Rousseau and Revolution

88 Rousseau and Revolution
The adoration surrounding Rousseau did indeed reach religious and
cultish dimensions, and the fact that he was arguably persecuted (or so he
believed) by the men in power, be they politicians or philosophes, had, in the
eyes of the revolutionaries, given him a Christ-like magnitude. Although
the fi gure of Rousseau was used to replace a deposed God, the contextual
structure of the Catholic faith, as Quinet argues, remained intact.
Rousseau, like Christ, was glorifi ed in a covenant of persecution and suffering.
By placing him on the altar, people were reminded of their own affl ictions
suffered under the Ancien Régime, and the revolution was seen as
both their and Rousseau’s vengeance over the oppressors. In his Lettres sur
les Confessions published in 1791, Guingené, a great admirer of Rousseau,
starts his preface with the following words: ‘The man of genius is avenged;
The French Nation is vindicated in the eyes of Europe. It has erected a
statue to the Author of the Social Contract and decreed that his Widow
will be provided for at the expense of the State’ (Guingéné, 1791, v–vi).
Guingéné then proceeds to compare his literary homage to Rousseau to
drops of incense devotedly left at the foot of the author’s statue, ‘at a time
when his memory has somehow become sacred’. The religious symbolism
surrounding Rousseau’s glory is once again raised by the same Guingéné
in La Feuille villageoise, a revolutionary paper founded in Paris in 1790 to
spread the ideals of the revolution throughout all the villages of France. In
the journal, celebrating the 1794 Fête des victoires and the particular homage
given to Rousseau, Guingéné writes, ‘It seemed not like we were honoring
the man of genius, the eloquent man, the great man but rather the good
man, the apostle of good morals, the benefactor of humanity [ . . . ] All of
this had airs of magic and religion’ (cited in Roussel, 1972, 14).
As Jean Roussel notes in Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France après la Révolution,
the worship of Rousseau did move from the ceremonial to the ritual. As the
Jacobins gained more power, it was common to see among the populace, at
least for a short period of time, a sort of sacrament to honor the author of
the Social Contract. Roussel writes,
Among the people and beyond, we witness a sort of mystical recourse to
Rousseau, as if there was a need for a “tutelary genius”, an unlikely intercessor
during a precarious time between the Frenchmen and the
“Supreme Being” or Nature. The Cult of the Martyrs of Liberty had
recently given to the adoration of Rousseau a dramatic character, and
often added his name to the sacrifi cial consecration which until then was
limited to the “trinity” of Le Peletier, Marat and Chalier. (Ibid.)