Rousseau and Revolution

96 Rousseau and Revolution
which it is the legislator’s duty, as pedagogue, to inculcate to the masses
should antedate the laws and the institutions themselves.
The legislator’s authorship is retrospective in the same way Rousseau’s
will be during the revolution. It is an invisible authorship where the spirit
religiously supersedes the text and where the mythical supplants the causal.
Before the citizens of the Social Contract decide on the laws of the republic,
they are infused with a spirit that paradoxically predestines them towards
their legislative pronouncements. The spirit is not dictated through authoritative
measures. Instead it is impressed on people by the soft force of habit.
Since it is not written, the spirit is not conceived of as an external mandate
and since it is fl uid, it can be renewed and it can easily revisit and revise
the foundational story of either the institution or its people. Regardless of
Rousseau’s real intentions, he became the author of the revolution because
the spirit of his writing was revisited and revised to sanctify the event. That
the revolutionaries chose Rousseau as their intercessor is not surprising
because more than any other eighteenth-century philosopher, Rousseau’s
political philosophy championed the supremacy of the spirit over the letter.
During the revolution, it was therefore Rousseau’s spirit that dominated
and not precisely his letter. Often unread and misunderstood, the
Social Contract had nonetheless become the Bible of an era.
Notes
1 The intelligence Vautrin displays in the Comédie humaine suggests that he has read
Rousseau. The careless slip might refl ect instead his awareness that nobody else
will catch it.
2 In his discourse ‘Sur les rapports des idées religieuses et morales’ of May 1794,
Robespierre attacks atheism and the materialist philosophers, and while urging
the importance of religious faith as a means to cement the ideas of the revolution,
he turns to the fi gure of Rousseau who, Robespierre writes, is ‘worthy of the ministry
as preceptor of humankind’ (cited and translated in Chartier, 1991, 88).
3 Since language supposes the existence of society, Rousseau does not believe or
refuses to believe that it might have had a role in the state of nature. In contrast to
Rousseau’s, Condillac’s account of the development of language seems more scientifi
c and refl ects the views of most of the other philosophes. Condillac refuses any
innate or metaphysical considerations, and defends the creation of language as
following a materialist maturation that starts with the involuntary movements of
the body. On the supposed religious nature of Rousseau’s account of language,
Joesph Garat, professor at the École normale, declares in 1800, ‘How does he
unravel the threads of this problem he helped knot? Just like bad poets unravelling
the threads of a bad tragedy, by calling upon a divinity to descend on earth to