Rousseau and Revolution

84 Rousseau and Revolution
Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau (1837) and where
Balzac makes use of the introduction of Birotteau’s character, a lower middle
class perfumer during the Restauration, to criticize the Parisian bourgeois’
superfi cial culture:
When he fi rst came to Paris, Cesar had known how to read, write, and
cipher, but his education stopped there; his laborious life had kept him
from acquiring ideas and knowledge outside the business of perfumery.
Mixing wholly with people to whom science and letters were of no importance,
and whose information did not go beyond their specialty, having no
time to give to higher studies, the perfumer had become a merely practical
man. He adopted necessarily the language, blunders, and opinions of
the bourgeois of Paris, who admires Moliere, Voltaire, and Rousseau on
faith, and buys their books without ever reading them. (Balzac, 2004, 29)
Another character of Le Père Goriot, Vautrin, the criminal genius of Balzac’s
Human Comedy, declares, only after disparaging the Social Contract, that
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is his hero. Referring to himself by his real name,
Jacques Collin, Vautrin says,
A convict of Collin’s caliber, and here I am, is not such a coward as other
men; he is protesting against the monstrous betrayals of the Social Contract,
to use the words of Jean-Jacques, whose disciple I am proud to be. In a
word, I stand alone against the government, with its pile of courts, policemen
and civil budgets, and I get the better of them. (Balzac, 1991, 186)
Against the deceptions of the Social Contract yet, Rousseau’s proud pupil
Vautrin, in the span of two sentences, reveals or feigns a disconcerting
lack of knowledge about his self-avowed hero. 1 The fi gure of Rousseau as a
sort of rebel against the abuses of the powerful is here reduced to its basest
cliché. As these Balzacian examples demonstrate, Rousseau’s legacy,
after the French Revolution, seemed to be in the hands of people who had
never read him. Heralded as the father of the revolution, celebrated as the
saviour of the masses, Rousseau’s name had become commonplace, but so
was the risk of his misinterpretation.
The Revolution Writes Rousseau Writes the Revolution
The generation following 1789 saw Rousseau in light of a revolution, which
although posthumous, gradually came to be considered the philosopher’s