Émile was a fictionalised treatise designed to show how to bring up a child according to the laws of nature, free from the corrupting influences of society. Here Rousseau showed that his vegetarian principles did not apply to females alone, for he guides the male pupil, Émile, down Pierre Gassendi’s clearly marked vegetarian path of nature. Once again, Rousseau’s inspiration was the maternal breast.
Rousseau knew that the ninety or so per cent of Parisian babies sent off to be wet-nursed in the country stood a much lower chance of survival than those raised on the fresh milk of their own mothers. So instead of abandoning infants to lower-class wet-nurses, Rousseau encouraged middle- and upper-class mothers to nurse their own infants, liberating them from taboos about uncovering bosoms (though shackling them to no less onerous a life centred on child-rearing in the home, and, to the dismay of husbands, ruining the perceived attractiveness of their pert virginal breasts).35 Rousseau thus redressed the injustice in Pamela when Mr B. resorted to his patriarchal prerogative by forbidding Pamela from marring her figure by breastfeeding their baby, despite her conviction that it was an indispensable moral duty. This was key to the regeneration of virtue in society. ‘Let mothers deign to nurse their children,’ Rousseau pleaded, ‘morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled.’36
It was still more important, Rousseau explained, that whoever was nursing the infant preserve the purity of their milky nourishment by keeping meat entirely out of their diet.37 Having nursed the child on healthy vegetarian milk, mothers were then responsible for ensuring that the child kept to their natural herbivorous impulses for as long as possible.
Rousseau agreed with Gassendi that children’s instinctive preference for vegetable foods proved that ‘meat is not natural to man’,38 and he warned that ‘It is, above all, important not to denature this primitive taste and make children carnivorous.’ As well as protecting the child from physical ailments like worms, Rousseau believed that abstaining from flesh preserved the innate principle of sympathy – the essential ingredient to moral virtue. The brutalising effect of meat-eating was all too visible in carnivorous societies like the English, who were ‘more cruel and ferocious’, whereas vegetarian peoples like the Banians and Zoroastrians were ‘the gentlest of men’.39
So long as these rules were observed, the child would grow naturally into a benevolent being. ‘He will begin to have gut reactions at the sounds of complaints and cries, the sight of blood flowing will make him avert his eyes; the convulsions of a dying animal will cause him an ineffable distress.’ From this natural tendency, Rousseau explained, all the human virtues could be cultivated.40
Still using Gassendi as a template for his argument, Rousseau paraphrased Plutarch’s graphic challenge to anyone who claimed that meat-eating was natural:
Kill the animals yourself – I mean with your own hands, without iron tools, without knives. Tear them apart with your nails, as do lions and bears. Bite this cow and rip him to pieces; plunge your claws in its skin. Eat this lamb alive; devour its still warm flesh; drink its soul with its blood. You shudder? You do not dare to feel living flesh palpitating in your teeth?41
Rousseau went on to list all the five senses, showing how each one was repulsed by killing: what more scientific proof did one need that predation was unnatural? Even when the time came to harden the adolescent pupil against the extremes of sympathy (though Rousseau doubted if this was entirely necessary), it was to be accomplished by sending him hunting where the killer and the killed came into direct contact.42
Modern society had bypassed the natural relation between man and his prey by distancing the consumer from the consumed, employing butchers to kill and cooks to disguise the flesh. This spatial distance – as Plutarch, Gassendi, Richardson, Cheyne and Mandeville had pointed out – created a hypocritical moral distance. Rousseau argued – in the economic critique that inspired Marx and Lenin – that the division between the sympathiser and the sympathised facilitated inequality in society. Rousseau had faith that the principles of nature held the solution, if only people would realise the ethical ramifications latent in their consumption.43
Rousseau did not try to push the whole of society back into a pre-human state of herbivorousness. In his Confessions he unabashedly admitted to eating meat.44 Looking back to the days of his youth, when, as a runaway watchmaker’s son, he was given sanctuary by the buxom Baronne de Warens, he remembered her lessons about natural goodness and the healthy fleshless meals she provided: ‘I did not know and I still do not know of better fare than a rustic meal,’ he said. ‘With dairy-foods, eggs, herbs, cheese, brown bread and tolerable wine, one is always sure to regale me well.’45 He recalled the happy day when he enjoyed a polyamorous country adventure with two women and – replaying the foraging instincts of his fruitarian ancestors – he clambered up cherry trees collecting the dessert to their frugal meal. Uniting breasts, polygamy and frugivorousness into one unified symbol, he dropped cherries into their bosoms and fantasised, ‘Why are not my lips cherries? how gladly would I throw them there likewise!’46
Rousseau’s principles of pure food became a national craze in France. From the 1760s frugality was fervently embraced by high and middle society and, as the historian Rebecca Spang has shown, the nascent restaurant industry jumped on the bandwagon. Calling themselves maisons de santé and touting their nouvelle cuisine, instead of lavish feasts they served light meals which claimed to ‘restore’ natural balance in the body of the consumer. Tailored to fastidious patrons on delicate regimens, whole menus were carved from the pages of Rousseau’s novels: semolina, fresh eggs, seasonal vegetables, fresh butter and cream cheese.47 The court artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun – who painted stunning images of ladies with the trademark one breast exposed – accompanied her new artistic movement by serving Arcadian suppers of honey cake and raisins.
The implications of Rousseau’s herbivorous breast were destined to overspill the nature-adoring enthusiasm of the French court. For by 1789 the populace had become inflamed with desire to try out Rousseau’s ‘general will’, and in place of milk, the bosom-baring French Liberty – memorably depicted by Eugène Delacroix – was to shed rivers of blood before the egalitarian principles of sympathy could be restored to ailing mankind.
Revolutionaries later in the century pushed Rousseau’s equivocations on sympathy and primitivism to an even further extreme (see Part III). Herbivorousness became a byword in the French republic and Émile spawned a generation of Rousseauist children educated in the vegetarian laws of nature.48 The meat-free education became such a distinctive mark of ‘natural’ morality that the cynical Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) attacked it in his anti-moralist novel Eugénie de Franval where Eugénie’s fleshless vegetable regimen is part of the routine her father employs to ensure the success of his incestuous seduction.49
This legacy of Rousseauist vegetarianism – which went beyond what Rousseau himself espoused – was very largely thanks to Rousseau’s young friend Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) who developed his own nature philosophy and carried it over into the era of the French Revolution, this time with an explicit endorsement of vegetarianism. Saint-Pierre was an unrepentant idealist. As a child he ran away from school to live as a hermit with the plants and animals in the woods. After renouncing an official job in France and going to work for the beautiful Tsarina Catherine II, he set his heart on establishing a Rousseauist-cum-Platonic community on the banks of the Caspian Sea. Later he imagined that the island of Madagascar would be more appropriate and took a job on Mauritius, the French island in the Indian Ocean, where he formulated his theories about the tropics which became a central part of his thinking. Eventually he gained enough expertise to succeed Buffon, on the eve of the overthrow of King Louis XVI, to the prestigious post of Intendant of the Cabinet of Natural History and the Jardin des Plantes (where he oversaw the creation of an animal menagerie).50
On his initial
return to France in 1771, Saint-Pierre made friends with Rousseau and followed his technique of using both popular fiction and learned philosophy to propagate his ideas. Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie (1788) was met with unprecedented rapture throughout Europe and became one of the most frequently reprinted and imitated works ever. By the end of the nineteenth century this quintessence of the sentimental genre had become known as the archetype of slush, and Gustave Flaubert affectionately debunked it in his tale ‘Novembre’ by putting it in the hands of the prostitute Marie who read it a hundred times; and in Un Cæur Simple by giving Madame Aubin’s children the names Paul and Virginie. But in the Romantic period the eponymous hero and heroine were idolised as true representations of pure benevolent humanity.
Egalité, engraved by L. Gautier, c.1793–94 after Antoine Boizot (c.1702–82)
Growing up in an isolated community on Mauritius, the pair live in harmony with nature. Virginie has a special grove in the woods where she feeds birds that have become so tame that (just as in Julie’s grove) they come ‘up to her feet like domestic hens’. ‘Paul and she delighted themselves with their transports of joy, with their eager appetites, and with their loves.’ ‘Never has the murderous gun terrified these peaceful children of nature. Sounds of joy alone are heard,’ enthused Saint-Pierre of his island Paradise.51 Into these sentimental themes, Saint-Pierre infused the ethics of Hinduism: after Virginie dies in a shipwreck Hindu girls ‘brought cages full of small birds, to whom they gave freedom over her coffin’. The novel celebrates Paul and Virginie’s ‘Indian repasts’, ‘those delicate rural repasts, which cost no animal its life! Gourds filled with milk, new-laid eggs, cakes of rice served up on banana leaves, baskets filled with potatoes, mangoes, oranges, pomegranates, bananas, dates, and pineapples; affording at once, nutriment the most salutary, colours of the most delightful hues, and juices the most delicious.’52
In his next novel, La Chaumière Indienne (The Indian Cottage) (1790), Saint-Pierre depicted a Western scientist’s search for wisdom in the East. (Saint-Pierre had read the works of Linschoten, Roe, Kircher, Tavernier, Bernier and the more recent Orientalism of Sir William Jones.) The scientist realises that the Brahmins take their vegetarian taboos to excessively superstitious extremes, but he eventually finds wisdom in the poor cottage of an Indian pariah who lives happily on the original diet of nature. The pariah entertains his European guest with a meal of ‘mangoes, custard apples, yams, potatoes roasted under the embers, grilled bananas, and a pot of rice dressed with sugar and coconut milk’; his wife, as she was represented in all the contemporary illustrations, bared her maternal breasts, and in the hearth of the cottage a cat and a dog lie down together in symbolic realisation of the Golden Age.53
Saint-Pierre revealed the significance of these meals of tropical fruit in his monumental works Études de la Nature (1784) and Harmonies de la Nature (1815). He explained that the tropics must have been the birthplace of mankind because only there did nature supply all human needs without requiring labour or technology: ‘the banana tree could have sufficed alone for all the needs of the first man. It produces the most healthy foods in its farinaceous, succulent, sweet, unctuous and aromatic fruits … under its delicious shade, and amidst its fruits … the bramine prolongs often over a century the course of a life without inquietude.’ Saint-Pierre translated the Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden into a deistic-Rousseauist notion of the origins of mankind. This was a stepping stone between biblical and modern evolutionary history.54 His Orientalist notion of man’s union with nature became a vital stimulus to Romanticism and informed the early philosophies of environmentalism. As far as he was concerned, the tropical civilisations still provided a model for environmental harmony which the whole world should pursue:55
It is from [India] also that our arts, sciences, laws, games and religions originated. It is there that Pythagoras, the father of philosophy, went to search among the wise brachmanes the elements of physics and morality. It is from there that he brought back to Europe the vegetable regimen [le régime végétal] which carries his name, and which causes health, beauty and life to flourish, and, in calming the passions, increases wisdom and intelligence. Some enemies of the human race have claimed that this diet enfeebles courage and the vigour of the body … But is it necessary to be a carnivore or murderer to brave dangers and death?
A. Colin, The Interior of a Native Hut, 1832
Having refuted the idea that vegetarianism caused effeminacy, Saint-Pierre explained the main advantage of the vegetable diet. In the wake of grain shortages and ecological degradation, the French physiocrats were searching for the most efficient methods of food production. Saint-Pierre suggested turning to the chestnut tree, for it provided ‘a great deal more substantial fruit than a field of corn’ and supplied a bonus crop of useful timber. This, Rousseau had argued, was the only way of reversing the transformation of the earth into desert under the pressure from the increasing consumption habits of urban populations. Buffon had noticed that plants put more back into the soil than they take out of it, whereas animals – including humans – did the opposite. Fruit trees, Rousseau proved in a practical land-use experiment, produced enough to feed animals while still returning enough nutrients to the soil.
Alongside the Indians with their banana tree, the Japanese delectation of seaweed provided another solution. Locked away on their isolated rocky island, the ‘Pythagorean’ Japanese had solved most of the problems associated with limited resources. Not only were they a flesh-abstaining martial nation – disproving the idea that vegetarianism effeminates – they had also discovered the use of seaweeds, an abundant food source edible without complex preparation, which, Saint-Pierre lamented, ‘we neglect because most of them are unknown to us, even to our botanists’. (The shellfish consumed by the Japanese alongside their seaweed was another ecologically efficient resource, which may explain why they were the only animals Saint-Pierre allowed Paul and Virginie to eat.) Saint-Pierre wished that Europeans would learn a lesson from these enlightened Eastern nations, but even without resorting to seaweed, he insisted, it was perfectly possible ‘right now, to lead a very agreeable pythagorean life’.56
In Études de la Nature, Saint-Pierre developed Rousseau’s maxim that children should be brought up on the vegetable diet: ‘Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquillity of the mind.’ ‘The peoples living upon vegetable foods,’ he concluded, ‘are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest.’57
Saint-Pierre was not just a theorist: he practised what he preached. ‘Do you use the régime véégetal?’ he wrote to his friend Monsieur Hennin. ‘I am persuaded that this diet suffices to cure all illnesses.’58 Though he did not permanently abjure meat, he brought up his own daughter, whom he called Virginie, on the vegetable regimen. While away from home during the French smallpox outbreaks, he anxiously urged his first wife to ‘keep, as far as you are able, our Virginie from all animal food, whose juices augment alkalescency and the putrefaction of the humours’.59 Saint-Pierre regarded vegetarianism as a solution to moral, physiological and agronomic problems, and he transformed Rousseau’s philosophy into a manifesto that French revolutionaries took to the barricades.
In Germany, Romanticism was swiftly germinating from Rousseau’s fertile seedbed. The great literary icon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) elusively referred to a phase in his life during which he and his companions adopted a rigorously simple lifestyle of cold baths, hard beds and ‘an unfortunate diet [which] destroyed the powers of my digestion’. That Goethe was pursuing a vegetarian diet under the illusion that this is what Rousseau recommended seems to be supported by his explanation that ‘These and other follies, the consequence of some misunderstood suggestion of Rousseau, would, as was promised, lead us nearer to Nature
and deliver us from the corruption of morals.’60 Like Saint-Pierre, his sympathy for animals, his quasi-pantheist idea of the unity of nature, and his belief that all living things experienced ‘joy and pain’, was inspired by Indian culture which he read about in Rogerius and in Jones’ new translations of Sanskrit texts.61 In his novels The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (1821–9), Goethe treated his characters to a dose of Rousseau and Richardson’s dietary didacticism. Werther, for example, rejoices in a dinner of home-grown peas and butter, declaring how happy he is ‘that my heart is capable of feeling the same simple and innocent pleasure as the peasant whose table is covered with food of his own rearing’.62
Goethe’s contemporary Jean Paul (Richter), who had nicknamed himself ‘Jean’ after Rousseau, was echoing Émile when he wrote that ‘The child learns to regard all animal life as sacred,’ and that animals in turn ‘impart to him the feeling of a Hindu in place of the heart of a Cartesian philosopher’. Their companion, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), enquired about vegetarianism from the Scottish Rousseauist James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, who had suggested that since orang-utans (which he considered to be primitive people) were herbivorous, humans must originally have evolved with a diet based entirely on vegetation.63 These figures were probably encouraged by another friend, the Weimar court physician Christian Wilhelm Hufeland, whose enthusiasm for the ‘natural way of life’ echoed that of Goethe. His correlation of human longevity and vegetarianism continued the project of Cheyne and Hecquet and lent scientific force to the more emotional appeals against flesh-eating: ‘We frequently find a very advanced old age amongst men who from youth upwards have lived, for the most part, upon the vegetable diet, and perhaps, have never tasted flesh.’64
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