19 Augustin Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (Chiré en Montreuil, 1973), 217.
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laziness those who purported to set France free had turned to Rousseau and Du
Contrat social, ‘the worst book’, Mounier commented, ‘which has ever been written
about government’. It was from his ‘principles of anarchy’ that these ‘modern
legislators’ had taken their ideas. In their speeches and proclamations they had
‘without cease drawn upon the expressions of J.-J. Rousseau’.20
How might the matter of Rousseau’s influence in the French Revolution be
summarized? First, Rousseau was read by all sections of society, from the aristocracy
downwards.21 Next, he was read in diverse and contradictory ways and those who
cited Rousseau often did so for no better reason than to give added authority to
their own views. Robespierre is a good example of this. Thirdly, if Rousseauian
discourse undoubtedly permeated the revolutionary decade and if those who
aspired to lead the revolution sought occasionally to put Rousseau’s ideas directly
into practice, then equally the actions of the revolutionaries frequently contradicted
anything Rousseau might have said. Bernard Manin, for example, points out that
Jacobin policies on the economy and taxation owed nothing to Rousseau. He also
reminds us that Robespierre specifically indicated that the theory of revolutionary
government underpinning the Terror could not ‘be found in the books of writers
on politics’.22
Stated in this way, however, we have no sense of the emotional (and frequently
tearful) frenzy that Rousseau induced amongst his disciples. The community born
out of the social contract was to be frugal, hard-working, virtuous, distrustful of
wealth, free of corruption, trusting to the simple qualities of the people cast as the
repositories of all that was naturally good. Armed thus, men such as Robespierre
and Saint-Just had little difficulty affirming their own rhetorical and moral ascen-
dancy over opponents who bore the mark of evil. What happened when the people,
corrupted by despotism, were found to be unworthy of the love that had been
invested in them was the recourse to an ever-extensive dictatorship, with the general
will supposedly articulated by a twelve-man Committee of Public Safety.
The revolutionaries, then, were not just millenarians: they were ‘Rousseauist
millenarians’.23 Moreover, the hypnotic effect of their actions was such as to
bequeath to France a living tradition and style of politics––what Pierre Rosanvallon
has termed a ‘political culture of generality’––that was deeply imbued with Rous-
seauian notions. The bare bones of what virtually amounted to a revolutionary
catechism can be easily sketched out.24 Sovereignty belonged to the people. There
were no limits to sovereignty because the field of politics was itself without limits.
It was the task of the community to ensure that the general will was respected and it
alone had the right to decide upon the sacrifices that were to be demanded of each
20 Mounier, Recherches sur les causes (179, 1973), 147–58.
21 Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française (1990), 105–7.
22 Bernard Manin, ‘Rousseau’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), Dictionnaire critique de la
Révolution française: Idées (1992), 457–81.
23 Norman Hampson, ‘The Heavenly City of the French Revolutionaries’, in Colin Lucas (ed.),
Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 53.
24 See Jacques Julliard, La Faute à Rousseau (1985) and Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français: La
Société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (2004).
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
115
individual. The role of government was limited to the execution of the general will
as expressed by the people as sovereign. Money and the activities it engendered were
the source of corruption and moral decline. The goal of politics was that of
transformation and regeneration. Its political expression was to be the one and
indivisible Republic. By general agreement, therefore, Rousseau’s greatness lay in
his advocacy of liberty and in his recognition that this would demand the destruc-
tion of all past forms of tyranny. For many in France he was the philosopher of
fraternity.
I I I
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Robespierre there was no shortage of
commentary upon Rousseau’s work. Almost without exception a connection was
made between Rousseau and the events of the Revolution and invariably Rousseau’s
influence was seen in strongly negative terms. Time and time again his influence was
attributed to his seductive style and to the naivety, if not the malice, of his readers.
Clearly too there was a sense that his influence persisted and that his ideas still needed
to be refuted. A work such as that by Pierre Landes, Principes du droit politique, mis en
opposition avec ceux de J.J. Rousseau sur le Contrat social, for example, consisted of a
point by point refutation of Rousseau’s ideas, beginning with the contention that, far
from being born free, man was born weak and therefore in need of authority rather
than liberty.25 Written slightly later, Gabriel-Jacques Dageville’s De la Propriété
politique et civile argued, against Rousseau, that the ‘true’ social contract could only
be that made between property owners to defend their property and thus that
Rousseau’s contract, as had been demonstrated by the events of the Revolution,
could only lead to disorder and the disintegration of society.26 Given the persistence
of these fears, Rousseau’s works virtually vanished from booksellers’ shelves and
under Napoleon no edition of Du Contrat social was published.
Nowhere was the hostility and distrust directed towards Rousseau’s ideas more
evident than among those writers who, like Rousseau, believed that sovereignty was
one and absolute but who saw the origin of that sovereignty as found not among the
people but in God. Of these no one put the case more succinctly than Joseph de
Maistre. Written in exile between 1794 and 1796, his Étude sur la souveraineté
amounted to a systematic attempt to demolish the very foundations of Rousseau’s
thought.27
25 Pierre Landes, Principes du droit politique, mis en opposition avec ceux de J. J. Rousseau sur le
Contrat social (1801).
26 Gabriel-Jacques Dageville, De la propriété politique et civile (1813).
27 Joseph de Maistre, ‘Étude sur la souveraineté’, in Œuvres complètes (Lyons, 1884), i. 309–554.
A revised version of this text has been publ. under the title of De la Souveraineté du peuple: Un anti-
contrat social (1992). See also Joseph de Maistre, ‘Examen d’un écrit de J.-J. Rousseau: Sur l’inégalité
des conditions parmi les hommes’, in Œuvres complètes, vii. 507–66. In English see Maistre, Against
Rousseau: ‘On the State of Nature’ and ‘On the Sovereignty of the People’ (Montreal and Kingston, 1996).
116
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
There was no doubt in Maistre’s mind that Rousseau had been one of those
responsible for both the outbr
eak and the horrors of the Revolution. Robespierre
and Marat could not have committed their crimes had Rousseau and the other
philosophes not undermined the bases of France’s pre-1789 Christian order. Rous-
seau’s particular achievement (and again special mention was made of his seductive
‘eloquence’) was everywhere to have spread ‘contempt for authority and the spirit of
insurrection’. Nor did Maistre have any doubts about Rousseau’s motives. Rous-
seau, Maistre wrote, could never forgive God for not making him either a duke or a
peer of the realm. His work was infused with ‘a certain plebeian anger directed
against all forms of superiority’.28
However, the core of the theocratic argument directed by Maistre against
Rousseau lay in the assertion that man was by nature ‘sociable’ and therefore that
it made no sense to speak of man existing prior to the existence of society. The
latter, Maistre argued, was ‘the direct result of the will of the Creator who wanted
that man should be what he always and everywhere had been’. It followed therefore
that it was ‘a major error’ to conceive of society as a ‘choice’ based upon human
consent, deliberation, or what Maistre described as ‘a primitive contract’. The
confusion, he believed, derived in part from a misunderstanding about what was
meant by the word ‘nature’ and in this context he was sure that such anomalous
examples as the ‘American savage’ had little to teach us. It was absurd to seek the
character of a being in its most undeveloped and untypical form. By the same token
a people could not be said to pre-date the existence of sovereignty. A sovereign, in
Maistre’s view, was necessary to make a people and therefore society and sovereign-
ty both appeared at precisely the same time. ‘There was’, Maistre wrote, ‘a people,
some kind of civilization and a sovereign as soon as men came into contact with
each other.’
The same logic also told Maistre that the very power which had decreed
the existence of the social order and of sovereignty had also willed ‘modifications
to sovereignty according to the different character of nations’. Nations, Maistre
believed, quite definitely had different characters and from this were derived
different forms of government that in each case were suited to the conditions.
Thus, to ask in the abstract, as Maistre interpreted Rousseau to have done, what
was the best possible form of government was to pose an insoluble question. ‘From
these incontestable principles’, Maistre continued, ‘derives a conclusion which is no
less so: that the social contract is a chimera. Because if there are as many govern-
ments as there are different peoples, if the various forms of these governments are
perforce prescribed by the power which has given to each nation its moral, physical,
geographical and commercial qualities, then it is no longer possible to speak of a
pact.’29 In short, each people had the type of government that suited it and none of
them had been either chosen or self-consciously created.
As such Rousseau, in addition to his many personal faults and the immense
damage he had caused, was cast as ‘the mortal enemy of experience’.30 If history
28 Maistre, ‘Étude sur la souveraineté’, 457.
29 Ibid. 329.
30 Ibid. 456.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
117
taught us (as Maistre believed it did) that monarchy was the most natural and
universal form of government and that no pure form of democracy had ever existed,
this had in no way prevented Rousseau from proclaiming that the ‘sole legitimate
government’ was one he himself acknowledged was made for gods, was suitable
only for small states, and for a people with a simplicity of morals.31 So also
Rousseau judged democracy not by how it actually worked––‘Of all the monarchs’,
Maistre wrote, ‘the hardest, the most despotic, the most intolerable, is the monarch
people’32––but in terms of its theoretical perfection: hence the general will was
by definition always right. The whole thing, from the idea of the social contract
upwards, was nothing more than ‘un rêve de collège’.33
Just as importantly there lay beneath this critique of Rousseau an alternative
(and, Maistre believed, more compelling) account of the origin of society and of the
nature of government. Joseph de Maistre’s ‘general thesis’ was that human beings
were relatively powerless and therefore were incapable of any significant level of
creative activity. They were also tainted by original sin and hence were not, as
Rousseau believed, potentially perfect. From this Maistre found himself in agree-
ment with Hobbes. Society, he wrote, ‘is in reality a state of war and here is to be
found the necessity of government: given that man is evil he must be governed;
wherever several people want the same thing there must be a superior power
over everyone who can adjudicate and who can prevent them from fighting each
other . . . a being who is both social and evil must be put under the yoke’.34
Government was therefore not a vehicle for human liberation but was rather a
necessary remedy for the consequences of original sin. To limit the power of the
sovereign was to destroy it. If there was a difficulty, it was not that the sovereign
should not exercise his will ‘invincibly’ but that he should be prevented from
exercising it ‘unjustly’.35 This was to be avoided by ensuring that power derived
from the papacy rather than from Rousseau’s ‘blind multitude’. How then was the
legitimacy of a government to be assessed? For Maistre, all governments, given their
divine source, were good governments but the best were those that provided the
greatest sum of happiness to the greatest number of people over the longest period
of time. Ultimately this could be measured not by the maxims of ‘human reason’
but by the simple criterion of their longevity or duration.
The overall import of Joseph de Maistre’s argument, as all his writings testify,
was that the Revolution of 1789, directly inspired by Rousseau’s ‘disastrous
principles’, had been a frontal assault upon what he chose to describe as ‘the eternal
laws of nature’. By divorcing politics from religion and by mistakenly seeking to
rebuild society upon the foundation of a man-made contract, chaos and disorder
had inevitably followed.
This was to be a refrain taken up by the ideologists of Catholic counter-
revolution on a regular basis, none more so than Louis de Bonald. The writings
of Bonald have neither the brilliance nor the trenchancy of those of Maistre, but
31 Ibid. 482.
32 Ibid. 502.
33 Ibid. 489.
34 Maistre, ‘Examen d’un écrit de J.-J. Rousseau’, 563.
35 Maistre, ‘Étude sur la souveraineté’, 422.
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Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
they again demonstrate that central to the counter-revolutionary defence of both
throne and altar was the perceived need to refute Rousseau’s ideas, in this case by
demonstrating how Rousseau’s own arguments could be used to subvert the very
ideas for which he was taken to stand.
Louis de Bonald
began his magisterial Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux
dans la société civile, démontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire,36 first published
in 1796 and written in exile in Heidelberg, with a statement effectively denying the
possibility of ever reconstructing society from first principles. ‘Man’, he proclaimed,
‘has always wanted to set himself up as the legislator of religious society and of civil
society and to provide a constitution for each of them: I believe it possible to show
that man can no more give a constitution to religious and political society than he
can give weight to a body or dimensions to matter.’37 In short, the constitution of
society was as natural and as immune to human action as the physical constitution
of man himself. As such all forms of political voluntarism––of which Rousseau’s
ideas were a prime example––were nothing less than deviations from what Bonald
regarded as ‘the fundamental axioms of politics or of the science of society’. Indeed,
he went so far as to suggest that Du Contrat social would have been better published
under the lugubrious title of Méthode à l’usage des sociétés pour les éloigner de leur
inclination naturelle, ou de la nature.
What Bonald took these axioms to be is, to say the least, somewhat complicated.
His argument, never quick in pace, moved forward by way of deduction and
analogy, and was built around a series of tripartite divisions. As we saw in our
earlier discussion of Bonald’s critique of the rights of man, the central claim was
that a properly constituted society was one in which the elements of will, love, and
force were in harmony and that certain relationships between men were ‘necessary’
and must therefore be respected if the lives and property of a society’s members
were to be preserved. At this point our focus must be on the first of Bonald’s
categories: la volonté.
Given that God had created man in his own image, how could society’s descent
into turmoil be explained? Bonald’s reply was in accord with what he took to be the
teachings of theology. These, he argued, saw ‘an unrestrained will, an uncontrolled
love of self, immoral or criminal action as the source of all our disorders and as the
origin of all our tribulations’.38 From this there had followed war between men and
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