plays were performed; Candide circulated. The part that bears on this article is the toleration argument, which also circulated, and which arrived in a colonial world already working out its own settlements between churches and civil authority.³⁰ None of that makes a French book the source of any American measure, and the surviving record does not support such a claim; what it shows is a set of arguments already under way on both sides of the ocean, reaching the same conclusion about the civil power and the conscience.
The personal encounter came late and is well attested. In February 1778, Benjamin Franklin, then in Paris negotiating the French alliance, called on Voltaire, who had returned to the city after nearly thirty years away and was being received like a monarch. Franklin brought his grandson and asked for a blessing. Voltaire put his hands on the boy’s head and pronounced two words, God and liberty, and mentioned the scene in a letter of his own a few days later. In April the two men were made to embrace in front of the Académie des sciences, and the room wept. Whether the blessing was given in French or English is not established.³¹
Rousseau’s American reception is thinner and more selective. The standard study of it, which surveys libraries, booksellers, newspapers, college curricula, and political pamphlets, finds him present but finds the presence weighted toward Émile, Julie, and the writings on music and education rather than toward the Social Contract, and finds the political work cited far less often than a modern reader would expect.³² The men who quoted him in the 1770s were as likely to be quoting the educational theorist as the theorist of sovereignty.
Which is the point at which a familiar claim has to be corrected rather than repeated. It is often said that the founders chose Locke over Rousseau. The counting does not support the shape of that sentence. The broad citation study of American political literature between 1760 and 1805 ranks Locke well behind Montesquieu and Blackstone among European writers, and the study’s own author concluded that no single European writer and no single tradition dominated. Whatever the founders did, they did not sit down with two French books and choose between them. They were reading a great deal, unevenly, and taking what fit arguments they were already having.³³
What can be said is more discerning. The parts of each man that Americans encountered, and that fit arguments already under way on their side of the ocean, were Voltaire’s case against persecution and Rousseau’s case that legitimate authority derives from the consent of those bound by it. What found little evident purchase in the surviving record was the rest of each man: not Voltaire’s enlightened absolutism, which had nothing to offer a people about to depose a king, and not Rousseau’s unrepresentable sovereign, which had nothing to offer a people about to build a system of representation and then defend it.
What the Revolution Made of Them
Both men died in 1778, five weeks apart, eleven years before the Estates-General met. Everything commonly said about their responsibility for what followed concerns a period neither of them saw, and the honest version of it is a story about reading rather than a story about causes.
Begin with what is documented.
Maximilien Robespierre invoked Rousseau by name and in public. A manuscript exists in which he addresses Rousseau directly, claims to have seen him in his last days, and describes the encounter as a source of pride. On May 7, 1794, he presented a report to the Convention on the relation of religious and moral ideas to republican principles, and out of it came a decree establishing a state cult of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, inaugurated with a national festival on June 8 that he led in person. The content of that creed tracks the Savoyard vicar’s profession of faith and the civil religion of the Social Contract closely enough that the connection does not need arguing.³⁴
Now the qualifications.
The manuscript in which Robespierre claims the meeting with Rousseau is of uncertain date, its authenticity has been questioned on the physical character of the document, and it first reached print in 1830 in memoirs now regarded as apocryphal before being reprinted five years later. It may be genuine. It is not the sort of evidence on which a chain of causation should rest.³⁵
A much-quoted sentence from that period of his speeches is not Rousseau’s doctrine. In the report on the principles of political morality, delivered to the Convention on February 5, 1794, he said that the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, and in time of revolution both virtue and terror — virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue is powerless. The category he is using there is the spring of a government, the passion that sets a particular form in motion, and the doctrine that the spring of a popular government is virtue belongs to the magistrate of Bordeaux whose book the previous article in this series examined at length. Robespierre took the framework from the man the Americans quoted more than any other European writer, and added the second term himself.³⁶
That observation is not offered as a counter-accusation. It is offered because it shows what the method costs. If a book of 1748 is not answerable for a policy of 1794, then a book of 1762 requires an argument before it can be, and the argument has to be made from evidence about how it was read.
The evidence exists, and it was gathered by someone who went looking through the pamphlets, books, and reported speeches of the revolutionary decades to see who invoked Rousseau, for what, and with what understanding of him. The findings are these: a cult of Rousseau did arise from 1789 onward; most of the writers on the revolutionary side who invoked his name did so in order to advance positions of their own, often flatly contradicting what he had written; the Social Contract was not widely read in those years; and those revolutionaries who did study it were frequently critical of what they found.³⁷ The book was taken up after the Revolution was already running, and taken up as a sanction for what was already being done.
The scholarly argument about this is genuinely open and both sides of it are serious. One tradition, running through the middle of the twentieth century and still well represented, holds that the Social Contract supplies the pattern of a politics in which a claim to embody the whole people licenses the suppression of anyone outside it. The opposing tradition holds that the Jacobins used Rousseau as a flag rather than a manual, that the doctrine of an unrepresentable sovereign was precisely what the Convention violated in every act it took, and that reading 1794 back into 1762 mistakes an appropriation for a derivation.³⁸
This article does not settle it, and says so rather than pretending to. What it will not do is state the chain as though the question were closed. The distance between a book and a scaffold is filled with people making choices, and every one of those people is responsible for the choice he made.
There is one further matter, which is a matter of vocabulary. It is tempting to describe the general will with twentieth-century words. The temptation should be resisted, because those words carry a theory of the state, mass parties, modern policing, and a technology of surveillance that no eighteenth-century writer could have imagined and none of them was describing. What can be said in period terms is enough: Rousseau told his sovereign what it must not do, and held that the sovereign owed its subjects no guarantee that it would abstain.
The Honest Reckoning
The Advocate at Court
The man who taught Europe to be ashamed of persecution spent three years at the court of Frederick of Prussia on a pension, a chamberlain’s key, and a decoration, having gone there to be the philosopher of a philosopher-king. It ended in a quarrel over a satire he had promised not to publish and did, which the king had burned by the hangman in Berlin. He returned the key, the decoration, and the pension, left Potsdam in March 1753, and was detained for weeks at Frankfurt on the king’s orders over the manuscript of the king’s own poems. They resumed corresponding within a year and kept it up for the rest of their lives.³⁹
He also corresponded for fifteen years with Catherine of Russia, addressed her in terms no reader can defend, and supported her intervention in Poland on the ground that the Polish confederates were persecutors of religious dissidents — which they were. As the partition was being arranged, he wrote to her in congratulatory terms. A historian of the episode, writing about the reaction across Europe, called them the most ambiguous of congratulations, which is generous.⁴⁰
The pattern is consistent and it is not hypocrisy, which is the easy word for it. He believed that reform came from above, that the way to stop a parlement from breaking a man on a wheel was to have the sovereign overrule it, and that a writer’s business was to get the sovereign’s ear. The Calas judgment was reversed by the Royal Council, which is to say by the king’s own men, and the method worked. It also committed him to flattering whoever held the power he wanted used, and he flattered them.
The Writing on the Judaism
Across forty years he produced a body of writing about Jewish persons and Judaism that is hostile, repetitive, and in places contemptuous of a kind that does not reduce to the manners of his century. A passage often quoted against him, an article under the heading of Jews, does not belong to the Dictionnaire philosophique as he published it; it was assembled into the posthumous Kehl edition of 1784, and citing it to him directly is an error that most popular accounts make. But the authentic texts are extensive enough without it — a treatise on the Jews of 1756, the sections on their history in the Essai sur les mœurs, and passages scattered through the philosophical writings.⁴¹
Scholars have read this in sharply different ways, and the disagreement is worth setting out rather than resolving. One influential account holds that a secular hostility toward Jewish persons was manufactured inside the Enlightenment rather than inherited from Christian theology, and that he is its principal author. Another holds that his attacks on Hebrew antiquity are attacks on the scriptural foundation of Christianity, aimed past Jewish persons at the Church, and that reading them as racial doctrine misses the target. A third holds that whatever the intention, the writing marks the boundary of his toleration and shows what his universalism could not include. A recent monograph on the question takes the last position.⁴²
One finding in that literature is that later writers hostile to Jews cited him frequently while writers sympathetic to them almost never did; whether that shows derivation or only a convenient stock of phrases is disputed by the same scholars who report it. Whether a writer is answerable for what later men do with his pages is precisely the question already refused a cheap answer in the other direction, and the refusal has to hold in both. What can be stated without any hedging at all is that the man who spent three years of his life and a great deal of his money on a broken Protestant merchant wrote, about another minority, pages that people who wanted a different minority broken were glad to find. Both sentences are true. Neither cancels the other, and holding them together is harder than saying either one alone.
Five Children, and the Man Who Told
By his own account, Rousseau and Thérèse Levasseur had five children, and each was carried to the hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris within days of birth, the first late in 1746. Their births and their individual fates are not independently documented; what is known is that foundling mortality in that city was appalling and that it is unlikely more than one of the five reached adulthood. He acknowledged the abandonment in his correspondence, in the Confessions, and in the Rêveries, and defended it, excused it, and finally repented of it at different points across thirty years.⁴³
The author of Émile wrote in the first book of it that a man who cannot fulfill the duties of a father has no right to become one, and that whoever fails in them will long shed bitter tears and never find consolation.⁴⁴ The distance between the sentence and the conduct is as wide as it looks.
Two things stop it from becoming the article’s argument.
The first is that a biographical failure does not refute a book. If the argument of Émile is wrong, it is wrong for reasons in the text, and a series that reached for the foundling hospital instead of the reasoning would be doing what it has refused to do with every figure it has examined.
The second is who published it. The pamphlet that told Europe, eight pages, anonymous, printed in Geneva in the last week of December 1764, is generally attributed to Voltaire, who denounced it while very probably having written it. Rousseau suspected a friend, then suspected everyone, and began the Confessions in part to answer it. So the exposure that has shadowed his reputation for two and a half centuries was an act of literary warfare by Voltaire, conducted anonymously, in the middle of a fight about Geneva.⁴⁵
One of the century’s most searching accounts of how people become unfree, and one of its most effective campaigns against judicial cruelty, were produced by two men who spent their last years at war with each other in print.
The Distinction and the Missing Judge
The last item belongs to the text rather than the life.
Rousseau saw what a government can do to a person as clearly as anyone writing in his century, and he armed his republic against it. The assemblies can dismiss a government. The tribunate can block one, and can also hold the people off the government or keep the balance between them, so it is not a device pointed in a single direction.
What he does not clearly commit to any independent officer is the question of which acts are which. He is not careless about the danger. He sees the case exactly: once a matter turns on one man rather than on all men, on a point no general convention has already regulated, there is no law to govern it and no judge to decide it, and the public is one of the parties. His answer is to say what such an act is not. It is not sovereignty; it is magistracy wearing the sovereign’s room. That settles the terminology and leaves the practical question standing, because he does not expressly say who is to announce that the reclassification has occurred, and on what may be demanded of a citizen he makes the sovereign the sole judge. A reader who has watched an assembly convince itself that its enemies are not really part of the people will see the difficulty. The assembly will not be calling itself a magistrate. The previous article closed on a device for arresting power. This one closes on a distinction with no one clearly charged to draw it, in the work of a writer who cared about the outcome quite as much.
The Skeptic’s Case
The Fork Is a Shape Chosen in Advance
The strongest objection is to the article rather than to either man, and it is that the divergence it is built on was decided before the evidence was read.
Two writers of the same language and the same decades are sorted into a bright road and a dark one. One is assigned toleration, limits on power, and the American inheritance. The other is assigned the general will, the guillotine, and everything the series disapproves of. The sorting is then presented as something the period contained rather than something the sorter supplied.
The objection is sharpened by what the scholarship actually says. There is a well-known argument that the Enlightenment divided into two incompatible strains, and its author puts both of these men on the same side of his line, classing one as comparatively conservative and the other as the exemplar of the moderate mainstream. There is a second well-known argument that separates a French road from a British and an American one, and it too is contested. So the constructions available in the literature do not divide Voltaire from Rousseau, and a reader is entitled to ask where the division here came from if not from the conclusion it was wanted for.⁴⁶
Three things can be said in reply.
The first is a concession. The bright road and the dark road is not a finding and it is not offered here as one. What the Scottish arc of this series established, and said at the time, was a difference of method rather than of virtue. The writers in Paris took an institution and demanded that it account for itself. The writers in Edinburgh took a human being and asked what he was observably like, then studied how people in groups had arrived at the arrangements they had. That difference is documented and it matters. It is also a difference between two countries, and it does not run between these two Frenchmen, who used the same tools and detested each other for reasons that had nothing to do with method.
The second is that the divergence actually asserted here is narrow and textual. One writer located the protection of a person in limits on what authority may reach. The other located it in the identity of the ruler and the ruled, stated real limits on what a sovereign act may be, built real defenses against the magistrates, and did not clearly assign the application of those limits to any independent body. That is a difference in the text, available to any reader, and it is the difference that bears on the problem Americans were about to face.
The third is that the men themselves are the evidence for the fork. They did not need a later historian to set them against each other. They did it themselves, in public, at length, in print, for twenty years.
Rousseau Is Not the Enemy He Has Been Made
The second objection is that the libertarian tradition has built a villain out of this man and that the villain does not survive contact with the book.
Concede the particulars. The general will is not reducible to majority preference, and he says so; under the conditions he lays down, however, the counting of votes is how citizens declare it. The forcing to be free is a claim about being bound by law rather than by a person, and the alternative he is arguing against is not liberty but personal domination — the condition of owing obedience to a man who can change his mind. He is a fierce opponent of slavery in every form, including the doctrine that a people may contract itself into subjection. He is among the century’s most serious critics of a dependence in which one person’s living comes from another person’s favor. A tradition that cares about being ruled arbitrarily has more in common with him than it likes to admit, and the caricature has done a great deal of work for people who never opened the book.
The reply is not that the caricature is accurate. It is that the objection, pressed all the way, leaves the difficulty standing. A doctrine can name the right limits, and arm the people against their magistrates, and still leave unanswered who decides whether a given act falls inside them — and the hardest form of that difficulty is stated by Rousseau himself, not imported from outside. The reason to read him is that he saw the problem and bounded his sovereign against it. The reason to be careful with him is that on what may be required of a citizen he made the sovereign sole judge, and on the rest he did not expressly identify who would make the classification. Good intentions in a design are not a safeguard, and this series has said the same thing about writers it admires more.
Voltaire Is a Poor Ancestor for a Series About Liberty
The third objection has been coming since the opening pages.
He doubted the capacity of most people to govern themselves. He wanted reform imposed from above and courted the autocrats who could impose it. He accepted pensions, offices, and decorations from princes. He wrote things about a minority that have already been named here at full strength. Where he did defend a republic, the citizen body he had in mind was small, propertied, and nothing like the electorate any modern reader has in view.
All of that is true and the concession should be complete. He is a thin ancestor of self-government and the founders did not take him for a full one.
The parallel American argument was more specific, and it was real. In Virginia it held that the civil power has no business in a person’s conscience and should reach a belief only when the belief issues in acts against peace and good order, and Virginia put that into statute in 1786, eight years after he died, in the hands of people who would have found his politics insufferable.⁴⁷ The resemblance does not show that anyone took it from him. It shows that the proposition survives its author, which is the only claim being made here. An argument is not the property of its author’s character, which is fortunate, because if it were, this series would have very little to work with.
Two Graves in the Panthéon
Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778. The curé of Saint-Sulpice would not bury him, and his body was taken out of the city in his own carriage to the abbey of Scellières in Champagne, where the prior examined the papers presented to him and conducted the burial with the usual offices; the prohibition from his bishop arrived afterward.⁴⁸ Rousseau died at Ermenonville on July 2, thirty-three days later, and was buried on a small island planted with poplars, which became a place of pilgrimage almost at once.
Thirteen years later the National Assembly had Voltaire’s remains brought to Paris and placed in the deconsecrated church of Sainte-Geneviève, renamed the Panthéon and dedicated to the great men of a grateful country. Three years after that, by a decree the Montagnards passed and the men who overthrew them carried out, Rousseau was brought there too. They lie a few yards apart, claimed by a revolution neither of them lived to see, honored by men who had read them selectively and by men who had not read them at all.
The durable arguments associated with each are smaller than the monuments suggest and have outlasted them. From the one, that a government has no jurisdiction over what a person believes. From the other, that authority is legitimate only where those bound by it have consented. Neither man supplied what the Americans still lacked, which was a way to hold both propositions at once in a working government — consent that could be organized across a continent, and limits that would hold when the consenting majority wanted them not to.
They would not find it in France. They had been building it for a hundred and fifty years on their own side of the ocean, in town meetings, colonial assemblies, and charters rooted in British colonial practice rather than in any Parisian argument. In the same woodlands, five nations had bound themselves together under a law of peace without a king, on terms that Americans would later argue about at length. That is where the next article goes, and it is where the European arcs of this series end.
This is the road to 1776.
Self-Reflection Prompts
The campaign that saved the Calas name worked by persuading a king’s council to overrule a court. The remedy required a sovereign willing to be persuaded. Think of an injustice you believe is being done now. Does your preferred remedy depend on someone in authority choosing to act well, and what happens to your remedy if that person declines?
The general will is defined as the will citizens have when they ask what the law of their common life should be rather than what each of them wants out of it. Recall a decision made by a group you belong to. Could you tell, at the time, which of the two questions the group was actually answering, and what would have told you?
Voltaire held that ordinary people were unfit to govern themselves and worked to reform them from above. Where do you hold that view about people who are not you, and what would they have to do to change your mind?
The exposure that has shadowed one man’s reputation for two hundred and fifty years was published anonymously by his rival in the middle of a quarrel. When you have learned something damaging about a person, how often have you asked who told you and what they stood to gain?
The Liberty Test. One of these men argued that authority must be limited in what it may reach. The other argued that authority is legitimate when the ruled and the rulers are the same people. Take a rule you live under that was adopted by a genuine majority and that restricts what you may do with your own property or your own time. Does the fact of consent settle whether it leaves you more free or more governed, and if not, what does?
Endnotes
Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance à l’occasion de la mort de Jean Calas (1763), ch. 23, the prayer to God. Quoted here in the English of the Cambridge Texts edition, Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings, ed. Simon Harvey, trans. Brian Masters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); the epigraph joins the opening of the prayer to a phrase from its close and marks the omission. No page pinpoint is asserted.
On the sentence of March 9, 1762, the execution on March 10, the judicial torture that preceded it, and Calas’s refusal to confess, see Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Jean Calas”; and the account of the proceedings in Ken Armstrong, “Broken on the Wheel,” The Paris Review, March 13, 2015, drawn from the trial record. Breaking on the wheel is described here as the sentence prescribed it: the condemned bound to a wheel, the limbs broken with an iron bar, followed by strangulation and the burning of the body.
On the death of Marc-Antoine Calas on October 13, 1761, the family’s initial account, the religious composition of the household, the confiscation of the property, the placing of the daughters in a convent of the Visitation, and the sons’ escape to Geneva and the family’s subsequent movements, see the Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “The Calas Case,” and the entry “Calas, Jean,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, reproduced at Encyclopedia.com. The two accounts differ on who reached Geneva: the older entry names the sons Pierre and Donat, the later one the widow and her sons. The narrower claim is given here. Voltaire’s correspondence of June 1762 already has Mme Calas in Paris pressing her case, and does not show him escorting her there. On the annual Toulouse commemoration and the atmosphere of the city, see the Musée protestant notice on the Calas affair.
The Royal Council annulled the judgment on June 4, 1764, and the review declared Calas innocent on March 9, 1765; the property was restored and Louis XV sent money to the widow. Sources differ on the number of judges who sat on the review, giving forty or fifty; no figure is asserted here. Sources also differ on the sum paid to the family. For Voltaire’s own account of why he took the case, see his letter to the comte d’Argental of 1762, quoted in Edna Nixon, “Voltaire and the Calas Case 1761–1765,” History Today 7, no. 8 (August 1957).
On the licensing system, the royal privilege, the censors, and the illegal trade that supplied France from presses in Amsterdam, Geneva, Neuchâtel, and Rouen, see Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), and Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Darnton’s Forbidden Best-Sellers is also the source for the middle ground between privilege and prohibition: tacit permissions and tolerated printings ran to a substantial share of the trade, and no figure for them is asserted here. The lettre de cachet is described in the body as an order under the king’s private seal committing a named person without charge, trial, or stated term. The Encyclopédie ran to twenty-eight volumes in its main body — seventeen of text, published between 1751 and 1765, and eleven of plates, published between 1762 and 1772 — with supplements and index volumes issued afterward by other hands; the Royal Council suppressed the first two volumes in 1752, the parlement of Paris condemned the work and the royal privilege was revoked in 1759, and the later text volumes carried a false Neuchâtel imprint. See the ARTFL Encyclopédie project, University of Chicago, and Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Encyclopédie.”
On the constitution of the Genevan republic, the councils, the distinction between citizens, bourgeois, natives, and inhabitants, and the standing of the church establishment and the consistory, see Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). No population figure is asserted here.
On the birth in 1694, the Jesuit education, the eleven months in the Bastille from 1717, the Rohan affair of 1726, and the release on condition of exile, see the Voltaire Foundation, “About Voltaire,” and J. B. Shank, “Voltaire,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
On the London publication of Letters concerning the English Nation in 1733, the French Lettres philosophiques of 1734, the order of the parlement of Paris on June 10, 1734 for the public burning, the lettre de cachet, and the retreat to Cirey, see Voltaire Foundation, “About Voltaire”; Shank, “Voltaire,” SEP; and the contemporary account of the burning in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice reproduced in Will Durant, The Age of Voltaire (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), ch. on the Lettres. On the legal position of the dissenting congregations Voltaire observed, the Toleration Act of 1689 exempted most Protestant dissenters from the penalties for non-attendance and permitted worship in meeting houses registered with the authorities, while the Test and Corporation Acts continued to bar dissenters from office; the exemption did not extend to Catholics or to anti-Trinitarians. See the survey of dissenting legislation compiled by the Dissenting Academies project, Queen Mary University of London. The point for the text is the contrast with France, where Protestant worship had no legal standing at all after 1685.
Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance (1763), chs. 1–14, for the Calas narrative and the historical arguments; chs. 8–10 for the treatment of Roman practice and the martyr literature. Harvey and Masters edition as above. No page pinpoints are asserted.
Traité sur la tolérance, ch. 23.
On the use of écrasez l’infâme in the correspondence from the 1750s onward, and on the adjective applied to superstition, persecution, and fanaticism, see the survey of the phrase’s occurrences in the Besterman correspondence summarized in Durant, The Age of Voltaire, ch. 22. On the disputed referent, and on Voltaire’s deism and his quarrel with the atheists of the d’Holbach circle, see René Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire (Paris: Nizet, 1956), the standard treatment; and Sabina Kruszyńska, “Écrasez l’infâme: Voltaire’s Philosophy of Religion,” Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica 16, no. 1 (2015): 125–37.
On the Sirven case and Voltaire’s commentary on Beccaria, see Shank, “Voltaire,” SEP, section on the Ferney years. For the charges against the chevalier de La Barre, the failure to uncover before the procession, and the burning of the Dictionnaire philosophique with the body, see Voltaire, Relation de la mort du chevalier de La Barre, composed in 1766–67, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 63B, critical edition by Robert Granderoute (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008). The particulars of the indictment entered this article on the auditor’s inspection; the drafting thread has not read the trial record.
Voltaire, Idées républicaines, published anonymously and undated and generally assigned to late 1765, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, vol. 24 (Paris: Garnier, 1879); the pamphlet responds in part to the burning of the Social Contract at Geneva and to the constitutional struggle there, holds that a perfect government is impossible and that a republic approaches natural equality most nearly, defends the liberty of publication, and argues for a wider role for the Genevan citizen body on a property qualification. See Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 214–19 and Appendix II, which establishes the attribution and the dating and treats the pamphlet’s relation to Voltaire’s private memorandum on Geneva. Gay is also the standard treatment of Voltaire’s preference for reform imposed from above; this article states that preference and does not adopt Gay’s defense of it.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing as S. G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire (London: John Murray, 1906), ch. 7, “Helvétius: The Contradiction,” at pp. 198–99, where the sentence appears in quotation marks as a characterization of Voltaire’s attitude to the burning of Helvétius’s De l’esprit in 1759. Hall stated in the Saturday Review, May 11, 1935, p. 13, that she had not meant to imply that Voltaire used the words and would be surprised to find them in his works. The misattribution was popularized by a reprint in Reader’s Digest in June 1934. The page and date references in this note were verified against the reproductions in Quote Investigator, “I Disapprove of What You Say,” and the text of the 1906 edition at Project Gutenberg; the drafting thread did not inspect the 1935 periodical directly.
On the walk to Vincennes in October 1749, the prize question of the Academy of Dijon, and the award of the prize in 1750, see the chronology in The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Christopher Bertram, “Jean Jacques Rousseau,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Chronology from Scott, Major Political Writings, and from the editorial chronology in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), vol. 9: publication of the Social Contract in April 1762 and Émile in May; condemnation of Émile by the parlement of Paris on June 9 with a warrant the same day; the burning of both works at Geneva on June 19 with a warrant there; the pastoral letter of Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont on August 28. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica gives June 11 for the Paris condemnation; the scholarly chronologies are followed here. For the grounds of the Genevan condemnation of both works, described by Rousseau as an attack on Christianity and on all governments, see his Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), first letter.
On the renunciation of Genevan citizenship on May 12, 1763, the Lettres écrites de la montagne of December 1764, the stoning of the house at Môtiers on the night of September 6, 1765, the removal to England in 1766 at Hume’s invitation, the pension obtained from George III and refused, and the public rupture, see Scott, Major Political Writings, chronology; and “Rousseau, Jean Jacques,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, reproduced at Encyclopedia.com. The Hume quarrel is treated in the Scottish arc of this series only by reference.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762), I.1. Quoted and cited throughout from The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Passages are cited by book and chapter; no page pinpoints are asserted.
Du contrat social, I.6 for the statement of the problem and the terms of the association; II.3 for the distinction between the general will and the will of all; IV.2 for the account of what a citizen learns from being outvoted.
Du contrat social, III.15.
Du contrat social, I.7. The formulation was quoted in the closing passage of the previous article in this series and is developed rather than introduced here. The French is qu’on le forcera à être libre.
Du contrat social, II.4, titled in English translation “The Limits of the Sovereign Power,” for the statement that sovereign power cannot exceed the limits of the general conventions, for the requirement that acts of sovereignty be general in object, and for the rule that the sovereign may not burden one subject more than another; II.6 for the generality of law; III.1 for the distinction between sovereign and government. The statement that the sovereign requires no guarantee toward its subjects is at I.7. II.4 also contains the passage relied on here for the absence of a law and a judge in a dispute over a particular fact or right not already regulated by a general convention, and the reclassification that follows it: a people that exercises the functions of government by particular decrees, as Rousseau says the Athenians did, no longer has a general will in the strict sense and acts no longer as sovereign but as magistrate. The same chapter makes the sovereign sole judge of what services matter enough to be demanded of a citizen.
Du contrat social, III.18, titled in English translation for the means of preventing usurpations of the government, for the periodic assemblies and the two standing questions put at each; III.14 for the suspension of the government’s jurisdiction while the assembly sits and for the inviolability of the least citizen during it; IV.5 for the tribunate as preserver of the laws and of the legislative power, for its capacity to prevent rather than to act, and for its standing outside the constitution and its liability to suspension without the constitution being affected.
Du contrat social, II.7.
Du contrat social, IV.8, for the articles of the civil profession of faith, the power of banishment, and the provision for one who has publicly professed the dogmas and then acts as though he does not believe them.
John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, Part I (1672), act I, scene 1, for the first appearance of the phrase in English. On the absence of the phrase from Rousseau and on the nineteenth-century construction of the association, see Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), exordium to Part One. Cited from The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The instruction to set the facts aside, and the charge that previous writers described social man while speaking of savage man, are both in that passage.
Discours sur l’inégalité, opening of Part Two.
Voltaire to Rousseau, August 30, 1755, acknowledging the second Discourse. The drafting thread has not inspected the letter in the Besterman correspondence; the wording is paraphrased here rather than quoted, and the date is given as it appears in the standard accounts of the exchange.
On Voltaire’s presence in colonial and early republican America — library holdings, booksellers’ stock, performance of the plays, newspaper reprinting, and the quotation of the toleration argument in American religious-liberty controversy — see Paul Merrill Spurlin, The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), ch. 8, and Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969), for the comparative thinness of the Rousseau material. Spurlin finds the histories the most widely held of Voltaire’s works in the libraries he surveyed, with Candide appearing only rarely and the toleration essay infrequently; no ranking of the toleration argument’s reach is asserted here, and no figures from either survey are quoted, the tables not having been consulted directly. The chapter locator was corrected in audit.
Voltaire to the abbé Gaultier, February 21, 1778, in which Voltaire reports having blessed the grandson of Franklin with the words God and liberty. On the visit of February 1778, the public embrace at the Académie des sciences on April 29, 1778, and the question whether the blessing was pronounced in French or English, see Paul Merrill Spurlin, The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), ch. 2, which treats the language of the invocation as unsettled.
Paul Merrill Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969), the standard survey of the American reception, which examines library holdings, booksellers’ advertisements, newspapers, college curricula, and political writing. The weighting of the American presence toward the educational and literary works rather than the Social Contract is Spurlin’s finding; no figures are given here, the tables not having been consulted directly.
Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (1984): 189–97, discussed at length in the previous article in this series. The ranking of Montesquieu and Blackstone ahead of Locke, and the conclusion that no one European writer or tradition dominated, are Lutz’s.
On the report of 18 Floréal Year II, May 7, 1794, on the relation of religious and moral ideas to republican principles, and the decree establishing the cult of the Supreme Being, see Paul H. Beik, ed., The French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1970), document 42, which translates the printed report. On the festival of 20 Prairial Year II, June 8, 1794, see Jonathan Smyth, Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), which argues against the older reading of the festival as a merely compulsory political event. On the relation of the creed to the profession of faith of the Savoyard vicar in Émile, Book IV, and to Du contrat social, IV.8, see Michel Vovelle, La Révolution contre l’Église: De la raison à l’Être suprême (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1988).
On the Dédicace aux mânes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its uncertain date, the questions raised about the manuscript, and its first appearance in print in 1830 in memoirs regarded as apocryphal before its reprinting in the 1835 Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères, see Paul Gossart, “Robespierre, lecteur de Rousseau dans la Révolution” (2015), which sets out the transmission history and the grounds on which the manuscript has been questioned. Hector Fleischmann, Charlotte Robespierre et ses mémoires (Paris, 1910), treats the text as authentic on stylistic grounds. This article treats the claimed meeting as unestablished.
Maximilien Robespierre, Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale, delivered on 17 Pluviôse Year II, February 5, 1794, according to the parliamentary record, and printed by order of the Convention under a heading giving 18 Pluviôse. Translated in Beik, The French Revolution, document 40, and at the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity archive of the Center for History and New Media. The formulation renders ressort, the spring or mainspring of a government, which is Montesquieu’s category at The Spirit of Laws, III.1, and the doctrine that virtue is the principle of a popular government is Montesquieu’s at III.3. For Montesquieu’s standing in the American citation count, see Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” cited in full elsewhere in these notes; the ranking is his finding and not this article’s. This article asserts that Robespierre used Montesquieu’s framework, which is evident on the face of the text, and asserts no claim about Montesquieu’s responsibility for what was built on it.
Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762–1791, University of London Historical Studies XVII (London: Athlone Press, 1965; reissued London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). The findings stated here — the growth of a revolutionary cult of Rousseau from 1789, the use of his name by writers advancing positions contradicting his own, the limited readership of the Social Contract in those years, and the critical response of those revolutionaries who did study it — are those of the published summary of the book’s argument. The drafting thread has not consulted the underlying survey of pamphlets and reported speeches.
For the reading that traces a politics of the embodied whole to the Social Contract, see J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952), and, in a different idiom, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s essay in The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). For the reading that treats the Jacobin use of Rousseau as appropriation rather than derivation, see McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, and Dunn’s introductory essay in the same volume. The two positions are printed between the same covers in the Dunn edition, which is a fair indication of the state of the argument.
On the invitation to Potsdam, the pension, the chamberlain’s key and the order, the Diatribe du docteur Akakia against Maupertuis and its burning by the hangman in Berlin, the return of the honors, the departure from Potsdam on March 26, 1753, and the detention at Frankfurt from the end of May over the manuscript of Frederick’s poems, see Shank, “Voltaire,” SEP; Voltaire Foundation, “Voltaire and Life Writing”; and Durant, The Age of Voltaire, ch. on Potsdam. On the resumption of the correspondence, see the Voltaire Foundation’s notes on the Frederick letters.
Voltaire to Catherine II, May 29, 1772, in W. F. Reddaway, ed., Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 162. The characterization of the letter as the most ambiguous of congratulations is D. B. Horn’s, in “Great Britain and Poland, 1762–72,” Cambridge Historical Journal 4, no. 3 (1934). The letter precedes the partition treaty of August 5, 1772. On the religious dissidents in Poland as the stated ground of Russian intervention, see the same article. This article asserts nothing about Voltaire’s financial dealings with either sovereign beyond the Prussian pension named above.
On the article “Juifs” as an addition of the posthumous Kehl edition of 1784 rather than a part of the Dictionnaire philosophique as Voltaire published it, and on the authentic texts — Des Juifs (1756) and the treatment of Jewish history in the Essai sur les mœurs — see Marco Piazza, Voltaire Against the Jews, or the Limits of Toleration (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), introduction and conclusion.
Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), for the argument that secular hostility to Jews was formed within the Enlightenment and that Voltaire is its principal source. Pierre Aubery, “Voltaire et les Juifs: ironie et démystification,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24 (1963): 67–79, and “Voltaire and Antisemitism: A Reply to Hertzberg,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 217 (1983): 177–82, for the reading of the passages as directed past the Jews at Christianity. Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 12, for the argument that the hostility marks the boundary of the toleration doctrine itself. Piazza, Voltaire Against the Jews, is a recent monograph taking the last position. On Voltaire’s citation by later hostile writers and the difficulty of inferring derivation from citation, see the discussion in Piazza’s introduction.
Graeme Garrard, “Children of the State: Rousseau’s Republican Educational Theory and Child Abandonment,” History of Education 50, no. 2 (2021): 147–60, for the placement of all five children in a foundling hospital, for the dating of the first to late 1746, for the foundling mortality of the period, and for the argument that the charge of hypocrisy is unfair once Rousseau’s theory of public education is taken as a whole. For the systematic treatment of Rousseau’s own successive accounts — an analytical table of nineteen rationales in five types, the documents of 1751 and 1778 that defend the abandonment, the oscillation around the Confessions, and the later unqualified remorse — see Matthew D. Mendham, “Rousseau’s Discarded Children: The Panoply of Excuses and the Question of Hypocrisy,” History of European Ideas 41, no. 1 (2015): 131–52, which takes a middle position between those who read the episode as unchecked subjectivism and those who absolve it. See also Rousseau to the duchesse de Luxembourg, June 12, 1761, in Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh, vol. 9. An earlier version of this note credited Garrard’s article to Mendham; the error was caught in audit. The births and individual fates of the children are not independently documented and the text says so.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762), Book I, for the statement that a man who cannot fulfill the duties of a father has no right to become one and that whoever fails in them will long shed bitter tears without consolation. Cited from The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 13, ed. and trans. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), and Œuvres complètes, vol. 4, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1959–95). No page pinpoint is asserted; the passage is identified by book.
Le Sentiment des citoyens, eight pages, published anonymously at Geneva in the last week of December 1764; the attribution to Voltaire is general in the scholarship though not formally proved, and Voltaire denounced the pamphlet. See the edition of Frédéric Eigeldinger (Geneva: Slatkine; Paris: Champion, 1997); Garrard, “Children of the State,” which records the attribution and the denial; and Matthew D. Mendham, Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau: The Jean-Jacques Problem (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 206 n. 6, for the date of publication. Rousseau’s reply is printed in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 12.
Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), for the division between a radical and a moderate Enlightenment, in which Voltaire stands with the moderates and Rousseau is treated as comparatively conservative. The thesis is contested; for a critical assessment see Omri Boehm, review of Democratic Enlightenment, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2012.02.06, which confirms that Israel’s moderate list includes Voltaire, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Knopf, 2004), separates a French road from a British and an American one, and argues that the French road led toward the guillotine and beyond it. For a critical assessment see Stephen Howe’s review in New Humanist, May 8, 2008, which calls the book one-sided and dismissive of alternative readings. No claim is made here about how far either construction has been taken up in the field.
An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia in January 1786 and preserved at Virginia Code § 57-1, which bars compulsion in religion and confines the civil magistrate to acts against peace and good order rather than opinions. The statute is named here only to show that the proposition outlived Voltaire; no derivation from him is asserted, and the drafting and passage of the statute belong to the American arc of this series.
On the refusal of the curé of Saint-Sulpice and the bishop’s attempted prohibition, see Histoire posthume de Voltaire, pièce 6; on the record that the burial had already taken place, pièce 7; on the transport documents, the papers examined by the prior, and the religious burial at the abbey of Scellières in Champagne, pièce 9. All three in Pièces pour servir à l’histoire posthume de Voltaire, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, vol. 1 (Paris: Garnier, 1883), 429–500. On Rousseau’s death at Ermenonville on July 2, 1778 and his burial on the Île des Peupliers, see the chronology in Scott, Major Political Writings. Voltaire’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon on July 11, 1791 and Rousseau’s on October 11, 1794; see the chronology published by the Centre des monuments nationaux for the Panthéon. The decree ordering Rousseau’s transfer was carried by the Montagnards and executed after Thermidor. The burial-record pinpoints and the transfer dates entered this article on the auditor’s inspection rather than the drafting thread’s.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary Sources
Voltaire. Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings. Edited by Simon Harvey. Translated by Brian Masters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Voltaire. Letters concerning the English Nation. London, 1733.
Voltaire. Lettres philosophiques. 1734.
Voltaire. Idées républicaines. [1765.] In Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Louis Moland, vol. 24. Paris: Garnier, 1879.
Voltaire. Le Sentiment des citoyens. Geneva, 1764. Edited by Frédéric Eigeldinger. Geneva: Slatkine; Paris: Champion, 1997.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Major Political Writings. Translated and edited by John T. Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Collected Writings of Rousseau. Edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Correspondance complète. Edited by R. A. Leigh. Geneva and Madison, WI: Institut et Musée Voltaire and University of Wisconsin.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Lettres écrites de la montagne. 1764.
Robespierre, Maximilien. Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale. Paris, 1794.
Beik, Paul H., ed. The French Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1970.
Reddaway, W. F., ed. Documents of Catherine the Great: The Correspondence with Voltaire and the Instruction of 1767. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931.
Dryden, John. The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards. London, 1672.
Voltaire. Relation de la mort du chevalier de La Barre. [1766–67.] In Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. 63B, critical edition by Robert Granderoute. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008.
Pièces pour servir à l’histoire posthume de Voltaire. In Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Louis Moland, vol. 1, 429–500. Paris: Garnier, 1883.
Hall, Evelyn Beatrice [S. G. Tallentyre]. The Friends of Voltaire. London: John Murray, 1906.
Secondary Works
Aubery, Pierre. “Voltaire and Antisemitism: A Reply to Hertzberg.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 217 (1983): 177–82.
Aubery, Pierre. “Voltaire et les Juifs: ironie et démystification.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 24 (1963): 67–79.
Bertram, Christopher. “Jean Jacques Rousseau.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Dunn, Susan, ed. The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Durant, Will. The Age of Voltaire. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.
Ellingson, Ter. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Fleischmann, Hector. Charlotte Robespierre et ses mémoires. Paris, 1910.
Garrard, Graeme. “Children of the State: Rousseau’s Republican Educational Theory and Child Abandonment.” History of Education 50, no. 2 (2021): 147–60.
Gay, Peter. Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Gossart, Paul. “Robespierre, lecteur de Rousseau dans la Révolution.” Online paper, June 2015. https://www.paulgossart.com/publication/2015-06-robespierre/
Hertzberg, Arthur. The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Horn, D. B. “Great Britain and Poland, 1762–72.” Cambridge Historical Journal 4, no. 3 (1934).
Israel, Jonathan I. Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Kruszyńska, Sabina. “Écrasez l’infâme: Voltaire’s Philosophy of Religion.” Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica 16, no. 1 (2015): 125–37.
Lutz, Donald S. “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought.” American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (1984): 189–97.
McDonald, Joan. Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762–1791. London: Athlone Press, 1965.
Mendham, Matthew D. Hypocrisy and the Philosophical Intentions of Rousseau: The Jean-Jacques Problem. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Mendham, Matthew D. “Rousseau’s Discarded Children: The Panoply of Excuses and the Question of Hypocrisy.” History of European Ideas 41, no. 1 (2015): 131–52.
Nixon, Edna. “Voltaire and the Calas Case 1761–1765.” History Today 7, no. 8 (August 1957).
Piazza, Marco. Voltaire Against the Jews, or the Limits of Toleration. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Pomeau, René. La Religion de Voltaire. Paris: Nizet, 1956.
Rosenblatt, Helena. Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Shank, J. B. “Voltaire.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Smyth, Jonathan. Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
Spurlin, Paul Merrill. Rousseau in America, 1760–1809. University: University of Alabama Press, 1969.
Spurlin, Paul Merrill. The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.
Sutcliffe, Adam. Judaism and Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Talmon, J. L. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. London: Secker and Warburg, 1952.
Vovelle, Michel. La Révolution contre l’Église: De la raison à l’Être suprême. Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1988.
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