The Cult of Rousseau and the French Revolution
1945; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2707363
ISSN1086-3222
Autores Tópico(s)European Political History Analysis
ResumoThe influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the French Revolution is a familiar theme, and a great deal has been written during the years in attempting to assess that influence. Yet only a few vague and general conclusions have been advanced, and they are subject to serious criticism.' The present essay is only an indirect contribution to that study.2 Influence is one thing; the cult of Rousseau is something else quite different. The study of the latter involves an analysis of the various expressions of devotion to Rousseau and admiration for his writings, which in the second half of the eighteenth century achieved the proportions of a popular cult. In part this cult was an expression of the influence which contemporaries assumed Rousseau had on this period. That supposed influence, if the word influence is used with caution, is not without significance in any precise evaluation of the actual influence which Rousseau may have had, although there can be influence without contemporaries being aware of it. The cult of Rousseau had actually two phases, the one literary and the other political. The distinction is important, and the failure to make it has led students of the subject astray. First in point of time, and reaching its climax in the decade before the Revolution, was the literary cult, in which Rousseau was admired and honored, not for the Contrat social, but for the Nouvelle Heloise and the ]'mile. The Nouvelle Heloise, a long and sentimental novel of passionate love and marital devotion, was published in 1761; and there were more than forty editions of the book before JeanJacques' death thirteen years later, and more than seventy before the turn of the century.3 The almost as famous Ermile, a treatise on education and religion, was published in 1762. These dates mark the beginning of the literary cult. Readers of these two books found in them something for which they had been groping, something which Rousseau's rationalist
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