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Four Philosophes

Of the four best-known philosophes it was Voltaire who became a symbol of human rights and of tolerance for others’ beliefs. "I do not agree with what you say, but I will give my life to defend your right to say it", he said. In this defiant spirit, he spent his life protecting the Protestants from persecution, even though he was himself a Deist, which was one step removed from being an atheist.

He lashed out against the Church for playing on the people’s fear and ignorance to keep them under its thumb. His hatred of priests was such that he signed his missives with the exclamation "Ecrasez l’infame!", roughly meaning Stamp out the oppressors, and it soon became the Revolution’s battle cry too.

Voltaire wrote many treatises, essays and books, but most of them are nowadays only read by specialists, perhaps because the enemy which he railed against – the Catholic Church - no longer threatens us, to a large extent thanks to his own efforts.

But among the now dated tomes he left is one brilliant exception, Candide. The irony is that this short novel can still be read with pleasure in spite - rather than because - of the philosophical message Voltaire meant it to convey. This is due to the artfully ingenuous style Voltaire used to describe his starry-eyed hero’s wandering through an unexpectedly wicked world.

Candide, then, is that literary oddity, a book that doesn’t age. But Voltaire wrote it not to be eternal literature but a pamphlet or lampoon, aimed at a philosophical adversary. Since the subject was highly controversial, he signed it with an English pseudonym and said it was translated from German. For many years he denied he had written it, even in private.

The parable of folly which delights us for its fantasy and wit was in fact aimed at debunking the ideas of a German thinker, Leibniz. In the optimistic spirit of the generation previous to Voltaire’s, he said that God had designed the world for the benefit of man, to be "the best of all possible worlds".

Voltaire shows his hero, like Don Quijote, misinterpreting the calamities he discovers on his journey. This is because he has been taught, by his companion, a German professor, to believe that the world is an admirable rather than a sordid place.

The most spectacular bit of proof which Voltaire introduces to show just how little we mortals have to be thankful for was the great earthquake which struck the city of Lisbon and was still fresh in everyone’s memory. Debates had raged about divine clemency, or – if you were a radical – the lack of it, in every scholarly circle of Europe.

Candide arrives on the scene just after it happens, witnessing at first hand the horrors needlessly wrought upon men by nature and, by association, God.

Since Pompey was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, there was nothing in the history of Europe that could compare with the earthquake of 1755 that began off the coast of Lisbon. The shaking opened huge chasms in the ground, into which houses and people tumbled like toys.

Then the sea receded so far out that those who had not been buried alive rushed to the wharves to gape at the sunken ships which had been lying on the bottom for years. Less than an hour later, a monster-wave immersed the lower part of the city, leaving the rest to be destroyed by the fires which broke out in the ruined houses of the upper port.

The effects were felt as far away as Algeria and Finland, and all Europe read the reports with horror and bewilderment. How, people thought, could God punish those Christians so cruelly, especially since Lisbon, with its many monasteries and convents, was known for its piety? The fact that it happened on All Saints Day while half the city was hearing Mass – in churches which often collapsed on top of them - made it all the more terrifying.

When the plague struck Europe in the 14^th century, there were the Jews to blame for surreptitiously working magic against their ancient enemies the Christians. But by the 18^th century, what with the advances of science, people needed a more rational explanation.

The materialism of Voltaire’s message, that nature is a mindless force that takes no account of human destiny, was shocking to his readers, but the earthquake had shaken their faith too, so – to the Church’s horror - many decided that Divine Providence had indeed failed them.

With his scathing wit Voltaire could make anyone seem ridiculous, including the revered Leibniz, who was famous as a visionary mathematician rather than a philosopher. But since almost no one today knows Leibnitz existed while almost everyone has at least heard of Voltaire, the book Candide is usually read out of context, as a raucous adventure story.

But even though Voltaire knew how to spin a good yarn, his pessimism was no better a candle to see by than the optimism he derided. Within a century of his death, mankind would begin to learn to protect itself from famine, disease and even earthquakes, and, also, to enjoy a cornucopia of comforts that would have left even the verbose Voltaire speechless.

In my Sorbonne text book was the famous anecdote about Voltaire’s insolence towards a powerful nobleman, which was a display of verbal magic in itself. The young writer’s given names, Francis Mary, were too redolent with Catholic piety and, as for the surname, he had no love for his family either, so he invented an epithet with which he signed all of his works, Voltaire.

It is thought to be an amalgam of the words volontaire, strong-willed and stubborn, and voltiger, to twist and turn like a free and uncatchable lark. When a powerful aristocrat made fun of it, Voltaire replied, "Monsieur, I am beginning my name, but you are ending yours". For his cheek he was beaten and locked up in the Bastille, before fleeing to democratic England.

Although Voltaire was the most endearing and certainly the most picturesque of the revolutionary writers popularly known as les philosophes, he was no prophet. He believed that there was some nebulous kind of God, and that the best form of government was that of an enlightened monarch – rather than democracy which he thought meant the rule of the barbaric mob. This, among many other today-untenable viewpoints, showed that Voltaire was only a man of his time, no better or worse than many of his fellows.

He spent his life deriding the ruling class of priests and noblemen, but he had less to fear from them than might be thought. This was because Voltaire was also a formidable financier and had over his life acquired vast wealth, which made him almost untouchable by his enemies.

The idea of a writer also being a businessman seemed incongruous to me when I was a student, even though I later became a self-styled one myself. But what truly shocked me, when I searched beyond the brief description in my text book, was to learn that Voltaire’s fortune was partly obtained from his investments in a slave-trading company established in Nantes. According to this revelation, one of this company’s ships was even christened "Voltaire" as a tribute to the outfit’s most illustrious actionnaire.

I could scarcely imagine how such a cargo could have been carried in a boat named for the champion of the oppressed. As a businessman, Voltaire must have known – to name only one horror - that captains regularly ordered sick and dying slaves to be thrown overboard in mid-ocean, and then claimed losses from the insurers.

Voltaire’s opinion that blacks were insensitive brutes was something which was then taken for granted, even, it seems, by great thinkers. Voltaire in his writings made no bones of putting Africans halfway on a scale between humans and shellfish - oysters to be exact. The blacks he encountered, on his visits to Nantes where the slaves disembarked, must have been so abject that no one could possibly have thought they had feelings like other men.

He vociferously hated Jews, a feeling which also was the rule then, even among enlightened scholars. He declared in print and aloud, that Jews were "the most abominable people in the world".

But this was partly because, in his business ventures, he had to compete with loan sharks and speculators who were Jewish. Vain as he was, he must have hated dealing with anyone clever enough to get the better of him, Gentile or Jew.

But he aimed most of his arrows at his lifelong enemy the Catholic Church, as well as every symbol of mystical mumbo-jumbo that raised its haloed head, notably Joan of Arc. The irony is that, in so doing, he unintentionally got the legend-making machinery started which eventually transformed an obscure medieval marty into a great national heroine.

To irritate Joan’s devotees, he wrote a bawdy novelette in which he painted her as a lusty peasant wench who lost her famed virginity soon after taking up arms and from then on wantonly copulated with her soldiers. The book, which was written in verse, went from hand to hand as an illicit piece of pornography, to the horror of the prelates.

The German writer Schiller later came to Joan’s defence with a play showing her in a more romantic light, which became very popular too. Napoleon, to drum up support for his campaigns, presented her as a symbol of French pride and resistance to foreign invaders.

Finally, at the end of the 19^th century, the rising tide of French nationalism lifted all boats that could be used to form a fleet of historical heroes, with the curious result that Voltaire and Joan, among other figures, were rehabilitated simultaneously. Their figures were reproduced in engravings, medallions and variously sized plaster statuettes, to inspire the citizens of the Third Republic with their courageous, and patriotic, examples.

What made it so easy for Voltaire to become a legend was his highly picturesque appearance, as it was represented by sculptors toward the end of his long life. Hunched under his wig, bandy-legged in his stockings and grinning impishly, he resembled, as his name deliberately suggested, a spry jester ready to whirl out of harm’s way. If he had gone through life as a normal-looking, well-fleshed fellow of modest means, he might not have received the admiration he deserved. His decision to stop using his unevocative name François-Marie Arouet may have helped him become a legend, too.

Voltaire was the subject of some highly amusing stories and the author of at least one. But I don’t like people who build their reputations only on what they hate. What would he have been without the Catholic Church, for example?

It is necessary to decry ugliness, to be sure, but the only way of destroying it is to create beauty, and I see none of that in Voltaire. He was scheming, spiteful and self-enamoured. He knew how to flatter and offend just the right people, and how to play to the French penchant for posturing and verbal glibness.

He genuflected enthusiastically before his patrons the "enlightened" monarchs Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia, who heaped upon him gifts and honours in return. Wittingly or not, Voltaire with his prestige conferred upon them the reputation for humanism which they craved, thus allowing them to perpetuate their despotic practices without being accused of backwardness. It was a time when everyone wanted to be seen as scholarly and modern.

For his intellectual rivals, however, Voltaire reserved the most vitriolic insults, and never forgave a slight or a snub. At the end of his life, he fled Paris to live in a great manor near Geneva, to be close to the border in case the French police came after him. There, he found the local Protestants too provincial and tried to have a theatre built for them, where they could enjoy the latest Parisian productions.

Rousseau, on the other hand, was a native Genevan and born a Protestant, and after putting on plays and operas in Paris himself, turned his back on sinful worldliness and returned to his puritanical origins. He was outraged at Voltaire’s plan and wrote to accuse him of corrupting the morals of his neighbours. Voltaire response went down in history as a masterpiece of venom, made doubly cruel because Voltaire was so rich and powerful, and Rousseau a penniless and persecuted eccentric.

We often forget that Voltaire was primarily a man of the theatre, not politics or philosophy. He wrote many plays and acted in them himself, and when he retired to his manour near Geneva, he built a tiny theatre there to entertain his friends. He would direct the plays presented – most of them his own – in the smallest details, and had a box built for himself to sit in, right on the stage. There he would sit in his wig, urging the actors on, weeping at the sad parts, laughing at the funny ones, and shouting criticisms when they made a slip.

When he was 83 and frail of health, Voltaire madly decided to return to Paris, where he had not been for almost 30 years, to direct one of his plays. The young Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro, had in his absence become France’s favourite baiter of bluebloods and Voltaire wanted to reimpose himself. But the excitement of the hero’s welcome he was given by the Parisians and the strain of the rehearsals led him to the grave, a willing victim of his own vanity.

In spite of all his attacks on the Church, he died as the Roman Catholic he had always nominally been, saying he believed in God, but not superstition. His nephew who was a priest knew that the Archbishop would deny him a Christian burial so he had the remains rushed overnight to a monastery near Paris, before the prohibition had been published. And there he stayed until the Revolutionaries carried his bones to the Pantheon.

Voltaire was kind and generous to the Protestants, it is true, but this was only because they were persecuted by the Catholics. As we have seen, he had no pity on the Negroes, whether it is true that he profited from their enslavement or not, nor did he on the Jews he callously slandered.

When I was a student, I saw Voltaire as he was presented in my text books, inseparable from the tolerance and courage which his name symbolizes. But, putting the legend on one side, I would now say that he was a man whose fame and wealth allowed him to speak his mind more freely than anyone else, but that his insatiable vanity ended up making him as hateful as the tyrants he attacked.

He was the enfant terrible of the lettered salon-goers, the lords and ladies who dabbled in rebuilding the world without getting up from their Louis XV armchairs. Voltaire’s ego in this dazzling milieu – which still exists and is known in 21^st century parlance as "la gauche caviar" – grew to manic proportions.

The flattery of his acolytes blinded him to his own wretchedness. My verdict is that Voltaire should have been more candid, like the hero of his novel.

More to my taste was Montesquieu, but since he was not ambitious like Voltaire, less of his gossip was left behind to feed our imaginations. Whereas Voltaire was a puny upstart who stopped at nothing to increase his fame, Montesquieu was an elegant aristocrat who could afford to be modest. He had nothing to prove to anyone but himself.

Since Montesquieu had no personal grudges against society, there was no mauvais sang to trouble the free flow of his thoughts. Being a studious, serious sort of man, he never inflamed popular passions like scrappy Voltaire did so successfully. When the Revolution came, Voltaire’s body was dug up and carried triumphantly to be buried in the Pantheon, while Montesquieu’s bones were left to moulder beneath a church floor, on the other side of the Latin Quarter.

It is true that he never challenged the ancien regime as directly as Voltaire did, but his ideas on law and government were admired by revolutionary thinkers the world around. Montesquieu wanted an unfettered relativism to replace the absolutism of the feudal past, and he wrongly thought that French society could make the change peacefully. It should be said, en passant, that both Voltaire and Montesquieu dreaded democracy as being tantamount to mob rule by the unlettered masses.

To understand the world in this realistic light, Montesquieu set out to see as much of it as he could. When he visited Budapest, for example, he surprised his distinguished hosts by insisting on making an arduous journey to look into the Hungarian mines, in order to observe how the miners lived, and suffered, at first hand.

Voltaire only ever left Paris to flee his political enemies or to enjoy the hospitality of his blue-blooded admirers, while Montesquieu was a man of the world who travelled for travel’s sake, which is what makes me feel closest to him. Voltaire, on the other hand, was a forerunner of our professional intellectual, so sure of his own brilliance that he feels no need to go down on his knees to seek truth on the ground.

They were not really philosophers – they were given the name, as today they might be called "the intellectuals" - but provocative litterateurs who were as much concerned with style as content . To begin with, most of their ideas were borrowed from dour Englishmen like Locke and Hume, who lived in the previous century but never created much of a stir outside the academic class. The Frenchmen, being born artists, whipped their lumpy concepts into frothy mayonnaise, high-class literary entertainment which everyone could enjoy and learn from. That is why the names of Locke and Hume are known only to scholars, whereas our four pamphleteers are household words in France and even familiar to many Englishmen.

And no one could equal virtuoso Voltaire when it came to such concoctions, not even the wise, well-meaning Montesquieu. Voltaire wrote a popular novel to show what the uncivilized world looked like to a deluded member of the civilized one, long after Montesquieu had published his own fantasy, The Persian Letters, to show what 18^th century Parisian society might look like to a pair of Orientals.

But compared to Candide, it plods rather than soars, in spite of Montesquieu’s witty way of saying things. It is composed of the letters two Persian visitors write home containing their impressions of the strange ways of their hosts, who are for the most part wealthy Parisian sophisticates – precisely the author’s milieu.

This immediately gives away the underlying purpose of the novel, which is to make fun of Montesquieu’s peers. It was very entertaining for the readers of the day, but the device of having Persians writing letters to the women and eunuchs of their harems in the worldly language of 18^th century gentlemen, and getting similar replies from them, is less convincing, and much less amusing, than the obstinately optimistic utterances of Candide and his thick-headed teacher Doctor Pangloss.

Montesquieu was the better philosopher of the two, but Voltaire was the artist, the maître de la parole, who could spin a fantastic yarn for the enjoyment of anyone who could turn a page, even he had to have someone else read it aloud to him. By comparison, Les Lettres Persanes is a thinly disguised vehicle for the author’s social criticisms, however well-founded they may have been.

The book that gave Montesquieu his repute in revolutionary circles in Europe and America has come to be known by the greatly abbreviated version of the original title as The Spirit of the Laws. Its enormous prestige reposes on some visionary ideas which most of us are familiar with thanks to quotations and extracts in schoolbooks. But, as a glance at the entire work makes clear, these great concepts have been plucked like juicy berries from a bramble bush of incongruities.

The book’s purpose was to reform society, to give it a new and more rational shape, and even if few people today would for pleasure read it from cover to cover, the author certainly succeeded. Within half a century of his death, The Spirit of the Laws had provided the model and inspiration for the French revolutionaries in drawing up the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and for the American ones in that of the Constitution of the United States.

Montesquieu held that absolute law of the medieval kind which monarchies enforced should be replaced by "natural law". By this he meant that laws should respond to human needs, rather than divine dictates, an idea which was deeply offensive to the Catholic Church.

His opus maximus was written like a rambling meditation, a vast painting of the world as the author saw it, with judgments which while rational in intention could only be based on existing knowledge and were therefore often skewed.

But what made the book so successful was less the contents themselves than the freedom and spontaneity with which the author discussed them. That alone was like a liberation to the readers of the 18^th century, hearing subjects hitherto reserved for theologians being held up to the light of reason and judged for their human worth alone.

But if the book were presented today as the work of an author of our time, most of it would be laughed at as naive. It was thought then that a reasonable man with a good eye could unravel every mystery, but relying on uneducated observation alone can take you as far from the truth as Biblical teachings.

For example, Montesquieu believed that laws should be different in each part of the world because the cultures were not the same, and neither was the weather. Thus, temperate France had the ideal climate for reasonable men to live in, as opposed to the harsh winters of the northlands. He confidently said that France was protected from the icy winds of the North Pole by the high ranges of mountains in southern Scandinavia that, literally, kept them out.

There was little understanding then of mountains, not only where they really were, as Montesquieu’s gaffe goes to show, but also how they came to exist. The wanderers who had been up them were amazed to find fossilized sea shells, which the Church said was because the Great Flood had risen above the summits and left them there before it subsided.

Voltaire scornfully contested this Biblical explanation with a "rational" one of his own, which proved to be even further off the mark. It was obvious to any open-minded man, he wrote with his usual self-assurance, that pilgrims travelling across the mountains and carrying shellfish among their supplies had left them there after eating the molluscs inside.

The 18^th century saw the birth of the modern concept of tolerance, in reaction to the Church’s persecution of the Lutheran reformers. This went far beyond the medieval approach of pragmatically "getting along with one’s enemies" as, in their best moments, men had done until then. Instead, Voltaire and his fellows proclaimed that other beliefs deserve the same respect as our own, and that there was not only one but several truths.

This has always seemed contradictory to me, since by definition a true statement or belief is simply the only one which is not a mistake or a lie. Dogs run and jump, and anyone who says they do not should be instantly decried.

But what motivated the philosophes, I think, was a political objective. If religious men could be brought to accept one another’s obviously wrong beliefs, they would eventually give up religion altogether and begin to think in the one right way, which was rationally.

It therefore stands that the tolerance preached by the 18^th century philosophes is a convention. Like the revolutionary notion of equality, it is a noble fallacy in which nobody believes but which for political reasons we feel it necessary to uphold.

Real tolerance – as opposed to cynical laissez-faire - is madness because it means hearing someone say that dogs do not run or jump and kindly conceding that he might be right. But we promote it as an impossible goal, in the hope that it will help prevent men from killing one another.

While reason had become the new faith of men freed from superstition, solidarity took the place which religion gave to the old virtues of charity and pity. I recently read a story about Montesquieu, unearthed in an 18^th American century newspaper, which shows just how noble the Baron was, when he it came to succouring his fellow man.

Since the 16^th century the Mediterranean had been an open hunting ground for Berber and Turkish pirates who plundered Christian ships and seaports, for booty and for people to sell as slaves. Their wealthier captives languished in Algiers and Tunis until relatives could raise the demanded ransom, which might take years, and many were forgotten there altogether. The hostage industry was highly organized with professional intermediaries who travelled back and forth across the sea to negotiate with and pay off the captors. There was even a special alms’ box in churches for the raising of ransom, to free those whose relatives were unable to do so.

Two brothers in Marseilles desperately wanted to raise the large sum of money demanded by pirates who had captured their father and taken him to Tripoli. Their only way of making enough money was to ferry passengers on a boat they owned across the bay.

One day their only customer was an elderly gentleman who, during the crossing, heard their story with great sympathy. When he paid, he added a large tip to help them in their effort.

Some months later, the brothers were astounded to see their father walk in the door. A mysterious benefactor had paid the ransom and set him free.

They felt certain he was the generous stranger they had carried in their boat, but it was only after his death that they learned that their benefactor was the illustrious Montesquieu. His heirs had discovered among his papers the account he had written of his meeting with the brothers, and how, afterwards, he had secretly arranged for the ransom to be paid to their father’s captors.

From my high school days, I knew that the Age of Enlightenment was neatly followed by the Romantic Movement, each epoch tucked into its respective century, with the first one ending a decade early at the Revolution.

In the 18^th century, I was taught, reason was upheld by thinking men as a better path than religion for finding earthly happiness. But in the 19^th it was decried because its rise had, see-saw fashion, created a spiritual void due to the inevitable decline of religion. Man could no more live on reason alone than on bread, because he had an innate need for mystery and salvation, proclaimed the new prophets called the Romantics.

However, now that I was a university student, and a French one to boot, I learned to my surprise that the new movement had a forerunner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Half a century before the anti-rational fashion got started in earnest, Rousseau, one of the contributors to the Encyclopaedia, distinguished - or disgraced - himself by suddenly abandoning Reason and proclaiming that the truth was Elsewhere.

With that, mankind’s best hope of saving itself since the time of ancient Rome was nipped in the bud. Just as the muddle-headed Rousseau turned from Protestantism to Catholicism and back again during his restless life, he also turned against his comrades and spat out their powerful but bitter pill of reason. In its place, Rousseau concocted a new sugar-coated one, which being more narcotic than medicine was avidly swallowed by the reading public.

Being an elitist concept devised by scholarly gentlemen, reason failed to cater to ordinary men’s innate fatalism and frivolity, to satisfy their craving for fantasy. Since reason was simply logical materialism, it offered no comfort or solace to the weak, no help for the hopeless to escape reality.

Above all, reason did not make good art, and men love art, and especially popular novels of the kind Rousseau penned. more than philosophy. For example, an ode to the virtues of reason would never capture the imagination like a poem about the meaninglessness of life or blind passion. What makes real art is emotion, not truth, which is why we hate boring books even when they are "good for us", and love exciting ones even when they are morally worthless.

We are grateful to the philosophes for having pointed the way towards a better life. But now that we have built the society they dreamed of, we are happy to remember their names and a few things they said, and concentrate on the production of ideas which by comparison with theirs are silly.

This is possible because romanticism is not at all contradictory to reason but, rather, the expression of part of human experience, the feelings, which reason, or materialism, cannot resolve. Our brain is partly logical, partly impulsive, and the 18^th and 19^th centuries gave both cerebral regions their literary expression.

Did people stop being reasonable after the French Revolution? To the contrary, the rise of the middle class and industrialism made them more rational than ever before. And this triumphant mercantilism brought with it a yearning for the primitive, the wild, the mysterious – everything that escaped the realm of reason.

Rousseau’s existence was a joyless and ultimately even friendless one, in spite of the idyllic images of him we are shown in text books, jauntily striding along country roads in search of adventure, cap on head and bag on shoulder. A yawning gap exists between the legend created around his life and what it really was.

His mother died when he was born, leaving him in the hands of his watchmaker father, who transmitted to him his nostalgia for a lost time of purity and goodness. When this restless soul had to flee their hometown Geneva, because of a run-in with the city’s stern, Calvinist authorities, the boy was sent to live with relatives where he was treated unkindly.

At the age of 16 he fled westward into French Catholic territory where he was taken in by a capricious lady missionary who had been given a stipend, by the King who reigned over what would later become Italy, to convert heretics fleeing from Geneva, "the Protestant Rome".

This Madame de Warens gave Jean-Jacques the only schooling he ever had, and at the same time made him her steward and her lover as well. First, she dutifully sent him to Turin to learn his catechism and be converted to Catholicism. But instead of being welcomed by the priests like a lamb returning to the fold, as he had hoped, he was treated like scum, even worse than the Jews and Muslims who were his comrades in conversion. Worst of all, once he had been baptized in a joint ceremony, he was put out in the street with a handful of alms thrown at him by the congregation, instead of being rewarded with the brilliant position he dreamed of.

He returned to Madame de Warens, but each time he left her to find work, he would on his return humiliatingly find that another pretty boy had taken his place. He was encouraged by the flighty woman he called "maman" to move on, so he tearfully set off – on foot as usual - to Paris in the hope of making his fame as a musician, having learned something of the subject with his cultivated but flighty tutor.

He was thirty years old, and penniless. But he felt sure that he could gain fame and wealth with a system of music annotation he had invented using ciphers arranged in a single line instead of the usual bars and notes.

In the meantime he gave music lessons to rich men’s daughters, with whom he always seemed to fall hopelessly in love. When he finally presented his system to the academic authorities it was rejected as impracticable.

The big city did not let itself be conquered by the provincial lad as easily as he had hoped. And it was as a musician that he tried to do so, long before he turned his pen to writing political literature.

Music, and especially opera – which the French called tragédie en musique - was the life blood of Paris and hotly debated in every café, boutique and bakery. Its undisputed monarch was the elderly Jean-Philippe Rameau, a solitary and frugal fellow who barely ever looked up from the keyboard of his organ. He invented mathematical formulas to compose his graceful, measured gavottes, which earned him, with some justification, the epithet of the "French Bach".

When Rousseau finally met Rameau, whom he greatly admired, he hastened to show him his invention, but the grumpy old man rejected it. Determined to win his esteem at any price, Rousseau went home and composed an opera of his own, modelled on Rameau’s masterpiece Les Indes Galantes. With his usual indiscretion he even named it Les Muses Galantes, thinking Rameau would be flattered! But the old man was so irritated by the young upstart’s cheek that he accused him of plagiarism.

Nevertheless, Rameau thought enough of Rousseau’s talents to sub-commission him to write an opera which he didn’t have time to work on himself, thanks to the great demand for new tragedies en musique, as opera was then called. Rousseau humbly complied, but later squabbled with Rameau and his librettist Voltaire, because they treated him condescendingly, like the ghost writer which he was.

He was so bitter that he falsely accused them of using the music and ideas he had created, just as Rameau had, justifiably, accused him of copying his title. From then on, Rousseau’s admiration for Rameau turned to desire for revenge.

Rousseau’s fascination for the arts and sciences led him to the Latin Quarter coffee houses, where, thanks to Voltaire, radical ideas were the rage. He had by then made friends with another penniless young provincial, the writer Diderot, who was working on that compendium of knowledge and opinion which was called the Encyclopaedia.

The two friends’ first radical action was, curiously, not to attack the Church as Voltaire did, but a less likely symbol of the Ancien Regime, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rousseau was now forty.

In a series of increasingly virulent pamphlets which were widely read if only for their extreme insolence, he dared to attack French music in general and august old Rameau’s in particular. He and Diderot wanted to make a dent in Rameau’s reputation in order to embellish their own. The resulting storm in a coffee cup raged for several years, being more about the new challenging the old, as the declared subject, operatic styles.

As an outsider, Rousseau had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by flying in the face of convention. He poured ridicule on the old-fashioned, disciplined cadences and harmonies of the music of Versailles, in which the lyrics were decorously recited rather than really sung, and proclaimed the superiority of the Italian "opera buffa", full of catchy tunes and spontaneous outbursts.

Since the rest of Europe preferred Italian opera because it was much more entertaining and sing-able, there was nothing terribly revolutionary about this position. The Italian operette which Rousseau held up as an example of what music should be had had been put on in Paris years before without arousing any special interest.

But with what was later to be confirmed as his gift for rabble-rousing denunciation, he succeeded in making a more recent performance of the musical sketch – as an innocuous interlude between the acts of a more prestigious French piece - seem like a storm of novelty, and liberty, which had just burst upon the cloudless, complacent sky.

To provide an example of what he wanted in the way of opera, Rousseau composed one of his own in the "Italian" style, full of amusing ditties and picturesque situations, called The Village Soothsayer. It was a popular success, and played before Louis XV who greatly enjoyed it. Madame de Pompadour even played one of the roles, in a special performance.

Rousseau’s offensive pamphlets were, predictably, seen by the old school as an affront to French culture perpetrated by a crass foreigner, and by the radicals as a cry for liberating innovation. To quote a few lines, "there is neither melody nor measure in French music", "French singing is nothing but yapping and barking", "the French have no music and will never have any". The dispute became so poisonous, and public, that it even stung the thick-skinned old Rameau, who was forced to defend himself by insisting, laudably, that he loved Pergolese too.

Lamentably, he then attempted to write several operas which were more spontaneous and tuneful, less archaic, but they fell flat. The "natural" style which Rousseau upheld was, after all, just a style, and it belonged to a new world.

Rameau’s art was more deliberately artful, with its luxuriant textures, fleeting dissonances and untuneful recitatives. He was soon swept into the dust basket with the Ancien Regime until, a century later, he was resurrected by Debussy, who cared more about the sound of music than its meaning.

Rousseau contributed several articles on musical composition to the Encyclopedia which were widely read. Rameau was the author of a highly-regarded treatise on harmony which is still used today, and he criticized them sharply. Diderot paid him back by using his name in a satirical novel, Rameau’s Nephew, which tells the story of a depraved and cynical would-be musician who in spite of being the nephew of the great Rameau, has got nothing from it because of the old man’s stinginess.

And so it went, never a moment’s peace for the art-and-idea makers of mid-18^th century Paris, always at one another’s throat.

The legendary turning point in Rousseau’s life – when he had his "illumination" - occurred when he was 37. Diderot had been thrown in prison at the fortress of Vincennes outside of Paris, sentenced to three months for antagonizing the Church. Writers had a good deal of freedom to say what they wanted, as long as they didn’t criticize the monarchy or any notables by name, but the Church could lash out when it felt overly threatened.

Rousseau tells in his Confessions how one hot summer day he walked out of the city to visit his friend, pitifully and unfairly imprisoned. He could not afford to pay a coach, and to while away the few hours on the road he took with him a copy of a literary magazine. He leafed through it as he walked, and read various articles when he stopped to rest in the shade of a tree.

It was then that he spotted an announcement for an essay contest held by the Academy of Dijon. The writer had to answer the question, have the arts and sciences been morally beneficial for mankind?

That was when he had his revelation, which hit him like a thunderbolt. He saw the truth in a flash, realizing that it was useless to improve society as he and his friends were trying to do, since it was precisely society and progress which had degraded and ruined men, ever since they left their primitive state of innocence.

When he got to the prison, he told Diderot about his illumination, and Diderot encouraged him to develop his ideas and submit the essay. A year later, he learned that his entry had won the prize, making him a famous and controversial figure.

In his Confessions, Rousseau mysteriously says that this decision to write the essay spelled his ruin. This was certainly because, while making him famous, it led to his various books, which brought upon him the opprobrium of the French and Genevan authorities.

Only natural, uncivilized man was good, kind, pure, he proclaimed, speculatively since he had never met one himself, in 18^th century Switzerland, France and Italy. It was the "noble savage" theory which so strongly appealed to the readers of the day, who were already getting bored with reason, if they ever found it interesting in the first place.

To regain this state of purity, Rousseau prescribed in Emile that children should be brought up to follow their impulses, indulged rather than disciplined. People who had not been exposed to civilization and, by inference, Christianity, were naturally gentle and forgiving of one another’s weaknesses, so, he reasoned, education should avoid making children compete for marks, awards and diplomas, since this would brand them for the rest of their lives as winners or losers.

Man’s natural state could not be regained, so it had to be reproduced in the classroom, for children to be educated virtuously. Thus, each child should only be asked to learn skills which he found easy, rather than be humiliated by demanding schoolmasters.

In The Social Contract he pointed his finger at private property as the source of man’s suffering, which was reasonable, if only because he had none of it himself. But then he explains, ridiculously, how the history of mankind is divided into two stages, the first of which belonged to those noble savages who could do no evil. When men were hunters and roamed the earth, he said, they used the land freely, but when they fatally turned into farmers they felt the need to stake out pieces of it for themselves. This led to permanent ownership, wars and strife, and man’s ruin.

Rousseau didn’t invent this all on his own, as is often assumed, but gave a theoretical shape to popular notions that had long existed. It could be said that he used them to create the world’s first ideology, if ideology can be understood as religion without god.

Europeans had been fascinated with pagan innocence and "savages" – by which they meant uncivilized, not necessarily ferocious, people – ever since Jacques Cartier came across the Hurons and Iroquoi in Canada and found them physically and spiritually admirable. Similar reports came from the South Seas, and one Tahitian was even brought back to England and presented to society as a natural aristocrat.

Long before Rousseau wrote his essay, novels featuring frightening but at the same time friendly heathen were extremely popular. One man of letters even complained that his contemporaries, instead of reading books about knights and damsels as they had done before, only craved fantastical tales of "monstruous" people who could hardly be called people at all.

We associate the term "noble savage" with Rousseau, but it was created in England a century before by John Dryden in a play about the Moors of Granada, to describe a Muslim who had all the attributes of a Spanish gentleman except that he was not Christian! The French translated it as "bon sauvage" because in their society the word noble was reserved for princes, and when Rousseau’s writings about primitive humans became popular, they identified it with them.

Rousseau astutely used this popular notion of the man who was naturally innocent to demonstrate that original sin was an invention of the Church, since the "noble savage" did not need to be saved from hellfire. Whether he really had an "illumination" or not, his genius was to turn a popular engouement into an irresistible back-to-natural movement. Soon Rousseau was like the Pied Piper, leading the ladies and gentlemen of his Paris, and Berlin and London too, into the hills…

And especially the ladies. All his life long, literary-minded ladies in high places mothered him and made him their protégé, entertaining him in their salons, putting him up on their estates, even flirting with him, although he regretfully avowed that these dalliances were purely Platonic. He was the only one of the leading philosophes who never saw the inside of a prison, because one of his literary ladies always got him off the hook at the last minute, by murmuring in the ear of the right official.

There were many educated women in France, and most of his readers could be found among them, less of his theoretical works than his romantic novels. They preferred him to his more masculine, cerebral colleagues for his cult of sensitivity and his celebration of the joys of nature and solitude.

There was such a demand for copies of La Nouvelle Heloïse that booksellers resorted to renting them out by the hour. Sensitive girls and ladies took turns sitting on a store bench, weeping and sighing over as many pages of amour impossible as they could afford to read at one go.

One would have thought that Rousseau, in turn, would pat them on the head for being such loyal supporters and find his primitive fulfilment with honest, uncorrupted, unsophisticated women of the peasant class. Indeed, the only companion he ever had, who followed him in his self-imposed exile from one refuge to another, and even to England, was such a girl.

But she was little more to him than a nurse and substitute mother, to whom he became attached because she was the only creature he trusted. In his Confessions, he makes it clear that his real desires went in the other social direction, even though he never seemed to succeed in fully satisfying them.

"Seamstresses and chambermaids have never attracted me. I always longed for ladies! Each man has his own preference, and this has always been mine. What I prize is a milky skin, delicate hands, elegance of dress. A woman should be delicate and neat, speak graciously, have a fine gown, a well-turned ankle, small feet, ribbons, lace, and well combed hair. I would rather have a woman who is lacking in natural beauty, as long as she is tastefully groomed."

He was always the poor boy looking through the windows of fine homes and hoping to be asked in, even if it was only as a valet or music coach. Just to breathe the same air, to catch the attention of a prettily painted demoiselle on the sly, when her ferocious father was looking the other way.

Out of despair, he took the illiterate chambermaid Therèse Levasseur as his common-law wife, whom he presented everywhere as his "gouvernante". She had five children, all of whom he immediately turned over to the foundlings’ home. He didn’t want to see his precious seed sprouting in a turnip patch, to produce more turnips!

He unemotionally describes how he took the babies, one by one, from her breast as soon as they were born. She said not a word, only shivered each time. Then he carried them to the squalid orphanages called Les Enfants Trouvés where they would most likely have soon died.

This tale has since it was discovered shocked not only Rousseau’s many detractors but also his admirers, since in his books he presented himself not only as a visionary of child-rearing and education, but also as the champion of love and understanding, tolerance and respect - les sentiments. How can he have committed such a callous crime against babies and mother, it is asked in outrage?

It is, sadly, quite possible not to practice what you preach, and still deliver a good and useful sermon. Rousseau would not be the first prophet to set himself and others high principles and then be too weak of flesh to follow them himself.

If there was one thing Voltaire could never be accused of it is sentimentality, and protested violently against Rousseau’s abuses of the truth and common sense. After reading the copy of The Social Contract which Rousseau solicitously sent him, Voltaire wrote to thank him for his book "against the human race", commenting sardonically that "never has so much intelligence been used to encourage us all to be stupid. It makes me want to walk on all fours like a baby."

At first it was an intellectual quarrel, but then it got very personal. After initial overtures on each side, because each thought that the other might be useful to him, Rousseau dared the unthinkable – he criticized Voltaire to his face.

He had been greatly angered when he learned that Voltaire, who lived near Geneva to be harder to catch by the French police, was planning to liven up the drab cultural life there by creating a theatre. Rousseau had by that time turned his back on wicked Paris and everything it represented and returned to Geneva, to seek out his puritanical origins.

But then he annoyed the Swiss by criticizing their moral laxity lack of Calvinist zeal, and found himself on the run again. Voltaire, who took in religious refugees on his huge estate at Ferney, offered him a place there, out of solidarity.

But Rousseau would not forget Voltaire’s pernicious theatre project, and answered with a sharply disapproving letter which began with the words, "Je ne vous aime pas".  One must assume that he reserved his well-wishing sentimentality for noble savages, not products of civilization like Voltaire. It is the side of Rousseau that I must admit to preferring, because I think it is the real one. In fact, it makes me dream of having the courage to say the same thing to many people I meet, in so many words!

He then dared to publish a pamphlet attacking this contaminator of good Swiss morals. Voltaire was enraged at what he considered to be a slur on his reputation, all the moreso because at that moment he was waging one of his campaigns in defence of the beleaguered Protestants and was anxious to be seen as a symbol of public virtue. To punish Rousseau, he publicly revealed the discovery he had made of his abandonment of Therese’s five babies, indignantly asking how a father who had so failed to care for his own children could have lectured a nation on the need for kinder and more loving education.

Rousseau lamely explained that he was unable to care for them and thought that they would have a better chance chez les Enfants Trouvés, but this skeleton that had been pulled out of the closet haunted him for the rest of his life. It is said that in his final years he grew so remorseful that he had one of his Parisian acolytes attempt to discover what had become of the five, who would have been grown up if they had survived the foundlings’ home.

His name has become so inseparably linked from the then revolutionary concept of caring tenderly for children and respecting them as if they were adults that this sad story is accepted as inevitable, given the hardship of his life. Where another would be blamed, he is forgiven because he was Rousseau.

But I no longer find this story convincing, as it always has been told. Rousseau had another, much more understandable reason for dumping the babies than his inability to care for them, as he claimed in his Confessions. But he kept quiet all his life because he wanted to avoid the shame of being known as a cuckold.

As he describes it, in his often fanciful "confessions", she was a humble, meek, modest creature who without understanding much of what he was about, followed him loyally to the very end. Perhaps out of their natural discretion, the French, even if they knew what was going on, preferred to overlook this.

But when Rousseau sought refuge in England, under the auspices of his fellow philosopher David Hume, the couple was appraised under a less forgiving light. They must have seemed like a travelling circus, Rousseau followed by his dog Sultan and wearing his Armenian fur hat and tasselled gown, which he had recently adopted because it gave him room to carry the device into which he urinated, due to his weak bladder.

Hume was astonished to see how Therèse ruled over Rousseau and how dependent he was on her, like a helpless infant on its mother.

"Madame Levasseur is wicked, quarrelsome and tattling. His affection for this creature is beyond all expression. She is too dull to know in what year of the Lord she is. But she has absolute authority over him." He also deplored her infidelity, roaming the streets in search of new gowns and young bucks to flirt with.

Rousseau and Hume had left France first, leaving Therèse to follow some weeks later in the company of Hume’s friend James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson. In Boswell’s diaries, discovered in the 20^th century, he tells how ""I was seduced in coach and inn 13 times between Paris and London. I drank to sustain my fading virility. How can Rousseau be so besotted to think her many children his?". 

Having five babies with the same woman requires a certain amount of normal sexual intercourse, and Rousseau was so severely repressed and insecure that this seems unlikely. He may in fact have kept Therèse as a motherly companion who constantly scolded and perhaps beat him, for the masochistic pleasure he himself evokes in the Confessions.

Both he and her mother, whose suggestion it was that the babies be given away, knew that she found her own pleasures in the street and that they were not his. For this reason, he had no wish to keep them and assume their fatherhood. This position falls far short of his lofty preachings about humanity and redemption, but is typical of the more traditional, mundane man which he may have been at heart.

Earlier in the Confessions, he tells the dismaying story of how he bought a twelve-year old girl to be his mistress. During the year he spent in Venice at the French Embassy, just before he met Therese, he and an Italian croney became partners in a curious project.

Sleeping with prostitutes was dangerous because of the diseases that were rampant, and neither of them could afford to keep a mistress of their own. So they pooled their resources to do something which, Rousseau assures the reader, was a common solution to the problem, namely to "buy" a pre-pubescent girl, aged "11 or 12", from her prostitute mother. The fact that the child was, Rousseau tells us approvingly, not swarthy or typically Italian in appearance may have been a factor in the price agreed upon.

He describes how this "shameless" woman, in exchange for the amount needed to feed and clothe the girl, promised to protect her until she had become "nubile", in other words until her first menstruation. After that the two men could both come to the house to enjoy her whenever they wanted and in any way they wanted, under pledge of exclusivity. All this for a fraction of what a similar arrangement would have cost them in France.

This much of the story of Anzoletta is quite believable, when you think that in many European cities more women lived from prostitution than not. But the rest, in my opinion, is nothing but self-serving moralistic fluff, added on to assure the readers that Rousseau’s heart was pure.

The two friends, he virtuously insists, were so enchanted by the girl, "as fair and gentle as a lamb", that after several visits to see how the singing lessons they paid for were progressing, and to keep an eye on their investment, they forgot their lustful aims and felt instead like a pair of doting uncles. The spiritual pleasure Anzoletta gave them now was more intense, the two rakes ecstatically agreed, than the carnal one which she would provide them with once she began ovulating.

That was the weak point of the deal they had made, because "we were forced to wait until she came of age, which meant that we had to sow for a long time before we could begin reaping." Waiving his right after such an investment of money and time would have been painful, and left him and his friend as womanless as they were at the start.

But the contrite confessor is rescued at the last minute from having to tell us what he decided. He is advised to leave Venice in a hurry, following a nasty dispute with his autocratic employer the Ambassador, which had been brewing for some time.

And so he backs out gracefully, and sceptical readers, such as myself, are left to wonder if the cold-blooded lecher who could think up such a scheme could truly have put the girl’s chastity before his selfish pleasure. Others, blinded by the blaze of Rousseau’s greatness, will accept his high-minded conclusion:

"I feel certain that, when the time came, we would have respected the poor girl’s innocence no matter how beautiful she had become, instead of defiling her. But since I had to leave Venice and was therefore deprived of the satisfaction of completing this good work, my only merit in the affair is the goodness of my intentions."

"This good work", "my merit", "goodness of my intentions" – it’s enough to make him seem to be a champion of children who had sought the girl out in order to save her! Somerset Maugham couldn’t have worded it better, if he had written his tale "Rain" in reverse, with the missionary seducing Sadie Thompson first, and then protecting her from sin.

Rousseau knew how to pull on his reader’s heart strings by first accusing and then acquitting himself, to get pity and then praise. You can almost hear the ladies sigh, "Now he’s being naughty!" and a page or two later, "But now he’s nice again!".

Nothing drew more attention to Rousseau than his decision to leave glittering Paris and lead the hermit’s life on the estate of one of his many benefactors. Whether he knew it or not, the best way for a maverick like Rousseau to conquer Paris was to turn his back on it, because Parisians thought, and still think, that anyone who having tasted the pleasures of their society could walk away from them was some sort of crazy hero.

But he got more than he bargained for. The curiosity aroused by his decision to live in a field among inarticulate farmers brought floods of excursionists from Paris to take a look, he grumbled, at "the man who doesn’t want to see anybody".

But he was not as enamoured of the joys of nature as he would have had others believe. He protested so loudly about the corrupt society of his peers that it is easy to see, between the lines of his Confessions, that he longed to return to Paris. But he knew that in the salons they were placing bets on how long he would stick it out in his solitude.

"They laughed at me and said I wouldn’t stand it for more than six months", he wrote, "but I kept away from Paris for twenty". But he confesses that, in a weak moment, he did accept at least one invitation to a soirée attended by his fellow philosophes, which cheered him up immeasurably.

There was also the friend he secretly visited on the edge of the city, but he insisted that this was not cheating. He made a point of coming and going through the back door of the house, facing the countryside, so he could still claim not to have set foot in the streets of Paris.

 

Of all the philosophes, Rousseau is the one we know best because his verbosity and exhibitionism drove him to write everything down. Everyone then, even more than today, was hunting for fame and fortune, and Rousseau knew that his only capital, so to speak, was his own heart, which he laid bare accordingly. Personal revelation has since become such a literary prerequisite that the effect has worn off, but then it was unheard of and earned him a huge following.

It is interesting to note that his fear of an impending catastrophe, to which he alludes over and over again in the Confessions, was not as unfounded as has been assumed. His former friends – Diderot among them - knew he was at work on his memoirs and dreaded what might happen if he "told all" about their radical goings-on, and he seems to have seriously feared that they might try to silence him.

When he began giving public readings of his manuscript, his once-soulmate Madame d’Epinay had the police order him to stop, and began writing her own version of their relationship to ward off a scandal.

But they had nothing to worry about, because Rousseau in his old age was concerned only with navel-staring and wallowing in self pity, not the shifting sands of politics. His Confessions speak only of his personal longings, disappointments, grudges, sins smaller than large and, most of all, the cruelty with which he claimed he had been treated by everyone he knew, even, if my theory is correct, by the scheming Therese, whom in a fit of Christian piety he finally married.

Rousseau’s inner misery blighted his whole life and drove away from him the very people who could have helped him on his way. After criticizing the military exploits of a leading aristocrat, he fled to England – as I have said - under the protection of the writer Hume, who was eager to introduce him to literary circles there.

But he soon withdrew to a country cottage because he feared that his hosts had led him into a trap and were planning his destruction. Soon he returned clandestinely to France where he eked out a living copying musical scores, always with Therese in tow.

Immediately after he died on the estate of a wealthy protector, where he had taken his final refuge from society, his tomb there became a popular shrine with admirers arriving everyday to see where he lay. Rousseau had become the first modern saint, the patron of the misfits.

But for most, Rousseau is known for a handful of excerpts and telegraphic descriptions transmitted to them, at best, during their adolescence in school books. If they only knew what a masterpiece of failure this self-pitying saint made of his own life!

But they don’t read his Confessions, or if they do they turn a blind eye to the pessimism with which the rambling, self-contradictory rag is ridden. They focus on the rosy Utopia of Rousseau’s day-dreams, his ravings about a Spartan democracy of happily ignorant, virile warriors, where everyone who didn’t want to be free in the way he prescribed should be cast out.

After a life of moralizing, his own conscience was so troubled that he worried with false modesty that his "book of confessions could become one of justifications". To me, it reads more like one of bitter accusations.

What is of real interest in Rousseau is not the writings which purportedly expressed his ideas, but what he himself and those who knew him wrote about his tortured personality. Since he makes almost no mention of any of his theories in his Confessions, I wonder if he seriously believed in them himself.

Most of the talk bandied about during that feverish time was literary opportunism, a coffee house contest to see who could raise the greatest polemic, who could outdo the other man’s radical proposals. It was a peculiarly Parisian sport, which triggered the Revolution and survived until the days of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

The opening sentence of The Social Contract, "Man is born free but everywhere he lives in chains", has a wonderful ring to it, but coming from Rousseau, it is just empty words. Men were not given freedom at birth, they created it themselves it as the ultimate act of civilization, by agreeing that it was something which everyone wanted. Rousseau’s "natural society" means living in fear of anyone stronger than you are, and that cannot be called freedom!

In spite of my antipathy for Rousseau, I must admit that he had an eerie gift for showing where the wind would soon be blowing, but like a mindless weathervane rather than wise prophet. For example, he was the first to see the beauty of nature and to cultivate a feminine side of our imaginations which has had a civilizing effect, even if he would be horrified to hear me say it.

I wonder what would have become of him if he had not been awarded the prize for his essay at age 37. He might well have gone on scraping out a living copying scores and composing doggerel and ditties for the stage, which swallowed them up like Parisians did coffee, never to be heard again.

What makes me deeply distrust everything Rousseau stands for, apart from the pseudo-religious revelations and the pseudo-scientific postulating, is the lamentable fact that he had no sense of humour, unlike his cronies who were known for their rapacious wit. He took everything, and himself more than anything else, dead seriously. Such a person, for me, can only be a bigot and a fake.

There is however one glaring crack in this mournful mask he presented to the world (because he may in real life have been a very funny fellow), found at the beginning of the Confessions. But it doesn’t really count, because he obviously regarded the episode as another tragedy that befell him, rather than a hilarious if humiliating farce. In fact, before starting his story he promises the reader that the pages to follow will tell him more about the author than anything else in the book.

He was sent for a year to Venice to be a clerk to the French Ambassador, since he had a smattering of Italian. There, he was introduced to several of the city’s glamorous prostitutes. Men went mad over them, and they had to be conquered with courtly manners and declarations of devotion as well as gifts and money.

Rousseau lusted after women but apart from his housekeeper-concubine always fell short of conquering them, due to his disturbing childhood experiences. His parents had been raised in the same home together, which made him feel that he was the child of siblings and gave him an unhealthy fascination with incestuous relationships. He called his mistress, the older woman Madame de Warens, "mummy", and his companion, Therese, "auntie".

The only sensation of pleasure he wrote about was the thrill of being whipped by his foster mother for being a naughty boy, and then hoping she would do it again. All of his infatuations with elegant ladies and their daughters, when he was a valet and music coach in the fine homes of Paris, and afterwards when he was a star of their salons, never went beyond what is euphemistically called Platonic love.

The first Venetian whore he visited didn’t excite him so he put the requisite amount of money on the table, invented some polite excuse for not wanting sex and put on his hat. Her professional pride would not allow this, however, and upon her insistence he followed through in a presumably perfunctory manner.

He went home terrified that she might have infected him, as if that was the obligatory punishment for having sinned. But the physician he called examined him and put his fears to rest by mysteriously declaring that his member was formed in such a way that he had little chance of contracting disease.

The second girl was entirely to his taste, very young, innocent and impudent at the same time, vivacious and, of course, flirtatious. He was carried away by his Zulietta and her physical freshness, he says, and then suddenly remembered that she was in fact a "miserable slut" and broke down in tears, with his head in his hands.

Zulietta consoled him in a motherly way which calmed him down, and then proceeded to lay bare her treasures. It was all perfect, delightful… except one small defect, which Rousseau could not avoid staring at with horror. One of her nipples was alarmingly different to the other, it was shrunken and withered like an old woman’s!

He was convinced that she was some harpy out of hell who had taken on the form of a sweet virgin to seduce him, and lead him to his destruction. But his purity was saved from peril, thanks to his customary indiscretion.

Instead of keeping his discovery to himself, he excitedly pointed it out to Zulietta, as if she might not be aware of the sign of some incipient malady. As might be expected, the poor girl was keenly aware of all of her professional attributes and disadvantages. In spite of his attempts to make her forget his boorishness, her face turned red with anger. After pulling her dress back on she dismissed her hapless client with what was probably the best advice he ever got, "Johnny, forget women and study mathematics".

Like all men born free of faith, I think that happiness is my just reward, if I can get it, for enduring the indignities of life on earth. But I disagree with Rousseau and his friends that the purpose of society is only to make us happy.

When we are satisfied for too long we become bland and complacent, we lose our edge. The mind is a sword which must be tempered by the fire of adversity, honed on the grinding stone of want.

Rousseau blamed civilization for our unhappiness, because being a puritan he was a blamer by nature, and being self-educated he was a simplifier. The ambiguous truth is that society is half cloak and half straitjacket, because we the men who make it are imperfect.

The vicious circle from which no human can escape is that large doses of things we want can be bad for us, like security and comfort, while periodical infusions of things we dread, like insecurity and poverty, and even war, ultimately do us good.

But Rousseau’s claim that emotion is more important than reason seems to me to be defeating the whole purpose of the human adventure. Since emotion is something I am always trying to fight against rather than stimulate, I feel that Rousseau is strictly for people in the opposite situation. For example, I might often say that emotion got the better of me, but never reason!

If one thing makes me think that Rousseau might not have been a deranged charlatan, it is that for almost two decades he was the dearest friend of Diderot. As a rule, someone who says he loves Rousseau must either be very young, very gullible or very unhappy, and with Diderot it can only have been the last of the three. He was a dreamer who must have worshipped in Rousseau the living symbol he was of individual, anarchistic freedom.

But even among men of Reason, friendship is an irrational thing. We may befriend someone we pity because we need rather than admire him, and often simply because he needs us. The ever humble Diderot was haunted by the thought of what he called his own mediocrity, his weaknesses, so he may have loved Rousseau because he was destined to become the apostle of the weak and mediocre.

 

Diderot was the black sheep of a respectable provincial family, whose father wanted him to follow a legal career. But after finishing his studies at the Sorbonne, he renounced his filial rights and set out to become a writer.

To support himself, his family and his mistress of the moment, Diderot sold his literary services, as a ghost writer or "pen for hire". He took any job he could find, even writing sermons for missionaries in want of inspiration at a fixed rate per sermon. But mainly he eked out a living as a publisher’s hack, the literary fellow who wrote on any subject at all to fill up the newspapers of the day.

The demand for information, even if it was misinformation, was huge, without technicalities such as plagiarism and copyright to harness rapacious rag-printers. So it was that Diderot unintentionally carved a name for himself as an art critic. It was an activity so new as to be almost unknown, but to which he gave his customary éclat.

Each year a show, or "salon", was held in Paris of the latest works of prominent painters, in an atmosphere of rivalry and backbiting so ruthless that some artists refused to take part for fear of being publicly savaged. The fame of the salons spread all over Europe and aroused the curiosity of the enlightened inhabitants of Prussia, Sweden and Russia.

They couldn’t see the controversial artworks, but they didn’t want this to prevent them from discussing them in their own learned gatherings, along with other Parisian developments, so Diderot was recruited to write vivid descriptions of them. They were printed in a gazette that circulated throughout Europe, published by one of his "philosophe" friends.

Diderot had an impassioned and warmly personal style which helped many see the hidden meaning in paintings, even meaning that they did not really have. It was not until the Impressionists that people began to accept painting for its visual appeal only, for the sheer beauty of the colours and shapes, regardless of what they represented. Before, there had to be a melodramatic story, and if possible a lofty moral, to make a tableau come alive.

These Diderot set out to supply, so enthusiastically that his reviews were often the fruit of his imagination rather than observation. But no matter, these flights of fantasy only enhanced his reputation among the readers, even the Parisian ones who had visited the Salon.

One admiring woman wrote in to say that whenever she had the chance to see one of the paintings he described, she never enjoyed it as much as his review. So are great authors made, not in schools or by imitating the masters, but in the struggle to be read!

One of his most popular, and controversial "salons", as the reviews were known, dealt with an oval-shaped painting of a plump, rosy-tinted maiden resting her pretty head on her hand in despair. In front of her, atop an empty bird cage, is the limp body of a dead canary.

Paintings had to have a story and if possible a lofty moral, to grip people’s imaginations and give them something which was both uplifting and lurid to think about. The title was always worded to ensure that the viewer understood what was going on, and the boring bit of kitsch which Diderot dignified with his exciting review was called "Girl Mourning her Dead Bird".

The painter was Greuze, very popular in his day for theatrically staged scenes of family dramas, such as the wayward son returning to his forgiving father and the doting mother unaware that her unruly infant is feeding his dinner to the dog under the table. People wanted simple messages and edifying homilies and Greuze got very rich providing them!

Diderot was an impassioned admirer, and personal friend, of Greuze and in his 1765 "salon" he gave this this painting his highest praise. Taking even more poetic licence than was then customary, he claimed that the bird was merely a symbol of the girl’s virginity, which the girl’s stricken look suggested had just been taken by an unscrupulous suitor.

He went so far as to address her directly, as if he were an affectionate uncle whom she could trust, if only she would tell him everything that had happened. "Come now, my dear, you know it is not the bird you are weeping for. Your mother left you alone this morning and then, unexpectedly, he came. He was so unhappy, so full of desire, and you suffered so much at seeing him so. What else could you do but let him enjoy what he wanted? I myself would have liked to be in his place at that moment! And when the deed was done, how gay he was, how he went out singing and dancing…!"

Diderot turned his review into a titillating piece of erotica, while striking the obligatory pose of staunch but worldly defender of morality. By loudly licking his lips as he sermonized, he encouraged the gentlemen who read his rag in Potsdam and Saint Petersburg to dwell with him on the penis-stiffening scene: the plump, pink maiden, all resistance gone, being greedily deflowered by the ardent buck, in her mother’s absence.

Everyone else took the title of the painting "Jeune fille qui pleure son oiseau mort" at its face value, and accused Diderot of misleading the public. But others have since shown that the dead bird is a consecrated symbol of lost innocence, so he may have been right after all. Greuze painted other nymphets mournfully displaying cracked mirrors and broken jugs, perhaps meant to transmit the same salacious message.

But Diderot had a parti pris because he was a writer of elegant pornography, a genre which was forbidden but much in demand. A sophisticated lady of the day called them "books which are meant to be held in one hand".

In one of Diderot’s discreetly distributed novels, The Nun, a young woman is sent to a convent where she is tortured and raped by a lascivious Mother Superior, and in another, The Indiscreet Jewels, the vaginas of elegant ladies begin speaking aloud in public to reveal their owners’ most intimate secrets.

Some modern art critics have protested that what Diderot wrote about painting was simply the work of a hack who churned out the right verbal blend of moralism and libertinage, on any subject and upon demand, and that he does not deserve to be called an "art critic" at all. Whatever the accusation is worth, given my lack of esteem for art critics, the fantasies triggered in Diderot’s brain by the Young Girl Mourning Her Bird inspired the only enjoyable art review I can remember having read.

 

Like me for many years, Diderot made ends meet by giving lessons and doing translations, which means that he was always hunting for jobs, any jobs he could find. His English could not have been very good, since he never went to England and seems to have picked up what he could from the foreigners he came across in the Latin Quarter and what he could teach himself with books.

But very few Frenchmen knew English or any other foreign tongue, because French was the world’s most important language and they could use it wherever they went. So it can be assumed that when it came to the barbaric tongue of Shakespeare, Diderot was a one-eyed man in the country of the blind, and the man to consult when in need of a translation.

He was said to use an English-Latin dictionary to help him decipher the original texts, and then use his knowledge of Latin, learned with the Jesuits, for the rendition into French. When up against the wall of incomprehension, it may be assumed that he simply let his fertile imagination take over. How many readers would have been able to check his translations anyway?

That is why his first big job, a strongly anti-Christian philosophical treatise by the 3^rd Earl of Shaftesbury, is euphemistically known as a "free translation". Diderot later took the liberty of publishing a book of his own directly inspired by the Earl’s and even incorporating segments of it, since there were no laws against plagiarism of the kind we have today.

Neither were there any professional standards such as those I had to grapple with, but translations of English books were desperately needed and therefore were done. The French were keen to learn about the philosophical and scientific developments which had been unleashed in England since, a century before the French, it got rid of its absolute monarchy.

It was natural enough that Diderot and his friends should look abroad for ideas that expressed their longings, but what is strange is that when they got together to express their own in a major opus, they should have chosen to do so in an encyclopaedia.

Encyclopaedias are by definition harmless stockpiles of information without any special position or argument. That was precisely why the philosophes chose it as a Trojan horse with which they hoped to stuff their radical viewpoints.

So there was the official and commercial aim of producing a reference work with the money provided by individual subscribers, and a surreptitious one, to discredit the mysticism of the Church’s version of life, and replace it with a rational one which could "change the common way of thinking".

 

To read the school books, one might think that the "rational dictionary" was created when the learned men of France gathered about the daring young Diderot, with the purpose of setting down the knowledge they had acquired not from priestly sermons but open-minded observation, in the humanistic, irreligious spirit of the time.

This is the romantic version which the French cherish because it shows the philosophes as being guided by a lofty purpose and acting of a common accord. As with all national heroes, by praising them the French praise themselves.

But, precisely because the project was French, it was conceived in controversy and its importance was only fully understood once it was under way. To make it even less lofty and sublime, it all began as a small-scale business venture.

No one had realized how popular encyclopaedias could be until a two-volume review "of the sciences, arts and trades" called the Cyclopaedia was published in England, making huge profits for the bookseller. This determined a Parisian publisher to have it translated into French and put on the market as soon as possible.

Diderot himself was only chosen to be the translator after several others had failed or backed out. One was an Englishman who lived in Paris but, after receiving a cash advance, confessed he was unable to write in French.

When the publisher went to his home to view the first instalment of the job, he was so furious when he saw that not a page had been done that he beat the false translator with his cane. The battered Englishman took him to court, but the judge deemed that the publisher had acted within his rights!

Once Diderot and his colleague the mathematician Alembert got started on the job, with a fixed monthly salary, it became apparent that the opportunity existed for a much vaster and more ambitious home-grown project. The publisher decided to drop the English original and have French experts in various fields contribute to an entirely new, home-grown work.

Diderot thus became the editor rather than the translator of a much larger project with an implicit political purpose, to challenge the wisdom of the Church. But this would be a bone of contention among the Encylopaedians from the very beginning, since it meant risking jail and disgrace. When the first volume came out there were frightening rumblings from above, causing Alembert to withdraw from the project and leave the tenacious Diderot to continue on his own.

 

Just as the innocent word "encyclopaedia" stirred feelings that it would never do today, so did the now relatively toothless one of "Church". France’s dilemma was that since the Middle Ages, when holy doctrine was blindly accepted, people’s minds had been liberated by the Renaissance, Montaigne and Molière, but that the Church refused to loosen its grip.

By Diderot’s day, official Christianity had become an octopus of bureaucratic bigots bent on stemming the tide of rationalism which conspired to wash away the Church and the monarchy. Thousands of ignorant monks kept fanatical practices alive, rebellious girls were cloistered away in convents to prevent them from dissipating their patrimony through mariages d’amour. The time-honoured sale of papal indulgences was a well-organized industry and thanks to it the high clergy lived in scandalous luxury. The younger scions of wealthy families were routinely made bishops and cardinals, just to give them a respectable way of making a living.

Even one of the leading contributors to the Encyclopaedia, the expert in sensory perception Condillac, had for the same reason been ordained a priest, even though he devoted his whole life to rationalist thought. It was this massive, rotten system of exploitation, which no one was stupid enough to believe in except old women and ignorant peasants, that Voltaire had in mind when he exhorted his countrymen to "crush the source of infamy".

The philosophes believed that men were intelligent enough to look at the world around them more reasonably and, on the basis of what they saw they could set about improving their lives. But none of them could have imagined that just a few years after the last of them was dead, their ideas would inspire people to violently tear down the old regime and send the king to the guillotine.

They would have been even more horrified to learn that those ideas of theirs would end up benefiting not only their own wronged class, the bourgeoisie, but also the illiterate peasantry, which they had deemed to be unworthy of political power. They called for better kings, not for democracy which, in a country like France, would have been tantamount to mob rule.

 

Any large-scale analysis of the world from a non-religious viewpoint would have been anathema to the Church, let alone one which was written by Voltaire and company! Precisely thanks to the prestige of its more controversial contributors, the Encyclopédie became famous throughout Europe as a symbol of defiance.

But by their own account philosophes failed in conveying the dangerous new ideas which were the work’s real attraction, because so many other contributors and editors refused to provoke the authorities. Diderot complained that the best passages were struck out at the last minute by the fearful publisher. Instead, he and his friends had to write things they didn’t believe, lest the whole project be shut down by the police, as happened with the first edition.

To salvage some of his integrity, honest Diderot learned to become a master of deception. He would have high-ranking priests write the main article for a given subject, to provide it with a Christian "front", and then cross-reference it to other secondary ones which expressed the rationalist, anti-religious viewpoint. Thus a small number of provocative pamphlets lashing out against injustice and religion hid like deer in a forest of elegant dissertations on harmless subjects.

The radical contributors had to depend on the support of sympathetic conservatives such as Jaucourt, an illustrious and well-travelled scientist who was wealthy enough to hire a team of secretaries to help him churn out over a quarter of the entire encyclopaedia.

He worked without payment and solely for the love of knowledge but, being an aristocrat, posterity did not thank him for it as warmly as it did the low-born Diderot and Rousseau. One can only hope that the radicals in question were personally more grateful to the loyal Chevalier Louis, since he used his influence to keep them out of jail, whenever their articles excited the ire of the ruling classes.

 

But Jaucourt only joined the Encyclopédie for the second edition, so he wasn’t able to defend Diderot for having written an article in the first one. It was a visionary proposal for teaching the blind to read by touch, an idea which Braille made reality a century later.

In his contribution, Diderot audaciously slipped in some statements about evolution and natural selection which might have passed unnoticed had it not been for the outrage of a God-fearing noblewoman. She had Diderot thrown in prison, first in the Bastille and then the castle of Vincennes, where he languished for a season until his publishers could get him released.

It was there that Rousseau visited him, when, as he walked out of Paris, he had the illumination about the noxious effects of progress and knowledge which was the subject of his entry to the essay contest.

Apart from their artistic interests, the two friends had in common their age, about 37, and an urgent need to make money and a name for themselves. Rousseau certainly had the prize in mind when he sent his essay to the Academy in Dijon, and Diderot’s direction of the Encyclopaedia was for him what we could call today a "good job", or at least one which he could not afford to refuse.

In the twenty years it took him to finish it, he came to deeply regret having let himself get involved. He even denied that it was his decision to abandon the translation of the English work and create a new French work, in a letter to a friend which went, "It is not true that I chose to undertake the edition of the Encyclopédie. Rather, in a foolish moment I gave my word of honour to see it through, and thus bound myself hand and foot to that huge task…". It reminds me of a translation project I gladly took on, which after a few months of wading through juridical terminology I would have been delighted to get out of.

If Diderot’s father had not disowned him, he would certainly never have accepted such a poorly-paid job to begin with. Voltaire once commented, with what must have been a mixture of moral indignation and personal satisfaction, that, in just a few hours, he made more money selling supplies to the army (one of his lucrative business activities) than Diderot earned in a year as chief editor of the Encyclopédie.

It is amazing for us, in the era of specialization, how the contributors were able to write articles on such a variety of unrelated subjects. Rousseau began as the musical expert but then went on to write about political matters as well, and Diderot contributed over 1,000 articles on enough fields of knowledge to qualify him as a genius by current reference work standards.

In an information-starved world, it was almost enough to be interested in a given subject to be thought of as an expert on it. Rank, also, was so revered that it was assumed that a fine gentleman who knew his Latin and Greek could discourse convincingly on just about anything before his distinguished fellows. The poor and underprivileged may have fought under its banner in the Revolution, but the Encylopaedia was not conceived with them in mind.

The curious tone of the articles is that of a sage but cosy debate, deftly blending polemic with the requisite references to the Ancients and even the occasional hint of salon gossip. In the extremely long article Diderot devotes to "Encyclopaedia", he focuses less on the practical aspects of such a work than on all the random thoughts which the word encyclopaedia stimulates in his imagination, most of which have to do with the one he himself was working on at the time. And en passant permits himself to sing the praise of his great friend Rousseau, who taught him to love truth, while decrying several other figures whom he despised.

Diderot was the son of a master cutler, which gave him more credibility than most of his colleagues as an authority on the industry of the day. Since he quixotically believed in a free economy without trade secrets, rather than the medieval guilds which still stifled France’s manufacturing trade, he wanted to cover in the Encyclopaedia as much as possible of the state of his country’s arts and crafts.

Many volumes were devoted to the subject, and especially to the detailed engravings of workshops which he and his friends were able to visit. But this noble undertaking failed completely in its aim to revolutionize France’s economy because, even before it was published, the Industrial Revolution had crossed the Channel and rendered all of those traditional looms and lathes obsolete.

Diderot often complained that his task was made even more difficult because the manufacturers refused to share their secrets, or suspected that the mysterious visitors with their notebooks were tax inspectors in disguise. The least cooperative were, understandably, the producers of luxury goods which France exported around the world, and Diderot even considered having spies planted in them as apprentices to gather information on the sly.

 

At the end of his twenty-odd years with the Encyclopaedia, the Quixotic Diderot was even poorer than when he began. He was half-blind from his nights of proof-reading and lived in a fifth floor apartment filled with his only treasure, the great library which he had built up over the years.

He had made great efforts to adequately educate, and then marry, his adored daughter. But he couldn’t afford to pay the necessary dowry, so – one can imagine, with a very philosophical sigh – he put his library up for sale.

Fortunately for both him and Rousseau, there was always a wealthy aristocrat to save their skins at the last minute. How ironic when one thinks that the ideas they produced would soon deprive so many of their benefactor’s relatives of their heads, if not their skins!

 

Diderot’s protectress was Catherine the Great of Russia, who was really a German with a French education. No wonder she felt so easily at home with the philosophes, and maintained an affectionate correspondence with them.

When she heard of Diderot’s dilemma, she had the library purchased in her name and then gave him the job of caring for it until his death. In exchange for this painless task, she paid him a monthly salary as a sort of old age pension.

Diderot hated travel and never left Paris and its environs, but in his old age he felt bound to accept Catherine’s invitation to go Saint Petersburg to thank her personally. The honour was more important for her than for him, since she put great store in being thought of far and wide as a truly enlightened ruler, and there was no better proof of it than to receive the visit of one of the great Parisian philosophes.

But Diderot was a renegade, a bohemian who could pay no more than lip service to people bearing dynastic titles, no matter how sympathetic they were. After some months of profound discussion conversations with his hostess around the Hermitage fireplace, he came back cured of his illusions about enlightened despots. Serfs were still bought and sold in Russia, and the poverty was far worse than at home. And even if there could be wise rulers, who could be sure of those who succeeded them?

Voltaire was more adept at paying lip service but also left, rather escaped from, the court of Frederick the Great minus many of his illusions about authoritarian princes. If Rousseau had been sent to live with the natives of some primitive Garden of Eden he might have come back in a similar state of disgust. The lesson to be drawn for all three of them might be that the grass is only greener far from France when you have never seen it up close!

 

Like many literary chaps, Diderot did hack work of different kinds so that he would have time to write novels. But he was no Voltaire when it came to stripped-down, hard-hitting style, and we might not know much about the few books he wrote if he hadn’t landed himself that job which he came to hate.

The baroque novel in the 18^th century was to the realistic novel in the 19^th century what silent films are to the talkies. Jacques le Fataliste and Le Neveu de Rameau, Diderot’s most admired novels, provide the reader with none of the mainstays of the full-blown novels of Balzac and Stendahl, such as character portrayal, sense of time and place, surrounding atmosphere and dramatic dialogue.

Travellers arrive at a country inn and before going to bed reel off their various tales and tragedies, each with its sage moral lesson to impart. A would-be musician meets a wandering philosopher in the street and ruminates on his chequered past and the cruelty of his fate. This means that a post-18^th century reader like me must make the effort to add the colours, sounds and smells, and above all the real-life surprises, which for a satisfying literary experience I find lacking.

Literature is the art which ages fastest, if you consider the number of people who actually read the books for pleasure rather than rely for academic purposes on what contemporaries write about them in encapsulated form. This is because tastes change from one epoch to the other, and to be read writers must put them in the foreground, rather than others which have lost their appeal.

 

Conclusion

Much has been made of the courage of the philosophes and their persecution by Church and State. But under Louis XV and Louis XVI the ancien regime had lost much of its bite, simply because the people, and especially the growing middle class, would no longer sit silently by while Kings and Cardinals exercised their God-given powers.

In the same century, heretics were being burned at the stake in Spain, and even today intellectuals in many parts of the world are often tortured and murdered. In contrast, dissidents in 18^th century France had to pay for their impudence with, at worst, a few years or months in the Bastille, or exile in England.

This unofficial tolerance existed because the very potentates whose power was threatened by the new ideas were also their primary consumers and even creators. France was the richest and most powerful country in Europe, and no one feared an upheaval such as the Revolution, or even imagined it could exist.

When the illustrious Scottish philosopher David Hume visited Paris, he was delighted to be received like a celebrity, whereas in Britain few people knew who he was or what he stood for. The French fondly called him "le bon David" because he was such a kindly, peace-loving fellow.

Benjamin Franklin, was fêted in like manner, and greeted by almost everyone who passed him in the streets of Paris. One of his most endearing although curious traits was that he never wore the wigs which were customary for gentlemen of his quality.

The rules required free-thinkers to be sanctioned, but few people really believed in the rules and so they were very loosely applied. When the trouble-makers were thrown in jail, there was always a sympathizer such as Madame de Pompadour – who was the mistress of Louis XV – to have them set free. Even the Chief of Police secretly lifted the ban on the Encyclopaedia, because he had a soft spot for the darlings of his favourite salons.

In a less curious and cultivated country, Rousseau’s essay contest would not have existed, because there would have been no Academy in a small town like Dijon to begin with. Neither would Diderot have had the chance to edit the great Encylopaedia, without the over 4,000 subscribers who were willing to pay for it. France had the thirst for ideas and the wealth to pay for them, and they were produced and publicized on a grand scale, in spite of the atrophied monarchy and clergy.

These favourable circumstances detract, in my opinion, from the strictly individual value of the men and women who were the movement’s human faces. Was it really those noisy, squabbling thinkers and talkers who made their century great, or was it the 18^th century that conferred greatness on them, because they were there to speak for it? And was anything greater in the Age of Enlightenment than the simple blaze of energy which fuelled it and lit up the way ahead?

xxx