Rousseau and Revolution

Chapter 5
Reverse Revolution: The Paradox of
Rousseau’s Authorship
Fayçal Falaky
Rousseau, Saviour of People Who Never Read Him
Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1835) includes a passage where the ambitious
Rastignac is left contemplating an unholy offer to get rich from Vautrin, a
sort of criminal dandy with whom he happened to share the same boarding
house. If Rastignac marries Victorine de Taillefer, Vautrin will get rid of
her older brother, the only obstacle between the girl and the family inheritance.
Tempted by this diabolic deal, Rastignac confi des his dilemma to
his friend Bianchon through an allusion to Rousseau.
Have you read Rousseau?
Yes.
Do you recall the passage where he asks what the reader would do if he
could become rich by killing some old mandarin in China without stirring
from Paris, simply by willing it so?
I do.
Well?
Bah! I am well on to my thirty-third mandarin. (Balzac, 1991, 124)
The problem with Rastignac’s reference is that Rousseau never wrote such a
thing. The story of the murdered mandarin originates in Chateaubriand’s
Génie du christianisme where he, in turn, refers to a passage taken from a
text written by Diderot in 1773, entitled Entretien d’un père avec ses enfants, ou
du danger de se mettre au-dessus des lois (Ginzburg, 2001). The fact that this
misattribution to Rousseau happens after the explicit question: ‘Have you
read Rousseau?’ and to which the answer is another explicit ‘Yes’ means
that Balzac was well aware of the lapse, and he was instead making a point
on people’s general ignorance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s works. This
point is quite explicit in a different novel of La Comédie humaine entitled