Rousseau Part 21

Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits.

That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to recognise her power and position,--a manly policy, as creditable to their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made them powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had taken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had always been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the system of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out.

Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of their fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man," said Grimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe, and this man is M. Rousseau." The parliaments went to work with alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no allies of the one even when destroying the other.

Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their number, like Voltaire or Helvetius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.

On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he courageously insisted on placing his name on the t.i.tle-page of all his works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]

The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not only that man may be saved without believing in G.o.d, but even that the Christian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for the writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either that the alleged a.s.sertions were in the book, or that the name of the author was really the name on its t.i.tle-page. Rousseau fared no worse, but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.

The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in G.o.d was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in the fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading, and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]

It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste to carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the proposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be sure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that of Malesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be made public, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to their interest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had no difficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After a tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight for seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of the castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stage of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven from place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and religious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own diseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home of weariness and torment.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Conf._, x. 62.

[2] _Conf._, x.

[3] _Ib._ x. 70.

[4] Louis Francois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776), was great-grandson of the brother of the Great Conde. He performed creditable things in the war of the Austrian Succession (in Piedmont 1744, in Belgium 1745); had a scheme of foreign policy as director of the secret diplomacy of Lewis XV. (1745-1756), which was to make Turkey, Poland, Sweden, Prussia, a barrier against Russia primarily, and Austria secondarily; lastly went into moderate opposition to the court, protesting against the destruction of the _parlements_ (1771), and afterwards opposing the reforms of Turgot (1776). Finally he had the honour of refusing the sacraments of the church on his deathbed.

See Martin's _Hist. de France_, xv. and xvi.

[5] _Conf._, 97. _Corr._, v. 215.

[6] _Corr._, ii. 144. Oct. 7, 1760.

[7] _Conf._, x. 98.

[8] The reader will distinguish this correspondent of Rousseau's, _Comtesse_ de Boufflers-Rouveret (1727-18--), from the _d.u.c.h.esse_ de Boufflers, which was the t.i.tle of Rousseau's Marechale de Luxembourg before her second marriage. And also from the _Marquise_ de Boufflers, said to be the mistress of the old king Stanislaus at Luneville, and the mother of the Chevalier de Boufflers (who was the intimate of Voltaire, sat in the States General, emigrated, did homage to Napoleon, and finally died peaceably under Lewis XVIII.). See Jal's _Dict. Critique_, 259-262. Sainte Beuve has an essay on our present Comtesse de Boufflers (_Nouveaux Lundis_, iv. 163). She is the Madame de Boufflers who was taken by Beauclerk to visit Johnson in his Temple chambers, and was conducted to her coach by him in a remarkable manner (Boswell's _Life_, ch. li. p. 467). Also much talked of in H.

Walpole's Letters. See D'Alembert to Frederick, April 15, 1768.

[9] Streckeisen, ii. 32.

[10] _Conf._, x. 71.

[11] For instance, _Corr._ ii. 85, 90, 92, etc. 1759.

[12] Streckeisen, ii. 28, etc.

[13] _Ib._, 29.

[14] _Conf._, x. 99.

[15] _Ib._, x. 57.

[16] _Ib._, xi. 119.

[17] _Corr._, ii. 196. Feb. 16, 1761.

[18] _Ib._, ii. 102, 176, etc.

[19] _Conf._, x. 60.

[20] _Corr._, ii. 12.

[21] As M. St. Marc Girardin has put it: "There are in all Rousseau's discussions two things to be carefully distinguished from one another; the maxims of the discourse, and the conclusions of the controversy.

The maxims are ordinarily paradoxical; the conclusions are full of good sense." _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Aug. 1852, p. 501.

[22] _Corr._, ii. 244-246. Oct. 24, 1761.

[23] _Ib._, 1766. _Oeuv._, lxxv. 364.

[24] _Corr._, ii. 32. (1758.)

[25] _Corr._, ii. 63. Jan. 15, 1779.

[26] Bernardin de St. Pierre, xii. 102.

[27] 4th Letter, p. 375.

[28] _Mem._, ii. 299.

[29] _Corr._, ii. 98. July 10, 1759.

[30] _Corr._, ii. 106. Nov. 10, 1759.

[31] _Ib._, ii. 179. Jan. 18, 1761.

[32] _Ib._, ii. 268. Dec. 12, 1761.

[33] _Ib._, ii. 28. Dec. 23, 1761.

[34] _Nouv. Hel._, III. xxii. 147. In 1784 Hume's suppressed essays on "Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul" were published in London:--"With Remarks, intended as an Antidote to the Poison contained in these Performances, by the Editor; to which is added, Two Letters on Suicide, from Rousseau's Eloisa." In the preface the reader is told that these "two very masterly letters have been much celebrated." See Hume's _Essays_, by Green and Grose, i. 69, 70.

[35] _Corr._, iii. 235. Aug. 1, 1763.

[36] _Corr._, ii. 226. Sept. 29, 1761.

[37] P. 294. Jan. 11, 1762.

[38] Madame Latour (Nov. 7, 1730-Sept. 6, 1789) was the wife of a man in the financial world, who used her ill and dissipated as much of her fortune as he could, and from whom she separated in 1775. After that she resumed her maiden name and was known as Madame de Franqueville.

Musset-Pathay, ii. 182, and Sainte Beuve, _Causeries_, ii. 63.

[39] _Corr._, ii. 214. _Conf._, ix. 289.

[40] English translations of Rousseau's works appeared very speedily after the originals. A second edition of the Helosa was called for as early as May 1761. See _Corr._ ii. 223. A German translation of the Helosa appeared at Leipzig in 1761, in six duodecimos.

[41] For instance, _Corr._, ii. 168. Nov. 19, 1762.