In his new book The Tremors of Translation: An Edition of Voltaire’s ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (1756) (Legenda, Cambridge, 2025), Clive Scott encourages us to go back and experience afresh Voltaire’s poem about the Lisbon earthquake. This natural catastrophe occurred on 1 November 1755, and it took three weeks for the news to reach Geneva. Voltaire’s immediate response was categorical: ‘La Providence en a dans le c**!’ An early manuscript of the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne dates from as early as December of that year, unauthorised printings followed, and the first approved publication appeared in late March 1756. Voltaire’s initial literary response to this natural disaster was swift, visceral and in verse (or to be precise, in verse and prose).
The Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne is both known and not known. The poem is celebrated, not least because it provoked J.-J. Rousseau’s Letter on Providence of 18 August 1756 (Leigh 424 and D6973). And yet, while the question of Voltaire and Optimism has been extensively discussed, very little has been written about the poem itself and its virtues as a poetic performance. One of the few important pieces of critical writing about the poem is in fact by Clive Scott, who writes interestingly about rhyme patterns in the poem in a chapter of his earlier book, The Riches of Rhyme (1988).
‘La Cathédrale’, in Recueil des plus belles ruines de Lisbonne causées par le tremblement et par le feu du premier Novembre 1755. Dessiné sur les lieux par MM. Paris et Pedegache, et gravé à Paris par Jacques Philippe Le Bas (Paris, 1757).
Clive Scott now returns to the poem, adopting an entirely fresh and provocative perspective. Although calling itself an ‘edition’, this book does not pretend to be a critical edition that sets out to establish the different versions of the text and place it in its historical context. A self-styled ‘translational edition’, this work seeks to dismantle the text, with a view to exploring its expressive possibilities, making room in the process for different kinds of creative participation by the ‘translator’. Voltaire’s poem is an angry and emotional piece of writing, not entirely typical of his other verse works, and one that lends itself well to this approach of rebellious rewriting. This book challenges the reader to improvise ‘translations’ or rereadings of the work that free it from its immediate context and explore more openly its resonance and significance.
The book proposes three interpretative reimaginations of the poem, described as ‘tremors’, each a reworking of the text incorporating a range of images (words extracted from newsprint, photographs, doodlings) to underpin these free-wheeling interpretations. In between these ‘tremors’, in a series of short chapters, Scott discusses a range of approaches to translation theory, engaging with a wide range of theorists including Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, and including an excursus on translation and quantum mechanics.
‘Salle de l’Opéra’, in Recueil des plus belles ruines de Lisbonne (Paris, 1757).
The whole point of this edition of the Poème is, of course, that it should free the reader from the straightjacket of conventional scholarship. Even so, when writing from the vantage-point of the Voltaire Foundation, which devoted half a century to producing the authoritative modern edition of Voltaire’s works, it’s a little frustrating that this edition takes as its ‘base text’ a version published over sixty years ago in the Pléiade ‘Mélanges’ volume. The new edition of the poem by David Adams and Haydn Mason, published in volume 45A (2009) of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, is not used, nor is any reference made to other recent critical commentary, some of which touches closely on questions raised in this book (for example, Christiane Mervaud, ‘Comment penser le cataclysme: Voltaire et le désastre de Lisbonne’, Lumières, 6, 2005, p.25-40).
The Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne is often presented as a stand-alone poem, but in fact Voltaire did not intend it to be read in that way: in the first authorised edition (56G2), the volume opens with an important ‘Préface de l’auteur’ in prose, and extensive prose notes, commentaries designed to underline the philosophical discussion, are added at the end: this is in effect a work in prose and verse. And while it would not have been useful to go into the minutiae of the minor variants, it is of obvious relevance that there are two different versions of the poem’s conclusion, reminding us that Voltaire’s text is very much a text in movement. Scott speaks of the activity of translation as ‘living with text in a condition of perpetual modification’ (p.16), a comment particularly appropriate to this poem as well as to the nature of Voltaire’s writing in general.
‘Place de la Patriarchale’, in Recueil des plus belles ruines de Lisbonne (Paris, 1757).
This remarkable study is aimed in the first instance at researchers in the field of translation studies: Clive Scott returns to themes he has discussed previously, developing them here in new directions. Although not aimed in the first instance at Voltaire specialists, this book also provides rich pickings for those readers. There is an insightful chapter on ‘The music of Voltaire’s verse’ (chapter 11), though Voltaire would not have agreed with Scott regarding the alleged ‘generical constraints’ of the alexandrine as a verse form, as threatening ‘the free exercise of the contingencies of speech’ (p.23, 25). Clive Scott’s comment that the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne could be considered as ‘an anti-epic’ (p.31) is immensely suggestive. He also speaks of parallels between translation and marginalia, which he calls ‘an underlying form of textual doodling’ (p.22), and again it is relevant to recall Voltaire’s own pronounced cultivation of marginal writing in thousands of volumes of his personal library.
‘Eglise de Saint-Nicolas’, in Recueil des plus belles ruines de Lisbonne (Paris, 1757).
In the context of Scott’s ‘tremors of translation’, we remember that Voltaire himself was fascinated by questions of translation. In many of the articles in works such as the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, he includes his own verse translations of quotations from the Latin classics. Scott talks about the ‘polyglot literary translation’, which in effect means a translation into English for readers who can already read the original French, so who are able to read the two versions in parallel: ‘the translational mode we are envisaging, writes Scott, is that designed not for the monoglot reader, the reader without a knowledge of the language of the source text, but for the polyglot reader, the reader who has knowledge of the source language and in interested in the creative divergence of the target text from the source text’ (p.14). This is to describe an English poetic genre, the Imitation, made popular by John Oldham in the late seventeenth century. Poets would provide versions of Latin satirists such as Juvenal or Horace, often printing their reimagined satires on a page facing the Latin original, so that the reader, who is assumed to be a fluent reader of Latin, can relish the ways in which the new poem diverges from the classical source. Voltaire was familiar with this genre, and quotes Oldham in his Letters concerning the English nation, even including some ‘Imitations’ of his own: this is a remarkable poetic tour de force that disappears from the subsequent Lettres philosophiques.
Clive Scott’s book is a remarkable celebration of the energies of creative language, and an important continuing contribution to the field of translation studies. It is also an exciting invitation to reread and reassess Voltaire’s poetry. Clive Scott explains that the present experimental translations arose as ‘acts of commiseration and commemoration’ (p.66) in response to the 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, Syria and Morocco. Voltaire in his own century was far from the only poet to treat the subject of the Lisbon earthquake, but it was he who led the way in elevating the natural catastrophe into an enduring and potent topic of literary and philosophical debate. In addition to Rousseau’s 1756 Letter on Providence, there are Le Brun’s Odes sur Lisbonne et sur les causes physiques des tremblements de terre de 1755 (1756), and Kant too entered the fray, publishing a brochure, Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigsten Vorfälle des Erdbebens, welches an dem Ende des 1755sten Jahres (Königsberg), as well as two articles, all in 1756. Voltaire’s success in transforming a news event into an Enlightenment debate ranks among his greatest achievements as a poet.
I wrote my very first book, nearly twenty-five years ago now, on the Enlightenment’s opponents – men and women of the nascent Right who regarded the prospect of moral progress as an illusion, who warned that loosening the ties of religion, patriarchal authority, the family, and tradition, would spell disaster, who scoffed at notions of individual rights, and who were suspicious of gender and sexual liberation. Above all, they were people virulently opposed to opening up those matters to discussion and debate.
And that, to my mind, is one of the key – if not the key – points of division between Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, between those who would question, who would critique, who would dare to know and those who would silence. The historian Emma Rothschild once described Enlightenment aptly as a ‘discursive, disputatious theorising way of life,’ which gets to the point that many advocates of Enlightenment were more concerned with asking probing questions than with providing hard and fast answers. [1] In other words, Enlightenment relished open inquiry, it relished getting into arguments, and it has done so continually from the very beginning.
‘The Phoenix Reborn from the Ashes’ (1817). Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique is burned along with works by Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, and Mably, but the spirit of the Enlightenment survives.
Those who opposed the Enlightenment, by contrast, were much less bullish on the marketplace of ideas. Although they could, and did, engage in vigorous debates in the public sphere, enthusiasm for that contest was less pronounced than it was on the other side. And indeed, when they were in a position to do so, supporters of Counter-Enlightenment aimed to shut the conversation down on the view that some ideas should be beyond critique. It is hardly surprising that supporters of the Counter-Enlightenment pursued the burning of what they described as ‘bad books’ when they were in a position to do so.
Book burning is less common today, but the effort to suppress what people read, and to curtail the kinds of questions they ask, is alive and well in many parts of the world, not least the contemporary United States, where books are disappearing from library shelves, and where the Trump administration has recently banned a litany of words and concepts from official documents and pronouncements. One word that leapt out at me from the list was ‘equality,’ the subject of my most recent book.
Contrary to what many scholars have suggested, the Enlightenment did not ‘invent’ equality. [2] Both the concept and efforts to apply it had a long history prior to the 18th century in various parts of the world – a history that has long been ignored, but that is recently being recovered. That fact is important for it allows us to see not only that equality is far from an exclusively Western ideal, but also that it has not always served egalitarian ends. On the contrary, equality has very often functioned as a hierarchical premise, the very basis on which qualitative distinctions are put in place. [3]
But if the Enlightenment did not invent equality, what it did do was bandy the word about, over and over again in ways that made it impossible to ignore. Enlightenment thinkers, in other words, put equality on the table as a topic of general discussion, and they asked pointed questions about its social and political relevance. Enlightenment authors, that is, debated equality, from many different sides, and they brought to that debate a passionate intensity.
Consider the case of Voltaire. ‘The so-called equality of men, that some sophists have made fashionable, is a pernicious chimera,’ he observes in an unlikely place, his article on ‘Fertilisation’ in the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1772). That sounds pretty dismissive. Yet in his better-known article Égalité in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), Voltaire describes equality as ‘at once the most natural and the most chimerical of things.’ Indeed, you can find him in different places, and different times and moods, coming at the question of equality from different points of few. On the one hand, he is perfectly capable, like so many people in the 18th century, of saying some pretty unsavoury things, at least they strike us that way now – passing judgment on the inequality of peoples and races and religions and sexes. But he is also perfectly capable of denying or minimising those differences in favour of a greater universality. [4] And so in Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs he writes of ‘the dangerous truth’ (and note that he calls it a truth) ‘that all men are born equal’ that all of us carry in our hearts. But it is a dangerous truth because it can cause political upheaval. After pointing out some examples, Voltaire concludes that ‘all men are born with a rather violent penchant for domination, wealth, and pleasure,’ and that it is these ‘natural passions’ that create universal inequality,’ rendering ‘social equality’ nothing but a chimera.
Now one might call Voltaire inconsistent or confused. Like all of us, he was on occasion one or the other or even both. But he is also getting at a central human contradiction, and that is that we are as a species fundamentally conflicted about equality. In effect, we want it and we don’t. And by that I mean not just that at any given moment of history you can find some people in favour of more equality of one type or another, and some in favour of less – which is true, of course, and not in the least surprising – but rather that all of us, as human beings, are conflicted about equality because we are status-creatures par excellence, wired to constantly monitor our place in hierarchies that form everywhere that human beings come together in groups. We are, like it or not, hierarchical beings, a fact that we are often uncomfortable acknowledging, but that remains the case nonetheless. And so, as Voltaire says in the language of natural passions, we seek domination, we seek status, we seek to amass our pleasures, and to put ourselves above.
But if all that is hard to contest, it is no less true that human beings are moved by profoundly pro-social feelings of reciprocity, cooperation, and concern for others. Not only that, but we have developed vital resources for challenging hierarchies, for enforcing group solidarity, for contesting and combating domination – in effect for guarding that proud sense of ‘equality’ that, as Voltaire says, we feel in our hearts. The upshot is that we are conflicted: part of us seeks preferment and status and even domination, and part of us works against it.
I spend quite a lot of time in the first several chapters of my book exploring that conflict in our early and evolutionary history. But the point for now is that what you might see as a contradiction – that, as Voltaire says, all humans are born equal and feel themselves so and at the same time seek to prevail – is, rather, two sides of the same coin, or a kind of continuum on which human beings find themselves. [5] That helps explain, I think, why equality is often so elusive. It also explains why reasonable people can be both for it and against it.
Voltaire was hardly alone in this respect. From Rousseau to Mary Wollstonecraft, from David Hume to Immanuel Kant; from Adam Smith to Condorcet, Helvétius, Holbach, Burke, or Mably, to name only a few, we get an extensive array of perspectives on the question of equality in the age of Enlightenment, both for and against. The Enlightenment, in this sense, was ‘Janus-faced’ on the question of equality, as the Dutch historian Siep Stuurman has argued. [6] It looked in different directions at once. And so, just as one hears new arguments for the universality of humanity in the 18th century, along with new arguments against slavery, one also hears a new discourse of the inequality of peoples, whether based on environmental factors, as in the dominant account of Buffon, or in an incipient discourse destined to have a robust life in the 19th and 20th centuries, of race. At the same time as some contemporaries could argue that the ‘mind has no sex,’ or strive to demonstrate, as one anonymous tract put it, the Equality of the Sexes Morally and Physically Proved (London, 1758), we also see the emergence of powerful gendered discourses based on the alleged psychological and physiological differences of men and women. To accompany accounts that imagined all peoples as alike and the world’s societies as passing through common processes of development, we get a new political economy that categorised peoples according to where they were on a line of stadial progress, from hunter gatherers, to pastoral peoples, to those employing agriculture, and finally to modern commercial society, which effectively divided humanity between the backward and the advanced according to their level of economic development. And following directly from that, the eighteenth century witnessed new discourses about the development of history – the general movement from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation,’ in which all people are nominally equal, but some more so than others, farther along in history’s unfolding, with the vast majority of mankind consigned to what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as the ‘temporality of not-yet,’ waiting to catch up. [7]
All this discussion and debate – new assertions of equality and new justifications for inequality – was reinforced in the 18th century by social practices that created new possibilities in their own right and incited new resentments: Mixing across class lines and status groups in public parks and promenades where increasingly men and women dressed in ways that belied their social standing, allowing them to mix as equals, as the historian William Sewell has shown;[8] doing business together in more cosmopolitan settings where the measure of worthiness was more merit than title or birth or blood; acting and speaking as equals in the special atmosphere of Masonic lodges and clubs; or even, as Lynn Hunt has suggested, by reading novels, which encouraged readers to empathise with strivings of strangers and ‘to think of others as their equals.’ [9] In these and other social practices, thought was embodied, and bodies were shaped by thought.
Equality, Fraternity, Death. From the frontispiece to the counter-revolutionary Dictionnaire des Jacobins vivants (Hamburg, 1799). Bibliothèque nationale de France.
That conjuncture helped to reinforce the affective dimension of equality, which was very much on the minds – and in the sentiments – of Enlightened men and women. As Montesquieu put it in the Spirit of the Laws, the ‘love of equality’ was a passionate virtue, a ‘feeling,’ he insisted, ‘and not a consequence of knowledge.’ For Voltaire too, natural equality was something we carried in our hearts, more a sentiment than a logical proposition. That was a notion worthy of a sentimental age, and one, as Dan Edelstein has argued convincingly, that applied to Enlightenment rights talk in general, which was more apt to justify natural rights in terms of the habits of the heart than through appeals to logic or reason. But as Edelstein also takes pains to show, support for rights based on the alleged natural sentiments could quickly dry up when people didn’t feel the way that humanity apparently should. A potential terror loomed in natural rights for the ‘enemies of humanity’ who were denied them. [10] If it is true, as Plato remarked, that ‘equality produces amity,’ forging the affective ties that bind together bands of equals, it is no less true, as Aristotle observed, that the ‘passion for equality’ is at the ‘root of faction,’ as groups of equals set themselves against those they regard as fundamentally different.
The Scythe of Equality. Anonymous Engraving, 1789. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Both those ancient truths were on vivid display at the time of the French Revolution when fraternal equality flourished and what the Jacobins described as the ‘scythe of equality’ or the ‘hatchet of the law,’ was put into action to cut others down to size. The Terror, to be sure, is a complicated affair, its origins and explanations multi-causal. But it remains true nonetheless that the Revolution’s leaders targeted its enemies, both real and apparent, in an effort to rally true equals to the cause. For both the Revolution’s opponents and its friends, the image of equality shone in the guillotine’s blade.
‘Liberty and Equality United by Nature,’ engraving by Louis Charles Routte (1795 or 1796). The longstanding affinity of liberty and equality, reaffirmed by the French Revolution, was sundered by it. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
One of the consequences of that terrible spectre was to sunder what had long been the intimate connection between liberty and equality. For ancients and moderns alike, who considered liberty as non-domination, it followed that one could only be truly free among equals or subordinates. To be under the domination of another was to have, by definition, one’s liberty constrained. Thus, Rousseau could observe typically of equality in the Social Contract, ‘liberty cannot exist without it.’ The two went hand in hand. But in the Revolution’s aftermath, many argued, the two were inherently in tension, or mutually exclusive.
Arguably the most articulate voice expressing that view was Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, for Tocqueville, the advent of the equality of conditions threatened what he described in Democracy in America as ‘a new type of oppression so great that the old words “despotism” and “tyranny” will not do.’ The work as a whole was written with a kind of dread, ‘in the grip of a religious terror,’ as he famously put it in the introduction, inspired by nothing less than what he regarded as equality’s leveling force and its irresistible forward momentum. ‘The gradual progress of equality,’ Tocqueville observed in oracular tones, ‘is something fated,’ a providential fact, its spread a process at once ‘universal and permanent’ that ‘every event and every man’ helps along. That idea, too, traces to the Enlightenment. It was Condorcet who put it most succinctly in his Sketch for the Future Progress of the Human Mind, articulating what I call a ‘cascade thesis,’ the idea that equality is destined to spread outward and downward like water over rocks, pulled, as it were, by natural law or gravitational force to pool and then spread over ever-wider surfaces of the globe, making more and more equality, from the civil to the political, to the economic, for all. Inequalities, meanwhile, as Condorcet put it, would ‘diminish continually.’
That idea, as articulated powerfully by Condorcet, Tocqueville, and others, was picked up over and over again in the succeeding years by people all across the political spectrum. And in the 20th century it was voiced by anti-colonial and civil rights activists, most eloquently by Martin Luther King, who riffed on a phrase from the 19th-century abolitionist theologian Theodore Parker, to suggest that the moral ‘arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice, it bends towards equality.’ That is a phrase that President Obama used some thirty-three times in his speeches while in office, the point being that until relatively recently that same assumption was very much alive: the world, however fitfully, however slowly, was struggling towards equality. I cite, in my conclusion, hundreds of books written since the 1980s with precisely that title, The Struggle Towards Equality, or the Pursuit of Equality, the Road to Equality. Equality was a kind of oasis on the horizon, hazy and indistinct, something we were moving towards in the future, even if it was difficult to see in the present.
For many reasons – not least the spiraling inequalities of our own time in many parts of the world – that faith is harder to sustain today, when the future of equality can only seem less certain. But that very fact – what some, myself included, describe as the contemporary ‘crisis of equality’ – also provides an opportunity, an opportunity to examine with fresh eyes an idea we thought we knew. And that is really where I would end in urging us to keep talking about equality, to keep questioning it, and so to keep alive a great Enlightenment discussion and debate. At a time when many would prefer our silence, and are making active efforts to enforce it, the mere fact of talking about equality is a necessary form of resistance.
– Darrin M. McMahon
[1] Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p.49. See as well, Antoine Lilti, The Legacy of the Enlightenment: Ambivalences of Modernity, trans. C. Jon Delogu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025).
[2] See for example, Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), esp. ch.1 ‘The Invention of Equality.’
[3] This is a major theme of my Equality: The History of an Elusive idea (London: Ithaka, 2025). On the history of ‘equality before egalitarianism,’ see also the important body of work of Teresa Bejan, crystallised in her forthcoming First Among Equals (Harvard University Press, 2026); as well as Lars Behrisch, Democracy’s Double Helix: Participation, Equality, and Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025); David Lay Williams, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024), and the work of Siep Stuurman, cited below.
[4] On these complexities as applied to matters of race, see Devin Vartija’s fine study, The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
[5] The psychologists James Sidanius and Felicia Pratto describe this continuum as a scalable ‘social dominance orientation,’ in their Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[6] See his seminal The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), esp. ch.6 (‘Global Equality and Inequality in Enlightenment Thought’).
[7] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and the Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.8-9.
[8] William H. Sewell Jr., Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
[9] Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p.58.
[10] Dan Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Darrin M. McMahon is the David W. Little Professor of History at Dartmouth and the author, most recently, of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea. These comments are based on a lecture given on April 5, 2025 at the Oxford Literary Festival, sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation.
Besterman’s vision for Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
In a report written on 20 January 1950 to his newly formed ‘International Advisory Committee’, Theodore Besterman noted that his ‘search for Voltaire correspondence had brought to light other manuscript material’; he envisioned publishing ‘many by-products’ with the hope that his efforts on the correspondence would lead to ‘something bigger’. [1] In May of that year, he wrote to Norman Torrey, a member of the advisory committee, that out of frustration with the lack of activity among other publishers, ‘I have decided to establish a new series, Eighteenth-Century French Studies’. [2] The same day, he wrote to André Delattre, inquiring if he had found a publisher for his repertory of Voltaire letters, and explained the rationale for ‘a new series of Eighteenth-Century French Studies. This is for various reasons… partly because of the intolerable publications bottle-neck in this country’. [3]
That July he reported to the same advisory committee ‘I am to edit a series entitled “Eighteenth-Century French Studies”, the first volume of which will be an edition of Voltaire’s note-books’. [4] In September, he wrote to his closest collaborator, Bernard Gagnebin, that he would retain material that could not be included in the edition of the correspondence ‘pour les Eighteenth-Century French Studies, en français naturellement’. [5]
By April 1952, he was at work planning out the envisioned Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva, and he wrote to Herbert Dieckmann, who had recently discovered the Diderot manuscripts, that ‘if the institute is established, it is my intention to set upon foot a publications policy to enable such undertakings as a critical edition of Diderot’s works at the expense of the institute and without interference…’ He continued: ‘The endless talk that goes on about the crisis in learned publication seems to me singularly unprofitable; what is needed is to do something’. [6]
That something, of course, would be the Institut et Musée Voltaire. In early September 1954, as he prepared for the public launch of the Institut the following month, he wrote to Pierre Lelièvre, the influential French art historian then working under Julien Cain overseeing all French public libraries, and who provided him essential assistance in obtaining Voltaire manuscripts from provincial French libraries. He expressed to Lelièvre his joy to have the latter’s collaboration in the preparation of ‘le premier volume’ of a new series. [7]
In November 1954, having now formally established and publicly launched the Institut, and having published the Notebooks as well as the initial volumes of the Correspondence, he wrote again to Torrey and mentioned the need for a serial, conceived as a venue for additional manuscript material, now referred to as the ‘Travaux sur Voltaire’. [8] The first volume did appear in 1955 and with its second volume, in 1956, adopted the title Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century; it has continued to appear mutatis mutandis for nearly 70 years, since 2015 as the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. Besterman had envisioned it not only as a companion to the Voltaire correspondence (which would itself evolve into the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire) but as the basis for a wide-ranging publication program of source material and commentary on eighteenth-century French literature.
Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment ONLINE: an expansion of the archive for 2024
This year, through the expansion of its online offerings of digital editions of Voltaire Foundation publications, Liverpool University Press has brought together a collection that fulfils the original vision of Besterman. This began in 2019 with the publication of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment ONLINEebook collection including over 500 volumes of the series published up through 2016. This year, the online collection is expanding, in two ways.
First, the collection will be enhanced with 57 additional volumes from the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenmentprint series, published from 2017 through 2021. Almost every major development in eighteenth-century scholarship of the past few years is well represented in this set. This includes a number of particularly noteworthy volumes, in literature, history, art history, philosophy, and environmental studies, as well as two volumes in digital humanities scholarship. Geographically there are books covering France, Britain, Italy, Greece, Russia, China, Persia, Mexico and the Caribbean. Authors range from Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to Linnaeus, from Buffon to Beccaria, and from Vico to John Millar, Potocki, Catherine the Great, and, of course, Voltaire. Topics covered range from the history of sexuality and libertine fiction to classical tragedy, from volcanoes and geographers to scepticism, and from atheism and the Catholic enlightenment to slavery and republican political theory. Here one can read works on the emergence in the eighteenth century of empirical historiography, the art of letter writing, the aesthetics of history painting, and the work of creating an encyclopaedia.
This collection had already been enhanced, in 2023, with the inclusion of nine volumes published in the Vif series, combining texts and commentary. It had also included two special volumes, available Open Access: a collection of essays on Voltaire’s contes and nouvelles for the 2020 agrégation and Robert Darnton’s 2022 lecture, ‘Theatricality and Violence in Paris, 1788’, delivered to commemorate the historic occasion of the celebration of the completion of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire.
This year, the digital collection will expand further with the inclusion of several major Voltaire Foundation editions of texts and commentaries available in digital format for the first time. This includes five collections of correspondence by leading eighteenth-century figures – La Beaumelle, Helvétius, André Morellet, Pierre Bayle and Madame de Graffigny (accompanied by an edition of her Lettres d’une Péruvienne). The enhanced collection will also include the complete works of Montesquieu accompanied by several volumes of interpretive essays on Montesquieu (entitled Cahiers Montesquieu). Finally, the expanded collection includes a series of clandestinely published texts expressing Enlightenment free thought:
Correspondance complète de RousseauONLINE: immortalising Rousseau
Equally significantly for eighteenth-century French scholars, Liverpool University Press released in the latter part of 2023 a digital edition of Ralph Leigh’s masterful (and in the editor’s own word, ‘Immortal’) 52 volumes of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau.
Such a collection of source material, edited by the leading scholarly institute in the field, and enhanced with additional functionality for search and analysis, offers new opportunities for the study, and teaching, of the eighteenth century.
‘The impossible dream’
Besterman, in 1950, promised ‘much bigger things’ than just the Voltaire letters. He may have never dreamed of a digital archive of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenmentas part of a larger Eighteenth-Century Studies Collection. But in so many ways, this umbrella collection represents a fulfilment of what he once called ‘the impossible dream’.
The masterly critical edition of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau in 52 volumes, edited and annotated by Ralph Leigh, was first published between 1965 and 1998, in Geneva and then in Oxford. Critics are unanimous in hailing this edition as a model of its kind. It is this monument that Liverpool University Press, in partnership with the Voltaire Foundation, that has been made available as an ebook collection for the first time.
Scientifically impeccable, this edition meets the highest scholarly standards in every respect. The fruit of more than 25 years of research, it offers a wealth of information and an astounding degree of accuracy, providing an essential record of the public and private life of one of the most important figures in eighteenth-century literature and the history of ideas. This edition has been the subject of exemplary care from start to finish: the meticulous precision of the explanatory notes, which involve a huge amount of archival work, and the quality of the remarks, leave us astonished.
The Correspondance complète de Rousseau is the first edition to include all the letters written by Rousseau or addressed to him, as well as all correspondence between third parties on a broad range of subjects relating to the philosophe and his time, together with a large number of additional documents. Drafts and copies have been collated against the original manuscripts and all variants reproduced. Ralph Leigh’s extensive annotations provide information on a host of characters who played a role in the intellectual circle of the time, identify events and places, explain eighteenth-century linguistic usage, give bibliographical information and clarify obscure allusions.
But while the edition of this correspondence offers invaluable documentary resources, it also provides access to a body of work that can be read for itself and in relation to other Rousseau’s works: reading the correspondence invites us to re-read the epistolary fiction of La Nouvelle Héloïse, the autobiographical project of Les Confessions, and also Rousseau’s theoretical and polemical works. A vast repository of open questions, the Correspondence continues to profoundly renew critical approaches to Rousseau and his time.
In this edition, Rousseau’s correspondence occupies volumes 1 to 40 of the collection; volumes 41 to 49 presents posthumous letters and documents concerning, in particular, the various editions of Rousseau’s works published after his death, the birth of Rousseauism and Rousseau’s influence on the Revolution. The indexes occupying volumes 51–52 already provided a very useful and effective research tool. Correspondance complète de Rousseau ONLINE is now available and will provide invaluable services to researchers. As a result, it makes this fantastic collection not only more accessible, but also enriches it by making it cross-searchable.
Dans l’atelier de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Genèse et interprétation, c’est d’abord le choix d’un point de vue – adopté dans la nouvelle collection « Dans l’atelier de… » aux éditions Hermann – : celui d’entrer dans une œuvre depuis l’espace de travail de l’écrivain au milieu de ses manuscrits. Chez un auteur comme Rousseau, autant dire tout de suite qu’il s’agit d’une invitation au voyage.
Récit de l’atelier et métier de l’écrivain
Nathalie Ferrand, Dans l’atelier de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Pour faire entrer les lecteurs dans l’espace de travail de Rousseau, le premier chapitre commence par l’observer tel qu’il s’est lui-même raconté quand il se plaçait face à une page blanche. On traverse ainsi une série de lieux d’écriture les plus divers – chambres d’hôtel, lazaret à Gênes, « donjon » de Montmorency, « laboratoire » de Môtiers… –, qui, mis bout à bout, forment ce que j’ai appelé un « récit de l’atelier », à considérer comme une première trace documentaire pour cerner l’image de l’écrivain dans laquelle Rousseau se projette, et comme une rêverie quasi bachelardienne sur les espaces de l’écriture. Dans cette visite ambulante et guidée par l’auteur lui-même d’un atelier de travail polymorphe, se révèlent sa conception et sa pratique du métier d’écrivain au XVIIIe siècle, sont mises en situation ses valeurs, ses aspirations, parfois ses hantises vis-à-vis d’une destinée qu’il finit par vivre comme une douloureuse fatalité, au point que dans les dernières années son écriture entre quasiment en clandestinité.
Un legs imposant et éclaté
Quelle est l’ampleur du corpus des manuscrits de travail de Rousseau ? On peut l’estimer à environ 17 000 pages autographes (ch.2, p.62) qui, rappelons-le, ne sont qu’une partie des manuscrits issus de sa main (lettres et minutes de sa correspondance, notes de secrétaire prises pour ceux qu’il sert, copies de textes ou d’œuvres musicales qu’il réalise en tant que copiste pour gagner sa vie…). En tout cas, c’est beaucoup si l’on considère qu’à l’époque la conservation des ébauches était loin d’être une habitude, et si l’on tient compte de la vie accidentée de l’auteur. Parmi ces papiers, se trouvent des premiers jets tracés hâtivement au crayon, des mises au net remaniées mais aussi, à l’autre bout de la chaîne, plusieurs manuscrits pour l’imprimeur préparés par Rousseau lui-même et qu’il retravaille encore et encore, jusqu’au seuil de la publication. Ceux-ci sont exceptionnels, car ils étaient en général détruits après l’impression. Parmi eux, figure celui de la Lettre à D’Alembert qui vient d’être acquis par la Fondation Bodmer à Cologny et ainsi rendu aux chercheurs du monde entier.
Manuscrit autographe de la Lettre à D’Alembert envoyé à M.-M. Rey pour l’impression en 1758, avec des corrections de l’auteur dans le texte (ajouts marginaux et biffures). Le feuillet inséré qui contient le texte d’une note ajoutée n’est pas de la main de Rousseau. (Avec l’aimable autorisation de la Fondation Martin Bodmer, Genève.)
Lecture génétique d’un chef-d’œuvre : Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse
Après un tour d’horizon concernant la situation la plus actuelle des manuscrits pour les principales œuvres de Rousseau, sans oublier le cas fascinant de la Correspondance avec ses nombreux brouillons encore conservés, le chapitre suivant se consacre à une œuvre en particulier, son roman épistolaire La Nouvelle Héloïse, dont on peut suivre la genèse en disposant sur une table imaginaire son impressionnant dossier génétique enfin (numériquement) rassemblé – sept mille pages, avec quelques versions inconnues de certains passages. Tandis que l’œuvre s’étoffe et se transforme au fil de ses rédactions, une poétique romanesque en acte émerge du fouillis des réécritures, l’écrivain juge son travail avec ses notes de régie et suggère les normes qui le guident, les phases créatives deviennent repérables et interprétables.
Page avec note de régie dans un brouillon de La Nouvelle Héloïse (Lettre 18 de la IIIe partie ; Paris, BnF : NAF 28006, f.12r / Gallica).
On considère souvent que Rousseau est un écrivain de la spontanéité, du sentiment, de l’effusion, un auteur qui pratiquerait une forme d’écriture instinctive. Il faut réviser ce point de vue : il est plutôt un écrivain du repentir, de la retouche corrective, du contrôle de soi, de la maîtrise. Et c’est aussi un écrivain autodictate qui joue, d’une manière géniale, avec cette culture qui ne lui était pas donnée au départ. L’un des mécanismes les plus frappants de son invention littéraire tient à ce jeu, à ces ancrages référencés qu’il construit au fil du travail de l’écriture avec un immense patrimoine littéraire et philosophique. Dans La Nouvelle Héloïse, on le voit ajouter au fil de la rédaction toute une série d’allusions lettrées, à la poésie italienne par exemple (des citations qui ne sont jamais ornementales mais profondément pensées). Au seuil de la publication, il décide d’ajouter dans le manuscrit pour l’imprimeur la mention explicite, en note de bas de page, de deux romanciers de son temps, S. Richardson et Mme Riccoboni, ce qui inscrit l’œuvre dans son époque littéraire et en avoue encore davantage l’appartenance générique. L’étude des brouillons donne également à comprendre l’invention du système des noms et pseudonymes (St. Preux, Héloïse) qui innerve la structure symbolique et pulsionnelle du roman.
Les bibliothèques du promeneur solitaire
Il vaut vraiment la peine de s’intéresser à la bibliothèque de Rousseau et d’en ouvrir les quelques volumes aujourd’hui connus, si l’on veut réellement comprendre quel laboratoire de l’écriture ses livres ont pu constituer pour lui. Cet aspect, qui est l’objet du dernier chapitre, n’a jusqu’à présent été que peu étudié. Or comme Voltaire, Rousseau fut un « marginaliste » écrivant dans les livres ; mais différemment de lui, il a périodiquement vendu ses bibliothèques, de sorte qu’aujourd’hui il n’y a pas un endroit où ils seraient tous rassemblés. La vente la plus significative se fit à Londres, au début de l’année 1767, avant qu’il ne quitte l’Angleterre. L’échange de lettres entre Rousseau et ses amis britanniques qui eut lieu alors nous fait comprendre à quoi ressemblaient ses livres après être passés entre ses mains (beaucoup étaient autographés) ; il révèle aussi le type d’intérêt que les contemporains pouvaient avoir pour les bibliothèques d’écrivains, dès le milieu du siècle des Lumières – Diderot avait vendu la sienne à Catherine II deux ans auparavant. Parmi les mille volumes de la bibliothèque « anglaise » de Rousseau qui fut achetée en grande partie par Vincent Louis Dutens – huguenot installé à Londres, futur membre de la Société royale de Londres et historiographe du roi d’Angleterre –, certains se trouvent encore en Angleterre. C’est le cas des Œuvres de Platon aujourd’hui à la British Library ou de l’édition partielle des Lettres écrites de la campagne de J.-R. Tronchin qui est à la Bodleian Library à Oxford, dans laquelle Rousseau rédige les premiers jets de ses Lettres écrites de la montagne, l’un de ses derniers textes publiés. En revanche, le volume des Essais de Montaigne annoté par Rousseau aujourd’hui à Cambridge a connu une autre trajectoire, car ce volume faisait partie de la petite collection de livres que Rousseau avait gardé auprès de lui jusqu’au moment de sa mort à Ermenonville. Parmi les autres auteurs de son panthéon littéraire, son exemplaire commenté de De l’esprit d’Helvétius aujourd’hui à la BnF à Paris est d’autant plus intéressant que de leur côté Diderot et Voltaire ont eux aussi annoté le leur, et qu’on peut comparer leur manière de s’approprier depuis ses marges un texte si important.
Exemplaire de De l’esprit (Paris, Durand, 1758) d’Helvétius commenté par Rousseau (Paris, BnF : RES-R-895, p.79 / Gallica).
Chez Rousseau, la note marginale s’adapte au texte sur lequel elle se greffe et varie fortement d’une œuvre à l’autre, non pas seulement du point de vue du contenu mais dans sa forme et son style. Il n’annote pas Montaigne comme il annote Platon, Helvétius ou même Voltaire (dont on découvrira que Rousseau l’a annoté deux fois). Le rapport de Rousseau marginaliste à ses livres montre à quel point il s’engage dans sa lecture et peut se transformer lui-même dans la profondeur du dialogue qu’il établit avec l’auteur lu. Mais surtout au cours de sa lecture active, il lui arrive de déposer des états préparatoires de ses propres œuvres, comme cette esquisse jusqu’à présent ignorée d’une lettre de La Nouvelle Héloïse inscrite au crayon sur une page de garde des Œuvres de Platon. Elle peut rejoindre désormais le dossier génétique de ce roman (son analyse est au ch.3, p.160-65).
Ainsi il est possible de mieux cerner le profil d’écrivain-lecteur de Rousseau et ses méthodes de travail quand sa plume ou son crayon court non plus sur une feuille vierge mais sur la page imprimée d’un livre ouvert. La connaissance de ses usages de la bibliothèque donne maintenant une nouvelle dimension à celle de ses pratiques de créateur.
What can Enlightenment philosophes – especially Rousseau, arguably the most difficult of them all – have to tell us about modern life that we don’t already know?
Le Lévite d’Ephraïm: la douleur du Lévite (c.1806), by Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours of Geneva, 1752-1809 (MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève).
We are a team of scholars from different academic areas, each of whom offers a unique vantage point in understanding Rousseau’s texts. This constellation of approaches – grounded in an appreciation of the shared background of feminist critique promoted by the contributors to our volume Reframing Rousseau’s Lévite d’Ephraïm: The Hebrew Bible, hospitality and modern identity – provides the density that allows Rousseau’s nuanced writings to be read in their full complexity.
This book focuses on a relatively unfamiliar work of Rousseau’s: Le Lévite d’Ephraïm, a prose-poem in which Rousseau elaborates on a little-known Hebrew biblical text to interrogate many of the accepted, conventional views on issues ranging from the role of sacred texts; to Rousseau’s self-construction through the representation of guilt and remorse; to the role of hospitality in structuring both individual self-representation and social cohesion; to the place of violence in establishing national and communal self-identity. In each of these spheres, Rousseau reveals a particularly modern perspective in trying to honor both personal and social needs, and in privileging both the individual viewpoint and the political structure.
In keeping with Rousseau’s own multifocal writings as reflected in our own authors’ distinct voices, each contributor here provides a more detailed description of the sections in this book.
Reframing Rousseau’s Lévite d’Ephraïm: The Hebrew Bible, hospitality and modern identity (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment May 2021).
In focusing on Rousseau’s rewriting of one narrative in the Hebrew biblical text, the first chapter interrogates the uses to which Enlightenment thinkers put the ancient – to many, still sacred – understanding of the biblical text. Why do 18th-century thinkers feel the need to refer to biblical texts at all? What new ways of reading do they create to construct a world view that differs markedly both from ancient and classical philosophical and political thought? This section foregrounds the ‘strange’ reliance Rousseau places on an ancient text to propose a modern critique of the conventional way of understanding the world.
Although Rousseau named Le Lévite d’Ephraïm the ‘most cherished’ of his works, it has drawn far less scholarly attention than most of his other works. Taking the author at his word, the second chapter of the volume explores the paradox behind Rousseau’s valorization of the most disturbing of his writings and his contention that it provided proof of his gentle nature. This chapter identifies links between LeLévite d’Ephraïm and Rousseau’s autobiographical works and writings on language and society. Rousseau’s rewriting of this Biblical narrative reflects his vision of language, human nature and the fragility of community bonds while offering unique insight into Rousseau’s understanding of human psychology, manipulation of language, and the dynamics of scapegoating and civil unrest.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Line engraving. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Chapter three looks to how Rousseau incorporates the metatext of hospitality into his œuvre, utilizing the social and textual themes of misguided and absent hospitality. It seems that Rousseau’s personal circumstances intensified his conviction that the subversion of hospitality by the host (individual, group, or nation), ineluctably leads to moral catastrophe. Inter alia, this presentation addresses the issue of failed hospitality as it relates to the marginalization of individuals and to the eventual alienation of the group. In the end, society creates its own strangers, and by mistreating them, prefigures its own demise. Le Lévite constitutes a plea for society to restore its moral compass. While much of Rousseau’s work, including the Confessions and Emile, provides insight into the context of his interpretation of faulty hospitality, it is LeLévite d’Ephraïm that offers a view from a different vantage point of the developing political philosophy explored more fully in the Contrat social.
The book’s final chapter focuses on Rousseau’s view of how nationalism can intersect with violence. Do these two movements inevitably presuppose each other? What determines the notion of ‘belonging’ to a nation? Concomitantly, Rousseau treats the inverse implication of these questions: what is the status of the stranger, of the person who doesn’t belong? Rousseau’s choice of an abstruse biblical text through which to examine this complicated issue highlights Rousseau’s understanding of the complexities of texts, and of others, as we try to interpret these all to get at their essences.
The Afterword of this volume explores some of the current implications of the questions raised, both implicitly and explicitly, by the text of Le Lévite d’Ephraïm. How do Rousseau’s writings – particularly Le Lévite d’Ephraïm – speak to a 21st-century world fractured by demonization and alienation? This section of the book outlines the ways in which strangeness and nationalism can be utilized to unite the world of variegated individuals and communities that form the complicated texture of our lives.
In Reframing Rousseau’s Lévite d’Ephraim, Abrams, Morgenstern and Sullivan offer us a new look at Rousseau’s writing on political and cultural issues that continue to be salient in contemporary times. The authors look forward to expanding this conversation with the responses and reactions from the readers of this book.
– Barbara Abrams, Mira Morgenstern, and Karen Sullivan (Suffolk University Boston, City College / City University of New York, Queens College / City University of New York)
Fig. 1: João Luís Paixão in the role of Pygmalion, in the research project Performing Premodernity’s production of Rousseau’s Pygmalion at the Castle Theatre of Český Krumlov 2015. Photo by Maria Gullstam.
In the Lettre à d’Alembert (1758) – Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critical assessment of the Parisian theatre – the philosopher writes in a footnote: ‘[J]’ai presque toujours écrit contre mon propre intérêt. Vitam impendere vero. Voilà la devise que j’ai choisie et dont je me sens digne. Lecteurs, je puis me tromper moi-même, mais non pas vous tromper volontairement; craignez mes erreurs et non ma mauvaise foi. L’amour du bien public est la seule passion qui me fait parler au public.’[1] Rousseau claims to be writing with the ‘public good’ in mind, even though it might go against his own interests – such as his love for theatre and opera. When approaching Rousseau’s writings for and about theatre, we need to consider the often forgotten parts of his œuvre, as well as highlight the relation between these works and his political, musical, and literary writings. There are still numerous links to be made, and the task of making the connections is not always easy.
An illustrative example of this is Rousseau’s essay De l’imitation théâtrale – a translation and adaptation of parts of the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, with personal annotations by Rousseau himself. Originally, the text was composed in connection with the Lettre à d’Alembert in 1758, and Rousseau planned to publish the two texts together. However, he writes in the preface of De l’imitation théâtrale, ‘n’ayant pu commodément l’y faire entrer, je le mis à part pour être employé ailleurs’.[2] A few years later, Rousseau finds himself in a similar situation when publishing Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse in 1761. Its preface in dialogue form had to be published separately from the novel, ‘sa forme et sa longueur ne m’ayant permis de le mettre que par extrait à la tête du recueil’, as its author writes in the avertissement of the separate publication.[3] Interestingly, he then attempts to publish it together with De l’imitation théâtrale, though without success.
Fig. 2: Laila Cathleen Neuman as Galathée and João Luís Paixão as Pygmalion, in the research project Performing Premodernity’s production of Rousseau’s Pygmalion at the House of Nobility (Riddarhuset) in Stockholm 2016. Photo by Maria Gullstam.
Two years later, in 1763, Rousseau has new plans to publish his ‘extrait de divers endroits où Platon traite de l’Imitation théatrâle’[4] – this time together with the Essai sur l’origine des langues and Lévite d’Ephraïm, and he starts to write a preface (Projet de préface).[5] But, just as in previous attempts, this third initiative to publish De l’imitation théâtrale is never finalised. Instead, the text is published on its own in 1764.
Rousseau saw fit to publish his essay on theatrical imitation together with texts ranging over a whole spectrum of topics and genres: his apparently complex treatise the Lettre à d’Alembert – criticising the Parisian theatre from both an anthropological and a moral perspective; the Préface to his novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloïse, which when published separately in 1761 carried the subtitle Entretien sur les romans; further, the Essai sur l’origine des langues, which has strong connections to both Rousseau’s political writings (through its kinship with the Discours sur l’inégalité) and his writings on music (parts of the Essai started to develop in his unpublished response to Rameau’s accusations in the Erreurs sur la musique dans ‘l’Encyclopédie’); and finally, his moral tale Le Lévite d’Ephraïm. Thus, Rousseau could see connections between his essay on theatrical imitation and all these works. This is just one example amongst his many works for or about theatre that need to be reincorporated in his œuvre as a whole.
Rousseau loved drama passionately, he was aware of the consequences of attacking the Parisian theatre, and yet he criticised the Comédie-Française so fiercely in his Lettre à d’Alembert that this work’s inflammatory reputation still echoes in the twenty-first century. The Lettre’s notoriety has kept most theatre scholars from further exploring Rousseau’s own works for the stage, while the widespread labelling of Rousseau as an homme à paradoxes has every so often justified loose ends within Rousseau studies on the topic. Rousseau’s seemingly dual position in relation to theatre does entail numerous challenges. Our volume Rousseau on stage: playwright, musician, spectator does not claim to resolve these challenges, but to aim, nonetheless, at probing certain difficulties and starting to unravel others. The point of departure for Rousseau on stage is Rousseau’s passionate and double relationship to theatre as expressed and elaborated in the Lettre à d’Alembert, his theoretical texts on music and opera, his compositions for the stage and many descriptions of his experiences as a theatre-goer. Its authors and editors hope to add to the recent increasing interest in Rousseau as playwright, musician and spectator.
– Maria Gullstam and Michael O’Dea
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols (Paris, 1959-1895) (henceforward OC), vol.5, Lettre à d’Alembert, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Jean Rousset, p.120.
[2] Rousseau, OC, vol.5, ‘Avertissement’ in De l’imitation théâtrale, ed. André Wyss, p.1195.
[3] Rousseau, OC, vol.2, Préface de la Nouvelle Héloïse, ou Entretien sur les romans, ‘Avertissement’, ed. Henri Coulet and Bernard Guyon, p.9.
[4] Rousseau, OC, vol.5, ‘Avertissement’ in De l’imitation théâtrale, p.1195.
[5] Neuchâtel, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, MS R 91.
In December 1776, the Courrier d’Avignon reported a curious incident in Ménilmontant: a supposedly mortal collision between the famed philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and…a great dane.
‘Rousseau, qui se promène souvent seul à la campagne, a été renversé il y a quelques jours par un de ces chiens Danois qui précèdent les equipages lestes: on dit qu’il est très malade de cette chute, et on ne peut trop deplorer son sort d’avoir été écrasé par des chiens.’ (no.97, December 3, 1776, p.4).
‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau est mort des suites de sa chute. Il a vécu pauvre, il est mort misérablement; et la singularité de sa destinée l’a accompagné jusqu’au tombeau.’ (no.102, December 20, 1776, p.4).
Jean Jacques François Le Barbier, Brusselles (éd. de Londres), 1783, ‘Rousseau apportant le manuscrit des “Dialogues” à Notre-Dame de Paris’. Illustration pour Rousseau, juge de Jean-Jacques dans Œuvres de J.-J. Rousseau.
Rousseau, as we know, died a few years later in 1778 – the event in Ménilmontant leaving him not mortally injured, but with a face bruised and beaten. The mistaken reports in the Courrier d’Avignon prompted his Rêveries’ critical assessment of eighteenth-century public culture and, in particular, the social and discursive mechanisms that permitted the spread of rumours, an absence of fact-checking, and sensationalism. It was hardly, however, his first diagnosis of ‘fake news’.
In the very era when the postal system and print culture brought people together in ‘imagined communities’, Rousseau worried deeply about the risks of dead letters. Although Rousseau’s colleague, Diderot, was convinced that the two most important technological developments in early modern Europe were the postal system and print culture (enthusing to his sculptor friend Falconet, ‘Il y a deux grandes inventions: la poste qui porte en six semaines une découverte de l’équateur au pôle, et l’imprimerie qui la fixe à jamais’), Rousseau was much more leery of the new information age.
A critical assessment of the Enlightenment’s faith in transparent communication must attune itself to the persistent traces of ancient modes of rhetoric: the traditions of doublespeak and dog-whistle politics. Rousseau, sensitive to the tensions between an esoteric, libertine tradition of communication and an intellectual climate of social progressivism, frames the debate in a series of vexed questions: for whom should I be writing? what is a public and what can it do? Despairing over the absence of any true ‘ami de la vérité’, Rousseau heads to Notre Dame cathedral to deposit, in a famous acte manqué, a copy of Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacqueson the altar of the church.
‘En entrant, mes yeux furent frappés d’une grille que je n’avois jamais remarquée et qui séparoit de la nef la partie des bas-cotés qui entoure le Chœur. Les portes de cette grille étoient fermées, de sorte que cette partie des bas-cotés dont je viens de parler étoit vuide & qu’il m’étoit impossible d’y pénétrer. Au moment où j’apperçus cette grille je fus saisi d’un vertige comme un homme qui tombe en apoplexie, et ce vertige fut suivi d’un bouleversement dans tout mon être, tel que je ne me souviens pas d’en avoir éprouvé jamais un pareil. L’Eglise me parut avoir tellement changé de face que doutant si j’étois bien dans Notre-Dame, je cherchois avec effort à me reconnoître et à mieux discerner ce que je voyois. Depuis trente six ans que je suis à Paris, j’étois venu fort souvent et en divers tems à Notre Dame; j’avois toujours vu le passage autour du Chœur ouvert et libre, et je n’y avois même jamais remarqué ni grille ni porte autant qu’il put m’en souvenir.’ (‘Histoire du précédent écrit’, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, OC, t.1, p. 980).
He notes that in spite of having been in the church scores of times, he had failed to notice the barrier blocking access to the altar. The unpredictability of the reading public – indeed, the plurality of publics and their occasionally indeterminate nature – makes literary reception a chancy affair. In the very loud and crowded market of ideas of the French Enlightenment, the rhetorical gesture of address underscored the vulnerability and power of the modern writer. In my study, Jean-Jacques Rousseau face au public: problèmes d’identité, I explore the vagaries of public communication during the Enlightenment and the dialectical tensions between shadow and illumination, musicality and transparency.
As an insider of the Encyclopédie project turned outsider, Rousseau understood the complexities of the new social and ethical demands placed on the philosophes in a way that is fundamentally different from his contemporaries. By noting the unpredictability and inconsistencies of systems of public address (with readers and spectators moved alternatively by emotions, reason, flows of information, and the major works of a few key power players), Rousseau proposes alternative ways of thinking about communication and the circulation of information. He places value on economies of speech that include silence, babil (babbling), laconism,and musicality – modes of communication that contest conventional modalities of rationality and social exchange. His work is thus an invitation to consider the precarity of address within modern social life and, consequently, the politics of truth at stake in symbolic exchange.
Voltaire Foundation 