Rousseau and Revolution

Reverse Revolution 93
among the most, if not the most published book of the revolutionary
period. After having little circulation prior to 1789, the Social Contract
became what Mornet would term the ‘Bible of the Revolution’. 9 This comparison
to the Bible is not solely numeric, used to highlight the prodigious
number of Social Contract editions published but it lends to a more religious
metaphor. Considering that the Bible, a book where spirit dominates over
text, is often used as a relic rather than a text, and read accordingly, we
are to wonder if a similar approach was accorded to the Social Contract. In
the case of Rousseau’s political treatise, can we actually equate publication
with reading? In Le Mercure britannique, the ideologue Mallet du Pan writes
from his exile in London that he had once heard Marat read the Social
Contract to a crowd whose immoderate enthusiasm refl ected a dangerous
and delirious zeal. He then proceeds to compare the reception of the Social
Contract to that of the Koran,
This Social Contract which destroys society was a Koran to the affected
speech makers of 1789, to the Jacobins of 1790, to the Republicans of
1791, and to the most atrocious madmen. [ . . . ] Through some remarkable
oddity, the most isolated of writers, a hapless stranger retired from
the world, without a party, without friends in his lifetime and who counted
as his enemies the majority of the Paris philosophes, became the prophet
of revolutionary France. (Mallet du Pan cited in Roussel, 1972, 77)
The comparison to the Koran suggests that the force of the Social Contract
was in its symbolic signifi cance rather than in its content and that most
people, instead of expounding its theories, bought it more readily for its
consecrated and ceremonial nature. In 1795, Sénac de Meilhan declares
in Des gouvernements, des moeurs et des conditions en France avant la Révolution
that ‘this profound and abstract book is rarely read and understood by a
few number of people’ (cited in ibid., 78). Yet, lack of readership does not
mean that the Social Contract was not read at all. Besides the many editions
of the book that appeared after the revolution, Rousseau’s political treatise
was readily available in several compilations of his works. The fact, however,
that the text generated several interpretations refl ects the considerable liberties
taken with the text but also the text’s own predisposition to misreadings
and non-readings and its susceptibility to be used as a symbol more
than anything else. It is precisely this symbolic dimension that explains the
revolutionaries’ attachment to a book which was politically unpractical and
whose disapproval of representation contradicted the form of government
they pursued (Swenson, 2000, 167–74).