Rousseau and Revolution

94 Rousseau and Revolution
When the Club de femmes à Lyon started organizing meetings to read
the Social Contract together, Louis-Marie Prudhomme, a revolutionary journalist
who founded Les Révolutions de Paris, wrote an article where he tried
to dissuade the women from such a perilous activity and what is more based
his argument on none other than Rousseau. He writes,
Does a mother need to read books to raise her children? Doesn’t she have
the book of nature and of her heart? [ . . . ] Why do we care so much in
this club of Lyonnaises to teach to the young Citizens entire chapters from
J. J. Rousseau’s Social Contract? Didn’t he believe that La Fontaine’s fables
were beyond the reach of children? (quoted from Rousseau, 1965–98,
Vol. 47, 96)
Prudhomme then concludes by entreating the women to stay in their homes,
‘We beg the good Citizens of Lyon to stay in their homes, to look after their
household [ . . . ] without pretending to understand the Social Contract as
if it was an easy book.’ When the women protested Prudhomme’s observations,
through a letter written by the Citizen Charton, the President of
the Club, Prudhomme brushed their criticism by resorting once again to
Rousseau,
As for the rest, if there are reproaches to make to the article in question,
the Citizen Charon needs to address them to J.J. Rousseau, whose natural
principles we profess. Julie Volmar would have certainly never taken
her children to the club of the Citoyennes of Lyon. (quoted from Rousseau,
1965–98, Vol. 47, 99)
Prudhomme’s claim to the women of Lyon to follow Rousseau’s teachings
and at the same time to give up their desire of reading his book, besides
refl ecting the journalist’s misogyny, resonates with one of the Balzacian
quotes cited at the beginning of this article, ‘the bourgeois of Paris [ . . . ]
admires Moliere, Voltaire, and Rousseau on faith, and buys their books without
ever reading them.’ Publication and reading in this case do not necessarily
complement each other, and in Rousseau’s case the gap between the
two is further exacerbated by the religious dimension given to the Social
Contract. Instead of the textual signifi cance of the book – and this is what is
implied by Prudhomme’s beseeching – it is its spirit that counts.
It is precisely through this Pauline perspective that we can understand
Rousseau’s authorship of the revolution and also the lack of causality
implied by such an affi rmation. To say that Rousseau wrote something which