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.

damrosch.jpgLeo 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?

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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.

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15 November 2005 | author2author |

DC Indie’s Bid for Survival

Chapters, an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., recently celebrated its 20th anniversary last September, but is having trouble staying in business long enough to make the 21st. The solution they’ve hit upon is to become a nonprofit—or, technically, to sell the bookstore to Wordfest, the 501(c)(3) they founded four years ago to sponsor a D.C. poetry festival. The plan is to get 1,600 people to contribute $50 each; so far, they’ve convinced just over 150 donors and have until the end of the year to raise the rest. One of the store’s co-owners, Steve Moyer, spoke with a local writers’ association about their attempt at a fourth-quarter rally:

In the short run it would enable Chapters to get an infusion of capital and we would be back on firm financial footing. Once that happens it completes the circle. Wordfest can continue doing the events it does and Chapters can continue selling books at these events. When, and if, Chapters has a profit it would go back to Wordfest and support its work.”

15 November 2005 | uncategorized |

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