Rousseau and Revolution

Rousseau and the Terror 55
of elected representatives, journalists and the general public – various factions
and actors seeing in him what they wanted (Hesse, 2005). I would
like merely to add a minor qualifi cation to this established historical judgement.
An examination of debate at the National Convention, the Jacobins
and Parisian culture more generally during the Terror and the fi rst months
of Thermidor demonstrate the limited ways in which Rousseau was evoked.
I have relied on the semi-offi cial Le Moniteur universel between July 1793 and
November 1794. The picture of Rousseau that emerges is of a Genevan citizen
who wrote foundational books for the revolution as a whole and education
in particular, who is an authority to be cited and celebrated, but also of
someone capable of error and who can be surpassed. The invocation of ‘J.-J.’
in order to justify violence during the Terror is altogether rare.
The link between Rousseau and Geneva was a constant reference in the
mid-1790s, as news trickled back from Switzerland and as Genevan citizens
in Paris promoted their favorite son. In July 1793, a festival in his honor was
held in his hometown. In December, citizens there demanded that a statue
of him be erected within six months. In May 1794, Genevan citizens in Paris,
claiming that Rousseau belonged to all nations, called for a French festival;
and three months later, in the very edition of the Moniteur that described
the fall of Robespierre and his allies, word came of Rousseau’s global revolution
being forcefully defended on the shores of Lake Geneva. In August,
the Swiss ambassador addressed the Convention, noting the French appreciation
for ‘this Hercules of the political’ whose ‘pen,’ together with the
arrow of William Tell, were the ‘great instruments of liberty’. In October, a
certain citizen Adet from outside Geneva wrote to the Convention that
arms were necessary to reestablish and maintain sacred principles, and that
Rousseau had seeded the tree of liberty. 4
The plan for a Parisian festival honoring Rousseau had been in the works
for some time. In November 1793, the philosopher’s old confi dant and
admirer, the aristocrat René Girandin, had proposed that Rousseau’s remains
(which he possessed) be placed on an island in the Seine planted with poplar
trees; he also offered to change his name to Émile in order to prove his loyalty
to the revolution. At the May 1794 assembly where Genevans had called
for a French Rousseau celebration, Jean Debry proposed that his remains be
moved to the Pantheon – an appeal he repeated several months later in front
of the Swiss ambassador. That event fi nally took place in October 1794, the
National Convention’s procession ‘surrounded by a tricolor ribbon’ and preceded
by a copy of the Social Contract, that ‘lighthouse of legislators’. 5
Other disparate symbolic and cultural gestures were noticeable in these
years; for instance, in October 1793 the town of Montmorency changed its