Author2Author: Leo Damrosch & Roger Pearson

When the galleys for Leo Damrosch’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius and Roger Pearson’s Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom arrived in my mailbox within days of each other, I knew I had an Author2Author to set up. So I got busy—and while I was making the necessary arrangements, Prof. Damrosch received a nomination for this year’s National Book Award in the nonfiction category. I’m glad he was able to take some time during an incredibly hectic month to chat with Prof. Pearson by email, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy the results.

Leo Damrosch: The breach between Voltaire and Rousseau certainly originated in some intemperate remarks of Rousseau’s, exacerbated by his public campaign against the theater Voltaire hoped to establish in Calvinist Geneva. But afterwards it does seem that Voltaire worked insidiously against Rousseau behind the scenes, while proclaiming total innocence even to those closest to him. What is your sense of this from Voltaire’s point of view?

Roger Pearson: Voltaire regarded theatrical entertainment as having a civilizing effect on actors and spectators alike. He liked to draw on the history of ancient China, Greece and Rome in particular to argue that public theatre, by bringing people together in the shared enjoyment of the ‘pure pleasures of the mind’, renders human beings more sociable in their dealings, more moderate in their behaviour, and keener in their judgement. Progressive elements in Geneva shared his view, and were pressing for the city fathers to lift their ban. Rousseau tried to persuade the city of his birth not to do so. For him the theatre was emblematic of the insincerity, immorality and taste for show that he found widespread in the society of his time.

In campaigning against Voltaire Rousseau accused him of being an atheist, thereby seeking to alienate moderate (let alone reactionary) Genevan opinion. And yet Voltaire was a deist, as was Rousseau. What caused the breach, however, was not the substance of the charge but its timing. Rousseau’s accusation (in his ‘Letters written from the Mountain’ (1764)) came just at the moment when Voltaire was awaiting a decision from the royal council in France in the case of Jean Calas.

Calas was the Protestant merchant from Toulouse, who in a monstrous miscarriage of justice had been executed for supposedly murdering his own son for wanting to convert to Catholicism. Thanks to Voltaire’s extraordinary efforts Louis XV’s council had agreed to review the evidence, and the world’s first champion of human rights was hopeful that they would clear Calas’s name, even if they could not restore the man to life. And Rousseau—whom Voltaire considered a fellow-traveller in the great cause of Enlightenment—chooses this moment not only to accuse Voltaire of being an atheist but also to reveal that he was the anonymous author of the ‘Sermon of the Fifty’ (1752), a particularly savage onslaught on the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition? Just when Voltaire was trying to get the Establishment to back him? Voltaire never forgave Rousseau for putting his own campaign against the theatre before the posthumous fate of an innocent man. Thereafter he attacked him openly and violently, revealing to the world for the first time what Rousseau had done with his five children and (in Voltaire’s view) exposing him as a hypocrite.

Leo Damrosch: During the eighteenth century it was usual to regard Voltaire as a major thinker and Rousseau as a clever purveyor of paradoxes. Is it fair to say that Rousseau’s thought, while certainly full of paradoxes, is strikingly original, and that Voltaire was really a brilliant popularizer?

Roger Pearson: I would certainly agree that Rousseau’s thought is strikingly original. And, as you have shown so well in your wonderful biography, this was a quite remarkable achievement given his lack of a formal education, and given also the various physical and psychological handicaps with which he had to contend. As to Voltaire, he was certainly brilliant—in his wit, his charisma, his energy, his quickness of mind—but I’m not sure he is best described as a popularizer.

Sure, he did ‘popularize’ the very complex science of Isaac Newton for a sceptical French readership, and he did have a way of expounding abstruse philosophical argument in clear and accessible prose. But ‘controversialist’ might be nearer the mark. He was not an original thinker, but he had unsurpassed skills as a communicator, and he was unique in the eighteenth century for his ability to mobilise and change public opinion. His core values were tolerance, particularly religious toleration (through his deism he sought especially to defuse sectarian strife and expose the unfoundedness of religious wars), and freedom: freedom of conscience, of thought, of speech. And he showed just what could be done with those freedoms.

The author of the classic English-language biography of Rousseau, Maurice Cranston, died before he could complete his three-volume biography of his subject, and your own biography is the first to examine the last decade of his life in scholarly detail. How does your view of these years change our traditional view of Rousseau?

Leo Damrosch: Cranston’s biography is certainly classic in that it’s judicious and comprehensive. However, I was drawn to the daunting project of a Rousseau biography because I felt that Cranston (whose professed model was “Lockean”) emphasized factual details and paid too little attention to the ways in which Rousseau’s personality and his very unusual life story lie at the heart of his amazing originality. The full-blown paranoia of Rousseau’s final years was rooted in anxieties and suspicions that had plagued him from childhood onward, and his deep sense of otherness—of never knowing how to fit in—inspired penetrating insights into aspects of society that most people take for granted.

As for Rousseau’s final years, they began with a period of genuine terror during which he was driven from one place of exile to another, due partly to his overreaction to imagined threats (an admirer wrote years later, “He was forever persecuted, whether by envy or by himself”). What surprised me, however, was the peacefulness of Rousseau’s final eight years in Paris. He contracted his social life, enjoyed long walks in the countryside, wrote the magnificent Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and achieved something like the tranquil “sentiment de l’existence” that had always been his ideal.

Roger Pearson: Were—are— people right to condemn Rousseau for placing his newborn children in an orphanage?

Leo Damrosch: It wasn’t an orphanage, but a foundling hospice, intended for the temporary care of infants who would then be sent to nurses in the country; the vast majority of them died. It goes without saying that it’s right to condemn Rousseau for this action, repeated five times against the protests of the children’s mother (though the facts remain murky and virtually everything we know about it comes from Rousseau himself). His attempts, later on, to rationalize what he had done were hollow and self-serving in the extreme. The best that can be said is that he himself came to regret bitterly what he had done, and that his guilt helped to inspire his groundbreaking treatise on education, Emile. It should be noted, also, that his common-law wife Therese Levasseur remained with Rousseau loyally through all his tribulations, and someone who knew her after his death remembered that “she always said he was a very good man.” I would add, too, that although some reviewers have complained that I haven’t judged Rousseau sternly enough, I believe the biographer’s task is to describe and explain, not to judge.

15 November 2005 | author2author |