By the time Rousseau arrived in Paris in the mid-1740s, he had, in an itinerant early career across Europe, already toiled in various subordinate positions: as an apprentice engraver in Geneva; a footman in Turin, tutor in Lyons and secretary in Venice. In Paris in 1745 he started living with a near-illiterate seamstress, who bore him five children, while making his first tentative forays into the city’s salons, the focal point of the French Enlightenment, where the commercial society was theorized and promoted by freethinking men (and a few women), and in which Rousseau turned out to have no real place.
One of his earliest acquaintances in Paris was Denis Diderot, a fellow provincial who was committed to making the most of that decade’s relatively free intellectual climate. As a frequent contributor to the Encyclopédie, publishing nearly four hundred articles, many of them on politics and music, Rousseau appeared to have joined in the collective endeavour of France’s ambitious rising class. But Rousseau, who had felt material deprivation, class divisions and social injustice more keenly than the other upstarts, was developing his own views on the good life proposed by them.
On the afternoon of October 1749, Rousseau was travelling to see Diderot, who had been imprisoned in a fortress at Vincennes outside Paris for authoring a tract that challenged the existence of God. Reading a newspaper on the way, Rousseau noticed an advertisement for a prize essay competition. The topic was: ‘Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?’ In his autobiography, Confessions, Rousseau recalled: ‘The moment I read this I beheld another universe and became another man.’ He had to, he claims, sit down by the roadside, and he spent the next hour in a trance, drenching his coat in tears.
This epiphany may not have been quite so histrionically received; Rousseau may have already started to formulate his heresies. Nevertheless, he boldly declared in his prize-winning contribution to the essay contest that contrary to what the Enlightenment philosophes claimed about the civilizing and liberating effects of progress, it was leading to new forms of enslavement. The arts and sciences, he wrote, were merely ‘garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh us down’. In fact, ‘our minds have been corrupted in proportion’ as human knowledge has improved. ‘Civilized man,’ he argued, ‘is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life man is imprisoned by our institutions.’
It isn’t just that the strong exploit the weak; the powerless themselves are prone to enviously imitate the powerful. But people who try to make more of themselves than others end up trying to dominate others, forcing them into positions of inferiority and deference. The lucky few on top remain insecure, exposed to the envy and malice of the also-rans. The latter use all means available to them to realize their unfulfilled cravings while making sure to veil them with a show of civility, even benevolence.
In Rousseau’s bleak vision, ‘sincere friendship, real esteem and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform.’ This pathological inner life was a devastating ‘hidden contradiction’ at the heart of commercial society, which turned the serene flow of progress into a maelstrom.
Human beings, he predicted, would eventually recoil from their alienation in the modern world into desperate pleadings to God to regain their ‘ignorance, innocence, and poverty, the only goods that can make for our happiness and that are precious in your sight’. For the next two decades Rousseau would elaborate this blinding flash of inspiration on the road to Vincennes, with anger and bitter contempt, a profound critique of the way we – ‘victims of the blind inconsistency of our hearts’ – still live. Or, ‘die without having lived’.
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What makes Rousseau, and his self-described ‘history of the human heart’, so astonishingly germane and eerily resonant is that, unlike his fellow eighteenth-century writers, he described the quintessential inner experience of modernity for most people: the uprooted outsider in the commercial metropolis, aspiring for a place in it, and struggling with complex feelings of envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection.
He never ceased to speak out of his own intensely personal experience of fear, confusion, loneliness and loss – spiritual ordeals today experienced millions of times over around the world. H?lderlin, one of Rousseau’s many distinguished German devotees, wrote in his ode to the Genevan, ‘You’ve heard and understood the strangers’ voice / Interpreted their soul.’ Rousseau connects easily with the strangers to modernity, who feel scorned and despised by its brilliant but apparently exclusive realm. His books were the biggest best-sellers of the eighteenth century, and we still return to them today because they explore dark emotions stirring in the hearts of strangers rather than the workings of abstract reason. They reveal human beings as subject to conflicting impulses rather than as rational individuals pursuing their self-interest.
Take for instance his epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Hélo?se (1761), whose socially outcast protagonist Saint-Preux is exactly the author’s own age. He arrives in glittering Paris to find in it ‘many masks but no human faces’. Everyone is tyrannized by the fear of other people’s opinion. The airs of politeness conceal a lack of fidelity and trust. Survival in the crowd seems guaranteed by conformity to the views and opinions of whichever sectarian group one belongs to. The elites engage meanwhile in their own factional battles and presume to think on behalf of everyone else. The general moral law is one of obedience and conformity to the rules of the rich and powerful. Such a society where social bonds are defined by a dependence on other people’s opinion and competitive private ambition is a place devoid of any possibility of individual freedom. It is a city of valets, ‘the most degraded of men’ whose sense of impotence breeds wickedness – in children, in servants, in writers and the nobility.
Saint-Preux’s lover, Julie, reminds him that Paris also contains poor and voiceless people, remote from the exalted realms where opinions are made and spread, and that it is his responsibility to speak for them. In many ways Rousseau embraced this obligation, setting himself against the conventionally enlightened wisdom of his age, and inventing the category of disadvantaged and trampled-upon ‘people’, who have a claim on our compassionate understanding.