themselves for a definite purpose and time. Each contractee was therefore mutually
obliged to provide a certain amount of goods, services, and work in exchange for
other goods, services, and work of equal value. Beyond this, each of the contractees
was perfectly independent. The contract therefore was ‘essentially reciprocal’:
it implied no obligation upon the parties concerned except that which resulted
from their personal promise of reciprocal delivery. Just as importantly, it was not
subject to any external authority. ‘When I agree with one or more of my fellow
citizens’, Proudhon wrote, ‘it is clear that my own will is my law; it is myself who,
in fulfilling an obligation, am my own government.’ Likewise, by agreeing upon a
contract, individuals indicated their willingness to ‘abdicate all pretensions to govern
each other’. More than this, Proudhon envisaged that this system of contract could be
extended indefinitely throughout society, producing a community that would be
composed of an intricate web of contracts freely agreed upon by the individuals
concerned. ‘It implies’, Proudhon wrote, ‘that a man bargains with the aim of securing
his liberty and his well-being without any personal loss.’
Seen in this light it was what Proudhon described as ‘the constitution of value’ that
was ‘the contract of contracts’. Each contract was to be based upon a ‘just price’ for
the goods and services exchanged and this, in Proudhonian terms, made possible the
realization of what he regarded as a pattern of justice that was ‘totally human and
nothing but human’. All conflicting interests were reconciled and all divergences were
unified. ‘Everything else’, Proudhon wrote, ‘is war, the rule of authority.’
Proudhon’s case against Rousseau, therefore, was that he had fundamentally
misinterpreted the idea of the social contract as it had emerged out of the sixteenth
century. This ‘revolutionary tradition’, born out of the quarrel between the Catholic
Bossuet and the Protestant Jurieu, had given us ‘the idea of the social contract as the
very antithesis of government’: under the guise of eloquence and paradox, Rousseau
had turned it into the very opposite.
I V
When the July Monarchy collapsed in 1848 the constitutional and political
questions that had engulfed France in the 1790s resurfaced with a vigour that
seemed hardly to have diminished over the preceding five decades. Yet this time
the names of Montesquieu and Rousseau were rarely cited.63 When they were, as
was the case with Pierre Leroux before the Constituent Assembly, it was to
63 François Luchaire, Naissance d’une constitution: 1848 (1998), 45.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
129
encourage its members to seek new guides as they sought to frame the constitu-
tion of the Second Republic. France, he believed, needed a new ‘political science’
which would avoid the Montesquieu and Rousseau-inspired errors of the past.64
If not explicitly cited, however, the influence of Rousseau’s ideas was not difficult
to discern. This was especially so in the pronouncements of those such as Victor
Considérant and Ledru-Rollin as they advocated a system of direct democracy.
Again one claim was that representation would put an end to the sovereignty of
the people.
As might be anticipated, the orthodox republican response came from Louis
Blanc in the form of the familiar argument that, strictly speaking, Rousseau’s ideas
could only be applied to societies characterized by ‘a very small state, a people that
was easy to bring together, citizens who knew each other, a pronounced simplicity
of morals, high levels of equality in both rank and fortune, little or no luxury’.
Where this did not exist, Blanc asked, had Rousseau not countenanced the
separation of executive and legislative power? Had he not also acknowledged the
need for a legislator? Anything else would lead to a return to federalism and
therefore to the chaos produced by the Girondins.65
As it was, the constitution of the Second Republic did not need an element of
Rousseauian democracy to push it towards a speedy disintegration. The provision
that the president was to be directly elected for a fixed and non-renewable period
was sufficient to do the job. In these circumstances, as Sudhir Hazareesingh has
argued,66 Rousseau was subject to ‘systematic exclusion’ from republican memo-
ry. When not forgotten, however, an important transformation occurred, as was
illustrated by views of Jules Barni.
Written in exile, the second volume of Barni’s Histoire des Idées morales et politique
en France au dix-huitième siècle amounted to a detailed analysis of Rousseau’s ideas
seen through the perspective of Barni’s enthusiastic neo-Kantianism.67 The most
striking innovation in Barni’s argument was not only that Rousseau was freed of
responsibility for the Terror and the acts of the Convention but that he was now seen
in an unambiguously favourable light as the philosopher not of 1793 but of 1789.
The Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, Barni wrote, was ‘the
putting into practice of the ideas of Du Contrat social ’.68 It was Rousseau’s idea that
had inspired the abolition of the feudal order and that had led to the demand of the
Third Estate that voting was to be by head. In no way, Barni continued, was
Rousseau responsible ‘for the politics of the slaughterhouse that sullied the French
Revolution and that made possible the resuscitation of Caesarism in the France of
the nineteenth century’.69 In moral terms, Rousseau stood for the recognition of
64 Le Moniteur Universel: Journal Officiel de la République française, 250 (6 Sept. 1848), 2317–18.
65 See esp. Louis Blanc, Plus de Girondins! (1851) and La République Une et Indivisible (1851).
66 Sudhir Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic: Five Studies in Nineteenth-Century
French Political Thought (Oxford, 2001), 293.
67 Jules Barni, Histoire des Idées morales et politiques en France au dix-huitième siècle (1867), ii.
68 Ibid. 296.
69 Ibid. 300.
130
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
the inner voice of conscience, whilst in politics he was the advocate of republican
equality and the sovereignty of the people.70 He understood and showed that the
liberty of man was inalienable. At bottom, Barni wrote, ‘the principle of Rousseau
is nothing else than that of the free adhesion of citizens to the political institutions
and to the laws under which they live and which they are required to obey; and this
principle is nothing else than that of liberty, without which man is nothing more
than a slave or a machine’.71 In this way Rousseau could be read as an unremitting
critic of the Second Empire of Napoleon III.
But Barni was also alive to the fact that in Rousseau’s theory of the State ‘the
liberty of the individual and the rights of the human person are not sufficiently
recognized or safeguarded’. This was where Kant came to Barni’s rescue. The source
of Rousseau’s errors, Barni argued, lay in his preoccupation with unity, an enthusi-
asm grounded in an admiration for the ‘ancient city’.
Rousseau, he commented, ‘too
easily forgets when he speaks of the people that if it can be seen as a person . . . this
person is not strictly and absolutely one, and that it is composed of as many persons as
there are individuals in the State and that the general will which arises from it can
never have in reality the ideal and abstract unity which he attributes to it’.72 That
weakness, Barni contended, could be overcome by supplementing Rousseau with a
reading of the author of The Critique of Pure Reason, thus allowing us to move from
the potential for ‘civil despotism’ to the realization of ‘philosophical liberty’.
In short, if, as Barni wished, Rousseau was to have an appeal for the moderate
republicans who were to set out to construct the edifice of the Third Republic from
the 1870s onwards, it had to be a Rousseau who could be said to lend support to the
reforming, but not radical, programme upon which the regime was to be constructed.
He had to be seen as an advocate of modern and not ancient democracy and as an
opponent of governmental despotism, as someone whose views would no longer
inspire fear and who would not scare away the bourgeoisie.
If this strategy failed, however, there was always the device of falling back
upon the figure of Rousseau as a writer.73 As we have seen, even the most ardent
opponent of Rousseau found it difficult not to acknowledge his literary abilities. His
was a style that overcame the most hard-hearted hostility. What better then than to
focus upon this rather than upon anything that Rousseau might have said about
politics? And this indeed was to be one of the primary ways in which the Third
Republic came to celebrate his genius. Standing before the statue of Rousseau on
the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève on the day of its inauguration in February 1889,
Jules Simon of the Académie Française put the case beautifully. Rousseau, he
proclaimed, was ‘above all a great writer’. The literary style was the man. ‘I do not
70 This was the theme of the chapter devoted to Rousseau in Barni’s Les Martyrs de la libre-pensée
(1880), 230–56. The book is composed of lectures given in Geneva in the early 1860s.
71 Barni, Histoire des Idées, 223.
72 Ibid. 259.
73 See Jean-Marie Goulemot and Eric Walter, ‘Les Centenaires de Voltaire et Rousseau: Les Deux
Lampions des Lumières’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire (1997), i. 351–82. Between 1878
and 1912 (the bicentenary of his birth), Goulemot and Walter argue, Rousseau acquired ‘the status of a
great national writer’ who had devoted his life to ‘the triumph of French culture’.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
131
know’, he went on, ‘to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau [this statue] has been raised:
whether it be the author of Emile or the author of La Nouvelle Héloise or the author of
Du Contrat social, but it is to the incomparable writer, to one of the masters of our
language, that the Académie Française dedicates it.’74
Rousseau was thus domesticated, removed from the political passions his writings
had done so much to foster during the nineteenth century. In the same way that the
language of rights and of liberty was detached from the threat of tyranny and of
dictatorship and that compromises were made by republicans over the constitution,
so too the radical dimensions of Rousseauian thinking were now underplayed,
bequeathing a Rousseau made more palatable to a Republic which appeared to
prize stability and order above all. Yet, in truth, the enigma remained. As we have
seen, the experience of the French Revolution had been such as to convince many of
Rousseau’s readers that his doctrine of the social contract and the general will had
merely transposed the absolutism of government onto another plane, producing a
catastrophe without precedent. Exactly how and why this might have happened was
what continued to intrigue and horrify his many readers. There was no clear answer
to this conundrum. Moreover, what made both this fascination with Rousseau and
the extent of his impact all the more remarkable, as Bertrand de Jouvenel commen-
ted as long ago as 1947, was that virtually everything Rousseau believed in had since
been either ‘rejected or condemned’ by the evolution of society. As Jouvenel pointed
out, Rousseau preferred ‘the countryside to the town, agriculture to commerce,
simplicity to luxury, the equality of citizens in an unsophisticated economy to their
inequality in a complex economy, direct solidarity between men whose interests
were the same to indirect solidarity between men whose different interests were
complementary’.75 The world described and desired by Rousseau, in other words,
had become increasingly removed from the realities of French society.
V
The general outline of Rousseau’s anti-modernist argument was clearly visible in
Du Contrat social, but the groundwork for this position had been laid in his earlier
discourses and in his response to the criticisms these had engendered. According to
Rousseau, the first source of evil was inequality. From this had arisen riches. From
riches were born luxury and idleness. Out of luxury came the fine arts. Out of
idleness came the sciences.76 Rousseau’s opinion was that, as everything beyond
what was absolutely necessary was a ‘source of evil’, it would be ‘exceedingly
imprudent’ to multiply our needs.77
74 Jules Simon, Inauguration de la Statue de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Le dimanche, 3 Fevrier 1889 (1889).
75 Bertrand de Jouvenal, ‘Essai sur la politique de Rousseau’, preface to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Du contrat social (1992), 124.
76 ‘Observations by Jean-Jacques of Geneva’, in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political
Writings (Cambridge, 1997), 45.
77 ‘Last Reply’, in Rousseau, ibid. 84. See Renato Gallieni, Rousseau, le luxe et l’idéologie nobiliare:
Étude socio-historique (Oxford, 1989).
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Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
This, as Rousseau readily recognized, had turned out not to be the case. From a
situation where, in the state of nature, the inequality existing among men had been
‘scarcely perceptible’ had arisen a ‘nascent inequality’ which had not only come to
characterize civil society in general but which had also given rise ‘to the most
horrible state of war’.78 Men were consumed by ambition and jealousy. Competi-
tion, rivalry, and conflict of interest defined their relations with each other. ‘Savage
man and civilised man’, Rousseau told his readers,
differ so much in their inmost heart and inclinations that what constitutes the supreme
happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair. The first breathes nothing else
but repose and freedom. . . . By contrast, the Citizen, forever active, sweats, scurries,
constantly agonises in search of ever more strenuous occupations . . . He courts the
great whom he hates, and the rich whom he despises; he spares nothing to attain
the honour of serving them.79
Such was the sorry outcome of our enslavement to luxury and inequality.
The manner in which these ills could be rectified was set out in the third of
Rousseau’s famous discourses, the Discours sur l’économ
ie politique, published in
Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in 1755.80 The guiding principle was that
‘the first and most important rule of legitimate or popular government . . . is . . . to
follow in everything the general will’. From this Rousseau set out what he described
as a series of general rules of political economy, the second of which included the
prescription that citizens must be taught to be good. This, however, was not
possible if society remained subject to division and ‘the tyranny of the rich’.
Therefore, Rousseau stated, ‘it is one of the most important functions of govern-
ment to prevent extreme inequalities of fortune’. This was to be done ‘not by taking
away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men of the means to
accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor but by securing citizens
from being poor’.
Rousseau sketched out how this was to be done in some detail. If ‘the right to
property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizenship’, by the same token, ‘the
distribution of provisions, money and merchandise in just proportions . . . is the true
secret of finance’. Taxes thus became primarily not a means of raising revenue for the
State but of constructing a just society. Where then should taxes fall?: ‘on the
productions of the frivolous and all too lucrative arts, on the importation of all
pure luxuries, and in general on all objects of luxury’. To this was added an extensive
list of items which were to be taxed out of existence. These would include: servants in
livery, carriages, rich furniture, fine clothes, spacious courts and gardens, public
entertainments of all kinds, as well as useless professions such as dancers, singers,
and actors.
78 ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men’, in Rousseau, Discourses,
113–88.
79 Ibid. 186–7.
80 ‘Discourse on Political Economy’, in Rousseau, Social Contract, 3–38.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
133
How such a society might operate in the contemporary world was described
in Rousseau’s reflections on the projected reformation of the government of
Poland.81 If the Poles were to escape from their present situation of anarchy and
Revolution and the Republic Page 28
