Rousseau and Revolution

Summary

Rousseau and Revolution is the tenth volume of The Story of Civilization, published in 1967 by Will and Ariel Durant and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968. Its subtitle describes an unusual double frame: the history of France, England and Germany from 1756, and of the rest of Europe from 1715, to 1789. The volume thus finishes the eighteenth century begun in The Age of Voltaire and brings every region of Europe to the threshold of the French Revolution. Its organizing figure is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom the authors treat as the decisive voice of feeling against the reason of the philosophes. The book opens with a long biography of Rousseau: his Genevan childhood and early wanderings, his years with Madame de Warens, his arrival in Paris, his life with Thérèse Levasseur and the abandonment of their children to the foundling hospital, the prize discourse of 1750 on the arts and sciences, the Discourse on Inequality, the Letter to d'Alembert, Julie, or the New Héloïse, and the twin works of 1762, Émile and The Social Contract. The condemnation of those books in Paris and Geneva begins a period of flight to Môtiers, to England as David Hume's guest, the bitter quarrel that followed, and the return to France, where he wrote the Confessions and the Reveries and died at Ermenonville in 1778. The Durants then move across the continent, surveying Italy and its music, art and scholarship, Pombal's Portugal, Charles III's Spain and the young Goya, the Austria of Maria Theresa and Joseph II with Gluck, Haydn and Mozart, Frederick the Great's Prussia, Catherine the Great's Russia, the partitions of Poland, and Gustavus III's Sweden. A substantial English section covers the age of Samuel Johnson and Boswell, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Wesley's revival, Adam Smith, Burke, Gibbon and the early industrial changes. The German chapters follow Lessing, Herder, Kant's critical philosophy, and the young Goethe and Schiller of the Sturm und Drang. The volume ends in France under Louis XV and Louis XVI: Turgot's and Necker's attempts at reform, Marie Antoinette, the cost of intervention in the American war, the deaths of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the fiscal crisis that forced the summoning of the Estates-General. The authors present Rousseau as a man of genius, self-pity and moral seriousness whose books outran his conduct, and they credit him with reviving religious feeling, reshaping education and supplying a political vocabulary of popular sovereignty to the revolutionaries. They are sympathetic to the reforming monarchs while noting how much power they kept, and they treat the Old Regime as exhausted rather than simply wicked. As with the earlier volumes, this is a synthesis of printed sources for general readers; it should be used to place Rousseau, Johnson, Smith, Burke, Kant and Goethe in context before reading their own works.

Top Lessons

• A teacher of virtue who left his own children

  Rousseau wrote Émile, a treatise on raising a child according to nature, after sending his five infants to the foundling hospital. The Durants report both facts and Rousseau's later remorse. Students can ask how far a writer's conduct bears on the truth of his teaching, and what the Confessions reveal about self-examination without repentance before God.

• Feeling against the philosophes

  The authors present Rousseau's break with Diderot, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists as a revolt of sentiment and conscience against a confident, often irreligious rationalism. His Savoyard vicar defends a religion of the heart without dogma. Students can trace both what this recovered (reverence, simplicity, the dignity of ordinary affections) and what it surrendered (revelation and the Church's authority).

• Reform from the throne

  Frederick II, Catherine II, Joseph II, Charles III and Pombal each attempted reform by royal command. The Durants weigh their tolerance, legal codes and schools against their wars, partitions and police. The comparison helps students ask whether good laws imposed from above can form a people, and why Joseph II's haste failed where more patient reform held.

• Why the Old Regime could not reform itself

  The closing chapters show Turgot and Necker trying to fix French finances against the resistance of parlements, court and tax-exempt orders, and debt mounting from the American war. The Durants present the Revolution as arising from a government that could neither tax nor change. Students should distinguish this fiscal and institutional account from the claim that Rousseau's books caused the Revolution.

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Medical Lens

The volume touches medical history through biography more than through a dedicated chapter. Rousseau's lifelong urinary complaint and his later conviction that a conspiracy surrounded him, especially after the quarrel with Hume, are discussed by the authors and by many later writers; any retrospective label, such as paranoia, is a reading of the evidence and not a diagnosis. Rousseau's mother died soon after his birth, which he describes as the first of his misfortunes. Samuel Johnson's melancholy, scrupulosity and fear of madness, as recorded by Boswell, enter the English chapters. Smallpox, which killed Louis XV in 1774, and the spreading practice of inoculation belong to the period's medical background. Mesmer's animal magnetism in Paris and the royal commission of 1784 that examined it are standard episodes of the 1780s and may be treated in the French chapters. Locators below are by subject and need checking against the printed text.

• Rousseau chapters, childhood and early years

  Rousseau's mother's death following his birth in Geneva, and the bladder ailment that troubled him through his life.

• Rousseau chapters, exile and the quarrel with Hume (1762-1770)

  Rousseau's growing belief in a plot against him, which the authors and later commentators have read in psychological terms.

• English chapters on Samuel Johnson

  Johnson's recurrent melancholy, physical tics and dread of losing his reason, known chiefly through Boswell.

• French chapters on Louis XV's last years and the 1780s

  Louis XV's death from smallpox in 1774, and the vogue for magnetic cures in Paris before the Revolution.