On the Cult of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

How a philosopher became a God.

In 1921, Bertrand Russell had a brush with death, becoming critically ill with pneumonia while travelling in China. His hosts promised him that in the event of his demise, they’d build a shrine to his memory, which rather appealed to Russell, since it held out the possibility of his becoming a god after death, quite an accomplishment for an atheist philosopher. Russell, though, would not have been the first philosopher to have a shrine built in his memory, and not the first to be deified after death.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an unlikely candidate for deification. He did not live what might be called a conventionally godly life. It is trivially easy to find instances of morally questionable behaviour. As a young man, for example, he routinely exposed his bottom to young women for the purposes of sexual gratification:

I haunted dark alleys and hidden retreats, where I might be able to expose myself to women in the condition in which I should have liked to have been in their company. What they saw was not an obscene object, I never even thought of such a thing; it was a ridiculous object. The foolish pleasure I took in displaying it before their eyes cannot be described.

Perhaps more seriously Rousseau had five children with his long-term mistress, Thérèse Levasseur (for whom, incidentally, he said he “never felt the least glimmering of love”), and abandoned them all to the Enfants-Trouvés foundling home. It is unlikely any of his children survived, and Rousseau on a number of occasions felt obliged to justify his actions:

How could I achieve the tranquillity of mind necessary for my work, my garret filled with domestic cares and the noise of children?

Luckily, Rousseau remained convinced of his own supreme virtue:

While my faults frighten me my heart reassures me, I would leave this life with apprehension if I knew a better man than me.

Curiously, Rousseau’s disciples, and they were legion, shared a similar view of the great man. The writer and historian, Gabriel Brizard, said of Jean-Jacques, “I have conversed with the wisest of men… I never left one of his conversations without feeling my soul uplifted and my heart more virtuous.” The poet Schiller went even further, describing Rousseau as “a Christlike soul for whom only Heaven’s angels are fit company”. Tolstoy, for his part, celebrated the Christlike Jean-Jacques with a medallion featuring an image of the philosopher, which he wore around his neck in his youth.

This is all a little odd, but actually not even the half of it. Rousseau died in 1778 at Ermenonville, the estate of the Marquis de Giradin. Here, centred on the Isle of Poplars, where Rousseau was buried, the Marquis established an elaborate shrine to the bon Jean-Jacques. Disciples flooded to the shrine.

They came to weep, to pray, to kiss the tomb and decorate it with flowers, to compose verses about Rousseau; and one at least came to commit suicide and be buried close to Jean-Jacques. Relics of the departed philosophe were eagerly sought after, and a duchess spent an entire afternoon walking around the estate with Rousseau’s wooden sabots on her delicate and aristocratic feet.

The demand for Rousseau iconography also exploded, and a whole industry, pushing out statues, portraits, engravings, prints and busts, emerged to satisfy it. The iconography was frequently religious in character.

Cochim drew a plate which was engraved by Prière. This plate, inspired by the entombment of Christ by the Holy Women, represents Rousseau from the front, the head slightly turned towards the left. He is standing, his body naked, inert, supported by two women who are surrounding him with a shroud. One of these women, who is naked, dominates him… She is placed on a cloud, behind which we see the rays of the sun.

This was largely a literary deification, inspired by the love of works such as Héloïse and Émile. Rousseau may well have been, as one scholar has suggested, a masochist, exhibitionist, onanist, hypochondriacal, paranoiac, narcissistic, irritable and miserly, but there is no doubting his ability to write.

A decade after Rousseau’s death, a similar political deification occurred, largely as a consequence of the politics of the French revolution, which in time came to supplant its literary forebear. This was more impersonal in character, though much wider in scope. Hymns were sung in Rousseau’s honour. A street in Paris was named after him, and his bust was mounted in the National Assembly. His book, Contrat Social, was republished 13 times between 1792 and 1795, appearing at one point in pocket Bible size. Poems and eulogies were written, and local authorities all over France celebrated Rousseau (and other revolutionary heroes) with lavish ceremonies. The name “Rousseau” quickly became an ideological weapon to be wielded in the battles that raged between revolutionary (and conservative) factions. Maximilien Robespierre, no less, said of Rousseau:

One man, by the elevation of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the position of teacher of the human race… If he had witnessed this revolution of which he was the precursor… who can doubt that his generous soul would have embraced with rapture the cause of justice and equality?

Perhaps the high point of the political cult of Rousseau was the ceremony of pantheonization which saw Rousseau’s remains transported from Ermenonville to the Tuileries gardens, and from there via a procession on October 11 1794 to the Pantheon. Historian Gordon H. McNeil described the ceremony as follows:

In the line of march were mounted police, a band playing Rousseau’s compositions, and various groups, each with an appropriately inscribed standard: botanists, artists and artisans, mothers and children, war orphans and Genevans. The Contrat social, the “beacon of legislators”, was carried on a velvet cushion, and a statue of its author in a cart pulled by twelve horses. At the Pantheon, a civic hymn was sung, the president of the Convention delivered a eulogy, and ended the ceremony by placing flowers on the coffin.

After 1795, the furore surrounding Rousseau began to settle down, and the political cult faded away. Rousseau’s literary disciples kept the light burning for a little while longer, but by the second decade of the nineteenth century, Rousseau’s deification, and the cult surrounding it, was largely a thing of the past.

Sources

Confessions, Book 1, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The Cult of Rousseau and the French Revolution”, Gordon H. McNeil

Intellectuals, Paul Johnson

Rousseau, the Self-Made Saint, Jakob Huizinga