Rousseau and Revolution

Reverse Revolution 89
In such an environment, any condemnation of Rousseau was tantamount
to sacrilege. In Leçons d’histoire, Volnay whose name, a compound of Ferney
and Voltaire, gave away his admiration for the latter describes the religious
fervour with which people reacted to criticism of Rousseau in these terms:
There is this characteristic difference between Rousseau and Voltaire,
considered as chieftains of opinions, that if you attack Voltaire before his
partizans, they defend him by reasoning or pleasantry, but without passion,
and at most only regard you as a person of bad taste: But if you
attack Rousseau before his disciples, you excite in them a religious horror,
and they regard you as a monster. (Volney, 1800, 217) 5
The divine statute given to Rousseau also forbade any heretical association
to his glory. Hence, when in 1791, a decree was passed to move Rousseau’s
grave from Ermenonville to the Panthéon, Marat denounced the idea and,
in a letter, appealed to René Girardin, Rousseau’s friend and the man
responsible for his mortal remains:
Girardin, it is you whom a dying Rousseau entrusted with the care of his
mortal remains. By putting them between your hands, he knew that they
will be under the sacred guard of friendship. Would you cowardly suffer
today that they be transported from the peaceful groves of Ermenonville
to the lair consecrated to the most notorious traitors of the homeland, to
the vilest corruptors of morals, to the most scandalous writers of the
century? Why! The ashes of the apostle of truth and of liberty, of the
defender of humanity, of the restorer of the sacred rights of nations, will
they lie in between the contagious corpses of the apostles of imposture,
the apologists of despotism? (Marat, 1908, 217)
These apostles of imposture and apologists of despotism are of course
Mirabeau and Voltaire whose remains had been translated to the Panthéon
that very same year, in 1791. For Marat, it was a sacrilege to associate them
in any way with the ‘apostle of truth’.
The fervour which had seized upon the French Revolution divinized
Rousseau to the point that good citizenship implied a fanatic embrace
of his ideas. Blaspheming the author of Émile could not go unnoticed or
unpunished. Charles Palissot, whose 1760 play Les Philosophes depicted
a Jean-Jacques Rousseau walking on all fours, had thus a hard time justifying,
after the revolution, his ancient hostility towards the Genevan