Rousseau and Revolution

Reverse Revolution 97
teach man the fi rst words of the fi rst language, to teach man the alphabet’ (cited
in Roussel, 1972, 29).
4 In a different book on the French Revolution, Quinet reiterates the same idea, ‘In
an edifi ed Catholic France, unprepared for liberty, we see the Revolution partially
keep, at fi rst, the exclusive temperament of the Church it replaced’ (Quinet, 1845,
351).
5 Writing shortly after the Reign of Terror, Volney tries to draw a connection between
the violent upheaval of the revolution and the fanatical embrace of Rousseau’s
ideas.
6 During the French Revolution, the Civic Certifi cates were mainly delivered to public
offi cials and attested to their patriotism. They were used to brush away any
accusations of treachery.
7 The republicanism professed by the legislators of the revolution leads to many
comparisons with Numa and Lycurgus. In Leçons d’Histoire, Volney (1800, 181)
emphasizes the religious dimension of the new devotion for Greek or Roman
myths, ‘Having emancipated ourselves from the Jewish fanaticism, let us now
repress that Vandal or Roman fanaticism, which, under political denominations,
would lead us back to all the fury of religious contests’.
8 Regarding the general question of what the eighteenth century read and how it
read, see Mornet, 1989; Darnton, 1995; Swenson, 2000, 16–31. Regarding the publication
of the Social Contract in post-revolutionary France see Palmer, 1959,
19–27.
9 In Édition and sédition, Robert Darnton writes (1991, 174), ‘Research tends to confi
rm Daniel Mornet’s old discovery, that even if the Contrat social was the “bible” of
the French Revolution, this work was very little known in pre-revolutionary
France’.