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See other formats Full text of "The Story of Civilization X: Rousseau and Revolution"

THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION

X

WILL and ARIEL

DURANT

A History of Civilization in France, England,

and Germany from 1756, and in the

Remainder of Europe from 17 1 5 to 1789

BY WILL DURANT

The Story of Philosophy

Transition

The Pleasures of Philosophy

Adventures in Genius

The Story of Civilization

by will and ariel durant

I. Our Oriental Heritage

II. The Life of Greece

III. Caesar and Christ

IV. The Age of Faith

V. The Renaissance

VI. The Reformation

VII. The Age of Reason Begins

VIII. The Age of Louis XIV

IX. The Age of Voltaire

X. Rousseau and Revolution

THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION: PART X

ROUSSEAU

AND

REVOLUTION

A History of Civilization in France, England, and

Germany from 1756, and in the Remainder of

Europe from 1715, to 1789

by

Will and Ariel Durant

SIMON AND SCHUSTER

NEW YORK • I967

SIXTH PRINTING

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 67-14239

DESIGNED BY EVE METZ

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC., SCRANTON, PA.

TO OUR BELOVED DAUGHTER

ETHEL BENVENUTA

WHO, THROUGH ALL THESE VOLUMES, HAS BEEN

OUR HELP AND OUR INSPIRATION

Dear Reader:

This is the concluding volume of that Story of Civilization to which we

devoted ourselves in 1929, and which has been the daily chore and solace of

our lives ever since.

Our aim has been to write integral history: to discover and record the eco-

nomic, political, spiritual, moral, and cultural activities of each civilization,

in each age, as interrelated elements in one whole called life, and to humanize

the narrative with studies of the protagonists in each act of the continuing

drama. While recognizing the importance of government and statesmanship,

we have given the political history of each period and state as the oft-told

background, rather than the substance or essence of the tale; our chief interest

was in the history of the mind. Hence in matters economic and political

we have relied considerably upon secondary sources, while in religion, philos-

ophy, science, literature, music, and art we have tried to go to the sources: to

see each faith at work in its own habitat, to study the epochal philosophies in

their major productions, to visit the art in its native site or later home, to enjoy

the masterpieces of the world's literature, often in their own language, and

to hear the great musical compositions again and again, if only by plucking

them out of the miraculous air. For these purposes we have traveled around

the world twice, and through Europe unnumbered times from 191 2 to 1966.

The humane reader will understand that it would have been impossible, in

our one lifetime, to go to the original sources in economics and politics as well,

through the sixty centuries and twenty civilizations of history. We have had

to accept limits, and acknowledge our limitations.

We regret that we allowed our fascination with each canto of man's epic

to hold us too willingly, with the result that we find ourselves exhausted on

reaching the French Revolution. We know that this event did not end his-

tory, but it ends us. Unquestionably our integral and inclusive method has

led us to give to most of these volumes a burdensome length. If we had

written shredded history— the account of one nation or period or subject—

we might have spared the reader's time and arms; but to visualize all phases

in one narrative for several nations in a given period required space for the

details needed to bring the events and the personalities to life. Each reader

will feel that the book is too long, and that the treatment of his own nation

or specialty is too brief.

French and English readers may wish to confine their first perusal of

this volume to Chapters i-viii, xm-xv, and xx-xxxvm, leaving the rest for an-

other day, and readers in other tongues may choose their chapters likewise.

We trust, however, that some heroes will go the course with us, seeking to

vii

Vlll

vision Europe as a whole in those thirty-three eventful years from the Seven

Years' War to the French Revolution.

We shall not sin at such length again; but if we manage to elude the

Reaper for another year or two we hope to offer a summarizing essay on

"The Lessons of History."

Will and Ariel Durant

Los Angeles

May i, 196 7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Yale University and the McGraw-Hill Book Com-

pany for permission to quote from Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany

and Switzerland, and from Boswell in Holland. It would be difficult to write

about Boswell without nibbling at the feast offered by the Yale Editions of

the Private Papers of James Boswell, so carefully edited and so handsomely

published.

We are indebted also to the author and to W. W. Norton & Company for

permission to quote a letter from Marc Pincherle's excellent Vivaldi.

Our warm appreciation to Sarah and Harry Kaufman for their long and

patient help in classifying the material, and to our daughter Ethel for not

only typing the manuscript immaculately, but for improving the text in

many ways. Our thanks to Mrs. Vera Schneider for her scholarly editing

of the manuscript.

NOTES ON THE USE OF THIS BOOK

i . Dates of birth and death are in the Index.

2. Italics in excerpts are never ours unless so stated.

3. We suggest the following rough equivalents, in terms of United States

dollars of 1965, for the currencies mentionectin this book:

carolin, $22.50

cigliato, $6.25

crown, $6.25

doppio, $25.00

ducat, $6.25

ecu, $3.75

florin, $6.25

franc, $1.25

groschen, $1.25

guilder, $5.25

guinea, $26.25

gulden, $5.25

kreutzer, $2.50

lira, $1.25

livre, $1.25

louisd'or, $25.00

mark, $1.25

penny, $.10

pistole, $12.50

pound, $25.00

reale, $.25

ruble, $10.00

rupee, $4.00

shilling, $1.25

sol, $1.25

sou, $.05

thaler, $5.00

4. The location of works of art, when not indicated in the text, will be

found in the Notes. In allocating such works the name of the city will imply

its leading gallery, as follows:

Amsterdam— Rijksmuseum

Berlin— Staatsmuseum

Bologna— Accademia di Belle Arti

Budapest— Museum of Fine Arts

Chicago— Art Institute

Cincinnati— Art Institute

Cleveland— Museum of Art

Detroit— Institute of Art

Dresden— Gemalde-Galerie

Dulwich— College Gallery

Edinburgh— National Gallery

Frankfurt— Stadelsches Kunstinstitut

Geneva— Musee d'Art et d'Histoire

The Hague— Mauritshuis

Kansas City— Nelson Gallery

Leningrad— Hermitage

London— National Gallery

Madrid— Prado

Milan— Brera

Naples— Museo Nazionale

New York— Metropolitan Museum

of Art

San Marino, Calif ornia— Huntington

Art Gallery

Vienna— Kunsthistorisches Museum

Washington— National Gallery

IX

Table of Contents

book i: PRELUDE

Chapter I. Rousseau Wanderer: i 7 1 2-56 3

1. The Confessions 3

11. Homeless 5

in. Maman 9

iv. Lyons, Venice, Paris 14

v. Is Civilization a Disease? ... 19

vi. Paris and Geneva 24

vii. The Crimes of Civilization . 28

viii. The Conservative 32

ix. Escape from Paris 33

Chapter II. The Seven Years' War: 1756-63 38

1. How to Start a War 38 v. The Making of the British

11. The Outlaw 44 Empire 57

in. From Prague to Rossbach . . 46 vi. Exhaustion 59

iv. The Fox at Bay 51 vn. Peace 62

book 11: FRANCE BEFORE THE DELUGE: 1757-74

Chapter III. The Life of the State 67

1. The Mistress Departs 67

11. The Recovery of France . . 69

in. The Physiocrats 71

iv. The Rise of Turgot 77

v. The Communists 80

vi. The King 84

vn. Du Barry 86

viii. Choiseul 88

ix. The Revolt of the

Parlements 89

x. The King Departs 95

Chapter IV. The Art of Life

1. Morality and Grace 97

11. Music 100

in. The Theater 101

iv. A4armontel 104

v. The Life of Art 106

1. Sculpture 106

2. Architecture 109

97

3. Greuze in

4. Fragonard 115

vi. The Great Salons 118

1. Mme. Geoffrin 118

2. Mme. du Deffand 121

3. Mile, de Lespinasse 125

XI

Xll

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter V. Voltaire Patriarch:

i. The Good Lord 132

11. The Scepter of the Pen 136

in. Voltaire Politicus 140

1758-78 132

iv. The Reformer 145

v. Voltaire Himself 147

Chapter VI. Rousseau Romantic: 1756-62 152

1. In the Hermitage 152 iv. The Break with the

11. In Love 155 Philosophes 161

in. Much Ado 159 v. The New Heloise 165

Chapter VII. Rousseau Philosopher 171

1. The Social Contract 171

11. imile 178 2. Religion 182

1. Education 178 3. Love and Marriage 185

Chapter VIII. Rousseau Outcast: 1762-67 189

I. Flight 189

II. Rousseau and the Arch-

bishop 192

in. Rousseau and the Calvinists 197

iv. Rousseau and Voltaire 199

v. Boswell Meets Rousseau . . .201

vi. A Constitution for Corsica 204

vii. Fugitive 205

viii. Rousseau in England 209

book in: THE CATHOLIC SOUTH: 1715-89

Chapter IX. Italia Felix: 1 7 1 5-59 217

1. The Landscape 217

11. Music 220

in. Religion 224

iv. From Turin to Florence ... 226

v. Queen of the Adriatic 228

1. Venetian Life 229

2. Vivaldi 232

3. Remembrances 235

4. Tiepolo 237

5. Goldoni and Gozzi 239

vi. Rome 244

vii. Naples 249

1 . The King and the People 249

2. Giambattista Vico 251

3. Neapolitan Music 254

Chapter X. Portugal and Pombal: 1706-82 259

1. John V 259 in. Pombal the Reformer 268

11. Pombal and the Jesuits 261 iv. The Triumph of the Past . . 270

TABLE OF CONTENTS Xlll

Chapter XL Spain and the Enlightenment: 1700-88 273

I. Milieu 273 vi. The Spanish Character . . . 290

11. Philip V 276 vii. The Spanish Mind 293

in. Ferdinand VI 279 vin. Spanish Art 297

iv. The Enlightenment Enters ix. Francisco de Goya y

Spain 280 Lucientes 300

v. Charles III 281 1 . Growth 300

1. The New Government 281 2. Romance 302

2. The Spanish Reforma- 3. Zenith 304

tion 283 4. Revolution 306

3. The New Economy .... 286 5. Decrescendo 308

Chapter XII. Vale, Italia: 1 760-89 310

1. Farewell Tour 310 2. Casanova 322

11. Popes, Kings, and Jesuits ..316 v. Winckelmann 325

in. The Law and Beccaria .... 3 19 vi. The Artists 331

iv. Adventurers 321 vn. / Musici 332

1. Cagliostro 321 vin. Alfieri 335

Chapter XIII. The Enlightenment in Austria: 1756-90 341

1. The New Empire 341 v. The Enlightened Despot ... 354

II. Maria Theresa 342 vi. The Emperor and the

in. Joseph Growing 346 Empire 360

iv. Mother and Son 348 vn. Atra Mors 364

Chapter XIV. Music Reformed 367

1. Christoph Willibald Gluck 367 11. Joseph Haydn 373

Chapter XV. Mozart 382

1. The Wonderful Boy 382 vi. The Composer 395

11. Adolescence 385 vn. Spirit and Flesh 400

in. Music and Marriage 389 vin. Apogee 402

iv. In Paris 392 ix. Nadir 405

v. Salzburg and Vienna 393 x. Requiem 407

book iv: ISLAM AND THE SLAVIC EAST: 1715-96

Chapter XVI. Islam: i 7 1 5-96 411

1. The Turks 411

11. African Islam 415 in. Persia 417

XIV TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter XVII. Russian Interlude: 1725-62 422

1. Work and Rule 422 iv. Elizabeth Petrovna 43 1

11. Religion and Culture 424 v. Peter and Catherine 432

in. Russian Politics .428 vi. Peter III 437

Chapter XVIII. Catherine the Great: 1762-96 441

1. The Autocrat 441 vi. The Warrior 456

11. The Lover 444 vn. The Woman 461

in. The Philosopher .446 vm. Literature 463

iv. The Statesman 450 ix. Art 466

v. The Economist 454 x. Journey's End 469

Chapter XIX. The Rape of Poland: 17 15-95 472

1. Polish Panorama 472 iv. The First Partition 481

11. The Saxon Kings 475 v. The Polish Enlightenment 484

in. Poniatowski 477 vi. Dismemberment 487

book v: THE PROTESTANT NORTH: 1756-89

Chapter XX. Frederick's Germany: 1756-86 495

1. Frederick Victorious 495 vi. The Romantic Reaction . . .517

11. Rebuilding Prussia 499 vn. Sturm und Drang 520

in. The Principalities 502 vm. The Artists 523

iv. The German Enlightenment 505 ix. After Bach 525

v. Gotthold Lessing 508 x. Der Alte Fritz 528

Chapter XXI. Kant: 1724-1804 531

1. Prolegomena 531

11. Critique of Pure Reason . . .535 v. Religion and Reason 544

in. Critique of Practical Reason 540 vi. The Reformer 547

iv. Critique of Judgment 543 vn. Posthumous 549

Chapter XXII. Roads to Weimar: 1733-87 552

1. The Athens of Germany . . 552 2. Gotz and Werther 560

11. Wieland 553 3. The Young Atheist 564

in. Goethe Prometheus 555 iv. Herder 567

1. Growth 555 v. Schiller's Wander jahre 569

TABLE OF CONTENTS XV

Chapter XXIII. Weimar in Flower: i 775-1 805 576

I. Wieland Sequel 576

11. Herder and History 577 v. Goethe Waiting 589

in. Goethe Councilor 580 vi. Schiller Waiting 591

iv. Goethe in Italy 586 vn. Schiller and Goethe 596

Chapter XXIV. Goethe Nestor: 1805-32 606

1. Goethe and Napoleon 606

II. Faust: Part I 607 v. The Philosopher 618

in. Nestor in Love -:'. .61 1 vi. Faust: Part II 623

iv. The Scientist 615 vn. Fulfillment 625

Chapter XXV. The Jews: i 7 1 5-89 629

1. The Struggle for Existence 629 in. Moses Mendelssohn 637

11. The Mystic Solace 635 iv. Toward Freedom 641

Chapter XXVI. From Geneva to Stockholm 643

1. The Swiss: 1754-98 643

11. The Dutch: 1715-95 645 2. Gustavus III 655

in. The Danes: 1715-97 649 3. The Swedish Enlighten-

iv. The Swedes: 1718-97 653 ment 658

1 . Politics 653 4. Assassination 662

book vi: JOHNSON'S ENGLAND: 1756-89

Chapter XXVII. The Industrial Revolution 669

1. Causes 669 in. Conditions 676

11. Components 671 iv. Consequences 680

Chapter XXVIII. The Political Drama: 1756-92 683

1. The Political Structure 683

11. The Protagonists 687 vi. England and India 715

in. The King versus Parliament 697 vn. England and the French

iv. Parliament versus the People 701 Revolution 721

v. England versus America . . .708 vin. The Heroes Retire 726

XVI TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter XXIX. The English People: 1756-89 728

1. English Ways 728

11. English Morals 730 v. The Theater 739

in. Faith and Doubt 734 1. The Performance 739

iv. Blackstone, Bentham, and 2. Garrick 741

the Law 736 vi. London 743

Chapter XXX. The Age of Reynolds: 1756-90 746

I. The Musicians 746

11. The Architects 747 iv. Joshua Reynolds 750

us. Wedgwood 748 v. Thomas Gainsborough .... 755

Chapter XXXI. England's Neighbors: 1756-89 759

I. Grattan's Ireland 759

11. The Scottish Background 762 vi. James Boswell 778

in. The Scottish Enlightenment 764 1. The Cub 778

iv. Adam Smith 768 2. Boswell Abroad 781

v. Robert Burns 772 3. Boswell at Home 783

Chapter XXXII. The Literary Scene: 1756-89 786

1. The Press 786

II. Laurence Sterne 787 2. The Book 800

in. Fanny Burney 790 3. The Man 804

iv. Horace Walpole 791 4. The Historian 806

v. Edward Gibbon 795 vi. Chatterton and Cowper . . . 808

1. Preparation 795 vn. Oliver Goldsmith 813

Chapter XXXIII. Samuel Johnson: 1709-84 818

1. Deformative Years 818 v. The Conservative Mind ....831

II. The Dictionary 820 vi. Autumn 835

in. The Charmed Circle 825 vn. Release 837

iv. Ursus Major 828 vni. Boswell Moriturus 840

bookvii: THE COLLAPSE OF FEUDAL FRANCE. 1774-89

Chapter XXXIV. The Final Glory: 1774-83 845

1. The Heirs to the Throne . . 845

11. The Government 848 v. The Ministry of Turgot ... 858

in. The Virgin Queen 850 vi. Necker's First Ministry 865

iv. Le Roi Bonho?nme 855 vn. France and America 867

TABLE OF CONTENTS XV11

Chapter XXXV. Death and the Philosophers: 1774-1807 . . . .873

1. Voltaire Finale 873

1. Twilight in Ferney 873 2. The Influence of

2. Apotheosis 875 Rousseau 887

3. The Influence of in. Marche Fimebre 892

Voltaire 880 iv. The Last Philosophe 894

11. Rousseau Epilogue 881 v. The Philosophers and the

1. The Haunted Spirit ... .881 Revolution 897

Chapter XXXVI. On the Eve: 1774-89 900

I. Religion and the Revolution 900

11. Life on the Edge 902 v. Art under Louis XVI 910

in. The Salonnieres 906 vi. Literature 914

iv. iMusic 909 vn. Beaumarchais 920

Chapter XXXVII. The Anatomy of Revolution: 1774-89 . . . .927

1. The Nobles and the

Revolution 927 iv. The Bourgeoisie and the

II. The Peasants and the Revolution 934

Revolution 930 v. The Gathering of the

in. Industry and the Revolution 931 Forces 937

Chapter XXXVIII. The Political Debacle: 1783-89 941

1. The Diamond Necklace . . .941 v. Enter Mirabeau 951

11. Calonne 943 vi. The Last Rehearsal 954

in. Lomenie de Brienne 945 vn. The States-General 956

iv. Necker Again 948 vm. To the Bastille 961

Envoi 964

Bibliographical Guide 967

Notes 983

Index 1023

List of Illustrations

The page number in the captions refers to a discussion in the text of the subject

or the artist, and sometimes both.

Part I. This section follows page 108

Fig. i— Maurice-Quentin de La Tour: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Fig. 2— Carmontelle: Melchior von Grimm

Fig. 3— Carmontelle: Mme. cTtLpi?iay

Fig. 4— Louis Tocque: Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz

Fig. 5— Engraving after a painting by F. Bock: Frederick the Great

in Old Age

Fig. 6— Augustin Pajou: Mme. du Barry

Fig. 7— J.-F. Oeben and J.-H. Riesener: Bureau du Roi

Fig. 8— Louis-Michel Vanloo: Louis XV in Later Life

Fig. 9— Sevres soft-paste porcelain

Fig. 10— Jacques- Ange Gabriel: The Petit Trianon

Fig. i i— Jean- Jacques Caffieri: Jean de Rotrou

Fig. i 2— Jacques-Germain Soufflot: The Pantheon, Paris

Fig. i 3— After a painting by Jean-Marc Nattier: Mme. Geoffrin

Fig. 14— Jean-Honore Fragonard: Self -Portrait

Fig. 15— Carmontelle: Mme. du Deffand Visited by Mme. de Choiseul

Fig. 16— Jean-Baptiste Greuze: Sophie Arnould

Fig. 17— Greuze: The Broken Pitcher (La Cruche Cassee)

Fig. 18— Fragonard: The Swi?ig

Fig. 19— Antonio Canaletto: View of St. Mark's, Venice

Fig. 20— Giambattista Tiepolo: The Banquet of Cleopatra

Fig. 2 i— Tiepolo: Apollo Bringing the Bride to Barbarossa

Fig. 22— Rosalba Carriera: Self-Portrait

Fig. 23— Giovanni Battista Piazzetta: Rebecca at the Well

Fig. 24— A. Longhi: Carlo Goldoni

Fig. 25— The Royal Palace, Madrid

Fig. 26— Fa fade of the Church of Santiago de Compost ela, Spain

Fig. 27— Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes: Charles IV and His Family

Fig. 28— Goya: Charles III

Fig. 29— Goya: The Duchess of Alba

Fig. 30— Goya: Self-Portrait

Fig. 31— Goya: The Tribunal of the Inquisition

Fig. 32— Goya: La Maja Desnuda

Fig. 33— Goya: La Maja Vestida

Fig. 34— Goya: Saturn Devouring His Off spring

Fig. 35— Francesco Guardi: Concert in the Sala dei Filarmonici

Fig. 36— Anton Raphael Mengs: Parnassus

Fig. 37— Jean-Antoine Houdon: Gluck

Fig. 38-Xavier-PascalFabre: V itt or io Al fieri

Fig. 39— Franz von Zauner: Emperor Joseph II

xviii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XIX

Fig. 40— Fabre: The Countess of Albany

Fig. 41— John Hoppner: Joseph Haydn

Fig. 42—Esterhdzy Castle at Eisenstadt

Fig. 43— Johann Nepomuk della Croce: The Mozart Family

Fig. 44— £tienne-Maurice Falconet: Statue of Peter the Great

Fig. 45— Artist Unknown: Czar Peter III

Fig. 46— Engraving by G. Skorodumov after a painting by F. S. Rokotov:

Catherine the Great

Fig. 47— F. S. Rokotov: Grigori Orlov

Fig. 48— Ivan Starov: Potemkhfs Taurida Palace

Part II. This section follows page 236

Fig. 49— Johann Gottfried Schadow: The Quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate

Fig. 50— Karl Gotthard Langhans: The Brandenburg Gate

Fig. 51— Angelica Kauffm ann: The Vestal Virgin

Fig. 52— Angelica Kauffmann: Stanislas Poniatowski

Fig. 53— Daniel Chodowiecki: A Gathering in the Zoological Garden

Fig. 54— Johann Heinrich Tischbein: Lessing in Youth

Fig. 55— Anton Raphael Mengs: Self-Portrait

Fig. 56— Engraving by Karl Barth after a drawing by Stobbe: Immanuel Kant

Fig. 57— Johann Friedrich August Tischbein: Schiller

Fig. 58— Anton Graff: The Actress Korona Schroter

Fig. 59— Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein: Goethe in the Roman

Campagna

Fig. 60— Asmus Jakob Carstens: The Birth of Light

Fig. 6 i —Alexander Roslin: Gust avus III

Fig. 62— The Bridgewater Canal at Barton Bridge

Fig. 63— Thomas Gainsborough: George III

Fig. 64— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Edmund Burke

Fig. 65— Engraving by John Jones after a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds:

Charles James Fox

Fig. 66— John Hoppner: William Pitt the Younger

Fig. 67— George Romney: Actress Mary Robinson

Fig. 68— Robert Pine: David Garrick

Fig. 69— Engraving by John Hall after a painting by Reynolds: Richard

Brinsley Sheridan

Fig. 70— From a print after a drawing by Canaletto: An Inside View of the

Rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens

Fig. 7 i— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Portrait of the Artist as a Deaf Man

Fig. 72— Chippendale and Haigh in the Style of Robert Adam: Side Table of

Gilt and Silvered Wood

Fig. 73— Thomas Gainsborough: Mrs. Sarah Siddons

Fig. 74— Rosalba Carriera: Horace Walpole

Fig. 75— Paul Sandby: Strawberry Hill

Fig. 76— Thomas Gainsborough: The Honorable Mrs. Graham

Fig. 77— Archibald Skirving: Robert Bums

Fig. 78— Henry Raeburn: Lord Newton

Fig. 79— Thomas Gainsborough: The Market Cart

Fig. 80— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

XX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 8i— George Dance: James Boswell

Fig. 82— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Laurence Sterne

Fig. 83— George Romney: William Cowper

Fig. 84— Studio of Reynolds: Oliver Goldsmith

Fig. 85— Mme. Vigee-Lebrun: Marie Antoinette

Fig. 86— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Dr. Samuel Johnson

Fig. 87— Jean-Antoine Houdon: The Artist's Wife

Fig. 88— Jean-Baptiste Pigalle: Denis Diderot

Fig. 89— Houdon: Voltaire

Fig. 90— Houdon: Mme. de Serilly

Fig. 91— Houdon: Mirabeau

Fig. 92— Clodion (Claude Michel): The Intoxication of Wine {Nymph and

Satyr)

Fig. 93— Jacques-Louis David: The Oath of the Horatii

Fig. 94— Houdon: Diana

Fig. 95— Nattier: Beaumarchais

Fig. 96— Houdon: George Washington

Fig. 97— Mme. Vigee-Lebrun : Portrait of the Artist and Her Daughter

Fig. 98— Engraving by J. E. Nochez after a painting by Allan Ramsay: Jean-

Jacques Rousseau

BOOK I

PRELUDE

CHAPTER I

Rousseau Wanderer

1712-56

I. THE CONFESSIONS

HOW did it come about that a man born poor, losing his mother at

birth and soon deserted by his father, afflicted with a painful and

humiliating disease, left to wander for twelve years among alien cities and

conflicting faiths, repudiated by society and civilization, repudiating Vol-

taire, Diderot, the Encyclopedic, and the Age of Reason, driven from place

to place as a dangerous rebel, suspected of crime and insanity, and seeing, in

his last months, the apotheosis of his greatest enemy— how did it come about

that this man, after his death, triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion,

transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Roman-

tic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of

Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the

poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics

of Tolstoi, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other

writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more

influential than they had ever been before? Here, if anywhere, the problem

faces us: what is the role of genius in history, of man versus the mass and

the state?

Europe was ready for a gospel that would exalt feeling above thought. It

was tired of the restraints of customs, conventions, manners, and laws. It

had heard enough of reason, argument, and philosophy; all this riot of un-

moored minds seemed to have left the world devoid of meaning, the soul

empty of imagination and hope; secretly men and women were longing to

believe again. Paris was weary of Paris, of the turmoil and hurry, the con-

finement and mad competition of city life; now it idealized the slower pace

of the countryside, where a simple routine might bring health to the body

and peace to the mind, where one might see modest women again, where all

the village would meet in weekly armistice at the parish church. And this

proud "progress," this vaunted "emancipation of the mind"— had they put

anything in place of what they had destroyed? Had they given man a more

intelligible or inspiring picture of the world and human destiny? Had they

improved the lot of the poor, or brought consolation to bereavement or

pain? Rousseau asked these questions, gave form and feeling to these doubts;

and after his voice was stilled all Europe listened to him. While Voltaire was

being idolized on the stage and at the Academy (1778), and while Rousseau,

4 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

berated and despised, hid in the obscurity of a Paris room, the age of Rous-

seau began.

In the decline of his life he composed the most famous of autobiographies,

the Concessions. Sensitive to every criticism, suspecting Grimm, Diderot,

and others of a conspiracy to blacken him in Paris salons and in the Memoires

of Mme. d'£pinay, he began in 1762, on the urging of a publisher, to write

his own account of his history and character. All autobiography, of course,

is vanity, but Rousseau, condemned by the Church, outlawed by three

states, and deserted by his closest friends, had the right to defend himself,

even at great length. When he read some passages of this defense to gather-

ings in Paris, his foes secured a government ban on further public readings

of his manuscript. Discouraged, he left it at his death with a passionate plea

to posterity:

Here is the sole human portrait— painted exactly after nature in all truth— that

now exists or that will probably ever exist. Whoever you are, whom my fate

and confidence have made the arbiter of this record, I beg you, by my mis-

fortunes and by your fellow feeling, and in the name of all mankind, not to

destroy a work useful and unique, which can serve as a first piece of compari-

son for the study of man, . . . and not to take from the honor of my memory

the only sure monument of my character that has not been disfigured by my

enemies. 1

His extreme sensitivity, subjectivity, and sentiment made the virtues and

the faults of his book. "A feeling heart," he said, ". . . was the foundation

of all my misfortunes"; 2 but it gave a warm intimacy to his style, a tender-

ness to his recollections, often a generosity to his judgments, that melt our

antipathy as we read. Here everything abstract becomes personal and alive;

every line is a feeling; this book is the fountainhead of the Mississippi of

introspective self-revelations that watered the literature of the nineteenth

century. Not that the Concessions had no forebears; but even St. Augustine

could not match the fullness of this self-denudation, or its claim to truth. It

begins with a burst of challenging eloquence:

I am forming an enterprise which has had no example, and whose execution

will have no imitator. I wish to show my fellow men a man in all the truth of

nature; and this man shall be myself.

Myself alone. I know my heart, and I am acquainted with men. I am not made

like any one of those who exist. If I am not better, at least I am different. If

nature has done well or ill in breaking the mold in which I was cast, this is

something of which no one can judge except after having read me.

Let the trumpet of the Last Judgment sound when it will, I shall come, this

book in hand, to present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I shall say loudly:

"This is how I have acted, how I have thought, what I have been. I have told

the good and the bad with the same candor. I have concealed nothing of evil,

added nothing of good. ... I have shown myself as I was: despicable and

vile when I was so, good, generous, sublime, when I was these; and I have un-

veiled my inmost soul . . . 3

This claim to complete sincerity is repeated again and again. But Rousseau

admits that his remembrance of things fifty years past is often fragmentary

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 5

and unreliable. In general Part I has an air of candor that is disarming; Part

II is disfigured by wearisome complaints of persecution and conspiracy.

Whatever else the book is, it is one of the most revealing psychological

studies known to us, the story of a sensitive and poetic spirit in painful con-

flict with a hard and prosaic century. In any case, "the Confessions, if it

were not an autobiography, would be one of the great novels of the

world." 4 *

ii. homeless: 17 i 2-3 i

"I was born at Geneva in 17 12, son of Isaac Rousseau and Suzanne Ber-

nard, citizens." This last word meant much, for only sixteen hundred of

Geneva's twenty thousand souls had the name and rights of citizen, and this

was to enter into Jean-Jacques' history. His family was of French origin,

but had been settled in Geneva since 1529. His grandfather was a Calvinist

minister; the grandson remained basically a Calvinist through all the wander-

ings of his faith. The father was a master watchmaker, imaginative and un-

stable, whose marriage (1704) brought him a dowry of sixteen thousand

florins. After the birth of a son Francois he left his wife (1705) and traveled

to Constantinople, where he remained for six years. Then he came back, for

reasons unknown, and "I was the sad fruit of this return." 8 The mother died

of puerperal fever within a week of Jean-Jacques' birth. "I came into the

world with so few signs of life that little hope was entertained of preserving

me"; an aunt nursed and saved him, for which, he said, "I freely forgive

you." This aunt sang well, and may have given him his lasting taste for

music. He was precocious and soon learned to read, and, since Isaac loved

romances, father and son read together the romances left in the mother's

little library; Jean-Jacques was brought up on a mixture of French love

stories, Plutarch's Lives, and Calvinist morality, and the mixture unsteadied

him. He described himself accurately enough as "at once haughty and

* The debate as to the truthfulness of the Confessions is still warm on two continents. It turns

chiefly on Rousseau's charge that Grimm and Diderot had conspired to give a false account of

his relations with Mme. d'£pinay, Mme. d'Houdetot, and themselves. The balance of criti-

cal judgment before 1900 was against Rousseau. About 1850 Sainte-Beuve, with unwonted

acerbity, decided that "Rousseau, whenever his self-esteem and his diseased vanity are at stake,

has not the slightest hesitation about lying, and I have arrived at the conclusion that with

respect to Grimm he was a liar." 5 And the most learned of French literary historians, Gus-

tave Lanson, agreed (1894): "We surprise Rousseau on every page in flagrant falsehoods— false-

hood, not mere error; yet the book as a whole burns with sincerity— a sincerity not of facts

but of feeling." 6 These judgments preceded the publication of Mrs. Frederika Macdonald's

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A New Study in Criticism (London, 1906), which "makes out a good

case for regarding Mme. d'£pinay's Memoir es as colored, if not actually dictated, by the

malevolent attitude of Grimm and Diderot; and her study of the documents undoubtedly

qualifies a good many of the assumptions that had been previously made." 7 Cf. Masson, La

Religion de Rousseau (I, 184): "We shall see with what caution we must use this recital [the

Memoires], which was so strongly retouched [remanie] by Diderot." Similar judgments

favorable to Rousseau were reached by Matthew Josephson (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 434-35,

531), £mile Faguet (Vie de Rousseau, 189), Jules Lemaitre (Jean- Jacques Rousseau, 9-10),

and C. E. Vaughn (Political Writings of Rousseau, II, 295, 547-48, 552 f.).

6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

tender, a character effeminate and yet invincible, which, fluctuating between

weakness and courage, luxury and virtue, has ever set me in contradiction to

myself." 9

In 1722 the father quarreled with a Captain Gautier, gave him a bloody

nose, was summoned by the local magistrate, fled from the city to escape

imprisonment, and took up residence at Nyon, thirteen miles from Geneva.

A few years later he married again. Francois and Jean-Jacques were taken

over by their uncle Gabriel Bernard. Francois was apprenticed to a watch-

maker, ran away, and disappeared from history. Jean-Jacques and his cousin

Abraham Bernard were sent to a boarding school operated by Pastor Lam-

bercier at the neighboring village of Bossey. "Here we were to learn Latin,

with all the insignificant trash that has obtained the name of education." 10

The Calvinist catechism was a substantial part of the curriculum.

He liked his teachers, especially the pastor's sister, Mile. Lambercier. She

was thirty, Jean-Jacques was eleven, so he fell in love with her, after his own

queer fashion. When she whipped him for some misbehavior he took delight

in suffering at her hands; "a degree of sensuality mingled with the smart and

shame, which left more desire, than fear, of a repetition." 11 When he of-

fended further, the pleasure he took in the chastisement became so obvious

that she resolved never to whip him again. A masochistic element remained

in his erotic make-up till the end.

Thus I passed the age of puberty, with a constitution extremely ardent, with-

out knowing or even wishing for any other gratification of the passions than

what Miss Lambercier had innocently given me an idea of; and when I be-

came a man that childish taste, instead of vanishing, only associated with the

other. This folly, joined to a natural timidity, has always prevented me from

being very enterprising with women, so that I have passed my days languishing

in silence for those I most admired, without daring to disclose my wishes. . . .

I have now made the first and most difficult step in the obscure and painful

maze of my Confessions. We never feel so great a degree of repugnance in

divulging what is really criminal, as what is merely ridiculous. 12

It is possible that in later life Rousseau found an element of pleasure in feel-

ing himself buffeted by the world, by his enemies, and by his friends.

Next to Mile. Lambercier's chastisements he enjoyed the magnificent

scenery that surrounded him. "The country was so charming . . . that I

conceived a passion for rural life which time has not been able to extin-

guish." 13 Those two years at Bossey were probably the happiest that he ever

experienced, despite his discovery of injustice in the world. Punished for an

offense that he had not committed, he reacted with lasting resentment, and

thereafter he "learned to dissemble, to rebel, to lie; all the vices common to

our years began to corrupt our happy innocence." 14

He never advanced further in formal or classical education; perhaps his

lack of balance, judgment, and self-control and his subordination of reason

to feeling were in part due to the early end of his schooling. In 1724, aged

twelve, he and his cousin were recalled to the Bernard household. He visited

his father at Nyon, and there fell in love with a Mile. Vulson, who rejected

him, and then with Mile. Goton, who, "while she took the greatest liberties

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 7

with me, would never permit any to be taken with her in return." 15 After a

year of vacillations he was apprenticed to an engraver in Geneva. He liked

drawing, and learned to engrave watchcases, but his master beat him severely

for some minor offenses, and "drove me to vices I naturally despised, such

as falsehood, idleness, and theft." The once happy boy turned into a morose

and unsociable introvert.

He consoled himself with intense reading of books borrowed from a

nearby library, and with Sunday excursions into the countryside. On two

occasions he dallied so long in the fields that he found the city gates closed

when he tried to return; he spent the night in the open, reported for work

half dazed, and received a special thrashing. On a third such occasion the

memory of these beatings made him resolve not to return at all. Not yet

sixteen (March 15, 1728), without money, and with nothing but the clothes

on his back, he marched on to Confignon in Catholic Savoy, some six miles

away.

There he knocked at the door of the village priest, Pere Benoit de Pont-

verre. Perhaps he had been told that the old cure was so anxious to convert

stray Genevans that he fed them well on the theory that a full stomach

makes for an orthodox mind. He gave Jean-Jacques a good dinner, and bade

him "go to Annecy, where you will find a good and charitable lady whom

the bounty of the king enables to turn souls from those errors she has hap-

pily renounced." 16 This, Rousseau adds, was "Mme. de Warens, a new con-

vert, to whom the priests contrived to send those wretches who were dis-

posed to sell their faith; and with these she was in a manner constrained to

share a pension of two thousand francs bestowed upon her by the King of

Sardinia." The homeless youth thought a part of that pension might be

worth a Mass. Three days later, at Annecy, he presented himself to Mme.

Frangoise-Louise de La Tour, Baronne de Warens.

She was twenty-nine, pretty, gracious, gentle, generous, charmingly

dressed; "there could not be a more lovely face, a finer neck, or handsome

arms more exquisitely formed"; 17 altogether she was the best argument for

Catholicism that Rousseau had ever seen. Born in Vevey of good family, she

had been married, quite young, to M. (later Baron) de Warens of Lausanne.

After some years of painful incompatibility she left him, crossed the lake

into Savoy, and won the protection of King Victor Amadeus, then at Evian.

Domiciled at Annecy, she accepted conversion to Catholicism, with the con-

viction that if her religious ritual were correct God would pardon her an

occasional amour; besides, she could not believe that the gentle Jesus would

send men— surely not a beautiful woman— to everlasting hell. 18

Jean-Jacques would gladly have stayed with her, but she was occupied;

she gave him money, and bade him go to Turin and receive instruction in

the Hospice of the Holy Spirit. He was received there on April 12, 1728,

and on April 21 he was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. Writing

thirty-four years later— eight years after his return to Protestantism— he de-

scribed with horror his experience in the hospice, including an attempt upon

his virtue by a Moorish fellow catechumen; he imagined that he had ap-

8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. I

proached conversion with revulsion, shame, and long delays. But apparently

he adjusted himself to the conditions that he found in the hospice, for he re-

mained there, uncompelled, over two months after being received into the

Church of Rome. 19

He left the hospice in July, armed with twenty-six francs. After a few

days of sightseeing he found work in a store to which he had been drawn

by the good looks of the lady behind the counter. He fell in love with her at

once; soon he knelt before her and offered her a lifetime of devotion. Mme.

Basile smiled, but let him go no further than her hand; besides, her husband

was expected at any minute. "My want of success with women," says Rous-

seau, "has ever proceeded from my having loved them too weir'; 20 but it

was his nature to find greater ecstasy in contemplation than in fulfillment.

He relieved his tumescence by "that dangerous supplement which deceives

nature, and saves young men of my temperament from many disorders, but

at the expense of their health, their vigor, and sometimes their life." 21 This

practice, made hectic by terrifying prohibitions, may have played a secret

role in promoting his irritability, his romantic fancies, his discomfort in so-

ciety, his love of solitude. Here the Confessions are frank beyond precedent:

My thoughts were incessantly occupied with girls and women, but in a

manner peculiar to myself. These ideas kept my senses in a perpetual and dis-

agreeable activity. . . . My agitation rose to the point where, unable to satisfy

my desires, I inflamed them with the most extravagant maneuvers. I went about

seeking dark alleys, hidden retreats, where I might expose myself at a distance

to persons of the [other] sex in the state wherein I would have wished to be

near them. That which they saw was not the obscene object— I did not dream

of that; it was the ridiculous object [the buttocks]. The foolish pleasure which

I had in displaying it before their eyes cannot be described. From this there

was but a step to the desired treatment [whipping]; and I do not doubt that

some resolute woman, in passing, would have given me the amusement, if I

had had the audacity to continue. . . .

One day I went to place myself at the back of a court in which was a well

where the young women of the house often came to fetch water. ... I of-

fered to the girls ... a spectacle more laughable than seductive. The wisest

among them pretended to see nothing; others began to laugh; others felt in-

sulted, and raised an alarm.

Alas, no girl offered to beat him; instead a guardsman came, with heavy

sword and frightful mustache, followed by four or five old women armed

with brooms. Rousseau saved himself by explaining that he was "a young

stranger of high lineage, whose mind was deranged," but whose means

might enable him later to reward their forgiveness. The "terrible man was

touched," and let him go, much to the discontent of the old women. 22

Meanwhile he had found employment as a liveried footman in the service

of Mme. de Vercellis, a Turinese lady of some culture. There he committed

a crime which weighed on his conscience through the rest of his life. He

stole one of Madame's colorful ribbons; when charged with the theft he

pretended that another servant had given it to him. Marion, who was quite

innocent of the theft, reproached him prophetically: "Ah, Rousseau, I

thought you were of a good disposition. You render me very unhappy, but

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 9

I would not be in your situation." 23 Both were dismissed. The Confessions

adds:

I do not know what became of the victim of my calumny, but there is little

probability of her having been able to place herself agreeably after this, as she

labored under an imputation cruel to her character in every respect. . . . The

painful remembrance of this transaction . . . has remained heavy on my

conscience to this day; and I can truly say that the desire to relieve myself in

some measure from it has contributed greatly to the resolve to write my

Confessions. 24

Those six months as a footman left a mark on his character; with all his

consciousness of genius he never achieved self-respect. A young priest whom

he met while serving Mme. de Vercellis encouraged him to believe that his

faults could be overcome if he would sincerely seek to approach the ethics of

Christ. Any religion, said "M. Gaime," is good if it spreads Christian con-

duct; hence he suggested that Jean-Jacques would be happier if he returned

to his native habitat and faith. These views of "one of the best men I ever

knew" lingered in Rousseau's memory, and inspired famous pages in Bmile.

A year later, in the Seminary of St.-Lazare, he met another priest, Abbe

Gatier, a "very tender heart," who missed advancement because he had con-

ferred pregnancy upon a maiden in his parish. "This," remarks Rousseau,

"was a dreadful scandal in a diocese severely good, where the priests (being

under good regulation) ought never to have children— except by married

women." 25 From "these two worthy priests I formed the character of the

Savoyard Vicar."

Early in the summer of 1729 Rousseau, now seventeen, felt again the call

of the open road; moreover, he hoped that with Mme. de Warens he might

find some employment less galling to his pride. Along with a jolly Genevan

lad named Bade, he marched from Turin to and through the Mont Cenis

pass of the Alps to Chambery and Annecy. His romantic pen colored the

emotions with which he approached Mme. de Warens' dwelling. "My legs

trembled under me, my eyes were clouded with a mist, I neither saw, heard,

nor recollected anyone, and was obliged frequently to stop that I might

draw breath and recall my bewildered senses." 26 Doubtless he was uncertain

of his reception. How could he explain to her all his vicissitudes since leaving

her? "Her first glance banished all my fears. My heart leaped at the sound

of her voice. I threw myself at her feet, and in transports of the most lively

joy I pressed my lips upon her hand." 27 She did not resent adoration. She

found a room for him in her house; and when some eyebrows rose she said,

"They may talk as they please, but since Providence has sent him back, I am

determined not to abandon him."

in. maman: 1729-40

He was intensely attracted to her, like any youth in proximity with a

femme de trente ans. He furtively kissed the bed on which she had slept,

IO ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

the chair she had sat on, "nay, the floor itself when I considered she had

walked there" 28 (here we suspect that romance got the better of history);

and he was furiously jealous of all who competed with him for her time.

She let him purr, and called him petit chat (little cat) and enfant; gradually

he resigned himself to calling her Maman. She employed him to write letters,

keep her accounts, gather herbs, and help in her alchemical experiments. She

gave him books to read— The Spectator, Pufendorf, Saint-£vremond, Vol-

taire's Henriade. She herself liked to browse in Bayle's Dictionnaire histo-

rique et critique. She did not let her theology discommode her; and if she

enjoyed the company of Father Gros, superior of the local seminary, it

might be because he helped to lace her stays. "While he was thus employed

she would run about the room, this way or that as occasion happened to call

her. Drawn by the laces, M. le Superieur followed grumbling, repeating at

every moment, 'Pray, Madame, do stand still'; the whole forming a scene

truly diverting." 29

It was perhaps this jolly priest who suggested that though Jean-Jacques

gave every sign of stupidity he might digest enough education to make him

a village cure. Mme. de Warens, glad to find a career for him, agreed. So

in the fall of 1729 Rousseau entered the Seminary of St.-Lazare, and pre-

pared for priesthood. By this time he had become accustomed to Catholi-

cism, even fond of it; 30 he loved its solemn ritual, its processions, music, and

incense, its bells that seemed to proclaim, every day, that God was in his

heaven, and that all was— or would be— right with the world; besides, no

religion could be bad that charmed and forgave Mme. de Warens. But he

had received so little formal education that he was first subjected to a con-

centrated course in the Latin language. He could not suffer its declensions,

conjugations, and exceptions patiently; after five months of effort, his teach-

ers sent him back to Mme. de Warens with the report that he was "a toler-

ably good lad," but not fit for holy orders.

She tried again. Having observed his flair for music, she introduced him

to Nicoloz Le Maitre, organist at the Annecy cathedral. Jean-Jacques went

to live with him through the winter of 1729-30, consoled by being only

twenty paces from Maman. He sang in the choir and played the flute; he

loved the Catholic hymns; he was well fed, and happy. All went well except

that M. Le Maitre drank too much. One day the little choirmaster quarreled

with his employers, gathered his music in a box, and left Annecy. Mme. de

Warens bade Rousseau accompany him as far as Lyons. There Le Maitre,

overcome with delirium tremens, fell senseless in the street. Frightened,

Jean-Jacques called the passers-by to his aid. He gave them the address

which the music master was seeking, and then fled back to Annecy and

Maman. "The tenderness and truth of my attachment to her had uprooted

from my heart every imaginable project, and all the follies of ambition. I

conceived no happiness but in living near her, nor could I take a step with-

out feeling that the distance between us was increased." 31 We must remem-

ber that he was still only eighteen years old.

When he reached Annecy he found that Madame had left for Paris, and

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER II

no one knew when she would return. He was desolate. Day after day he

walked aimlessly into the countryside, comforting himself with the colors

of spring and the pretty chatter of doubtless amorous birds. Above all he

loved to rise early and watch the sun lifting itself triumphantly above the

horizon. On one of these rambles he saw two damsels on horseback, urging

their reluctant mounts to ford a stream. In a burst of heroism he caught one

horse by the bridle and led it across, while the other followed. He was about

to go on his way, but the girls insisted upon his accompanying them to a

cottage where he might dry his shoes and stockings. At their invitation he

leaped up behind Mile. G. "When it became necessary to clasp her in order

to hold myself on, my heart beat so violently that she perceived it"; 32 at

that moment he began to outgrow his infatuation for Mme. de Warens. The

three youngsters spent the day picnicking together; Rousseau progressed to

kissing one girl's hand; then they left him. He returned to Annecy exalted,

and hardly minded that Maman was not there. He tried to find those made-

moiselles again, but failed.

Soon he was on the road once more, this time accompanying Mme. de

Warens' maid to Fribourg. Passing through Geneva "I found myself so

affected that I could scarcely proceed, . . . the image of [republican]

liberty so elevated my soul." 33 From Fribourg he walked to Lausanne. Of all

writers known to history he was the most devoted walker. From Geneva

to Turin to Annecy to Lausanne to Neuchatel to Bern to Chambery to

Lyons he knew the road and drank in gratefully the sights, odors, and

sounds.

I love to walk at my ease, and stop at leisure; a strolling life is necessary for

me. Traveling on foot, in a fine country, with fine weather, and having an

agreeable object to terminate my journey, is the manner of living most suited

to my taste. 34

Uncomfortable in the society of educated men, shy and wordless before

beautiful women, he was happy when alone with woods and fields, water

and sky. He made Nature his confidante, and in silent speech told her his

loves and dreams. He imagined that the moods of Nature entered at times

into a mystic accord with his own. Though he was not the first to make

men feel the loveliness of Nature, he was her most fervent and effective

apostle; half the nature poetry since Rousseau is part of his lineage. Haller

had felt and described the majesty of the Alps, but Rousseau made the slopes

of Switzerland along the northern shore of the Lake of Geneva his special

realm, and he sent down through the centuries the fragrance of their ter-

raced vines. When he came to choose a site for the home of his Julie and

Wolmar he placed them here, at Clarens between Vevey and Montreux, in

a terrestrial paradise mingling mountains, verdure, water, sun, and snow.

Unsuccessful in Lausanne, Rousseau moved to Neuchatel: "Here, . . .

by teaching music, I insensibly gained some knowledge of it." 35 At nearby

Boudry he met a Greek prelate who was soliciting funds for restoring the

Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem; Rousseau joined him as interpreter, but at

Soleure he left him and walked out of Switzerland into France. On this walk

12 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

he entered a cottage and asked might he buy some dinner; the peasant

offered him barley bread and milk, saying this was all he had; but when he

saw that Jean-Jacques was not a tax collector he opened a trapdoor, de-

scended, and came up with wheat bread, ham, eggs, and wine. Rousseau

offered to pay; the peasant refused, and explained that he had to hide his

better food lest he suffer additional taxation. "What he said to me . . .

made an impression on my mind that can never be effaced, sowing seeds of

that inextinguishable hatred which has since grown up in my heart against

the vexauons these unhappy people bear, and against their oppressors." 36

At Lyons he spent homeless days, sleeping on park benches or the ground.

For a time he was engaged to copy music. Then, hearing that Mme. de

Warens was living at Chambery (fifty-four miles to the east), he set out to

rejoin her. She found work for him as secretary to the local intendant

( 1732—34). Meanwhile he lived under her roof, his happiness only moder-

ately lessened by the discovery that her business manager, Claude Anet, was

also her lover. That his own passion had subsided appears from a unique

passage in the Confessions:

I could not learn, without pain, that she lived in greater intimacy with an-

other than with myself. . . . Nevertheless, instead of feeling any aversion to

the person who had this advantage over me, I found the attachment I felt for

her actually extended to him. I desired her happiness above all things, and since

he was concerned in her plan of felicity, I was content he should be happy

likewise. Meantime he entered perfectly into the views of his mistress; he con-

ceived a sincere friendship for me; and thus ... we lived in a union which

rendered us mutually happy, and which death alone could dissolve. One proof

of the excellence of this amiable woman's character is that all who loved her

loved each other, even jealousy and rivalry submitting to the more powerful

sentiment with which she inspired them; and I never saw any of those who

surrounded her entertain the least ill will among themselves. Let the reader

pause a moment in this encomium, and if he can recollect any other woman

who deserves it, let him attach himself to her if he would obtain happiness. 37

The next step in this polygonal romance was just as contrary to all the

rules of adultery. When she perceived that a neighbor, Mme. de Menthon,

aspired to be the first to teach Jean-Jacques the art of love, Mme. de Warens,

refusing to surrender this distinction, or desiring to keep the youth from

less tender arms, offered herself to him as mistress, without prejudice to her

similar services for Anet. Jean-Jacques took eight days to think it over; long

acquaintance with her had made him filial rather than sensual in his thoughts

of her; "I loved her too much to desire her." 38 He was already suffering from

the ailments that were to pursue him to the end— inflammation of the bladder

and stricture of the urethra. Finally, with all due modesty, he agreed to her

proposal.

The day, more dreaded than hoped for, at length arrived. . . . My heurt

confirmed my engagements without desiring the prize. I obtained it neverthe-

less. I saw myself for the first time in the arms of a woman, and a woman whom

I adored. Was I happy? No. I tasted pleasure, but I know not what invincible

sadness poisoned the charm. I felt as if I had committed incest. Two or three

times, while pressing her with transport in my arms, I deluged her bosom with

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 13

my tears. As for her, she was neither sad nor gay; she was caressingly tranquil.

Since she was hardly at all sensual, and had not at all sought pleasure, she had

in this no ecstasy, and she never felt remorse. 39

Recalling this epochal event, Rousseau ascribed Madame's maneuvers to

the poison of philosophy.

I repeat, all her failings were the result of her error, never of her passions.

She was well born, her heart was pure, her manners noble, her desires regular

and virtuous, her taste delicate; she seemed formed for that elegant purity of

manners which she ever loved but never practiced, because, instead of listening

to the dictates of her heart, she followed those of her reason, which led her

astray. . . . Unhappily, she piqued herself on philosophy, and the morality

which she drew from it spoiled that which her heart proposed. 40

Anet died in 1734. Rousseau left his post with the intendant and took over

the management of Madame's business affairs. He found them perilously

confused, near bankruptcy. He brought in some income by teaching music;

in 1737 he received three thousand francs falling due from his mother's

legacy; he spent part of this on books, and gave the rest to Mme. de Warens.

He fell ill, and Maman nursed him tenderly. As her dwelling had no garden,

she rented (1736) a suburban cottage, Les Charmettes. There "my life

passed in the most absolute serenity. ,, Though he "never loved to pray in a

chamber," the outdoors stirred him to thank God for the beauty of nature,

and for Mme. de Warens, and to ask the divine blessing on their union. He

was at this time firmly attached to the Catholic theology, with a somber

Jansenist tinge. "The dread of hell frequently tormented me." 41

Bothered by "the vapors"— a then fashionable form of hypochondria— and

thinking that he had a polypus near his heart, he traveled by stagecoach to

Montpellier. En route he eased his melancholy by allegedly consummating a

liaison with Mme. de Larnage (1738), mother of a fifteen-year-old girl. Re-

turning to Chambery, he found that Mme. de Warens was trying a similar

cure, having taken as her new lover a young wigmaker named Jean Wint-

zenried. Rousseau protested; she called him childish, and assured him that

there was room in her love for two Jeans. He refused to "thus degrade her,"

and proposed to resume his status quo ante as son. She professed consent, but

her resentment at being so readily surrendered cooled her affection for him.

He retired to Les Charmettes and took to philosophy.

Now for the first time (c. 1738) he became conscious of the Enlighten-

ment breezes that were blowing from Paris and Cirey. He read some works

of Newton, Leibniz, and Pope, and browsed in the maze of Bayle's Diction-

naire. He took up Latin again, made more progress by himself than formerly

with teachers, and managed to read bits of Virgil, Horace, and Tacitus, and

a Latin translation of Plato's Dialogues. Montaigne, La Bruyere, Pascal,

Fenelon, Prevost, and Voltaire came to him as a dizzy revelation. "Nothing

that Voltaire wrote escaped us"; indeed, it was Voltaire's books that "in-

spired me with a desire to write elegantly, and caused me to endeavor to

imitate the colorings of that author, with whom I was so enchanted." 42 In-

sensibly the old theology that had been the frame of his thoughts lost its

14 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

form and rigor; and he found himself entertaining without horror a hundred

heresies that would have seemed scandalous to his youth. An almost passion-

ate pantheism replaced the God of the Bible. There was a God, yes, and life

would be meaningless and unbearable without him; but he was not the ex-

ternal, vengeful deity conceived by cruel and fearful men, he was the soul of

Nature, and Nature was fundamentally beautiful, and human nature was

basically good. On this and Pascal Rousseau would build his philosophy.

In 1 740 Mme. de Warens found a post for him as tutor to the children of

M. Bonnot de Mably, grand provost of Lyons. He parted from her with no

reproach on either side; she prepared his wardrobe for the trip, and wove

some garments for it with her own once entrancing hands.

IV. LYONS, VENICE, PARIS: 1740-49

The Mably family was a new intellectual stimulus for Rousseau. The pro-

vost was the eldest of three distinguished brothers; one was the almost com-

munist Gabriel Bonnot de Mably; another was the almost materialist Abbe

£tienne Bonnot de Condillac; and Rousseau met all three. Of course he fell

in love with Mme. de Mably, but she was gracious enough to take no notice

of it, and Jean-Jacques had to mind his business of educating her two sons.

He drew up for M. de Mably a statement of his pedagogical ideas; in part

these accorded with the libertarian principles that were to receive their

classical romantic exposition in Emile twenty-two years later; in part they

contradicted his later rejection of "civilization," for they recognized the

value of the arts and sciences in the development of mankind. Meeting fre-

quently men like Professor Bordes of the Lyons Academy (who was a friend

of Voltaire), he imbibed more of the Enlightenment, and learned to laugh

at popular ignorance and superstition. But he remained ever adolescent.

Peeping into the public baths one day, he saw a young woman quite unen-

cumbered; his heart stopped beating. Back in the stealth of his room he ad-

dressed to her a bold but anonymous note:

I hardly dare confess to you, Mademoiselle, the circumstances to which I

owe the happiness of having seen you, and the torment of loving you. ... It

is less that figure, light and svelte, which loses nothing by nudity; it is less

that elegant form, those graceful contours; ... it is not so much the freshness

of lilies spread with such profusion over your person— but that soft blush . . .

which I saw covering your brow when I offered myself to your sight after

having unmasked you too mischievously by singing a couplet. 43

He was now old enough to fall in love with young women. Almost any

presentable girl set him longing and dreaming, but especially Suzanne Serre.

"Once— alas, only once in my life!— my mouth touched hers. O memory!

shall I lose you in the grave?" He began to think of marriage, but he con-

fessed, "I have nothing but my heart to offer." 44 As this was not legal tender

Suzanne accepted another hand, and Rousseau retired to his dreams.

He had not been made to be either a successful lover or a good teacher.

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 15

I had almost as much knowledge as was necessary for a tutor, . . . and the

natural gentleness of my disposition seemed calculated for the employment, if

hastiness had not mingled with it. When things went favorably, and I saw the

pains, which I did not spare, succeed, I was an angel; but when they went

contrary I was a devil. If my pupils did not understand me I was hasty; when

they showed any symptoms of an untoward disposition I was so provoked that

I could have killed them. ... I determined to quit my pupils, being convinced

that I should never succeed in educating them properly. M. de Mably saw this

as clearly as myself, though I am inclined to think he would never have dis-

missed me had I not spared him the trouble. 45

So, sadly resigning or gently dismissed, he took the diligence back to

Chambery, seeking again the solace of Maman's arms. She received him

kindly, and gave him a place at her table with her paramour; but he was not

happy in the situation. He buried himself in books and music, and contrived

a system of musical notation that used figures instead of notes. When he

resolved to go to Paris and submit his invention to the Academy of Sciences

everybody applauded his resolution. In July, 1742, he returned to Lyons to

seek letters of introduction to notables in the capital. The Mablys gave him

letters to Fontenelle and the Comte de Caylus, and Bordes introduced him to

the Due de Richelieu. From Lyons he took the public coach to Paris, dream-

ing of greatness.

France was at this time engaged in the War of the Austrian Succession

(1740-48); but as the conflict was fought on foreign soil, Paris went on with

its life of gilded gaiety, intellectual agitation, theaters mouthing Racine,

salons sparkling with heresy and wit, bishops reading Voltaire, beggars com-

peting with prostitutes, hawkers crying their wares, artisans sweating for

bread. Into this maelstrom came Jean-Jacques Rousseau, aged thirty, in

August, 1742, with fifteen livres in his purse. He took a room in the Hotel

St.-Quentin, Rue des Cordeliers, near the Sorbonne— "a vile street, a miser-

able hotel, a wretched apartment." 46 On August 22 he presented to the

Academy his Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la notation musi-

cale. The savants rejected his project with handsome compliments. Rameau

explained: "Your signs are very good, . . . but they are objectionable on

account of their requiring an operation of the mind, which cannot always

accompany the rapidity of execution. The position of our notes is described

to the eye without the concurrence of this operation." Rousseau confessed

the objection to be insurmountable. 47

Meanwhile his letters of introduction had given him access to Fontenelle,

who, now eighty-five, was too cautious of his energy to take him seriously;

and to Marivaux, who, though busy with success as both novelist and drama-

tist, read Rousseau's manuscript comedy Narcisse, and suggested improve-

ments. The newcomer met Diderot, who, one year younger than Jean-

Jacques, had as yet published nothing of importance.

He was fond of music, and knew it theoretically; . . . and he communi-

cated to me some of his literary projects. This soon formed between us a more

intimate connection, which lasted fifteen years, and which probably would still

exist were not I, unfortunately, ... of the same profession as himself. 48

1 6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

With Diderot he went to the theater, or played chess; in that game Rousseau

met Philidor and other experts, and "had no doubt but in the end I should

become superior to them all." 49 He found entrance to the home and salon of

Mme. Dupin, daughter of the banker Samuel Bernard, and struck up a

friendship with her stepson, Claude Dupin de Francueil. Meanwhile he could

see the bottom of his purse.

He began to look about him for some occupation that would supplement

his friends in feeding him. Through the influence of Mme. de Besenval he

was offered the post of secretary to the French embassy in Venice. After a

long journey made hazardous by the war, he reached Venice in the spring

of 1743, and reported to the ambassador, the Comte de Montaigu. This

count, Rousseau assures us, was almost illiterate; the secretary had to de-

cipher as well as to compose documents; he presented the messages of the

French government to the Venetian Senate in his own person— not having

forgotten the Italian he had learned in Turin. He was proud of his new

status, and complained that a merchant vessel which he visited gave him no

cannonade in salute, though "people of less consequence received it." 50 Mas-

ter and man quarreled as to who should pocket the fees paid for the secre-

tary's issuance of passports to France. With his share Rousseau prospered,

ate unusually well, attended theater and opera, and fell in love with Italian

music and girls.

One day, "not to appear too great a blockhead among my associates," he

visited a prostitute, La Padoana. He asked her to sing; she did; he gave her

a ducat, and turned to leave; she refused to take the coin without having

earned it. He satisfied her, and returned to his lodgings "so fully persuaded

that I should feel the consequences of this step that the first thing I did was

to send for the King's surgeon to ask him for medicine"; but the doctor

"persuaded me that I was formed in such a manner as not to be readily

infected." 51 Some time later his friends gave him a party, at which the pretty

harlot Zulietta was to be the prize. She invited him to her room, and dis-

robed. "Suddenly, instead of being devoured by flame, I felt a deadly chill

run through my veins, and sick at heart, I sat down and wept like a child."

He later explained his incapacity on the ground that one of the woman's

breasts was deformed. Zulietta turned upon him in scorn and bade him

"leave women alone, and study mathematics." 52

M. de Montaigu, his own salary being in arrears, withheld Rousseau's.

They quarreled again; the secretary was dismissed (August 4, 1744). Rous-

seau complained to his friends in Paris; an inquiry was sent to the ambassa-

dor; he replied: "I must inform you how greatly we have been deceived by

the Sire Rousseau. His temper and his insolence, caused by the high opinion

he has of himself, and by his madness, are the things that hold him in the

state in which we found him. 1 drove him out like a bad valet." 53 Jean-

Jacques returned to Paris (October 11), and presented his side of the matter

to officials in the government; they offered him no redress. He appealed to

Mme. de Besenval, she refused to receive him. He sent her a passionate

letter in which we can feel the heat of the distant Revolution:

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 1 7

I was wrong, Madame; I thought you just, and you are only noble [titled].

I should have remembered that. I should have perceived that it was improper

for me, a foreigner and plebeian, to complain against a gentleman. If my

destiny should ever again put me in the grip of an ambassador of the same

stuff, I shall suffer without complaint. If he is wanting in dignity, without ele-

vation of soul, it is because nobility dispenses with all that; if he is associated

with all that is vile in one of the most immoral of cities, it is because his an-

cestors have created enough honor for him; if he consorts with knaves, if he is

one himself, if he deprives a servitor of wages, ah, then, Madame, I shall think

only how fortunate it is not to be the son of one's own deeds! Those ancestors

—who were they? Persons of no repute, without fortune, my equals; they had

talent of some kind, they made a name for themselves; but nature, which sows

the seed of good and evil, has given them a pitiful posterity. 54

And in the Concessions Rousseau added:

The justice and futility of my complaints left in my mind seeds of indigna-

tion against our foolish social institutions, by which the welfare of the public

and real justice are always sacrificed to I know not what appearance of order,

which does nothing more than add the sanction of public authority to the op-

pression of the weak and the iniquity of the powerful. 55

Montaigu, returning to Paris, sent Rousseau "some money to settle my

account. ... I received what was offered me, paid all my debts, and re-

mained as before, with not a franc in my pocket." Re-established at the

Hotel St.-Quentin, he supported himself by copying music. When the cur-

rent Due d'Orleans, hearing of his poverty, gave him music to copy and

fifty louis, Rousseau kept five and returned the rest as overpayment. 56

He earned too little to support a wife, but he thought that with stoic

economy he could afford a mistress. Among those who ate at his table in the

Hotel St.-Quentin were the landlady, some impecunious abbes, and a young

woman who served the hotel as laundress or seamstress. Therese Levasseur

was as timid as Jean-Jacques, and as conscious— though not so proud— of

poverty. When the abbes teased her he defended her; she came to look upon

him as her protector; soon they were in each other's arms (1746). "I began

by declaring to her that I would never either abandon or marry her." 57 She

confessed that she was not a virgin, but assured him that she had sinned only

once, and long ago. He forgave her magnanimously, assuring her that a

virgin twenty years old was a rarity in Paris in any case.

She was a simple creature, devoid of all charm, free of all coquetry. She

could not talk philosophy or politics like a salonniere, but she could cook,

keep house, and put up patiently with his strange moods and ways. Usually

he spoke of her as his "housekeeper," and she spoke of him as "my man." He

rarely took her with him on visits to his friends, for she remained per-

manently adolescent mentally, as he remained permanently adolescent mor-

ally.

I at first tried to improve her mind, but in this my pains were useless. Her

mind is as nature formed it; it was not susceptible of cultivation. I do not blush

in acknowledging she never knew how to read well, although she writes toler-

ably. . . . She could never enumerate the twelve months of the year in order,

or distinguish one numeral from another, notwithstanding all the trouble I took

l8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. I

endeavoring to teach her. She neither knows how to count money, nor to

reckon the price of anything. The word which, when she speaks, comes to her

mind is frequently the opposite of that which she means to use. I formerly

made a dictionary of her phrases to amuse M. de Luxembourg, and her

qui pro quos often became celebrated among those with whom I was most

intimate. 58

When she became pregnant he "was thrown into the greatest embarrass-

ment"; what could he do with children? Some friends assured him it was

quite customary to send unwanted offspring to a foundling asylum. When

the infant came this was done, over Therese's protests but with the co-

operation of her mother (1747). In the next eight years four other children

came, and were disposed of in the same way. Some skeptics have suggested

that Rousseau never had any children, and that he invented this story to

hide his impotence, but his many apologies for this shirking of responsibility

make this theory improbable. He privately confessed his behavior in this

matter to Diderot, Grimm, and Mme. d'Epinay; 59 he implicitly acknowl-

edged it in femile; he raged against Voltaire for making it public; in the

Confessions he admitted it explicitly, and expressed remorse. He was not

made for family life, being a skinless mass of nerves, and a wanderer in

body and soul. He missed the sobering care of children, and never quite

became a man.

He had the good fortune, about this time, to find lucrative employment.

He served as secretary to Mme. Dupin, then to her nephew; and when Du-

pin de Francueil became receiver-general Rousseau was promoted to cashier

at a thousand francs a year. He adopted the gold braid, white stockings, wig,

and sword by which men of letters, to get entrance to aristocratic homes,

imitated aristocratic dress; 60 we can imagine the discomfort of his divided

personality. He was received in several salons, and made new friends: Raynal,

Marmontel, Duclos, Mme. d'fipinay, and, most intimately and fatally, Fried-

rich Melchior Grimm. He attended the exciting dinners at the home of Baron

d'Holbach, where Diderot slew gods with what his enemies called the jaw-

bone of an ass. In that den of infidels most of Jean-Jacques' Catholicism melted

away.

Meanwhile he wrote music. In 1743 he had begun a combination of opera

and ballet which he called Les Muses galantes, celebrating the loves of

Anacreon, Ovid, and Tasso; this was produced in 1745, with some eclat, at

the home of the tax collector La Popeliniere. Rameau shrugged it off as a

pasticcio of plagiarisms from Italian composers, but the Due de Richelieu

liked it, and commissioned Rousseau to revise an opera-ballet, Les Festes de

Ramire, tentatively prepared by Rameau and Voltaire. On December 11,

1 745, Rousseau wrote his first letter to the literary monarch of France:

For fifteen years I have been working to render myself worthy of your re-

gard, and of the kindness with which you favor young Muses in whom you

discover talent. But, through having written the music for an opera, I find my-

self metamorphosed into a musician. Whatever success my feeble efforts may

have, they will be glorious enough for me if they win me the honor of being

known to you, and of having shown the admiration and profound respect with

which I have the honor of being, sir, your humble and most obedient servitor. 61

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 19

Voltaire replied: "Sir, you unite in yourself two talents which have always

been found separate till now. Here are two good reasons why I should es-

teem and like you."

With such love letters began their famous enmity.

V. IS CIVILIZATION A DISEASE?

In 1 749 Diderot was imprisoned at Vincennes for some offensive passages

in his Letters on the Blind, Rousseau wrote to Mme. de Pompadour pleading

for his friend's release, or permission to share his imprisonment. Several

times during that summer he made the round trip of ten miles between Paris

and Vincennes to visit Diderot. On one such journey he took an issue of the

Mercure de France to read as he walked. So he came upon the announcement

of a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the ques-

tion: "Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to corrupt

or to purify morals?" He was tempted to compete, for he was now thirty-

seven years old, and it was time he should make a name for himself. But did he

know enough of science or art or history to discuss such topics without reveal-

ing the defects of his education? In a letter to Malesherbes, January 12, 1762,

he described with characteristic emotion the revelation that came to him on

this walk:

All at once I felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights. Crowds of

vivid ideas thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw me

into unspeakable agitation; 1 felt my head whirling in a giddiness like that of

intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me. Unable to walk for difficulty

in breathing, I sank down under one of the trees by the road, and passed half

an hour there in such a condition of excitement that when I rose I saw that

the front of my waistcoat was all wet with tears. . . . Ah, if ever I could have

written a quarter of what 1 saw and felt under that tree, with what clarity I

should have brought out all the contradictions of our social system! With what

simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is by nature good, and that

only our institutions have made him bad! 62

That last sentence was to be the theme song of his life, and those tears that

streaked his vest were among the headwaters of the Romantic movement in

France and Germany. Now he could pour out his heart against all the arti-

ficiality of Paris, the corruption of its morals, the insincerity of its fine

manners, the licentiousness of its literature, the sensuality of its art, the

snobbishness of class divisions, the callous extravagance of the rich financed

by exactions from the poor, the desiccation of the soul by the replacement

of religion with science, of feeling with logic. By declaring war on this

degeneration he could vindicate his own simplicity of culture, his village

manners, his discomfort in society, his disgust with malicious gossip and

irreverent wit, his defiant retention of religious faith amid the atheism of his

friends. In his heart he was again a Calvinist, remembering with a kind of

homesickness the morality expounded to him in his youth. By answering

Dijon he would exalt his native Geneva above Paris, and would explain to

20 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

himself and others why he had been so happy in Les Charmettes, and was

so miserable in the salons.

Arrived at Vincennes, he revealed to Diderot his intention to compete.

Diderot applauded him, and bade him attack the civilization of their time

with all possible force. Hardly any other competitor would dare take that

line, and Rousseau's position would stand out as individual.* Jean-Jacques

returned to his lodgings eager to destroy the arts and sciences that Diderot

was preparing to exalt in the Encyclopedic, on Dictionnaire raisonne des

sciences, des arts, et des metiers ( 1 75 1 f .) .

I composed the Discourse in a very singular manner. ... 1 dedicated to it

the hours of the night in which sleep deserted me; I meditated in bed with my

eyes closed, and in my mind I turned over and over again my periods with

incredible labor and care. ... As soon as the Discourse was finished I showed

it to Diderot. He was satisfied with the production, and pointed out some cor-

rections he thought should be made. ... I sent off the piece without men-

tioning it to anybody [else], except, I think, to Grimm. 65

The Dijon Academy crowned his essay with the first prize (August 23,

17.50)— a gold medal and three hundred francs. Diderot, with characteristic

enthusiasm, arranged for the publication of this Discours sur les arts et les

sciences, and soon he reported to the author: "Your Discours is taking be-

yond all imagination; never was there an instance of a like success." 66 It was

as if Paris realized that here, at the very mid-point of the Enlightenment, a

man had risen to challenge the Age of Reason, and to challenge it with a

voice that would be heard.

The essay seemed at first to applaud the victories of reason:

It is a noble and beautiful spectacle to see man raising himself, so to speak,

from nothing by his own exertions; dissipating by the light of reason all the

thick clouds by which he was by nature enveloped; mounting above himself,

soaring in thought even to the celestial regions, encompassing with giant

strides, like the sun, the vast extent of the universe; and what is still grander

and more wonderful, going back into himself, there to study man and get to

know his own nature, his duties, and his end. All these miracles we have seen

renewed within the last few generations. 67

Voltaire must have shed an approving smile over this initial ecstasy; here was

a new recruit to the philosophes, to the good companions who would slay

superstition and Pinfame; and was not this young Lochinvar already con-

tributing to the Ency elope die? But a page later the argument took a dis-

tressing turn. All this progress of knowledge, said Rousseau, had made

governments more powerful, crushing individual liberty; it had replaced the

simple virtues and forthright speech of a ruder age with the hypocrisies of

savoir-faire.

* A minor controversy obscures the narrative at this point. Diderot, in 1782, reported Rous-

seau's visit in a manner reconcilable with Rousseau's account: "When . . . Rousseau came to

consult me about the view he should adopt, 'The part you will take,' I said, 'is that which

others would reject.' 'You are right,' said he." 63 Marmontel, about 1793, quoted Diderot as

having dissuaded Rousseau from taking the affirmative stand. " 'I shall follow your advice,'

said Rousseau." 64

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 21

Sincere friendship, real esteem, and perfect confidence are banished from

among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie

constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness, that

boasted candor and urbanity, for which we are indebted to the light and lead-

ing of this age. . . . Let the arts and sciences claim the share they have had in

this salutary work! 68

This corruption of morals and character by the progress of knowledge

and art is almost a law of history. "Egypt became the mother of philosophy

and the fine arts; soon she was conquered." 69 Greece, once peopled by heroes,

twice vanquished Asia; "letters" were then in their infancy, and the virtues

of Sparta had not been replaced, as the Greek ideal, by the refinement of

Athens, the sophistry of the Sophists, the voluptuous forms of Praxiteles;

when that "civilization" had reached its height it was overthrown at a blow

by Philip of Macedon, and then supinely accepted the yoke of Rome. Rome

conquered the whole Mediterranean world when she was a nation of peasants

and soldiers inured to a stoic discipline; but when she relaxed into epicurean

indulgence, and praised the obscenities of Ovid, Catullus, and Martial, she

became a theater of vice, "a scorn among the nations, an object of derision

even to barbarians." 70 And when Rome revived in the Renaissance, arts and

letters again sapped the strength of governed and governors, and left Italy

too feeble to meet attack. Charles VIII of France mastered Tuscany and

Naples almost without drawing a sword, "and all his court attributed this

unexpected success to the fact that the princes and nobles of Italy applied

themselves with greater earnestness to the cultivation of their understandings

rather than to active and martial pursuits." 71

Literature itself is an element of decay.

It is related that the Caliph Omar, being asked what should be done with the

library of Alexandria, answered . . . , "If the books in the library contain

anything contrary to the Koran, they are evil and ought to be burned; if they

contain only what the Koran teaches, they are superfluous." This reasoning has

been cited by our men of letters as the height of absurdity; but if Gregory the

Great had been in the place of Omar, and the Gospel in the place of the Koran,

the library would still have been burned, and it would have been perhaps the

finest action of his life. 72

Or consider the disintegrating effect of philosophy. Some of these "lovers

of wisdom" tell us that there is no such thing as matter; another assures us

that nothing but matter exists, and no other God but the universe itself; a

third group announces that virtue and vice are mere names, and nothing

counts but strength and skill. These philosophers "sap the foundations of

our faith, and destroy virtue. They smile contemptuously at such old words

as patriotism and religion, and consecrate their talents ... to the destruc-

tion and defamation of all that men hold most sacred." 73 In antiquity such

nonsense did not long survive its author, but now, thanks to print, "the

pernicious reflections of Hobbes and Spinoza will last forever." Consequently,

the invention of printing was one of the greatest disasters in the history of

mankind, and "it is easy to see that sovereigns will hereafter take as much

22 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

pains to banish this dreadful art from their dominions as they ever took to

encourage it." 74

Note the vigor and excellence of those peoples who never knew philosophy

or science, literature or art: the Persians of Cyrus' time, the Germans as

described by Tacitus, or, "in our own time, that rustic nation [Switzerland]

whose renowned courage not even adversity could conquer, and whose

fidelity no example could corrupt." To these the proud Genevan adds

"those happy nations, which did not know even the names of many vices

that we find it hard to suppress— the savages of America, whose simple and

natural mode of government Montaigne preferred, without hesitation, not

only to the laws of Plato, but to the most perfect visions of government that

philosophy can suggest." 75

What, then, should be our conclusion? It is that

luxury, profligacy, and slavery have been in all ages the scourge of the efforts

of our pride to emerge from that happy state of ignorance in which the wis-

dom of Providence has placed us. . . . Let men learn for once that nature

would have preserved them from science as a mother snatches a dangerous

weapon from the hands of her child. 76

The answer to the question of the learned Academy is that learning without

virtue is a snare; that the only real progress is moral progress; that the ad-

vancement of learning has corrupted, rather than purified, the morals of

mankind; and that civilization is not an ascent of man to a nobler state, but

the fall of man from a rural simplicity that was a paradise of innocence and

bliss.

Toward the end of the Discourse Rousseau checked himself, and looked

with some trepidation at the shambles of science, art, literature, and philos-

ophy that he had left in his wake. He recalled that his friend Diderot was

preparing an encyclopedia dedicated to the progress of science. Suddenly he

discovered that some philosophers— e.g., Bacon and Descartes— were "sub-

lime teachers," and he proposed that living specimens of the breed should be

welcomed as counselors by the rulers of states. Had not Cicero been made

consul of Rome, and the greatest of modern philosophers been made chancel-

lor of England? 77 Perhaps Diderot had slipped these lines in, but Jean-Jacques

had the last word:

As for us, ordinary men, upon whom Heaven has not been pleased to

bestow such great talents, ... let us remain in our obscurity. . . . Let us

leave to others the task of instructing mankind in their duty, and confine our-

selves to the discharge of our own. . . . Virtue! sublime science of simple

minds, . . . are not your principles graven upon every heart? Need we do

more, to learn your laws, than . . . listen to the voice of conscience? . . . This

is the true philosophy, with which we must learn to be content. 78

Paris did not know whether to take this Discourse seriously or to interpret

it as a mischievous essay in hyperbole and paradox, tongue in cheek. It was

said by some (Rousseau tells us 79 ) that he did not believe a word of it.

Diderot, who believed in science but fretted under the restraints of conven-

tion and morality, apparently approved of Rousseau's exaggerations as a

CHAP.l) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 23

needed chastisement of Parisian society; and members of the court applauded

the essay as a long-deserved rebuke to insolent and subversive philosophers. 80

There must have been many sensitive spirits who were, like this eloquent

author, ill at ease in the babble and sparkle of Paris. Rousseau had expressed

a problem that appears in every advanced society. Are the fruits of tech-

nology worth the haste, strains, sights, noises, and smells of an industrialized

life? Does enlightenment undermine morality? Is it wise to follow science to

mutual destruction, and philosophy to disillusionment with every fortifying

hope?

A dozen critics rose to the defense of civilization: Bordes of the Lyons

Academy, Lacat of the Rouen Academy, Formey of the Berlin Academy,

and not least the genial Stanislas Leszczynski, once king of Poland, now

duke of Lorraine. Scholars pointed out that the diatribe merely enlarged

the doubts that Montaigne had voiced in his essay "On Cannibals." Others

heard the voice of Pascal retreating from science to religion, and of course a

thousand "doctors and saints" had long since condemned civilization as a

disease or a sin. Theologians could claim that the "innocence" and happiness

of the "state of nature" from which, in Rousseau's theory, man had lapsed

was only the Eden story retold; "civilization" took the place of "original sin"

as causing the fall of man; in both cases the desire for knowledge had ended

bliss. Sophisticates like Voltaire wondered that a man thirty-seven years old

should have written such a juvenile jeremiad against the achievements of

science, the boon of good manners, and the inspirations of art. Artists like

Boucher might well have squirmed under Rousseau's lash, but artists like

Chardin and La Tour could have charged him with indiscriminate generaliza-

tion. Soldiers smiled at the tender musician's exaltation of martial qualities

and perpetual readiness for war.

Rousseau's friend Grimm protested against any return to "nature." "What

devilish nonsense!" he exclaimed, and asked a thorny question: "What is

'nature'?" 81 Bayle had remarked: "There is scarcely a word that is used more

vaguely than . . . nature. . . . The conclusion is not certain that because

'this comes from nature, therefore this is good and right.' We see in the

human species many very bad things, although it cannot be doubted that

they are the work of nature." 82 Rousseau's conception of primitive nature

was of course a romantic idealization; nature (life without social regulation

and protection) is "red in tooth and claw," and its ultimate law is, Kill or be

killed. The "nature" that Jean- Jacques loved, as in Vevey or Clarens, was a

nature civilized— tamed and refined by man. In truth, he did not want to go

back to primitive conditions, with all their filth, insecurity, and physical

violence; he wished to return to the patriarchal family cultivating the soil

and living on its fruits. He longed to be freed from the rules and restraints

of polished society— and from the classic style of moderation and reason. He

hated Paris and yearned for Les Charmettes. Toward the end of his life, in

Les Reveries (Tun promeneur solitaire, he idealized his maladaptation:

I was born the most confiding of men, and for forty years together never

was this confidence deceived for a single time. Falling suddenly among another

24 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

order of persons and things, I slipped into a thousand snares. . . . Once con-

vinced that there was nothing but deceit and falsity in the grimacing demon-

strations which had been lavished upon me, I passed rapidly to the other ex-

treme. ... I became disgusted with men. ... I have never been truly ac-

customed to civil society, where all is worry, obligation, duty, and where my

natural independence renders me always incapable of the subjections necessary

to whoever wishes to live among men. 83

And in the Concessions he bravely admitted that this first Discourse, "though

full of force and fire, was absolutely wanting in logic and order; of all the

works I ever wrote it is the weakest in reasoning, and the most devoid of

number [prose rhythm? ] and harmony." 84

Nevertheless he replied vigorously to his critics, and reaffirmed his para-

doxes. He made an exception as a courtesy to Stanislas: on second thought

he decided not to burn the libraries or close the universities and academies;

"all we should gain by this would be to plunge Europe once more into

barbarism"; 85 and "when men are corrupt it is better for them to be learned

than ignorant." 86 But he recanted no item in his indictment of Parisian

society. To mark his withdrawal from it he discarded sword and gold braid

and white stockings, and dressed in the simple garb and smaller wig of the

middle class. "Thus," said Marmontel, "from that moment he chose the role

he was to play, and the mask he was to wear." 87 If it was a mask it was so well

and persistently worn that it became part of the man, and changed the face

of history.

VI. PARIS AND GENEVA: 1750-54

In December, 1750, Rousseau suffered so severely from his bladder ailment

that he was confined to his bed for six weeks. This misfortune increased his

tendency to melancholy and privacy. His rich acquaintances sent him their

own physicians, but the medical science of the time had not equipped them

to help him. "The more I submitted to their direction, the yellower, thinner,

and feebler I became. My imagination . . . presented to me, on this side of

the tomb, nothing but continued sufferings from the gravel, stone, and re-

tention of urine. Everything which gave relief to others— ptisans, baths, and

bleeding— increased my tortures." 88

Early in 175 1 Therese presented him with a third child, which followed its

predecessors to the foundling asylum. He later explained that he was too

poor to bring up children, that they would have been ruined by being

reared by the Levasseurs, and that they would have played havoc with his

work as a writer and a musician. His sickness had compelled him to resign

his position and income as cashier for Dupin de Francueil; henceforth he

supported himself chiefly by copying music at ten sous the page. Through

the negligence of Diderot, or the parsimony of the publishers, Rousseau

received nothing from the sale of his Discourse. His music proved more

profitable than his philosophy.

On October 18, 1752, through Duclos' influence, Rousseau's operetta, Le

Devin du village, was presented before King and court at Fontainebleau, and

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 25

with such success that it was repeated there a week later. A performance for

the public in Paris (March i, 1753) won a wider acclaim, and the retiring

author found himself again a celebrity. The little intermede, for which Rous-

seau had written both words and music, was almost an obbligato to the

Discourse: the shepherdess Colette, saddened by the flirtations of Colin with

urban demoiselles, is instructed by the village soothsayer to win him back by

flirtations of her own; Colin, jealous, returns, and together they sing ballads

praising rural as against city life. Rousseau attended the premiere, and was

almost reconciled to society:

There is no clapping before the King; therefore everything was heard, which

was advantageous to the author and the piece. I heard about me the whispering

of women, who appeared as beautiful as angels. They said to one another, in a

low voice: "This is charming; this is ravishing; there is not a sound that does

not go to the heart." The pleasure of giving this emotion to so many amiable

persons moved me to tears; and these I could not restrain in the first duet, when

I observed that I was not the only person who wept. 89

That evening the Due d'Aumont sent him word to come to the palace the

next morning at eleven to be presented to the King; and the messenger

added that the King was expected to give the composer a pension. But Rous-

seau's bladder vetoed the plan.

Will it be believed that the night of so brilliant a day was for me a night of

anguish and perplexity? My first thought was that after being presented I

should frequently want to retire; this had made me suffer very considerably at

the theater, and might torment me the next day, when I should be in the

gallery or in the King's apartment, amongst all the great, waiting for the de-

parture of his Majesty. My infirmity was the principal cause which prevented

me from mixing in polite companies and enjoying the conversation of the fair.

. . . None but persons who are acquainted with this situation can judge of the

horror which being exposed to the risk of it inspires. 90

So he sent word that he could not come. Two days later Diderot reproved

him for missing such a chance to provide more fitly for himself and Therese.

"He spoke of the pension with more warmth than, on such a subject, I

should have expected from a philosopher. . . . Although I was obliged to

him for his good wishes, I could not relish his maxims, which produced a

heated dispute, the first I ever had with him." 91 He was not without some

profit from his Devin. Mme. de Pompadour liked it so well that she herself

played the part of Colette in its second presentation at the court; she sent

him fifty louis d'or, and Louis sent him a hundred. 92 The King himself, "with

the worst voice in his kingdom," went around singing Colette's sad aria "J'ai

perdu mon serviteur"— a premonition of Gluck.

Meanwhile Rousseau prepared articles on music for the Encyclopedic.

"These I executed in great haste, and consequently very ill, in the three

months that Diderot had allowed me." Rameau criticized these contributions

severely in a pamphlet, Erreurs sur la musique dans VEncy elope die (1755).

Rousseau amended the articles, and made them the basis of a Dictionnaire de

la musique (1767). His contemporaries, excepting Rameau, rated him "a

musician of the very first order"; 93 we should now consider him as a good

26 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

composer in a minor genre; but he was without question the most interesting

writer on music in that generation.

When a troupe of Italian opera singers invaded Paris in 1752, a contro-

versy flared up on the relative merits of French versus Italian music. Rous-

seau leaped into the fray with a Lettre sur la musique frangaise (1753), "in

which," said Grimm, "he proves that it is impossible to compose music to

French words; that the French language is altogether unfit for music; that

the French have never had music, and never will." 94 Rousseau was all for

melody. "We sang some old song," he wrote in his Reveries, "which was far

better than modern discord"; 95 what age has not heard that plaint? In the

article "Opera" in his Dictionnaire de la musique he gave a cue to Wagner:

he defined opera as "a dramatic and lyrical spectacle which seeks to reunite

all the charms of the beaux arts in the representation of a passionate action.

. . . The constituents of an opera are the poem, the music, and the decora-

tion: the poetry speaks to the spirit, the music to the ear, the painting to the

eye. . . . Greek dramas could be called operas." 96

About this time (1752) Maurice-Quentin de La Tour portrayed Rousseau

in pastel. 97 He caught Jean-Jacques smiling, handsome, and well-groomed;

Diderot condemned the portrait as unfair to the truth. 98 Marmontel de-

scribed Rousseau as seen in these years at d'Holbach's dinners: "He had just

gained the prize ... at Dijon. ... A timid politeness, sometimes ... so

obsequious as to border on humility. Through his fearful reserve distrust was

visible; his lowering eyes watched everything with a look full of gloomy

suspicion. He seldom entered into conversation, and rarely opened himself

to us." 99

Having so forcefully denounced science and philosophy, Rousseau was ill

at ease among the philosophes who dominated the salons. His Discourse had

committed him to the defense of religion. Mme. d'£pinay tells how, at a

dinner given by Mme. Quinault, the hostess, finding the talk too irreverent,

begged her guests to "respect at least natural religion." "No more than any

other," retorted the Marquis de Saint-Lambert, lately Voltaire's rival for

Mme. du Chatelet, and soon to be Rousseau's for Mme. d'Houdetot. Mme.

d'£pinay continues:

At this answer Rousseau became angry, and muttered something which made

the company laugh at him. "If," he said, "it is cowardice to allow anyone to

speak ill of an absent friend, it is a crime to allow anyone to speak ill of his

God, who is present; and I believe in God, Messieurs." . . . Turning to Saint-

Lambert I said, "You, Monsieur, who are a poet, will agree with me that the

existence of an eternal being, all powerful and supremely intelligent, is the

germ of the most beautiful enthusiasm." "I confess," he replied, "that it is

beautiful to see this God inclining his face to the earth, . . . but it is the germ

of the follies—" "Monsieur," interrupted Rousseau, "if you say one word more

I shall leave the room." In fact he had left his seat, and was seriously meditating

flight, when the Prince de was announced, 100

and everybody forgot the subject of the debate. If we may believe Mme.

d'£pinay's Memoirs, Rousseau told her that these atheists well deserved

eternal hell. 101

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 27

In the preface to his comedy Narcisse— which was played by the Comedie

Fran^aise on December 18, 1752— Rousseau renewed his war on civilization.

"The taste for letters always announces in a people the commencement of a

corruption which it very soon accelerates. This taste arises in a nation only

from two evil sources . . . : idleness, and the desire for distinction." 102

Nevertheless he continued till 1754 to attend d'Holbach's "synagogue" of

freethinkers. There one day Marmontel, Grimm, Saint-Lambert, and others

heard the Abbe Petit read a tragedy that he had composed. They found it

lamentable, but praised it handsomely; the abbe had too much wine in him

to perceive their irony, and swelled with content. Rousseau, resenting the

insincerity of his friends, fell upon the abbe with a merciless tirade: "Your

piece is worthless; ... all these gentlemen are mocking you; go away from

here, and return to be vicar in your village." 103 D'Holbach reproved Rous-

seau for his rudeness; Rousseau left in anger, and for a year he stayed away.

His companions had destroyed his Catholicism, but not his faith in the

fundamentals of Christianity. His boyhood Protestantism came to the surface

again as his Catholicism subsided. He idealized the Geneva of his youth, and

thought that he would be more comfortable there than in a Paris that irked

his soul. If he returned to Geneva he would regain the proud title of citizen,

with the exclusive privileges that this implied. In June, 1754, he took the

coach to Chambery, found Mme. de Warens poor and unhappy, opened his

purse to her, and went on to Geneva. There he was welcomed as a repentant

prodigal son; he seems to have signed a statement reaffirming the Calvinist

creed; 104 the Genevan clergy rejoiced in the reclamation of an Encyclopedist

to their evangelical faith. He was reinstated as a citizen, and thereafter

proudly signed himself "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, CitoyenP

I was so impressed with the kindness shown me ... by the [civic] council

and the [ecclesiastical] consistory, and by the great civility and obliging be-

havior of the magistrates, ministers, and citizens, that ... I did not think of

going back to Paris except to break up housekeeping, find a situation for

Monsieur and Madame Levasseur, or provide for their subsistence, and then

return with Therese to Geneva, there to settle for the rest of my days. 105

He could now appreciate more thoroughly than in his boyhood the beauty

of the lake and its shores. "I preserved a lively remembrance of . . . the

farther end of the lake, and of this, some years afterward, I gave a description

in La Nouvelle Heloise" The Swiss peasants entered into the bucolic idyl

he was to write in that novel: they owned their farms, were free from poll

tax and corvee, busied themselves with domestic crafts in winter, and stood

contentedly apart from the noise and strife of the world. He had in mind

the small city-states of Switzerland when he described his political ideal in

Le Contrat social.

In October, 1754, he left for Paris, promising to be back soon. Voltaire

arrived in Geneva two months after Rousseau's departure, and settled down

at Les Delices. In Paris Jean-Jacques resumed his friendship with Diderot

and Grimm, but not as trustfully as before. When he learned that Mme.

d'Holbach had died, he wrote the Baron a tender letter of condolence; the

28 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

two men were reconciled, and Rousseau again sat at table with the infidels.

For three years more he was, to all appearances, one of the philosophes; his

new Calvinist creed sat lightly on his thoughts. He was absorbed now in

seeing through the press his second Discourse, which was to be more world-

shaking than the first.

VII. THE CRIMES OF CIVILIZATION

In November, 1753, the Dijon Academy announced another competition.

The new question was: "What is the origin of inequality among men, and

is it authorized by natural law?" "Struck with this great question," says

Rousseau, "I was surprised that the Academy had dared to propose it; but

since it had shown the courage, ... I immediately undertook the discus-

sion." 106 He entitled his contribution Discours sur Forigine et les jondements

de rinegalite parmi les hommes. At Chambery on June 12, 1 754, he dedicated

this second Discourse "to the Republic of Geneva," and added an address to

the "most honorable, magnificent, and Sovereign Lords," voicing some not-

able opinions on politics:

In my researches after the best rules common sense can lay down for the

constitution of a government, I have been so struck at finding them all in actu-

ality in your own, that even had I not been born within your walls I should

have thought it indispensable for me to offer this picture of human society to

that people which of all others seems to be possessed of its greatest advantages,

and to have best guarded against its abuses. 107

He complimented Geneva in terms quite applicable to Switzerland today:

A country diverted, by a fortunate lack of power, from the brutal love of

conquest, and secured, by a still more fortunate situation, from the fear of be-

coming itself the conquest of other states: a free city situated between several

nations, none of which should have any interest in attacking it, while each had

an interest in preventing it from being attacked by the others. 108

And the future idol of the French Revolution approved the limitations

placed upon democracy in Geneva, where only eight per cent of the popula-

tion could vote:

In order to prevent self-interest and ill-conceived projects, and all such dan-

gerous innovations as finally ruined the Athenians, each man should not be at

liberty to propose new laws at pleasure; this right should belong exclusively to

the magistrates. ... It is above all the great antiquity of the laws which makes

them sacred and venerable; men soon learn to despise laws whiclj they see daily

altered; and states, by accustoming themselves to neglect their ancient cus-

toms under the pretext of improvement, often introduce greater evils than

those they endeavor to remove. 109

Was this only a plea for readmission to Genevan citizenship?

This aim having been achieved, Rousseau submitted his essay to the Dijon

Academy. He was not awarded the prize, but when, in June, 1755, he pub-

lished the Discours, he had the satisfaction of becoming again the exciting

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 29

topic of Paris salons. He had left no paradox unturned to^stir debate. He did

not deny "natural" or biological inequality; he recognized that some indi-

viduals are by birth healthier or stronger than others in body or character

or mind. But he argued that all other inequalities— economic, political, social,

moral— are unnatural, and arose when men left the "state of nature," estab-

lished private property, and set up states to protect property and privilege.

"Man is naturally good"; 110 he becomes bad chiefly through social institu-

tions that restrain or corrupt his tendencies to natural behavior. Rousseau

pictured an ideal primitive condition in which most men were strong of

limb, fleet of foot, clear of eye,* and lived a life of action in which thought

was always a tool and incident of action, and not an enfeebling substitute

for it. He contrasted this natural health with the proliferating diseases en-

gendered in civilization by wealth and sedentary occupations.

The greater part of our ills are of our own making, and we might have

avoided them, nearly all, by adhering to that simple, uniform, and solitary

manner of life which nature prescribed. If she destined man to be healthy, I

venture to declare that a state of reflection is a state contrary to nature, and

that a thinking man is a depraved animal [Phomme qui medite est un animal

deprave']. When we think of the good constitution of the savages— at least of

those whom we have not ruined with our spirituous liquors— and reflect that

they are troubled with hardly any disorders save wounds and old age, we are

tempted to believe that in following the history of civil society we shall be

telling that of human sickness. 112

Rousseau admitted that his ideal "state of nature . . . perhaps never ex-

isted, and probably never will"; 113 he offered it not as a fact of history but as

a standard of comparison. This is what he meant by the startling proposal:

"Let us begin, then, by laying facts aside, as they do not affect the question.

The investigations we may enter into . . . must not be treated as historical

truths, but only as conditional and hypothetical reasonings." 114 However, we

may form some idea of man's life before the rise of social organization, by

observing the condition and conduct of modern states, for "states today re-

main in a state of nature" 115 — each individually sovereign, and knowing in

actuality no law but those of cunning and force; we may suppose that pre-

social man lived in a like condition of individual sovereignty, insecurity,

collective chaos, and intermittent violence. Rousseau's ideal was not such an

imaginary presocial existence [for society may be as old as man], but a later

stage of development in which men lived in patriarchal families and tribal

groups, and had not yet instituted private property. "The most ancient of

all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family." 116 That was the

time of maximal happiness for mankind; it had defects, pains, and punish-

ments, but it had no laws beyond parental authority and family discipline;

"it was altogether the best state that man could experience, so that he can

have departed from it only through some fatal accident." 117 That accident

was the establishment of individual property, from which came economic,

political, and social inequality, and most of the evils of modern life.

* "What I am not, that for me is God and virtue."— Nietzsche. 111

30 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself

of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was

the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders,

from how many horrors and misfortunes, might not anyone have saved man-

kind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows:

"Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that

the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." 118

From that permitted usurpation came the curses of civilization: class divi-

sions, slavery, serfdom, envy, robbery, war, legal injustice, political cor-

ruption, commercial chicanery, inventions, science, literature, art, "progress"

—in one word, degeneration. To protect private property, force was organ-

ized, and became the state; to facilitate government, law was developed to

habituate the weak to submit to the strong with a minimum of force and ex-

pense. 119 Hence it came about that "the privileged few gorge themselves with

superfluities, while the starving multitude lack the bare necessaries of life." 120

Added to these basic inequities is a mass of derivative iniquities: "shameful

methods sometimes practiced to prevent the birth of human beings," abor-

tion, infanticide, castration, perversions, "the exposure or murder of multi-

tudes of infants who fall victims to the poverty of their parents." 121 All these

calamities are demoralizing; they are unknown to animals; they make "civi-

lization" a cancer on the body of mankind. In comparison with this poly-

morphous corruption and perversity, the life of the savage is healthy, sane,

and humane.

Should we therefore go back to savagery? "Must societies be totally

abolished? Must 7mne and thine be annulled, and must we return to the for-

ests to live among bears?" That is no longer possible for us; the poison of

civilization is in our blood, and we shall not eradicate it by flight to the

woods. To end private property, government, and law would be to plunge

the people into a chaos worse than civilization. "Once man has left it he can

never return to the time of innocence and equality." 122 Revolution may be

justified, for force may justly overthrow what force has set up and main-

tained; 123 but revolution is not now advisable. The best we can do is to study

the Gospels again, and try to cleanse our evil impulses by practicing the

ethics of Christianity. 124 We can make a natural sympathy for our fellow

men the basis of morality and social order. We can resolve to live a less com-

plicated life, content with necessaries, scorning luxuries, shunning the race

and fever of "progress." We can slough off, one by one, the artificialities,

hypocrisies, and corruptions of civilization, and remold ourselves to honesty,

naturalness, and sincerity. We can leave the noise and riot of our cities, their

hatreds, licentiousness, and crimes, and go to live in rural simplicity and

domestic duties and content. We can abandon the pretensions and blind

alleys of philosophy, and return to a religious faith that will uphold us in the

face of suffering and death.

Today, having heard all this a hundred times, we sense a certain artificial-

ity in this righteous indignation. We are not sure that the evils Rousseau

described arise from corrupt institutions rather than from the nature of man;

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 31

after all, it is human nature that made the institutions. When Jean-Jacques

wrote his second Discourse the idealization of the "friendly and flowing

savage" had reached its peak. In 1640 Walter Hamond had published a

pamphlet "proving that the inhabitants of Madagascar are the happiest peo-

ple in the world." 125 Jesuit accounts of Huron and Iroquois Indians seemed

to bear out Defoe's picture of Robinson Crusoe's amiable man Friday. Vol-

taire generally laughed at the legend of the noble savage, but he used it gaily

in Ulngenu. Diderot played with it in the Supplement au Voyage de Bou-

gainville. But Helvetius ridiculed Rousseau's idealization of the savage, 126

and Duclos, though a faithful friend of Jean-Jacques, argued that "it is

among savages that crime is most frequent; the childhood of a nation is not

its age of innocence." 127 All in all, the intellectual climate favored Rousseau's

thesis.

The victims of Rousseau's invective calmed their consciences by repre-

senting the Discourse, like its predecessor, as a pose. Mme. du Deffand

openly called him a charlatan. 128 Skeptics laughed at his professions of Chris-

tian orthodoxy, at his literal interpretation of Genesis. 129 The philosophes

began to distrust him as upsetting their schemes to win the government to

their ideas of social reform; they were not in favor of appealing to the re-

sentments of the poor; they recognized the reality of exploitation, but they

saw no constructive principle in the replacement of magistrates with mobs.

The government itself made no protest against Rousseau's denunciations;

probably the court took the essay as an exercise in declamation. Rousseau

was proud of his eloquence; he sent a copy of the Discourse to Voltaire, and

anxiously awaited a word of praise. Voltaire's reply is one of the gems of

French literature, wisdom, and manners:

I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race. I thank

you for it. You will please men, to whom you tell truths that concern them,

but you will not correct them. You paint in very true colors the horrors of

human society; ... no one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade

men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on

four paws [marcher a quatre panes']. However, as it is more than sixty years

since I lost that habit, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to re-

sume it. . . .

I agree with you that literature and the sciences have sometimes been the

cause of much evil. . . . [But] admit that neither Cicero, nor Varro, nor

Lucretius, nor Virgil, nor Horace had the least share in the proscriptions of

Marius, Sulla, Antony, Lepidus, Octavius. . . . Confess that Petrarch and

Boccaccio did not cause the intestine troubles of Italy, that the badinage of

Marot did not cause the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and that Corneille's he

Cid did not produce the wars of the Fronde. The great crimes were com-

mitted by celebrated but ignorant men. That which has made, and will always

make, this world a vale of tears is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable

pride of men. . . . Literature nourishes the soul, corrects it, consoles it; it

makes your glory at the same time that you write against it. . . .

M. Chapuis informs me that your health is quite bad. You must come and

restore it in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me the milk of

our cows, and browse on our herbs. I am, very philosophically and with the

tenderest esteem, Monsieur, your very humble and very obedient servant. 130

32 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

Rousseau replied with equal courtesy, and promised to visit Les Delices

when he returned to Switzerland. 131 But he was deeply disappointed by the

reception of his Discourse in the Geneva to which he had dedicated it with

such ingratiating praise. Apparently the tight little oligarchy that ruled the

republic felt some of the barbs of that essay, and did not relish Rousseau's

wholesale condemnation of property, government, and law. "I did not per-

ceive that a single Genevan was pleased with the hearty zeal found in the

work." 132 He decided that the time was not ripe for his return to Geneva.

VIII. THE CONSERVATIVE

The same year 1755 that witnessed the publication of the second Discourse

saw the appearance, in Volume V of the Ency elope 'die, of a long article by

Rousseau— "Discours sur l'economie politique." It requires note because it

diverged from the earlier discourses in some vital particulars. Here society,

government, and law are honored as natural results of man's nature and

needs, and private property is described as a social boon and a basic right.

"It is certain that the right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of

citizenship, and even more important in some respects than liberty itself.

. . . Property is the true foundation of civil society, and the real guarantee

of the undertakings of citizens"; 133 i.e., men will not work beyond the pro-

vision of their simplest needs unless they may keep the surplus product as

their own, to consume or transmit as they may desire. Now Rousseau ap-

proves the bequest of property from parents to children, and cheerfully

accepts the class divisions that result. "Nothing is more fatal to morality and

the republic than the continual shifting of rank and fortune among the citi-

zens; such changes are both the proof and the source of a thousand disorders,

and overturn and confound everything." 134

But he continues to inveigh against social injustice and the class favoritism

of the law. just as the state should protect private property and its lawful

inheritance, so "the members of a society ought to contribute from their

property to the support of the state." A rigorous tax ought to be laid upon

all persons in graduated proportion to their property and "the superfluity of

their possessions." 135 There should be no tax on necessaries, but a heavy tax

on luxuries. The state should finance a national system of education. "If the

children are brought up in common [in national schools] in the bosom of

equality, if they are imbued with the laws of the state and the precepts of

the general will, ... we cannot doubt that they will cherish one another

mutually as brothers, ... to become in time defenders and fathers of the

country of which they will have been the children." 136 Patriotism is better

than cosmopolitanism or a watery pretense of universal sympathy. 137

As the two earlier discourses were overwhelmingly individualistic, so the

article on political economy is predominantly social-istic. Now for the first

time Rousseau announces his peculiar doctrine that there is in every society

a "general will" over and above the algebraic sum of the wishes and dislikes

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 33

of its constituent individuals. The community, in Rousseau's developing

philosophy, is a social organism with its own soul:

The body politic is also a moral being, possessed of a will; and this general

will, which tends always to the preservation and welfare of the whole and of

every part, is the source of the laws, and constitutes for all the members of the

state, in their relations to one another, the rule of what is just or unjust. 138

Around this conception Rousseau builds the ethics and the politics that will

henceforth dominate his views of public affairs. The rebel who thought of

virtue as the expression of the free and natural man now defines it as "noth-

ing more than the conformity of particular wills with the general will"; 139

and he who so recently saw law as one of the sins of civilization, as a con-

venient tool for keeping exploited masses in docile order, now declares that

"it is to law alone that men owe justice and liberty; it is that salutary organ

of the will of all which establishes, in civil right, the natural equality between

men; it is the celestial voice which dictates to each citizen the precepts of

public reason." 140

Perhaps the harassed editors of the Ency elope die had cautioned Rousseau

to moderate, in this article, his attack upon civilization. Seven years later, in

The Social Contract, we shall find him defending the community against

the individual, and building his political philosophy upon the notion of a

sacred and supreme general will. Meanwhile, however, he continued to be

an individualist and a rebel, hating Paris, asserting himself against his friends,

and making fresh enemies every day.

IX. ESCAPE FROM PARIS: 1 756

His closest friends now were Grimm, Diderot, and Mme. d'fipinay.

Grimm was born at Ratisbon in 1723, and was therefore eleven years

younger than Rousseau. He was educated at Leipzig in the closing decade of

Bach's life, and received from Johann August Ernesti a solid grounding in

the languages and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Coming to Paris

in 1749, he learned French with German thoroughness, and was soon writ-

ing articles for Le Mercure. In 1750 he became private secretary to Count

von Friesen. His love of music attached him to Rousseau, while a deeper

hunger brought him to the feet of Mile. Fel, a singer at the opera. When she

preferred M. Cahusac, Grimm, says Rousseau,

took this so much to heart that the appearances of his affliction became tragical.

. . . He passed days and nights in a continued lethargy. He lay with his eyes

open, . . . without speaking, eating, or stirring. . . . The Abbe Raynal and I

watched over him; the Abbe, more robust than I, and in better health than I

was, by night, and I by day, without ever both being absent at one time. 141

Von Friesen summoned a doctor, who refused to prescribe anything except

time. "At length, one morning, Grimm rose, dressed himself, and returned

to his regular way of life, without either then or later mentioning . . . this

irregular lethargy." 142

34 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

Rousseau introduced Grimm to Diderot, and the three dreamed of going

to Italy together. Grimm absorbed avidly the stream of ideas spouting from

the cornucopia of Diderot's mind; he learned the language of the irreverent

philosophes, wrote an agnostic Catechisme pour les enfants, and advised

von Friesen to take three mistresses at one time "in memory of the Holy

Trinity." 143 Rousseau was irked by the growing intimacy between Grimm,

whom Sainte-Beuve was to call "the most French of Germans," and Diderot,

"the most German of Frenchmen." 144 "Grimm," Jean-Jacques complained,

"you neglect me, and I forgive you for it." Grimm took him at his word.

"He said I was right, . . . and shook off all restraint; so that I saw no more

of him except in company with our common friends." 145

In 1747 the Abbe Raynal had begun to send to French and foreign sub-

scribers a fortnightly newsletter, Nouvelles litter aires, reporting events in

the French world of letters, science, philosophy, and art. In 1753 he turned

the enterprise over to Grimm, who, with help from Diderot and others,

carried it on till 1790. Under Grimm the letters had many distinguished sub-

scribers, including Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden, former King Stanislas

Leszczynski of Poland, Catherine II of Russia, the Princess of Saxe-Gotha,

the Prince and Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, the Duchess of Saxe-Coburg,

the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar. Frederick

the Great held back for a time, having several correspondents in France;

finally he consented to receive the letters, but he never paid. Grimm's first

number (May, 1753) announced his plan:

In the sheets which are requested of us we shall not spend time over the

brochures with which Paris is daily inundated; . . . rather we shall seek to

give an exact account, a logical analysis (critique raiso?inee) of the books which

deserve to hold the attention of the public. The drama, which constitutes so

brilliant a part of French literature, will be a considerable part of our report. In

general we shall let nothing escape us which is worthy of the curiosity of other

peoples. 146

This famous Correspondance litteraire is now a chief and precious record

for the intellectual history of France in the second half of the eighteenth

century. Grimm could be forthright in his critiques, since these were not

known to the French public or to the author discussed. He was usually fair,

except, later, to Rousseau. He made many judicious judgments, but mis-

judged Candide as "unable to bear serious criticism"; this, however, was

without prejudice, for he described Voltaire as "the most fascinating, the

most agreeable, and the most famous man in Europe." 147 Voltaire returned

the compliment in his impish way: "What is this Bohemian thinking about,

to have more wit than we?" 148 It was Grimm's Correspondance, more than

any other writings except Voltaire's, that spread through Europe the ideas

of the French Enlightenment. Yet he had his doubts of the philosophes and

their faith in progress. "The world," he said, "is made up of nothing but

abuses which none but a madman would try to reform." 149 And in 1757 he

wrote:

It seems to me that the eighteenth century has surpassed all others in the

eulogiums that it has heaped upon itself. ... A little more, and the best minds

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 35

will persuade themselves that the mild and peaceful empire of philosophy is

about to succeed the long tempests of unreason, and to establish forever the

repose, the tranquillity, and the happiness of mankind. . . . But unluckily the

true philosopher has less consoling but more accurate notions. ... I am a long

way from believing that we are approaching the age of reason, and I lack but

little of believing that Europe is threatened by some fatal revolution. 150

We catch here a hint of the pride and vanity that sometimes irritated

Grimm's friends. More Gallic than the Gauls, he spent hours on grooming

himself, powdering his face and hair, and so sprinkling himself with per-

fume that he was nicknamed "the musk bear." 151 His Correspondance shows

him scattering compliments with expectant hand. Frederick the Great made

it a condition of subscribing to the letters that Grimm should "spare me his

compliments." 152 Such flattery, of course, was part of epistolary style in the

Old Regime.

Grimm, usually cold and calculating, caught the attention of Paris by

almost dying for Mile. Fel, and fighting a duel for Mme. d'£pinay. Louise-

Florence Tardieu d'Esclavelles was the daughter of a Valenciennes baron

who died in the King's service in 1737. Eight years later Louise, aged twenty,

married Denis-Joseph Lalive d'Epinay, son of a rich tax collector. They

came to live in the handsome Chateau de la Chevrette, nine miles from Paris,

near the Forest of Montmorency. Her happiness bubbled. "Will my heart

ever be able to endure such happiness?" she wondered. She wrote to a

cousin: "He was playing the harpsichord, I was sitting on the arm of his

chair, my left hand resting on his shoulder, and my other hand turning over

the leaves; he never missed kissing it each time it passed in front of his lips." 153

She was not beautiful, but she was charmingly petite, tres bien fake (she

tells us); 154 and her big black eyes would later ravish Voltaire. But "always

to feel the same thing" is soon "the same as to feel nothing"; 155 after a year

M. d'£pinay no longer noticed those eyes. He had been promiscuous before

marriage, he became so again. He drank heavily, gambled heavily, and spent

a fortune on the sisters Verrieres, whom he installed in a cottage near La

Chevrette. Meanwhile his wife bore him two children. In 1748 he returned

from a trip in the provinces, slept with his wife, and infected her with

syphilis. Broken in health and spirits, she secured a legal separation from her

husband. He agreed to a generous settlement; she inherited the fortune of

her uncle; she kept La Chevrette; she tried to forget her unhappiness by caring

for her children and helping her friends. When one of these, Mme. de

Julli, fell mortally ill of smallpox, Louise went to nurse her, and stayed with

her to the end, running the risk of an infection that might have killed her or

disfigured her for life.

All her friends agreed that she should take a lover. One came (1746), that

same Dupin de Francueil who gave employment to Rousseau. He began

with music, and ended with syphilis; he was soon cured, while she continued

to suffer. 156 He joined her husband in sharing the Desmoiselles de Verrieres.

Duclos told her bluntly, "Francueil and your husband have the two sisters

between them." 157 She fell into a delirium that lasted thirty hours. Duclos

sought to take Dupin's place, but she sent him away. To these misfortunes

7,6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. I

another was added. Mme. de Julli, dying, had given Louise a batch of papers

revealing her amours, with an earnest request to burn them. Louise did. Then

M. de Julli accused her of having knowingly burned the certificates of her

own indebtedness to him. She denied the charge, but appearances were

against her, for it was known that despite separation she was giving her hus-

band financial help.

It was at this juncture that Grimm entered the drama. He had been in-

troduced to Louise by Rousseau in 1751; the three had several times played

or sung music together. One evening at a party given by Count von Friesen,

a guest expressed conviction of Mme. d'Epinay's guilt. Grimm defended her;

argument rose to the point of honor; accuser and defender fought a duel;

Grimm was slightly wounded. Soon afterward the lost documents were

found; Madame was exonerated; she thanked Grimm as her preux chevalier,

and their mutual esteem ripened into one of the most enduring loves of that

fitful age. When Baron d'Holbach sickened with grief over the death of his

wife, and Grimm went off to take care of him in the countryside, Louise

asked him: "But who will be my knight, monsieur, if I am attacked in your

absence?" Grimm answered: "The same as before— your past life." 158 The

reply was not beyond cavil, but it was beyond praise.

Rousseau had met Mme. d'fipinay in 1748 at Mme. Dupin's. She invited

him to La Chevrette. Her Memoirs describe him fairly:

He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he is without the air

of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages of society, but it is easily

seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He has a brown complexion, white eyes

that overflow with fire and give animation to his expression. . . . They say

he is in bad health, and endures agony which he carefully conceals. ... It is

this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of sullenness. 159

His picture of her is not very gallant:

Her conversation, though agreeable enough in mixed company, was unin-

teresting in private. ... I was happy to show her little attentions, and gave her

little fraternal kisses, which seemed not to be more sensual than herself. . . .

She was very thin, very pale, and had a bosom like the back of her hand. This

defect alone would have been sufficient to moderate my most ardent desires. 160

For seven years he was welcomed in Mme. d'£pinay's home. When she

saw how uncomfortable he was in Paris, she thought of ways to help him,

but she knew that he would refuse money. One day, as they were walking

through her park behind La Chevrette, she showed him a cottage, called

L'Hermitage, which had belonged to her husband. It was unused and in dis-

repair, but its situation, on the very edge of the Forest of Montmorency,

excited Rousseau to exclaim: "Ah, madame, what a delightful habitation!

This asylum was expressly prepared for me." 161 Madame made no reply, but

when, in September, 1755, they walked again to the cottage, Rousseau was

surprised to find it repaired, the six rooms furnished, and the grounds cleared

and neat. He quotes her as saying: "My dear, here behold your refuge; it is

you who have chosen it; friendship offers it to you. I hope this will remove

your cruel idea of separating from me." She knew that he had thought of

CHAP, i) ROUSSEAU WANDERER 37

residing in Switzerland; perhaps she did not know that his enthusiasm for

Geneva had cooled. He "bathed with tears the beneficent hand" of his

friend, but hesitated to accept her offer. She won Therese and Mme. Levas-

seur to her plan, and "at length she triumphed over all my resolutions."

On Easter Sunday, 1756, adding grace to her gift, she came to Paris in

her coach, and took her "bear," as she called him, along with his mistress and

his mother-in-law, to the Hermitage. Therese did not relish separation from

Paris, but Rousseau, sniffing the air, was happier than at any time since his

idyl with Mme. de Warens. "On April 9, 1756, I began to live." 162 Grimm

darkened the occasion with a warning to A4me. d'fipinay:

You do Rousseau a very ill service by giving him the Hermitage, but you

do yourself a very much worse one. Solitude will complete the work of black-

ening his imagination; all his friends will be, in his eyes, unjust and ungrateful,

and you first of all, if you refuse a single time to place yourself at his orders. 163

Then Grimm, now secretary to Marechal d'Estrees, went off to play his

part in the war that was to remake the map of the world.

CHAPTER II

The Seven Years' War

1756-63

I. HOW TO START A WAR

BY 1756 Europe had known eight years of peace. But the War of the

Austrian Succession had settled nothing. It had left Austria insecure

in Bohemia and Italy, Prussia insecure in Silesia, Britain insecure in Hanover,

France insecure in India, America, and on the Rhine. The Treaty of Aix-la-

Chapelle (1748) had achieved no territorial settlement comparable in stability

with that reached by the Treaty of Westphalia a century before. The old

balance of power had been disturbed by the growth of the Prussian army

and the British navy; that army might sally forth on new absorptions; that

navy needed only time to capture the colonies of France, Holland, and

Spain. The rising spirit of nationalism was fed in England by the profits and

prospects of commerce, in Prussia by successful war, in France by a cul-

tural superiority uncomfortably conscious of martial decline. The conflict

between Catholicism and Protestantism had ended in a stalemate; both sides

waited for some turn of chance to renew the Thirty Years' War for posses-

sion of the European soul.

Austria took the initiative in preparing a new throw of the human dice.

Maria Theresa, the thirty-nine-years-old but still fair head of the Aus-

trian empire, had all the pride of her Hapsburg ancestry, all the anger of

a woman scorned; how could she live with Silesia amputated from her in-

herited realm— whose territorial integrity all the major states of Europe had

guaranteed? Even the Frederick who had humiliated her would later praise

her "courage and ability," and the way in which "when it seemed that events

were conspiring to ruin her, this . . . younger ruler caught the spirit of gov-

ernment, and became the soul of her council." 1 Defeated, yielding Silesia as

the price of peace, she made the peace only a truce, and devoted herself to

the reform of administration, the restoration of her shattered armies, and the

acquisition of strong allies. Frequently she visited the camps where her

troops were being trained; for this purpose she traveled to Prague in Bo-

hemia, to Olmiitz in Moravia; she inspired the soldiers with rewards and

distinctions, and even more by her regal and yet womanly presence. Her

generals did not have to swear fidelity to her, for this was in their blood and

chivalry; so the Prince of Liechtenstein spent 200,000 ecus ($1,500,000?)

of his fortune in recruiting and equipping for her a complete artillery corps.

She founded near Vienna a War College for the younger nobility, and

brought to its staff the best teachers of geometry, geography, fortification,

38

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 39

and history. "Under her," said Frederick, "the military of Austria acquired

a degree of perfection never known to her predecessors, and a woman car-

ried out designs worthy of a great man." 2

Diplomacy was the other side of the design. She sent agents everywhere

to win friends for Austria and stir up hostility to Frederick. She noted the

rising strength of Russia, which had been organized by Peter the Great and

was now commanded by the Czarina Elizaveta Petrovna; she saw to it that

Frederick's sarcastic remarks about the amours of the Russian Empress

should reach her ears. Maria Theresa would gladly have renewed her alliance

with England, but that entente had been soured by England's separate peace

with Prussia ( 1 745 ) , which had compelled Austria to surrender Silesia. Now

England's foreign policy was turning to protect her trade in the Baltic

against the power of Russia, and her hold on Hanover against any threat

from Prussia or France. She depended upon Russia for the timber of her

navy, and she depended upon her navy for victory in war. So on September

30, 1755, England signed a treaty that bound Russia, in return for English

subsidies, to maintain 55,000 troops in Livonia; these, the English hoped,

would deter Frederick from any expansionist adventures to the west.

But how should England deal with France? For hundreds of years France

had been her enemy. Time and again France had fomented or financed

Scottish hostilities to England; repeatedly she had prepared or threatened to

invade the British Isles. Now she was the only state that challenged Britain

on the seas and in the colonial world. To defeat France decisively would be

to win her colonies in America and India; it would be to destroy her navy

or render it impotent; the British Empire would then be not only secure but

supreme. So William Pitt the Elder argued to Parliament day after day, in

the most forceful oratory that that body had ever heard. But could France

be defeated? Yes, said Pitt, by allying Prussia to England. Would it not be

dangerous to let Prussia grow stronger? No, Pitt answered; Prussia had a

great army, which on this plan would help England to protect Hanover, but

she had no navy, and therefore could not rival Britain on the sea. It seemed

wiser to let Protestant Prussia replace Catholic France or Catholic Austria

as the dominant power on the Continent, if that would let "Britannia rule

the waves" and capture colonies. Any victories of Frederick in Europe

would strengthen England overseas; hence Pitt's boast that he would win

America and India on the battlefields of the Continent. England would sup-

ply money, Frederick would fight the land battles, England would win half

the world. Parliament consented; Britain proposed to Prussia a pact for

mutual defense.

Frederick had to accept this plan, for the development of events had

clouded his victories. He knew that France was flirting with Austria; if

France and Austria— worse yet, if Russia too— should unite against him he

could hardly resist them all; in such a predicament only England could help

him. If he signed the pact that England offered he could call upon her to

keep Russia from attacking him; and if Russia abstained Austria might be

dissuaded from war. On January 16, 1756, Frederick signed the Treaty of

40 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. II

Westminster, which pledged both England and Prussia to oppose the entry

of foreign troops into Germany. That single clause, they hoped, would pro-

tect Prussia from Russia and Hanover from France.

France, Austria, and Russia all felt that this treaty was a betrayal by their

allies. There had been no formal termination of the alliances that had bound

England with Austria, and France with Prussia, in the War of the Austrian

Succession. Maria Theresa, as she informed the British ambassador, was

shocked to learn that her English friends had signed a pact with "the mortal

and constant enemy of my person and my family." 3 Louis XV complained

that Frederick had deceived him; Frederick replied that the treaty was purely

defensive, and should give no offense to any power not meditating offense.

Mme. de Pompadour, who chose and dominated French ministries, remem-

bered that Frederick had charged her with depositing great sums in British

banks, and had called her "la demoiselle Poisson" (Miss Fish) and "Cotillon

IV" (Petticoat IV— fourth mistress of Louis XV). Louis remembered that

Frederick had ridiculed the barnyard morals of the French King. The deser-

tion struck France just when her armies and treasury were exhausted, and

when her navy was only beginning to recover from the neglect it had

suffered under the pacific ministry of Cardinal Fleury. In 1756 France had

forty-five ships of the line, England had 1 30; 4 naval supplies were clogged

with corruption and theft, naval discipline had been ruined by the invidious

promotion of titled incompetents and the frequency of defeats. To whom

now could France turn for an ally? To Russia?— but England had forestalled

her. To Austria?— but in the last war France had violated her pledge to

guarantee Maria Theresa's inheritance, had joined Prussia in attacking her,

and had continued to attack her even when Frederick had made peace. Aus-

tria under the Hapsburgs, France under the Bourbons, had been foes for

centuries; how could they and their peoples, long trained to mutual hatred,

suddenly become friends?

Yet that was precisely the "reversal of alliances" that the Austrian govern-

ment now proposed to France. So far as we can now trace its history, the

plan took form in the mind of Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, the ablest,

most penetrating, most persevering diplomat produced on the European

Continent in the eighteenth century. The Seven Years' War was to be a

contest in arms between Frederick the Great and Marshal Daun, and a con-

test in brains between Kaunitz and Pitt. "Prince Kaunitz," said Frederick,

"has the wisest head in Europe." 5

Being a second son, Kaunitz was told to become a priest; instead, privately,

he became a disciple of Voltaire. 6 As his father served as ambassador to the

Vatican and as governor of Moravia, the son inherited diplomacy. At thirty-

one he was Austrian envoy at Turin. His first dispatch to his government was

so logically reasoned on such careful observation of political realities that

Count von Uhlfeld, presenting it to Maria Theresa, said, "Behold your first

minister." 7 At thirty-seven he was Austrian plenipotentiary at the Congress

of Aix-la-Chapelle. There he defended the interests of Maria Theresa with

such pertinacity and skill that even in her defeat the Empress was grateful

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 41

for his services and devotion. And when, as early as 1749, he broached to her

his plan for an alliance with France, she met with an open mind the idea of em-

bracing the traditional enemy of her house. Her heart was set on defeating

Frederick and regaining Silesia. But this, Kaunitz explained, could not be

done by alliance with England, whose power was on the seas; it required

alliance with France and Russia, whose power was on the land. Between

these and Austria Frederick could be crushed. The Empress bade Kaunitz

labor to this end.

In 1 75 1 he was sent as ambassador to Paris. He astonished the nobility by

the splendor of his official entry to the city; he pleased the populace by giv-

ing alms; he amused the salons with his luxurious raiment, his assortment of

cosmetics, and his laboriously powdered curls; 8 "a most high-sniffing, fantas-

tic, slightly insolent fellow," thought Carlyle; 9 but he impressed the King,

his mistress, and their ministers by his knowledge of affairs and his appraisal

of policies. Gradually he prepared their minds for an entente with Austria.

He pictured the possibility of bringing Russia, Poland, and Saxony into tak-

ing part in disciplining Frederick. He asked what France had gained by her

alliance with Prussia— only the aggrandizement of a land power that chal-

lenged the Continental hegemony of France; and had not Frederick repeat-

edly broken his pledge when it suited his interest?

Kaunitz was making good headway when Maria Theresa called him back

to Vienna to be her chancellor, with full power over both domestic and

foreign affairs (1753). His plan was long opposed by the aging nobles at the

Viennese court; patiently he expounded and defended it; the Empress sup-

ported him; and on August 21, 1755, the proposal for an alliance with France

received the formal approval of the Imperial ministry. Count Georg von

Starhemberg, who had succeeded Kaunitz as Austrian ambassador at Paris,

was instructed to promote the grand design at every opportunity with Louis

XV and Mme. de Pompadour. Kaunitz sent a flattering letter to the mai-

tresse-en-titre (August 30, 1755), and attached to it a note which she was

requested to hand secretly to the King. She did so. The note was from Maria

Theresa, and read:

As an empress and a queen, I promise that nothing will ever be disclosed of

all that is going to be offered in my name by Count Starhemberg to the most

Christian King, and that the deepest secrecy in this respect will always be

maintained, whether negotiations succeed or fail. It will be understood, of

course, that the King will give a similar declaration and promise.

Vienna, June 21, 1755 10

Louis appointed the Abbe de Bernis and the Marquise de Pompadour to

confer privately with Starhemberg at her pavilion "Babiole." There the am-

bassador proposed, in the name of the Empress, that France should renounce

her alliance with Prussia, and should pledge at least financial aid to Austria

in case of war. He argued that Frederick was a useless and unreliable ally,

and he hinted that Frederick was even now engaged in clandestine dealings

with the British ministry. Austria, for her part, would refrain from any hos-

tile action against France if France should make war upon England; in case

42 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. II

of such a war Austria would allow France to occupy Ostend and Nieuport,

and she might ultimately allow the Austrian Netherlands to fall to France.

Louis noted that the pact would involve him in an Austrian war against

Prussia, but would not pledge Austrian aid to France against England. He

had good reason to fear Frederick's army more than the Austrian— so often

defeated and so badly led in the recent war. He instructed Bernis to reply

that France would make no change in her alliance with Prussia until proofs

were offered of Frederick's dealings with England. Kaunitz could as yet

offer no such proofs, and was temporarily checked in his course. But when

Louis received Frederick's acknowledgment of the Anglo-Prussian Treaty

of Westminster, he saw that his alliance with Prussia was factually dead. Per-

haps, amid his sins, it occurred to him that he might appease the Almighty

by uniting the Catholic powers— France, Austria, Poland, and Spain— in a

plan to control the destinies of Europe. 11 On May i, 1756, the Treaty of

Versailles completed the reversal of alliances. The preamble professed that

the sole aim of the convention was to maintain the peace of Europe and the

balance of power. If either of the contracting parties should be threatened

in its European possessions by any power but England, the other would

come to its aid by diplomatic intercession and, if necessary, by subsidies or

troops. Austria would not promise aid to France against England, and France

would not aid Austria against Prussia unless Prussia should be clearly the

aggressor. As Louis saw no likelihood of Prussia endangering her gains by

again attacking Austria, he and his mistress could deceive themselves into

believing that the new alliance made for peace on the Continent.

Kaunitz had as yet fallen short of his aim to secure French aid against

Prussia. But he was patient; perhaps he could prod Frederick into attacking

Austria. Meanwhile he had little difficulty in persuading the Czarina into the

new alliance. Elizaveta was eager to remove the Prussian obstacle to Russia's

expansion westward. She offered to attack Prussia before the end of 1756 if

Austria would promise to do likewise; and she promised, in that event, to

make no peace with Prussia until Silesia was completely restored to Austria.

She learned with delight that France had signed the Treaty of Versailles.

Kaunitz had to check her enthusiasm; he knew that her armies would not be

ready for a major campaign till 1757. Not until December 31, 1756, did he

sign the agreement by which Russia formally joined the Franco- Austrian

entente.

Meanwhile England, confident that her alliance with Frederick would

immobilize Austria, had already begun naval operations against France, with-

out any declaration of war. From June, 1755, English men-of-war seized

French shipping wherever possible. France retaliated by preparing an inva-

sion of England, and by sending a squadron of fifteen vessels, under the Due

de Richelieu, to attack Minorca. This island had been captured by the British

in the War of the Spanish Succession ( 1 709) . To reinforce the small garrison

there Britain dispatched ten ships under Admiral John Byng; three additional

vessels joined these at Gibraltar. On May 20, 1756, the hostile fleets engaged

near Minorca. The French were repulsed, but the English squadron suffered

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 43

such damage that Byng led it back to Gibraltar, making no attempt to land

reinforcements at Minorca. The helpless garrison surrendered; France had

now a strategic post in the Mediterranean; Richelieu was hailed as a hero in

Paris and Versailles, and Byng was executed on his own quarterdeck in

Portsmouth Harbor (March 14, 1757) on the charge of failure to do his

utmost for victory; Voltaire and Richelieu interceded for him in vain. This,

said Voltaire, was England's way of "encouraging the others" who held

British commands. On May 17, 1756, England declared war on France, but

the official inception of the Seven Years' War was left to Frederick.

He knew that his conquest of Silesia had left him subject to revanche

whenever Maria Theresa should find new resources and allies. His own re-

sources were perilously limited. His kingdom was an assortment of disjecta

membra: East Prussia was severed from Prussia proper by Poland, and the

Prussian provinces in Westphalia and East Frisia were separated from

Brandenburg by independent German states. Including these scattered frag-

ments and Silesia, all Prussia had in 1756 some four million population, Eng-

land eight million, France twenty. A large part of Prussia's population was

in Silesia, which was still half Catholic and pro- Austrian. Only seven miles

from Berlin lay the border of hostile Saxony, whose Elector, the Catholic

King Augustus III of Poland, looked upon Frederick as an insolent and

rapacious infidel. How could one survive in that caldron of enmity?

Only by wits, economy, a good army, and good generals. His own wits

were as keen as any; he was the best-educated ruler of his age; he came off

with honors in correspondence, conversation, and controversy with Vol-

taire. But his tongue was too sharp to be loosed; he might have had calmer

seas had he not spoken of Elizaveta Petrovna, Maria Theresa, and Mme. de

Pompadour as the "three first whores of Europe"; 12 it is comforting to see

that even the Great can be foolish now and then. As to the economy of

Prussia, Frederick subjected it to state control and what seemed to him the

unavoidable needs of possible war. He did not dare, in the circumstances, to

change the feudal structure of Prussian life, lest it disturb the feudal organi-

zation of his army. That army was his salvation and his religion. Ninety per

cent of his revenues went to its maintenance. 13 He called it the Atlas whose

strong shoulders carried the state. 14 He built it up from the 100,000 men

bequeathed him by his father to 150,000 in 1756. He disciplined it with

severe punishments to immediate and precise obedience, to march steadily

toward the opposing line without firing a shot till ordered, to change direc-

tion, and maneuver en masse, under fire. It had, at the beginning of the war,

the best generals in Europe after Frederick himself— Schwerin, Seydlitz, and

James Keith.

Almost as important as his generals were the spies that he had scattered

among his enemies. They left him no doubt that Maria Theresa was forming

a cordon of hostile powers around him. In 1753-55 his agents in Dresden

and Warsaw secured copies of secret correspondence, between the Saxon

and Austrian ministries, which convinced him that these courts were con-

spiring to attack and— if fortune favored— dismember Prussia, and that France

44

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. II

was conniving at the scheme. 15 On June 23, 1756, he ordered the Prussian

general in Konigsberg to be prepared for an attack from Russia. He notified

the British government that "the court of Vienna has three designs to which

its present steps are tending: to establish its despotism in the Empire, to ruin

the Protestant cause, and to reconquer Silesia." 16 He learned that Saxony

was planning to enlarge its army from seventeen thousand to forty thousand

during the winter; 17 he guessed that the allies were waiting for the spring of

1757 to advance upon him from three directions; and he resolved to strike

before their mobilization was complete.

He felt that his only chance of escaping from his peril was to disable at

least one of his foes before they could unite in action. Schwerin agreed with

him, but one of his ministers, Count von Podewils, begged him not to give

his enemies excuse for branding him as the aggressor; Frederick called him

"Monsieur de la timide politique" 18 Long ago, in a secret "Political Testa-

ment" (1752), he had advised his successor to conquer Saxony and thereby

give Prussia the geographical unity, the economic resources, and the political

power indispensable to survival. 19 He had put the idea aside as beyond himself

to realize; now it seemed to him a military necessity. He must protect his

western frontier by disarming Saxony. Even in his almost idealistic Anti-

Machiavel (1740) he had sanctioned an offensive war to forestall a threat-

ened attack. 20 Mitchell, the Prussian minister in England, informed him that

while the British government strongly desired the maintenance of peace on

the Continent, it recognized the emergency that Frederick faced, and would

not hold him "in the least to blame if he tried to forestall his enemies instead

of waiting until they carried out their hostile intentions." 21

In July, 1756, he sent an envoy to Maria Theresa soliciting assurance that

Austria intended no attack upon Prussia either in the current year or in the

next. A member of the Austrian cabinet thought such assurance should be

given; Kaunitz refused to send it; all that Maria Theresa would say was that

"in the present crisis I deem it necessary to take measures for the security of

myself and my allies, which tend to the prejudice of no one." 22 Frederick

sent a second message to the Empress, asking for a clearer reply to his re-

quest for assurance; she answered that she "had concluded no offensive

alliance; and although the critical situation of Europe compelled her to arm,

she had no intention to violate the Treaty of Dresden [which pledged her

to peace with Frederick], but she would not bind herself by any promise

from acting as circumstances required." 23 Frederick had anticipated such a

reply; before it reached him he led his army into Saxony (August 29, 1756).

So began the Seven Years' War.

II. THE OUTLAW: 1 756-57

He made a halfhearted attempt to enlist the Saxon Elector as an ally,

offering him Maria Theresa's Bohemia as a bribe. Augustus scorned this

vicarious philanthropy; he ordered his generals to stop Frederick's advance,

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 45

and fled to Warsaw. The Saxon force was too small to resist the finest army

in Europe; it withdrew to the citadel at Pirna; Frederick entered Dresden

unopposed (September 9, 1756). At once he bade his agents open the Saxon

archives and bring him the originals of those documents that had revealed

Saxony's participation in the plan to chasten, perhaps to dismember, Prussia.

The aging Electress-Queen with her own person barred access to the ar-

chives, and demanded that Frederick should respect her royal inviolability;

he ordered her to be removed; she fled; the documents were secured.

Maria Theresa sent an army from Bohemia to dislodge the invader; Freder-

ick met it and defeated it at Lobositz, on the road from Dresden to Prague

(October 1). He returned to besiege Pirna; it surrendered (October 15);

he impressed the fourteen thousand captive Saxon soldiers into his own

divisions, arguing that this was cheaper than feeding them as prisoners; the

German appetite was notorious. He declared Saxony a conquered country,

and applied its revenues to his own needs. During the winter he published

the Saxon documents to the world. Maria Theresa called them forgeries, and

appealed to France, Russia, and all God-fearing Christians to aid her against

the man who, by flagrant aggression, had again plunged Europe into war.

Europe generally agreed in condemning Frederick. The German princi-

palities, fearing a fate like Saxony's if Frederick should triumph, declared

war upon Prussia (January 17, 1757), and raised a Reichsarmee, or Imperial

Army, for action against the Prussian King. Kaunitz lost no time in remind-

ing Louis XV that France had promised help in case Austria should be

threatened. The Dauphine, daughter of the Saxon Elector, pleaded with her

father-in-law to rescue her father. Mme. de Pompadour, who had hoped to

enjoy her reign in peace, now inclined to war. In appreciation of her aid

Maria Theresa sent her a royal portrait decorated with gems valued at 77,-

278 livres; 24 Pompadour became martial. Louis, usually slow to decide, de-

cided with impetuous vigor. By a second Treaty of Versailles (May 1, 1757)

France bound herself in defensive-offensive alliance with Austria, pledged

her an annual subsidy of twelve million florins, agreed to equip two German

armies, and proposed to devote a French force of 105,000 men to the

"destruction totale de la Frusse" She promised never to make peace with

Prussia until Silesia had been restored to Austria. When that restoration had

been consummated France was to receive five frontier towns in the Austrian

Netherlands, and these southern Netherlands were to be transferred to the

Bourbon Infante of Spain in return for Spanish duchies in Italy. Perhaps

France was knowingly writing off her colonies to British conquest by devot-

ing nearly all her resources to absorbing "Belgium." Kaunitz could feel that

he had won a vital diplomatic victory.

He found it easy now to draw Russia into active aid. The Convention of

St. Petersburg (February 2, 1757) committed Russia and Austria each to

put eighty thousand troops into the field, and to make war until Silesia had

been reunited with Austria, and Prussia had been reduced to a minor power.

Turning to Sweden, Kaunitz brought her into the alliance by guaranteeing

to her, in the event of victory, all that part of Pomerania which had been

46 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. II

conceded to her in the Treaty of Westphalia. Sweden was to contribute

25,000 men, Austria and France were to finance them. Poland, under its

refugee King Augustus III, pledged her modest resources to the Franco-

Austrian alliance. Now nearly all of Europe except England, Hanover, Den-

mark, Holland, Switzerland, Turkey, and Hesse-Cassel was united against

Frederick.

And England was tempted to leave Frederick to his fate. George II saw

with horror that his beloved Hanover, the electorate from which his father

had come to rule Britain, lay defenseless in the path of overwhelming armies,

with Frederick too distant and harassed to send substantial aid. The temptation

was made almost irresistible when Kaunitz offered to leave Hanover inviolate

if England would keep out of the Continental war; at that moment Fred-

erick's fate was touch and go. Pitt, who was appointed secretary of state on

November 19, 1756, was at first inclined to let Prussia and Hanover shift

for themselves, while England would concentrate all her martial resources

upon the contest for colonies; little wonder that George II, loving Hanover,

hated Pitt. Soon Pitt changed his mind, and declared that a France victorious

against Frederick would be master of Europe, and soon of England too;

Parliament must vote money for Frederick and troops for Hanover; France

must be made to spend herself in Europe, while England would pluck colo-

nies and markets out of the conquered seas.

So in January, 1757, Britain signed a second alliance with Prussia, promis-

ing subsidies to Frederick and soldiers to Hanover. But then, suddenly, Pitt

was dismissed (April 5), politics befuddled policy, help to Frederick was

delayed, and for almost a year he stood alone, with 145,000 men, against

armies converging from every quarter upon him: in the west 105,000 troops

from France and 20,000 from the German states; in the south 133,000 from

Austria; in the east 60,000 from Russia; in the north 16,000 from Sweden.

And on that same day which saw Pitt fall, the Emperor Francis I— the usually

amiable and docile husband of Maria Theresa— officially branded Frederick

as an outlaw, and called upon all good men to hunt him out as an impious

enemy of mankind.

III. FROM PRAGUE TO ROSSBACH: 1 757

On January 10 Frederick sent to his ministers in Berlin some secret instruc-

tions: "If I am killed, affairs must continue without the slightest alteration.

... If I have the bad luck to be captured, I forbid the smallest consideration

for my person, or the slightest attention to anything I may write in cap-

tivity." 25

It was a useless gesture, for without his military genius Prussia was lost.

His only hope lay in facing his foes one at a time before they could unite.

The French were not yet ready for battle, and perhaps the regiments that

England was sending to Hanover could hold them for a while. The Austrians

were accumulating in nearby Bohemia and Moravia immense magazines of

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 47

arms and provisions to equip their armies for an invasion of Silesia. Frederick

decided first to capture those precious stores, fight the Austrians, then march

back to face the French. He led his own force from Saxony, and ordered

the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern from East Germany, and Marshal Schwerin

from Silesia, to advance into Bohemia and meet him in the hills overlooking

Prague from the west. It was so done; the magazines were captured; and on

May 6, near Prague, 64,000 Prussians met 61,000 Austrians under Prince

Charles of Lorraine in the first great battle of the war.

The issue was decided not by numbers, nor by strategy, but by courage.

Schwerin's regiments, under Austrian fire, marched waist-deep, shoulder-

deep, through morasses. For a time they lost heart and turned in flight; then

Schwerin, aged seventy-three, rallied them, wrapped the colors about his

body, rode straight in the face of the foe, was struck by five balls at once,

and fell dead. His men, loving him almost more than they feared death,

charged in fury against the enemy, and turned defeat into victory. The

slaughter on both sides was enormous, and Frederick's losses included four

hundred officers and his best general; in this war generals did not die in bed.

The 46,000 surviving Austrians retired into their citadel in Prague, and pre-

pared to resist siege.

But Frederick found siege difficult, for Marshal Leopold von Daun, ablest

of the Austrian commanders, was coming up from Moravia with another

64,000 men. Leaving part of his army to blockade the citadel, Frederick

marched eastward with 32,000 troops, and met the advancing masses at Kolin

(June 16). The odds against him were too great, and the generalship of

Daun was in this case superior to his own. Two of Frederick's generals dis-

obeyed his orders, causing confusion; Frederick lost his temper, and shouted

to his retreating cavalry, "Would you live forever?" 26 The infantry, over-

whelmed by carnage, refused to advance. Frederick, despondent, withdrew

from the field, leaving 14,000 Prussians dead, wounded, or prisoners. He led

his 1 8,000 survivors back to Prague, abandoned the siege, and returned with

his remnants toward Saxony.

At Leitmeritz he rested his army for three weeks. There, on July 2, he

received word that his mother, Sophia Dorothea, had died. The iron man of

war broke down, wept, and secluded himself for a day. Perhaps he won-

dered, now, whether his assault on Silesia, seventeen years before, had been

a foolish tempting of Nemesis. He shared his grief with his sister Wilhelmine,

margravine of Bayreuth, whom he loved beyond any other soul. On July 7,

his pride nearly spent, he sent her a desperate appeal:

Since you, my dear sister, insist upon undertaking the great work of peace,

I beg you to be good enough to send M. de Mirabeau to . . . offer the favorite

[Mme. de Pompadour, formerly Cotillon IV] as much as 500,000 crowns for

peace. ... I leave it all to you . . . whom I adore, and who, although far

more accomplished than I, is another myself. 27

Nothing came of this approach. Wilhelmine tried another way: she wrote to

Voltaire, then living in Switzerland, and begged him to use his influence.

Voltaire transmitted her proposal to Cardinal de Tencin, who had opposed

48 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. II

the Franco-Austrian alliance. Tencin tried and failed. 28 The allies were sniff-

ing the scent of victory. Maria Theresa talked now of completely dismem-

bering Frederick's realm: not only must Silesia and Glatz be restored to

her, but Magdeburg and Halberstadt were to go to Augustus III, Pomerania

was to revert to Sweden, and Cleves and Ravensburg were to reward the

Elector Palatine.

Her hopes seemed reasonable. A French "army of the Dauphine" had

entered Germany; part of it, under Pompadour's favorite general, the Prince

de Soubise, was coming to join with the Imperial army at Erfurt; another

part, under Marechal d'Estrees, advanced to meet a Hanoverian force under

George II's son, the Duke of Cumberland. Near the village of Hastenbeck

the French so badly defeated this army (July 26) that the Duke signed at

Kloster-Zeven (September 8) a "convention" by which he promised to keep

his Hanoverian troops from any further action against France.

Word of this humiliating capitulation may have reached Frederick at ap-

proximately the same time as news that a Swedish army had landed in

Pomerania, and a Russian army of 100,000 men under Marshal Stepan Aprak-

sin had invaded East Prussia and overwhelmed a force of 30,000 Prussians at

Gross-Jagersdorf (July 30). These reverses, added to his own debacle in

Bohemia, almost destroyed Frederick's hope of overcoming enemies so

numerous and so fortified with reserves of materials and men. Having aban-

doned the morality as well as the theology of Christianity, he fell back upon

the ethics of the Stoics, and meditated suicide. To the end of the war he

carried on his person a phial of poison; he was resolved that his foes should

never take him except as a corpse. On August 24 he sent to Wilhelmine a

semihysterical paean to death:

And now, ye promoters of sacred lies, go on leading cowards by the nose;

... to me the enchantment of life is ended, the charm disappears. I see that all

men are but the sport of Destiny, and that if there do exist some Gloomy and

Inexorable Being, who allows a despised herd of creatures to go on multiply-

ing here, he values them as nothing; he looks down upon a Phalaris crowned

and a Socrates in chains, upon our virtues and our misdeeds, upon the horror

of war and the cruel plagues that ravage the earth, as things indifferent to him.

Wherefore my sole refuge and only haven, dear sister, is in the arms of death. 29

She answered (September 15) by vowing to join him in suicide:

My dearest brother, your letter, and the one you wrote to Voltaire, . . .

have almost killed me. What fatal resolutions, great God! Ah, my dear brother,

you say you love me, and yet you drive a dagger into my heart. Your letter . . .

made me shed rivers of tears. Now I am ashamed of such weakness. . . . Your

lot shall be mine. I will not survive either your misfortunes or those of the

House I belong to. You may calculate that such is my firm resolution.

But after this avowal let me entreat you to look back at what was the pitiable

state of your enemy when you lay before Prague. It is the sudden whirl of

Fortune for both parties. . . . Caesar was once the slave of pirates, and became

lord of the earth. A great genius like yours finds resources even when all seems

lost. I suffer a thousand times more than I can tell you; nevertheless hope does

not abandon me. ... I must finish, but I shall never cease to be, with the most

profound respect, your Wilhelmine. 30

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 49

She appealed to Voltaire to support her plea, and early in October, in his

first letter to Frederick since 1 7 5 3, he seconded her arguments:

The Catos and Othos, whose death your Majesty thinks noble, had nothing

else they could do but fight or die. . . . You must keep in mind how many

courts there are that see in your invasion of Saxony a violation of international

law. . . . Our morality and your situation are far from requiring such an act

[as suicide]. . . . Your life is needed; you know how dear it is to a numerous

family. . . . The affairs of Europe are never long on the same basis, and it is

the duty of a man like you to hold himself in readiness for events. ... If your

courage led you to that heroic extremity it would not be approved. Your

partisans would condemn it, your enemies would triumph. 31

To which Frederick replied in prose and verse:

Pour moi, menace du naufrage,

Je dois, en affrontant Forage,

Penser, vivre, et mourir en roi—

"as for me, menaced with shipwreck, I must, confronting the storm, think,

live, and die like a king." 32

Between poems (always in French) he searched for the French army;

now he longed for a battle that would settle for him the question of life or

death. At Leipzig, October 15, he sent for Johann Christoph Gottsched

(who wrote verses in German), and tried to convince him that German

poetry was impossible. So many explosions— Knap, Klop, Krotz, Krok; so

many gutturals, so many consonants— even in the professor's name five in a

row; how could you make a melody with such a language? Gottsched pro-

tested; Frederick had to prepare for another march; but ten days later, back

in Leipzig, he received the old poet again, found time to listen to a Gott-

sched ode in German, and gave him a gold snuffbox as a parting token of

good will.

During that literary interlude more bad news came: a force of Croats

under Count Hadik was advancing upon Berlin, and rumor said that Swedish

and French battalions were converging upon the Prussian capital. Frederick

had left a garrison there, but far too small to buffet such an avalanche. If

Berlin should fall, his principal source of supplies in arms, powder, and cloth-

ing would be in the hands of the enemy. He hurried with his army to rescue

the city and his family. On the march he received word that no French or

Swedish force was moving toward Berlin; that Hadik, halting in the suburbs,

had exacted a ransom of ^27,000 from Berlin, and had led his Croats con-

tentedly away (October 16). There was other comforting intelligence: the

Russians under Apraksin, racked with disease and famishing for food, had

withdrawn from East Prussia into Poland. Less pleasant messages informed

Frederick that the main French army under Soubise had entered Saxony,

had plundered the western cities, and had united with the Imperial army

under the Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen. The weary King turned back in

his tracks, and led his troops to the vicinity of Rossbach, some thirty miles

west of Leipzig.

There his tired army, reduced to 21,000 men, came at last face to face

50 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. II

with the 41,000 troops of France and the Reich. Even so, Soubise advised

against risking battle; better, he said, to continue evading Frederick and

wearing him out with fruitless marches until the overwhelming superiority

of the allies in manpower and materials should force him to yield. Soubise

knew the breakdown of discipline in his ranks, and the lack of enthusiasm,

in the mostly Protestant soldiers of the Reichsarmee, for fighting against

Frederick. 33 Hildburghausen pleaded for action, and Soubise gave in. The

German marshal led his men on a long detour to attack the Prussians on their

left flank. Frederick, watching from a housetop in Rossbach, ordered his

cavalry under Seydlitz to execute a countermovement against the right flank

of the enemy. Screened by hills, and proceeding with disciplined speed, the

Prussian cavalry, 3,800 strong, charged down upon the allied troops and

overcame them before they could re-form their ranks. The French came up

too late, and were shattered by the Prussian artillery; in ninety minutes the

crucial battle of Rossbach was over (November 5, 1757). The allies re-

treated in disorder, leaving 7,700 dead on the field; the Prussians lost only

550 men. Frederick ordered the prisoners to be well treated, and invited the

captured officers to share his table. With French grace and wit he excused

the limited fare: "Mais, messieurs, je ne vous attendais pas shot, en si grand

nombre" (But, gentlemen, I did not expect you so soon, in so great num-

ber). 34

Military men on all sides marveled at the disproportion of the losses, and at

the superior generalship that had made this possible. Even France confessed

admiration, and the French people, so lately allied with Prussia, could not yet

look upon Frederick as their foe. Did he not speak and write good French?

The philosophes applauded his victories and claimed him as their champion

of free thought against the religious obscurantism that they were fighting

at home. 35 Frederick responded to the gallant emotions of the French by

saying, "I am not accustomed to regard the French as enemies." 36 But pri-

vately he composed— in French— a poem expressing his pleasure at having

given the French a kick in the cul, which Carlyle delicately translated as

"the seat of honor." 37

England rejoiced with him, and put new faith in her ally. London cele-

brated his birthday with bonfires in the streets, and devout Methodists ac-

claimed the infidel hero as the savior of the one true religion. Pitt had been

brought back to head the government (July 29, 1757); henceforth he was

the unswerving support of the Prussian King. "England has taken long to

produce a great man for this contest," said Frederick, "but here is one at

last!" 38 Pitt denounced the Convention of Kloster-Zeven as cowardice and

treason— though the King's son had signed it; he persuaded Parliament to

send a better army to protect Hanover and help Frederick (October); and

whereas it had voted only ^164,000 for Cumberland's "Army of Observa-

tion," now it voted ;£ 1,200,000 for an "Army of Operations." Pitt and

Frederick united in choosing, as leader of this new force, Frederick's

brother-in-law and military pupil, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, thirty-six

years old, handsome, cultured, brave, who played the violin so well, said

CHAP. II ) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 51

Burney, that "he might have made his fortune by it." 39 Here was an instru-

ment nobly fit to play second fiddle to Frederick's flute!

IV. THE FOX AT BAY: 1757-60

Frederick had not much leisure for rejoicing. A French army under

Richelieu still held much of Hanover. On the very day of Rossbach 43,000

Austrians laid seige to Schweidnitz, the principal stronghold and storehouse

of the Prussians in Silesia; Frederick had left 41,000 men there, but they had

been reduced by desertion and death to 28,000; these were poorly led by

the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern, who ignored the King's order to attack the

besiegers; on November 11 he surrendered the fortress, yielding to the

Austrians 7,000 prisoners, 330,000 thalers, and provisions sufficient to main-

tain 88,000 men for two months. The victors, amplified to 83,000 troops by

union with forces under Prince Charles and Marshal Daun, went on to

Breslau; on November 22 they overwhelmed a small force of Prussians;

Breslau fell, and most of Silesia was now restored to the triumphant Maria

Theresa. Frederick might well feel that his victory at Rossbach had been

annulled.

But that victory had renewed his courage, and he no longer spoke of

suicide. His army too had recovered from its marches and battles, and

seemed usefully resentful of the ravages with which French soldiers had

desecrated Protestant churches in Saxony. Frederick appealed to his men

to help him recapture Silesia. They marched 170 milqs in twelve wintry days

through difficult terrain. En route they were joined by the remains of the

Prussian forces that had been defeated at Schweidnitz and Breslau. On

December 3 Frederick, with 43,000 men, sighted the 72,000 Austrians who

were encamped near Leuthen on the road to Breslau. That evening Frederick

addressed his captains in a speech prefiguring the martial harangues of

Napoleon:

It is not unknown to you, gentlemen, what disasters have befallen here while

we were busy with the French and Imperial armies. Schweidnitz is gone, . . .

Breslau is gone and all our war stores there; most of Silesia is gone. . . . My

embarrassments would be beyond recovery if it were not for my unbounded

confidence in your courage, your constancy, and your love for the Fatherland.

. . . There is hardly one among you who has not distinguished himself by

some conspicuous deed of valor. ... I flatter myself, therefore, that in the

coming opportunity you will not fail in any sacrifice that your country may

demand of you.

This opportunity is close at hand. I should feel that I had accomplished

nothing if Austria were left in possession of Silesia. Let me tell you, then, that I

propose, in defiance of all the rules in the art of war, to attack the army of

Prince Charles, three times as large as ours, wherever I find it. The question is

not of his numbers or the strength of his position; all this, by the courage of

our troops, and the careful execution of our plans, I hope to overcome. I must

take this step, or all will be lost; we must defeat the enemy, or we shall lie

buried under his batteries. So I read the case; so I shall act.

52 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. II

Make my determination known to all officers of the army; prepare the men

for the work that is to come, and tell them that 1 feel justified in demanding

exact fulfillment of orders. For you, when I reflect that you are Prussians, can

I think that you will act unworthily? But if there should be one or another

among you who dreads to share all dangers with me [here Frederick looked

into each face in turn], he can have his discharge, this evening, and shall suffer

not the least reproach from me. . . .

I knew that none of you would desert me. I count, then, absolutely on your

faithful help, and on certain victory. Should 1 not survive to reward you for

your devotion, the Fatherland must do it. Return now to camp, and report to

your troops what you have heard from me.

The cavalry regiment that does not at once, on receipt of the order, throw

itself upon the enemy I will, directly after the battle, unhorse, and make it a

garrison regiment. The infantry battalion that even begins to hesitate, no mat-

ter what the danger may be, shall lose its colors, its swords, and the gold lace

from its uniforms.

And now, gentlemen, good night. Soon we shall have beaten the enemy, or

we shall see each other no more. 40

Heretofore the Austrians, following a Fabian policy, had avoided battle

with Frederick, hesitating to pit their troops and generals against Prussian

discipline and Frederick's tactical genius; but now, inspired by superior

numbers and recent victories, they decided, against the advice of Marshal

Daun, to face the King in battle. And so, on December 5, 1757, the human

pawns of dynastic rivalry— 43,000 against 73,000— advanced upon each

other's swords and guns in the greatest battle of the war. "That battle,"

said Napoleon, "was a masterpiece. Of itself it suffices to entitle Frederick

to a place in the first rank among generals." 41 He sought first to gain the

hills, from which his artillery could fire over the heads of his infantry into the

enemy's ranks. He deployed his troops in an oblique order anciently used

by Epaminondas of Thebes: separate columns were to move at approxi-

mately forty-five-degree angles to strike the enemy sidewise and so disorder

his line of defense. Frederick pretended to be aiming his strongest pressure

against the Austrian right; Prince Charles weakened his left wing to reinforce

the right; Frederick poured his best troops upon the diminished left, routed

it, and then turned to attack the right wing on its flank, while the Prussian

cavalry rode down upon that same wing from concealment in the hills.

Order triumphed over disorder; the Austrians surrendered or fled; 20,000

of them were taken prisoner— a catch unprecedented in military history; 42

3,000 more were left dead, and 116 pieces of artillery fell into Prussian

hands. The Prussians too lost heavily— 1,141 dead, 5,118 wounded, 85 cap-

tured. When the carnage was over Frederick thanked his generals: "This

day will bring the renown of your name, and of the nation, to the latest

posterity." 43

The victor pursued his victory with passionate resolve to regain Silesia.

Within a day after the battle his army besieged the Austrian garrison in

Breslau; Sprecher, its commander, posted placards through the town pro-

claiming instant death for anyone who breathed a word of surrender; twelve

days later (December 18) he surrendered. Frederick took there 17,000

prisoners and precious military stores. Soon all Silesia, except heavily gar-

CHAP.Il) THE SEVEN YEARS* WAR

53

risoned and fortified Schweidnitz, was back in Prussian hands. Prince

Charles, humble before Daun's silent reproaches, retired to his estate in

Austria. Bernis and other French leaders advised Louis XV to make peace;

Pompadour overruled them, and replaced Bernis with the Due de Choiseul

as minister for foreign affairs (1758); but France, suspecting that she was

fighting for Austria while sacrificing her colonies, lost heart for the war.

Richelieu showed so little enthusiasm, so little fervor in pursuing his advan-

tage in Hanover, that he was recalled from his command (February, 1758).

He was replaced by the Comte de Clermont, an abbe licensed by the Pope

to keep his benefice while playing general. 44 The French evacuated Hanover

before the resolute advances of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick; they yielded

Minden to him in March; soon all Westphalia was freed from the French,

who there too had made themselves hated by plunder and desecration. 45

Ferdinand marched west and, with half as many men, defeated Clermont's

main force at Krefeld on the Rhine (June 23). Clermont yielded his post to

the Due de Contades; the defeated army was joined by Soubise with new

French levies and the survivors of Rossbach; before this united force Ferdi-

nand withdrew to Munster and Paderborn.

Encouraged by a season of victories, England signed (April 11) a third

treaty with Frederick, promising him a subsidy of ,£670,000 by October,

and pledging herself against a separate peace. 46 Meanwhile Frederick, his own

Prussia having been taxed to exhaustion, taxed Saxony and other conquered

territory likewise. He issued debased currencies, and (like Voltaire) hired

Jewish financiers to make profitable deals for him in foreign exchange. 47 By

the spring of 1758 he had rebuilt his army to 145,000 men. In April he at-

tacked and recovered Schweidnitz. Eluding the main Austrian army (recon-

stituted under Daun), he moved south with 70,000 men to Olmutz in Mo-

ravia; if he could capture this Austrian stronghold he hoped to march against

Vienna itself.

But about this same time 50,000 Russians under the Count of Fermor swept

over East Prussia and attacked Custrin, only fifty miles east of Berlin. Fred-

erick abandoned the siege of Olmutz and hurried north with 15,000 men. On

the way he learned that Wilhelmine was critically ill; he stopped at Grussau

to send her an anxious note: "O you, dearest of my family, you whom I have

most at heart of all beings in this world— for the sake of whatever is most

precious to you, preserve yourself, and let me have the consolation of shed-

ding my tears on your breast! " 48

After days and nights on the march he joined a Prussian force under Count

zu Dohna near Custrin. On August 25, 1758, with 36,000 men, he faced

Fermor's 42,000 Russians at Zorndorf. His favorite tactic of a flank attack

was here made impossible by marshy ground; Fermor proved as resourceful

in command as Frederick, and the Russians fought with a courage and per-

tinacity that the Prussians seldom encountered in the Austrians or the

French. Seydlitz and his cavalry won whatever honors could come from a

day of rival butchery. The Russians retreated in good order, leaving 21,000

dead, wounded, or captured; the Prussians lost 12,500 killed or wounded, and

1 ,000 prisoners.

54 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. II

But who could continue to fight on so many fronts at once? While Fred-

erick was in the north Daun had led his army to a junction with the Imperial

regiments, and was now besieging Dresden, where Frederick had left a gar-

rison under Prince Henry. A force of 1 6,000 Swedes marched through Pom-

erania, joined the Russians in ravaging a great part of the Mark of Branden-

burg, and might with them endanger Berlin again. A new army of 30,000

Austrians and Hungarians, under General Harsch, entered Silesia and headed

for Breslau. Which of the three capitals should be defended first? Reorgan-

izing his dispirited and now rebellious troops, Frederick marched them

twenty-two miles a day across Prussia into Saxony, and reached his belea-

guered brother just in time to discourage Daun from attack. After giving his

men two weeks' rest, he set out to drive Harsch from Silesia. At Hochkirch

in Silesia Daun blocked his path. Frederick pitched camp close to the enemy,

and waited four days for provisions to arrive from Dresden. Suddenly, at five

o'clock on the morning of October 14, 1758, Daun, whom Frederick had

relied upon to avoid the initiative, fell upon the Prussian right wing. The

movement of the Austrians had been concealed by a thick fog, the Prussians

were literally caught napping; they had no time to form the tactical lines that

Frederick had designed. Frederick exposed himself recklessly in his efforts to

restore order; he succeeded, but too late to retrieve the situation. After five

hours of battle, 37,000 pawns against 90,000, he gave the signal for retreat,

leaving on the field 9,450 men, to the Austrian loss of 7,590.

Again he contemplated suicide. With so able a general as Daun leading the

Austrians, with so able a general as Saltykov forming a new Russian army,

and with his own forces declining in number, quality, and discipline, while

his foes could make up any loss, it seemed clear that a Prussian victory could

come only through a miracle; and Frederick did not believe in miracles. On

the day after Hochkirch he showed to his reader, de Katt, an Apology for

Suicide which he had composed, and said, "I can end the tragedy when I

choose." 49 On that day (October 15, 1758) Wilhelmine died, leaving in-

structions that her brother's letters to her might be laid on her breast in her

tomb. 50 Frederick appealed to Voltaire to write something in her memory;

Voltaire responded well, but his ode to the "ame heroique et pure" 51 could

not match the simple fervor of the King's tribute in his Histoire de la Guerre

de sept am:

The goodness of her heart, her generous and benevolent inclinations, the

nobility and elevation of her soul, the sweetness of her character, brought to-

gether in her the brilliant gifts of the mind with a foundation of solid virtue. . . .

The tenderest and most constant friendship united the King [Frederick wrote

in the third person] and this worthy sister. These ties had been formed in their

earliest childhood; the same education and the same sentiments had further

bound them, and a mutual fidelity in every test had rendered these ties in-

dissoluble. 52

Spring brought new French armies into the field. On April 13, 1759, at

Bergen (near Frankfurt-am-Main), a French force ably led by the Due de

Broglie gave Ferdinand of Brunswick a taste of defeat, but Ferdinand re-

deemed himself at Minden. There (August 1), with 43,000 Germans, Eng-

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR

55

lish, and Scots, he routed 60,000 French under Broglie and Contades so de-

cisively, and with relatively so little loss, that he was able to send 12,000

troops to Frederick to make good the weakening of the King's army by a

disastrous campaign in the east.

On July 23 Saltykov's 50,000 Russians, Croats, and Cossacks overwhelmed

at Zullichau the 26,000 Prussians whom Frederick had left to guard the

approaches from Poland to Berlin; nothing there now stood in the way of a

Russian avalanche upon the Prussian capital. The King had no choice but

to rely upon his brother to hold Dresden against Daun, while he himself

marched to face the Russians. Reinforced on the way, he was able to muster

48,000 men, but meanwhile 18,000 Austrians under General Laudon had

joined the Russians, raising Saltykov's total to 68,000. On August 12, 1759,

these two armies— the largest masses of expendable human flesh since the

competitive slaughters of the War of the Spanish Succession— fought at Ku-

nersdorf (sixty miles east of Berlin) the most merciless, and for Frederick the

most tragic, battle of the war. After twelve hours of fighting he seemed to

have the advantage; then Laudon's 18,000 men, who had been kept in re-

serve, fell upon the exhausted Prussians and drove them into a rout. Fred-

erick dared every danger to rally his troops; three times he led them person-

ally to the attack; three horses were shot under him; a small gold case in his

pocket stopped a bullet that might have ended his career. He was not happy

over his escape; "Is there not," he cried, "one devil of a ball that can reach

me?" 53 His soldiers begged him to retire to safety, and soon they gave him

every example. He appealed to them: "Children, don't abandon me now,

your king, your father!" But no urging could get them to advance again.

Many of them had fought six hours under a burning sun, and without time

or chance for a cup of water. They fled, and at last he joined them, leaving

behind him 20,000 captured, wounded, or dead, against an enemy loss of

15,700. Among the mortally wounded was Ewald von Kleist, the finest Ger-

man poet of that age.

As soon as Frederick could find a place to rest he dispatched a message

to Prince Henry: "Of an army of 48,000 men I have at this moment not

more than 3,000, and I am no longer master of my forces. ... It is a great

calamity, and I will not survive it." He notified his generals that he was be-

queathing his command to Prince Henry. Then he dropped upon some straw

and fell asleep.

The next morning he found that 23,000 fugitives from the battle had re-

turned to their regiments, ashamed of their flight, and ready to serve him

again if only because they longed to eat. Frederick forgot to kill himself;

instead he reorganized these and other poor souls into a new force of 32,000

troops, and took a stand on the road from Kunersdorf to Berlin, expecting

to make a last attempt to protect his capital. But Saltykov did not come. His

men, too, had to eat; they were in enemy country and found foraging dan-

gerous, and the line of communications with friendly Poland was long and

hazardous. Saltykov thought it was time for the Austrians to take their turn

against Frederick. He gave the order to retreat.

Daun agreed that the next move should be his. Now, he felt, was the time

56 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. II

to take Dresden. Prince Henry had withdrawn a force from that city to go

to Frederick's help; he had left only 3,700 men to guard the citadel, but

powerful defenses had been raised to stave off attack. The new commander

in Dresden, Kurt von Schmettau, was a loyal servant of the King, but when

he received word from Frederick himself, after Kunersdorf , that all seemed

lost, he gave up hope of successful resistance. An Imperial army, fifteen thou-

sand strong, was approaching Dresden from the west; Daun was actively

cannonading the city from the east. On September 4 Schmettau surrendered;

on September 5 a message reached him from Frederick that he should hold

out, that help was on the way. Daun, with 72,000 men, now made Dresden

his winter quarters. Frederick came up to nearby Freiberg and wintered

there with half that number.

The winter of 1759-60 was exceptionally severe. For several weeks snow

covered the ground to the knee. Only the officers found shelter in homes;

Frederick's common soldiers lived in makeshift cabins, hugged their fires,

laboriously cut and brought wood to feed them, and themselves had scarcely

any other food than bread. They slept close together for mutual warmth.

Disease, in both camps, took almost as many lives as battle had done; in six-

teen days Daun's army lost in this way four thousand men. 54 On November

19 Frederick wrote to Voltaire: "If this war continues much longer, Europe

will return to the shades of ignorance, and our contemporaries will become

like savage beasts." 55

France, though immeasurably richer than Prussia in money and men, was

near bankruptcy. Choiseul nevertheless equipped a fleet to invade England,

but it was destroyed by the English at Quiberon Bay (November 20, 1759).

Taxes were multiplied with all the ingenuity of governments and financiers.

On March 4, 1759, the Marquise de Pompadour had secured the appoint-

ment of £tienne de Silhouette as controller general of finance. He proposed

curtailment of pensions, a tax on the estates of nobles, the conversion of their

silver into money, and even a tax on the tax-collecting farmers general. The

rich complained that they were being reduced to mere shadows of their for-

mer selves; thenceforth silhouette became the word for a figure reduced to

its simplest form. On October 6 the French treasury suspended payment on

its obligations. On November 5 Louis XV melted his silver to give good

example; but when Silhouette suggested that the King should get along with-

out the sums usually allotted him for his gambling and games, Louis agreed

with such visible pain that Choiseul vetoed the idea. On November 2 1 Sil-

houette was dismissed:

Like almost every Frenchman, the King felt that he had had enough of

war; he was ready to hear proposals of peace. Voltaire had sounded out

Frederick on the matter in June; Frederick replied (July 2): "I love peace

quite as much as you could wish, but I want it good, solid, and honorable";

and on September 22 he added, again to Voltaire: "For making peace there

are two conditions from which I will never depart: first, to make it con-

jointly with my faithful allies; . . . second, to make it honorable and glori-

ous." 56 Voltaire transmitted these proud replies (one dated after the debacle

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 57

at Kunersdorf ) to Choiseul, who found in them no handle for negotiation.

And faithful ally Pitt, who was busy absorbing French colonies, how could

he make peace before he had built the British Empire?

V. THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

The most important phase of the Seven Years' War was not fought in

Europe, for there it effected only minor changes in the map of power. It was

fought on the Atlantic, in North America, and in India. In those areas the

results of the war were immense and enduring.

The first step in the formation of the British Empire had been taken in the

seventeenth century, by the passage of naval supremacy from the Dutch to

the English. The second was marked by the Treaty of Utrecht (17 13),

which granted England the monopoly of supplying African slaves to the

Spanish and English colonies in America. The slaves produced rice, tobacco,

and sugar; part of the sugar was turned into rum; the trade in rum shared in

enriching the merchants of England (old and New); the profits of trade

financed the expansion of the British fleet. By 1758 England had 156 ships of

the line; France had seventy-seven. 57 Hence the third step in building the

Empire was the reduction of French power on the seas. This process was

interrupted by Richelieu's success at Minorca, but it was resumed by the

destruction of a French fleet off Lagos, Portugal (April 13, 1759), and of

another in Quiberon Bay. Consequently the commerce of France with her

colonies dropped from thirty million livres in 1755 to four million in 1760.

Supremacy on the Atlantic having been won, the way was open for the

British conquest of French America. This included not only the basin of the

St. Lawrence River and the region of the Great Lakes, but also the basin of

the Mississippi from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; even the Ohio River

Valley was in French hands. French forts dominated Chicago, Detroit, and

Pittsburgh— whose change of name from Fort Duquesne symbolized the re-

sults of the war. The French possessions blocked the westward expansion

of the English colonies in America; had England not won the Seven Years'

War, North America might have been divided into a New England in the

East, a New France in the center, and a New Spain in the West; the divisions

and conflicts of Europe would have been reproduced in America. The pa-

cific Benjamin Franklin warned the English colonists that they could never

be safe in their possessions, nor free in their growth, unless the French were

checked in their American expansion; and George Washington came into

history by attempting to take Fort Duquesne.

Canada and Louisiana were the two doors to French America; and the

nearer to England and France was Canada. Through the St. Lawrence came

supplies and troops for the habitants, and that door was guarded by the

French fort of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the great

river. On June 2, 1758, Louisbourg was besieged by an English flotilla of

forty-two vessels, bearing 1 8,000 soldiers, under Admiral Edward Boscawen.

58 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. II

The fort was defended by ten ships and 6,200 men; reinforcements sent from

France were intercepted by the British fleet. The garrison fought bravely,

but soon its defenses were shattered by British guns. The surrender of the

fort (July 26, 1758) began the British conquest of Canada.

The process was only slightly retarded by the strategy and heroism of the

Marquis de Montcalm. Sent from France (1756) to command the French

regulars in Canada, he advanced from one success to another until frustrated

by corruption and discord in the French-Canadian administration, and by

the inability of France to send him aid. In 1756 he captured an English fort

at Oswego, giving the French control of Lake Ontario; in 1757 he besieged

and took Fort William Henry, at the head of Lake George; in 1758, with

3,800 men, he defeated 15,000 British and colonial troops at Ticonderoga.

But he met his match when, with 15,000 men, he defended Quebec against

the English general James Wolfe, who had only 9,000 soldiers under his

command. Wolfe himself led his troops in scaling the heights to the Plains

of Abraham. Montcalm was mortally wounded in directing the defense;

Wolfe was mortally wounded on the field of victory (September 12-13,

1759). On September 8, 1760, the French governor of Canada* Vaudreuil-

Cavagnal, surrendered, and the great province passed under British control.

Turning their ships south, the English attacked the French islands in the

Caribbean. Guadeloupe was taken in 1759, Martinique in 1762; all the

French possessions in the West Indies— St.-Domingue excepted— fell to Brit-

ain. To add to the profits of victory Pitt sent squadrons to Africa to capture

the French slave-trading stations on the west coast; it was done; the French

trade in slaves collapsed; Nantes, its chief port in France, decayed. The price

of slaves in the West Indies rose, and British slave merchants made new

fortunes in supplying the demand. 58 We should add that the English were not

any more inhumane in this imperial process than the Spanish or the French;

they were merely more efficient; and it was in England that the antislavery

movement first took effective form.

Meanwhile British enterprise— naval, military, commercial— was busy ab-

sorbing India. The English East India Company had set up strongholds at

Madras (1639), Bombay (1668), and Calcutta (1686). French merchants

established domination at Pondicherry, south of Madras (1683), and at

Chandernagore, north of Calcutta (1688). All these centers of power ex-

panded as Mogul rule in India declined; each group used bribery and sol-

diery to extend its area of influence; already, in the War of the Austrian

Succession (1740-48), France and England had fought each other in India.

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle had merely interrupted the conflict; the Seven

Years' War renewed it. In March, 1757, an English fleet under Admiral

Charles Watson, aided by troops of the East India Company under a Shrop-

shire lad named Robert Clive, took Chandernagore from the French; on

June 23, with only 3,200 men, Clive defeated 50,000 Hindus and French at

Plassey (eighty miles north of Calcutta) in a battle that assured British mas-

tery in northeast India. In August, 1758, an English fleet under Admiral

George Pococke drove from Indian waters the French squadron that had

CHAP. Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 59

been protecting French possessions along the coast; thereafter, with the

British free, the French unable, to bring in men and supplies, the triumph of

England was only a matter of months. In 1759 the French siege of Madras by

the Comte de Lally was frustrated by the arrival of British provisions and

reinforcements by sea. The French were decisively defeated at Wandiwash

on January 22, 1760; Pondicherry surrendered to the British on January 16,

1 76 1. This last French outpost was restored to France in 1763, but everyone

understood that French possession continued only by British consent.

India and Canada remained, until our own time, two bastions, east and

west, of an empire that was built with money, courage, cruelty, and brains,

in full accord with the international morals of the eighteenth century. In

tardy retrospect we now perceive that that empire was a natural product

of human nature and material conditions, and that the alternative to it was

not the independence of helpless peoples, but a similar empire established by

France. In the long run, despite its Clives and Hastingses and Kiplings, the

rule of half the world by the British navy— the comparatively humane and

urbane maintenance of order amid ever-threatening chaos— was a blessing

rather than a bane to mankind.

vi. exhaustion: 1760-62

What was the hunted Prussian fox doing in that harsh winter of 1759—

60? He was raising and debasing money, conscripting and training men,

writing and publishing poetry. In January a pirate Parisian publisher issued

Oeuvres du philosophe de Sans-Souci, joyfully printing those reckless poems

which Voltaire had carried off with him from Potsdam in 1753, and for

which Frederick had had him intercepted and detained at Frankfurt-am-

Main. Those poems would amuse uncrowned heads, but would make royal

wigs tremble with rage, including those of Frederick's ally George II. Fred-

erick protested that the pirated publication was corrupted by malignant

interpolations; he bade his friend the Marquis d'Argens (director of fine

arts at the Berlin Academy) to issue at once an "authentic edition" carefully

purged. It was so done in March, and Frederick could turn back to war. On

February 24 he wrote to Voltaire:

Steel and death have made terrible ravages among us, and the sad thing is

that we are not yet at the end of the tragedy. You can easily imagine the result of

such cruel shocks upon me. I wrap myself up in stoicism as well as I can. . . .

I am old, broken, gray, wrinkled; I am losing my teeth and my gaiety. 59

Vast masses of soldiery were being marshaled to determine which ruler

should tax most men. Saltykov, in April, was returning from Russia with

100,000; Laudon had 50,000 Austrians in Silesia, against Prince Henry's 34,-

000; Daun at Dresden, with 100,000, hoped to break through Frederick's

40,000, who were now encamped near Meissen; the French, with 125,000,

were waiting to advance against Ferdinand's 70,000; altogether 375,000 men

60 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. II

were being aimed at Berlin. On March 21, 1760, Austria and Russia re-

newed their alliance, with a secret clause giving Prussia to Russia as soon

as Silesia should be restored to Austria. 60

Laudon drew first blood of the year 1760, overwhelming 1 3,000 Prussians

at Landeshut (June 23). On July 10 Frederick began to besiege Dresden

with heavy artillery, laying most of Germany's then loveliest city in ruins.

The bombardment availed him nothing; hearing that Laudon was approach-

ing Breslau, he abandoned the siege, marched his men one hundred miles in

five days, encountered Laudon's army at Liegnitz (August 15, 1760), in-

flicted upon it a loss of 10,000 men, and entered Breslau. But on October 9

an army of Cossacks under Fermor captured Berlin, ransacked its military

stores, and exacted a ransom of two million thalers— equal to half the British

subsidy that Frederick was receiving annually. He marched to relieve his

capital; the Russians fled on hearing of his approach, and Frederick turned

back to Saxony. On the way he wrote to Voltaire (October 30): "You are

fortunate in following Candide's advice, and limiting yourself to the cultiva-

tion of your garden. 'Tis not granted to everyone to do so. The ox must plow

the furrow, the nightingale must sing, the dolphin must swim, and I must

fight." 61

At Torgau on the Elbe (November 3) his 44,000 Prussians met 50,000

Austrians. Frederick sent half his army under Johann von Ziethen to detour

and attack the enemy in the rear. The maneuver did not succeed, for Ziethen

was delayed by an enemy detachment on the way. Frederick led his own

divisions personally into the fury of the battle; here too three horses were

shot under him; a shell struck him in the chest, but with spent force; he was

knocked unconscious to the ground, but soon recovered; "It is nothing," he

said, and returned to the fray. He won a Pyrrhic victory; the Austrians gave

way, with a loss of 1 1,260 men, but Frederick left 1 3,120 Prussians on that

field. He retired to Breslau, now his main center of supplies. Daun still held

Dresden, waiting patiently for Frederick to die. Winter again gave the sur-

vivors rest.

The year 1761 was one of diplomacy rather than war. In England the

death of George II (October 25, 1760), who had cared deeply for Hanover,

and the accession of George III, who cared for it much less, gave a royal

sanction to popular resentment of a war that was weighing heavily upon

English pounds. Choiseul put out feelers from France for a separate peace;

Pitt refused, and kept full faith with Frederick; but the British contingent in

Hanover was reduced, and Ferdinand had to yield Brunswick and Wolfen-

biittel to the French. Choiseul turned to Spain, and in a "Pacte de Famille"—

a family pact between Bourbon kings— persuaded her to join in the alliance

against Prussia. Military developments concurred with these diplomatic re-

verses to bring Frederick again to the verge of debacle. Laudon with 72,000

men affected a junction with 50,000 Russians; they completely severed Fred-

erick from Prussia, and laid plans to take and keep Berlin. On September 1,

1 761, the Austrians again took Schweidnitz and its stores. On October 5 Pitt,

overwhelmed by the popular demand for peace, resigned rather than betray

CHAP.Il) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 6l

Frederick. His successor, the Earl of Bute, thought Frederick's cause hope-

less, and saw, in the negotiation of peace, a means of strengthening George

III against Parliament. He pleaded with Frederick to admit defeat at least to

the extent of surrendering part of Silesia to Austria. Frederick demurred;

Bute refused him any further subsidy. Nearly all Europe, including many

Prussians, called upon Frederick to make concessions. His troops had lost

any hope of victory; they warned their officers that they would not attack

the enemy again, and, if attacked, would surrender. 62 As the year 1761 ended

Frederick found himself alone against a dozen foes. He admitted that only

a miracle could save him.

A miracle saved him. On January 5, 1762, 63 Czarina Elizaveta, who hated

Frederick, died, and was succeeded by Peter III, who admired him as the

ideal conqueror and king. When Frederick heard the news he ordered all

Russian prisoners to be clad, shod, fed, and freed. On February 2 3 Peter de-

clared the war with Prussia at an end. On May 5 he signed a treaty of peace

drawn up, at his request, by Frederick himself; on May 22 Sweden followed

suit; on June 10 Peter re-entered the war, but as an ally of Prussia. He

donned a Prussian uniform and volunteered for service "under the King my

master." It was one of the most remarkable overturns in history.

It warmed Frederick's heart, and restored morale in his army, but he half

agreed with his enemies that Peter was crazy. He was alarmed when he heard

that Peter proposed to attack Denmark to recover Holstein; Frederick used

every effort to dissuade him, but Peter insisted; finally, Frederick tells us,

"I had to keep silent, and abandon this poor prince to the self-confidence that

destroyed him." 64

Bute, now actively hostile to Frederick, asked Peter to let the twenty

thousand Russians now in the Austrian army continue there; Peter sent a

copy of this message to Frederick, and ordered the Russian troops to join

and serve Frederick. Bute offered Austria a separate peace, promising to

support the cession of Prussian territory to Austria; Kaunitz refused; Fred-

erick denounced Bute as a scoundrel. 65 He was pleased to learn that France

had ended her subsidies to Austria, and that the Turks were attacking the

Austrians in Hungary (May, 1762).

On June 28 Peter was deposed by a coup d'etat that established Catherine

II as "Empress of all the Russias"; on July 6 Peter was assassinated. Catherine

ordered Czernichev, who commanded the Russians under Frederick, to bring

them home at once. Frederick was just preparing an attack upon Daun. He

asked Czernichev to conceal for three days the news of the Czarina's in-

structions. Without using these Russian auxiliaries Frederick defeated Daun

at Burkersdorf (July 21). Czernichev now withdrew his troops, and Russia

took no further part in the war. Relieved of danger in the north, the King

drove the Austrians before him, and recaptured Schweidnitz. On October

29 Prince Henry, with 24,000 men, defeated 39,000 Austrians and Imperials

at Freiberg in Saxony; this was the only major action of the war in which

the Prussians were victorious when not under Frederick's command. It was

also the last important battle of the Seven Years' War.

6l ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. II

VII. PEACE

All Western Europe was exhausted. Prussia most of all, where boys of

fourteen had been conscripted, and farms had been devastated, and merchants

had been ruined by the stifling of trade. Austria had more men than money,

and had lost vital Russian aid. Spain had lost Havana and Manila to the

English, and nearly all her navy had been destroyed. France was bankrupt,

her colonies were gone, her commerce had almost disappeared from the sea.

England needed peace to consolidate her gains.

On September 5, 1762, Bute sent the Duke of Bedford to Paris to negotiate

a settlement with Choiseul. If France would yield Canada and India England

would restore Guadeloupe and Martinique, and France might keep, with

British consent, Frederick's western provinces of Wesel and Gelderland. 66

Pitt denounced these proposals with passionate eloquence, but public opinion

supported Bute, and on November 5 England and Portugal signed with

France and Spain the Peace of Fontainebleau. France gave up Canada, India,

and Minorca; England restored to France and Spain her conquests in the

Caribbean; France promised to maintain neutrality between Prussia and Aus-

tria, and to withdraw her armies from Prussian territory in western Ger-

many. A further Peace of Paris (February 10, 1763) confirmed these ar-

rangements, but left France her fishing rights near Newfoundland, and some

trading posts in India. Spain ceded Florida to England, but received Louisi-

ana from France. Technically these agreements violated Britain's pledge

against a separate peace; actually they were a boon to Frederick, for they

left him with only two adversaries— Austria and the Reich; and he was now

confident that he could hold his own against these disheartened enemies.

Maria Theresa resigned herself to peace with her most hated foe. All her

major allies had abandoned her, and 100,000 Turks were marching into

Hungary. She sent an envoy to Frederick, proposing truce. He accepted, and

at Hubertusburg (near Leipzig), February 5-15, 1763, Prussia, Austria, Sax-

ony, and the German princes signed the treaty that ended the Seven Years'

War. After all the shedding of blood, ducats, rubles, thalers, kronen, francs,

and pounds the status quo ante helium was restored on the Continent: Fred-

erick kept Silesia and Glatz, Wesel and Gelderland; he evacuated Saxony,

and promised to support the candidacy of Maria Theresa's son Joseph as

King of the Romans and therefore emperor-to-be. At the final signing Fred-

erick's aides congratulated him on "the happiest day of your life"; he replied

that the happiest day of his life would be the last one. 67

What were the results of the war? To Austria, the permanent loss of

Silesia, and a war debt of 100,000,000 ecus. The prestige of the Austrian

rulers as traditional holders of the Imperial title was ended; Frederick dealt

with Maria Theresa as ruler of an Austro-Hungarian, rather than a Holy

Roman, Empire. The German princes of the Empire were now left to their

resources, and would soon submit to the Prussian hegemony in the Reich;

CHAP. II ) THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR 63

the Hapsburg power declined, the Hohenzollern power rose; the road was

open for Bismarck. Patriotism and nationalism began to think in terms of

Germany instead of each proudly separate state; German literature was stim-

ulated to Sturm und Drang, and mounted to Goethe and Schiller.

Sweden lost 25,000 men, and gained nothing but debts. Russia lost 120,000

men to battle, hardship, and disease, but would soon reproduce them; she

had opened a new era in her modern history by marching into the west; the

partition of Poland was now inevitable. For France the result was enormous

losses in colonies and commerce, and a near-bankruptcy that moved her an-

other step toward collapse. For England the results were greater than even

her leaders realized: control of the seas, control of the colonial world, the

establishment of a great empire, the beginning of 182 years of ascendancy in

the world. For Prussia the results were territorial devastation, thirteen thou-

sand homes in ruins, a hundred towns and villages burned to the ground,

thousands of families uprooted; 180,000 Prussians (by Frederick's estimate 68 )

had died in battle, camp, or captivity; even more had died through lack of

medicine or food; in some districts only women and old men were left to

till the fields. Out of a population of 4,500,000 in 1756, only 4,000,000 re-

mained in 1763.

Frederick was now the hero of all Germany (except Saxony!). He en-

tered Berlin in triumph after an absence of six years. The city, though desti-

tute, with every family in mourning, blazed with illuminations to welcome

him, and acclaimed him as its savior. The iron spirit of the old warrior was

moved: "Long live my dear people! " he cried. "Long live my children! " 69 He

was capable of humility; in his hour of adulation he did not forget the many

mistakes he had made as a general— he the greatest of modern generals ex-

cepting Napoleon; and he could still see the thousands of Prussian youths

whose bloody deaths had paid for Silesia. He himself had paid. He was now

prematurely old at fifty-one. His back was bent, his face and figure lean and

drawn, his teeth lost, his hair white on one side of his head, his bowels racked

with colic, diarrhea, and hemorrhoids. 70 He remarked that now his proper

place was in a home for elderly invalids. 71 He lived twenty-three years more,

and tried to redeem his sins with peaceful and orderly government.

Politically the main results of the Seven Years' War were the rise of the

British Empire, and the emergence of Prussia as a first-class power. Economi-

cally, the chief result was an advance toward industrial capitalism: those

Gargantuan armies were glorious markets for the mass consumption of mass-

produced goods; what client could be more desirable than one that promised

to destroy the purchased goods at the earliest opportunity, and order more?

Morally, the war made for pessimism, cynicism, and moral disorder. Life was

cheap, death was imminent, suffering was the order of the day, pillage was

permissible, pleasure was to be seized wherever it could for a moment be

found. "But for this campaign," said Grimm in Westphalia, 1757, "I should

never have conceived how far the horrors of poverty and the injustice of

man can be carried"; 72 and they had only begun. The suffering helped, as

well as hindered, religion: if a minority was turned to atheism by the stark

64 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. II

reality of evil, the majority was moved to piety by the need to believe in the

ultimate triumph of the good. A reaction to religion would soon come in

France, England, and Germany. Protestantism in Germany was saved from

destruction; probably, if Frederick had lost, Prussia would have experienced,

like Bohemia after 1620, a compulsory restoration of Catholic faith and

power. The triumph of imagination over reality is one of the humors of

history.

BOOK II

FRANCE BEFORE THE DELUGE

1757-74

CHAPTER III

The Life of the State

I. THE MISTRESS DEPARTS

MME. DE POMPADOUR was among the casualties of the war. For

some time the charm of her personality kept the King in thrall while

the nation mourned; but after the attempt of Damiens to assassinate him (Jan-

uary 5, 1757) Louis XV, suddenly conscious of God, sent word to her that

she must leave at once. He made the humane mistake of coming to say good-

bye; he found her quietly and sadly packing. Some surviving tenderness

overcame him; he asked her to remain. 1 Soon all her former privileges and

powers were restored. She negotiated with diplomats and ambassadors; she

raised and lowered ministers and generals. Marc-Pierre de Voyer, Comte

d'Argenson, had opposed her at every step; she had sought to appease him

and had been repulsed; she had him replaced by the Abbe de Bernis as minis-

ter for foreign affairs, and then by Choiseul (1758). Reserving her tenderness

for her relatives and the King, she faced all others with a heart of steel within

an ailing frame. She sent some enemies to the Bastille, and let them stay there

for years. 2 Meanwhile she feathered her nests, adorned her palaces, and or-

dered a stately mausoleum for herself beneath the Place Vendome.

She bore, among the people, in the Parlement, and at court, the chief blame

for French reverses in the war, but she received no credit for the victories.

She was held accountable for the unpopular alliance with Austria, though

she had been only a minor factor in that mating. She was condemned for the

disaster at Rossbach, where her man Soubise had commanded the French; her

critics did not know— or considered it irrelevant— that Soubise had advised

against giving battle, and had been forced into it by the precipitancy of the

German general. If Soubise had had his way, if his plan of wearing out Fred-

erick with marches and desertions had been followed, if Czarina Elizaveta

had not died so inopportunely and left Russia to a young idolator of Fred-

erick—perhaps the Prussian resistance would have collapsed, France would

have received the Austrian Netherlands, and Pompadour would have been

carried on a sea of blood to national acclaim. She had failed to placate the

great god Chance.

The Parlement hated her for encouraging the King to ignore the Parle-

ment. The clergy hated her as friend of Voltaire and the Ency clopedistes;

Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, said he would "like to see her

burn." 3 When the Paris populace suffered from the high price of bread they

cried out that "that prostitute who governs the kingdom is bringing it to

ruin." "If we had her here," said a voice in the mob at the Pont de la Tour-

nelle, "there would soon not be enough left of her to make relics." 4 She

dared not show herself in the streets of Paris, and she was surrounded by

67

68 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

enemies at Versailles. She wrote to the Marquise de Fontenailles: "I am quite

alone in the midst of this crowd of petits seigneurs, who loathe me and whom

I despise. As for most of the women, their conversation gives me a sick head-

ache. Their vanity, their lofty airs, their meannesses, and their treacheries

make them insupportable." 5

As the war dragged on, and France saw Canada and India snatched from

her, and Ferdinand of Brunswick kept French armies at bay, and returning

soldiers, wounded or maimed, appeared in the streets of Paris, it became clear

to the King that he had made a tragic mistake in listening to Kaunitz and

Pompadour. In 1761 he consoled himself with a new mistress, Mile, de

Romans, who bore him the future Abbe de Bourbon. Gossip said that Pompa-

dour revenged herself by accepting Choiseul as her lover, 6 but she was too

weak, and Choiseul too clever, for such a liaison; to Choiseul she surrendered

her power rather than her love. Now, it may be, she uttered the despondent

prophecy, "Apres moi le deluge" 1

She had always been frail. Even in her youth she had spit blood; and

though we are not certain that she had tuberculosis, we know that her cough-

ing increased painfully as she turned forty. The singing voice that had once

thrilled King and court was now hoarse and strained. Her friends were

shocked by her emaciation. In February, 1764, she took to her bed with high

fever and bloody inflammation of the lungs. In April her condition became

so serious that she summoned a notary to draw up her last testament. She left

gifts to her relatives, friends, and servants, and added: "If I have forgotten

any of my relatives in this will I beg my brother to provide for them." To

Louis XV she deeded her Paris mansion, which, as the Elysee Palace, is now

occupied by the President of France. The King spent many hours at her

bedside; during her last days he seldom left the room. The Dauphin, who

had always been her foe, wrote to the bishop of Verdun: "She is dying with

a courage rare for either sex. Her lungs are full of water or pus, her heart

is congested or dilated. It is an unbelievably cruel and painful death." 8 Even

for this last battle she kept herself richly attired, and her parched cheeks were

rouged. She reigned almost to the end. Courtiers thronged around her couch;

she distributed favors, and nominated persons to high office; and the King

acted on many of her recommendations.

At last she admitted defeat. On April 14 she accepted gratefully the final

sacraments that sought to solace death with hope. So long the friend of

philosophers, she tried now to recapture the faith of her childhood. Like a

child she prayed:

I commend my soul to God, imploring Him to have pity on it, to forgive

my sins, to grant me the grace to repent of them and die worthy of His mercy,

hoping to appease His justice through the glory of the precious blood of Jesus

Christ my Saviour, and through the intercession of the Virgin Mary and all

the saints in Paradise. 9

To the priest who was departing as she entered her final agony, she whis-

pered, "Wait a moment; we will leave the house together." 10 She died on

April 15, 1764, choked by the congestion in her lungs. She was forty-two

years old.

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 69

It is not true that Louis took her death with indifference; he merely con-

cealed his grief. 11 "The King," said the Dauphin, "is in great affliction, though

he controls himself with us and with everybody." 12 When, on April 17, the

woman who had been half of his life for twenty years was carried from

Versailles Palace in a cold and driving rain, he went out on the balcony to

see her depart. "The Marquise will have very bad weather," he said to his

valet Champlost. It was not a frivolous remark, for Champlost reported that

there were tears in the royal eyes, and that Louis added sadly, "This is the

only tribute I can pay her." 13 By her own wishes she was buried by the side

of her child Alexandrine, in the now vanished church of the Capucines in the

Place Vendome.

The court rejoiced to be freed from her power; the populace, which had

not felt her charm, cursed her costly extravagance, and soon forgot her; the

artists and writers whom she had helped lamented the loss of a gracious and

understanding friend. Diderot was harsh: "So what remains of this woman

who cost us so much in men and money, who left us without honor and

without energy, and who overthrew the whole political system of Europe?

A handful of dust." But Voltaire, from Ferney, wrote:

I am very sad at the death of Mme. de Pompadour. I was indebted to her,

and I mourn out of gratitude. It seems absurd that while an ancient pen-pusher,

hardly able to walk, should still be alive, a beautiful woman, in the midst of a

splendid career, should die at the age of forty. Perhaps, if she had been able to

live quietly, as I do, she would be alive today. . . . She had justice in her mind

and heart. ... It is the end of a dream. 14

II. THE RECOVERY OF FRANCE

Not until Napoleon did France fully recover from the Seven Years' War.

High taxes had discouraged agriculture under Louis XIV; they continued to

the same effect under Louis XV; thousands of acres farmed in the seven-

teenth century were left uncultivated in 1760, and were reverting to wilder-

ness. 15 Livestock was depleted, fertilizer was lacking, the soil was starved.

Peasants kept to old clumsy methods of tillage, for taxes rose with every

improvement that increased the peasants' wealth. Many peasants had no heat

in their houses in winter except from the cattle that lived with them. Ab-

normal frosts in 1760 and 1767 ruined crops and vineyards in their growth.

One bad harvest could condemn a village to near-starvation, and to terror of

the famished wolves that lurked about.

Nevertheless economic recovery began as soon as peace was signed. The

government was inefficient and corrupt, but many measures were taken to

help the peasantry. Royal intendants distributed seed and built roads; agro-

nomic societies published agricultural information, established competitions,

awarded prizes; some tax collectors distinguished themselves by their humane

moderation. 16 Stimulated by the physiocrats, many seigneurs interested them-

selves in improving agricultural methods and products. Peasant proprietors

grew in number. By 1774 only six per cent of the French population still

70 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

labored under serfdom. 17 But every increment of production brought a rise

in population; the land was rich, yet the average peasant holding was small;

poverty remained.

Out of peasant loins came the human surplus that went to man the indus-

tries in the growing towns. With a few exceptions industry was still in the

domestic and handicraft stage. Large-scale capitalistic organizations domi-

nated metallurgy, mining, soap-making, and textiles. Marseilles in 1760 had

thirty-five soap factories, employing a thousand workers. 18 Lyons was al-

ready dependent for its prosperity upon the shifting market for the product

of its looms. English carding machines were introduced about 1750, and to-

ward 1770 the jenny, working forty-eight spindles at once, began to replace

the spinning wheel in France. The French were quicker to invent than to

apply, for they lacked the capital that England, enriched by commerce,

could use to finance mechanical improvements in industry. The steam engine

had been known in France since 1681. 19 Joseph Cugnot used it in 1769 to

operate the first known automobile; a year later this was employed to trans-

port heavy loads at four miles an hour; however, the machine got out of hand

and demolished a wall, and it had to stop every fifteen minutes to replenish

its water. 20

With such bizarre exceptions, transport was by horse, cart, coach, or boat.

Roads and canals were much better than in England, but inns were worse. A

regular postal service was established in 1760; it was not quite private, for

Louis XV ordered postmasters to open letters and report any suspicious con-

tent to the government. 21 Internal trade was hampered by tolls, external trade

by war and loss of colonies. The Compagnie des Indes went bankrupt, and

was dissolved (1770). Trade with European states, however, increased sub-

stantially during the century, from 176,600,000 livres in 17 16 to 804,300,000

livres in 1787; but some of the increase merely reflected inflation. Trade with

the French West Indies flourished in sugar and slaves.

A gradual inflation, due partly to debasement of the currency, partly to

rising world production of gold and silver, had a stimulating effect upon

industrial and commercial enterprise; the businessman could usually expect to

sell his product at a higher price level than that on which he had bought his

labor and materials. So the middle classes swelled their fortunes, while the

lower classes had all they could do to keep income in sight of prices. The

same inflation that enabled the government to cheat its creditors reduced the

value of its revenues, so that taxes rose as livres fell. The King became de-

pendent upon bankers like the brothers Paris, particularly Paris-Duverney,

who so delighted Pompadour with his fiscal prestidigitation that he was able,

during the war, to make or break ministers and generals.

The basic economic development in eighteenth-century France was the

passage of pre-eminent wealth from those who owned land to those who

controlled industry, commerce, or finance. Voltaire noted in 1755: "Owing

to the increasing profits of trade . . . there is less wealth than formerly

among the great, and more among the middle classes. The result has been to

lessen the distance between classes." 22 Businessmen like La Popeliniere could

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 71

build palaces that were the envy of nobles, and adorn their tables with the

best poets and philosophers in the realm; it was the bourgeoisie that now gave

patronage to literature and art. The aristocracy consoled itself by hugging

its privileges and displaying its style; it insisted upon noble birth as prerequi-

site to army commissions or episcopal posts; it flaunted its armorial bearings

and proliferated pedigrees; it strove— often in vain— to keep able or distin-

guished commoners out of high administrative office and the court. The rich

bourgeois demanded that career should be open to talent of whatever birth;

and when his demand was ignored he flirted with revolution.

All but the peasant phase of the class war took visible form in the tumult

and splendor of Paris. Half the wealth of France was siphoned into the capi-

tal, and half the poverty of France festered there. Paris, said Rousseau, "is

perhaps the city in the world where fortunes are most unequal, and where

flaunting wealth and the most appalling penury dwell together." 23 Sixty

paupers were part of the official escort for the corpse of the Dauphin's eldest

son in 1761. 24 Paris toward 1770 contained 600,000 of France's 22,000,000

souls. 25 It housed the most alert, the best-informed, and the most depraved

people in Europe. It had the best-paved streets, the most splendid avenues

and promenades, the busiest traffic, the finest shops, the lordliest palaces, the

dingiest tenements, and some of the most beautiful churches in the world.

Goldoni, coming to Paris from Venice in 1762, marveled:

What crowds! What an assemblage of people of every description! . . .

With what a surprising view my senses and mind were struck on approaching

the Tuileries! I saw the extent of that immense garden, which has nothing

comparable to it in the universe, and my eyes were unable to measure the

length of it. ... A majestic river, numerous and convenient bridges, vast

quays, crowds of carriages, an endless throng of people. 26

A thousand stores tempted purses and the purseless; a thousand vendors

hawked their goods in the streets; a hundred restaurants (the word first ap-

pears in 1765) offered to restore the hungry; a thousand dealers collected,

forged, or sold antiques; a thousand hairdressers trimmed and powdered the

hair or wigs of even the artisan class. In the narrow alleys artists and crafts-

men produced paintings, furniture, and finery for the well-to-do. Here were

a hundred printing shops producing books, sometimes at mortal risk; in 1774

the book trade at Paris was estimated at 45,000,000 livres— four times that of

London. 27 "London is good for the English," said Garrick, "but Paris is good

for everybody." 28 Said Voltaire in 1768, "We have over thirty thousand

people in Paris who take an interest in art." 29 There, beyond challenge, was

the cultural capital of the world.

III. THE PHYSIOCRATS

In an apartment at Versailles, under the rooms and the favoring eye of

Mme. de Pompadour, that economic theory took form which was to stir and

mold the Revolution, and shape the capitalism of the nineteenth century.

72 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. Ill

The French economy had been struggling to grow despite the swaddling

clothes of regulations— by guilds and Colbert— and the Midas myth of a mer-

cantilism that mistook gold for wealth. To increase exports, diminish im-

ports, and take the "favorable balance" in silver and gold as a prop of political

and military power, France and England had subjected their national econo-

mies to a mesh of rules and restraints helpful to economic order but harming

production by hampering innovation, enterprise, and competition. All this—

said men like Gournay, Quesnay, Mirabeau pere, Du Pont de Nemours, and

Turgot— was quite contrary to nature; man is by nature acquisitive and com-

petitive; and if his nature is freed from unnecessary trammels he will as-

tonish the world with the quantity, variety, and excellence of his products.

So, said these "physiocrats," let nature (in Greek, physis) rule (kratein);

let men invent, manufacture, and trade according to their natural instincts;

or, as Gournay is said to have said, laissez f aire— "let him do" as he himself

thinks best. The famous phrase was already old, for about 1 664, when Col-

bert asked businessman Legendre, "What should we [the government] do

to help you?" he answered, "Nous laisser f aire— let us do it, let us alone." 30

Jean-Claude Vincent de Gournay was the first clear voice of the physio-

crats in France. Doubtless he knew of the protests that Boisguillebert and

Vauban had made to Louis XIV against the stifling restrictions laid upon

agriculture under the feudal regime. He was so impressed by Sir Josiah

Child's Brief Observations Concerning Trade and Interest (1668) that he

translated it into French (1754); and presumably he had read Richard Can-

tillon's Essay on the Nature of Commerce (c. 1734) in its French form

(1755). Some would date from this last book the birth of economics as a

"science"— a reasoned analysis of the sources, production, and distribution of

wealth. "Land," said Cantillon, "is the source or material from which wealth

is extracted," but "human labor is the form which produces wealth"; and he

defined wealth not in terms of gold or money, but as "the sustenance, con-

veniences, and comforts of life." 31 This definition was itself a revolution in

economic theory.

Gournay was a well-to-do merchant operating at first (1729-44) in Cadiz.

After extensive business dealings in England, Germany, and the United

Provinces, he settled in Paris, and was appointed intendant du commerce

(175 1 ). Traveling through France on tours of inspection, he observed at

first hand the restraints put by guild and governmental regulations upon

economic enterprise and exchange. He left no written formulation of his

views, but they were summarized after his death (1759) by his pupil Turgot.

He urged that existing economic regulations should be reduced, if not re-

moved; every man knows better than the government what procedure best

favors his work; when each is free to follow his interest more goods will be

produced, wealth will grow. 32

There are laws unique and primeval, founded on nature alone, by which all

existing values in commerce balance one another and fix themselves at a de-

termined price, just as bodies left to their own weight arrange themselves ac-

cording to their specific gravity; 33

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 73

that is, values and prices are determined by the relations of supply and de-

mand, which in turn are determined by the nature of man. Gournay con-

cluded that the state should intervene in the economy only to protect life,

liberty, and property, and to stimulate, with distinctions and awards, the

quantity and quality of production. M. Trudaine, heading the Bureau of

Commerce, accepted these doctrines, and Turgot gave them the force of his

eloquence and acknowledged probity.

Frangois Quesnay followed a slightly different physiocratic line. Son of a

landed proprietor, he never lost his interest in land, though he was trained

to be a physician. He made a fortune by his skill in medicine and surgery, and

rose to be physician to Mme. de Pompadour and the King (1749). In his

rooms at Versailles he gathered a coterie of heretics— Duclos, Diderot, Buf-

fon, Helvetius, Turgot . . . ; there they discussed everything freely except

the King, whom they dreamed of transforming into an "enlightened despot"

as the agent of peaceful reform. Immersed in the Age of Reason, Quesnay

felt that the time had come to apply reason to economics. Though he was a

self-confident dogmatist in his works, he was in person a kindly soul, dis-

tinguished by integrity in an immoral milieu.

In 1750 he met Gournay, and soon became more interested in economics

than in medicine. Under careful pseudonyms he contributed essays to the

Encyclopedic of Diderot. His article "Farms" ascribed their desertion to

high taxes and conscription. The article "Grains" (1757) noted that small

farms were incapable of profitably using the most productive methods, and

favored large plantations managed by "entrepreneurs"— an anticipation of

the agricultural mammoths of our time. The government should improve

roads, rivers, and canals, remove all tolls on transportation, and free the

products of agriculture from all restraints of trade.

In 1758 Quesnay published a Tableau economique that became the basic

manifesto of the physiocrats. Though printed by the government press in

the Palace of Versailles under the supervision of the King, it condemned

luxury as a wasteful use of wealth that might have been employed to produce

greater wealth. In Quesnay's view only the products of the earth constituted

wealth. He divided society into three classes: a classe productive, of farmers,

miners, and fishermen; a classe disponible— persons available for military or

administrative offices; and a classe sterile— artisans who work up the products

of the earth into useful objects, and tradesmen who bring the products to

the consumer. Since taxes laid upon the second or third class ultimately (in

Quesnay's view) fall upon the owners of land, the most scientific and con-

venient impost would be a single tax (impot unique) upon the annual net

profit of each parcel of land. Taxes should be collected directly by the state,

never by private financiers (feriniers generaux) . The government should be

an absolute and hereditary monarchy.

Quesnay's proposals now seem to be vitiated by their underestimation of

labor, industry, commerce, and art, but to some of his contemporaries they

appeared as an illuminating revelation. The most colorful of his followers,

Victor Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, thought that the Tableau economique

74 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

rivaled writing and money as among the noblest inventions of history. Born

in 17 15, dying in 1789, the Marquis precisely spanned the age of Voltaire.

He inherited a comfortable estate, lived like a lord, wrote like a democrat,

entitled his first book UAmi des hommes, ou Traite de la population (1756),

and earned the name he had taken, "Friend of Mankind." After publishing

his chef-d'oeuvre he came under the influence of Quesnay; he revised his

book accordingly, and enlarged it into a six-volume treatise that went

through forty editions and shared in preparing the mind of France for 1789.

The Marquis was not as disturbed by human multiplication as Malthus was

to be in 1798. He held that a nation is made great by a large population, and

that this is made possible by "men multiplying like rats in a barn if they

have the means or subsistence" 34 — as we still see. He concluded that every

encouragement should be given to those who grow food. The unequal dis-

tribution of wealth, he thought, discourages food production, for the estates

of the rich take up land that could be fertile farms. Mirabeau's preface told

the King that the peasants were

the most productive class of all, those who see beneath them nothing but their

nurse and yours— Mother Earth; who stoop unceasingly beneath the weight of

the most toilsome labors; who bless you every day, and ask nothing from you

but peace and protection. It is with their sweat and (you know it not!) their

very blood that you gratify that heap of useless people who are ever telling

you that the greatness of a prince consists in the value and number ... of

favors that he divides among his courtiers. I have seen a tax-gathering bailiff

cut off the hand of a poor woman who clung to her saucepan, the last utensil

of the household, which she was defending from distraint. What would you

have said, great prince? 35

In Theorie de Vimpot (1760) the revolutionary Marquis attacked the tax-

collecting farmers general as parasites preying upon the vitals of the nation.

The angry financiers persuaded Louis XV to imprison him in the Chateau

de Vincennes (December 16, 1760); Quesnay induced Mme. de Pompadour

to intercede; Louis released the Marquis (December 25), but ordered him

to remain on his estate at Le Bignon. Mirabeau made a virtue of necessity by

studying agriculture- at first hand and in 1763 he issued Philosophie rurale,

"the most comprehensive treatise on economics prior to Adam Smith." 36

Grimm called it "the Pentateuch of the [physiocratic] sect." 37

Altogether this unique Marquis wrote forty books, right up to his dying

year— all despite the trouble given him by his son, whom in desperation he

sent to prison as a measure of safety for both. Like that son he was violent

and dissolute, married for money, charged his wife with adultery, let her

return to her parents, and took a mistress. He denounced lettres de cachet

as intolerable tyranny, and later prevailed upon the ministry to issue fifty of

them to help him discipline his family. 38

We find it hard to realize today the commotion raised by the publications

of the physiocrats, and the ardor of their campaigns. Quesnay's disciples

looked up to him as the Socrates of economics; they submitted their writ-

ings to him before going to print, and in many cases he contributed to their

books. In 1767 Lemercier de la Riviere, sometime governor of Martinique,

CHAP.IIl) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 75

issued what Adam Smith considered "the most distinct and best connected

account of the doctrine," 39 VOrdre naturel et essentiel des societes poli-

tiques. In economic relations (ran the argument) there are laws correspond-

ing to those that Newton found in the universe; economic ills arise from

ignorance or violation of those laws.

Do you wish a society to attain the highest degree of wealth, population, and

power? Trust, then, its interests to freedom, and let this be universal. By means

of this liberty (which is the essential element of industry) and the desire to

enjoy— stimulated by competition and enlightened by experience and example

—you are guaranteed that everyone will always act for his own greatest possible

advantage, and consequently will contribute with all the power of his particu-

lar interest to the general good, both to the ruler and to every member of the

society. 40

Pierre-Samuel du Pont summed up the gospel in Physiocratie (1768),

which gave the school its historic name. Du Pont spread the theory also in

two periodicals whose influence was felt all the way from Sweden to Tus-

cany. He served as inspector general of manufactures under Turgot, and fell

with Turgot's fall (1776). He helped to negotiate with England the treaty

that recognized American independence (1783). He was elected to the As-

sembly of Notables (1787) and the Constituent Assembly (1789). There, to

distinguish him from another member called Du Pont, he was called Du

Pont de Nemours, from the town that he represented. Having opposed the

Jacobins, he was endangered by their rise to power; in 1799 he exiled him-

self to America. He returned to France in 1802, but in 181 5 he made his

final home in the United States, where he founded one of America's most

famous families.

On the face of it the physiocratie doctrine appeared to favor feudalism,

since feudal lords still owned, or drew feudal dues from, at least a third of

the land of France. But they— who had paid hardly any taxes before 1756—

were appalled at the notion that all taxes should fall upon the landowners;

nor could they accept the removal of feudal tolls on the transport of goods

through their domains. The middle classes, which were thinking of new

dignities, resented the idea that they were a sterile, unproductive, part of the

nation. And the philosophes, though mostly agreeing with the physiocrats

about relying on the King as an agent of reform, could not accompany them

in making peace with the Church. 41 David Hume, who visited Quesnay in

1763, thought the physiocrats "the most chimerical and arrogant set of men

to be found nowadays since the destruction of the Sorbonne." 42 Voltaire

lampooned them (1768) in UHomme aux quarante ecus {The Man with

Forty Crowns). 43 In 1770 Ferdinando Galiani, an Italian habitue of d'Hol-

bach's "synagogue" of atheists, issued Dialoghi sul commercio del grani,

which Diderot in that same year translated into French. Voltaire said that

Plato and Moliere must have joined in writing this excellent contribution to

the already "dismal science" of economics. Galiani ridiculed with Parisian

wit the physiocratie notion that only the land produces wealth. To free

the trade in grains from all regulation would (he argued) ruin the farmers of

j6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

France, and could produce a famine at home while clever merchants ex-

ported French grain to other states. This is precisely what happened in 1768

and 1775.

A story tells how Louis XV asked Quesnay what he would do if he were

king. "Nothing," answered Quesnay. "Who, then, would govern?" "The

laws" 44 — by which the physiocrat meant the "laws" inherent in the nature of

man and governing supply and demand. The King agreed to try them. On

September 17, 1754, his ministry abolished all tolls and restraints on the sale

and transport of grains— wheat, rye, and corn— within the kingdom; in 1764

this freedom was extended to the export of grains except when these should

reach a stated price. Left to the operation of supply and demand, the price

of bread dropped for a time, but a bad harvest in 1765 raised it far beyond

normal. The shortage of grains reached the famine stage in 1768-69; peasants

grubbed for food in pigsties, and ate weeds and grass. In a parish of 2,200

souls 1,800 begged for bread. The people complained that while they faced

starvation, speculators were exporting grain. Critics charged the government

with profiting from the operations of these monopoleurs in a "Pacte de

Famine," and this bitter variation on the Pacte de Famille of 1761 rang

through subsequent years to accuse even the kindly Louis XVI of benefiting

from the high price of bread. Some officials were apparently guilty, but

Louis XV was not. He had commissioned certain dealers to buy grain in

good years, store it, and put it on the market in years of scarcity; but when

this was sold it was at prices too high for the impoverished to pay. The gov-

ernment took tardy remedial measures; it imported grain and distributed it

to the neediest provinces. The public clamored for restoration of state con-

trol over the trade in grain; the Parlement joined in the demand; it was at this

juncture that Voltaire published his V Homme aux quarante ecus. The gov-

ernment yielded; on December 23, 1770, the edicts permitting free trade in

grain were revoked.

Despite this setback, physiocratic notions made their way, at home and

abroad. An edict of 1758 had established free trade in wool and woolen

products. Adam Smith visited Quesnay in 1765, was attracted by his

"modesty and simplicity," and was confirmed in his own predilection for

economic liberty. He judged "the capital error of this system ... to lie in

its representing the class of artificers, manufacturers, and merchants as alto-

gether barren and unproductive," but he concluded that "this system, with

all its imperfections, is perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that

has yet been published on the subject of political economy." 45 The ideas of

the physiocrats accorded well with the desire of England— already the great-

est exporter among the nations— to reduce export and import dues. The doc-

trine that wealth would grow faster under freedom from governmental re-

strictions on production and distribution found sympathetic hearing in

Sweden under Gustavus III, in Tuscany under Grand Duke Leopold, in

Spain under Charles III. Jefferson's affection for a government that governed

least was in part an echo of physiocratic principles. Henry George acknowl-

edged the influence of the physiocrats on his advocacy of a single tax falling

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 77

upon realty. 46 The philosophy of free enterprise and trade charmed the

American business class, and gave an added stimulus to the rapid develop-

ment of industry and wealth in the United States. In France the physiocrats

provided a theoretical basis for freeing the middle classes from feudal and

legal impediments to domestic trade and political advancement. Before

Quesnay died (December 16, 1774) he had the comfort of seeing one of his

friends made controller general of finance; and had he lived fifteen years

more he would have seen the triumph of many physiocratic ideas in the

Revolution.

IV. THE RISE OF TURCOT: 1 727-74

Was Turgot a physiocrat? His rich and diverse background repels every

label. He came of an old family— "une bonne race" Louis XV called it—

which had through generations filled with distinction important posts. His

father was a councilor of state and prevot des marchands— the highest ad-

ministrative office in Paris. His older brother was maitre des requetes (secre-

tary for petitions and claims), and a leading member, of the Parlement of

Paris. As a younger son, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was intended for the

priesthood. In the College Louis-le-Grand, in the Seminary of St.-Sulpice,

and in the Sorbonne he passed all tests with credit, and at the age of nineteen

he became Abbe de Brucourt. He learned to read Latin, Greek, Hebrew,

Spanish, Italian, German, and English, and to speak the last three of these

languages fluently. In 1749 he was elected a prior of the Sorbonne, and in

that capacity he delivered lectures two of which made a stir beyond the

ramparts of theology.

In July, 1750, he addressed the Sorbonne in Latin on "The Advantages

that the Establishment of Christianity Has Conferred upon the Human

Race": it had rescued antiquity from superstition, had preserved many arts

and sciences, and had presented to mankind the liberating conception of a

law of justice transcending all human prejudices and interests. "Could one

hope for this from any other principle than religion? . . . The Christian

religion alone has . . . brought to light the rights of humanity." 47 There is

an echo of philosophy in this piety; apparently the young prior had read

Montesquieu and Voltaire, with some effect upon his theology.

In December, 1750, he addressed the Sorbonne with a Tableau philoso-

phique des progres successes de V esprit humain. This historic enunciation of

the new religion of progress was a remarkable performance for a youth of

twenty-three. Anticipating Comte— perhaps following Vico— he divided the

history of the human mind into three stages: theological, metaphysical, and

scientific:

Before man understood the causal connection of physical phenomena, noth-

ing was so natural as to suppose they were produced by intelligent beings, in-

visible, and resembling themselves. . . . When philosophers recognized the

absurdity of these fables about the gods, but had not yet gained an insight into

natural history, they thought to explain the causes of phenomena by abstract

78 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. Ill

expressions such as essences and faculties. ... It was only at a later period

that, by observing the reciprocal mechanical action of bodies, hypotheses were

formed which could be developed by mathematics and verified by experience. 48

Animals, said this brilliant youth, know no progress; they remain the same

from generation to generation; but man, by having learned to accumulate and

transmit knowledge, is able to improve the tools by which he deals with his

environment and enriches his life. As long as this accumulation and trans-

mission of knowledge and technology continues, progress is inevitable,

though it may be interrupted by natural calamities and the vicissitudes of

states. Progress is not uniform, nor is it universal; some nations advance while

others retreat; art may stand still while science moves on; but the sum of the

movement is forward. For good measure Turgot predicted the American

Revolution: "Colonies are like fruit, which clings to the tree only until it is

ripe. By becoming self-sufficient, they do what Carthage did, what America

will sometime do." 49

Inspired by the idea of progress, Turgot, while still in the Sorbonne,

planned to write a history of civilization. Only his notes for some sections

of the project survive; from these it appears that he had intended to include

the history of language, religion, science, economics, sociology, and psychol-

ogy as well as the rise and fall of states. 50 His father's death having left him

an adequate income, he determined, late in 1750, to leave the ecclesiastical

career. A fellow abbe protested, and promised him rapid advancement, but

Turgot replied, according to Du Pont de Nemours, "I cannot condemn my-

self to wear a mask throughout my life." 51

He had taken only minor orders, and was free to enter a political career.

In January, 1752, he became substitute attorney general, and in December

counselor in the Parlement; in 1753 he bought the office of maitre des re-

quetes, in which he won a reputation for industry and justice. In 1755-56

he accompanied Gournay on tours of inspection in the provinces; now he

learned economics by direct contact with farmers, merchants, and manufac-

turers. Through Gournay he met Quesnay, and through him Mirabeau pere,

Du Pont de Nemours, and Adam Smith. He never listed himself as of the

physiocratic school, but his money and his pen were main supports of Du

Pont's magazine, ftphemerides.

Meanwhile ( 175 1 ) his mind and manners won him welcome in the salons

of Mme. Geoffrin, Mme. de Graffigny, Mme. du DefFand, and Mile, de

Lespinasse. There he met d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, d'Holbach, and

Grimm. One early result of these contacts was his publication (1753) of two

Lettres sur la tolerance. To Diderot's Encyclopedie he contributed articles

on existence, etymology, fairs, and markets, but when the enterprise was con-

demned by the government he withdrew as a contributor. Traveling in

Switzerland and France, he visited Voltaire (1760), beginning a friendship

that lasted till Voltaire's death. The sage of Ferney wrote to d'Alembert: "I

have scarcely ever seen a man more lovable or better informed." 52 The

philosophes claimed him as their own, and hoped through him to influence

the King.

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 79

In 1766 he wrote, for two Chinese students who were about to return to

China, a hundred-page outline of economics— Reflexions sur la formation et

la distribution des richesses. Published in the Bphemerides (1769-70), it was

acclaimed as one of the most concise and forceful expositions of physiocratic

theory. Land, said Turgot, is the only source of wealth; all classes but culti-

vators of the soil live on the surplus that these produce beyond their own

need; this surplus constitutes a "wages fund" from which the artisan class can

be paid. Here follows an early formulation of what came to be known as

"the iron law of wages":

The wages of the worker are limited to his subsistence by competition among

the workmen. . . . The mere worker, who has only his arms and his industry,

has nothing except in so far as he succeeds in selling his toil to others. . . . The

employer pays him as little as he can; and as he has a choice among a great

number of workers, he prefers the one who works for the least wage. The

workers are therefore obliged to lower their price in competition with one

another. In every kind of work it cannot fail to happen, and actually it does

happen, that the wages of the worker are limited to what is necessary for his

subsistence. 53

Turgot went on to stress the importance of capital. Someone through his

savings must supply the tools and materials of production before the worker

can be employed, and he must keep the workers alive until the sale of the

product replenishes his capital. As an enterprise is never sure of success, prof-

its must be allowed to balance the risk of losing the capital. "It is this con-

tinual advance and return of capital which constitutes . . . the circulation

of money, that useful and fruitful circulation which gives life to all the labors

of the society, . . . and is with great reason compared to the circulation of

the blood in the animal body." 54 This circulation must not be interfered with;

profits and interest, like wages, must be allowed to reach their natural level

according to supply and demand. Capitalists, manufacturers, merchants, and

workingmen should be free from taxation; this should fall only upon land-

owners, who will reimburse themselves by charging more for their prod-

ucts. No duty should be charged on the transport or sale of any article of

consumption.

In these Reflexions Turgot laid down the theoretical basis of nineteenth-

century capitalism— before the effective organization of labor. One of the

kindest and most honest men of his time could see for the workers no better

future than a subsistence wage. Yet this same man became a devoted public

servant. In August, 1761, he was appointed intendant— the king's supervisor

—of the generalite of Limoges, one of the poorest regions of France. He

estimated that forty-eight to fifty per cent of the income of the land went in

taxes to the state and tithes to the Church. The local peasants were sullen,

the nobles uncouth. "I have the misfortune," he wrote to Voltaire, "of being

an intendant. I say the misfortune, for in this age of quarrels and remon-

strances there is happiness only in living the philosophic life among one's

books and friends." Voltaire answered: "You will win the hearts and the

purses of Limousins ... I believe that an intendant is the only person who

80 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. Ill

can be useful. Can he not have the highways repaired, the fields cultivated,

the marshes drained, and can he not encourage manufactures?"

Turgot did all that. He labored zealously in Limoges for thirteen years,

winning affection from the people and dislike from the nobility. He repeat-

edly—vainly—petitioned the Council of State to reduce the tax rate. He im-

proved the allotment of taxes, remedied injustices, organized a civil service,

freed the trade in grain, and built 450 miles of roads; they were part of that

nationwide road-building program (begun by the French government in

1732) to which we owe the lovely tree-shaded highways of France today.

Before Turgot the roads had been built by corvee— the forced and unpaid

labor of the peasantry; he abolished corvee in Limoges, and paid for the labor

by a general tax on all the laity. He persuaded the inhabitants to grow po-

tatoes as human food, instead of only for animals. His vigorous measures of

relief in the famine periods of 1768-72 won universal admiration.

On July 20, 1774, a new King invited him to join the central government.

All France rejoiced, and looked to him as the man who would save the

crumbling state.

V. THE COMMUNISTS

While the physiocrats were laying the theoretical basis of capitalism,

Morelly, Mably, and Linguet were expounding socialism and communism.

As the educated classes surrendered their hopes of heaven they consoled

themselves with earthly substitutes: the well-to-do, ignoring religious pro-

hibitions, indulged themselves with wealth and power, women and win6 and

art; the commoners found solace in visions of a Utopia in which the goods of

the earth would be equally shared between simple and clever, weak and

strong.

There was no socialist movement in the eighteenth century, no such defi-

nite group as the Levellers in Cromwell's England, or the communistic Jes-

uits of Paraguay; there were only individuals here and there adding their

voices to a mounting cry that would become, in "Gracchus" Babeuf, a fac-

tor in the French Revolution. We recall that the priestly skeptic Jean Mes-

lier, in his Testament of 1733, pleaded for a communistic society in which the

national product would be equally shared, and men and women would mate

and part as they pleased; meanwhile, he suggested, it would help if a few

kings should be killed. 55 Seven years before this proclamation came to print,

Rousseau, in his second Discourse (1755), denounced private property as

the source of all the evils of civilization; but even in that outburst he dis-

claimed any socialistic program, and by 1762 the heroes of his books were

well equipped with property.

In the same year with Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

appeared the Code de la nature of an obscure radical of whom, aside from his

books, we know hardly anything but his last name, Morelly. We must not

confuse him with Andre Morellet, whom we have seen as a contributor to

CHAP, hi) the life of the state 8i

the Ency elope die. Morelly first roused the wits with a Traite des qualites

d'un grand rot (1751), which pictured a communistic king. In 1753 he gave

his dream poetic form as Naufrage des iles flottantes, ou La Basiliade; here

the good king, perhaps after reading Rousseau's first Discourse, leads his peo-

ple back to a simple and natural life. The best and fullest exposition of

the communistic ideal was Morelly's Code de la nature (1755-60). Many

ascribed it to Diderot, and the Marquis d'Argenson pronounced it superior to

Montesquieu's UEsprit des lois (1748). Morelly thought, like Rousseau, that

man is by nature good, that his social instincts incline him to good behavior,

and that the laws corrupted him by establishing and protecting private prop-

erty. He praised Christianity for inclining to communism, and mourned that

the Church had sanctioned property. The institution of private property had

generated "vanity, fatuity, pride, ambition, villainy, hypocrisy, viciousness

. . . ; everything evil resolves itself into this subtle and pernicious element,

the desire to possess." 56 Then sophists conclude that the nature of man makes

communism impossible, whereas in real sequence it was the violation of com-

munism that perverted the natural virtues of man. If it were not for the

greed, egoism, rivalries, and hatreds engendered by private property, men

would live together in peaceful and co-operative brotherhood.

The road to reconstruction must begin by clearing all obstacles to the free

discussion of morals and politics, "allowing full liberty to wise men to attack

the errors and prejudices that maintain the spirit of property." Children

should be taken from their parents at six years of age and brought up com-

munally by the state until they are sixteen years old, when they should be

returned to their parents; meanwhile the schools will have trained them to

think in terms of the common good rather than personal acquisition. Private

property should be permitted only in articles pertaining to the individual's

intimate needs. "All products will be collected in public storehouses to be

distributed to all citizens for the needs of life." 57 Every able-bodied individ-

ual must work; from twenty-one to twenty-five he must help on the farms.

There is to be no leisure class, but everyone will be free to retire at forty,

and the state will see that he is well cared for in old age. The nation will be

divided into garden cities with a shopping center and a public square. Each

community is to be governed by a council of fathers over fifty years old;

and these councils will elect a supreme senate to rule and co-ordinate all.

Perhaps Morelly underestimated the natural individualism of men, the

strength of the acquisitive instinct, and the opposition that the hunger for

freedom would offer to the tyranny required for the maintenance of an un-

natural equality. Nevertheless his influence was considerable. Babeuf de-

clared that he had imbibed his communism from Morelly's Code de la na-

ture, and Charles Fourier probably took from the same source his plan

(1808) for co-operative "phalansteries," which in turn led to such commu-

nist experiments as Brook Farm (1841). In Morelly's Code occurs the fa-

mous principle that came down to inspire and plague the Russian Revolution:

"chacun selon ses facultes, a chacun selon ses besoins"— from each according

to his ability, to each according to his needs. 58

82 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

The philosophes generally rejected Morelly's system as impracticable, and

accepted private property as an unavoidable consequence of human nature.

But in 1763 Morelly found a vigorous ally in Simon-Henri Linguet, a lawyer

who attacked both law and property. Disbarred from practice, Linguet pub-

lished (1777-92) Annates politiques, a journal in which he delivered a run-

ning fire upon social abuses. Law, he thought, had become an instrument for

legalizing and maintaining possessions originally won by force or fraud.

Laws are destined above all to safeguard property. Now, as one can take

away much more from the man who has than from him who has not, they are

obviously a guarantee accorded to the rich against the poor. It is difficult to

believe, and yet it is clearly demonstrable, that the laws are in some respects a

conspiracy against the majority of the human race. 59

Consequently there is an inevitable class war between the owners of property

or capital and the workers who, in competition with one another, must sell

their labor to propertied employers. Linguet scorned the claims of the phys-

iocrats that the liberation of the economy from state controls would auto-

matically bring prosperity; on the contrary, it would accelerate the con-

centration of wealth; prices would rise, and wages would lag behind. The

control of prices by the rich perpetuates the slavery of the wage earner even

after slavery has been "abolished" by law; "all that they [the former slaves]

have gained is to be constantly tormented by the fear of starvation, a mis-

fortune from which their predecessors in this lowest rank of humanity were

at least exempt"; 60 slaves were lodged and fed all the year round; but in an

uncontrolled economy the employer is free to throw his employees into

beggary whenever he can make no profit from them; then he makes begging

a crime. There is no remedy against all this, Linguet thought, but a com-

munist revolution. He did not recommend it for his time, since it would lead

more likely to anarchy than to justice, but he felt that the conditions for such

a revolt were rapidly taking form.

Never has want been more universal, more murderous for the class which is

condemned to it; never, perhaps, amidst apparent prosperity, has Europe been

nearer to a complete upheaval. . . . We have reached, by a directly opposite

route, precisely the point which Italy had reached when the slave war [led by

Spartacus] inundated it with blood and carried fire and slaughter to the very

gates of the mistress of the world. 61

The Revolution came in his time despite his advice, and sent him to the

guillotine (1794).

The Abbe Gabriel Bonnot de Mably kept his head by dying four years

before the Revolution. He came of a prominent family in Grenoble; one of

his brothers was the Jean Bonnot de Mably with whom Rousseau stayed in

1740; another was the Condillac who made a sensation of psychology. Still

another famous relative, Cardinal de Tencin, tried to make a priest out of

him, but Gabriel stopped short at minor orders, attended the salon of Mme.

de Tencin in Paris, and succumbed to philosophy. In 1748 he quarreled with

CHAP. Ill) THELIFEOFTHESTATE 83

the Cardinal and withdrew into scholarly retirement; thereafter the only

events in his life were his books, all of them once renowned.*

His seven years in Paris and Versailles gave him a knowledge of politics,

of international relations, and of human nature. The result was a unique

mixture of socialistic aspirations with pessimistic doubts. Mably insisted (con-

trary to Machiavelli) that the same moral standards that are applied to in-

dividuals should be applied to the conduct of states, but he recognized that

this would require an enforceable system of international law. Like Voltaire

and Morelly he was a theist without Christianity, but he believed that moral-

ity cannot be maintained without a religion of supernatural punishments and

rewards, for most persons "are condemned to the permanent infancy of their

reason." 62 He preferred the Stoic ethics to those of Christ, and the Greek

republics to modern monarchies. He agreed with Morelly in deriving the

vices of man not from nature but from property; this is "the fountainhead of

all the ills that afflict society." 63 "The passion for enriching oneself has taken

a growing place in the human heart, stifling all justice"; 64 and that passion is

intensified as inequality of fortunes increases. Envy, covetousness, and class

divisions poison the natural amity of mankind. The rich multiply their lux-

uries, the poor sink into humiliation and degradation. Of what good is po-

litical liberty if economic slavery persists? "The freedom which every Euro-

pean thinks he enjoys is only the freedom to leave one master and give

himself to another." 65

How much happier and finer would men be if there were no mine and

thine! Mably thought that the Indians were happier under Jesuit communism

in Paraguay than the Frenchmen of his time; that the Swedes and the Swiss

of that age, who had given up the quest for glory and money and were con-

tent with a moderate prosperity, were happier than the English who were

conquering colonies and trade. In Sweden, he contended, character was held

in greater honor than fame, and a modest contentment was valued above

great wealth. 66 Real freedom is possessed only by those who are not anxious

to be rich. In the kind of society advocated by the physiocrats there would

be no happiness, for men would always be agitated by the desire to equal, in

possessions, those more affluent than themselves.

So Mably concluded that communism is the only social order that will

promote virtue and happiness. "Establish community of goods, and nothing

is thence easier than to establish equality of conditions, and to affirm on this

double foundation the well-being of man." 67 But how can such communism

be established with men so corrupted as they now are? Here the skeptic in

Mably raises his head, and despondently admits that "no human force today

could re-establish equality without causing greater disorders than those one

* Chiefly Droit public de V Eur ope (1748); Observations sur les Grecs (1749); Observations

sur les Romains (1751); Droits et devoirs des citoyens (1758); Entretiens de Phocion sur le

rapport de la morale avec la politique (1763); Observations sur Vhistoire de France (1765);

Doutes proposes aux philosophes economistes (1768, against the physiocrats); De la Legisla-

tion, ou Principes des lois (1776); De la Maniere d'ecrire Vhistoire (1783, demanding accurate

and contemporary documentation); Principes de la morale (1784); Observations sur le

gouvernement et les lois des £tats-Unis de VAmerique (1784).

84 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. Ill

wished to avoid." 68 Democracy is theoretically splendid, but in practice it

fails through the ignorance and acquisitiveness of the masses. 69 All that we

can do is to hold up communism as an ideal toward which civilization should

gradually and cautiously move, slowly changing the habits of modern man

from competition to co-operation. Our goal should be not the increase of

wealth, nor even the increase of happiness, but rather the growth of virtue,

for only virtue brings happiness. The first step toward a better government

would be the summoning of a States-General, which should draw up a con-

stitution giving supreme power to a legislative assembly (this was done in

1789-91). The acreage possessed by any one person should be limited; large

estates should be broken up to spread peasant proprietorship; there should

be strict curbs on the inheritance of wealth; and "useless arts" like painting

and sculpture should be banned.

Many of these proposals were adopted in the French Revolution. Mably's

collected works were published in 1789, again in 1792, again in 1793; and a

book published soon after the Revolution listed Helvetius, Mably, Rousseau,

Voltaire, and Franklin, in that order, as the principal inspirers of that event,

and the true saints of the new dispensation. 70

VI. THE KING

Louis XV, so far as he knew them, smiled at these communists as negligible

dreamers, and passed amiably from bed to bed. The court continued its reck-

less gambling and extravagant display; the Prince de Soubise spent 200,000

livres to entertain the King for one day; and every "progress" of his Majesty

to one of his country seats cost the taxpayers 1 00,000 livres. Half a hundred

dignitaries had their hotels, or palaces, at Versailles or Paris, and ten thousand

servants labored proudly to meet the wants and foibles of nobles, prelates,

mistresses, and the royal family. Louis himself had three thousand horses, 2 1 7

carriages, 150 pages garbed in velvet and gold, and thirty physicians to bleed

and purge and poison him. The royal household in one year 1751 spent 68,-

000,000 livres— almost a quarter of the government's revenue. 71 The people

complained, but for the most part anonymously; every year a hundred pam-

phlets, posters, satirical songs displayed the King's unpopularity. "Louis,"

said one brochure, "if you were once the object of our love, it was because

your vices were still unknown to us. In this kingdom, depopulated because

of you, and given over as a prey to the mountebanks who rule with you, if

there are Frenchmen left, it is to hate you." 72

What had led to this transformation of Louis le Bien-Aime into a despised

and insulted king? He himself, aside from his extravagance, negligence, and

adulteries, was not quite as bad as vengeful history has painted him. He was

physically handsome, tall, strong, capable of hunting all afternoon and en-

tertaining women at night. His educators had spoiled him; Villeroi had given

him to understand that all France belonged to him by inheritance and divine

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 85

right. The pride of sovereignty was moderated and confused by the shadow

and tradition of Louis XIV; the young King was obsessed and made timid

by a sense of his inability to meet that august standard of grandeur and will;

he became incapable of resolution, and gladly left decisions to his ministers.

His boyhood reading and his tenacious memory gave him some acquaintance

with history, and he acquired in time a considerable knowledge of European

affairs; through many years he kept his own secret diplomatic correspond-

ence. He was languidly intelligent, and judged well and mercilessly the char-

acter of the men and women about him. He could keep pace with the best

minds in his court in conversation and wit. But apparently he accepted even

the most absurd dogmas of the theology that Fleury had poured into his

youth. Religion became an intermittent fever with him as he alternated be-

tween piety and adultery. He suffered from fear of death and hell, but gam-

bled on absolution in articulo mortis. He halted the persecution of the Jansen-

ists, and in retrospect we perceive that the philosophes, on and off, enjoyed

considerable leeway in his reign.

He was sometimes cruel, but more often humane. Pompadour and Du

Barry learned to love him for himself as well as for the power he gave them.

His coldness and taciturnity were part of his shyness and self-distrust; behind

that reserve lay elements of tenderness, which he expressed especially in his

affection for his daughters; these loved him as a father who gave them every-

thing except good example. Usually his manners were gracious, but at times

he was callous, and talked too calmly about the ailments or approaching

death of his courtiers. He quite forgot to be a gentleman in his abrupt dis-

missals of d'Argenson, Maurepas, and Choiseul; but that too may have been

the result of diffidence; he found it hard to say no to a man's face. Yet he

could face danger bravely, as in the hunt or at Fontenoy.

Dignified in public, he was pleasant and sociable with his intimate friends,

preparing coffee for them with his own anointed hands. He observed the

complex etiquette that Louis XIV had established for royalty, but he re-

sented the formalism that it laid upon his life. Often he rose before the official

lever, and made his own fire so as not to awaken the servants; more often he

lingered in bed till eleven. At night, after having been put to bed with the

official coucher, he might slip away to enjoy his mistress or even to visit,

incognito, the town of Versailles. He avoided the artificialities of the court

by hunting; on those days when he did not run off to the chase the courtiers

said, "The King is doing nothing today." 73 He knew more about his hounds

than about his ministers. He thought that his ministers could take care of

matters better than he could; and when he was warned that France was mov-

ing toward bankruptcy and revolution, he comforted himself with the

thought that "les choses, comme elles sont, dureront autant que moi" (things

as they are will last through my time) . 74

Sexually he was a monster of immorality. We can forgive him the mistress

that he took when the Queen was oppressed by his virility; we can under-

stand his fascination with Pompadour, and his sensitivity to the beauty and

grace and bright vivacity of women; but there is little in royal history so

86 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. Ill

despicable as his serial passage through the girls prepared for his bed in the

Pare aux Cerfs. The coming of Du Barry was, by comparison, a return to

normalcy.

VII. DU BARRY

She began in the Champagne village of Vaucouleurs about 1743 as Marie-

Jeanne Becu, daughter of Mile. Anne Becu, who, it appears, never revealed

the father's identity. Such mysteries were quite frequent in the lower classes.

In 1748 Anne moved to Paris and became a cook to M. Dumonceux, who

arranged to have Jeanne, aged seven, boarded in the Convent of St.-Anne.

There the pretty girl remained for nine years and, it seems, not unhappily;

she kept pleasant memories of this well-ordered nunnery, received instruction

in reading, writing, and embroidery, and retained throughout her life a sim-

ple and unquestioning piety, and a reverence for nuns and priests; the shelter

that she gave to hunted priests in the Revolution shared in leading her to the

guillotine. 75

When she emerged from the convent she took as her surname that of her

mother's new mate, M. Rangon. She was sent to a hairdresser to learn his art,

but this included seduction, and Jeanne, irresistibly beautiful, knew not how

to resist. Her mother transferred her to Mme. de La Garde as a companion,

but Madame's visitors paid too much attention to Jeanne, and she was soon

dismissed. The millinery shop in which she became a salesgirl attracted an

unusual number of male patrons. She became the kept woman of a succession

of rakes. In 1763 she was taken up by Jean du Barry, a gambler who procured

women for aristocratic roues. Under the elegant name of Jeanne de Vauber-

nier she served this pimp for five years as hostess at his parties, and added

some refinement to her charms. Du Barry thought that he too, like Mme.

Poisson, had discovered a "morsel for the King."

In 1766 good King Stanislas died in Lorraine, which thereby became a

province of France. His daughter, Marie Leszczinska, the modest, pious

Queen of France, fell into a rapid decline after his death, for their mutual

love had upheld her in her long servitude to a faithless husband in an alien

environment; and on June 24, 1768, she passed away, mourned even by the

King. He gave his daughters hope that he would take no more mistresses. But

in July he saw Jeanne, who happened to be straying through the Palace of

Versailles as innocently as La Pompadour had driven in the Senart hunting

park twenty-four years before.

He was struck by her voluptuous beauty, her gaiety and playfulness; here

was someone who could amuse him again, and warm his cold and melancholy

heart. He sent his valet Lebel for her; "Comte" du Barry readily agreed to

part with her for a royal consideration. To appease appearances Louis in-

sisted that the girl should have a husband. The "Comte" married her in short

time to his brother Guillaume, the real but impoverished Comte du Barry,

who was brought from Levignac in Gascony for the purpose. Jeanne bade

CHAP. Ill) THELIFEOFTHESTATE 87

him farewell immediately after the ceremony (September i, 1768), and

never saw him again. Guillaume was awarded a pension of five thousand

livres. He took a mistress of his own, carried her off to Levignac, lived with

her there for twenty-five years, and married her on learning that his wife had

been guillotined.

Jeanne, new-named Comtesse du Barry, joined the King secretly at Com-

piegne, then publicly at Fontainebleau. The Due de Richelieu asked Louis

what he saw in this new toy. "Only this," his Majesty answered, "that she

makes me forget that soon I shall be sixty." 76 The courtiers were horrified.

They could readily understand a man's need of a mistress; but to take a

woman whom several of them had known as a prostitute, and elevate her to

a place above marquises and duchesses! Choiseul had hoped to offer his sister

to the King as maitresse en titre; this rejected lady goaded her usually cau-

tious brother into open hostility to the pretty upstart, and La Barry never

forgave him.

The new mistress was soon swimming in livres and gems. The King dow-

ered her with a pension of 1,300,000 francs, plus an annuity of 150,000 more,

levied on the city of Paris and the state of Burgundy. Jewelers hurried to

supply her with rings, necklaces, bracelets, tiaras, and other sparkling adorn-

ments, for which they billed the King 2,000,000 francs in four years. Alto-

gether, in those four years, she cost the treasury 6,000,375 livres. 77 The

people of Paris heard of her brilliance, and mourned that a new Pompadour

had come to swallow their taxes.

On April 22, 1769, entering in a blaze of jewelry and on the arm of Riche-

lieu, she was formally presented at court. The men admired her charms, the

women received her as coldly as they dared. She bore these slights quietly,

and appeased some courtiers by the modesty of her behavior and the melodi-

ous laughter with which she regaled the King. Even to her enemies (except

Choiseul) she showed no malice; she gained favor by bending his Majesty to

issue pardons more frequently than before. Bit by bit she gathered around

her titled men and women who used her intercession with the King. Like

Pompadour, she took good care of her relatives; she bought property and title

for her mother, and secured pensions for her aunt and her cousins. She paid

the debts of Jean du Barry, gave him a fortune, and bought for him a sump-

tuous villa at L'Isle-Jourdain. She herself won from the King the Chateau

of Louveciennes, which the Prince and Princesse de Lamballe had occupied,

on the edge of the royal park at Marly. She engaged the greatest architect

of that generation, Jacques- Ange Gabriel, to remodel the chateau to her con-

venience, and the meticulous cabinetmaker Pierre Gouthiere to decorate it

with furniture and objects of art to the value of 756,000 livres.

She lacked the background of education and association that had made

Pompadour a willing and discriminating patron of literature, philosophy, and

art. But she collected a library of well-bound books, from Homer to por-

nography, from Pascal's pious Pensees to Fragonard's spicy illustrations; and

in 1773 she sent her homage and portrait to Voltaire with "a kiss for each

cheek." He replied with a poem, as clever as ever:

88 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. Ill

Quoi! deux baisers sur la fin de ?na vie!

Quelle passeport vous daignez m } envoy erf

Deux! tfest trop d'un> adorable Egerie.

Je serai mort de plaisir au premier* 78

She asked Louis XV to let Voltaire return to Paris; he refused; she had to

content herself with buying an assortment of watches from Ferney. In 1778,

when the old Master came to Paris to die, she was among the many who

climbed the stairs in the Rue de Beaune to pay her respects to him. He was

charmed, and ended by rising from his bed to escort her to the door. On the

way down she met Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the future revolutionist; he was

hoping to submit to Voltaire a manuscript on criminal law; he had sought

entry the day before and had been refused; he was trying again. She led him

back to Voltaire's door, and arranged for his admittance. In his Memoires he

recalled her "smile so full of warmth and kindness." 79

She was unquestionably good-natured and generous. She bore without

recrimination the enmity of the royal family, and the refusal of Marie

Antoinette to speak to her. Choiseul alone she could not forgive, and that

was because he never ceased his efforts to drive her from the court. Soon he

or she would have to go.

VIII. CHOISEUL

He came of an old Lorraine family, and was already in early life the Comte

de Stainville. He earned distinction for his bravery in the War of the Aus-

trian Succession. In 1750, aged thirty-one, he replenished the fortunes of his

family by marrying a wealthy heiress. His brilliant mind and gay wit soon

won him prominence at court, but he interrupted his rise by opposing Pom-

padour. In 1752 he changed sides and gained her gratitude by revealing to

her a plot to get her dismissed. She secured his appointment as ambassador to

Rome, then to Vienna. In 1758 he was summoned to Paris to replace Bernis

as minister for foreign affairs, and was made a duke and peer 01 France. In

1 76 1 he transferred his ministry to his brother Cesar, but continued to direct

foreign policy; he himself took the ministries of war and marine. He became

so powerful that at times he overruled and intimidated the King. 80 He re-

built both the army and the navy; he reduced speculation and corruption

in military payments and supplies, restored discipline in the ranks, and re-

placed superannuated dignity with untitled competence in the officer corps.

He developed French colonies in the West Indies, and added Corsica to the

French crown. He sympathized with the philosophes, defended the publica-

tion of the Encyclopedic, supported the expulsion of the Jesuits (1764), and

winked at the reorganization of the Huguenots in France. He protected

Voltaire's security at Ferney, furthered his campaign for the Calas family,

and won from Diderot an apostrophe of praise: "Great Choiseul, you watch

sleeplessly over the fortunes of the Fatherland." 81

* "What! Two kisses at the close of my life! What a passport you deign to send me! Two!

—it is one too many, adorable Egeria; I shall die with pleasure at the first."

CHAP. Ill) THELIFEOFTHESTATE 89

All in all, his policies rescued France in modest measure from the disaster

brought upon her by the Austrian mesalliance. He reduced the subsidies that

France habitually paid to Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and some German

princes. He encouraged the efforts of Charles III to bring Spain into the

eighteenth century, and sought to strengthen both France and Spain by the

Pacte de Famille (1761) between the Bourbon kings. The plan went awry,

but Choiseul negotiated peace with England on much better terms than the

military situation appeared to support. He foresaw the revolt of the English

colonies in America, and strengthened the French position in St.-Domingue,

Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, in the hope of establishing a

new colonial domain that would compensate France for the loss of Canada.

The two Napoleons adopted the same policy in 1 803 and 1 863.

Against these achievements we must weigh his failure to stop the Russian

penetration of Poland, and his insistence upon leading France and Spain

into renewed hostilities with England. Louis had had enough of war, and

gave an open mind to those who were working for Choiseul's fall. The clever

Minister charmed many by his courtesy to courtiers, his prodigal entertain-

ment of friends, and his resourcefulness and industry in the service of France;

but he intensified rivalries into enmities by open criticism and careless speech,

and his unabated opposition to Du Barry gave his foes an intimate access to

the King. The inexhaustible Richelieu supported Du Barry, and his nephew

the Due d'Aiguillon itched to replace Choiseul as head of the government.

The royal family, resenting Choiseul's activity against the Jesuits, conde-

scended to use the scorned mistress as a tool in deposing the impious Minister.

Louis repeatedly asked him to avoid war with England and with Du

Barry; Choiseul continued secretly to plot war and openly to scorn the mis-

tress. Finally she joined all her forces against him. On December 24, 1770,

the irritated King sent a curt message to Choiseul: "My cousin, my dissatis-

faction with your services compels me to exile you to Chanteloupe, to which

you shall take yourself within the next twenty-four hours." Most of the

court, shocked by so abrupt a dismissal of one who had done great things

for France, dared the royal ire by expressing their sympathy for the fallen

Minister. Many nobles rode off to Chanteloupe to solace Choiseul in his

exile. It was a comfortable banishment, for the Duke's estate included one of

the finest palaces and most spacious private parks in France; and it was placed

in Touraine, not far from Paris. There Choiseul lived in state and elegance,

for Du Barry induced the King to send him 300,000 livres at once, and a

pledge of 60,000 livres per year. 82 The philosophes mourned his fall; "Tout

est perdu!" cried the diners chez d'Holbach, and Diderot described them as

melting in tears.

IX. THE REVOLT OF THE PARLEMENTS

Choiseul was succeeded by a "Triumvirat" in which d'Aiguillon was for-

eign minister, Rene-Nicolas de Maupeou was chancellor, and Abbe Joseph-

90 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

Marie Terray was controleur des finances. Terray gave Du Barry all the

funds that she demanded; otherwise, however, he reduced expenditures he-

roically. He suspended amortization, and lowered the rate of interest on

governmental obligations; he devised new taxes, dues, and fees, and doubled

the tolls on internal transport; altogether he saved 36,000,000 livres, and

added 15,000,000 to income. In effect he delayed financial collapse by partial

bankruptcy, but many men suffered through governmental defaults, and

added their voices to an unsettling discontent. Soon the deficit grew again,

and reached 40,000,000 livres in the last year of the reign (1774). What

would today seem to be a modest national debt for a nation with fiscal stabil-

ity was an added cause for anxiety to those who had lent money to the

government, and who now heard with less hostility the mounting cries for

change.

The culminating crisis in the final decade of Louis XV was the struggle of

his ministers to preserve the absolute power of the king against the active

rebellion of the parlements. These (as we have seen) were not representative

or legislative bodies like the British Parliament; they were judicial chambers

serving as appellate courts in thirteen cities of France. In addition, like the

English Parliament versus Charles I, they claimed to defend, against royal

absolutism, the "fundamental law," or established customs, of their regions;

and since the Regent Philippe d'Orleans had confirmed their "right of re-

monstrance" against royal or ministerial edicts, they advanced to the claim

that no such edict could become law unless they accepted and registered it.

If the parlements had been elected by the people, or by an educated and

propertied minority (as in Britain) , they might have served as a transition to

democracy, and in some measure they were a wholesome check upon the

central government; generally, therefore, the. people supported them in their

conflicts with the king. Actually, however, the parlements, almost entirely

composed of rich lawyers, were among the most conservative forces in

France. As the "nobility of the robe," these lawyers became as exclusive as

the "nobility of the sword"; u parlement after parlement decreed that new

posts carrying nobility were to be restricted to . . . families already no-

ble." 83 The Paris Parlement was the most conservative of all. It competed with

the clergy in opposing freedom of thought or publication; it banned, and

sometimes burned, the books of the philosophies. It had been won to Jansen-

ism, which brought a Calvinist theology into the Catholic Church. Voltaire

noted that the Jansenist Parlement of Toulouse tortured and killed Jean

Calas, and that the Parlement of Paris approved the execution of La Barre,

while the ministry of Choiseul reversed the Calas judgment and protected

the Encyclopedists.

Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, aggravated the conflict be-

tween the Jansenists and the orthodox Catholics by ordering the clergy under

his jurisdiction to administer the sacraments only to persons who had con-

fessed to a non-Jansenist priest. The Paris Parlement, with wide public ap-

proval, forbade the priests to obey this order; it accused the Archbishop of

fomenting a schism, and seized some of his temporal possessions. The King's

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 91

Council of State called this procedure illegally confiscatory, and bade the

Parlement withdraw from religious disputes. The Parlement refused; on

the contrary, it drew up "Grandes Remontrances" (May 4, 1753) which in

a degree foreshadowed the Revolution: they professed loyalty to the King,

but told him that "if subjects owe obedience to kings, these on their side owe

obedience to the laws"; 84 the implication was that the Parlement, as guardian

and interpreter of the law, would act as a supreme court over the king. On

May 9 the Council of State issued lettres de cachet banishing most members

of the Paris Parlement from the capital. The provincial parlements and the

people of Paris rose to the support of the exiles. The Marquis d'Argenson

noted, in December, that "the Parisians are in a state of subdued excite-

ment." 85 The government, fearing a popular rising, ordered its soldiery to

patrol the streets and protect the house of the Archbishop. In March, 1754,

d'Argenson wrote: "Everything is preparing for civil war." 86 Cardinal de

La Rochefoucauld devised a face-saving compromise; the government re-

called the exiles (September 7), but ordered the Parlement and the clergy

to refrain from further dispute. The order was not obeyed. The Archbishop

of Paris continued his campaign against Jansenism, and so vigorously that

Louis banished him to Conflans (December 3). The Parlement declared that

the papal bull against Jansenism was not a rule of faith, and bade the clergy

ignore it. The government vacillated, but finally, needing a loan from the

clergy to prosecute the Seven Years' War, it ordered the Parlement to accept

the papal bull (December 13, 1756).

The violent debate turned many heads. On January 5, 1757, Robert-

Frangois Damiens attacked the King in a Versailles street, and stabbed him

with a large penknife; then he stood by, awaiting arrest. Louis told his negli-

gent bodyguard, "Secure him, but let no one do him any harm." 87 The

wound proved minor, and the assailant claimed: "I had no intention to kill

the King. I might have done this had I been so inclined. I did it only that God

might touch the King's heart, and work on him to restore things to their

former footing." 88 In a letter from prison to the King he repeated that "the

Archbishop of Paris is the cause of all the disturbance about the sacraments,

by having refused them." 89 He had (he said) been aroused by the speeches

he had heard in the Parlement; "if I had never entered a court of justice . . .

I should never have gotten here." 90 Those speeches had so excited him that

he had sent for a physician to come and bleed him; none came; had he been

bled (he claimed), he would not have attacked the King. 91 The Grand'

Chambre of the Parlement tried, convicted, and sentenced him, and con-

demned his father, mother, and sister to perpetual banishment. Damiens suf-

fered the tortures prescribed by law for regicides: his flesh was torn by red-

hot pincers, he was splashed with boiling lead, he was torn apart by four

horses (March 28, 1757). Highborn ladies paid for points of vantage from

which to see the operation. The King expressed disgust with the tortures,

and sent pensions to the banished family.

The attempt won some sympathy for the King: Jews and Protestants

joined in prayers for his speedy recovery; but when it was learned that the

92 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. Ill

wound was, in Voltaire's phrase, only a "pinprick" (piqure d'epingle), the

tide of public support turned back to the Parlement. People began to discuss

representative government versus absolute monarchy. "They see in the

parlements" wrote d'Argenson, "a remedy for the vexations they suffer.

. . . Revolt is smoldering." In June, 1763, the Paris Parlement again affirmed

that "the verification of the laws by Parlement is one of those laws that can-

not be violated without violating that law by which the kings themselves

exist." 92 The Parlement of Toulouse went further, declaring that the law

required "the free consent of the nation"; 93 but by "nation" it meant the

parlements. On July 23, 1763, an important judicial body, the Cour des

Aides, under the presidency of the brave and honest Malesherbes, submitted

to the King a report on national poverty and the incompetence and corrup-

tion in the administration of the national finances; it begged him to "listen to

the people themselves through the voice of their deputies in a convocation

of the States-General of the realm." 94 Here was the first clear demand for

that national assembly which had not been called since 16 14.

In the crucial struggle that resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits from

France ( 1764) 95 the Paris Parlement seized the offensive, and forced the hand

of the King. In June and November the Parlement of Rennes, supreme judi-

cial court of Brittany, dispatched strong remonstrances to Louis against the

oppressive taxes levied by the Due d'Aiguillon, then governor of the prov-

ince. Receiving no satisfaction, it suspended its sittings, and most of its mem-

bers resigned (May, 1765). Its procureur general, Louis-Rene de La Chalo-

tais, published an attack upon the central government. He, his son, and three

counselors were arrested and charged with sedition. The King ordered the

Rennes Parlement to try them; it refused, and all the parlements of France,

backed by public opinion, supported the refusal. On March 3, 1766, Louis

appeared before the Parlement of Paris, warned it against conniving at sedi-

tion, and proclaimed his resolve to rule as an absolute monarch.

In my person alone resides the sovereign power. . . . To me alone belongs

the legislative power, unconditional and undivided. All public order emanates

from me. My people and I are one, and the rights and interests of the nation,

which some dare to make a body separate from the monarch, are necessarily

united with mine, and rest in my hands alone. 96

His vows, he added, had been not to the nation, as the Parlement asserted,

but only to God. The Parlement of Paris continued to defend that of Rennes,

but on March 20 it officially accepted, as "inevitable maxims," the doctrine

that "the sovereignty belongs to the king alone; he is accountable only to

God; ... the legislative power resides entirely in the person of the sover-

eign." 97 Choiseul and others urged the King to make responsive concessions.

La Chalotais and his fellow prisoners were released, but were exiled to

Saintes, near La Rochelle. D'Aiguillon was recalled from Brittany, and joined

Choiseul's foes. The Parlement of Rennes resumed its sittings (July, 1769).

Voltaire entered the conflict by issuing in 1769 his Histoire du Parlement

de Paris, par M. Tabbe Big. He denied authorship of the book, and wrote a

letter criticizing it as "a masterpiece of errors and awkwardness, a crime

CHAP. Ill) THE LIFE OF THE STATE 93

against the language"; 98 even so, it was his. Though written in haste, it

showed considerable historical research, but it lacked impartiality; it was a

long arraignment of the Parlement as a reactionary institution that had at

every turn opposed progressive measures— e.g., the establishment of the

French Academy, inoculation for smallpox, and free administration of jus-

tice. Voltaire accused the parlements of class legislation, superstition, and

religious intolerance. They had condemned the earliest printers in France;

they had applauded the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre; they had sentenced

the Marechal d'Ancre to be burned as a witch. They had been instituted, said

Voltaire, for purely judicial functions, and had no authority to legislate; if

they took this authority they would replace the autocracy of the king with

an oligarchy of rich lawyers, entrenched beyond any popular control. Vol-

taire had written this long brief during the ascendancy of Choiseul, whose

liberal tendencies encouraged the belief that progress could most readily be

made through a king enlightened by an enlightened minister. Diderot did not

agree with Voltaire; he argued that however reactionary the parlements had

been, their claim of the right to supervise legislation served as a desirable

check on royal tyranny."

The return of d'Aiguillon to Paris brought on a new crisis. The Parlement

of Rennes accused the Duke of malfeasance; he submitted to a trial of these

charges by the Parlement of Paris; when it became clear that he would be

pronounced guilty Mme. du Barry appealed to the King to intervene. Chan-

cellor Maupeou supported her, and on June 27, 1770, Louis announced that

the hearings were revealing state secrets and must be terminated. He an-

nulled the reciprocal complaints, pronounced both d'Aiguillon and La

Chalotais innocent, and ordered all parties to the dispute to refrain from fur-

ther agitation. Defying these commands as an arbitrary interference with the

lawful course of justice, the Parlement declared that the testimony had seri-

ously compromised the honor of d'Aiguillon, and recommended his absten-

tion from all functions as a peer until he had been cleared by due process of

law. On September 6 the Parlement published an arrete, or decision, that

flung down the gauge to the King:

The multiplicity of the actions of an absolute power exercised everywhere

against the spirit and letter of the constitutive laws of the monarchy is un-

equivocal proof of a premeditated project to change the form of government,

and to substitute, for the always equal force of the laws, the irregular actions

of arbitrary power. 100

Then the Parlement adjourned till December 3.

Maupeou used the interval to prepare an uncompromising defense of royal

power. On November 27 he issued, over the King's signature, a decree that,

while admitting the right of remonstrance, forbade any rejection of an edict

renewed after remonstrances had been heard. The Parlement replied by re-

questing the King to surrender the evil counselors of the throne to the ven-

geance of the laws. 101 On December 7 Louis summoned the Parlement to

Versailles, and in an official lit de justice he bade them accept and register the

November 27 decree. On returning to Paris the magistrates decided to ab-

94 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

stain from all functions of the Parlement until the November decree should

be withdrawn. Louis ordered them to resume their sittings; the order was

ignored. Choiseul tried to make peace at home to wage better war abroad;

Louis dismissed him; now Maupeou dominated the Council of State while Du

Barry fluttered about the King. She showed him Vandyck's portrait of

England's Charles I, and warned him of a like fate: "Your Parlement too will

cut off your head." 102

On January 3, 177 1, Louis again ordered the acceptance of the November

edict. The Parlement replied that the edict violated the basic laws of France.

On January 20, between one and four o'clock in the morning, the musketeers

of the King delivered to each magistrate a lettre de cachet giving him a choice

between obedience and exile from Paris. The great majority of them pro-

tested love of the King, but remained obdurate. Within the next two days

165 members of the Paris Parlement were banished to divers parts of France.

The people cheered them as they left their Palais de Justice.

Maupeou now moved to supplant the parlements with a new judicial or-

ganization. By a royal decree he set up in Paris a supreme court composed

of the Council of State and some complaisant jurists; and at Arras, Blois,

Chalons, Clermont-Ferrand, Lyons, and Poitiers he established conseils su-

perieurs as appellate courts for the provinces. Some judiciary abuses were

reformed, venality was interrupted, justice was henceforth to be adminis-

tered without charge. Voltaire hailed the reforms and rashly predicted: "I

am absolutely sure that the Chancellor will carry off a complete victory, and

that the people will love it." 103 But the people could not contentedly accept

the destruction of so ancient an institution as the parlements; there is nothing

so often condemned, and so deeply loved, as the past. The majority of the

public scorned the new courts as added tools of royal autocracy. Diderot,

though he had no delusions about the parlements, mourned their passing as

"the end of constitutional government. ... In one moment we have jumped

from the monarchical state to the most complete despotic state." 104 Eleven

peers of the realm, and even some members of the royal family, expressed

their disapproval of Maupeou's attempt to replace the parlements. There was

no visible commotion among the people, but the words liberte, droits (laws),

and legalite, which had lately been much heard in the Parlement, now ran

from mouth to mouth. Satires on the lecher King took on new audacity and

bitterness. Placards called upon the Due d'Orleans to lead a revolution.

Almost without willing it the parlements, despite their conservatism, were

caught up in a ferment of revolutionary ideas. The Discourses of Rousseau,

the communism of Morelly, the proposals of Mably, the secret meetings of

Freemasons, the Encyclopedie's exposure of abuses in the government and

the Church, the flock of pamphlets circulating through the capital and the

provinces: all these stood in violent opposition to the claim of absolute power

and divine right by a do-nothing and sexually promiscuous King. "M. Tout

le Monde"— i.e., public opinion— was on the move as a force in history.

Until 1750 the brunt of criticism had fallen upon the Church, but there-

after, goaded by the suppression of the Ency elope die, it fell increasingly

upon the state. Wrote Horace Walpole from Paris in October, 1765:

CHAP. Ill) THELIFEOFTHESTATE 95

Laughing is out of fashion. . . . Good folks, they have no time to laugh.

There is God and the King to be pulled down first; and men and women, great

and small, are devoutly engaged in the demolition. . . . Do you know who the

philosophes are, or what the term means here? In the first place, it compre-

hends almost everybody; and, in the next, means men who, vowing war against

popery, aim, many of them, at a subversion of all religion, and still many more

at the destruction of regal power. 105

This, of course, was an exaggeration; most of the philosophes (Diderot

particularly excepted) were supporters of monarchy, and fought shy of

revolution. They attacked the nobility and all hereditary privilege; they

pointed out a hundred abuses and called for reform; but they shuddered at

the thought of giving all power to the people. 106 Nevertheless Grimm wrote

in his Correspondance for January, 1768:

The general weariness with Christianity, which is manifested in all parts, and

especially in Catholic states; the disquiet which is vaguely agitating the minds

of men, and leading them to attack religious and political abuses— [all this] is a

phenomenon characteristic of our century, as the spirit of reform was of the

sixteenth, and it foreshadows an imminent and inevitable revolution. 107

X. THE KING DEPARTS

Louis XV, like Louis XIV, lacked the art of dying in due time. He knew

that France was waiting for him to disappear, but he could not bear to think

of death. The Austrian ambassador reported in 1773: "From time to time the

King remarks concerning his age, health, and the frightful account that he

must one day render to the Supreme Being." 108 Louis was transiently touched

by the retirement of his daughter Louise-Marie to a Carmelite convent, al-

legedly to atone for her father's sins; there, we are told, she scrubbed floors

and washed laundry. When he came to see her she reproved him for his way

of life, begged him to dismiss Du Barry, marry the Princesse de Lamballe, and

make his peace with God.

Several of his friends died in the final years of the reign; two of them, their

hearts failing, fell dead at his feet. 109 Yet he seemed to take a macabre pleas-

ure in reminding aged courtiers of their approaching demise. "Souvre," he

said to one of his generals, "you are growing old; where do you wish to be

buried?" "Sire," answered Souvre, "at the feet of your Majesty." We are

told that the reply "made the King gloomy and pensive." 110 Mme. du Hausset

thought that "a more melancholy man was never born." 111

The King's death was a long-delayed revenge unwittingly taken by the

sex that he had adored and debased. When his lust found even Du Barry

inadequate, he took into his bed a girl so young as to be barely nubile; she

carried the germs of smallpox, and infected the King. On April 29, 1774, the

disease began to mark him. His three daughters insisted on staying with him

and nursing him, though they had acquired no immunity. (They all con-

tracted the disease, but recovered.) At night they left, and Du Barry took

their place. But on May 5 the King, wishing to receive the sacraments, gently

dismissed her: "I realize now that I am seriously ill. The scandal of Metz

g6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. Ill

must not be repeated. I owe myself to God and to my people. So we must

part. Go to the Due d'Aiguillon's chateau at Rueil, and await further orders.

Please believe that I shall always hold you in the most affectionate regard." 112

On May 7 the King, in a formal ceremony before the court, declared that

he repented of having given scandal to his subjects; but he maintained that

he "owed no accounting of his conduct to anyone but God." 113 At last he

welcomed death. "Never in my life," he told his daughter Adelaide, "have

I felt happier." 114 He passed away on May 10, 1774, aged sixty-four, having

reigned fifty-nine years. His corpse, which infected the air, was hurried to

the royal vaults at St.-Denis without pomp, and amid the sarcasms of the

crowd that lined the route. Once more, as in 17 15, France rejoiced at the

death of her king.

CHAPTER IV

The Art of Life

I. MORALITY AND GRACE

HE who has not lived in the years around 1 780," said Talleyrand, "has not

known the pleasure of life."* Provided, of course, one belonged to the

upper classes, and had no prejudices in favor of morality.

It is hard to define morality, for each age makes its own definition to suit

its temper and sins. Frenchmen had through centuries relieved monogamy

with adultery, as America relieves it with divorce; and in the Gallic view

judicious adultery does less hurt to the family— or at least to the children—

than divorce. In any case adultery flourished in eighteenth-century France,

and was generally condoned. When Diderot, in his Ency elope die, wished to

distinguish bind and attach, he gave as example: "One is bound to one's wife,

attached to one's mistress." 2 "Fifteen out of twenty of the noble lords about

the court," according to a contemporary, "are living with women to whom

they are not married." 3 To have won a mistress was as necessary to status as

to have money. Love was frankly sensual: Bouc'kt painted it en rose,

Fragonard gave it lace and grace; Buffon said, brutaily, "There is nothing

good in love but the flesh." 4

Here and there the finer love appeared, even in Crebillon filsf and among

the philosophes Helvetius dared to be enamored of his wife, while d'Alem-

bert remained faithful to Julie de Lespinasse through all the variations on her

absorbing theme. Jean-Jacques Rousseau undertook in this age a one-man

reform of morals; and shall we also credit the novels of Samuel Richardson?

Some women put on virtue as a fashion, 6 but some received gratefully the

recollected gospel of premarital chastity and postmarital fidelity as saving

them from the indignity of serving as steppingstones for philanderers. At

least monogamy ceased to be a badge of shame. Roues, married, rediscovered

old pleasures in family life; better to plumb the depths of unity than be for-

ever scratching the surface of variety. Many women who had begun as

frivolous surfaces settled down when children came; some nursed their chil-

dren, even before Rousseau's exhortations; and often those children, growing

up under maternal love, returned it with filial interest. The Marechale de

Luxembourg, after an adventurous youth, became a model wife, faithful to

her husband while gently mothering Rousseau. When the Comte de Maure-

pas died (1781), after serving both Louis XV and Louis XVI and suffering

a long exile between his ministries, his wife recalled that they "had spent

* "Qui n*a pas vecu dans les annees voisine de iy8o rCa pas connu le plaisir de vivre" So

this famous remark appears in P. Dupre's Encyclopedic des citations (Paris, 1959), 1, 635,

which quotes, as source, Fr. Guizot's Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de mon temps (Paris,

1858-68), 1,6.!

97

98 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

fifty years together, and not one day apart." 7 We hear too much— we our-

selves have spoken too much— of women who gained entrance into history

by breaking marriage vows; we hear too little of those who could not be

made unfaithful even by infidelity. Mile. Crozat, betrothed at twelve to the

future Due de Choiseul, bore with patience his infatuation with his ambitious

sister; she accompanied him in exile, and even the sophisticated Walpole

honored her as a saint. The Duchesse de Richelieu continued to love her hus-

band through all his adulteries, and was grateful that fate allowed her to die

in his arms. 8

Perversions, pornography, and prostitution continued. French law re-

quired the penalty of death for sodomy, and indeed two pederasts were

burned in the Place de Greve in 1750; 9 but usually the law ignored voluntary

and private homosexual acts between adults. 10 Economic morality was then

as now; note the passage in Rousseau's £?7iile n (1762) about the adulteration

of food and drinks. Political morality was then as now; there were many

devoted public servants (Malesherbes, Turgot, Necker), but also many who

secured their posts by money or connections, and reimbursed themselves, in

office, beyond the letter of the law. Many idle nobles lived luxuriously on the

blood of their peasants; but public and private charity abounded.

All in all, the French of the eighteenth century were a kindly people, de-

spite a code of sexual ethics that violated Christian norms by its candor. See,

in the career of Rousseau, the number of people who came to his aid and

comfort despite the difficulty of pleasing him; and often these sympathetic

souls belonged to that aristocracy which he had reviled. Chivalry had declined

in the relation of men to women, but it survived in the conduct of French

officers to war captives of their class. The irritable and hostile Smollett, travel-

ing in France in 1764, wrote: "I respect the French officers in particular for

their gallantry and valor, and especially for that generous humanity which

they experience to their enemies, even amidst the horrors of war." 12 Goya

pictured, but probably exaggerated, the cruelty of French soldiers to Spanish

commoners in the Napoleonic Wars. Certainly the French could be callously

cruel, presumably because they had been inured to brutality by war and the

penal code. They were turbulent, given to knife- wielding college brawls, and

to street riots as a substitute for elections. They were impetuous, and plunged

into good or evil with little loss of time in deliberation. They were chauvin-

ists who could not understand why the rest of the world was so barbarous

as to speak any other language but French. Mme. Denis refused to learn the

English word for bread— "Why can't they all say pain?" 13 Perhaps more than

any other people they loved glory. Soon they would die by the thousands

crying, "Vive VEmpereur!"

Of course the French were supreme in manners. The customs of courtesy

established under Louis XIV were tarnished by hypocrisy, cynicism, and

superficiality, but essentially they survived, and gave to life in the educated

classes a grace which no society can rival today. "The French are so polite,

so obliging," said Casanova, "that one feels drawn to them at once"— but he

adds that he could never trust them. 14

CHAP. IV ) THEARTOFLIFE 99

They excelled in cleanliness; in the Frenchwoman this became one of the

cardinal virtues, practiced till death. And it was a part of good manners to

be neatly dressed. The men and women of the court sometimes sinned against

good taste by extensive finery or extravagant coiffures. Men wore their hair

in a queue, which Marechal de Saxe deprecated as dangerous in war, giving

a handle to the enemy; and they powdered their hair as assiduously as did

their ladies. The women raised their hair to such elevation that they feared

to dance, lest they catch fire from chandeliers. A German visitor calculated

that the chin of a French lady lay exactly midway between her feet and the

top of her hair. 15 Hairdressers made fortunes by changing hair fashions fre-

quently. Cleanliness did not extend to the female hair, for this took hours to

arrange, and all but the fanciest women kept the same hairdos for days with-

out disturbing them with a comb. Some ladies carried grattoirs of ivory, silver,

or gold, to scratch the head with piquant grace.

Facial make-up was as complex as now. Leopold Mozart wrote to his wife

from Paris in 1763: "You ask if Parisian ladies are beautiful. How can one

say, when they are painted like Nuremberg dolls, and so disfigured by this

repulsive trick that the eyes of an honest German cannot tell a naturally

beautiful woman when he sees her?" 16 Women carried their cosmetics with

them, and renewed their complexions in public as brazenly as today. Mme.

de Monaco rouged herself before riding off to be guillotined. Corpses were

made up, powdered, and rouged, as in our time. Feminine dress offered a

challenging mixture of invitations and impediments: low necklines, lacy

bodices, hypnotizing gems, great spreading skirts, and high-heeled shoes,

usually of linen or silk. Buffon, Rousseau, and others protested against cor-

sets, but these remained de rigueur till the Revolution discarded them.

The variety and gaiety of social life were among the attractions of Paris.

The cafes Procope, La Regence, and Gradot entertained intellectuals and

rebels, men about town and women about men, while the luminaries of liter-

ature, music, and art shone in the salons. The lords of pedigree or wealth kept

Versailles and Paris dancing with dinners, receptions, and balls. In the upper

classes the arts included eating and conversation. The French cuisine was the

envy of Europe. French wit had now reached a refinement where it had

worn all topics thin, and boredom clouded brilliance. The art of conversation

declined in the second half of the eighteenth century; declamation over-

heated it, speakers outran listeners, and wit was cheapened by its own pro-

fusion and its careless stings. Voltaire, w 7 ho himself could sting, reminded

Paris that wit without courtesy is crudity; 17 and La Chalotais thought that

"the taste for cleverness . . . has banished science and true learning" from

the salons. 18

In the parks— which were neatly groomed and alive with statuary— people

strolled at their ease, or followed their children or their dogs, and gay blades

pursued damsels skilled in vain retreat. The Gardens of the Tuileries were

probably more beautiful then than now. Hear Mme. Vigee-Lebrun:

The Opera was close by in those days, bordering on the Palais-Royal. In

summer the performance ended at half-past eight o'clock, and all the elegant

people came out, even before the end, to walk about the grounds. It was the

100 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

fashion for women to carry very large nosegays, which, together with the

scented powder in their hair, literally perfumed the air. ... I have known

these gatherings, before the Revolution, to continue till two in the morning.

There were musical performances by moonlight in the open. . . . There was

always a great crowd. 19

II. MUSIC

France took music as part of its gaiete Farisienne. She did not care to rival

Germany in Masses and solemn chorales; she almost ignored Mozart when

he came to Paris, but she forgot to be chauvinistic when her ears were

charmed by Italian melodies. She made fetes galantes out of her music; she

specialized in forms fit for, or recalling, the dance— courantes, sarabandes,

gigues, gavottes, minuets. Her music, like her morals, her manners, and her

arts, circled around woman, and often took names that recalled her image—

UEnchanteresse, U Ingenue, Mimi, Carillon de Cy there.

In France, as in Italy, opera buff a was more popular than opera seria before

Gluck came (1773). A troupe calling itself Opera-Comique had installed

itself in Paris in 17 14; in 1762 it merged with the Comedie-Italienne; in 1780

this enlarged Opera-Comique moved to a permanent home in the Salle Fa-

vart. The man who made its fortune was Frangois-Andre Philidor, who trav-

eled through Europe as chess champion, and composed twenty-five operas,

nearly all of a humorous turn, like Sancho Panga and Tom Jones, but show-

ing good taste and finished art. His operas are now forgotten, but "Philidor's

defense" and "Philidor's legacy" are still remembered as classic moves in

chess. Ballet was a favorite interlude in French opera; here French grace

found another outlet, and motion became poetry. Jean-Georges Noverre,

ballet master at the Paris Opera, wrote a once famous treatise on choreogra-

phy— Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (1760); this prepared the way for

Gluck's reforms by advocating a return to Greek ideals of the dance, with

naturalness of movement, simplicity of costume, and emphasis on dramatic

significance rather than on abstract configurations or virtuoso feats.

Public concerts were now a part of life in all the major cities of France.

In Paris the Concerts Spirituels (established in the Tuileries in 1725) set a

high standard of instrumental music. While the Opera-Comique played Per-

golesi's La serva padrona, the Concerts performed his Stabat Mater, which

was so well received that it was repeated annually till 1 800. 20 The Concerts

brought the compositions of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Jommelli, Piccini, and

the Bachs to French acceptance, and provided a platform for the leading

virtuosos of the day.

These visiting performers agreed in one thing— that France lagged behind

Germany, Austria, and Italy in music. The philosophes joined in this judg-

ment. "It is a pity," wrote Grimm (a German) "that people in this country

understand so little of music"; 21 he excepted Mile. Fel, who sang with a lovely

throat. Grimm concurred with Rousseau and Diderot in asking for a "return

to nature" in opera; these three led the Italian faction in that Guerre des

CHAP. IV ) THE ART OF LIFE IOI

Bouffons which had begun with the presentation of an opera buff a by an

Italian company in Paris. We have noted elsewhere this debate between

French and Italian musical styles; it was not yet over, for Diderot was still

fighting the "War of the Buffoons" in his Le Neveu de Rameau; and in his

Troisieme Entretien sur Le Fils naturel (1757) he called for a Messiah to

redeem French opera from pompous declamation and fanciful artifice. "Let

him come forward, who is to put true tragedy and true comedy upon the

lyric [operatic] stage!"— and he gave as example of a fit text the Iphigenia in

Aulis of Euripides. 22 Did Gluck, then in Vienna, hear that call? Voltaire re-

peated it prophetically in 1 76 1 :

It is to be hoped that some genius may arise, strong enough to convert the

nation from this abuse [of artifice], and to impart to a stage production . . .

the dignity and ethic spirit that it now lacks. . . . The tide of bad taste is

rising, insensibly submerging the memory of what was once the glory of the

nation. Yet again I repeat: the opera must be set on a different footing, that it

may no longer deserve the scorn with which it is regarded by all the nations of

Europe. 23

In 1773 Gluck arrived in Paris, and on April 19, 1774, he conducted there

the French premiere of lphigenie en Aulide. But that story must bide its time.

III. THE THEATER

France produced in this period no plays that have defied oblivion— perhaps

excepting a few of those that Voltaire sent up from Les Delices or Ferney.

But France gave the drama every encouragement of staging and acclaim. In

1 773 Victor Louis raised at Bordeaux the finest theater in the realm, with a

pompous portico of Corinthian columns, classic balustrade, and sculptural

embellishments. The Comedie-Frangaise, acknowledged by Garrick to be

the best group of actors in Europe, was housed in the Theatre-Frangais built

in 1683 in the Rue des Fosses, St.-Germain-des-Pres: three tiers of galleries in

a narrow oblong that compelled declamation and set the oratorical style of

acting in France. Hundreds of families staged private theatricals, from Vol-

taire at Ferney to the Queen at Trianon— where Marie Antoinette played

Colette in Rousseau's Le Devin du village— and the Prince de Ligne thought

that "more than ten ladies of quality play and sing better than any in the

playhouse." 24 "Little theaters" sprouted everywhere in France. A Bernardine

monastery, hidden in the woods of Bresse, built a small theater for its monks,

"without" (said one of them) "the knowledge of bigots and small minds." 25

Despite amateur competition, the stars of the Comedie-Frangaise shone

brightly over France. We have seen how the people of Geneva and Ferney

came out to see Lekain when he played for Voltaire at Chatelaine. His real

name was Henri-Louis Cain, but this was a cursed cognomen which he for-

givably changed. Neither was his face his fortune; Mile. Clairon took some

time to warm to him even in a play. Voltaire had discovered his ability in an

amateur performance, had coached him, and had found a place for him at the

102 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

Theatre-Fran^ais. On September 14, 1750, Lekain made his debut as Titus in

Voltaire's Brutus; and for a generation thereafter he took the male lead in

Voltaire's plays. The irascible patriarch loved him to the end.

But Voltaire's stage favorite (now that Adrienne Lecouvreur had passed

away) was Mile. Clairon. Legally she was Claire-Josephe Hippolyte Leris

de La Tude. Born without benefit of marriage in 1723, and not expected to

survive, she lived to be eighty— which is not always a blessing for the heroines

of the stage. It was not thought worth while to educate her, but she stole her

way into the Theatre-Fran^ais, was entranced by the scenery-plus-orations,

and never quite overcame a tendency to make speeches even in the ecstasy of

love. She announced that she would be an actress; her mother threatened to

break her arms and legs if she persisted in so sinful a resolve; 26 she persisted

and joined a traveling troupe. She soon acquired the morals that were custom-

ary in her new profession. "Thanks to my talent, my good looks, and the

ease with which I could be approached, I saw so many men at my feet that

it would have been impossible for me, being endowed with a naturally tender

heart, ... to be inaccessible to love." 27

Back in Paris, she charmed M. de La Popeliniere; he enjoyed her, and then

used his influence to get her a place at the Opera; four months later the

Duchesse de Chateauroux, current mistress to the King, secured her admis-

sion to the Comedie-Fran^aise. The company asked her to choose her first

role, expecting her to follow custom and select a minor part; she proposed to

play Phedre; the company protested, but let her have her way; she carried

off the adventure triumphantly. Henceforth she starred in tragic roles, in

which her only rival was Mile. Dumesnil. She gained a reputation for acquisi-

tive promiscuity. She entertained a roster of nobles, made them pay well,

hoarded her gains, and then yielded much of them to her favorite lover, the

Chevalier de Jaucourt, who wrote articles on economics for the Encyclo-

pedic She paid a price, too, for the attentions of Marmontel, whom we shall

soon meet as the author of Moral Tales. Consider the woman's side of it in

her letter to him: "Is it possible that you did not know what troubles you

caused me (unintentionally, but I had them all the same), and that those

troubles have kept me in bed for six weeks, in critical danger? I cannot be-

lieve that you were aware of this, else you would not have gone out in so-

ciety while everybody knew what condition I was in." 28 Nevertheless she

and Marmontel remained fast friends for thirty years.

It was he whose criticisms and suggestions led her to make an important

change in acting. Till 1748 she had followed the method usual at the

Theatre-Fran§ais— forceful and emotional speech, grand gestures, trembling

passion. Marmontel found this unnatural and distasteful. Amid her liaisons

Clairon had done much reading, and had become one of the best-educated

women of her day; her fame and esprit had won her admission to cultivated

society; she perceived that the emptiest vessels were the most resonant. In

1752 an attack of syphilis compelled her to withdraw for a time from the

stage. Recovering, she accepted an engagement to give thirty-five perform-

ances in Bordeaux. On her first night there, she tells us, she played Phedre

CHAP. IV ) THE ART OF LIFE IO3

in the traditional manner, "with all the noise, fury, and unreason which then

were so applauded in Paris." She was applauded. But on the next night she

played Agrippine in Racine's Britannicus in quiet voice and restrained ges r

tures, leaving emotions pent up until the final scene. She received an ovation.

Returning to Paris, she won the old audience to her new style. Diderot

warmly approved; he had her in mind when he wrote The Paradox of the

Actor— that a good actor is inwardly calm and self-possessed even in the most

passionate moments of his roles; and he asked, "What acting was ever more

perfect than Clairon's?" 29 She liked to shock her admirers by telling them

that she mentally reviewed her monthly bills while conveying to an audience

a pathos that moved it to tears. 30 Voltaire did not welcome the new method,

but he effectively supported her, and she him, in reforming costume and

furniture on the stage. Heretofore all actresses had played their roles— of any

nation or age— in the dress of eighteenth-century Paris, with hoopskirts and

powdered hair; Clairon startled her audience by dressing her body and hair

in the style of the time in the play; and when she played Idame in Voltaire's

Orphan of China the costume and furniture were Chinese.

In 1763 Clairon went to Geneva to consult Dr. Tronchin. Voltaire asked

her to stay with him at Les Delices. "Madame Denis is ill; so am I. Monsieur

Tronchin will come to our hospital to see the three of us." 31 She came, and

the old sage liked her so much that he lured her to Ferney for a longer visit,

and persuaded her to join him in several performances in his theater. An old

drawing shows him, in his seventieth year, kneeling before her in a passionate

avowal.

She retired from the stage in 1766, having already at forty-three lost her

health, and even the precision of her speech. Like Lecouvreur, she fell in love

with a dashing young noble; she sold nearly all her possessions to rescue him

from his creditors; he repaid her by giving his love, and her livres, to other

women. Then, aged forty-nine, she received from the thirty-six-years-old

Christian Friedrich Karl Alexander, Margrave of Ansbach and Bayreuth, an

invitation to live with him at Ansbach as his mentor and mistress. She went

(1773), and for thirteen years she kept her hold on him. He had imbibed in

France some ideals of the Enlightenment; with her encouragement he ef-

fected several reforms in his principality— abolishing torture and establishing

religious liberty. Her final accomplishment was to persuade him to sleep

every night with his wife. In time Clairon grew bored, and longed for Paris.

The Margrave took her there occasionally; on one of those trips he adopted

a new mistress, and left Clairon in Paris, handsomely endowed. She was now

sixty-three.

She was welcomed in the salons, even by the virtuous Mme. Necker; she

gave lessons in elocution to the future Mme. de Stael. She took on new

lovers, including later the husband of Mme. de Stael herself, who was glad

to get rid of him. He set up the aging actress in comfort, but the Revolution

deflated her livres, and she lived in poverty until Napoleon reinflated her

pension in 1801. In that year a Citizen Dupoirier offered her a last liaison.

She discouraged him in a pitiful note that summarizes the tragedy of many

104 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

an old actress: "It is likely that your memory still recalls me as brilliant,

young, and surrounded with all my prestige. You must revise your ideas.

I can scarcely see; I am hard of hearing; I have no more teeth; my face is all

wrinkled; my dried-up skin barely covers my weak frame." 32 He came

nevertheless, and they comforted each other by recalling their youth. She

died in 1 803 by falling out of bed.

She had long outlived the classic tragic drama whose greatest eighteenth-

century exponent, Voltaire, had acclaimed her as its supreme interpreter. The

Paris audience, predominantly middle-class, was surfeited with the rhyming

speeches of princes, princesses, priests, and kings; those majestic alexandrines

of Corneille and Racine, marching pompously on six feet, seemed now to be

a symbol of aristocratic life; but were there none but nobles in history? Yes,

of course, a Moliere had shown those others; but that was in comedy; were

there not tragedies, profound trials and noble feelings, in the homes and

hearts of people without pedigree? Diderot thought the time had come for

dramas of the bourgeoisie. And whereas the nobility had shunned sentimen-

tality, and required emotion to wear a stately mask, the new drama, said

Diderot, should liberate feeling, and should not be ashamed to move audi-

ences to handkerchiefs and tears. So he, and some others after him, wrote

drames larmoy ants— weeping plays. Moreover, several of the new play-

wrights not only portrayed and exalted middle-class life, they attacked the

nobility, the clergy, at last even the government— its corruption, taxes, lux-

ury, and waste; they did not merely denounce despotism and bigotry (Vol-

taire had done this well), they praised republics and democracy; and those

passages were applauded with special warmth. 33 The French stage joined a

hundred other forces in preparing revolution.

IV. MARMONTEL

"Authors are everywhere," wrote Horace Walpole from Paris in 1765,

and they "are worse than their own writings, which I don't mean as a com-

pliment to either." 34 Certainly the age could not compare, in literature, with

the age of Moliere and Racine, nor with that of Hugo, Flaubert, and Balzac;

in this brief period between 1757 and 1774 we have, as memorable authors,

only Rousseau and Marmontel, and the living embers of Voltaire's fire, and

the secret, unpublished ebullience of Diderot. Men and women gave them-

selves so intensely to conversation that their wits were spent before they took

to ink. Aristocratic polish was out of print; philosophy, economics, and poli-

tics held the stage; content now dominated form. Even poetry tended to

propaganda; Saint-Lambert's Les Saisons (1769) imitated James Thomson,

but denounced fanaticism and luxury unseasonably, and, like Lear, thought

of winter in terms of icy blasts whistling about the hovels of the poor.

Jean-Frangois Marmontel owed his rise to his shrewdness, to women, and

to Voltaire. Born in 1723, he wrote in his old age amiable Memoir es (Tun

pere (1804), which offer us a tender picture of his childhood and youth.

CHAP. IV) THE ART OF LIFE IO5

Though he became a skeptic, and almost an idolator of Voltaire, he had

nothing but good to say of the pious people who had brought him up, and

of the kindly and devoted Jesuits who had educated him. He loved these so

much that he took the tonsure, aspired to join their order, and taught in their

colleges at Clermont and Toulouse. But like many another fledgling of the

Jesuits, he flew off on the winds of enlightenment, and lost at least his in-

tellectual virginity. In 1743 he submitted verses to Voltaire, who so relished

them that he sent Marmontel a set of his works corrected in his own hand.

The young poet kept these as a sacred heirloom, and gave up all notions of

a priestly career. Two years later Voltaire secured a place for him in Paris,

and free admission to the Theatre-Frangais; indeed, in the hidden goodness

of his parental-childless heart, Voltaire sold Marmontel's poems, and sent

him the proceeds. In 1747 Marmontel's play Denys le Tyran (Dionysius)—

dedicated to Voltaire— was accepted and produced; it succeeded beyond his

hopes; "in one day I became famous and rich." 35 Soon he was a minor lion in

the salons; he feasted on dinners and paid with wit, and found a route to

Clairon's bed.

His second play, Aristomene, brought him more money, friends, and mis-

tresses. At Mme. de Tencin's gatherings he met Fontenelle, Montesquieu,

Helvetius, Marivaux; at the table of Baron d'Holbach he heard Diderot,

Rousseau, and Grimm. Guided by women, he made his way up in the world.

Having praised Louis XV in clever verses, he was admitted to the court.

Pompadour was charmed by his handsome face and blooming youth; she

persuaded her brother to employ him as secretary, and in 1758 she made him

editor of the official journal, Mercure de France. He wrote a libretto for

Rameau, and articles for the Encyclopedie. Mme. GeofFrin liked him so well

that she offered him a cozy apartment in her home, where he remained for

ten years as a paying guest.

To the Mercure he contributed (1753-60) a series of Contes moraux

(Moral Tales), which lifted that periodical into literature. Ex uno judice

omnes. Soliman II, tiring of Turkish delights, asks for three European beau-

ties. The first one resists for a month, yields for a week, and is then put aside.

Another sings beautifully, but her conversation is soporific. Roxalana does

not merely resist, she berates the Sultan as a lecher and a criminal. "Do you

forget who I am and who you are?" he cries. Roxalana: "You are power-

ful, I am beautiful; so we are even." She is not surpassingly beautiful, but she

has a retrousse nose, and this overwhelms Soliman. He tries every device to

break down her resistance, but fails. He threatens to kill her; she proposes to

spare him the trouble by killing herself. He insults her; she insults him more

cuttingly. But also she tells him that he is handsome, and that he needs only

her guidance to be as fine as a Frenchman. He is offended and pleased. Finally

he marries her and makes her his queen. During the ceremony he asks him-

self, "Is it possible that a little turned-up nose should overthrow the laws of

an empire?" 36 Marmontel's moral: It is little things that cause great events,

and if we knew those secret trivia we should completely revise history.

Nearly everything prospered with Marmontel until he published (1767)

106 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

a novel, Belisaire. It was excellent, but it advocated religious toleration, and

questioned "the right of the sword to exterminate heresy, irreligion, and im-

piety, and to bring the whole world under the yoke of the true faith." 37 The

Sorbonne condemned the book as containing reprehensible doctrine. Mar-

montel appeared before the Syndic of the Sorbonne and protested, "Come,

sir, is it not the spirit of the age, not mine, that you are condemning?" 38 The

spirit of the age showed in his boldness, and in the mildness of his punish-

ment. Ten years earlier he would have been sent to the Bastille, and his book

would have been suppressed; actually the sale of his novel proceeded fa-

mously, still bearing the "permission and privilege of the King"; and the

government contented itself with recommending that he should keep silence

on the matter. 39 However, Mme. Geoffrin was much disturbed when the

Sorbonne's decree banning Belisaire was not only read in the churches but

posted on her door. She gently suggested that Marmontel should find other

lodgings.

He landed on his feet as usual. In 1771 he was appointed royal historiogra-

pher, with a good salary; in 1783 he became "perpetual secretary" of the

French Academy; in 1786 he was professor of history at the Lycee. In 1792,

aged sixty-nine and sickened by the excesses of the Revolution, he retired to

£vreux, then to Abloville; there he composed his Memoir es, in which even

the Sorbonne was forgiven. He spent his final years in uncomplaining pov-

erty, grateful for having lived a full and zestful life. He died on the last day

of 1799.

V. THE LIFE OF ART

7. Sculpture

The King had a fine taste in art; so did the lords and ladies of his court,

and the millionaires who were now itching to control the state. It was an

event in French history when the Sevres factories, which Mme. de Pompa-

dour had established, began in 1769 to produce hard-paste porcelain; and

though the Germans at Dresden and Meissen had done this sixty years ear-

lier, the Sevres products soon gained a European market. Great artists like

Boucher, Caffieri, Pajou, Pigalle, Falconet, and Clodion were not above

making designs for Sevres porcelain. Meanwhile faience and soft-paste porce-

lain of exquisite design continued to come from the potters of Sevres, St.-

Cloud, Chantilly, Vincennes . . .

Potters, metalworkers, cabinetmakers, and tapestry weavers combined

their resources to adorn the rooms of royalty, nobility, and financiers.

Clocks, like that which Boizot designed and Gouthiere cast in bronze, 40 were

a characteristic ornament of this age. Pierre Gouthiere and Jacques Caffieri

excelled in "ormolu"— literally, "ground gold," actually an alloy composed

chiefly of copper and zinc, carved and chased and inlaid into furniture. The

master cabinetmakers formed a proud and powerful guild, whose members

CHAP. IV) THE ART OF LIFE I07

were required to stamp their work with their names as an emblem of re-

sponsibility. The best of them in France came from Germany: Jean-Frangois

Oeben and his pupil Jean-Henri Riesener; these two joined their skills in

making for Louis XV (1769) a magnificent "Bureau du Roi," a rococo orgy

of design, carving, inlay, and gilt, for which the King paid 63,000 livres. It

was enjoyed by Napoleons I and III, and was surrendered to the Louvre in

1 870. It is now valued at £ 50,ooo. 41

In this age, which set such store by tactile values, sculpture was esteemed

at almost its classic estimate, for its essence was form, and France was learn-

ing that form, not color, is the soul of art. Here again women outshone the

gods; not in the natural imperfections of reality, but in the ideal shapes and

drapery that sensitive sculptors could assemble and conceive. Sculpture em-

bellished not only palaces and churches but gardens and public parks; so the

statues in the Jardins des Tuileries were among the most popular figures in

Paris; and Bordeaux, Nancy, Rennes, and Reims emulated Paris in terra cotta,

marble, and bronze.

Guillaume Coustou II (only one year younger than the reign) now pro-

duced his finest work. In 1764 Frederick the Great commissioned him to

make statues of Venus and Mars; in 1769 Coustou sent them to Potsdam for

the Palace of Sanssouci. Also in 1769 he began the stately tomb of the

Dauphin and the Dauphine (parents of Louis XVI) for the cathedral of Sens;

on this he labored till his death (1777). In his last decades he saw the rise of

as brilliant a quartet of sculptors as France has ever known: Pigalle, Falconet,

Caffieri, and Pajou.

Failing to win the grand prix that paid for an art education in Rome, Pigalle

went there at his own expense, helped by Coustou. Returning to Paris, he

won admission to the Academie des Beaux-Arts with his first chef-d'oeuvre,

Mercure Attachdnt Ses Talonnieres (Mercury Attaching His Heelpieces).

Seeing it, the old sculptor Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne cried out, "Je voudrais

r avoir fait/" (I wish I had done that! ) Louis XV liked it, too, and sent it

to his ally, Frederick II, in 1749. Somehow it found its way back to the

Louvre, where we may contemplate the remarkable skill with which the

young artist suggested the impatience of the Olympian herald to be up and

off. Mme. de Pompadour found Pigalle's work congenial, and gave him many

commissions. He made a bust of her, which is now in the Metropolitan Mu-

seum of Art in New York; and when her amour with the King subsided into

friendship he carved her likeness as Deesse de FAmitie (1753). 42 He made

a statue of Louis as plain Citoyen for the Place Roy ale at Reims, and finished

Bouchardon's Louis XV for what is now the Place de la Concorde. He por-

trayed Diderot in bronze, as a man torn by conflicting philosophies. But he

let himself go histrionic in the tomb that he carved for the remains of the

Marechal de Saxe in the Church of St. Thomas at Strasbourg— the amorous

warrior striding to death as to a victory.

The most talked-of statue of this period was that which the intelligentsia

of Europe chose Pigalle to make of Voltaire. Mme. Necker suggested it at

108 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

one of her soirees on April 17, 1770. All of her seventeen guests (who in-

cluded d'Alembert, Morellet, Raynal, Grimm, and Marmontel) welcomed

the proposal, and the public was invited to subscribe to the cost. Some ob-

jections were raised, for it was unusual to raise statues to any living persons

except royalty, and none had been made of Corneille or Racine before their

death. Nevertheless subscriptions poured in, even from half the sovereigns

of Europe; Frederick sent in two hundred louis d'or to commemorate his old

friend and foe. Rousseau asked permission to contribute; Voltaire objected;

d'Alembert persuaded him to consent. Freron, Palissot, and other anti-

philosophes offered their tribute, but were refused; the philosophes proved

slower than their opponents to forgive. As for Voltaire himself, he warned

Mme. Necker that he was no fit subject for statuary:

I am seventy-six years old, and I have scarcely recovered from a severe

malady which treated my body and soul very badly for six weeks. M. Pigalle,

it is said, is to come and model my countenance. But, madame, it would be

necessary that I should have a countenance, and the place where it was can

hardly be divined. My eyes are sunk three inches; my cheeks are of old parch-

ment, badly stuck upon bones that hold to nothing; the few teeth I had are all

gone. What I say to you is not coquetry; it is pure truth. A poor man has never

been sculptured in that condition; M. Pigalle would believe that he was being

played with; and for my part I should have so much self-love that I should

never dare to appear in his presence. I would advise him, if he wished to put

an end to this strange affair, to take his model, with slight alterations, from the

little figure in Sevres porcelain. 43

Pigalle doubled the problem by proposing to make a nude statue of the

famous imp, but he was dissuaded. He went to Ferney in June, and for eight

days the bashful philosopher sat for him, on and off, but so restlessly— dic-

tating to a secretary, making grimaces, blowing peas at various objects in the

room— that the sculptor came close to a nervous breakdown. 44 Returning to

Paris with a mold, he labored on the task for two months, and revealed the

result on September 4; half the elite came to marvel and smile. It is now in

the vestibule of the library of the Institute.

Pigalle's only rival for sculptural primacy in this period was fitienne-

Maurice Falconet, and Diderot tells us a pretty story of their enmity. Two

years younger, Falconet avoided direct competition at first by making fig-

ures in porcelain. Especially delightful was the Fygmalion which Duru mod-

eled after Falconet's design, showing the Greek sculptor's astonishment as

his marble Galatea bends to speak to him. That figure could symbolize a

half -forgotten truth: unless a work of art speaks to us it is not art. When

Pigalle was shown this bit of clay transformed into enduring significance, he

uttered the traditional compliment of one great artist to another: "I wish I

had done that!" But Falconet, seeing Pigalle's Louis XV Citoyen, did not

entirely return the compliment. "Monsieur Pigalle," he said, "I do not like

you, and I believe you return my feeling. I have seen your Citoyen. It was

possible to create such a work, since you have done it; but I do not believe

that art can go one line beyond it. This does not prevent us from remaining

as we were." 45

Falconet was soured by forty years of trials before full recognition came

Fie. i— iVIaurick-Quf.n tin dk La Tour: J can-Jacques Rousseau, pastel

portrait (1752). Musee de Snint-Qucntin, France. page 26

Fig. 2— Caumonti-xlk (1717-1806): Melchior

von Grimm* Musee Conde, Chantilly, France.

(Photo Giraudon.) page 33

4*£W ■

FlG. 3— Cakmomkuj:: Mine. d'Epivay. A'lusce

Condi, Chantilly. (Photo Giraudon.) page 35

Fig. 4— Louis Tocouk (1 696-1 772): Count

IVenzel Anton von Kaunitz. National Li-

brary, Vienna. page 40

Fig, 5— Engraving after a painting by F.

Bock: Frederick the Great in Old Age. (Bect-

inann Archive.)

v.. ''- _ ■ _

Fig. 6— Augustin Pajou: Mwe. du

Barry, marble bust. Louvre, Paris.

pages 86, 109

mg. 7— J.-K. OivHKN and J.-H. RiESENER; Bureau da Roi ( r 769) . Louvre, Paris.

PAGE IO7

Fig. 8— Louis-Michel Vanloo: Louis XV in Later Life. The Mansell Collection,

London. page 84

Fig. ySevres soft-paste

porcelain, 1784. The

Metropolitan Museum of

Art, New York, gift of

R. Thornton Wilson,

1950, in memory of

Florence Ellsworth Wil-

son. PAGE 106

Fig. 10— Jacques- Angi-.

Gabriel: The Petit Tri-

anon (1762-68). French

Embassy Press and In-

formation Division.

page 1 1 1

Fig, i i— Jean- Jacques Caffieri: Jem de

RotroiL Comcdic Frangaise, Paris. Repro-

duced from Max Osborn, Die Kuvst des

Rokoko (Berlin: Propyliien Verlag, 1929).

PAGE IO9

Fig, 1 2— Jacquks-Gkrmain Sou vv lot: The

Pant he on, Far is (1757-90). French Embassy

Press and Information Division. pack i 10

Fig. 13— After a painting by Jean-

Marc Nattier: Mine. Geojfrin.

page 1 1 8

Fig. 14— Jeax-Honore Fragonard: Self-

Portrait. Louvre, Paris. page 117

Fig. 15— C arm on telle: Mine, du Deffand Visited by Mine, de Choi se id. From a

drawing by G. P. Harding. page 125

Fig. i 6— Jeax-Baptiste Greuze: So-

phie A mould. Reproduced by permis-

sion of the Trustees of the Wallace

Collection, London. page 113

Fig. 17— Greuze: The Broken Pitch-

er (La Cruche Cassee). Louvre,

Paris. page 1 1 3

Fig. i H— I'racon aki): The Siiing. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the

YVnlhice Collection, London. PAGE 117

.

Fig, 19— Anionic) Canat.ktto: View of St. Mark's, Venice. Collection of Baron

von Thvssen, Castagnok-Lugano. (Foco Brunei, Lugano.) page 236

Fig. 20— Giamkattista Tikpolo: The Banquet of Cleopatra. Palazzo Labia, Ven-

ice. (Fotogrnfo Rossi, Venice.) page 238

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,

A

■;»'►

*

Fir, 2 1— TiEPOLo: Apollo Bringing the Bride to Barbarossd. The Resident, Wiirz-

burg, (Photo- VerJag Gundermann.) page 239

I ; k;. 22— Rosa lb a Carrikra: Self-

Portrait. Windsor Gistlc. Copyright

reserved. PAGE 235

Kio. 23— Giovanni Battista Piaz-

/ktta: Rebecca at the Well. Brera,

Milan. page 236

Kig. 24— A. Loxghi: Carlo Goldovi. Alu-

seo Con*ci\ Venice. packs 239, 331

Fig. 25— The Royal Palace, Madrid. Spanish National Tourist Office.

page 297

I ; k.\ 26— Facade of the Church of Santiago de Covipostela, Spain (1738). Spanish Na-

tional Tourist Office. page 297

Fig. 27— Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes: Charles IV and His Family.

Prado, Madrid. page 304

Kig. 28— Goya: Charles III. Prado, Madrid.

PAGE 3OO

Fig. 29— Goya: The Duchess of Alba. Prado, Madrid.

PAGE 303

Fig. 30— Goya: Self -For trait. Prado,

Madrid. page 304

Fig. 31— Goya: The Tribunal of the

hiquhitiofi. Prado, Madrid, page 306

Fig. 32— Goya: La Maja Desnuda. Prado, Madrid.

PAGE 305

Fig. 33— Goya: La Maja Vcstida. Prado, Madrid.

page 305

Fig. 34— Goya: Saturn Devouring His Off spring. Prado, Madrid, page 308

S

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Oh

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y.

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Fig. 37— Jf.an-/Yntoink Houdon: Gluck. Lou-

vre, Paris. page 367

Fig. 3 8 —X a vi r«: k - P a s( ; a t F abrk

(1766-1837): Vhtorio Al fieri Uf-

fizi, Florence. page 335

>' ^^ — ■»"'

Fig. j9— Franz von Zauner (1746-182 2):

Emperor Joseph //. Kunstliistorischcs Mu-

seum, Vienna. page 346

I

Kig. 40— Fab&E: T/x' Countess of

Albany . Uffi/i, Florence, page 339

Fig. 41— John FIoppxer (1758-18 10): Jo-

seph Haydn. Windsor Castle. Copyright re-

served, page 373

Fig. 42— Ester hazy Castle at Eisenstadt. Aus-

trian Information Service. page 375

Fig. 43— Johann Nkpom.uk dklla Crock: The Mozart Family. Original in iMozart's

dwelling house in Salzburg, Austria. page 382

Fig.

('7*

44— P/l'JI NX

0-

k-Maukick Falcon it: Stilt /fc of I* e ra-

the Great, Leningrad

page 467

Fig. 45— Artist Unknown: Czar Peter III.

page 437

Fig. 46— Engraving by G. Sko-

RODUMOV AFTKR A PAINTING BY

F. S. Rokotov: Cat her hie the

Great. State Historical Museum,

.Moscow. (Sovfoto.) pack 441

Fig. 47— F. S. Rokotov: Grigori Orlov.

PAGE 437

Fig. 48— Ivan Starov: Potemkirts Taurida

Palace (1783), Leningrad. (Sovfoto.)

page 469

CHAP.IV) THE ART OF LIFE IO9

to him. He retired into himself, lived in Diogenic simplicity, quarreled read-

ily, belittled his own work, and expressed contempt for fame, living or post-

humous. Fame came at last with his Baigneuse ( 1757)— a pretty bather trying

the water's temperature with her toes. 46 Now Mme. de Pompadour warmed

to him; for her he carved Amour Menagant— Cupid threatening to loose an

arrow infected with love. For a time Falconet became the Boucher and

Fragonard of sculpture, turning out such charming titillations as Venus and

Cupid, Venus Disrobing before Paris . . . He excelled in designing can-

delabra, small fountains, and figurines; he carved in marble the Clock of the

Three Graces now in the Louvre; and he pleased Pompadour by representing

her as Music. 47 In 1766 he accepted Catherine IFs invitation to Russia; in

St. Petersburg he carved his masterpiece, Peter the Great on a prancing

horse. He shared with Diderot and Grimm the favor of the Empress; labored

for her through twelve years; quarreled with her and her ministers; left in a

huff and returned to Paris. In 1783 he suffered a paralytic stroke; during the

eight years that remained to him he kept to his room, confirmed in his gloomy

view of life.

Jean-Jacques Caffieri could be more cheerful, having been nursed into suc-

cess by his father, Jacques, one of the leading bronze workers of the preced-

ing age. He gained early entry into the Academy of Fine Arts with his figure

of an old man, clad only in whiskers, and entitled Le Fleuve (The River).

The Comedie-Frangaise engaged him to adorn its halls with busts of the

French dramatists; he delighted everyone with his idealized representations

of Corneille, Moliere, and Voltaire. His masterpiece is a bust of the play-

wright Jean de Rotrou, which he made from an engraving preserved in the

family; it is d'Artagnan in middle age— flowing hair, flashing eyes, pugnacious

nose, bristling mustache; this is one of the finest busts in sculpture's history.

Jealous of the Comedie, the Company of the Opera persuaded Caffieri to

portray their heroes, too; he made busts of Lully and Rameau, but these have

disappeared. A lovely Portrait of a Young Girl remains, 48 perhaps a member

of the Opera ballet, a charming reconciliation of modest eyes and proud

breasts.

Mme. du Barry's favorite sculptor was Augustin Pajou. After the custom-

ary novitiate in Rome, he achieved early prosperity with royal commissions

and orders from abroad. He made a dozen portraits of the new mistress; the

one in the Louvre has a classic costume wondrously carved. At the King's

request he portrayed Buffon for the Jardin du Roi; 49 then he commemorated

Descartes, Turenne, Pascal, and Bossuet. His finest work survives in the

reliefs with which he adorned the lower tier of boxes at the opera house in

Versailles. He lived long enough to work for Louis XVI, to mourn that

King's execution, and to watch Napoleon bestride the Continent.

2. Architecture

Was there any memorable building in the France of 'these eighteen years?

Not much. The churches were already too spacious for the remaining faith-

ful, and the palaces were arousing the jealousy of the famine-stricken multi-

HO ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

tude. The renewal of interest in Roman architecture by the excavations at

Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748-63) was nourishing a revival of

classical styles— lines of simplicity and dignity, fa$ade of columns and pedi-

ment, and sometimes a spacious dome. Jacques-Francois Blondel, professor

at the Academie Royale de l'Architecture, was all for such classic forms, and

his successor, Julien-David Le Roy, issued in 1754 a treatise, Les plus Beaux

Monuments de la Grece, which accelerated the intoxication. Anne-Claude

de Tubieres, Comte de Caylus, after much traveling in Italy, Greece, and

the Near East, published (1752-67) seven epochal volumes, Recueil (Van-

tiquites egyptiennes, etrusques, grecques, romaines, et gauloises, carefully

illustrated from some of his own drawings; the whole world of French art,

even of French manners, was powerfully influenced by this book toward

rejecting the irregularities of baroque and the frivolities of rococo to seek

again the purer lines of classic styles. So in 1763 Grimm told his clientele:

For some years past we have been making keen inquiry for antique monu-

ments and forms. The predilection for them has become so universal that now

everything is to be done a la grecque, from architecture to millinery; our ladies

have their hair dressed a la grecque, our fine gentlemen would think themselves

dishonored if they did not hold in their hands a little box a la grecque?

And Diderot, the apostle of bourgeois romanticism, suddenly surrendered to

the new wave (1765) on reading a translation of Winckelmann's History of

Ancient Art. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that we must study the antique

in order that we may learn to see nature." 51 That sentence itself was a

revolution.

In 1757 Jacques-Germain Soufflot began to build the Church of Ste.-

Genevieve, which Louis XV, when ill at Metz, had vowed to raise to the

patron saint of Paris as soon as he should recover. The King himself laid the

first stone, and the erection of this edifice "became the great architectural

event of the second half of the eighteenth century" in France. 52 Soufflot de-

signed it in the form of a Roman temple, with a portico of sculptured pedi-

ment and Corinthian columns, and four wings meeting in a Greek cross in a

central choir under a triple dome. Controversy marked almost every stage

of the construction. Harassed and disheartened by attacks upon his design,

Soufflot died in 1780, leaving the structure incomplete. The four piers de-

signed by him to support the dome proved too weak, and Charles-£tienne

Cuvillier replaced them by a much more beautiful circle of columns. This

chef-d'oeuvre of the classical revival was secularized by the Revolution; it

was renamed the Pantheon in memory of A4arcus Agrippa's masterpiece at

Rome, as the burial place "of all the gods" of the new order, even of Vol-

taire, Rousseau, and Marat; it ceased to be a Christian church, and became a

pagan tomb; it symbolized, in its architecture and its fate, the progressive

triumph of paganism over Christianity.

The classic style won another victory in the first Church of the Madeleine

(Magdalen), begun in 1764; colonnades and flat-ceiled aisles took the place

of arches and vaults, and a dome covered the choir. Napoleon swept it away

unfinished, to make way for the still more classical Madeleine that occupies

the site today.

CHAP. IV) THE ART OF LIFE III

This reversion to grave classic modes, after the rebellious exuberance of

baroque under Louis XIV and the playful elegance of rococo under Louis

XV, was part of the transition, under Louis XV himself, to le style Louis

Seize— the style of building, furniture, and ornament that was to take the

name of the guillotined King. Art disciplined itself from incalculable curves

and superfluous decoration to the sober simplicity of straight lines and struc-

tural form. It was as if the decline of Christianity had taken the heart out

of the Gothic exaltation, and had left art no recourse but to a Stoic reserve

shorn of gods and clinging to the earth.

The greatest of French builders in this generation was Jacques-Ange Ga-

briel, whose ancestry had put architecture in his blood. Commissioned by

Louis XV (1752) to rebuild an old castle at Compiegne, he graced the en-

trance with a Greek portico of Doric columns, dentil cornice, and unem-

bellished balustrade. He followed similar designs in rebuilding the right wing

of the palace at Versailles (1770). To the same palace he added (1753-70)

an exquisite opera house. The flushed columns, the delicately carved cornices

and handsome balustrade, make this one of the loveliest interiors in France.

Tired of court publicity and formality, Louis appealed to Gabriel to build

him a petite maison hidden in the woods; Gabriel chose a site a mile from

the palace, and raised there in French Renaissance style the Petit Trianon

(1762-68). Here Pompadour had hoped to enjoy privacy and ease; Du

Barry romped there for a while; then Marie Antoinette made it her favorite

retreat as the royal shepherdess in those happy, careless days when the sun

still shone upon Versailles.

3. Greuze

In the intimacy of aristocratic homes paintings were a favored decoration.

Statues were cold and colorless; they pleased the eye and mind rather than

heart and soul; paintings could reflect the flux of moods and tastes, and they

could transport the spirit to open spaces, shady trees, or distant scenes while

the body remained immured. So Claude-Joseph Vernet pictured so many

ships riding in French waters that Louis XV, in a famous quip, thought it

unnecessary to build more. The French government hired Vernet to visit the

ports and make paintings of the vessels anchored there; he did, and made

France proud of her fleets. Diderot secured one of Vernet's seascapes and

landscapes, and prized it so highly that he prayed to an extemporized God:

"I abandon all to thee, take all back; yes, all, except Vernet!" 53 — And there

was Hubert Robert, who was called "Robert des Ruines" because he

equipped nearly all his landscapes with Roman ruins, like The Pont du Gard

at Nimes. Nevertheless, Mme. Vigee-Lebrun assures us, he was "very much

in demand" in Paris salons, though he was ruinously fond of eating. 54 — And

there was Frangois-Hubert Drouais, who preserved for us, with sensitive

portraiture, the loveliness of the Marquise de Sorau and the innocent child-

hood of the future Charles X and his sister Marie-Adelaide. 55 But let us look

more intimately at Greuze and Fragonard.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was the Rousseau and Diderot of the brush, who

112 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

rosied his colors with sentiment, and made himself the Apelles of the bour-

geoisie. Sentiment is happier than sophistication, and not as shallow; we must

forgive Greuze for seeing and painting the pleasant sides of life, for loving

the gay gambol of children, the fragile innocence of pretty girls, and the

modest contentment of middle-class homes. Without Greuze and Chardin we

might have supposed that all France was decadent and corrupt, that Du Barry

was its model, that Venus and Mars were its only gods. But it was the nobles

who were decadent, it was Louis XV who was corrupt; and it was the

aristocracy and the monarchy that fell in the Revolution. The masses of the

people— excepting the rural and city mobs— retained the virtues that save a

nation, and Greuze portrayed them. Diderot hailed Chardin and Greuze, not

Boucher and Fragonard, as the voice and health of France.

We have the usual stories about the artist's youth: he wanted to draw; his

father forbade it as a cover for idleness; the boy crept from his bed at night

to draw pictures; the father, coming upon one, relented, and sent him to

study with an artist in Lyons. Jean-Baptiste was not long satisfied with what

he could learn there; he made his way to Paris. He worked for some time in

the poverty that tests young talent. He had good reason later to show the

better side of men, for, like most of us, he found much kindness mingled with

the busy inattentiveness of the world. About 1754 an art collector, La Live

de Jully, bought Greuze's Fere de Famille (Diderot used the same title for

his second play, 1758), and encouraged him to persevere. The art instructor

of the royal family, seeing a picture by Greuze, recommended him as a

candidate for the Academy. But every candidate was expected to present,

within six months, a painting of some scene in history. Such "histories" were

not in Greuze's line; he let his candidacy drop, and accepted the offer of

Abbe Gougenot to finance his trip to Rome (1755).

He was now thirty, and must long since have felt the magnetism of

woman; is not half of art a by-product of that irresistible force? He experi-

enced it in Rome to the point of agony. He was engaged to teach drawing

to Laetitia, daughter of a duke; she was in the full bloom of youth; what

could he do but fall in love? And he was handsome, with curly hair and

cheerful, ruddy face; Fragonard, his fellow student, called him an "amorous

cherub"; see in the Louvre his self-portrait in old age, and imagine him at

thirty; inevitably Laetitia, with blood that could not count ducats, played

Heloi'se to his Abelard, surgery omitted. He took no advantage of her. She

proposed marriage; he longed for her, but realized that the marriage of a poor

artist with the heiress of a duke would soon be a tragedy for the girl; and,

uncertain of his self-control, he resolved not to see her again. She fell ill; he

visited and comforted her, but returned to his resolution. We are assured

that for three months he lay in bed with fever and frequent delirium. 56 In

1756 he returned to Paris, quite untouched by classic art or the neoclassical

revival.

"A few days after my arrival in Paris," he tells us, "I happened to be pass-

ing, I know not by what fatality, down the Rue Saint-Jacques, when I no-

ticed Mile. Babuti at her counter." 57 Gabrielle Babuti worked in a book-

CHAP.IV) THE ART OF LIFE 1 1 3

shop; Diderot had bought her books and "loved her well" (his words) some

years before. Now (1756-57) she was "over thirty years old" (Greuze's

account), and feared spinsterhood; she found Jean-Baptiste not affluent but

delectable; after he had paid her a few visits she asked him, "Monsieur

Greuze, would you marry me if I were willing?" Like any decent French-

man he replied, "Mademoiselle, would not any man be too happy to spend

his life with such a charming woman as you are?" He thought no more of it,

but she let the neighborhood understand that he was her betrothed. He had

not the heart to contradict her; he married her, and for seven years they were

reasonably happy. She had a luscious beauty, and willingly served as his

model in many poses that revealed nothing but suggested all. She gave him in

those years three children; two survived and inspired his art.

The world knows him for his pictures of children. We must not expect

here the supreme excellence of Velazquez' Don Balthasar Carlos 58 or Van-

dyck's James II as a Boy; 59 and we are sometimes repelled, in Greuze's girls,

by an exaggerated and weepy sentiment, as in the Berlin Portrait of a Maiden;

but why should we reject the curls and rosy cheeks and wistful-trustful eyes

of Innocence™ or the unrouged simplicity of A Young Peasant Girl? 61 There

is no pose in the Boy with a Lesson Book; 62 it is any lad weary of a task

seemingly irrelevant to life. Of 1 3 3 extant pictures by Greuze, thirty-six are

of girls. Johann Georg Wille, a German engraver living in Paris, bought as

many as he could of these childhood idealizations, and "held them more

precious than the finest paintings of the period." 63 Greuze repaid the com-

pliment by portraying the unprepossessing Saxon as an exemplar of virility.

As these girls grow up in Greuze's art they become more artificial; La

Laitiere {The Milkmaid) 6 * is all dressed up as if for a ball, and the lass of

La Cruche Cassee (The Broken Pitcher) 65 has no excuse (except beauty)

for exposing a nipple on her way from the well. But in a portrait of Sophie

Arnould 66 the feathered hat, saucy pose, and carmine lips seem all in char-

acter.

Greuze was a minor Chardin touched with Boucher; a man honestly ad-

miring virtue and middle-class life, but dressing it up, now and then, with a

sensuous lure that Chardin would have shunned. When Greuze forgot the

flesh of his women he could achieve an idyl of bourgeois domesticity, as in

The Village Bride (UAccordee de Village) 61 Exhibited in the final week of

the 1 76 1 Salon, it won the highest honors, and became the talk of Paris.

Diderot extolled it for its emotion douce; and the Theatre des Italians paid it

the unprecedented compliment of representing it in a "living picture" on the

stage. Connoisseurs found flaws in it— ill-managed light, discordant colors,

imperfect drawing and execution; aristocrats laughed at its sentiment; but

the Paris public, which had swilled adultery to the dregs, and was in this very

year weeping over Rousseau's Julie, was in a mood to respect the moral ad-

monitions that were almost audibly coming from the father of the bride to

the promised spouse. Every middle-class matron knew the feelings of the

mother as she surrendered her daughter to the trials and hazards of marriage;

and any peasant would have felt at home in that cottage where a hen and

114 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

her chicks pecked for corn on the floor, or drank in safety from the bowl

at the father's feet. The Marquis de Marigny bought the picture at once, and

the King later paid 16,650 livres for it to prevent its being sold abroad. It is

now in one of the less-frequented rooms of the Louvre, spoiled by the de-

terioration of its too superficial colors, and passed by in the reaction of real-

ism and cynicism against optimistic sentiment.

Nearly all the artists of Paris felt that Greuze had lowered art by making

it preach through romances instead of revealing truth and character with

penetration and impartiality. Diderot defended him as "the first of our artists

who gave morals to art, and arranged his pictures to tell a story." 68 He

mounted to exclamation points over the tender tragedies that Greuze de-

picted; "Delicieux! Delicieuxr he cried over The Young Girl Weeping for

Her Dead Bird. He himself was campaigning for middle-class subjects and

feelings in drama; he saw in Greuze a precious ally, and praised him even

above Chardin. Greuze took him too seriously; he stereotyped himself as

the apostle of virtue and sentiment; he sent to Paris journals long expositions

of the moral lessons in the pictures that he was producing. Finally he wore out

his welcome with the art public, even while sentiment was the rising mood

of the age.

During all the twelve years since the acceptance of his candidacy for the

Academy, he had neglected to submit to it the historical picture required for

full membership. In the judgment of the Academy a genre picture, describing

domestic or everyday "life, called for a less mature talent than the imaginative

reconstruction and competent representation of some historical scene; hence

it accepted genre painters only as agrees (literally, agreeable), but not yet

eligible to academic honors or professorships. In 1767 the Academy an-

nounced that Greuze's pictures would no longer be exhibited in the biennial

Salon until he had submitted an historical picture.

On July 29, 1769, Greuze sent in a painting of Septimius Severus reproach-

ing his son Caracalla for attempting to assassinate him. 69 The picture was

shown to the members of the Academy. After an hour the director informed

him that he had been accepted, but added, "Monsieur, you have been re-

ceived into the Academy, but it is as a painter of genre. The Academy took

into consideration the excellence of your previous productions; it has closed

its eyes to the present work, which is unworthy both of it and of you." 70

Shocked, Greuze defended his picture, but one of the members demonstrated

the faults in the drawing. Greuze appealed to the public in a letter to the

Avant-Courier (September 25, 1769); his explanation failed to impress con-

noisseurs, and even Diderot admitted the justice of the criticism.

Diderot suggested that the inadequacy of the painting was due to the dis-

turbance of the artist's mind by the collapse of his marriage. He charged that

Gabrielle Babuti had degenerated into an arrogant vixen, exhausting her

husband's funds by her extravagance, wearing him down with vexations, and

destroying his pride by her repeated infidelities. 71 Greuze himself submitted

to the commissioner of police (December 11, 1785) a deposition charging

his wife with persistently receiving her lovers into his home and over his

protests. In a later letter he accused her of stealing large sums from him, and

CHAP. IV) THEARTOFLIFE 115

of attempting to "batter in my head with a chamber pot." 72 He secured a

legal separation, took their two daughters with him, and left her half his

fortune and an annuity of 1,350 livres.

His character deteriorated under these blows. He became resentful of any

criticism, and lost all modesty in the exaltation of his pictures. The public,

however, agreed with his self -estimate; it flocked to his studio, and made him

rich with purchases of his paintings, and of the prints derived from them. He

invested his earnings in government bonds— assignats; the Revolution left

these bonds worthless, and Greuze found himself a poor man, while the

absorption of France in class violence, political ecstasy, and the neoclassical

reaction destroyed the market for his pictures of domestic felicity and peace.

The new government rescued him moderately (1792) with a pension of

1,537 livres, but he soon outran this, and appealed for an advance. A woman

of the streets, named Antigone, came to live with him and care for his failing

health. When he died (1805) nearly all the world had forgotten him, and

only two artists attended his corpse to the grave.

4. Fragonard

Jean-Honore Fragonard survived better than Greuze the trials of success,

for he surpassed Greuze in both sensuality and technique. His elegant art is

the final exaltation of the woman of eighteenth-century France.

Born at Grasse in Provence (1732), he carried the perfumes and flowers

of his birthplace into his art, along with the romantic love of the trouba-

dours; to which he added Parisian gaiety and philosophic doubt. Brought to

Paris at fifteen, he asked Boucher to take him as a pupil; Boucher told him,

as kindly as possible, that he took only advanced students. Fragonard went to

work for Chardin. In his off hours he copied masterpieces wherever he could

find them. Some of these copies he showed to Boucher, who, much im-

pressed, now accepted him as a pupil, and enlisted his youthful imagination

in making designs for tapestry. The lad improved so rapidly that Boucher

urged him to compete for the Prix de Rome. Fragonard submitted an his-

torical painting— ]eroboam Sacrificing to the Idols. 73 It was a remarkable

product for a boy of twenty— magnificent Roman columns, flowing robes,

old heads bearded, turbaned, or bald; Fragonard had learned so soon that

there is more character in an old face than in one that has not yet been carved

by sensation and response. The Academy awarded him the prize; he studied

three years in the studio of Carle Vanloo, and then (1765) went off in

ecstasy to Rome.

At first he was discouraged by the masterpieces abounding there.

The energy of Michelangelo terrified me— I experienced an emotion which I

could not express; and on seeing the beauties of Raphael I was moved to tears,

and the pencil fell from my hands. In the end I remained in a state of indolence

which I lacked the strength to overcome. Then I concentrated upon the study

of such painters as permitted me to hope that I might some day rival them. It

was thus that Baroccio, Pietro da Cortona, Solimena, and Tiepolo attracted

and held my attention. 74

Il6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

Instead of copying Old Masters he drew plans or sketches of palaces, arches,

churches, landscapes, vineyards, anything; for already he had acquired that

skill with the pencil which was to make him one of the most facile and

finished draftsmen of an age rich in that basic art.* Few drawings catch

more of nature's life than the green trees of the Villa d'Este as seen by

Fragonard at Tivoli. 75

On his return to Paris he set himself to satisfy the Academy with a "his-

tory" as the indispensable morceau de reception. Like Greuze he found

historical subjects uncongenial; present Paris with its entrancing women

drew him more powerfully than the past; the influence of Boucher was still

warm in his mood. After much delay he submitted Le Grand Pretre Coresus

Se Sacrifie pour Sauver Callirhoe; let us not stop to inquire who this priest

and maiden were; the Academy found them vivid and well drawn, and

granted Fragonard associate membership. Diderot raved— "I do not believe

that any other artist in Europe could have conceived this painting"; 76 Louis

XV bought it as a design for tapestry. But Fragonard was finished with his-

torical subjects; indeed, after 1767 he refused to exhibit in the Salon; he

worked almost wholly on private commissions, where he could indulge his

own taste, freed from academic restraints. Long before the French romantics

he rebelled against the "brown sauce" of the Renaissance, and moved out

gaily into less charted seas.

Not quite uncharted. Watteau had opened the way with his radiantly

robed women starting out with easy conscience for Venus' isle; Boucher had

followed with romping senses; Greuze had mated sensuality and innocence.

Fragonard combined them all: delicate raiment blowing in the breeze; dainty

tarts offering unimpeded sweets; stately ladies hypnotizing men with the

rustle of a dress or the fragility of a blouse, or with some rhythmic grace or

melting smile; and children plump and rosy and tousle-haired, who had

never yet discovered death. In his drawings and miniatures he pictured almost

every aspect of child life— babes caressing their mothers, girls fondling their

dolls, boys mounting a donkey or playing with a dog . . .

Fragonard's Gallic amorousness responded congenially to the requests of

aging courtiers and tired mistresses for pictures celebrating and stirring the

flesh. He ranged through the pagan mythology for goddesses whose rosy

bodies were immune to time; now it was Venus, not the Virgin, who was

raised in triumphant assumption to the skies. He stole half the ritual of re-

ligion for the ceremonies of love: The Kiss 77 is a prayer, The Vow of Love

is a sacred pledge, The Sacrifice of the Rose is the ultimate offering. Among

four pictures painted by Fragonard for Mme. du Barry's chateau at Louve-

ciennes one had a title that might have covered half the artist's work:

V Amour Qui Embrasse PUnivers (Love That Sets the World on Fire). He

fingered the Gerusalemme liberata to find the scene where nymphs flaunted

their charms before the chaste Rinaldo. He became the Boucher of the bed,

* This was the age of such master engravers and etchers as Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Gabriel

de Saint-Aubin, Jean-Jacques Boissieu, and Charles Eisen— who was the outstanding book

illustrator of the 18th century.

CHAP.IV) THE ART OF LIFE 117

revealing women in half or all their nudity, as in La Dormeuse (The Sleeping

Beauty), La Chemise Enlevee (The Blouse Removed), 01 La Bacchante

Endormie.™ Then, realizing that nudity can be disillusioning, he returned

from revelation to suggestion, and painted his most famous picture, Les

Hasards de VEscarpolette (The Hazards of the Swing); 79 the lover gazes in

delight at the mysteries of lingerie revealed as his lady swings higher and

higher, kicking one slipper with laughing abandon into the air. — Finally,

Fragonard could be Greuze, and even Chardin: he pictured modest women,

as in UEtude, La Lecture, 80 and Les Baisers Maternels; and in Mademoiselle

Colombe he discovered that women have souls.

In 1769, aged thirty-seven, he submitted to marriage. When Mile. Gerard

came up from Grasse to study art in Paris, she had only to name her birth-

place to win admission to Fragonard's studio. She was not beautiful, but she

was a woman in full bloom; and "Frago" (as he called himself) decided, like

Mme. Bovary, that there could not be much more boredom in monogamy

than in adultery. He found a new pleasure in working together with her on

such pictures as The Child's First Steps, and joining his signature with hers.

When she bore their first child she asked might she bring her fourteen-year-

old sister up from Grasse to help her with the infant and the house; he agreed,

and for years this menage lived in precarious peace.

Now he rivaled Greuze in portraying domestic life, and Boucher in con-

veying the tranquillity of rural scenes. He painted some religious pictures,

and made portraits of his friends. He was more constant as a friend than as

a lover, remaining always fond of Greuze and Robert and David despite

their success. When the Revolution came he dedicated a patriotic picture,

La Bonne Mere, to the nation. His savings were mostly annulled by inflation

and governmental defaults, but David, favorite artist of the new era, secured

his appointment to some minor sinecure. It was about this time that he

painted the remarkable self-portrait that hangs in the Louvre: strong and burly

head, white hair cropped close, eyes still calm with confidence. The Terror

frightened and disgusted him, and he fled to his native Grasse, where he

received shelter in the home of his friend Maubert. He decorated the walls

with panels collectively known as Roman d? Amour et de la Jeunesse (A

Story of Love and Youth) . These he had intended for Mme. du Barry, but

she, no longer affluent, had refused them; now they are among the treasures

of the Frick Gallery in New York.

One summer day, returning hot and perspiring from a walk in Paris, he

stopped at a cafe and ate an ice. He was seized almost immediately by a

cerebral congestion, and died with blessed suddenness (August 22, 1806).

Grasse raised a pretty monument to him, with a naked urchin at his feet and,

behind him, a young woman swirling her skirts in a joyous dance.

An artist must pay a price for symbolizing an age; his fame fades with its

passions, and can return only when the pathos of distance ennobles him, or

some turn in the tide brings a past mode into present taste. Fragonard pros-

pered because his art, desnuda or vestida, pleased his time, soothing and grac-

ing decay; but the stern code of a Revolution fighting for its life against all

I I 8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

the rest of Europe needed other gods than Venus to inspire it, and found

them in the stoic heroes of republican Rome. The reign of woman ended,

the rule of the warrior returned. Greco-Roman models, redeified by Winc-

kelmann, served a new generation of artists, and the neoclassical style swept

away baroque and rococo in a tidal wave of ancient forms.

VI. THE GREAT SALONS

1. Mme.Geoffrin

The reign of woman ended, but only after the zenith of the salons. That

unique institution reached its climax with Mme. Geoffrin, and subsided in a

fever of romance with Mile, de Lespinasse. It would revive after the Revolu-

tion, with Mesdames de Stael and Recamier, but never again with the zest and

fullness of the time when political celebrities met on Saturdays at Mme. du

Deffand's, artists met on Mondays and philosophers and poets on Wednes-

days at Mme. Geoffrin's, philosophers and scientists on Tuesdays at Mme.

Helvetius' and on Sundays and Thursdays at Baron d'Holbach's, and literary

and political lions on Tuesdays at Mme. Necker's, and any of these might

meet any night at Julie de Lespinasse's. Besides these there were many minor

salons: chez Mesdames de Luxembourg, de La Valliere, de Forcalquier, de

Talmont, de Broglie, de Bussy, de Crussol, de Choiseul, de Cambis, de Mire-

poix, de Beauvau, d'Anville, d'Aiguillon, d'Houdetot, de Marchais, Dupin,

and d'fipinay.

It was not beauty that distinguished these Junos of the salons; nearly all of

them were middle-aged or older; it was that complex of intelligence, tact,

grace, influence, and unobtrusive money that enabled a hostess to assemble

women of charm and men of mind who could make a gathering or causerie

sparkle with wit or wisdom without setting it on fire with passion or preju-

dice. Such a salon was no place for flirtations, or for erotic themes or

double-entendres? 1 Every man there might have a mistress, every woman a

lover, but this was politely veiled in the civilized give and take of courtesies

and ideas. Platonic friendships could find acceptance there, as with Du Def-

fand and Horace Walpole, or with Lespinasse and d'Alembert. As the Revo-

lution neared, the salons tended to lose their dispassionate elevation, and be-

came centers of revolt.

Mme. Geoffrin's salon won the highest repute because she was the most

skillful of lion tamers among the salonnieres, allowed more freedom of dis-

cussion, and knew how— without appearing oppressive— to keep liberty from

passing the bounds of good manners or good taste. She was one of the few

women who rose from the middle class to maintain a distinguished salon.

Her father, valet de chambre to the Dauphine iMarie-Anne, had married the

daughter of a banker; their first child, born in 1699, was Marie-Therese, who

became Mme. Geoffrin. The mother, a woman of culture with some talent

for painting, laid great plans for her daughter's development, but died in

CHAP. IV) THE ART OF LIFE I 1 9

1700 giving birth to a son. The two children were sent to live with their

grandmother in the Rue St.-Honore. Half a century later, in reply to Cath-

erine IPs request for a brief autobiography, Mme. Geoffrin explained her

lack of erudition:

My grandmother . . . had very little education, but her mind was so ob-

servant, so clever, so quick, that ... it always served her instead of knowl-

edge. She spoke so agreeably of the things she knew nothing of, that no one

desired she should know them better. . . . She was so satisfied with her lot

that she regarded education as superfluous for a woman. "I have managed so

well," she said, "that I have never felt the need of it. If my granddaughter is a

fool, knowledge will make her self-confident and unbearable; if she has wit

and sense she will do as I did; she will make up the deficiency by her tact and

perception." Therefore, in my childhood, she taught me simply how to read,

but she made me read a great deal. She taught me to think, and made me reason;

she taught me to know men, and made me say what I thought of them, and

told me how she herself judged them. . . . She could not endure the ele-

gancies that dancing masters teach; she only desired me to have the grace which

nature gives to a well-formed person. 82

Religion, Grandma felt, was more important than education; so the two

orphans were taken to Mass every day.

Grandma attended also to Marie's marriage. A wealthy businessman,

Frangois Geoffrin, aged forty-eight, offered to marry the thirteen-year-old

girl; Grandma thought it a good match, and Marie was too well brought up

to object. She insisted, however, on taking her brother with her to join

M. Geoffrin in the comfortable home, also in the Rue St.-Honore, which she

was to keep to the end of her life. In 1 7 1 5 she gave birth to a daughter, and

in 1 7 1 7 to a son— who died at the age of ten.

In that same fashionable street Mme. de Tencin opened a famous salon.

She invited Mme. Geoffrin to attend. M. Geoffrin objected; La Tencin's

past had made some noise, and her favorite guests were such dangerous free-

thinkers as Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Marivaux, Prevost, Helvetius, and

Marmontel. Mme. Geoffrin went nevertheless. She was fascinated by these

untrammeled minds; how tiresome, by comparison, were the merchants who

came to visit her aging husband! He was sixty-five now, and she was Balzac's

]emme de trente ans. She too began to entertain. He objected, she overruled

him; finally he consented to preside at her dinners, usually silent and always

polite. When he died (1749), aged eighty-four, her diners hardly noticed his

absence. One who returned from a journey inquired what had become of

the old gentleman who had sat so unobtrusively at the head of the table. Mme.

Geoffrin answered softly, "It was my husband. He is dead." 83

Mme. de Tencin also completed her course in 1 749, to the dismay of her

accustomed guests. We must record again the remark of the ninety-two-

year-old Fontenelle: "Such a good woman! [She had been a veritable syn-

thesis of sins.] What a worry! Where shall I dine on Tuesdays now?" But

he brightened up: "Well, on Tuesdays now I must dine at Mme. Geof-

frin's." 84 She was glad to have him, for he had been a philosophe before

Montesquieu and Voltaire, he had memories stretching back to Mazarin, he

120 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

had seven years left in him, and could bear teasing without taking offense,

being hard of hearing. Most of the celebrities who had shone at Tencin's

table followed his example, and soon the Geoffrin Wednesday midday din-

ners brought together, at one time or another, Montesquieu, Diderot, d'Hol-

bach, Grimm, Morellet, Raynal, Saint-Lambert, and the witty little Neapoli-

tan, Abbe Ferdinando Galiani, secretary to the Neapolitan ambassador in

Paris.

After her husband's death, and despite her daughter's scandalized opposi-

tion, Mme. Geoffrin allowed Diderot, d'Alembert, and Marmontel to set the

line and tone of discussion at her Wednesday dinners. She was a patriot and

a Christian, but she admired the courage and vivacity of the philosophes.

When the Ency elope die was organized she contributed over 500,000 livres

to its costs. Her home became known as "the salon of the Encyclopedie";

and when Palissot satirized the rebels in his comedy Les Philosophes (1760),

he made fun of her as Cydalize, the fairy godmother of the coterie. There-

after she asked her lions to roar more courteously, and checked wild elo-

quence with a deflating compliment— "Ah, there's something good!" 85 At

last she withdrew her standing invitation to Diderot, but she sent him a suite

of new furniture and an uncomfortably gorgeous dressing gown.

She discovered that artists, philosophers, and men of affairs did not mix

well; the philosophers liked to talk, the statesmen expected discretion and

good manners; the artists were a tempestuous tribe, and only artists could

understand them. So Madame, who collected art and had caught some aes-

thetic glow from the Comte de Caylus, invited the leading artists and con-

noisseurs of Paris to special dinners on Monday evenings. Boucher came, La

Tour, Vernet, Chardin, Vanloo, Cochin, Drouais, Robert, Oudry, Nattier,

Soufflot, Caylus, Bouchardon, Greuze. Marmontel was the only philosophe

admitted, for he lived in Mme. Geoffrin's house. The amiable hostess not

only entertained these guests; she bought their works, posed for their por-

traits of her, and paid them well. Chardin pictured her best, as a stout and

kindly matron in a lace bonnet. 86 After the death of Vanloo she bought two

of his pictures for four thousand livres; she sold them to a Russian prince for

fifty thousand livres, and sent the profit to the widow. 87

To round out her hospitality Mme. Geoffrin gave petits soupers for her

women friends. But no woman was invited to the Monday dinners, and

Mile, de Lespinasse (perhaps as d'Alembert's alter ego) was one of the few

women who came to the Wednesday soirees. Madame was somewhat pos-

sessive, and besides she found that female presences distracted her lions

from philosophy and art. Her policy of segregation seemed justified by the

high repute her assemblies gained for interesting and significant discussions.

Foreigners in Paris angled for invitations; to be able to say, when they re-

turned home, that they had attended Mme. Geoffrin's salon was a distinction

second only to being received by the King. Hume, Walpole, and Franklin

were among her grateful guests. Ambassadors to Versailles— even the lordly

Count von Kaunitz— made it a point to present themselves at the famous house

in the Rue St.-Honore. In 1758 Prince Cantemir, the Russian ambassador,

CHAP.IV) THE ART OF LIFE 121

brought with him the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, who told of the accomplish-

ments of her daughter; four years later this daughter became Catherine II,

and for many years thereafter the Empress of All the Russias carried on a

charming correspondence with the bourgeois salonniere. A handsome and

brilliant Swede who attended some of Madame's dinners went home to be

Gustavus III.

A still handsomer youth, Stanislas Poniatowski, was a frequent visitor, al-

most a devotee of Mme. Geoffrin (who sometimes paid his debts); 88 soon

he was calling her Maman; and when he became King of Poland (1764) he

invited her to visit Warsaw as his guest. Though now sixty-four years old,

she accepted. She made a triumphal stay in Vienna on the way: "I am better

known here," she wrote, "than a couple of yards from my own house." 89 For

a while, in the royal palace at Warsaw (1766), she played at mothering and

advising the King. The letters that she sent to Paris were passed from hand

to hand there, like the letters of Voltaire from Ferney; "those who had not

read Mme. Geoffrin's letters," Grimm wrote, "were not fit to go into good so-

ciety." 90 When she came back to Paris and resumed her dinners, a hundred

celebrities rejoiced; Piron and Delille wrote poems celebrating her return.

The trip had been arduous— riding in a coach through half the length of

Europe and back; Mme. Geoffrin was never again as alert and sprightly as

before. She who had once expressed her disbelief in life after death, 91 and

had reduced religion to charity, now renewed her observance of Catholic

worship. Marmontel described her peculiar piety:

To be in favor with heaven without being out of favor with her society, she

used to indulge in a kind of clandestine devotion. She went to Mass as secretly

as others go to an intrigue; she had an apartment in a nunnery, . . . and a pew

in the church of the Capuchins, with as much mystery as the galante women of

that day had their petites maisons for their amours. 92

In 1776 the Catholic Church announced a jubilee in which all who visited

certain churches at stated times would receive dispensations and indulgences.

On March 1 1 Mme. Geoffrin attended a long service in the Cathedral of

Notre Dame. Soon after reaching home she fell in an apoplectic fit. The

philosophes were angry that her illness should have followed an act of wor-

ship; the mordant Abbe Morellet remarked, "She has confirmed, by her

own example, the maxim which she frequently repeated: 'One dies only

through an act of stupidity.' " 93 The daughter, Marquise de La Ferte-

Imbault, took possession of her sick mother, and warned the philosophes

away. Madame never saw d'Alembert or Morellet again; however, she ar-

ranged that the pensions she had given them should be increased after her

death. She lingered on for another year, paralyzed and dependent, but dis-

tributing charity to the end.

2. Mme.duDeffand

There was only one salon in Europe that could rival Geoffrin's in fame

and votaries. We have studied elsewhere the career and character of Marie

122 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. IV

de Vichy-Chamrond: how as a girl she dismayed nuns and priests with her

freethinking; how she wed the Marquis du Deffand, left him, and solaced

her solitude with a salon (1739 f , at first in the Rue de Beaune, then ( 1 747 )

in the Convent of St. Josephin the Rue St.-Dominique. Her new site fright-

ened away all but one of ^e philosophes who had previously come to enjoy

her wine and wit; d'Alembert remained, being the least pugnacious of the

tribe; for the rest, her habitues were men and women of the aristocracy,

who tended to snub La Geoffrin as bourgeoisie. When the Marquise be-

came blind at the age of fifty-seven (1754), her friends still came to her

dinners; but during the rest of the week she felt loneliness with a rising

despondency, until she persuaded her niece to stay with her and serve as

assistant hostess at her soirees.

Julie de Lespinasse was the illegitimate daughter of the Comtesse d'Albon

and Gaspard de Vichy, brother of Mme. du Deffand. The Comtesse ac-

knowledged her, brought her up with her other children, gave her an ex-

ceptionally good education, and sought to have her legitimized; but one of

the daughters objected, and it was never done. In 1739 this half sister mar-

ried Gaspard de Vichy and went to live with him in the Chateau de Cham-

rond in Burgundy. In 1748 the Comtesse died, leaving an annuity of three

hundred livres for Julie, then sixteen. Mme. de Vichy took Julie to Cham-

rond, but treated her as an illegitimate orphan who served as governess for

the children. When Mme. du Deffand visited Chamrond she was struck by

the excellent mind and manners of Mile, de Lespinasse; she won the girl's

confidence, and learned that she was so unhappy in her present position that

she had decided to enter a convent. The Marquise proposed that Julie come

and live with her in Paris. Objections were raised by the family, in fear that

Du Deffand would arrange Julie's legitimation, thus entitling her to a share

in the Albon estate. The Marquise promised that she would not so offend her

relatives. Meanwhile Julie entered a convent (October, 1752), not as a

novice but as a boarder. The Marquise renewed her proposal. After a year

of hesitation, Julie agreed. On February 13, 1754, the Marquise sent her a

strange letter, which must be remembered in judging the sequel:

I shall introduce you as a young lady from my province who intended to go

into a convent, and will say that I offered you a lodging until you should find

one which would suit you. You will be treated with politeness, and even with

compliment, and you can count upon me that your self-respect will never be

offended.

However, . . . there is another point which I must explain to you. The least

artifice, even the most trifling little art, if you were to put it into your conduct,

would be intolerable to me. I am naturally distrustful, and all those in whom

I detect slyness become suspect to me until I lose all confidence in them. I

have two intimate friends— Formont and d'Alembert. I love them passionately,

but less for their agreeable charms and their friendship than for their absolute

truthfulness. Therefore you must, my queen, resolve to live with me with the

utmost truth and sincerity. . . . You may think that I preach, but I assure you

that I never do so except in regard to sincerity. On that point I am without

mercy. 94

In April, 1754, Julie came to live with Mme. du Deffand, first above a car-

riage shed, then in a room over the Marquise's apartment in the Convent of

CHAP. IV) THEARTOFLIFE 123

St. Joseph. Perhaps at Madame's suggestion, the Due d'Orleans settled upon

her a pension of 692 livres. 95 She helped the blind hostess to receive and

place her guests at the salon assemblies; she brightened the proceedings with

her pleasant manners, her quick intelligence, her fresh and modest youth.

She was no beauty, but her bright black eyes and rich brown hair made an

arresting combination. Half the men who came there fell half in love with

her, even Madame's old faithful chevalier, Charles-Jean-Fran§ois Henault,

president of the Court des Enquetes, who was seventy, always ailing, always

rubicund with a flow of wine. Julie took their compliments with proper dis-

count, but even so the Marquise, doubly sensitive in her blindness, must have

felt that some worship had passed from her throne. Perhaps another element

entered: the older woman had begun to love the younger one with an affec-

tion that would not share. Both were vessels of passion, despite the fact that

the Marquise had one of the most penetrating minds of the time. _

It was inevitable that Julie should fall in love. First (?) with a young

Irishman of whom we know only the name Taaffe. Once admitted to the

salon, he came almost every day, and it was soon obvious to the Marquise that

he had come to see not her but Mademoiselle. She was alarmed to see that

Julie received his advances favorably. She warned Julie against compro-

mising herself. The proud girl resented the motherly advice. Fearing to lose

her, and anxious to protect her against an impetuous attachment that prom-

ised no permanence, the Marquise commanded Julie to keep to her room

when Taaffe called. Julie obeyed, but was so excited by the quarrel that she

took opium to calm her nerves. Many persons in the eighteenth century used

opium as a sedative. Mile, de Lespinasse increased her doses with each new

romance.

She learned to forget Taaffe, but her next love entered history, for it fell

upon the man whom Mme. du Deffand had taken to herself with a mater-

nal but possessive attachment. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert was in 1754 at the

peak of his renown as mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and collaborator

in that Encyclopedic that was the talk of all intellectual Paris. Voltaire, in

a modest moment, called him "the foremost writer of the century." 96 Yet

he had none of Voltaire's advantages. He was of illegitimate birth; his

mother, Mme. de Tencin, had disowned him, and he had not seen his father

since childhood. He lived like a simple bourgeois in the home of the glazier

Rousseau. He was handsome, neat, courteous, sometimes gay; he could talk

with almost any specialist on any subject, but he could also hide his learning

behind a fa§ade of stories, mimicry, and wit. Otherwise he made few com-

promises with the world. He preferred his independence to the favor of

kings and queens; and when Mme. du Deffand campaigned to get him into

the French Academy he refused to assure himself of Henault's vote by prais-

ing Henault's Abrege chronologique de Vhistoire de France (1744). There

was a strain of satire in him that made his wit bite now and then; 97 he could

be impatient, "sometimes violently choleric against opponents." 98 He never

found out what to say or do when alone with women; yet his shyness at-

tracted them, as if by challenging the efficacy of their charms.

When Mme. du Deffand first met him (1743) she was struck by the

124 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. IV

range and clearness of his mind. She was then forty-six, he twenty-six. She

adopted him as her "wildcat" {chat sauvage)- 99 invited him not only to her

salon but to private dinners tete-a-tete; she vowed her willingness to "sleep

for twenty-two hours of the twenty-four, so long as we pass the remaining

two hours together." 100 It was after eleven years of this warm friendship that

Julie came into their lives.

There was a natural bond between the natural son and the natural daugh-

ter. D'Alembert noted it in retrospect:

Both of us lacked parents and family, and having suffered abandonment, mis-

fortune, and unhappiness from our birth, nature seemed to have sent us into

the world to find each other, to be to each other all that each had missed, to

stand together like two willows, bent by the storm but not uprooted, because

in their weakness they have intertwined their branches. 101

He felt this "elective affinity" almost at first sight. "Time and custom stale

all things," he wrote to her in 177 1, "but they are powerless to touch my af-

fection for you, an affection which you inspired seventeen years ago." 102

Yet he waited nine years before declaring his love, and then he did it by in-

direction: he wrote to her from Potsdam in 1763 that in refusing Fred-

erick's invitation to become president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences he

had had "a thousand reasons, one of which you haven't the wits to guess" 103 —

a strange lapse of intelligence in d'Alembert, for was there ever a woman

who did not know when a man was in love with her?

Mme. du Deffand felt the growing warmth between her prized guest and

her guarded niece; she noticed, too, that Julie was becoming the center of

discussion and interest in the salon. For a while she uttered no reproach, but

in a letter to Voltaire (1760) she made some bitter remarks on d'Alembert.

She allowed a friend to read to her guests, before d'Alembert had arrived,

Voltaire's reply, referring to these remarks. D'Alembert came in soon after

the reading had begun, and heard the telltale passage; he laughed with the

others, but he was hurt. The Marquise tried to make amends, but the wound

remained. When he visited Frederick in 1763 his letters were almost daily

to Mile, de Lespinasse, seldom to Madame. After his return to Paris he fell

into the habit of visiting Julie in her apartment before they came down to

the salon; and sometimes Turgot or Chastellux or Marmontel accompanied

him in these intimate visits. The aging hostess felt that she was being be-

trayed by those whom she had helped and loved. Now she looked upon

Julie as her enemy, and she revealed her feelings in a dozen irritating ways-

cold tone, petty demands, occasional reminders of Julie's dependence. Julie

grew daily more impatient with this "blind and vaporous old woman," and

with the obligation to be always on hand or nearby to attend to the Mar-

quise at any hour. Every day increased her unhappiness, for each day had

its sting. "AH pain strikes deep," she later wrote, "but pleasure is a bird of

quick passage." 104 In a final outburst Madame accused her of deceiving her

in her own home and at her expense. Julie replied that she could no longer live

with one who so considered her; and on a day early in May, 1764, she left to

seek other lodgings. The Marquise made the breach irreparable by insisting

CHAP.IV) THE ART OF LIFE I25

that d'Alembert should choose between them; d'Alembert left, and never

returned.

For a time the old salon seemed mortally wounded by these amputations.

Most of the habitues continued to come to the Marquise, but several of them

—the Marechale de Luxembourg, the Duchesse de Chatillon, the Comtesse

de Boufflers, Turgot, Chastellux, even Henault— went to Julie to express

their sympathy and continued interest. The salon was reduced to old and

faithful friends, and newcomers who sought distinction and good food.

Madame described the change in 1768:

Twelve people were here yesterday, and I admired the different kinds and

degrees of futility. We were all perfect fools, each in his kind. . . . We were

singularly wearisome. All twelve departed at one o'clock, but none left a

regret behind. . . . Pont-de-Veyle is my only friend, and he bores me to

death three quarters of the time. 105

She had never, since her light went out, had any love for life, but now

that her dearest friends were gone she sank into a hopeless and cynical

despair. Like Job, she cursed the day of her birth. "Of all my sorrows my

blindness and age are the least. . . . There is only one misfortune, . . . and

that is to be born." 106 She laughed equally at the dreams of romantics and

philosophers— not only at Rousseau's Heloi'se and Savoyard Vicar, but at

Voltaire's long campaign for "truth." "And you, Monsieur de Voltaire, the

declared lover of Truth, tell me in good faith, have you found it? You com-

bat and destroy errors, but what do you put in their place?" 107 She was a

skeptic, but she preferred genial doubters like Montaigne and Saint-fivre-

mond to aggressive rebels like Voltaire and Diderot.

She thought herself finished with life, but life had not yet quite finished

with her. Her salon had a fitful resurrection during the ministry of Choiseul,

when the leading men in the government gathered around the old Marquise,

and the friendship of the kindly Duchesse de Choiseul brought some bright-

ness to darkened days. And in 1765 Horace Walpole began to come to her

gatherings, and gradually she developed for him an affection that became

her last desperate hold upon life. We hope to meet her again in that final

and amazing avatar.

3. Mile, de Lespinasse

Julie chose as her new home a three-story house at the meeting of the Rue

de Bellechasse with the Rue St.-Dominique— only a hundred yards from the

Marquise's conventual home. She was not reduced to poverty; besides sev-

eral small pensions, she had received pensions of 2,600 livres out of "the

King's revenues" (1758 and 1763), apparently at the urging of Choiseul; and

now Mme. Geoffrin, at d'Alembert's suggestion, dowered her with separate

annuities of two thousand livres and one thousand crowns. The Marechale

de Luxembourg gave her a complete suite of furniture.

Soon after settling in these new quarters Julie came down with a severe

case of smallpox. "Mile, de Lespinasse is dangerously ill," wrote David Hume

126 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

to Mme. de Boufflers, "and I am glad to see that d'Alembert has come out

of his philosophy at such a moment." 108 Indeed, the philosopher walked a

long distance every morning to watch at her bed till late at night, and

then walked back to his own room at Mme. Rousseau's. Julie recovered, but

was left permanently weak and nervous, her complexion coarsened and

blotched. We can imagine what this meant to a woman thirty-two years

old and still unmarried.

She was cured just in time to care for d'Alembert, who took to his bed in

the spring of 1765 with a stomach ailment that brought him near death.

Marmontel was shocked to find him living in a "little room ill-lit, ill-aired,

with a very narrow bed like a coffin." 109 Another friend, the financier Wate-

let, offered d'Alembert the use of a commodious home near the Temple. The

philosopher now sadly consented to leave the woman who had housed and

fed him since his childhood. "Oh, wondrous day!" exclaimed Duclos;

"d'Alembert is weaned!" To his new quarters Julie commuted daily, repay-

ing his recent care of her with her own unstinted devotion. When he was

well enough to move she begged him to occupy some rooms on the upper

floor of her house. He came in the fall of 1765, and paid her a moderate

rental. He did not forget Mme. Rousseau; he visited her frequently, shared

some of his income with her, and never ceased apologizing for their separa-

tion. "Poor foster mother, fonder of me than of your own children! " 110

For a while Paris assumed that Julie was his mistress. Appearances war-

ranted the assumption. D'Alembert took his meals with her, wrote letters for

her, managed her business affairs, invested her savings, collected her income.

Publicly they were always together; no host dreamed of inviting one with-

out the other. Nevertheless it gradually dawned even upon the gossipers that

Julie was neither mistress nor wife nor lover to d'Alembert, but only a sister

and friend. She seems never to have realized that his love for her, though he

could not put it into words, was complete. Mesdames Geoffrin and Necker,

both of exemplary morals, accepted the relationship as Platonic. The aging

salonniere invited both of them to both of her gatherings.

It was a severe test of Mme. Geoffrin's motherly kindness that she made

no known protest when Mile, de Lespinasse developed a salon of her own.

Julie and d'Alembert had made so many friends that within a few months

her drawing room was filled almost daily, from five to nine o'clock, with

chosen visitors, women as well as men, nearly all of fame or rank. D'Alem-

bert led the conversation, Julie added all the charms of womanhood, all the

warmth of hospitality. No dinner or supper was offered, but the salon

gained the reputation of being the most stimulating in Paris. Here came

Turgot and Lomenie de Brienne, soon to be high in the government; aristo-

crats like Chastellux and Condorcet, prelates like de Boismont and Boisgelin,

skeptics like Hume and Morellet, authors like Mably, Condillac, Marmontel,

and Saint-Lambert. At first they came to see and hear d'Alembert; then to

enjoy the sympathetic skill with which Julie drew out each guest to shine

in his or her special excellence. No topics were barred here; the most deli-

cate problems of religion, philosophy, or politics were discussed; but Julie—

CHAP. IV) THEARTOFLIFE 1 27

trained in this art by Mme. Geoffrin— knew how to calm the excited, and

return dispute to discussion. The desire not to offend the frail hostess was

the unwritten law that generated order in this liberty. At the close of Louis

XV's reign the salon of Mile, de Lespinasse, in Sainte-Beuve's judgment, was

"the most in vogue, the most eagerly frequented, at an epoch that counted so

many that were brilliant." 111

No other salon offered such a double lure. Julie, though pockmarked and

fatherless, was becoming the second love of a dozen distinguished men. And

d'Alembert was at the height of his powers. Grimm reported:

His conversation offered all that would instruct and divert the mind. He

lent himself with as much facility as good will to whatever subject would

please most generally, bringing to it an almost inexhaustible fund of ideas,

anecdotes, and curious memories. There was no topic, however dry or frivolous

in itself, that he had not the secret of making interesting. . . . All his humorous

sayings had a delicate and profound originality. 112

And hear David Hume, writing to Horace Walpole:

D'Alembert is a very agreeable companion, and of irreproachable morals. By

refusing offers from the Czarina and the King of Prussia he has shown himself

above personal gain and vain ambition. . . . He has five pensions: one from

the King of Prussia, one from the King of France, one as a member of the

Academy of Sciences, one as a member of the French Academy, and one from

his own family. The whole amount is not above six thousand livres a year; on

half of this he lives decently; the other half he gives to poor people with whom

he is connected. In a word I scarce know a man who, with some few exceptions,

... is a better model of a virtuous and philosophical character. 113

Julie was at opposite poles to d'Alembert in everything but facility and

elegance of speech. But whereas the Encyclopediste was one of the last

heroes of the Enlightenment, seeking reason and measure in thought and

action, Julie, after Rousseau, was the first clear voice of the Romantic move-

ment in France, a creature (Marmontel described her) of "the liveliest fancy,

the most ardent spirit, the most inflammable imagination which has existed

since Sappho." 114 None of the romantics, in flesh or print— no Heloi'se of

Rousseau nor Rousseau himself, no Clarissa of Richardson or Manon of

Prevost— exceeded her in keenness of sensibility, or in the ardor of her inner

life. D'Alembert was objective, or tried to be; Julie was subjective to the

pitch of a sometimes selfish self -absorption. Yet she "suffered with those

that she saw suffer." 115 She went out of her way to comfort the sick or ag-

grieved, and she labored feverishly to get Chastellux and Laharpe elected

to the Academy. But when she fell in love she forgot everything and every-

body else— in the first case Mme. du Deffand, in the second and third

d'Alembert himself.

In 1766 a young noble, Marques Jose de Mora y Gonzaga, son of the

Spanish ambassador, entered the salon. He was twenty-two, Julie was

thirty-four. He had been married at twelve to a girl of eleven, who died in

1764. Julie soon felt the charm of his youth, possibly of his fortune. Their

mutual attraction ripened rapidly to a pledge of marriage. Hearing of this,

128 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

his father ordered him to military duty in Spain. Mora went, but soon re-

signed his commission. In January, 177 1, he began to spit blood; he went

to Valencia, hoping for relief; not cured, he rushed up to Paris and Julie.

They spent many happy days together, to the amusement of her little court

and the secret suffering of d'Alembert. In 1772 the ambassador was recalled

to Spain, and insisted on his son coming with him. Neither parent would

consent to his marrying Julie. Mora broke away from them and started north

to rejoin her, but he died of tuberculosis at Bordeaux, May 27, 1774. On

that day he wrote to her: "I was on my way to you, and I must die. What a

horrible doom! . . . But you have loved me, and the thought of you still

gives me happiness. I die for you." Two rings were removed from his fin-

gers; one contained a strand of Julie's hair; the other was engraved with

the words, "AH things pass, but love endures." The magnanimous d'Alembert

wrote of Mora: "I regret on my own account that sensitive, virtuous, and

high-minded man, . . . the most perfect being that I have ever known. . . .

I shall ever remember those priceless moments when a soul so pure, so noble,

so strong, and so sweet loved to mingle with mine." 116

Julie's heart was torn by the news of Mora's death, and all the more be-

cause she had in the meantime given her love to another man. In September,

1772, she met Comte Jacques- Antoine de Guibert, twenty-nine, who had

made a notable record in the Seven Years' War. Moreover, his Compre-

hensive Study of Tactics was acclaimed as a masterpiece by generals and in-

tellectuals; Napoleon was to carry a copy of it, annotated by his own hand,

through all his campaigns; and its "Preliminary Discourse," denouncing all

monarchies, formulated, twenty years before the Revolution, the basic

principles of 1789. We can judge the admiration that poured upon Guibert

from a topic selected for discussion in a leading salon: "Is the mother, the

sister, or the mistress of M. de Guibert to be most envied?" 117 He had, of

course, a mistress— Jeanne de Montsauge, the latest and longest of his

amours. Julie, in a bitter moment, judged him harshly:

The levity, even hardness, with which he treats women comes from the

small consideration in which he holds them. . . . He thinks them flirtatious,

vain, weak, false, and frivolous. Those whom he judges most favorably he be-

lieves romantic; and though obliged to recognize good qualities in some, he

does nor on that account value them more highly, but holds that they have

fewer vices rather than more virtues. 118

However, he was handsome, his manners were perfect, his speech combined

substance with feeling, and erudition with clarity. "His conversation," said

Mme. de Stael, was the "most varied, the most animated, and the richest that

ever I knew." 119

Julie considered herself fortunate in the preference that Guibert showed

for her gatherings. Fascinated by each other's fame, they developed what on

his side became an incidental conquest, and on her side a mortal passion. It

was this consuming love that gave her letters to Guibert a place in French

literature and among the most revealing documents of the time; there, even

more than in Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), the proto-

Romantic movement in France finds its living expression.

CHAP. IV ) THE ART OF LIFE 1 29

Her earliest extant letter to Guibert (May 15, 1773) shows her already

in his toils. But she was torn with remorse over the violation of her pledge

of fidelity to Mora. So she wrote to Guibert, who was leaving for Stras-

bourg:

Ah, mon Dieu! by what charm, by what fatality, have you come to distract

me? Why did I not die in September? I could have died then without . . . the

reproaches that I now make to myself. Alas, I feel it, I could still die for him;

there is no interest of mine that I would not sacrifice to him. . . . Oh, he will

pardon me! I had suffered so much! My body and soul were so exhausted by

the long continuance of sorrow. The news I received of him threw me into a

frenzy. It was then that I first saw you; then that you received my soul, then

that you brought pleasure into it. I know not which was sweetest— to feel it, or

to owe it to you. 120

Eight days later she took down all her defenses: "If I were young, pretty,

and very charming, I should not fail to see much art in your conduct to me;

but as I am nothing of all that, I find a kindness and an honor in it which

have won you right over my soul forever." 121 At times she wrote with all the

abandon of Heloi'se to Abelard:

You alone in the universe can possess and occupy my being. My heart, my

soul, can henceforth be filled by you alone. . . . Not once has my door been

opened today that my heart did not beat; there were moments when I dreaded

to hear your name; then again I was brokenhearted not to hear it. So many

contradictions, so many conflicting emotions, are true, and three words explain

them: I love you. 122

The conflict of the two loves increased the nervous agitation that perhaps

had come from the starvation of her hopes for womanly fulfillment, and

from a growing tendency to consumption. She wrote to Guibert on June 6,

1773:

Though your soul is agitated, it is not like mine, which passes ceaselessly

from convulsion to depression. I take poison [opium] to calm myself. You

see that I cannot guide myself; enlighten me, strengthen me. I will believe you;

you shall be my support. 123

Guibert returned to Paris in October, severed his relations with Mme. de

Montsauge, and offered his love to Julie. She accepted gratefully, and

yielded to him physically— in the antechamber of her box at the opera (Feb-

ruary 10, 1774). 124 She claimed later that this, when she was forty-two, was

her first lapse from what she called "honor" and "virtue," 125 but she did not

reproach herself:

Do you remember the condition in which you put me, and in which you

believed you left me? Well, I wish to tell you that, returning quickly to myself,

I rose again [italics hers], and I saw myself not one hair's-breadth lower than

before. . . . And what will astonish you, perhaps, is that of all the impulses

that have drawn me to you, the last is the only one for which I have no re-

morse. ... In that abandonment, that last degree of abnegation of myself and

of all personal interests, I proved to you that there is but one misfortune on

earth that seems to me unbearable— to offend you and lose you. That fear

would make me give my life. 126

130 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IV

For a time she experienced transports of happiness. "I have thought of

you constantly," she wrote to him (for they kept their liaison secret, and

dwelt apart). "I am so engrossed in you that I understand the feeling of the

devotee for his God." 127 Guibert inevitably tired of a love that poured itself

out so profusely, leaving no challenge to his power. Soon he was paying at-

tention to the Comtesse de Boufflers, and resuming his affair with Mme. de

Montsauge (May, 1774). J u ^ e reproached him; he replied coldly. Then,

on June 2, she learned that Mora had died on his way to her, blessing her

name. She sank into a delirium of remorse, and tried to poison herself;

Guibert prevented her. Now her letters to him were mostly about Mora, and

how superior the young Spanish nobleman had been to every other man she

had ever known. Guibert saw her less frequently, Montsauge more. Hoping

to remain at least one of his mistresses, Julie planned marriages for him; he

rejected her choices, and on June 1, 1775, he married Mile, de Courcelles,

seventeen and rich. Julie wrote him letters of hatred and disdain, ending with

protestations of undying love. 128

Through all the fever of her passion she was able to conceal the nature of

it from d'Alembert, who thought the absence, then death, of Mora was its

cause. He welcomed Guibert to her salon, developed a sincere friendship

for him, and personally mailed the sealed letters which she wrote to her

lover. But he noted that she had lost interest in him, that at times she re-

sented his presence. And indeed she wrote to Guibert: "Did it not seem too

ungrateful, I would say that M. d'Alembert's departure would give me a

sort of pleasure. His presence weighs upon my soul. He makes me ill at

ease with myself; I feel too unworthy of his friendship and his goodness." 129

When she was dead he wrote to her "manes":

For what reason, which I can neither imagine nor suspect, did that feeling,

[once] so tender for me, . . . change suddenly to estrangement and aversion?

What had I done to displease you? Why did you not complain to me if you

had anything to complain of? . . . Or, my dear Julie, . . . had you done me

some wrong of which I was ignorant, and which it would have been so sweet

to pardon had I known of it? . . . Twenty times have I been on the point of

throwing myself into your arms, and asking you to tell me what was my

crime; but I feared that those arms would repulse me. . . .

For nine months I sought the moment to tell you what I suffered and felt,

but during those months I always found you too feeble to bear the tender re-

proaches I had to make to you. The only moment when I could have shown

to you, uncovered, my dejected and discouraged heart was that dreadful mo-

ment, a few hours before your death, when you asked me, in so heartrending

a manner, to forgive you. . . . But then you had no longer the strength to

either speak to me or hear me; . . . and thus I lost, without recovery, the mo-

ment of my life which would have been to me the most precious— that of

telling you, once more, how dear you were to me, how much I shared your

woes, and how deeply I desired to end my woes with you. I would give all the

moments that remain to me to live, for that one instant which I can never have

again, that instant when, by showing you all the tenderness of my heart, I might

perhaps have recovered yours. 130

The collapse of Julie's dream helped tuberculosis to kill her. Dr. Bordeu

(whom we have met in Diderot's Dream of d'Alembert) was called in, and

CHAP. IV ) THE ART OF LIFE I 3 I

pronounced her condition hopeless. From April, 1776, she never left her

bed. Guibert came to see her every morning and evening, and d'Alembert

left her bedside only to sleep. The salon had been discontinued, but Con-

dorcet came, and Suard, and the good Mme. Geoffrin, herself dying. On the

last days Julie would not let Guibert come, for she did not wish to let him

see how convulsions had disfigured her face; but she sent him frequent notes;

and now he too protested: "I have always loved you; I have loved you from

the first moment that we met; you are dearer to me than anything else in

the world." 131 This, and d'Alembert's silent fidelity, and the solicitude of her

friends, were her only solace in her suffering. She made her will, of which

she appointed d'Alembert executor, and she entrusted to him all her papers

and effects.*

Her brother, the Marquis de Vichy, came up from Burgundy, and urged

her to make her peace with the Church. To the Comte d'Albon he wrote:

"I am happy to say that I persuaded her to take the sacraments, in spite of,

in the face of, the entire Encyclopedic" 132 She sent a last word to Guibert:

"My friend, I love you. . . . Farewell." She thanked d'Alembert for his

long devotion, and begged him to forgive her ingratitude. She died that

night, in the early hours of May 23, 1776. She was buried that same day,

from the Church of St.-Sulpice, and as she had desired in her will— "like

the poor."

' Her letters to Guibert were preserved by his wife, and were published in 181 1.

CHAPTER V

Voltaire Patriarch

1758-78

I. THE GOOD LORD

JN October, 1758, Voltaire bought an ancient estate at Ferney, in the pays,

or county, of Gex, which bordered on Switzerland. Soon thereafter he

added, by a life purchase, the neighboring seigneury of Tournay; now he

became legally a lord, and in legal matters he signed himself "Comte de

Tournay"; he displayed his coat of arms over his portal and on his silver

plate. 1

He had lived at Les Delices in Geneva since 1755, and had played with

pleasure and acclaim the role of a millionaire philosopher who entertained

handsomely. But d'Alembert's Ency elope die article on Geneva, revealing

the private heresies of its clergymen, subjected Voltaire to charges that he

had betrayed them to his friend. He ceased to be persona grata on Swiss soil,

and looked about him for another residence. Ferney was in France, but only

three miles from Geneva; there he could thumb his nose at the Calvinist lead-

ers; and if the Catholic leaders in Paris— 250 miles away— should renew their

campaign for his arrest, he could in an hour be across the frontier; mean-

while (1758-70) his friend the Due de Choiseul was heading the French

ministry. Perhaps to guard against confiscation through a veering of the po-

litical wind, he bought Ferney in the name of his niece Mme. Denis, merely

stipulating with her that she should recognize him as master of the estate as

long as he lived. Till 1764 Les Delices remained his principal home; he took

his time remodeling the house at Ferney, and finally moved into it in that

year.

The new mansion was of stone, was largely designed by Voltaire, and

contained fourteen bedrooms; the seigneur had prepared for his court. "It is

not a palace," he wrote, "but a commodious country house, with lands ad-

jacent that produce much hay, wheat, straw, and oats. I have some oaks as

straight as pines, which touch the sky." 2 Tournay added an old chateau, a

farm, a barn, stables, fields, and woods. Altogether his stables sheltered

horses, oxen, and fifty cows; his barns were spacious enough to store the

produce of his lands and yet leave room for wine presses, poultry yards, and

a sheep fold; four hundred beehives kept the plantation humming; and the

trees gave wood to warm the Master's bones against the winter winds. He

bought and planted young trees, and grew many more from seedlings in his

hothouses. He extended the gardens and grounds around his home till they

measured three miles in circuit; they included fruit trees, grapevines, and a

132

CHAP.V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 1 33

great variety of flowers. All these structures, plants, and fields, and their

thirty caretakers, he supervised in person. Now again, as when he entered

Les Delices, he was so content that he forgot to die. He wrote to Mme. du

DefFand: "I owe my life and health to the course I have taken. If I dared I

would believe myself wise, so happy am I." 3

Over the thirty or more servants and guests who lived in the chateau Mme.

Denis ruled with an uneven hand. She was good-natured, but she had a

temper, and loved money just a little bit more than she loved anything else.

She called her uncle stingy; he denied it; in any case he "transferred to her,

little by little, the greater part of his fortune." 4 He had loved her as a child,

then as a woman; now he was glad to have her as his maitresse d'hotel. She

acted in the plays that he staged, and so well that he compared her to Clairon.

This praise went to her head; she took to writing dramas herself, and Vol-

taire was hard put to dissuade her from exposing them to public view. She

was bored by country life, and longed for Paris; it was partly to amuse her

that Voltaire invited and tolerated so long a succession of guests. She did

not care for his secretary Wagniere, but she was fond of Pere Adam, the

old Jesuit whom Voltaire welcomed to his household as a genial foe at

chess— and whom he surprised one day at the feet of servant Barbara. 5 Once,

perhaps by letting Laharpe depart with one of the Master's manuscripts,

Denis so angered Voltaire that he sent her off to Paris— with an annuity of

twenty thousand francs. 6 After eighteen months he broke down, and begged

her to return.

Ferney became a goal of pilgrimage for those who could afford travel and

had savored enlightenment. Here came minor rulers like the Duke of Wiirt-

temberg and the Elector Palatine, lords like the Prince de Ligne and the Dues

de Richelieu and Villars, notables like Charles James Fox, gleaners like Bur-

ney and Boswell, rakes like Casanova, and a thousand lesser souls. He lied

lamely when the uninvited came: "Tell them I am very sick," "Tell them

that I am dead"; but no one believed. "My God!" he wrote to the Marquis

de Villette, "deliver me from my friends; I will take care of my enemies

myself." 7

He had hardly settled down at Ferney when Boswell appeared (Decem-

ber 24, 1764), still warm with his visits to Rousseau. Voltaire sent down

word that he was still in bed, and could not be disturbed. This was but a

slight discouragement to the eager Scot; he stayed on doggedly till Voltaire

came forth; they conversed briefly, then Voltaire retired to his study. On the

following day, from an inn in Geneva, Boswell wrote to Mme. Denis:

I must beg your interest, Madam, in obtaining for me a very great favor

from M. de Voltaire. I intend to have the honor to return to Ferney Wed-

nesday or Thursday. The gates of this sober city shut at a most . . . absurd

hour, so that one is obliged to post away after dinner before the illustrious

landlord has had time to shine upon his guests. . . .

Is it possible, Madam, that I may be allowed to lodge one night under the

roof of M. de Voltaire? I am a hardy and vigorous Scot. You may mount me

to the highest and coldest garret. I shall not even refuse to sleep upon two

chairs in the bedchamber of your maid. 8

134 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

Voltaire bade his niece tell the Scot to come; there would be a bed for him.

He came on December 27, spoke with Voltaire while Voltaire was playing

chess, was charmed by the Master's English conversation and curses, and

then was "very genteelly lodged" in "a handsome room." 9 On the morrow

he undertook to convert Voltaire to orthodox Christianity; soon Voltaire,

almost fainting, had to beg a respite. A day later Boswell discussed his land-

lord's religion with Pere Adam, who told him, "I pray for Monsieur de Vol-

taire every day. ... It is a pity that he is not a Christian. He has many

Christian virtues. He has the most beautiful soul. He is benevolent; he is

charitable; but he is very strongly prejudiced against the Christian

religion." 10

To entertain his guests Voltaire provided food, wisdom, wit, and drama.

Near his home he built a small theater; Gibbon, seeing it in 1763, described

it as "very neat and well contrived, situated just by his chapel, which is far

inferior to it." 11 The philosopher laughed at Rousseau and the Genevan min-

isters, who condemned the stage as the Devil's rostrum. He trained not only

Mme. Denis but his servants and guests to take parts in his and other plays;

he himself pranced across the boards in principal roles; and professional actors

were readily persuaded to perform for the most famous writer in the world.

Visitors found his appearance almost as fascinating as his conversation.

The Prince de Ligne described him as muffled up in a flower-patterned

dressing gown, an immense wig topped with a bonnet of black velvet, jacket

of fine cotton reaching to his knees, red breeches, gray stockings, shoes of

white cloth. 12 His eyes were "brilliant and filled with fire," according to

Wagniere; and the same devoted secretary reported that his master "often

washed his eyes with pure, cool water," and "never used spectacles." 13 In the

later years of his life, tired of shaving, he pulled out his beard with pincers.

"He had a singular love for cleanliness and neatness," Wagniere continues,

"and was himself scrupulously clean." 14 He made frequent use of cosmetics,

perfumes, and pomades; his keen sense of smell suffered from any offensive

odor. 15 He was "unbelievably thin," with just enough flesh to cover his

bones. Dr. Burney, after visiting him in 1770, wrote: "It is not easy to con-

ceive it possible for life to subsist in a form so nearly composed of skin and

bone. . . . He supposed I was anxious to form an idea of . . . one walking

after death." 16 He described himself as "ridiculous for not being dead." 17

He was sick half his life. He had an especially sensitive epidermis; he com-

plained frequently of various itches, 18 perhaps from nervousness or excessive

cleanliness. He suffered at times from strangury— slow and painful urination;

in this regard he and Rousseau, so often at odds, were brothers under the skin.

He drank coffee at every turn: fifty times a day, according to Frederick the

Great; 19 three times a day, said Wagniere. 20 He laughed at doctors, and

noted that Louis XV had outlived forty of his physicians; and "who ever

heard of a centenarian doctor?" 21 — but he himself used many medicines. He

agreed with Moliere's candidate for the M.D. that the best remedy in any

serious illness is cltstertum donare; 22 he purged himself thrice a week with a

cassia solution, or with a soapy enema. 23 The best medicine, he thought, was

CHAP. V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 1 35

preventive, and the best preventive was to clean the internal organs and the

external integument. 24 Despite his years, ailments, and visitors, he worked

with the energy that comes to a man who does not carry surplus flesh. Wag-

niere reckoned that his master slept "not more than five or six hours" a day. 25

He worked far into the night, and sometimes he roused Father Adam from

bed to help him hunt a Greek word. 26

He held action to be a good remedy for philosophy and suicide. Still bet-

ter, action outdoors. Voltaire literally cultivated his garden; sometimes he

plowed or sowed with his own hands. 27 Mme. du Deffand detected in his

letters the pleasure with which he saw his cabbages grow. He hoped that

posterity would remember him at least for the thousands of trees that he had

planted. He reclaimed wastelands and drained swamps. He set up a breeding

stable, brought in ten mares, and welcomed the Marquis de Voyer's offer of

a stallion. "My seraglio is ready," he wrote, "nothing is wanting but the

sultan. ... So much has been written of late years on population that I

wish at least to people the land of Gex with horses, since I am little able to

have the honor of increasing my own species." 28 To the physiologist Haller

he wrote: "The best thing we can do on this earth is to cultivate it; all other

experiments in physics are by comparison children's play. Honor to those

who sow the earth; woe to the miserable man— crowned or helmeted or

tonsured— who troubles it! " 29

Not having enough land to give agricultural employment to all the popu-

lation around him, he organized in Ferney and Tournay shops for watch-

making and the weaving of stockings— for which his mulberry trees grew

silk. He gave employment to all who asked for it, until he had eight hundred

persons working for him. He built a hundred houses for his workers, lent

them money at four per cent, and helped them find markets for their prod-

ucts. Soon crowned heads were buying the watches of Ferney, and titled

ladies, seduced by his letters, wore stockings some of which he claimed to

have woven with his own hand. Catherine II bought Ferney watches to the

value of 39,000 livres, and offered to help him find outlets in Asia. Within

three years the watches, clocks, and jewelry made in Ferney went in regular

shipments to Holland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Algeria, Turkey,

Russia, China, and America. As a result of the new industries Ferney grew

from a village of forty peasants to a population of twelve hundred during

Voltaire's stay. "Give me a fair chance," he wrote to Richelieu, "and I am

the man to build a city." 30 Catholics and Protestants lived in peace on the

lands of the infidel.

His relations with his "vassals" were those of a bon seigneur. He treated

them all with conscience and courtesy. "He talked with his peasants," said

the Prince de Ligne, "as if they were ambassadors." 31 He exempted them

from the taxes on salt and tobacco (1775). 32 He fought in vain but persist-

ently to have all the peasants of the Pays de Gex freed from serfdom. When

the region was threatened with famine he imported wheat from Sicily and

sold it far below what it had cost him. 33 While carrying on his war against

rinfame— against superstition, obscurantism, and persecution— he spent much

136 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

of his rime in practical administration. He excused himself for not leaving

Ferney to visit his friends: "I have eight hundred people to guide and sus-

tain; ... I cannot absent myself without having everything relapse into

chaos." 34 His success as an administrator astonished all who saw the results.

"He showed clear judgment and very good sense," said one of his severest

critics. 35 Those whom he governed learned to love him; on one occasion they

threw laurel leaves into his coach as he passed. 36 The young people were es-

pecially fond of him, for he opened his chateau to them every Sunday for

dancing and refreshments; 37 he urged them on, and rejoiced in their joy. "He

was very happy," reported Mme. de Gallatin, "and did not perceive that

he was eighty-two years old." 38 He perceived it, but was content. "Je deviens

patriarche," he wrote— "I am becoming a patriarch." 39

II. THE SCEPTER OF THE PEN

Meanwhile he continued to write, to send forth an incredible quantity,

variety, and quality of histories, treatises, dramas, stories, poems, articles,

pamphlets, letters, and critical reviews to an international audience that

waited eagerly for his every word. In the one year 1768 he wrote VHomme

aux quarante ecus, La Princesse de Baby lone (one of his best tales), Bpitre a

Boileau, Profession de foi d?un theiste, Le Pyrrhonisme de Vhistoire, two

comic-opera librettos, and a play. Almost every day he composed some

"fugitive verse"— short, light, graceful epigrams in rhyme; in this department

he has no equal in all literature, not even in the composite excellence of the

Greek Anthology.

His writings on religion and philosophy have occupied us elsewhere. We

look only briefly at the plays that he wrote at Ferney— Tancrede, Nanine,

VBcossaise, Socrate, Saul, Irene; they are the least alive of his progeny, though

they were the talk of Paris in his day. Tancrede, presented at the Theatre-

Fran§ais September 3, 1759, won universal applause, even from Voltaire's

bitter enemy Freron. Mile. Clairon as Deborah and Lekain as Tancrede

reached in this drama the peak of their art. The stage had been cleared of

spectators, and allowed a spacious and striking decor; the medieval and chiv-

alric subject was a welcome deviation from classic themes; indeed, the

disciple of Boileau here wrote a romantic play. Nanine revealed that Vol-

taire, like Diderot, had been influenced by Richardson; Rousseau himself

praised it. Socrate contained a treasurable line: "It is the triumph of reason to

live well with those who have none." 40

Hailed in his time as the equal of Corneille and Racine, Voltaire studied

them endlessly, and long hesitated as to which of the two he preferred; fi-

nally he voted for Racine. He boldly placed both above Sophocles and Eurip-

ides, and he ranked "Moliere, in his best pieces, superior to the pure but cold

Terence, and to the buffoon Aristophanes." 41 He was aroused when he

learned that Marie Corneille, grand-niece of the dramatist, was living in pov-

erty near Evreux; he offered to adopt her and provide for her education; and

CHAP.V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 1 37

when he learned that she was pious he assured her that every opportunity

would be given to practice her religion. She came to him in December, 1760;

he adopted her, taught her to write good French, corrected her pronuncia-

tion, and went to Mass with her. To raise a dowry for her he proposed to

the French Academy that it should commission him to edit the works of

Corneille. It agreed. He began at once to reread the plays of his predeces-

sor, to supply introductions and notes; and, being a good businessman, he

advertised the project and solicited subscriptions. Louis XV, Czarina Eliza-

veta, Frederick of Prussia each subscribed for two hundred copies, Mme. de

Pompadour and Choiseul for fifty, and additional subscriptions came from

Chesterfield and other foreign notables. The result was that Marie Corneille

had many suitors. She married twice, and became in 1768 the mother of

Charlotte Corday.

Voltaire was the greatest historian, as well as the greatest poet and drama-

tist, of his time. In 1757 the Empress Elizaveta asked him to write a biog-

raphy of her father, Peter the Great. She invited Voltaire to St. Petersburg,

and promised him a world of honors. He replied that he was too old to

undertake such travel, but that he would write the history if her minister,

Count Shuvalov, would send him documents illustrating Peter's career and

the changes produced by the Czar's reforms. He had in his youth seen Peter

at Paris (17 16); he considered him a great man, but still a barbarian; and to

avoid going too perilously into his faults he decided to write not a biography

but a history of Russia in that memorable reign— a much more difficult task.

He undertook considerable researches, labored on the work from 1757 to

1763, and published it in 1759-63 as Histoire de la Russie sous Pierre le

Grand. It was a creditable performance for its time, and remained the best

treatment of the subject before the nineteenth century; but honest Michelet

found it "a bore." 42 The Czarina saw parts of it; she sent Voltaire some

"big diamonds" on account, but they were stolen en route, and the Czarina

died before the book was complete.

On and off, while the Seven Years' War raged around him, he undertook

to bring up to date his Histoire generate, or Essai sur les moeurs, by adding

(1755-63) a Precis du siecle de Louis XV. It was a delicate operation, for he

was still formally under the ban of the French government; we must forgive

him if he glided cautiously over the faults of the reigning King; even so it

was an excellent narrative, simple and clear; in telling the story of Prince

Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) he almost rivaled his own

Charles XII. True to his conception of history as being best when recording

the advances of the human mind, he added a concluding discourse "On the

Progress of the Understanding in the Age of Louis XV," and noted what

seemed to him to be signs of growth:

A whole order [the Jesuits] abolished by the secular power, the discipline of

other orders reformed by this power, the divisions between the [jurisdiction of]

magistrates and bishops, plainly reveal how much prejudice has been dissipated,

how far the knowledge of government is extended, and to what degree our

minds are enlightened. The seeds of this knowledge were sown in the last

138 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

century; in the present they are everywhere springing, even in the remotest

provinces. . . . Pure science has illuminated the useful arts, and these have al-

ready begun to heal the wounds of the state caused by two fatal wars. . . .

The knowledge of nature, and the discrediting of ancient fables once honored

as history; sound metaphysics freed from the absurdities of the schools: these

are products of this age, and human reason is greatly improved.

Having paid his debt to history, Voltaire returned to philosophy, and to

his campaign against the Catholic Church. He issued in rapid succession

those little books which we have already examined, as light artillery in the

war against Pinfdme: The Ignorant Philosopher, Important Examination of

Milord Bolingbroke, Ulngenu (or The Huron), Histoire de Jenni, and La

Raison par alphabet. Amid all these labors he carried on the most remarkable

correspondence ever maintained by one man.

When Casanova visited him in 1760 Voltaire showed him a collection of

some fifty thousand letters that he had received to that year; there were to

be, thereafter, almost as many more. As the recipient paid the postage, Vol-

taire sometimes spent a hundred livres for the mail that he received in one

day. A thousand admirers, a thousand enemies, a hundred young authors, a

hundred amateur philosophers, sent him gifts, bouquets, insults, curses,

queries, and manuscripts. It was not unusual for an anxious inquirer to beg

him to say, by return post, whether there was a God, or whether man had

an immortal soul. Finally he inserted a warning in the Mercure de France:

"Several persons having complained of not receiving acknowledgment of

packages sent to Ferney, Tourney, or Les Delices, notice is given that, on

account of the immense number of those packages, it has become necessary

to decline receiving all that do not come from persons with whom the pro-

prietor had the honor to be acquainted." 43

In the definitive edition by Theodore Besterman Voltaire's correspond-

ence fills ninety-eight volumes. Brunetiere thought it "the most living por-

tion of his entire work." 44 And in truth there is not a dull page in the whole

immensity, for in these letters we can still hear the most brilliant conversa-

tionalist of his time talk with all the intimacy of a friend. Never before or

since has a writer caught on his running pen— currente calamo—so much

courtesy, vivacity, charm, and grace. It is a feast not only of wit and elo-

quence but of warm friendship, humane feeling, and incisive thought. Beside

them the letters of Mme. de Sevigne, delightful though they are, seem to

flutter casually over the surface of trivial and transitory things. Doubtless

there was something of convention in the flourishes of Voltaire's epistolary

style, but he seems to mean it when he writes to d'Alembert: "I embrace you

with all my strength, and I regret that it must be at so great a distance." (To

which d'Alembert replied: "Farewell, my dear and illustrious friend; I em-

brace you tenderly, and am more than ever tuus in animo"— yours in

spirit.) 45 And hear Voltaire to Mme. du Deffand: "Adieu, madame. ... Of

all the truths that I seek, that which seems to be surest is that you have a soul

which is congenial to me, and to which I shall be tenderly attached during

the little time that remains to me." 46

CHAP. V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 1 39

His letters to his acquaintances in Paris were prized by the recipients, and

were passed from hand to hand as nuggets of news and gems of style. For it

was in his letters that Voltaire's style reached its fullest brilliance. It was not

at its best in his histories, where a smooth and flowing narrative is more de-

sirable than eloquence or wit; it ran to pompous declamation in his plays;

but in his letters he could let the diamond point of his pen flash into epigram,

or illuminate a topic with incomparable precision and brevity. He added the

learning of Bayle to the elegance of Fontenelle, and took a touch of irony

from the Lettres provinciales of Pascal. He contradicted himself in his

seventy years of writing, but he was never obscure; we can hardly believe

that he was a philosopher, he is so clear. He goes directly to the point, to

the vital spot of an idea. He is sparing of adjectives and similes, lest he com-

plicate the thought, and almost every other sentence is a flash of light. Some-

times there are too many flashes, too many strokes of wit; now and then the

reader tires of the sparkle, and loses some darts of Voltaire's agile mind. He

realized that this excess of brilliance was a fault, like gems on a robe. "The

French language," he modestly confessed, "was carried to the highest point

of perfection in the age of Louis XIV." 47

Half the notables of the time were among his correspondents— not only all

the philosophes, and all the major authors of France and England, but

cardinals, popes, kings, and queens. Christian VII apologized to him for not

installing all Voltairean reforms at once in Denmark; Stanislas Poniatowski

of Poland mourned that he had been precipitated into royalty just as he was

on the way to Ferney; Gustavus III of Sweden thanked Voltaire for occa-

sionally casting a glance at the cold North, and prayed that "God may pro-

long your days, so precious to humanity." 48 Frederick the Great scolded him

for cruelty to Maupertuis, and for insolence to kings; 49 but a month later he

wrote: "Health and prosperity to the most malign and most seductive man

of genius who has ever been or ever will be in this world"; 50 and on May 12,

1760, he added:

For my part 1 shall go there [Hades] and tell Virgil that a Frenchman has

surpassed him in his own art. I shall say as much to Sophocles and Euripides; I

shall speak to Thucydides of your histories, to Quintus Curtius of your

Charles XII; and perhaps I shall be stoned by these jealous dead because a

single man has united all their different merits in himself. 51

On September 19, 1774, Frederick continued his lauds: "After your death

there will be no one to replace you; it will be the end of good letters in

France." 52 (A mistake, of course; there is never an end of good literature in

France.) And finally, on July 24, 1775, Frederick lowered his scepter before

Voltaire's pen: "For my part, I am consoled by having lived in the age of

Voltaire; that suffices me." 53

Catherine the Great wrote to Voltaire as one crowned head to another—

indeed, as a pupil to a teacher. She had read him with delight for sixteen

years before cleaving her way to the throne of Russia; then, in October,

1763, she began their correspondence by replying in the first person to a

letter in verse which he had sent to a member of her diplomatic corps. 54

I40 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

Voltaire called her the Semiramis of the North, glided gracefully over her

crimes, and became her apologist to France. She begged to be spared his

compliments, he extended them. She prized his partisanship, for she knew

that it was largely through him— and then through Grimm and Diderot—

that she obtained a "good press" in France. French philosophy became a

tool of Russian diplomacy. Voltaire recommended Assyrian-style scythe-

armed chariots to Catherine for use against the Turks; she had to explain

that the unco-operative Turks would not attack in sufficiently close forma-

tion to be conveniently mowed down. 55 He forgot his hatred of war in his

enthusiasm for the possibility that Catherine's armies would liberate Greece

from the Turks; he called upon "Franfais, Bretons, Italiens" to support this

new crusade; and he mourned when Semiramis stopped short of his goal.

Byron took up his cause.

Many Frenchmen berated Voltaire for his flirtations with royalty; they

felt that he lowered himself in fluttering about thrones and mouthing com-

pliments. And doubtless this fluttering sometimes went to his head. But he

too was playing a diplomatic game. He had never pretended to republican

sentiments; he repeatedly argued that more progress could be made through

"enlightened" kings than by enthroning the unstable, unlettered, supersti-

tious masses. He was warring not against the state but against the Catholic

Church, and in that battle the support of rulers was a precious aid. We have

seen how precious that support was in his triumphant campaigns for the

Calas and the Sirvens. It was of much moment to him that in his fight for

religious toleration he had both Frederick and Catherine on his side. Nor did

he give up hope of winning Louis XV. He had won Mme. de Pompadour

and Choiseul; he wooed Mme. du Barry. He had no scruples in his strategy;

and indeed, before the end of the reign, he had the support of half the gov-

ernment of France. The battle for religious toleration was won.

III. VOLTAIRE POL1T1CUS

What, in politics and economics, did he hope to accomplish? He set his

sights both high and low: his great aim was to free men from theological

myths and priestly power— a task difficult enough; for the rest he asked for

some reforms, but no Utopia. He smiled at "those legislators who govern the

universe, . . . and from their garrets give orders to kings." 56 Like nearly all

the philosophes, he was opposed to revolution; he would have been shocked

by it— perhaps guillotined.* Besides, he was scandalously rich, and doubtless

his wealth colored his views.

In 1758 he proposed to invest 500,000 francs ($625,000?) in Lorraine. 58

* See Robespierre's description of the Encyclopedists: "As far as politics were concerned,

this party drew the line at the Rights of the People. ... Its leaders sometimes held forth

against despotism, and were fed by despots; sometimes they wrote articles on kings, some-

times dedications in their honor. They penned speeches for courtiers, and madrigals for

courtesans." 57

CHAP.V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 141

On March 17, 1759, he wrote to Frederick: "I derive sixty thousand livres

[$75,000?] of my [annual] income from France. ... I admit that I am

very rich." His fortune had been made through "tips" from financier friends

like the brothers Paris; through winning lotteries in France and Lorraine;

through sharing in his father's estate; through buying government bonds;

through taking shares in commercial ventures; and through lending money

to individuals. He was content with a six per cent return, which was mod-

erate considering the risks and losses. He lost a thousand ecus ($3,750?) in

the bankruptcy of the Gilliart firm in Cadiz (1767). 59 In 1768, referring to

the eighty thousand francs ($100,000?) that Voltaire had lent to the Due de

Richelieu, Gibbon noted: "The Duke is ruined, the security worth nothing,

and the money vanished"; 60 at Voltaire's death a fourth of the loan had

been repaid. Pensions brought Voltaire four thousand francs per year. Alto-

gether, in 1777, his income came to 206,000 francs ($257,5oo?). 61 He graced

this wealth with commensurate generosity, but he felt called upon to de-

fend it as not necessarily unbecoming a philosopher.

I saw so many men of letters poor and despised that 1 made up my mind

that I would not increase their number. In France a man must be anvil or

hammer; I was born anvil. A slender patrimony becomes smaller every day,

because in the long run everything increases in price, and government often

taxes both income and money. . . . You must be economical in your youth,

and you find yourself in your old age in possession of a capital that surprises

you; and that is the time when fortune is most necessary to us. 62

As far back as 1736, in his poem Le Mondain, he had confessed: "I love

luxury, and even a soft life, all the pleasures, all the arts." He held that the

demand of the rich for luxuries brought their money into circulation among

artisans; and he suspected that without wealth there would have been no

great art. 63 When Voltaire published Meslier's atheistic-communistic Testa-

ment he omitted the section against property. He believed that no economic

system could succeed without the stimulus of ownership. "The spirit of

property doubles a man's strength." 64 He hoped to see every man a property

owner; and while Rousseau sanctioned serfdom in Poland, Voltaire wrote:

"Poland would be thrice as populous and wealthy if the peasants were not

slaves." 65 However, he was not in favor of peasants' becoming rich; who,

then, would be strong soldiers for the state? 66

He did not share Rousseau's enthusiasm for equality; he knew that all men

are created unfree and unequal. He rejected Helvetius' notion that if equal

education and opportunity were given to all, all would soon be equal in edu-

cation and ability. "What folly to imagine that every man could be a New-

ton!" 67 At all times there will be strong and weak, clever and simple, and

therefore rich and poor.

It is impossible in our melancholy world to prevent men who live in a

society from being divided into two classes— one of the rich who command,

the other of the poor who obey. . . . Every man has a right to entertain a

private opinion of his own equality to other men, but it does not follow that a

142 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

cardinal's cook should take it upon him to order his master to prepare his

dinner. The cook, however, may say: "I am a man as well as my master; I was

born like him in tears, and shall die like him in agony. . . . We both perform

the same animal functions. If the Turks get possession of Rome and I then

become a cardinal and my master a cook, I will take him into my service." This

language is perfectly reasonable and just, but, while waiting for the Grand

Turk to take Rome, the cook is bound to do his duty, or all human society is

subverted. 68

As the son of a notary, and only lately become a seigneur, he had mingled

views about aristocracy, apparently preferring the English type. 69 He ac-

cepted monarchy as the natural form of government. "Why is almost the

whole earth governed by monarchs? . . . The honest answer is: Because

men are rarely worthy of governing themselves." 70 He laughed at the divine

right of kings, and traced them and the state to conquest. "A tribe, for its

pillaging expeditions, chooses a chief; it accustoms itself to obey him, he

accustoms himself to command; I believe this is the origin of monarchy." 71

Is it natural? Look at a farmyard.

A farmyard exhibits the most perfect representation of a monarchy. There

is no king comparable to a cock. If he marches haughtily and fiercely in the

midst of his flock it is not out of vanity. If the enemy is advancing he does

not content himself with issuing an order to his subjects to go out and get

killed for him . . . ; he goes in person, ranges his troops behind him, and

fights to the last gasp. If he conquers, it is himself who sings the Te Deum.

... If it be true that bees are governed by a queen to whom all her subjects

make love, that is a more perfect government still. 72

Living in Berlin and then in Geneva, he could study monarchy and "de-

mocracy" in their living operation. Like the other philosophes, he was

prejudiced by the fact that several monarchs— Frederick II, Peter III, Cath-

erine II— and some ministers— Choiseul, Aranda, Tanucci, Pombal— had lis-

tened to appeals for reforms, or had given pensions to philosophers. In an

age when the Russian peasant was so primitive, when the masses everywhere

were largely illiterate and too tired to think, it seemed absurd to propose

popular rule. Actually the "democracies" in Switzerland and Holland were

oligarchies. It was the populace that loved the old myths and ceremonies of

religion, and stood as a massive army in the path of intellectual freedom and

development. Only one force was strong enough to resist the Catholic

Church in France, as it had successfully resisted the Protestant churches in

England, Holland, and Germany; and that was the state. Only through the

existing monarchical governments in France, Germany, and Russia could

the philosophes hope to win their struggle against superstition, bigotry,

persecution, and an infantile theology. They could not expect support from

the parlements, for these rivaled the Church and exceeded the King in

obscurantism, censorship, and intolerance. On the other hand, consider what

Henry the Navigator had done for Portugal, what Henry IV had done for

France, or Peter the Great for Russia, or Frederick the Great for Prussia. "Al-

most nothing great has ever been done in the world except by the genius and

firmness of a single man combating the prejudices of the multitude. ,,73 So the

CHAP. V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 143

philosophes prayed for enlightened kings. "Virtue on the throne," Voltaire

wrote in Merope, "is the fairest work of heaven." 74 *

Voltaire's politics stemmed partly from a suspicion that many people

would be incapable of digesting education even if it were offered them. He

referred to "the thinking portion of the human race— i.e., the hundred-

thousandth part." 76 He feared the mental immaturity and emotional ex-

citability of the people at large. "Quand le populace se mele de raisonner,

tout est perduC* (When the populace takes to reasoning, all is lost) . 77 And

so, until his mellower years, he had little sympathy with democracy. When

Casanova asked him, "Would you see the people possessed of sovereignty?"

he answered, "God forbid!" 78 And to Frederick: "When I begged you to

be the restorer of the fine arts of Greece, my request did not go so far as to

beg you to re-establish the Athenian democracy. I do not like government

by the rabble." 79 He agreed with Rousseau that "democracy seems to agree

only with small countries," but he added further limitations: "only with

those happily situated, . . . whose liberty is assured by their situation, and

whom it is to the interest of their neighbors to preserve." 80 He admired the

Dutch and Swiss republics, but there too he had some doubts.

If you remember that the Dutch ate on a grill the heart of the two brothers

De Witt; if you . . . recall that the republican John Calvin, . . . after having

written that we should persecute no man, even such as deny the Trinity, had

a Spaniard, who thought otherwise than he about the Trinity, burned alive by

green [slow-burning] fagots; then, in truth, you will conclude that there is no

more virtue in republics than in monarchies. 81

After all these antidemocratic pronouncements we find him actively sup-

porting the Genevan middle class against the patricians (1763), and the un-

franchised natifs of Geneva against both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie

( 1766) ; let us defer this story to its locale.

Indeed, Voltaire seemed to become more radical as he aged. In 1768 he

sent forth his UHomrne aux quarante ecus— The Man 'with Forty Crowns.

It went through ten printings in its first year, but was burned by the Parle-

ment of Paris, which sent the printer to the galleys. This severity was due

not to the ridicule which the story lavished upon the physiocrats, but to its

vivid picture of peasants reduced to destitution by taxation, and of monks

living in idleness and luxury on properties tilled by serfs. In another pam-

phlet in 1768, called UA, B, C (which Voltaire was at great pains to dis-

avow), he made "Monsieur B" say:

I could adjust quite easily to a democratic government. . . . All those who

have possessions in the same territory have the same right to maintain order

in that territory. I like to see free men make the laws under which they live.

... It pleases me that my mason, my carpenter, my blacksmith, who have

helped me to build my lodging, my neighbor the farmer, my friend the manu-

* Michelet has a charming passage on this these royale: "It is the chimera of the philosophes

and the economists— of such men as Voltaire and Turgot— to accomplish the revolution— to

achieve the happiness of mankind— by means of the king. Nothing is more curious than to

behold this idol disputed by both parties. The philosophes pull him to the right, the priests

to the left. Who will carry him off? Women." 75

144 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

facturer, will raise themselves above their trade, and know the public interest

better than the most insolent Turkish official. In a democracy no laborer, no

artisan, need fear either molestation or contempt. . . . To be free, to have

only equals, is the true, the natural life of man; all other ways of life are un-

worthy artifices, bad comedies in which one man plays the part of master, the

other that of slave, one that of parasite, the other that of procurer. 82

In or soon after 1769 (aged seventy-five), in a new edition of the Dic-

tionnaire philosophique, Voltaire gave a bitter description of governmental

tyrannies and abuses in France, 83 and praised England by comparison:

The English constitution has in fact arrived at that point of excellence

whereby all men are restored to those natural rights of which, in nearly all

monarchies, they are deprived. These rights are: entire liberty of person and

property; freedom of the press; the right of being tried in all criminal cases by

a jury of independent men; the right of being tried only according to the strict

letter of the law; and the right of every man to profess, unmolested, what re-

ligion he chooses while he renounces offices which only the members of the

Established Church may hold. These are . . . invaluable privileges. . . . To

be secure, on lying down, that you will rise in possession of the same property

with which you retired to rest; that you will not be torn from the arms of your

wife and your children in the dead of night, to be thrown into a dungeon or

be buried in exile in a desert; that . . . you will have the power to publish all

your thoughts; . . . these privileges belong to every one who sets foot on

English soil. . . . We cannot but believe that states not established upon such

principles will experience revolutions. 84

Like so many observers, he foresaw revolution in France. On April 2,

1764, he wrote to the Marquis de Chauvelin:

Everywhere I see the seeds of an inevitable revolution, which, however, I

shall not have the pleasure to witness. The French come late to everything,

but finally they do come. Enlightenment has been so widely spread that it

will burst out at the first opportunity; and then there will be quite a pretty

explosion. The young are fortunate; they will see great things.

And yet, when he recalled that he was living in France by sufferance of a

King whom he had offended by taking up residence in Potsdam; when he

saw Pompadour and Choiseul and Malesherbes and Turgot turning the

French government toward religious toleration and political reform— and

perhaps because he longed for permission to return to Paris— he took, gen-

erally, a more patriotic tone, and deprecated violent revolution:

When the poor strongly feel their poverty, wars follow such as those of the

popular party against the Senate at Rome, and those of the peasantry in Ger-

many, England, and France. All these wars ended sooner or later in the sub-

jection of the people, because the great have money, and money in a state

commands everything. 85

So, instead of an upheaval from below, where ability to destroy would not

be followed by ability to rebuild, and the simple many would soon again be

subject to a clever few, Voltaire preferred to work for a nonviolent revolu-

tion through enlightenment passing from thinkers to rulers, ministers and

magistrates, to merchants and manufacturers, to artisans and peasants. "Rea-

son must first be established in the minds of leaders; then gradually it de-

CHAP.V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 145

scends and at length rules the people, who are unaware of its existence, but

who, perceiving the moderation of their superiors, learn to imitate them." 86

In the long run, he thought, the only real liberation is education, the only

real freedom is intelligence. "Plus les hommes sont eclaires, plus Us seront

libres" (The more enlightened men are, the more they will be free) . 87 The

only real revolutions are those that change the mind and heart, and the only

real revolutionists are the sage and the saint.

IV. THE REFORMER

Instead of agitating for a radical political revolution, Voltaire labored for

moderate, piecemeal reform within the existing structure of French society;

and within this self-denying circle he achieved more than any other man of

his time.

His most basic appeal was for a thorough revision of French law, which

had not been revised since 1670. In 1765 he read, in Italian, the epochal

Trattato dei delitti e delle pene of the Milanese jurist Beccaria, who in turn

had been inspired by the philosophes. In 1766 Voltaire issued a Commentaire

sur le livre des delits et des peines, frankly acknowledging Beccaria's lead;

and he continued to attack the injustices and barbarities of French law till

1777, when, aged eighty-two, he published Prix de la justice et de Fhumanite.

He demanded, to begin with, the subordination of ecclesiastical to civil

law; a check on the power of the clergy to require degrading penances or to

enforce idleness on so many holydays; he asked for a mitigation of the penal-

ties for sacrilege, and a repeal of the law insulting the body, and confiscating

the property, of suicides. He insisted on distinguishing sin from crime, and

ending the notion that the punishment of crime should pretend to avenge an

insulted God.

No ecclesiastical law should be of any force until it has received the ex-

press sanction of the government. . . . Everything relating to marriages de-

pends solely upon the magistrates, and priests should be confined to the august

function of blessing the union. . . . Lending money at interest is purely an

object of civil law. . . . All ecclesiastics, in all cases whatsoever, should be

under the perfect control of the government, because they are subjects of the

state. . . . No priest should possess authority to deprive a citizen of even the

smallest of privileges under pretense that that citizen is a sinner. . . . The

magistrates, cultivators, and priests should alike contribute to the expenses of

the state. 88

He compared the law of France to the city of Paris— a product of piece-

meal building, of chance and circumstance, a chaos of contradictions; a trav-

eler in France, said Voltaire, changed his laws almost as often as he changed

his post horses. 89 All the laws of the various provinces should be unified and

brought into general harmony. Every law should be clear, precise, and as

far as possible immune to legalistic chicanery. All citizens should be equal

in the eyes of the law. Capital punishment should be abolished as barbarous

146 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

and wasteful. It is surely barbarous to punish forgery, theft, smuggling, or

arson with death. If theft is punishable with death, the thief will have no

reason for avoiding murder; so in Italy many highway robberies are accom-

panied by assassination. "If you hang on the public gallows [as happened

at Lyons in 1772] the servant girl who stole a dozen napkins from her mis-

tress, she will be unable to add a dozen children to the number of your

citizens. . . . There is no proportion between a dozen napkins and a human

life." 90 To confiscate the property of a man condemned to death is plain

robbery of the innocent by the state. If Voltaire sometimes argued from a

merely utilitarian standpoint, it was because he knew that such arguments

would outweigh, with most lawmakers, any humanitarian appeal.

But on the subject of judicial torture his humanitarian spirit spoke out

forcefully. Judges were allowed by French law to apply torture to elicit

confessions before a trial, if suspicious clues suggested guilt. Voltaire sought

to shame France by referring to Catherine IPs edict abolishing torture in

supposedly barbarous Russia. "The French, who are considered— I know not

why— to be a very humane people, are astonished that the English, who have

had the inhumanity to take all Canada from us, have renounced the pleasure

of using torture." 91

Some judges, he charged, were bullies who acted like prosecutors instead

of judges, apparently on the assumption that the accused was guilty until

proved innocent. He protested against keeping the accused in foul jails,

sometimes in chains and for months, before bringing him to trial. He noted

that a person accused of a major crime was forbidden to communicate with

anyone, even with a lawyer. He related again and again the treatment of

the Calas and the Sirvens as illustrating the hasty condemnation of innocent

persons. He argued that the evidence of only two persons, even if eye-

witnesses, should no longer be held sufficient to convict a man of murder;

he adduced cases of false witness, and urged that capital punishment be abol-

ished if only to prevent the execution of one innocent in a thousand in-

stances. Death sentences could in France be passed by a majority of two

among the judges; Jean Calas had been sent to death by a vote of eight to

five. Voltaire demanded that a death sentence require an overwhelming

majority, preferably unanimity. "What an absurd horror, to play with the

life and death of a citizen in a game of six to four, or five to three, or four to

two, or three to one! " 92

By and large the reforms suggested by Voltaire were a compromise be-

tween his middle-class heritage, his hatred of the Church, his experience and

investments as a businessman and a landholder, and his sincere sentiments as

a humanitarian. His demands were moderate, but they were in many cases

effective. He campaigned for freedom of the press, and it was immensely

extended— if only by governmental winking— before he died. He asked for

an end to religious persecution, and in 1787 it was practically ended in

France. He proposed that Protestants be permitted to build churches and

transmit or inherit property, and enjoy the full protection of the laws; this

was done before the Revolution. He asked that marriages between persons

CHAP. V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 147

of different religions be legalized; they were. He denounced the sale of

offices, the taxes on necessaries, the restrictions on internal trade, the survival

of serfdom and mortmain; he advised the state to recapture from the Church

the administration of wills and the education of youth; and in all these mat-

ters his voice had influence on events. He led the campaign to exclude spec-

tators from the stage of the Theatre-Fran§ais; it was done in 1759. He rec-

ommended that taxes fall upon all classes, and in proportion to their wealth;

this had to wait for the Revolution. He wanted a revision of French law;

it was done in the Code Napoleon (1807); the most permanent achievement

of the warrior-statesman, who determined the legal structure of France till

our own time, was made possible by jurists and philosophers.

V. VOLTAIRE HIMSELF

How shall we sum him up, this most amazing man of the eighteenth cen-

tury? We need no longer speak of his mind— it has revealed itself in a hun-

dred pages of these volumes. No one has ever challenged him in quickness

and clarity of thought, in sharpness and abundance of wit. He defined wit

with fond care:

What is called wit is sometimes a startling comparison, sometimes a delicate

allusion; or it may be a play upon words— you use a word in one sense, know-

ing that your interlocutor will [at first] understand it in another. Or it is a sly

way of bringing into juxtaposition ideas not usually considered in association.

... It is the art of finding a link between two dissimilars, or a difference be-

tween two similars. It is the art of saying half of what you mean and leaving

the rest to the imagination. And I would tell you much more about it if I had

more of it myself. 93

No one had more, and perhaps, as we have said, he had too much. His sense

of humor sometimes passed out of control; too often it was coarse, and

occasionally it verged on buffoonery.

The quickness of his perceptions, correlations, and comparisons left him

no pause for consistency, and the swift succession of his ideas did not always

allow him to penetrate a subject to its humanly attainable depths. Perhaps

he disposed too readily of the masses as "canaille"; we could not expect him

to foresee the time when universal education would be necessary to a tech-

nologically progressive economy. He had no patience with the geological

theories of Buffon, or the biological speculations of Diderot. He recognized

his limits, and had his moments of modesty. "You think that I express myself

clearly enough," he told a friend; "I am like the little brooks— they are trans-

parent because they are not deep." 94 He wrote to Daquin in 1766:

Since I was twelve years old I divined the enormous quantity of things for

which I have no talent. I know that my organs are not arranged to go very

far in mathematics. I have shown that I have no inclination for music. Rely

upon the esteem of an old philosopher who has the folly ... to think himself

a very good farmer, but has not that of thinking that he has all the talents. 95

148 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

It would be unfair to ask of a man who dealt with so many matters that he

should have exhausted all available data on every topic before tossing it on

the point of his pen. He was not all scholar; he was a warrior, a man of

letters who made letters a form of action, a weapon of transformation. Yet

we can see from his library of 6,210 volumes, and their marginal comments,

that he studied eagerly and painstakingly an astonishing variety of subjects,

and that in politics, history, philosophy, theology, and Biblical criticism he

was a very learned man. The range of his curiosity and his interests was im-

mense; so were the wealth of his ideas and the retentiveness of his memory.

He took no tradition for granted, but examined everything for himself. He

had a proper skepticism which did not hesitate to oppose common sense

to the absurdities of science as well as the legends of the popular faith. An

unprejudiced scholar called him "a thinker who amassed more accurate in-

formation about the world in all its aspects than any man since Aristotle." 96

Never elsewhere has one mind transposed into literature and action so ex-

tensive a mass of materials from such a diversity of fields.

We have to picture him as the strangest amalgam of emotional instability

with mental vision and power. His nerves kept him always on the jump. He

could not sit still except when absorbed in literary composition. When the

lady with only one buttock asked, "Which is worse— to be ravished a hun-

dred times by Negro pirates, to have one's rump gashed, ... to be cut to

pieces, to row in the galleys, ... or to sit still and do nothing?," Candide

answered thoughtfully, "That is a great question." 97 Voltaire had days of

happiness, but he seldom knew peace of mind or body. He had to be busy,

active, buying, selling, planting, writing, acting, reciting. He feared boredom

worse than death, and in a bored moment he maligned life as "either ennui

or whipped cream." 98

We could draw an ugly picture of him if we described his appearance

without noting his eyes, or listed his faults and follies without his virtues and

his charm. He was a bourgeois gentilhomme who felt that he had as much

right to a title as his dilatory debtors. He rivaled the lordliest seigneur in

grace of manners and speech, but he was capable of haggling over small

sums, and bombarded President de Brosses with vituperative missiles over

fourteen cords of wood— which he insisted on accepting as a gift and not a

sale. He loved money as the root of his security. Mme. Denis accused him

of parsimony in no measured terms: "The love of money torments you.

. . . You are, in heart, the lowest of men. I shall hide as well as I can the

vices of your heart"; 99 but when she wrote this (1754) she was living ex-

travagantly in Paris on funds that were a serious drain on his purse; and for

the rest of her years with him she lived in state at Ferney.

Before and after becoming a millionaire he cultivated the socially or po-

litically powerful with a flattery that sometimes came close to sycophancy.

In an Bpitre au Cardinal Dubois he called that vessel of vices a greater man

than Cardinal Richelieu. 100 When he was seeking admission to the French

Academy and needed ecclesiastical support, he assured the influential Pere

de La Tour that he wished to live and die in the Holy Catholic Church. 101

His printed lies would make a book; many were not printed, some were

CHAP.V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 149

unprintable. He held this procedure justifiable in war; he felt that the Seven

Years' War was merely the sport of kings compared with his thirty years'

war against the Church; and a government that could jail a man for tell-

ing the truth could not justly complain if he lied. On September 19, 1764, at

the top of his war, he wrote to d'Alembert: "As soon as the slightest danger

comes up, kindly notify me, so that I may disown my writings in the public

press with my habitual candor and innocence." He denied almost all his

works except the Henriade and the poem on the battle of Fontenoy. "One

must show the truth to posterity with boldness, and to his contemporaries

with circumspection. It is very hard to reconcile these two duties." 102

It goes without saying that he was vain: vanity is the spur of development,

and the secret of authorship. Usually Voltaire kept his vanity under con-

trol; he frequently revised his writings according to suggestions and criticism

offered in good spirit. He was generous in praise of authors who did not com-

pete with him— Marmontel, Laharpe, Beaumarchais. But he could be child-

ishly jealous of competitors, as in his slyly critical Sloge de Crebillon [pere] ;

Diderot thought he had "a grudge against every pedestal." 103 His jealousy

led him to scurrilous abuse of Rousseau: he called him "the clockmaker's

boy," "a Judas who betrayed philosophy," "a mad dog who bites every-

body," "a madman born of a chance mating of Diogenes' dog with that of

Erasistratus." 104 He thought the first half of Julie, ou La Nouvelle Helo'ise

had been composed in a brothel, and the second in a madhouse. He predicted

that Bmile would be forgotten after a month's time. 105 He felt that Rousseau

had turned his back upon that French civilization which, with all its sins and

crimes, was precious to Voltaire as the very wine of history.

Being nerves and bones with little flesh, Voltaire was even more sensitive

than Rousseau. And as we must feel our pains more keenly than our pleas-

ures, so he took commendation in his stride but was "reduced to despair" by

an adverse critique. 106 He was seldom wise enough to restrain his pen; he

answered every opponent, however small. Hume described him as one "who

never forgives [? ], and never thinks an enemy beneath his notice." 107 Against

persistent foes like Desfontaines and Freron he fought without restraint or

truce; he used every device of satire, ridicule, and vituperation, even crafty

distortion of the truth. 108 His rancor shocked old friends and made new

enemies. "I know how to hate," he said, "because I know how to love." 109

"By my stars [I am] a bit inclined to malice"; 110 so he successfully moved

all his cohorts to defeat de Brosses' candidacy for the Academy (1770). He

summed up the matter in a mixture of d'Artagnan and Rabelais:

As for my puny self, I make war up to the last moment— Jansenists, Molin-

ists, Frerons, Pompignans to the right and to the left, and preachers, and Jean-

Jacques Rousseau. I receive a hundred thrusts and give back two hundred,

and I laugh. . . . God be praised! I look upon the whole world as a farce

which sometimes becomes tragic. All is the same at the end of the day, and

all is still the same at the end of days. 111

In his anti-Semitism he turned upon an entire people the resentment gen-

erated by his encounters with a few individuals. From the standpoint of

those memories Voltaire interpreted the history of the Jews, noting their

150 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. V

faults meticulously, and seldom giving them the benefit of a doubt. He

could not forgive the Jews for having begotten Christianity. "When I see

Christians cursing Jews methinks I see children beating their fathers." 112 He

saw in the Old Testament hardly anything but a record of murder, lechery,

and wholesale assassination. The Book of Proverbs seemed to him "a col-

lection of trivial, sordid, incoherent maxims, without taste, without selec-

tion, and without design"; and the Song of Songs was to him "an inept

rhapsody." 113 However, he praised the Jews for their ancient disbelief in

immortality, for refraining from proselytism, and for relative tolerance; the

Sadducees denied the existence of angels, but suffered no persecution for

heresy.

Did his virtues outweigh his vices? Yes, and even if we do not place in the

scale his intellectual with his moral qualities. Against his parsimony we must

place his generosity, against his love of money his cheerful acceptance of

losses and his readiness to share his gains. Hear Collini, who as his secretary

for many years must have known his faults:

Nothing is more baseless than the reproach of avarice made against him. . . .

Stinginess never had a place in his home. I have never known a man whom his

domestics could more easily rob. He was a miser only of his time. . . . He had,

with regard to money, the same principles as for time: it was necessary, he

said, to economize in order to be liberal. 114

His letters reveal some of the many gifts he distributed, usually without re-

vealing his name, and not only to friends and acquaintances, but even to

persons whom he had never seen. 115 He allowed the booksellers to keep the

profit from his books. We have seen him helping Mile. Corneille; we shall

see him helping Mile. Varicourt. We have seen him helping Vauvenargues

and Marmontel; he did the same to Laharpe, who failed as a dramatist before

developing into the most influential critic in France; Voltaire asked that half

of his own governmental pension of two thousand francs be given to La-

harpe, without letting him know who was the donor. 116 "Everyone knows,"

wrote Marmontel, "with what kindness he received all young men who

showed any talent for poetry." 117

If Voltaire, conscious of his puny size, had little physical courage (allow-

ing himself to be caned by Captain Beauregard in 1722 118 ), he had astonish-

ing moral courage (attacking the most powerful institution in history, the

Roman Catholic Church). If he was bitter in controversy, he was quick

to forgive opponents who sought reconciliation; "his fury vanished with

the first appeal." 119 He lavished affection upon all who asked for it, and

was loyal to his friends. When, after twenty-four years of association, he

parted from Wagniere, "he cried like a child." 120 As to his sexual moral-

ity, it was above the level of his time with Mme. du Chatelet, below that

level with his niece. He was tolerant of sexual irregularity, but rose in fine

fury against injustice, fanaticism, persecution, hypocrisy, and the cruelties

of the penal law. He defined morality as "doing good to mankind"; for the

rest he laughed at prohibitions, and enjoyed wine, woman, and song in philo-

CHAP. V) VOLTAIRE PATRIARCH 151

sophical moderation. In a little story called "Bababec" he disposed of asceti-

cism with characteristic pungency. Omni asks the Brahmin if there is any

chance of his eventually reaching the nineteenth heaven.

"It depends," replied the Brahmin, "on what kind of life you lead."

"I try to be a good citizen, a good husband, a good father, a good friend. I

sometimes lend money without interest to the rich; I give to the poor; I pre-

serve peace among my neighbors."

"But," asked the Brahmin, "do you occasionally stick nails into your behind?"

"Never, reverend father."

"I am sorry," the Brahmin replied; "you will certainly never attain to the

nineteenth heaven." 121

Voltaire's crowning and redeeming virtue was his humanity. He stirred

the conscience of Europe with his campaigns for the Calas and the Sirvens.

He denounced war as "the great illusion": "The victorious nation never

profits from the spoils of the conquered; it pays for everything; it suffers as

much when its armies are successful as when they are defeated"; 122 whoever

wins, humanity loses. He pleaded with men of diverse needs and states to

remember that they were brothers; and that plea was heard with gratitude

in the depths of Africa. 123 Nor was he subject to Rousseau's charge that those

who preached love of mankind spread their love so widely that they had

little left for their neighbor; all who knew him remembered his kindness and

courtesy to the lowliest persons around him. He respected every ego, know-

ing its sensitivity from knowing his own. 124 His hospitality survived the

excessive calls upon it. "How moved I was," wrote Mme. de Graffigny, "to

find you always as perfectly good as you are great, and to see you doing

all about you the good that you would have liked to do to all humanity." 125

He could be irascible and break out in a temper, but "you could never imag-

ine," wrote another visitor, "how lovable this man is in his heart." 126

As the fame of his help to persecuted persons spread through Europe, and

reports circulated through France of his private charities and beneficence, a

new image of Voltaire took form in the public mind. He was no longer Anti-

christ, no longer the warrior against a faith beloved by the poor; he was the

savior of the Calas, the good seigneur of Ferney, the defender of a hundred

victims of intolerant creeds and unjust laws. Genevan clergymen expressed

their wonder whether, at the Last Judgment, their faith would balance the

works of this impious man. 127 Educated men and women forgave his impiety,

his quarrels, his vanity, even his malice; they saw him grow out of hostility

into benevolence; and they thought of him now as the venerable patriarch

of French letters, the glory of France before the literate world. This was

the man whom even the populace would acclaim when he came to Paris to

die.

CHAPTER VI

Rousseau Romantic

1756-62

I. IN THE HERMITAGE: 1 756-57

ROUSSEAU had moved into Mme. d'£pinay's cottage on April 9, 1756,

along with his common-law wife Therese Levasseur and her mother. For

a while he was happy, loving the song and chatter of the birds, the rustling

and fragrance of the trees, the peace of solitary walks in the woods. On his

walks he carried pencil and notebook to catch ideas in their flight.

But he was not made for peace. His sensitivity doubled every trouble, and

invented more. Therese was a faithful housewife, but she could not be a

companion for his mind. "The man who thinks," he wrote in Smile, "should

not ally himself with a wife who cannot share his thoughts." 1 Poor Therese

had small use for ideas, and little for written words. She gave him her body

and soul; she bore with his tantrums, and probably replied in kind; she al-

lowed him to skirt the edge of adultery with Mme. d'Houdetot, and was

herself, so far as we know, humbly faithful except for an episode vouched

for only by Boswell. But how could this simple woman respond to the range

and wild diversity of a mind that was to unsettle half the Continent? Hear

Rousseau's own explanation:

What will the reader think when I tell him . . . that from the first moment

in which I saw her, until that wherein I write, I have never felt the least love

for her, that I never desired to possess her, . . . and that the physical wants

which were satisfied with her person were to me solely those of the sex, and

by no means proceeded from the individual? . . . The first of my wants, the

greatest, strongest, and most insatiable, was wholly in my heart: the want of

an intimate [spiritual] connection, as intimate as it could possibly be. This

singular want was such that the closest corporal union was not sufficient; two

souls would have been necessary. 2

Therese might have made countercomplaints, for Rousseau had by this

time ceased to perform his conjugal duties. In 1754 he had stated to a

Geneva physician: "I have been subject for a long time to the crudest suf-

ferings, owing to the incurable disorder of retention of the urine, caused by

a congestion in the urethra, which blocks the canal to such an extent that

even the catheters of the famed Dr. Daran cannot be introduced there." 3

He claimed to have ceased all sexual intercourse with Therese after 1755. 4

"Until then," he added, "I had been good; from that moment I became

virtuous, or at least infatuated with virtue."

The presence of his mother-in-law made the triangle painfully acute. He

l 5 2

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC 153

maintained her and his wife as well as he could with the income from his

copying of music and the sale of his writings. However, Mme. L^vasseur

had other daughters, who required marriage portions, and were always in

need. Grimm, Diderot, and d'Holbach made up, for the two women, an

annuity of four hundred livres, pledging them to hide this from Rousseau

lest his pride be hurt. The mother (according to Rousseau 5 ) kept most of the

money for herself and her other daughters, and contracted debts in Therese's

name. Therese paid these debts, and long concealed the annuity; finally

Rousseau found it out, and flared into anger at his friends for so humiliating

him. They fed his wrath by urging him to move from the Hermitage before

the winter set in; the cottage (they argued) was not adapted for cold

weather; and even if his wife could bear it, would the mother survive?

Diderot, in his play Le Fils naturel, 6 had written: "The good man lives in

society; only the bad man lives alone." Rousseau took this as applying to

himself; now began a long quarrel in which reconciliations were only armis-

tices. Rousseau felt that Grimm and Diderot, envious of the peace he had

found in the woods, were trying to lure him back to a corrupt city. In a

letter to his benefactress, Mme. d'fipinay (then in Paris), he revealed his

character with candor and insight:

I want my friends to be my friends and not my masters; to advise me but

not to try to rule me; to have every claim upon my heart but none upon my

liberty. I consider it extraordinary the way people interfere, in friendship's

name, in my affairs, without telling me of theirs. . . . Their great eagerness

to do me a thousand services wearies me; there is a touch of patronage about

it that wearies me; besides, anyone else could do as much. . . .

As a recluse, I am more sensitive than other men. Suppose I fall out with one

who lives amid the throng; he thinks of the matter for a moment, then a

hundred and one distractions will make him forget it for the rest of the day.

But nothing takes my thoughts off it. Sleepless, I think of it all night long;

walking by myself, I think of it from sunrise to sunset. My heart has not an

instant's respite, and a friend's unkindness will cause me to suffer, in a single

day, years of grief. As an invalid I have a right to the indulgence due from

his fellow men to the little weaknesses and temper of a sick man. ... I am

poor, and my poverty (or so it seems to me) entitles me to some considera-

tion. . . .

So do not be surprised if I hate Paris yet more and more. Nothing for me,

from Paris, except your letters. Never shall I be seen there again. If you care

to state your views on this subject, and as vigorously as you like, you have a

right to do so. They will be taken in good part, and will be— useless. 7

She answered him vigorously enough: "Oh, leave these petty complaints

to the empty-hearted and empty-headed!" 8 Meanwhile she made frequent

inquiries about his health and comfort, shopped for him, and sent him small

gifts.

One day, when it froze to an extreme degree, in opening a packet of several

things I had asked her to buy for me, I found a little under-petticoat of English

flannel, which she told me she had worn, and desired I should make of it an

under-waistcoat. This more than friendly care appeared to me so tender— as if

she had stripped herself to clothe me— that in my emotion I repeatedly kissed

both the note and the petticoat, while shedding tears. Therese thought me mad. 9

154 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

During his first year at the Hermitage he compiled a Dictionnaire de

musique, and summarized in his own language the twenty-three volumes of

the Abbe de Saint-Pierre on war and peace, education, and political reform.

In the summer of 1756 he received from the author a copy of Voltaire's

poem on the earthquake that had killed fifteen thousand persons, and

wounded fifteen thousand more, at Lisbon on All Saints' Day, November 1,

1755. Voltaire, like half the world, wondered why a presumably beneficent

Providence had chosen for this indiscriminate slaughter the capital of a

country completely Catholic, and an hour— 9:40 a.m.— when all pious people

were worshiping in church. In a mood of utter pessimism Voltaire painted a

picture of life and nature as being heartlessly neutral between evil and good.

A passage in the Confessions gives us Rousseau's reaction to this powerful

poem.

Struck by seeing this poor man, overwhelmed (if I may so speak) with

prosperity and honor, bitterly exclaiming against the miseries of this life, and

finding everything to be wrong, I formed the mad project of making him turn

his attention to himself, and of proving to him that everything was right.

Voltaire, while he appeared to believe in God, never really believed in any-

thing but the Devil, since his pretended deity is a malicious being who, according

to him, has no pleasure but in evil. The glaring absurdity of this doctrine is

particularly disgusting from a man enjoying the greatest prosperity, who, from

the bosom of happiness, endeavors, by the frightful and cruel image of all the

calamities from which he is exempt, to reduce his fellow creatures to despair.

I, who had a better right than he to calculate and weigh all the evils of human

life, impartially examined them, and proved to him that of all possible evils

there was not one to be attributed to Providence, and which had [not] its

source rather in the abusive use man made of his faculties than in nature. 10

So, on August 18, 1756, Rousseau sent to Voltaire a twenty-five-page

"Lettre sur la Providence." It began with a handsome acknowledgment:

Your latest poems, monsieur, have come to me in my solitude; and though

all my friends know the love I have for your writings, I do not know who

could have sent me this book unless it be yourself. I have found in it both

pleasure and instruction, and have recognized the hand of the master; ... I

am bound to thank you at once for the volume and for your work. 11

He urged Voltaire not to blame Providence for the misfortunes of mankind.

Most evils are due to our own folly, sin, or crime.

Note that Nature did not assemble twenty thousand houses of six or seven

stories, and that if the inhabitants of that great city had been more evenly dis-

persed and more lightly lodged, the damage would have been much less, per-

haps nothing. All would have fled at the first tremor, and we should have

seen them, on the morrow, twenty leagues away, as gay as if nothing had

happened. 12

Voltaire had written that few persons would want to be reborn to the same

conditions; Rousseau replied that this is true only of rich people surfeited

with pleasures, bored with life, and shorn of faith; or of literary men seden-

tary, unhealthy, reflective, and discontent; it is not true of simple people

like the French middle class or the Swiss villagers. It is only an abuse of life

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC 155

that makes life a problem to us. 13 Moreover, the evil of the part may be the

good of the whole; the death of the individual makes possible the rejuvenated

life of the species. Providence is universal, not particular: it watches over the

whole, but leaves specific events to secondary causes and natural laws. 14

Early death, such as came to Lisbon's children, may be a boon; in any case

it is unimportant if there is a God, since He will recompense all for un-

merited suffering. 15 And the question of God's existence is beyond solution

by reason. We may choose between belief and unbelief; and why reject an

inspiring and consolatory faith? As for himself, "I have suffered too much in

this life not to hope for another. All the subtleties of metaphysics will not

make me doubt for a moment a beneficent Providence and the immortality

of the soul. I feel this, I believe it, I wish it; ... I will defend these beliefs

to my last breath." 16

The letter ended amiably: Rousseau expressed his agreement with Voltaire

on religious toleration, and assured him, "I would rather be a Christian after

your fashion than in the style of the Sorbonne." 17 He begged Voltaire to

compose, with all the force and charm of his verse, a "catechism for the

citizen," which would inculcate a code of morals to guide men through the

confusion of the age. — Voltaire wrote a polite acknowledgment, and invited

Rousseau to be his guest at Les Delices. 18 He made no formal attempt to

refute Rousseau's arguments, but replied to them indirectly with Candide

0759)-

II. IN LOVE

The winter of 1756-57 was heavy with events for Rousseau. At some time

during those months he began to write the most famous novel of the eight-

eenth century: Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise. He conceived it first as a study

in friendship and love: cousins Julie and Claire both love Saint-Preux, but

when he seduces Julie Claire remains the loyal friend of both. Ashamed to

write merely a romance, Rousseau proposed to raise the story to philosophy

by having Julie become religious, and live in exemplary monogamy with

Wolmar, a gentleman agnostic who has succumbed to Voltaire and Diderot.

According to Rousseau's Confessions:

The storm brought on by the Encyclopedic . . . was at this time at its height.

Two parties, exasperated against each other to the last degree of fury, soon

resembled enraged wolves . . . rather than Christians and philosophers who

had a reciprocal wish to enlighten and convince each other and lead their

brethren to the way of truth. . . . Being by nature an enemy to all spirit of

party, I had freely spoken severe truths to each, but they had not listened. I

thought of another expedient, which in my simplicity appeared to be ad-

mirable: this was to abate their mutual hatred by destroying their prejudices,

and showing to each party the virtue and merit which in the other deserved

public esteem and respect. This project . . . had the success that was to be

expected: it drew together and united the rival parties for no other purpose

than that of crushing the author. . . . Satisfied with . . . my plan, I returned

to the situations in detail, . . . and there resulted Parts I and II of Heloise. 19

156 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VI

Every evening, by the fireside, he read some pages to Therese and Mme.

Levasseur. Encouraged by the tears Therese shed, he submitted the manu-

script to Mme. d'fipinay when she returned to her chateau, La Chevrette,

a mile from the Hermitage. Her memoirs recall: "On our arrival here . . .

we found Rousseau awaiting us. He was calm, and in the best temper in the

world. He brought me an installment of a romance which he has commenced.

... He returned to the Hermitage yesterday in order to continue this work,

which he says constituted the happiness of his life." 20 Soon afterward she

wrote to Grimm:

After dinner we read Rousseau's manuscript. I do not know whether I am

ill-disposed, but I am not satisfied with it. It is wonderfully well written, but it

is too elaborate, and seems to be unreal and wanting in warmth. The characters

do not say a word of what they ought to say; it is always the author who

speaks. I do not know how to get out of it. I should not like to deceive Rous-

seau, and I cannot make up my mind to grieve him. 21

Somehow, during that winter, Rousseau poured warmth into Julie. Was it

because a living romance had come into his life? About January 30, 1757,

he was visited by a lady whom he had met in Paris as the sister-in-law of

Mme. d'fipinay. Elisabeth-Sophie de Bellegarde had married Comte d'Hou-

detot, had left him, and had now for several years been the mistress of the

Marquis de Saint-Lambert— once the rival of Voltaire for Mme. du Chatelet.

Both her husband and her lover were off to the war. In the summer of 1756

the Comtesse had leased the Chateau of Eaubonne, some two and a half

miles from the Hermitage. Saint-Lambert wrote to her that Rousseau was

within riding distance of her, and suggested that she might mitigate her soli-

tude by visiting the famous author who had put all civilization on the defen-

sive. She went in a coach; when this stuck in the mire she continued on foot,

and arrived with her shoes and her dress soiled with mud. "She made the

place resound with laughter, in which I most heartily joined." 22 Therese gave

her a change of clothing, and the Marquise stayed for "a rustic collation."

She was twenty-seven, Rousseau was forty-five. She had no special beauty of

face or form, but her kindliness, good temper, and gay spirit brightened his

somber life. The next afternoon she sent him a pretty letter, addressing him

by the title he had taken after his repatriation in Geneva:

My dear Citizen, I return the garments which you were kind enough to

lend me. In leaving I found a much better road, and I must tell you of my

joy over that, because it makes it much more possible to see you again. I am

sorry to have seen so little of you. ... I would be less sorry if I were more

free, and always sure of not disturbing you. Farewell, my dear Citizen, and I

beg you to thank Mile. Levasseur for all the kindness she showed me. 23

A few days later Saint-Lambert returned from the front. In April he was

recalled to service, and soon afterward the sprightly Comtesse pranced to

the Hermitage on horseback, dressed like a man. Rousseau was shocked by

the costume, but was soon conscious that it contained a charming woman.

Leaving Therese to her housewifely chores, he and his guest walked out into

the woods, and Mme. d'Houdetot told him how passionately she loved Saint-

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC 157

Lambert. In May he returned her visit, going to Eaubonne at a time when,

she had told him, she would be "quite alone." "In my frequent excursions to

Eaubonne," he says, "I sometimes slept there. ... I saw her almost every

day during three months. ... I saw my Julie in Mme. d'Houdetot, and I

soon saw nothing but Mme. d'Houdetot [in Julie], but with all the perfec-

tions with which I had adorned the idol of my heart." 24

For a time he so abandoned himself to "my delirium" that he ceased to

work on his novel; instead he composed love letters, which he took care that

she should find in the niches of Eaubonne's trees. He told her that he was in

love, not saying with whom; of course she knew. She reproved him, and

protested that she belonged body and soul to Saint-Lambert, but she allowed

his visits and ardent attentions to continue; after all, a woman exists only

when she is loved, and doubly so when loved by two. "She refused me noth-

ing that the most tender friendship could grant; yet she granted me nothing

that rendered her unfaithful." He tells of their "long and frequent conversa-

tions . . . during the four months we passed together in an intimacy almost

without example between two friends of different sexes who contain them-

selves within the bounds which we never exceeded." 25 In his account of this

liaison we find the Romantic movement in full swing: nothing in his novel

could rival these ecstasies:

We were both intoxicated with the passion— she for her lover, I for her; our

sighs and delicious tears were mingled together. . . . Amid this delicious in-

toxication she never forgot herself for a moment, and I solemnly protest that

if ever, led away by my senses, I have attempted to render her unfaithful, I was

never really desirous of succeeding. . . . The duty of self-denial had elevated

my mind. ... I might have committed the crime; it had been a hundred times

committed in my heart; but to dishonor my Sophie! Ah, was ever this possible?

No! I have told her a hundred times it was not. ... I loved her too well to

possess her. . . . Such was the sole enjoyment of a man of the most combust-

ible constitution, but who was, at the same time, perhaps one of the most timid

mortals Nature ever produced. 26

Mme. d'fipinay noticed that her "bear" rarely came to see her now, and

she soon learned of his trips to her sister-in-law. She was hurt. "It is hard,

after all," she wrote to Grimm in June, "that a philosopher should escape

from you at the moment when you least expect it." 27 One day at Eaubonne

Rousseau found "Sophie" in tears. Saint-Lambert had been informed of her

flirtation, and (as she put it to Jean-Jacques) "ill informed of it. He does me

justice, but he is vexed. ... I am much afraid that your follies will cost me

the repose of the rest of my days." 28 They agreed that it must have been

Mme. d'fipinay who had told the secret to Saint-Lambert, for "we both

knew that she corresponded with him." Or she might have revealed it to

Grimm, who occasionally saw Saint-Lambert in Westphalia. If we may

accept Rousseau's account, Mme. d'£pinay tried to secure from Therese the

letters he had received from Mme. d'Houdetot. In a wild letter to his hostess

he accused her of betraying him:

Two lovers [Sophie and Saint-Lambert], closely united and worthy of each

other's love, are dear to me. . . . I presume that attempts have been made to

158 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

disunite them, and that I have been made use of to inspire one of the two with

jealousy. The choice was not judicious, but it appeared convenient to the pur-

poses of malice; and of this malice it is you whom I suspect to be guilty. . . .

Thus the woman whom I most esteem would . . . have been loaded with the

infamy of dividing her heart and her person between two lovers, and I with

that of being one of these wretches. If I knew that but for a single moment in

your life you ever had thought this, either of her or of myself, I should hate

you until my last hour. But it is with having said, and not [merely] with having

thought it, that I charge you.

Do you know in what manner I will make amends for my faults during the

short space of time I have to remain near you? By doing what nobody but

myself would do: by telling you freely what the world thinks of you, and the

breaches that you have to repair in your reputation. 29

Mme. d'£pinay, guilty or not (we do not know), was distressed by the

violence of these accusations. She reported them to her distant lover Grimm.

He replied that he had warned her against the "devilish scrapes" she would

be involved in by letting the moody and incalculable Rousseau into the

Hermitage. 80 She invited Jean-Jacques to La Chevrette; she greeted him with

an embrace and tears; he responded tear for tear; she gave him no explana-

tion that we know of; he dined with her, slept in her house, and departed

the next morning with expressions of friendship.

Diderot complicated the mess. He advised Rousseau to write to Saint-

Lambert confessing his tenderness for Sophie, but assuring him of her fidel-

ity. Rousseau (according to Diderot) promised to do so. But Mme. d'Houde-

tot begged him not to write, and to let her extricate herself in her own way

from the difficulties in which his infatuation and her dalliance had placed

her. When Saint-Lambert returned from the front Diderot spoke to him

of the affair, assuming that Rousseau had confessed it. Rousseau reproached

Diderot with betraying him; Diderot reproached Rousseau for deceiving

him. Only Saint-Lambert behaved philosophically. He came with Sophie to

the Hermitage; he "invited himself to dinner with me, . . . treated me

severely but in a friendly manner," and inflicted no worse punishment than

to sleep and snore while Jean-Jacques read aloud his long letter to Voltaire.

Mme. d'Houdetot, however, discouraged any further meetings with Rous-

seau. At her request he returned the letters she had written him, but when

he asked for those that he had written to her she said she had burned them.

"Of this," he tells us, "I dared to doubt, . . . and doubt still. No such letters

as mine to her were ever thrown into the fire. Those of Heloi'se [to Abe-

lard] have been found ardent; good heavens! what would have been said

of these?" 31 Wounded and ashamed, he retired into his imaginary world; he

resumed the writing of La Nouvelle Heloise, and poured into it the passions

of his letters to Mme. d'Houdetot.

New humiliations awaited him when Grimm returned from the war

(September, 1757). "I could scarcely recognize the same Grimm who" for-

merly had "thought himself honored when I cast my eyes upon him." 32

Rousseau could not understand Grimm's coldness to him; he did not know

that Grimm knew of the insulting letter to Mme. d'£pinay. Grimm was al-

most as self-centered as Jean-Jacques, but was otherwise antipodal to him

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC 1 59

in mind and character— skeptical, realistic, blunt, and hard. 33 Rousseau with

one letter had lost two friends.

III. MUCH ADO

A new crisis developed when, in October, 1757, Mme. d'fipinay decided

to visit Geneva. This is Rousseau's story:

"My friend," she said to me, "I am immediately going to set out for Geneva;

my chest is in a bad state, and my health so deranged, that I must go and

consult Tronchin." I was the more astonished at this resolution so suddenly

taken, and at the beginning of the bad season of the year. ... I asked her

whom she would take with her. She said her son and [his tutor] M. de Linant;

and then she carelessly added: "And you, dear, will not you go also?" As I did

not think she spoke seriously, knowing that at this season I was scarcely able

to go to my chamber [i.e., to travel between La Chevrette and the Hermitage],

I joked upon the utility of one sick person to another. She herself had not

seemed to make the proposition seriously, and there the matter dropped. 34

He had excellent reasons for not wishing to accompany Madame; his ail-

ments forbade it, and how could he leave Therese? Moreover, gossip whis-

pered that his hostess was pregnant, presumably by Grimm; Rousseau for a

time believed the tale, and complimented himself on escaping from a ridic-

ulous situation. The poor woman was telling the truth: she was suffering

from tuberculosis; she seems to have sincerely desired Rousseau to accom-

pany her; and why should he not be glad to revisit, at her expense, the city

of which he was so proudly Citoyen? Aware of her feelings, Diderot wrote

to Rousseau urging him to take her request seriously and accede to it, if only

as some return for her benefactions. He replied in his characteristic style:

I perceive that the opinion you give comes not from yourself. Besides my

being but little disposed to suffer myself to be led by the nose under your name

by any third or fourth person, I observe in this secondary advice a certain

underhand dealing which ill agrees with your candor, and from which you will,

on your account as well as mine, do well in future to abstain. 35

On October 22 he took Diderot's letter and his own reply to La Chevrette

and read them "in a loud, clear voice" to Grimm and Mme. d'fipinay. On

the twenty-fifth she left for Paris; Rousseau went to bid her an awkward

goodbye; "fortunately," he tells us, "she set out in the morning, and I still

had time to go and dine with her sister-in-law" at Eaubonne. 36 On the

twenty-ninth (according to Mme. d'£pinay's Memoirs) he wrote to Grimm:

Tell me, Grimm, why do all my friends declare that I ought to accompany

Mme. d'Epinay? Am I wrong, or are they all bewitched? . . . Mme. d'Epinay

starts in a nice postchaise, accompanied by her husband, her son's tutor, and

five or six servants. . . . Should I be able to endure a postchaise? Can I hope

to accomplish so long a journey so speedily without a mishap? Shall I have it

stopped every moment that I may get down, or shall I accelerate my torments

and my last hours by being obliged to put restraint upon myself? . . . My

devoted friends . . . [seem] intent upon worrying me to death. 37

l6o ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

On October 30 Mme. d'fipinay left Paris for Geneva. On November 5

Grimm (according to the Memoirs) replied to Rousseau:

I have done my utmost to avoid replying definitely to the horrible apology

which you have addressed to me. You press me to do so. ... I never thought

that you ought to have accompanied Mme. d'Epinay to Geneva. Even if your

first impulse had been to offer her your company, it would have been her

duty to refuse your offer, and to remind you of what you owe to your position,

your health, and the women whom you have dragged into your retreat; that

is my opinion. . . .

You dare to speak to me of your slavery, to me who, for more than two

years, have been the daily witness of all the proofs of the most tender and

generous friendship which this woman has given you. If I were able to pardon

you, I should think myself unworthy to have a friend. I will never see you

again in my life, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish from my mind

the memory of your behavior. I ask you to forget me, and not to disturb me

any more. 38

From Geneva Mme. d'fipinay wrote to Grimm: "I have received the

thanks of the Republic for the way in which I have treated Rousseau, and

a formal deputation of watchmakers on the same subject. The people here

hold me in veneration on his account." 39 Tronchin warned her that she would

have to remain under his care for a year. She was a frequent visitor at Vol-

taire's homes in Geneva and Lausanne. After some delay Grimm joined her,

and they had eight months of happiness.*

On November 23, 1757, Rousseau (he tells us) wrote to her as follows:

Were it possible to die of grief I should not now be alive. . . . Friendship,

madame, is extinguished between us, but that which no longer exists still has

its rights, and I respect them. I have not forgotten your goodness to me, and

you may expect from me as much gratitude as it is possible to have toward a

person I can no longer love. . . .

I wished to quit the Hermitage, and I ought to have done it. My friends pre-

tend I must stay there till spring; and since my friends desire it I will remain

there till then if you will consent. 40

Early in December Diderot came to see Rousseau, and found him in wrath

and tears at the "tyranny" which his friends exercised over him. Diderot's

report of this visit appears in his letter of December 5 to Grimm:

The man is a madman (forcene). I have seen him; I reproached him, with

all the force given me by honesty, for the enormity of his conduct. He put into

his defense of himself an angry passion which afflicted me. . . . This man

comes between me and my work, and troubles my mind; it is as though I had

one of the damned near me. . . . Oh, what a spectacle it is— that of a wicked

and ferocious man! Let me never see him again; he would make me believe in

devils and hell. 41

Rousseau received an answer from Mme. d'fipinay on December 10. Ap-

parently Grimm had told her of Rousseau's comments on his "slavery" at

the Hermitage, for she wrote with unusual bitterness:

* They returned to Paris in October, 1759; her home there became one of the minor salons.

Her book on education was crowned by the Academy.

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC l6l

After having for several years given you every possible mark of friendship,

all I can now do is to pity you. You are very unhappy. . . .

Since you are determined to quit the Hermitage, and are persuaded that you

ought to, I am astonished that your friends have prevailed upon you to stay

there. For my part I never consult mine on my duty, and I have nothing further

to say to you on your own. 42

On December 15, though winter was closing in, Rousseau left the Hermi-

tage with Therese and all their belongings. Her mother he sent to live in

Paris with the other daughters, but he promised to contribute to her support.

He moved to a cottage in Montmorency, leased to him by an agent of Louis-

Fran?ois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti. There, turning his back upon his

former friends, he produced in five years three of the most influential books

of the century.

IV. THE BREAK WITH THE PH1LOSOPHES

His new home was in what he called the jardin de Mont-Louis; a "single

chamber" fronted with a lawn, and, at the end of the garden, an old tower

with an "alcove quite open to the air." When visitors came he had to re-

ceive them "in the midst of my dirty plates and broken pots," and he trem-

bled lest "the floor, rotten and falling to ruin," should collapse under his

guests. He did not mind his poverty; he earned enough by copying music;

he rejoiced in being a competent artisan, 43 no longer a rich woman's re-

tainer. When kindly neighbors sent him gifts he resented them; he felt that

to receive more than one gives is a humiliation. The Prince de Conti twice

sent him pullets; he told the Comtesse de Boufflers that a third gift would be

returned.

We should note, in passing, how many aristocrats helped the rebels of the

Enlightenment, not so much through agreement with their views as through

generous sympathy with genius in need. There were many elements of

nobility in the nobles of the Old Regime. And Rousseau, who denounced

the aristocracy, was especially befriended by it. Sometimes the proud artisan

forgot himself, and boasted of his titled friends. Speaking of his lawn he

wrote:

That terrace was my drawing room, wherein I received M. and Mme. de

Luxembourg, the Due de Villeroi, the Prince de Tingry, the Marquis d'Armen-

tieres, the Duchesse de Montmorency, the Duchesse de Boufflers,* the Comtesse

de Valentinois, the Comtesse de Boufflers, and other persons of the same rank,

who . . . deigned to make the pilgrimage to Mont-Louis. 44

Not far from Rousseau's cottage was the home of the Marechal and

Marechale de Luxembourg. Soon after his arrival they invited him to dinner;

* In the profusion of Boufflers who entered history in the 18th century we may distinguish

(1) the Duchesse de Boufflers, who became the Marechale de Luxembourg, (2) the Marquise

de Boufflers, mistress of Stanislas Leszczynski, and (3) the Comtesse de Boufflers, friend of

David Hume and Horace Walpole.

\6l ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

he refused. They repeated the invitation in the summer of 1758; he again

refused. Toward Easter of 1759 they came, with half a dozen titled friends,

to beard him in his retreat. He was frightened; the Marechale, as Duchesse

de Boufflers, had earned a reputation for charming too many men. But she

had outlived her sins, and had matured into a woman of maternal rather than

merely sexual charm; soon she thawed his shy reserve, and aroused him into

lively conversation. The visitors wondered why a man of such parts should

be living in such poverty. The Marechal invited Rousseau and Therese to

come and live with him until the cottage could be repaired; Jean- Jacques

still resisted; finally he and Therese were persuaded to occupy for a time

the "Petit Chateau" on the Luxembourg estate. They moved into it in May,

1759. Sometimes Rousseau visited the Luxembourgs in their luxurious home;

there he was easily induced to read to them and their guests some parts of

the novel that he was completing. After a few weeks he and Therese re-

turned to their own cottage, but he continued to visit the Luxembourgs, and

they remained loyal to him through all the perturbations of his moods.

Grimm complained that Rousseau "had left his old friends and replaced us

with people of the highest rank," 45 but it was Grimm who had rejected

Rousseau. In a letter of January 28, 1762, to Malesherbes Jean-Jacques an-

swered those who accused him of both denouncing and courting the nobility:

Sir, I have a violent aversion to the social classes that dominate others. . . .

I have no trouble admitting this to you, scion of illustrious blood. ... I hate

the great, I hate their position, their harshness, their prejudices, . . . their

vices. ... It was in such a frame of mind I went as one dragged along to the

chateau [of the Luxembourgs] at Montmorency. Then I saw the masters; they

loved me, and I, sir, loved them, and will love them as long as I live. ... I

would give them, I will not say my life, for that gift would be a feeble one;

. . . but I will give them the only glory that has ever touched my heart— the

honor I expect from posterity, and which it will certainly pay me, because

this is due me, and posterity is always just.

One former friend he had hoped to keep— Mme. d'Houdetot; but Saint-

Lambert reproached her for the gossip in which Paris linked her name with

Rousseau's, and she bade Rousseau refrain from addressing letters to her. He

remembered that he had confessed his passion for her to Diderot; now he

concluded that it was Diderot who had babbled about it in the salons, and

"I resolved to break with him forever." 46

He chose the worst possible moment and means. On July 27, 1758, Hel-

vetius had published, in De FEsprit, a powerful attack upon the Catholic

clergy. The resultant furor led to a rising demand for the suppression of the

Encyclopedic (then seven volumes old) and all writings critical of Church

or state. Volume VII contained d'Alembert's rash article on Geneva, lauding

the Calvinist clergy for their secret Unitarianism, and pleading with the

Genevan authorities to allow the establishment of a theater. In October,

1758, Rousseau published his Lettre a M. (TAlembert sur les spectacles.

Moderate in tone, it was nevertheless a declaration of war against the Age

of Reason, against the irreligion and immorality of mid-eighteenth-century

France. In the preface Rousseau went out of his way to repudiate Diderot,

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC 163

without naming him: "I had an Aristarchus, severe and judicious. I have him

no more; I want no more of him; but I shall regret him unceasingly, and my

heart misses him even more than my writings." And in a footnote he added,

believing that Diderot had betrayed him to Saint-Lambert:

If you have drawn a sword against a friend, don't despair, for there is a way

to return it to him. If you have made him unhappy by your words, fear not,

for it is possible to be reconciled with him. But for outrage, hurtful reproach,

the revelation of a secret, and the wound done to his heart by betrayal, there

is no grace in his eyes; he will go away from you and never return. 47

The letter, 1 35 pages in translation, was in part a defense of religion as pub-

licly preached in Geneva. As his Emile would soon indicate, Rousseau was

himself a Unitarian— rejecting the divinity of Christ; but in applying for Gene-

van citizenship he had professed the full Calvinist creed; in this Lettre he de-

fended the orthodox faith, and belief in a divine revelation, as indispensable

aids to popular morality. "What can be proved by reason to the majority of

men is only the interested calculation of personal benefit"; hence a merely

"natural religion" would let morality degenerate into nothing more than

avoidance of detection.

But theology was a minor issue in Rousseau's argument; his frontal assault

was upon d' Alembert's proposal that a theater should be legalized in Geneva.

Here the secret enemy was not d'Alembert but Voltaire: Voltaire whose

fame as a resident of Geneva irritably outshone Rousseau's glory as Citoyen

de Geneve; Voltaire who had dared to stage plays in or near Geneva, and

who doubtless had prompted d'Alembert to insert a plea for a Genevan

theater in an Ency elope die article. What? Introduce into a city famous for

its Puritan morals a form of entertainment that had almost everywhere glori-

fied immorality? Tragic dramas nearly always pictured crime; they did not

purge the passions, as Aristotle thought; they inflamed the passions, especially

of sex and violence. Comedies seldom represented wholesome married love;

often they laughed at virtue, as even Moliere had done in he Misanthrope. All

the world knew that actors led lawless and immoral lives, and that most of

the alluring actresses of the French stage were paragons of promiscuity,

serving as centers and sources of corruption in a society that idolized them.

Perhaps, in large cities like Paris and London, these evils of the stage affect

only a small part of the population, but in a small city like Geneva (with

only 24,000 population) the poison would spread through all ranks, and the

representations would stir up newfangled notions and party strife. 48

So far Rousseau had echoed the Puritan, or Calvinist, view of the theater;

he was saying in France in 1758 what Stephen Gosson had said in England

in 1579, William Prynne in 1632, Jeremy Collier in 1698. But Rousseau did

not confine himself to denunciation. He was no Puritan; he advocated balls

and dances under public sponsorship and supervision. There should be public

amusements, but of a social and wholesome kind, like picnics, open-air games,

festivals, parades. (Here Rousseau added an animated description of a regatta

on Lake Geneva. 49 )

The Letter, he tells us, "had a great success." Paris was beginning to tire

164 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

of immorality; there was no further zest in unconventional deviations that

had themselves become conventional. The city was surfeited with men who

behaved like women, and women who itched to be like men. It had had

enough of classic drama and its stilted forms. It saw how poor a showing

Mme. de Pompadour's generals and soldiers were making against Frederick's

Spartan troops. To hear a philosopher speak well of virtue was a refreshing

experience. The moral influence of the Letter would grow until, with Rous-

seau's other writings, it would share in producing an almost revolutionary

return to decency under Louis XVI.

The philosophes could not foresee this. What they felt in Rousseau's proc-

lamation was an act of betrayal: he had attacked them in the moment of their

greatest danger. In January, 1759, the government finally forbade the pub-

lication or sale of the Ency elope die. When Rousseau denounced the morals

of Paris his former intimates, recalling his pursuit of Mme. d'Houdetot, con-

demned him a hypocrite. When he denounced the stage they pointed out

that he had written he Devin du village and Narcisse for the stage, and had

frequented the theater. Saint-Lambert rejected with a harsh message (Octo-

ber 10, 1758) the copy which Rousseau had sent him of the Letter:

I cannot accept the present you have offered me. . . . You may, for aught

I know to the contrary, have reason to complain of Diderot, but this does not

give you a right to insult him publicly. You are not unacquainted with the

nature of the persecutions which he suffers. ... I cannot refrain from telling

you, sir, how much this heinous act of yours has shocked me. . . . You and

I differ too much in our principles ever to be agreeable to each other. Forget

that I exist. ... I promise to forget your person, and to remember nothing

about you but your talents. 50

Mme. d'fipinay, however, on her return from Geneva, thanked Rousseau for

the copy that he had directed to her, and invited him to dinner. He went,

and met Saint-Lambert and Mme. d'Houdetot for the last time.

From Geneva came a dozen letters of praise. Encouraged by Rousseau's

stand, the Genevan magistrates forbade Voltaire to stage any further theatri-

cals on Genevan soil. Voltaire removed his dramatic properties to Tourney,

and transferred his residence to Ferney. He felt the sting of defeat. He

branded Rousseau as a deserter and apostate, and mourned that the little

flock of philosophes had fallen into a self-consuming strife. "The infamous

Jean-Jacques," he wrote, "is the Judas of the brotherhood." 51 Rousseau re-

torted in a letter (January 29, 1760) to the Genevan pastor Paul Moultou:

You speak to me of that man Voltaire? Why does the name of that buffoon

sully your correspondence? That miserable fellow has ruined my country

[Geneva]. I would hate him more if I despised him less. I only see in his great

gifts something additionally shameful, which dishonors him by the use he

makes of them. . . . Oh, citizens of Geneva, he makes you pay well for the

refuge you have given him! 52

It grieved Rousseau to learn that Voltaire was producing plays at Tour-

ney, and that many citizens of Geneva were crossing the frontiers into

France to witness these performances— some even to take part in them. His

resentment found an added casus belli when his letter to Voltaire on the

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC 1 65

Lisbon earthquake was printed in a Berlin journal (1760), apparently

through Voltaire's careless lending of the manuscript to a friend. Now (June

17) Rousseau sent to Voltaire one of the most extraordinary letters in the

correspondence of this turbulent age. After reproaching Voltaire for the

unauthorized publication, he proceeded:

I don't like you, monsieur. To me, your disciple and enthusiast, you have

done the most painful injuries. You have ruined Geneva as a reward for the

asylum that you received there. You have alienated my fellow citizens from

me as a reward for the praises I gave you among them. It is you who make it

unbearable for me to live in my own country; you who will compel me to die

on foreign soil, deprived of all the consolations of the dying, and thrown dis-

honored upon some refuse heap, while all the honors that a man can expect

will attend you in my native land. In short, I hate you, since you have willed

it so; but i. hate you with the feelings of one still capable of loving you, if you

had desired it. Of all the feelings with which my heart was filled for you, there

remains only admiration for your fine genius, and love for your writings. If I

honor in you only your talents it is not my fault. I shall never be found want-

ing in the respect which is due them, nor in the behavior which that respect

demands. 53

Voltaire did not answer, but privately he called Rousseau "charlatan,"

"madman," "little monkey," and "miserable fool." 54 In correspondence with

d'Alembert he showed himself quite as sensitive and passionate as Jean-

Jacques.

I have received a long letter from Rousseau. He has gone completely mad.

. . . He writes against the stage after having written a bad comedy himself; he

writes against France, which nourishes him; he finds four or five rotten staves

from the barrel of Diogenes and climbs into them in order to bark at us; he

abandons his friends. He writes to me— to me!— the most insulting letter that a

fanatic ever scrawled. ... If he were not an inconsequential poor pygmy of

a man, swollen with vanity, there would be no great harm done; but he has

added to the insolence of his letter the infamy of intriguing with Socinian

pedants here in order to prevent me from having a theater of my own at

Tourney, or at least preventing the citizens from playing there with me. If he

meant by this base trick to prepare for himself a triumphant return to the low

streets whence he sprang, it is the action of a scoundrel, and I shall never

pardon him. I would have avenged myself on Plato if he had played a trick of

that sort on me; even more on the lackey of Diogenes. The author of the

Nouvelle Aloha is nothing but a vicious knave. 55

In these two letters of the two most famous writers of the eighteenth cen-

tury we see, behind the supposedly impersonal currents of the time, the

nerves that felt keenly every blow in the conflict, and the common human

vanity that throbs in the hearts of philosophers and saints.

V. THE NEW HELOISE

The book that Voltaire misnamed had been for three years Rousseau's

refuge from his enemies, his friends, and the world. Begun in 1756, it was

finished in September, 1758, was sent to a publisher in Holland, and appeared

in February, 1 761, as Julie, ou ha Nouvelle Helo'ise, Lettres de deux amants,

l66 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

recueillies et publiees par J. -J. Rousseau. The letter form for a novel was al-

ready old, but was probably determined in this instance by the example of

Richardson's Clarissa.

The story is improbable but unique. Julie is the daughter, seventeen or so

years old, of Baron d'£tange. Her mother invites the young and handsome

Saint-Preux to be her tutor. The new Abelard falls in love with the new

Heloi'se, as any real mother would have foreseen. Soon he is sending his

pupil love letters that set the tune for a century of romantic fiction:

I tremble as often as our hands meet, and I know not how it happens, but

they meet constantly. I start as soon as I feel the touch of your finger; I am

seized with a fever, or rather delirium, in these sports; my senses gradually

forsake me; and when I am thus beside myself what can I say, what can I do,

where hide myself, how be answerable for my behavior? 56

He proposes to go away, but lets the word do for the deed.

Adieu, then, too charming Julie. . . . Tomorrow I shall be gone forever.

But be assured that my violent spotless passion for you will end only with my

life; that my heart, full of so divine an object, will never debase itself by ad-

mitting a second impression; that it will divide all its future homage between

you and virtue; and that no other flame shall ever profane the altar at which

Julie was adored. 57

Julie may smile at this adoration, but she is too womanly to send so de-

lightful an acolyte from the altar. She bids him postpone his flight. In any

case the electric contact of male with female has set her in similar agitation;

soon she confesses that she too has felt the mysterious sting: "The very first

day we met I imbibed the poison which now infects my senses and my rea-

son; I felt it instantly, and thine eyes, thy sentiments, thy discourse, thy

guilty pen, daily increase its malignity." 58 Nevertheless he is not to ask for

anything more sinful than a kiss. "Thou shalt be virtuous, or despised; I

will be respectable, or be myself again; it is the only hope I have left that is

preferable to the hope of death." Saint-Preux agrees to unite delirium with

virtue, but believes that this will require supernatural aid:

Celestial powers! . . . Inspire me with a soul that can bear felicity! Divine

love! spirit of my existence, oh, support me, for I am ready to sink down

under the weight of ecstasy! . . . Oh, how shall I withstand the rapid torrent

of bliss which overflows my heart?— and how dispel the apprehensions of a

timorously loving girl [une craintive amante]} 59

—and so on for 657 pages. At page 91 she kisses him. Words fail to tell "what

became of me a moment after, when I felt— my hands shook— a gentle tremor

—thy balmy lips— my Julie's lips— pressed to mine, and myself within her

arms! Quicker than lightning a sudden fire darted from my frame." 60 By

Letter xxix he has seduced her, or she him. He meanders through reams of

rapture, but she thinks all is lost. "One unguarded moment has betrayed me

to endless misery. I am fallen into the abyss of infamy, from which there is

no return." 61

Julie's mother, having learned of her deflowering, dies of grief. The Baron

vows to kill Saint-Preux, who thereupon begins a circumnavigation of the

globe. In remorse and in obedience to her father, Julie marries Wolmar, a

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC l6j

Russian of high birth and considerable years. Clandestinely she continues to

correspond with Saint-Preux, and to feel for him a sentiment stronger than

her dutiful attachment to her husband. She is surprised to find that Wolmar,

though an atheist, is a good man, faithful to her, solicitous for her comfort,

just and generous to all. In one of her letters to Saint-Preux she assures him

that man and wife can find content in a manage de convenance. But she

never again knows full happiness. Her premarital deviation weighs on her

memory. Finally she confesses to her husband that moment of sin. He has

known of it, and resolved never to mention it; he tells her it was no sin at

all; and to confirm her absolution he invites Saint-Preux to come and stay

with them as tutor of their children. Saint-Preux comes, and we are assured

that the three live together in harmony till death does them part. The in-

credible husband absents himself for several days. Julie and Saint-Preux go

boating on the Lake of Geneva; they cross to Savoy, and he shows her the

rocks upon which, in his banishment, he wrote her name; he weeps, she holds

his trembling hand, but they return sinless to her home in Clarens, in the

Pays de Vaud. 62

They wonder how Wolmar can be so good without religious belief. Saint-

Preux, who, like Julie, is a pious Protestant, explains the anomaly:

Having resided in Roman Catholic countries, he [Wolmar] has never been

led to a better opinion of Christianity by what he found professed there. Their

religion, he saw, tended only to the interest of their priests; it consisted entirely

of ridiculous grimaces and a jargon of words without meaning. He perceived

that men of sense and probity were unanimously of his opinion, and that they

did not scruple to say so; nay, that the clergy themselves, under the rose, ridi-

culed in private what they inculcated and taught in public; hence he has often

assured us that, after taking much time and pains in the search, he has never

met with above three priests who believed in God. 63

Rousseau adds, in a footnote: "God forbid that I should approve these hard

and rash assertions!" Despite them, Wolmar regularly goes to Protestant

services with Julie, out of respect for her and his neighbors. Julie and Saint-

Preux see in him "the strangest absurdity"— a man "thinking like an infidel

and acting like a Christian." 64

He did not deserve the final blow. Julie, dying of a fever contracted while

saving her son from drowning, entrusts to Wolmar an unsealed letter to

Saint-Preux, which declares to Saint-Preux that he has always been her only

love. We can understand the permanence of that first impression, but why

reward her husband's long fidelity and trust with so cruel a deathbed rejec-

tion? It is hardly consistent with the nobility with which the author has in-

vested Julie's character.

Nevertheless she is one of the great portraits in modern fiction. Though

it was probably suggested by Richardson's Clarissa, it was inspired by Rous-

seau's own recollections: the two girls whose horses he had led across the

stream at Annecy; the memories he treasured of Mme. de Warens in his first

years under her protection; and then Mme. d'Houdetot, who had made him

feel the overflow of love by damming his desire. Of course Julie is none of

these women, and perhaps no woman that Rousseau had ever met, but only

l68 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

the composite ideal of his dreams. The picture is spoiled by Rousseau's in-

sistence upon making nearly all his characters talk like Rousseau; Julie, as

motherhood deepens her, becomes a sage who discourses lengthily on every-

thing from domestic economy to mystic union with God. "We will examine

into the validity of this argument," she says; but what lovable woman ever

descended to such bathos?

Saint-Preux, of course, is especially Rousseau, sensitive to all the charms of

women, longing to kneel at their idealized feet, and to pour out the eloquent

phrases of devotion and passion that he has rehearsed in his loneliness. Rous-

seau describes him as "always perpetrating some madness, and always making

a start at being wise." 65 Saint-Preux is an unbelievable prig compared with

the frankly villainous Lovelace of Richardson. He too must mouth Rousseau:

he describes Paris as a maelstrom of evils— great wealth, great poverty, in-

competent government, bad air, bad music, trivial conversation, vain philos-

ophy, and the almost total collapse of religion, morality, and marriage; he

repeats the first Discourse on the natural goodness of man and the corrupting

and degrading influences of civilization; and he compliments Julie and

Wolmar on preferring the quiet and wholesome life of the countryside at

Clarens.

Wolmar is the most original character in Rousseau's gallery. Who was his

model? Perhaps d'Holbach, the "amiable atheist," the philosopher baron, the

virtuous materialist, the devoted husband of one wife and then of her sister.

And perhaps Saint-Lambert, who had shocked Rousseau by preaching

atheism but had forgiven him for making love to his mistress. Rousseau

candidly avows his use of living prototypes and personal memories:

Full of that which had befallen me, and still affected by so many violent

emotions, my heart added the sentiment of its sufferings to the ideas with which

meditation had inspired me. . . . Without perceiving it I described the situa-

tion I was then in, gave portraits of Grimm, Mme. d'Epinay, Mme. d'Houdetot,

Saint-Lambert, and myself. 66

Through these character portraits Rousseau expounded nearly all facets

of his philosophy. He gave an ideal picture of a happy marriage, of an

agricultural estate managed with efficiency, justice, and humanity, and of

children brought up to be exemplary mixtures of freedom and obedience,

restraint and intelligence. He anticipated the arguments of his Bmile: that

education should be first of the body to health, then of the character to a

Stoic discipline, and only then of the intellect to reason. "The only means of

rendering children docile," says Julie, "is not to reason with them, but to

convince them that reason is above their age"; 67 there should be no appeal to

reason, no intellectual education at all, before puberty. And the story went

out of its way to discuss religion. Julie's faith becomes the instrument of her

redemption; the religious ceremony that sanctified her marriage brought her

a sense of purification and dedication. But it is a strongly Protestant faith that

pervades the book. Saint-Preux ridicules what seems to him the hypocrisy of

the Catholic clergy in Paris, Wolmar denounces sacerdotal celibacy as a

cover for adultery, and Rousseau in his own person adds: "To impose celi-

bacy upon a group so numerous as the Roman clergy is not so much to forbid

CHAP.Vl) ROUSSEAU ROMANTIC 169

them to have women of their own, as to order them to satisfy themselves

with the women of other men." 68 In passing Rousseau declares in favor of

religious toleration, extending it even to atheists: "No true believer will be

either intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate, and if the law pro-

nounced the penalty of death against atheists, I would begin by burning, as

such, whoever should come to inform against another." 69

The novel had an epochal influence in arousing Europe to the beauties

and sublimities of nature. In Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert the fever of

philosophy and urban life had not encouraged sensitivity to the majesty of

mountains and the kaleidoscope of the sky. Rousseau had the advantage of

being born amid the most impressive scenery in Europe. He had walked

from Geneva into Savoy, and across the Alps to Turin, and from Turin into

France; he had savored the sights and sounds and fragrances of the country-

side; he had felt every sunrise as the triumph of divinity over evil and doubt.

He imagined a mystic accord between his moods and the changing temper of

the earth and the air; his ecstasy of love embraced every tree and flower, every

blade of grass. He climbed the Alps to midway of their height, and found a

purity of air that seemed to cleanse and clear his thoughts. He described

these experiences with such feeling and vividness that mountain climbing,

especially in Switzerland, became one of Europe's major sports.

Never before in modern literature had feeling, passion, and romantic love

received so detailed and eloquent an exposition and defense. Reacting against

the adoration of reason from Boileau to Voltaire, Rousseau proclaimed the

primacy of feeling and its right to be heard in the interpretation of life and

the evaluation of creeds. With La Nouvelle Heloise the Romantic movement

raised its challenge to the classic age. Of course there had been romantic

moments even in the classic heyday: Honore d'Urfe had played with bu-

colic love in UAstree (1610-27); Mile, de Scudery had stretched amours to

reams in Artamene, ou Le Grand Cyrus (1649-53); Mme. de La Fayette

had married love and death in La Princesse de Cleves (1678); Racine had

brought the same theme into Phedre (1677)— the very apex of the classic

age. We recall how Rousseau had inherited old romances from his mother,

and had read them with his father. As for the Alps, Albrecht von Haller

had already sung their majesty (1729), and James Thomson had celebrated

the beauty and terror of the seasons (1726-30). Jean-Jacques must have

read Prevost's Manon Lescaut ( 1 7 3 1 ) , and (since he could read English with

difficulty) he must have been familiar with Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48)

in Prevost's translation. From that two-thousand-page (still incomplete) se-

duction he took the letter form of narrative as congenial to psychological

analysis; and he gave Julie a cousin confidante in Claire as Richardson had

given Clarissa Miss Howe. Rousseau noted with resentment that Diderot

published an ecstatic Bloge de Richardson (1761) soon after Julie, dimming

Julie's glory.

Julie is quite equal to Clarissa in originality and faults, far superior to it in

style. Both are rich in improbabilities and heavy with sermons. But France,

which excels the world in style, had never known the French language to

take on such color, ardor, smoothness, and rhythm. Rousseau did not merely

170 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VI

preach feeling, he had it; everything he touched was infused with sensitivity

and sentiment, and though we may smile at his raptures we find ourselves

warmed by his fire. We may resent, and hurry over, the untimely disquisi-

tions, but we read on; and every now and then a scene intensely felt renews

the life of the tale. Voltaire thought in ideas and wrote with epigrams; Rous-

seau saw in pictures and composed with sensations. His phrases and periods

were not artless; he confessed that he turned them over in bed while the

passion of the artist frightened sleep. 70 "I must read Rousseau," said Kant,

"until his beauty of expression no longer distracts me, and only then can I

examine him with reason." 71

Julie succeeded with everyone except the philosophes. Grimm called it

"a feeble imitation" of Clarissa, and predicted that it would soon be for-

gotten. 72 "No more about Jean-Jacques' romance, if you please," growled

Voltaire (January 21, 1761); "I have read it, to my sorrow, and it would be

to his if I had time to say what I think of this silly book." 73 A month later he

said it in Lettres sur La Nouvelle Heloise, published under a pseudonym. He

pointed out grammatical errors, and gave no sign of appreciating Rousseau's

descriptions of nature— though he would later imitate Jean-Jacques by climb-

ing a hill to worship the rising sun. Paris recognized Voltaire's hand, and

judged the patriarch to be bitten with jealousy.

Barring these pricks, Rousseau was delighted with the reception of his

first full-length work. "In all literary history," thought Michelet, "there had

never been so great a success." 74 Edition followed edition, but printings fell

far behind demand. Lines formed at the stores to buy the book; eager readers

paid twelve sous per hour to borrow it; those who had it during the day

rented it to others for the night. 75 Rousseau told happily how one lady, all

dressed to go to a ball at the Opera, ordered her carriage, took up Julie

meanwhile, and became so interested that she read on till four in the morn-

ing while maid and horses waited. 76 He ascribed his triumph to the pleasure

women took in reading of love; but there were also women who were tired

of being mistresses, and longed to be wives and to have fathers for their

children. Hundreds of letters reached Rousseau at Montmorency, thanking

him for his book; so many women tendered him their love that his imagina-

tion concluded: "There was not one woman in high life with whom I

might not have succeeded had I undertaken to do it." 77

It was something new that a man should so completely reveal himself as

Rousseau had done through Saint-Preux and Julie; and there is nothing so

interesting as a human soul, even partly or unconsciously bared to view.

Here, said Mme. de Stael, "all the veils of the heart have been rent." 78 Now

began the reign of subjective literature, a long succession, lasting to our own

days, of self -revelations, of hearts broken in print, of "beautiful souls" pub-

licly bathing in tragedy. To be emotional, to express emotion and sentiment,

became a fashion not only in France but in England and Germany. The

classic mode of restraint, order, reason, and form began to fade away; the

reign of the philosophes neared its end. After 1760 the eighteenth century

belonged to Rousseau. 79

CHAPTER VII

Rousseau Philosopher

I. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

TWO months before the publication of La Nouvelle Heloise, Rousseau

wrote to M. Lenieps (December 1 1, 1760):

I have quit the profession of author for good. There remains an old sin to be

expiated in print, after which the public will never hear from me again. I know

of no happier lot than that of being unknown save only to one's friends.

. . . Henceforth copying [music] will be my only occupation. 1

And again on June 25, 1761:

Until the age of forty I was wise; at forty I took up the pen; and I put it

down before I am fifty, cursing, every day of my life, the day when my foolish

pride made me take it up, and when I saw my happiness, my repose, my health,

all go up in smoke without hope of recapturing them again. 2

Was this a pose? Not quite. It is true that in 1762 he published both Du

Contrat social and Bmile; but these had been completed by 1761; they were

the "old sin to be expiated in print." And it is true that he later wrote replies

to the Archbishop of Paris, to the Geneva Consistory, and to the requests from

Corsica and Poland to propose constitutions for them; but these composi-

tions were pieces (('occasion, induced by unforeseen events. The Confes-

sions, the Dialogues, and the Reveries (Tun promeneur solitaire were pub-

lished after his death. Essentially he kept to his novel vow. It is no wonder

that in 1761 he felt exhausted and finished, for in the space of five years he

had composed three major works, each of which was an event in the history

of ideas.

Far back in 1743, when he was secretary to the French ambassador in

Venice, his observation of the Venetian government in contrast with the

Genevan and the French had led him to plan a substantial treatise on political

institutions. The two Discourses were sparks from that fire, but they were

hasty attempts to get attention by exaggeration, and neither of them did

justice to his developing thought. Meanwhile he studied Plato, Grotius,

Locke, and Pufendorf . The magnum opus that he dreamed of was never

completed. Rousseau did not have the ordered mind, patient will, and quiet

temper needed for such an enterprise. It would have required him to reason

as well as feel, to conceal passion rather than reveal it; and such self-denial

was beyond his reach. His renunciation of authorship was his admission of

defeat. But he gave the world in 1762 a brilliant fragment of his plan in the

125 pages published at Amsterdam as Du Contrat social, ou Principes du

droit politique.

Everyone knows the bold cry that opened the first chapter: "Uhomme est

171

172 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VII

ne libre y et partout il est dans les fers" (Man is born free, and he is everywhere

in chains). Rousseau began with conscious hyperbole, for he knew that logic

has a powerful virtus dormitiva; he judged rightly in striking so shrill a note,

for that line became the watchword of a century. As in the Discourses, he

assumed a primitive "state of nature" in which there were no laws; he

charged existing states with having destroyed that freedom; and he proposed,

in their place, "to find a form of association which will defend and protect,

with the whole common force, the person and goods of each associate, and

in which each, while uniting himself to all, may still obey himself alone, and

remain as free as before. . . . This is the fundamental problem of which

The Social Contract provides the solution." 3

There is a social contract, says Rousseau, not as a pledge of the ruled to

obey the ruler (as in Hobbes's Leviathan), but as an agreement of indi-

viduals to subordinate their judgment, rights, and powers to the needs and

judgment of their community as a whole. Each person implicitly enters into

such a contract by accepting the protection of the communal laws. The

sovereign power in any state lies not in any ruler— individual or corporate—

but in the general will of the community; and that sovereignty, though it

may be delegated in part and for a time, can never be surrendered.

But what is this volonte generate? Is it the will of all the citizens, or only

of the majority?— and who are to be considered citizens? It is not the will of

all (volonte de tous) , for it may contradict many an individual will. Nor is

it always the will of the majority living [or voting] at some particular mo-

ment; it is the will of the community as having a life and reality additional

to the lives and wills of the individual members. [Rousseau, like a medieval

"realist," ascribes to the collectivity, or general idea, a reality additional to

that of its particular constituents. The general will, or "public spirit," should

be the voice not only of the citizens now living, but of those dead or yet to

be born; hence its character is given to it not only by present wills but by

the past history and future aims of the community. It is like some old family

that thinks of itself as one through generations, honors its ancestors, and pro-

tects its progeny. So a father, out of obligation to grandchildren yet un-

born, may overrule the desires of his living children, and a statesman may

feel himself bound to think in terms not of one election but of many gen-

erations.] * Nevertheless "the vote of the majority always binds all the rest." 4

Who may vote? Every citizen. 5 Who is a citizen? Apparently not all male

adults. Rousseau is especially obscure on this point, but he praises d'Alem-

bert for distinguishing "the four orders of men . . . who dwell in our town

[Geneva], of which only two compose the public; no other French writer

... has understood the real meaning of the word citizen. m

Ideally, says Rousseau, law should be the expression of the general will.

Man is by nature predominantly good, but he has instincts that must be con-

trolled to make society possible. There is no idealization of a "state of nature"

in The Social Contract. For a moment Rousseau talks like Locke or Montes-

quieu, even like Voltaire:

* The material in brackets is tentative interpretation, and is not explicitly in Rousseau.

CHAP. VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER 173

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very re-

markable change in man, by substituting law for instinct in his conduct, and

giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. . . . Although, in

this [civil] state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he had from

nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and

developed, his ideas so extended, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not

the abuses of his new condition often degrade him below that which he left,

he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him

from it forever, and instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him

an intelligent being and a man. 7

So Rousseau (who once talked like a not quite philosophical anarchist) is

now all for the sanctity of law, if the law expresses the general will. If, as

often happens, an individual does not agree with that will as expressed in

law, the state may justly force him to submit. 8 This is not a violation of free-

dom, it is a preservation of it, even for the refractory individual; for in a

civil state it is only through law that the individual can enjoy freedom from

assault, robbery, persecution, calumny, and a hundred other ills. Hence, in

compelling the individual to obey the law, society in effect "forces him to be

free." 9 This is especially so in republics, for "obedience to a law which we

prescribe to ourselves is liberty." 10

Government is an executive organ to which the general will provisionally

delegates some of its powers. The state should be thought of not as only

the government, but as the government, the citizens, and the general will or

communal soul. Any state is a republic if it is governed by laws and not by

autocratic decrees; in this sense even a monarchy can be a republic. But if

the monarchy is absolute— if the king makes as well as executes the laws-

then there is no res publica, or commonwealth, there is only a tyrant ruling

slaves. Hence Rousseau refused to join those philosophes who praised the

"enlightened despotism" of Frederick II or Catherine II as means of advanc-

ing civilization and reform. He thought that peoples living in arctic or tropi-

cal climates might need absolute rule to preserve life and order; 11 but in

temperate zones a mixture of aristocracy and democracy is desirable. Heredi-

tary aristocracy is "the worst of all governments"; "elective aristocracy" is

the best; 12 i.e., the best government is one in which the laws are made and

administered by a minority of men periodically chosen for their intellectual

and moral superiority.

Democracy, as direct rule by all the people, seemed to Rousseau im-

possible:

If we take the term in the strict sense, there never has been a real democracy,

and there never will be. It is against the natural order for the many to govern

and the few to be governed. It is unimaginable that the people should remain

continually assembled to devote their time to public affairs, and it is clear that

they cannot set up commissions for that purpose without changing the form of

administration. . . .

Besides, how many conditions difficult to unite are presupposed by such a

government? First, a very small state, where the people can be readily assem-

bled, and where each citizen can with ease know all the rest; secondly, great

simplicity of manners, to prevent business from multiplying and raising thorny

174 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VII

problems; next, a large measure of equality in rank and fortune, without which

equality of rights and authority cannot long subsist; and lastly, little or no

luxury, for luxury corrupts at once the rich and the poor— the rich by posses-

sion and the poor by covetousness. . . . This is why a famous writer [Mon-

tesquieu] has made virtue the fundamental principle of republics, for all these

conditions could not exist without virtue. ... If there were a people of gods,

their government would be democratic, but so perfect a government is not for

men.

13

These passages invite misinterpretation. Rousseau uses the term democracy

in a sense rarely ascribed to it in politics or history, as a government in which

all laws are made by the whole people meeting in national assemblies. Actu-

ally the "elective aristocracy" that he preferred is what we should call repre-

sentative democracy— government by officials popularly chosen for their

supposedly superior fitness. However, Rousseau rejects representative de-

mocracy on the ground that the representatives will soon legislate for their

own interest rather than for the public good. "The people of England re-

gards itself as free, but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the elec-

tion of members of Parliament; as soon as they are chosen, slavery overtakes

the people, and it ceases to count." 14 Representatives should be elected to

administrative and judicial offices, but not to legislate; all laws should be

made by the people in general assembly, and that assembly should have the

power to recall elected officials. 15 Hence the ideal state should be small

enough to allow all the citizens to assemble frequently. "The larger the state,

the less the liberty." 16

Was Rousseau a socialist? The second Discourse derived almost all the

evils of civilization from the establishment of private property; yet even

that essay judged the institution to be too deeply rooted in the social struc-

ture to permit its removal without a chaotic and desolating revolution. The

Social Contract allows for private ownership, but subject to communal con-

trol; the community should retain all basic rights, it may seize private prop-

erty for the common good, and it should fix a maximum of property allow-

able to any one family. 17 It may sanction the bequest of property, but if it

sees wealth tending to a disruptive concentration it may use inheritance taxes

to redistribute wealth and diminish social and economic inequality. "It is

precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that

legislation should always tend to maintain it." 18 One purpose of the social

contract is that "men who may be unequal in strength or intelligence shall

all become equal in social and legal rights." 19 Taxes should fall heavily upon

luxuries. "The social state is advantageous to men only when all have

something and no one has too much." 20 Rousseau did not commit himself to

collectivism, and never thought of a "dictatorship of the proletariat"; he

despised the nascent proletariat of the cities, and agreed with Voltaire in

calling it "canaille"— rabble, scum. 21 His ideal was a prosperous, independent

peasantry and a virtuous middle class composed of families like Wolmar's in

La Nouvelle Heloise. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was to accuse him of enthron-

ing the bourgeoisie. 22

What place should religion have in the state? Some religion, Rousseau felt,

CHAP.VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER 175

was indispensable to morality; "no state has ever been established without a

religious basis." 23

Wise men, if they try to speak their language to the common herd instead

of its own, cannot possibly make themselves understood. . . . For a young

people to be able to prefer sound principles of political theory . . . the effect

would have to become the cause: the social spirit which should be created by

these institutions would have to preside over their very foundation; and men

would have to be before law what they should become by means of law. The

legislator, therefore, being unable to appeal to either force or reason, must

have recourse to an authority of a different order, capable of constraining

without violence. . . . This is what in all ages compelled the fathers of nations

to have recourse to divine intervention, and credit the gods with their own

wisdom, in order that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the state as to

those of nature, . . . might obey freely, and bear with docility the yoke of

the public good. 24

Rousseau would not always hold to this old political view of religion, but

in The Social Contract he made supernatural belief an instrument of the

state, and considered priests to be at best a kind of celestial police. However,

he rejected the Roman Catholic clergy as such agents, for their Church

claimed to be above the state, and was therefore a disruptive force, dividing

the citizen's loyalty. 25 Moreover (he argued), the Christian, if he takes his

theology seriously, focuses his attention upon the afterlife, and puts little

value upon this one; to that extent he is a poor citizen. Such a Christian

makes an indifferent soldier; he may fight for his country, but only under

constant compulsion and supervision; he does not believe in waging war

for the state, because he has only one fatherland— the Church. Christianity

preaches servitude and docile dependence; hence its spirit is so favorable

to tyranny that tyrants welcome its co-operation. "True Christians are made

to be slaves." 26 Here Rousseau agreed with Diderot, anticipated Gibbon, and

was for the moment more violently anti-Catholic than Voltaire.

Nevertheless, he felt, some religion is necessary, some "civil religion"

formulated by the state and made compulsory upon all its population. As

to creed:

The dogmas of the civil religion ought to be few, simple, and precisely

worded, but without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty,

intelligent, and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence; the

life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the

sanctity of the social contract and the laws; these are its positive dogmas. 27

So Rousseau, at least for political purposes, professed the basic beliefs of

Christianity, while rejecting its ethics as too pacifistic and international— just

the reverse of the usual philosophic procedure of retaining the ethics of

Christianity while discarding its theology. He allowed other religions in his

imaginary state, but only on condition that they did not contradict the offi-

cial creed. He would tolerate those religions "that tolerate others," but

"whoever dares to say, 'Outside the Church there is no salvation,' ought to

be driven from the state, unless the state is the Church, and the prince is

176 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VII

the pontiff' ' thereof. 28 No denial of the articles in the religion of the state is

to be permitted.

While the state can compel no one to believe them, it can banish him, not

for impiety, but as an antisocial being, incapable of truly loving the laws and

justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If anyone, after publicly

recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be

punished by death. 29

Next to "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains/' this last is the

most famous sentence in The Social Contract. Taken literally, it would put

to death any person acting as if he had no belief in God, heaven, or hell; ap-

plied to the Paris of that time, it would have almost depopulated the capital.

Rousseau's love of startling and absolute statements probably misled him

into saying more than he meant. Perhaps he recalled the Diet of Augsburg

(1555), at which the signatory princes agreed that each of them should have

the right to banish from his territory any person not accepting the prince's

faith— cuius regio eius religio; and the laws of Geneva, taken literally (as in

the case of Servetus), provided an antecedent for Rousseau's sudden sav-

agery. Ancient Athens had made asebeia— failure to recognize the official

gods— a capital crime, as in exiling Anaxagoras and poisoning Socrates; the

persecution of Christians by Imperial Rome was similarly excused; and on

Rousseau's penology the order for his arrest, in this year 1762, could be

described as an act of Christian charity.

Was The Social Contract a revolutionary book? No and yes. Here and

there, amid Rousseau's demand for a government responsible to the general

will, some moments of caution calmed him, as when he wrote: "None but

the greatest dangers can counterbalance that of changing the public order;

and the sacred power of the laws should never be arrested save when the ex-

istence of the country is at stake." 30 He blamed private property for nearly all

evils, but he called for its maintenance as made necessary by the incorrigible

corruption of mankind. He wondered whether the nature of man would,

after a revolution, reproduce old institutions and servitudes under new

names. "People accustomed to masters will not let mastery cease. . . . Mis-

taking liberty for unchained license, they are delivered by their revolutions

into the hands of seducers who will only aggravate their chains." 31

Nevertheless his was the most revolutionary voice of the time. Though

elsewhere he belittled and distrusted the masses, here his appeal was to the

multitude. He knew that inequality is inevitable, but he condemned it with

force and eloquence. He announced unequivocally that a government per-

sistently contravening the general will might justly be overthrown. While

Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert were curtsying to kings or empresses,

Rousseau raised against existing governments a cry of protest that was

destined to be heard from one end of Europe to the other. While the philo-

sophes, already embedded in the status quo, called only for piecemeal reform

of particular ills, Jean-Jacques attacked the whole economic, social, and po-

litical order, and with such thoroughness that no remedy seemed possible

but revolution. And he announced its coming: "It is impossible that the great

CHAP. VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER 1 77

kingdoms of Europe should last much longer. Each of them has had its

period of splendor, after which it must inevitably decline. The crisis is ap-

proaching: we are on the edge of a revolution." 32 And beyond this he pre-

dicted far-reaching transformations: "The Empire of Russia will aspire to

conquer Europe, and will itself be conquered. The Tatars— its subjects or

neighbors— will become its masters and ours, by a revolution which I con-

sider inevitable." 33

The Social Contract, which in hindsight we perceive to have been the

most revolutionary of Rousseau's works, made far less stir than La Nouvelle

Heloise. France was ready for emotional release and romantic love, but it

was not ready to discuss the overthrow of the monarchy. This book was

the most sustained argument that Rousseau had yet produced, and it was not

as easy to follow as the sparkling vivacities of Voltaire. Impressed by its

later vogue, we are surprised to learn that its popularity and influence be-

gan after, not before, the Revolution. 34 Even so we find d'Alembert writing

to Voltaire in 1762: "It will not do to speak too loudly against Jean-Jacques

or his book, for he is rather a king in the Halles" 35 — i.e., among the burly

workers in the central market of Paris, and, by implication, among the pop-

ulace. This was probably an exaggeration, but we may date from 1762 the

turn of philosophy from attack upon Christianity to criticism of the state.

Few books have ever aroused so much criticism. Voltaire marked his copy

of Du Contrat social with marginal rejoinders; so, on Rousseau's prescription

of death for active unbelief: "All coercion on dogma is abominable." 36

Scholars have reminded us how old was the claim that sovereignty lies in the

people: Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, even Catholic theologians

like Bellarmine, Mariana, and Suarez had put forth that claim as a blow be-

hind the knees of kings. It had appeared in the writings of George Buchanan,

Grotius, Milton, Algernon Sidney, Locke, Pufendorf . . . The Social Con-

tract, like nearly all of Rousseau's political and moral philosophy, is an echo

and reflex of Geneva by a citizen distant enough to idealize it without feeling

its claws. The book was an amalgam of Geneva and Sparta, of Calvin's Insti-

tutes and Plato's Laws.

A hundred critics have pointed out the inconsistency between the individ-

ualism of Rousseau's Discourses and the legalism of The Social Contract.

Long before Rousseau's birth Filmer, in Patriarcha (1642), had disposed of

the notion that man is born free; he is born subject to paternal authority and

to the laws and customs of his group. Rousseau himself, after that initial cry

for freedom, moved further and further from liberty toward order— toward

submission of the individual to the general will. Basically the contradictions

in his works lay between his character and his thought; he was a rebel in-

dividualist by temperament, ailment, and lack of formal discipline; he was a

communalist (never a communist, not even a collectivist) by his tardy per-

ception that no operative society can be composed of mavericks. We must

allow for development: a man's ideas are a function of his experience and

his years; it is natural for a thinking person to be an individualist in youth-

loving liberty and grasping for ideals— and a moderate in maturity, loving

178 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VII

order and reconciled to the possible. Emotionally Rousseau remained always

a child, resenting conventions, prohibitions, laws; but when he reasoned he

came to realize that within the restrictions necessary for social order many

freedoms can remain; and he ended by perceiving that in a community

liberty is not the victim but the product of law— that it is enlarged rather

than lessened by general obedience to restraints collectively self-imposed.

Philosophical anarchists and political totalitarians alike can quote Rousseau

to their purpose, 37 and alike unjustly, for he recognized that order is free-

dom's first law, and the order that he spoke for was to be the expression of

the general will.

Rousseau denied any real contradictions in his philosophy. "All my ideas

are consistent, but I cannot expound them all at once." 38 He admitted that

his book "needs rewriting, but I have neither the strength nor the time

to do it"; 39 when he had the strength, persecution took away his time, and

when persecution ceased, and time was given, strength had been worn away.

In those later years he grew doubtful of his own arguments. "Those who

pride themselves on thoroughly understanding The Social Contract are

cleverer than I am." 40 In practice he quite ignored the principles he had there

laid down; he never thought of applying them when asked to draw up con-

stitutions for Poland or Corsica. Had he continued in the line of change that

he followed after 1762 he would have ended in the arms of the aristocracy

and the Church, perhaps under the knife of the guillotine.

II. tMlLE

1. Education

We can forgive much to an author who could, within fifteen months, send

forth La Nouvelle Helo'ise (February, 1761), The Social Contract (April,

1762), and Smile (May, 1762). All three were published in Amsterdam, but

Smile was published also in Paris, with governmental permission secured at

great risk by the kindly Malesherbes. Marc-Michel Rey, the Amsterdam

publisher, deserves a passing salute. Having made unexpected profits from

Helo'ise y he settled upon Therese a life annuity of three hundred livres; and

foreseeing a greater sale for Smile than for Du Contrat social (which he had

bought for a thousand livres), he paid Jean-Jacques six thousand livres for

the new and longer manuscript.

The book originated partly from discussions with Mme. d'Epinay on the

education of her son, and took its first form as a minor essay written "to

please a good mother who was able to think"— Mme. de Chenonceaux,

daughter of Mme. Dupin. Rousseau thought of it as a sequel to La Nouvelle

Helo'ise: how should Julie's children be brought up? For a moment he

doubted whether a man who had sent all his children to a foundling asylum,

and who had failed as a tutor in the Mably family, was fit to talk on parent-

age and education; but as usual he found it pleasant to give his imagination

CHAP. VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER 1 79

free rein, unhampered by experience. He studied Montaigne's Essays, Fene-

lo^'s Telemaque, Rollin's Traite des etudes, and Locke's Some Thoughts on

Editimtion. His own first Discourse was a challenge to him, for it had pic-

tured man as good by nature but spoiled by civilization, including education.

Could that natural goodness be preserved and developed by right education?

Helvetius had just given an affirmative answer in De r Esprit (1758), but he

had presented an argument rather than a plan.

Rousseau began by rejecting existing methods as teaching, usually by

rote, worn-out and corrupt ideas; as trying to make the child an obedient

automaton in a decaying society; as preventing the child from thinking and

judging for himself; as deforming him into a mediocrity and brandishing

platitudes and classic tags. Such schooling suppressed all natural impulses, and

made education a torture which every child longed to avoid. But education

should be a happy process of natural unfolding, of learning from nature and

experience, of freely developing one's capacities into full and zestful living.

It should be the "art of training men": 41 the conscious guidance of the grow-

ing body to health, of the character to morality, of the mind to intelligence,

of the feelings to self-control, sociability, and happiness.

Rousseau would have wanted a system of public instruction by the state,

but as public instruction was then directed by the Church, he prescribed a

private instruction by an unmarried tutor who would be paid to devote

many years of his life to his pupil. The tutor should withdraw the child as

much as possible from its parents and relatives, lest it be infected with the

accumulated vices of civilization. Rousseau humanized his treatise by imagin-

ing himself entrusted with almost full authority over the rearing of a very

malleable youth called fimile. It is quite incredible, but Rousseau managed to

make these 450 pages the most interesting book ever written on education.

When Kant picked up Bmile he became so absorbed that he forgot to take his

daily walk. 42

If nature is to be the tutor's guide, he will give the child as much freedom

as safety will allow. He will begin by persuading the nurse to free the babe

from swaddling clothes, for these impede its growth and the proper develop-

ment of its limbs. Next, he will have the mother suckle her child instead of

turning it over to a wet nurse; for the nurse may injure the child by harsh-

ness or neglect, or may earn from it, by conscientious care, the love that

should naturally be directed to the mother as the first source and bond of

family unity and moral order. Here Rousseau wrote lines that had an ad-

mirable effect upon the young mothers of the rising generation:

Would you restore all men to their primal duties?— begin with the mother;

the results will surprise you. Every evil follows in the train of this first sin.

. . . The mother whose children are out of sight wins scanty esteem; there is

no home life, the ties of nature are not strengthened by those of habit; fathers,

mothers, brothers, and sisters cease to exist. They are almost strangers; how

should they love one another? Each thinks of himself.

But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, there will be a reform

in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there will be no lack of

citizens for the state; this first step will by itself restore mutual affection. The

l8o ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VII

charms of home are the best antidote of vice. The noisy play of children,

which we thought so trying, becomes a delight; mother and father . . . grow

dearer to each other; the marriage tie is strengthened. . . . Thus the cure of

this one evil would work a widespread reformation; nature would regain her

rights. When women become good mothers men will become good husbands

and fathers. 43

These famous paragraphs made breast feeding by mothers part of the change

in manners that began in the final decade of Louis XV's reign. Buffon had

issued a similar appeal a decade before, but it had not reached the women of

France. Now the fairest breasts in Paris made their debut as organs of ma-

ternity as well as bewitchments of sex.

Rousseau divided the educational career of his pupil into three periods:

twelve years of childhood, eight of youth, and an indeterminate age of

preparation for marriage and parentage, for economic and social life. In the

first period education is to be almost entirely physical and moral; books and

book learning, even religion, must await the development of the mind; till he

is twelve £mile will not know a word of history, and will hardly have heard

any mention of God. 44 Education of the body must come first. So £mile is

brought up in the country, as the only place where life can be healthy and

natural.

Men are not made to be crowded together in anthills, but scattered over the

earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the more corrupt they

become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities. . . . Man's

breath is fatal to his fellows. . . . Man is devoured by our towns. In a few

generations the race dies out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and is

always renewed from the country. Send your children out to renew themselves;

send them to regain in the open field the strength lost in the foul air of our

crowded cities. 45

Encourage the boy to love nature and the outdoors, to develop habits of

simplicity, to live on natural foods. Is there any food more delectable than

that which has been grown in one's own garden? A vegetarian diet is the

most wholesome, and leads to the least ailments. 46

The indifference of children toward meat is one proof that the taste for meat

is unnatural. Their preference is for vegetable foods, milk, pastry, fruit, etc.

Beware of changing this natural taste and making your children flesh-eaters.

Do this, if not for their health, then for the sake of their character. How can

we explain away the fact that great meat-eaters are usually fiercer and more

cruel than other men? 47

After proper food, good habits. £mile is to be taught to rise early. "We

saw the sun rise in midsummer, we shall see it rise at Christmas; . . . we are

no lie-abeds, we enjoy the cold." 48 £mile washes often, and as he grows

stronger he reduces the warmth of the water, till "at last he bathes winter

and summer in cold, even in ice water. To avoid risk, this change is slow,

gradual, imperceptible." 49 He rarely uses any headgear, and he goes barefoot

all the year round except when leaving his house and garden. "Children

should be accustomed to cold rather than heat; great cold never does them

any harm if they are exposed to it soon enough." 50 Encourage the child's

CHAP.VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER l8l

natural liking for activity. "Don't make him sit still when he wants to run

about, nor run when he wants to be quiet. . . . Let him run, jump, and

shout to his heart's content." 51 Keep doctors away from him as long as you

can. 52 Let him learn by action rather than by books or even by teaching; let

him do things himself; just give him materials and tools. The clever teacher

will arrange problems and tasks, and will let his pupil learn by hitting a

thumb and stubbing a toe; he will guard him from serious injury but not from

educative pains.

Nature is the best guide, and should be followed this side of such injury:

Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature

are always right. There is no original sin in the human heart. . . . Never pun-

ish your pupil, for he does not know what it means to do wrong. Never make

him say, "Forgive me." . . . Wholly unmoral in his actions, he can do nothing

morally wrong, and he deserves neither punishment nor reproof. . . . First

leave the germ of his character free to show itself; do not constrain him in any-

thing; so you will better see him as he really is. 53

However, he will need moral education; without it he will be dangerous

and miserable. But don't preach. If you want your pupil to learn justice and

kindness, be yourself just and kind, and he will imitate you. "Example!

Example! Without it you will never succeed in teaching children any-

thing." 54 Here too you can find a natural basis. Both goodness and wicked-

ness (from the viewpoint of society) are innate in man; education must

encourage the good and discourage the bad. Self-love is universal, but it can

be modified until it sends a man into mortal peril to preserve his family, his

country, or his honor. There are social instincts that preserve the family and

the group as well as egoistic instincts that preserve the individual. 55 Sympathy

(pitie) may be derived from self-love (as when we love the parents who

nourish and protect us), but it can flower into many forms of social behavior

and mutual aid. Hence some kind of conscience seems universal and innate.

Cast your eyes over every nation of the world, peruse every volume of its

history; amid all these strange and cruel forms of worship, in this amazing

variety of manners and customs, you will everywhere find the same [basic]

ideas of good and evil. . . . There is, at the bottom of our hearts, an inborn

principle of justice and virtue by which, despite our maxims, we judge our own

actions, or those of others, to be good or evil; and it is this principle that we

call conscience. 56

Whereupon Rousseau breaks out into an apostrophe which we shall find

almost literally echoed in Kant:

Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure

guide of a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free, infallible,

judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence

of man's nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee I find nothing

in myself to raise me above the beasts— nothing but the sad privilege of wander-

ing from one error to another by the help of an unbridled intellect and reason

which knows no principle. 57

So intellectual education must come only after the formation of moral

character. Rousseau laughs at Locke's advice to reason with children:

1 82 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VII

Those children who have been constantly reasoned with strike me as excep-

tionally silly. Of all human faculties reason ... is the last and choicest growth

—and you would use this for the child's early training? To make a man reason-

able is the coping stone of a good education, and yet you profess to train a

child through his reason. You begin at the wrong end. 58

No; we must, rather, retard mental education. "Keep the child's mind [in-

tellect] idle as long as you can." 59 If he has opinions before he is twelve you

may be sure they will be absurd. And don't bother him yet with science;

this is an endless chase, in which everything that we discover merely adds to

our ignorance and our foolish pride. 60 Let your pupil learn by experience

the life and workings of nature; let him enjoy the stars without pretending

to trace their history.

At the age of twelve intellectual education may begin, and £mile may read

a few books. He may make a transition from nature to literature by reading

Robinson Crusoe, for that is the story of a man who, on his island, went

through the various stages through which men passed from savagery to

civilization. But by the age of twenty £mile will not have read many books.

He will quite ignore the salons and the philosophes. He will not bother with

the arts, for the only true beauty is in nature. 61 He will never be "a musician,

an actor, or an author." 62 Rather, he will have acquired sufficient skill in some

trade to earn his living with his hands if that should ever be necessary. (Many

a tradeless emigre, thirty years later, would regret having laughed, as Vol-

taire did, at Rousseau's u gentilhomme menuisier"— gentleman carpenter. 63 ) In

any case £mile (though he is heir to a modest fortune) must serve society

either manually or mentally. "The man who eats in idleness what he has not

earned is a thief." 64

2. Religion

Finally, when £mile is about eighteen, we may talk to him about God.

I am aware that many of my readers will be surprised to find me tracing the

course of my scholar through his early years without speaking to him of reli-

gion. At fifteen he will not even know that he has a soul; at eighteen he may

not yet be ready to learn about it. ... If I had to depict the most heartbreak-

ing stupidity I would paint a pedant teaching children the catechism; if I

wanted to drive a child crazy I would set him to explain what he learned in

his catechism. . . . No doubt there is not a moment to be lost if we must de-

serve eternal salvation; but if the repetition of certain words suffices to obtain

it, I do not see why we should not people heaven with starlings and magpies as

well as with children. 65

Despite this proclamation, which infuriated the Archbishop of Paris, Rous-

seau now aimed his sharpest shafts at the philosophes. Picture Voltaire or

Diderot reading this:

I consulted the philosophes. ... I found them all alike proud, assertive, dog-

matic; professing— even in their so-called skepticism— to know everything; prov-

ing nothing, scoffing at one another. This last trait . . . struck me as the only

point in which they were right. Braggarts in attack, they are weaklings in de-

CHAP. VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER 1 83

fense. Weigh their arguments, they are all destructive; count their voices, each

speaks for himself alone. . . . There is not one of them who, if he chanced

to discover the difference between falsehood and truth, would not prefer his

own lie to the truth which another had discovered. Where is the philosophe

who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory? 66

While he continued to condemn intolerance, Rousseau, reversing Bayle,

denounced atheism as more dangerous than fanaticism. He offered to his

readers a "profession of faith" by which he hoped to turn the tide from the

atheism of d'Holbach, Helvetius, and Diderot back to belief in God, free

will, and immortality. He remembered the two abbes— Gaime and Gatier—

whom he had met in his youth; he welded them into an imaginary vicar in

Savoy; and he put into the mouth of this village cure the feelings and argu-

ments that justified (in Rousseau's view) a return to religion.

The vicaire Savoyard is pictured as the priest of a small parish in the Italian

Alps. He privately admits to some skepticism: he doubts the divine inspira-

tion of the Prophets, the miracles of the Apostles and the saints, and the au-

thenticity of the Gospels; 67 and, like Hume, he asks, "Who will venture to

tell me how many eyewitnesses are required to make a miracle credible?" 68

He rejects petitional prayer; our prayers should be hymns to the glory of

God, and expressions of submission to His will. 69 Many items in the Catholic

creed seem to him to be superstition or mythology. 70 Nevertheless he feels

that he can best serve his people by saying nothing of his doubts, and prac-

ticing kindness and charity to all (believers and unbelievers alike), and per-

forming faithfully all the ritual of the Roman Church. Virtue is necessary to

happiness; belief in God, free will, heaven, and hell is necessary to virtue;

religions, despite their crimes, have made men and women more virtuous, at

least less cruel and villainous, than they might otherwise have been. When

these religions preach doctrines that seem unreasonable, or weary us with

ceremony, we should silence our doubts for the sake of the group.

Even from the standpoint of philosophy religion is essentially right. The

Vicar begins like Descartes: "I exist, and I have senses through which I re-

ceive impressions; this is the first truth that strikes me, and I am forced to

accept it." 71 He makes short work of Berkeley: "The cause of my sensations

is outside of me, for they affect me whether I have any reason for them or

not; they are produced and destroyed independently of me. . . . Thus other

entities exist besides myself." A third step answers Hume and anticipates

Kant: "I find that I have the power of comparing my sensations, so I am

endowed with an active force" for dealing with experience. 72 This mind

cannot be interpreted as a form of matter; there is no sign of a material or

mechanical process in the act of thought. How an immaterial mind can act

upon a material body is beyond our understanding; but it is a fact immedi-

ately perceived, and not to be denied for the sake of some abstract reasoning.

Philosophers must learn to recognize that something may be true even if they

cannot understand it— and especially when it is of all truths the one most

immediately perceived.

The next step (the Vicar admits) is mere reasoning. I do not perceive

184 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VII

God, but I reason that just as in my voluntary actions there is a mind as the

perceived cause of motion, so there is probably a cosmic mind behind the

motions of the universe. God is unknowable, but I feel that He is there and

everywhere. I see design in a thousand instances, from the structure of my

eyes to the movements of the stars; I should no more think of attributing to

chance (however often multiplied [a la Diderot] ) the adjustment of means

to ends in living organisms and the system of the world, than I would ascribe

to chance the delectable assemblage of letters in printing the Aeneid. 73

If there is an intelligent deity behind the marvels of the universe, it is in-

credible that He will allow justice to be permanently defeated. If only to

avoid the desolating belief in the victory of evil, I must believe in a good

God assuring the triumph of good. Therefore I must believe in an afterlife,

in a heaven of reward for virtue; and though I am revolted by the idea of

hell, and would rather believe that the wicked suffer hell in their own hearts,

yet I will accept even that awful doctrine if it is necessary for controlling the

evil impulses of mankind. In that case I would implore God not to make the

pains of hell everlasting. 74 Hence the doctrine of purgatory, as a place of

abbreviable punishment for all but the most persistent and unrepentant sin-

ners, is more humane than the division of all the dead between the forever

blessed and the eternally damned. Granted that we cannot prove the exist-

ence of heaven, how cruel it is to take from the people this hope that solaces

them in their grief and sustains them in their defeats! 75 Without belief in God

and an afterlife morality is imperiled and life is meaningless, for in an atheistic

philosophy life is a mechanical accident passing through a thousand sufferings

to an agonizing and eternal death.

Consequently we must accept religion as, all in all, a vital boon to man-

kind. Nor need we make much account of the different sects into which

Christianity has been torn; they are all good if they improve conduct and

nourish hope. It is ridiculous and indecent to suppose that those who have

other creeds, gods, and sacred scriptures than our own will be "damned." "If

there were but one religion on earth, and all beyond its pale were condemned

to eternal punishment, ... the God of that religion would be the most un-

just and cruel of tyrants." 76 So £mile will not be taught any particular form

of Christianity, "but we will give him the means to choose for himself ac-

cording to the right use of his reason." 77 The best way is to continue in the

religion that we inherited from our parents or our community. And to Rous-

seau himself his imaginary Vicar's counsel is: "Return to your own country,

go back to the religion of your fathers, follow it in sincerity of heart, and

never forsake it; it is very simple and very holy; in no other religion is the

morality purer, or the doctrine more satisfying to reason." 78

Rousseau, in 1754, had anticipated this counsel— had returned to Geneva

and its creed; however, he had not kept his promise to come and dwell there

after settling his affairs in France. In the Letters from the Mountain which

he wrote ten years later he repudiated, as we shall see, most of the faith of his

fathers. In his final decade we shall find him advising religion to others, but

giving hardly any sign of religious belief or practice in his daily life. Protes-

CHAP.VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER 1 85

tants and Catholics, Calvinists and Jesuits, joined in attacking him and his

vicarious "Profession of Faith" as essentially un-Christian. 79 The education

he proposed for £mile shocked Christian readers as in effect irreligious, for

they suspected that an average youth brought up to no religion would not

adopt one later except for social convenience. Despite his formal acceptance

of Calvinism Rousseau rejected the doctrine of original sin and the redemp-

tive role of the death of Christ. He refused to accept the Old Testament as

the word of God, and thought the New Testament "full of incredible things,

things repugnant to reason," 80 but he loved the Gospels as the most moving

and inspiring of all books.

Can a book at once so grand and so simple be the work of men? Is it possible

that he whose history is contained therein is no more than a man? . . . What

gentleness and purity in his actions, what a touching grace in his teachings!

How lofty are his sayings, how profoundly wise are his sermons, how just and

discriminating are his replies! What man, what sage can live, suffer, and die

without weakness or ostentation? ... If the life and death of Socrates are

those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God. 81

3. Love and Marriage

When Rousseau ended the fifty pages of the Savoyard Vicar and turned

back to £mile, he faced the problems of sex and marriage.

Should he tell his pupil about sex? Not till he asks about it; then tell him

the truth. 82 But do everything consistent with truth and health to retard

sexual consciousness. In any case don't stimulate it.

When the critical age approaches, present to young people such spectacles

as will restrain rather than excite them sexually. . . . Remove them from

great cities, where the flaunted attire and boldness of the women hasten and

anticipate the promptings of nature, where everything offers to their view

pleasures of which they should know nothing till they are of an age to choose

for themselves. ... If their taste for the arts keeps them in town, guard them

. . . from a dangerous idleness. Choose carefully their company, their occupa-

tions, and their pleasures; show them nothing but modest and pathetic pictures,

. . . and nourish their sensibility without stimulating their senses. 83

Rousseau worried about the dire results of a practice about which he seems

to have had firsthand experience:

Never leave the young man night or day, and at least share his room. Never

let him go to bed till he is sleepy, and let him rise as soon as he awakes. ... If

once he acquires this dangerous habit he is ruined. From that time forward

body and soul will be enervated; he will carry to the grave the effects of . . .

the most fatal habit which a young man can acquire.

And he lays down the law to his pupil:

If you cannot master your passions, dear Emile, I pity you, but I shall not

hesitate for a moment; I will not permit the purposes of nature to be evaded.

If you must be a slave I prefer to surrender you to a tyrant from whom I may

deliver you; whatever happens, I can free you more easily from slavery to

women than from yourself. 84

1 86 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VII

But don't let your associates tease you into a brothel! "Why do these young

men want to persuade you? Because they wish to seduce you. . . . Their

only motive is a secret spite because they see you are better than they are;

they want to drag you down to their level."

It is better to marry. But whom? The tutor describes his ideal of a girl, a

woman, and a wife, and strives to imprint that ideal upon fimile's mind as a

guide and a goal in searching for a mate. Rousseau feared masculine, dom-

ineering, immodest women; he saw the fall of civilization in the rule of in-

creasingly masculine women over increasingly feminine men. "In every land

the men are the sort that the women make them; . . . restore women to

womanhood, and we shall be men again." 85 "The women of Paris usurp the

rights of one sex without wishing to renounce those of the other; conse-

quently they possess none in their fullness." 86 They do these things better

in Protestant countries, where modesty is not a jest among sophists but a

promise of faithful motherhood. 87 A woman's place is in the home, as among

the ancient Greeks; she should accept her husband as a master, but in the

home she should be supreme. 88 In that way the health of the race will be

preserved.

The education of girls should aim to produce such women. They should

be educated at home, by their mothers; they should learn all the arts of the

home, from cooking to embroidery. They should get much religion, and as

early as possible, for this will help them to modesty, virtue, and obedience.

A daughter should accept without question the religion of her mother, but

a wife should accept the religion of her husband. 89 In any case let her avoid

philosophy and scorn to be a salonniere. 90 However, a girl should not be

suppressed into a dull timidity; "she should be lively, merry, and eager; she

should sing and dance to her heart's content, and enjoy all the innocent

pleasures of youth"; let her go to balls and sports, even to theaters— under

proper supervision and in good company. 91 Her mind should be kept active

and alert if she is ever to be a fit wife for a thinking man. And she "may be

allowed a certain amount of coquetry" as part of the complex game by which

she tests her suitors and chooses her mate. 92 The proper study of womankind

is man. 93

When this ideal of girlhood and womanhood has been fixed in fimile's

hopes he may go out and seek a mate. He, not his parents or his tutor, shall

make the choice, but he owes it to them, and to their loving care of him

through many years, to consult them respectfully. You wish to go to the big

city and look at the girls who are on display there? Very well; we shall

go to Paris; you will see for yourself what these exciting demoiselles are. So

Emile lives a while in Paris, mingles in "society." But he finds there no girl

of the kind his sly tutor has described. "Then farewell, Paris, far-famed

Paris, with all your noise and smoke and dirt, where the women have ceased

to believe in honor and the men in virtue. We are in search of love, happi-

ness, innocence; the farther we go from Paris, the better." 94

And so tutor and pupil are back in the country; and lo, in a quiet hamlet

far from the madding crowd they come upon Sophie. Here ("Book V")

CHAP.VIl) ROUSSEAU PHILOSOPHER 1 87

Rousseau's treatise becomes a love story, idealized but delightful, and told

with the skill of an accomplished writer. After those long discourses on edu-

cation, politics, and religion he returns to romance, and while Therese is

busy with housework he resumes his dreams of that gentle woman whom he

has found only in scattered moments of his wanderings; and he names her

from his latest flame.

This new Sophie is the daughter of a once prosperous gentleman who now

lives in contented retirement and simplicity. She is healthy, lovely, modest,

tender— and useful; she helps her mother with quick and quiet competence

in everything; "there is nothing that she cannot do with her needle." 95 £mile

finds reason to come again, and she finds reason for his further visits; gradu-

ally it dawns upon him that Sophie has all the qualities that his tutor pictured

as ideal; what a divine coincidence! After several weeks, he reaches the dizzy

height of kissing the hem of her garment. More weeks, and they are be-

trothed. Rousseau insists that this shall be a formal and solemn ceremony;

every measure must be taken— by ritual and elsewise— to exalt, and fix in

memory, the sanctity of the marriage bond. Then, when £mile trembles on

the edge of bliss, the incredible tutor, throwing liberty and nature to the

winds, makes him leave his betrothed for two years of absence and travel to

test their affection and fidelity. £mile weeps and obeys. When he returns,

still miraculously virginal, he finds Sophie dutifully intact. They marry, and

the tutor instructs them on their duties to each other. He bids Sophie be

obedient to her husband except in bed and board. "You will long rule him by

love if you make your favors scarce and precious; ... let £mile honor his

wife's chastity without complaining of her coldness." 96 The book concludes

with a triune victory:

One morning . . . Emile enters my room and embraces me, saying, "My

master, congratulate your son; he hopes soon to have the honor of being a

father. What a responsibility will be ours, how much we shall need you! Yet

God forbid that I should let you educate the son as well as the father; God

forbid that so sweet and holy a task should be fulfilled by any but myself.

. . . But continue to be the teacher of the young teachers. Advise and control

us; we shall be easily led; as long as I live I shall need you. . . . You have done

your duty; teach me to follow your example, while you enjoy the leisure you

have earned so well. 97

After two centuries of laudation, ridicule, and experiment, the world is

generally agreed that £mile is beautiful, suggestive, and impossible. Education

is a dull subject, for we remember it with pain, we do not care to hear about

it, and we resent any further imposition of it after we have served our time

at school. Yet of this forbidding topic Rousseau made a charming romance.

The simple, direct, personal style captivates us despite some flowery exalta-

tions; we are drawn along and surrender ourselves to the omniscient tutor,

though we should hesitate to surrender our sons. Having extolled maternal

care and family life, Rousseau takes £mile from his parents and brings him

up in antiseptic isolation from the society in which he must later live. Never

having brought up children, he does not know that the average child is by

1 88 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VII

"nature" a jealous, acquisitive, domineering little thief; if we wait till he

learns discipline without commandments, and industry without instruction,

he will graduate into an indolent, shiftless, and anarchic misfit, unwashed,

unkempt, and unbearable. And where shall we find tutors willing to give

twenty years to educating one child? "That kind of care and attention," said

Mme. de Stael (1810), ". . . would compel every man to devote his whole

life to the education of another being, and only grandfathers would at last

be freed to attend to their own careers." 98

Probably Rousseau recognized these and other difficulties after he re-

covered from the ecstasy of composition. At Strasbourg in 1765 an enthusiast

came to him bursting with compliments: "You see, sir, a man who brings up

his sons on the principles which he had the happiness to learn from your

£mile" "So much the worse, sir, for you and your son!" growled Rousseau."

In the fifth of his Letters from the Mountain he explained that he had written

the book not for ordinary parents but for sages: "I made clear in the preface

. . . that my concern was rather to offer the plan of a new system of educa-

tion for the consideration of sages, and not a method for fathers and moth-

ers." 100 Like his master Plato, he took the child away from the contagion of

his parents in the hope that the child, graduating from a saving education,

would then be fit to rear his own children. And like Plato, he "laid up in

heaven a pattern" of a perfect state or method, so that "he who desires may

behold it, and beholding, may govern himself accordingly." 101 He announced

his dream, and trusted that somewhere, to some men and women, it would

carry inspiration and make for betterment. It did.

CHAPTER VIII

Rousseau Outcast

1762-67

I. FLIGHT

IT is remarkable that a book containing, as did femile, so open an attack upon

all but the fundamentals of Christianity should have passed the censor

and been printed in France. But the censor was the tolerant and sympathetic

Malesherbes. Before allowing publication he urged Rousseau to delete some

passages that would almost certainly rouse the Church to active hostility.

Rousseau refused. Other heretics had escaped personal prosecution by using

pseudonyms, but Rousseau bravely stated his authorship on the title pages

of his books.

While the philosophes denounced Bmile as further treason to philosophy,

the prelates of France and the magistrates of Paris and Geneva condemned

it as apostasy from Christianity. The anti-Jansenist Archbishop of Paris pre-

pared for August, 1762, a powerful mandemant against the book. The pro-

Jansenist Parlement of Paris was engaged in expelling the Jesuits; it wished,

nevertheless, to display its zeal for Catholicism; the appearance of Bynile

offered an opportunity to strike a blow for the Church. The Council of State,

at war with the Parlement, and unwilling to lag behind it in zeal for ortho-

doxy, proposed to arrest Rousseau. Getting wind of this, his aristocratic

friends advised him to leave France at once. On June 8 Mme. de Crequi sent

him an excited message: "It is only too true that an order has been issuedfor

your arrest. In the name of God, go away! . . . The burning of your book

will do no harm, but your person cannot stand imprisonment. Consult your

neighbors." 1

The neighbors were the Marechal and Marechale de Luxembourg. They

feared involvement if Rousseau were arrested; 2 they and the Prince de Conti

urged him to flee, and gave him funds and a carriage for the long ride across

France to Switzerland. He yielded reluctantly. He commended Therese to

the Marechale's care, and left Montmorency on June 9. On that day a decree

was issued for Rousseau's arrest, but it was executed with merciful tardiness,

for many in the government were glad to let him escape. On that same day

Maitre Omer Joly de Fleury, brandishing a copy of Emile, told the Parle-

ment of Paris

That this work appears to have been composed solely with the aim of reduc-

ing everything to natural religion, and of developing that criminal system in

the author's plan for the education of his pupil; . . .

189

190 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

That he regards all religions as equally good, and as all having their reasons

in the climate, the government, and the character of the people; . . .

That in consequence he dares seek to destroy the truth of Sacred Scripture

and the prophecies, the certitude of the miracles described in the Holy Books,

the infallibility of revelation, and the authority of the Church. . . . He ridicules

and blasphemes the Christian religion, which alone has God for its author. . . .

The author of this book, who has had the boldness to sign his name to it,

should be arrested as soon as possible. It is important that . . . justice should

make an example, with all severity, both of the author and of those who . . .

have shared in printing or distributing such a work.

Thereupon the Parlement ordered that

the said book shall be torn and burned in the court of the Palace [of Justice],

at the foot of the grand staircase, by the High Executioner; all those who have

copies of the book shall deliver them to the Register, to be destroyed; no pub-

lisher shall print or sell or distribute this book; all sellers or distributors thereof

shall be arrested and punished according to the rigor of the law; . . . and J.-J.

Rousseau shall be apprehended and brought to the Conciergerie prison of the

Palace. 3

On June 1 1 Umile was "torn and burned" as ordered, but by June 1 1

Rousseau had reached Switzerland. "The moment I was in the territory of

Bern I bade the postilion stop; I got out of my carriage, prostrated myself,

kissed the ground, and exclaimed in a transport of joy: 'Heaven, protector of

virtue, be praised; I touch a land of liberty!' " 4

He was not quite sure. He drove on to Yverdon, near the south end of the

Lake of Neuchatel, in the canton of Bern; there he stayed for a month with

his old friend Roguin. Should he seek a home in Geneva? But on June 19

the Council of Twenty-five, ruling Geneva, condemned both tZmile and

The Social Contract as

impious, scandalous, bold, full of blasphemies and calumnies against religion.

Under the appearance of doubts the author has assembled everything that

could tend to sap, shake, and destroy the principal foundations of the revealed

Christian religion. . . . These books are so much the more dangerous and rep-

rehensible as they are written in French [not in esoteric Latin], in the most

seductive style, and appear over the name of "Citizen of Geneva." 5

Accordingly the Council ordered both books to be burned, prohibited their

sale, and decreed arrest for Rousseau should he ever enter the territory of the

republic. The Genevan clergy made no protest against this repudiation of

Geneva's most famous living son; doubtless they feared that any sympathy

shown by them to the author of "The Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith"

would confirm d'Alembert's revelation of their secret Unitarian sentiments.

Jacob Vernes, Rousseau's friend of many years, turned against him and de-

manded a retraction. "If [Rousseau recalled] there was any rumor amongst

the populace, it was unfavorable to me, and I was publicly treated by all the

gossips and pedants like a pupil threatened with a flogging for not having

recited his catechism rightly." 6

Voltaire was touched by the situation of his rival. He had read £mile; his

comments can still be seen on his copy in the Bibliotheque de Geneve. In a

letter of June 15 he had written of the book: "It is a hodgepodge of a silly

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 191

wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the

boldest ever known. . . . He says as many hurtful things against the philos-

ophers as against Jesus Christ, but the philosophers will be more indulgent

than the priests." 7 In any case he admired the "Profession of Faith": "fifty

good pages," he called them, but added: "it is regrettable that they should

have been written by . . . such a knave [coquin]" 8 To Mme. du Deffand

he wrote: "I shall always love the author of the 'Vicaire Savoyard' whatever

he has done, and whatever he may do." 9 When he heard that Jean-Jacques

was homeless he cried out: "Let him come here [to Ferney] ! He must come!

I shall receive him with open arms. He shall be master here more than I. I

shall treat him like my own son." 10 He sent this invitation to seven different

addresses; it must have reached one address, for Rousseau later expressed re-

gret that he had made no reply. 11 In 1763 Voltaire renewed the invitation;

Rousseau declined it, and accused Voltaire of having incited the Council of

Twenty-five to condemn The Social Contract and tLmile. Voltaire denied

this, apparently with truth.

Early in July, 1762, the Senate of Bern notified Rousseau that it could not

tolerate his presence on Bernese soil; he must leave it within fifteen days or

face imprisonment. Meanwhile he received a kindly note from d'Alembert

advising him to seek domicile in the principality of Neuchatel; this was under

the jurisdiction of Frederick the Great, and was governed by Earl Marischal

George Keith, who, said d'Alembert, "would receive and treat you as the

patriarchs of the Old Testament received and treated persecuted virtue." 12

Rousseau hesitated, for he had spoken critically of Frederick as a tyrant in

philosophic disguise. 13 Nevertheless, on July 10, 1762, he accepted the invita-

tion of Roguin's niece, Mme. de La Tour, to occupy a house belonging to her

in Motiers-Travers, fifteen miles southwest of the city of Neuchatel, in what

Boswell was to describe as "a beautiful wild valley surrounded by immense

mountains." 14 About July 1 1 Jean-Jacques appealed to the governor, and,

with characteristic humility and pride, wrote to

The King of Prussia:

I have said a good deal that is bad about you; I shall probably say more

such things; however, chased from France, from Geneva, from the canton of

Bern, I have come to seek an asylum in your states. . . . Sir, I have not merited

grace from you, and I do not ask any; but I have felt that I ought to declare

to your Majesty that I am in your power, and that I have willed to be so.

Your Majesty may dispose of me as you like.

At an uncertain date Frederick, still in the Seven Years' War, wrote to Keith:

We must succor this poor unfortunate. His only offense is to have strange

opinions which he thinks are good ones. I will send a hundred crowns, from

which you will be kind enough to give him as much as he needs. I think he will

accept them in kind more readily than in cash. If we were not at war, if we

were not ruined, I would build him a hermitage with a garden, where he could

live as I believe our first fathers did. ... I think poor Rousseau has missed his

vocation; he was obviously born to be a famous anchorite, a desert father, cele-

brated for his austerities and flagellations. ... I conclude that the morals of

your savage are as pure as his mind is illogical. 15

192 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VIII

The Marischal, whom Rousseau speaks of as a gaunt, aged, absent-minded

saint, sent him provisions, coal, and wood, and proposed to "build me a little

house." Jean-Jacques interpreted this offer as coming from Frederick, and

refused it, but "from that moment I became so sincerely attached to him that

I interested myself as much in his glory as until then I had thought his suc-

cesses unjust." 16 On November 1, as the war was nearing its end, he wrote to

Frederick prescribing the tasks of peace:

Sire:

You are my protector and my benefactor, and I have a heart made for grati-

tude; I want to acquit myself with you if I can.

You want to give me bread; is there none of your subjects who lacks it?

Take away from before my eyes that sword that flashes and wounds me.

. . . The career of kings of your mettle is great, and you are still far from

your time. But time is pressing; there is not a moment left you to lose. . . . Can

you resolve to die without having been the greatest of men?

Could I ever be permitted to see Frederick the Just and Feared cover his

states at last with a happy people whose father he would be, then Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, the enemy of kings, would go to die of joy at the foot of his throne. 17

Frederick made no known answer, but when Keith went to Berlin the King

told him he had received a "scolding" from Rousseau. 18

Apparently assured of a home, Jean- Jacques sent for Therese to join him.

He was not certain that she would come, for he "had long perceived her

affection to grow colder." He ascribed this to his having ceased to have

sexual relations with her, since "a connection with women was prejudicial to

my health." 19 Perhaps now she would prefer Paris to Switzerland. But she

came. They had a tearful reunion, and looked forward at last to some years

of peace.

II. ROUSSEAU AND THE ARCHBISHOP

Their next four years were their unhappiest. The Calvinist clergy of

Neuchatel publicly denounced Rousseau as a heretic, and the magistrates

forbade the sale of Bmile. Perhaps to appease them, or in sincere desire to

follow the precepts of his "Vicar," Rousseau asked the pastor at Motiers

might he join the congregation. (Therese remained Catholic.) He was ac-

cepted, attended worship, and received Communion "with an emotion of

heart, and my eyes suffused with tears of tenderness." 20 He gave a handle to

ridicule by adopting Armenian costume— fur bonnet, caftan, and girdle; the

long robe allowed him to conceal the effects of his urinary obstruction. He

attended church in this garb, and wore it in visiting Lord Keith, who made

no comment upon it except to wish him salaam aleikum. He continued to add

to his income by copying music; now he added needlework, and learned to

make lace. "Like the women, I carried my cushion with me when I made

visits, or sat down to work at my door. . . . This enabled me to pass my

time with my female neighbors without weariness." 21

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 193

Probably about this time (late 1762) his publishers prevailed upon him to

begin writing his Confessions. He had forsworn authorship, but this would

not be authorship so much as a defense of his character and conduct against

a world of enemies, and especially against charges of the philosophes and the

gossip of the salons. Furthermore, he had to answer a great variety of cor-

respondence. Women especially offered him the consoling incense of their

adoration, and not only because of their sympathy with the hunted author of

a famous romance, but because they longed to revert to religion, and saw in

the Savoyard Vicar and his creator no real foe of faith but its brave cham-

pion against a desolating atheism. For such women, and several men, he be-

came a father confessor, a director of souls and consciences. He advised them

to remain in, or return to, the religion of their youth, regardless of all the

difficulties that science and philosophy had suggested; those incredibilities

were not of the essence, and might be silently put aside; what mattered was

trust in God and immortality; with that faith and hope one could rise above

all the unintelligible disasters of nature, all the pains and griefs of life. A

young Catholic in rebellion against his religion asked for sympathy; Rous-

seau, forgetting his own rebellions, told him not to make so much ado about

incidentals: "if I had been born Catholic I would have remained Catholic,

knowing well that your Church puts a very salutary restraint upon the wan-

derings of human reason, which finds neither bottom nor bank when it would

sound the abysses of things." 22 To nearly all these suitors for wisdom he ad-

vised a flight from the city to the country, from artifice and complexity to

a natural simplicity of life, and a modest contentment with marriage and

parenthood.

Women who had been shocked by worldly priests and agnostic abbes fell

in love, if only through correspondence, with this unworldly heretic whom

all the churches denounced. Mme. de Blot, titled and respected, exclaimed to

a company of lords and ladies, "Only the loftiest virtue could keep a woman

of true sensibility from devoting her life to Rousseau, if she were certain he

would love her passionately." 23 Mme. de La Tour mistook some compliments

in his letters for an avowal of love; she responded tenderly, warmly, effu-

sively; she sent him her portrait, protesting that it did not do her justice; she

grew despondent when he replied with the calmness of a man who had never

seen her. 24 Yet other worshipers wished to kiss the ground he walked on;

some raised altars to him in their hearts; some called him the reborn Christ.

At times he took them seriously, and thought of himself as the crucified

founder of a new faith. 25

Amid these exaltations, and as if to confirm the analogy, a high priest of

the Temple aroused the people to condemn him as a dangerous revolutionary.

On August 20, 1762, Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, issued a

mandate to all priests in his diocese to read to their congregations, and to

publish to the world, his twenty-nine-page denunciation of Bmile. He was a

man of rigorous orthodoxy and saintly repute; he had fought against the

Jansenists, the Encyclopedic, and the philosophes; now it seemed to him that

Rousseau, after apparently breaking away from the infidels, had joined them

194 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

in attacking the faith upon which, in the Archbishop's view, rested the whole

social order and moral life of France.

He began by quoting St. Paul's Second Epistle to Timothy: "There will

come perilous days of men enamored of themselves, bold and proud blas-

phemers, impious calumniators swollen with arrogance, lovers of pleasure

rather than God, men corrupt in spirit and perverse in faith." 26 Surely those

times had come!

Unbelief, emboldened by all the passions, presents itself under every form to

adapt itself in some way to all ages, characters, and degrees. Sometimes ... it

borrows a style light, agreeable, and frivolous; hence so many tales, as obscene

as they are impious [Voltaire's romans], amusing the imagination as a means

of seducing the mind and corrupting the heart. Sometimes, affecting profundity

and sublimity in its views, it pretends to go back to the first principles of

knowledge, and to assume divine authority, in order to throw off a yoke which,

they say, dishonors mankind. Sometimes it declaims like a raging woman against

religious zeal, and yet with enthusiasm preaches universal toleration. And some-

times, uniting all these diverse manners of speech, it mixes the serious with

the playful, pure maxims with obscenities, great truths with great errors, the

Faith with blasphemy; in a word, it undertakes to reconcile light with dark-

ness, Jesus Christ with Belial. 27

This, said the Archbishop, was especially the method of Smile, a book full

of the language of philosophy without being truly philosophy; replete with

bits of knowledge which have not enlightened the author and must only con-

fuse his readers; a man given to paradoxes of opinions and conduct, allying

simplicity of manners with pomp of thought, ancient maxims with a madness

of innovation, the obscurity of his retreat with the desire to be known by all

the world. He denounces the sciences, and cultivates them; he praises the

excellence of the Gospel, and destroys its teachings. He has made himself the

Preceptor of the Human Race to deceive it, the Monitor of the Public to

mislead the world, the Oracle of the Century to destroy it. What an

enterprise! 28

The Archbishop was appalled by Rousseau's proposal to make no mention

of God or religion to £mile before the age of twelve, or even eighteen. So,

then, "all nature would in vain have declared the glory of their Creator," and

all moral instruction would forfeit the support of religious faith. But man is

not by nature good, as the author supposed; he is born with the taint of

original sin; he shares in the general corruption of humanity. The wise educa-

tor—best of all, a priest guided by divine grace— will use every just means to

nourish the good impulses in men, and to weed out the evil; therefore he will

feed the child with "the spiritual milk of religion, that it may grow toward

salvation"; only by such education can the child develop into a "sincere

worshiper of the true God, and a faithful subject of the sovereign." 29 So

much sin and crime survive even this assiduous instruction; imagine what

they would be without it. A torrent of wickedness would engulf us. 30

For these reasons, concluded the Archbishop,

after having consulted several persons distinguished for their piety and wisdom,

and having invoked the holy name of God, we condemn the said book as con-

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 195

taining an abominable doctrine subversive of natural law and the foundations

of the Christian religion; as establishing principles contrary to the moral teach-

ing of the Gospels; as tending to disturb the peace of states and lead the revolt

against the authority of the sovereign; as containing a very great number of

propositions false, scandalous, full of hatred against the Church and her minis-

ters. . . . Therefore we expressly forbid each and every person in our diocese

to read or keep the said book, under the penalties of the law. 31

This mandate was printed "with the privilege of the King," and soon

reached Motiers-Travers. Rousseau, always resolving to write no more, de-

cided to reply. Before he put down his pen (November 18, 1762) he had let

his answer run to 128 pages. It was printed at Amsterdam in March, 1763,

as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve, a Christophe de Beaumont,

Archeveque de Paris. It was soon condemned by the Parlement of Paris and

the Council of Geneva. Attacked by both the leading religions of Europe,

Rousseau retaliated by assailing them both; now the shy romantic who had

disowned the philosophies repeated their arguments with reckless audacity.

He opened with a question that all opponents in the unending debate still

ask of each other: "Why must I say anything to you, monseigneur? What

common language can we speak, how can we understand each other?" 32 He

regretted that he had ever written books; he had not done this till he was

thirty-eight, and he had fallen into this error by the accident of noticing that

"miserable question" of the Dijon Academy. The critics of his Discourse

had led him to reply; "dispute led to dispute, . . . and I found myself, so to

speak, becoming an author at an age when one usually abandons authorship";

from that time to this, "repose and friends have disappeared." 33 In all his

career, he claimed, he had been

more ardent than enlightened, . . . but sincere in everything; . . . simple and

good, but sensitive and weak, often doing evil and always loving the good;

. . . adhering rather to my sentiments than to my interests; . . . fearing God

without fearing hell; reasoning on religion, but without libertinage; loving

neither impiety nor fanaticism, but hating the intolerant more than the free-

thinkers; . . . confessing my faults to my friends and my opinions to all the

world. 34

He mourned less the Catholic than the Calvinist condemnation of frnile.

He who had proudly called himself Citoyen de Geneve had fled from France

hoping to breathe in his native city the air of freedom, and to find there a

welcome that would console him for his humiliations. But now "what am I

to say? My heart closes up, my hand trembles, the pen falls from it. I must be

silent; ... I must consume in secret the bitterest of my griefs." 35 Behold

the man who, "in the century so celebrated for philosophy, reason, and hu-

manity," dared to "defend the cause of God"— behold him "branded, pro-

scribed, hunted from country to country, from refuge to refuge, without

regard for his poverty, without pity for his infirmities"; finding asylum at

last under "an illustrious and enlightened prince," and secluding himself in

a little village hidden among the mountains of Switzerland; thinking at last

to find obscurity and peace, but pursued even there by the anathemas of

priests. This Archbishop, "a virtuous man, as noble in soul as in birth,"

196 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

should have reproved the persecutors; instead, he authorized them shame-

lessly, "he who should have pleaded the cause of the oppressed." 36

Rousseau perceived that the Archbishop was particularly offended by the

doctrine that men are born good, or at least not evil; Beaumont realized that

if this were true, if man is not tainted at birth by inheriting the guilt of Adam

and Eve, then the doctrine of atonement by Christ would fall; and this doc-

trine was the very heart of the Christian creed. Rousseau answered that the

doctrine of original sin is nowhere clearly stated in the Bible. He realized that

the Archbishop was shocked by the proposal to defer religious instruction;

he replied that the education of children by nuns and priests had not lessened

sin or crime; those pupils, grown up, had lost their fear of hell, and preferred

a small pleasure at hand to all Paradise in promise; and those priests them-

selves—were they models of virtue in contemporary France? 37 Nevertheless,

"I am a Christian, sincerely Christian, according to the doctrine of the Gos-

pel; not a Christian as a disciple of the priests, but as a disciple of Jesus

Christ." Then, with an eye on Geneva, Rousseau added: "Happy to have

been born in the holiest and most reasonable religion on the earth, I remain

inviolably attached to the faith of my fathers. Like them, I take Scripture

and reason as the sole rules of my belief." 38 He felt the reproach of those who

told him that "though all men of intelligence think as you do, it is not good

that the commonalty [le vulgaire] should think so."

This is what they cry out to me on every side; this perhaps is what you your-

self would tell me if we two were alone in your study. Such are men; they

change their language with their clothes; they speak the truth only in their

dressing gowns; in their public dress they know only how to lie. And not only

are they deceivers and impostors in the face of mankind, but they are not

ashamed to punish, against their own conscience, whoever refuses to be public

cheats and liars like themselves. 39

This difference between what we believe and what we preach is at the heart

of the corruption in modern civilization. There are prejudices which we

should respect, but not if they turn education into a massive deception and

undermine the moral basis of society. 40 And if those prejudices become mur-

derous shall we still be silent about their crimes?

I do not say, nor do I think, that there is no good religion, . . . but I do say

. . . that there is none, among those which have been dominant, that has not

inflicted cruel wounds upon humanity. All sects have tormented others, all

have offered to God the sacrifice of human blood. Whatever may be the source

of these contradictions, they exist; is it a crime to wish to remove them? 41

Toward the end of his reply Rousseau defended his £mile lovingly, and

wondered why no statue had been raised to its author.

Assuming that I have made some mistakes, even that I have always been

wrong, is no indulgence due to a book in which one feels everywhere— even

in its errors, even in the harm that may be in it— a sincere love of the good and

a zeal for the truth? ... A book which breathes only peace, gentleness, pa-

tience, love of order, and obedience to the laws in everything, even in the mat-

ter of religion? A book in which the cause of religion is so well established,

where morals are so respected, . . . where wickedness is painted as folly, and

CHAP. VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 197

virtue as so lovable? . . . Yes, I do not fear to say it: if there were in Europe

a single government truly enlightened, ... it would render public honors to

the author of Emile, it would raise statues to him. I know men too well to

expect such recognition; I did not know them well enough to expect that which

they have done. 42

They have raised statues to him.

III. ROUSSEAU AND THE CALVINISTS

The Letter to Christophe Beaumont pleased only a few freethinkers in

France and a few political rebels in Switzerland. Of twenty-three "refuta-

tions" addressed to the author, nearly all were from Protestants. The Calvin-

ist clergy of Geneva saw in the Letter an attack upon miracles and Biblical

inspiration; to condone such heresies would be to invite again the danger to

which they had been exposed by d'Alembert. Angry at the failure of

Genevan liberals to speak out in his defense, Rousseau (May 12, 1763) sent

to the Grand Council of Geneva a renunciation of his citizenship.

This action won some audible support. On June 1 8 a delegation submitted

to the First Syndic of the republic a "Very Humble and Respectful Repre-

sentation of Citizens and Burghers of Geneva," which, among other griev-

ances, complained that the judgment against Rousseau had been illegal, and

that the confiscation of copies of Bmile from Genevan bookstores had in-

vaded property rights. The Council of Twenty-five rejected the protest, and

in September the public prosecutor, Jean-Robert Tronchin (cousin of Vol-

taire's doctor) issued Lettres ecrites de la campagne, defending the disputed

actions of the Council. The "Representants" appealed to Rousseau to answer

Tronchin. Never willing to let bad enough alone, Rousseau published (De-

cember, 1764) nine Lettres ecrites de la montagne—z retort from his moun-

tain home to the oligarchy of the Genevan plain. Furious against clergy as

well as Council, he attacked Calvinism as well as Catholicism, and burned

nearly all his bridges behind him.

Formally he addressed the letters to the leader of the Representants. He

began by dealing with the harm done to himself through the hasty condem-

nation of his books and his person, without any opportunity for defense. He

admitted the imperfections of his books: "I myself have found a great num-

ber of errors in them; I doubt not that others may see many more, and that

there are still others that neither I nor others have perceived. . . . After

having heard both parties the public will judge; . . . the book will triumph

or fall, and the case is closed." 43 But was the book "pernicious"? Could any-

one read La Nouvelle Heloise and the "Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard"

and really believe that their author intended to destroy religion? True, these

writings sought to destroy superstition as "the most terrible plague of man-

kind, the sorrow of sages and the tool of tyranny"; 44 but did they not affirm

the necessity of religion? The author is accused of not believing in Christ; he

believes in Christ, but in a different way from his accusers:

198 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. VIII

We recognize the authority of Jesus Christ because our intelligence agrees

with his precepts and we find them sublime. . . . We admit revelation as

emanating from the Spirit of God, without our knowing how. . . . Recog-

nizing a divine authority in the Gospel, we believe that Jesus Christ was

clothed with this authority; we recognize a more than human virtue in his

conduct, and a more than human wisdom in his teaching.

The second letter (forgetting The Social Contract) denied the right of a

civic council to judge in matters of religion. A basic principle of the Protes-

tant Reformation, the right of the individual to interpret Scripture for him-

self, had been violated in condemning Emile. 45 "If you prove to me today

that in matters of faith I am obliged to submit to the decisions of someone

else, tomorrow I shall become a Catholic." 46 Rousseau admitted that the Re-

formers in their turn had become persecutors of individual interpretation, 47

but this did not invalidate the principle without which the Protestant revolt

against the papal authority would have been unjust. He accused the Calvinist

clergy ("except my pastor") of taking over the intolerant spirit of Catholi-

cism; if they had been true to the spirit of the Reformation they would have

defended his right to publish his own interpretation of the Bible. He now had

a good word to say for d'Alembert's view of the Genevan clergy:

A philosopher casts a quick glance upon them; he penetrates them, sees that

they are Arians, Socinians; he says so, and thinks to do them honor; but he

does not see that he is endangering their temporal interests— the only matter

that generally determines, here below, the faith of men. 48

In his third letter he took up the charge that he had rejected miracles. If

we define a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature we can never know

if anything is a miracle, for we do not know all the laws of nature. 49 Even

then every day saw a new "miracle" achieved by science, not in contraven-

tion, but through greater knowledge, of nature's laws. "Anciently the Proph-

ets made fire descend from the sky at their word; today children do as much

with a little piece of [burning] glass." Joshua made the sun stop; any almanac

maker can promise the same result by calculating a solar eclipse. 50 And as

Europeans who perform such wonders among barbarians are thought by

these to be gods, so the "miracles" of the past— even those of Jesus— may have

been natural results misinterpreted by the populace as divine interruptions of

natural law. 51 Perhaps Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead, had not

really been dead. — Besides, how can the "miracles" of a teacher prove the

truth of his doctrine when teachers of doctrines generally considered false

have performed "miracles" reported as equally real, as when the magicians

of Egypt rivaled Aaron in turning wands into serpents? 52 Christ warned

against "false Christs" who "shall show great signs as wonders." 53

Rousseau had begun his letters with a view to helping the middle-class

Representants; he made no plea for the further extension of the franchise in

a democratic direction. Indeed, in Letter vi he again committed himself to an

elected "aristocracy" as the best form of government, and he assured the

rulers of Geneva that the ideal which he had sketched in The Social Contract

was essentially one with the Genevan constitution. 54 But in Letter vn he told

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 199

his friends of the protesting bourgeoisie that that constitution acknowledged

the sovereignty of the enfranchised citizens only during the elections to the

General Council and its annual assembly; for the remainder of the year the

citizens were powerless. 55 In all that long interval the small Council of

Twenty-five was the "supreme arbiter of the laws, and thereby of the fate

of all individuals." In effect the citoyens et bourgeois, who appeared sover-

eign in the Conseil General, became, after its adjournment, "the slaves of a

despotic power, delivered defenseless to the mercy of twenty-five despots." 56

This was almost a call to revolution. However, Rousseau deprecated such a

last resort. In his final letter he praised the bourgeoisie as the sanest and most

peace-loving class in the state, caught between an opulent and oppressive

patriciate and a "brutish and stupid populace"; 57 but he advised the Repre-

sentants to keep their patience and trust to justice and time to right their

wrongs.

The Lettres de la montagne offended Rousseau's enemies and displeased

his friends. The Genevan clergy were alarmed by his heresies, and still more

by his claim that they shared them. Now he turned violently against the

Calvinist ministers, called them "canaille, swindlers, stupid courtiers, mad

wolves," and expressed preference for the simple Catholic priests of the

French villages and towns. 58 The Representants made no use of the Letters

in their successful campaign for more political power; they considered Rous-

seau a dangerous and incalculable ally. He resolved to take no further part in

Genevan politics.

IV. ROUSSEAU AND VOLTAIRE

He had wondered, in Letter v, why "M. de Voltaire," whom the Genevan

councilors "so often visit," had not "inspired them with that spirit of toler-

ance which he preaches without cease, and of which he sometimes has need."

And he put into Voltaire's mouth an imaginary speech 59 favoring freedom of

speech for philosophers on the ground that only a negligible few read them.

The imitation of Voltaire's light and graceful manner was excellent. But the

sage of Ferney was represented as avowing his authorship of a recently pub-

lished Sermon des cinquantes {Sermon of the Fifty), whose paternity Vol-

taire had repeatedly denied— for it was heavy with heresies. We do not know

whether Rousseau's revelation of the secret was deliberate and malicious;

Voltaire thought so, and was furious, for it subjected him to the possibility

of renewed expulsion from France just as he was settling into Ferney.

"The miscreant!" he exclaimed when he read the telltale letter. "The mon-

ster! I must have him cudgeled— yes, I will have him cudgeled in his moun-

tains at the knees of his nurse! "

"Pray calm yourself," said a bystander, "for I know that Rousseau means

to pay you a visit, and will very shortly be at Ferney."

"Ah, only let him come!" cried Voltaire, apparently meditating mayhem.

"But how will you receive him?"

200 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

"I will give him supper, put him into my own bed, and say, 'There is a

good supper; this is the best bed in the house; do me the pleasure to accept

one and the other, and to make yourself happy here.' " 60

But Rousseau did not come. Voltaire revenged himself by issuing (Decem-

ber 31, 1764) an anonymous pamphlet, Sentiments des citoyens {Feelings of

the Citizens), which is one of the blackest marks on his character and career.

It must be quoted to be believed.

We take pity on a fool, but when his dementia becomes fury we tie him

up. Tolerance, which is a virtue, then becomes a vice. . . . We pardoned

this man's romances, in which decency and modesty are as damaged as good

sense. . . . When he mixed religion with his fiction, our magistrates were of

necessity obliged to imitate those of Paris . . . and Bern. . . . Today is not

patience exhausted when he publishes a new book wherein he outrages with

fury the Christian religion, the Reformation that he professes, all the ministers

of the Holy Gospel, and all the agencies of the state? . . . He says clearly, in

his own name, "There are no miracles in the Gospel which we can take literally

without abandoning good sense." . . .

Is he a scholar who debates with scholars? No, ... he is a man who still

carries the tragic marks of his debauches, and who . . . drags along with him

from town to town, and from mountain to mountain, the unhappy woman

whose mother he made die, and whose children he exposed at the door of a

hospital, . . . abjuring all the feelings of nature, as he discards those of honor

and religion. . . .

Does he wish to overthrow our constitution by disfiguring it, as he wishes

to overthrow the Christianity that he professes? It suffices to warn him that

the city which he troubles disavows him. ... If he thought that we would

draw the sword [make a revolution] because of [the condemnation of] Emile y

he can put this idea into the class of his absurdities and his follies. But he should

be told that if we punish lightly an impious romance we punish capitally a

vile traitor. 61

This was a disgraceful performance, hardly to be excused by Voltaire's

anger, ailments, and age. (He was now seventy.) No wonder Rousseau never

believed (even today we can hardly believe) that Voltaire wrote it; he

ascribed it instead to the Genevan minister Vernes, who protested in vain

that he was not the author. Rousseau, in one of his finest moments, published

a reply to the Sentiments (January, 1 765) :

I wish to make with simplicity the declaration that seems required of me

by this article. No malady small or great, such as the author speaks of, has

ever soiled my body. The malady that affects me has not the slightest resem-

blance to the one indicated; it was born with me, as those who took care of my

childhood, and who still live, know. It is known to MM. Malouin, Morand,

Thierry, Daran. ... If they find in this [ailment] the least sign of debauchery,

I beg them to confound me and shame me. . . . The wise and world-esteemed

woman who takes care of me in my misfortunes ... is unhappy only be-

cause she shares my misery. Her mother is in fact full of life, and in good

health, despite her old age [she lived to be ninety-three]. I have never exposed,

nor caused to be exposed, any children at the door of a hospital, nor anywhere

else. ... I will add nothing more . . . except to say that, at the hour of

death, I would prefer to have done that of which the author accuses me, than

to have written a piece like this. 62

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 201

Though Rousseau's delivery of his children to a foundling asylum (not

quite precisely their "exposure") had been known to Paris gossip (he had

admitted it to the Marechale de Luxembourg) , Voltaire's pamphlet was the

first public disclosure. Jean-Jacques suspected Mme. d'£pinay of having re-

vealed it on her visit to Geneva. Now he was convinced that she and Grimm

and Diderot were conspiring to blacken his reputation. Grimm at this time

repeatedly attacked Rousseau in the Correspondance litteraire, 63 and in his

letter of January 15, 1765, speaking of the Letters from the Mountain, he

joined Voltaire in accusing Rousseau of treason: "If there be anywhere on

earth such a crime as high treason, it is found surely in attacking the funda-

mental constitution of a state with the arms that M. Rousseau has employed

to overthrow the constitution of his country."

The long quarrel between Voltaire and Rousseau is one of the sorriest

blemishes on the face of the Enlightenment. Their birth and status set them

far apart. Voltaire, son of a prosperous notary, received a good education,

especially in the classics; Rousseau, born to an impoverished and soon to be

broken home, received no formal education, inherited no classical tradition.

Voltaire accepted the literary norms laid down by Boileau— "Love reason, let

all your writings take from reason their splendor and their worth"; 64 to Rous-

seau (as to Faust seducing Marguerite with Rousseau) "feeling is all." 65 Vol-

taire was as sensitive and excitable as Jean-Jacques, but usually he thought it

bad manners to let passion discolor his art; he sensed in Rousseau's appeal

to feeling and instinct an individualistic anarchic irrationalism that would

begin with revolt and end with religion. He repudiated— Rousseau echoed—

Pascal. Voltaire lived like a millionaire, Rousseau copied music to earn his

bread. Voltaire was the sum of all the graces in society; Rousseau was ill at

ease in social gatherings, and too impatient and irritable to keep a friend.

Voltaire was the son of Paris, of its gaiety and luxuries; Rousseau was the

child of Geneva, a somber and Puritan bourgeois resentful of class distinc-

tions that cut him, and of luxuries that he could not enjoy. Voltaire defended

luxury as putting the money of the rich in circulation by giving work to the

poor; Rousseau condemned it as "feeding a hundred poor people in our

towns, and causing a hundred thousand to perish in our villages." 66 Voltaire

thought that the sins of civilization are outweighed by its comforts and arts;

Rousseau was uncomfortable everywhere, and denounced almost everything.

Reformers listened to Voltaire; revolutionists heard Rousseau.

When Horace Walpole remarked that "this world is a comedy to those

who think, a tragedy to those who feel," 67 he unwittingly compressed into a

line the lives of the two most influential minds of the eighteenth century.

V. BOSWELL MEETS ROUSSEAU

We get an exceptionally pleasant picture of Jean-Jacques in Boswell's re-

port of five visits to him in December, 1764. The inescapable idolator had

solemnly sworn (October 21) "neither to talk to an infidel, nor to enjoy a

202 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

woman, before seeing Rousseau." 68 On December 3 he set out from Neucha-

tel for Motiers-Travers. At Brot, halfway, he stopped at an inn, and asked

the landlord's daughter what she knew about his prey. Her reply was dis-

concerting:

"Monsieur Rousseau often comes and stays here several days with his house-

keeper, Mademoiselle Levasseur. He is a very amiable man. He has a fine face.

But he doesn't like to have people come and stare at him as if he were a man

with two heads. Heavens! The curiosity of people is incredible. Many, many

people come to see him, and often he will not receive them. He is ill, and doesn't

wish to be disturbed." 69

Of course Boswell went ahead. At Motiers he put up at the village inn and

prepared a letter to M. Rousseau, in which I informed him that an ancient Scots

gentleman of twenty-four was come hither with the hopes of seeing him. I

assured him that I deserved his regard. . . . Towards the end of my letter I

showed him that I had a heart and soul. . . . The letter is really a masterpiece.

I shall ever preserve it as proof that my soul can be sublime. 70

His letter— in French— was a subtle mixture of deliberate naivete and irre-

sistible adulation:

Your writings, Sir, have melted my heart, have elevated my soul, have fired

my imagination. Believe me, you will be glad to have seen me. . . . O dear

Saint-Preux! Enlightened Mentor! Eloquent and amiable Rousseau! I have a

presentiment that a truly noble friendship will be born today. ... I have

much to tell you. Though I am only a young man, I have experienced a variety

of existence that will amaze you. . . . But I beg you, be alone. ... I know

not if I would not prefer never to see you than to see you for the first time in

company. I await your reply with impatience. 71

Rousseau sent word that he might come if he promised to make his visit

short. Boswell went, "dressed in a coat and waistcoat, scarlet with gold lace,

buckskin breeches, and boots. Above all, I wore a greatcoat of green camlet

lined with foxskin fur." The door was opened by Therese, "a little, lively,

neat French girl." She led him upstairs to Rousseau— "a genteel black [dark-

complexioned] man in the dress of an Armenian. ... I asked him how he

was. 'Very ill, but I have given up doctors.' " Rousseau expressed admiration

for Frederick, scorn for the French— "a contemptible nation," but "you will

find great souls in Spain." Boswell: "And in the mountains of Scotland."

Rousseau spoke of theologians as "gentlemen" who "provide a new explana-

tion of something, leaving it as incomprehensible as before." They discussed

Corsica; Rousseau said he had been asked to draw up laws for it; Boswell

began his lasting enthusiasm for Corsican independence. Presently Rousseau

dismissed him, saying that he wished to go for a walk by himself.

On December 4 Boswell returned to the siege. Rousseau talked with him

for a while, then dismissed him: "You are irksome to me. It's my nature, I

cannot help it." Boswell: "Do not stand on ceremony with me." Rousseau:

"Go away." Therese saw Boswell to the door. She told him, "I have been

twenty-two years with Monsieur Rousseau; I would not give my place to be

queen of France. I try to profit by the good advice he gives me. If he should

die, I shall have to go into a convent." 72

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 203

Boswell was at the door again on December 5. Rousseau sighed, "My dear

sir, I am sorry not to be able to talk with you as I would wish." Boswell

"waived such excuses," and stirred conversation by saying "I had turned

Roman Catholic and intended to hide myself in a convent." Rousseau:

"What folly!" . . . Boswell: "Tell me sincerely, are you a Christian?"

Rousseau "struck his breast and replied, 'Yes, I pique myself on being one.' "

Boswell (who suffered from melancholy): "Tell me, do you suffer from

melancholy?" Rousseau: "I was born placid. I have no natural disposition to

melancholy. My misfortunes have infected me with it." Boswell: "What do

you think of cloisters, penances, and remedies of that sort?" Rousseau:

"Mummeries, all of them." Boswell: "Will you, sir, assume [spiritual] direc-

tion of me?" Rousseau: "I cannot." Boswell: "I shall come back." Rousseau:

"I don't promise to see you. I am in pain. I need a chamber pot every

minute." 73

That afternoon, in the maison du village, Boswell wrote a fourteen-page

"Sketch of My Life," and sent it to Rousseau. It confessed one of his adul-

teries, and asked, "Is it possible for me yet to make myself a man?" He re-

turned to Neuchatel, but was back at Rousseau's door on December 14.

Therese told him her master was "very ill." Boswell persisted; Rousseau

received him. "I found him sitting in great pain." Rousseau: "I am overcome

with ailments, disappointments, and sorrow. I am using a probe [a urethral

dilator]. Everyone thinks it my duty to attend to him. . . . Come back in

the afternoon." Boswell: "For how long?" Rousseau: "A quarter of an hour,

and no longer." Boswell: "Twenty minutes." Rousseau: "Be off with you!"

—but he could not help laughing.

Boswell was back at four, dreaming of Louis XV. "Morals appear to me

an uncertain thing. For instance, I should like to have thirty women. Could

I not satisfy that desire?" "No." "But consider, if I am rich, I can take a

number of girls; I get them with child; propagation is thus increased. I give

them dowries, and I marry them off to good peasants who are very happy to

have them. Thus they become wives at the same age as would have been the

case if they had remained virgins, and I, on my side, have had the benefit of

enjoying a great variety of women." Then, having made no impression with

this royal hypothesis, he asked, "Pray tell me how I can expiate the evil I

have done?" Rousseau made a golden answer: "There is no expiation for evil

except good." 74 Boswell asked Rousseau to invite him to dinner; Rousseau

said, "Tomorrow." Boswell returned to the inn "full of fine spirits."

On December 1 5 he dined with Jean-Jacques and Therese in the kitchen,

which he found "neat and cheerful." Rousseau was in good humor, with no

sign of the mental disturbances that were later to appear. His dog and cat

got along well together and with him. "He put some victuals on a trencher,

and made his dog dance around it. He sang ... a lively air with a sweet

voice and great taste." Boswell talked about religion. "The Anglican Church

is my choice." Rousseau: "Yes, but it is not the Gospel." "You have no liking

for Saint Paul?" "I respect him, but I think he is partly responsible for mud-

dling your head. He would have been an Anglican clergyman."

Mile. Levasseur: "Shall you, sir, see Monsieur de Voltaire?" Boswell:

2 <H ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

"Most certainly." Then to Rousseau: "Monsieur de Voltaire has no liking

for you." Rousseau: "One does not like those whom one has greatly injured.

His talk is most enjoyable; it is even better than his books." Boswell over-

stayed his welcome, but when he left, Rousseau "kissed me several times, and

held me in his arms with elegant cordiality." When Boswell reached the inn

the landlady said, "Sir, I think you have been crying." "This," he adds, "I

retain as a true eulogium of my humanity." 75

VI. A CONSTITUTION FOR CORSICA

Perhaps at Rousseau's prompting, Boswell, after visiting Voltaire at Fer-

ney, went on to Italy, Naples, and Corsica. Corsica, under the leadership of

Pasquale di Paoli, had freed itself from Genoese domination (1755). Rous-

seau, in The Social Contract, had hailed the birth of the new state:

There is still one country in Europe open to the Lawgiver. It is the island of

Corsica. The valor and firmness with which this brave people has shown itself

able to regain and defend its freedom richly deserve the aid of some wise man

who will teach them how to preserve it. I have a premonition that some day

this little island will astonish Europe. 76

Voltaire would have thought Rousseau the last man in Europe to be invited

as a lawgiver; but on August 31, 1764, Jean-Jacques received the following

letter from Matteo Buttafuoco, Corsican envoy to France:

You mentioned Corsica, sir, in your Contrat social, in a way most flattering

to our country. Such praise from a pen so sincere as yours . . . has suggested

the strong wish that you could be the wise legislator who would assist the na-

tion to maintain the liberties obtained at the cost of so much blood. I recognize,

of course, that the task I dare press you to undertake needs a special knowl-

edge of details. ... If you deign to accept this charge, I would supply you

with all the illumination necessary; and M. Paoli . . . will use his best endeav-

ors to send you from Corsica all the information you may want. This distin-

guished chief, and indeed all my compatriots who have the advantage to know

your works, share my desire, and the sentiments of respect that all Europe has

for you, and which are due you on so many grounds. 77

Rousseau's reply (October 15, 1764) accepted the assignment and asked

for material illustrating the character, history, and problems of the Corsican

people. He confessed that the task might be "beyond my power, though not

beyond my zeal"; but "I promise you," he wrote to Buttafuoco on May 26,

1765, "that for the rest of my life I shall have no other interest but my-

self and Corsica; all other matters will be completely banished from my

thoughts." 78 He began work at once on his Projet de constitution pour la

Corse.

With the "social contract" in mind, Rousseau proposed that every citizen

should sign a solemn and irrevocable pledge of himself— "body, goods, will,

and all my powers"— to the Corsican nation. 79 He hailed the braves Corses

who had won their independence, but he warned them that they had many

CHAP. VIII ) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 205

vices— laziness, banditry, feuds, ferocity— mostly derived from hatred of

their foreign masters. The best cure for these vices is a completely agricul-

tural life. The laws should give every inducement to the people to remain on

the land rather than gather in cities. Agriculture makes for individual char-

acter and national health; trade, commerce, finance open the doors to all

sorts of chicanery, and should be discouraged by the state. All travel should

be on foot or beast. Early marriage and large families are to be rewarded;

men unmarried by the age of forty should lose their citizenship. Private prop-

erty should be reduced, state property increased. "I should wish to see the

state the sole owner, the individual taking a share of the common property

only in proportion to his services." 80 If necessary, the population should be

conscripted to till the lands of the state. The government should control all

education, and all public morality. The form of government should model

itself on the Swiss cantons.

In 1768 France bought Corsica from Genoa, sent in an army, deposed

Paoli, and subjected the island to French law. Rousseau abandoned his Pro-

jet, and denounced the French invasion as violating "all justice, all humanity,

all political right, all reason." 81

VII. FUGITIVE

For two years Rousseau lived modestly and quietly at Motiers, reading,

writing, treating his ailment, suffering an attack of sciatica (October, 1764),

and receiving courteously the visitors who passed Therese's scrutiny. One of

these described him gratefully:

You have no idea how charming his society is, what true politeness there is

in his manners, what a depth of serenity and cheerfulness in his talk. Did you

not expect quite a different picture, and figure to yourself an eccentric creature,

always grave and sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression

of great mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes the vivacity of which was

never seen. When you handle any matter in which he has taken an interest,

then his eyes, his lips, his hands— everything about him— speak. You would be

quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting grumbler. Not at all; he laughs

with those who laugh, he chats and jokes with children, he rallies his house-

keeper. 82

But the local ministers had discovered the heresies in Bmile and the Letters

from the Mountain, and it seemed to them a scandal that such a monster

should further contaminate Switzerland with his presence. To appease them

he offered (March 10, 1765) to bind himself, by a formal document, "never

to publish any new work on any topic of religion, never even to deal with it

incidentally in any other new work; . . . and, further, I shall continue to

testify, through my feelings and my conduct, to the great store I set on the

happiness of being united with the church." 83 The Neuchatel Consistory

summoned him to appear and answer charges of heresy; he begged to be

excused: "It would be impossible for me, in spite of all my good will, to

206 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

suffer a long sitting" 84 — which was painfully true. His own pastor turned

against him, and denounced him in public sermons as Antichrist. 85 The at-

tacks of the clergy inflamed their parishioners; some villagers took to stoning

Rousseau when he went out for a walk. About midnight of September 6-7

he and Therese were awakened by stones pelting their walls and breaking

the windows; one large rock came through the glass and fell at his feet. A

neighbor— a village official— summoned some guards to his rescue; the crowd

dispersed; but Rousseau's remaining friends in Motiers advised him to leave

the town.

He had several offers of asylum, "but I was so attached to Switzerland

that I could not resolve to quit it as long as it was possible for me to live

there." 86 He had visited, a year before, the tiny lie de St.-Pierre, in the mid-

dle of the Lake of Bienne; there was but one house on the island— the home

of the caretaker; here, thought Rousseau, was an ideal spot for an unpopular

lover of solitude. It was in the canton of Bern, which had ejected him two

years before, but he received informal assurances that he might move to

the island without fear of arrest. 87

And so, about the middle of September, 1765, after twenty-six months in

Motiers, he and Therese left the home that had become dear to them, and

went to board with the caretaker's family in a place so isolated that "neither

the populace nor the churchmen can trouble it." 88 "I thought I should in

that island be more separated from men . . . and sooner forgotten by man-

kind." 89 To meet his expenses he gave the printer Du Peyrou the right to

publish all his works, "and made him the depositary of all my papers, under

the express condition of making no use of them until after my death, having

it at heart to end my days quietly, without doing anything which would

again bring me back to the recollection of the public." 90 He was offered an

annuity of twelve hundred livres by Marischal Keith; he agreed to take half.

He arranged another annuity for Therese. He settled down with her on the

island, expecting nothing further of life. He was now fifty-three years old.

Thirteen years later— in the final year of his life— he composed one of his

finest books, Reveries (Vun promeneur solitaire. It described with subdued

eloquence his existence on the Island of St. Peter. "A delicious idleness was

the first and principal enjoyment that I wished to taste in all its sweetness." 91

We have seen elsewhere how he admired Linnaeus; now, with one of the

Swedish botanist's books in his hand, he began to list and study the plants on

his little domain. Or on fair days, like Thoreau on Walden Pond,

I threw myself alone into a boat which I rowed out to the middle of the lake

when the water was calm. There, stretching myself out at full length in the

boat, my eyes toward heaven, I let myself go and wander about slowly at the

will of the water, sometimes for several hours, plunged into a thousand delight-

ful reveries. 92

Even on these waters he could not long rest. On October 17, 1765, the Sen-

ate of Bern ordered him to leave the island and the canton within fifteen

days. He was bewildered and overwhelmed. "The measures I had taken to

secure the tacit consent of the government, the tranquillity with which I

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 207

had been left to make my establishment, the visits of several people from

Bern," had led him to believe that he was now safe from molestation and

pursuit. He begged the Senate for some explanation and delay, and sug-

gested a desperate alternative to banishment:

I see but one resource for me, and however frightful it may appear, I will

adopt it not only without repugnance, but with eagerness, if their Excellencies

will be good enough to consent. It is that it should please them for me to pass

the rest of my days in prison in one of their castles, or such other place in their

estates as they may think fit to select. I will live there at my own expense, and

I will give security never to put them to any cost. I submit to be without paper

or pen, or any communication from without. . . . Only let me keep, with a

few books, the liberty to walk occasionally in a garden, and I am content.

Was his mind beginning to break down? He assures us to the contrary:

Do not suppose that an expedient so violent in appearance is the fruit of

despair. My mind is perfectly calm at this moment. I have taken time to de-

liberate, and it is only after profound consideration that I have brought myself

to this decision. Mark, I pray you, that if this seems an extraordinary resolu-

tion, my situation is still more so. The distracted life I have been made to lead

for several years without intermission would be terrible for a man in full health;

judge what it must be for a miserable invalid worn down with weariness and

misfortune, and who has now no wish but to die in peace. 93

The answer from Bern was an order to leave the island, and all Bernese terri-

tory, within twenty-four hours. 94

Where should he go? He had invitations to Potsdam from Frederick, to

Corsica from Paoli, to Lorraine from Saint-Lambert, to Amsterdam from

Rey the publisher, and to England from David Hume. On October 22

Hume, then secretary to the British embassy in Paris, wrote to Rousseau:

Your singular and unheard-of misfortunes, independent of your virtue and

genius, must interest the sentiments of every human creature in your favor; but

I flatter myself that in England you could find an absolute security against all

persecution, not only from the tolerating spirit of our laws, but from the re-

spect which everyone there bears to your character. 95

On October 29 Rousseau left the He de St.-Pierre. He arranged for The-

rese to remain for the time being in Switzerland; he himself moved on to

Strasbourg. There he stayed a full month, hesitating. Finally he decided to

accept Hume's invitation to England. The French government gave him a

passport to come to Paris. There Hume met him for the first time, and soon

became fond of him. All Paris talked about the exile's return. "It is impos-

sible," wrote Hume, "to express or imagine the enthusiasm of this nation in

Rousseau's favor. . . . No person ever so much enjoyed their attention.

. . . Voltaire and everybody else are quite eclipsed." 96

The new friendship was flawed at its birth. It is difficult here to determine

the facts with accuracy, or to report them impartially. On January 1, 1766,

Grimm sent to his clientele the following report:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau made his entry into Paris on the 17th of December.

The following day he promenaded in the Luxembourg Gardens in his Armenian

208 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

costume; as no one had been warned, no one profited by the spectacle. M. le

Prince de Conti has lodged him in the Temple, where the said Armenian holds

his court daily. He also promenades daily at an appointed hour on the boule-

vards near his residence.* . . . Here is a letter that went the rounds of Paris

during his stay here, and which has had a great success. 98

At this point Grimm transcribed a letter purporting to have come to Rous-

seau from Frederick the Great. It had been composed as a hoax on Rousseau

by Horace Walpole. Let Walpole himself tell of it in his letter to H. S. Con-

way, January 12, 1766:

My present fame is owing to a very trifling composition, but which has made

incredible noise. I was one evening at Mme. GeofFrin's joking on Rousseau's

affectations and contradictions, and said some things that diverted them. When

I came home I put them in a letter, and showed it next day to Helvetius and

the Due de Nivernois; who were so pleased with it that, after telling me some

faults in the language, . . . they encouraged me to let it be seen. As you know,

I willingly laugh at mountebanks, political or literary, let their talents be ever

so great; I was not averse. The copies have spread like wildfire, et me void a la

mode [and behold, I am in fashion] . . . Here is the letter [literally translated

from Walpole's French]:

"The King of Prussia to M. Rousseau: My dear Jean-Jacques:

You have renounced Geneva, your fatherland; you have had yourself chased

from Switzerland, a country so much praised in your writings; France has issued

a warrant against you. Come, then, to me; I admire your talents; I am amused by

your dreams, which (be it said in passing) occupy you too much and too long.

You must at last be wise and happy. You have had yourself talked of enough

for peculiarities hardly fitting to a truly great man. Show your enemies that

you can sometimes have common sense; this will annoy them without doing

you harm. My states offer you a peaceful retreat; I wish you well, and would

like to help you if you can find it good. But if you continue to reject my aid,

be assured that I shall tell no one. If you persist in racking your brains to find

new misfortunes, choose such as you may desire; I am king, and can procure

any to suit your wishes; and— what surely will never happen to you among your

enemies— I shall cease to persecute you when you cease to find your glory in

being persecuted.

Your good friend,

Frederick." 99

Walpole had never met Rousseau. His sophisticated intellect and inherited

fortune found no sense in Jean-Jacques' writings. He knew of Rousseau's

faults and follies from the dinners at Mme. GeofFrin's, where he met Diderot

and Grimm. He probably did not realize that Rousseau, sensitive to the

point of neurosis, had been brought near to mental collapse by a succession

of controversies and tribulations. If Walpole knew this, his jeu d* esprit was

disgracefully cruel. We should add, however, that when Hume asked for

his advice in finding a retreat for Rousseau in England, Walpole undertook

to provide the exile with every assistance. 100

Did Hume know of this letter? Apparently he had been present at Mme.

Geoffrin's when it was first concocted; he has been accused of "taking part"

* Cf. Rousseau to his friend de Luze: "I wish I could go and see you, but in order not to

show off my Armenian cap in the streets, I am obliged to ask you to come to me." 97

CHAP.VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 209

in its composition. 101 He wrote to the Marquise de Brabantane on February

16, 1766: "The only pleasantry I permitted myself in connection with the

pretended letter of the King of Prussia was made by me at the dinner table

of Lord Ossory." 102 On January 3, 1766, Hume made a farewell visit to the

diners at Baron d'Holbach's. He told them of his hopes to free "the little

man" from persecution, and to make him happy in England. D'Holbach was

skeptical. "I am sorry," he said, "to dispel the hopes and illusions that flatter

you, but I tell you it will not be long before you are grievously undeceived.

You don't know your man. I tell you plainly, you're warming a viper in your

bosom." 103

The next morning Hume and Rousseau, with Jean-Jacques de Luze and

Rousseau's dog Sultan, left Paris in two post chaises for Calais. Rousseau

paid his own expenses, having refused offers by Hume, Mme. de Boufflers,

and Mme. de Verdelin to supply him with funds. When they reached Dover

(January 10), Rousseau embraced Hume, and thanked him for bringing

him to a land of freedom.

VIII. ROUSSEAU IN ENGLAND

They arrived at London on January 13, 1766. Passers-by remarked Rous-

seau's costume— fur cap, purple robe, and girdle; he explained to Hume that

he had an infirmity which made breeches inconvenient for him. 104 Hume

persuaded his friend Conway to suggest a pension for the distinguished for-

eigner; George HI agreed to one hundred pounds a year, and expressed a

desire to get an informal glimpse of him. Garrick reserved for Rousseau and

Hume a box at the Drury Lane Theatre opposite the royal box, for a night

when the King and Queen were to attend. But when Hume called for Rous-

seau he had great difficulty in persuading him to leave his dog, whose howls

at being locked up tore the exile's heart. At last "I caught Rousseau in my

arms, and . . . partly by force, I engaged him to proceed." 105 After the per-

formance Garrick gave a supper for Rousseau, who complimented him on

his acting: "Sir, you have made me shed tears at your tragedy, and smile at

your comedy, though I scarce understood a word of your language."

Altogether, Hume was thus far pleased with his guest. Soon after reaching

London he wrote to Mme. de Brabantane:

You have asked me my opinion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. After having

watched him in every aspect, ... I declare that I have never known a man

more amiable and virtuous. He is gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested, of

exquisite sensitivity. Seeking faults in him, I find none but extreme impatience,

and a disposition to nurse unjust suspicions against his best friends ... As for

me, I would pass my life in his company without a cloud arising between us.

There is in his manners a remarkable simplicity. In ordinary affairs he is a

veritable child. This makes it easv . . . for those who live with him to govern

him. 106

And again:

2IO ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

He has an excellent warm heart, and in conversation kindles often to a degree

of heat which looks like inspiration. I love him much, and hope to have some

share in his affections. . . . The philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I

could not conduct him to Calais without a quarrel; but 1 think I could live

with him all my life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source

of our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not the case

with any of them. They are also displeased with him because they think he

overabounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable that the philosopher of this

age who has been most persecuted is by far the most devout. 107 . . . He has a

hankering after the Bible, and is indeed little better than a Christian. 108

But there were difficulties. As in Paris, so in London, lords, ladies, authors,

commoners flocked to the house of Mrs. Adams, in Buckingham Street,

where Rousseau had been lodged by Hume. Soon he wearied of these atten-

tions, and begged Hume to find him a home away from London. An offer

came to take care of him in a Welsh monastery; he wished to accept it, but

Hume prevailed upon him to board with a grocer at Chiswick on the

Thames, six miles from London. Thither Rousseau and Sultan moved on

January 28. Now he sent for Therese, and troubled his host and Hume by

insisting that she should be allowed to sit at table with him. Hume com-

plained in a letter to Mme. de Boufflers:

M. de Luze . . . says that she passes for wicked and quarrelsome and tat-

tling, and is thought to be the chief cause of his quitting Neuchatel [Motiers].

He himself owns her to be so dull that she never knows in what year of the

Lord she is, nor in what month of the year, nor in what day of the month or

week; and that she can never learn the different values of the pieces of money

in any country. Yet she governs him as absolutely as a nurse does a child. In her

absence his dog has acquired this ascendancy. His affection for that creature is

beyond all expression or conception. 109

Meanwhile Therese had come to Paris. Boswell met her there, and of-

fered to escort her to England. On February 1 2 Hume wrote to Mme. de

Boufflers: "A letter has come to me by which I learn that Mademoiselle sets

out post in company with a friend of mine, a young gentleman, very good-

humored, very agreeable, and very mad. . . . He has such a rage for litera-

ture that I dread some event fatal to our friend's honor." 110 Boswell claimed

to have justified this premonition. According to pages, now destroyed, 111 in

his diary, he shared the same bed with Therese at an inn on the second night

out from Paris, and several nights thereafter. They reached Dover early on

February 11. The diary proceeds: "Wednesday, 12 February: Yesterday

morning had gone to bed very early, and had done it once; thirteen in all.

Was really affectionate to her. At two [p.m.] set out on the fly." That same

evening he took Therese to Hume in London, and promised her "not [to]

mention affaire till after her death, or that of the philosopher." On the

thirteenth he "delivered her over" to Rousseau. "Quanta oscula. He seemed

so oldish and weak you [Boswell] had no longer your enthusiasm for him." 112

Naturally.

At Chiswick, as at Motiers, Rousseau received more mail than he wished,

and complained of the postage he had to pay. One day, when Hume brought

CHAP. VIII ) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 211

him a "cargo" from London, he refused to take it, and bade him return it to

the post office. Hume warned him that in that case the postal officials would

open the rejected mail and learn his secrets. The patient Scot offered to open

such of Rousseau's correspondence as came to London, and to bring him

only so much as seemed important. Jean-Jacques agreed, but soon suspected

Hume of tampering with his mail.

Invitations to dinner, usually including Mile. Levasseur, came from not-

ables in London; Rousseau refused them on the score of ill health, but prob-

ably because he was loath to reveal Therese to elevated company. He re-

peatedly expressed a wish to retire farther into the country. Hearing of this

from Garrick, Richard Davenport offered him a home at Wootton in Der-

byshire, 150 miles from London. Rousseau accepted gladly. Davenport sent

a coach to transport him and Therese; Rousseau complained that he was

being treated like a beggar, and he added to Hume: "If this be really a

contrivance of Davenport's you are acquainted with it and consenting to it,

and you could not possibly have done me a greater displeasure." An hour

later (according to Hume),

he sat suddenly on my knee, threw his hands about my neck, kissed me with

the greatest warmth, and, bedewing all my face with tears, exclaimed: "Is it

possible you can ever forgive me, dear friend? After all the testimonies of

affection I have received from you, I reward you at last with this folly and ill

behavior. But I have, notwithstanding, a heart worthy of your friendship; I

love you, I esteem you; and not an instance of your kindness is thrown away

upon me." ... I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a plenti-

ful effusion of tears. 113

The next day, March 22, Jean-Jacques and Therese set off for Wootton,

and Hume never saw them again. Soon afterward Hume wrote to Hugh

Blair a perceptive analysis of Rousseau's condition and character:

He was desperately resolved to rush into this solitude, notwithstanding all my

remonstrances; and I foresee that he will be unhappy in that situation, as he has

indeed been always in all situations. He will be entirely without occupation,

without company, and almost without amusements of any kind. He has read

very little in the course of his life, and has now totally renounced all reading;

he has seen very little, and has no manner of curiosity to see or remark; . . .

he has not, indeed, much knowledge. He has only felt, during the whole course

of his life; and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have

seen any example of, but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of

pleasure. He is like a man who were stript not only of his clothes but of his

skin, and turned out in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous

elements, such as perpetually disturb this lower world. 114

Rousseau and Therese arrived at Wootton on March 29. At first he was

well pleased with his new home. He described it in a letter to a friend in

Neuchatel: "A solitary house, . . . not very large but very suitable, built

halfway up the side of a valley"; before it "the loveliest lawn in the universe,"

and a landscape of "meadows, trees, or scattered farms," and, nearby, pleas-

ant walks along a brook. "In the worst weather in the world I go tranquilly

botanizing." 115 The Davenports occupied part of the house on their infre-

212 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

quent stops there, and their servants remained to take care of the philosopher

and his "housekeeper." Rousseau insisted on paying Davenport thirty pounds

a year for rent and service.

His happiness lasted a week. On April 3 a London journal, the St. James

Chronicle, published in French and English the supposed letter of Frederick

the Great to Rousseau, with no indication of the real author. Jean-Jacques

was deeply hurt when he learned of this, and all the more when he found that

the editor, William Strahan, had long been a friend of Hume. Aioreover, the

tone of the British press toward Rousseau had distinctly changed since his

departure from Chiswick. Articles critical of the eccentric philosopher

multiplied; some contained items which he thought only Hume knew and

could have supplied; in any case, he felt, Hume should have written some-

thing in defense of his former guest. He heard that the Scot was living in

London in the same house with Frangois Tronchin, son of Jean-Jacques'

enemy in Geneva; presumably Hume was now plentifully informed of

Rousseau's faults.

On April 24 Rousseau wrote to the St. James Chronicle as follows:

You have offended, sir, against the respect which every private person owes

to a sovereign, by publicly attributing to the King of Prussia a letter full of

extravagance and spite, which consequently you should have known could not

have had this author. You have even ventured to transcribe his signature, as

though you have seen it written by his hand. I inform you, sir, that this letter

was fabricated in Paris; and what grieves and tears my heart especially is that

the impostor who wrote it has accomplices in England. You owe it to the King

of Prussia, to the truth, and also to me, to print this letter, signed by me, in

reparation of an error which no doubt you would reproach yourself for having

committed, did you know of what a wicked design you have been made the

instrument. I offer you my sincere salutation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 116

We can understand now why Rousseau thought there was a "conspiracy"

against him. Who but his old foes, Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm, and other

lanterns of the Enlightenment, could have engineered the sudden change of

tone in the British press from one of welcome and honor to one of ridicule

and belittlement? About this time Voltaire published, anonymously, a

Letter to Dr. J. -J. Pansophe, reproducing the unfavorable references to the

English people in Jean-Jacques' writings— that they were not really free,

they cared too much for money, they were not "naturally good." The most

damaging items in Voltaire's pamphlet were reprinted in a London periodical,

Lloyd's Evening News. 117

On May 9 Rousseau wrote to Conway asking that the pension offered him

be withheld for the time being. Hume urged him to accept it; Rousseau re-

plied that he could not accept any benefit obtained through Hume's media-

tion. Hume demanded an explanation. Brooding in his isolation, Rousseau

seems now to have passed into a frenzy of suspicion and resentment. On

July 10 he sent Hume a letter of eighteen folio pages, too long for total

quotation, but so pivotal to a famous quarrel that some central passages must

be borne in mind:

CHAP. VIIl) ROUSSEAU OUTCAST 2 1 3

I am ill, sir, and little disposed for writing; but as you ask for an explanation,

it must be given you. . . .

I live outside the world, and I remain ignorant of much that goes on in it. . . .

I only know what I feel. . . .

You ask me, confidently, who is your accuser? Your accuser, sir, is the one

man in the whole world whom ... I would believe: it is yourself. . . . Nam-

ing David Hume as a third person, I will make you the judge of what I ought

to think of him.

Rousseau acknowledged at length Hume's benefactions, but added:

As for the real good done me, these services are more apparent than weighty.

... I was not so absolutely unknown that, had I arrived alone, I should have

gone without help or counsel. ... If Mr. Davenport has been good enough to

give me this habitation, it was not to oblige Mr. Hume, whom he did not

know. . . . All the good that has befallen me here would have befallen me in

much the same way without him [Hume]. But the evil that has befallen me

would not have happened. For why should I have any enemies in England? And

how and why does it happen that these enemies are precisely Mr. Hume's

friends? . . .

I heard also that the son of the mountebank Tronchin, my most mortal en-

emy, was not only the friend but the protege of Mr. Hume, and that they

lodged together. . . .

All these facts together made an impression upon me which rendered me

anxious. ... At the same time the letters I wrote did not reach their destina-

tion; those I received had been opened; and all these had passed through Mr.

Hume's hands. . . .

But what became of me when 1 saw in the public press the pretended letter

from the King of Prussia? ... A ray of light revealed to me the secret cause

of the astonishingly sudden change toward me in the disposition of the British

public; and I saw in Paris the center of the plot which was being executed in

London. . . . When this pretended letter was published in London Mr. Hume,

who certainly knew that it was fictitious, said not one word, wrote to me

nothing. . . .

There remains only one word for me to say to you. If you are guilty, do not

write to me; it would be useless; be assured you would not deceive me. But if

you are innocent deign to justify yourself. ... If you are not— farewell for-

ever. 118

Hume replied briefly (July 22, 1766), not meeting the charges, for he

had come to the conclusion that Rousseau was verging upon insanity. "If I

may venture to give my advice/' he wrote to Davenport, "it is that you

would continue the charitable work you have begun, till he be shut up alto-

gether in Bedlam." 119 Hearing that Rousseau had denounced him in letters to

Paris (e.g., to the Comtesse de Boufflers, April 9, 1766), he sent to Mme. de

Boufflers a copy of Jean-Jacques' long letter. She replied to Hume:

Rousseau's letter is atrocious; it is to the last degree extravagant and inex-

cusable. . . . But do not believe him capable of any falsehood or artifice; nor

imagine that he is either an impostor or a scoundrel. His anger has no just

cause, but it is sincere; of that I feel no doubt.

Here is what I imagine to be the cause of it. I have heard it said, and he has

perhaps been told, that one of the best phrases in Mr. Walpole's letter was by

you, and that you had said in jest, speaking in the name of the King of Prussia,

"If you wish for persecutions, I am a king, and can procure them for you of

any sort you like," and that Mr. Walpole . . . had said you were its author. If

214 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. VIII

this be true, and Rousseau knows of it, do you wonder that, sensitive, hot-

headed, melancholy, and proud, ... he has become enraged? 120

On July 26 Walpole wrote to Hume taking full blame— not expressing

any repentance— for the false letter, and condemning Rousseau's "ungrateful

and wicked heart"; 121 but he did not deny that Hume had had a hand in the

letter. Hume wrote to d'Holbach, "You are quite right; Rousseau is a mon-

ster," and withdrew the kindly words he had formerly used of Rousseau's

character. 122 When he learned from Davenport that Jean-Jacques was writ-

ing Confessions he assumed that Rousseau would air his side of the affair.

Adam Smith, Turgot, and Marischal Keith advised Hume to bear the attack

in silence, but the philosophes of Paris, led by d'Alembert, urged him to pub-

lish his own account of a cause already celebre in two capitals. So he issued

(October, 1766) an Expose succinct de la contestation qui s>est elevee entre

M. Hume et M. Rousseau, which had been put into French by d'Alembert

and Suard; a month later it appeared in English. Grimm gave its essence wide

circulation in his subscription letter of October 15, so that the quarrel re-

sounded in Geneva, Amsterdam, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. A dozen pam-

phlets redoubled the bruit. Walpole printed his version of the dispute; Bos-

well attacked Walpole; Mme. de La Tour's Precis sur M. Rousseau called

Hume a traitor; Voltaire sent him additional material on Rousseau's faults

and crimes, on his frequentation of "places of ill fame," and on his seditious

activities in Switzerland. 123 George III "followed the battle with intense

curiosity." 124 Hume sent the pertinent documents to the British Museum. 125

Amid all this furor Rousseau maintained a somber silence. But he resolved

now to return to France at whatever risk and cost. The damp climate of

England, the reserve of the English character, depressed him; the solitude

he had sought was greater than he could bear. Having made no attempt to

learn English, he found it difficult to get along with the servants. He could

converse only with Therese— who daily pleaded with him to take her to

France. To further her plans she assured him that the servants were planning

to poison him. On April 30, 1767, he wrote to his absent landlord,

Davenport:

Tomorrow, sir, I leave your house. ... I am not unaware of the ambushes

which are laid for me, nor of my inability to protect myself; but, sir, I have

lived; it remains for me only to finish bravely a career passed with honor. . . .

Farewell, sir. I shall always regret the dwelling which 1 leave now; but I shall

regret even more having had in you so agreeable a host, and yet not having

been able to make of him a friend. 126

On May 1 he and Therese fled in haste and fear. They left their baggage

behind, and money to pay for thirteen months' lodging. Unfamiliar with

English geography, they took various circuitous conveyances, traveled part

of the way on foot, and for ten days were lost to the world. The newspapers

advertised their disappearance. On May 1 1 they turned up at Spalding in

Lincolnshire. Thence they found their way to Dover, and there, on May 22,

they embarked for Calais, after sixteen months in England. Hume wrote to

Turgot and other friends, 127 asking them to help the outcast who, still tech-

nically under warrant of arrest, now returned desolate to France.

BOOK III

THE CATHOLIC SOUTH

1715-89

CHAPTER IX

Italia Felix

17*5-59

I. THE LANDSCAPE

DIVIDED into a dozen jealous states, Italy could not unite for its own

defense; the Italians were so busy relishing life that they allowed

immature aliens to kill one another for the bitter fruit of politics and the

tainted spoils of war. So the golden peninsula became the battleground of

Bourbon Spain and France against Hapsburg Austria. A succession of wars

of succession ended in 1 748 with Spain again holding the kingdom of Naples

and the duchy of Parma; the popes kept control of the Papal States; Savoy,

Venice, and San Marino remained free; Genoa and Modena were French

protectorates; Austria retained the Milanese and Tuscany. Meanwhile the

sun shone, the fields, vineyards, and orchards gave food and drink, the

women were beautiful and passionate, and arias filled the air. Foreigners

came as tourists and students to enjoy the climate, the scenery, the theaters,

the music, the art, and the society of men and women dowered with the

culture of centuries. Half conquered, half despoiled, Italy, at least in the

north, was the happiest country in Europe.

Its population stood at some fourteen millions in 1700, about eighteen

millions in 1800. Less than half the land was arable, but of that half every

square foot was tilled with patient labor and skillful care. Sloping terrain

was terraced to hold the earth, and vines were hung from tree to tree, gar-

landing the orchards. In the south the soil was poor; there the sardonically

smiling sun dried up the rivers, the earth, and man, and feudalism kept its

medieval hold. A bitter proverb said that "Christ had never gotten south of

Eboli"— which was just south of Sorrento. In central Italy the soil was fertile,

and was tilled by sharecroppers under ecclesiastical lords. In the north-

above all in the valley of the Po— the soil was enriched with irrigation canals;

these required capital outlays and a peasantry disciplined to dredge the beds

and shore the banks; here too the farmers tilled another man's land for a

share in the crops. But in those teeming fields even poverty could be borne

with dignity.

A thousand villages took form on the plains, in the hills, by the sea: dirty

and dusty in the summer, noisy in the morning with talkative labor slowing

its pace to the heat, silent at noon, alive in the evening with gossip, music,

and amorous pursuits. More than money the Italians loved their midday

siesta, when, said Pere Labat, "one saw nothing in the streets but dogs, fools,

and Frenchmen." 1 A hundred towns rich in churches, palaces, beggars, and

217

2l8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

art; half a dozen cities as beautiful as Paris; thousands of artisans still at the

top of their craft. Capitalistic industry was again developing in textiles, es-

pecially in Milan, Turin, Bergamo, and Vicenza; but even in textiles most of

the work was done at domestic looms as. part of family life. A small middle

class (merchants, bankers, manufacturers, lawyers, physicians, function-

aries, journalists, writers, artists, priests) was growing up between the aris-

tocracy (landowners and ecclesiastical hierarchy) and the "populace" (shop-

keepers, artisans, and peasantry), but it had as yet no political power.

Class distinctions, except in Venice and Genoa, were not painfully pro-

nounced. In most Italian cities the nobles entered actively into commerce,

industry, or finance. The fact that any Italian peasant could become a bishop

or a pope infused a democratic element into social life; at the court the

possessor of an awesome pedigree rubbed elbows with a prelate of humble

birth; in the academies and universities intellectual excellence outweighed

the claims of caste; in the Carnival melee men and women, at ease behind

their masks, forgot their social grades as well as their moral codes. Conversa-

tion was as gay as in France, except for a tacit agreement not to disturb a

religion that brought international tribute to Italy, even— especially— from

her conquerors.

There was nothing puritanic about that religion; it had made its peace

with the nature of man and the climate of Italy. It allowed, in the carnivals,

a moratorium on modesty, but it labored to preserve the institutions of mar-

riage and the family against the credulity of women and the imagination of

men. In the literate classes girls were sent to a convent at an early age— as

early as their fifth year— not chiefly for education but for moral surveil-

lance. The eager product was released only when a dowry had been raised

for her, and some suitor, approved by her parents or guardians, was prepared

to offer her marriage. Occasionally, if we may credit Casanova, a concupis-

cent nun could elude the mother superior— or the mother superior could

elude her nuns— and find a way to meet a concupiscent male between dusk

and dawn; but these were rare and perilous escapades. We cannot say as

much for the morals of the monks.

Generally the unmarried male, if he could not seduce a wife, patronized

prostitutes. The Comte de Caylus estimated eight thousand of them at

Naples in 1714 in a population of 150,000. President de Brosses, in Milan,

found that "one cannot take a step in the public squares without encounter-

ing pimps [courtiers de galanterie] who offer you women of whatever color

or nationality you may desire; but you may believe that the effect is not

always as magnificent as the promise." 2 In Rome the prostitutes were ex-

cluded from the churches and public assemblies, and were forbidden to sell

their charms during Advent or Lent, or on Sundays and holydays.

Their greatest cross was the accessibility of married women to illicit devo-

tion. These revenged themselves on their guarded adolescence and unchosen

mates by indulging in liaisons, and by adopting a cavaliere servente. This

custom of cicisbeatura, imported from Spain, allowed a married woman,

with her husband's consent and in his absence, to be attended by a "serving

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 219

gentleman" who accompanied her to dinner, to the theater, to society, but

rarely to bed. Some husbands chose cavalieri serventi for their wives to

keep these from unlawful loves. 3 The wide circulation of Casanova's

Memoirs, and the hasty reports of French travelers .accustomed to French

laxity, led to an exaggerated foreign conception of Italian immorality.

Crimes of violence or passion abounded, but by and large the Italians were

devoted children, jealous husbands, hard-working wives, and fond parents,

living a united family life, and facing the tribulations of marriage and parent-

age with dignity, volubility, and resilient good cheer.

The education of women was not encouraged, for many men considered

literacy dangerous to chastity. A minority of girls received in convents

some instruction in reading, writing, embroidery, the arts of dressing and

pleasing. Yet we hear of well-educated women conducting salons in which

they conversed at ease with writers, artists, and men of affairs. In Palermo

Anna Gentile translated Voltaire into good Italian verse, and published

Lettere filosofiche in which she boldly defended the nonreligious ethics of

Helvetius. At Milan President de Brosses heard Maria Gaetana Agnesi, aged

twenty, lecture in Latin on hydraulics; 4 she learned Greek, Hebrew, French,

and English, and wrote treatises on conic sections and analytical geometry. 5

At the University of Bologna Signora Mazzolini taught anatomy, and Si-

gnora Tambroni taught Greek. 6 At that same university Laura Bassi received

the doctorate in philosophy at the age of twenty-one (1732); she soon ac-

quired such erudition that she was appointed to a professorship; she lectured

on Newton's Opticks, and wrote treatises on physics; meanwhile she gave

her husband twelve children, and educated them herself. 7

The great majority in both sexes remained illiterate without social con-

tumely. If a village lad showed an alert and eager mind the priest would

usually find some way of getting him an education. Various religious "con-

gregations" organized schools in the towns. The Jesuits had a great number

of colleges in Italy— six in Venice, seven in the Milanese, six in Genoa, ten

in Piedmont, twenty-nine in Sicily, and many in the kingdom of Naples and

the Papal States. There were universities at Turin, Genoa, Milan, Pavia,

Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Padua, Rome, Naples, and Palermo. All these were

under control of Catholic ecclesiastics, but there were many laymen on the

faculties. Teachers and students alike were sworn not to teach, read, say, or

do anything contrary to the doctrine of the Roman Church. At Padua, says

Casanova, "the Venetian government paid well-known professors very

highly, and left the students absolute liberty to follow their lessons and lec-

tures or not as they liked." 8

In addition the Italian mind was stimulated by many academies devoted to

literature, science, or art, and usually free from priestly control. Chief of

these in fame was the Arcadian Academy, which was now in genteel decay.

There were public libraries, like the beautiful Biblioteca Ambrosiana at

Milan, or the Biblioteca Magliabechiana (now Nazionale) at Florence; and

many private libraries, like that of the Pisani at Venice, were opened to the

public on stated days of the week. De Brosses reported that the libraries of

220 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

Italy were more frequently and zealously used than those of France. Finally,

there were periodicals of every sort— scholarly, literary, or humorous. The

Giornale dei letter an d' Italia, established in 17 10 by Apostolo Zeno and

Francesco Scipione di Maffei, was one of the most learned and respected

journals in Europe.

All in all, Italy was enjoying a lively intellectual life. Poets abounded, liv-

ing from dedication to dedication; the air was powdered with lyrics still

echoing Petrarch; improvisatori competed in spawning verses on the spur of

the invitation; but there was no great poetry till Alfieri closed the century.

There were theaters at Venice, Vicenza, Genoa, Turin, Milan, Florence,

Padua, Naples, Rome; to these elegant structures the elite and the common-

alty came to converse and ogle as well as to hear the opera or the play.

There were great scholars like Maffei, industrious historians like Muratori;

soon there would be great scientists. It was a slightly artificial culture, cau-

tious under censorship, and too courteous to be brave.

Even so, some fitful breezes of heresy came over the Alps or the sea. For-

eigners—chiefly Jacobite Englishmen— established in Genoa, Florence, Rome,

and Naples, from 1730 onward, Freemason lodges with a tendency to deism.

Popes Clement XII and Benedict XIV condemned them, but they attracted

numerous adherents, especially from the nobility, occasionally from the

clergy. Some books of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Raynal, Mably, Condillac,

Helvetius, d'Holbach, and La Mettrie were imported into Italy. Editions of

the Encyclopedie, in French, were published at Lucca, Leghorn, and Padua.

In a modest degree, in a form available to persons who could read French,

the Enlightenment reached Italy. But the Italian deliberately, and for the

most part contentedly, refrained from philosophy. His bent and skill lay in

the creation or appreciation of art and poetry or music; a tangible or visible

or audible beauty seemed preferable to an elusive truth that was never

guaranteed to please. He let the world argue while he sang.

II. MUSIC

Europe acknowledged the supremacy of Italian music, accepted its instru-

ments and forms, welcomed its virtues, crowned its castrati, and surrendered

to its melodious opera before, despite of, and after Gluck. Gluck, Hasse,

Mozart, and a thousand others went to Italy to study its music, to learn the

secrets of bel canto from Porpora, or to receive Padre Martini's accolade.

In Venice, said Burney, "if two persons are walking together arm in arm,

it seems as though they converse only in song. All the songs there are duets." 9

"In the Piazza di San Marco," reported another Englishman, "a man from

the people— a shoemaker, a blacksmith— strikes up an air; other persons of his

sort, joining him, sing this air in several parts, with an accuracy and taste

which one seldom encounters in the best society of our Northern countries." 10

Lovers under a window plucked at a guitar or mandolin and a maiden's

heart. Street singers carried their strains into coffeehouses and taverns; in the

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 221

gondolas music caressed the evening air; salons, academies, and theaters gave

concerts; churches trembled with organs and choirs; at the opera men melted

and women swooned over some diva's or castrato's aria. At a symphony con-

cert given in Rome under the stars (1758) Morellet heard such exclamations

as "O benedetto! O che gusto! Piacer di morirl—O blessed one! Oh, what

delight! One could die of pleasure!" 11 It was not unusual, at the opera, to hear

sobbing in the audience.

Musical instruments were loved with more than sexual fidelity. Money

was lavished to make them objects of art, precisely fashioned in precious

wood, inlaid with ivory, enamel, or jewelry; diamonds might be seen on

harps or guitars. 12 Stradivari had left in Cremona pupils like Giuseppe An-

tonio Guarneri and Domenico Montagnana, who carried on the secret of

making violins, violas, and violoncellos with souls. The harpsichord (which

the Italians called clavicembalo) remained to the end of the eighteenth cen-

tury the favorite keyboard instrument in Italy, though Bartolommeo Cristo-

fori had invented the pianoforte at Florence about 1709. Virtuosi of the

harpsichord like Domenico Scarlatti, or of the violin like Tartini and Gemi-

niani, had in this age an international reputation. Francesco Geminiani was

the Liszt of the violin, or, as his rival Tartini called him, II Furibondo—

"the madman" of the bow. Coming to England in 17 14, he became so popu-

lar in the British Isles that he stayed there through most of his final eighteen

years.

The rise of such virtuosi encouraged the production of instrumental music;

this was the golden age of Italian compositions for the violin. Now— chiefly

in Italy— overture, suite, sonata, concerto, and symphony took form. All of

them stressed melody and harmony rather than the polyphonic counterpoint

which was culminating and dying with Johann Sebastian Bach. As the suite

grew out of the dance, so the sonata grew out of the suite. It was something

sounded, as the cantata was something sung. In the eighteenth century it

became a sequence of three movements— fast (allegro or presto), slow (an-

dante or adagio), and fast (presto or allegro), with sometimes the inter-

polation of a scherzo ("joke") recalling the merry gigue, or a graceful

minuet recalling the dance. By 1750 the sonata, at least in its first movement,

had developed "sonata form"— the exposition of contrasting themes, their

elaboration through variation, and their recapitulation toward the close.

Through the experiments of G. B. Sammartini and Rinaldo di Capua in

Italy, and of Johann Stamitz in Germany, the symphony evolved by apply-

ing sonata form to what had formerly been an operatic overture or recitative

accompaniment. In these ways the composer provided pleasure for the mind

as well as for the senses; he gave to instrumental music the added artistic

quality of a definite structure limiting and binding the composition into

logical order and unity. The disappearance of structure— of the organic rela-

tion of parts to a whole, or of beginning to middle and end— is the degenera-

tion of an art.

The concerto (Latin concertare, to contend) applied to music that princi-

ple of conflict which is the soul of drama: it opposed to the orchestra a solo

222 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. IX

performer, and engaged them in harmonious debate. In Italy its favorite form

was the concerto grosso, where the opposition was between a small orchestra

of strings and a concertino of two or three virtuosi. Now Vivaldi in Italy,

Handel in England, and Bach in Germany brought the concerto grosso to

ever finer form, and instrumental music challenged the pre-eminence of

song.

Nevertheless, and above all in Italy, the voice continued to be the favorite

and incomparable instrument. There it had the advantage of a euphonious

language in which the vowel had conquered the consonant; of a long tradi-

tion of church music; and of a highly developed art of vocal training. Here

were the alluring prima donnas who yearly mounted the scales in weight

and wealth, and the plump castrati who went forth to subdue kings and

queens. These male sopranos or contraltos combined the lungs and the

larynx of a man with the voice of a woman or a boy. Emasculated at the age

of seven or eight, and subjected to a long and subtle discipline of breathing

and vocalization, they learned to perform the trills and flourishes, the quavers

and runs and breathtaking cadenzas, that sent Italian audiences into a delirium

of approval, sometimes expressed by the exclamation "Evviva il coltello!"

(Long live the little knife!) 13 The ecclesiastical opposition (especially at

Rome) to the employment of women on the stage, and the inferior training

of female singers in the seventeenth century, had created a demand which

the little knife supplied by cutting the seminal ducts. So great were the re-

wards of successful castrati that some parents, with the victim's induced

consent, submitted a son to the operation at the first sign of a golden voice.

Expectations were often disappointed; in every city of Italy, said Burney,

numbers of these failures could be found, "without any voice at all." 14 After

1750 the vogue of the castrati declined, for the prima donnas had learned to

surpass them in purity of tone and rival them in vocal power.

The most famous name in eighteenth-century music was not Bach, nor

Handel, nor Mozart, but Farinelli— which was not his name. Carlo Broschi

apparently assumed the name of his uncle, who was already well known in

musical circles. Born in Naples (1705) of pedigreed parentage, Carlo would

not normally have entered the ranks of the unmanned; we are told that an

accident that befell him while riding compelled the operation that resulted

in the finest voice in history. He studied singing with Porpora, accompanied

him to Rome, and appeared there in Porpora's opera Eumene. In one aria

he competed with a flutist in holding and swelling a note, and so outpuffed

him that invitations came to him from a dozen capitals. In 1727, at Bologna,

he met his first defeat; he divided a duo with Antonio Bernacchi, acknowl-

edged him as "King of Singers," and begged him to be his teacher. Ber-

nacchi consented, and was soon eclipsed by his pupil. Farinelli now went

from triumph to triumph in city after city— Venice, Vienna, Rome, Naples,

Ferrara, Lucca, Turin, London, Paris. His vocal technique was a wonder of

the age. The art of breathing was one secret of his skill; more than any other

singer he knew how to breathe deeply, quickly, imperceptibly, and could

hold a note while all musical instruments gave out. In the aria "Son qual

nave" he began the first note with almost inaudible delicacy, expanded it

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 223

gradually to full volume, and then reduced it by degrees to its first faintness.

Sometimes an audience, even in staid England, would applaud this curiosa

felicitas for five minutes. 15 He won his hearers also by his pathos, grace, and

tenderness; and these qualities were in his nature as well as in his voice. In

1737 he made what he thought would be a brief visit to Spain; he remained

in or near Madrid for a quarter of a century. We shall look for him there.

With castrati like Farinelli and Senesino, with divas like Faustina Bordoni

and Francesca Cuzzoni, opera became the voice of Italy, and, as such, was

heard with delight everywhere in Europe except in France, where it stirred

a war. Originally opera was the plural of opus, and meant works; in Italian

the plural became singular, still meaning work; what we now call opera was

termed opera per musica—z musical work; only in the eighteenth century

did the word take on its present meaning. Influenced by traditions of the

Greek drama, it had been designed originally as a play accompanied by

music; soon, in Italy, the music dominated the play, and arias dominated the

music. Operas were planned to give display solos to each prima donna and

each primo uomo in the cast. Between these exciting peaks the auditors con-

versed; between the acts they played cards or chess, gambled, ate sweets,

fruit, or hot suppers, and visited and flirted from box to box. In such feasts

the libretto was regularly drowned in an intermittent cascade of arias, duets,

choruses, and ballets. The historian Lodovico Muratori denounced this sub-

mergence of poetry (1701); 16 the librettist Apostolo Zeno agreed with him;

the composer Benedetto Marcello satirized this tendency in Teatro alia moda

(172 1 ). Metastasio for a time stemmed the torrent, but rather in Austria

than in Italy; Jommelli and Traetta struggled against it, but were repudiated

by their countrymen. The Italians frankly preferred music to poetry, and

took the drama as mere scaffolding for song.

Probably no other art form in history ever enjoyed such popularity as

opera in Italy. No enthusiasm could compare with an Italian audience wel-

coming an aria or a cadenza by a singer of renown. To cough during such

a ceremony was a social felony. Applause began before the familiar song

was finished, and was reinforced by canes beating upon floors or the backs

of chairs; some devotees tossed their shoes into the air. 17 Every Italian town

of any pride (and which of them was without pride?) had its opera house;

there were forty in the Papal States alone. Whereas in Germany opera was

usually a court function closed to the public, and in England it limited its

audience by high prices of admission, in Italy it was open to all decently

dressed persons at a modest charge, sometimes at no charge at all. And as the

Italians were devoted to the enjoyment of life, they insisted that their operas,

however tragic, should have a happy ending. Moreover, they liked humor as

well as sentiment. The custom grew to interpolate comic intermezzi be-

tween the acts of an opera; these interludes developed into a genus of their

own, until they rivaled opera seria in popularity, and sometimes in length. It

was an opera buff a— Pergolesi's La serva padrona—xhzx: charmed Paris in

1752, and was acclaimed by Rousseau as attesting the superiority of Italian

music over French.

Buff a or seria, Italian opera was a force in history. As Rome had once

224 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

conquered Western Europe with her armies, as the Roman Church had

conquered it again with her creed, so Italy conquered it once more, with

opera. Her operas displaced native productions in Germany, Denmark, Eng-

land, Portugal, Spain, even in Russia; her singers were the idols of almost

every European capital. Native singers, to win acceptance at home, took

Italian names. That enchanting conquest will go on as long as vowels can

outsing consonants.

III. RELIGION

After the prima donnas and the great castrati, the dominant class in Italy

was the clergy. In their distinctive cassocks and under their broad-rimmed

hats they walked or rode in proud freedom across the Italian scene, knowing

that they dispensed the most precious boon known to humanity— hope.

Whereas in France there was in this century approximately one ecclesiastic

for each two hundred souls, in Rome there was one for fifteen, in Bologna

one for seventeen, in Naples and Turin one for twenty-eight. 18 A con-

temporary Neapolitan, professedly orthodox, complained:

So greatly have the clergy increased in number that the princes must either

take measures to restrict them, or allow them to engulf the whole of the state.

Why is it necessary that the smallest Italian village should be controlled by

fifty or sixty priests? . . . The great number of campaniles and convents shuts

out the sun. There are cities with as many as twenty-five convents of friars or

sisters of St. Dominic, seven colleges of Jesuits, as many of Theatines, about

twenty or thirty monasteries of Franciscan friars, and a good fifty others of dif-

ferent religious orders of both the sexes, not to speak of four or five hundred

churches and chapels. 19

Perhaps these figures were exaggerated for argument. We hear of four

hundred churches in Naples, 260 in Milan, no in Turin; these, however,

included small chapels. The monks were relatively poor, but the secular

clergy, as a whole, possessed more wealth than the nobility. In the kingdom

of Naples the clergy received a third of the revenues. In the duchy of Parma

one half, in Tuscany almost three quarters, of the soil belonged to the clergy.

In Venice, in the eleven years from 1755 t0 l l&5, new legacies added 3,300,-

000 ducats' worth of property to the Church. 20 Some cardinals and bishops

were among the richest men in Italy, but cardinals and bishops were primar-

ily administrators and statesmen, only occasionally saints. Several of them,

in the second half of the century, renounced their wealth and luxury, and

led lives of voluntary poverty.

The Italian people, barring a few publicists or satirists, made no significant

protest against the wealth of the clergy. They took pride in the splendor of

their churches, monasteries, and prelates. Their contributions seemed a

small price to pay for the order that religion brought to the family and the

state. Every home had a crucifix, and an image of the Virgin; before these

the family— parents, children, and servants— knelt in prayer each evening;

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 225

what could replace the moral influence of those unifying prayers? The

abstinence from meat on Fridays, and on Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent,

was a wholesome discipline of desire— and was a boon to health and fisher-

men. The priests, who themselves knew the charms of women, were not too

hard on sins of the flesh, and winked an eye at the laxities of Carnival. Even

the prostitutes, on Saturdays, lit a candle before the Virgin, and deposited

money for a Mass. De Brosses, attending a play in Verona, was astonished to

see the performance stop when church bells rang the Angelus; all the actors

knelt and prayed; an actress who had fallen in a dramatic faint rose to join

in the prayer, and then fainted again. 21 Seldom has a religion been so loved

as Catholicism in Italy.

There was another side to the picture— censorship and Inquisition. The

Church demanded that every Italian, at least once a year, perform his or her

"Easter duty"— go to confession on Holy Saturday, and receive Communion

on Easter morn. Failure to do this brought— in all but the largest cities-

priestly reproof; failure of private reproof and exhortation brought public

listing of the recusant's name on the doors of the parish church; continued

refusal brought excommunication and, in some towns, imprisonment. 22 The

Inquisition, however, had lost much of its power and bite. In the larger cen-

ters ecclesiastical surveillance could be evaded, censorship was reduced, and

there was a silent spread of doubt and heresy in the intelligentsia, even in

the clergy themselves— for some of these, despite papal bulls, were secret

Jansenists.

While many priests and monks led easy lives, and were no strangers to sin,

there were also many who were faithful to their vows, and kept the faith

alive by devotion to their tasks. New religious foundations testified to the

survival of the monastic impulse. St. Alfonso de' Liguori, a lawyer of noble

lineage, founded in 1732 the "Redemptorists"— i.e., the Congregation of the

Most Holy Redeemer; and St. Paul of the Cross (Paolo Danei), who prac-

ticed the most severe asceticism, founded in 1737 the "Passionist Order"—

i.e., the Clerks of the Holy Cross and Passion of Our Lord.

The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) had in 1750 some 23,000 members,

3,622 of them in Italy, half of them priests. 23 Their power was quite out of

proportion to their number. As confessors to kings, queens, and prominent

families they often influenced domestic and international politics, and they

were sometimes the most urgent force— next to the populace itself— in the

persecution of heresy. Yet they were the most liberal of the Catholic theolo-

gians; we have seen elsewhere how patiently they sought a compromise with

the French Enlightenment. A similar flexibility marked their foreign mis-

sions. In China they converted "several hundred thousands" to Catholicism, 24

but their intelligent concessions to ancestor worship, to Confucianism, and

to Taoism shocked the missionaries of other orders; and these persuaded

Pope Benedict XIV to check and reprove the Jesuits in the bull Ex quo

singulari (1743). They remained nevertheless the most able and learned de-

fenders of the Catholic faith against Protestantism and unbelief, and the

most loyal supporters of the popes against the kings. In the conflicts of

2 26 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

jurisdiction and power between the national states and the supernational

Church, the kings saw in the Society of Jesus their subtlest and most per-

sistent enemy. They resolved to destroy it. But the first act of this drama

belongs to Portugal.

IV. FROM TURIN TO FLORENCE

Entering Italy from France by Mont-Cenis, we descend the Alps into

"foot-of-the-mountain" Piedmont, and pass through vineyards, fields of

grain, and orchards of olive or chestnut trees to two-thousand-year-old

Turin, ancient citadel of the house of Savoy. This is one of the oldest royal

families in existence, founded in 1003 by Umberto Biancamano— Humbert

of the White Hand. Its head in this period was among the ablest rulers of

the time. Victor Amadeus II inherited the ducal throne of Savoy at the age

of nine (1675), took charge at eighteen, fought now for, now against, the

French in the wars of Louis XIV, shared with Eugene of Savoy in driving

the French from Turin and Italy, and emerged from the Treaty of Utrecht

(17 1 3) with Sicily added to his crown. In 17 18 he exchanged Sicily for

Sardinia; he took the title of King of Sardinia (1720), but kept Turin as his

capital. He governed with brusque competence, improved public education,

raised the general prosperity, and, after fifty-five years of rule, abdicated in

favor of his son Charles Emmanuel I (r. 1 7 30-7 3 ) .

During these two reigns, covering almost a century, Turin was a leading

center of Italian civilization. Montesquieu, seeing it in 1728, called it "the

most beautiful city in the world" 25 — though he loved Paris. Chesterfield, in

1749, praised the court of Savoy as the best in Europe for forming "well-

bred and agreeable people." 26 Part of Turin's splendor was due to Filippo

Iuvara, an architect who still breathed the afflatus of the Renaissance. On

the proud hill of Superga, towering 2,300 feet above the city, he built

(171 7-3 1 ) for Victor Amadeus II, to commemorate the liberation of Turin

from the French, a handsome basilica in classic style of portico and dome,

which for a century served as a tomb for Savoyard royalty. To the old

Palazzo Madama he added (17 18) a lordly staircase and massive fagade; and

in 1729 he designed (Benedetto Alfieri completed) the immense Castello

Stupinigi, whose main hall displayed all the ornate splendor of baroque.

Turin remained the capital of the Savoy dukes until, in their final triumph

( 1 860 f.) , they moved to Rome to become kings of united Italy.

Milan, long stifled by Spanish domination, revived under the milder Aus-

trian rule. In 1703 Franz Tieffen, in 1746 and 1755 Felice and Rho Clerici,

aided by the government, established textile factories that extended the re-

placement of handicrafts and guilds with large-scale production under

capitalistic financing and management. — In the cultural history of Milan the

great name was now Giovanni Battista Sammartini, whom we can still hear

occasionally over the affluent air. In his symphonies and sonatas the contra-

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 227

puntal solemnity of the German masters was replaced by a dynamic interplay

of contrasted themes and moods. The young Gluck, coming to Milan (1737)

as chamber musician to Prince Francesco Melzi, became the pupil and friend

of Sammartini, and adopted his method of constructing an opera. In 1770 the

Bohemian composer Josef Myslivecek, listening with the youthful Mozart

to some of Sammartini's symphonies in Milan, exclaimed, "I have found the

father of Haydn's style!" 27 — and therefore one of the fathers of the modern

symphony.

Genoa had a bad eighteenth century. Its commerce had declined through

the competition of the oceans with the Mediterranean, but its strategic loca-

tion on a defensive hill overlooking a well-equipped port attracted the dan-

gerous attention of neighboring powers. Placed between enemies without

and an uneducated but passionate populace within, the government fell into

the hands of old commercial families ruling through a closed council and an

obedient doge. This self-perpetuating oligarchy taxed the people into a

sullen and impatient poverty, and was in turn dominated and fleeced by the

Banco di San Giorgio. When the allied forces of Savoy and Austria besieged

Genoa in 1 746 the government did not dare arm the people to resist, for fear

they would kill the rulers; it preferred to open the gates to the besiegers, who

exacted indemnities and ransoms that broke the bank. The commonalty,

preferring indigenous exploiters, rose against the Austrian garrison, bom-

barded it with tiles and stones torn from roofs and streets, and drove it igno-

miniously out. The old tyranny was resumed.

The Genoese patriciate built new mansions like the Palazzo Deferrari, and

shared with Milan in supporting a painter who has come to a second fame in

our time. Almost every extant picture by Alessandro Magnasco strikes us

with the dark originality of its style. Punchinello Playing the Guitar 28 — an

elongated figure in careless patches of black and brown; the graceful Girl

and Musician before the Fire; 2 * The Barber, 30 apparently eager to cut his

client's throat; the massive Refectory of the Monks, 31 attesting the culinary

prosperity of the Church: all these are masterpieces, recalling El Greco in

their gaunt forms and tricks of light, anticipating Goya in macabre exposure

of life's cruelties, and almost modernistic in rough disdain of prim detail.

Florence in this age saw the end of one of history's most famous families.

The prolonged reign of Cosimo III (1670-172 3) as Grand Duke of Tuscany

was a misfortune for a people still proud with memories of Florentine gran-

deur under the earlier Medici. Obsessed with theology, Cosimo allowed the

clergy to govern him and draw from his ailing revenues rich endowments for

the Church. Despotic rule, incompetent administration, and exorbitant taxa-

tion forfeited the popular support that the dynasty had enjoyed for 250

years.

Cosimo's eldest son, Ferdinand, preferred courtesans to courtiers, ruined

his health with excesses, and died childless in 17 13. Another son, "Gian"

(John) Gastone, took to books, studied history and botany, and lived a quiet

228 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

life. In 1697 his father forced him to marry Anne of Saxe-Lauenburg, a

widow of unfurnished mind. Gian went to live with her in a remote Bo-

hemian village, bore boredom for a year, then consoled himself with adul-

teries in Prague. When Ferdinand's health failed, Cosimo called Gian back to

Florence; when Ferdinand died Gian was named heir to the grand-ducal

crown. Gian's wife refused to live in Italy. Cosimo, fearing extinction of the

Medici line, persuaded the Florentine Senate to decree that on the death of

the childless Gian Gastone, Gian's sister Anna Maria Ludovica should suc-

ceed to the throne.

The European powers fluttered eagerly around the dying dynasty. In 1 7 1 8

Austria, France, England, and Holland refused to recognize Cosimo's ar-

rangement, and declared that on Gian's death Tuscany and Parma should

be given to Don Carlos, eldest son of Elizabeth Farnese, Queen of Spain.

Cosimo protested, and belatedly reorganized the military defenses of Leg-

horn and Florence. His death left to his son an impoverished state and a pre-

carious throne.

Gian Gastone was now (1732) fifty-two years old. He labored to remedy

abuses in the administration and the economy, dismissed the spies and syco-

phants who had fattened under his father, reduced taxes, recalled exiles, re-

leased political prisoners, assisted the revival of industry and commerce, and

restored the social life of Florence co security and gaiety. The enrichment

of the UfEzi Gallery by Cosimo II and Gian Gastone, the flourishing of

music under the lead of Francesco Veracini's violin, the masked balls, the

parades of decorated carriages, the popular battles of confetti and flowers,

made Florence rival Venice and Rome in attracting foreign visitors; here,

for example, about 1740, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole,

and Thomas Gray gathered around Lady Henrietta Pomfret in the Palazzo

Ridolfo. There is something wistfully attractive in a society in decay.

Exhausted by his efforts, Gian Gastone in 173 1 turned the government

over to his ministers, and slipped into sensual degradation. Spain sent an

army of thirty thousand men to ensure Don Carlos' succession; Charles VI

of Austria sent fifty thousand troops to escort his daughter Maria Theresa

to the grand-ducal throne. War was averted by an agreement (1736) among

Austria, France, England, and Holland that Carlos should have Naples, and

that Tuscany should go to Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis of Lor-

raine. On July 9, 1737, the last of the Medici rulers died, Tuscany became a

dependency of Austria, and Florence flowered again.

V. QUEEN OF THE ADRIATIC

Between Milan and Venice some minor cities lolled in the sun. Bergamo

had to be content, in this half century, with painters like Ghislandi, com-

posers like Locatelli. Verona presented operas in her Roman theater, and had

an outstanding man in Marchese Francesco Scipione di Maffei. His poetic

drama Merope (17 13) was imitated by Voltaire, who honorably dedicated

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 229

his own Merope to him as "the first who had courage and genius enough to

hazard a tragedy without gallantry, a tragedy worthy of Athens in its glory,

wherein maternal affection constitutes the whole intrigue, and the most

tender interest arises from the purest virtue." 32 Even more distinguished was

Maffei's scholarly Verona illustrata (1731-32), which set a pace for archae-

ology. His city was so proud of him that it raised a statue to him in his

lifetime. — Vicenza, with its buildings by Palladio, was a goal of pilgrimage

for architects reviving the classic style. — Padua had a university then espe-

cially noted for its faculties of law and medicine, and it had Giuseppe Tartini,

acknowledged by all (except Geminiani) to be at the head of Europe's

violinists; who has not heard Tartini's "Devil's Trill"?

All these cities were part of the Venetian Republic. So, in the north, were

Treviso, Friuli, Feltre, Bassano, Udine, Belluno, Trento, Bolzano; so in the

east was Istria; in the south the state of Venezia extended through Chioggia

and Rovigo to the Po; across the Adriatic it held Cattaro, Preveza, and other

parts of today's Yugoslavia and Albania; and in the Adriatic it held the

islands of Corfu, Cephalonia, and Zante. Within this complex realm dwelt

some three million souls, each the center of the world.

7. Venetian Life

Venice herself, as the capital, contained 137,000 inhabitants. She was now

in political and economic decline, having lost her Aegean empire to the

Turks, and much of her foreign commerce to Atlantic states. The failure of

the Crusades; the unwillingness of the European governments, after the vic-

tory at Lepanto (1571), to help Venice defend the outposts of Christendom

in the East; the eagerness of those governments to accept from Turkey

commercial privileges denied to her bravest enemy 33 — these developments

had left Venice too weak to maintain her Renaissance splendor. She decided

to cultivate her own garden— to give to her Italian and Adriatic possessions

a government severe in law, political censorship, and personal supervision,

but competent in administration, tolerant in religion and morals, liberal in

internal trade.

Like the other republics of eighteenth-century Europe, Venice was ruled

by an oligarchy. In the flotsam of diverse stocks— Antonios, Shylocks, Othel-

los— with a populace poorly educated, slow to think and quick to act, and

preferring pleasure to power, democracy would have been chaos enthroned.

Eligibility to the Gran Consiglio was generally restricted to some six hun-

dred families listed in the Libro <Voro; but to that native aristocracy some

judicious additions were made from the ranks of merchants and financiers,

even though of alien blood. The Great Council chose the Senate, which

chose the powerful Council of Ten. A swarm of spies circulated silently

among the citizens, reporting to the lnquisitori any suspicious action or

speech of any Venetian— of the doge himself. The doges were now usually

figureheads, serving to polarize patriotism and adorn diplomacy.

The economy was fighting a losing battle against foreign competition, im-

230 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

port dues, and guild restraints. Venetian industry did not expand into free

enterprise, free trade, and capitalistic management; it was content with the

fame of its crafts. The wool industry, which had fifteen hundred employees

in 1700, had only six hundred at the end of the century; the silk industry

declined in the same period from twelve thousand to one thousand. 34 The

glass workers of Murano resisted any change in the methods that had once

brought them European renown; their secrets escaped to Florence, France,

Bohemia, England; their rivals responded to advances in chemistry, to ex-

periments in manufacture; the Murano ascendancy passed. The lace industry

similarly succumbed to competitors beyond the Alps; by 1750 the Venetians .

themselves were wearing French lace. Two industries flourished: fisheries,

which employed thirty thousand men, and the importation and sale of slaves.

Religion was not allowed to interfere with the profits of trade or the

pleasures of life. The state regulated all matters concerning ecclesiastical

property and clerical crime. The Jesuits, expelled in 1 606, had been recalled

in 1657, but under conditions that checked their influence in education and

politics. Despite a governmental ban on the importation of works by the

French philosophers, the doctrines of Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, and

Diderot found their way, if only by visitors, into Venetian salons, and in

Venice, as in France, the aristocracy toyed with the ideas that sapped its

power. 35 The people accepted religion as an almost unconscious habit of

ritual and belief, but they played more often than they prayed. A Venetian

proverb described Venetian morals with all the inadequacy of an epigram:

"In the morning a little Mass, after dinner a little gamble, in the evening a

little woman." 36 Young men went to church not to worship the Virgin but

to examine the women, and these, despite ecclesiastical and governmental

fulminations, dressed decollete. 37 The perennial war between religion and

sex was giving sex the victory.

The government permitted a regulated prostitution as a measure of public

safety. The courtesans of Venice were famous for their beauty, good man-

ners, rich raiment, and sumptuous apartments on the Grand Canal. The

supply of cortigiane was considerable, but still fell short of the demand.

Thrifty Venetians, and aliens like Rousseau, clubbed together, two or three,

to maintain one concubine. 38 Despite these facilities, and not content with

cavalieri serventi, married women indulged in liaisons dangereuses. Some of

them frequented the casinos, in which every convenience was provided for

assignations. Several noble ladies were publicly reproved by the government

for loose conduct; some were ordered confined to their homes; some were

exiled. The middle classes showed more sobriety; a succession of offspring

kept the wife busy, and filled her need for receiving and giving love. No-

where did mothers lavish more ardent endearments upon their children—

"// mio leon di Sa?i Marco! La mia allegrezza! II mio fior di primavera!"

(My lion of St. Mark! My joy! My flower of spring! )

Crime was less frequent in Venice than elsewhere in Italy; the arm ready

to strike was held back by the abundance and watchfulness of constables and

gendarmes. But gambling was accepted as a natural occupation of mankind.

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 231

The government organized a lottery in 17 15. The first ridotto, or gambling

casino, was opened in 1638; soon there were many, public or private, and

all classes hastened to them. Clever sharpers like Casanova could live on their

gambling gains; others could lose the savings of a year in a night. The play-

ers, some masked, bent over the table in a silent devotion more intense than

love. The government looked on amiably (till 1774), for it taxed the ridotti,

and received some 300,000 lire from them in annual revenue. 39

Moneyed idlers came from a dozen states to spend their savings, or their

declining years, in the relaxed morals and plein-air gaiety of the piazzas and

the canals. The abandonment of empire lowered the fever of politics. No

one here talked of revolution, for every class, besides its pleasures, had its

stabilizing customs, its absorption in accepted tasks. Servants were pliant

and faithful, but they brooked no insult or contumely. The gondoliers were

poor, but they were the lords of the lagoons, standing on their gilded barks

in the confident pride of their ancient skill, or rounding a turn with lusty

esoteric cries, or murmuring a song to the sway of their bodies and the

rhythm of their oars.

Many different nationalities mingled in the piazzas, each keeping its dis-

tinctive garb, language, and profanity. The upper classes still dressed as in

the heyday of the Renaissance, with shirts of finest linen, velvet breeches,

silk stockings, buckled shoes; but it was the Venetians who in this century

introduced to Western Europe the Turkish custom of long trousers— pan-

taloons. Wigs had come in from France about 1665. Young fops took such

care of their dress, hair, and smell that their sex was imperceptible. Women

of fashion raised upon their heads fantastic towers of false or natural hair.

Men as well as women felt undressed without jewelry. Fans were works of

art, elegantly painted, often encrusted with gems or enclosing a monocle.

Every class had its clubs, every street its caffe; "in Italy," said Goldoni,

"we take ten cups of coffee every day." 40 All kinds of amusement flourished,

from prize fights (pugni) to masked balls. One game, pallone— tossing an

inflated ball about with the palm of the hand— gave us our word balloon.

Water sports were perennial. Ever since 1315a regatta had been held on

January 25 on the Grand Canal— a race between galleys rowed by fifty oars

and decorated like our "floats"; and the festival was climaxed by a water

polo game in which hundreds of Venetians divided into shouting and com-

peting groups. On Ascension Day the doge sailed in glory from San Marco

to the Lido on the richly decorated ship of state, the Bucintoro (Bucentaur),

amid a thousand other craft, to remarry Venice to the sea.

Saints and historical anniversaries lent their names and memories to fre-

quent holidays, for the Senate found that bread and circuses were an accept-

able substitute for elections. On such occasions picturesque processions

passed from church to church, from square to square; colorful carpets,

garlands and silks were hung from windows or balconies on the route; there

was intelligible music, pious or amorous song, and graceful dancing in the

streets. Patricians chosen for high office celebrated their victories with pa-

rades, arches, trophies, festivities, and philanthropies costing sometimes

232 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

thirty thousand ducats. Every wedding was a festival, and the funeral of a

dignitary was the grandest event in his career.

And there was Carnival— the Christian legacy from the Saturnalia of pagan

Rome. Church and state hoped that by allowing a moral holiday they could

reduce, for the remainder of the year, the tension between the flesh and

the Sixth Commandment. Usually, in Italy, Carnevale extended only through

the last week before Lent; in eighteenth-century Venice, from December

26 or January 7 to Martedi Grasso ("Fat Tuesday," Mardi Gras); perhaps

from that final day of permissible meat-eating the festival took its name—

carne-vale, farewell to flesh food. Almost every night in those winter weeks

the Venetians— and visitors converging from all Europe— poured into the

piazzas, dressed in gay colors, and hiding age, rank, and identity behind a

mask. In that disguise many men and women laughed at laws, and harlots

thrived. Confetti flew about, and artifical eggs were cast around to spread

their scented waters when they broke. Pantalone, Arlechino, Columbine,

and other beloved characters from the comic theater pranced and prattled

to amuse the crowd; puppets danced, rope walkers stopped a thousand

breaths. Strange beasts were brought in for the occasion, like the rhinoceros,

which was first seen in Venice in the festivities of 1751. Then, at midnight

before Ash Wednesday (Mercoledi della Ceneri) , the great bells of San Marco

tolled the end of Carnival; the exhausted reveler returned to his legal bed,

and prepared to hear his priest tell him on the morrow, "Memento, homo,

quia puhis es, et in pulverem redieris" (Remember, man, that thou art dust,

and unto dust thou shalt return) .

2. Vivaldi

Venice and Naples were the rival foci of music in Italy. In its theaters

Venice heard twelve hundred different operas in the eighteenth century.

There the most renowned divas of the age, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina

Bordoni, fought their melodious battles for supremacy; and each from one

foot of board moved the world. Cuzzoni sang opposite Farinelli in one

theater, Bordoni sang opposite Bernacchi in another, and all Venice was

divided between their worshipers. If all four had sung together the Queen

of the Adriatic would have melted into her lagoons.

At antipodes to these citadels of opera and joy were the four ospedali, or

asylums, in which Venice cared for some of her orphan or illegitimate girls.

To give function and meaning to the lives of these homeless children they

were trained in vocal and instrumental music, to sing in choirs, and to give

public concerts from behind their semi-monastic grills. Rousseau said he had

never heard anything so touching as these girlish voices singing in disciplined

harmony; 41 Goethe thought he had never heard so exquisite a soprano, or

music "of such ineffable beauty." 42 Some of the greatest of Italy's composers

taught in these institutions, wrote music for them, and conducted their con-

certs: Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lotti, Galuppi, Porpora, Vivaldi . . .

To supply her theaters with operas, to furnish her ospedali, orchestras,

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 233

and virtuosi with vocal and instrumental music, Venice called upon the

cities of Italy, sometimes of Austria and Germany. She herself was the

mother or nurse of Antonio Lotti, organist and then maestro di capella at St.

Mark's, author of indifferent operas but of a Mass that brought tears to

Protestant Burney's eyes; of Baldassare Galuppi, famous for his opera buffe,

and for the splendor and tenderness of his operatic airs; of Alessandro Mar-

cello, whose concertos rank high in the compositions of his time; of his

younger brother Benedetto, whose musical setting of fifty psalms "constitute

one of the finest productions of musical literature"; 43 and of Antonio Vivaldi.

To some of us the first hearing of a Vivaldi concerto was a humiliating

revelation. Why had we been ignorant of him so long? Here was a stately

flow of harmony, laughing ripples of melody, a unity of structure and a

cohesion of parts, which should have won this man an earlier entry into our

ken, and a higher place in our musical histories.*

He was born about 1675, son of a violinist in the orchestra of the Doges'

Chapel in St. Mark's. His father taught him the violin, and obtained a place

for him in the orchestra. At fifteen he took minor orders; at twenty-five he

became a priest; he was called II Prete Rosso because his hair was red. His

passion for music may have conflicted with his sacerdotal ministrations.

Enemies said that "one day, when Vivaldi -was saying Mass, a subject for a

fugue came to his mind; he at once left the altar, . . . and repaired to the

sacristy to write out the theme; then he came back to finish Mass." 44 A papal

nuncio charged him with keeping several women, and finally (it was said)

the Inquisition forbade him to say Mass. Antonio in later years gave quite a

different account:

It was twenty-five years ago that I said Mass for . . . the last time, not due

to interdiction, . . . but by my own decision, because of an ailment that has

burdened me since birth. After being ordained a priest I said Mass for a year

or a little more; then I ceased to say it, having on three occasions been com-

pelled by this ailment to leave the altar without completing it.

For this same reason I nearly always live at home, and I only go out in a

gondola or coach, because I can no longer walk on account of this chest con-

dition, or rather this tightness in the chest [strettezza di petto, probably

asthma]. No nobleman invites me to his house, not even our prince, because all

are informed of my ailment. My travels have always been very costly because

I have always had to make them with four or five women to help me.

These women, he added, were of spotless repute. "Their modesty was ad-

mitted everywhere. . . . Every day of the week they made their devo-

tions." 45

He could not have been much of a rake, for the Seminario Musicale dell'

Ospedale della Pieta kept him through thirty-seven years as violinist, teacher,

composer, or maestro di coro— rector of the choir. For his girl students he

composed most of his nonoperatic works. The demands were great; hence he

wrote in haste and corrected at what leisure he could find; he told de Brosses

* The 1928 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians gave him one column; the

1954 edition gave him twelve; judge from this the sudden expansion of Vivaldi's reputation.

Is fame a whim of chance?

234 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

that he could "compose a concerto faster than a copyist could copy it." 46

His operas were equally hurried; one of them bore on the title page the

boast (or excuse) "Fatto in cinque giorni"— Done in five days. Like Handel,

he saved time by borrowing from himself, adapting past performances to

meet present needs.

In the interstices of his work at the Ospedale he composed forty operas.

Many contemporaries agreed with Tartini that they were mediocre; Bene-

detto Marcello made fun of them in his Teatro alia moda; but audiences in

Venice, Vicenza, Vienna, Mantua, Florence, Milan, and Vienna welcomed

him, and Vivaldi often deserted his girls to travel with his women through

northern Italy, even to Vienna and Amsterdam, to perform as a violinist, or

to conduct one of his operas, or to supervise its staging and decor. His operas

are now dead, but so are nearly all those composed before Gluck. Styles,

manners, heroes, voices, sexes have changed.

History knows of 554 compositions by Vivaldi; of these 454 are concertos.

A clever satirist said that Vivaldi had not written six hundred concertos, but

had written the same concerto six hundred times; 47 and sometimes it seems

so. There is in these pieces much sawing of strings, much hurdy-gurdy con-

tinue), an almost metronomic beating of time; even in the famous series

called The Seasons (1725) there are some deserts of monotony. But there

are also peaks of passionate vitality and wintry blasts, oases of dramatic con-

flict between soloists and orchestra, and grateful streams of melody. In such

pieces 48 Vivaldi brought the concerto grosso to an unprecedented excellence,

which only Bach and Handel would surpass.

Like most artists, Vivaldi suffered from the sensitivity that fed his genius.

The power of his music reflected his fiery temper, the tenderness of his

strains reflected his piety. As he aged he became absorbed in religious devo-

tions, so that one fanciful record described him as leaving his rosary only to

compose. 49 In 1740 he lost or resigned his post at the Ospedale della Pieta.

For reasons now unknown he left Venice and went to Vienna. We know

nothing further of him except that there, a year later, he died, and received

a pauper's funeral.

His death passed unnoticed in the Italian press, for Venice had ceased to

care for his music, and no one ranked him near the top of his art in his land

and time. His compositions found a welcome in Germany. Quantz, flutist

and composer for Frederick the Great, imported Vivaldi's concertos, and

frankly accepted them as models. Bach so admired them as to transpose at

least nine for the harpsichord, four for the organ, and one for four harpsi-

chords and a string ensemble. 50 Apparently it was from Vivaldi and Corelli

that Bach derived the tripartite structure of his concertos.

Throughout the nineteenth century Vivaldi was almost forgotten except

by scholars tracing the development of Bach. Then in 1905 Arnold Scher-

ing's Geschichte des Instrumentalkonzerts restored him to prominence; and

in the 1920s Arturo Toscanini gave his passion and prestige to Vivaldi's

cause. Today the Red Priest takes for a time the highest place among the

Italian composers of the eighteenth century.

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 235

3. Remembrances

From the Indian summer of Venetian art a dozen painters rise up and ask

for remembrance. We merely salute Giambattista Pittoni, whom Venice

placed only after Tiepolo and Piazzetta; and Jacopo Amigoni, whose voluptu-

ous style passed down to Boucher; and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who

carried his colors to England, France, and Germany; it was he who decor-

ated Kimbolton Castle, Castle Howard, and the Banque de France. Marco

Ricci makes a more striking figure, since he killed a critic and himself. In

1699, aged twenty-three, he stabbed to death a gondolier who had slighted

his paintings. He fled to Dalmatia, fell in love with its landscapes, and caught

them so skillfully with his colors that Venice forgave him and hailed him as

Tintoretto reborn. His uncle Sebastiano Ricci took him to London, where

they collaborated on the tomb of the Duke of Devonshire. Like so many

artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he loved to paint real

or imaginary ruins, not forgetting himself. In 1729, after several attempts,

he succeeded in committing suicide. In 1733 one of his paintings was sold

for $500; in 1963 it was resold for $9o,ooo, 51 illustrating both the apprecia-

tion of art and the depreciation of money.

Rosalba Carriera is more pleasant to contemplate. She began her career

by designing patterns for point de Venise lace; then (like the young Renoir)

she painted snuffboxes; then miniatures; finally she found her forte in pastel.

By 1709 she had won such fame that when Frederick IV of Denmark came

he chose her to paint for him pastel portraits of the most beautiful or cele-

brated ladies of Venice. In 1720 Pierre Crozat, millionaire art collector, in-

vited her to Paris. There she was welcomed and feted as no other foreign

artist since Bernini. Poets wrote sonnets about her; Regent Philippe d'Or-

leans visited her; Watteau painted her, and she him; Louis XV sat for her;

she was elected to the Academie de Peinture, and offered, as her diploma

piece, the Muse that hangs in the Louvre. It was as if in her the soul of ro-

coco had been made flesh.

In 1730 she went to Vienna, where she made pastel portraits of Charles

VI, his Empress, and the Archduchess Maria Theresa. Back in Venice, she

so absorbed herself in her art that she forgot to marry. The Accademia

there has a roomful of her portraits, the Gemaldegalerie of Dresden has 157,

almost all characterized by pink faces, blue backgrounds, rosy innocence,

dimpled delicacy; even when she pictured Horace Walpole 52 she made him

look like a girl. She flattered every sitter but herself; the self-portrait in

Windsor Castle shows her in her later years, white-haired, a bit somber, as

if foreseeing that she would soon be blind. For the last twelve of her eighty-

two years she had to live without the light and color that had been to her

almost the essence of life. She left her mark on the art of her time: La Tour

may have taken fire from her; Greuze remembered her idealization of young

women; her rosy tints — /^r vie en rose— passed down to Boucher and Renoir.

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta was a greater artist, superior to sentiment, dis-

236 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

daining decoration, seeking not so much to please the public as to conquer

the difficulties, and honor the highest traditions, of his metier. His fellow

craftsmen recognized this, and though Tiepolo had led in establishing (1750)

the Venetian Accademia di Pittura e Scultura, it was Piazzetta whom they

chose as its first president. His Rebecca at the Well 53 is worthy of Titian,

and makes even less concession to conventional conceptions of beauty;

enough of Rebecca is revealed to stir the savage breast, but her Dutch face

and snub nose were not fashioned for Italian ecstasies. It is the man who

moves us here, a figure worthy of the Renaissance: a powerful face, an

insinuating beard, a feathered hat, a gleam of sly inducement in his eyes—

and all the picture a masterpiece of color, texture, and design. It was charac-

teristic of Piazzetta that he was the most respected of Venetian painters in

his day, and died the poorest.

Antonio Canale, called Canaletto, is more famous, for half the world

knows Venice through his vedute, or views, and England knew him in the

flesh. He followed for a while his father's profession of scene painting for

theaters; in Rome he studied architecture; returning to Venice, he applied

compass and T square to his drawing, and made architecture a feature of his

pictures. From these we know the Queen of the Adriatic as she looked in the

first half of the eighteenth century. We note from his Baccino di San Marco 54

how crowded with vessels was the main lagoon; we watch A Regatta on the

Grand Canal, 55 and see that life was as full and eager then as it had ever been;

and we are pleased to find the Ponte di Rialto, 56 the Piazza San Marco 57 the

Piazzetta 58 the Palazzo dei Dogi, 59 and Santa Maria della Salute 60 almost as we

find them today, except for the rebuilt Campanile. Such pictures were pre-

cisely what tourists needed in the cloudy north to remember gratefully the

sun and magic of Venezia la Serenissima. They bought and paid, and took

their mementos home, and soon England demanded Canaletto himself. He

came in 1 746, and painted extensive views of Whitehall 61 and The Thames

from Richmond House; this last, astonishing in its combination of space, per-

spective, and detail, is Canaletto's masterpiece. Not till 1755 did he return to

Venice. There in 1766, aged sixty-nine, he was still hard at work, and

proudly wrote, on The Interior of St. Mark's, "Done without spectacles." 62

He handed down his technique of precise measurement to his nephew Ber-

nardo Bellotto Canaletto, and his flair for vedute to his "good scholar," Fran-

cesco Guardi, whom we shall meet again.

As Canaletto showed the outer view of the splendid city, so Pietro Longhi

revealed the life within the walls by applying genre painting to the middle

class. The lady at breakfast en neglige, the abbe tutoring her son, her little

girl fondling a toy dog, the tailor coming to display a frock, the dancing

master putting the lady through the steps of a minuet, the children wide-

eyed at a menagerie, the young women frolicking at blindman's buff, the

tradesmen in their shops, the maskers at Carnival, the theaters, the coffee-

houses, the literary coteries, the poets reciting their verses, the quack doctors,

the fortunetellers, the vendors of sausages and plums, the promenade in the

piazza, the hunting party, the fishing party, the family on its villeggiatura

FlG. 49— J OH ANN GoTTFRIKD ScHADOW:

The Quadriga on the Wraudenlrurg

Gate. German Information Center.

PAGE 523

PlG, 50— Karl G on hard Langhans:

The Brandenburg Gate (1788-91).

German Information Center, page 525

Fig. 51— Angelica Kauffmann: The

* Vestal Virgin. Staatliche Kunstsammlun-

gen, Dresden. page 644

Fig. 52— Angelica Kauffmann: Stanislas

Poniatouoski. Uffizi, Florence. page 477

*Sjs

Pig. 53— Daniel Chodoyvikcki: A Gathering in the Zoological Garden. Museum

der Bildenden Kunstc, Leipzig. pagf, 524

Fig. 54— Johann Heinrich Tischbein:

Lessing in Youth. National Gallery,

Berlin. page 523

dBfc^jS;

<.

Ij J J

Fig.

>5"

-Anton Raphael Mengs:

Self ^Portrait, paste]. Staatliche Gc-

maldegalcric, Dresden. Repro-

duced from A4ax Osborn, Die

Kitnst des Rokoko (Berlin: Pro-

pylacn Verlag, 1929). page 332

Fig. 56— Engraving by Karl Bakth

AFTER A DRAWING BY ST0BBE: lw-

manuel Kant. page 531

Fig. 57— Johann F^riedrich Au-

gust Tischbein: Schiller.

page 569

Fig. 58— Anton Graff: The Actress

Korova Schroter. Schlossmuscum, Wei-

mar. PAGE 524

Fig. 59— Johann H fin rich Wilhki.m

Tischbkin: Goethe in the Roman Cctvi-

pagna. Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frank-

furt-anv.Vlain. pagfs 523, 587

Fig. 60— Asm us Jakob Carstkns: The Birth of Light, drawing. Schlossmuseum,

Weimar. page 524

Fig. (St— Alexander Rosrix (1718?-

53): Gustavns ///. National Museum,

Stockholm. page 655

Fig. 62— The Bridgezuater Canal at

Barton Bridge (1794). Reproduced

from A. S. Turbcrville, Johnson's Eng-

land (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933);

Vol. I. page 672

r K;. 63— Thomas Gainsborough: George III. Windsor Cisrlc. Copyright reserved.

page 687

Fig. 64— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Ed-

mund Burke, 1774. The National Gal-

lery of Ireland, Dublin. pack 689

Fig. 65— Engraving by John Jones

after a painting by slr joshua

Reynolds: Charles ] antes Vox. The

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund,

1953. PAGES 693, 752

Fie 66— John Hoppm.r: William Pitt the Younger. The Tate Gallery, London.

page 696

Fig. 67— George Romney: Actress

Mary Robinson. Reproduced by

permission of the Trustees of the

Wallace Collection, London.

page 740

Fig. 68— Robert Pine (1742-90):

David Garrick. National Portrait

Gallery, London. page 741

Fig. 69— Engraving by John Hall

(1739-97) A F TER A p A l N TI N G ] l Y

Reynolds: Richard Brinsley Sheri-

dan. National Portrait Gallery, Lon-

don. PAGES 694, 752

Fig. 70— From a pri nt AFTER a draw-

ing by Canalktto: An Inside Vie-xo

of the Rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens.

Reproduced from A. S. Turberville,

Johnson's England, Vol. I. page 744

Fig, 71— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Por-

trait of the Artist as a Deaf Man.

Reproduced by courtesy of the

Trustees of the Tate Gallery, Lon-

don, page 754

Fig. 72— Chippendale and Haigh

in the Style of Robert Adam:

Side Table of Gilt and Silvered

Wood. Courtesy of Lord Hare-

wood, Leeds. (Photo by .Mr. Ber-

tram Unnc.) page 748

Fig. 73— Thomas Gainsborough: Airy

Sarah Siddons. National Gallery, London.

pages 740, 756

Fig. 74— Rosalba Carriera: Horace

Walpole. Lord Walpole Collection,

Wo Iter ton Hall, Norwich, page 791

F 1 c ; . 7 5— Paul Sa n d b y , Straw b erry Hill

c. '774, drawing. Reproduced from

the original drawing, engraved by E.

Rooker. pages 747, 750

of Scotland.

Graham. National Gallcrv

PAGE 756

Fig. 77— Archibald Skirving: Robert

Burns. National Gallery of Scotland.

page 772

Fig. 78— Hknry Raf.hurn: Lord

Newton. National Gallery of Scot-

land, page 765

Fig. 79— Thomas Gainsborough: The Market Cart. Reproduced by courtesy of

the Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London. page 755

Fig. 80— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Geor-

gian a, Duchess of Devonshire. Dev-

onshire Collection, Chatsworth. Re-

produced by permission of the Trus-

tees of the Chats worth Settlement.

page 753

//•>*' f i$ . ins

Fig. 8 i— George Dance (i 741-1825):

James BoszvelL National Portrait Gal-

lery, London. page 77^

Fug. 82— Sir Joshua Reynolds: Laurence Sterne. Reproduced with permission. (Photo-

graph courtesy of the University of London, Courtnuld Institute of Art, London.)

packs 752, 787

Fig. 83— George Romney: William

Cowper. National Portrait Gallery,

London. page 810

K

v

:

/-A.

t v ' ""*-

•■^^

Nit

Fig. 84— Studio of Reynolds:

Oliver Goldsmith. National Por-

trait Gallery, London.

pages 752, 813

Fig. 85— Mjvik. Vigee-Lebrun: Marie

Antoinette. Reproduced from Max

Osborn, Die Kunst des Rokoko.

pages 850, 913

Pig. 86— Sir Joshua Reynolds:

Dr. Samuel Johnson. Reproduced

by courtesy of the Trustees of

the Tate Gallery, London.

pages 752, 818

Fk;. 87— Jf.an-Antoink Houuon: The

Artist's Wife. Louvre, Paris. Repro-

duced from Max Osborn, Die Kunst

des Rokoko. page 911

Fig, HS— |],an-J]ami isl'k Pigalle: Denis

Diderot. Louvre^ Paris. From Max Os-

born, Die K/fiist des Rokoko.

PAGES 107, 892

FlG. 89— Houdox: Voltaire. Comcdic Francaisc. (Photo Jean Roubicr.)

PACKS 873, 912

Fig. 90— Houdon: Mme. de Sir illy . Reproduced

by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Col-

lection, London. page 91 1

Fig. 91— Houdon: Mirabeau.

packs 91 1, 951

Fig. 92— Clodion (Claude Michel): The Intoxication of Wine (Nymph and

Satyr), terra-cotta statue. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest

of Benjamin Altman, 191 3. pagk 911

/ lit l . : \

Fig. 93— Jacques-Louis David: The Oath of the Horatii. Louvre, Paris, page 91:.

UHHHHIl

Fig. 94— Houdon: Diana, bronze. Louvre, Paris. Reproduced from Max Osborn,

Die Kunst des Rokoko. page 9 r 1

Fig. 95— Nattier: Beaumarchais. Pri-

vate Collection. Reproduced from

French Art of the iSth Century, ed.

Stephane Faniel (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1957). page 920

Fig. 96— Houdon: George Washing-

ton. Louvre, Paris. page 912

i ; ic. 97— Mme. Vigee-Lebruk: Portrait of the Artist mid Her Daughter. Louvre,

Paris. page 914

Fk5, 98— Engraving by J. E. Nochkz after a painting hy Allan Ramsay: Jean-

Jacques Rousseau. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Edith

Root Grant, E. W. Root, and Elihu Root, Jr., 1937.

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 237

holiday: all the mentionable activities of the bourgeoisie are there, even more

fully than in the comedies of Goldoni, Longhi's friend. It is not great art, but

it is delightful, and shows a society more orderly and refined than we should

have imagined from the aristocrats of the gambling casinos or the cursing

stevedores of the wharves.

4-. Tiepolo

The Venetian who made Europe believe for a moment that the Renais-

sance had returned was Giambattista Tiepolo. Any summer's day will see a

procession of students and tourists entering the Residenz of the Bishop of

Wurzburg to see the staircase and ceiling frescoed by Tiepolo in 1750-53;

these are the peak of Italian painting in the eighteenth century. Or look at

The Trinity Appearing to St. Clement in the National Gallery at London;

observe its skillful composition, its precise drawing, its subtle handling of

light, its depth and glow of color; surely this is Titian? Perhaps, if Tiepolo

had not wandered so, he might have joined the giants.

Or, possibly, he was handicapped by good fortune. He was the last child

of a prosperous Venetian merchant who, dying, left a substantial patrimony.

Handsome, bright, frolicsome, Gian "soon acquired an aristocratic scorn of

anything plebeian." 63 In 17 19, aged twenty-three, he married Cecilia, sister

of Francesco Guardi. She gave him four daughters and five sons, of whom

two became painters. They lived in "a fine house" in the parish of Santa

Trinita.

His talent had already bloomed. In 17 16 he exhibited his Sacrifice of

Isaac,™ crude but powerful; he was visibly at this time under Piazzetta's

influence. He studied Veronese too, and assumed a maniera Paolesca of

sumptuous raiment, warm colors, and sensuous lines. In 1726 the Archbishop

of Udine invited him to adorn his cathedral and palace. Tiepolo chose themes

from the story of Abraham, but the treatment was not quite Biblical: Sarah's

face, emerging from a Renaissance ruff, is a corrugation of wrinkles revealing

two vestigial teeth; the angel, however, is an Italian athlete with an engaging

leg. Tiepolo seems to have felt that in a century that was beginning to laugh

at angels and miracles he could let his humor play with reverend traditions,

and the amiable archbishop indulged him. But the artist had to be careful,

for the Church was still one of the chief sources of pictorial commissions in

the Catholic world.

The other source was the layman with a palace to be adorned. In the

Palazzo Casali-Dugnani at Milan ( 1 7 3 1 ) Gian told in frescoes the story of

Scipio. These were not typical Tiepolo, for he had not yet formed his char-

acteristic style of figures moving easily and loosely in undefined space, but

they showed a skill that made a stir in northern Italy. By 1 740 he found his

forte, and achieved what some 65 have thought his chef-d'oeuvre— the ceiling

and banquet hall of the Palazzo Clerici in Milan. Here he chose, as vehicles

for his fancy, The Four Farts of the World, The Course of the Sun, and

Apollo with the Pagan Gods. He was happy to leave the somber world of

238 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. IX

Christian legend and disport himself on Olympian heights where he could use

the Greco-Roman divinities as figures in a realm free from the laws of mo-

tion, the chains of gravity, and even the academic rules of design. Like most

artists, whose moral code melts in the heat of their feelings, he was at heart

a pagan; moreover, a fine body might be the product of a resolute and forma-

tive soul, and be therefore itself a spiritual fact. For thirty years now

Tiepolo would send gods and goddesses— garbed in gauze and nonchalantly

nude— frolicking through space, chasing one another among the planets, or

making love on a cushion of clouds.

Back in Venice, he returned to Christianity, and his religious pictures

absolved his mythologies. For the Scuola di San Rocco he painted a canvas,

Hagar and Ishmael, notable for the fine figure of a sleeping boy. In the

Church of the Gesuati— renamed by the Dominicans Santa Maria del Rosario

—he pictured The Institution of the Rosary. For the Scuola dei Carmini, or

School of the Carmelite Monks, he depicted The Madonna of Mount Car-

mel; this almost rivaled Titian's Annunciation. For the Church of St. Alvise

he made three pictures; one of these, Christ Carrying the Cross, is crowded

with powerful figures vividly portrayed. Tiepolo had paid his debt to his

native faith.

His fancy moved more freely on palace walls. In the Palazzo Barbaro he

showed The Apotheosis of Francesco Barbaro— now in the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York. For the Palace of the Doges he portrayed

Neptune Offering to Venus the Riches of the Sea. To the Palazzo Papa-

dopoli he contributed two delightful snatches of Venice in Carnival— The

Minuet and The Charlatan. And (topping all his palace pictures in Venice)

he embellished the Palazzo Labia with frescoes telling the story of Antony

and Cleopatra in magnificent scenes brilliantly realized. A fellow artist,

Girolamo Mengozzi-Colonna, painted the architectural backgrounds in a

burst of Palladian splendor. On one wall the meeting of the two rulers; on

the opposite wall their banquet; on the ceiling a wild array of flying figures

representing Pegasus, time, beauty, and the winds— these blown about by

jolly puffing imps. In The Meeting Cleopatra descends from her barge in

dazzling raiment revealing twin mounds calculated to lure a tired triumvir

to fragrant rest. In the still more effulgent Banquet she drops a pearl without

price into her wine; Antony is impressed by this careless wealth; and on a

balcony musicians strum their lyres to double the jeopardy and triple the

intoxication. This masterpiece, recalling and rivaling Veronese, was one of

the pictures that Reynolds copied in 1752.

Such work in the grand style raised Tiepolo to a height visible across the

Alps. Count Francesco Algarotti, friend of Frederick and Voltaire, spread

his name through Europe. As early as 1736 the Swedish minister in Venice

informed his government that Tiepolo was just the man to decorate the

royal palace in Stockholm; "he is full of wit and zest, easy to deal with, bub-

bling over with ideas; he has a gift for brilliant color, and works at a pro-

digious speed; he paints a picture in less time than it takes another artist to

mix his colors." 66 Stockholm was already beautiful, but it seemed so far away.

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 239

In 1750 a closer invitation came: Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau, Prince-

Bishop of Wiirzburg, asked him to paint the Imperial Hall of his newly built

Residejzz, or administrative palace. The proffered fee moved the aging mas-

ter. Arriving in December with his sons Domenico, twenty-four, and Lo-

renzo, fourteen, he found an unexpected challenge in the splendor of the

Kaisersaal, which Balthasar Neumann had designed; how could any picture

catch the eye amid that radiance? Tiepolo's success here was the crown of

his career. On the walls he depicted the story of the Emperor Frederick Bar-

barossa (who had kept tryst with Beatrice of Burgundy at Wiirzburg in

1 156), and on the ceiling he showed Apollo Bringing the Bride; here he

reveled in an ecstasy of white horses, gay gods, and the play of light upon

prancing cherubs and filmy clouds. On a slope of the ceiling he represented

The Wedding: handsome faces, stately figures, flowered drapery, garments

recalling Veronese's Venice rather than medieval styles. The Bishop was so

pleased that he enlarged the contract to include the ceiling of the grand

staircase, and two altarpieces for his cathedral. Over the majestic stairway

Tiepolo pictured the continents, and Olympus— the happy hunting ground

of his fancy— and a lordly figure of Apollo the Sun God circling the sky.

Rich and weary, Giambattista returned to Venice (1753), leaving Domen-

ico to finish the assignment at Wiirzburg. Soon he was elected president of

the Academy. He was of so amiable a disposition that even his rivals were

fond of him, and called him II Buon Tiepolo. He could not resist all the

demands made upon his waning time; we find him painting in Venice, Tre-

viso, Verona, Parma, and doing a large canvas commissioned by "the court

of Muscovy." We should hardly have expected another major work from

him, but in 1757, aged sixty-one, he undertook to decorate the Villa Val-

marana near Vicenza. Mengozzi-Colonna drew the architectural setting,

Domenico signed some pictures in the guest house, Giambattista deployed

his brush in the villa itself. He chose subjects from the Iliad, the Aeneid, the

Orlando furioso, the Gerusalemme liberata. He gave his airy illusionism full

rein, losing color in light, and space in infinity, letting his gods and goddesses

float at their ease in an empyrean raised above all care and time. Goethe,

marveling before these frescoes, exclaimed, "Gar frohlich und brav" (Very

joyful and bold) . It was Tiepolo's last riot in Italy.

In 1 76 1 Charles III of Spain asked him to come and paint in the new royal

palace at Madrid. The tired Titan pleaded age, but the King appealed to the

Venetian Senate to use its influence. Reluctantly, aged sixty-six, he set out

once more with his faithful sons and his model Christina, again leaving his

wife behind, for she loved the casinos of Venice. We shall find him on a

scaffold in Spain.

5. Goldoni and Gozzi

Four figures, paired, stand out in the Venetian literature of this age: Apos-

tolo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio, both of whom wrote librettos that were

poetry; Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, who fought over Venetian comedy

a comedy that became Goldoni's tragedy. Of the first pair Goldoni wrote:

24O ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

These two illustrious authors effected the reform of Italian opera. Before

them nothing but gods, devils, machines, and wonders were to be found in

these harmonious entertainments. Zeno was the first who conceived the possi-

bility of representing tragedy in lyrical verse without degradation, and singing

it without producing exhaustion. He executed the project in a manner most

satisfactory to the public, reflecting the greatest glory on himself and his

nation. 67

Zeno carried his reforms to Vienna in 17 18, retired amiably in favor of

Metastasio in 1730, and returned to Venice and twenty years of peace.

Metastasio, as Goldoni noted, played Racine to Zeno's Corneille, adding re-

finement to power, and bringing operatic poetry to an unprecedented

height. Voltaire ranked him with the greatest French poets, and Rousseau

thought him the only contemporary poet who reached the heart. His real

name was Pietro Trapassi— Peter Cross. A dramatic critic, Gian Vincenzo

Gravina, heard him singing in the streets, adopted him, rechristened him

Metastasio (Greek for Trapassi), financed his education, and, dying, left him

a fortune. Pietro ran through the fortune with poetic license, then articled

himself to a lawyer who exacted the condition that he should not read or

write a line of verse. So he wrote under a pseudonym.

At Naples he was asked by the Austrian envoy to provide lyrics for a

cantata. Porpora composed the music; Marianna Bulgarelli, then famous

under the name of La Romanina, sang the lead; all went well. The diva in-

vited the poet to her salon; there he met Leo, Vinci, Pergolesi, Farinelli,

Hasse, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti; A4etastasio developed rapidly in

that exciting company. La Romanina, thirty-five, fell in love with him,

twenty-three. She rescued him from the toil of the law, took him into a

menage a trots with her complaisant husband, and inspired him to write his

most famous libretto, Didone abba?idonata } which twelve successive com-

posers set to music between 1724 and 1823. In 1726 he wrote Siroe for his

inamorata; Vinci, Hasse, and Handel independently made operas of it.

Metastasio was now the most sought-after librettist in Europe.

In 1730 he accepted a call to Vienna, leaving La Romanina behind. She

tried to follow him; fearing that her presence would compromise him, he

secured an order forbidding her to enter Imperial territory. She stabbed her

breast in an attempt at suicide; this effort to play Dido failed, but she lived

only four years more. When she died she left to her unfaithful Aeneas all

her fortune. Stricken with remorse, Metastasio renounced the legacy in

favor of her husband. "I have no longer any hope that I shall succeed in con-

soling myself," he wrote, "and I believe that the rest of my life will be savor-

less and sorrowful." 67a He sadly enjoyed triumph after triumph till the War

of the Austrian Succession interrupted operatic performances in Vienna.

After 1750 he repeated himself aimlessly. He had exhausted life thirty years

before his death (1782).

Opera, as Voltaire had predicted, drove the tragic drama from the Italian

stage, and left it to comedy. But Italian comedy was dominated by the com-

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 241

media delV arte— the play of improvised speech and characterizing masks.

Most of the characters had long since become stereotyped: Pantalone, the

good-humored, trousered bourgeois; Tartaglia, the stammering Neapolitan

knave; Brighella, the simpleton schemer caught in his own intrigues; Truffal-

dino, the genial, carnal ton vivant\ Arlecchino— our Harlequin; Pulcinello—

our Punch; diverse towns and times added several more. Most of the dia-

logue, and many incidents in the plot, were left to extempore invention. In

"those improvised comedies," according to Casanova, "if the actor stops short

for a word, the pit and the gallery hiss him mercilessly." 68

There were usually seven theaters operating in Venice, all named after

saints, and housing scandalously behaved audiences. The nobles in the boxes

were not particular about what they dropped upon the commoners below.

Hostile factions countered applause with whistling, yawns, sneezes, coughs,

cockcrows, or the meowing of cats. 69 In Paris the theater audience was

mostly composed of the upper classes, professional men, and literati; in Ven-

ice it was chiefly middle-class, sprinkled with gaudy courtesans, ribald gon-

doliers, priests and monks in disguise, haughty senators in robe and wig. It

was hard for a play to please all elements in such an olla-podrida of human-

ity; so Italian comedy tended to be a mixture of satire, slapstick, buffoonery,

and puns. The training of the actors to portray stock characters made them

incapable of variety and subtlety. This was the audience, this the stage, that

Goldoni strove to raise to legitimate and civilized comedy.

Pleasant is the simple beginning of his Memoirs:

I was born at Venice in 1707. . . . My mother brought me into the world

with little pain, and this increased her love for me. My first appearance was

not, as is usual, announced by cries; and this gentleness seemed then an indica-

tion of the pacific character which from that day forward 1 have ever pre-

served. 70

It was a boast, but true; Goldoni is one of the most lovable men in literary

history; and despite this exordium his virtues included modesty— a quality

uncongenial to scribes. We may believe him when he says, "I was the idol

of the house." The father went off to Rome to study medicine, and then to

Perugia to practice it; the mother was left at Venice to bring up three

children.

Carlo was precocious; at four he could read and write; at eight he com-

posed a comedy. The father persuaded the mother to let Carlo come and live

with him in Perugia. There the boy studied with the Jesuits, did well, and

was invited to join the order; he declined. The mother and another son

joined the father, but the cold mountain air of Perugia disagreed with her,

and the family moved to Rimini, then to Chioggia. Carlo went to a Domini-

can college in Rimini, where he received daily doses of St. Thomas Aquinas'

Summa theologiae. Finding no drama in that masterpiece of rationalization,

he read Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence; and when a com-

pany of actors came to Rimini he joined it long enough to surprise his par-

ents in Chioggia. They scolded him, embraced him, and sent him to study

law at Pavia. In 173 1 he received his degree, and began to practice. He mar-

242 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. IX

ried, and "was now the happiest man in the world," 71 except that he came

down with smallpox on his wedding night.

Gravitating back to Venice, he succeeded in law, and became consul there

for Genoa. But the theater continued to fascinate him; he itched to write,

and to be produced. His Belisarius was staged on November 24, 1734, with

inspiring success; it ran every day till December 14, and his old mother's

pride in him doubled his joy. Venice, however, had no taste for tragedy; his

further offerings in that genre failed, and he sadly took to comedy. Never-

theless he refused to write farces for the commedia delF arte; he wanted to

compose comedies of manners and ideas in the tradition of Moliere, to put

upon the stage no stock characters frozen into masks, but personalities and

situations drawn from contemporary life. He chose some actors from a corn-

media troupe in Venice, trained them, and produced in 1740 his Momolo

cortesan {Momolo the Courtier). "The piece was wonderfully successful,

and I was satisfied." 72 Not quite, for he had compromised by leaving all the

dialogue unwritten except for the leading part, and by providing roles for

four of the traditional masked characters.

He advanced his reforms step by step. In La domia di gar bo (The Woman

of Honor) he for the first time wrote out action and dialogue completely.

Hostile companies rose to compete with his, or to mock his plays; the classes

that he had satirized, like the cicisbei, plotted against him; he fought them all

with success after success. But no other author could be found to furnish his

troupe with suitable comedies; his own, too often repeated, forfeited favor;

he was compelled, by the competition, to write sixteen plays in one year.

He was at his peak in 1752, hailed by Voltaire as the Moliere of Italy. La

locandera (The Mistress of the Inn) had in that year "a success so brilliant

that it was . . . preferred to everything else that had yet been done in that

kind of comedy." He prided himself on having observed the "Aristotelian

unities" of action, place, and time; otherwise he judged his plays realistically:

"Good," he said, "but not yet Moliere." 73 He had written them too rapidly

to make them works of art; they were cleverly constructed, pleasantly gay,

and generally true to life, but they lacked Moliere 's reach of ideas, force of

speech, power of presentation; they remained on the surface of character

and events. The nature of the audience forbade him to try the heights of

sentiment, philosophy, or style; and he was by nature too cheerful to plumb

the depths that had tortured Moliere.

Once at least he was shocked out of his genial humor and touched to the

quick: when Carlo Gozzi challenged him for theatrical supremacy in Ven-

ice, and won.

There were two Gozzi involved in the literary turmoil at this time. Gas-

paro Gozzi wrote plays that were chiefly adaptations from the French; he

edited two prominent periodicals, and began the revival of Dante. Not so

genial was his brother Carlo: tall, handsome, vain, and ever ready for a fight.

He was the wittiest member of the Accademia Granelleschi, which cam-

paigned for the use of pure Tuscan Italian in literature, rather than the Vene-

tian idiom which Goldoni used in most of his plays. As the lover or cavaliere

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 243

servente of Teodora Ricci, he may have felt the sting when Goldoni satirized

the cicisbei. He too wrote Memoirs— the white paper of his wars. He judged

Goldoni as one author sees another:

I recognized in Goldoni an abundance of comic motives, truth, and natural-

ness. Yet I detected poverty and meanness of intrigue; . . . virtues and vices

ill-adjusted, vice too often triumphant; plebeian phrases of low double mean-

ing; . . . scraps and tags of erudition stolen Heaven knows where, and brought

to impose upon a crowd of ignoramuses. Finally, as a writer of Italian (except

in the Venetian dialect, of which he showed himself a master) he seemed not

unworthy to be placed among the dullest, basest, and least correct authors

who have used our language. ... At the same time I must add that he never

produced a play without some excellent comic trait. In my eyes he had always

the appearance of a man who was born with a natural sense of how sterling

comedies should be composed, but who— bv defect of education, by want of

discernment, by the necessity of satisfying the public and supplying new wares

to the poor comedians through whom he gained his livelihood, and by the

hurry in which he produced so many pieces every year to keep himself afloat—

was never able to fabricate a single play which does not swarm with faults. 74

In 1757 Gozzi produced a volume of verses expressing kindred criticisms

in "the style of good old Tuscan masters." Goldoni replied in terza rima

(Dante's medium) to the effect that Gozzi was like a dog baying at the moon

—"come il cane che abbaja la lunar Gozzi retorted by defending the corn-

media deW arte from Goldoni's strictures; he charged that Goldoni's plays

were "a hundred times more lascivious, indecent, and harmful to morals"

than the comedy of masks; and he compiled a vocabulary of "obscure ex-

pressions, dirty double-entendres, . . . and other nastinesses" from Gol-

doni's works. The controversy, Molmenti tells us, "threw the city into a

kind of frenzy; the case was discussed in playhouses, homes, shops, coffee-

houses, and streets." 75

Abate Chiari, another dramatist stung by Gozzi's Tuscan asp, challenged

him to write a better play than those he had condemned. Gozzi answered

that he could do this easily, on even the most trivial themes, and by using

only the traditional comedy of masks. In January, 1761, a company at the

Teatro San Samuele produced his Fiaba delV amore delle tre melarancie

{Fable of the Love of the Three Oranges)— merely a scenario that showed

Pantalone, Tartaglia, and other "masks" seeking three oranges believed to

have magic powers; the dialogue was left to be improvised. The success of

this "fable" was decisive: the Venetian public, living on laughter, relished

the imagination of the tale and the implied satire of Chiari's and Goldoni's

plots. Gozzi followed with nine other fiabe in five years; but in these he

supplied a poetic dialogue, thereby in part admitting Goldoni's criticism of

the commedia delV arte. In any case, Gozzi's victory seemed complete. The

attendance at the San Samuele remained high, that at Goldoni's Teatro Sant'

Angelo fell toward bankruptcy. Chiari moved to Brescia, and Goldoni ac-

cepted an invitation to Paris.*

* Two of Gozzi's "fables" were made into operas: Re Turandote by Weber, Busoni, and

Puccini, The Love of the Three Oranges by Prokofiev.

244 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. IX

As his farewell to Venice Goldoni produced (1762) Una delle ultime sere

di Carnevale (One of the Last Evenings of Carnival). It told of a textile de-

signer, Sior Anzoleto, who with a heavy heart was leaving in Venice the

weavers whose looms he had so long provided with patterns. The audience

soon saw in this an allegory for the dramatist regretfully leaving the actors

whose stage he had so long supplied with plays. When Anzoleto appeared

in the final scene, the theater (Goldoni tells us) "rang with thunderous ap-

plause, amid which could be heard, ... 'A happy journey!' 'Come back

to us!' 'Don't fail to come back to us!' " 76 He left Venice on April 15, 1762,

and never saw it again.

In Paris he was engaged for two years in writing comedies for the Theatre

des Italiens. In 1763 he was sued for seduction, 77 but a year later he was

engaged to teach Italian to the daughters of Louis XV. For the wedding of

Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI he composed in French one of

his best plays, Le Bourru bienfaisant (The Benevolent Boor). He was re-

warded with a pension of twelve hundred francs, which was annulled by the

Revolution when he was eighty-one years old. He solaced his poverty by

dictating to his wife his Memoirs (1792)— inaccurate, imaginative, illuminat-

ing, entertaining; Gibbon thought them "more truly dramatic than his

Italian comedies." 78 He died on February 6, 1793. On February 7 the Na-

tional Convention, on a motion by the poet Marie-Joseph de Chenier, restored

his pension. Finding him in no condition to receive it, the Convention gave it,

reduced, to his widow.

Gozzi's victory in Venice was brief. Long before his death (1806) his

Fiabe had passed from the stage, and Goldoni's comedies had been revived

in the theaters of Italy. They are still played there, almost as frequently as

Moliere's in France. His statue stands on the Campo San Bartolommeo in

Venice, and on the Largo Goldoni in Florence. For, as his Memoirs said,

"humanity is everywhere the same, jealousy displays itself everywhere, and

everywhere a man of a cool and tranquil disposition in the end acquires the

love of the public, and wears out his enemies." 79

VI. ROME

South of the Po, along the Adriatic and spanning the Apennines, were the

states of the Church— Ferrara, Bologna, Forli, Ravenna, Perugia, Benevento,

Rome— forming the central and largest part of the Magic Boot.

When Ferrara was incorporated into the Papal States (1598) its Estense

dukes made Modena their home, and gathered there their archives, books,

and art. In 1700 Lodovico Muratori, priest, scholar, and doctor of laws, be-

came curator of these treasures. From them in fifteen years of labor and

twenty-eight volumes, he compiled Rerum italicarum scriptores ( Writers of

Italian Affairs, 1723-38) ; later he added ten volumes of Italian antiquities and

inscriptions. He was rather an antiquarian than an historian, and his twelve-

volume Annali d'ltalia was soon superseded; but his researches in documents

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 245

and inscriptions made him the father and source of modern historical writing

in Italy.

Aside from Rome the most flourishing of these states was Bologna. Its

renowned school of painting continued under Giuseppe Crespi ("Lo Spag-

nuolo"). Its university was still one of the best in Europe. The Palazzo Bevi-

lacqua (1749) was among the most elegant structures of the century. A

remarkable family, centering in Bologna, brought theatrical architecture and

scene painting to their highest excellence in modern times. Ferdinando Galli

da Bibiena built the Teatro Reale at Mantua ( 1 7 3 1 ) , wrote famous texts on

his art, and begot three sons who carried on his skill in deceptive and sump-

tuous ornament. His brother Francesco designed theaters in Vienna, Nancy,

and Rome, and Verona's Teatro Filarmonico— of ten rated the finest in Italy.

Ferdinando's son Alessandro became chief architect for the Elector of the

Palatinate. Another son, Giuseppe, designed the interior of the opera house

at Bayreuth (1748)— "the most beautiful of its kind in existence." 80 A third

son, Antonio, drew the plans for the Teatro Communale at Bologna.

That theater, and the massive old Church of San Petronio, heard the best

instrumental music in Italy, for Bologna was the chief Italian center of musi-

cal education and theory. There Padre Giovanni Battista Martini held his

modest but austere court as the most respected music teacher in Europe. He

had a music library of seventeen thousand volumes; he composed classic texts

on counterpoint and musical history; he corresponded with a hundred celeb-

rities in a dozen lands. The accolade of the Accademia Filarmonica, of which

he was for many years the head, was coveted by all musicians. Here the boy

Mozart would come in 1770 to face the prescribed tests; here Rossini and

Donizetti were to teach. The annual festival of new compositions, performed

by the hundred-piece orchestra of the Accademia, was, for Italy, the su-

preme event of the musical year.

Gibbon estimated the population of Rome in 1740 at some 156,000 souls.

Recalling the brilliance of the Imperial past, and forgetting its paupers and

slaves, he found the charm of the Catholic capital uncongenial to his taste:

Within the spacious enclosures of the [Aurelian] walls the largest portion of

the seven hills is overspread with vineyards and ruins. The beauty and splendor

of the modern city may be ascribed to the abuses of the government, and to

the influence of superstition. Each reign (the exceptions are rare) has been

marked by the rapid elevation of a new family, enriched by the childless pontiff

at the expense of the Church and country. The palaces of these fortunate

nephews are the most costly monuments of elegance and servitude: the perfect

arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture have been prostituted in their serv-

ice; and their galleries and gardens are decorated with the most precious works

of antiquity which taste or vanity has prompted them to collect. 81

The popes of this period were distinguished by their high morality; their

morals rose as their power fell. They were all Italians, for none of the Cath-

olic monarchs would allow any of the others to capture the papacy. Clem-

ent XI (r. 1700-21) justified his name by reforming the prisons of Rome.

Innocent XIII (172 1-24), in the judgment of the Protestant Ranke,

246 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

possessed admirable qualifications for the spiritual as well as the temporal gov-

ernment, but his health was extremely delicate. . . . The Roman families con-

nected with him, and which had hoped to be promoted by him, found them-

selves completely deceived; even his nephew could not obtain without difficulty

the enjoyment of those twelve thousand ducats annually, which had now be-

come the usual income of a nephew. 82

Benedict XIII (1724-30) was "a man of great personal piety," 83 but (says a

Catholic historian) he "allowed far too much power to unworthy favor-

ites." 84 Clement XII (1730-40) flooded Rome with his Florentine friends,

and, when old and blind, allowed himself to be ruled by his nephews, whose

intolerance further embittered the conflict between Jesuits and Jansenists in

France.

Macaulay thought Benedict XIV (1740-58) "the best and wisest of the

250 successors of St. Peter." 85 A sweeping judgment, but Protestants, Cath-

olics, and unbelievers join in acclaiming Benedict as a man of wide learning,

lovable character, and moral integrity. As archbishop of Bologna he had

seen no contradiction between attendance at the opera three times a week

and strict attention to his episcopal tasks; 86 and as a pope he reconciled the

purity of his personal life with gaiety of humor, freedom of speech, and an

almost pagan appreciation of literature and art. He added a nude Venus to

his collection, and told Cardinal de Tencin how the Prince and Princess of

Wurttemberg scratched their names on a gracefully rounded portion of

the anatomy not often mentioned in papal correspondence. 87 His wit was

almost as keen as Voltaire's, but it did not prevent him from being a careful

administrator and a far-seeing diplomat.

He found papal finances in chaos: half the revenue was lost in transit, and

a third of Rome's population consisted of ecclesiastics far more numerous

than the business of the Church required, and more expensive than the

Church could properly afford. Benedict reduced his own staff, dismissed

most of the papal troops, ended papal nepotism, lowered taxes, introduced

agricultural improvements, and encouraged industrial enterprise. Soon his

probity, economies, and efficiency brought a surplus to the papal treasury.

His foreign policy made genial concessions to turbulent kings: he signed

with Sardinia, Portugal, Naples, and Spain concordats allowing their Catholic

rulers to nominate to episcopal sees. He strove to quiet the doctrinal furor

in France by a lax enforcement of the anti-Jansenist bull XJnigenitus; "since

infidelity progresses daily," he wrote, "we must rather ask whether men

believe in God than whether they accept the bull." 88

He made brave efforts to find a modus vivendi with the Enlightenment.

We have noted his cordial acceptance of the dedication of Voltaire's Ma-

homet, though this play was under ecclesiastical fire in Paris (1746). He ap-

pointed a commission to revise the Breviary and to eliminate some of the

more incredible legends; however, the recommendations of this commission

were not carried out. He secured by his personal activity the election of

d'Alembert to the Bologna Institute. 89 He discouraged the hasty prohibition

of books. When some aides advised him to denounce La Mettrie's V Homme

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 247

machine he replied, "Should you not refrain from reporting to me the

audacities of fools?" And he added, "Know/that the pope has a free hand

only to give blessings." 90 The revised Index Expurgatorius which he issued

in 1758 abandoned all attempts to keep track of non-Catholic literature; with

a few exceptions it confined itself to prohibiting some books by Catholic

authors. No condemnation should be made until the author, if available, had

been given a chance to defend himself; no book on a learned subject should

be condemned except after consultation with experts; men of science or

scholarship should be readily given permission to read prohibited books. 91

These rules were followed in subsequent editions of the Index, and were

confirmed by Leo XIII in 1900.

The popes found it almost as difficult to govern Rome as to rule the Cath-

olic world. The populace of the city was probably the roughest and most

violent in Italy, perhaps in Europe. Any cause could lead to a duel in the

nobility, or to a bloody conflict between the sectionally patriotic gangs that

divided the Holy City. At the theater the judgment of the audience could

be merciless, especially when wrong; we shall see an instance with Pergolesi.

The Church strove to appease the people with festivals, processions, indul-

gences, and Carnival. During the eight days preceding Lent they were al-

lowed to don gay and fanciful disguises, and frolic on the Corso; nobles

sought popular favor by parades of horses or chariots bearing skilled riders

or beautiful women, all richly adorned; prostitutes offered their wares at

temporarily raised rates; and masked flirtations relieved for some hours the

strain of monogamy. Carnival over, Rome resumed its uneven tenor of piety

and crime.

Art did not prosper amid the diminishing returns of a declining faith.

Architecture made some minor contributions: Alessandro Galilei gave the

old Church of San Giovanni in Laterano a proud fagade, Ferdinando Fuga

put a new face upon Santa Maria Maggiore, and Francesco de Sanctis raised

the stately, spacious Scala di Spagna from the Piazza di Spagna to the shrine

of Santissima Trinita dei Monti. Sculpture added a famous monument, the

Fontana di Trevi— where the pleased tourist throws a coin over his shoulder

into the water to ensure a further visit to Rome. This "Fountain of the Three

Outlets" had a long history. Bernini may have left a sketch for it; Clement

XII opened a competition for it; Edme Bouchardon of Paris and Lambert-

Sigisbert Adam of Nancy submitted plans; Giovanni Maini was chosen to

design it; Pietro Bracci carved the central group of Neptune and his team

(1732); Filippo della Valle molded the figures of Fertility and Healing;

Niccolo Salvi provided the architectural background; Giuseppe Pannini

completed the work in 1762; this collaboration of many minds and hands

through thirty years may suggest some faltering of will or failure of funds,

but it bars any thought that art in Rome was dead. Bracci added to his honors

the tomb (now in St. Peter's) of Maria Clementina Sobieska, the unhappy

wife of the Stuart Pretender James III; and della Valle left in the Church of

St. Ignatius a delicately carved relief of the Annunciation, worthy of the

High Renaissance.

248 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. IX

Painting produced no marvels at Rome in this age, but Giovanni Battista

Piranesi made engraving a major art. Born to a stonemason near Venice, he

read Palladio and dreamed of palaces and shrines. Venice had more artists

than money, Rome had more money than artists; so Giovanni moved to

Rome, and set up as architect. But buildings were not in demand. He de-

signed them anyway; or, rather, he drew imaginary structures that he knew

no one would build, including fantastic jails that looked as if the Spanish

Steps had fallen upon the Baths of Diocletian. He published these drawings

in 1750 as Opere varie di architettura and Carceri (Prisons), and people

bought them as they bought puzzles or mysteries. In loftier mood Piranesi

turned his skill to engraving his sketches of ancient monuments. He fell in

love with them, as Poussin and Robert did; he mourned to see these classic

ruins disintegrating further, day by day, through spoliation or neglect; for

twenty-five years, almost daily, he went out to draw them, sometimes miss-

ing meals; even when he was dying of cancer he continued to draw, engrave,

and etch. His Roman Antiquities and Views of Rome went out as prints over

Europe, and shared in the architectural revival of classic styles.

That revival was powerfully stimulated by excavations at Herculaneum

and Pompeii— towns that had been overwhelmed by the eruption of Vesuvius

in a.d. 79. In 1 7 19 some peasants reported that they had found statues em-

bedded in the earth at Herculaneum. Nineteen years passed before funds

could be secured for systematic exploration of the site. In 1 748 similar ex-

cavations began to reveal the wonders of pagan Pompeii, and in 1752 the

massive and majestic Greek temples of Paestum were cleared from the jungle.

Archaeologists came from a dozen countries to study and describe the find-

ings; their drawings stirred the interest of artists as well as historians; soon

Rome and Naples were invaded by enthusiasts for classic art, especially from

Germany. Mengs came in 1740, Winckelmann in 1755. Lessing longed to go

to Rome, "to remain there at least for a year, and, if possible, forever." 92 And

Goethe— but let that story wait.

Anton Raphael Mengs is hard to place, for he was born in Bohemia (1728),

worked chiefly in Italy and Spain, and chose Rome for his home. His father,

a painter of miniatures at Dresden, named him after Correggio and Raphael,

and pledged him to art. The boy showed talent, and the father took him, aged

twelve, to Rome. There, we are told, he shut him up in the Vatican day

after day, with bread and wine for lunch, and told him, for the rest, to

feed on the relics of Raphael, Michelangelo, and the classic world. After a

brief stay in Dresden Anton returned to Rome, and won attention by a

painting of the Holy Family. For this he took as his model Margarita Guazzi,

"a poor, virtuous, and beautiful maiden." 93 He married her in 1749, and in

the same embrace he accepted the Roman Catholic faith. Again in Dresden,

he was appointed court painter to Augustus III at a thousand thalers a year.

He agreed to paint two pictures for a Dresden church, but he persuaded the

Elector-King to let him do these in Rome, and in 1752, aged twenty-four, he

settled there. At twenty-six he was made director of the Vatican School of

Painting. In 1755 he met Winckelmann, and agreed with him that baroque

CHAP. IX) ITALIA FELIX 249

was a mistake, and that art must chasten itself with neoclassic forms. Prob-

ably about this time he executed in pastel the self-portrait now in the Dres-

den Gemaldegalerie— the face and hair of a girl, but eyes flashing with the pride

of a man sure that he could shake the world.

When Frederick the Great chased Augustus from Saxony (1756), Mengs's

royal salary stopped, and he had to live on the modest fees offered him in

Italy. He tried Naples, but the local artists, following an old Neapolitan

custom, threatened his life as an alien invader, and Mengs hurried back to

Rome. He adorned the Villa Albani with once famous frescoes; still visible

there is his famassus (1761), technically excellent, coldly classical, emotion-

ally dead. Nevertheless the Spanish minister at Rome felt that this was the

man to decorate the royal palace in Madrid. Charles III sent for Mengs,

promised him two thousand doubloons per year, plus a house and a coach,

and free passage on a Spanish man-of-war soon to sail from Naples. In Sep-

tember, 1 76 1, Mengs arrived in Madrid.

VII. NAPLES

/. The King and the People

The kingdom of Naples, comprising all Italy south of the Papal States, was

buffeted about in the struggle for power among Austria, Spain, England, and

France. But that is the dreary logic-chopping of history, the bloody seesaw

of victory and defeat; let us merely note that Austria took Naples in 1707;

that Don Carlos, Bourbon duke of Parma and son of Philip V of Spain,

drove out the Austrians in 1734, and, as Charles IV, king of Naples and

Sicily, ruled till 1759. His capital, with 300,000 population, was the largest

city in Italy.

Charles matured slowly into the royal art. At first he took kingship as a

license for luxury: he neglected government, spent half his days in hunting,

and ate himself into obesity. Then, toward 1755, inspired by his Minister of

Justice and Foreign Affairs, Marchese Bernardo di Tanucci, he undertook to

mitigate the harsh feudalism that underlay the toil and ecstasy of Neapolitan

life.

Three interlocking groups had long ruled the kingdom. Nobles owned

almost two thirds of the land, held four fifths of its five million souls in bond-

age, dominated the parliament, controlled taxation, and frustrated all reform.

The clergy owned a third of the land, and held the people in spiritual

subjection with a theology of terror, a literature of legends, a ritual of stupe-

faction, and such miracles as the semiannual manipulated liquefaction of the

congealed blood of St. Januarius, Naples' patron saint. Administration was

in the hands of lawyers beholden to nobles or prelates, and therefore pledged

to the medieval status quo. A small middle class, mostly of merchants, was

politically impotent. Peasants and proletaires lived in a poverty that drove

some into brigandage and many into beggary; there were thirty thousand

250 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

beggars in Naples alone. 94 De Brosses called the masses of the capital "the most

abominable riffraff, the most disgusting vermin" 95 — a judgment that con-

demned the result without stigmatizing the cause. We must admit, however,

that those ragged, superstitious, and priest-ridden Neapolitans seemed to have

more of the salt and joy of life in them than any other populace in Europe.

Charles checked the power of the nobles by attracting them to the court

to be under the royal eye, and by creating new nobles pledged to his support.

He discouraged the flow of youth into monasteries, reduced the ecclesiastical

multitude from 100,000 to 81,000, laid a tax of two per cent upon church

property, and limited the legal immunities of the clergy. Tannuci restricted

the jurisdiction of the nobles, fought judicial corruption, reformed legal

procedure, and moderated the severity of the penal code. Freedom of wor-

ship was allowed to the Jews, but the monks assured Charles that his lack of

a male heir was God's punishment for this sinful toleration, and the indul-

gence was withdrawn. 98

The King's passion for building gave Naples two famous structures. The

vast Teatro San Carlo was raised in 1737; it is still one of the largest and most

beautiful opera houses in existence. In 1752 Luigi Vanvitelli began at Caserta,

twenty-one miles northeast of the capital, the enormous royal palace that

was designed to rival Versailles, and to serve the similar functions of hous-

ing the royal family, the attendant nobility, and the main administrative

staff. Slaves black or white toiled on the task for twenty-two years. Curved

buildings flanked a spacious approach to the central edifice, which spread its

front for 830 feet. Within were a chapel, a theater, countless rooms, and a

broad double stairway of which every step was a single marble slab. Behind the

palace, for half a mile, lay formal gardens, a population of statues, and ma-

jestic fountains supplied by an aqueduct twenty-seven miles long.

Other than this Caserta (for the palace, like the Escorial and Versailles,

took the name of its town) there was no outstanding art in the Naples of this

age, nor anything meijiorable in drama or poetry. One man wrote a bold

Istoria civile del regno di Napoli (1723), a running attack upon the greed

of the clergy, the abuses of the ecclesiastical courts, the temporal power of

the Church, and the claim of the papacy to hold Naples as a papal fief; its

author, Pietro Giannone, was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Na-

ples, fled to Vienna, was thrown into prison by the King of Sardinia, and

died in Turin (1748) after twelve years of confinement. 97 — Antonio Geno-

vesi, a priest, lost his faith while reading Locke, and in Elementa metaphys-

icae (1743) tried to introduce the Lockian psychology into Italy. In 1754 a

Florentine businessman established in the University of Naples the first

European chair of political economy on two conditions: that it should never

be held by an ecclesiastic, and that its first occupant should be Antonio Geno-

vesi. Genovesi repaid him (1756) with the first systematic economic treatise

in Italian, Lezioni di comtnercio, which voiced the cry of merchants and

manufacturers for liberation from feudal, ecclesiastical, and other restraints

on free enterprise. In that same year Quesnay raised the same demand for the

French middle class in his articles for Diderot's Encyclopedie.

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 25 I

Perhaps some liaison had been established between Genovesi and Quesnay

by Ferdinando Galiani, of Naples and Paris. Galiani published in 1750 a

Trattato della moneta, in which, with the innocence of a twenty-two-year-

old economist, he determined the price of a product by the cost of its pro-

duction. More brilliant was his Dialoghi sul commercio dei grani, which we

have noted as a criticism of Quesnay. When he had to come home after his

exciting years in Paris, he mourned that Naples had no salons, no Mme.

Geoffrin to feed him and stir his wit. It had, however, a philosopher who

left a mark on history.

2. Giambattista Vico

At the age of seven, says his autobiography, he fell from a ladder, struck

the ground head first, and remained unconscious for five hours. He suffered

a cranial fracture over which a massive tumor formed. This was reduced by

successive lancings; however, the boy lost so much blood in the process that

the surgeons expected his early death. "By God's grace" he survived, "but

as a result of this mischance I grew up with a melancholy and irritable tem-

perament." 98 He also developed tuberculosis. If genius depends upon some

physical handicap Vico was richly endowed.

At seventeen (1685) he earned his bread by tutoring at Vatolla (near

Salerno) the nephews of the bishop of Ischia. There he remained nine years,

meanwhile feverishly studying jurisprudence, philology, history, and phi-

losophy. He read with special fascination Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Ma-

chiavelli, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Grotius, with some injury to his

catechism. In 1697 he obtained a professorship in rhetoric at the University

of Naples; it paid him only a hundred ducats yearly, to which he added by

tutoring; on this he raised a large family. One daughter died in youth; one

son showed such vicious tendencies that he had to be sent to a house of

correction. The wife was illiterate and incompetent; Vico had to be father,

mother, and teacher." Amid these distractions he wrote his philosophy of

history.

Principi di una scienza nuova d'intorno alia commune natura delle nazioni

(1725) offered the "principles of a new science concerning the common

nature of the nations," and proposed to find in the jungle of history regulari-

ties of sequence that might illuminate past, present, and future. Vico thought

that he could discern three main periods in the history of every people:

(1) The age of the gods, in which the Gentiles believed that they lived

under divine governments, and that everything was commanded them by

[gods through] auspices and oracles. ... (2) The age of heroes, when these

reigned in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority of

nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of

men, in which all recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and there-

fore established the first popular commonwealths, and then monarchies. 100

Vico applied the first period only to "Gentiles" and "profane" (non-

Biblical) history; he could not, without offending sacred tradition, speak of

252 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

the Old Testament Jews as merely believing that they "lived under divine

governments." Since the Inquisition (severer in Naples than in northern

Italy) had prosecuted Neapolitan scholars for talking of men before Adam,

Vico laboriously reconciled his formula with Genesis by supposing that all

the descendants of Adam, except the Jews, had relapsed, after the Flood, into

an almost bestial condition, living in caves, and copulating indiscriminately

in a communism of women. It was from this secondary "state of nature" that

civilization had developed through the family, agriculture, property, moral-

ity, and religion. At times Vico spoke of religion as a primitive animistic way

of explaining objects and events; at times he exalted it as a peak of evolution.

To the three stages of social development correspond three "natures," or

ways of interpreting the world: the theological, the legendary, the rational.

The first nature, by an illusion of imagination (which is strongest in those

who are weakest in reasoning power), was a poetic or creative nature, which

we may be allowed to call divine, since it conceived physical things as ani-

mated by gods. . . . Through the same error of their imagination men had a

terrible fear of the gods whom they themselves had created. . . . The second

nature was the heroic: the heroes believed themselves to be of divine origin.

. . . The third was the human nature [way], intelligent and therefore modest,

benign, and rational, recognizing conscience, reason, and duty as laws. 101

Vico strove to fit the history of language, literature, law, and government

into this triadic scheme. In the first stage men communicated through signs

and gestures; in the second, through "emblems, similitudes, images"; in the

third, through "words agreed upon by the people, . . . whereby they might

fix the meaning of the laws." Law itself passed through a corresponding

development: at first it was divine, god-given, as in the Mosaic code; then

heroic, as in Lycurgus; then human— "dictated by fully developed human

reason." 102 Government, too, has gone through three stages: the theocratic,

in which the rulers claimed to be the voice of God; the aristocratic, in which

"all civil rights" were confined to the ruling order of "heroes"; and the hu-

man, wherein "all are accounted equal before the laws. . . . This is the case

in the free popular cities, and . . . also in those monarchies that make all

their subjects equal under their laws." 103 Vico evidently recalled Plato's

summary of political evolution from monarchy through aristocracy to de-

mocracy to dictatorship (tyrannis), but he varied the formula to read:

theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, monarchy. He agreed with Plato that

democracy tends toward chaos, and he looked upon one-man rule as a neces-

sary remedy for democratic disorder; "monarchies are the final governments

... in which nations come to rest." 104

Social disorder may come through moral deterioration, luxury, effeminacy,

loss of martial qualities, corruption in office, a disruptive concentration of

wealth, or an aggressive envy among the poor. Usually such disorder leads

to dictatorship, as when the rule of Augustus cured the democratic chaos

of the Roman Republic. 105 If even dictatorship fails to stem decay, some more

vigorous nation enters as conqueror.

Since people so far corrupted have already become slaves of their unre-

strained passions, . . . Providence decrees that they become slaves by the

CHAP.IX) ITALIA FELIX 253

natural law of nations; . . . they become subject to better nations which,

having conquered them, keep them as subject provinces. Herein two great lights

of natural order shine forth: first, that he who cannot govern himself must

let himself be governed by another who can; second, that the world is always

governed by those who are naturally fittest. 106

In such cases the conquered people falls back into the stage of development

reached by its conquerors. So the population of the Roman Empire, after

the barbarian invasions, relapsed into barbarism, and had to begin with the-

ocracy [rule by priests and theology]; such were the Dark Ages. With the

Crusades came another heroic age; the feudal chieftains correspond to the

heroes of Homer, and Dante is Homer again.

We hear in Vico echoes of the theory that history is a circular repetition,

and of Machiavelli's law of corsi e ricorsi, development and return. The idea

of progress suffers in this analysis; progress is merely one half of a cyclical

movement in which the other half is decay; history, like life, is evolution and

dissolution in an ineluctible sequence and fatality.

On his way Vico offered some striking suggestions. He reduced many

heroes of classic legend to eponyms— afternames— post-factum personifica-

tions of long impersonal or multipersonal processes; so Orpheus was the

imaginary consolidation of many primitive musicians; Lycurgus was the

embodiment of the series of laws and customs that congealed Sparta; Romu-

lus was a thousand men who had made Rome a state. 107 Likewise Vico re-

duced Homer to a myth by arguing— half a century before Friedrich Wolfs

Prolegomena to Homer (1795)— that the Homeric epics are the accumulated

and gradually amalgamated product of groups and generations of rhapsodes

who sang, in the cities of Greece, the sagas of Troy and Odysseus. 108 And

almost a century before Barthold Niebuhr's History of Rome (181 1-32)

Vico rejected as legendary the first chapters of Livy. "All the histories of the

Gentile nations have had fabulous beginnings." 109 (Again Vico carefully

avoids impugning the historicity of Genesis.)

This epochal book reveals a powerful but harassed mind struggling to

formulate basic ideas without getting himself into an Inquisition jail. Vico

went out of his way, time after time, to profess his loyalty to the Church,

and he felt that he merited ecclesiastical commendation for explaining the

principles of jurisprudence in a manner compatible with Catholic theology. 110

We hear a sincerer tone in his view of religion as the indispensable support

of social order and personal morality: "Religions alone have the power to

cause the people to do virtuous works . . ." m And yet, despite his frequent

use of "Providence," he seems to eliminate God from history, and to reduce

events to the unimpeded play of natural causes and effects. A Dominican

scholar attacked Vico's philosophy as not Christian but Lucretian.

Perhaps the emerging secularism of Vico's analysis had something to do

with its failure to win a hearing in Italy, and doubtless the disorderly dis-

cursiveness of his work and the confusion of his thought doomed his "new

science" to a still but painful birth. No one agreed with his belief that he

had written a profound or illuminating book. He appealed in vain to Jean

Le Clerc to at least mention it in the periodical Nouvelles de la republique

254 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

des lettres. Ten years after the Scienza nuova appeared, Charles IV came to

Vico's aid by appointing him historiographer royal with a yearly stipend of

a hundred ducats. In 1741 Giambattista had the satisfaction of seeing his son

Gennaro succeed to his professorship in the University of Naples. In his final

years (1743-44) his mind gave way, and he lapsed into a mysticism border-

ing on insanity.

A copy of his book was in Montesquieu's library. 112 In private notes the

French philosopher acknowledged his debt to Vico's theory of cyclical de-

velopment and decay; and that debt, unnamed, appears in Montesquieu's

Greatness and Decadence of the Rowans (1734). For the rest Vico remained

almost unknown in France until Jules Michelet published (1827) an abridged

translation of the Scienza nuova, Michelet described Italy as "the second

mother and nurse who in my youth suckled me on Virgil, and in my ma-

turity nourished me with Vico." 113 In 1826 Auguste Comte began the lec-

tures that became his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42), wherein the

influence of Vico is felt at every stage. It was left for a Neapolitan, Benedetto

Croce, to give Vico his full due, 114 and to suggest again that history must

take its place beside science as the ground and vestibule of philosophy.

3. Neapolitan Music

Naples reversed Pythagoras, and judged music to be the highest philoso-

phy. Said Lalande, the French astronomer, after a tour of Italy in 1765-66:

Music is the special triumph of the Neapolitans. It seems as if in that country

the membranes of the eardrum are more taut, more harmonious, more sonorous

than elsewhere in Europe. The whole nation sings. Gestures, tone, voice,

rhythm of syllables, the very conversation— all breathe music. ... So Naples

is the principal source of Italian music, of great composers and excellent operas;

it is there that Corelli, Vinci, Rinaldo, Jommelli, Durante, Leo, Pergolesi, . . .

and so many other famous composers have brought forth their masterpieces. 115

Naples, however; was supreme only in opera and vocal melody; in instru-

mental music Venice led the way; and music fanciers complained that the

Neapolitans loved the tricks of the voice more than the subtleties of harmony

and counterpoint. Here reigned Niccolo Porpora, "perhaps the greatest sing-

ing teacher who ever lived." 116 Every Italian warbler aspired to be his pupil,

and, once accepted, bore humbly with his imperious eccentricities; so, said

a story, he kept Gaetano Caffarelli for five years at one page of exercises, and

then dismissed him with the assurance that he was now the greatest singer in

Europe. 117 Second only to Porpora as a teacher was Francesco Durante, who

taught Vinci, Jommelli, Pergolesi, Paisiello, and Piccini.

Leonardo Vinci seemed handicapped by his name, but he won early ac-

claim by his setting of Metastasio's Didone abbandonata; Algarotti felt that

"Virgil himself would have been pleased to hear a composition so animated

and so harrowing in which the heart and soul were at once assailed by all

the powers of music." 118 Still more famous was Leonardo Leo, in opera seria

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 255

and buff a, oratorio, Masses, and motets; Naples oscillated for some time be-

tween laughing at his comic opera La finta Fracastana and weeping over the

"Miserere" that he composed for the Lenten services of 1 744.

When, about 1735, Leo heard a cantata by Niccolo Jommelli, he ex-

claimed, "A short time, and this young man will be the wonder and admira-

tion of Europe." 119 Jommelli almost verified the prophecy. At twenty-three

he won the plaudits of Naples with his first opera; at twenty-six he earned

a similar triumph in Rome. Passing to Bologna, he presented himself as a

pupil to Padre Martini; but when that reverend teacher heard him extem-

porize a fugue in all its classic development he cried out, "Who are you,

then? Are you making fun of me? It is 1 who should learn from you." 120 At

Venice his operas aroused such enthusiasm that the Council of Ten appointed

him music director of the Scuola degli Incurabili; there he wrote some of the

best religious music of that generation. Moving on to Vienna (1748) he

composed in close friendship with Metastasio. After further victories in

Venice and Rome he settled down in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg (1753-68)

as Kapellmeister to the Duke of Wiirttemberg. Here he modified his operatic

style in a German direction, giving more complexity to his harmony, more

substance and weight to the instrumental music; he discarded the da capo

repetition of arias, and provided orchestral accompaniment for recitatives.

Probably under the influence of Jean-Georges Noverre, the French ballet

master at Stuttgart, he gave ballet a prominent part in his operas. In some

measure these developments in Jommelli's music prepared the way for the

reforms of Gluck.

When the aging composer returned to Naples (1768) the audience re-

sented his Teutonic tendencies, and decisively rejected his operas. Mozart,

hearing one of them there in 1770, remarked: "It is beautiful, but the style

is too elevated, as well as too antique, for the theater." 121 Jommelli fared

better with his church music; his "Miserere" and his Mass for the Dead were

sung throughout the Catholic world. William Beckford, after hearing the

Mass in Lisbon in 1787, wrote: "Such august, such affecting music I never

heard, and perhaps may never hear again." 122 Having saved his earnings with

Teutonic care, Jommelli retired to his native Aversa, and spent his final

years in opulent corpulence. In 1774 all the prominent musicians of Naples

attended his funeral.

Naples laughed even more than it sang. It was with a comic opera that

Pergolesi conquered Paris after that proud city, alone among the European

capitals, had refused to submit to Italy's opera seria. Giovanni Battista Pergo-

lesi did not fight that battle in person, for he died in 1736 at the age of

twenty-six. Born near Ancona, he came to Naples at sixteen. By the age of

twenty-two he had written several operas, thirty sonatas, and two Masses

much admired. In 1733 he presented an opera, // prigioniero, and as an inter-

lude to this he offered La serva padrona— "the maid" become "mistress" of

the house. The libretto is a jolly story of how Serpina, the servant, maneu-

vers her master into marrying her; the music is an hour of gaiety and agile

arias. We have seen how this artful frolic captured the mood and heart of

256 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

Paris in the Guerre des Bouffons of 1752, when it ran for a hundred per-

formances at the Opera, and then, in 1753, for ninety-six more at the

Theatre-Fran5ais. Meanwhile Pergolesi conducted his opera UOlimpiade in

Rome (1735). It was hailed with a storm of hoots, and with an orange accu-

rately aimed at the composer's head. 123 A year later he went to Pozzuoli to

be treated for tuberculosis, which had been made worse by his profligate life.

His early death atoned for his sins, and he was buried in the local cathedral

by the Capuchin friars among whom he had spent his last days. Rome, re-

pentant, revived UOlimpiade, and applauded it rapturously. Italy honors him

not so much for his joyous intermezzi as for the tender sentiment of his

"Stabat Mater," which he did not live to complete. Pergolesi himself was

made the subject of two operas.

Domenico Scarlatti, like Pergolesi, has been slightly inflated by the winds

of taste, but who can resist the sparkle of his prestidigitation? Born in the

annus mirabilis of Handel and Bach (1685), he was the sixth child of Ales-

sandro Scarlatti, then the Verdi of Italian opera. He breathed music from his

birth. His brother Pietro, his cousin Giuseppe, his uncles Francesco and

Tommaso, were musicians; Giuseppe's operas were produced in Naples,

Rome, Turin, Venice, Vienna. Fearing lest Domenico's genius be stifled by

this plethora of talent, the father sent him, aged twenty, to Venice. "This son

of mine," he said, "is an eagle whose wings are grown. He must not remain

in the nest, and I must not hinder his flight." 124

In Venice the youth continued his studies, and met Handel. Perhaps to-

gether they passed to Rome, where, at the urging of Cardinal Ottoboni, they

engaged in an amiable competition on the harpsichord and then on the organ.

Domenico was already the best harpsichordist in Italy, but Handel, we are

told, equaled him; while on the organ Scarlatti frankly owned /'/ caro Sas-

sone's superiority. The two men became fast friends; this is extremely diffi-

cult for leading practitioners of the same art, but, a contemporary tells us,

"Domenico had the sweetest temper and the genteelest behavior," 125 and

Handel's heart was as big as his frame. The shy modesty of the Italian de-

terred him from giving public displays of his harpsichord mastery; we know

it only from reports of private musicales. One auditor in Rome (17 14)

"thought ten thousand devils had been at the instrument"; never before had

he heard "such passages of execution and effect." 126 Scarlatti was the first to

develop the keyboard potentialities of the left hand, including its crossing

over the right. "Nature," he said, "gave me ten fingers, and as my instrument

has employment for all, I see no reason why I should not use them." 127

In 1709 he accepted appointment as maestro di capella to the former

Queen of Poland, Maria Kazimiera. On the death of her husband, Jan So-

bieski, she had been banished as a troublesome intriguer; coming to Rome in

1 699, she resolved to set up a salon as brilliant with genius as that of Queen

Christina of Sweden, who had died ten years before. In a palace on the Piazza

della Trinita dei Monti she gathered many of Christina's former circle,

including several members of the Arcadian Academy. There (1709-14)

Scarlatti produced several of his operas. Encouraged by their success, he

CHAP. IX ) ITALIA FELIX 257

presented Amleto (Hamlet) in the Teatro Capranico. It was not well re-

ceived, and Domenico never again offered an opera to an Italian public. His

father had set a standard too high for him to reach.

For four years (17 15-19) he directed the Cappella Giulia at the Vatican,

and officiated at the organ in St. Peter's; now he composed a "Stabat Mater"

which has been pronounced "a genuine masterpiece. " 128 In 17 19 he con-

ducted his opera Narciso in London. Two years later we find him in Lisbon

as chapelmaster to John V, and as teacher to the King's daughter Maria Bar-

bara, who became a skilled harpsichordist under his tutelage; most of his

extant sonatas were composed for her use. Returning to Naples (1725), he

married, age forty-two, Maria Gentile, age sixteen; and in 1729 he took her

to Madrid. In that year Maria Barbara married Ferdinand, Crown Prince of

Spain. When she moved with him to Seville Scarlatti accompanied her, and

he remained in her service till her death.

Scarlatti's wife died in 1739, leaving him five children. He married again,

and soon the five were nine. When Maria Barbara became queen of Spain

(1746) she brought the Scarlatti family with her to Madrid. Farinelli was the

favorite musician of the royal pair, but the singer and the virtuoso became

good friends. Scarlatti's position was that of a privileged servitor, providing

music for the Spanish court. He obtained leave to go to Dublin in 1740 and

to London in 1741; but mostly he lived in quiet content in or near Madrid,

almost secluded from the world, and probably with no suspicion that he

would become a favorite with pianists in the twentieth century.

Of the 555 "sonatas" that now precariously support his fame on their tonal

filigree, Scarlatti in his lifetime published only thirty. Their modest title,

Esercizii per gravicembalo, indicated their limited aim— to explore the possi-

bilities of expression through harpsichord technique. They are sonatas only

in the older sense of the term, as instrumental pieces to be "sounded," not

sung. Some have contrasted themes, and some are paired in major and minor

keys, but they are all in single movements, with no attempt at thematic elabo-

ration and recapitulation. They represent the emancipation of harpsichord

music from the influence of the organ, and the reception, by keyboard com-

positions, of influences from opera. The vivacity, delicacy, trills, and tricks

of sopranos and castrati are here surpassed by agile fingers obeying a playful

and prodigal imagination. Scarlatti literally "played" the harpsichord. "Do

not expect," he said, "any profound learning, but rather an ingenious jesting

with art." 129 Something of the Spanish dance— its prancing feet and swirling

skirts and tinkling castanets— is in these ripples and cascades, and everywhere

in the sonatas is the abandon of a performer to pleasure in mastery over his

instrument. 130

That joy in the instrument must have been one source of solace to Scar-

latti in those serving years in Spain. It was rivaled by his delight in gambling,

which consumed much of his pension; the Queen had repeatedly to pay his

debts. After 1751 his health failed, and his piety increased. In 1754 he re-

turned to Naples, and there, three years later, he died. The good Farinelli

provided for his friend's impoverished family.

258 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. IX

We have left to a later chapter the strange career of Farinelli in Spain. He

and Domenico Scarlatti, Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo, were among

the gifted Italians who, with the almost Italianate Mengs, brought Italian

music and art into the Spanish quickening. In 1759 the King of Naples fol-

lowed or preceded them. In that year Ferdinand VI died without issue, and

his brother Charles IV of Naples inherited the Spanish throne as Charles III.

Naples was sorry to see him go. His departure, in a fleet of sixteen ships, was

a sad holiday for the Neapolitans; they gathered in great throngs along the

shore to see him sail away, and many, we are told, wept in bidding farewell

to "a sovereign who had proved himself the father of his people." 131 He was

to crown his career by rejuvenating Spain.

CHAPTER X

Portugal and Pombal

1706-82

1. john v: 1706-50

WHY had Portugal declined since the great days of Magellan, Vasco

da Gama, and Camoes? Once her flesh and spirit had sufficed to ex-

plore half the globe, leaving bold colonies in Madeira, the Azores, South

America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Malacca, Sumatra; now, in the eight-

eenth century, she was a tiny promontory of Europe, tied in trade and war

to England, and nourished by Brazilian gold and diamonds reaching her by

permission of the British fleet. Had her loins been exhausted by furnishing

brave men to hold so many outposts precariously poised on the edges of the

world? Had that influx of gold washed the iron out of her veins, and relaxed

her ruling classes from adventure into ease?

Yes, and it had enervated Portuguese industry as well. What was the use

of trying to compete in handicrafts or manufactures with artisans or entre-

preneurs of England, Holland, or France, when imported gold could be paid

out for imported clothing, food, and luxuries? The rich, handling the gold,

grew richer and more gorgeously accoutered and adorned; the poor, kept at

a distance from that gold, remained poor, and had only hunger as a prod

to toil. Negro slave labor was introduced on many farms, and beggars made

the cities noisy with their cries. William Beckford, hearing them in 1787,

reported: "No beggars equal those of Portugal for strength of lungs, luxuri-

ance of sores, profusion of vermin, variety and arrangement of tatters, and

dauntless perseverance. . . . Innumerable, blind, dumb, and scabby." 1

Lisbon was not then the lovely city that it is today. The churches and the

monasteries were magnificent, the palaces of the nobility were immense, but

fully a tenth of the population was homeless, and the tortuous alleys reeked

with rubbish and filth. 2 Yet here, as elsewhere in southern lands, the poor

had the consolations of sunny days, starry evenings, music, religion, and

pious women with tantalizing eyes. Undeterred by fleas on their flesh and

mosquitoes in the air, the people poured into the streets after the heat had

subsided, and there they danced, sang, strummed guitars, and fought over a

damsel's smile.

Treaties (1654, 1661, 1703) had bound Portugal to England in a strange

symbiosis that allied them in economy and foreign policy while keeping

them enthusiastically diverse in manners and hostile in creed. England prom-

ised to protect Portugal's independence, and to admit Portuguese wine (port

from Oporto) at a greatly reduced tariff. Portugal pledged herself to admit

2 59

260 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. X

English textiles duty free, and to side with England in any war. The Portu-

guese thought of the English as damned heretics with a good navy; the Eng-

lish looked upon the Portuguese as benighted bigots with strategic ports.

British capital dominated Portuguese industry and trade. Pombal complained,

with some exaggeration:

In 1754 Portugal scarcely produced anything toward her own support. Two

thirds of her physical necessities were supplied by England. England had be-

come mistress of our entire commerce, and all our foreign trade was managed

by English agents. . . . The entire cargo of vessels sent from Lisbon to Brazil,

and consequently the riches that were returned in exchange, belonged to them.

Nothing was Portuguese except in name. 3

Nevertheless enough of colonial gold, silver, and gems reached the Portu-

guese government to finance its expenses and make the king independent of

the Cortes and its taxing power. So John V, in his reign of forty-four years,

lived in sultanic ease, gracing polygamy with culture and piety. He gave or

lent enormous sums to the papacy, and received in return the title of His

Most Faithful Majesty, and even the right to say Mass— though not to change

bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. "His pleasures," said Fred-

erick the Great, "were in priestly functions; his buildings were convents, his

armies were monks, his mistresses were nuns." 4

The Church prospered under a King who owed her so many absolutions.

She owned half the land, 5 and her devotees filled nine hundred religious

houses. Of the nation's two million population some 200,000 were ecclesias-

tics of some degree, or attached to a religious establishment. The Jesuits were

especially prominent, at home and in the colonies; they had shared in win-

ning Brazil for Portugal, and were pleasing even Voltaire by their adminis-

tration of Paraguay; several of them were welcomed at court, and some of

them acquired ascendancy over the King. In the great procession of Corpus

Christi the King bore one of the poles of the canopy under which the

Patriarch of Lisbon carried the Blessed Sacrament. When Englishmen mar-

veled to see the route of the procession lined with troops and worshipers, all

bareheaded and kneeling, it was explained to them that such ceremonies, and

the display of precious vessels and miraculous relics in the churches, were a

main factor in keeping social order among the poor.

Meanwhile the Inquisition watched over the purity of the nation's faith

and blood. John V checked the power of the institution by securing from

Pope Benedict XIII a bull allowing its prisoners to be defended by counsel,

and requiring that all its sentences be subject to review by the king. 6 Even

so the authority of the tribunal sufficed to burn sixty-six persons in Lisbon

in eleven years (1732-42). Among them was the leading Portuguese drama-

tist of the age, Antonio Jose da Silva, who was charged with secret Judaism.

On the day of his execution (October 19, 1739) one of his plays was per-

formed in a Lisbon theater. 7

John V loved music, literature, and art. He brought French actors and

Italian musicians to his capital. He founded the Royal Academy of History.

He financed the great aqueduct that supplies Lisbon with water. He built,

CHAP.X) PORTUGAL AND POMBAL l6l

at a cost of fifty million francs, the Convent of Mafra (1717-32), vaster than

the Escorial, and still among the most imposing structures in the Iberian

Peninsula. To adorn the interior he summoned back from Spain the greatest

Portuguese painter of the century.

The eighty-four years of Francisco Vieira mingled love and art in a ro-

mance that stirred all Portugal. Born at Lisbon in 1699, he fell in love with

Ignez Elena de Lima when both were children. Enamored also of painting,

he went to Rome at the age of nine, studied there for seven years, and, aged

fifteen, won the first prize in a competition offered by the Academy of St.

Luke. Returning in 17 15, he was chosen by John V to paint a Mystery of

the Eucharist. This, we are told, he finished in six days; then he set out to

find Ignez. Her titled father turned him away, and immured the girl in a

convent. Francisco appealed to the King, who refused to intervene. He went

to Rome and secured a bull annulling Ignez' conventual vows and author-

izing the marriage. The bull was ignored by Portuguese authorities. Fran-

cisco, back in Lisbon, disguised himself as a bricklayer, entered the convent,

carried off his beloved, and married her. Her brother shot him; he recovered

and forgave his assailant. John V made him court painter and gave him com-

missions to decorate not only the Mafra Convent but the royal palaces. After

Ignez died (1775), Francisco spent his remaining years in religious retreat

and works of charity. How many such romances of soul and blood are lost

behind the fagades of history!

II. POMBAL AND THE JESUITS

John V died in 1750 after eight years of paralysis and imbecility, and his

son Joseph I (Jose Manoel) began an eventful reign. He appointed to his

cabinet, as minister for war and foreign affairs, Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e

Mello, whom history knows as the Marques de Pombal, the greatest and most

terrible minister who ever governed Portugal.

He was already fifty-one years old when Joseph reached the throne. Edu-

cated by the Jesuits at the University of Coimbra, he won his first fame as an

athletic and pugnacious leader of the "Mohocks" gang that infested the

streets of Lisbon. In 1733 he persuaded the highborn Dona Teresa de No-

ronha to elope with him. Her family denounced him, then recognized his

talent and promoted his political career. His wife brought him a small for-

tune; he inherited another from an uncle. He made his way by influence,

persistence, and obvious ability. In 1739 he was appointed minister plenipo-

tentiary to London. His wife retired to a convent, and died there in 1745.

In his six years in England Pombal studied the English economy and govern-

ment, noted the obedience of the Anglican Church to the state, and perhaps

shed some of his Catholic faith. He returned to Lisbon (1744), was sent as

envoy to Vienna (1745), and there married a niece of Marshal Daun, who

remained devoted to him through all his triumphs and defeats,

was to earn immortality by defeating Frederick once. Pombal's new bride

262 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. X

John V had distrusted him as having "a hairy heart," 8 as "coming from a

cruel and vindictive family," 9 and as capable of defying a king. Nevertheless

Pombal was called home in 1749, and was raised to ministerial office with

Jesuit support. Joseph I confirmed the appointment. Intelligence combined

with industry soon gave Pombal dominance in the new cabinet. "Carvalho,"

reported a French charge d'affaires, "may be looked upon as the chief minis-

ter. He is indefatigable, active, and expeditious. He has won the confidence

of the King his master, and in all political matters none has it more than

he." 10

His superiority became evident in the great earthquake of November 1,

1755. At 9:40 a.m. on All Saints' Day, when most of the population were

worshiping in the churches, four convulsions of the earth laid half of Lis-

bon in ruins, killing over fifteen thousand people, destroying most of the

churches, sparing most of the brothels, 11 and Pombal's home. Many inhabit-

ants ran in terror to the shores of the Tagus, but a tidal wave fifteen feet

high drowned thousands more, and wrecked the vessels that lay in the river.

The fires that broke out in every quarter of the city claimed additional lives.

In the resultant chaos the scum of the populace began to rob and kill with

impunity. The King, who himself had narrowly escaped death, asked his

ministers what should be done. Pombal is reported to have answered, "Bury

the dead and relieve the living." Joseph gave him full authority, and Pombal

used it with characteristic energy and dispatch. He stationed troops to main-

tain order, set up tents and camps for the homeless, and decreed immediate

hanging for anyone found robbing the dead. He fixed the prices of provisions

at those that had prevailed before the earthquake, and compelled all incom-

ing ships to unload their cargoes of food and sell them at those prices. Helped

by an undiminished influx of Brazilian gold, he supervised the rapid rebuild-

ing of Lisbon with wide boulevards and well-paved and well-lit streets. The

central part of the city as it is today was the work of the architects and

engineers who worked under Pombal. 12

His success in this demoralizing catastrophe confirmed his power in the

ministry. Now he undertook two far-reaching tasks: to free the government

from domination by the Church, and to free the economy from domination

by Britain. These enterprises required a man of steel, of patriotism, ruthless-

ness, and pride.

If his anticlericalism struck especially at the Jesuits, it was primarily be-

cause he suspected them of fomenting the resistance to Portuguese appro-

priation of that Paraguayan territory where the Jesuits had since 1 605 been

organizing over 100,000 Indians into thirty-one reductiones, or settlements,

on a semicommunistic basis in formal submission to Spain. 13 Spanish and

Portuguese explorers had heard of (quite legendary) gold in Paraguayan soil,

and merchants complained that the Jesuit fathers were monopolizing the ex-

port trade of Paraguay and were adding the profits to the funds of their

order. In 1750 Pombal negotiated a treaty by which Portugal surrendered to

Spain the rich colony of San Sacramento (at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata)

in exchange for seven of the Jesuit "reductions" adjacent to the Brazilian

CHAP.X) PORTUGAL AND POMBAL 263

frontier. The treaty stipulated that the thirty thousand Indians in these com-

munities should emigrate to other regions, and relinquish the land to the in-

coming Portuguese. Ferdinand VI of Spain ordered the Paraguayan Jesuits

to leave the settlements, and to instruct their subjects to depart in peace. The

Jesuits claimed to have obeyed these orders, but the Indians resisted with a

passionate and violent tenacity, which it took a Portuguese army three years

to overcome. Pombal accused the Society of Jesus of secretly encouraging

this resistance. He resolved to end all Jesuit participation in Portuguese in-

dustry, commerce, and government. Perceiving his intention, the Jesuits of

Portugal joined in efforts to overthrow him.

Their leader in this movement was Gabriel Malagrida. Born in Menaggio

(on Lake Como) in 1689, he distinguished himself at school by biting his

hands till the blood flowed; so, he said, he prepared himself to bear the pains

of martyrdom. He joined the Society of Jesus, and sailed as a missionary to

Brazil. From 1724 to 1735 he preached the Gospel to Indians in the jungle.

Several times he escaped death— from cannibals, crocodiles, shipwreck, dis-

ease. His beard turned white in early middle age. He was credited with

miraculous powers, and expectant crowds followed him whenever he ap-

peared in the cities of Brazil. He built churches and convents, and founded

seminaries. In 1 747 he came to Lisbon to solicit funds from King John. He

received them, sailed back to Brazil, and established more religious houses,

often sharing in the manual labor of construction. In 1753 he was in Lisbon

again, for he had promised to prepare the Queen Mother for death. He at-

tributed the earthquake of 1755 to the sins of the people, called for a reform

of morals, and, with others of his order, predicted further earthquakes if

morals did not improve. His house of religious retreat became a focus of

plots against Pombal.

Some noble families were involved in these plots. They protested that the

son of an insignificant country squire had made himself master of Portugal,

holding their lives and fortunes in his hands. One of these aristocratic factions

was led by Dom Jose de Mascarenhas, Duke of Aveiro; another was headed

by the Duke's brother-in-law, Dom Francisco de Assiz, Marquis of Tavora.

Tavora's wife, the Marchioness Dona Leonor, a leader of Portuguese society,

was a fervent disciple and frequent visitor of Father Malagrida. Her oldest

son, Dom Luis Bernardo, the "younger Marquis" of Tavora, was married to

his own aunt. When Luis went off to India as a soldier, this lovely and beau-

tiful "younger Marchioness" became the mistress of Joseph I; this too the

Aveiros and the Tavoras never forgave. They heartily agreed with the Jes-

uits that should Pombal be removed the situation would be eased.

Pombal struck back by persuading Joseph that the Society of Jesus was se-

cretly encouraging further revolt in Paraguay, and was conspiring not only

against the ministry but against the King as well. On September 19, 1757,

a decree banished from the court the Jesuit confessors of the royal family.

Pombal instructed his cousin, Francisco de Almada e Mendonga, Portuguese

envoy to the Vatican, to leave no ducat unturned in promoting and financing

the anti-Jesuit party in Rome. In October Almada presented to Benedict

264 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. X

XIV a list of charges against the Jesuits: that they had "sacrificed all Chris-

tian, religious, natural, and political obligations in a blind wish ... to make

themselves masters of the government"; and that the Society was actuated

by "an insatiable desire to acquire and accumulate foreign riches, and even

to usurp the dominion of sovereigns." 14 On April 1, 1758, the Pope ordered

Cardinal de Saldanha, patriarch of Lisbon, to investigate these charges. On

May 15 Saldanha published a decree declaring that the Portuguese Jesuits

carried on commerce "contrary to all laws divine and human," and he bade

them desist. On June 7, probably at Pombal's urging, he ordered them to

abstain from hearing confessions or preaching. In July the superior of the

Lisbon Jesuits was banished sixty leagues from the court. Meanwhile (May

3, 1758) Benedict XIV died; his successor, Clement XIII, appointed another

commission of inquiry; and this body reported that the Jesuits were innocent

of the charges brought against them by Pombal. 15

There was some doubt whether Joseph I would support his minister in

attacking the Jesuits; but a dramatic turn of events drove the King com-

pletely to Pombal's side. On the night of September 3, 1758, Joseph was re-

turning to his palace near Belem from a secret rendezvous, probably with the

young Marchioness of Tavora. 16 Shortly before midnight three masked men

emerged from the arch of an aqueduct and fired into the coach, without

effect. The coachman put his horse to the gallop, but a moment later two

shots came from another ambush; one shot wounded the coachman, the

other wounded the King in his right shoulder and arm. According to a later

court of inquiry a third ambush, by members of the Tavora family, awaited

the coach farther on the highway to Belem. But Joseph ordered the coach-

man to leave the main road and drive to the house of the royal surgeon, who

dressed the wounds. The resultant events, which made a noise throughout

Europe, might have been very different if the third ambush had succeeded in

the attempted assassination.

Pombal acted with subtle deliberation. Rumors of the attack were officially

denied; the King's temporary confinement was ascribed to a fall. For three

months the secret agents of the minister gathered evidence. A man was found

who testified that Antonio Ferreira had borrowed a musket from him on

August 3 and had returned it on September 8. Another man was reported

as saying that Ferreira had borrowed a pistol from him on September 3 and

had returned it a few days later. Ferreira, said both these witnesses, was in

the service of the Duke of Aveiro. Salvador Durao, a servant in Belem, testi-

fied that on the night of the attack, while he was keeping an assignation out-

side the Aveiro home, he had overheard some members of the Aveiro family

returning from a nocturnal enterprise.

Pombal prepared his case with caution and audacity. He set aside the pro-

cedure required by law, which would have tried the suspected nobles by a

court of their peers; such a court would never condemn them. Instead, as the

first public revelation of the crime, the King issued on December 9 two de-

crees: one nominated Dr. Pedro Gongalves Pereira as judge to preside over

a Special Tribunal of High Treason; the other ordered him to discover,

CHAP. X) PORTUGAL AND POMBAL 265

arrest, and execute those responsible for the attempt to kill the King. Gon-

?alves Pereira was empowered to disregard all customary forms of legal proc-

ess, and the tribunal was told to execute its decrees on the day of their

announcement. To these decrees Pombal added a manifesto, posted through-

out the city, relating the events of September 3, and offering rewards to any

person who would give evidence leading to the arrest of the assassins. 17

On December 13 government officers arrested the Duke of Aveiro, his

sixteen-year-old son the Marquis of Gouveia, his servitor Antonio Ferreira,

the old and the younger Marquis of Tavora, the old Marchioness of Tavora,

all servants of these two families, and five other nobles. All Jesuit colleges

were on that day surrounded by soldiers; Malagrida and twelve other leading

Jesuits were jailed. To accelerate matters, a royal decree of December 20

permitted (against Portuguese custom) the use of torture to elicit confes-

sions. Under torture or threat of it fifty prisoners were examined. Several

confessions implicated the Duke of Aveiro; he himself, under torture, ad-

mitted his guilt; Antonio Ferreira acknowledged that he had fired at the

coach, but swore that he had not known that the prospective victim was the

King. Under torture several servants of the Tavoras compromised that entire

family; the younger Marquis confessed complicity; the older Marquis, tor-

tured to the point of death, denied his guilt. Pombal himself assisted at the

examination of witnesses and prisoners. He had had the mails examined; he

claimed to have found in them twenty-four letters by the Duke of Aveiro, by

several Tavoras, by Malagrida and other Jesuits, notifying their friends or

relatives in Brazil of the abortive attempt, and promising renewed efforts to

overturn the government. On January 4, 1759, the King nominated Dr.

Eusebio Tavares de Sequeira to defend the accused. Sequeira argued that the

confessions, elicited under torture, were worthless as evidence, and that all

the accused nobles could prove alibis for the night of the crime. The defense

was judged unconvincing; the intercepted letters were held to be genuine

and to corroborate the confessions; and on January 1 2 the court declared all

indicted persons guilty.

Nine of them were executed on January 1 3 in the public square of Belem.

The first to die was the old Marchioness of Tavora. On the scaffold the

executioner bent to tie her feet; she repelled him, saying, "Do not touch me

except to kill me!" 18 After being compelled to see the instruments— wheel,

hammer, and faggots— by which her husband and her sons were to die, she

was beheaded. Her two sons were broken on the wheel and strangled; their

corpses lay on the scaffold when the Duke of Aveiro and the old Marquis of

Tavora mounted it. They suffered the same shattering blows, and the Duke

was allowed to linger in agony until the last of the executions— the burning

alive of Antonio Ferreira— was complete. All the corpses were burned, and

the ashes were thrown into the Tagus. Portugal still debates whether the

nobles, though admittedly hostile to Pombal, had meant to kill the King.

Were the Jesuits involved in the attempt? There was no doubt that Mala-

grida, in his passionate fulminations, had predicted the fall of Pombal and the

early death of the King; 19 and no doubt that he and other Jesuits had held

266 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. X

conferences with the minister's titled foes. He had implied his awareness of

a plot by writing to a lady of the court a letter begging her to put Joseph

on his guard against an imminent danger. Asked, in jail, how he had learned

of such a peril, he replied, In the confessional. 20 Aside from this (according

to an anti-Jesuit historian) "there is no positive evidence to connect the Jes-

uits with the outrage." 21 Pombal accused them, by their preaching and teach-

ing, of having excited their allies to the point of murder. He persuaded the

King that the situation offered the monarchy an opportunity to strengthen

itself as against the Church. On January 19 Joseph issued edicts attaching all

Jesuit property in the kingdom, and confining all Jesuits to their houses or

colleges pending settlement, by the Pope, of the charges against them. Mean-

while Pombal used the government press to print— and his agents to distribute

widely, at home and abroad— pamphlets stating the case against the nobles

and the Jesuits; this was apparently the first time that a government had made

use of the printing press to explain its actions to other nations. These publi-

cations may have had some influence in leading to the expulsion of the Jes-

uits from France and Spain.

In the summer of 1759 Pombal sought from Clement XIII permission to

submit the arrested Jesuits to trial before the Tribunal of High Treason;

moreover, he proposed that henceforth all ecclesiastics accused of crimes

against the state should be tried in secular, not ecclesiastical, courts. A per-

sonal letter from Joseph to the Pope announced the King's resolve to expel

the Jesuits from Portugal, and expressed the hope that the Pope would ap-

prove the measure as warranted by their actions and as necessary for the

protection of the monarchy. Clement was shocked by these messages, but

he feared that if he directly opposed them Pombal would induce the King

to sever all relations between the Portuguese Church and the papacy. He

recalled the action of Henry VIII in England, and knew that France too

was developing hostility against the Society of Jesus. On August 1 1 he sent

his permission to try the Jesuits before the secular tribunal, but explicitly

confined his consent to the present case. To the King he made a personal

appeal for mercy to the accused priests; he reminded Joseph of the past

achievements of the order, and trusted that all Portuguese Jesuits would not

be punished for the mistakes of a few.

The papal appeal failed. On September 3, 1759— the anniversary of the

attempted assassination— the King issued an edict giving a long list of alleged

offenses by the Jesuits, and decreeing that

these religious, being corrupt and deplorably fallen away from their holy in-

stitute [rule], and rendered manifestly incapable, by such abominable and in-

veterate vices, of returning to its observance, must be properly and effectually

banished, . . . proscribed, and expelled from all his Majesty's dominions, as

notorious rebels, traitors, adversaries, and aggressors of his royal person and

realm; . . . and it is ordered, under the irremissible pain of death, that no

person, of whatever state or condition, is to admit them into any of his pos-

sessions, or hold any communication with them by word or writing. 22

Those Jesuits who had not yet made their solemn profession, and who should

petition to be released from their preliminary vows, were exempted from the

CHAP. X) PORTUGAL AND POMBAL 267

decree. All Jesuit property was confiscated by the state; the exiles were for-

bidden to take anything with them but their personal clothing. 23 From all

sections of Portugal they were led in coaches or on foot to ships that took

them to Italy. Similar deportations were carried out from Brazil and other

Portuguese possessions. The first shipload of expatriates reached Civita-

vecchia on October 24, and even Pombal's representative there was moved to

pity by their condition. Some were weak with age, some were near starva-

tion, some had died on the way. Lorenzo Ricci, general of the Society, ar-

ranged for the reception of the survivors into Jesuit houses in Italy, and the

Dominican friars shared in extending hospitality. On June 17, 1760, the

Portuguese government suspended diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

The victory of Pombal seemed complete, but he knew that it was unpop-

ular with the nation. Feeling insecure, he expanded his power to full dicta-

torship, and began a reign of absolutism and terror that continued till 1777.

His spies reported to him every detected expression of opposition to his

policies or his methods; soon the jails of Lisbon were crowded with political

prisoners. Many nobles and priests were arrested on charges of new plots

against the King, or of implication in the old plot. The Junqueira fort, mid-

way between Lisbon and Belem, became the special jail of aristocrats, many

of whom were kept there till their death. Other prisons held— some for

nineteen years— Jesuits brought from the colonies and charged with resisting

the government.

Malagrida languished in prison for thirty-two months before being brought

to trial. The old man solaced his confinement by writing The Heroic Life

of St. Anne, the Mother of Mary, Dictated to the Reverend Father Mala-

grida by St. Anne Herself. Pombal had the manuscript seized, and found in

it several absurdities that could be labeled heresies; St. Anne, said Malagrida,

had been conceived, like Mary, without the stain of original sin, and she had

spoken and wept in her mother's womb. 24 Having made his own brother,

Paul de Carvalho, head of the Inquisition in Portugal, Pombal had Malagrida

summoned before its tribunal, and drew up with his own hand an indictment

charging the Jesuit with cupidity, hypocrisy, imposture, and sacrilege, and

with having menaced the King with repeated predictions of death. Made

half insane by his sufferings, Malagrida, now seventy-two years old, told the

Inquisitors that he had spoken with St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Theresa. 25 One

judge, moved to pity, wished to stop the trial; Pombal had him removed.

On January 12, 1761, the Holy Office pronounced Malagrida guilty of

heresy, blasphemy, and impiety, and of having deceived the people by pre-

tended divine revelations. He was allowed to live eight months more. On

September 20 he was led to a scaffold in the Pra?a Rossio, was strangled, and

was burned at the stake. Louis XV, hearing of the execution, remarked, "It

is as if I burned the old lunatic in the Petites [Maisonsl asylum, who says

that he is God the Father." 26 Voltaire, recording the event, pronounced it

"folly and absurdity joined to the most horrible wickedness." 27

The French philosophes, who in 1758 had looked upon Pombal as an "en-

lightened despot," were not pleased with his development. They welcomed

the overthrow of the Jesuits, but they deprecated the arbitrary methods of

268 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. X

the dictator, the violent tone of his pamphlets, and the barbarity of his pun-

ishments. They were shocked by the treatment of the Jesuits during their

deportation, by the wholesale execution of ancient families, and by the inhu-

mane treatment of Malagrida. We have, however, no record of their protest-

ing the eight-year imprisonment of the bishop of Coimbra for condemning

Pombal's Censorship Board, which had allowed the circulation of such radical

works as Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and Rousseau's Social Contract.

Pombal himself preached no heresies, and went to Mass regularly. He

aimed not at the destruction of the Church but at its subjection to the King;

and when, in 1770, Clement XIV agreed to let the government nominate

to bishoprics, he made his peace with the Vatican. Joseph I, as he neared

death, rejoiced in the thought that, after all, he might die with full benefit of

clergy. The Pope sent a cardinal's hat to Pombal's brother Paul, and to

Pombal himself a ring bearing the papal portrait, and a miniature framed in

diamonds, and the entire cadavers of four saints.

III. POMBAL THE REFORMER

Meanwhile the dictator had left his mark upon the economy, administra-

tion, and cultural life of Portugal. With the help of English and German

officers he reorganized the army, which turned back a Spanish invasion in

the Seven Years' War. Like Richelieu in seventeenth-century France, he

reduced the disruptive power of the aristocracy, and centralized the govern-

ment in a monarchy that could give the nation political unity, educational

development, and some protection from ecclesiastical domination. After the

execution of the Tavoras the nobles ceased to plot against the king; after the

expulsion of the Jesuits the clergy submitted to the state. During the aliena-

tion from the Vatican Pombal appointed the bishops, and his bishops or-

dained priests without reference to Rome. A royal decree curtailed the

acquisition of land by the Church, and restrained Portuguese subjects from

burdening their estates with bequests for Masses. 28 Many convents were

closed, and the rest were forbidden to receive novices under twenty-five

years of age. The Inquisition was brought under government control: its

tribunal was made a public court, subject to the same rules as the courts of

the state; it was shorn of censorship powers; its distinction between Old

Christians and New Christians (Christianized Jews or Moors, and their de-

scendants) was abolished, for Pombal took it for granted that most Spaniards

and Portuguese had now some Semitic strain in their blood. 29 A decree of

May 25, 1773, made all Portuguese subjects eligible to civil, military, and

ecclesiastical office. 30 There was no burning of persons by the Portuguese

Inquisition after that of Malagrida in 1761. 31

In that year Pombal abolished three quarters of the petty offices that had

hampered the administration of justice; the law courts were made more ac-

cessible, litigation was made less expensive. In 1761 he reorganized the Treas-

ury, required it to balance its books every week, ordered yearly audits of

CHAP. X) PORTUGAL AND POMBAL 269

municipal revenues and expenditures, and made some progress in the most

difficult reforms of all— the reduction of personnel and extravagance at the

royal court. The eighty cooks that had fed John V and his entourage were

weeded out; Joseph I had to content himself with twenty. An edict of May

25, 1773, in effect abolished slavery in Portugal, but allowed it to continue

in the colonies.

The reformer's hand moved everywhere. He gave governmental support

to agriculture and fisheries, and introduced the silkworm into the northern

provinces. He established potteries, glassworks, cotton mills, woolen fac-

tories, and paper plants, to end the dependence of Portugal upon the im-

portation of such products from abroad. He abolished internal tolls in the

movement of goods, and established free trade between Portugal and her

American colonies. He founded a College of Commerce to train men for

business management. He organized and subsidized companies to take over

Portuguese trade from foreign merchants and carriers; here he— or the Portu-

guese—failed, for in 1780 the commerce of Portugal was still mostly in for-

eign, chiefly in British, hands.

The expulsion of the Jesuits necessitated a thorough reconstruction of

education. New elementary and secondary schools, to the number of 837,

were scattered over the land. The Jesuit college at Lisbon was transformed

into a College of Nobles under secular administration. The curriculum at

Coimbra was enlarged with additional courses in science. Pombal persuaded

the King to build an opera house and to invite Italian singers to lead the

casts. In 1757 he founded the Arcadia de Lisboa for the stimulation of

literature.

For an exciting half century (1755- 1805) Portuguese literature enjoyed

a relative freedom of ideas and forms. Liberating itself from Italian models,

it acknowledged the spell of France, and felt some zephyrs of the Enlighten-

ment. Antonio Diniz da Cruz e Silva won national fame by a satire, O

Hissope (1772), describing in eight cantos the quarrel of a bishop with his

dean. Joao Anastasio da Cunha translated Pope and Voltaire, for which he

was condemned by the Inquisition (1778) soon after Pombal's fall. Francisco

Manoel do Nascimento, son of a longshoreman, took passionately to books,

and became the center of a group that rebelled against the Arcadian Acad-

emy as a drag on the development of national poetry. In 1778 (again taking

advantage of Pombal's fall) the Inquisition ordered his arrest as being ad-

dicted "to modern philosophers who follow natural reason." He escaped to

France, where he spent nearly all his remaining forty-one years; there he

wrote most of his poems, ardent for freedom and democracy, including an

ode "To the Liberty and Independence of the United States." His followers

ranked him as second only to Camoes in Portuguese poetry. — The most

elegant and melodious verse of the age was in a volume of love poems, A

Marilia, bequeathed by Tomaz Antonio Gonzaga, who suffered imprison-

ment (1785-88) for political conspiracy, and died in exile. — Jose Agostinho

de Macedo, an Augustinian friar unfrocked because of his dissipated life,

boldly took for the subject of his epic, O Oriente, the same subject as Camoes

270 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. X

—the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India; he judged his poem superior to

the Lusiads and the Iliad, but we are assured that it is a dreary performance.

More interesting was a satire in six cantos, Os Burros, in which Macedo

pilloried by name men and women of all ranks, living or dead. — His favor-

ite enemy was Manuel Maria Barbosa de Bocage, who was imprisoned by

the Inquisition (1797) on a charge of spreading Voltairean ideas in his verse

and plays. The execution of Marie Antoinette turned him back to conserva-

tism in religion and politics; he recaptured his youthful piety, and saw in the

mosquito a proof of the existence of God. 32

The great event in the art history of Pombal's regime was the statue raised

to Joseph I, which still stands in Lisbon's Black Horse Square. Designed by

Joaquim Machado de Castro, cast in bronze by Bartolommeo da Costa, it

represented the King riding a steed victoriously over serpents symbolizing

the evil forces overcome during his reign. Pombal made the inauguration of

the monument (June 6, 1775) a celebration of his triumphant ministry.

Troops of soldiery lined the square; the diplomatic corps, the judiciary, the

Senate, and other dignitaries were assembled in full costume; then came the

court, then the King and the Queen; finally Pombal came forward and un-

veiled the figures and the massive pedestal, on which a medallion pictured the

minister wearing the Cross of Christ. Everyone but the King understood that

the real subject of the celebration was Pombal.

A few days after the unveiling he sent to Joseph I a rosy-colored descrip-

tion of the progress made by Portugal since 1750: the spread of education

and literacy, the growth of manufactures and trade, the development of

literature and art, the general rise in the standard of living. Truth must make

many deductions from his account: industry and trade were growing, but

very slowly, and were in financial difficulties; the arts were stagnant, and

half of Lisbon still lay (1774) in the ruins caused by the earthquake of 1755.

The natural piety of the people was restoring ecclesiastical power. Pombal's

lordly manners and dictatorial methods were making new enemies every

day. He had enriched himself and his relatives; he had built for himself an

extravagantly costly palace. There was hardly a noble family in the kingdom

that did not have a beloved member wasting away in jail. Everywhere in

Portugal there were secret hopes and prayers for Pombal's fall.

IV. THE TRIUMPH OF THE PAST

The King was sixty years old in 1775. Illnesses and mistresses had aged him

beyond his years, and he spent hours in meditation on sin and death. He

wondered had he been right in following the policies of his minister. Had he

been just to the Jesuits? Those nobles and priests in prison— he would gladly

have pardoned them, now that he sought pardon for himself, but how could

he mention such an idea to the unrelenting Pombal, and what could he do

without Pombal? On November 12, 1776, he suffered an apoplectic stroke,

and the court almost visibly rejoiced in expectation of a new reign and a

new ministry. The heir to the throne was his daughter Maria Francisca, who

CHAP. X) PORTUGAL AND POMBAL 27 I

had married his brother Pedro. She was a good woman, a good wife and

mother, a kind and charitable soul, but she was also a fervent Catholic, who

had so resented Pombal's anticlericalism that she had left the court to live

quietly with Pedro at Queluz, a few miles from the capital. The foreign diplo-

mats notified their governments to expect an early reversal of Portuguese

policies.

On November 18 the King received the sacraments; on November 29

Maria became regent. One of her first acts was to end the bishop of Coim-

bra's long imprisonment; the seventy-four-year-old prelate was restored to

his see amid almost universal rejoicing. Pombal saw his authority waning, and

noted with somber premonitions that courtiers lately subservient to him

now looked upon him as politically moribund. In a final act of despotism he

took a wild revenge upon the village of Trefaria, whose fisherfolk had op-

posed the forcible impressment of their sons into the army; he ordered a

platoon of soldiers to burn the village down; they did it by flinging lighted

torches through the windows of the wooden cottages in the dark of night

(January 23, 1777).

On February 24 Joseph I died; the regent became Queen Maria I (r. 1777-

1816), and her husband became King Pedro III (r. 1777-86). Pedro was a

man of weak mind; Maria absorbed herself in piety and charity. Religion,

which was half the life of the Portuguese people, rapidly recovered its power.

The Inquisition resumed its activity in censorship and the suppression of

heresy. Queen Maria sent forty thousand pounds to the papacy to partially

reimburse it for expenses incurred in caring for the banished Jesuits. On the

day after Joseph's burial Queen Maria ordered the release of eight hundred

prisoners, most of them incarcerated by Pombal for political opposition.

Many of them had been in the dungeons for twenty years; when they

emerged their eyes could not bear the sun; nearly all were in rags; many

looked twice their age. Hundreds of prisoners had died in jail. Of the 124

Jesuits who had been imprisoned eighteen years before, only forty-five still

lived. 33 Five nobles condemned for alleged complicity in the plot to kill

Joseph refused to leave prison until their innocence had been officially de-

clared.

The sight of the released victims of Pombal's hostility, and the news of the

burning of Trefaria, brought his unpopularity to the point where he no

longer ventured to show himself in public. On March 1 he sent to Queen

Maria a letter resigning all his offices and asking permission to retire to his

estate in the town of Pombal. The nobles who surrounded the Queen de-

manded his imprisonment and punishment; but when she discovered that all

the measures which they resented had been signed by the late King, she

decided that she could not punish Pombal without laying a public stain upon

her father's memory. She accepted the minister's resignation, and allowed

him to retire to Pombal, but she ordered him to remain there. On March 5

he left Lisbon in a hired chaise, hoping to escape notice; some people recog-

nized him and stoned his carriage, but he escaped. At the town of Oeiras his

wife joined him. He was seventy-seven years old.

Now that he was only a private citizen he was assailed from every side by

272 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. X

suits for debts he had neglected to pay, for injuries he had inflicted, for

properties he had taken without adequate compensation. Bailiffs besieged his

doors at Pombal with a succession of writs. "There is not a hornet or a gnat

in Portugal," he wrote, "that does not fly to this remote spot and buzz in my

ears." 34 The Queen helped him by granting continuance for life of the salary

he had received as minister, and added to it a modest pension. Nevertheless

countless enemies urged the Queen to summon him to trial on charges of

malfeasance and treason. She compromised by allowing judges to visit him

and subject him to examination on the charges. They questioned him for

hours at a time through three and a half months, until the old dictator, ex-

hausted, begged for mercy. The Queen delayed action on the report of the

examination, hoping that PombaPs death might relieve her embarrassment;

meanwhile she sought to appease his foes by ordering retrial of those who had

been convicted of complicity in the attempt upon her father. The new court

confirmed the guilt of the Duke of Aveiro and three of his servants, but

exonerated all the rest of the accused. The Tavoras were declared innocent,

and all their honors and property were remitted to their survivors (April 3,

1781). On August 16 the Queen issued a decree condemning Pombal as an

"infamous criminal," but adding that since he had begged for pardon he was

to be left at peace in his exile and in the possession of his property.

Pombal was entering upon his final illness. His body was almost covered

with pus-oozing sores, apparently from leprosy. 35 Pain kept him from sleep-

ing more than two hours in a day; dysentery weakened him; and his doctors,

as if to add to his torments, persuaded him to drink a broth made from the

flesh of snakes. He prayed for death, received the sacraments, and ended his

sufferings on May 8, 1782. Forty-five years later a party of Jesuits, passing

through the town, stopped at his grave and recited a requiem, in triumph

and pity, for the repose of his soul.

CHAPTER XI

Spain and the Enlightenment

1700-88

I. MILIEU

AT his death in 1700 Charles II, last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, bequeathed

/~\ Spain and all its global empire to the age-long enemy of the Hapsburgs

—Bourbon France. The grandson of Louis XIV, as Philip V of Spain, fought

bravely during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) to maintain

that empire unimpaired; nearly all Europe rose in arms to prevent so danger-

ous an aggrandizement of Bourbon power; in the end Spain had to yield

Gibraltar and Minorca to England, Sicily to Savoy, and Naples, Sardinia, and

"Belgium" to Austria.

Moreover, the loss of sea power left Spain only a precarious hold on the

colonies that nourished her commerce and her wealth. Wheat in Spanish

America gave from five to twenty times the yield per acre that came from

the soil of Spain. From those sunny lands came mercury, copper, zinc, ar-

senic, dyes, meat, hides, rubber, cochineal, sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, tea,

quinine and a dozen other medicaments. In 1788 Spain exported to her Amer-

ican colonies goods valued at 158,000,000 reales; she imported from them

goods valued at 804,000,000 reales; this "unfavorable balance of trade" was

wiped out by a stream of American silver and gold. The Philippines sent

cargoes of pepper, cotton, indigo, and sugar cane. At the end of the eight-

eenth century Alexander von Humboldt estimated the population of the

Philippines at 1,900,000, of Spanish America at 16,902,000; Spain herself, in

1797, had 1 0,54 1, 000. l It is one credit to Bourbon rule that this last figure

almost doubled the population of 5,700,000 in 1700.

Geography favored Spain only for maritime commerce. In the north the

land was fertile, fed with rains and the melting snows of the Pyrenees; irriga-

tion canals (mostly bequeathed to their conquerors by the Moors) had re-

claimed Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia from aridity; the rest of Spain was

discouragingly mountainous or dry. The gifts of nature were not developed

by economic enterprise; the most venturesome Spaniards went to the colo-

nies; Spain preferred to buy industrial products from abroad with her co-

lonial gold and the yield of her own mines of silver, copper, iron, or lead; her

industries, still in the guild or domestic stage, lagged far behind those of the

industrious North; and many of her rich mines were operated by foreign

management for the profit of German or English investors. The production

of wool was monopolized by the Mesta, an association of flock owners privi-

leged by the government, entrenched in tradition, and dominated by a small

273

274 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

minority of nobles and monasteries. Competition was stifled, improvements

lagged. A meager proletariat festered in the towns, serving as domestics to

the great or as journeymen in the guilds. Some Negro or Moorish slaves

adorned affluent homes. A small middle class lived in dependence upon the

government, the nobility, or the Church.

Of the agricultural land 51.5 per cent was owned in vast tracts by noble

families, 16.5 per cent by the Church, 32 per cent by communes (towns) or

peasants. The growth of peasant proprietorship was retarded by an old law

of entail, which required that an estate should be bequeathed intact to the

eldest son, and that no part of it should be mortgaged or sold. Through most

of the century, except in the Basque provinces, three quarters of the soil was

tilled by tenants paying tribute in rent, fees, service, or kind to aristocratic

or ecclesiastical landlords whom they rarely saw. As rents were raised ac-

cording to the productivity of the farm, the tenants had no incentive to

inventiveness or industry. 2 The owners defended the practice by alleging that

the progressive depreciation of the currency forced them to raise rents to

keep pace with rising prices and costs. Meanwhile a sales tax on such neces-

saries as meat, wine, olive oil, candles, and soap fell heavily upon the poor

(who spent most of their income on necessaries), more lightly upon the rich.

The result of these procedures, of hereditary privilege, and of the natural

inequality of human ability, was a concentration of wealth at the top, and

at the bottom a somber poverty that continued from generation to genera-

tion, alleviated and abetted by supernatural consolations.

The nobility was jealously divided into grades of dignity. At the top (in

1787) were 1 19 grandees— grandes de Espafw. We may guess at their wealth

from the probably exaggerated report of the contemporary British traveler

Joseph Townsend that "three great lords— the dukes of Osuna, Alba, and

Medinaceli— cover [own] almost the whole province of Andalusia." 3 Medi-

naceli received one million reales yearly from his fisheries alone; Osuna had

an annual income of 8,400,000 reales; the Count of Aranda had nearly

1,600,000 reales a year. 4 Below the grandees were 535 titidos— men who had

been given hereditary titles by the king on condition of remitting half their

income to the Crown. Below these were the caballeros— chevaliers or knights

named by the king to lucrative membership in one of the four military orders

of Spain: Santiago, Alcantara, Calatrava, and Montesa. The lowliest of the

nobles were the 400,000 hidalgos, who owned modest tracts of land, were

exempt from military service and from imprisonment for debt, and had the

right to display a coat of arms and be addressed as Don. Some of them were

poor, some joined the beggars in the streets. Most of the nobles lived in the

cities, and named the municipal officials.

As the divine guardian of the status quo the Spanish Church claimed a

comfortable share of the gross national product. A Spanish authority reck-

oned its annual income, after taxes, at 1,101,753,000 reales, and that of the

state at i,37i,ooo,ooo. 5 A third of its revenues came from land; large sums

from tithes and first fruits; petty cash from christenings, marriages, funerals,

Masses for the dead, and monastic costumes sold to pious people who thought

CHAP. XI ) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 275

that if they died in such robes they might slip unquestioned into Paradise.

Monastic mendicants brought in an additional 53,000,000 reales. The aver-

age priest, of course, was poor, partly because of his number; Spain had

91,258 men in orders, of whom 16,481 were priests and 2,943 were Jesuits. 6

In 1797 sixty thousand monks and thirty thousand nuns lived in three thou-

sand monasteries or convents. The Archbishop of Seville and his staff of 235

aides enjoyed an annual revenue of six million reales; the Archbishop of

Toledo, with six hundred aides, received nine million. Here, as in Italy and

Austria, ecclesiastical wealth aroused no protest from the people; the cathe-

dral was their creation, and they loved to see it gorgeously adorned.

Their piety set a standard for Christendom. Nowhere else in the eighteenth

century was the Catholic theology so thoroughly believed, or the Catholic

ritual so fervently observed. Religious practices rivaled the pursuit of bread,

and probably exceeded the pursuit of sex, as part of the substance of life.

The people, including the prostitutes, crossed themselves a dozen times a

day. The worship of the Virgin far surpassed the adoration of Christ; images

of her were everywhere; women lovingly sewed robes for her statues, and

crowned her head with fresh flowers; in Spain above all rose the popular

demand that her "immaculate conception"— her freedom from the stain of

original sin— be made a part of the defined and required faith. The men al-

most equaled the women in piety. Many men, as well as women, heard Mass

daily. In some religious processions (until it was forbidden in 1777) men of

the lower classes flogged themselves with knotted cords ending in balls of

wax containing broken glass; they professed to be doing this to prove their

devotion to God or Mary or a woman; some thought such bloodletting was

good for the health 7 and kept Eros down.

Religious processions were frequent, dramatic, and colorful; one humorist

complained that he could not take a step in Madrid without coming upon

such a solemnity; and not to kneel when it passed was to risk arrest or in-

jury. When the people of Saragossa rose in revolt in 1766, sacking and loot-

ing, and a religious procession appeared with a bishop holding the Sacrament

before him, the rioters bared their heads and knelt in the streets; when the

retinue had filed by they resumed the sack of the town. 8 In the great Corpus

Christi procession all the departments of the government took part, some-

times led by the king. Throughout Holy Week the cities of Spain were

draped in black, theaters and cafes were closed, churches were crowded,

and supplementary altars were set up in public squares to accommodate the

overflow of piety. In Spain Christ was king, Mary was queen, and the sense

of divine presence was, in every waking hour, part of the essence of life.

Two religious orders especially prospered in Spain. The Jesuits, through

their learning and address, dominated education and became confessors to

royalty. The Dominicans controlled the Inquisition, and though this institu-

tion had long since passed its heydav it was still strong enough to terrify the

people and challenge the state. When some remnants of Judaism appeared

under Bourbon laxity the Inquisition snuffed them out with autos-da-fe. In

seven years (1720-27) the Inquisitors condemned 868 persons, of whom 820

276 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XI

were accused of secret Judaism; seventy-five were burned, others were sent

to the galleys, or merely scourged. 9 In 1722 Philip V testified his adoption

of Spanish ways by presiding over a sumptuous auto-da-fe in which nine

heretics were burned in celebration of the coming of a French princess to

Madrid. 10 His successor, Ferdinand VI, showed a milder spirit; during his

reign (1746-59) "only" ten persons— all "relapsed" Jews— were burned

alive. 11

The Inquisition exercised a strangling censorship over all publication. A

Dominican monk reckoned that there was less printing in Spain in the eight-

eenth century than in the sixteenth. 12 Most books were religious, and the

people liked them so. The lower classes were illiterate, and felt no need for

reading or writing. Schools were in the hands of the clergy, but thousands of

parishes had no schools at all. The once great Spanish universities had fallen

far behind those of Italy, France, England, or Germany in everything but

orthodox theology. Medical schools were poor, ill-staffed, ill-equipped; ther-

apy relied upon bloodletting, purging, relics, and prayer; Spanish physicians

were a peril to human life. Science was medieval, history was legend, super-

stition flourished, portents and miracles abounded. The belief in witchcraft

survived to the end of the century, and appeared among the horrors that

Goya drew.

Such was the Spain that the Bourbons came from France to rule.

11. Philip v: 1700-46

Felipe Quinto was a good man within his lights, which had been limited

by his education. As a younger son to the Dauphin he had been trained to

modesty, piety, and obedience, and he never overcame these virtues suffi-

ciently to meet half a century of challenges in government and war. His

piety led him to accept in Spain a religious obscurantism that was dying in

France; his docility made him malleable by his ministers and his wives.

Maria Luisa Gabriela, daughter of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, was only

thirteen when she married Philip (1701), but she was already adept in femi-

nine wiles; her beauty and vivacity, her tantrums and tears reduced the King

to an exhausted subjection, while she and her chief lady in waiting manipu-

lated the politics of their adopted land. Marie Anne de La Tremoille, Prin-

cesse des Ursins, French widow of a Spanish grandee, had helped the girl

Queen to marriage and power. Ambitious but tactful, she became for a

decade a power behind the throne. She could not rely upon beauty, for she

was fifty-nine in 1701, but she provided the knowledge and subtlety lacking

in the Queen, and after 1705 she determined policy. In 17 14 Maria Luisa,

aged twenty-six, died, and Philip, who had learned to love her devotedly,

sank into a morbid melancholy. Mme. des Ursins thought to salvage her

power by arranging his marriage with Isabella (Elizabeth) Farnese, daughter

of Duke Odoardo II of Parma and Piacenza. She went to meet the new Queen

at the Spanish border, but Isabella curtly ordered her to leave Spain. She

withdrew to Rome and died eight years later in wealth and oblivion.

CHAP. XI ) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 277

Isabella did not admit that the Renaissance was over; she had all the force

of will, keenness of intellect, fire of temper, and scorn of scruples that had

marked the women, as well as the men, who had dominated sixteenth-

century Italy. She found in Philip a man who could not make up his mind,

and who could not sleep alone; their bed became her throne, from which she

ruled a nation, directed armies, and won Italian principalities. She had known

almost nothing of Spain, nor did she ever take to the Spanish character, but

she studied that character, she made herself familiar with the needs of the

country, and the King was surprised to find her as informed and resourceful

as his ministers.

In his first years of rule Philip had used Jean Orry and other French aides

to reorganize the government on lines set by Louis XIV: centralized and

audited administration and finance, with a trained bureaucracy and provin-

cial intendants, all under the legislative, judicial, and executive authority of

the royal council, here called the Consejo de Castilla. Corruption diminished,

extravagance was checked— except in the building operations of the King. To

these French ministers there succeeded in 17 14 an able and ambitious Italian,

the Abate Giulio Alberoni, whose energy made the Spanish shudder. Son of

a Piacenza gardener, he had reached Spain as secretary to the Due de Ven-

dome. He had been the first to suggest Isabella Farnese as Philip's second

wife; grateful, she eased his way to power. Together they kept the King

away from affairs, and from any counsel but their own. Together they

planned to build up Spain's armed forces, and use them to drive the Austrians

out of Italy, restore Spanish ascendancy in Naples and Milan, and set up

ducal thrones to be graced, someday, by the farseeing Isabella's sons.

Alberoni asked five years for preparation. He replaced titled sluggards

with middle-class ability in the leading posts; he taxed the clergy and im-

prisoned rebellious priests; 13 he scrapped worn-out vessels and built better

ones; he set up forts and arsenals along coasts and frontiers; he subsidized

industry, opened up roads, accelerated communication, abolished sales taxes

and traffic tolls. The British ambassador in Madrid warned his government

that with a few more years of such advances Spain would be a danger to

other European powers. 14 To soothe such fears Alberoni pretended that he

was raising forces to help Venice and the papacy against the Turks. Indeed,

he sent six galleys to Clement XI, who rewarded him with a red hat (17 17).

"The Spanish monarchy," wrote Voltaire, "has resumed new life under

Cardinal Alberoni." 15

Everything was granted him but time. He hoped to win French and Eng-

lish consent to Spanish aims in Italy, and offered substantial concessions in

return, but the careless King spoiled these maneuvers by revealing his desire

to replace Philippe d'Orleans as ruler of France. Philippe turned against

Felipe, and joined England and the United Provinces in a pact to maintain

the territorial arrangements fixed by the Treaty of Utrecht. Austria violated

that treaty by compelling Savoy to give her Sicily in exchange for Sardinia.

Alberoni protested that this placed athwart the Mediterranean a power

whose head still claimed the crown of Spain. Cursing the undue acceleration

of events, he resigned himself to premature war. His newborn fleet captured

278 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

Palermo (17 18), and his troops soon brought all Sicily under Spanish con-

trol. Austria thereupon joined England, France, and Holland in a Quadruple

Alliance against Spain. On August 11, 17 18, a British squadron under Ad-

miral Byng destroyed the Spanish fleet off the coast of Sicily; Spain's best

troops were bottled up in that island while French armies invaded Spain.

Philip and Isabella sued for peace; it was granted on condition of Alberoni's

banishment. He fled to Genoa (17 19), made his way in disguise through

Austrian-held Lombardy to Rome, took part in the conclave that elected

Innocent XIII, and died in 1752, aged eighty-eight. On February 17, 1720, a

Spanish envoy signed in London a treaty by which Philip resigned all claim

to the throne of France, Spain surrendered Sicily to Austria, England prom-

ised to restore Gibraltar to Spain, and the Allies pledged to Isabella's off-

spring the right of succession to Parma and Tuscany.

In the kaleidoscope of international politics allies soon become enemies,

and foes may formally become friends. To cement peace with France, Philip

had betrothed his two-year-old daughter, Maria Ana Victoria, to Louis XV

in 172 1, and had sent her— all wondering— to France (1722). But in 1725

France sent her back so that Louis might marry a woman who could at once

undertake the task of giving him an heir. Insulted, Spain allied herself with

Austria; the Emperor Charles VI promised to help recapture Gibraltar; when

a Spanish army tried to take that bastion Austrian help did not come; the

attempt failed, and Spain not only made peace with England, but restored

to her the Asiento monopoly of selling slaves to Spanish colonies; in return

Britain pledged to put Isabella's son Don Carlos on the ducal throne of

Parma. In 173 1 Carlos and six thousand Spanish troops were escorted to

Italy by an English fleet. Austria, to secure British and Spanish support for

the accession of Maria Theresa to the Imperial throne, yielded Parma and

Piacenza to Carlos. In 1734 Carlos promoted himself to Naples. Isabella's

triumph was complete.

Philip, however, sank into a melancholy mood that, after 1736, lapsed now

and then into insanity. He shrank into a corner of his room, thinking that all

who entered planned to kill him. He was loath to eat for fear of being

poisoned. For a long time he refused to leave his bed or be shaved. Isabella

tried a hundred ways to heal or soothe him; all failed but one. In 1737 she

coaxed Farinelli to come to Spain. One night, in an apartment adjoining the

King's, she arranged a concert in which the great castrato sang two arias by

Hasse. Philip rose from his bed to look through a doorway and see what

agency could make such captivating sounds. Isabella brought Farinelli to

him; the monarch praised and caressed him, and bade him name his reward;

nothing would be refused. Previously instructed by the Queen, the singer

asked only that Philip should let himself be shaved and dressed, and should

appear at the royal council. The King consented; his fears subsided; he

seemed miraculously healed. But when the next evening came he called for

Farinelli, and begged him to sing those same two songs again; only so could

he be calmed to sleep. So it continued, night after night, for ten years.

Farinelli was paid 200,000 reales a year, but was not allowed to sing except at

CHAP. Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 279

the court. He accepted the condition gracefully, and though his power over

the King was greater than that of any minister, he never abused it, always

used it for good; he remained untouched by venality, and won the admiration

of all. 16

In 1746 Philip ordered 100,000 Masses to be said for his salvation; if so

many should not be needed to get him into heaven the surplus should be

applied to poor souls for whom no such provision had been made. 17 In that

year he died.

III. FERDINAND VI: 1 746-59

His second son by his first wife succeeded him, and gave Spain thirteen

years of healing rule. Isabella survived till 1766; she was treated with kind-

ness and courtesy by her stepson, but she lost her power to influence events.

Ferdinand's wife, Maria Barbara, Scarlatti's pupil, was now the woman be-

hind the throne; though she loved food and money beyond reason, she was

a gentler spirit than Isabella, and gave most of her energies to encouraging

music and art. Farinelli continued to sing for the new rulers, and Scarlatti's

harpsichord could not rival him. King and Queen worked to end the War

of the Austrian Succession; they accepted the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle

(1748), though it gave Tuscany to Austria; and a year later they terminated

the 136-year-old Asiento by paying ,£100,000 to the South Sea Company

for the loss of its privileges in the slave trade.

Ferdinand was a man of good will, kindly and honest, but he had inherited

a delicate constitution and was subject to fits of passion, of which he was

painfully ashamed. 18 Conscious of his limitations, he left administration to two

able ministers— Don Jose de Carvajal and Zenon de Somodevilla, Marques

de la Ensenada. Ensenada improved agricultural methods, subsidized mining

and industry, built roads and canals, abolished internal tolls, rebuilt the navy,

replaced the hated sales tax by a tax on income and property, reorganized the

finances, and broke down the intellectual isolation of Spain by sending stu-

dents abroad. Partly through Ensenada's diplomacy a concordat was signed

with the papacy (1753), reserving to the King the right to tax ecclesiastical

property and to appoint bishops to Spanish sees. The power of the Church

was reduced, the Inquisition was subdued, public autos-da-fe were abolished.

The two ministers diverged in foreign policy. Carvajal felt the charm of

the devoted British ambassador, Sir Benjamin Keene, and took a peaceful

pro-British line; Ensenada favored France, and moved toward war with

England. Ferdinand, appreciating his energy and ability, was long patient

with him, but finally dismissed him. While nearly all Europe fell into seven

years of war, Ferdinand gave his people a longer period of tranquillity and

prosperity than Spain had enjoyed since Philip II.

In 1758 Maria Barbara died. The King, who had loved her as if politics

had had nothing to do with their marriage, fell into a state of melancholy

and unshaved dishevelment strangely recalling that of his father; in his final

280 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

year he too was insane. Toward the end he refused to go to bed, fearing that

he would never get up again. He died in his chair, August 10, 1759. Every-

one mourned the royal lovers, for their rule had been a rare blessing to Spain.

IV. THE ENLIGHTENMENT ENTERS SPAIN

The story of the Enlightenment in Spain is a case of a resistible force en-

countering an immovable body. The Spanish character, and its blood-written

pledge to its medieval faith, turned back sooner or later all winds of heresy

or doubt, all alien forms of dress or manners or economy. Only one eco-

nomic force favored foreign thought— Spanish merchants who daily dealt

with strangers, and who knew to what power and wealth their like had risen

in England and France. They were willing to import ideas if these could

weaken the hold that nobles and clergy had inherited on the land, life, and

mind of Spain. They knew that religion had lost its power in England; some

had heard of Newton and Locke; even Gibbon was to find a few readers

in Spain. 19

Of course the strongest Enlightenment breezes came from France. The

French aristocrats who followed Philip V to Madrid were already touched

by the irreligion that hid its head under Louis XIV but ran rampant during

the Regency. In 17 14 some scholars founded the Real Academia Espanola in

emulation of the French Academy; soon it began work on a dictionary; in

1737 th e Diario de los liter atos de Espaiia undertook to rival the Journal des

savants. The Duke of Alba, who directed the Real Academia for twenty

years (1756-76), was a warm admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 20 In 1773

he subscribed eight louis d'or for Pigalle's statue of Voltaire; "Condemned

to cultivate my reason in secret," he wrote to d' Alembert, "I take this oppor-

tunity to give public testimony to my gratitude and admiration for the great

man who first showed me the way." 21

Gratuitous advertisement was given to Rousseau's £?i7ile by its ceremoni-

ous burning in a Madrid church (1765). 22 Young Spaniards acquainted with

Paris, like the Marques de Mora who loved Julie de Lespinasse, came back

to Spain with some rubbing of the skepticism that they had encountered in the

salons. Copies of works by Voltaire, Diderot, or Raynal were smuggled into

Spain, and aroused some innovating minds. A Spanish journalist wrote in

1763: "Through the effect of many pernicious books that have become the

fashion, such as those of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Helvetius, much cooling

of faith has been felt in this country." 23 Pablo Olavide openly expressed

Voltairean ideas in his Madrid salon (c. 1766). 24 On the shelves of the So-

ciedades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais in Madrid were works by Vol-

taire, Rousseau, Bayle, d'Alembert, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, and

Hume. 25 Abbe Clement, touring Spain in 1768, reported a wide spread of

religious indifference, even unbelief, covered with external observance of

Catholic ritual. 26 In 1778 the Inquisition was informed that the highest offi-

cials of the court read the French philosophes. 27

It was of considerable importance to Spanish history that Pedro Abarca,

CHAP. Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 28 1

Conde de Aranda, traveling in France, became a friend of Voltaire. We may

judge of his connections by his later activity as Spanish ambassador to Ver-

sailles; he mixed freely with the Encyclopedists in Paris, formed an admiring

intimacy with d'Alembert, and crossed France to visit Voltaire at Ferney. In

Spain he professed fidelity to the Church, but it was he who persuaded

Charles III to expel the Jesuits. Under his guidance Charles joined the ranks

of those "enlightened despots" to whom the philosophes were looking as

their likeliest aides in the spread of education, liberty, and reason.

v. charles hi: 1759-88

/. The New Government

When he arrived from Naples he was forty-three years old. He was wel-

comed by all but the Jesuits, 28 who resented the sale of their Paraguayan

settlements by Spain to Portugal (1750). Otherwise he won all hearts by

remitting arrears of taxes, and restoring some of the privileges that the

provinces had lost under the centralizing policy of Philip V. His first year as

king of Spain was saddened by the death of his wife, Maria Amalia. He never

married again. It is to the credit of the Spanish Bourbons of the eighteenth

century that they gave the monarchs of Europe an example of marital devo-

tion and stability.

A British diplomat drew a British picture of Charles, who had had some

encounters with the English in Naples:

The King has a very odd appearance in person and dress. He is of diminu-

tive stature, with a complexion the color of mahogany. He has not been meas-

ured for a coat these thirty years, so that it sits on him like a sack. His waist-

coat and breeches are generally leather, with a pair of cloth spatterdashes on

his legs. . . . He goes out a-sporting every day of the year, rain or blow. 29

But the Earl of Bristol added, in 1 76 1 :

The Catholic King has good talents, a happy memory, and uncommon com-

mand of himself on all occasions. His having been often deceived renders him

suspicious. He ever prefers carrying a point by gentle means, and has the pa-

tience to repeat exhortations rather than exert his authority. . . Yet, with

the greatest air of gentleness, he keeps his ministers and attendants in the utmost

awe. 30

His personal piety gave no warning that he would attack the Jesuits or

undertake religious reforms. He heard Mass daily. His "honest and obstinate

adherence to all his treaties, principles, and engagements" astonished an Eng-

lish enemy. 31 He devoted a large part of each weekday to governmental

affairs. He rose at six, visited his children, breakfasted, worked from eight

to eleven, sat in council, received dignitaries, dined in public, gave several

hours to hunting, supped at nine-thirty, fed his dogs, said his prayers, and

went to bed. His hunting was probably a health measure, aimed to dispel

the melancholy that ran in the family.

He began with some serious mistakes. Unfamiliar with Spain, which he

282 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

had not seen since his sixteenth year, he took as his first aides two" Italians

who had served him well in Naples: the Marchese de' Grimaldi in foreign

policy, the Marchese de' Squillaci in domestic affairs.

The Earl of Bristol described Squillaci as "not bright. He is fond of busi-

ness, and never complains of having too much, notwithstanding the variety

of departments that center in him. ... I believe he is incapable of taking

any bribes, but I would not be equally responsible for his wife." 32 Squillaci

did not like the crime, odor, and gloom of Madrid; he organized a zealous

police and a street-cleaning squad, and lighted the capital with five thousand

lamps. He legalized monopolies for supplying the city with oil, bread, and

other necessities; a drought raised prices, and the populace called for Squil-

laci's head. He offended the clergy by regulations that checked their privi-

leges and power. He lost a thousand supporters by banning concealed weap-

ons. Finally he stirred up a revolution by attempting to change the dress of

the people. He persuaded the King that the long cape, which hid the figure,

and the broad hat with turned-down rim, which hid much of the face, made

it easier to conceal weapons, and harder for the police to recognize criminals.

A succession of royal decrees forbade the cape and the hat, and officers were

equipped with shears to cut the offending garments down to legal size. 33

This was more government than the proud Madrilenos could stand. On Palm

Sunday, March 23, 1766, they rose in revolt, captured ammunition stores,

emptied the prisons, overwhelmed soldiers and police, attacked Squillaci's

home, stoned Grimaldi, killed the Walloon guards of the royal palace, and pa-

raded with the heads of these hated foreigners held aloft on pikes and

crowned with broad-rimmed hats. For two days the mob slaughtered and

pillaged. Charles yielded, repealed the decrees, and sent Squillaci, safely

escorted, back to Italy. Meanwhile he had discovered the talents of the

Conde de Aranda, and appointed him president of the Council of Castile.

Aranda made the long cape and wide sombrero the official costume of the

hangman; the new connotation made the old garb unfashionable; most Ma-

drilenos adopted French dress.

Aranda came of an old and wealthy family in Aragon. We have seen him

imbibing Enlightenment in France; he went also to Prussia, where he studied

military organization. He returned to Spain eager to bring his country

abreast of those northern states. His Encyclopedist friends rejoiced too pub-

licly over his accession to power; he mourned that they had thereby made

his course more difficult, 34 and he wished they had studied diplomacy. He

defined political diplomacy as the art of

recognizing the strength, resources, interests, rights, fears, and hopes of the dif-

ferent powers, so that, as the occasion warrants it, we may appease these

powers, divide them, defeat them, or ally ourselves with them, depending on

how they serve our advantage and increase our security. 35

The King was in a mood for ecclesiastical reforms because he suspected

the clergy of secretly encouraging the revolt against Squillaci. 36 He had per-

mitted the government press to print in 1765 an anonymous Tratado de la

CHAP. XI ) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 283

regalia de V amortization, which questioned the right of the Church to amass

real property, and argued that in all temporal matters the Church should be

subject to the state. The author was Conde Pedro Rodriguez de Campoma-

nes, a member of the Consejo de Castilla. In 1761 Charles had issued an order

requiring royal consent for the publication of papal bulls or briefs in Spain;

later he rescinded this order; in 1768 he renewed it. Now he supported

Aranda and Campomanes in a succession of religious reforms that for one

exciting generation remade the intellectual face of Spain.

2. The Spanish Reformation

The Spanish reformers— perhaps excepting Aranda— had no intent to de-

stroy Catholicism in Spain. The long wars to drive out the Moors (like the

long struggle for the liberation of Ireland) had made Catholicism a part of

patriotism, and had intensified it into a faith too sanctified by the sacrifices of

the nation to admit of successful challenge or basic change. The hope of the

reformers was to bring the Church under control of the state, and to free

the mind of Spain from terror of the Inquisition. They began by attacking

the Jesuits.

The Society of Jesus had been born in Spain in the mind and experiences

of Ignatius Loyola, and some of its greatest leaders had come from Spain.

Here, as in Portugal, France, Italy, and Austria, it controlled secondary edu-

cation, gave confessors to kings and queens, and shared in forming royal

policies. Its expanding power aroused the jealousy, sometimes the enmity, of

the secular Catholic clergy. Some of these believed in the superior authority of

ecumenical councils over the popes; the Jesuits defended the supreme author-

ity of the popes over councils and kings. Spanish businessmen complained

that Jesuits engaging in colonial commerce were underselling regular mer-

chants because of ecclesiastical exemption from taxation; and this, it was

pointed out, lessened royal revenues. Charles believed that the Jesuits were

still encouraging the resistance of the Paraguayan Indians to the orders of the

Spanish government. 37 And he was alarmed when Aranda, Campomanes, and

others showed him letters which, they alleged, had been found in the cor-

respondence of the Jesuits; one of these letters, supposedly from Father Ricci,

general of the order, declared that Charles was a bastard and should be super-

seded by his brother Luis. 38 The authenticity of these letters has been rejected

by Catholics and unbelievers alike; 39 but Charles thought them genuine, and

concluded that the Jesuits were plotting to depose him, perhaps to have him

killed. 40 He noted that an attempt had been made, allegedly with Jesuit com-

plicity, to assassinate Joseph I of Portugal (1758). He determined to follow

Joseph's example, and expel the order from his realm.

Campomanes warned him that such a move could succeed only through

secret preparations followed by a sudden and concerted blow; otherwise the

Jesuits, who were revered by the people, could arouse a troublesome furor

throughout the nation and its possessions. On Aranda's suggestion sealed

messages, signed by the King, were sent out early in 1767 to officials every-

284 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

where in the empire, with orders, on pain of death, to open them only on

March 31 in Spain, on April 2 in the colonies. On March 31 the Spanish

Jesuits awoke to find their houses and colleges surrounded by troops, and

themselves placed under arrest. They were ordered to depart peaceably,

taking only such possessions as they could carry with them; all other Jesuit

property was confiscated by the state. Each of the exiles was granted a small

pension, which was to be discontinued if any Jesuit protested the expulsion.

They were taken in carriages under military escort to the nearest port, and

shipped to Italy. Charles sent word to Clement XIII that he was transporting

them "to the ecclesiastical territories, in order that they may remain under

the wise and immediate direction of his Holiness. ... I request your Holi-

ness not to regard this resolution otherwise than as an indispensable civil

precaution, which I have adopted only after mature examination and pro-

found reflection." 41

When the first vessel, bearing six hundred Jesuits, sought to deposit them

at Civitavecchia, Cardinal Torrigiani, papal secretary, refused to let them

land, arguing that Italy could not so suddenly take care of so many refugees. 42

For weeks the ship roamed the Mediterranean seeking some hospitable port,

while its desperate passengers suffered from weather, hunger, and disease.

Finally they were allowed to debark in Corsica; and later, in manageable

groups, they were absorbed into the Papal States. Meanwhile the Jesuits

experienced similar banishment from Naples, Parma, Spanish America, and

the Philippines. Clement XIII appealed to Charles III to revoke edicts whose

suddenness and cruelty must shock all Christendom. Charles replied: "To

spare the world a great scandal I shall ever preserve, as a secret in my heart,

the abominable plot that necessitated this rigor. Your Holiness ought to be-

lieve my word: the safety of my life exacts of me a profound silence." 43

The King never fully revealed the evidence upon which he had based his

decrees. The details are so controverted and obscure that judgment is baffled.

D'Alembert, no friend of the Jesuits, questioned the method of their banish-

ment. On May 4, 1767, he wrote to Voltaire:

What do you think of the edict of Charles III, so abruptly expelling the

Jesuits? Persuaded as I am that he had good and sufficient reasons, do you not

think that he ought to have made them known, and not shut them up in his

"royal heart"? Do you not think he ought to have allowed the Jesuits to

justify themselves, especially since everyone is sure they could not? Do you

not think, too, that it would be very unjust to make them all die of starvation

if a single lay brother, who perhaps is cutting cabbage in the kitchen, should

say a word, one way or the other, in their favor? . . . Does it not seem to

you that he could act with more common sense in carrying out what, after all,

is a reasonable matter? 44

Was the expulsion popular? A year after its completion, on the festival of

St. Charles, the King showed himself to the people from the balcony of his

palace. When, following custom, he asked what gift they desired of him,

they cried out "with one voice" that the Jesuits should be allowed to return,

and to wear the habit of the secular clergy. Charles refused, and banished the

CHAP. XI ) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 285

Archbishop of Toledo on charge of having instigated the suspiciously con-

cordant petition. 45 When, in 1769, the Pope asked the bishops of Spain for

their judgment on the expulsion of the Jesuits, forty-two bishops approved,

six opposed, eight gave no opinion. 46 Probably the secular clergy were con-

tent to be relieved of Jesuit competition. The Augustinian friars of Spain

approved the expulsion, and later supported the demand of Charles III that

the Society of Jesus be completely dissolved. 47

No such summary action could be taken with the Inquisition. Far more

deeply than the Society of Jesus it was mortised in the awe and tradition of

the people, who ascribed to it the preservation of morals and the purity of

their faith— even of their blood. When Charles III came to the throne the

Inquisition held the mind of Spain by a severe and watchful censorship. Any

book suspected of religious heresy or moral deviation was submitted to

calificadores— qualifiers, or examiners; if they thought it dangerous they sent

their recommendations to the Consejo de la Inquisicion; this could decree the

suppression of the book and the punishment of the author. Periodically the

Inquisition published an Index of prohibited books; to own or read one of

these without ecclesiastical permission was a crime that only the Inquisition

could forgive, and for which the offender could be excommunicated. Priests

were required, especially in Lent, to ask all penitents whether they had, or

knew anyone who had, a prohibited book. Any person failing to report a

violation of the Index was considered as guilty as the violator, and no ties of

family or friendship could excuse him. 48

Charles's ministers here accomplished only minor reforms. In 1768 the

Inquisitorial censorship was checked by requiring that all edicts prohibiting

books should secure royal approval before being put into effect. In 1770 the

King ordered the Inquisition's tribunal to concern itself only with heresy and

apostasy, and to imprison no one whose guilt had not been conclusively

established. In 1784 he ruled that proceedings of the Inquisition regarding

grandees, cabinet ministers, and royal servants must be submitted to him for

review. He appointed Inquisitor generals who showed a more liberal attitude

toward diversities of thought. 49

These modest measures had some effect, for in 1782 the Inquisitor General

sadly reported that fear of ecclesiastical censure for reading forbidden books

was "nearly extinct." 50 In general the agents of the Inquisition, after 1770,

were milder, its penalties more humane, than before. Toleration was granted

to Protestants under Charles III, and in 1779 to Moslems, though not to

Jews. 51 There were four autos-da-fe during the reign of Charles III, the last

in 1780 at Seville, of an old woman accused of witchcraft; and this execution

aroused such criticism throughout Europe 52 that the way was prepared for

the suppression of the Spanish Inquisition in 181 3.

Nevertheless even under Charles III freedom of thought, if expressed, was

still legally punishable with death. In 1768 Pablo Olavide was denounced to

the Inquisition as having pornographic paintings in his Madrid home— per-

haps some copies of Boucher's nudes, for Olavide had traveled in France,

286 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

even to Ferney. A more serious charge was laid against him in 1774— that in

the model villages established by him in Sierra Morena he had allowed no

monasteries, and had forbidden the clergy to say Mass on weekdays, or beg

for alms. The Inquisition notified the King that these and other offenses had

been proved by the testimony of eighty witnesses. In 1778 Olavide was sum-

moned to trial; he was accused of upholding the Copernican astronomy, and

of corresponding with Voltaire and Rousseau. He abjured his errors, was

"reconciled" with the Church, suffered confiscation of all his property, and

was sentenced to confinement in a monastery for eight years. In 1780 his

health collapsed, and he was allowed to take the waters at a spa in Catalonia.

He escaped to France, and received a hero's welcome from his philosophic

friends in Paris. But after some years of exile he grew unbearably lonesome

for his Spanish haunts. He composed a pious work, The Gospel Triumphant,

or The Philosopher Converted, and the Inquisition permitted his return. 53

We note that the trial of Olavide occurred after the fall of Aranda from

his place at the head of the Consejo de Castilla. In his final years of power

Aranda founded new schools, taught by secular clergy, to supply the void

left by the Jesuits; and he reformed the currency by replacing debased coins

with money of good quality and superior design (1770). However, his sense

of his superior enlightenment made him in time irritable, overbearing, and

presumptuous. After making the power of the king absolute, he sought to

limit it by increasing the authority of the ministers. He lost perspective and

measure, and dreamed of bringing Spain, in one generation, out of its con-

tented Catholicity into the stream of French philosophy. He expressed too

boldly his heretical ideas, even to his confessor. Though many of the secular

clergy supported some of his ecclesiastical reforms as beneficial to the

Church, 54 he frightened many more by disclosing his hope of completely

disbanding the Inquisition. 55 He became so unpopular that he did not dare

go out of his palace without a bodyguard. He complained so often of the

burdens of office that at last Charles took him at his word and sent him as

ambassador to France (1773-87). There he predicted that the English colo-

nies in America, which were beginning their revolt, would in time become

one of the great powers of the world. 56

3. The New Economy

Three able men dominated the ministry after Aranda's departure. Jose

Monino, Conde de Floridablanca, succeeded Grimaldi as secretary of state

for foreign affairs (1776), and dominated the cabinet till 1792. Like Aranda,

but in less degree, he felt the influence of the philosophes. He guided the

King in measures for improving agriculture, commerce, education, science,

and art; but the French Revolution frightened him into conservatism, and

he led Spain into the first coalition against Revolutionary France (1792).

Pedro de Campomanes presided over the Council of Castile for five years,

and was the prime mover in economic reform. Gaspar Melchor de Jove-

llanos, "the most eminent Spaniard of his age," 57 came into public view as

CHAP. Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 287

a humane and incorruptible judge in Seville (1767) and Madrid (1778).

Most of his activity in the central government followed 1789, but he con-

tributed powerfully to economic policy under Charles HI with his Informe

sobre un proyecto de ley agraria (1787); this proposal for a revision of agri-

cultural law, written with almost Ciceronian elegance, gave him a European

reputation. These three men, with Aranda, were the fathers of the Spanish

Enlightenment and the new economy. On the whole, in the judgment of an

English scholar, their "result for good rivals that achieved in an equally short

time in any other country; and in the history of Spain there is certainly no

period which can compare with the reign of Charles III." 58

The obstacles to reform in Spain were as great in economy as in religion.

The concentration of inalienable ownership in titled families or ecclesiastical

corporations, and the monopoly of wool production by the Mesta seemed to

be insurmountable barriers to economic change. Millions of Spaniards took

pride in indolence, and showed no shame in begging; change was distrusted

as a threat to idleness.* Money was hoarded in palace coffers and church

treasuries instead of being invested in commerce or industry. The expulsion

of Moors, Jews, and Moriscos had removed many sources of agricultural

betterment and commercial development. Difficulties of internal communica-

tion and transport left the interior a century behind Barcelona, Seville, and

Madrid.

Despite these deterrents, in Madrid and other centers men of good will

—nobles, priests, and commoners, without distinction of sex— formed Socie-

dades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais to study and promote education,

science, industry, commerce, and art. They founded schools and libraries,

translated foreign treatises, offered prizes for essays and ideas, and raised

money for progressive economic undertakings and experiments. Acknowl-

edging the influence of French physiocrats and Adam Smith, they con-

demned the national accumulation of gold as a monument to stagnation, and

one of them asserted: "The nation that has the most gold is the poorest, . . .

as Spain has shown." 60 Jovellanos hailed "the science of civil economy" as

"the true science of the state." 61 Economic treatises multiplied. Campomanes'

Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular inspired thousands, includ-

ing the King.

Charles began by importing grain and seed for regions where agriculture

had decayed. He urged towns to lease their uncultivated common lands to

peasants at the lowest practical rent. Floridablanca, using crown revenues

from vacant ecclesiastical benefices, established in Valencia and Malaga

montes pios (pious funds) for lending money to farmers at low interest. To

check deforestation and erosion, Charles ordered all communes to plant,

each year, a fixed number of trees; hence came that annual celebration of

"Arbor Day" which was still, in both hemispheres, a wholesome custom in

our youth. He encouraged the disregard of old entails, discouraged new ones,

and thereby facilitated the breakup of large estates into peasant properties.

* A law of Aragon prescribed that every hidalgo should supply each of his sons with a

pension, since "it would not be seemly for a nobleman to work." 59

288 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

The privileges of the Mesta sheep monopoly were sharply reduced; large

tracts of land formerly reserved by it for pasturage were opened to cultiva-

tion. Foreign colonists were brought in to people sparsely inhabited areas;

so, in the Sierra Morena region of southwestern Spain, hitherto abandoned

to robbers and wild beasts, Olavide created (1767 f.) forty-four villages and

eleven towns of French or German immigrants; these settlements became

famous for their prosperity. Extensive canals were dug to connect rivers and

irrigate large tracts of formerly arid land. A network of new roads, which

for a time were the best in Europe, 62 bound the villages and the towns in a

quickened facility of communication, transport, and trade.

Governmental aid went to industry. To remove the stigma traditionally

attached to manual labor, a royal decree declared that craft occupations were

compatible with noble rank, and that craftsmen were henceforth eligible to

governmental posts. Model factories were established: for textiles at Guada-

lajara and Segovia; for hats at San Fernando; for silks at Talavera; for porce-

lain at Buen Retiro; for glass at San Ildefonso; for glass, cabinetry, and

tapestry at Madrid. Royal edicts favored the development of large-scale

capitalistic production, especially in the textile industry. Guadalajara in 1780

had eight hundred looms employing four thousand weavers; one company

at Barcelona managed sixty factories with 2,162 cotton-weaving looms;

Valencia had four thousand looms weaving silk, and, favored by its facilities

for export, was cutting into the silk trade of Lyons. By 1792 Barcelona had

eighty thousand weavers, and ranked second only to the English Midlands in

the production of cotton cloth.

Seville and Cadiz had long enjoyed a state-protected monopoly of com-

merce with Spain's possessions in the New World; Charles III ended this

privilege, and allowed various ports to trade with the colonies; and he ne-

gotiated a treaty with Turkey (1782) that opened Moslem harbors to Span-

ish goods. The results were beneficial to all parties. Spanish America grew

rapidly in wealth; Spain's income from America rose eight hundred per cent

under Charles III; her export trade was tripled. 63

The expanding activities of the government required enlarged revenues.

These were raised in some measure by state monopolies in the sale of brandy,

tobacco, playing cards, gunpowder, lead, mercury, sulfur, and salt. At the

outset of the reign there were sales taxes of fifteen per cent in Catalonia,

fourteen per cent in Castile. Jovellanos aptly described sales taxes: "They sur-

prise their prey ... at its birth, pursue and nip it as it circulates, and never

lose sight of it or let it escape, until the moment of its consumption." 64 Under

Charles the sales tax in Catalonia was abolished, and in Castile it was reduced

to two, three, or four per cent. 65 A moderate graduated tax was laid upon

incomes. To secure additional funds by putting the savings of the people to

work, Francisco de Cabarrus persuaded the Treasury to issue interest-bear-

ing government bonds. When these fell to seventy-eight per cent of their

par value, he founded (1782) the first national bank of Spain, the Banco de

San Carlos, which redeemed the bonds at par and restored the financial credit

of the state.

CHAP.Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 289

The result of statesmanship and enterprise was a substantial rise in the

prosperity of the nation as a whole. The middle classes profited most, for it

was their organizations that remade the Spanish economy. At Madrid 375

businessmen composed five great merchant guilds— the Cinco Gremios Ma-

yores— which controlled most of the trade of the capital; we may judge their

wealth from the fact that in 1776 they lent thirty million reales to the

government. 66

Generally the government favored this rise of the business class as indis-

pensable to freeing Spain from economic and political dependence upon

states with a more advanced economy. Here, as there, the growing prole-

tariat had little share in the new affluence. Wages rose, especially in Cata-

lonia, where the well-to-do complained that servants were hard to find and

hard to keep; 67 but, by and large, prices rose faster than wages, and the

"working classes" were as poor at the end of the reign as at the beginning.

An Englishman traveling in Valencia in 1787 remarked the contrast between

"the opulence of . . . merchants, manufacturers, ecclesiastics, the military,

or gentlemen of landed property," and the "poverty, wretchedness, and

rags" visible "in every street." 68 So the middle classes welcomed the Luces—

the Enlightenment coming in from France and England— while their em-

ployees, crowding the churches and kissing the shrines, comforted themselves

with divine grace and hopes of paradise.

The cities expanded under the new economy. The great maritime centers

—Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Cadiz— had populations ranging from 80,000 to

100,000 (1800). Madrid in. 1797 had 167,607, plus 30,000 foreigners. When

Charles III came to the throne the city had the reputation of being the

dirtiest capital in Europe. In the poorer quarters people still emptied their

garbage into the streets, relying upon wind or rain to distribute it; when

Charles forbade this they denounced him as a tyrant. "The Spaniards," he

said, "are children, who cry when they are washed." 69 Nevertheless his agents

established a system of garbage-collection and sewage, and scavengers were

organized to gather offal for fertilizer. 70 An effort to suppress mendicancy

failed; the people refused to let the police arrest beggars— especially the blind

ones, who had formed themselves into a powerful guild.

Year by year Charles improved his capital. Water was led from the moun-

tains into seven hundred fountains, from which 720 water carriers laboriously

delivered it to the houses of the city. The streets were lighted by oil lamps

from nightfall to midnight during six months of autumn and winter. Most

streets were narrow and tortuous, following old and devious paths and

hiding from the summer sun; but some fine avenues were laid out, and the

people enjoyed spacious parks and shady promenades. Especially popular

was the Paseo del Prado, or Meadow Walk, cooled with fountains and trees,

and favored for amorous reconnaissance and rendezvous. There, in 1785,

Juan de Villanueva began to build the Museo del Prado. And there, almost

any day, four hundred carriages drove by, and, any evening, thirty thousand

Madrilenos gathered. They were forbidden to sing ribald songs, or bathe

nude in the fountains, or play music after midnight; but they enjoyed the

290 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

melodious cries of women selling naranjas, limas, and avellanas— oranges, limes,

and hazelnuts. At the end of the eighteenth century, said travelers, the

spectacle visible daily on the Prado equaled that which in other cities of that

period could be seen only on Sundays and holidays. 71 Madrid became then, as

it has again become in our time, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

Charles III was not as successful in foreign policy as in domestic affairs.

The revolt of the English colonies in America seemed to offer a chance to

avenge the losses suffered by Spain in the Seven Years' War; Aranda urged

Charles to help the revolutionists; the King secretly sent the rebels a million

livres (June, 1776). Attacks by English corsairs upon Spanish shipping fi-

nally led Spain to declare war (June 23, 1779). A Spanish force recaptured

Minorca, but an attempt to take Gibraltar failed. An invasion of England was

prepared, but was frustrated by "Protestant" storms. In the Peace of Ver-

sailles Spain (1783) withdrew its demand for Gibraltar, but regained Florida.

The failure to restore Spain's territorial integrity saddened the King's final

years. The wars had consumed much of the wealth which the new economy

had produced. His brilliant ministers had never overcome two powerful

forces of conservatism— the grandees with their vast estates, and the clergy

with their vested interest in the simplicity of the people. Charles himself had

seldom wavered in his basic fidelity to the Church. His people never ad-

mired him so much as when, meeting a religious procession, he gave his

coach to the prelate who was carrying the Host, and then joined the retinue

on foot. His religious devotion won the affection which had been withheld

from him, as a stranger from Italy, in the first decade of his reign. When he

died (December 14, 1788), after fifty-four years of rule in Naples and

Spain, there were many who reckoned him, if not the greatest, certainly

the most beneficent king that Spain had ever had. His kindly nature shone

out when, on his deathbed, he was asked by the attending bishop had he yet

pardoned all his enemies. "How should I wait for this pass before forgiving

them?" he asked. "They were all forgiven the moment after the offense." 72

VI. THE SPANKSH CHARACTER

What sort of people were they, these Spaniards of the eighteenth cen-

tury? By all reports their morals were good, compared with their peers in

England or France. Their intense religion, their courage and sense of honor,

their family coherence and discipline provided strong correctives to their

sexual sensitivity and their pugnacious pride, even while sanctioning a pas-

sionate chauvinism of race and faith. Sexual selection promoted courage, for

Spanish women, desiring protection, gave their most intoxicating smiles to

those men who dared the bulls in the arena or the streets, or who quickly re-

sented and avenged an insult, or who returned with glory from the wars.

Sexual morality had softened with the influx of French ideas and ways.

Girls were closely guarded, and parental consent (after 1766) was a legal

requisite for marriage; but after marriage the women in the larger cities in-

CHAP.Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 291

dulged in flirtations. The cortejo or cicisbeo— courtier or attendant cavalier

—became a necessary appendage to a woman of fashion, and adultery in-

creased. 73 One small group, the majos and majas, constituted a unique aspect

of Spanish life. The majos were men of the lower class who dressed like

dandies, wore long capes, long hair, and broad-rimmed hats, smoked big

cigars, were always ready for a fight, and lived a Bohemian life financed as

often as possible by their majas— their mistresses. Their sexual unions paid no

attention to law; often the maja had a husband who supported her while she

supported her majo. Half the world knows the maja, garbed or not, from

Goya's brush.

Social morality was relatively high. Political and commercial corruption

existed, but not on the scale known in France or England; a French traveler

reported that "Spanish probity is proverbial, and it shines conspicuously in

commercial relations." 74 The word of a Spanish gentleman was moral tender

from Lisbon to St. Petersburg. Friendship in Spain was often more lasting

than love. Charity was plentiful. In Madrid alone religious institutions daily

distributed thirty thousand bowls of nourishing soup to the poor. 75 Many

new hospitals and almshouses were established, many old ones were enlarged

or improved. Almost all Spaniards were generous and humane, except to

heretics and bulls.

Bullfights rivaled religion, sex, honor, and the family as objects of Spanish

devotion. Like the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, they were defended

on two grounds: courage had to be developed in men, and bulls had to die

before being eaten. Charles III forbade these contests, but they were resumed

soon after his death. Skillful and riskful toreadors were the idols of all

classes. Each had his following; the Duchess of Alba favored Costillares, the

Duchess of Osuna favored Romero, and these factions divided Madrid as

Gluck and Piccini divided Paris. Men and women wagered their earnings on

the fate of the bulls, and on almost everything else. Gambling was illegal but

universal; even private homes held gambling soirees, and the hostesses pock-

eted the fees.

Genteel male dress gradually abandoned the somber black garb and stiff

collar of an earlier generation for the French habit of colored coat, long

vest of satin or silk, knee breeches, silk stockings, buckled shoes, all crowned

with a wig and a three-cornered hat. Usually the Spanish woman made a

sacred mystery of her charms by swathing them in lace bodices and long-

sometimes hoop— skirts, and using mantilla veils to hide eyes in whose dark

depths some Spaniard would gladly sink his soul. But whereas in the seven-

teenth century a lady rarely allowed her feet to be seen by a man, now her

skirts were shortened to a few inches above the floor, and the formerly

heelless slippers were displaced by sharp-pointed high-heeled shoes. Preach-

ers warned that such indecent exposure of female feet added dangerous fuel

to the already combustible male. The women smiled, adorned their shoes,

flashed their skirts, and waved their fans, even on winter days. Isabella Far-

nese had an armory of 1,626 fans, some of them painted by artists of na-

tional renown.

Social life was restrained in everything but the dance. The evening assem-

292 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

blies avoided serious discussion, preferring games, the dance, and gallantry.

Dancing was a major passion in Spain, and sprouted varieties that became

famous in Europe. The fandango was danced to a triple measure with cas-

tanets; the seguidilla was performed by two or four couples, with castanets

and usually with song; its derivative, the bolero, took form toward 1780,

and soon acquired a mad popularity. In the contradanza a line of men faced

a line of women in alternating approach and retreat, as if symbolizing the

tactics of the eternal war between woman and man; or four couples formed

and enclosed a square in the stately contradanza cuadrada— the quadrille.

Masquerade balls sometimes drew 3,500 eager dancers, and in Carnival time

they danced till dawn.

These dances made motion a living poetry and a sexual stimulus. "It was

said that a Spanish woman dancing the seguidilla was so seductive that even

a pope and the whole College of Cardinals would be swept off their dig-

nity." 76 Casanova himself found something to learn in Spain:

About midnight the wildest and maddest of dances began. ... It was the

fandango, which I fondly supposed 1 had often seen, but which [here] was far

beyond my wildest imaginings. ... In Italy and France the dancers are care-

ful not to make the gestures which render this the most voluptuous of dances.

Each couple, man and woman, make only three steps, then, keeping time to the

music with their castanets, they throw themselves into a variety of lascivious

attitudes; the whole of love from its birth to its end, from its first sigh to its

last ecstasy, is set forth. In my excitement I cried aloud. 77

He marveled that the Inquisition allowed so provocative a dance; he was

told that it was "absolutely forbidden, and no one would dare to dance it

if the Conde de Aranda had not given permission."

Some of the most popular forms of Spanish music were associated with

the dance; so the cante flamenco, or gypsy ("Flemish") singing, used a plain-

tive and sentimental tone with which all gypsy singers accompanied the

seguidilla gitana. Perhaps these mournful melodies echoed old Moorish airs,

or reflected the somber quality of Spanish religion and art, or the irritating

inaccessibility of the female form, or the disillusionment following realiza-

tion. A more joyous strain came in with Italian opera (1703) and Farinelli's

arias. The old castrato, after trilling through two reigns, lost favor under

Charles III, who dethroned him with a line: "Capons are good only to

eat." 78 The Italian influence continued with Scarlatti, and triumphed again

with Boccherini, who arrived in 1768, dominated the music of the court

under Charles III and Charles IV, and remained in Spain till his death

(1805).

By a reverse movement Vicente Martin y Solar, after making a name in

Spain, successfully produced Italian opera in Florence, Vienna, and St. Peters-

burg. Antonio Soler's harpsichord sonatas rivaled Scarlatti's; and Don Luis

Mison developed the tonada y or vocal solo, into the tonadillo as an inter-

mezzo of song between the acts of a play. In 1799 a royal order ended the

reign of Italian music in Spain by forbidding the performance of any piece

not written in Castilian language and presented by Spanish artists. 79

CHAP. Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 293

We cannot sum up the Spanish character in one homogeneous mold. The

Spanish soul varies with the scenery from state to state, and the apancesados,

or Frenchified Spaniards, who gathered in Madrid, were quite another type

than those natives who had been mortised and tenoned in Spanish ways. But

if we set aside exotic minorities, we may recognize in the Spanish people a

character indigenous and unique. The Spaniard was proud, but with a silent

force that took little from chauvinism or nationality; it was a pride of in-

dividuality, a resolute sense of solitary struggle against earthly injury, per-

sonal insult, or eternal damnation. To such a spirit the external world could

seem of secondary moment, not worth bothering about or toiling for; noth-

ing mattered but the fate of the soul in the conflict with man and in the

search for God. How trivial, then, were the problems of politics, the race

for money, the exaltation of fame or place! Even the triumphs of war had

no giory unless they were victories over the enemies of the faith. Rooted in

that faith, the Spaniard could face life with a stoic tranquillity, a fatalism

that waited quietly for eventual Paradise.

VII. THR SPANISH MIND

When Louis XIV accepted the offer of the last Hapsburg King of Spain

to bequeath his crown to a grandson of the Grand Monarque, a Spanish

ambassador at Versailles exclaimed joyfully, "Now there are no more

Pyrenees!" But those gloomy masses stood their ground as an obstinate

barrier to French lumieres, and as a symbol of the resistance that would meet

the attempt of a dedicated few to Europeanize the Spanish mind.

Campomanes startled the old with a Discurso sobre la education popular

de los artesanos y su jovtento (1774-76), which made a wider extension of

popular education an indispensable base for national vitality and growth.

Some high ecclesiastics and great landowners saw no sense in disturbing the

people with unnecessary knowledge that might lead to religious heresy and

social revolt. Undeterred, Jovellanos labored to spread faith in education.

"Numerous are the streams that lead to social prosperity," he wrote, "but all

spring from the same source, and that source is public education." 80 He

hoped that education would teach men to reason, that reason would free

them from superstition and intolerance, and that science, developed by such

men, would use the resources of nature for the conquest of disease and pov-

erty. Some noble ladies took up the challenge, and formed a Junta de Damas

to finance primary schools. Charles III spent considerable sums in establish-

ing free elementary schools. Private individuals joined in founding academies

for the study of language, literature, history, art, law, science, or medicine.

The expulsion of the Jesuits compelled and facilitated the remolding of

secondary schools. Charles ordered an expansion of science courses in these

colleges, a modernization of their textbooks, and the admission of laymen

to their faculties. He endowed colleges, and gave pensions to outstanding

teachers. 81 The universities were advised to admit Newton to their courses

294 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XI

in physics, and Descartes and Leibniz into their courses in philosophy. The

University of Salamanca rejected the advice on the ground that "the prin-

ciples of Newton . . . and Cartesio do not resemble the revealed truth as

much as do those of Aristotle"; 82 but most Spanish universities accepted the

royal directive. The University of Valencia, with 2,400 students, was now

(1784) the largest and most progressive educational center in Spain. Several

religious orders adopted filosofia moderna in their colleges. The general of

the Discalced Carmelites urged Carmelite teachers to read Plato, Aristotle,

Cicero, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Locke, Wolff, Con-

dillac; here was no regimen for saints. One chapter of the Augustinian Friars

studied Hobbes, another studied Helvetius. Such studies were always fol-

lowed by refutations, but many an ardent soul has lost his faith in refuting

its enemies.

One remarkable monk had "modernized" while Charles III was still a

youth. Though spending the last forty-seven years (171 7-64) of his life in

a Benedictine monastery at Oviedo, Benito Jeronimo Feijoo y Montenegro

managed to study Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, Gassendi, Newton, and

Leibniz; and he saw with wonder and shame how Spain, since Cervantes,

had been isolated from the main currents of European thought. From his

cell he sent forth, between 1726 and 1739, a series of eight volumes which

he called Teatro critico— not dramatic criticism, but a critical examination

of ideas. He attacked the logic and philosophy then taught in Spain; lauded

Bacon's plea for inductive science; summarized the findings of scientists in

many fields; ridiculed magic, divination, bogus miracles, medical ignorance,

and popular superstitions; laid down rules of historical credibility that ruth-

lessly punctured fond national legends; demanded an extension of education

to all classes; and advocated a freer and more public life for women in edu-

cation and society.

A swarm of enemies gathered around his books, impugning his patriotism

and denouncing his audacities. The Inquisition summoned him before its

tribunal, but it could find no explicit heresy in him or his work. In 1742 he

resumed his campaign with the first of five volumes entitled Cartas eruditas

y curiosas {Learned and Inquiring Letters) . He wrote a good style, recog-

nizing every author's moral obligation to be clear; and the public so relished

his instruction and his courage that fifteen editions of the Teatro and the

Cartas were required by 1786. He could not banish superstition from Spain;

witches, ghosts, and demons still peopled the air and frightened the mind;

but a beginning had been made, and it is to the credit of his order that this

had been done by a monk who remained unmolested in his modest cell until

his death at eighty-eight ( 1 764) .

It was another cleric who wrote the most famous prose work of eight-

eenth-century Spain. Just as the Benedictines saw that no harm should come

to Feijoo, so the Jesuits protected one of their priests whose chief production

was a satire of sermons. Jose Francisco de Isla was himself an eloquent

preacher, but he was first amused, then disturbed, by the oratorical tricks,

the literary conceits, the histrionics and buffoonery with which some preach-

CHAP. Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 295

ers caught the attention and pennies of the people in churches and public

squares. In 1758 he made high fun of these evangelists in a novel called

Historia del famoso predicador Fray Gerundio. Brother Gerund, said Father

Isla,

always began his sermons with some proverb, some pothouse witticism, or

some strange fragment which, taken from its context, would seem at first blush

to be an inconsequence, a blasphemy, or an impiety, until at last, having kept

his audience waiting a moment in wonder, he finished the clause, and came out

with an explanation that reduced the whole to a sort of miserable trifling. Thus,

preaching one day on the mystery of the Trinity, he began his sermon by say-

ing, "I deny that God exists a Unity in essence and a Trinity in person," and

then stopped short for an instant. The hearers, of course, looked around, . . .

wondering what would be the end of this heretical blasphemy. At length, when

the preacher thought he had fairly caught them, he went on: "Thus say the

Ebionite, the A4arcionite, the Arian, the Manichean, the Socinian; but I prove

it against them all from the Scriptures, the Councils, and the Fathers." 83

Within a day of its publication eight hundred copies of Fray Gerundio were

sold. The preaching friars assailed it as encouraging disrespect of the clergy.

Isla was summoned before the Inquisition, and his book was condemned

(1760), but he himself was not punished. Meanwhile he joined his fellow

Jesuits in exile, and on the road suffered an attack of paralysis. He spent his

declining years at Bologna, living on the pittance allowed him by the Span-

ish government.

Almost every Spaniard who could write wrote poetry. At a poetic joust

in 1727 there were 150 competitors. Jovellanos added poetry and drama to

his activities as jurist, educator, and statesman. His home in Madrid became

a meeting place for men of letters. He composed satires in the manner of

Juvenal, rebuking the corruption he had found in government and law; and,

like any city dweller, he sang the joys of rural peace. — Nicolas Fernandez

de Moratin composed an epic canto on the exploits of Cortez; we are told

that this is "the noblest poem of its class produced in Spain during the eight-

eenth century." 84 The gay and gracious verses of Diego Gonzalez, an Au-

gustinian friar, were more popular than the didactic Four Ages of Man

which he dedicated to Jovellanos. — Don Tomas de Iriarte y Oropesa also

indulged a didactic bent in his poem On Music; better were his Fables

(1782), which chastised the foibles of pundits and earned him a reputation

that still survives. He translated tragedies by Voltaire and comedies by

Moliere; he made fun of the monks "who hold sway over the heavens and

two thirds of Spain"; he was prosecuted by the Inquisition, recanted, and

died of syphilis at forty-one ( 1 79 1 ) , 85

In 1780 the Spanish Academy offered an award for an eclogue celebrating

pastoral life. Iriarte won second prize and never forgave the victor, for Juan

Melendez Valdes went on to become the leading Spanish poet of the age.

Juan wooed Jovellanos, and through him obtained the chair of humanities at

Salamanca (1781); there he won first the students, then the faculty, to a

more adventurous curriculum, even to reading Locke and A4ontesquieu. Be-

tween classes he wrote a volume of lyrics and pastoral poetry— vivid evoca-

296 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

tions of natural scenery in verses of such delicacy and finish as Spain had not

read for more than a century. The continuing favor of Jovellanos raised

Melendez to the judiciary at Saragossa and to the chancery court at Vallado-

lid, and his poetry suffered from his politics. When Jovellanos was exiled

(1798) Melendez was banished, too. He turned his pen to denouncing the

French invaders of Spain, and Joseph Bonaparte especially; but in 1 808 he

returned to Madrid, accepted office under Joseph Bonaparte, and shocked

Spain with poetic flatteries of his foreign masters. In the war of liberation

that deposed Joseph the poet's house was sacked by French soldiers, he him-

self was attacked by an angry mob, and he fled for his life from Spain. Be-

fore crossing the Bidassoa into France he kissed the last spot of Spanish earth

(181 3). Four years later he died in obscurity and poverty in Montpellier.

Spain should have had good dramatists in this age, for the Bourbon kings

were well disposed toward the theater. Three factors made for its decline:

the strong preference of Isabella Farnese for opera and of Philip V for

Farinelli; the consequent dependence of the theater upon the general public,

whose applause went most to farces, miracles, legends, and verbal conceits;

and the effort of the more serious dramatists to imprison their plays within

the "Aristotelian unities" of action, place, and time. The most popular play-

wright of the century was Ramon Francisco de la Cruz, who wrote some

four hundred little farces satirizing the manners, ideas, and speech of the

middle and lower classes, but portraying the sins and follies of the populace

with a forgiving sympathy. Jovellanos, the uomo universale of Spain, put

his hand to comedy, and won both the audience and the critics with his

Delinquente honrado (1773)— The Honored Criminal: a Spanish gentleman,

after repeatedly refusing to fight a duel, finally takes up a persistent chal-

lenge, kills his opponent in a fair fight, and is condemned to death by a

judge who turns out to be his father. Always a reformer, Jovellanos aimed

with his play to obtain a mitigation of the law that made dueling a capital

crime.

The campaign for the Aristotelian unities was led by the poet Nicolas

Fernandez de Moratin, and was carried on to success by his son Leandro.

The early poems of this youth pleased Jovellanos, who secured a berth for

him with the Spanish embassy in Paris. There he made friends with Goldoni,

who turned him to writing plays. Fortune lavished gifts upon "Moratin the

Younger"; he was sent at public expense to study the theaters in Germany,

Italy, and England; and on his return to Spain he was given a sinecure that

allowed him time for literary work. His first comedy was offered to a Ma-

drid theater in 1786, but its presentation was delayed for four years while

managers and actors debated whether a play obeying the rules of Aristotle

and French drama could win a Spanish audience. Its success was moderate.

Moratin took the offensive; in his Comedia nueva (1792) he made such fun

of the popular comedies that the audience thereafter accepted dramas that

studied character and illuminated life. Moratin was acclaimed as the Spanish

Moliere, and dominated the stage of Madrid until the French invasion of

1808. His French sympathies and liberal politics led him, like Melendez and

CHAP. Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 297

Goya, to co-operate with the government of Joseph Bonaparte. When Jo-

seph fell, Moratin narrowly escaped imprisonment. He sought refuge in

France, and died in Paris in 1828— the same year in which the self-exiled

Goya died in Bordeaux.

Vlll. SPANISH ART

What could be expected of it after the ravaging of Spain in the long War

of the Spanish Succession? Invading armies pillaged the churches, rifled the

tombs, burned the pictures, and stabled their horses in venerated shrines.

And after the war a new invasion came; through half a century Spanish art

submitted to French or Italian domination; and when, in 1752, the Academy

of San Fernando was formed to guide and help young artists, it labored to

impress upon them the principles of a neoclassicism completely uncongenial

to the Spanish soul.

Baroque struggled violently to preserve itself, and in architecture and

sculpture it had its way. It triumphed in the towers that Fernando de Cases y

Nova added (1738) to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, and in the

north front by Ventura Rodriguez (1764) for that same monument to

Spain's patron St. James. One of the legends dear to the people told how a

statue of the Virgin on a pillar in Saragossa had come to life and had spoken

to St. James; on that site Spanish piety built the Church of the Virgen del

Pilar; and for that church Rodriguez designed the Templete, a chapel of

marble and silver to house the Virgin's image.

Two famous palaces were raised in the reign of Philip V. Near Segovia

he bought the grounds and grange of a monastery; he engaged Filippo Iuvara

of Turin to erect there the Palace of San Ildefonso (1719 f.); he surrounded

the buildings with gardens and twenty-six fountains rivaling those of Ver-

sailles. The ensemble took the name of La Gran j a, and cost the people

45,000,000 crowns. It had hardly been finished when, on Christmas Eve of

1734, fire destroyed the Alcazar, which had been the royal residence in

Madrid since the Emperor Charles V. Philip moved to Buen Retiro, where

Philip IV had built a palace in 163 1; this remained the chief royal seat for

thirty years.

To replace the Alcazar Iuvara planned a palacio real— apartments, offices,

council rooms, chapel, library, theater, and gardens— which would have sur-

passed in grandeur any royal residence then known; the model alone con-

tained enough wood to build a house. Before he could begin construction

Iuvara died (1736). Isabella Farnese rejected his design as impossibly ex-

pensive, and his successor, Giovanni Battista Sacchetti of Turin, raised

(1737-64) the royal palace that stands in Madrid today— 470 feet long, 470

feet wide, 100 feet high. Here the style of the late Renaissance replaced

baroque: the fagade was of Doric and Ionic columns, and was crowned by

a balustrade pointed with colossal statues of Spain's early kings. When Na-

poleon escorted his brother Joseph to reign in this palace he said, as they

298 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

mounted the superb stairway, "You will be better lodged than I." 86 Charles

III moved into this immensity in 1764.

Under French and Italian influences Spanish sculpture lost something of

its wooden severity, and dowered its seraphim with laughter and a saint or

two with grace. Subjects were nearly always religious, for the Church paid

best. So the Archbishop of Toledo spent 200,000 ducats for the Transparente

which Narciso Tome raised ( 172 1) behind the cathedral choir: a complex

of marble angels floating on marble clouds; an opening in the ambulatory,

making the marble luminous, gave the altar screen its name. The old realism

survived in the Christ Scourged 87 of Luis Carmona— a figure in wood, hor-

rible with welts and bloody wounds. Lovelier are the statues of Faith, Hope,

and Charity which Francisco Vergara the Younger carved for the cathe-

drals of Cuen§a (1759); Cean-Bermudez, the Vasari of Spain, ranked these

among the finest products of Spanish art.

The great name in the Hispanic sculpture of the eighteenth century was

Francisco Zarcillo y Alcaraz. His father and teacher, a sculptor in Capua,

died when Francisco was twenty, leaving him the main support of a mother,

a sister, and six brothers. Too poor to pay for models, Francisco invited

passers-by, even beggars, to share his meal and pose for him; so, perhaps, he

found the figures for his masterpiece, The Last Supper, now in the Ermita

de Jesus in Murcia. With the aid of his sister Ines, who drew and modeled,

his brother Jose, who carved details, and his priest brother Patricio, who

colored the figures and the drapes, Francisco in his seventy-four years pro-

duced 1,792 statues or statuettes, some with such tasteless devices as an

embroidered velvet robe on a figure of Christ, some so moving in their simple

piety that A^adrid offered him rich commissions to decorate the royal palace.

He preferred to remain in his native Murcia, which in 1781 gave him a

sumptuous funeral.

Spanish painting in the eighteenth century labored under a double foreign

incubus, from which it did not recover until Goya broke all shackles with

his impetuous and unprecedented art. First came a French wave, with Jean

Ranc, Rene and Michel-Ange Houasse, and Louis-Michel Vanloo. The last

became court painter to Philip V, and painted an immense canvas of the

entire royal family, wigs, hoops, and all. 88 Then a flock of lively Italians—

Vanvitelli, Amigoni, Corrado . . .

Giambattista Tiepolo and his sons reached Madrid in June, 1762. On the

ceiling of the throne room in the new royal palace they painted a vast fresco,

The Apotheosis of Spain, celebrating the history, power, virtues, piety and

provinces of the Spanish monarchy: symbolical mythological figures poised

in air, nereids, tritons, zephyrs, winged genii, chubby putti, virtues and vices

flying through the luminous void, and Spain herself enthroned amid her

possessions, and glorified with all the attributes of good government. On

the ceiling of the guardroom Tiepolo represented Aeneas Conducted to the

Temple of Immortality by Venus; and on the ceiling of the Queen's ante-

chamber he portrayed again The Triumph of the Spanish Monarchy. In

CHAP. XI ) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 299

1766 Charles commissioned Tiepolo to paint seven altarpieces for the Church

of San Pasquale at Aranjuez; one of these, still brilliant in the Prado, used

the face of a Spanish beauty to represent The Immaculate Conception of the

Virgin. The King's confessor, Padre Joaquin de Electa, condemned the

paganism and crudities of Tiepolo's work as alien to the spirit of Spain.

Tiepolo repented, and painted a powerful Deposition from the Cross 89 — a

meditation on death brightened by angels promising resurrection. These

efforts exhausted the old Titan; he died in Madrid in 1770, aged seventy-

four. Shortly afterward the Aranjuez altarpieces were removed, and Anton

Raphael Mengs was commissioned to replace them.

Mengs had come to Madrid in 1761. He was then thirty-three, strong,

confident, masterful. Charles III, who had never felt at ease on Tiepolo's

fluorescent clouds, saw in the enterprising German just the man to organize

the artwork for the palace. In 1764 Mengs was made director of the San

Fernando Academy, and he ruled Spanish painting during his stays in Spain.

He misinterpreted the classic style into a bloodless, lifeless immobility, en-

raging both old Tiepolo and young Goya. But he fought beneficently to

end the extravagance of baroque decoration and the fantasies of rococo

imagination. Art, said Mengs, should seek first a "natural style," by imitating

nature faithfully; only then should it aim at the "sublime style" of the

Greeks. How was sublimity to be achieved? By eliminating the imperfect

and irrelevant; by combining partial perfections, variously found, into ideal

forms conceived by a disciplined imagination, shunning all excess.

Mengs began his work by depicting the deities of Olympus on the ceiling

of the King's bedchamber. Similar pictures decorated the bedroom of the

Queen. Perhaps perceiving that their Majesties did not quite follow him to

Olympus, Mengs produced for the royal oratory an altarpiece, The Nativity

of Our Lord and a Descent from the Cross. He worked hard, ate little, grew

irritable, lost his health, thought Rome would restore it; Charles gave him a

leave of absence, which Mengs extended to four years. In his second Span-

ish sojourn (1773-77) he added more frescoes to the royal palaces in Madrid

and Aranjuez. His health again gave way, and he begged permission to re-

tire to Rome. The good King granted it, and a continuing pension of three

thousand crowns per year.

But were there no native artists then painting in Spain? There were many,

but our interest, waning with distance and time, has left them in the murky

limbo of fading fame. There was Luis Melendez, who almost equaled Char-

din in still lifes (bordegones, fruteras); the Prado has forty of them, the

Boston Museum has an appetizing example, but the Louvre outdoes them all

with a wonderful self-portrait. And Luis Paret y Alcazar, who rivaled Cana-

letto in picturing city scenes, as in his Puerta del SoP°— the main square of

Madrid. And Antonio Viladamat, whom Mengs pronounced the finest Span-

ish painter of the age. And the kindly, surly, devoted Francisco Bayeu y

Subias, who won first prize at the Academy in 1758, designed tapestries for

Mengs, and became the friend, enemy, and brother-in-law of Goya.

3<X) ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XI

IX. FRANCISCO DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES

/. Growth

Like all Iberian boys, Francisco took the name of a patron saint, then the

name of his father, Jose Goya, and of his mother, Eugracia Lucientes— lady

of grace and light. She was an hidalga, hence the de that Francisco inserted

into his name. He was born on March 30, 1746, in Fuentetodos, an Aragon

village of 150 souls and no trees— a stony soil, a hot summer, a cold winter,

killing many, making the survivors grim and tough.

Francisco dabbled with brushes, and, in his boyhood, painted for the local

church a picture of Nuestra Senora del Pilar, patroness of Aragon. In 1760

the family moved to Saragossa; there the father worked as a gilder, and

earned enough to send his boy to study art under Jose Luzan. With him and

Juan Ramirez Goya copied Old Masters, imitated Tiepolo's subtle coloring,

and learned enough anatomy to draw forbidden nudes. Story tells of his

joining— soon leading— a band of wild youths who defended their parish

against another, how in one of the brawls some bravos were killed, and how

Francisco, fearing arrest, fled to Madrid.

In December, 1763, he took an examination for admission to the Academy,

and failed. Legend describes his riotous life in the capital; we only know that

Goya was not in love with laws. He competed again in 1766, and failed.

Perhaps these failures were his fortune: he escaped the academic tutelage of

Mengs, he studied the work that Tiepolo was doing in Madrid, and he laid

the foundations of a unique style pervaded with personality. The legend tells

next how he joined a troupe of bullfighters and traveled with them to Rome,

at a date unknown. He was always a devotee of toreadors, and once he

signed himself "Francisco de los Toros." "I used to be a bullfighter in my

youth," he wrote in old age to Moratfn; "with sword in hand I feared noth-

ing." 91 Perhaps he meant that he had been one of those venturesome lads who

fought bulls in the streets. In any case he reached Italy, for in 1770 he won

second prize in a competition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma. Legend

describes him climbing the dome of St. Peter's, and breaking into a convent

to carry off a nun. More likely lie was studying the pictures of Magnasco,

whose dark coloring, tortured figures, and Inquisition scenes may have

moved him more deeply than the calm and classic poses that Mengs had

recommended in Spain.

In the fall of 177 1 he was back in Saragossa, decorating a chapel in the

cathedral, Iglesia Metropolitana della Nuestra Senora del Pilar. This he did

well, earning fifteen thousand reales for six months' work; and now he

could support a wife. Since propinquity dominates in determining our choice

of mates, he married (1773) Josef a Bayeu, who had youth and golden hair

and was near at hand. She served as his model, and he painted her portrait

many times; that which hangs in the Prado shows her tired with many preg-

nancies, or saddened by Francisco's digressions from monogamy. 92

CHAP.Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 301

He returned to Madrid (1775). Probably on Bayeu's recommendation,

Mengs commissioned him (1776) to paint large canvases as "cartoons" for

the Royal Tapestry Factory that Philip V had founded in emulation of the

Gobelins. Now, risking a serious repulse, Goya made a decision that shaped

his career. Ignoring Mengs's predilection for classical mythology and heroic

history, he portrayed in massive line and vivid color the people of his own

kind and time— their labor and loves, their fairs and festivals, their bullfights

and kite-flying, their markets, picnics, and games; and to this realism he

added, venturesomely, things he had imagined but never seen. Mengs rose

to the occasion: he did not condemn this transcending of academic tradi-

tions; he felt the pulse of life in the new style, and gave the rebel more com-

missions. In fifteen years Goya produced forty-five cartoons as the staple

of his work, while moving with growing confidence into other fields. Now

he could eat and drink in comfort. "I have twelve to thirteen thousand reales

a year," he wrote to his friend Zapater.

A spirochete intruded upon this prosperity. We do not know the origin

of Goya's syphilis; we know that he was seriously ill in April, 1777. 93 He

recovered gradually, but we may suspect that the ailment had some influence

on the pessimism in his art, perhaps on his loss of hearing in 1793. He was

well enough in 1778 to take part in a project of Charles III to spread abroad,

through prints, the treasures of Spanish art. For this purpose Goya made

copies of eighteen paintings by Velazquez; from these copies he made etch-

ings; it was a new skill for him, and his burin was for a while unsure and

crude; but from that beginning he grew to be one of the greatest etchers

since Rembrandt. He was allowed to present his copies in person to the

King, and in 1780 he was enrolled as one of the court painters. Now at last

he was received into the Academy. About 1785 he made his famous portrait of

Charles III, showing him in hunting costume, dressed to kill, but aged,

weary, toothless, bowlegged, bent; here, as usual, Goya sacrificed favor to

truth.

His father having died, Goya brought his mother and brother Camilo to

live with him, Josefa, and the children. To support this enlarged household

he accepted a variety of commissions: to paint a fresco in the Church of San

Francisco el Grande, devotional pictures for the Calatrava College at Sala-

manca, and genre scenes for the country house of the Duke of Osuna; and

to execute portraits as the most lucrative branch of his profession. He made

several of Osuna; 94 one of the Duke and his family— the children as stiff as

dollars; and a three-quarter length of the Duchess of Osuna 95 — a miracle of

oils transfigured into silk and lace.

Perhaps Goya was happy in 1784. In that year Javier was born, the only

one of his children who would survive him. The frescoes in San Francisco

el Grande were ceremoniously unveiled, and were hailed as the finest paint-

ing of that age; the King and all the court were present, and joined in the

praise. About 1787 Goya painted the portrait of the Marquesa de Pontejos,

which is now one of the prize possessions of the National Gallery at Wash-

ington. A year later he returned to nature in La Pradera de San Isidro 96 —2i

302 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

field crowded with picnickers celebrating the feast of Madrid's great patron

saint by riding, strolling, sitting, eating, drinking, singing, dancing on the

grassy shores of the Manzanares. It is only a sketch, but it is a chef-d'oeuvre.

When Charles died (1788) Goya was in his forty-third year, and thought

himself old. In the previous December he had written to Zapater: "I have

become old, with so many wrinkles in my face that you could no longer

recognize me if it were not for my flat nose and sunken eyes." 97 He could

hardly foresee that he had forty years more of life in him, and that his

wildest adventures and most distinguished work lay in his future. He had

developed slowly; now romance and revolution would compel him to

quicken his pace or be submerged. He rose with events, and became the

greatest artist of his time.

2. Romance

He was kept busy in 1789 making portraits of the new King and Queen

for their formal entry into Madrid on September 21. Felipe, eldest son of

Charles III, had been barred from the succession as an imbecile; the crown

passed to the second son, whom an unsympathetic historian described as

only "semi-imbecile." 98 Charles IV was simple and unsuspecting, and so

good as almost to invite wickedness. Presuming himself, as second son, ex-

cluded from the succession, he had taken to a life of hunting, eating, and

parentage. Now, plump and malleable, he submitted amiably to his wife,

Maria Luisa of Parma; he ignored— or was ignorant of— her adulteries, and

promoted her lover, Manuel de Godoy, to head the ministry ( 1 792-97 ) .

The new Queen had played with liberal ideas before her accession, and

Charles IV in his first year encouraged Floridablanca, Jovellanos, and Cam-

pomanes (all of whom Goya portrayed) to continue their program of re-

forms. But the fall of the Bastille frightened Charles IV and Floridablanca

into a political reaction that turned the government back to full co-operation

with the Church as the strongest bulwark of monarchy. Many of the pro-

gressive measures enacted under Charles III were allowed to lapse; the

Inquisition recaptured some of its powers; the importation of French litera-

ture was stopped; all newspapers except the official Diario de Madrid were

suppressed; Jovellanos, Campomanes, and Aranda were banished from the

court. The people rejoiced in the triumph of their cherished faith. In 1793

Spain joined in the war of the monarchical powers against revolutionary

France.

Amid this turmoil Goya prospered. In April, 1789, he was named pintor

de cdmara— painter to the chamber. When Josefa fell ill and the doctor pre-

scribed sea air, Goya took her to Valencia (1790), where he was feted as

Spain's new Velazquez. Apparently he was in demand from one end of

Spain to another, for in 1792 we find him in Cadiz as the guest of Sebastian

Martinez. On his way back, at Seville, he was stricken with dizziness and

partial paralysis; he returned to his friend in Cadiz, and fretted through a

lengthy convalescence.

CHAP.Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 303

What was this illness? Bayeu spoke of it vaguely as "of the most terrible

nature," and doubted that Goya would ever recover." Goya's loyal friend

Zapater wrote in March, 1793: "Goya has been brought to this pass by his

lack of reflection, but he is to be commiserated with all the pity that his

affliction demands." 100 Many students have interpreted the disease as an

aftermath of syphilis, 101 but the latest medical analysis rejects this view and

diagnoses it as inflammation of the nerves in the labyrinth of the ear. 102

Whatever the cause, Goya, returning to Madrid in July, 1793, was stone

deaf, and remained so till his death. In February, 1794, Jovellanos noted in

his diary: "I wrote to Goya, who answered that as a result of his apoplexy

he was not even capable of writing." 103 But the paralysis gradually disap-

peared, and by 1795 Goya was strong enough to fall in love.

Teresa Cayetana Maria del Pilar was the thirteenth duchess of the famous

Alba line. As her father had imbibed French philosophy, she was brought up

on libertarian lines, with an education that gave her an alert intellect and

an undisciplined will. At thirteen she married the nineteen-year-old Don

Jose de Toledo Osorio, Duke of Alba. Frail and sickly, the Duke for the

most part kept to his home and absorbed himself in music. Goya portrayed

him at the harpsichord confronting a Haydn score. The Duchess was

haughty, beautiful, and sensual; a French traveler remarked that "she has not

a hair on her head that does not provoke desire"; 104 and she satisfied her own

desires without restriction of morals, expense, or class. She took into her house-

hold a half-wit, a one-eyed monk, and a little Negress who became her especial

pet. Generosity hid in her audacities; she may have taken to Goya because

he was deaf and unhappy, as well as because he could immortalize her with

his brush.

He must have seen her many times before she stood for her portrait by

him, for she fluttered in and out of the court, keeping gossip busy with her

flirtations and her bold hostility to the Queen. His first dated picture of her

shows her in full length, her sharp, thin features shrouded in a mass of black

hair, her right hand pointing to something on the ground; looking, clearly

we read the inscription: "A la duquesa de Alba Fco de Goya 1795"; 105 there

is here a suggestion of friendship already established. This is not one of

Goya's masterpieces. Much better is the portrait that he painted, in this year,

of Francisco Bayeu, who had just passed away. In November Goya suc-

ceeded him as director of the school of painting in the Academy.

The Duke of Alba died in June, 1796. The Duchess retired for a brief

period of mourning to her country estate at Sanlucar, between Seville and

Cadiz. It is not certain that Goya accompanied her; we only know that he

was absent from Madrid from October, 1796, till April, 1797, and that he

recorded in two notebooks some of the things he had seen in Sanlucar. Most

of the drawings show the Duchess: receiving guests, petting her Negro girl,

tearing her own hair in a rage, taking her siesta (while the maid removes the

chamber vessel), 106 fainting in a promenade, or flirting with one or another

of Goya's rivals for her caressing hands. The sketches show his rising jeal-

ousy, and picture also another woman— emerging naked from the bath, lying

304 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XI

half dressed on the bed, or adjusting the garter on a shapely leg; perhaps

Goya, like the Duchess, indulged in tangents to the curve of love. Yet it

was probably in Sanlucar that he painted his proudest picture of her 107 —

dressed as a saucy maja in a black-and-yellow costume, with a sash of scarlet

and gold about her tiny waist, and a black mantilla over her head; her right

hand (itself a masterpiece of painting) carries two rings, one bearing the

name "Alba," the other "Goya"; her index finger points to his name, and

the date 1797, traced in the sandy soil at her feet. He always refused to sell

this portrait.

The bloom of the romance had blown away by the time Goya returned

to Madrid. Some of his Capricho drawings (1797?) accuse her of wanton

surrender to an indecent variety of males. Godoy accused her of seducing

the Minister of War, and wrote to the Queen that "the Alba and all her

supporters ought to be buried in a huge pit." 108 When the Duchess died

(July 23, 1803), age forty, Madrid gossiped that she had been poisoned.

Sympathy went out to her because she had left much of her huge fortune

to her servants; also she bequeathed an annuity of 3,600 reales to Goya's son

Javier. The King ordered an inquiry into her death— and put Godoy at its

head. The physician and some attendants of the Duchess were imprisoned;

her will was annulled; her servants were deprived of their legacies; the

Queen was soon wearing Alba's most beautiful jewels. 109

3. Zenith

Goya had resigned in 1797 as director of painting at the Academy. He

was too busy now to teach. In 1798 he was chosen to decorate the dome and

tympanums of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida; and though he

troubled the clergy by giving his angels voluptuous limbs, nearly all agreed

that he had transferred to those saintly spaces, in a fury of inspiration, the

life and blood of Madrid's streets. On October 31, 1799, he was appointed

"First Painter to the Court," with a salary of fifty thousand reales per year.

He made in 1800 the most famous of all his paintings: Charles IV and His

Fa7mly 110 —2. merciless revelation of royal imbecility; we shudder to think

how this collection of swollen bodies and stunted souls would have looked

without their glamorous raiment— a virtuosity of radiance rarely surpassed

in the history of art. We are told that the victims expressed complete satis-

faction with the work. 111

In a corner of that picture Goya painted himself. We must forgive the

egotism of his many self-portraits; some of them, doubtless, were experi-

mental studies made with a mirror, like an actor practicing facial expression

before a glass; and two of them are magnificent. The best of them (Plate 1

of the Caprichos) shows him at fifty, deaf but proud, with a pugnacious

chin, sensual lips, enormous nose, sly and surly eyes, black hair growing over

his ears and almost to his chin, and, to top it all, a lordly silk hat rising over

his massive head like a challenge to all the fortuitous nobles of the world.

Nineteen years later, after surviving a revolution, he discarded the hat,

CHAP.Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 305

opened his shirt at the neck, and showed himself in a more amiable mood,

still proud, but too confident of himself to stoop to challenges. 112

Portraiture was his forte. Though his contemporaries knew that he would

not flatter them, they eagerly submitted to the verdict of an art that they

hoped would carry them down, for fame or shame, through centuries. We

know of three hundred nobles and eighty-eight members of the royal family

who sat for him; two hundred of these portraits survive. One of the best is of

Ferdinand Guillemardet, the French ambassador; it was brought to Paris by

the sitter, was acquired by the Louvre in 1 865, and played a part in stirring up

Goya's fame in France. Among Goya's pictures of children the finest is that of

Don Manuel Osorio de Zuniga, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in

New York; here Goya touched Velazquez. He rivaled Velazquez again in his

gallery of women, running the range from such scarecrows as The Infanta

Maria Josef a to the "ravishing" Senora Garcia™ and the aging actress La

Tirana 114 — beauty waning but replaced with character.

The most fully revealed of Goya's women is the saucy maja who, about

1798, posed unadorned for the Maja Desnuda, and, provocatively dressed,

for La Maja Vestida; these companion pictures attract almost as many gazers

in the Prado as the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The Desnuda and Velazquez'

Rokeby Venus are among the few nudes in Spanish painting; to depict the

nude in Spanish art was punishable by a year in prison, confiscation of goods,

and exile. Velazquez ventured it under the protection of Philip IV, Goya

under the protection of Godoy, who agreed with Goya in preferring sub-

stantial bosoms, slim waists, and swelling hips. Despite legend, Goya's Maja

did not represent the Duchess of Alba, nor was the Vestida painted over-

night to replace the Desnuda when the angry Duke (in the legend) came

with a duel in his eye. But the two pictures were bought by, or given to, the

Duchess, and passed at her death into the collection of Godoy.

While Goya was financing his family with portraits he amused himself

(1796-97?) with etchings and water colors which he published in 1799 as

Los Caprichos—z\g\\ty-t\\rtt caprices of graver, brush, and angry mind, de-

scribing with somber satire and sarcastic captions the manners, morals, and

institutions of his time. The most significant of the series is No. 43: a man

has fallen asleep at his desk while demons swarm about his head; on the desk

is an inscription: "El sueno de la razon produce monstruos" (The dream of

reason produces monsters). Goya interpreted this to mean "Fantasy aban-

doned by reason produces monsters; united with reason she is the mother of

the arts and the source of their marvels." 115 This was a thrust at the supersti-

tions that darkened the mind of Spain, but it was also a description of half

of Goya's art. He was haunted by horrible dreams; the Caprichos espe-

cially are ghastly with them. There the human form is degraded into a hun-

dred bloated, haggard, crippled, bestial shapes; owls and cats leer at us,

wolves and vultures prowl, witches fly through the air, the ground is strewn

with skulls and shinbones, and corpses of newborn children newly dead. It

is as if the diseased imagination of Hieronymus Bosch had leaped across

France and the centuries to enter and disorder Goya's mind.

306 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XI

Was Goya a rationalist? We can only say that he favored reason against

superstition. In one of his drawings he showed a young woman, crowned

with laurel and holding a scale, chasing black birds with a whip; underneath

this Goya wrote: "Divine Reason, do not spare anyone." 116 Another shows

monks unfrocking themselves; 117 and upon a monk in prayer he put the face

of a lunatic. 118 He pictured The Tribunal of the Inquisition 119 as a dismal

scene of pitiful victims judged by cold authority. He represented a Jew

chained in an Inquisition cell, and wrote the caption: "Zapata, your glory

will be everlasting"; 120 was this an echo of Voltaire's Questions of Zapata?

He made twenty-nine plates of Inquisition victims suffering diverse punish-

ments, 121 and at their end he drew a rejoicing figure over the caption "Divine

Liberty!" 122 And yet, to the end of his life, he crossed himself piously, in-

voked Christ and the saints, and headed his letters with a cross; perhaps all

these were vestiges of habits formed in youth.

4. Revolution

Was Goya a revolutionist? No. He was not even a republican. There is

no sign in his art or his words that he desired the overthrow of the Spanish

monarchy. He attached himself and his fortunes to Charles III, to Charles

IV, to Godoy, to Joseph Bonaparte, and associated gladly with the nobility

and the court. But he had known poverty, he still saw it around him, he was

repelled by the destitution of the masses, their consequent ignorance and

superstition, and the Church's acceptance of mass poverty as a natural con-

sequence of the nature and inequality of men. Half of his art commemorated

the rich, the other half was a cry for justice to the poor, a protest against the

barbarism of law, the Inquisition, and war. He was a loyalist in his portraits,

a Catholic in his paintings, a rebel in his drawings; there, with an almost

savage power, he expressed his hatred of obscurantism, injustice, folly, and

cruelty. One drawing represents a man stretched on a rack, with an inscrip-

tion, "Because he discovered the movement of the earth." Another pictures

a woman in the stocks because "she showed sympathy for the Liberal cause."

Who were these Spaniards who called themselves Liberates? They were

apparently the first political faction to use that name. They meant by it to

signalize their desire for liberty— of the mind from censorship, of the body

from degradation, of the soul from tyranny. They had received gratefully

the Luces coming in from the French Enlightenment. They welcomed the

entry of a French force into Spain (1807); indeed, half of the population

welcomed it as an army of liberation; no protest was heard when Charles

IV resigned and his son Ferdinand VII was enthroned under the protection

of Murat's soldiery. Goya painted a portrait of the new ruler.

But the mood of the people, and of Goya, changed when Napoleon sum-

moned Charles IV and Ferdinand VII to Bayonne, deposed both of them,

exiled one to Italy, the other to France, and made his brother Joseph king

of Spain. An angry crowd gathered before the royal palace; Murat ordered

his soldiers to clear the square; the crowd fled, but reassembled, twenty

CHAP.Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 307

thousand strong, in the Plaza Mayor. When French and Mameluke troops

marched toward the plaza they were fired on from windows and arcades;

infuriated, they entered houses, killing indiscriminately. Troops and crowd

entered into an all-day battle, the famous Dos de Mayo (May 2, 1808);

hundreds of men and women fell. From some nearby vantage Goya saw

part of the massacre. 123 On May 3 thirty of the prisoners taken by the sol-

diers were executed by a firing squad, and every Spaniard found with a gun

in his hands was put to death. Nearly all Spain was now in revolt against

the French. A "War of Liberation" spread from province to province, dis-

gracing both sides with bestial ferocities. Goya saw some of these, and was

haunted by their memory till his death. In 1 8 1 1 , fearing the worst, he made

his will. In 181 2 Josef a died. In 181 3 Wellington took Madrid; Ferdinand

VII was again king.

Goya celebrated the triumph of Spain by painting two of his most famous

pictures (1814). 124 One, Dos de Mayo, was his reconstruction of what he

had seen, heard, or imagined of the battle between the populace of Madrid

and the French and Mameluke troops. He placed the Mamelukes in the

center, for it was their participation that stirred the hottest resentment in

Spanish memory. We need not ask if the picture is accurate history; it is

brilliant and powerful art, from the gradations of gleaming colors on the

horse of the falling Mameluke to the faces of men terrified and brutalized

by the choice between killing and being killed. Even more vivid is the com-

panion picture, The Shooting of the Third of May— a squad of French rifle-

men executing Spanish prisoners; nothing in Goya is more impressive than

the contrast of terror and defiance in the central figure of that massacre.

Still a pensioned pintor de cdmara, but no longer a favorite at the court,

Goya, widowed, silenced, and deaf, retired into the world of his art. Perhaps

in 1 81 2 he made the most powerful of his engravings, The Colossus 125 — a

Hercules with the face of Caliban, seated on the edge of the earth, a Mars

resting after triumphant war. Ever since 1810 he had been drawing little

sketches which he later engraved and printed, and to which he gave the

title The Fatal Consequences of Spain's Bloody War with Bonaparte, and

other Caprichos. He did not dare publish these eighty-five drawings; he be-

queathed them to his son, whose son sold them to the Academy of San Fer-

nando, which published them in 1863 as Los Desastres de la Guerra.

These sketches are not usual battle scenes, which disguise killing as hero-

ism and glory; they are moments of terror and cruelty in which the frail

restraints of civilization are forgotten in the ecstasy of conflict and the in-

toxication of blood. Here are houses on fire, collapsing upon their inmates;

women rushing to the battle with stones or pikes or guns; women raped;

men tied to posts before firing squads; men shorn of a leg, an arm, or a head;

a soldier cutting off a man's genitals; 126 corpses impaled upon the sharp

stumps or limbs of trees; dead women still clutching their infants at their

breast; children gazing in horror at the slaughter of their parents; dead men

cast in heaps into pits; vultures feasting upon the human dead. Under these

pictures Goya added sardonic captions: "This is what you were born for"; 127

308 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XI

"This I saw"; 128 "It happened like this"; 129 "To bury the dead and be

silent." 130 At the end Goya expressed his despair and his hope: No. 79 is a

woman dying amid gravediggers and priests, and is captioned "Truth dies";

but No. 80 shows her radiating light, and asks, "Will she rise again?"

5. Decrescendo

In February, 18 19, he bought a country house on the other side of the

Manzanares. It was shaded by trees, and though he could not hear the music

of the brook that bordered it, he could feel the lesson of its placid continu-

ance. The neighbors called his home La Quinta del Sordo, the House of the

Deaf. As Javier had married and made a separate household, Goya took

with him Dona Leocadia Weiss, who served him as mistress and house-

keeper. She was a lusty shrew, but Goya was immune to her eloquence. She

brought with her two children— a boy, Guillermo, and a lively little girl,

Maria del Rosario, who became the solace of the artist's declining life.

He badly needed so wholesome a stimulus, for his mind was on the edge

of lunacy. Only so can we understand the pinturas negras with which he

covered many walls of the house that was his asylum. As if reflecting the

darkness of his mind, he painted chiefly in black and white; and as if faithful

to the vagueness of his visions, he gave no certain contours to the forms, but

used rough daubs to quickly fix upon the walls the fleeting images of a

dream. On one of the long side walls he represented The Pilgrimage of San

Isidro— the same festival that he had painted joyfully in 1788, thirty-one

years before; but now it was a gloomy panorama of bestial and drunken

fanatics. On the opposite wall he gathered even more horrible figures in a

Sabbath of Witches awesomely worshiping a huge black goat as their Satan

and commanding god. At the farther end of the room rose the most hideous

form in the history of art, Saturn Devouring His Offspring— a giant crunch-

ing a naked child, having eaten the head and one arm, and now gorging

himself on the other, splashing blood; 131 perhaps it is an insane symbol of insane

nations consuming their children in war. These are the visions of a man who

is obsessed with macabre imaginings, and madly paints them to drive them out

of himself and immobilize them on the wall.

In 1823 Leocadia, whose Freemason activities had made her fear arrest,

fled to Bordeaux with her children. Goya, left alone with the madness that

he had painted on his walls, decided to follow them. But if he went without

royal permission he would forfeit the official salary that he was receiving as

pintor de cdmara. He asked for several months' leave to take the waters at

Plombieres; it was granted. He deeded the Quinta del Sordo to his grandson

Mariano, and in June, 1824, he made his way to Bordeaux, Leocadia, and

Maria of the Rosary.

As he neared death his love for his grandson Mariano became his dominant

passion. He settled an annuity on the boy, and offered to pay expenses if

Javier would bring Mariano to Bordeaux. Javier could not come, but he sent

his wife and son. When they arrived Goya embraced them with such emo-

CHAP.Xl) SPAIN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 309

tion that he broke down and had to take to his bed. He wrote to his son:

"My dear Javier, I only want to tell you that all this joy has been too much

for me. . . . May God grant that you can come and fetch them, and then

my cup of happiness will be full." 132 The next morning his voice was gone,

and half his body was paralyzed. He lingered for thirteen days, impatiently

awaiting Javier, in vain. He died on April 16, 1828. In 1899 his remains were

brought from Bordeaux to Madrid and were interred before the altar of the

Church of San Antonio de la Florida, where, 10 1 years before, he had

painted under the dome the pains and griefs, the joys and loves, of Spanish

life.

CHAPTER XII

Vale, Italia

1760-89

I. FAREWELL TOUR

IF we indulge ourselves in one more look at Italy we shall find her, even

in this seeming siesta, warm with life: Turin nursing Alfieri, Lucca

publishing Diderot's Encyclopedie, Florence flowering again under Grand

Duke Leopold, Milan reforming law with Beccaria, Pavia and Bologna

thrilling with the experiments of Volta and Galvani, Venice suffering Casa-

nova, Naples challenging the papacy, Rome caught in the tragedy of the

Jesuits, and a hundred breeding grounds of music exporting opera and vir-

tuosi to tame the savage transalpine breast. We shall meet in Italy a hundred

thousand foreigners coming to study her treasures and bask in her sun.

There, in this age, Goethe, choked with Weimar dignitaries, came to renew

his youth and discipline his Muse.

Goethe's first impression, as he came down from the Alps into Venezia

Tridentina (September, 1786), was of the mild and luminous air, which

"gave exquisite enjoyment to mere existence, even to poverty." 1 And next,

the uncaged life: "the inhabitants are always out of doors, and, in their

lightheartedness, think of nothing" but to live. He thought that the fruitful

soil must readily provide for the modest wants of these simple people; yet

the poverty, and the lack of sanitation in the smaller towns, dismayed him.

When I asked the waiter for a certain place he pointed down into the court-

yard, "qui abasso puo servire" "Dove?" I asked. "Da per tutto, dove vuol" was

the friendly reply. . . . Forecourts and colonnades are all soiled with filth, for

things are done in the most natural manner. 2

Sensory adaptation gradually reconciled him.

Venice was enjoying her amiable decay. About 1778 Carlo Gozzi de-

scribed with righteous exaggeration what seemed to him a general dissolu-

tion of morality:

The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both

men and women turned into monkeys; all of them immersed ... in the whirli-

gig of fashion; corrupting and seducing one another with the eagerness of

hounds on the scent, vying in their lusts and ruinous extravagance, . . . burn-

ing incense ... to Priapus. 3

In 1797 he blamed the collapse on philosophy:

Religion, that salutary curb on human passion, has . . . become a laughing-

stock. I am bound to believe that the gallows benefit society, being an instru-

310

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 3II

ment for punishing crime and deterring would-be criminals. But our new-

fangled philosophers have denounced the gallows as a tyrannical prejudice, and

by so doing they have multiplied murders on the highway, robberies and acts

of violence, a hundredfold. ...

It was pronounced a musty and barbarous prejudice to keep women at home

for the supervision of their sons and daughters, . . . their domestic service

and economy. At once the women poured forth, storming like Bacchanals^

screaming, "Liberty! liberty !" The streets swarmed with them. . . . Mean-

while they abandoned their vapory brains to fashions, frivolous inventions,

. . . amusements, amours, coquetries, and all sorts of nonsense. . . . The hus-

bands had not the courage to oppose this ruin of their honor, their substance,

their families. They were afraid of being pilloried with that dreadful word

prejudice. . . . Good morals, modesty, and chastity received the name of

prejudice. . . . When all the so-called prejudices had been put to flight, . . .

many great and remarkable blessings appeared: . . . irreligion, respect and

reverence annulled, justice overturned, . . . criminals encouraged and bewept,

heated imaginations, sharpened senses, animalism, indulgence in all lusts and

passions, imperious luxury, . . . bankruptcies, . . . adulteries. 4

But of course the basic causes of decay were economic and military;

Venice no longer had the wealth to defend her former power. By contrast

her rival, Austria, had grown so strong in manpower that she commanded

all land approaches to the lagoons, and fought some of her campaigns on the

soil of the neutral but helpless republic.

On March 9, 1789, Lodovico Manin was elected to head the government

—the last of the 120 doges who had presided over Venice in an impressive

continuity since 697. He was a man of great riches and little character, but

poverty and courage would not have prevented his tragedy. Four months

later the Bastille fell; the religion of liberty captured the imagination of

France; and when the religion came with the legions of Napoleon it swept

nearly all Italy under its banner and ecstasy. On the ground that Austrian

forces had used Venetian territory, and on the charge that Venice had

secretly aided his enemies, the victorious Corsican, backed by eighty thou-

sand troops, imposed upon the Queen of the Adriatic a provisional govern-

ment dictated by himself (May 12, 1797). On that day Doge Manin, re-

signing, gave his cap of state to an attendant, and bade him "take it away;

we shall not want it again." 5 A few days later he died. On May 1 6 French

troops occupied the city. On October 1 7 Bonaparte signed at Campof ormio

a treaty that transferred Venice and nearly all her territorial possessions to

Austria in exchange for Austrian concessions to France in Belgium and on

the left bank of the Rhine. It was exactly eleven hundred years since the

first doge had been elected to rule and defend the lagoons.

Parma was a Spanish protectorate, but its Duke, Don Felipe, son of Philip

V and Isabella Farnese, married Louise Elisabeth, daughter of Louis XV; he

adopted her expensive habits, and made his court a miniature Versailles.

Parma became a center of culture, gaily mingling cosmopolitan ways. "It

seemed to me," said Casanova, "that I was no longer in Italy, for everything

had the air of belonging to the other side of the Alps. I heard only French

312 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

and Spanish spoken by the passers-by." 6 An enlightened minister, Guillaume

du Tillot, gave the duchy stimulating reforms. Here were made some of the

finest textiles, crystals, and faience.

Milan now experienced an industrial expansion modestly prefiguring its

economic pre-eminence in the Italy of today. Austrian rule gave loose rein

to local ability and enterprise. Count Karl Joseph von Firmian, governor of

Lombardy, co-operated with native leaders in improving administration, and

reduced the oppressive power of feudal barons and municipal oligarchs. A

group of economic liberals led by Pietro Verri, Cesare Bonesana di Bec-

caria, and Giovanni Carli adopted the principles of the physiocrats, abol-

ished taxes on internal trade, ended the farming of taxes, and spread the

burden by taxing ecclesiastical property. The textile industry grew till in

1785 it comprised twenty-nine firms, operating 1,384 looms. The land was

surveyed, the state financed irrigation projects, the peasants worked with a

will. In the twenty-one years between 1749 and 1770 the population of the

duchy rose from 90,000 to 1 3o,ooo. 7 It was in this period of Milanese ex-

hilaration that the community built the Teatro alia Scala (1776-78), seating

3,600 spectators amid palatial decorations, and offering facilities for music,

conversation, eating, playing cards, and sleeping; and, surmounting all, a

reservoir of water designed to extinguish any fire. Here Cimarosa and

Cherubini now enjoyed resounding victories.

This was the heroic age of Corsica. That mountainous isle was already

surfeited with history. The Phocaeans from Asia Minor had established a

colony there toward 560 B.C.; they were conquered by the Etruscans, who

were conquered by the Carthaginians, who were conquered by the Romans,

who were conquered by the Byzantine Greeks, who were conquered by the

Franks, who were conquered by the Moslems, who were conquered by the

Tuscan Italians, who were conquered by the Pisans, who were conquered

by the Genoese (1347). Two thirds of the population, in that century,

died from the Black Plague. Under Genoese rule the Corsicans, harassed by

pestilence and piratical raids, barred from major offices and taxed beyond

bearing, sank into a semisavagery in which violent vendettas were the only

honored law. Periodical revolts failed because of internecine feuds and lack

of foreign aid. Genoa, fighting for its own life against Austrian armies, ap-

pealed to France for help in maintaining order in Corsica; France responded

lest the island be taken by the British as a citadel for control of the Mediter-

ranean; French troops occupied Ajaccio and other Corsican strongholds

(1739-48). When peace seemed secure the French withdrew, Genoese

domination was resumed, and the historic revolt of Paoli began.

Pasquale di Paoli anticipated by a century the exploits of Garibaldi. Lord

Chatham called him "one of those men who are no longer to be found but

in the pages of Plutarch." 8 Born (1725) the son of a Corsican rebel, he fol-

lowed his father into exile, studied in Naples under the liberal economist

Genovesi, served in the Neapolitan army, returned to Corsica (1755), and was

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 3 1 3

chosen to lead a rebellion against Genoa. In two years of fighting he suc-

ceeded in driving the Genoese from all but some coastal towns. As elected

head of the new republic (1757-68) he proved himself as brilliant in legis-

lation and administration as he had shown himself in the strategy and tactics

of war. He established a democratic constitution, suppressed the vendetta,

abolished the oppressive rights of feudal lords, spread education, and founded

a university at Corte, his capital.

Unable to overcome him, Genoa sold the island to France (May 15, 1768)

for two million francs. Paoli now found himself fighting against repeatedly

reinforced French troops. His secretary and aide at this time was Carlo

Buonaparte, to whom a son Napoleone was born at Ajaccio on August 15,

1769. Overwhelmed by the French at Pontenuovo (May, 1769), Paoli

abandoned the hopeless struggle and took refuge in England; there he re-

ceived a government pension, was celebrated by Boswell, and numbered

Johnson among his friends. The National Assembly of Revolutionary

France recalled him from exile, acclaimed him as "the hero and martyr of

liberty," and made him governor of Corsica (1791). But the French Con-

vention judged him insufficiently Jacobin; it sent a commission to depose

him; British troops came to his aid, but the British general took control of

the island and sent Paoli back to England (1795). Napoleon dispatched a

French force to expel the British (1796); the islanders welcomed the French

as coming from "the Corsican"; the British withdrew, and Corsica submitted

to France.

Tuscany flourished under the Hapsburg grand dukes who succeeded the

Medici (1738). Since its nominal ruler, Francis of Lorraine, resided in Aus-

tria as the husband of Maria Theresa, the government was deputed to a re-

gency under native leaders, who rivaled the Milanese liberals in economic

reforms; seven years before Turgot's similar attempt in France, they estab-

lished free internal trade in grains (1767). When Francis died (1765) he

was followed as grand duke by his younger son Leopold, who developed

into one of the most enterprising and courageous of the "enlightened des-

pots." He checked corruption in office, improved the judiciary, the admin-

istration, and the finances, equalized taxation, abolished torture, confiscation,

and capital punishment, helped the peasantry, drained marshes, ended mo-

nopolies, extended free trade and free enterprise, allowed self-government in

the communes, and looked forward to setting up a semidemocratic constitu-

tion for the duchy. Goethe was impressed by the comparative cleanliness of

the Tuscan cities, the good condition of roads and bridges, the beauty and

grandeur of the public works. 9 Leopold's brother Joseph, on becoming sole

emperor, supported Leopold in abolishing most feudal privileges in Tuscany,

in closing many monasteries, and in reducing the power of the clergy.

In ecclesiastical reforms Leopold received powerful co-operation from

Scipione de' Ricci, bishop of Pistoia and Prato. A harsh custom in Tuscany

required all dowerless women to take the veil; Ricci joined the Grand Duke

in raising the minimum age for taking the vows, and turning many convents

314 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

into schools for girls. Provision was made for secular education by substitut-

ing lay for Jesuit schools. Ricci celebrated Mass in Italian, and discouraged

superstitions, much to the displeasure of the populace. When it was rumored

that he intended to remove as spurious the famous "girdle of the Virgin" at

Prato, the people rioted and sacked the episcopal palace. Ricci nevertheless

called a diocesan synod, which met at Pistoia in 1786 and proclaimed prin-

ciples recalling the "Gallican Articles" of 1682: that the temporal power is

independent of the spiritual (i.e., the state is independent of the Church);

and that the pope is fallible even in matters of faith.

Leopold lived simply, and was liked for his unassuming manners. But as

his reign progressed, and the hostility of the orthodox pressed upon him,

he grew suspicious and aloof, and employed a multitude of spies to watch

not only his enemies but his aides. Joseph advised him from Vienna: "Let

them deceive you sometimes, rather than thus torment yourself constantly

and in vain." 10 When Leopold left Florence to succeed Joseph as emperor

(1790) the forces of reaction triumphed in Tuscany. Ricci was condemned

by Pope Pius VI in 1794, anc * was imprisoned (1 799-1 805) until he re-

tracted his heresies. The advent of Napoleonic government (1800) restored

the liberals to power.

Goethe hurried through Tuscany to Rome. Hear him, writing on Novem-

ber 1, 1786:

At last I have arrived at this great capital of the world. ... I have as good

as flown over the mountains of the Tirol. . . . My anxiety to reach Rome was

so great . . . that to think of stopping anywhere was out of the question. Even

in Florence I stayed only three hours. Now, ... as it would seem, I shall be

put at peace for my whole life; for we may almost say that a new life begins

when a man once sees with his own eyes all that previously he has but partially

heard or read of. All the dreams of my youth 1 now behold realized before me.

What a dizzy mixture it was, that eighteenth-century Rome, swarming

with beggars and nobles, cardinals and castrati, bishops and prostitutes,

monks and tradesmen, Jesuits and Jews, artists and criminals, bravi and

saints, and tourists seeking antiquities by day and cortigiane by night. Here,

within twelve miles of city walls, were pagan amphitheaters and triumphal

arches, Renaissance palaces and fountains, three hundred churches and ten

thousand priests, 1 70,000 people, and, around the Vatican citadel of Catholic

Christianity, the most turbulent, lawless, and anticlerical rabble in Christen-

dom. Scurrilous pamphlets against the Church were hawked about the

streets; buffoons parodied in public squares the most sacred ceremonies of

the Mass. Perhaps Winckelmann, a timid and tender soul, exaggerated a bit:

In the daytime it is pretty quiet in Rome, but at night it is the devil let loose.

From the great freedom which prevails here, and from the absence of any sort

of police, the brawling, shooting, fireworks, and bonfires in all the streets, last

during the whole night. . . . The populace is untamed, and the governor is

weary of banishing and hanging. 11

Even more than Paris, Rome was a cosmopolitan city where artists, stu-

CHAP. XIl) VALE, ITALIA 315

dents, poets, tourists mingled with prelates and princesses in the salons, the

galleries, and the theaters. Here Winckelmann and Mengs were proclaiming

the revival of the classic style. And here the harassed, beleaguered popes were

struggling to mollify the impoverished populace with bread and benedic-

tions, to hold back ambassadors pressing for the abolition of the Jesuits, and

to keep the whole complex edifice of Christianity from crumbling under the

advance of science and the assaults of philosophy.

But let us go on, with Goethe, to Naples. He thought he had never seen

such joie de vivre.

If in Rome one can readily set oneself to study, here one can do nothing but

live. You forget yourself and the world; and to me it is a strange feeling to go

about with people who think of nothing but enjoying themselves. . . . Here

men know nothing of one another. They scarcely observe that others are also

going on their way, side by side with them. They run all day backward and

forward in a paradise, without looking about them; and if the neighboring

jaws of hell begin to open and to rage, they have recourse to St. Januarius. 12

Don Carlos, leaving Naples for Spain in 1759, had bequeathed the king-

dom of Naples and Sicily to his eight-year-old son Ferdinand IV, with the

Marchese di Tanucci as regent. Tanucci continued that war against the

Church which he had begun under Carlos. He suppressed many convents

and monasteries, and willingly followed the directive of Charles III of Spain

to expel the Jesuits. Shortly after midnight of November 3-4, 1767, soldiers

arrested all members of the order in the realm, and escorted them, with no

possessions but the clothes they wore, to the nearest port or frontier, whence

they were deported to the Papal States.

Ferdinand IV, reaching the age of sixteen (1767), ended Tanucci's re-

gency. A year later he married Maria Carolina, pious daughter of Maria

Theresa. She soon dominated her husband and led a reaction against

Tanucci's anticlerical policies. The Marchese's reforms had strengthened

the Neapolitan monarchy against the feudal barons and the Church, but

they had done little to mitigate the poverty that left to the populace no

hope but in another life.

Sicily followed a similar curve. The erection of the cathedral of Palermo

(1782-1802) was of far more moment to the people than the attempt of

Domenico di Caraccioli to tame the feudal lords who controlled the land. He

had served many years as Neapolitan ambassador in London and Paris, and

had listened to Protestants and philosophers. Appointed viceroy of Sicily

( 1 781), he laid heavy taxes upon the great landowners, reduced their feudal

rights over their serfs, and ended their privileges of choosing the local

magistrates. But when he dared to imprison a prince who protected bandits,

and decreed a reduction of two days in the holidays honoring Palermo's

patron St. Rosalia, all classes rose against him, and he returned to Naples in

defeat (1785). 13 The philosophers had not yet proved that they understood,

better than the Church, the needs and nature of man.

3 16 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XII

II. POPES, KINGS, AND JESUITS

The power of the Catholic Church rested on the natural supernaturalism

of mankind, the recognition and sublimation of sensual impulses and pagan

survivals, the encouragement of Catholic fertility, and the inculcation of a

theology rich in poetry and hope, and useful to moral discipline and social

order. In Italy the Church was also the main source of national income, and

a valued check upon a people especially superstitious, pagan, and passionate.

Superstitions abounded; as late as 1787 witches were burned at Palermo— and

refreshments were served to fashionable ladies witnessing the scene. 14 Pagan

beliefs, customs, and ceremonies survived with the genial sanction of the

Church. "I have arrived at a vivid conviction," wrote Goethe, "that all traces

of original Christianity are extinct here" in Rome. 15 There were, however,

many real Christians left in Christendom, even in Italy. Conte Caissotti di

Chiusano, bishop of Asti, gave up his rich inheritance, lived in voluntary

poverty, and traveled only on foot. Bishop Testa of Monreale slept on straw,

ate only enough to subsist, kept only 3,000 lire of his revenues for his personal

needs, and devoted the remainder to public works and the poor. 16

The Church responded in some measure to the Enlightenment. The works

of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, d'Holbach, La Mettrie, and other

freethinkers were of course placed on the Index Expurgatorius, but permis-

sion to read them might be obtained from the pope. Monsignor Ventimiglio,

bishop (1757-73) of Catania, had in his library full editions of Voltaire,

Helvetius, and Rousseau. 17 The Inquisition was abolished in Tuscany and

Parma in 1769, in Sicily in 1782, in Rome in 1809. In 1783 a Catholic priest,

Tamburini, under the name of his friend TrauttmansdorfF, published an

essay On Ecclesiastical and Civil Toleration, in which he condemned the

Inquisition, declared all coercion of conscience to be un-Christian, and ad-

vocated toleration of all theologies except atheism. 18

It was the misfortune of the popes, in this second half of the eighteenth

century, that they had to face the demand of Catholic monarchs for the

total dissolution of the Society of Jesus. The movement against the Jesuits

was part of a contest of power between the triumphant nationalism of

the modern state and the internationalism of a papacy weakened by the

Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the business class. The Cath-

olic enemies of the Society did not openly press their chief objection, that

it had persistently upheld the authority of the popes as superior to that of

kings, but they were keenly resentful that an organization acknowledging

no superior except its general and the pope should in effect constitute, within

each state, an agent of a foreign power. They acknowledged the learning

and piety of the Jesuits, their contributions to science, literature, philosophy,

and art, their sedulous and efficient education of Catholic youth, their hero-

ism on foreign missions, their recapture of so much territory once lost to

Protestantism. But they charged that the Society had repeatedly interfered

in secular affairs, that it had engaged in commerce to reap material gains, that

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 317

it had inculcated casuistic principles excusing immorality and crime, con-

doning even the murder of kings, that it had allowed heathen customs and

beliefs to survive among its supposed converts in Asia, and that it had of-

fended other religious orders, and many of the secular clergy, by its sharp-

ness in controversy and its contemptuous tone. The ambassadors of the

Kings of Portugal, Spain, Naples, and France insisted that the papal charter

of the Society be revoked, and that the organization be officially and uni-

versally dissolved.

The expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759, from France in

1764-67, from Spain and Naples in 1767, had left the Society still operative

in Central and North Italy, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Catholic

Germany, Silesia, and Poland. On February 7, 1768, they were expelled

from the Bourbon duchy of Parma, and were added to the congestion of

Jesuit refugees in the states of the Church. Pope Clement XIII protested

that Parma was a papal fief; he threatened Duke Ferdinand VI and his min-

isters with excommunication if the edict of expulsion should be enforced;

when they persisted he launched a bull declaring the rank and title of the

Duke forfeited and annulled. The Catholic governments of Spain, Naples,

and France opened war upon the papacy: Tanucci seized the papal cities of

Benevento and Pontecorvo, and France occupied Avignon. On December

10, 1768, the French ambassador at Rome, in the name of France, Naples,

and Spain, presented to the Pope a demand for the retraction of the bull

against Parma, and for the abolition of the Society of Jesus. The seventy-six-

year-old pontiff collapsed under the strain of this ultimatum. He sum-

moned for February 3, 1769, a consistory of prelates and envoys to consider

the matter. On February 2 he fell dead through the bursting of a blood

vessel in his brain.

The cardinals who were called to choose his successor were divided into

two factions: zelanti who proposed to defy the kings, and regalisti who

favored some pacific accommodations. As the Italian cardinals were almost

all zelanti, and soon gathered in Rome, they tried to open the conclave be-

fore the regalist cardinals from France, Spain, and Portugal could arrive. The

French ambassador protested, and the conclave was deferred. Meanwhile

Lorenzo Ricci, general of the Jesuits, compromised their case by issuing a

pamphlet questioning the authority of any pope to abolish the Society. 19 In

March Cardinal de Bernis arrived from France, and began to canvass the

cardinals with a view to ensuring the election of a pope willing to satisfy

their Catholic Majesties. Later rumors 20 that he or others bribed, or otherwise

induced, Cardinal Giovanni Ganganelli to promise such action if chosen

have been rejected by Catholic 21 and anti-Catholic 22 historians alike. Ganga-

nelli, by common consent, was a man of great learning, devotion, and in-

tegrity; however, he belonged to the Franciscan order, which had often been

at odds with the Jesuits, both in missions and in theology. 23 On May 19,

1769, he was elected by the unanimous vote of the forty cardinals, and took

the name of Clement XIV. He was sixty-three years old.

He found himself at the mercy of the Catholic powers. France and

3 18 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

Naples held on to the papal territory they had seized; Spain and Parma were

defiant; Portugal threatened to establish a patriarchate independent of Rome;

even Maria Theresa, hitherto fervently loyal to the papacy and the Jesuits,

but now losing authority to her freethinker son Joseph II, answered the

Pope's appeal for aid by saying that she could not resist the united will of

so many potentates. Choiseul, dominating the government of France, in-

structed Bernis to tell the Pope that "if he does not come to terms he can

consider all relations with France at an end." 24 Charles III of Spain had sent

a similar ultimatum on April 22. Clement, playing for time, promised Charles

soon to "submit to the wisdom and intelligence of your Majesty a plan for

the total extinction of the Society." 25 He ordered his aides to consult the

archives and summarize the history, achievements, and alleged offenses of

the Society of Jesus. He refused to surrender to Choiseul's demand that he

decide the issue within two months. He took three years, but finally yielded.

On July 21, 1773, he signed the historic brief Doviinus ac Redemptor

Noster. It began with a long list of religious congregations that had, in the

course of time, been suppressed by the Holy See. It noted the many com-

plaints made against the Jesuits, and the many efforts of divers popes to

remedy the abuses so alleged. "We have observed with the bitterest grief

that these remedies, and others applied afterward, had neither efficacy nor

strength to put an end to the troubles, the charges, and the complaints." 26

The brief concluded:

Having recognized that the Society of Jesus could no longer produce the

abundant fruit and the great good for which it was instituted and approved by

so many popes, our predecessors, who adorned it with so many most admirable

privileges, and seeing that it was almost— and indeed absolutely— impossible for

the Church to enjoy a true and solid peace while this order existed, . . . we do

hereby, after a mature examination, and of our certain knowledge, and by the

plenitude of our Apostolic power, suppress and abolish the Society of Jesus.

We nullify and abrogate all and each of its offices, functions, administrations,

houses, schools, colleges, retreats, refuges, and other establishments which be-

long to it in any manner whatever, and in every province, kingdom, or state

in which it may be found. 27

The brief went on to offer pensions to those Jesuits who had not yet taken

holy orders, and who wished to return to lay life; it permitted Jesuit priests

to join the secular clergy or some religious congregation approved by the

Holy See; it allowed "professed" Jesuits, who had taken final and absolute

vows, to remain in their former houses provided they dressed like secular

priests and submitted to the authority of the local bishop.

For the most part, and excepting a few missionaries in China, the Jesuits

took the papal sentence of death for their Society with apparent docility

and order. Anonymous pamphlets, however, were printed and circulated in

their defense, and Ricci and several assistants were arrested on charges, never

proved, that they were in correspondence with opponents of the decree.

Ricci died in prison November 24, 1775, aged seventy-two.

Clement XIV survived the edict by little more than a year. Rumors mul-

tiplied that in his last months his mind broke down. Physical ills, including

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA

3*9

scurvy and hemorrhoids, made every day and night a misery to him. A cold

contracted in April, 1774, never left him; by the end of August the cardinals

were already discussing the succession; and on September 22 Clement died.

After many delays and intrigues the conclave raised to the papacy (Feb-

ruary 15, 1775) Giovanni Braschi, who took the name of Pius VI. He was

a man of culture rather than a statesman. He collected art, charmed every-

one by his kindliness, improved the administration of the Curia, and effected

a partial reclamation of the Pontine marshes. He arranged a peaceful modus

vivendi for the Jesuits with Frederick the Great. In 1793 he joined the coali-

tion against Revolutionary France. In 1796 Napoleon invaded the Papal

States; in 1798 the French army entered Rome, proclaimed a republic, and

demanded of the Pope a renunciation of all temporal power. He refused,

was arrested, and remained in various places and conditions of imprisonment

until his death (August 29, 1799). His successor, Pius VII, made the restora-

tion of the Society of Jesus (1814) a part of the victory of the coalition

against Napoleon.

III. THE LAW AND BECCARIA

The morals and manners of Italy remained a mixture of violence and

indolence, vendetta and love. The fourteen-year-old Mozart wrote from

Bologna in 1770, "Italy is a sleepy country"; 28 he had not learned the philos-

ophy of siesta. His father, in 1775, was of the opinion that "Italians are

rascals all the world over." 29

Both Mozart and Goethe commented on Italian crime. In Naples, wrote

Mozart, "the lazzaroni [beggars] have their own captain or head, who draws

twenty-five silver ducats from the King each month for nothing more than

to keep them in order." 30 "What strikes the stranger most," wrote Goethe,

"is the common occurrence of assassination. Today the victim has been an

excellent artist— Schwendemann. . . . The assassin with whom he was strug-

gling gave him twenty stabs; and as the watch came up, the villain stabbed

himself. This is not generally the fashion here; the murderer usually makes

for the nearest church; once there he is quite safe." 31 Every church gave the

criminal "sanctuary"— immunity from arrest so long as he remained under

its roof.

The law attempted to deter crime rather by severity of punishment than

by efficiency of police. Under the laws of the gentle Benedict XIV blas-

phemy was punished by flogging, and, for a third offense, five years in the

galleys. Unlawful entry of a convent at night was a capital crime. The solici-

tation or public embrace of an honorable woman brought condemnation to

the galleys for life. Defamation of character, even if it spoke nothing but

the truth, was punishable with death and confiscation of goods. (Pasquin-

ades abounded none the less.) A like penalty was decreed for carrying con-

cealed pistols. These edicts were in many areas evaded by flight to a neigh-

boring state, or by the mercy of a judge, or by sanctuary of a church, but

320 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

in several instances they were strictly carried out. One man was hanged for

pretending that he was a priest, another for stealing an ecclesiastical vest-

ment which he sold for one and a quarter francs; another was beheaded for

writing a letter that accused Pope Clement XI of a liaison with Maria Clem-

entina Sobieska. 32 As late as 1762 prisoners were broken on the wheel, bone

after bone, or were dragged over the ground at the tail of a prodded horse.

We should add, as a brighter side to the picture, that some confraternities

raised money to pay the fines and secure the liberation of prisoners. Reform

of the law, in both its procedure and its penalties, became a natural part of

that humanitarian spirit born from the double parentage of a humanist En-

lightenment and a Christian ethic freed from a cruel theology.

It is to the credit of Italy that the most effective appeal for law reform

came in this century from a Milanese nobleman. Cesare Bonesana, Marchese

di Beccaria, was a product of the Jesuits and the philosophes. Though rich

enough to be idle, he gave himself with restless devotion to a career of phil-

osophical writing and practical reform. He refrained from attacking the

religion of the people, but confronted directly the actual conditions of crime

and punishment. He was shocked to see the disease-breeding filth of Mil-

anese jails, and to hear from prisoners how and why they had taken to

crime, and how they had been tried. He was dismayed to find flagrant ir-

regularities in procedure, inhuman tortures of suspects and witnesses, arbi-

trary severities and mercies in judgment, and barbarous cruelties in punish-

ment. About 1 76 1 he joined with Pietro Verri in a society which they

called Dei Pugni— "The Fists"— vowed to action as well as thought. In 1764

they started a review, // Caffe, in imitation of Addison's Spectator. And in

that year Beccaria published his historic Tratto dei delitti e delle pene

( Treatise on Crimes and Penalties) .

He modestly announced at the outset that he was following the lead of

The Spirit of Laws of "the immortal President" of the Bordeaux Parlement.

Laws should be based upon reason; their basic reason is not to avenge crime

but to preserve social order; they should always aim at "the greatest happi-

ness divided among the greatest number" (la massbna felicita divisa nel

maggior numero); 33 here, twenty-five years before Bentham, was the famous

principle of utilitarian ethics. Beccaria, with his customary candor, acknowl-

edged the influence of Helvetius, who had offered the same formula in De

P Esprit (1758). (It had already appeared in Francis Hutcheson's Ideas of

Beauty and Virtue, 1725.) For the good of society, said Beccaria, it would

be wiser to widen and deepen education, in the hope of diminishing crime,

than to resort to punishments that, by association, may transform an inci-

dental miscreant into a confirmed criminal. Every accused person should

have a fair and public trial before competent magistrates pledged to im-

partiality. Trial should come soon after accusation. Punishment should be

proportioned not to the intention of the agent but to the harm done to so-

ciety. Ferocity of punishment breeds ferocity of character, even in the non-

criminal public. Torture should never be used; a guilty man accustomed to

pain may bear it well and be supposed innocent, while an innocent man with

keener nerves may be driven by it to confess anything and be judged guilty.

CHAP. XIl) VALE, ITALIA

3 21

Ecclesiastical sanctuary for criminals should no longer be allowed. Capital

punishment should be abolished.

The little book went through six editions in eighteen months, and was

translated into twenty-two European languages. Beccaria praised the French

version by Morellet as superior to the original. Voltaire contributed an

anonymous preface to that translation, and repeatedly acknowledged the in-

fluence of Beccaria on his own efforts at law reform. Most Italian states soon

reformed their penal codes, and nearly all Europe discarded torture by

1789. Catherine was moved by Beccaria as well as Voltaire in abolishing

torture in her dominions; Frederick the Great had already ended it in Prussia

( 1 740) except for treason.

In 1768 Beccaria was appointed to a chair of law and economy founded

expressly for him in the Palatine College at Milan. In 1790 he was named to

a commission for the reform of jurisprudence in Lombardy. His lectures

anticipated several basic ideas of Adam Smith and Malthus on the division

of labor, the relation between labor and capital, and between population and

the food supply. In him the humanism of the Renaissance was reborn as the

Enlightenment in Italy.

IV. ADVENTURERS

/. Cagliostro

Giuseppe Balsamo was born to a shopkeeper in Palermo in 1743. He

matured early, and was soon an accomplished thief. At thirteen he was en-

tered as a novice in the Monastery of the Benfratelli. There he was assigned

to aid the house apothecary, from whose bottles, tubes, and books he learned

enough chemistry and alchemy to equip himself for quackery. Required to

read the lives of the saints to the friars as they ate, he substituted for the

names of the saints those of Palermo's most distinguished prostitutes.

Flogged, he decamped, joined the underworld, and studied the art of eating

without working. He served as a pimp, a forger, a counterfeiter, a fortune-

teller, a magician, and a robber, usually with such concealment of his traces

that the police could convict him only of insolence.

Seeing himself uncomfortably suspect, he moved to Messina, crossed to

Reggio Calabria, and sampled the opportunities of Naples and Rome. For a

while he lived by touching up prints and selling them as his own. He mar-

ried Lorenza Feliciani, and prospered by selling her body. Taking the name

of Marchese de' Pellegrini, he brought his lucrative lady to Venice, Mar-

seilles, Paris, London. He arranged to have his wife discovered in the arms

of a rich Quaker; the resultant blackmail supported them for months. He

changed his name to Count di Cagliostro, put on whiskers and the uniform

of a Prussian colonel, and rechristened his wife Countess Seraphina. He re-

turned to Palermo, was arrested as a forger, but was released on the ominous

insistence of his friends, who terrified the law.

As Seraphina's charms were worn with circulation, he put his chemistry

322 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XII

to use, concocting and selling drugs guaranteed to flatten wrinkles' and set

love aflame. Back in England he was accused of stealing a diamond necklace,

and spent a spell in jail. He joined the Freemasons, moved to Paris, and set

himself up as the Grand Cophta of Egyptian Masonry; he assured a hundred

gullibles that he had found the ancient secrets of rejuvenation, which could

be obtained through a forty days' course of purges, sweats, root diet,

phlebotomy, and theosophy. 34 As soon as he was exposed in one city he went

on to another, winning access to moneyed families by his Masonic grip and

ring. In St. Petersburg he practiced as a doctor, treated the poor gratis, and

was received by Potemkin; but Catherine the Great's physician, a canny

Scot, analyzed some of the doctor's elixirs, and found them worthless; Cag-

liostro was given a day to pack and depart. In Warsaw he was exposed by

another physician in a booklet, Cagliostro demasque (1780), but before it

could catch up with him he was off to Vienna, Frankfurt, Strasbourg. There

he charmed Cardinal Prince Louis-Rene-£douard de Rohan, who placed in

his palace a bust of the Grand Cophta inscribed "The divine Cagliostro."

The Cardinal brought him to Paris, and the great impostor was unwittingly

involved in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. When this hoax was ex-

posed Cagliostro was sent to the Bastille; he was soon liberated as innocent,

but was ordered to leave France (1786). He found a new clientele in Lon-

don. Meanwhile Goethe visited Cagliostro's mother in Sicily, and assured

her that her famous son had been acquitted and was safe. 35 *

From London, where doubters had multiplied, the Count and Countess

moved to Basel, Turin, Rovereto, Trent, everywhere suspected and expelled.

Seraphina begged to be taken to Rome to pray at her mother's grave; the

Count agreed. In Rome they tried to set up a lodge of his Egyptian Free-

masonry; the Inquisition arrested them (December 29, 1789); they confessed

their charlatanry; Cagliostro was sentenced to life imprisonment, and ended

his days in the Castle of San Leo near Pesaro in 1795, aged fifty-two. He too

was part of the picture of the Illuminated Century.

2. Casanova

Giovanni Jacopo Casanova added the lordly "de Seingalt" to his name by

a random plucking of the alphabet, as a useful honorific in overwhelming

nuns and braving the governments of Europe. Born to two actors in Venice

in 1725, he gave early promise of mental alacrity. He was apprenticed to the

law, and claimed to have received the doctorate at the University of Padua

when he was sixteen. 36 At every step in his engaging Memoirs we must be-

ware of his imagination, but he tells his story with such self-damning candor

that we may believe him though we know he lies.

While at Padua he made his first conquest— Bettina, "a pretty girl of thir-

teen," sister of his tutor the good priest Gozzi. When she fell ill of smallpox

Casanova nursed her and caught the disease; by his own account his acts of

* Goethe was fascinated by Cagliostro's career, and made it the subject of a middling play,

Der Grosskophta.

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 323

kindness equaled his amours. In his old age, going to Padua for the last time,

"I found her old, ill and poor, and she died in my arms." 37 Nearly all his

sweethearts are represented as loving him until his death.

Despite his law degree he suffered from a humiliating poverty. His father

was dead, his mother was acting in cities as far away as St. Petersburg, and

usually forgot him. He earned some bread by fiddling in taverns and streets.

But he was strong as well as handsome and brave. When ( 1 746) the Venetian

Senator Zuan Bragadino suffered a stroke while descending a stairway, Ja-

copo caught him in his arms and saved him from a precipitate fall; thereafter

the Senator protected him in a dozen scrapes, and gave him funds to visit

France, Germany, and Austria. At Lyons he joined the Freemasons; at Paris

"I became a Companion, then a Master, of the order." (We note with some

shock that "in my time no one in France knew how to overcharge." 38 )

In 1753 he returned to Venice, and soon caught the attention of the gov-

ernment by peddling occult wisdom. A year later an official inquisitor re-

ported on him to the Senate:

He has insinuated himself into the good graces of the noble Zuan Bragadino,

. . . and has fleeced him grievously. . . . Benedetto Pisano tells me that

Casanova is by way of being a cabalistic philosopher, and, by false reasoning

cleverly adapted to the minds he works on, contrives to get his livelihood.

. . . He has made . . . Bragadino believe that he can evoke the angel of light

for his benefit. 39

Furthermore (the report continues) Casanova had sent to his friends com-

positions that revealed him as an impious freethinker. Casanova tells us: "A

certain Mme. Memno took it into her head that I was teaching her son the

precepts of atheism." 40

The things I was accused of concerned the Holy Office, and the Holy Office

is a ferocious beast with whom it is dangerous to meddle. There were certain

circumstances . . . which made it difficult for them to shut me up in the ec-

clesiastical prisons of the Inquisition, and because of this it was finally decided

that the State Inquisition should deal with me. 41

Bragadino advised him to leave Venice; Casanova refused. The next morn-

ing he was arrested, his papers were confiscated, and he was confined without

trial in I Piombi, "the Leads"— a name given to the Venetian state prison from

the plates on its roof.

When night came it was impossible for me to close my eyes, for three rea-

sons: first, the rats; second, the terrible din made by the clock of St. Mark's,

which sounded as if it were in my room; and third, the thousands of fleas

which invaded my body, bit and stung me, poisoning my blood to such an ex-

tent that I suffered from spasmodic constrictions amounting to convulsions. 42

He was sentenced to five years, but after fifteen months of incarceration he

escaped (1757), by a complication of devices, risks, and terrors whose nar-

rative became part of his stock in trade in a dozen lands.

Arrived a second time in Paris, he fought a duel with the young Comte

Nicolas de La Tour d'Auvergne, wounded him, healed him with a "magic"

ointment, won his friendship, and was introduced by him to a rich aunt,

324 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XII

Mme. d'Urfe, who devoutly believed in occult powers, and hoped through

them to change her sex. Casanova played upon her credulity, and found in it

a secret means of opulence. "I cannot, now that I am old, look back upon

this chapter of my life without blushing"; 43 but it lasted through a dozen

chapters of his book. He added to his income by cheating at cards, by or-

ganizing a lottery for the French government, and by obtaining a loan for

France from the United Provinces. En route from Paris to Brussels "I read

Helvetius' De FEsprit all the way." 44 (He was to offer to conservatives a

persuasive example of the libertin [freethinker] becoming a libertine— though

the sequence was probably the reverse.) At every stop he picked a mistress; at

many stops he found a former mistress; now and then he stumbled upon his

own unpremeditated progeny.

He visited Rousseau at Montmorency, and Voltaire at Ferney (1760); we

have already enjoyed part of that tete-a-tete. If we may believe Casanova, he

took the occasion to reprove Voltaire for exposing the absurdities of the

popular mythology:

Casanova: Suppose you do succeed in destroying superstition, with what

will you replace it?

Voltaire: I like that! When I have delivered humanity from a ferocious mon-

ster that devours it, you ask what shall I put in its place?

Casanova: Superstition does not devour humanity; it is, on the contrary,

necessary to its existence.

Voltaire: Necessary to its existence! That is a horrible blasphemy. I love

mankind; I would like to see it, as I am, free and happy. Superstition and liberty

cannot go hand in hand. Do you think that slavery makes for happiness?

Casanova: What you want, then, is the supremacy of the people?

Voltaire: God forbid! The masses must have a king to govern them.

Casanova: In that case superstition is necessary, for the people would never

give a mere man the right to rule them. . . .

Voltaire: I want a sovereign ruling a free people, and bound to them by

reciprocal conditions, which should prevent any inclination to despotism on his

part.

Casanova: Addison says that such a sovereign ... is impossible. I agree with

Hobbes: between two evils one must choose the lesser. A nation freed from

superstition would be a nation of philosophers, and philosophers do not know

how to obey. There is no happiness for a people that is not crushed, kept down

and held in leash.

Voltaire: Horrible! And you are of the people! . . .

Casanova: Your master passion is love of humanity. This love blinds you.

Love humanity, but love it as it is. Humanity is not susceptible to the benefits

you wish to shower upon it; these would only make it more wretched and

perverse. . . .

Voltaire: I am sorry you have such a bad opinion of your fellow creatures. 45

Wherever he went, Casanova made his way into some aristocratic homes,

for many of the European nobility were Freemasons, or Rosicrucians, or

addicts of occult lore. He not only claimed esoteric knowledge in these fields,

but in addition had a good figure, a distinguished (though not handsome)

face, a command of languages, a seductive self-assurance, a fund of stories

and wit, and a mysterious ability to win at cards or in casino games. Every-

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 325

where he was sooner or later escorted to jail or the frontier. Now and then

he had to fight a duel, but, like a nation in its histories, he never lost.

At last he succumbed to longing for his native land. He was free to travel

anywhere in Italy except Venice. He repeatedly applied for permission to

come back; it was finally granted, and in 1775 he was in Venice again. He

was employed by the government as a spy; his reports were discarded as

containing too much philosophy and too little information; he was dismissed.-

Relapsing into his youthful ways, he wrote a satire on the patrician Grimaldi;

he was told to leave Venice or face another stay in the Leads. He fled to

Vienna (1782), to Spa, and to Paris.

There he met a Count von Waldstein, who took a fancy to him and in-

vited him to serve as his librarian in the Castle of Dux in Bohemia. Casanova's

arts of love and magic and sleight-of-hand had reached the point of diminish-

ing returns; he accepted the post at a thousand florins per year. Arrived and

installed, he was grieved to find that he was considered a servant, and dined

in the servants' hall. At Dux he spent his final fourteen years. There he wrote

his Histoire de ma vie, "principally to palliate the deadly dullness which is

killing me in this dull Bohemia. ... By writing ten or twelve hours a day

I have prevented black sorrow from eating up my poor heart and destroying

my reason." 46 He professed absolute veracity in his narrative, and in many

cases it gibes well enough with history; often, however, we find no veri-

fication of his account. Perhaps his memory declined while his imagination

grew. We can only say that his book is one of the most fascinating relics of

the eighteenth century.

Casanova lived long enough to mourn the death of the Old Regime.

O my dear, my beautiful France!— where, in those days, things went so well,

despite lettres de cachet, despite the corvee and the misery of the people! . . .

Dear France, what have you become today? The people is your sovereign, the

people, most brutal and tyrannical of all rulers. 47

And so, on his last day, June 4, 1798, he ended his career in timely piety. "I

have lived a philosopher, and I die a Christian." 48 He had mistaken sensualism

for philosophy, and Pascal's wager for Christianity.

V. WINCKELMANN

By contrast let us look at an idealist.

The most influential figure in the art history of this age was not an artist,

but a scholar whose mature life was dedicated to the history of art, and whose

strange death moved the soul of literate Europe. He was born on December

9, 17 17, at Stendal in Brandenburg. His cobbler father hoped he would be a

cobbler, but Johann wished to study Latin. He paid for his early education

by singing. Eager and industrious, he advanced rapidly. He tutored less able

pupils, and bought books and food. When his teacher went blind Johann

read to him, and devoured his master's library. He learned Latin and Greek

3^6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

thoroughly, but he had no interest in modern foreign languages. Hearing

that the library of the late Johann Albert Fabricius, a famous classical scholar,

was to be sold at auction, he walked 178 miles from Berlin to Hamburg,

bought Greek and Latin classics, and carried them on his shoulders back to

Berlin. 49 In 1738 he entered the University of Halle as a theological student;

he did not care for theology, but he seized the opportunity to study Hebrew.

After graduating he lived by tutoring. He read twice completely Bayle's

Dictionnaire historique et critique, presumably with some effect upon his

religious faith. In one year he read the Iliad and the Odyssey thrice through

in Greek.

In 1743 he accepted an invitation to be associate director of a school at

Seehausen in Altmark, at a salary of 250 thalers per year. During the day he

taught "children with scabby heads their ABC, whilst I . . . was ardently

longing to attain to a knowledge of the beautiful, and was repeating similes

from Homer." 50 In the evening he tutored for his lodging and meals, then he

studied the classics till midnight, slept till four, studied the classics again,

then went wearily to teach. He gladly accepted a call from Count von Biinau

to be assistant librarian in the chateau at Notheniz, near Dresden, for lodging

and fifty to eighty thalers a year (1748). There he reveled in one of the most

extensive book collections of the time.

Among those who used this library was Cardinal Archinto, papal nuncio

at the court of the Elector of Saxony. He was impressed by Winckelmann's

learning and enthusiasm, his emaciation and pallor. "You should go to Italy,"

he told him. Johann replied that such a trip was the deepest desire of his heart,

but beyond his means. Invited to visit the nuncio in Dresden, Winckelmann

went several times. He was delighted by the erudition and the courtesy of

the Jesuits he met in the nuncio's home. Cardinal Passionei, who had 300,000

volumes in Rome, offered him the post of librarian there, for board and

seventy ducats; however, the post could be filled only by a Catholic. Winck-

elmann agreed to conversion. As he had already expressed his belief that

"after death you have nothing to dread, nothing to hope," 51 he found no

theological, only social, difficulties in making the change. To a friend who

reproached him he wrote: "It is the love of knowledge, and that alone, which

can induce me to listen to the proposal that has been made to me." 52 *

On July 11, 1754, in the chapel of the nuncio at Dresden, he professed his

new faith, and arrangements were made for his journey to Rome. For various

reasons he remained for another year in Dresden, living and studying with

the painter-sculptor-etcher Adam Oesen. In May, 1755, he published in a

* Cf. Pater, in his classic essay on Winckelmann: "He may have had a sense of a certain

antique and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the

crabbed Protestantism which had been the ennui of his youth, he might reflect that while

Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off

Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty." 53 And Goethe wrote in a little book on

Winckelmann (1804): "The pagan temper radiates from all of his actions and writings. . . .

His remoteness from every Christian way of thinking, indeed his very aversion to this way of

thinking, must be kept in mind when we attempt to pass judgment on his so-called change of

religion. The parties into which the Christian religion is divided were to him a matter of

utter indifference." 54 "Pagan" need not mean atheist; Winckelmann repeatedly affirmed his

belief in God, but in "the God of all tongues, nations, and sects." 55

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 327

limited edition of fifty copies his first book, Gedanken uber die Nachahmung

der griechischen Werke in Mahler ei iind Bildhauerkunst {Thoughts on the

Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture). Besides describing

the antiques that had been gathered in Dresden, he contended that the Greek

understanding of nature was superior to the modern, and that this was the

secret of Hellenic pre-eminence in art. He concluded that "the only way for

us to become great, indeed to become inimitably great, ... is through imi-

tation of the ancients"; 56 and he thought that of all modern artists Raphael

had done this best. This little volume marked the beginning of the neoclassic

movement in modern art. It was well received; Klopstock and Gottsched

joined in praising both its erudition and its style. Father Rauch, confessor to

Frederick Augustus, secured for Winckelmann, from the Elector-King, a

pension of two hundred thalers for each of the next two years, and provided

him with eighty ducats for the trip to Rome. At last, on September 20, 1755,

Winckelmann set out for Italy, in the company of a young Jesuit. He was al-

ready thirty-seven years old.

Arrived in Rome, he had trouble at the customshouse, which confiscated

several volumes of Voltaire from his baggage; these were returned to him

later. He found lodging with five painters in a house on the Pincian Hill-

sanctified by the shades of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. He met

Mengs, who helped him in a hundred ways. Cardinal Passionei gave him the

freedom of his library, but Winckelmann, wishing to explore the art of

Rome, refused as yet any regular employment. He obtained permission for

repeated visits to the Belvedere of the Vatican; he spent hours before the

Apollo, the Torso, and the Laocoon; in contemplation of these sculptures

his ideas took clearer form. He visited Tivoli, Frascati, and other suburbs

containing ancient remains. His knowledge of classical art won him the

friendship of Cardinal Alessandro Albani. Cardinal Archinto gave him an

apartment in the Palazzo della Cancelleria— the Papal Chancellery; in return

Winckelmann reorganized the palace library. Now he was almost ecstatically

happy. "God owed me this," he said; "in my youth I suffered too much." 57

And to a friend in Germany he wrote as a hundred distinguished visitors

were writing:

All is naught, compared with Rome! Formerly I thought that I had thor-

oughly studied everything, and behold, when I came hither, I perceived that I

knew nothing. Here I have become smaller than when I came out of school to

the Biinau library. If you wish to learn to know men, here is the place; here are

heads of infinite talent, men of high endowments, beauties of the lofty char-

acter which the Greeks have given to their figures. ... As the freedom en-

joyed in other states is only a shadow compared with that of Rome— which

probably strikes you as a paradox— so there is also in this place a different mode

of thinking. Rome is, I believe, the high school of the world; and I too have

been tried and refined. 58

In October, 1757, armed with letters of introduction, he left Rome for

Naples. There he lived in a monastery, but he dined with men like Tanucci

and Galiani. He visited cities redolent with classic history— Pozzuoli, Baia,

Misenum, Cumae— and stood in wonder before the stately temples of Paestum.

328 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

In May, 1758, he returned to Rome laden with antiquarian lore. In that

month he was called to Florence to catalogue and describe the enormous col-

lection of gems, casts, engravings, maps, and manuscripts left by Baron

Philip von Stosch. The task occupied him for nearly a year, and almost

ruined his health. Meanwhile Archinto died, and Frederick the Great rav-

aged Saxony; Winckelmann lost his apartment in the Cancelleria, and his

pension from the unfortunate Elector-King. Albani came to his rescue by

offering him four rooms and ten scudi per month to take care of his library.

The Cardinal himself was a fervent antiquarian; every Sunday he drove out

with Winckelmann to hunt antiquities.

Winckelmann added to his reputation by issuing scholarly monographs:

On Grace in Works of Art, Remarks upon the Architecture of the Ancients,

Description of the Torso in the Belvedere, The Study of Works of Art. In

1760 he tried to arrange a trip to Greece with Lady Or ford, sister-in-law of

Horace Walpole; the plan fell through. "Nothing in the world have I so

ardently desired as this," he wrote. "Willingly would I allow one of my

fingers to be cut off; indeed, I would make myself a priest of Cybele could

I but see this land under such an opportunity." 59 The priests of Cybele had

to be eunuchs, but this did not prevent Winckelmann from denouncing an

old ordinance of the Roman government requiring the private parts of the

Apollo, the Laocoon, and other statues in the Belvedere to be covered by

metal aprons; "there has hardly ever been in Rome," he declared, "so asinine

a regulation."

The sense of beauty was so dominant in him that it almost annulled any

consciousness of sex. If he felt an aesthetic preference it favored the beauty

of the virile male figure rather than the frail and transitory loveliness of

woman. The muscular Torso of Hercules seems to have moved him more

than the soft and rounded contours of the Venus de* Medici. He had a good

word to say for hermaphrodites— at least for the one in the Villa Borghese. 60

He protested, "I have never been an enemy of the other sex, but my mode of

life has removed me from all intercourse with it. I might have married, and

probably should have done so, if I had revisited my native land, but now I

scarcely think of it." 61 In Seehausen his friendship with his pupil Lamprecht

had taken the place of feminine attachments; in Rome he lived with ecclesi-

astics, and seldom met young women. "For a long time," we are told, "there

dined with him, on Saturdays, a young Roman, slender, fair, and tall, with

whom he talked of love." 62 He "caused a portrait to be painted of a beautiful

castrato." 63 He dedicated to the youthful Baron Friedrich Reinhold von Berg

a Treatise on the Capability of the Feeling for Beauty; "readers found in it,

and in the letters to Berg, the language not of friendship but of love; and

such it actually is." 64

In 1762 and 1764 he visited Naples again. His Letter on the Antiquities of

Herculaneum (1762) and his Account of the Latest Herculanean Discov-

eries (1764) gave European scholars the first orderly and scientific informa-

tion about the treasures excavated there and at Pompeii. He was now recog-

nized as the supreme authority on ancient classical art. In 1763 he received

an office in the Vatican as "antiquarian to the Apostolic Chamber." Finally,

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 329

in 1764, he published the massive volumes that he had been writing and illus-

trating for seven years past: Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums {History

of Ancient Art).

Despite its long and painstaking preparation it contained many errors, two

of which were cruel hoaxes. His friend Mengs had foisted upon him, as

faithful reproductions of antique paintings, two drawings born of Mengs's

imagination; Winckelmann listed these paintings, used the engravings, and

dedicated the entire work to Mengs. The translations that soon appeared in

French and Italian carried nearly all the errors, to Winckelmann's mortifica-

tion. "We are wiser today than we were yesterday," he wrote to some

friends. "Would to God I could show you my History of Art entirely re-

modeled and considerably enlarged! I had not yet learned to write when I

took it in hand: the thoughts were not yet sufficiently linked together; there

is wanting, in many cases, the transition from what precedes to what follows

—in which the greatest art consists." 65 And yet the book had accomplished a

very difficult task— to write well about art. His intense devotion to his sub-

ject lifted him to style.

He addressed himself literally to the history of art rather than the much

easier history of artists. After a hurried survey of Egyptian, Phoenician,

Jewish, Persian, and Etruscan art Winckelmann let all his enthusiasm loose in

450 pages on the classical art of the Greeks. In some final chapters he dis-

cussed Greek art under the Romans. Always his emphasis was on the Greeks,

for he was convinced that they had found the highest forms of beauty: in

the refinement of line rather than in brilliance of color, in the representation

of types rather than individuals, in the normality and nobility of the figure,

in the restraint of emotional expression, in the serenity of aspect, in the re-

pose of features even in action, and above all in the harmonious proportion

and relation of differentiated parts in a logically unified whole. Greek art,

to Winckelmann, was the Age of Reason in form.

He connected the superiority of Greek art with the high regard that the

Greeks paid to excellence of form in either sex. "Beauty was an excellence

that led to fame, for we find that the Greek histories make mention of those

who were distinguished for it," 66 as histories now record great statesmen,

poets, and philosophers. There were beauty contests, as well as athletic con-

tests, among the Greeks. Winckelmann thought that political freedom, and

Greek leadership of the Mediterranean world before the Peloponnesian War,

led to a synthesis of grandeur with beauty, and produced the "grand style"

(hohe, grosse Stil) in Pheidias, Polycleitus, and Myron. In the next stage the

"grand" gave way to the "beautiful" style, or "style of grace"; Pheidias gave

way to Praxiteles, and decline began. Freedom in art was part of Greek

freedom; artists were liberated from rigid rules, and dared to create ideal

forms not found in nature. They imitated nature only in details; the whole

was a composite of perfections found only in part in any natural object.

Winckelmann was a romantic preaching classic form.

His book was accepted throughout Europe as an event in the history of

literature and art. Frederick the Great sent him an invitation (1765) to come

to Berlin as superintendent of the royal library and cabinet of antiquities.

330 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XII

Winckelmann agreed to come for two thousand thalers per year; Frederick

offered one thousand; Winckelmann stood his ground, and recalled the

story of the castrato who demanded a fat sum for his songs; Frederick com-

plained that he asked more than his best general cost him; "Eh bene" said

the castrato, "faccia cantare il suo generate!" (Very well, then; let him make

his general sing! ) . 67

In 1765 Winckelmann revisited Naples, this time in company with John

Wilkes, who had made Europe resound with his defiance of Parliament and

George III. After gathering more data he returned to Rome and completed

his second major work, Monumenti antichi inediti (1767). His prelate

friends had complained of his writing the History in German, which was not

yet a major medium of scholarship; now he pleased them by using Italian,

and the happy author, seated between two cardinals, had the ecstasy of read-

ing a part of his book at Castel Gandolfo to Clement XIII and a numerous

assembly of notables. However, he was accused of having heretical books

and making heretical remarks, 68 and he never obtained from the papacy the

post which he felt he deserved.

Perhaps in hope that he might there secure the means of seeing Greece, he

decided to visit Germany (1768). But he had so immersed himself in classic

art and Italian ways that he took no pleasure in his native land; he ignored

its scenery and resented its baroque architecture and ornament; "Let us re-

turn to Rome," he repeated a hundred times to his traveling companion. 69

He was received with honors in Munich, where he was presented a beautiful

antique gem. At Vienna Maria Theresa gave him costly medallions, and both

the Empress and Prince von Kaunitz invited him to settle there; but on May

28, after hardly a month's absence, he turned back to Italy.

At Trieste he was delayed while waiting for a ship that would take him to

Ancona. During these days he developed acquaintance with another traveler,

Francesco Arcangeli. They took walks together, and occupied adjoining

rooms in the hotel. Soon Winckelmann showed him the medallions he had

received in Vienna; he did not, so far as we know, show his gold-filled purse.

On the morning of June 8, 1768, Arcangeli entered Winckelmann's room,

found him seated at a table, and threw a noose around his neck. Winckel-

mann rose and fought; Arcangeli stabbed him five times and fled. A physician

bandaged the wounds but pronounced them fatal. Winckelmann received

the last sacrament, made his will, expressed a desire to see and forgive his

assailant, and died at four o'clock in the afternoon. Trieste commemorates

him with a handsome monument.

Arcangeli was captured on June 14. He confessed, and on June 18 he was

sentenced: "For the crime of murder, done by you on the body of Johann

Winckelmann, . . . the Imperial Criminal Court has decreed that you . . .

shall be broken alive on the wheel, from the head to the feet, until your soul

depart from your body." On July 20 it was so done.

The limitations of Winckelmann were bound up with geography. Because

he never realized his hope of visiting Greece under conditions that would

CHAP. XIl) VALE, ITALIA

331

have allowed extensive study of classic remains, he thought of Greek art in

terms of Greco-Roman art as found in the museums, collections, and palaces

of Germany and Italy, and in the relics of Herculaneum and Pompeii. His

predilection for sculpture over painting, for the representation of types

rather than individuals, for tranquillity as against the expression of emotion,

for proportion and symmetry, for imitation of the ancients as against origi-

nality and experiment: all this placed upon the creative impulses in art se-

vere restraints that resulted in the Romantic reaction against the cold rigidity

of classical forms. His concentration on Greece and Rome blinded him to the

rights and possibilities of other styles; like Louis XIV, he thought that the

genre paintings of the Netherlands were grotesqueries.

Even so, his achievement was remarkable. He stirred the whole European

realm of art, literature, and history with his exaltation of Greece. He went

beyond the semiclassicism of Renaissance Italy and Louis XIV's France to

classic art itself. He aroused the modern mind to the clean and placid perfec-

tion of Greek sculpture. He turned the chaos of a thousand marbles, bronzes,

paintings, gems, and coins into a scientific archaeology. His influence on the

best spirits of the next generation was immense. He inspired Lessing, if only

to opposition; he shared in maturing Herder and Goethe; and perhaps with-

out the afflatus that rose from Winckelmann Byron would not have crowned

his poetry with death in Greece. The ardent Hellenist helped to form the

neoclassic principles of Mengs and Thorwaldsen, and the neoclassic painting

of Jacques-Louis David. "Winckelmann," said Hegel, "is to be regarded as

one of those who, in the sphere of art, have known how to initiate a new

organ for the human spirit." 70

VI. THE ARTISTS

Italy hardly needed Winckelmann's exhortations, for she honored her

gods, and her accumulated art served in each generation as a school of disci-

pline for a thousand artists from a dozen lands. Carlo Marchionni designed

the palatial Villa Albani (1758), into which Cardinal Albani, guided by

Winckelmann, gathered a world-famous collection of antique sculptures-

still rich after many rapes. (Napoleon stole 294 of the pieces for France;

hence, perhaps, an Italian saying of those days, Non tutti francesi sono la-

troni, ma Buona Parte— not all Frenchmen are thieves, but a good part of

them are.)

Venice produced nearly all the leading Italian painters of these years, and

three of them inherited already famous names. Alessandro Longhi, son of

Pietro, illustrated the genius of his people with some delicate portraits, includ-

ing two of Goldoni. 71 We have seen Domenico Tiepolo accompanying his

father to Augsburg and Madrid, and modestly offering his specialty to the

common stock. In the guest house of the Villa Valmarana he struck out for

himself with genre scenes from rural life; Peasants Reposing is an idyl of

dropped tools and restful ease. After his father's death in Spain Domenico

332 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XII

returned to Venice, and gave his own style of humorous realism free rein. 72

Francesco Guardi, brother-in-law to Giambattista Tiepolo, learned paint-

ing from his father, his brother, and Canaletto. He missed acclaim in his gen-

eration, but his vedute caught critical eyes by seizing and conveying subtle-

ties of light, and moods of atmosphere, which may have given some hints to

French Impressionists. He did not wait for Constable's caution, "Remember

that light and shade never stand still." 73 Perhaps his favorite hour was twi-

light, when lines were blurred, colors merged, and shadows were dim, as in

Gondola on the Lagoon.™ Venetian skies and waters seemed designed to offer

such misty, melting views. Sometimes, we are told, Guardi carried his studio

into a gondola, and moved on the minor canals to catch unhackneyed scenes.

He painted the human figures carelessly, as if he felt that they were eva-

nescent minutiae beside the solid architecture and the changing yet persistent

sea and sky. But he could picture men too, crowding the Piazzetta in some

gala Festival™ or moving in stately dress in the great Sala dei Filarmonici. 76

In their lifetime his brother Giovanni was rated the better painter, and Ca-

naletto greater than either; today Francesco Guardi promises to outlive them

both.

Anton Raphael Mengs returned from Spain in 1768, and was soon lord of

the studios in Rome. Hardly anyone questioned his supremacy among con-

temporary artists. Crowned heads angled for his brush, sometimes in vain.

Winckelmann called him the Raphael of his age, praised his deadly Parnas-

sus as a masterpiece before which "even Raphael would have bowed his

head," 77 and injected into the History of Ancient Art a superlative estimate

of his friend. 78

The best of Mengs's paintings in this period is his self-portrait ( 1773?). 79

It shows him still vigorous, handsome, black-haired, proud at forty-five.

After a second stay in Spain Mengs returned (1777) to spend his declining

years in Italy. He continued to prosper, but the death of his wife (1778)

broke his once buoyant spirit. A variety of ailments weakened him, and his

resort to quack doctors and miraculous cures completed his physical ruin.

He died in 1779 at the age of fifty-one. His disciples raised to his memory a

cenotaph in the Pantheon, beside the monument to Raphael. Today there is

no critic so poor to do him reverence.

VII. / MUSIC!

Church music had declined with the growing secularization of life, and had

suffered infection from operatic forms. Instrumental music was prospering,

partly through the improvement of the pianoforte, but still more with the

increasing popularity of the violin. Virtuosi like Pugnani, Viotti, and Nar-

dini conquered Europe with a bow. Muzio Clementi, who went from Italy

to live for twenty years in England, toured the Continent as organist and

pianist, competed with Mozart in Vienna, and may have profited from

Mozart's comment that his playing was too mechanical. He was the most

CHAP. XIl) VALE, ITALIA 333

successful piano teacher of the eighteenth century, and he established the

nineteenth-century style of piano technique with his famous series of exer-

cises and studies, Gracilis ad Parnassum— steps to the home of the Muses from

whom music took its name. Gaetano Pugnani inherited his master Tartini's

violin artistry, and passed it on to his pupil Giovanni Battista Viotti, who

traversed Europe triumphantly. Viotti's Violin Concerto in A Minor can still

be enjoyed by our old-fashioned ears.

Like so many Italians, Luigi Boccherini left a land crowded with musicians

to seek an audience abroad. From 1768 till his death in 1805 he charmed

Spain with his cello as Farinelli had charmed it with his voice and Scarlatti

with his harpsichord. For a generation his instrumental compositions rivaled

those of Mozart in international acclaim; Frederick William II of Prussia,

himself a cellist, preferred Boccherini's quartets to Mozart's. 80 In his sixty-

two years he composed ninety-five string quartets, fifty-four trios, twelve

piano quintets, twenty symphonies, five concertos for the cello, two orato-

rios, and some religious music. Half the world knows his "Minuet"— a move-

ment from one of his quintets; but all the world should know his Concerto

in B Flat for violoncello and orchestra.

Europe surrendered without a struggle (again excepting Paris) to the bel

canto of Italy. From a dozen cities of the Magic Boot prima donnas like Cate-

rina Gabrielli and castrati like Gasparo Pacchierotti poured across the Alps

to Vienna, Munich, Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Hamburg, Brus-

sels, London, Paris, and Madrid. Pacchierotti was among the last of the

famous emasculates; for a generation he rivaled Farinelli's career. He held

London captive for four years; his acclaim there still echoes in Fanny Bur-

ney's Diary? 1 and in her father's General History of Music. 82

Italian composers and conductors followed the singers. Pietro Guglielmi

wrote two hundred operas, and moved from Naples to Dresden to Bruns-

wick to London to conduct them. Another Neapolitan, Niccolo Piccini, has

come down to us disfigured by his unwilling contest with Gluck in Paris; but

Galiani described him as im tres honnete homme—* thoroughly honorable

man. 83 His opere buffe were for a decade the rage of Naples and Rome; even

the Serva padrona of Pergolesi won no such popularity as Piccini's La cec-

china (1760). Jommelli, Pergolesi, Leo, and Galuppi had set to music Meta-

stases Olimpiade-, Piccini did likewise, and, by common consent, excelled

them all. In 1776 he accepted a call to Paris; the wild war that ensued there

must wait its geographical turn; through it all Piccini carried himself with

complete courtesy, remaining friends with his rivals Gluck and Sacchini even

though their partisans threatened his life. 84 When the Revolution drowned

out this opera buff a Piccini returned to Naples. There he was placed under

house arrest for four years because of sympathy with France; his operas were

hooted from the stage, and he lived in a poverty disgraceful to his country.

After Napoleon's conquest of Italy he was again invited to Paris (1798); the

First Consul gave him a modest sinecure, but a paralytic stroke broke him

down in body and spirit, and he died in Paris in 1 800.

Antonio Sacchini was born to a fisherman at Pozzuoli, and was being

334 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XII

trained to succeed his father when Francesco Durante heard him sing, and

carried him off to Naples as pupil and protege. His Semiramide was so well

received at the Teatro Argentino in Rome that he remained with that thea-

ter for seven years as its composer of operas. After a stay in Venice he set

off to conquer Munich, Stuttgart, . . . and London (1772). His operas

were applauded there, but hostile cabals damaged his popularity, and his dis-

solute habits ruined his health. Moving to Paris, he produced his masterpiece,

Oedipe a Co lone (1786), which held the boards of the Opera through 583

representations in the next fifty-seven years; we can still hear it, now and

then, on the air. He adopted several of Gluck's reforms; he abandoned the

Italian style of making an opera a patchwork of arias; in Oedipe the story

controls the arias, and the choruses, inspired by Handel's oratorios, lend gran-

deur to both the music and the theme.

The melodious conquest went on with Antonio Salieri, foe of Mozart and

friend of the young Beethoven. Born near Verona, he was sent at the age of

sixteen to Vienna ( 1766) ; eight years later Joseph II appointed him composer

to the court, and in 1788 Kapellmeister. In this post he preferred other com-

posers to Mozart, but the story that this opposition caused Mozart's collapse

is a myth. 85 After Mozart's death Salieri befriended the son and promoted his

musical development. Beethoven submitted several compositions to Salieri,

and accepted his suggestions with unwonted humility.

"The most radiant star in the Italian operatic firmament during the second

half of the eighteenth century" 86 was Giovanni Paisiello. Son of a veterinary

surgeon at Taranto, his voice so impressed his Jesuit teachers there that they

persuaded his father to send him to Durante's conservatory in Naples ( 1 754) .

When he took to composing operas he found the Neapolitan audiences so

enamored of Piccini that he accepted an invitation from Catherine the Great.

In St. Petersburg he wrote (1782) // barbiere di Siviglia; it had so lasting a

success throughout Europe that when Rossini offered in Rome (February

5, 1 816) an opera on the same subject it was damned by the public as an

ungentlemanly intrusion upon territory sacred to Paisiello, who was still

alive. On his way back from Russia in 1784, Paisiello stopped long enough in

Vienna to write twelve "symphonies" for Joseph II, and to produce an opera,

// re Teodoro, which soon won Europe-wide acceptance. Then he returned

to Naples as maestro di cappella to Ferdinand IV. Napoleon persuaded Fer-

dinand to "lend" him Paisiello; when the composer arrived in Paris (1802)

he was received with a magnificence that made him many enemies. In 1 804

he returned to Naples under the patronage of Joseph Bonaparte and Murat.

We should note, in passing, how patiently these Italians prepared their

careers. Paisiello studied for nine years at Durante's Conservatorio di San

Onofrio; Cimarosa studied for eleven years in the Conservatorio di Santa

Maria di Loreto, and later at Naples. After long tutelage under Sacchini,

Piccini, and others, Domenico Cimarosa produced his first opera, he strava-

ganze del conte. Soon his operas were heard in Vienna, Dresden, Paris, and

London. In 1787 he took his turn at St. Petersburg, where he delighted the

polyandrous Empress with Cleopatra. Invited by Leopold II to succeed Sa-

CHAP. XII ) VALE, ITALIA 335

lieri as Kapellmeister at Vienna, he produced there his most celebrated opera,

// matrimonio segreto (1792). It so pleased the Emperor that at its close he

ordered supper to be served to all those present, and then commanded a repe-

tition of the whole. 87 In 1793 he was called back to Naples as maestro di cap-

pella for Ferdinand IV. When the King was deposed by a French Revolu-

tionary army (1799) Cimarosa hailed the event with enthusiasm; when Fer-

dinand was restored Cimarosa was condemned to death. The sentence was

commuted to exile. The composer set out for St. Petersburg, but died on the

way at Venice (1801). He left, in addition to many cantatas, Masses, and

oratorios, some sixty-six operas, which were far more applauded than Mo-

zart's, and which even now must be reckoned second only to Mozart's in the

opere buffe of the eighteenth century.

If melody is the heart of music, Italian music is supreme. The Germans

had preferred polyphonic harmony to a simple melodic line; in this sense

Italy won another victory over Germany when the German Mozart sub-

ordinated polyphony to melody. But the Italians gave melody so dominant a

place that their operas tended to be a succession of tuneful arias rather than

musical dramas such as the first Italian opera composers (c. 1600) had had

in mind in their attempt to rival the dramatic art of the Greeks. In Italian

opera the significance of the action, and often of the words, was lost in the

glory of the song; this was beautiful, but if, as we used to think, art is the

replacement of chaos with order to reveal significance, opera, in Italian

hands, had fallen short of its highest possibilities. Some Italians, like Jom-

melli and Traetta, acknowledged this, and strove to mold the music and the

play into a united whole; but that achievement had to await, for its clearest

form, the operas of Gluck. So, in the pendulum of life, theltalian conquest

of Europe with melody ended when, in 1774, Gluck produced at Paris an

Iphigenie en Aulide which subordinated the music to the play. But the con-

flict between melody and drama went on; Wagner won a battle for drama,

Verdi captured new trophies for melody. May neither side win.

VIII. ALFIERI

There were no Dantes in this age, but there was Parini in verse, Filangieri

in prose, and Alfieri in drama, prose, and poetry.

Giuseppe Parini struggled up from penury, lived by copying manuscripts,

and entered print (1752) with a small volume of versi sciolti— blank verse.

He took holy orders as a means of eating, and even then had to earn his bread

by tutoring; there was a plethora of priests in Italy. His poverty sharpened

his pen to satire. Contemplating the idleness and pomp of many Italian no-

bles, he conceived the idea of describing a typical day in such a blueblood's

life. In 1763 he issued the first part as // mattino {Morning) ; two years later

he added // mezzogiorno {Noon) ; he completed, but never lived to publish,

// vespro {Evening) and La notte {Night) ; together they formed a substan-

tial satire, which he called II giorno {The Day), Count von Firmian showed

336 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

real nobility by appointing the poet-priest editor of the Milan Gazzetta, and

professor of belles-lettres in the Scuola Palatina. Parini welcomed the French

Revolution, and was rewarded by Napoleon with a place on the municipal

council of Milan. The odes that he composed between 1757 and 1795 are

among the minor classics of Italian literature. We get a faint echo of him in

translation, as in this sonnet, written as a lover rather than a priest:

Benignant Sleep, that, on soft pinion sped,

Dost wing through darkling night thy noiseless way,

And fleeting multitudes of dreams display

To weariness reposed on quiet bed:

Go where my Phillis doth her gentle head

And blooming cheek on peaceful pillow lay;

And, while the body sleeps, her soul affray

With dismal shape from thy enchantment bred;

So like unto mine own that form be made-

Pallor so dim disfiguring its face-

That she may waken by compassion swayed.

If this thou wilt accomplish of thy grace,

A double wreath of poppies I will braid,

And silently upon thine altar place. 88

To this posy let us add, as a flower from the Italian Enlightenment, a pas-

sage from Gaetano Filangieri's La scienza della legislazione (1780-85), in-

spired by Beccaria and Voltaire:

The philosopher should not be the inventor of systems but the apostle of

truth. ... So long as the evils that affect humanity are still uncured; so long as

error and prejudice are allowed to perpetuate them; so long as the truth is

limited to the few and the privileged, and concealed from the greater part of

the human species and from the kings; so long will it remain the duty of the

philosopher to preach the truth, to sustain it, to promote it, and to illuminate

it. Even if the lights he scatters are not useful in his own century and people,

they will surely be useful in another country and century. Citizen of every

place and every age, the philosopher has the world for his country, the earth

for his school, and posterity will be his disciples. 89

The age was summed up in Alfieri: the revolt against superstition, the

exaltation of pagan heroes, the denunciation of tyranny, the acclaim of the

French Revolution, the revulsion from its excesses, and the cry for Italian

freedom— all added to a romance of illicit love and noble fidelity. He re-

corded this passionate career in Vita di Vittorio Alfieri . . . scritta da esso

—his life "written by himself," and continued to within five months of his

death. It is one of the great autobiographies, as revealing as Rousseau's Con-

fessions. It begins disarmingly: "Speaking— and, still more, writing— of one-

self is beyond all doubt the offspring of the great love one has for oneself."

Thereafter there is no mask of modesty, and no sign of dishonesty.

I was born in the city of Asti in Piedmont January 1 7, 1 749, of noble, opulent,

and respectable parents. I notice these circumstances as fortunate ones for the

following reasons. Noble birth was of great service to me, . . . for it enabled

me, without incurring the imputation of base or invidious motives, to disparage

nobility for its own sake, to unveil its follies, its abuses, and its crimes. . . .

Opulence made me incorruptible, and free to serve only the truth. 90

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 337

His father died when Vittorio was an infant; his mother married again.

The boy retired into himself, brooded, meditated suicide at the age of eight,

but could not hit upon any comfortable way. An uncle took charge of him,

and sent him, aged nine, to be educated at the Academy of Turin. There he

was served and bullied by a valet. His teachers tried to break his will as the

first stage in making a man of him, but their tyranny inflamed his pride and

his longing for liberty. "The class in philosophy . . . was something to send

one to sleep standing upright." 91 The death of his uncle left him, aged four-

teen, master of a large fortune.

Having secured the consent of the King of Sardinia as a prerequisite to

foreign travel, he set out in 1766 on a three-year tour of Europe. He fell in

love with sundry women, French literature, and the English constitution.

The reading of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau destroyed his inherited

theology, and began his hatred of the Roman Church— though he had only

recently kissed the foot of Clement XIII, "a fine old man of venerable maj-

esty." 92 In The Hague he became desperately enamored of a married woman;

she smiled and went away; again he contemplated suicide; this was the age of

Werther, and suicide was in the air. Again finding the idea more attractive in

prospect than in execution, he returned to Piedmont, but was so unhappy in

an atmosphere of political and religious conformity that he resumed his trav-

els (1769).

Now he went through Germany, Denmark, and Sweden— where, he tells

us, he liked the scenery, the people, and even the winter. Then to Russia,

which he despised, seeing in Catherine the Great only a crowned criminal;

he refused to be presented to her. He enjoyed Frederick's Prussia no better;

he hurried on to bravely republican Holland, and to an England that was

trying to teach George III to keep out of the government. He cuckolded an

Englishman, fought a duel, was wounded. He caught syphilis in Spain, 93 and

returned to Turin (1772) to be cured.

In 1774 he was sufficiently recovered to undertake his second great ro-

mance, with a woman nine years his senior. They quarreled and parted, and

he cleansed her from his dreams by writing a play, Cleopatra; what could be

more dramatic than two triumvirs, a queen, a battle, and an asp? The piece

was produced at Turin June 16, 1775, "amid applause, for two successive

nights"; then he withdrew it for alterations. He itched now "with a very

noble and elevated passion for fame." He reread Plutarch and the Italian

classics, and studied Latin again to delve into Seneca's tragedies; in these

readings he found themes and form for his dramas. He would restore ancient

heroes and virtues as Winckelmann had restored ancient art.

Meanwhile (1777) he was writing his treatise Delia tirannide, but it con-

tained such hot indictments of state and Church that he could not think of

publishing it; it came to print only in 1787. An almost religious fervor ani-

mated it:

Not pressing poverty, . . . not the slavish idleness in which Italy lies pros-

trate, no, these were not the reasons which directed my mind to the true lofty

honor of assailing false empires with my pen. A fierce god, a god unknown, has

ever been at my back scourging me on since my earliest years. . . . My free

338 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

spirit can never find peace or truce unless I pen harsh pages for the destruction

of tyrants. 94

He defined tyrants as

all those who by force or fraud— or even by the will of the people or the nobles

—obtain the absolute reins of government, and believe themselves to be, or are,

above the law. . . . Tyranny is the name that must be applied ... to any gov-

ernment in which he who is charged with the execution of the laws may make,

destroy, break, interpret, hinder, or suspend them with assurance of impunity. 95

Alfieri considered tyrannical all European governments except the Dutch

Republic and the constitutional monarchies of England and Sweden. Influ-

enced by Machiavelli, he idealized the Roman Republic, and hoped that

revolution would soon establish republics in Europe. He thought the best

thing any minister of a tyrant could do would be to encourage him to such

excesses of tyranny as would drive the people to revolt. 96 In its first years a

revolution is justified in using violence to prevent the revival of the tyranny:

As political, like religious, opinions can never be completely changed without

the use of much violence, so every new government is at first unfortunately

compelled to be cruelly stern, sometimes even unjust, so as to convince, or pos-

sibly coerce, those who neither desire, understand, love, nor consent to innova-

tions. 97

Though he himself was a noble as Conte di Cortemilia, Alfieri condemned

hereditary aristocracy as a form or instrument of tyranny. He applied the

same condemnation to all organized religions of authority. He admitted that

"Christianity has contributed no little to softening universal customs," but

he noted "many acts of stupid and ignorant ferocity" in Christian rulers

"from Constantine to Charles V." 98 In general,

the Christian religion is almost incompatible with freedom. . . . The pope, the

Inquisition, purgatory, confession, indissoluble marriage, and the celibacy of

priests— these are the six rings of the sacred chain which binds the profane one

[the state] so much more tightly that it becomes ever heavier and more un-

breakable. 99

Alfieri so hated tyranny that he advised against having children, or ever

marrying, in a despotic state. Instead of children, but with comparable Italian

fertility, he produced fourteen tragedies between 1775 and 1783, all in blank

verse, all classical in structure and form, all excoriating tyranny with de-

clamatory passion, and enthroning liberty as nobler than life. So in La con-

giura del Pazzi his sympathy was with the attempt of the conspirators to

overthrow Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici; in Bruto primo and Bruto se-

condo he gave short shrift to Tarquin and Caesar; in Filippo he was all for

Carlos against the King of Spain; in Maria Stuarda, however, he found more

tyranny in the Scottish chieftains than in the Catholic Queen. Criticized for

bending history to his thesis, he defended himself:

More than one malicious tongue will be heard to say . . . that I never depict

anything but tyrants, in too many pages devoid of sweetness; that my blood-

red pen, dipped in venom, always strikes a single and monotonous note; and

CHAP.XIl) VALE, ITALIA 339

that my surly Muse rouses no man from evil servitude, but makes many laugh.

These complaints will not divert my spirit from so sublime a purpose, nor deter

my art, though weak and inadequate to so great a need. Nor will my words

ever be scattered to the winds if true men are born after us who will hold lib-

erty vital to life. 100

Only next to his passion for freedom was his love for the Countess of Al-

bany. Daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, Prince of Stolberg-Gedern, she

married (1774) Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, who

now called himself the Count of Albany. Once so gallant as Bonnie Prince

Charlie, he had taken to drink and mistresses to forget his defeats. The mar-

riage, arranged by the French court, proved childless and unhappy. Ap-

parently the Countess herself was not without fault. Alfieri met her in 1777,

pitied her, loved her. To be near her, free to help her and follow her fortunes

without the irksome necessity of securing royal permission for every move

across the frontier, he gave up his citizenship in Piedmont, transferred most

of his fortune and estate to his sister, and moved to Florence (1778). He was

now twenty-nine years old.

The Countess returned his love with a discreet delicacy that observed all

public decorum. In 1780, when her husband's drunken violence endangered

her life, she retired to a convent, and later to the home of her brother-in-law

in Rome. "I remained in Florence like an abandoned orphan," wrote Alfieri,

"and it was then that I became fully convinced . . . that without her I did

not so much as half exist; for I found myself almost completely incapable of

doing any good work." 101 Soon he went to Rome, where he was allowed to

see his inamorata now and then; but the brother-in-law, under priestly guid-

ance, opposed his efforts to secure an annulment of her marriage. (Hence

his Miltonic plea for divorce in Delia tirannide. 102 ) Finally the brother-in-law

forbade him any further visit to the Countess. He left Rome, and tried to

distract himself with travel and with horses— which were his "third love,"

next to the Muses and "my lady." In 1784 she won a legal separation. She

moved to Colmar in Alsace; there Alfieri joined her, and thenceforth they

lived in unwedded union until the death of the husband allowed them to

marry. Alfieri wrote of his love with an ecstasy that recalled Dante's Vita

nuova:

This, my fourth and last fever of love, was . . . quite different from those of

my first three liaisons. In those I had not found myself agitated by any passion

of intellect counterbalancing, and commingled with, the passion of the heart.

This had indeed less impetuosity and fervor, but proved more lasting and more

deeply felt. The strength of my passion was such that it . . . dominated my

every emotion and thought, and it will never henceforth be extinguished in me

but with life itself. It was clear to me . . . that in her I had found a true

woman, for instead of her proving, like all ordinary women, an obstacle to

attainment of literary fame— one who set up occupations of utility and cheap-

ened . . . one's thoughts— I found in her, for every good action, both encour-

agement and comfort and good example. Recognizing and appreciating a treas-

ure so unique, I gave myself to her with utter abandon. Certainly I was not

wrong, for now, more than twelve years later, . . . my passion for her in-

creases in proportion as those transitory charms (which are not her enduring

34° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XII

self) by time's decree fade away. But concentrated upon her, my mind is ele-

vated, softened, and with every day made better; and as regards hers I am bold

to say that the same is true, and that from me she may draw support and

strength. 103

So spurred on, he wrote more tragedies, some comedies, and occasional

poetry. He had already composed five odes entitled "America libera." In

1788 the lovers moved to Paris, where Alfieri supervised the publication of

his works by Beaumarchais' press at Kehl on the Rhine. When the Bastille

fell Alfieri, all fiery for freedom, hailed the Revolution as the dawn of a

happier age for the world. But soon the excesses of the Revolution disgusted

a soul whose conception of liberty was aristocratic, demanding freedom from

mobs and majorities as well as from popes and kings. On August 18, 1792,

he and the Countess left Paris with such possessions as they could take in two

carriages. They were stopped at the city gates by a crowd that questioned

their right to leave. Alfieri "jumped out of the coach amongst the mob,

brandishing all my seven passports, and started in shouting and making a

row, . . . which is always the way to get the better of Frenchmen." 104 They

drove on to Calais and Brussels; there they learned that the Revolutionary

authorities in Paris had ordered the arrest of the Countess. They hurried on

to Italy, and settled in Florence. Now Alfieri composed his Misogallo, hot

with hatred of France and its "crowd of ill-begotten slaves." 105

In 1799 the French Revolutionary army captured Florence. Alfieri and

the Countess took refuge in a suburban villa until the invaders departed. The

excitement of these years weakened and aged him; ending his autobiography

in 1802, aged fifty-three, he spoke of himself as already old. After bequeath-

ing all his goods to the Countess, he died at Florence on October 7, 1803,

and was buried in the Church of Santa Croce. There in 1810 the Countess

raised to him a massive monument by Canova; she posed for the figure of

Italy mourning over the tomb. She joined her lover there in 1824.

Italy honors Alfieri as II Vate d'ltalia, prophet of the Risorgimento that

freed her from alien and ecclesiastical rule. His dramas, though strident and

monotone, were an invigorating advance upon the sentimental tragedies that

had been offered to the Italian stage before him. From his Filippo, his Saul,

his Mirra the soul of Italy prepared for Mazzini and Garibaldi. His Delia

tirannide was not confined to foreign publication at Kehl (1787) and Paris

(1800); it was printed in Milan (1800) and other Italian cities in 1802,

1803, 1805, 1809, 1848, 1849, i860; it became for Italy what Paine's Rights

of Man (1791) had been for France, England, and America. Alfieri was the

beginning of the Romantic movement in Italy, a Byron before Byron,

preaching the emancipation of minds and states. After him Italy had to be

free.

CHAPTER XIII

The Enlightenment in Austria

1756-90

I. THE NEW EMPIRE

STRICTLY, Austria designates a nation; loosely it may stand for the em-

pire of which Austria was the head. Formally, till 1 806, this was the Holy

Roman Empire, which had included Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary,

and parts of Italy and France. But nationalistic aims had so weakened Im-

perial allegiance that what now (1756) survived was really an Austro-Hun-

garian Empire, embracing Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, the Tirol,

Hungary, Bohemia, the Catholic archbishoprics of Cologne, Trier, and

Mainz, diverse and varying parts of Italy, and, since 171 3, the formerly

Spanish, now Austrian, Netherlands— approximately the Belgium of today.

Hungary, with a population of some five million souls, was proudly feudal.

Four fifths of the soil were owned by Magyar nobles, and were tilled by

serfs; taxes fell only upon the peasants and the German or Slav burghers of

the towns. The new empire had had its legal birth in 1687, when the Hun-

garian nobles renounced their ancient right of electing their king, and ac-

knowledged the Hapsburg emperors as their sovereigns. Maria Theresa, fol-

lowing Bourbon strategy, invited the leading Hungarian magnates to her

court, gave them offices, titles, and ribbons, and lulled them into accepting

Imperial law for their domains, and Vienna for their capital. In generous

response the Empress commissioned Lukas von Hildebrandt to draw up plans

for governmental buildings in Buda; the work was begun in 1769, and was

renewed in 1894, giving the old capital one of the most impressive royal

structures in the world. Rivaling the Queen, rich Hungarian nobles built

lordly chateaux along the Danube or in their mountain retreats; so Prince

Pal Esterhazy built a family seat at Eisenstadt (1663-72), and Prince Miklos

Jozsef Esterhazy built in Renaissance style, some thirty miles away, the new

Schloss Esterhazy (1764-66). Here were 126 guest rooms, two great halls

for receptions and balls, a rich collection of art, and, nearby, a library of

7,500 volumes, and a theater with four hundred seats. Around the palace a

vast swamp was transformed into gardens decorated with grottoes, temples,

and statuary, with hothouses, orangeries, and game preserves. Said a French

traveler: "There is no place— perhaps excepting Versailles— that equals this

castle in splendor." Here came painters, sculptors, actors, singers, virtuosi;

here, for a full generation, Haydn conducted, composed, and longed for a

larger world.

Bohemia, which is now the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, did not fare so

34 1

34 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

well under Maria Theresa's rule. It had withdrawn from history after the

Thirty Years' War, its national spirit broken by foreign rule, and by a Cath-

olic creed imposed upon a people that had once known Jan Hus and Jerome

of Prague. Its eight million inhabitants suffered the wounds of war in the

repeated conflicts between Prussia and Austria, and its historic capital

changed hands again and again as its alien Queen passed from defeat to vic-

tory to defeat. Bohemia had to content itself with an independence of culture

and taste; it developed its own composers, like Georg Benda, and Prague

distinguished itself by giving a hearty reception to the premiere of Mozart's

Don Giovanni (1787), which Vienna later damned with faint applause.

In the Austrian Netherlands the struggle of local dignitaries to retain their

traditional authority was more successful than in Bohemia; it was to cloud

with tragedy the last days of the "revolutionary Emperor." Those seven

provinces— Brabant (which included Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain), Lux-

embourg, Limburg, Flanders, Hainaut, Namur, and Gelders— had an ancient

and prestigious history, and the nobles who ruled their four million souls

were jealous of the privileges that had survived so many centuries of trial.

"Society" displayed its fashions, gambled its gains, and sometimes drank the

waters, as well as the wines, at Spa in the neighboring episcopate of Liege.

The flower of that society in this age was Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne,

whom Brussels gave to the world in 1735. He was tutored by several abbes,

"only one of whom believed in God"; he himself was "devout for a fort-

night" 1 in this strongly Catholic country. He fought with distinction in the

Seven Years' War, served Joseph II as counselor and intimate friend, joined

the Russian army in 1787, accompanied Catherine the Great in her "prog-

ress" to the Crimea, built himself a luxurious chateau and art gallery near

Brussels, wrote thirty-four volumes of Melanges, impressed even the French

with the perfection of his manners, and amused the cosmopolitan circles of

Europe with his philosophic wit.*

It was this complex empire, stretching from the Carpathians to the Rhine,

which for forty years submitted to one of the great women of history.

II. MARIA THERESA

We have seen her in war; there she yielded only to Frederick and Pitt in

military statesmanship, in scope of view and pertinacity of purpose, in

courage confronting defeat. Said Frederick in 1752: "Except the Queen of

Hungary and the King of Sardinia [Charles Emmanuel I], whose genius

triumphed over a bad education, all the princes of Europe are only illustrious

imbeciles." 3 Elizabeth I of England before her, and Catherine II of Russia

after her, excelled her in the art of rule; no other queens. Frederick thought

her "ambitious and vengeful," 4 but did he expect her to seek no redress for

his rape of Silesia? The Goncourts saw in her "a good average brain with a

* "Mme. de Lucchesini . . . was able to listen, which is not as easy as many think, and no

fool ever knew how to do it." 2

CHAP. XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 343

loving heart, an exalted sense of duty, astonishing powers of work, an im-

posing presence and exceptional charm; ... a true mother of her people." 5

She was the soul of kindness to all who did not attack her empire or her

faith; note her warm reception of the Mozart family in 1768. 6 She was a

good mother to her children; her letters to them are models of tenderness

and wise counsel; had Joseph listened to her he might not have died a failure;

had Marie Antoinette followed her advice she might have escaped the guil-

lotine.

Maria Theresa was not an "enlightened despot." She was no despot; Vol-

taire thought "she established her reign in all hearts by an affability and

popularity which few of her ancestors had ever possessed; she banished form

and restraint from her court; . . . she never refused audience to anyone,

and no person ever departed from her presence dissatisfied." 7 She was far

from enlightened in Voltaire's sense; she issued intolerant decrees against

Jews and Protestants, and remained a devout Catholic to the end. She saw

with tremors the infiltration of religious skepticism into Vienna from Lon-

don and Paris; she tried to stem the tide by a fervent censorship of books

and periodicals, and she forbade the teaching of English "because of the

dangerous character of this language in respect of its corrupting religious

and ethical principles." 8

And yet she was not untouched by the anticlericalism of her councilors

and her son. They pointed out that the territorial and other wealth of the

clergy was rapidly increasing through priestly suggestions that moribund pa-

tients might expiate their sins and propitiate God by bequeathing property

to the Church; at this rate the Church— already a state within a state— must

soon be master of the government. Convents and monasteries were multiply-

ing, removing men and women from active life, and excluding more and

more property from taxation. Young women were being induced to take

conventual vows before they were old enough to realize the significance of

these lifelong dedications. Education was so completely controlled by the

clergy that every growing mind was being molded into giving its supreme

allegiance to the Church rather than to the state. The Empress so far yielded

to these arguments as to order some substantial reforms. She forbade the

presence of ecclesiastics at the making of wills. She reduced the number of

religious establishments, and ordered the taxation of all religious property.

No vows were to be taken by persons under twenty-one years of age.

Churches and convents were no longer to afford asylum to criminals by

"right of sanctuary." No papal brief was to be recognized in the Austrian

realm until it had received Imperial consent. The Inquisition was subjected

to governmental supervision, and was in effect suppressed. Education was

reorganized under the direction of Gerhard van Swieten (the Queen's phy-

sician) and Abbot Franz Rautenstrauch; in many professorships Jesuits were

replaced by laymen; 9 the University of Vienna was brought under laic ad-

ministration and state control; the curriculum there and elsewhere was re-

vised to widen instruction in science and history. 10 So the pious Empress

anticipated in some measure the ecclesiastical reforms of her skeptical son.

344 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIII

She was a model of morality in an age when the courts of Christendom

rivaled Constantinople in polygamy. The Church might have used her as an

argument for orthodoxy, except that Augustus III, the Catholic King of Po-

land, and Louis XV of France were the most avid pluralists of all. The Vien-

nese aristocracy did not follow her example. Count Arco fled to Switzerland

with his mistress; Countess Esterhazy eloped to France with Count von der

Schulenburg; Prince von Kaunitz took his current mistress with him in his

coach, and when the Empress remonstrated he told her, "Madame, I have

come here to speak about your affairs, not mine." 11 Maria Theresa looked

with disgust upon this laxity, and issued Draconic decrees to enforce the

Sixth Commandment among the people. She ordered that women's skirts

should be lengthened at the bottom and blouses at the top. 12 She organized

a corps of Chastity Commissioners empowered to arrest any woman sus-

pected of prostitution. Casanova complained that "the bigotry and narrow-

mindedness of the Empress made life difficult, especially for foreigners." 13

A great part of her success as a ruler was due to her able ministers. She

accepted their lead and earned their devotion. Prince von Kaunitz, despite

the failure of his "reversal of alliances," remained in charge of foreign affairs,

and served the Empire well for forty years. Ludwig Haugwitz transformed

internal administration, and Rudolf Chotek reorganized the economy. These

three men did for Austria what Richelieu and Colbert had done for France;

in effect they created a new state, immeasurably stronger than the disordered

realm that Maria Theresa had inherited.

Haugwitz began by rebuilding the Imperial army. He believed that this

had collapsed in the face of Prussian discipline because it was composed of

independent units raised and commanded by semi-independent nobles; he

proposed and created a standing army of 108,000 men under unified training

and central control. To finance this force he recommended that nobles and

clergy, as well as commoners, be taxed; nobles and clergy protested; the

Empress braved their wrath and laid upon them a property and an income

tax. Frederick praised his enemy as an administrator: "She put her finances

in such order as her predecessors had never attained, and not only recouped

by good management what she had lost by ceding provinces to the Kings

of Prussia and Sardinia, but she considerably augmented her revenue." 14

Haugwitz went on to co-ordinate the law, to free the judiciary from domina-

tion by the nobles, and to bring the feudal lords under control by the central

government. A new and unified legal code, the Theresianische Halsgericht-

sordnung, was proclaimed in 1768.

Meanwhile Chotek strove to invigorate the sluggish economy. Industry

was hampered by monopolies that favored nobles, and by guild regulations

which remained in force till 1774; nevertheless Linz had woolen mills with a

total of 26,000 employees, Vienna excelled in glass and porcelain, and Bohe-

mia led the Empire in metallurgical operations. Both Austria and Hungary

had productive mines; Galicia had great salt deposits, and Hungary mined

seven million gulden' worth of gold per year. Chotek protected these in-

dustries with tariffs, for Austria, frequently at war, had to be made self-suffi-

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 345

cient in necessary goods; free trade, like democracy, is a luxury of security

and peace.

Even so, the Empire remained agricultural and feudal. Like Frederick, the

Empress, facing war, dared not risk social disruption by attacking the en-

trenched nobility. She gave a good example by abolishing serfdom on her

own lands, and she imposed upon the haughty magnates of Hungary a decree

empowering the peasant to move, marry, and bring up his children as he

liked, and to appeal from his lord to the county court. 15 Despite these mitiga-

tions the peasantry in Hungary and Bohemia was almost as poor as in Russia.

In Vienna the lower class lived in traditional poverty, amid lordly palaces,

elaborate operas, and magnificent churches dispensing hope.

Vienna was beginning to rival Paris and its environs in royal splendor.

Schonbrunn ("Beautiful Spring"), just outside the city, included 495 acres

of gardens, laid out (1753-75) in emulation of Versailles, with straight tow-

ering hedges, fanciful grottoes, symmetrical ponds, lovely statues by Donner

and Beyer, a "Menagerie," a botanical garden, and, on a hill in the back-

ground, a "Gloriette" built in 1775 by Johann von Hohenberg— a colonnaded

arcade in chaste Romanesque. The Schonbrunn palace itself, an immense

congeries of 1,441 rooms, had been designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer

von Erlach in 1695, but had been left unfinished in 1705; Maria Theresa en-

gaged Niccolo Pacassi to remodel it; work was resumed in 1744, and was

completed in the year of the Empress' death (1780). Within was a Great

Gallery 141 feet long, with a rococo ceiling painted by Gregorio Guglielmi

( 1 76 1 ) . Schonbrunn housed the court from spring till fall.

The court numbered now some 2,400 souls. Two hundred and fifty stew-

ards and grooms were needed to care for the horses and carriages. Altogether

the maintenance of the palace and its grounds cost 4,300,000 gulden per

year. 16 The Empress herself practiced economy, and excused the splendor of

her palace as necessary to the histrionics of royal rule. She offset the luxury

of her court with the extent of her charities. A generation later Mme. de Stael

reported of Austria: "The charitable elements there are regulated with great

order and liberality; private and public beneficence is directed with a fine

spirit of justice . . . Everything in this country bears the mark of a parental,

wise, and religious government." 17

Despite poverty there was hardly any begging, and relatively little crime. 18

The people found their simple pleasures in exchanging visits, rubbing elbows

in the squares, cooling their heat in shady parks, promenading on the tree-

lined Hauptallee of the Prater, picnicking in the countryside, or, at their

lowest, thrilling to ferocious fights arranged between famished animals. Pret-

tier were the dances, and, above all, the formal minuet; in this the man and

the woman rarely touched each other, every movement was governed by

tradition and rule, and was performed with restraint and grace. Music was

so large a part of Viennese life that it commands a chapter to itself.

By comparison literature was mediocre and immature. Austria, sacerdo-

tally controlled, had no share in the Sturm und Drang movement that excited

Germany. Maria Theresa was no patron of learning or belles-lettres. There

346 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

were no literary salons in Vienna, no mingling of authors, artists, and philos-

ophers with women, nobles, and statesmen as in France. It was a static soci-

ety, with the charm and comfort of old and calculable ways, saved from the

turmoil of revolution but missing the zest of challenging ideas. The Viennese

newspapers, carefully censored, were dull impediments to thought, perhaps

excepting the Wiener Zeitung, founded in 1780. The Viennese theaters were

given to opera for the aristocracy and the court, or to coarse comedies for

the general public. Leopold Mozart wrote that "the Viennese public, as a

whole, has no love of anything serious or sensible; they cannot even under-

stand it; and their theaters furnish abundant proof that nothing but utter

trash, such as dances, burlesques, harlequinades, ghost tricks, and devil's an-

tics will go down with them." 19 But Papa Mozart had been disappointed with

Vienna's reception of his son.

Over this medley of actors, musicians, populace, serfs, barons, courtiers,

and ecclesiastics the great Empress ruled with maternal watchfulness and

solicitude. Her consort, Francis of Lorraine, had been crowned emperor in

1745, but his talents inclined him to business rather than government. He

organized manufactures, provided the Austrian armies with uniforms, horses,

and arms, sold flour and provender to Frederick while Frederick was at war

with Austria (1756), 20 and left the management of the Empire to his wife.

Matrimonially, however, he insisted on his rights, and the Empress, loving

him despite his adulteries, 21 bore him sixteen children. She brought them

up with love and severity, scolded them frequently, and gave them such

doses of morality and wisdom that Marie Antoinette was glad to escape to

Versailles, and Joseph flirted with philosophy. She plotted skillfully to secure

cozy berths for her other offspring: she made her daughter Maria Carolina

queen of Naples, her son Leopold grand duke of Tuscany, her son Ferdi-

nand governor of Lombardy. She devoted herself to preparing her eldest son,

Joseph, for the formidable responsibilities that she would bequeath to him;

and she watched with anxiety his development through education and mar-

riage, through the storms of philosophy and the bereavements of love, to the

time when, in a transport of affection and humility, she raised him up, aged

twenty-four, to sit beside her on the Imperial throne.

in. Joseph growing: 1741-65

She had entrusted his education to the Jesuits, but, anticipating Rousseau,

she had asked that he be taught as if he were amusing himself. 22 When he

was four years old she complained that "my Joseph can't obey"; 23 obedience

was not amusing. "He has already a high conception of his station," reported

the Prussian ambassador when Joseph was six. Maria Theresa resorted to

discipline and enforced piety, but the boy found religious observances irk-

some, and resented the importance attached to the supernatural world; this

one, being in part his patrimony, sufficed. He soon tired of orthodoxy, and

discovered the fascination of Voltaire. Otherwise he cared little for litera-

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 347

ture, but he took eagerly to science, economics, history, and international

law. He never outgrew his boyhood haughtiness and pride, but he developed

into a handsome and alert youth, whose faults did not yet alienate him from

his mother. On his travels he wrote to her letters of warm filial tenderness.

At the age of twenty he was made a member of the Staatsrath, or State

Council. Soon (1761) he drew up, and submitted to his mother, a paper out-

lining his ideas on political and religious reform; these remained the essence

of his policies to the end of his life. He advised the Empress to extend reli-

gious toleration, to reduce the power of the Church, to relieve the peasantry

of feudal burdens, and to allow greater freedom in the movement of goods

and ideas. 24 He asked her to spend less on the court and its ceremonies, and

more on the army. Every member of the government should work for his

salary, and the nobles should be taxed like anybody else. 25

Meanwhile he was learning another side of life. Louis XV, as part of the

reversal of alliances, had offered his granddaughter Isabella of Parma as a

fit bride for the Archduke. Joseph seemed fortunate: Isabella was eighteen,

beautiful, and of good character except for a turn to melancholy. In June,

1760, she came across the Alps in a caravan drawn by three hundred horses;

the marriage was celebrated with a sumptuous feast, and Joseph was happy

to have so fair a creature in his arms. But Isabella took to heart the theology

she had learned; dowered with all the gifts of life, she found no joy in them,

but longed for death. "Death is beneficent," she wrote to her sister in 1763.

"Never have I thought of it more than now. Everything arouses in me the

desire to die soon. God knows my wish to desert a life which insults Him

every day. ... If it were permitted to kill oneself I would already have

done it." 26 In November, 1763, she was stricken with smallpox; she gave no

encouragement to the physicians who tried to cure her; in five days she was

dead. Joseph, who loved her deeply, never recovered from this blow.

A few months later he was taken by his father to Frankfurt-am-Main to be

crowned King of the Romans— the traditional step to the Imperial throne.

There, March 26, 1764 (young Goethe in the crowd), he was elected, and

on April 3 he was crowned. He did not enjoy the prolonged ritual, the reli-

gious services, the orations; he complained, in a letter to his mother, of the

"trash and idiocies which we had to listen to all day. ... It costs me great

efforts to refrain from telling these gentlemen to their faces how idiotically

they act and talk." Through it all he kept thinking of the wife he had lost.

"With my heart full of pain I must appear as if enraptured. ... I love soli-

tude, . . . and yet I must live among people. ... I have to chatter all day

and say pretty nothings." 27 He must have concealed his feelings well, for his

brother Leopold reported that "our King of the Romans is always charming,

always in good humor, gay, gracious, and polite, and he wins all hearts." 28

On his return to Vienna he was informed that he must marry again; the

orderly continuity of the government seemed to require the continuity of

the Hapsburg family. Kaunitz chose a wife for him, Josepha of Bavaria, for

Kaunitz was hoping to add Bavaria to the Austrian realm. Joseph signed the

proposal of marriage that Kaunitz had composed for him, sent it off, and

348 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIII

wrote to the Duke of Parma (father of Isabella) a description of Josepha as

"a small squat figure without the charm of youth; pimples and red spots on

her face; . . . repulsive teeth. . . . Judge for yourself what this decision has

cost me. . . . Have pity on me, and do not fail in your love for a son who,

although he has another wife, has eternally buried in his heart the image of

his adored." 29 Joseph and Josepha were married early in 1765. She tried to

be a good wife, but he abstained from her publicly and privately. She suf-

fered in silence, and died of smallpox in 1767. Joseph refused to marry again.

Now, with a tragic mixture of coldness and devotion, of idealism and arro-

gance, he gave the remainder of his life to government.

IV. MOTHER AND SON: I J 65-8 O

When the Emperor Francis I died (August 18, 1765) Maria Theresa was

for a time broken in body and mind. She joined his mistress in mourning

him; "My dear Princess," she said, "we have both lost much." 30 She cut off

her hair, gave away her wardrobe, discarded all jewelry, and wore mourning

till her death. She turned the government over to Joseph, and spoke of retir-

ing to a convent; then, fearful that her impetuous heir should prove unfit to

rule, she returned to public affairs, and signed on November 17 an official

declaration of co-regency. She kept supreme authority over the internal

affairs of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia; Joseph, as emperor, was to have

charge of foreign affairs and the army, and, less fully, of administration and

finance; but in foreign affairs he accepted the guidance of Kaunitz, and in

all fields his decisions were subject to review by the Empress. His eagerness

for power was tempered by his respect and love for his mother. When

(1767) she nearly died of smallpox he seldom left her side, and astonished

the court with the depth of his anxiety and grief. These three attacks of the

disease upon the royal family at last persuaded the Austrian physicians to in-

troduce inoculation.

The loving son troubled his mother with the urgency of his ideas for re-

form. In November, 1765, he sent to the Council of State a memorandum

that must have startled its readers:

To retain more able men capable of serving the state, I shall decree— what-

ever the Pope and all the monks in the world may say— that none of my sub-

jects shall embrace an ecclesiastical career before . . . the age of twenty-five.

The sad results, for both sexes, often caused by early vows should convince us

of the utility of this arrangement, quite apart from reasons of state. . . .

Religious toleration, a mild censorship, no prosecution for morals, and no

espionage in private affairs should be maxims of government. . . . Religion and

morals are unquestionably among the principal objects of a sovereign, but his

zeal should not extend to correcting and converting foreigners. In faith and

morals violence is unavailing; conviction is needed. As for the censorship, we

should be very careful about what is printed and sold, but to search pockets and

trunks, especially of a foreigner, is an excess of zeal. It would be easy to prove

that, despite the now vigorous censorship, every prohibited book is now avail-

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 349

able at Vienna, and everyone, attracted by the veto, can buy it at double the

price. . . .

Industry and commerce are to be prompted through the prohibition of all

foreign goods except spices, through the abolition of monopolies, the establish-

ment of schools of commerce, and an end to the notion that the pursuit of busi-

ness is incompatible with aristocracy. . . .

Liberty of marriage should be introduced, even of what we now call mesal-

liances. Neither the divine law nor the law of nature forbids it. Only prejudice

makes us believe that I am worth more because my grandfather was a count, or

because I possess a parchment signed by Charles V. From our parents we in-

herit only physical existence; thus king, count, bourgeois, peasant, it is exactly

the same. 31

Maria Theresa and the councilors must have smelled the breath of Voltaire

or the Encyclopedic in these proposals. The young Emperor had to proceed

slowly, but he advanced. He transferred to the Treasury twenty million

gulden— in cash, shares, and property— bequeathed him in his father's will,

and he refunded the national debt at a charge of only four instead of six per

cent. He sold the hunting preserves of the late Emperor, and ordered the

slaughter of the wild boars that had served as targets for the hunters and

as destroyers of peasant crops. Over the protests of nobles, but with the

approval of his mother, he opened the Prater and other parks to the public. 32

In 1769 he shocked Empress and court by going to Neisse, in Silesia, and

spending three days (August 25-27) in friendly discussion with Austria's

most hated enemy, Frederick the Great. He had taken from the King of

Prussia the conception of a monarch as "the first servant of the state." He

admired Frederick's subordination of Church to state, and toleration of reli-

gious varieties; he envied the Prussian military organization and law reform.

Both men felt that it was time to sink their differences in a protective accord

against the rising strength of Russia. Joseph wrote to his mother: "After

supper ... we smoked, and talked about Voltaire." 33 The King, now fifty-

seven, formed no high opinion of the Emperor, now twenty-eight. "The

young prince," he wrote, "affected a frankness which suited him well. . . .

He is desirous of learning, but he has had no patience to instruct himself. His

exalted position makes him superficial. . . . Boundless ambition devours

him. . . . He has enough taste to read Voltaire and appreciate his merits." 34

The alarming success of Catherine II in Russia led Kaunitz to arrange a

second conference with Frederick. King, Emperor, and Prince met at Neu-

stadt, in Moravia, September 3-7, 1770. Joseph must have developed consid-

erably during the year, for Frederick now wrote to Voltaire: "Brought up in

a bigoted court, the Emperor has discarded superstition; reared in splendor,

he has adopted simple manners; fed with incense, he is modest; eager for

glory, he sacrifices his ambitions to filial duty." 35

These two meetings were part of Joseph's education in politics. He added

to it by visiting his dominions and examining their problems and possibilities

at first hand. He went not as an emperor but as a common traveler, on horse-

back. He avoided ceremonies, and put up at inns instead of chateaux. Visit-

ing Hungary in 1764 and 1768, he noted the extreme poverty of the serfs,

350 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

and was shocked by seeing, in a field, the corpses of children who had died

of hunger. In 1771-72 he saw similar conditions in Bohemia and Moravia;

everywhere he heard reports, or saw evidence, of brutal landlords and starv-

ing serfs. "The internal situation," he wrote, "is incredible and indescribable;

it is heartbreaking." 36 Returning to Vienna, he fumed at the trifling improve-

ments contemplated by the Empress's councilors. "Petty reforms will not

do," he said; "the whole must be transformed." He proposed, as a first step,

to take over some ecclesiastical lands in Bohemia and build upon them

schools, asylums, and hospitals. After much argument he persuaded the

Council to issue (1774) an "Urbarian Law" reducing and regulating the

amount of serf labor (which the Bohemians called robota) due to a feudal

lord. The lords of Bohemia and Hungary resisted; the Bohemian serfs rose

in disorderly revolt, and were put down by the military. Maria Theresa

blamed her son for the turmoil. To her agent in Paris, Mercy d'Argentau,

she wrote:

The Emperor, who pushes his popularity too far, has on his various trips

talked too much . . . about religious liberty and peasant emancipation. All this

has caused confusion in all our German provinces. ... It is not only the

Bohemian peasant that is to be feared, but also the Moravian, the Styrian, the

Austrian; even in our section they dare indulge in the greatest impertinences. 37

The strain between son and mother increased when (1772) Joseph joined

Frederick and Catherine II in the first partition of Poland. She protested

against this rape of a friendly (and Catholic) nation; she wept when Joseph

and Kaunitz prevailed upon her to add her signature to the agreement, which

gave a sector of Poland to Austria. Frederick commented cynically, "Elle

pleure, mats elle prend" (She weeps, but she takes). 38 Her regret was sincere,

as we see from her letter to her son Ferdinand: "How often did I strive to

dissociate myself from an action which sullies the whole of my reign! God

grant that I shall not be held responsible for it in another world. It weighs

upon my heart, tortures my brain, and embitters my days." 39

She contemplated the character of her son with fear and love. "He likes

respect and obedience, regards opposition as distasteful and almost intoler-

able, . . . and is often inconsiderate. . . . His great and growing vivacity

results in a vehement desire to get his way in every detail. . . . My son has

a good heart." Once she reproached him bitterly:

When I am dead I flatter myself that I will live on in your heart, so that the

family and the state will not lose by my death. . . . Your imitation [of Fred-

erick] is not flattering. This hero, . . . this conqueror— does he have a single

friend? . . . What a life, when there is no humanity! No matter what your

talents may be, it is not possible that you have already experienced everything.

Beware of falling into spitefulness! Your heart is not yet evil, but it will become

so. It is time to no longer take pleasure in all these bon mots, these clever con-

versations whose only aim is to ridicule others. . . . You are an intellectual

coquet. You are only a thoughtless imitator where you think you are an inde-

pendent thinker. 40

Joseph revealed his side of the situation in a letter to Leopold:

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 35 1

Our uncertainties here have reached a pitch you cannot imagine. Tasks ac-

cumulate daily, and nothing is done. Every day till five or six, except for a

quarter hour for a solitary meal, I am at work; yet nothing happens. Trifling

causes, intrigues of which I have long been the dupe, block the way, and mean-

while everything goes to the devil. I make you a present of my position as eldest

son. 41

He scorned the men who had grown old in the service of his mother. Only

Kaunitz supported him, but with irritating caution.

The aging Empress heard with trepidation the revolutionary ideas of her

son. She told him frankly:

Among your fundamental principles the most important are: (1) the free

exercise of religion, which no Catholic prince can permit without heavy re-

sponsibility; (2) the destruction of the nobility [by ending serfdom] . . . ; and

(3) the so frequently repeated [advocacy of] liberty in everything. ... I am

too old to accommodate myself to such ideas, and pray to God that my succes-

sor will never try them. . . . Toleration, indifferentism, are precisely the means

to undermine everything. . . . Without a dominant religion what restraint is

there? None. Neither the gallows nor the wheel. ... I speak politically, not

as a Christian. Nothing is so necessary and beneficial as religion. Would you al-

low everyone to act according to his fancy? If there were no fixed worship, no

subjection to the Church, where would we be? Fist law would be the result.

... I only wish that when I die I can join my ancestors with the consolation

that my son will be as great, as religious, as his forefathers, and that he will give

up his false arguments, the evil books, and the contact with those who have

seduced his spirit at the expense of everything that is precious and sacred, only

to establish an imaginary freedom which could . . . only lead to universal de-

struction. 42

But if there was one thing Joseph was eager for it was freedom of religion.

He may not have been an atheist, as some have thought, 43 but he had been

deeply affected by the literature of France. Already in 1763 a group of

Austrian intellectuals had formed an Aufklarungspartei, or Party of Enlight-

enment. 44 In 1772 Gyorgy Bessenyei, of Hungary, published in Vienna a play

echoing the ideas of Voltaire; he accepted conversion to Catholicism to

please Maria Theresa, but he returned to rationalism after her death. 45 Joseph

doubtless knew the remarkable book, De statu ecclesiae et legitima potestate

romani pontificis (1763), in which a prominent Catholic bishop, under the

pseudonym of Febronius, had reasserted the supremacy of general councils

over the popes, and the right of each national church to govern itself. The

young Emperor saw in the entrenched wealth of the Austrian Church a prin-

cipal obstacle to economic development, and in the ecclesiastical control of

education the main barrier to the maturing of the Austrian mind. In January,

1770, he wrote to Choiseul:

As regards your plan for getting rid of the Jesuits, you have my complete ap-

proval. Don't count too much on my mother; a close attachment to the Jesuits

is hereditary in the Hapsburg family. . . . However, you have a friend in

Kaunitz, and he does what he likes with the Empress. 46

Joseph seems to have used his influence in Rome to bring Clement XIV to the

final step, and he was well pleased by the papal abolition of the order ( 1 77 3 ) . 47

352 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

Maria Theresa would have been shocked to see, from her son's letters,

how far he had strayed into the camp of the philosophes. She did her best to

prevent the dissolution of the Society of Jesus, but Kaunitz persuaded her

to yield to the view of all the other Catholic powers. "I am disconsolate and

in despair about the Jesuits," she wrote to a friend. "I have loved and hon-

ored them all my life, and have never seen anything in them but what was

edifying." 48 She delayed enforcement of the papal bull by appointing a com-

mission to study it. The Austrian Jesuits had time to remove their cash, valu-

ables, and papers from the country. Jesuit property was confiscated, but the

Empress saw to it that the members of the order received pensions, clothing,

and diverse gifts.

Joseph's obvious satisfaction over the suppression of the Jesuits widened

the gap between mother and son. In December, 1773, he broke under the

strain, and begged her to release him from all share in the government. She

was dismayed by so startling a proposal, and wrote him a touching appeal

for reconciliation:

I must admit that my abilities, face, hearing, and skill are rapidly deteriorat-

ing, and that the weakness which I have dreaded all my life— indecision— is now

accompanied by discouragement and lack of faithful servitors. The alienation of

yourself and Kaunitz, the death of my loyal advisers, the irreligion, the de-

terioration of morals, the jargon that everybody uses, and which I do not un-

derstand—all this is enough to overwhelm me. I offer you my whole confidence,

and ask you to call attention to any mistakes I may make. . . . Help a mother

who . . . lives in loneliness, and who will die when she sees all her efforts and

sorrows gone to waste. Tell me what you wish and I will do it. 49

He was reconciled, and for a time the woman who had once fought Fred-

erick to a standstill agreed to co-operate with Frederick's admirer and pupil.

Together they applied the confiscated property of the Jesuits to educational

reform. In 1774 they issued an "Allgemeine Schulordnung" which effected

a basic reorganization of both primary and secondary schools. Grade schools

provided compulsory education for all children; they admitted Protestants

and Jews as students and teachers, gave religious instruction in each faith to

its adherents, but placed control in the hands of state officials; these Volk-

schulen soon came to be ranked as the best in Europe. Normal schools were

established to train teachers; Hauptschulen specialized in science and tech-

nology, and Gymnasien taught Latin and the humanities. The University of

Vienna was devoted largely to law, political science, and administration, and

served as a nursery for the civil service. Control of education by the Church

was replaced by equally rigorous control by the state.

Collaboration of mother and son went on to abolish torture (1776). But

the entente was shattered by the events of the following year. Joseph had

long thought of visiting Paris— not to see the philosophes and bask in the

salons, but to study the resources, army, and government of France, to see

Marie Antoinette, and to strengthen the ties that so loosely bound the ancient

enemies in their frail entente. When Louis XV died, and France seemed

about to fall apart, Joseph wrote to Leopold: "I am anxious for my sister;

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 353

she will have a difficult part to play." 50 He arrived in Paris April 18, 1777,

and courted privacy by pretending to be Count von Falkenstein. He advised

the gay young Queen to abandon extravagance, frivolity, and rouge; she

listened impatiently. He tried and failed to win Louis XVI to a secret alli-

ance for checking the expansion of Russia. 51 He moved quickly about the

capital, and "in a few days he learned more about it than Louis XVI would

learn in all his life." 52 He visited the Hotel-Dieu and did not conceal his aston-

ishment at the inhuman mismanagement of that hospital. The people of Paris

were charmed, and the courtiers at Versailles were alarmed, to find the loftiest

monarch in Europe dressed like a simple citizen, speaking French like a

Frenchman, and meeting all classes with the most unassuming manners. Of

literary lights he sought out especially Rousseau and Buff on. He joined a soiree

at Mme. Necker's, and met Gibbon, Marmontel, and the Marquise du Deff and;

it is a Qredit to him that he was more embarrassed by her poise and fame than

she by his exalted state; blindness is a leveler, for dignities are half composed of

garb. He attended a session of the Parlement of Paris and a sitting of the French

Academy. The philosophes felt that here at last was the enlightened ruler

whom they had hoped for as the agent of a peaceful revolution. — After a

month in Paris Joseph left for a tour of the provinces, traveling north to Nor-

mandy, then along the west coast to Bayonne, then to Toulouse, Montpellier,

and Marseilles, then up the Rhone to Lyons and east to Geneva. He passed

through Ferney without visiting Voltaire; he did not wish to offend his

mother, or too openly ally himself with a man who seemed a devil incarnate to

the people of Austria and the King of France.

He was anxious to appease his mother, for during his absence some ten

thousand Moravians had abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism, and Ma-

ria Theresa— or the Council of State— had reacted to this catastrophe with

measures recalling the anti-Huguenot dragonnades under Louis XIV. The

leaders of the movement were arrested, Protestant assemblies were dispersed;

persistent converts were drafted into the army and assigned to hard labor,

and their women were sent to workhouses. When Joseph returned to Vienna

he protested to his mother: "To reconvert those people you make soldiers

of them, send them to the mines, or use them for public works. ... I must

positively declare . . . that whoever is responsible for this order is the most

infamous of your servants, who deserves only my contempt, for he is both

a fool and shortsighted." 53 The Empress answered that not she but the Coun-

cil of State had issued the decrees; however, she did not retract them. A dele-

gation of Moravian Protestants came to see Joseph; Maria Theresa ordered

their arrest. The crisis between mother and son was reaching an impasse

when Kaunitz persuaded her to withdraw the decrees. The persecutions were

stopped; the converts were allowed to practice their new worship provided

it was done quietly in their homes. The conflict of the generations paused.

It was resumed when, on December 30, 1777, Maximilian Joseph, elector

of Bavaria, died childless after a long and prosperous reign. In the contest for

the succession to his power the Elector Palatine, Charles Theodore (Karl

Theodor), was supported by Joseph II, on condition of ceding a part of

354 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

Bavaria to Austria; and Charles, duke of Zweibriicken, was supported by

Frederick the Great, who announced that he would resist any acquisition

of Bavarian territory by Austria. The Empress warned her son against chal-

lenging the yet invincible King of Prussia. Joseph ignored her advice, Kau-

nitz upheld him, and an Austrian force was sent into Bavaria. Frederick di-

rected his troops to enter Bohemia and take Prague unless the Austrians

evacuated Bavaria. Joseph led his main army to the defense of Prague; the

hostile hosts approached each other, and another Austro-Prussian war seemed

about to shed fratricidal blood. Frederick, violating precedents and expecta-

tions, avoided battle, content to let his soldiers consume Bohemia's crops; and

Joseph, knowing Frederick's reputation as a general, hesitated to attack. He

had hoped that France would come to his aid, and he dispatched pleas to

Marie Antoinette. Louis XVI sent him fifteen million livres, but could do no

more, for France had signed (February 6, 1778) an alliance with the revolt-

ing American colonies, and had to be prepared for war with England. Joseph

fretted in camp, while hemorrhoids agitated him at one end, and an enormous

boil at the other.

Maria Theresa, with a last flurry of will, took matters into her own hands,

and secretly sent Frederick an offer of peace (July 12). Frederick agreed to

negotiate; Joseph submitted to his mother; Louis of France and Catherine of

Russia mediated. The Treaty of Teschen (May 13, 1779) solaced Joseph

with thirty-four square miles of Bavaria, but allotted all the rest of that elec-

torate to Charles Theodore, so uniting Bavaria and the Palatinate; Prussia

was to receive Bayreuth and Ansbach at the death of their childless ruler.

Everyone claimed victory.

This third crisis between the aging Frederick and the aging Empress ex-

hausted her life. She was only sixty-three in 1780, but she was stout and

asthmatic, and two wars, sixteen pregnancies, and incessant worry had weak-

ened her heart. In November she was caught in a heavy rain while driving

in an open carriage; she developed a bad cough, but insisted on spending the

next day at her desk, working; she had once remarked, "I reproach myself

for the time I consume in sleep." 54 Finding it almost impossible to breathe

while lying down, she spent her final illness in a chair. Joseph summoned his

brothers and sisters to her side, and attended her lovingly. The doctors aban-

doned hope for her, and she resigned herself to the last sacrament. In her final

hours she rose and stumbled from her chair to her bed. Joseph tried to make

her comfortable, saying, "Your Majesty lies in a bad position." She an-

swered, "Yes, but good enough to die in." She died on November 29, 1780.

V. THE ENLIGHTENED DESPOT: 1780-90

After sincerely mourning a mother whose greatness he now realized, Jo-

seph felt free to be himself, and to put into operation his burgeoning ideas for

reform. He was absolute monarch over Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and the

Southern Netherlands; his brother Leopold obeyed him in Tuscany, his sister

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA

355

Marie Antoinette would serve him in France. He felt deeply the opportuni-

ties that had come to him at the zenith of his life and power.

What was he like? Forty years old, still in the prime of life, he was quite

handsome when he covered his bald head with a wig. He had an alert, almost

feverishly active mind, abreast of his time, but insufficiently steadied by a

knowledge of history and human character. Always feeling the stinginess of

time, he erred only through haste, rarely through ill-will. Many stories tell

of his sensitivity to the misfortunes of others, of his readiness to remedy re-

mediable wrongs. 55 He made himself as accessible to the people as his tasks

allowed. He lived simply, dressed like any sergeant, and shunned the purple

robes of kings. He was as free from mistresses as Frederick, and had no

"Greek friends"; his work was his absorbing love. Like Frederick, he worked

harder than any of his aides. He had prepared himself conscientiously for his

responsibilities; he had traveled not for amusement and display, but for ob-

servation and study; he had examined the industries, arts, charities, hospitals,

courts, naval and military establishments of many countries; he had looked

with his own eyes at the peoples, classes, and problems of his realm. Now he

resolved, so far as one man could, to realize the dreams of the philosophers.

"Since I have come to the throne, and wear the foremost diadem in the

world, I have made philosophy the lawgiver of my empire." 56 Philosophers

everywhere in Europe looked at the great enterprise with eager expectations.

The first difficulty was to find aides who would share his dream. Those

whom he had inherited were nearly all of the upper classes whose privileges

would be clipped by his reforms. Kaunitz and van Swieten supported him;

two privy councilors, Qualtenburg and Gebler, and two professors in the

University of Vienna, Martini and Sonnenfels, encouraged him; but below

these men were bureaucrats mortised in habit, comfortable in tradition, and

automatically resisting change. Joseph, too hurried to be courteous, treated

these servitors as servants, confused them with a cloud of orders, asked them

to report on any serious fault in their associates, 57 clogged them with ques-

tionnaires, and demanded of them labor as unremitting as his own. He prom-

ised them, and their widows, pensions after ten years of service; they thanked

him, resented his methods, and nursed their pride. Joseph's confidence in the

justice of his aims led him to impatient intolerance of criticism or debate. He

wrote to Choiseul (now in easeful retirement): "Live happier than I can be.

I have hardly known happiness, and before I complete the course that I have

set out for myself I shall be an old man." 58 He never lived to be old.

He put aside all thought of democracy. His people, he felt, were unpre-

pared for political judgment; with a few exceptions they would adopt what-

ever opinions were handed down to them by their masters or their priests.

Even a constitutional monarchy appeared unpromising; a parliament like

England's would be a closed society of landlords and bishops defying any

basic change. Joseph took it for granted that only an absolute monarchy

could break the cake of custom and the chains of dogma and protect the

simple weak from the clever strong. So he took up every problem personally,

and issued directives covering every phase of life. To promote compliance

356 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

with his orders he set up a system of espionage that soured his benefactions.

It was part of his absolutism to raise by conscription a large standing army

independent of territorial magnates, manned by universal conscription, and

hardened by Prussian discipline. That army, he hoped, would give strength

to his voice in international affairs, and would keep Frederick at a distance;

perhaps (for our philosopher was somewhat acquisitive) it would enable him

to absorb Bavaria and drive the Turks from the adjoining Balkans. He named

a commission of jurists to reform and codify the laws; after six years of labor

it published a new civil code of judicial procedure. Penalties were lightened,

and capital punishment was abolished. (In contemporary England a hundred

crimes were still considered capital.) Magic, witchcraft, and apostasy were

no longer punishable by law. Dueling was forbidden; to kill in a duel was

classified as murder. Marriage was made a civil contract; marriages between

Christians and non-Christians became legal; divorce could be obtained from

the civil authority. Magistrates were to be appointed only after specific train-

ing and after passing difficult examinations. Many ecclesiastical courts were

abolished. All persons were to be held equal before the law. Aristocrats were

shocked when one of their number was exposed in a pillory and another was

sentenced to sweep the streets.

Serfdom was abolished by a series of decrees, 1781-85. The right to

change residence or occupation, to own property, and to marry by mutual

consent was guaranteed to all, and special attorneys were provided to protect

the peasants in their new liberties. The barons lost criminal jurisdiction over

their tenants, but, lest baronial manors remain unproductive, the lords could

require some customary services from their former serfs.

Convinced that guild regulations hampered economic development, Jo-

seph encouraged capitalist industry, but he opposed the multiplication of

machines for fear "it would deprive thousands of their livelihood." 59 He

exempted industrial workers from conscription, but they grumbled at his

reduction of workless holydays. He elevated merchants, manufacturers, and

bankers to aristocratic titles and national honors. He abolished or reduced

internal tolls, but retained high protective tariffs on imports. Domestic manu-

facturers, so shielded from foreign competition, raised prices and produced

shoddy goods. 60 Resenting the tariffs, Prussia, Saxony, and Turkey closed

their gates to the products of the Empire; the Elbe, the Oder, and the Dan-

ube lost some of their trade. Joseph tried to increase overland traffic with

Adriatic ports by cutting a new road, the Via Josephina, through the Car-

niolan Alps; he set up an East India Company, and hoped to develop com-

merce with the Orient, Africa, and America through the free ports of Fiume

and Trieste. In 1784 he negotiated a commercial treaty with Turkey, but

three years later his war with Turkey closed the Danube's exits to the Black

Sea, and the Danubian merchants followed one another into bankruptcy.

To promote the circulation of capital he removed from the statutes the old

prohibition of interest, legalized loans at five per cent, and raised a Jewish

banker to the baronetcy. He offered state loans and temporary monopolies

to new enterprises. He adopted the physiocratic idea of a single tax falling

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 357

only upon land, varying with location and fertility, and paid by landowners

great or small. The proposal required a survey of all the lands of the Em-

pire; this was carried out at a cost of 120,000,000 gulden, paid by the pro-

prietors. The new law decreed that the peasant was to keep seventy per cent

of his produce or income, give twelve per cent to the state, and divide the

remainder between feudal dues and ecclesiastical tithes; previously he had

paid thirty-four per cent to the state, twenty-nine per cent to the landlord,

and ten per cent to the Church, keeping only twenty-seven per cent for him-

self. 61 The nobles protested that this new division would ruin them; in Hun-

gary they rose in revolt.

The population of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia rose from 18,700,000

in 1780 to 2 1,000,000 in 1790. 62 A contemporary reported that brick cottages

were replacing the old rural hovels, and that brick was replacing wood in

urban housing. 63 Poverty remained, but an Imperial rescript of 1781 estab-

lished Armeninstitute (Institutes for the Poor) where any person unable to

earn a living could claim support without sacrificing his self-respect.

Though Joseph was officially "Vicar of Christ," "Advocate of the Chris-

tian Church," and "Protector of Palestine . . . and the Catholic Faith," he

set about, soon after his rise to absolute power, to reduce the role of the

Church in his "hereditary" lands— i.e., Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia. On

October 12, 1781, he issued an Edict of Toleration: Protestants and Greek

Orthodox were to be free to have their own temples, schools, and conven-

tions, to own property, enter the professions, and hold political or military

offices. The Emperor exhorted the people to "forbear all occasions of dispute

relative to matters of faith, . . . and to treat affectionately and kindly those

who are of a different communion." 64 In a directive to van Swieten Joseph

frankly revealed the sources of his inspiration: "Intolerance is banished from

my Empire, [which can be] happy that it has not made victims like Calas

and Sirven. . . . Toleration is the effect of the propagation of the enlighten-

ment [les lumieres] which has now spread through all Europe. It is based on

philosophy, and on the great men who have established it. . . . It is philos-

ophy alone that governments must follow." 65

There were limits to this toleration, as there had been in Voltaire's Treatise

on Toleration (1763). Some councilors warned Joseph that if all restraint

were removed there would be a rank growth of wild creeds, even of outright

atheism, and that this would eventuate in warring sects, social disorder, and

the breakdown of all authority. So when he was told that several hundred

Bohemians had publicly declared themselves deists (1783), he ordered that

any man so professing "should, without further investigation, be given

twenty-four lashes on his buttocks with a leather whip, and then be sent

home," and that this operation was to be repeated as often as such public

profession was renewed. 66 Some persisting deists were transported to mili-

tary colonies. We shall see later how far Joseph went in his efforts to liberate

the Jews.

One result of the Edict of Toleration was a rapid rise in the number of

professing Protestants in the realm, from 74,000 in 1781 to 157,000 in 1786.

358 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

Free thought grew, but remained confined to private circles. The Free-

masons, who had long been established in Austria, organized in Vienna

(1781) a lodge which was joined by many prominent citizens, and (despite

its implicit deism) was protected by the Emperor himself. "The aim of the

society," said one member, "was to give effect to that freedom of conscience

and thought so happily fostered by the government, and to combat super-

stition and fanaticism in the . . . monkish orders, which are the main sup-

ports of these evils." 67 Masonic lodges multiplied to the number of eight in

Vienna alone; it became fashionable to belong; Masonic emblems were worn

by both sexes; Mozart wrote music for Masonic ceremonies. In time Joseph

suspected the lodges of political conspiracy; in 1785 he ordered the Viennese

lodges to merge into two, and allowed only one lodge in each provincial

capital.

Joseph appointed a commission to revise the laws of censorship, and in

1782 he promulgated its results in a new code. Books systematically attack-

ing Christianity, or containing "immoral utterances and unclean obscenities,"

were prohibited; but so too were books "containing fabulous miracles, ap-

paritions, revelations, and such things, which would lead the common man

to superstition, [and] arouse disgust in scholars." 68 Criticisms and lampoons

were allowed, even if they assailed the Emperor, but they must bear the au-

thor's real name, and were subject to the law of libel. Books listed in the

Roman Index Librorum Prohibitorum were to be open to the use of scholars

in libraries. Scientific works were to be entirely exempt from censorship; so

were learned works, provided some recognized authority vouched for their

scholarly character. Books in a foreign language might be imported and sold

without hindrance. Academic freedom was enlarged. When fourteen stu-

dents at the University of Innsbruck denounced their teacher to the au-

thorities for contending that the world was older than six thousand years,

Joseph handled the matter summarily: "The fourteen students should be

dismissed, for heads so poor as theirs cannot profit from education." 69 — The

new regulations elicited indignant protests from the hierarchy; Joseph re-

sponded by allowing Vienna complete liberty of publication (1787). Even

before this liberation the Viennese printers took advantage of the lax en-

forcement of the 1782 code: pamphlets, books, and magazines flooded Aus-

tria with semiobscenities, "revelations" of nuns, and attacks upon the Catho-

lic Church, or upon Christianity itself.

Joseph felt that he should also regulate ecclesiastical affairs. On November

29, 1 78 1, he issued a decree that closed a great number of monasteries and

nunneries, such as "neither operate schools, nor care for the sick, nor engage

in studies." Of 2,163 religious houses in the German dominions (Austria,

Styria, Carinthia, Carniola) 413 were closed; of their 65,000 inmates 27,000

were freed with pensions; and a similar reduction was effected in Bohemia

and Hungary. "The monarchy," said Joseph "is too poor and backward to

allow itself the luxury of supporting the idle." 70 The wealth of the disman-

tled institutions— amounting to some sixty million gulden— was declared a

patrimony of the people, and was confiscated by the state. The surviving

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA

359

monasteries were declared ineligible to inherit property. The mendicant

orders were commanded to cease begging, and were forbidden to take nov-

ices. Religious brotherhoods were abolished. All ecclesiastical possessions

were to be registered with the government, which prohibited their sale,

alienation, or exchange.

Joseph proceeded to bring the Catholic episcopate under state control.

New bishops were required to take an oath of obedience to the secular au-

thorities. No papal regulation or decree was to be valid in Austria without

the government's permission. The papal bulls of 1362 and 171 3, condemning

heretics or Jansenists, were to be ignored. On the other hand Joseph organ-

ized new parishes, built new churches, and provided stipends to support can-

didates for the priesthood. He opened new seminaries, and prescribed for

them a curriculum stressing science and secular knowledge as well as theol-

ogy and liturgy.

These measures aroused the Catholic clergy throughout Europe. Many

prelates begged Joseph to rescind his anticlerical decrees; unheeded, they

threatened him with hell; he smiled and kept his course. Finally the Pope

himself, Pius VI, handsome, cultured, kindly, vain, took the unusual step of

leaving Italy (February 27, 1782), crossed the Apennines and the Alps in

winter, and arrived in Vienna (March 22) resolved to make a personal plea

to the Emperor; this was the first time since 141 4 that a pope had set foot on

German soil. Joseph, with his fellow skeptic Kaunitz, went out from the city

to escort the pontiff to the apartments that had been used by A4aria Theresa.

During the Pope's stay in Vienna immense crowds gathered almost daily be-

fore the royal palace to seek the papal blessings. Joseph later described them:

All the passages and stairs of the court were crammed with people; despite

redoubled sentries it was impossible to protect oneself from all the things they

brought him to be blessed: scapularies, rosaries, images. And for the benedic-

tions which he gave seven times daily from the balcony he had a throng of

people so great that one can form no idea of it unless one has seen it; it is no

exaggeration to say that at one time there were at least sixty thousand souls.

That was a most beautiful spectacle; peasants and their wives and children came

from twenty leagues around. Yesterday a woman was crushed right beneath my

window. 71

Joseph was moved less by the Pope's eloquent exhortations than by this

evidence of religion's power on the human mind; nevertheless he continued

to close monasteries, even while Pius was his guest. 72 The Pope warned him

prophetically: "If you persevere in your projects, destructive of the faith

and the laws of the Church, the hand of the Lord will fall heavily upon you;

it will check you in the course of your career, it will dig under you an abyss

where you will be engulfed in the flower of your life, and will put an end

to the reign which you could have made glorious." 73 After a month of honors

and failure Pius returned sadly to Rome. Shortly afterward the Emperor ap-

pointed as archbishop of Milan a Visconti unacceptable to the Curia; the

Pope refused confirmation, and Church and Empire neared a break. Joseph

was not ready for so drastic a step. He hurried to Rome (December, 1782),

360 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

visited Pius, professed piety, and won papal consent to the appointment of

bishops— even in Lombardy— by the state. Prince and prelate parted amicably.

Joseph scattered thirty thousand scudi among the Roman mob, and was

hailed with grateful cries of " Viva nostro lmper atore!"

Back in Vienna, he continued his one-man Reformation. Having defied

the Pope like Luther (with whom many Protestants gratefully compared

him), and having attacked the monasteries like Henry VIII, he proceeded

like Calvin to cleanse churches by ordering the removal of votive tablets and

most statuary, and by stopping the touching of pictures, the kissing of relics,

the distribution of amulets ... He regulated the length and number of reli-

gious services, the clothing of the Virgin, the character of church music; the

litanies were hereafter to be recited in German, not Latin. Pilgrimages and

processions were to require the consent of the secular authorities; ultimately

only one procession was allowed— for Corpus Christi Day; the people were

officially informed that they need not kneel in the streets before a procession,

even if it carried a consecrated Host; it was enough to doff their hats. Uni-

versity professors were told that they need no longer swear belief in the

immaculate conception of the Virgin.

No one could question the humanity of Joseph's aims. The wealth taken

from dispensable monasteries was set apart for the support of schools, hospi-

tals, and charities, for pensions to displaced monks and nuns, and for sup-

plementary payment to poor parish priests. The Emperor issued a long series

of ordinances for the promotion of education. All communities containing

a hundred children of school age were required to maintain elementary

schools; elementary education was made compulsory and universal. Schools

for girls were provided by convents or the state. Universities were supported

at Vienna, Prague, Lemberg, Pest, and Louvain; those at Innsbruck, Briinn,

Graz, and Freiburg were made into lycees to teach medicine, law, or prac-

tical arts. Medical schools were established, including the "Josephinum" at

Vienna, for military medicine and surgery. Vienna began to be one of the

most advanced medical centers in the world.

VI. THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE

The difficulty of Joseph's revolutionary enterprise was doubled by the

diversity of his realm. He knew Austria well, but, despite arduous travels,

he had not realized how deeply entrenched were the Hungarian magnates in

the economic and political life of their nation, and how the patriotism of the

Hungarian masses could outweigh class interests. On acceding to power he had

refused to follow tradition and go to Pressburg to be crowned king of Hun-

gary, for in that ceremony he would be required to swear allegiance to

the Hungarian constitution, which sanctioned the feudal structures of so-

ciety. He had offended every Hungarian by ordering the crown of Hun-

gary's patron St. Stephen to be removed from Buda to Vienna (1784). He

had replaced Latin with German, not Magyar, as the language of law and

CHAP. XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 36 1

instruction in Hungary. He had angered Hungarian businessmen by imped-

ing with tariffs the export of their products into Austria. He had shocked

the Catholic Church by interfering with traditional rituals, and by allowing

Hungarian Protestant communities to multiply from 272 to 758 in one year

(1783-84). Hungary fell into a turmoil of conflicting classes, nationalities,

languages, and faiths.

In 1784 the peasants of Wallachia (between the Danube and the Transyl-

vanian Alps) broke out in a violent Jacquerie against their feudal lords, set fire

to 182 baronial chateaux and sixty villages, slaughtered four thousand Hun-

garians, 74 and announced that they were doing all this with the blessing of

the Emperor. Joseph sympathized with their resentment of long oppression, 75

but he was seeking to end feudalism peaceably by legislation, and could not

allow the peasants to rush matters by arson and murder. He sent troops to put

down the insurrection; 150 leaders were executed, and the rebellion halted.

The nobles blamed him for the uprising, the peasants blamed him for its fail-

ure. The stage was set for national revolt against the Emperor in 1787.

In November, 1780, Joseph came in person to study the problems of the

Austrian Netherlands. He visited Namur, Mons, Courtrai, Ypres, Dunkirk,

Ostend, Bruges, Ghent, Audenaarde, Antwerp, Malines, Louvain, Brussels.

He made a side trip into the United Netherlands— to Rotterdam, The Hague,

Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Spa (where he dined with the

philosophe Raynal). He was struck by the contrast between the prosperity

of Holland and the relative stagnation of the Belgian economy. He at-

tributed this to the activity and opportunities of Dutch businessmen, and to

the closing of the River Scheldt to oceanic trade by the Treaty of Miinster

(1648). He returned to Brussels, and entered into conferences seeking to im-

prove commerce, administration, finance, and law. In January, 1781, he ap-

pointed his sister Maria Christina and her husband, Duke Albert of Saxe-

Teschen, governors of the Austrian Netherlands.

Now for the first time he perceived how opposed to his reforms were the

traditional privileges of the upper classes in this historic land. One province,

Brabant, had a charter of liberties dating back to the thirteenth century, and

known as the Joyeuse Entree; any ruler entering Brussels was expected to

swear fidelity to this charter, and one clause declared that if the sovereign

violated any article his Flemish subjects would have the right to refuse him

all service and obedience. Another clause required the sovereign to maintain

the Catholic Church in all its existing privileges, possessions, and powers, and

to enforce all the decisions of the Council of Trent. Similar constitutions

were cherished by the patricians and clergy in the other provinces. Joseph

resolved not to allow these traditions to defy his reforms. After a brief visit

to Paris (July, 1781) he returned to Vienna.

In November he began to apply to these provinces his Edict of Toleration.

He made the Belgian monasteries independent of the pope, closed several of

them, and confiscated their revenues. The bishops of Brussels, Antwerp, and

Malines protested; Joseph passed on to extend to "Belgium" his regulations

3^2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

on votive tablets, processions, and ritual. He withdrew control of the- schools

from the bishops, saying that "the children of Levi should no longer have a

monopoly on the human mind." 76 He abrogated the exclusive privileges long

enjoyed by the University of Louvain. He established there a new seminary

free from episcopal dominance, and ordered that all Belgian candidates for

the priesthood should study for five years in this institution. 77 Eager to im-

prove provincial government, he replaced (January, 1787) the provincial

Estates, or assemblies, and the old aristocratic privy councils, with a single

Council of General Administration under a plenipotentiary appointed by

the emperor; and he substituted a unified and secular judiciary for the exist-

ing feudal, territorial, and ecclesiastical courts. All persons, of whatever class,

were declared equal before the law.

The nobles and many bourgeois joined the clergy in resisting these meas-

ures. Their hostility was not appeased by the futile efforts that Joseph made

to reopen the Scheldt to oceanic commerce; Holland refused to permit it,

and France, despite the pleas of Marie Antoinette, joined in the refusal. In

January, 1787, the Estates of Brabant notified Joseph that changes in the

existing constitution of the province could not be made without the consent

of the Estates; in effect they informed him that his rule in the Austrian Neth-

erlands must be a constitutional, not an absolute, monarchy. He ignored the

declaration, and ordered the enforcement of his decrees. The Estates refused

to vote taxes unless attention was paid to their remonstrances. Agitation

flared into such widespread violence that Maria Christina promised annul-

ment of the hated reforms (May 31, 1787).

Where was the Emperor during this turmoil? He was flirting diplomati-

cally with Catherine II, believing that an entente with Russia would isolate

Prussia and strengthen Austria against the Turks. Even before the death of

his mother Joseph had visited the Czarina at Mogilev (June 7, 1780), and

thence he had gone on to Moscow and St. Petersburg. In May, 1781, Austria

and Russia signed an alliance that pledged each to come to the aid of the

other in case of attack.

Thinking that this agreement would immobilize the septuagenarian Fred-

erick, Joseph again (1784) offered the Austrian Netherlands to Elector

Charles Theodore in exchange for Bavaria. The Elector was tempted, but

Frederick roused all his energies to foil the plan. He stirred up revolt against

the Emperor in Hungary and Belgium; he induced the Duke of Zweibriicken

—heir to Bavaria— to oppose the exchange; he sent agents to convince the

German princes that their independence was threatened by Austrian expan-

sion; and he succeeded in organizing (July 23, 1785) Prussia, Saxony, Han-

over, Brunswick, Mainz, Hesse-Cassel, Baden, Saxe- Weimar, Gotha, Meck-

lenburg, Ansbach, and Anhalt into a Fiirstenbund, or League of Princes,

pledged to resist any expansion of Austria at the expense of a German state.

Joseph again appealed to his sister at Versailles; Marie Antoinette used her

charm on Louis XVI to win his support for her brother; Vergennes, foreign

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 363

minister, cautioned Louis against consent; Joseph confessed himself defeated

by the old fox who had been the idol of his youth. When, in August, 1786,

he received news of Frederick's death, he expressed a double grief: u As a sol-

dier I regret the passing of a great man who has been epoch-making in the

art of war. As a citizen I regret that his death has come thirty years too

late." 78

Now the Emperor's only hope of extending his realm lay in joining Cath-

erine in a campaign to divide between them the European possessions of Tur-

key. When the Empress of Russia set out in January, 1787, to visit and awe

her new conquests in the south, she invited Joseph to meet her en route and

accompany her to the Crimea. He went, but did not at once agree to her

proposal for a united crusade. "What I want," he said, "is Silesia, and war

with Turkey will not give me that." 79 Nevertheless, when Turkey declared

war against Russia (August 15, 1787) Joseph's hand was forced; his alliance

with Catherine required him to help her in a "defensive" war; besides, now

that Turkey was so critically engaged, Austria had a chance to regain Serbia

and Bosnia, perhaps even a port on the Black Sea. So, in February, 1788, Jo-

seph sent his soldiers to war, and told them to take Belgrade.

But meanwhile the Swedes seized the opportunity to send a force against

St. Petersburg. Catherine summoned troops from the south to defend her

capital. The Turks, relieved of Russian pressure, concentrated their power

against the Austrians. Joseph, going to lead his army, saw it weakened by

apathy, desertion, and disease; he ordered a retreat, and returned to Vienna

in despair and disgrace. He turned over the command to Laudon, a hero of

the Seven Years' War; the old Marshal redeemed Austrian arms by capturing

Belgrade (1789). Sweden's sortie against Russia having failed, Catherine's

soldiers swarmed backward to the south, and survived in slightly superior

number in competitive holocausts with the Turks. Joseph was rejoicing in

the prospect of long-awaited martial glory when Prussia, England, Sweden,

and Holland, fearing Russian aggrandizement, intervened to help the Turks.

Suddenly Joseph found nearly all of Protestant Europe united and arming

against him. Once more he appealed to France, but France, in 1789, was busy

with revolution. Prussia, under Frederick William II, signed an alliance with

Turkey (January, 1790), and sent agents to foment revolt against the Em-

peror in Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands.

Hungary welcomed these machinations, for it was in open rebellion against

Joseph's edicts of conscription, taxation, language change, and religious re-

form. In 1786 Emerich Malongei called upon the Hungarians to elect their

own king. In 1788 Remigius Franyo organized a plot to make Frederick

William king of Hungary; Counts Esterhazy and Karolyi betrayed the plot

to the Emperor, and Franyo was sentenced to sixty years' imprisonment. In

1789 the Hungarian Estates appealed to Prussia to free Hungary from Aus-

tria. When news of the French Revolution reached Hungary the country

rang with cries for independence. Joseph, who felt death in his veins, had no

more strength to maintain his stand. His brother Leopold urged him to yield.

In January, 1790, he announced:

364 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIII

We have decided to restore the administration of the Kingdom [of Hungary]

... to the status of 1 780. . . . We instituted [the reforms] out of zeal for the

common good, and in the hope that you, taught by experience, would find

them pleasing. Now we have convinced ourselves that you prefer the old order.

. . . But it is our will that our Edict of Toleration, ... as well as that con-

cerning the serfs, their treatment and their relation to the seigneurs, remain in

force. 80

In February the crown of St. Stephen was carried back to Buda, and was ac-

claimed with public rejoicing at every stop on the way. The revolt died

down.

The revolt in the Austrian Netherlands went full course, for there it felt

the heat of the revolutionary movement in neighboring France. Joseph re-

fused to confirm the promise his sister had given to the Estates of Brabant

that the reforms they resented would be annulled; he ordered their enforce-

ment, and bade his soldiers fire upon any crowds resisting them. It was so

done; six rioters were killed in Brussels (January 22, 1788), an unknown

number in Antwerp and Louvain. A Brussels lawyer, Henri van den Noot,

summoned the people to arm themselves and enroll as volunteers in an army

of independence. The appeal was actively supported by the clergy; an anom-

alous inspiration was added by news that the Bastille had fallen; soon ten

thousand "Patriots," ably led, were in the field. On October 24 a manifesto

of "the Brabantine people" announced the deposition of Joseph II as their

ruler. On October 26 a force of Patriots defeated the Austrian soldiery.

Town after town was occupied by the insurgents. On January 1 1, 1790, the

seven provinces declared their independence, and proclaimed the Republic

of the United States of Belgium, taking the name of the Belgic tribes that

had troubled Caesar eighteen centuries before. England, Holland, and Prus-

sia were happy to recognize the new government. Joseph appealed to France

for help, but France herself was busy deposing her King. All the old world

that Joseph had known seemed to be falling apart. And death was calling

him.

VII. ATRA MORS

The bitterness of those final months was complete. Hungary and Belgium

were in revolt, the Turks were advancing, his army was mutinous, his own

people, the Austrians, who once had loved him, had turned against him as the

violator of their sacred customs and beliefs. The priests denounced him as an

infidel, the nobles hated him for freeing their serfs, the peasants cried out for

more land; the urban poor were near starvation; all classes cursed the high

taxes and prices caused by the war. On January 30, 1790, in full surrender,

Joseph rescinded all reforms decreed since the death of Maria Theresa, ex-

cept the abolition of serfdom.

Why had he failed? He had accepted in full faith and generous trust the

thesis of the philosophes that a monarch of good education and good will

CHAP.XIIl) THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN AUSTRIA 365

would be the best instrument of enlightenment and reform. He had a good

education, but his good will was tarnished by love of power, and ultimately

his eagerness to be a conqueror overcame his zeal for putting philosophy on

the throne. He lacked the philosopher's capacity for doubt; he took for

granted the wisdom of his means as well as of his ends. He tried to reform

too many evils at once, and too hurriedly; the people could not absorb the

bewildering multiplicity of his decrees. He commanded faster than he could

convince; he sought to achieve in a decade what required a century of edu-

cation and economic change. Basically it was the people who failed him.

They were too deeply rooted in their privileges and prejudices, in their cus-

toms and creeds, to give him the understanding and support without which,

in such challenging reforms, his absolutism was impotent. They preferred

their churches, priests, and tithes to his taxes, spies, and wars. They could not

put their trust in a man who laughed at their beloved legends, badgered their

bishops, and humiliated their Pope.

Through all those exacting years since 1765 his body had rebelled against

his will. His stomach could not digest his pace; repeatedly and in vain it cau-

tioned him to rest. The Prince de Ligne warned him that he was killing him-

self; he knew it, but u what can I do?" he said; "I am killing myself because

I cannot rouse up others to work." 81 His lungs were bad, his voice was feeble

and hollow; he had varicose veins, running eyes, erysipelas, hemorrhoids . . .

He exposed himself to all kinds of weather in the war with the Turks; like

thousands of his troops he contracted quartan fever. Sometimes he could

hardly breathe; "my heart palpitates at the slightest movement." 82 In the

spring of 1789 he began to vomit blood— "almost three ounces at once," he

wrote to Leopold. In June he had violent pains in the kidneys. "I observe the

strictest diet; I eat neither meat nor vegetables nor dairy products; soup and

rice are my nourishment." 83 He developed an anal abscess; this and his

hemorrhoids had to be lanced. He developed dropsy. He summoned Leopold

to come and take over the government. "I do not regret leaving the throne,"

he said; "all that grieves me is to have so few people happy." 84 To the Prince

de Ligne he wrote: "Your country has killed me. The taking of Ghent was

my agony; the loss of Brussels is my death. . . . Go to the Low Countries;

bring them back to their sovereign. If you cannot do this, stay there. Do not

sacrifice your interests to me. You have children." 85 He made his will, leav-

ing generous gifts to his servants, and to "the five ladies who bore my so-

ciety." 86 He composed his own epitaph: "Here lies Joseph, who could suc-

ceed in nothing." 87 He received with resignation the last sacrament of the

Catholic Church. He begged for death, and on February 20, 1790, it was

given him. He was forty-eight years old. Vienna rejoiced at his passing, and

Hungary gave thanks to God.

Was he a failure? In war, unquestionably. Despite Laudon's victories Leo-

pold II (1790-92) found it advisable to make peace with Turkey (August 4,

1 791) on the basis of the status quo ante. Unable to pacify the Hungarian

barons, Leopold revoked the grant of freedom to the serfs. In Bohemia and

366 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP.XIII

Austria most of the reforms were preserved. The toleration edicts were not

repealed; the closed monasteries were not restored; the Church remained sub-

ject to the laws of the state. The economic legislation had freed and stimu-

lated commerce and industry. Austria passed without violent revolution from

a medieval to a modern state, and shared in the diverse cultural vitality of the

nineteenth century.

"Deeply convinced of the integrity of my intentions/' Joseph had written

to Kaunitz, "I hope that when I am dead posterity— more favorable, more

impartial, and therefore juster than my contemporaries— will examine my ac-

tions and goals before judging me." 88 It has taken posterity a long time to do

this, but it has learned at last, while deploring his autocracy and haste, to

recognize in him the bravest and most thoroughgoing, as well as the least

judicious, of the "enlightened despots." After the reaction under Metternich

had passed away, the reforms of Joseph II were one by one restored, and the

revolutionaries of 1 848 laid a wreath of grateful acknowledgment upon his

tomb.

CHAPTER XIV

Music Reformed

WE do not readily think of the embattled Joseph II as a musician. Yet

we are told that he received a "thorough musical education," had a

fine bass voice, heard a concert almost daily, and was "a skillful player from

score" on the violoncello, the viola, and the clavier. 1 Many nobles were musi-

cians, many more were patrons of music. The middle classes followed suit;

every household had a harpsichord; everyone learned to play some instru-

ment. Trios and quartets were performed in the streets; open-air concerts

were given in the parks and, on St. John's Day, from illuminated boats on the

Danube Canal. Opera flourished at the court and in the National Opera

Theater founded by Joseph II in 1778.

Vienna rose to its early-nineteenth-century sovereignty as the musical cap-

ital of Europe because in the late eighteenth century it brought together the

rival musical traditions of Germany and Italy. From Germany came polyph-

ony, from Italy melody. From Germany came the Singspiel—a mixture of

comic drama, spoken dialogue, incidental music, and popular songs; from

Italy came opera buff a; at Vienna the two forms coalesced, as in Mozart's

The Abduction from the Seraglio. Generally the Italian influence overcame

the German in Vienna; Italy conquered Austria with arias, as Austria con-

quered North Italy with arms. In Vienna opera seria was chiefly Italian until

Gluck came, and Gluck was formed on Italian music.

I. CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK: I 7 1 4—8 7

He was born at Erasbach, in the Upper Palatinate, to a Catholic forester

who in 1 7 1 7 moved the family to Neuschloss in Bohemia. In the Jesuit school

at Komotau Christoph received instruction in religion, Latin, the classics,

singing, violin, organ, and harpsichord. Moving to Prague in 1732, he took

lessons on the violoncello, and supported himself by singing in churches,

playing the violin at dances, and giving concerts in nearby towns.

Every clever boy in Bohemia gravitated to Prague, and some still cleverer

found a way to Vienna. Gluck's way was to secure a place in the orchestra

of Prince Ferdinand von Lobkowitz. In Vienna he heard Italian operas, and

felt the magnetism of Italy. Prince Francesco Melzi liked his playing, and in-

vited him to Milan (1737). Gluck studied composition under Sammartini,

and became devoted to Italian styles. His early operas (1741-45) followed

Italian methods, and he conducted their premieres in Italy. These successes

won him an invitation to compose and produce an opera for the Haymarket

Theatre in London.

367

3^8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIV

There he presented La caduta de* giganti (1746). It was dismissed with

faint praise, and gruff old Handel said that Gluck knew "no more counter-

point than mein cook"; 2 but the cook was a good basso and Gluck's fame was

not to rest on counterpoint. Burney met Gluck, and described him as "of a

temper as fierce as Handel's. ... He was horribly scarred by smallpox, . . .

and he had an ugly scowl." 3 Perhaps to balance his budget Gluck announced

to the public that he would give "a concerto on twenty-six drinking glasses

tuned [by filling them to different levels] with spring water, accompanied

with the whole band [orchestra], being a new instrument of his own inven-

tion, upon which he performs whatever may be done on a violin or harpsi-

chord." Such a "glass harmonica," or "musical glasses," had been introduced

in Dublin two years before. Gluck evoked the notes by stroking the rims of

the glasses with moistened fingers. The performance (April 23, 1746) ap-

pealed to the curious, and was repeated a week later.

Saddened with this success, Gluck left London December 26 for Paris.

There he studied the operas of Rameau, who had moved toward reform by

integrating the music and the ballet with the action. In September he con-

ducted operas at Hamburg, had a liaison with an Italian singer, and con-

tracted syphilis. He recovered so slowly that when he went to Copenhagen

(November 24) he was unable to conduct. He returned to Vienna, and mar-

ried Marianne Pergia (September 15, 1750), daughter of a rich merchant.

Her dowry made him financially secure; he took a house in Vienna, and dis-

appeared into a long rest.

In September, 1754, Count Marcello Durazzo engaged him as Kapell-

meister at two thousand florins per year to compose for the court. Durazzo

had tired of conventional Italian opera, and collaborated with Gluck in a

musical drama, Uinnocenza gi7istificata, in which the story was no mere

scaffolding for music, and the music no mere assemblage of arias, but the

music reflected the action, and the arias— even the choruses— entered with

some logic into the plot. The premiere (December 8, 1755) was therefore

the herald and first product of the reform that history associates with

Gluck's name. We have seen elsewhere the contributions made by Benedetto

Marcello, Jommelli, and Traetta to this development, and the appeal made

by Rousseau, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists for a closer union of drama and

music. Metastasio had helped by proudly insisting that the music should be

servant to the poetry. 4 Winckelmann's passion for restoring Greek ideals in

art may have affected Gluck, and composers knew that Italian opera had

begun as an attempt to revive the classic drama, in which the music was sub-

ordinated to the play. Meanwhile Jean-Georges Noverre (1760) pleaded for

an elevation of the ballet from mere rhythmic prancing to dramatic panto-

mimes that would express "the passions, manners, customs, ceremonies, and

costumes of all the peoples on earth." 5 By the mysterious alchemy of genius

Gluck wove all these elements into a new operatic form.

One secret of success is to seize a propitious chance. What was it that

brought Gluck to abandon the librettos of Metastasio and take Raniero da

Calzabigi as the poet for Orfeo ed Euridice? The two men had been born

CHAP.XIV) MUSIC REFORMED 369

in the same year, 17 14, but far apart— Calzabigi in Livorno. After some ad-

ventures in love and finance he came to Paris, published there an edition of

Metastasio's Poesie drammatiche (1755), and prefaced it with a "Disserta-

zione" expressing his hope for a new kind of opera— "a delightful whole

resulting from the interplay of a large chorus, the dance, and a scenic action

where poetry and music are united in a masterly way." 6 Moving to Vienna,

he interested Durazzo with his ideas on opera; the Count invited him to

write a libretto; Calzabigi composed Orfeo ed Eurtdice; Durazzo offered the

poem to Gluck, who saw in the simple and unified plot a theme that could

elicit all his powers.

The result was presented to Vienna on October 5, 1762. For the role of

Orpheus Gluck was able to secure the leading castrato contralto of the time,

Gaetano Guadagni. The story was as old as opera; a dozen librettists had used

it between 1600 and 1761; the audience could follow the action without un-

derstanding Italian. The music dispensed with unaccompanied recitatives,

da capo arias, and decorative flourishes; otherwise it followed the Italian

style, but it rose to lyric heights of a purity seldom attained before or since.

The despondent cry of Orpheus after losing his beloved a second time to

death— "Che faro senz' Euridice?"— is still the loveliest aria in opera; on hear-

ing this, and the threnody of the flute in the "Dance of the Blessed Spirits,"

we wonder that the stormy Bohemian could have found such delicacy in his

soul.

Orfeo was not enthusiastically received in Vienna, but Maria Theresa was

deeply moved by it, and sent Gluck a snuffbox stuffed with ducats. Soon he

was chosen to teach singing to the Archduchess Maria Antonia. Meanwhile he

and Calzabigi worked on what some have rated their most perfect opera,

Alceste. In a preface to the published form, written for Gluck by Calzabigi,

the composer declared the principles of his operatic reform:

When I undertook to write the music for Alceste I resolved to divest it en-

tirely of all those abuses . . . which have so long disfigured Italian opera. . . .

I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of

expression, and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting

the action or stifling it with useless superfluity of comments. ... I did not

think it my duty to pass quickly over the second section of an aria— of which

the words are perhaps the most impassioned and important— in order to repeat

regularly . . . those of the first part. ... I have felt that the overture should

apprize the spectators of the nature of the action that is to be represented, and

to form, so to speak, its argument; . . . that the orchestral instruments should

be introduced in proportion to the interest and intensity of the words, and not

leave that sharp contrast between the aria and the recitative in the dialogue,

. . . [which] wantonly disturbs the force and heat of the action. . . . T believed

that my greatest labor should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity. 7

In short, the music was to serve and intensify the drama, and not make the

drama a mere scaffolding for vocal or orchestral displays. Gluck put the

matter extremely by saying that he was "trying to forget that I am a musi-

cian"; 8 he was to be one person with the librettist in composing a dramma per

music a. — The story of Alceste is a bit beyond belief, but Gluck redeemed it

37° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIV

with a somber overture that prefigured and led into the tragic action; with

scenes of touching sentiment between Alceste and her children; with her

invocation to the underworld gods in the aria "Divinites du Styx"; with

majestic chorales and spectacular ensembles. The Viennese audience gave

the opera sixty hearings between its premiere, December 16, 1767, and 1779.

The critics, however, found many faults in it, and the singers complained

that it gave them insufficient scope to display their art.

Poet and composer tried again with Paride ed Elena (November 30, 1770).

Calzabigi took the plot from Ovid, who had made the story of Paris and

Helen a personal romance instead of an international tragedy. The work

received twenty performances in Vienna, one in Naples, none elsewhere.

Calzabigi assumed the blame for the comparative failure, and renounced the

writing of librettos. Gluck sought other soil for his seed. A friend in the

French embassy at Vienna, Frangois du Rollet, suggested that Paris audiences

might welcome the compliment of a French opera by a German composer.

Following suggestions by Diderot and Algarotti that Racine's Iphigenie

offered an ideal subject for an opera, Du Rollet molded the play into a li-

bretto, and submitted this to Gluck. The composer found the material per-

fectly suited to his taste, and at once set to work.

To pave the way to Paris Du Rollet addressed to the director of the Opera

a letter— printed in the Mercure de France for August 1, 1772— telling how

indignant "Monsieur Glouch" was at the idea that the French language did

not lend itself to music, and how he proposed to prove the opposite with

Iphigenie en Aulide. Gluck softened the expected ire of Rousseau (then living

quietly in Paris) by sending the Mercure a letter (February 1, 1773) ex-

pressing his hope that he might consult with Rousseau about "the means I

have in view to produce a music fit for all the nations, and to let the ridicu-

lous distinctions of national music disappear." 9 To complete this masterpiece

of advertising, Marie Antoinette, remembering her old teacher, used her

influence at the Opera. The manager agreed to produce Iphigenie; Gluck

came to Paris, and put singers and orchestra through such arduous and dis-

ciplined rehearsals as they had rarely experienced before. Sophie Arnould,

the reigning diva, proved so intractable that Gluck threatened to abandon the

project; Joseph Legros seemed too weakened by illness to play the mighty

Achilles; Gaetan Vestris, the current god of the dance, wanted half the

opera to be ballet. 10 Gluck tore at his hair, or his wig, persisted, and tri-

umphed. The premiere (April 19, 1774) was the musical sensation of the

year. We can feel the agitation of the ebullient capital in a letter of Marie

Antoinette to her sister Maria Christina in Brussels:

A great triumph, my dear Christine! I am carried away with it, and people

can no longer talk of anything else. All heads are fermenting as a result of this

event; . . . there are dissensions and quarrels as though it were . . . some reli-

gious dispute. At court, though I publicly expressed myself in favor of this in-

spired work, there are partisanships and debates of a particular liveliness; and in

the city it seems to be worse still. 11

Rousseau repaid Gluck's advances by announcing that "Monsieur Gluck's

opera had overturned all his ideas; he was now convinced that the French

CHAP.XIV) MUSIC REFORMED 37 1

language could agree as well as any other with a music powerful, touching,

and sensitive." 12 The overture was so startlingly beautiful that the first night's

audience demanded its repetition. The arias were criticized as too many,

interrupting the drama, but they were marked by a complex depth of feeling

characteristic of Gluck's music; of one of them, Agamemnon's "Au faite des

grandeurs," Abbe Arnaud exclaimed, "With such an air one might found a

religion." 13

Gluck now rivaled the dying Louis XV as the talk of Paris. His burly

figure, his rubicund face and massive nose were pointed out wherever he

went, and his imperious temper became the subject of a hundred anecdotes.

Greuze painted his portrait, showing the jovial good nature behind the lines

of strife and strain. He ate like Dr. Johnson, and drank only less than Bos-

well. He made no pretense about scorning money, and joined readily in

appreciation of his work. He treated courtiers and commoners alike— as

inferiors; he expected noble lords to hand him his wig, his coat, his cane; and

when a prince was introduced to him, and Gluck kept his seat, he explained,

"The custom in Germany is to rise only for people one respects." 14

The director of the Opera had warned him that if Iphigenie en Aulide

was accepted, Gluck would have to write five more operas in quick order,

since Iphigenie would drive all other operas from the stage. This did not

frighten Gluck, who had a way of conscripting parts of his older composi-

tions to squeeze them into new ones. He had Orfeo ed Euridice translated

into French; and since no good contralto was available, he rewrote the part

of Orpheus for the tenor Legros. Sophie Arnould, become tractable, played

Eurydice. The Paris premiere was a heartening success. Marie Antoinette,

now Queen of France, awarded a pension of six thousand francs to "mon

cher Gluck" 15 He returned to Vienna with his head in the stars.

In March, 1776, he was back in Paris with a French version of Alceste,

which was produced to mild applause on April 23. Gluck, inured to success,

reacted to this setback with angry pride: "Alceste is not the kind of work to

give momentary pleasure, or to please because it is new. Time does not exist

for it; and I claim that it will give equal pleasure two hundred years hence

if the French language does not change." 16 In June he retreated to Vienna,

and soon thereafter he began to put to music Marmontel's revision of Qui-

nault's libretto Roland.

Now began the most famous contest in operatic history. For meanwhile

the management of the Opera had commissioned Niccolo Piccini of Naples

to set to music the same libretto, and to come to Paris and produce it. He

came (December 31, 1776). Informed of this commission, Gluck sent to Du

Rollet (now in Paris) a letter of Olympian wrath:

I have just received your letter . . . exhorting me to continue my work on

the words of the opera Roland. This is no longer feasible, for when I heard that

the management of the Opera, not unaware that I was doing Roland, had given

the same work to M. Piccini to do, I burned as much of it as I had already

done, which perhaps was not worth much. ... I am no longer the man to

enter into competition, and M. Piccini would have too great an advantage over

me, since— his personal merit apart, which is assuredly very great— he would

37 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIV

have that of novelty. ... I am sure that a certain politician of my acquaintance

will offer dinner and supper to three quarters of Paris in order to win him

proselytes. 17

For reasons not now clear this letter, obviously private, was published in the

Annee litter aire for February, 1777. It became, unintentionally, a declara-

tion of war.

Gluck reached Paris May 29 with a new opera, Armide. The rival com-

posers met at a dinner; they embraced, and conversed amicably. Piccini had

come to France with no notion that he was to be a pawn in a mess of partisan

intrigue and operatic salesmanship; he himself warmly admired Gluck's

work. Despite the friendliness of the protagonists the war went on in salons

and cafes, in streets and homes; "no door was opened to a visitor," reported

Charles Burney, "without the question being asked, previous to admission,

'Monsieur, estes vous Ficciniste ou Gluckiste?' " 18 Marmontel, d'Alembert,

and Laharpe led in acclaiming Piccini and the Italian style; the Abbe Arnaud

defended Gluck in a Profession de foi en musique; Rousseau, who had begun

the war with his pro-Italian Lettre sur la musique frangaise (1753), sup-

ported Gluck.

Armide was produced on September 23, 1777. Subject and music were

reversions to modes established before Gluck's reform; the story was from

Tasso, exalting the Christian Rinaldo and the pagan Armida; the music was

Lully restored with romantic tenderness; the ballet was Noverre in excelsis.

The audience liked the mixture; it gave the opera a good reception; but the

Piccinistes condemned Armide as a refurbishing of Lully and Rameau. They

waited anxiously for their standard-bearer's Roland. Piccini dedicated it to

Marie Antoinette with apologies: "Transplanted, isolated, in a country

where all was new to me, intimidated in my work by a thousand difficulties,

I needed all my courage, and my courage forsook me." 19 At times he was on

the verge of abandoning the contest and returning to Italy. He persevered,

and had the comfort of a successful premiere (January 27, 1778). The two

victories seemed to cancel each other, and the public war went on. Mme.

Vigee-Lebrun saw it at first hand. "The usual battlefield was the garden of

the Palais-Royal. There the partisans of Gluck and Piccini quarreled so

violently that many a duel resulted." 20

Gluck returned to Vienna in March, stopping at Ferney to see Voltaire.

He took home with him two librettos: one by Nicolas-Franjois Guillard

based on the Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides, the other by Baron Jean-

Baptiste de Tschoudi on the Echo and Narcissus theme. He worked on both

books, and by the fall of 1778 he felt ready for another battle. So in Novem-

ber we find him in Paris again; and on May 18, 1779, he presented at the

Opera what most students consider his greatest composition, Iphigenie en

Tauride. It is a somber story, and much of the music is monotonously plain-

tive; at times we tire of Iphigenia's high-keyed laments. But when the per-

formance is over, and the incantation of the music and the lines has stilled

our skeptic reason, we realize that we have experienced a profound and

powerful drama. A contemporary remarked that there were many fine pas-

CHAP.XIV) MUSIC REFORMED 373

sages in it. "There is only one," said Abbe Arnaud, "—the entire work." 21

The first night's audience gave the piece a wild ovation.

Gluck challenged the gods by hurrying to offer his other piece, Echo et

Narcisse (September 21, 1779). It failed, and the maestro left Paris in a huff

(October), declaring that he had had enough of France, and would write

no more operas. If he had remained he could have heard another Iphigenie

en Tauride, produced by Piccini after two years of labor. The premiere

(January 23, 1781) was well received, but on the second night Mile. La-

guerre, who sang the title role, was so obviously drunk that Sophie Arnould

destroyed the performance by calling it Iphigenie en Champagne. 22 This

contretemps ended the operatic war; Piccini handsomely admitted defeat.

Gluck, in Vienna, dreamed of other victories. On February 10, 1780, he

wrote to Goethe's Duke Karl August of Saxe- Weimar: "I have grown very

old, and have squandered the best powers of my mind upon the French na-

tion; nevertheless I feel an inward impulse to write something for my own

country." 23 Now he put some odes of Klopstock to music that prepared for

the finest lieder. In April, 1781, he suffered a stroke, but he was comforted

by Vienna's reception of Iphigenie in Tauris and the revival of Orfeo and

Alceste. On November 15, 1787, while entertaining friends, he drank at one

gulp a glass of strong liquor, which had been forbidden him. He fell into

convulsions, and died within four hours. Piccini, in Naples, tried in vain to

raise funds for annual concerts in his rival's memory. 24 Italy, pursuing melody,

ignored Gluck's reforms; Mozart followed the Italians, and must have been

shocked at the idea of making music the servant of poetry. But Herder, com-

ing at the end of this creative era, and looking back upon it with limited

knowledge of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, called Gluck the greatest com-

poser of the century. 25

II. JOSEPH HAYDN: 1732-1809

It is easier to love Haydn, for here was a man who quarreled with no one

but his wife, hailed his competitors as his friends, suffused his music with

gaiety, and was constitutionally incapable of tragedy.

He had no advantages of birth. His father was a wagonmaker and house

painter at Rohrau, a little town on the Austro-Hungarian frontier. His

mother had been cook for the counts of Harrach. Both parents were of Slavic-

Croatian, not German, stock, and many of Haydn's melodies echo Croatian

songs. He was the second of twelve children, of whom six died in infancy.

He was baptized Franz Josef Haydn; however, it was customary to call

children by their second name.

Aged six, he was sent to live with a relative, Johann Matthias Franck, who

kept a school in Hainburg. There his day began with classes from seven to

ten, then Mass, then home for dinner, then classes from twelve to three, then

instruction in music. He was trained to piety, and never lost it. His mother

longed to make him a priest, and she was deeply grieved when he chose the

374 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIV

hazardous life of a musician. Franck encouraged the boy's predilection for

music, taught him all that was in his own range, and held him to a severe

regimen of study. In old age Haydn recalled and forgave: "I shall be grateful

to that man as long as I live for keeping me so hard at work, though I used to

get more floggings than food." 26 After two years with Franck, Joseph was

taken to Vienna by Georg Reutter, Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's; Reutter

thought his "weak, sweet voice" could find some modest place in a choir.

So, at the age of eight, the timid-eager lad went to live in the Kantorei, or

Singers' School, adjoining the stately cathedral. There he received lessons

in arithmetic, writing, Latin, religion, singing, and violin. He sang in the

cathedral and in the Imperial Chapel, but he was so poorly fed that he wel-

comed calls to sing in private homes, where he could fill his stomach besides

singing his songs.

In 1745 his brother Michael, five years his junior, joined him in the Kan-

torei. About this time Joseph's voice began to break: He was invited to keep

his soprano by having himself castrated, but his parents refused consent.

Reutter kept him as long as possible; then, in 1748, Joseph, now sixteen,

found himself free and penniless, and with no grace of person to win fortune's

smile. His face was pitted with smallpox, his nose was outstanding, his legs

were too short for his body, his dress was shabby, his gait awkward, his

manner shy. He was not yet skilled in any instrument, but he was already

turning over compositions in his head.

A fellow chorister offered him an attic room, and Anton Buchholz lent

him 1 50 florins, which honest Haydn later repaid. He had to fetch water up

to his garret every day, but he secured an old clavier, took pupils, and sur-

vived. On most days he worked sixteen hours, sometimes more. He played

the violin in a church; he played the organ in the private chapel of Count

Haugwitz, minister to Maria Theresa; he sang tenor, now and then, in St.

Stephen's. The famous Metastasio had an apartment in the same building; he

secured Haydn as music teacher for the daughter of a friend; through

Metastasio Haydn met Porpora; Haydn agreed to serve this prince of singing

masters in any capacity, in return for instruction in composition. He received

the precious lessons, cleaned the maestro's shoes, coat, and wig, and provided

clavier accompaniment for Porpora and pupils. Said Haydn in retrospect:

"Young people can learn from my example that something can come out of

nothing. What I am is all the result of the direst need." 27

Through his new friends he became acquainted with Gluck and Ditters-

dorf, and several members of the nobility. Karl Joseph von Fiirnberg took

him (1755) for a long stay at his country house, Weinzierl, near Melk; there

Haydn found an orchestra of eight pieces, and some leisure to compose.

Now he wrote his first quartets. To the sonata structure of three movements,

which he adopted from Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, he added a minuet,

scored the four movements for four pieces, and gave the instrumental quartet

its modern form. He returned to Vienna in 1756, attracted distinguished

pupils like the Countess von Thun, and (1759) accepted the post of Musik-

direktor for Count Maximilian von Morzin, whose private orchestra of

CHAP.XIV) MUSIC REFORMED 375

twelve to sixteen pieces played at Vienna in winter and, in summer, in the

Count's villa at Lukavec in Bohemia. For this ensemble Haydn wrote his

first symphony (1759).

As he was now earning two hundred florins per year, with board and

lodging, he thought he could risk the gamble of marriage. Among his pupils

were two daughters of a wigmaker; he fell in love with the younger one,

but she became a nun, and the father prevailed upon Haydn to marry the

sister, Maria Anna (1760). She was thirty-one, he twenty-eight. She proved

to be quarrelsome, bigoted, wasteful and barren. "She doesn't care a straw,"

said Haydn, "whether her husband is an artist or a cobbler." 28 He began to

look at other women.

The audience in Morzin's home occasionally included Prince Pal Anton

Esterhazy. When Morzin disbanded his orchestra the Prince engaged Haydn

(1761) as assistant music director for his country seat at Eisenstadt in Hun-

gary. The contract called for four hundred florins per year with a seat at

the officers' table; and "it is especially observed that when the orchestra shall

be summoned to perform before company, the . . . musicians shall appear

in uniform, ... in white stockings, white linen, and ... a queue or a

tiewig." 29 At Eisenstadt the Kapellmeister, Gregor Werner, busied himself

with church music; Haydn prepared concerts and composed music for them.

He had under him fourteen musicians, seven singers, and a chorus chosen

from the servants of the Prince. The small size of the orchestra, and the

character of the audience, shared in determining the light and amiable qual-

ity of the music written by Haydn for the Esterhazy family. His genial

spirit made him popular with the musicians; they called him "Papa Haydn"

soon after his coming to Eisenstadt, though he was then only twenty-nine. 30

For them he composed sonatas, trios, quartets, concertos, songs, cantatas, and

some thirty symphonies. Many of these compositions, though by contract

they belonged to the Prince, were published or circulated in manuscript, in

Vienna, Leipzig, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, and gave Haydn, by 1766,

an international reputation.

When Pal Anton died (March 18, 1762) he was succeeded, as head of the

Esterhazy family, by his brother Miklos Jozsef, who loved music almost as

much as his diamond-studded uniform. He played well on the viola di bor-

done (a variant of the viola da gamba), and was a kindly master to Haydn

in the nearly thirty years of their association. Said Haydn: "My Prince was

always satisfied with my works. I not only had the encouragement of con-

stant approval, but as conductor of an orchestra I could make experiments,

observe what produced an effect and what weakened it, and was thus in a

position to improve, alter, . . . and be as bold as I pleased. I was cut off

from the world, there was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced

to become original." 31

Werner died on March 5, 1766, and Haydn became Kapellmeister. Soon

afterward the household moved into the new palace— the Schloss Esterhazy

—which Miklos had built at the southern end of the Neusiedler See in north-

western Hungary. The Prince was so fond of this place that he lived there

37<5 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIV

from early spring through autumn; in winter he removed, sometimes with

his musicians, to Vienna. The players and singers resented this rural isolation,

especially since they were separated, for three seasons of the year, from their

wives and children; but they were well paid, and dared not complain. Once,

to hint to Miklos that his musicians were longing for a leave of absence,

Haydn composed the Farewell Symphony (No. 5), in which, toward the

end, one instrument after another disappeared from the score, the musician

put out his candle, took up his music and his instrument, and left the stage.

The Prince saw the point, and arranged for an early departure of the troupe

to Vienna.

Haydn, by exception, was allowed to have his wife with him at Esterhaza,

but he did not appreciate the privilege. In 1779 he fell in love with Luigia

Polzelli, a mediocre singer who had been engaged for Esterhaza along with

her violinist husband Antonio. Haydn seems to have felt that since the Cath-

olic Church did not allow him to divorce his troublesome wife, it should, in

mercy, permit him a diversion or two; and he made little effort to conceal

his liaison. Antonio was too old and ill to make effective protest, and knew

that he was kept on the rolls only because the Kapellmeister relished Luigia.

She had come to Esterhaza with a two-year-old son; in 1783 she bore another

boy, whom gossip credited to Papa Haydn; he took both the boys to his heart,

and helped them throughout his life.

During those busy years at Esterhaza Haydn, lacking outside stimulus

and competition, developed slowly as a composer. He produced nothing

memorable till he was thirty-two— an age at which Mozart had completed

his oeuvre except for The Magic Flute and the Requiem. Haydn's finest

works came after he was fifty: his first major symphony when he was nearly

sixty, The Creation when he was sixty-six. He wrote several operas for per-

formance at Esterhaza, but when Prague invited him to present an opera

there, in a series that was to include The Marriage of Figaro and Don Gio-

vanni, he demurred in a letter of noble modesty (December, 1 787 ) :

You desire an opera buff a from me. ... If you intend to stage it at Prague T

cannot oblige you. My operas are inseparable from the company for which I

wrote them, and would never produce their calculated effect apart from their

native surroundings. It would be quite another matter if I had the honor of be-

ing commissioned to write a new opera for your theater. Even then, however, it

would be a risk to put myself in competition with the great Mozart. If I could

only inspire every lover of music, especially among the great, with feelings as

deep, and comprehension as clear, as my own, in listening to the inimitable

works of Mozart, then surely the nations would contend for the possession of

such a jewel within their borders. Prague must strive to retain this treasure

within her grasp, but not without fitting reward. The want of this often sad-

dens the life of a great genius, and offers small encouragement for further ef-

forts and future times. I feel indignant that Mozart has not yet been engaged

at any imperial or royal court. Pardon my wandering from the subject; Mozart

is a man very dear to me. 32

Haydn himself was longing for some court where his talent might more

widely spread its wings, but he had to be content with royal compliments.

CHAP.XIV) MUSIC REFORMED 377

Gifts arrived from Ferdinand IV of Naples, Frederick William II of Prussia,

and the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia. In 1781 Charles III of

Spain sent him a golden snuffbox set with diamonds, and the Spanish am-

bassador at Vienna traveled to Esterhaza to present the little treasure in per-

son. Perhaps Boccherini, then settled in Madrid, had a hand in this, for he so

zealously adopted Haydn's style that he was nicknamed "Haydn's wife." 33

When the cathedral chapter at Cadiz decided to commission a musical setting

for the "Seven Last Words of Our Saviour" it applied to Haydn, who re-

sponded with an oratorio (1785) that was soon performed in many lands—

in the United States as early as 1791. In 1784 a Paris producer asked for six

symphonies; Haydn obliged with six Paris Symphonies. Several invitations

came to him to conduct concerts in London. Haydn felt bound to Esterhaza

by loyalty as well as contract, but his private letters revealed his increasing

eagerness for a larger stage.

On September 28, 1790, Prince Miklos Jozsef died. The new Prince, Anton

Esterhazy, cared little for music; he dismissed nearly all the musicians, but

kept Haydn nominally in his service, gave him a yearly pension of fourteen

hundred florins, and allowed him to live wherever he pleased. Haydn almost

precipitately moved to Vienna. Several proposals were now made to him,

most urgently from Johann Peter Salomon, who announced, "I have come

from London to fetch you; we shall conclude our accord tomorrow." He

offered ^300 for a new opera, ^300 more for six symphonies, ^200 more

for their copyright, £ 200 more for twenty concerts in England, £200 more

for a concert to be given there for Haydn's benefit— £ 1,200 in all. Haydn

knew no English, and dreaded the Channel crossing. Mozart begged him not

to take on such labors and risks: "Oh, Papa, you have had no education for

the wide world, and you speak so few languages!" Haydn answered, "But

my language is understood all over the world." 34 He sold the house Prince

Miklos Jozsef had given him in Eisenstadt, provided for his wife and his

mistress, and set off on the great adventure. He spent with Mozart the final

days before departure. Mozart wept to see him go; "I'm afraid, Papa, that

this will be our last farewell."

Haydn and Salomon left Vienna December 15, 1790, and reached London

January 1, 1791. His first concert (March n) was a triumph. The Morning

Chronicle ended its report by saying: "We cannot suppress our very anxious

hope that the first musical genius of the age may be induced by our liberal

welcome to take up his residence in England." 35 All the concerts went well,

and on May 16 a benefit concert gladdened Haydn with ^350. In that

month he attended the Handel Commemoration Concert in Westminster

Abbey and heard the Messiah; he was so impressed that he wept, saying,

humbly, "Handel, the master of us all." 36 Burney suggested that Oxford

give the new Handel an honorary degree; it was offered; Haydn went up to

the university in July, became a doctor of music, and conducted there his

Symphony in G Major (No. 92); he had composed it three years before,

but henceforth history knew it as the Oxford Symphony. Its lovely slow

movement recalls the old English ballad "Lord Randall."

378 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIV

Having had a view of the English countryside as a divine transfiguration

of seed and rain, Haydn, after returning to London, gladly accepted invita-

tions to country houses. There and in the city he won many friends by his

cheerful readiness to play and sing at private gatherings. He took advanced

pupils to teach them composition. One of these was a comely and wealthy

widow, Johanna Schroeter. Though he was sixty the aura of his fame went

to her head, and she tendered him her love. He said later, "In all likelihood I

should have married her if I had been single." 37 Meanwhile his wife impor-

tuned him to come home. In a letter to Luigia Polzelli he grumbled: "My

wife, that infernal beast, wrote me so many things that I was forced to an-

swer that I was never coming back." 38

Despite three women on his conscience and his purse, he worked hard

and now composed six (Nos. 93-98) of his twelve London Symphonies.

They show a remarkable development from his productions at Eisenstadt

and Esterhaza. Perhaps Mozart's symphonies had stimulated him, or he had

been put on his mettle by the reception given him in England, or hearing

Handel had stirred in him depths untouched by his quiet environment in the

Hungarian hills, or his love affairs had moved him to tender sentiments as

well as simple joy. He found it difficult to leave England, but he was under

contract with Prince Anton Esterhazy, who now insisted that Haydn return

to share in the festivities prepared for the coronation of the Emperor Francis

II. So, toward the end of June, 1792, he braved the Channel again, passed

from Calais to Brussels to Bonn, met Beethoven (then twenty-two), attended

the coronation at Frankfurt, and reached Vienna July 29.

No newspaper mentioned his return, no concerts were arranged for him,

the court ignored him. Mozart would have welcomed him, but Mozart was

no more. Haydn wrote to the widow, offered gratis lessons to Mozart's son,

and urged publishers to print more of Mozart's music. He went to live with

his wife in the house which is now preserved as a Haydn museum (Haydn-

gasse 19). The wife wished him to put the property in her name; he refused.

His quarrels with her were intensified. Beethoven came in December,

1792, to study with him. The two geniuses did not harmonize: Beethoven

was proud and domineering; Haydn called him "that great Mogul," 39 and

was too absorbed in his own work to correct his pupil's exercises conscien-

tiously. Beethoven secretly found another teacher, but continued to take les-

sons from Haydn. "I have learned nothing from him," said the young Ti-

tan; 40 however, many of his early pieces follow Haydn's style, and some

were dedicated to the old master.

Appreciation of Haydn grew in Austria, and at Rohrau, in 1792, Count

von Harrach set up a monument to the town's now famous son. But the

memory of triumphs and friendships in England was still warm, and when

Salomon offered him a second engagement in London, with a commission to

write six new symphonies, the composer readily agreed. He left Vienna on

January 19, 1794, and reached London on February 4. This stay of eighteen

months in England was as heartening a success as the first. The second set of

London Symphonies (Nos. 99-104) was well received, a benefit concert

CHAP.XIV) MUSIC REFORMED 379

netted Haydn ^400, pupils paid him a guinea per lesson, and Mrs. Schroeter

lived nearby. He was again a favorite with the aristocracy; both the King

and the King's enemy, the Prince of Wales, received him; the Queen offered

him a residence at Windsor for the summer if he would remain in England

for another season. He excused himself on the ground that the new Prince

Esterhazy was summoning him, and he could not so long absent himself from

his wife (!). Prince Anton had died; his successor, Prince Miklos II, wished

to restore orchestral performances at Eisenstadt. So, his trunks packed and

his pockets full, Haydn left London August 15, 1795, and made his way

home.

After a visit to his own statue at Rohrau, he reported to Miklos II at Eisen-

stadt, and organized music for various occasions there. Except for summer

and autumn, however, he lived in his own house on the outskirts of Vienna.

In the years 1796-97 Napoleon was driving the Austrians before him in

Italy, and the rise of revolutionary sentiment in Austria threatened the Haps-

burg monarchy. Haydn recalled how the emotion aroused by the singing

of "God Save the King" had strengthened the Hanoverian dynasty in Eng-

land; might not a national anthem do likewise for Emperor Francis II? His

friend Baron Gottfried van Swieten (son of Maria Theresa's physician)

suggested this to Count von Saurau, minister of the interior; Saurau ap-

pointed Leopold Haschka to compose a text; the poet responded with "Gott

erhalte Franz den Kaiser, unsern guten Kaiser Franz!" Haydn adapted to

these words the tune of an old Croat song, and the result was a simple but

stirring anthem. It was first publicly sung on the Emperor's birthday, Febru-

ary 12, 1797, in all the principal theaters of the Austro-Hungarian realm. It

continued, with some change of words, to be the Austrian national hymn

until 1938. Haydn developed the melody, with variations, into the second

movement of his string quartet Opus 76, No. 3.

Still under the spell of Handel, Haydn tried next to rival the Messiah.

Salomon had offered him a libretto compiled from Milton's Paradise Lost;

van Swieten translated the libretto into German, and Haydn composed his

massive oratorio Die Schopfujig. The Creation was performed before an in-

vited audience in the palace of Prince von Schwarzenberg April 29-30, 1798.

So great a crowd gathered outside the palace that fifty mounted police (we

are assured) were needed to keep order. 41 The Prince financed a public per-

formance in the National Theater March 19, 1799, and gave all the proceeds

(four thousand florins) to the composer. The auditors greeted the music

with almost religious fervor; soon the oratorio was heard in almost every

major city in Christendom. The Catholic Church condemned the composi-

tion as too lighthearted for so august a theme, and Schiller agreed with Bee-

thoven in ridiculing Haydn's mimicry of Eden's animals; but Goethe ac-

claimed the work, and in Prussia it was more frequently performed in the

nineteenth century than any other choral composition.

Van Swieten offered another libretto, adapted from James Thomson's The

Seasons. Haydn labored over it for nearly two years (1 799-1 801), at much

cost to his health; The Seasons, he said, "has broken my back." The premiere

380 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIV

(April 24, 1 801) was well received, but the piece aroused no wide or lasting

enthusiasm. After conducting The Seven Last Words of Christ for a hospital

benefit, Haydn retired from active life.

His wife had died on March 20, 1800, but he was now too old to enjoy

his freedom, though not too old to enjoy his fame. He was recognized as the

dean of composers; a dozen cities voted him honors; famous musicians—

Cherubini, the Webers, Ignaz Pleyel, Hummel— came to pay him homage.

Nevertheless rheumatism, dizziness, and other ailments left him melancholy,

irritable, and fearfully pious. Camille Pleyel, visiting him in 1805, found him

"holding a rosary in his hands, and I believe he passes almost the whole day

in prayer. He says always that his end is near. . . . We did not stay long,

for we saw that he wished to pray." 42 In that year a false report spread that

Ha; r dn had died. Cherubini wrote a cantata on his death, and Paris planned

a memorial concert with Mozart's Requiem; then word came that the old

l :\n was still alive. When Haydn heard of this he remarked, "I would have

dueled to Paris to conduct the Requiem myself." 43

He made his last public appearance on March 27, 1809, when The Crea-

tion was sung at the University of Vienna to celebrate his approaching sev-

enty-sixth birthday. Prince Esterhazy sent his carriage to take the invalid to

the concert; Haydn was borne in an armchair into the hall amid an audience

of nobles and celebrities; princesses wrapped their shawls around his shiver-

ing body; Beethoven knelt and kissed his hand. Emotion overcame the old

composer; he had to be taken home in the intermission.

On May 12, 1809, Napoleon's artillery began to bombard Vienna. A

cannonball fell near Haydn's house, shaking it and the inmates, but Haydn

assured them, "Children, don't be frightened; where Haydn is no harm can

come to you." It proved true except for himself; the bombardment shat-

tered his nervous system. When the French took the city Napoleon ordered

a guard of honor to be placed before the composer's home. A French officer,

entering, sang an aria from The Creation in "so manly and sublime a style"

that Haydn embraced him. On May 3 1 he died, aged seventy-seven. All the

major cities of Europe held services in his memory.

Haydn's historic achievement was in the development of musical forms.

He gave the orchestra a new vitality by balancing the strings with wind and

percussion instruments. Building upon the work of Sammartini, Stamitz, and

Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, he established the structure of the sonata as the

exposition, elaboration, and recapitulation of contrasted themes. He pre-

pared the divertimento for Mozart as less formal than the suite, and better

adapted for social gatherings. He gave the string quartet its classic configura-

tion by extending it to four movements, and by giving the first movement

"sonata form." Here his successors had to use the same number and quality

of instruments that Haydn had employed, and he achieved in several in-

stances a cheerful and tender loveliness to which some of us return with

relief from the laborious involutions of Beethoven's later quartets.

Nine or ten of the 104 Haydn symphonies still live. The names they bear

were not his choice, but were applied by commentators or editors. We have

CHAP. XIV ) MUSIC REFORMED 38 1

noted elsewhere the evolution of the sinfonia (i.e., assembled sounds) from

the overture through the experiments of Sammartini and Stamitz; many

others preceded Haydn in molding the structure of the "classic" symphony;

and when he emerged from Esterhaza into a wider world he was not too old

to learn from Mozart how to fill out the structure with significance and feel-

ing. The Oxford Symphony marks his rise to greater amplitude and power,

and the London Symphonies show him in his fullest symphonic reach. No.

101 (the Clock Symphony) is delightful, and No. 104 is quite up to Mozart.

Generally we perceive in his music a kindly, gracious nature which may

never have felt the depths of grief or love, and which had been compelled to

produce too rapidly to permit the maturing of concept, theme, or phrase.

Haydn was too happy to be profoundly great, and spoke too often to say

much. And yet there is a treasure of pure and placid delight in these playful

scores; here, as he put it, "the weary and worn, or the man burdened with

affairs, may enjoy some solace and refreshment." 44

Haydn fell out of fashion soon after his death. His works reflected a stable

feudal world, and an environment of aristocratic security and ease; they

were too gay and self-content to satisfy a century of revolutions, crises, and

romantic ecstasies and despair. He came back into favor when Brahms

praised him and Debussy wrote Homage a Haydn (1909) . A4en then realized

that though the Raphael and the Michelangelo of music who followed him

poured deeper thought with subtler mastery into their compositions, they

were able to do this because Haydn and his predecessors had molded the

forms to receive their gold. "I know that God has bestowed a talent upon

me," Haydn said, "and I thank Him for it. I think I have done my duty, and

been of use; ... let others do the same." 45

CHAPTER XV

Mozart

I. THE WONDERFUL BOY: 1 756-66

SALZBURG, like Prague and Pressburg and Esterhaza, was a musical out-

post of Vienna. It had its own character, partly from the salt mines that ex-

plain its name, partly from its environing mountains and its bisecting Salzach

River, partly from having grown up around the monastery and episcopal see

founded there about a.d. 700 by St. Rupert of Worms. The archbishop had

been made an Imperial prince in 1278, and from that time till 1802 he was

the civic as well as the ecclesiastical ruler of the city. In 1731-32 some thirty

thousand Protestants had been forced to migrate, leaving Salzburg thor-

oughly and theocratically Catholic. Otherwise the archiepiscopal rule rested

lightly on an orthodox population which, assured of eternal certainties, de-

voted itself to epidermal contacts and other worldly joys. Sigismund von

Schrattenbach, archbishop during Mozart's youth, was especially genial and

kindly, except to heretics.

To this lovely town Leopold Mozart had come in 1737, aged eighteen,

from his native Augsburg, presumably to study theology and become a

priest. But he lost his heart to music, served for three years as musician and

valet in a patrician's home, and in 1743 became fourth violinist in the Arch-

bishop's orchestra. When he married Anna Maria Pertl (1747) he and she

were rated the handsomest couple in Salzburg. He composed concertos,

Masses, symphonies, and wrote a long-honored textbook of violin technique.

In 1757 he was appointed court composer to the Archbishop. Of his seven

children only two survived childhood: Maria Anna (Marianna, "Nannerl"),

born 175 1, and Wolfgang Amadeus, born January 27, 1756. (The boy's full

name— soliciting the intercession of several saints— was Joannes Chrysostomus

Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart; Theophilus was translated from Greek

into Latin as Amadeus, Lover of God.) Leopold was a good husband and

father, devoted and industrious. His letters to his son are warm with love,

and not wanting in wisdom. The Mozart home— allowing for a little obscenity

—was a haven of mutual affection, parental piety, childish pranks, and music

without end.

Every German child was expected to become in some measure, on some

instrument, a musician. Leopold taught his children music with their ABC's.

Marianna was already at eleven a virtuoso at the clavichord. Wolfgang,

stimulated by her lead, took eagerly to the clavier: at three he picked out

chords; at four he played several pieces from memory; at five he invented

compositions which the father put on paper as they were played. Leopold

refrained, at some cost, from taking other pupils, wishing to give full atten-

tion to his children. He did not send "Wolf" to school, for he proposed to be

382

CHAP.XV) MOZART 383

his teacher in everything. Presumably some German discipline was used, but

not much was needed in this case; the boy would of his own accord remain

at the keyboard for hours on end till forced away. 1 Years later Leopold

wrote to him:

Both as a child and as a boy you were serious rather than childlike; and when

you were at the clavier, or otherwise engaged with music, you would not suffer

the least joking to go on with you. Your very countenance was so serious that

many observant persons prophesied your early death, on the ground of your

precocious talent and earnest mien. 2

In January, 1762, while Germany was still torn with war, Leopold took

daughter and son to Munich to display their artistry before the Elector Max-

imilian Joseph; and in September he led them to Vienna. They were invited

to Schonbrunn; Maria Theresa and Francis I were delighted with the chil-

dren; Wolfgang leaped into the Empress' lap, hugged and kissed her; chal-

lenged by the Emperor, he played the violin with one finger, and played the

clavichord unerringly though the keys were covered with a cloth. Romping

with the princesses, Wolfgang stumbled and fell; the Archduchess Maria An-

tonia, seven years old, picked him up and comforted him. "You are good,"

he said, and gratefully added, "I will marry you." 3 A dozen aristocrats

opened their homes to the Mozarts, marveled at the music they heard, and re-

warded the trio with money and gifts. Then the boy was bedded for a fort-

night with scarlet fever— the first of many illnesses that were to mar his

travels. In January, 1763, the troupe returned to Salzburg.

The indulgent Archbishop overlooked the fact that Leopold had exceeded

his leave of absence; indeed, he promoted him to be Vize-Kapellmeister. But

on June 9, forfeiting further promotion, Leopold took to the road again, this

time with his wife, to show his brood to Europe; after all, they could not re-

main child prodigies forever. At Mainz the children gave two concerts, at

Frankfurt four; sixty years later Goethe recalled that he had heard one of

these, and how he had marveled at "the little man with wig and sword"— for

so Leopold had accoutered his son. Wolfgang was exploited by his father as

almost a circus wonder. An announcement in a Frankfurt newspaper of Au-

gust 30, 1763, promised that in the concert of that evening

the little girl, who is in her twelfth year, will play the most difficult composi-

tions of the greatest masters; the boy, who is not yet seven, will perform on the

clavichord or harpsichord; he will also play a concerto for the violin, and will

accompany symphonies on the clavier, the keyboard being covered with a cloth,

with as much facility as if he could see the keys. He will instantly name all

notes played at a distance, whether singly or in chords, on the clavier or on any

other instrument— bell, glass, or clock. He will finally, both on the harpsichord

and the organ, improvise as long as may be desired, and in any key. 4

Such demands upon the boy's talents may have done some damage to his

health or nerves, but he seems to have enjoyed the applause as much as his

father enjoyed the florins.

They played at Coblenz, were disappointed at Bonn and Cologne, but had a

concert at Aachen. At Brussels they expected that the governor-general,

384 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

Prince Charles of Lorraine, would honor their performance with his presence,

but he was busy. Leopold angrily reported:

We have now been nearly three weeks in Brussels . . . and nothing has hap-

pened. . . . His Highness does nothing but hunt, gobble, and swill, and we may

in the end discover that he has no money. ... I own that we have received

sundry presents here, but we do not wish to convert them into cash. . . . What

with snuffboxes and leather cases and such-like gewgaws, we shall soon be able

to open a stall. 5

The Prince finally agreed to attend; a concert was given, florins were col-

lected, and the troupe encoached for Paris.

On November 15, 1763, they arrived in Paris after tumbling three days on

rough and rutted roads. They had letters of introduction to many notables,

but none proved so valuable as the one to Melchior Grimm. He arranged to

have the Mozarts received by Mme. de Pompadour, by the royal family,

finally by Louis XV and Queen Marie Leszczinska. Now the most lordly

homes were opened to the visitors, private and public concerts went off well,

and Grimm wrote enthusiastically to his clientele:

True miracles are rare, but how wonderful it is when we have the opportu-

nity to see one! A Salzburg Kapellmeister by the name of Mozart has just come

here with two of the prettiest children in the world. His daughter, aged eleven,

plays the piano in the most brilliant fashion, performs the longest and most

difficult pieces with astounding precision. Her brother, who will be seven next

February, is such an extraordinary phenomenon that you can hardly believe

what you see with your own eyes. . . . His hands are hardly big enough to

take a sixth. . . . He improvises for an hour, yielding himself to the inspiration

of his genius, with a wealth of delightful ideas. . . . The most consummate

Kapellmeister cannot possibly have so deep a knowledge of harmony and mod-

ulation as this child. ... It is nothing for him to decipher whatever you put

before him. He writes and composes with marvelous ease, and does not find it

necessary to go to the piano and look for his chords. I wrote out a minuet for

him and asked him to put a bass to it. He seized a pen, and without going to

the piano he wrote the bass. . . . The child will turn my head if I listen to him

much more. . . . What a pity that so little is understood of music in this coun-

try! 6

After many triumphs in Paris the family departed for Calais (April 10,

1764). In London they were received by George III. For four hours, on May

19, before King and court, Wolfgang played Handel and Bach and other

masters at sight; he accompanied Queen Charlotte's singing, and improvised

a new melody to the bass of a Handel aria. Johann Christian Bach, who had

settled in London in 1762, placed the boy on his knee and played a sonata

with him, each playing a bar in turn, "with so much precision that no one

would have suspected two performers." 7 Bach began a fugue, Wolfgang

pursued it, again as if the two geniuses were one. Thereafter, for several

years, Mozart's compositions showed the influence of Johann Christian Bach.

On June 5 the children gave a concert which gladdened Leopold with a

hundred guineas net. But the father was afflicted with severe inflammation

of the throat, and the family retired to Chelsea for seven weeks' rest, during

which Wolfgang, now eight, composed two symphonies (K. 16 and 19).

CHAP.XV) MOZART 385

On July 24, 1765, they left London for Holland, but at Lille both father

and son took sick, and the tour was halted for a month, though Archbishop

von Schrattenbach had long ago called for Leopold's return. They reached

The Hague on September 1 1 , but on the next day Marianna fell ill in her

turn, and soon worsened so that on October 2 1 she received the last sacra-

ment. On September 30 Wolfgang gave a concert without his sister's aid.

She had scarcely recovered when he was seized with a fever, and the family

had to live in costly idleness till January, 1766. On January 29 and February

26 they gave concerts at Amsterdam; now for the first time a Mozart sym-

phony (K. 22) was publicly performed. During these months the boy com-

posed furiously. In May they returned to Paris, where much of their baggage

had been left; Grimm secured comfortable lodgings for them; they again

performed at Versailles and in public; not till July 9 did they tear themselves

away from the fascinating capital.

They dallied at Dijon as guests of the Prince de Conde; they spent four

weeks at Lyons, three at Geneva, one in Lausanne, another in Bern, two in

Zurich, twelve days at Donaueschingen; then brief stops at Biberach, Ulm,

and Augsburg; a longer stay at Munich, where Wolfgang again took sick.

At last, toward the end of November, 1766, after an absence of three and a

half years, the family regained Salzburg. The old Archbishop forgave them,

and they could now appreciate the comforts of home. All seemed well, but

Mozart was never quite healthy again.

II. ADOLESCENCE: 1 766-77

Leopold was an unrelenting taskmaster. He put his son through a hard

course of instruction in counterpoint, thorough bass, and such other elements

of composition as had come down to him from German and Italian music.

When the Archbishop heard that Wolfgang composed, he wondered was

not the father co-operating. To settle the question he invited the boy to stay

with him for a week; he isolated him from all outside help, gave him paper,

pencil, and harpsichord, and bade him compose part of an oratorio on the

First Commandment. At the close of the week Mozart presented the result;

the Archbishop was told that it merited praise; he commissioned his Konzert-

meister, Michael (brother of Joseph) Haydn, to compose a second part, and

his organist to compose a third; the whole was performed at the archiepis-

copal court on March 12, 1767, and was judged worthy of repetition on

April 2. Mozart's part is now included as No. 35 in KochePs catalogue. *

Learning that the Archduchess Maria Josepha was soon to marry King

Ferdinand of Naples, Leopold thought the ceremonies to be held at the Im-

perial court would offer a new opportunity for his children. On September

1 1, 1767, the family left for Vienna. They were admitted to the court, with

* This was originally^ issued at Leipzig in 1862 as Chronologisch-thematisches V erzeichniss

s'dmmtlicher Tonwerke W. A. Mozart s. We use the revision by Alfred Einstein in Mozart,

His Character and His Work (London, 1957), 473-83.

386 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XV

the result that both Wolfgang and Marianna caught smallpox from the bride.

The unhappy parents took their prodigies to Olmutz in Moravia, where

Count Podstatsky gave them shelter and care. Mozart was blind for nine

days. On January 10, 1768, the family was back in Vienna; both the Empress

and Joseph II received them cordially, but the court was mourning the death

of the bride, and concerts were out of the question.

After a long and unprofitable absence the family returned to Salzburg

(January 5, 1769). Mozart continued his studies with his father, but toward

the end of the year Leopold decided that he had taught the boy all that he

could, and that what Wolfgang needed now was acquaintance with the musi-

cal life of Italy. Having secured letters of introduction to Italian maestri

from Johann Hasse and others, father and son set out on December 1 3, 1769,

leaving Marianna and mother to keep a footing in Salzburg. On the next eve-

ning Mozart gave a concert at Innsbruck; he played at sight an unfamiliar

concerto placed before him as a test of his skill; the local press acclaimed his

"extraordinary musical attainments." 8 At Milan they met Sammartini, Hasse,

and Piccini, and Count von Firmian secured for Wolfgang a commission for

an opera; this meant a hundred ducats for the family coffers. At Bologna

they heard the still marvelous voice of Farinelli, who had returned from his

triumphs in Spain, and they arranged with Padre Martini that Wolfgang

should return to take the tests for the coveted diploma of the Accademia

Filarmonica. At Florence, at the court of the Grand Duke Leopold, Mozart

played the harpsichord to Nardini's violin. Then father and son hurried on

to Rome for the Holy Week music.

They arrived on April n, 1770, in a storm of thunder and lightning, so

that Leopold could report that they had been "received like grand people

with a discharge of artillery." 9 They were just in time to go to the Sistine

Chapel and hear the "Miserere" of Gregorio Allegri, which was sung there

annually. Copies of this famous chorale, written for four, five, or nine parts,

were hard to get; Mozart listened to it twice and wrote it out from memory.

They stayed four weeks in Rome, giving concerts in the homes of the civil

or ecclesiastical nobility. On May 8 they undertook the journey to Naples;

robbers made the road perilous; the Mozarts traveled with four Augustinian

monks to secure divine protection or an emergency viaticum. Naples held

them for a full month, for the aristocracy, from Tanucci downward, invited

them to soirees and placed lordly equipages at their disposal. When Wolf-

gang played at the Conservatorio della Pieta the superstitious audience

ascribed his prowess to some magic in the ring he wore; they were amazed

when, having discarded the ring, he played as brilliantly as before.

After enjoying Rome again they crossed the Apennines to worship the

Virgin in her Santa Casa at Loretto; then they turned north to spend three

months at Bologna. Almost daily Mozart received instruction from Padre

Martini in the arcana of composition. Then he took the test for admission

to the Accademia Filarmonica: he was given a piece of Gregorian plain

chant, to which, while he was shut up alone in a room, he was required to

add three upper parts in stile osservato—stnct traditional style. He failed, but

CHAP.XV) MOZART 387

the good padre corrected his work, and the revised form was accepted by

the jury "in view of the special circumstances"— presumably Mozart's youth.

On October 18 father and son were in Milan. There Wolfgang had his

first triumph as a composer, but after hard work and much tribulation. The

subject for his commissioned opera was Mitridate, re di Ponto; the libretto

was taken from Racine. The fourteen-year-old youth toiled so hard in com-

posing, playing, and rewriting that his fingers ached; his enthusiasm became

a fever, and his father had to restrict his hours of work and cool his agitation

with an occasional walk. Mozart felt that this, his first opera seria, was a far

more critical test than that antiquarian trial at Bologna; his career as an oper-

atic composer might depend upon the outcome. Now, though not much in-

clined to piety, he begged his mother and sister to pray for the success of

this venture, "so that we may all live happily together again." 10 At last, when

he was near exhaustion with rehearsals, the opera was presented to the public

(December 26, 1770); the composer conducted, and his triumph was com-

plete. Every important aria was received with wild applause, some with cries

of "Evviva il maestro! Evviva il maestrino!" The opera was repeated twenty

times. "We see by this," wrote the proud and pious father, "how the power

of God works in us when we do not bury the talents that He has graciously

bestowed upon us." 11

Now they could go home with their heads high. On March 28, 177 1, they

reached Salzburg. They had hardly arrived when they received a request

from Count von Firmian, in the name of the Empress, that Wolfgang write

a serenata or cantata, and come to Milan in October to conduct it as part of

the ceremonies that were to celebrate the marriage of Archduke Ferdinand

to the Princess of Modena. Archbishop Sigismund consented to another ab-

sence of Leopold from his duties; and on August 1 3 pater et films set out

again for Italy. Arrived in Milan, they found that Hasse was there, prepar-

ing an opera for the same ceremonies; perhaps without intending it so, the

managers had arranged a battle of genius between the most renowned living

composer of Italian opera, who was in his seventy-third year, and the fifteen-

year-old lad who had barely tried his operatic wings. Hasse's Ruggiero was

performed to great applause on October 16. On the next day Mozart's can-

tata, Ascanio in Alba, was sung under his baton, and "the applause was

extraordinary." "I am sorry," wrote Leopold to his wife, "that Wolfgang's

serenata should have so entirely eclipsed Hasse's opera." 12 Hasse was gen-

erous; he joined in the praise of Mozart, and made a famous prophecy:

"Questo ragazzo ci fard dimenticar tutti" (This boy will throw us all into

oblivion). 13

Father and son returned to Salzburg (December 11, 1 77 1 ) . Five days later

the good Sigismund died. His successor as archbishop, Hieronymus von

Paula, Count von Colloredo, was a man of intellectual culture, an admirer of

Rousseau and Voltaire, an enlightened despot eager to carry out the reforms

that Joseph II was preparing. But even more than Joseph he was despotic as

well as enlightened, demanding discipline and obedience, and intolerant of

opposition. For his ceremonial installation on April 29, 1772, he asked noth-

388 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XV

ing less than an opera from Mozart. The now famous youth responded hast-

ily with // sogno di Scipione (The Dream of Scipio) ; it served its turn and is

forgotten. Colloredo forgave it, and appointed Wolfgang concertmaster with

a yearly salary of 150 florins. The youth busied himself for some months

with composing symphonies, quartets, and religious music, but also he

worked on an opera, Lucio Silk, which Milan had ordered for 1773.

By November 4, 1772, Leopold and his moneymaker were again in the

Lombard capital, and soon Wolf was laboring to find compromises between

his musical ideas and the caprices and capacities of the singers. The prima

donna began by being imperious and hard to satisfy; the maestrino was pa-

tient with her; she ended by loving him, and declared herself "enchanted by

the incomparable way Mozart had served her." 14 The premiere (February

26, 1772) was not so certain a success as Mitridate two years before; the

tenor fell ill during rehearsals, and had to be replaced by a singer with no

stage experience; nevertheless the opera bore nineteen repetitions. The music

was difficult; the arias were strung too high with passion; perhaps some strain

of Germany's Sturm und Drang had made here an incongruous entry into

Italian opera. 15 In exchange, Mozart brought back with him the bel canto

clarity of Italian song, and his naturally happy spirit was further brightened

by Italian skies and plein-air life. He learned in Italy that opera buff a, as he

heard it in the works of Piccini and Paisiello, could be high art; he studied

the form, and in Figaro and Don Giovanni he perfected it. To his alert mind

and ears every experience was education.

March 13, 1773, saw pere et fils again in Salzburg. The new Archbishop

was not as tolerant of their long absences as Sigismund had been. He saw no

reason for rewarding Leopold with promotion, and treated Wolfgang as

merely one of his household retinue. He expected the Mozarts to supply his

choir and his orchestra with music prompt, new, and good; and for two years

they labored to satisfy him. But Leopold wondered how he could support

his family without additional tours, and Wolfgang, accustomed to applause,

could not adjust himself to being a musical servant. Besides, he wanted to

write operas, and Salzburg had too small a stage, too small a choir, orchestra,

and audience, to let the bright fledgling flap his expanding wings.

The clouds broke for a while when Elector Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria

commissioned Mozart to write an opera buff a for the Munich Carnival of

1775, and secured the Archbishop's consent to a leave of absence for the

composer and his father. They left Salzburg on December 6, 1774. Wolf-

gang suffered from the severe cold, which brought on a toothache more

severe than either music or philosophy could mitigate. But the premiere of

La finta giardiniera (The Pretended Garden Girl), January 13, 1775, led

Christian Schubart, a prominent composer, to predict: "If Mozart does not

turn out to be a hothouse plant [too rapidly developed by intensive domestic

care], he will undoubtedly be one of the greatest composers that ever

lived." 16 His head swirling with success, Mozart returned to Salzburg to

serve what he felt to be an unworthy vassalage.

The Archbishop ordered a music drama to celebrate the expected visit of

CHAP.XV) MOZART 389

Maria Theresa's youngest son, the Archduke Maximilian; Mozart took an

old libretto by Metastasio and composed // re pastor e (The Shepherd King).

It was performed on April 23, 1775. The story is silly, the music is excellent;

excerpts from it still show up in the concert repertoire. Meanwhile Mozart

was pouring forth sonatas, symphonies, concertos, serenades, Masses; and

some of the compositions of these unhappy years— e.g., the Piano Concerto in

E Flat (K. 271) and the Serenade in B (K. 250)— are among his enduring

masterpieces. The Archbishop, however, told him that he knew nothing of

the composer's art, and should go to study at the Naples Conservatory. 17

Unable to bear the situation longer, Leopold asked permission to take his

son on a tour; Colloredo refused, saying he would not have members of his

staff go on "begging expeditions." When Leopold asked again the Arch-

bishop dismissed him and his son from their employment. Wolfgang re-

joiced, but his father was frightened at the prospect of being flung, aged

fifty-six, upon the indiscriminate world. The Archbishop relented and re-

instated him, but would not hear of any absence from his work. Who now

would go with Wolfgang upon the extensive foray that had been planned?

Mozart was twenty-one, just the age for sexual adventure and marital im-

prisonment; more than ever he needed guidance. So it was decided that his

mother should accompany him. Marianna, trying to forget that she too had

been a genius, remained to give her father the most loving care. On Septem-

ber 23, 1777, mother and son left Salzburg to conquer Germany and France.

III. MUSIC AND MARRIAGE: 1 777-78

From Munich, on September 26, Mozart wrote to his father a paean of

liberation: "I am in my very best spirits, for my head has been as light as a

feather ever since I got away from all that humbug; and what is more, I have

become fatter." 18 That letter must have crossed one from Leopold, whose

emotion may remind us again that the events of history were written upon

human flesh:

After you both had left, I walked up our steps very wearily, and threw my-

self down on a chair. When we said good-by I made great efforts to retain my-

self in order not to make our parting too painful, and in the rush and flurry I

forgot to give my son a father's blessing. I ran to the window and sent my

blessing after you, but I did not see you. . . . Nannerl wept bitterly. . . . She

and I send greetings to Mamma, and we kiss you and her millions of times. 19

Munich taught Wolfgang that he was no longer a prodigy, but just one

musician in a land where the supply of composers and performers was out-

running the demand. He had hoped to secure a good place in the Elector's

musical retinue, but all places were filled. Mother and son passed on to Augs-

burg, where they wore themselves out with visiting, at Leopold's urging,

the friends of Leopold's youth; but the survivors were now mostly fat and

stodgy, and Wolfgang found no interest in them except with a merry cousin,

Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, whom he was to immortalize with obscenities.

39° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

More to his purpose was Johann Andreas Stein, maker of pianofortes; here

for the first time Mozart, who had hitherto used the harpsichord, began to

appreciate the possibilities of the new instrument; by the time he reached

Paris he had made his transition to the piano. At a concert in Augsburg he

played both the piano and the violin, to great applause but little profit.

On October 26 mother and son moved on to Mannheim. There Mozart en-

joyed the company and stimulus of skilled musicians, but the Elector Karl

Theodor could find no opening for him, and rewarded his performance at

court with only a gold watch. Mozart wrote to his father: "Ten carolins

would have suited me better. . . . What one needs on a journey is money;

and, let me tell you, I now have five watches. ... I am seriously thinking

of having a watch pocket on each leg of my trousers; when I visit some great

lord I shall wear both watches, ... so that it will not occur to him to give

me another." 20 Leopold advised him to hurry on to Paris, where Grimm and

Mme. d'fipinay would help him; but Wolfgang persuaded his mother that

the trip would be too arduous for her in the winter months. Assuming that

they were soon leaving for Paris, Leopold warned Wolfgang to beware of

the women and the musicians there, and reminded him that he was now the

financial hope of the family. Leopold had gone into debt for seven hundred

gulden; he was taking pupils in his old age,

and that, too, in a town where this heavy work is wretchedly paid. . . . Our

future depends upon your abundant good sense. ... I know that you love me,

not merely as your father, but also as your truest and surest friend; and that

you understand and realize that our happiness and unhappiness, and, what is

more, my long life or my speedy death, are, . . . apart from God, in your

hands. If I have read you aright, I have nothing but joy to expect from you,

and this alone must console me when I am robbed by your absence of a father's

delight in hearing you, seeing you, and folding you in my arms. . . . From my

heart I give you my paternal blessing. 21

To one of Leopold's letters (February 9, 1778) "Nannerl," now twenty-six,

dowerless and facing spinsterhood, added a note that rounds out the picture

of this loving family:

Papa never leaves me room enough to write to Mamma and yourself. ... I

beg her not to forget me. ... I wish you a pleasant journey to Paris, and the

best of health. I do hope, however, that I shall be able to embrace you soon.

God alone knows when that will happen. We are both longing for you to make

your fortune, for that, I know for certain, will mean happiness for us all. I kiss

Mamma's hands and embrace you, and trust that you will always remember us

and think of us. But you must do so only when you have time, say for a quarter

of an hour when you are neither composing nor teaching. 22

It was in this mood of great expectations and loving trust that Leopold re-

ceived a letter written by Wolfgang on February 4, announcing the arrival

of Cupid. Among the minor musicians at Mannheim was Fridolin Weber,

who was blessed and burdened with a wife, five daughters, and a son. Frau

Weber was casting nets to snare husbands, especially for the oldest daughter,

Josefa, nineteen and nervously nubile. Mozart, however, fancied Aloysia,

sixteen, whose angelic voice and swelling charms made her a young musi-

CHAP.XV) MOZART 391

cian's dream. He hardly noticed Constanze, fourteen, who was to be his wife.

For Aloysia he composed some of his tenderest songs. When she sang them

he forgot his own ambitions, and thought of accompanying her— and Josefa

and their father— to Italy, where she could get vocal instruction and operatic

opportunities, while he would help to support them by giving concerts and

writing operas. All this the brave young lover explained to his father:

I have become so fond of this unfortunate family that my dearest wish is to

make them happy. . . . My advice is that they should go to Italy. So now I

should like you to write to our good friend Lugiati, and the sooner the better,

and inquire what are the highest terms given to a prima donna in Verona. . . .

As far as Aloysia's singing is concerned, I would wager my life that she will

bring me renown. ... If our plan succeeds, we— Herr Weber, his two daugh-

ters, and I— will have the honor of visiting my dear sister for a fortnight on our

way through Salzburg. ... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for fifty

zecchini ($650?), if only in order that she may make her name. . . . The eldest

daughter will be very useful to us, for we could have our own menage, as she

can cook. Apropos, you must not be too much surprised when you learn that I

have only forty-two gulden left out of seventy-seven. This is merely the result

of my delight at being again in the company of honest and like-minded peo-

ple. . . .

Send me an answer soon. Do not forget how much I desire to write operas. I

envy anyone who is composing one. I could really weep for vexation when I

hear ... an aria. But Italian, not German; seria, not buff a! ... I have now

written all that is weighing on my heart. My mother is quite satisfied with my

ideas. . . . The thought of helping a poor family, without injury to myself, de-

lights my very soul. I kiss your hands a thousand times and remain until death

your most obedient son. 23

Leopold replied on February 1 1 :

My dear son! I have read your letter of the 4th with amazement and horror.

. . . For the whole night I have been unable to sleep. . . . Merciful God! . . .

Those happy moments are gone when, as a child or a boy, you never went to

bed without standing on a chair and singing to me, . . . and kissing me again

and again on the tip of my nose, and telling me that when I grew old you would

put me in a glass case and protect me from every breath of air, so that you

might always have me with you and honor me. Listen to me, therefore, in pa-

tience! . . .

He went on to say that he had hoped Wolfgang would defer marriage until

he had made a secure place for himself in the musical world; then he would

get a good wife, bring up a fine family, help his parents and his sister. But

now, infatuated with a young siren, this son forgets his parents, and thinks

only of following a girl to Italy, as part of her entourage. What incredible

nonsense!

Off with you to Paris! and that soon! Find your place among great people.

Aut Caesar aut nihil! . . . From Paris the name and fame of a man of great

talent resounds through the whole world. There the nobility treat men of

genius with the greatest deference, esteem, and courtesy; there you will see a

refined manner of life, which forms an astonishing contrast to the coarseness

of our German courtiers and their ladies; and there you may become proficient

in the French tongue. 24

392 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XV

Mozart answered humbly that he had not taken very seriously the plan to

escort the Webers to Italy. He said a tearful goodbye to the Webers, and

promised to see them on his way home. On March 14, 1778, he and his

mother set off in the public coach for Paris.

iv. in paris: 1778

They arrived on March 23, just in time to be engulfed in the apotheosis of

Voltaire. They took simple lodgings, and Mozart ran about seeking commis-

sions. Grimm and Mme d'£pinay bestirred themselves to draw some atten-

tion to the youth whom Paris had acclaimed as a prodigy fourteen years

before. Versailles offered him the post of court organist at two thousand

livres for six months' service per year; Leopold advised him to take it; Grimm

opposed; Mozart refused it as too poorly paid, and perhaps as uncongenial to

his talent. Many homes were opened to him if he would play the piano for a

meal, but even to get to those homes required an expensive cab ride through

muddy streets. One noble, the Due de Guines, looked promising; for him

and his daughter Mozart composed the glorious Concerto in C for flute and

harp (K. 299), and he gave the young lady lessons in composition at a good

fee; but soon she married, and the Duke paid only three louis d'or ($75?)

for a concerto that should have laid Paris at Mozart's feet. For the first time

in his life Mozart lost courage. "I am tolerably well," he wrote to his father

on May 29, "but I often wonder whether life is worth living." His spirits re-

vived when Le Gros, director of the Concerts Spirituels, engaged him to

write a symphony (K. 297). It was performed on June 18 with success.

Then, on July 3, his mother died. She had begun by enjoying her vacation

from Salzburg and housewifery; soon she was longing to return to her home

and the daily tasks and contacts that had given substance and significance to

her life. The nine days' trip to Paris in a jolting coach and jarring company

and drenching rain had broken her health; and the failure of her son to find

a berth in Paris had cast a gloom over her usually buoyant spirit. Day after

day she had sat solitary amid strange surroundings and unintelligible words,

while her son went to pupils, concerts, operas . . . Now, seeing her fade

quietly away, Mozart spent the last weeks at her side, caring for her tenderly,

and hardly believing that she could die so soon.

Mme. d'£pinay offered him a room in her home with Grimm, a place at

her table, and the use of her piano. He did not quite harmonize with Grimm

so near; Grimm idolized Voltaire, Mozart despised him, and was shocked

at the assumption of his hosts and their friends that Christianity was a myth

useful in social control. Grimm wanted him to accept small commissions as a

road to larger ones, and to play gratis for influential families; Mozart felt

that such a procedure would sap his strength, which he preferred to give to

composing. Grimm thought him indolent, and so informed Leopold, who

agreed. 25 The situation was made worse by Mozart's repeated borrowing

from Grimm, to a total of fifteen louis dor ($375?). Grimm told him that

repayment could be indefinitely postponed; it was. 28

CHAP.XV) MOZART 393

The situation was resolved by a letter (August 31, 1778) from Mozart

pere that Archbishop Colloredo had offered to make the father Kapellmeister

if Wolfgang would serve as organist and concertmaster, each to receive five

hundred florins per year; moreover, "the Archbishop has declared himself

prepared to let you travel where you will if you want to write an opera." As

irresistible bait Leopold added that Aloysia Weber would probably be in-

vited to join the Salzburg choir, in which case "she must stay with us." 27

A4ozart replied (September 11): "When I read your letter I trembled with

joy, for I felt myself already in your embrace. It is true, as you will acknowl-

edge, that it is not much of a prospect for me; but when I look forward to

seeing you, and embracing my very dear sister, I think of no other prospect."

On September 26 he took the coach to Nancy. At Strasbourg he earned

a few louis d'or with arduous concerts to almost empty houses. He dallied at

A4annheim, hoping to be appointed conductor of German opera; this too

failed. He went on to Munich, dreaming of Aloysia Weber. But she had

found a place in the Elector's choir, perhaps in his heart; she received Mozart

with a calm that showed no desire to be his bride. He composed and sang a

bitter song, and resigned himself to Salzburg.

V. SALZBURG AND VIENNA: 1 779-82

He reached home in mid-January, and was welcomed with festivities sad-

dened by the now keenly realized death of the mother. Soon he was in har-

ness as organist and concertmaster, and soon he was fretting. He later re-

called:

In Salzburg work was a burden to me, and I could hardly ever settle down to

it. Why? Because I was never happy. ... In Salzburg— for me at least— there

is not a farthing's worth of entertainment. I refuse to associate with a good

many people there— and most of the others do not think me good enough. Be-

sides, there is no stimulus for my talent. When I play, or when any of my com-

positions is performed, it is just as if the audience were all tables and chairs. If

only there were even a tolerably good theater in Salzburg! 28

He longed to write operas, and gladly accepted the request of Elector

Karl Theodor to compose one for the next Munich festival. He began work

on Idomeneo, re di Creta, in October, 1 780; in November he went to Munich

for rehearsals; on January 29, 1781, the opera was produced with success,

despite its unusual length. Mozart remained six weeks more in A4unich, relish-

ing its social life, until a summons came from Archbishop Colloredo to join

him in Vienna. There he had the pleasure of living in the same palace with

his employer, but he ate with the servants. "The two valets sit at the head of

the table, and I have the honor to be placed above the cooks." 29 This was the

custom of the time in the homes of the nobility; Haydn bore it with silent

resentment, /Mozart rebelled against it ever more audibly. He was pleased to

have his music and his talent displayed in the homes of the Archbishop's

friends, but he fumed when Colloredo refused most of his requests to let him

394 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XV

accept outside engagements that might have brought him added income and

wider fame. "When I think of leaving Vienna without at least a thousand

florins in my pocket, my heart sinks within me." 30

He made up his mind to quit Colloredo's service. On May 2, 1781, he

went to live as a lodger with the Webers, who had moved to Vienna. When

the Archbishop sent him instructions to return to Salzburg, he replied that

he could not leave till May 12. An interview followed, in which the Arch-

bishop (as Mozart reported to his father)

called me the most opprobrious names— oh, I really cannot bring myself to write

you all! At last, when my blood was boiling, I could hold out no longer, and

said, "Then your Serene Highness is not satisfied with me?" "What! do you

mean to threaten me, you rascal, you villain? There is the door; I will have

nothing more to do with such a wretched fellow!" At last I said, "Neither will

I with you." "Then be off!" As I went I said, "Let it be so, then; tomorrow you

shall hear from me by letter." Tell me, dear father, should I not have had to say

this sooner or later? . . .

Write to me privately that you are pleased— for indeed you may be so— and

find fault with me heartily in public, so that no blame may attach to you. But

if the Archbishop offers you the least impertinence, come to me at once in

Vienna. We can all three live on my earnings. 31

Leopold was plunged into another crisis. His own position seemed im-

periled, and it was not for some time yet that he would receive reassurances

from Colloredo. He was alarmed at the news that his son was rooming with

the Webers. The father of that family was now dead; Aloysia had married

the actor Joseph Lange; but the widow had another daughter, Constanze,

waiting for a husband. Was this another blind alley for Wolfgang? Leopold

begged him to apologize to the Archbishop, and come home. Mozart now

for the first time refused to obey his father. "To please you, my dear father,

I would renounce my happiness, my health, and life itself, but my honor

comes before all with me, and so it must be with you. My dearest, best of

fathers, demand of me what you will, only not that." 32 On June 2 he sent

Leopold thirty ducats as an earnest of future aid.

Three times he went to the Archbishop's Vienna residence to submit his

formal resignation. Colloredo's chamberlain refused to transmit it, and on the

third occasion he "threw him [Mozart] out of the antechamber and gave

him a kick in the behind"— so Mozart described the scene in his letter of

June 9. 33 To appease his father he left the Weber home and took other lodg-

ings. He assured Leopold that he had only "had fun" with Constanze: "if I

had to marry all those with whom I have jested, I should have two hundred

wives at least." 34 However, on December 15 he informed his father that Con-

stanze was so sweet, so simple and domestic, that he wished to marry her.

You are horrified at the idea? But I entreat you, dearest, most beloved father,

to listen to me. . . . The voice of nature speaks as loud in me as in others-

louder, perhaps, than in many a big, strong lout of a fellow. I simply cannot live

as most young men do in these days. In the first place, I have too much religion;

in the second place I have too much love of my neighbor and too high a feel-

ing of honor to seduce an innocent girl; and in the third place I have too much

CHAP.XV) MOZART 395

horror and disgust, too much dread and fear of diseases, and too much care for

my health, to fool about with whores. So I can swear that I have never had

relations of that sort with any woman. ... I stake my life on the truth of what

I have told you. . . .

But who is the object of my love? . . . Surely not one of the Webers? Yes,

. . . Constanze, . . . the kindest-hearted, the cleverest, the best of them all.

. . . Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife. ... All that I desire

is to have a small assured income (of which, thank God, I have good hopes),

and then I shall never cease entreating you to allow me to save this poor girl

and to make myself and her— and, if I may say so, all of us— very happy. For

surely you are happy when I am? And you are to enjoy one half of my fixed

income. . . . Please take pity on your son! 35

Leopold did not know what to believe. He used every effort to dissuade

his almost penniless son from marriage, but Mozart felt that after twenty-six

years of filial obedience it was time for him to have his own way, to lead his

own life. Through seven months he pleaded in vain for parental consent;

finally, on August 4, 1782, he married without it. On August 5 it came. Now

Mozart was free to discover how far one could support a family by compos-

ing the most varied assemblage of superb music in man's history.

VI. THE COMPOSER

He had reason for confidence, for he had already won reputation as a

pianist, had acquired some paying pupils, and had produced successful operas.

Just a month after leaving the Archbishop's service he received from Count

Orsini-Rosenberg, director of court theaters for Joseph II, a commission to

compose a Singspiel—a spoken drama interspersed with songs. The result was

presented on July 16, 1782, in the presence of the Emperor, as Die Entfiih-

rung aus dem Serail {The Abduction pom the Seraglio). A hostile clique

condemned it, but nearly all the audience was won over by the vivacious

arias that adorned an aged theme: a Christian beauty captured by pirates,

sold to a Turkish harem, and rescued by her Christian lover after incredible

intrigues. Joseph II commented on the music, "Too beautiful for our ears,

my dear Mozart, and far too many notes"; to which the reckless composer

answered, "Exactly as many, your Majesty, as are needed." 36 The operetta

was repeated thirty-three times in Vienna in its first six years. Gluck praised

it, though he perceived that it quite ignored his "reform" of the opera; he

admired the instrumental compositions of the impetuous youth, and invited

him to dinner.

Mozart took inspiration rather from Italy than from Germany; he pre-

ferred melody and simple harmony to complex and erudite polyphony. Only

in his final decade did he feel strong influences from Handel and Johann

Sebastian Bach. In 1782 he joined the musicians who, under the aegis of

Baron Gottfried van Swieten, gave concerts, chiefly of Handel and Bach, in

the National Library or in van Swieten's home. In 1774 the Baron had

brought from Berlin to Vienna The Art of the Fugue, The Well-tempered

Clavichord, and other works of J. S. Bach. He deprecated Italian music as

39<5 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

amateurish; real music, he thought, required strict attention to fugue, po-

lyphony, and counterpoint. Mozart, though he never allowed structure, rule,

or form to be an end in itself, profited from van Swieten's counsel and con-

certs, and carefully studied Handel and the major Bachs. After 1787 he

conducted Handel concerts in Vienna, and took some liberties in adjusting

Handel's scores to Viennese orchestras. In his later instrumental music he

wedded Italian melody and German polyphony in a harmonious union.

A glance at Kochel's catalogue of Mozart's compositions is an impressive

experience. Here are listed 626 works— the largest body of music left by any

composer except Haydn, all produced in a life of thirty-six years, and in-

cluding masterpieces in every form: 77 sonatas, 8 trios, 29 quartets, 5 quin-

tets, 51 concertos, 96 divertimenti, dances or serenades, 52 symphonies, 90

arias or songs, 60 religious compositions, 22 operas. If some of those near

Mozart thought him indolent, it may have been because they did not quite

realize that the labor of the spirit can exhaust the flesh, and that without in-

tervals of lethargy genius would slip into insanity. His father told him, "Pro-

crastination is your besetting sin," 37 and in many cases Mozart waited till

almost the last hour before putting to paper the music that had been taking

form in his head. "I am, so to speak, steeped in music," he said; "it is in my

mind the whole day, and I love to dream, to study, to reflect on it." 38 His

wife reported, "He was always strumming upon something— his hat, his

watch fob, the table, the chair, as if they were the keyboard." 39 Sometimes

he carried on this silent composition even while apparently listening to an

opera. He kept scraps of music paper in his pockets, or, when traveling, in

the side pocket of the carriage; on these he made fragmentary notes; usually

he carried a leather case to receive such obiter scripta. When he was ready

to compose he sat not at a keyboard but at a table; he "wrote music like let-

ters," said Constanze, "and never tried a movement until it was finished." Or

he would sit at the piano for hours on end, improvising, leaving his musical

fancy seemingly free, but half unconsciously subjecting it to some recog-

nizable structure— sonata form, aria, fugue . . . Musicians enjoyed Mozart's

improvisations because they could detect, with esoteric delight, the order

hidden behind the apparently whimsical strains. Niemetschek said in old age,

"If I dared to pray for one more earthly joy it would be that I might hear

Mozart improvise." 40

Mozart could play almost any music at sight, because he had seen certain

combinations and sequences of notes so often that he could read them as one

note, and his habituated fingers played them as one musical phrase or idea,

just as a practiced reader takes in a line as if it were a word, or a paragraph

as if it were a line. Mozart's trained memory was allied with this capacity to

perceive aggregates, to feel the logic that compelled the part to indicate the

whole. In later years he could play almost any one of his concertos by heart.

At Prague he wrote the drum and trumpet parts of the second finale in Don

Giovanni without having at hand the score for the other instruments; he had

kept that complex music in his memory. Once he wrote down only the violin

part of a sonata for piano and violin; the next day, without a rehearsal, Re-

CHAP.XV) MOZART 397

gina Strinasacchi played the violin part at a concert, and Mozart played the

piano part purely from the memory of his conception, without having had

time to set it down upon paper. 41 Probably no other man in history was ever

so absorbed in music.

We think of Mozart's sonatas as rather slight and playful, hardly in a class

with Beethoven's passionate and powerful pronouncements in the same genre;

this may be because they were written for pupils of limited legerdemain, or

for harpsichords of minor resonance, or for a piano that had no means of con-

tinuing a note. 42 The favorite of our childhood, the Sonata in A (K. 331),

with its engaging "Minuetto" and its "Rondo alia Turca," is still (1778) in

harpsichord style.

Mozart did not at first care for chamber music, but in 1773 he came upon

Haydn's early quartets, envied their contrapuntal excellence, and imitated

them with something short of success in the six quartets that he composed in

that year. In 1781 Haydn published another series; Mozart was again stirred

to rivalry, and issued (1782-85) six quartets (K. 387, 421, 428, 458, 464-65)

that are now universally recognized as among the supreme examples of their

kind. Performers complained that they were abominably difficult; critics es-

pecially condemned the sixth for its clashing dissonances and its turbulent

mixture of major and minor keys. An Italian musician returned the score to

the publisher as obviously full of gross mistakes, and one purchaser, when he

found that the discords were deliberate, tore up the sheets in a rage. Yet it

was after playing the fourth, fifth, and sixth of these quartets with Mozart,

Dittersdorf, and others that Haydn said to Leopold Mozart, "Before God,

and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known

to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most

profound knowledge of composition." 43 When the six quartets were pub-

lished (1785) Mozart dedicated them to Haydn with a letter that shines out

even in a brilliant correspondence:

A father who had decided to send his sons out into the great world thought

it his duty to entrust them to the protection and guidance of a man who was

very celebrated at the time, and who, moreover, happened to be his best friend.

In like manner I send my six sons to you, most celebrated and very dear friend.

They are indeed the fruit of a long and laborious study; but the hope which

many friends have given me that their toil will be in some degree rewarded,

. . . flatters me with the thought that these children may one day prove a source

of consolation to me.

During your last stay in this capital you . . . expressed to me your approval

of these compositions. Your good opinion encourages me to offer them to you,

and leads me to hope that you will not consider them unworthy of your favor.

Please then receive them kindly, and be to them a father, guide, and friend.

From this moment I surrender to you all my rights over them. I entreat you,

however, to be indulgent to those faults which may have escaped their com-

poser's partial eye, and, in spite of them, to continue your generous friendship

towards one who so highly appreciates it. 44

Mozart had a particular fondness for his quintets. He thought his Quintet

in E Flat for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon (K. 452) "the best

398 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

work I have ever composed/' 45 but that was before he had written his major

operas. "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" was originally (1787) composed as a quin-

tet, but it was soon taken up by small orchestras, and is now classed among

Mozart's serenades. He valued, as "rather carefully" written, the Serenade in

E Flat (K. 375), with which he himself was serenaded one evening in 1781,

but musicians rank above it the Serenade in C Minor (K. 388)— which is as

somber as the Pathetiques of Beethoven and Tchaikowsky.

Having discovered the orchestra, Mozart turned it to a hundred experi-

ments: overtures, nocturnes, suites, cassations (variants of the suite), dances,

divertimenti. The last were usually intended to serve a passing purpose rather

than to echo in the halls of history; they are not to be weighed but enjoyed.

Even so, Divertimenti No. 15 (K. 287) and No. 17 (K. 334) are substantial

works, more delightful than most of the symphonies.

For his symphonies Mozart, like Haydn, used a "band" of thirty-five

pieces; hence they fail to convey their full worth to ears accustomed to the

multiplied sonority of twentieth-century orchestras. Pundits praise No. 25

(K. 183) as "impassioned" 46 and "a miracle of impetuous expression," 47 but

the earliest Mozart symphony of note is the Paris (No. 31, K. 297), which

Mozart adapted to the French taste for refinement and charm. The Haffner

Symphony (No. 35, K. 385) was originally composed in haste to grace the

festivities planned by Sigismund Haffner, former burgomaster of Salzburg,

for the wedding of his daughter (1782); Mozart later added parts for flute

and clarinet, and presented it at Vienna (March 3, 1783) at a concert at-

tended by Joseph II. The Emperor "gave me great applause," and twenty-

five ducats. 48 In this and No. 36, written at Linz in November, 1783, Mozart

still kept to the form and stamp— always pleasant, seldom profound— that

Haydn had laid upon the symphony; in both cases the slow movement comes

most gratefully to aging ears. We must speak more respectfully of No. 38,

which Mozart composed for Prague in 1786; here the first movement pleases

the musician with its structural logic and contrapuntal skill, and the andante,

adding contemplation to melody, has stirred experts to speak of its "undying

perfection" 49 and its "enchanted world." 50

By common consent the greatest of Mozart's symphonies are the three

that he poured forth in a torrent of inspiration in the summer of 1788— at a

time of depressing poverty and mounting debts. The first is dated June 26,

the second July 25, the third August 10— three births in three months. So far

as we know, none of them was ever played in his lifetime; he never heard

them; they remained in that mysterious realm in which black spots on a sheet

were for the composer "ditties of no sound"— notes and harmonies heard only

by the mind. The third, misnamed the Jupiter (No. 41 in C, K. 551), is

usually accounted the best; Schumann equated it with Shakespeare and

Beethoven, 51 but it does not lend itself to amateur appreciation. No. 40 in

G Minor (K. 550) begins with a vigor that presages the Eroica, and it pro-

ceeds to a development that has led commentators— struggling in vain to ex-

press music in words— to read into it a Lear or Macbeth of personal tragedy; 52

yet to simpler ears it seems almost naively joyous. To the same ears the most

CHAP.XV) MOZART 399

satisfying of the symphonies is No. 39 in E Flat (K. 543) . It is not burdened

with woe, nor is it tortured with technique; it is melody and harmony flow-

ing in a placid stream; it is such music as might please the gods on a rural

holiday from celestial chores.

The sinfonia concert ante is 2. cross between the symphony and the con-

certo; it grew out of the concerto grosso by opposing two or more instru-

ments to the orchestra in a dialogue between melody and accompaniment.

Mozart raised the form to its apex in the Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat (K.

364) for flute, violin, and viola (1779); this is as fine as any of his sym-

phonies.

All the concertos are delightful, for in them the solo passages help the un-

trained ear to follow themes and strains that in the symphonies may be ob-

scured by technical elaboration or contrapuntal play. Debate is interesting,

and all the more so when, as in the form of the concerto as proposed by

Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach and developed by Mozart, the contest is of one

against all— solo contra tutti. Since Mozart relished such harmonious con-

frontations, he wrote most of his concertos for the piano, for in these he

played the solo part himself, usually adding, toward the end of the first move-

ment, a cadenza that allowed him to frolic and shine as a virtuoso.

He first touched excellence in this form with Piano Concerto No. 9 in

E Flat (K. 271). The earliest of his still popular concertos is No. 20 in D

Minor (K. 466), famous for its almost childlike "Romanze"; in this slow

movement, we might say, the Romantic movement in music began. Whether

through laziness or distractions, Mozart did not complete the score of this

concerto till an hour before the time appointed for its performance (Febru-

ary 1 1, 1785); copies reached the players just before the recital, allowing no

time for practice or rehearsal; yet the performance went so well, and Mozart

played his part so expertly, that many repetitions were called for in the en-

suing years.

Mozart offered noble music for other solo instruments. Perhaps the melo-

dious Concerto in A for clarinet (K. 622) comes over the air more frequently

than any other of his compositions. In his merry youth (1774) he had great

fun with a Concerto in B Flat for the bassoon. The horn concertos were

bubbles gaily blown upon the score— which sometimes bore humorous direc-

tions for the performer: "da bravo!" "coraggio!" "bestial " "ohime!"—ioi

Mozart was familiar with more wind instruments than one. Then the Con-

certo for Flute and Harp (K. 299) lifts us to the stars.

In 1775 Mozart, aged nineteen, composed five violin concertos, all of

them beautiful, three of them still in living repertoires. No. 3 in G (K. 216)

has an adagio that sent an Einstein into ecstasy, 53 No. 4 in D is one of music's

masterpieces, and No. 5 in A has an andante cantabile that rivals the miracle

of a woman's voice.

Little wonder that Mozart produced, especially in the years of his love for

Aloysia Weber, some of the most delectable airs in all the literature of song.

They are not full-blown lieder, such as found their ripe development in

Schubert and Brahms; they are simpler and shorter, often adorning silly

400 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

words; but when Mozart found a real poem, like Goethe's "Das Veilchen,"

he rose to the peak of the form (K. 476). A violet, trembling with joy at the

approach of a pretty shepherdess, thinks how sweet it would be to lie upon

her breast; but as she walks along, gaily singing, she crushes it unseen under

her foot. 54 Was this a memory of the cruel Aloysia? For her Mozart had

written one of his tenderest arias— "Non so d'onde viene." But he attached

little importance to such isolated songs; he kept the secret resources of his vocal

art for the arias in his operas and his compositions for the Church.

His religious music was rarely heard outside Salzburg, for the Catholic

Church frowned upon the operatic qualities apparently expected by the

archbishops whom Mozart served. High Mass in Salzburg was sung to an

accompaniment of organ, strings, trumpets, trombones, and drums, and pas-

sages of merriment broke out in the most solemn places in Mozart's Masses.

Yet the religious spirit must surely be moved by the motets "Adoramus Te"

(K. 327) and "Santa Maria Mater Dei" (K. 341b); and the most hauntingly

beautiful strain in all of Mozart appears in the "Laudate Dominum" in the

fourth of the "Vesperae solennes di confessore" (K. 339) . 55

All in all, Mozart's music is the voice of an aristocratic age that had not

heard the Bastille fall, and of a Catholic culture undisturbed in its faith, free

to enjoy the charms of life without the restless search to find new content

for an emptied dream. In its lighter aspects this music harmonizes with the

elegance of rococo ornament, with the pictorial romances of Watteau, the

calmly floating Olympus of Tiepolo, the smiles and robes and pottery of

Mme. de Pompadour. It is, by and large, serene music, touched now and

then by suffering and anger, but raising neither a humble prayer nor a Pro-

methean challenge to the gods. Mozart began his work in childhood, and a

childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned upon him that the

Requiem which he was writing for a stranger was his own.

VII. SPIRIT AND FLESH

Mozart was not physically attractive. He was short, his head was too large

for his body, his nose was too large for his face, his upper lip overlapped the

lower, his bushy brows darkened his restless eyes; only his abounding blond

hair impressed. In later years he sought to offset the shortcomings of his

stature and features by splendid dress: shirt of lace, blue coat with tails, gold

buttons, knee breeches, and silver buckles on his shoes. 56 Only when he

performed at the piano was his physique forgotten; then his eyes burned with

intense concentration, and every muscle of his body subordinated itself to

the play of his mind and hands.

As a boy he was modest, good-natured, trustful, loving; but his early fame,

and an almost daily diet of applause, developed some faults in his character.

"My son," Leopold warned him (1778), "you are hot-tempered and impul-

sive, . . . much too ready to retort in a bantering tone to the first chal-

CHAP.XV) MOZART

4OI

lenge." 57 Mozart admitted this and more. "If anyone offends me," he wrote,

"I must revenge myself; unless I revenge myself with interest, I consider I

have only repaid my enemy and not corrected him." 58 And he yielded to no

one in appreciating his genius. "Prince Kaunitz told the Archduke that peo-

ple like myself come into the world only once in a hundred years." 59

A sense of humor prevailed in his letters, and appeared in his music, till

his dying year. Usually it was harmlessly playful; sometimes it became sharp

satire; occasionally, in youth, it ran to obscenity. He passed through a stage

of fascination with defecation. When he was twenty-one he wrote to his

cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart nineteen letters of incredible vulgarity. 60

A letter to his mother celebrated flatulence in prose and verse. 61 She was not

squeamish, for in a letter to her husband she counseled him, "Keep well, my

love; into your mouth your arse you'll shove." 62 Apparently such funda-

mental phrases were standard procedure in the Mozart family and their cir-

cle; they were probably an heirloom from a lustier generation. They did not

prevent Mozart from writing to his parents and his sister letters of the tender-

est affection.

He was, on his own word, a virgin bridegroom. Was he a faithful hus-

band? His wife accused him of "servant gallantries." 63 According to his de-

voted biographer:

Rumor was busy among the public and in the press, and magnified solitary

instances of weakness on his part into distinguishing features of his character.

He was credited with intrigues with every pupil he had, and with every singer

for whom he wrote a song; it was considered witty to designate him as the nat-

ural prototype of Don Juan. 64

The frequent confinements of his wife, her repeated trips to health resorts,

his own absence from her on concert tours, his sensitivity to all the charms of

women, his association with bewitching singers and uninhibited actresses,

created a situation in which some adventure was well-nigh inevitable. Con-

stanze related how he had confessed such an "indiscretion" to her, and why

she forgave him— "he was so good it was impossible to be angry with him";

but her sister reports violent outbreaks now and then. 65 Mozart seems to

have been very fond of his wife; he bore patiently her deficiencies as a house-

wife, and wrote to her, during their separations, letters of almost childish

endearment. 66

He was not a success socially. He judged some rivals harshly, "dementi's

sonatas are worthless. . . . He is a charlatan, like all Italians." 67 "Yesterday

I was fortunate enough to hear Herr Freyhold play a concerto of his own

wretched composition. I found very little to admire." 68 On the other hand,

he praised the quartets recently published by Ignaz Pleyel, though they com-

peted with his own. His father reproached him for getting himself disliked

because of his arrogance; 69 Mozart denied the arrogance, but it cannot be

denied that he had very few friends among Viennese musicians, and that his

proud spirit raised obstacles to his advancement. In Austria and Germany

a musician's fate depended upon the aristocracy, and Mozart refused to give

precedence to birth over genius.

402 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

He suffered another handicap in having never gone to school or univer-

sity. His father had allowed him no time for general education. Mozart had

among his few books some volumes of poetry by Gessner, Wieland, and

Gellert, but he seems to have used them chiefly as a source of possible libret-

tos. He cared little for art or literature. He was in Paris when Voltaire died;

he could not understand why the city had made such a fuss over the old

rebel's visit and death. "That godless rascal Voltaire," he wrote to his father,

"has pegged out like a dog, like a beast! That is his reward." 70 He imbibed

some anticlericalism from his Masonic confreres, but he took part, candle in

hand, in a Corpus Christi procession. 71

Perhaps it was the simplicity of his mind that made him lovable despite

his faults. Those who were not his rivals in music found him sociable, cheer-

ful, kind, and usually serene. "All my life," his sister-in-law Sophie Weber

wrote, "I have never seen Mozart in a temper, still less angry"; 72 but there

were contrary reports. He was the life of many a party, always willing to

play, always ready for a joke or a game. He liked bowling, billiards, and the

dance; at times he seemed prouder of his dancing than of his music. 73 If he

was not generous to his competitors, he was almost thoughtlessly liberal to

everybody else. Beggars were seldom repulsed by him. A piano tuner re-

peatedly borrowed from him and failed to repay. Mozart talked frankly

about his high regard for money, but that was because he had so little time

or inclination to think of it that he often had none. Thrown upon his own

moneymaking resources, and called upon to support a family by competing

with a hundred jealous musicians, he neglected his finances, allowed his earn-

ings to slip unheeded through his fingers, and fell into despondent destitu-

tion just when, in his last three symphonies and his last three operas, he was

writing the finest music of his time.

VIII. APOGEE: 1782-87

He began his free-lance career in Vienna with heartening success. He was

well paid for the lessons he gave; each of his concerts in 1782-84 brought

him some five hundred gulden. 74 Only seventy of his compositions were

published in his lifetime, but he was reasonably paid. The publisher Artarin

gave him a hundred ducats for the six quartets dedicated to Haydn— a hand-

some sum for those days. 75 Another publisher, Hoffmeister, lost money by

printing Mozart's piano quartets in G Minor (K. 478) and E Flat (K. 493);

the musicians found them too difficult (they are now considered easy), and

Hoffmeister warned Mozart, "Write more popularly, or else I can neither

print nor pay for anything more of yours." 76 Mozart received the usual fee,

a hundred ducats, for his operas; for Don Giovanni he was paid 225 ducats

plus the proceeds of a benefit concert. He had in these years "a very good

income." 77 His father, visiting him in 1785, reported: "If my son has no

debts to pay, I think that he can now lodge two thousand gulden in the

bank." 78

CHAP.XV) MOZART 403

But Mozart did not put those gulden in the bank. He spent them on cur-

rent expenses, entertainment, good clothes, and in meeting the needs of

mendicant friends. For these and more obscure reasons he fell into debt at

the height of the demand for his services and his compositions. As early as

February 15, 1783, he wrote to the Baroness von Waldstadten that one of

his creditors had threatened to "bring an action against me. ... At the

moment I cannot pay— not even half the sum! ... I entreat your Lady-

ship, for Heaven's sake, to help me keep my honor and my good name." 79

He was temporarily relieved by the success of a concert given for his benefit

in March, which brought in sixteen hundred gulden. Out of this he sent a

gift to his father.

In May, 1783, he moved to a good house at No. 244 in the Judenplatz.

There his first child was born (June 17)— "a fine, sturdy boy, as round as a

ball." This event, and the gift, softened paternal resentment of the marriage;

Wolfgang and Constanze took advantage of the thaw to visit Leopold and

Nannerl in Salzburg, leaving the infant in Vienna with a nurse. On August

19 the child died. Its parents remained in Salzburg, for Mozart had arranged

for the performance there of his Mass in C Minor, in which Constanze was

to sing. Wolfgang and Constanze outstayed their welcome, for Leopold had

to count every penny, and thought three months were too long a visit. On

their way back to Vienna they stopped at Linz, where Count von Thun

commissioned Mozart to write a symphony.

Home again, he worked hard, teaching composing, performing, conduct-

ing. In two months (February 26 to April 3, 1784) he gave three concerts

and played in nineteen others. 80 In December he joined one of the seven

Freemason lodges in Vienna; he enjoyed their meetings, and readily con-

sented to write music for their festivals. In February his father, mollified by

the birth of another son to Constanze, came for a long visit. And in 1785

Lorenzo da Ponte entered Mozart's life.

This Lorenzo had almost as adventurous a life as his friend Casanova. He

had begun life in 1749 as the son of a tanner in the ghetto of Ceneda. When

he was fourteen Emmanuele Conegliano and two brothers were taken by

their father to Lorenzo da Ponte, bishop of Ceneda, to be baptized into the

Catholic Church. Emmanuele adopted the bishop's name, became a priest,

had an affair at Venice with a married woman, was banished, moved to

Dresden, then to Vienna, and was engaged in 1783 as poet and librettist to

the National Theater.

Mozart suggested to him the possibility of making an opera libretto out

of Beaumarchais' recent comedy Le Manage de Figaro. This had been trans-

lated into German with a view to staging it in Vienna, but Joseph II forbade

it as containing revolutionary sentiments that would scandalize his court.

Could the Emperor, who was himself quite a revolutionary, be persuaded to

allow an opera judiciously abstracted from the play? Ponte admired Mozart's

music; he was to speak of him later as one who, "although endowed with

talents surpassing those of any composer, past, present, or future, had .not

been able as yet, owing to the intrigues of his enemies, to utilize his divine

404 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

genius in Vienna." 81 He eliminated the radical overtones of Beaumarchais'

drama, and transformed the remainder into an Italian libretto rivaling the

best of Metastasio.

The story of Le nozze di Figaro was the old maze of disguises, surprises,

and recognitions, and the clever hoodwinking of masters by servants: all

familiar in comedy since Menander and Plautus. Mozart took readily to the

theme, and composed the music almost as fast as the libretto took form; both

were completed in six weeks. On April 29, 1786, Mozart wrote the overture;

on May 1 the premiere went off triumphantly. Part of the success may have

been due to the jovial, stentorian basso, Francesco Benucci, who sang the

part of Figaro; more must have been due to the vivacity and fitness of the

music, and to such arias as Cherubino's plaintive "Voi che sapete" and the

Countess' intense yet restrained appeal to the god of love in "Porgi amor."

So many encores were demanded that the performance took twice the usual

time; and at the end Mozart was repeatedly called to the stage.

The income from the production of Figaro in Vienna and Prague should

have kept Mozart solvent for a year had it not been for his extravagance, and

the illnesses and pregnancies of his wife. In April, 1787, they moved to a

less expensive house, Landstrasse 224. A month later Leopold died, leaving

his son a thousand gulden.

Prague commissioned another opera. Ponte suggested for a subject the

sexual escapades of Don Juan. Tirso de Molina had put the legendary Don

on the stage at Madrid in 1630 as El burlador de Sevilla {The Deceiver of

Seville) ; Moliere had told the story in Paris as Le Festin de pierre (The

Feast of Stone, 1665); Goldoni had presented it in Venice as Don Giovanni

Tenorio (1736); Vincente Righini had staged // convitato di pietra in Vienna

in 1777; an d at Venice, in this very year 1787, Giuseppe Gazzaniga had pro-

duced, under the same title, an opera from which Ponte stole many lines,

including the jaunty catalogue of Giovanni's sins.

The "greatest of all operas" (as Rossini called it) had its premiere at

Prague on October 29, 1787. Mozart and Constanze went up to the Bohemian

capital for the event; they were feted so fully that he deferred the composi-

tion of the overture till the eve of the premiere; then, at midnight, "after

spending the merriest evening imaginable," 82 he composed a piece which is

almost Wagnerian in foreshadowing the tragic and comic elements of the

play. The score reached the orchestra just in time for the performance. 83 The

Vienna Zeitung reported: "On Monday Kapellmeister Mozart's long-ex-

pected opera, Don Giovanni, was performed . . . Musicians and connois-

seurs are agreed that such a performance has never before been witnessed in

Prague. Herr Mozart himself conducted, and his appearance in the orchestra

was the signal for cheers, which were renewed at his exit." 84

On November 12 the happy couple were back in Vienna. Gluck died

three days later, and Joseph II appointed Mozart to succeed him as Kammer-

musikus— chamber musician— to the court. After much trouble with the

singers Don Giovanni was produced in Vienna on May 7, 1788, to scanty

applause. Mozart and Ponte made further alterations, but the opera never

attained in Vienna the success it had in Prague, Mannheim, Hamburg . . .

CHAP.XV) MOZART

405

A Berlin critic complained that the dramma giocoso was an offense against

morals, but he added: "If ever a nation might be proud of one of its children,

Germany may be proud of Mozart, the composer of this opera." 85 Nine years

later Goethe wrote to Schiller: "Your hopes for opera are richly fulfilled in

Don Giovanni"** and he mourned that Mozart had not lived to write the

music for Faust.

ix. nadir: 1788-90

The proceeds from Don Giovanni were soon used up, and Mozart's modest

salary hardly paid for food. He took some pupils, but teaching was an

exhausting, time-consuming task. He moved to cheaper quarters in suburban

Wahringerstrasse; debts multiplied nevertheless. He borrowed wherever he

could— chiefly from a kindly merchant and fellow Mason, Michael Puch-

berg. To him Mozart wrote in June, 1788:

I still owe you eight ducats. Apart from the fact that at the moment I am not

in a position to pay you back this sum, my confidence in you is so boundless

that I dare implore you to help me out with a hundred gulden until next week,

when my concerts in the Casino are to begin. By that time I shall certainly have

received my subscription money, and shall then be able quite easily to pay you

back 136 gulden with my warmest thanks. 87

Puchberg sent the hundred gulden. Encouraged, Mozart appealed to him

(June 17) for a loan of "one or two thousand gulden for a year or two at a

suitable rate of interest." He had left unpaid the arrears of rent at his

former home; the landlord threatened to have him jailed; Mozart borrowed

to pay him. Apparently Puchberg sent less than was asked, for the desperate

composer made further appeals in June and July. It was in those harassed

months that Mozart composed the three "Great Symphonies."

He welcomed an invitation from Prince Karl von Lichnowsky to ride with

him to Berlin. For that trip he borrowed a hundred gulden from Franz

Hofdemel. Prince and pauper left Vienna April 8, 1789. At Dresden Mozart

played before Elector Frederick Augustus, and received a hundred ducats.

At Leipzig he gave a public performance on Bach's organ, and was stirred

by the Thomasschule choir's singing of Bach's motet "Singet dem Herrn."

At Potsdam and Berlin (April 28 to May 28) he played for Frederick Wil-

liam II, and received a gift of seven hundred florins, with commissions for

six quartets and six sonatas. But his gains were spent with mysterious celerity;

an unverified rumor ascribed part of the outlet to a liaison with a Berlin

singer, Henriette Baronius. 88 On May 23 he wrote to Constanze: "As regards

my return, you will have to look forward to me more than to the money." 89

He reached home June 4, 1 789.

Constanze, pregnant again, needed doctors and medicines and an expensive

trip to take the waters at Baden-bei-Wien. Mozart again turned to Puchberg:

Great God! I would not wish my worst enemy to be in my present position.

If you, most beloved friend and brother [Mason] forsake me, we are altogether

lost— both my unfortunate and blameless self and my poor sick wife and chil-

406 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

dren. ... All depends . . . upon whether you will lend me another five hun-

dred gulden. Until my affairs are settled, I undertake to pay back ten gulden

a month; and then I shall pay back the whole sum. . . . Oh, God! I can hardly

bring myself to dispatch this letter, and yet I must!— For God's sake forgive me,

only forgive me! 90

Puchberg sent him 150 gulden, most of which went to pay Constanze's

bills at Baden. On November 16, at home, she gave birth to a daughter, who

died the same day. Joseph II helped by commissioning Mozart and Ponte to

write a dramma giocoso on an old theme (used by Marivaux in Le ]eu de

V amour et du hasard, 1730): two men disguise themselves to test the fidelity

of their fiancees; they find them pliable, but forgive them on the ground that

"cost fan tutte"— "so do all" women; thence the opera's name. It was hardly a

subject fit for Mozart's tragic mood (except that Constanze had flirted a bit

at Baden), but he provided for the clever and witty libretto music that is the

very embodiment of cleverness and wit; seldom has nonsense been so glori-

fied. It had a moderately successful premiere on January 26, 1790, and four

repetitions in a month, bringing Mozart a hundred ducats. Then Joseph II

died (February 20), and the Vienna theaters were closed till April 12.

Mozart hoped that the new Emperor would find work for him, but Leo-

pold II ignored him. He ignored Ponte too, who went off to England and

America, and ended (1838) as a teacher of Italian in what is now Columbia

University in New York. 91 Mozart made further appeals to Puchberg (De-

cember 29, 1789, January 20, February 20, April 1, 8, and 23, 1790), never in

vain, but seldom receiving all that he asked. Early in May he pleaded for six

hundred gulden to pay rent due; Puchberg sent a hundred. He confessed to

Puchberg on May 17, "I am obliged to resort to moneylenders"; in that letter

he numbered his pupils as only two, and asked his friend "to spread the news

that I am willing to give lessons." 92 However, he was too nervous and impa-

tient to be a good teacher. Sometimes he failed to keep appointments with

his pupils; sometimes he played billiards with them instead of giving a les-

son. 93 But when he found a student of promising talent he gave himself un-

reservedly; so he gladly and successfully taught Johann Hummel, who came

to him (1787) at the age of eight and became a famous pianist in the next

generation.

Serious illnesses added pains to Mozart's griefs. One physician diagnosed

his ailments as "excretory pyelitis with pyonephritis, latent focal lesions of

the kidneys, tending inescapably toward eventual total nephritic insuffi-

ciency" 94 — i.e., a disabling pus-forming inflammation of the kidneys. "I am

absolutely wretched today," he wrote to Puchberg on August 14, 1790. "I

could not sleep at all last night because of pain. . . . Picture to yourself my

condition— ill, and consumed with worries and anxieties. . . . Can you not

help me with a trifle? The smallest sum would be very welcome." Puchberg

sent him ten gulden.

Despite his physical condition Mozart undertook a desperate expedient to

support his family. Leopold II was to be crowned at Frankfurt October 9,

1790. Seventeen court musicians were in the Emperor's retinue, but Mozart

was not invited. He went nevertheless, accompanied by Franz Hofer, his

CHAP. XV) MOZART

407

violinist brother-in-law. To defray the expense he pawned the family's silver

plate. At Frankfurt on October 1 5 he played and conducted his Piano Con-

certo in D (K. 537), which he had composed three years before, but which

the whim of history has named the "Coronation Concerto"— hardly among

his best. "It was a splendid success," he wrote to his wife, "from the point

of view of honor and glory, but a failure as far as money was concerned." 95

He returned to Vienna having earned little more than his expenses. In No-

vember he moved to cheaper lodgings at Rauhensteingasse 70, where he was

to die.

x. requiem: 1 79 1

He was kept alive for another year by three commissions coming in

crowded succession. In May, 1791, Emanuel Schikaneder, who produced

German operas and plays in a suburban theater, offered him the sketch of a

libretto about a magic flute, and appealed to his brother Mason to provide

the music. Mozart agreed. When Constanze, pregnant once more, went to

Baden-bei-Wien in June, he accepted Schikaneder's invitation to spend his

days in a garden house near the theater, where he could compose Die Zau-

berflote under the manager's prodding. In the evenings he joined Schikaneder

in the night life of the town. "Folly and dissipation," Jahn tells us, "were the

inevitable accompaniments of such an existence, and these soon reached the

public ear, . . . covering his name for several months with an amount of

obloquy beyond what he deserved." 96 Amid these relaxations Mozart found

time to drive to Baden (eleven miles from Vienna) to visit his wife, who on

July 26 gave birth to Wolfgang Mozart II.

In that month a request came from an anonymous stranger, offering a hun-

dred ducats for a Requiem Mass to be secretly composed and to be trans-

mitted to him without any public acknowledgment of its authorship. Mozart

turned from the merriment of The Magic Flute to the theme of death, when,

in August, he received a commission from Prague for an opera, La clemenza

di Tito, to be performed there at the approaching coronation of Leopold II

as king of Bohemia. He had barely a month to set Metastasio's old libretto to

new music. He worked at it in shaky coaches and noisy inns while journey-

ing to Prague with his wife. The opera was sung on September 6 to mild

applause. Mozart had tears in his eyes as he left the one city that had be-

friended him, and as he realized that the Emperor had witnessed his failure.

His only consolations were the two hundred ducats' fee and the later news

that the repetition of the opera at Prague on September 30 was a complete

success.

On that day he conducted from the piano the premiere of Die Zauberflote.

The story was in part a fairy tale, in part an exaltation of Masonic initiation

ritual. Mozart gave his best art to the composition, though he kept most of

the arias to a simple melodic line congenial to his middle-class audience. He

lavished coloratura pyrotechnics on the Queen of the Night, but privately

he laughed at coloratura singing as "cut-up noodles." 97 The March of the

408 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XV

Priests, opening the second act, is Masonic music; the aria of the high priest,

"In diesen heiligen Hallen"— "In these holy halls we know nothing of re-

venge, and love for their fellow men is the guiding rule of the initiated"— is

the claim of Freemasonry to have restored that brotherhood of man which

Christianity had once preached. (Goethe compared The Magic Flute to

Part II of Faust, which also preached brotherhood; and, himself a Mason, he

spoke of the opera as having "a higher meaning which will not escape the

initiated." 98 The first performance had an uncertain success, and the critics

were shocked by the mixture of fugues and fun; 99 soon, however, The Magic

Flute became the most popular of Mozart's operas, and of all operas before

Wagner and Verdi; it was repeated a hundred times within fourteen months

of its premiere.

This last triumph came when Mozart already felt the hand of death touch-

ing him. As if to accentuate the irony, a group of Hungarian nobles now

assured him an annual subscription of a thousand florins, and an Amsterdam

publisher offered him a still larger sum for the exclusive right to print some

of his work. In September he received an invitation from Ponte to come to

London; he replied: "I would gladly follow your advice, but how can I?

. . . My condition tells me that my hour strikes; I am about to give up my

life. The end has come before I could prove my talent. Yet life was beau-

tiful." 100

In his final months he gave his failing strength to the Requiem. For several

weeks he worked at it feverishly. When his wife sought to turn him to less

gloomy concerns he told her, "I am writing this Requiem for myself; it will

serve for my funeral service." 101 He composed the Kyrie and parts of the

Dies Irae, the Tuba Mirum, the Rex Tremendae, the Recordare, the Confu-

tatis, the Lacrimosa, the Domine, and the Hostias; these fragments were left

unrevised, and reveal the disordered state of a mind facing collapse. Franz

Xaver Siissmayr completed the Requiem remarkably well.

In November Mozart's hands and feet began to swell painfully, and partial

paralysis set in. He had to take to his bed. On those evenings when The

Magic Flute was performed he laid his watch beside him and followed each

act in imagination, sometimes humming the arias. On his last day he asked for

the score of the Requiem; he sang the alto part, Mine. Schack sang the so-

prano, Franz Hofer the tenor, Herr Gerl the bass; when they came to the

Lacrimosa, Mozart wept. He predicted that he would die that night. A priest

administered the last sacrament. Toward evening Mozart lost consciousness,

but shortly after midnight he opened his eyes; then he turned his face to the

wall, and soon suffered no more (December 5, 1791).

Neither his wife nor his friends could give him a fitting funeral. The body

was blessed in St. Stephen's Church on December 6, and was buried in the

churchyard of St. Mark's. No grave had been bought; the corpse was low-

ered into a common vault made to receive fifteen or twenty paupers. No

cross or stone marked the place, and when, a few days later, the widow

came there to pray, no one could tell her the spot that covered Mozart's

remains.

BOOK IV

ISLAM AND THE SLAVIC EAST

1715-96

CHAPTER XVI

Islam

1715-96

I. THE TURKS

IN the eighteenth century Christianity was caught between Voltaire and

Mohammed— between the Enlightenment and Islam. Though the Mos-

lem world had lost military power since Sobieski's repulse of the Turks from

Vienna in 1683, it still dominated Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt,

Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, the Crimea, South Russia, Bes-

sarabia, Moldavia, Wallachia (Romania), Bulgaria, Serbia (Yugoslavia),

Montenegro, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Greece, Crete, the Aegean Isles, and Tur-

key. All these except Persia were part of the immense empire of the Otto-

manTurks. On the Dalmatian coast they touched the Adriatic and faced the

Papal States; on the Bosporus they controlled the sole naval outlet from the

Black Sea, and could at will block the Russians from the Mediterranean.

Crossing from Hungarian territory into Moslem lands, one would at first

note little difference between Christian and Mohammedan civilization. Here

too the simple and pious poor tilled the soil under the overlordship of the

clever and skeptical rich. But beyond the Bosporus the economic landscape

changed: hardly fifteen per cent of the terrain had come under cultivation;

the rest was desert, or mountains permitting only mining or pasturage; there

the characteristic figure was the Bedouin, black and parched with the sun,

and wrapping himself complexly against the sand and the heat. The coastal

cities or incidental towns hummed with trade and handicrafts, but life

seemed more leisurely than in Christian centers; women stayed at home, or

walked in stately dignity under their burdens and behind their veils, and the

men moved unhurried along the streets. Industry was nearly all manual,

and the craftsman's shop was a frontal annex to his home; he smoked and

chatted as he worked, and sometimes shared his coffee (qahveh) and his pipe

with a lingering customer.

By and large the common Turk was so satisfied with his civilization that he

had not for centuries tolerated any significant change. As in Roman Catholic

doctrine, tradition was as sacred as sacred scripture. Religion was more

powerful and pervasive in Islam than in Christendom; the Koran was the

law as well as the gospel, and the theologians were the official interpreters of

the law. The pilgrimage to Mecca annually led its moving drama over the

desert and along the dusty roads. But in the upper classes the rationalist

heresies voiced by the eighth-century Mutazilites, and continued through

the Age of Faith by Moslem poets and philosophers, received a wide and

secret assent. From Constantinople in 1 7 1 9 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

reported:

411

412 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVI

The effendis (that is to say, the learned) . . . have no more faith in the

inspiration of Mohammed than in the infallibility of the pope. They make a

frank profession of deism among themselves, or to those they can trust, and

never speak of their law [the dictates of the Koran and the traditions] but as a

politic institution, fit now to be observed by wise men, however at first intro-

duced by politicians and enthusiasts. 1

The Sunni and Shi'a sects divided Islam, as Catholicism and Protestantism

divided Western Christianity; and in the eighteenth century a new sect was

founded by Mohammad ibn-Abd-al-Wahab, a sheik of the Nejd— that cen-

tral plateau which we now know as Saudi Arabia. The Wahabites were the

Puritans of Islam: they condemned the worship of saints, destroyed the

tombs and shrines of saints and martyrs, denounced the wearing of silk and

the use of tobacco, and defended the right of each individual to interpret the

Koran for himself. 2 In all the sects superstitions were popular; religious

impostors and bogus miracles found ready credence; and by most Moslems

the realm of magic was considered as real as the world of sand and sun. 3

Education was dominated by the clergy, who held that good citizens or

loyal tribesmen could be more surely made by disciplining character than

by liberating intellect. The clergy had won the battle against the scientists,

philosophers, and historians who had prospered in medieval Islam; astronomy

had relapsed into astrology, chemistry into alchemy, medicine into magic,

history into myth. But in many Moslems a wordless wisdom took the place

of education and erudition. As the wise and eloquent Doughty wrote: "The

Arabs and Turks, whose books are men's faces, . . . and whose glosses are

the common saws and thousand old sapient proverbs of their oriental world,

touch near the truth of human things. They are old men in policy in their

youth, and have little later to unlearn." 4 Wortley Montagu, in a letter of

17 1 7, assured Addison that "the men of consideration among the Turks ap-

pear in their conversation as civilized as any I have met with in Italy." 5 Wis-

dom has no nationality.

Poets have always abounded in Islam. The awesome deserts, the encom-

passing sky, and the infinity of stars on cloudless nights stirred the imagina-

tion, as well as religious faith, with the sense of mystery, and the blood

idealized with impeded desire the charms that women wisely enhanced with

concealment and modesty. In 1774 Sir William Jones, in Commentaries on

Arabic Poetry, revealed to alert minds in Western Europe the popularity,

elegance, and passion of poetry in Islam. Greatest of Ottoman poets in the

eighteenth century was Nedim, who sang in the time of Sultan Ahmed III

(1703-30):

Love distraught, my heart and soul are gone for naught, . . .

All my patience and endurance spent. . . .

Once I bared her lovely bosom, whereupon did calm and peace

Forth from my breast take flight. . . .

Paynim [pagan] mole, paynim tresses, paynim eyes, . . .

All her cruel beauty's kingdom forms a heathenness, 1 swear.

Kisses on her neck and kisses on her bosom promised she.

Woe is me, for now the Paynim rues the troth she pledged while-ere.

CHAP.XVl) ISLAM 413

Such the winsome grace wherewith she showed her locks from 'neath her fez;

Whatsoever wight beheld her, gazed bewildered then and there. . . .

Ruthless, 'tis for thee that all men weep and wail in drear despair. . . .

Sweeter than all the perfumes, brighter than all dyes, thy dainty frame;

One would deem some fragrant rose had in her bosom nurtured thee. . . .

Holding in one hand a rose, in one a cup, thou comest, sweet;

Ah, I know not which of these— rose, cup, or thee— to take to me.

Lo, there springs a jetting fountain from the Stream of Life, methought,

When thou madest me that lovely lissom shape of thine to see. 6

Women had to take what advantage they could of their lissom shapes, for

once their lilies and roses faded they were lost in the recesses of the harim.

This term was applied not only to the wives and concubines of the hus-

band but to all the females of his household. Seclusion was still their lot in

the eighteenth century; they might go out, but (after 1754) they had then to

veil all but their alluring eyes, and no male but father, brother, husband and

son might enter their apartment. Even after death this separation of the

sexes was supposed to remain: saved women would have their own Elysium,

apart from the men; saved men would go to another Paradise, where they

would be entertained by houris— heavenly nymphs periodically revirginized.

Adultery by women was severely punished, and was rare; Arabs swore by

"the honor of my women" as their securest oath 7 Lady Mary reported that

the Turkish women whom she had been allowed to meet did not resent

their separation from the men. Some of them she thought as fair in face and

figure, and as refined in manners, as "our most celebrated English beauties." 8

Admitted to one of the many public baths, she discovered that women could

be beautiful even without clothing. She was especially charmed by the ladies

in a bathing establishment at Adrianople. They invited her to undress and

bathe with them; she begged to be excused. "They being all so earnest in

persuading me, I was at last forced to open my shirt and show them my

stays; which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked

up in that machine that it was not in my power to open it; which contrivance

they attributed to my husband"; and one of them remarked, "See how cruelly

the poor English ladies are used by their husbands." 9

The Turks were proud of their public baths, and generally considered

themselves a more cleanly people than the Christian infidels. Many persons

in the upper and middle classes went to a "Turkish bath" twice a week,

more of them once a week. There they sat in a steam room until they had

sweated abundantly; then an attendant manipulated every joint, massaged

the flesh, rubbed it with a coarse cloth, washed it; we do not hear much

about arthritis in Turkey. Some other diseases flourished, especially ophthal-

mia; sand and flies infected the eyes. But the Turks, as we have seen, taught

Europe to inoculate for smallpox.

They had no doubt that their civilization excelled that of Christendom.

They admitted that slavery was more widespread in Islam, but they saw no

real difference between slaves in Turkey and serfs or servants in the Chris-

tian world, and Lady Mary and etymology agreed with them. They were

as zealous as we in the love and care of flowers; they too, as in Constan-

4H ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVI

tinople under Ahmed III (1703-30), had feverish competitions in cultivating

tulips; apparently it was the Turks who, through Venice and Vienna and

the Netherlands, introduced to Christian Europe the tulip, the Oriental

hyacinth, and the garden ranunculus, as well as the chestnut and mimosa

trees. 10

Art in Turkey was now in decline, as in most Christian lands. The Turks

considered themselves superior in pottery, textiles, rugs, decorations, even in

architecture. They had inherited the art of endowing abstract painting with

logic, communication, and significance. They gloried in the splendor of

their faience (as on the Fountain of Ahmed III in Constantinople), the un-

fading gleam of their tiles, the strength and delicacy of their weaves, the

sturdy brilliance of their rugs. Anatolia and the Caucasus were noted in this

age for the lustrous pile and strict geometrical design of their carpets, es-

pecially of their prayer rugs, whose columns and pointed arches kept the

bent worshiper facing the mihrab that indicated, in each mosque, the direc-

tion of Mecca. And the Turks preferred their domed and tiled and mina-

retted mosques to the spires and arches and gloomy grandeur of Gothic

cathedrals. Even in this declining age they raised the majestic mosques of

Nuri-Osmanieh (1748) and Laleli-Jamissi (1765), and Ahmed III brought

the style of the Alhambra to the palace that he built in 1729. Constantinople,

despite its tangled streets and noisome slums, was probably the most impres-

sive, as well as the largest, of European capitals; its population of two mil-

lion souls 11 was double that of London, three times that of Paris, eight times

that of Rome. 12 When Lady Mary looked out upon the city and the port

from the palace of the British ambassador, she thought they constituted

"perhaps, all together, the most beautiful prospect in the world." 13

Over this Ottoman Empire, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic, reigned

the sultans of the decline. We have considered elsewhere 14 the causes of

that decline: the movement of Asia-bound West-European commerce

around Africa by sea instead of overland through Egypt or western Asia;

the destruction or neglect of the irrigation canals; the expansion of the em-

pire to distances too great for effective central rule; the consequent inde-

pendence of the pashas and the separatism of the provinces; the deterioration

of the central government through corruption, incompetence, and sloth;

the repeated rebellions of Janissaries repudiating the discipline that had made

them strong; the domination of life and thought by a fatalistic and unpro-

gressive religion; and the lassitude of sultans who preferred the arms of

women to those of war.

Ahmed III began his reign by allowing the Janissaries to dictate his choice

of a grand vizier. It was this vizier who, when he led 200,000 Turks against

the 38,000 troops of Peter the Great at the River Prut, accepted a bribe of

230,000 rubles to let the cornered Czar escape (July 21, 171 1). When Ven-

ice incited the Montenegrins to revolt, Turkey declared war against Venice

(17 15), and completed the conquest of Crete and Greece. When Austria

intervened, Turkey declared war against Austria (17 16); but Eugene of

Savoy defeated the Turks at Peterwardein, and compelled the Sultan, by the

CHAP.XVl) ISLAM 415

Treaty of Passarowitz (17 18), to evacuate Hungary, to cede Belgrade and

parts of Wallachia to Austria, and to surrender to Venice certain strong-

holds in Albania and Dalmatia. An attempt to balance these losses by raids

on Persia brought more reverses; a mob led by a bath attendant killed the

Vizier Ibrahim Pasha, and forced Ahmed to abdicate (1730).

His nephew, Mahmud I (r. 1730-54), renewed the struggle with the

West to determine by war the flow of taxes and the doctrines of theology.

One Turkish army took Ochakov and Kilburun from Russia, another recov-

ered Belgrade from Austria. But the military decline of Turkey was resumed

under Mustafa III (1757-74). In 1762 Bulgaria declared itself independent.

In 1769 Turkey opened war with Russia to prevent the spread of Russian

power in Poland; so began the long conflict in which the armies of Catherine

the Great inflicted fatal repulses upon the Turks. After Mustafa's death his

brother Abdul-Hamid I (1774-89) signed the humiliating Treaty of Ku-

chuk Kainarji (1774), which finished Turkish influence in Poland, South

Russia, Moldavia, and Wallachia, and Turkish control of the Black Sea.

Abdul-Hamid renewed the war in 1787, suffered disastrous routs, and died

of grief. Turkey had to wait for Kemal Pasha to end two centuries of chaos

and make it a modern state.

II. AFRICAN ISLAM

The Turks, after conquering Arabic Egypt (15 17), delegated its govern-

ment to pashas and viceroys. The Mamelukes, who had ruled Egypt since

1250, were allowed to retain local power as the beys of the twelve sanjaks

into which the country was divided. While the pashas lost their vigor in

luxury, the beys trained their soldiers to personal loyalty, and soon chal-

lenged the authority of the hated viceroys. The most enterprising of these

local rulers was 'Ali Bey, who in boyhood had been sold as a slave. In 1766

he deposed the pasha; in 1769 he declared Egypt independent. Feverish with

success, he led his Mameluke troops to the conquest of Arabia, captured

Mecca, and took the titles of Sultan of Egypt and Khakan of the Two Seas

(the Red and the Mediterranean). In 1771 he sent abu'l-Ahahab with

thirty thousand men to conquer Syria; abu'l-Ahahab conquered, but then

allied himself with the Porte, and led his army back into Egypt. 'Ali fled to

Acre, organized another army, met the forces of abu'l-Ahahab and the

Turks, fought till he was disabled by wounds, was captured, and died within

a week (1773). Egypt became again a province of the Ottoman Empire.

Beneath such oscillations of power and ecstasies of homicide the ships and

caravans of trade, the industry of craftsmen, the annual overflow of the Nile,

and the labor of fellaheen in the fertile mud, maintained in Egypt an econ-

omy whose profits went to a minority dowered by nature or circumstance

with ability or place. The toil and yield of fields and seas fed the cities— here,

above all, Alexandria, one of the greatest ports, and Cairo, one of the most

populous capitals, of the eighteenth-century world. The streets were narrow

4*6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVI

to obstruct the sun, and were made picturesque by latticed windows and

balconies from which the women of the harem could look unseen upon the

life below. The larger streets hummed with handicrafts that defied capitalis-

tic intrusion or machine production. In Islam every industry was an art, and

the quality of the product took the place of quantity. The poor made beau-

tiful things for the rich, but they never sold their pride.

Three hundred mosques supported the poor of Cairo with hope, and

adorned it with massive domes, shady porticos, and stately minarets. One

mosque, El Azhar, was also the mother university of Islam; to it came two or

three thousand students, from as far east as Malaysia and as far west as Mo-

rocco, to learn Koranic grammar, rhetoric, theology, ethics, and law. The

graduates of universities constituted the ulema, or body of scholars, from

whom were chosen the teachers and judges. It was a regimen made for a

rigorous orthodoxy in religion, morals, and politics.

So morals hardly changed from century to century. Puberty came earlier

than in the north; many girls married at twelve or thirteen, some at ten; to

be unmarried at sixteen was a disgrace. Only the rich could afford the polyg-

amy that Koranic law allowed. A cuckolded husband was not only per-

mitted by law, but was encouraged by public opinion, to put the offending

wife to death. 15 Islamic theology, like the Christian, considered woman a

main source of evil, which could be controlled only by her strict subordina-

tion. Children grew up in the discipline of the harem; they learned to love

their mother and to fear and honor their father; nearly all of them developed

self-restraint and courtesy. 16 Good manners prevailed in all classes, along

with a certain ease and grace of motion probably derived from the women,

who may have derived it from carrying burdens on their heads. The climate

forbade haste, and sanctioned indolence.

Polygamy did not prevent prostitution, for prostitutes could provide the

excitation that familiarity had allayed. The courtesans of Egypt specialized

in lascivious dances; some ancient monuments reveal the antiquity of this

lure. Every large town allotted to prostitutes a special quarter where they

might practice their arts without fear of the law. As in all civilizations,

women skilled in erotic dances were engaged to vibrate before male assem-

blies, and in some cases women also took pleasure in witnessing such per-

formances. 17

Music served both love and war; in either case it aroused attack and

soothed defeat. Professional musicians, of either sex, could be engaged to

provide entertainment. "I have heard the most celebrated musicians in

Cairo," said Edward Lane in 1833, "and have been more charmed with their

songs . . . than with any other music that I have ever enjoyed." 18 The fa-

vorite instrument was the kemengeh, a kind of emaciated viol, with two

strings of horsehair over a sounding box made of a cocoanut shell partly cut

open between center and top, and covered with fish skin tightly stretched.

The performer sat cross-legged, rested the pointed end of the instrument

upon the ground, and stroked the strings with a bow of horsehair and ash.

Or the artist sat with a large chanoon, or zither, on his lap, and plucked the

CHAP.XVl) ISLAM 417

strings with horn plectra attached to the forefingers. The ancient lute now

took the form of a guitar (the co'd). Add a flute, a mandolin, and a tambou-

rine, and the ensemble would provide an orchestra whose strains might suit

a civilized taste better than the primitive music that now agitates Occidental

gatherings.

The "Barbary States," or lands of the allegedly barbarous Berbers— Trip-

oli, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco— entered history in the eighteenth century

chiefly through the exploits of their corsairs or the assassination of their beys

or deys. These governments, by sending occasional "presents" to the sultans

at Constantinople, maintained virtual independence. The people lived pre-

dominantly by agriculture or piracy; the ransoms paid for Christian captives

were a substantial part of the national income; the corsair captains, however,

were mostly Christians. 19 The arts maintained a precarious existence, but the

Moroccan builders kept enough skill to blazon with radiant blue and green

tiles the lordly "Bab-Afonsur" that was added as a gateway in 1732 to the

immense seventeenth-century palace-mosque of Mulai Ismail at Meknes,

then the seat of the Moroccan sultans. Mulai Ismail, in a reign of fifty-five

years (1672-1727), established order, begot hundreds of children, and

thought his achievements warranted him in asking for his harem a daughter

of Louis XIV. 20 It is difficult for us to appreciate ways of life much different

from our own, but it is helpful to remember the remark of the Moroccan

traveler who, on returning from a visit to Europe, exclaimed, "What a com-

fort to be getting back to civilization!" 21

in. Persia: 1722-89

A Persian would have expressed similar relief on returning to his native

land after a sojourn in Christendom, or even in Ottoman Islam. Until the

fall of the Safavid dynasty (1736) an educated Persian would probably have

ranked Iranian civilization as superior to any contemporary culture except

possibly the Chinese. He would have deprecated Christianity as a reversion

to popular polytheism. He might have admitted the superiority of Christen-

dom in science, commerce, and war, but he would have preferred art to sci-

ence and handicrafts to mechanized industry.

The eighteenth was a bitter century for Persia. Conquered by Afghans

from the southeast, harassed by slave-gathering raids from the Uzbeks in the

northeast, attacked by Russian depredations in the north, repeatedly overrun

by vast Turkish armies in the west, impoverished by the taxgathering tyr-

anny of its own spectacular Nadir Shah, and dismembered by the brutal

conflict of rival families for the Persian throne— how could Iran continue,

in this turbulence, the great traditions of Persian literature and art?

In the sixteenth century the land now called Afghanistan was divided by

three governments: Kabul under Indian rule, Balkh under the Uzbeks, and

Herat and Kandahar under the Persians. In 1706-08 the Afghans of Kanda-

41 8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVI

har rose under Mir (Amir) Vais and expelled the Persians. His son Mir Mah-

mud invaded Persia, deposed the Safavid ruler Husein, and made himself

shah. Religion strengthened his arms, for the Afghans followed the Sunni,

or orthodox, form of Mohammedanism, and considered the Shi'a Persians

to be damned infidels. Mahmud put to death in hot blood three thousand of

Husein's bodyguard, three hundred Persian nobles, and some two hundred

children suspected of resenting the murder of their fathers. After a long rest

Mahmud in one day (February 7, 1725) slaughtered all the surviving mem-

bers of the royal family except Husein and two of his younger children.

Then Mahmud went insane, and was killed, aged twenty-seven, by his cou-

sin Ashraf (April 22, 1725), who proclaimed himself shah. So began the

bloodletting that devitalized Persia in that century.

Tahmasp, son of Husein, appealed to Russia and Turkey for help; they

responded by agreeing to partition Persia between them (1725). A Turkish

army entered Persia and took Hamadan, Kazvin, and Maragha, but was de-

feated by Ashraf near Kermanshah. The Turkish troops lacked fervor; why,

they asked, should they fight their fellow Sunnis, the Afghans, to restore the

heretical Shi'a Safavids? The Turks made peace with Ashraf, but retained

the provinces they had conquered (1727).

Ashraf now seemed secure, but a year later his usurped and alien power

was challenged by the rise of an obscure Persian who swept in a few years

through a military career as brilliant and bloody as any in history. Nadir Kuli

(i.e., "Slave of the Wonderful"— i.e., of Allah) was born in a tent in north-

eastern Iran (1686). He helped his father to tend their flocks of sheep and

goats; he had no schooling but a hard and adventurous life. When he was

eighteen, and had succeeded his dead father as head of the family, he and his

mother were carried off by Uzbek raiders to Khiva and were sold as slaves.

The mother died in bondage, but Nadir escaped, became the head of a rob-

ber band, captured Kalat, Nishapur, and Meshed, declared himself and these

cities loyal to Shah Tahmasp, and undertook to drive the Afghans out of

Persia and restore Tahmasp to the Persian throne. He accomplished this in

swift campaigns (1729-30); Tahmasp was reinstated, and made Nadir "sul-

tan" of Khurasan, Seistan, Kerman, and Mazanderan.

The victorious general soon set out to recover the provinces that Turkey

had seized. By decisively defeating the Turks at Hamadan ( 173 1 ) he brought

Iraq and Azerbaijan under Persian rule. Hearing of a rebellion in Khurasan,

he raised the siege of Erivan and marched fourteen hundred miles across

Iraq and Iran to invest Herat— a march that dwarfs the famous crossings of

Germany by Frederick the Great in the Seven Years' War. Meanwhile

Tahmasp in person took the field against the Turks, lost all that Nadir had

won, and ceded Georgia and Armenia to Turkey on promise of Turkish

help against Russia (1732). Nadir rushed back from the east, denounced the

treaty, deposed and imprisoned Tahmasp, set up Tahmasp's six-month-old

son as Shah Abbas III, proclaimed himself regent, and sent Turkey a declara-

tion of war.

Having raised, by persuasion or conscription, an army of eighty thousand

men, he marched against the Turks. Near Samarra he encountered a vast

CHAP.XVl) ISLAM 419

Turkish force led by Topal Osman, who, maimed in both legs, commanded

from a litter. Nadir twice had horses shot under him; his standard-bearer

fled, thinking him slain; an Arab contingent on whose aid he had relied

turned against him; the Persian rout was complete (July 18, 1733). He as-

sembled the remnants at Hamadan, recruited, armed, and fed new thousands,

marched again to meet the Turks, and overwhelmed them at Leilan in a holo-

caust in which Topal Osman was killed. Another revolt having broken out

in southeastern Persia, Nadir again crossed from west to east, and overcame

the rebel leader, who committed suicide. Marching back across Persia and

Iraq, he met eighty thousand Turks at Baghavand (1735), and so thoroughly

defeated them that Turkey signed a peace ceding Tiflis, Gandzha, and Erivan

to Persia.

Nadir had not forgotten that Peter the Great had attacked Persia in

1722-23, appropriating the Caspian provinces of Gilan, Astarabad, and

Mazanderan, and the cities of Derbent and Baku. Russia, busy on other

fronts, had restored the three provinces to Persia (1732). Now (1735) Nadir

threatened that unless Russia withdrew from Derbent and Baku he would

ally himself with Turkey against Russia. The two cities were surrendered,

and Nadir entered Isfahan as the triumphant rebuilder of Persian power.

When the child Abbas III died (1736), ending the Safavid dynasty, Nadir

wedded reality to form, and made himself Nadir Shah.

Believing that the religious differences between Turkey and Persia made

for repeated wars, he declared that henceforth Persia would abandon its

Shi'a heresy and accept the orthodoxy of Sunni Islam. When the head of

the Shi'a sect condemned this move Nadir had him strangled as quietly as

possible. He confiscated the religious endowments of Kazvin to meet the

expenses of his army, saying that Persia owed more to its army than to its

religion. 22 Then, lonesome for war, he appointed his son Riza Kuli regent,

and led 100,000 men to the conquest of Afghanistan and India.

For a year he besieged Kandahar. When it surrendered (1738) he treated

its defenders so leniently that a troop of Afghans enlisted under his standard

and remained faithful to him till his death. He marched on to Kabul, the key

to the Khyber Pass; there the captured booty enabled him to keep his army

in good spirits. Mohammed Shah, Mogul emperor of India, had refused to be-

lieve a Persian invasion possible; one of his governors had killed Nadir's

envoy; now Nadir crossed the Himalayas, took Peshawar, crossed the Indus,

and advanced to within sixty miles of Delhi before Mohammed's army re-

sisted him. On the plain of Karnal the immense hordes met in battle (1739);

the Indians relied on their elephants, the Persians attacked these patient ani-

mals with fireballs; the elephants turned and fled, throwing the Indian army

into disorder; ten thousand Indians were slain, more were captured; Mo-

hammed Shah came as a suppliant for mercy "to our heavenly presence,"

Nadir reported. 23 The victor exacted from him the surrender of Delhi and

of nearly all its portable wealth, amounting to ^87,500,000, and including

the famous Peacock Throne, which had been made (1628-35) for Shah

Jehan at the zenith of Mogul power. A riot among the populace killed some

of Nadir's soldiers; he avenged them by allowing his army to massacre

420 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVI

100,000 natives in seven hours. He apologized for this by giving his son

Nasrulla in marriage to Mohammed's daughter. Then he marched unimpeded

back to Persia, having established himself as the greatest conqueror since

Timur.

It was his fatality that if he disbanded his army it might create havoc and

rebellion; if he kept it in force it would have to be clothed and fed; his con-

clusion was that war would be cheaper than peace if the war could be fought

on foreign soil. Whom should he attack next? He remembered the Uzbek

raids on northeast Persia, and his own enslavement, and his mother's death

in slavery. In 1 740 he led his troops into Uzbekistan. The Emir of Bokhara

had no force or stomach to dispute Nadir's advance; he submitted, paid a

huge indemnity, and agreed that the River Oxus should, as of old, be the

boundary between Uzbekistan and Persia. The Khan of Khiva had put

Nadir's emissary to death; Nadir slew the Khan, and released thousands of

Persian and Russian slaves ( 1 740) .

Nadir was all soldier, with no mind left for statesmanship. Peace became

for him an intolerable bore. His spoils made him avaricious instead of gen-

erous. Enriched by Indian treasure, he declared a three years' moratorium on

taxes in Persia; then he changed his mind and ordered the accustomed pay-

ments; his tax collectors impoverished Persia as if it had been a conquered

land. He suspected his son of plotting to depose him; he had him blinded. "It

is not my eyes that you have put out," said Riza Kuli, "but the eyes of

Persia." 24 The Persians began to hate their savior, as the Russians had learned

to hate Peter the Great. The religious leaders roused against him the resent-

ment of a nation offended in its religious faith. He tried to suppress the rising

rebellion by wholesale executions; he built pyramids from the skulls of the

victims. On June 20, 1747, four members of his own bodyguard entered his

tent and attacked him; he killed two of them; the others cut him down. All

Persia breathed a sigh of relief.

After him the country fell into worse disorder than under the Afghan

domination. Several provincial khans claimed the throne; a contest of as-

sassination ensued. Ahmed Khan Durani contented himself with founding

the modern kingdom of Afghanistan; Shah Rukh— handsome, amiable, hu-

mane—was blinded shortly after his accession, and retired to rule Khurasan

till 1796. Karim Khan emerged victorious from the contest, and established

(1750) the Zand dynasty, which held power till 1794. Karim made Shiraz

his capital, adorned it with handsome buildings, and gave South Persia

twenty-nine years of moderate order and peace. Upon his death the scramble

for power took again the form of civil war, and chaos was restored.

With the overthrow of the Safavid dynasty by the Afghans, Persia ended

the last of her great periods in art, and only some minor productions graced

this century. The Madrasa-i-Shah-Husein (17 14) at Isfahan, a college for

training scholars and lawyers, was described by Lord Curzon as "one of the

stateliest ruins in Persia"; 25 Sir Percy Sykes marveled at its "exquisite tiles

. . . and lovely stenciling." 26 The tilemakers were still the ablest in the

world, but the impoverishment of the upper classes by protracted wars

CHAP. XVI ) ISLAM 42 1

destroyed the market for excellence, and compelled the potters to lower

their art into an industry. Splendid book covers were made of lacquered papier

mache. Textile workers produced brocades and embroidery of consummate

finesse. Persian rugs, though they had seen their last supremacy under Shah

Abbas I, were still woven for the fortunate of many nations. Especially at

Joshagan, Herat, Kerman, and Shiraz, the weavers produced carpets that

"suffer only by comparison with their classical predecessors." 27

The Afghan conquest broke the heart of Persian poetry, and left it almost

voiceless through the ensuing servitude. Lutf 'AH Beg Adar, about 1750,

compiled a biographical dictionary of Persian poets, concluding with sixty

contemporaries; despite this apparent abundance, he deplored what seemed

to him the dearth of good writers in his time, and ascribed it to the prevalent

chaos and misei v, "which have reached such a point that no one has the heart

to read poetry, let alone compose it." 28 Typical was the experience of Shaykh

'Ali Hazin, who wrote four diwans (collections) of verse, but was caught in

die siege of Isfahan by the Afghans; all the dwellers in his household died

then except himself; he recovered, fled from the ruins of the once beautiful

city, and spent the last thirty-three years of his life in India. In his Memoirs

(1742) he commemorated a hundred Persian poets of his time. Accounted

greatest of these was Sayyid Ahmad Hatif of Isfahan; probably the most

praised of his poems was an ecstatic reaffirmation of faith in God despite

doubt and desolation:

In the church I said to a Christian charmer of hearts, "O thou in whose net the

heart is held captive!

O thou to the warp of whose girdle each hair tip of mine is separately bound!

How long wilt thou miss the way to the Divine Unity? How long wilt thou

impose upon the One the shame of the Trinity?

How can it be right to name the One True God "Father, Son, and Holy

Ghost"?

She parted her sweet lips and said to me, while with sweet laughter she poured

sugar from her lips:

"If thou art aware of the secret of the Divine Unity, do not cast upon me the

stigma of infidelity!

In three mirrors the Eternal Beauty casts a ray from His effulgent counte-

nance." . . .

Whilst we were so speaking, this chant rose up beside us from the church bell:

"He is One and there is naught but He;

There is no God save Him alone!" . . .

In the heart of each atom which thou cleavest thou wilt behold a sun in the

midst.

If thou givest whatever thou hast to love, may I be accounted an infidel if thou

shouldst suffer a grain of loss! . . .

Thou wilt pass beyond the narrow straits of dimensions, and wilt behold the

spacious realms of the Placeless;

Thou shalt hear what ear hath not heard, and shalt see what eye hath not seen;

Until they shall bring thee to a place where, of the world and its people, thou

shalt behold One alone.

To that One thou shalt give love with heart and soul, until with the eye of

certainty thou shalt clearly see that

"He is One and there is naught but he;

There is no God save Him alone!" 29

CHAPTER XVII

Russian Interlude

1725-62

I. WORK AND RULE

FREDERICK the Great wrote, about 1776: "Of all the neighbors of

Prussia, Russia merits most attention, as being the most dangerous; it is

powerful and near. Those who in the future will govern Prussia will, like me,

be forced to cultivate the friendship of these barbarians." 1

Always, in thinking of Russia, we must remember its size. Under Cath-

erine II it included Esthonia, Livonia, Finland (in part), European Russia,

the northern Caucasus, and Siberia. Its area expanded from 687,000 to 913,-

000 square kilometers in the eighteenth century; its population grew from

thirteen millions in 1722 to thirty-six millions in 1790. 2 Voltaire in 1747

estimated the population of France or Germany to be slightly greater than

that of Russia, but he noted that Russia was three times larger than either of

those states. Time and Russian loins would fill those vast spaces.

In 1722, 97.7 per cent of the Russian population was rural; in 1790, still

96.4 per cent; so slow was industrialization. In 1762 all but ten per cent of

the people were peasants, and 52.4 per cent of these were serfs. 3 Half of

the land was owned by some 100,000 nobles, most of the rest by the state or

the Russian Orthodox Church, some by semif ree peasants still owing services

and obedience to local lords. A landlord's wealth was reckoned by the num-

ber of his serfs; so Count Peter Cheremetyev was 140,000 serfs rich. 4 The

992,000 serfs of the Church were a main part of her wealth, and 2,800,000

serfs tilled the lands of the Crown in 1762. 5

The noble provided military leadership and economic organization; he

was usually exempt from military service, but often offered it in hopes of

favors from the government. He had judiciary rights over his serfs, he

could punish them, sell them, or banish them to Siberia; normally, however,

he allowed his peasants to govern their internal affairs through their village

assembly, or mir. He was obliged by law to provide seed for his serfs, and to

maintain them through periods of dearth. A serf might achieve freedom by

buying it from his owner or by enlisting in the army; but this required his

owner's consent. Free peasants could buy and own serfs; some of these free-

men, called kulaki (fists), dominated village affairs, lent money at usurious

rates, and exceeded the lords in exploitation and severity. 6 Master and man

alike were a tough breed, strong in frame and arm and hand; they were en-

gaged together in the conquest of the soil, and the discipline of the seasons lay

heavy upon them both. Sometimes the hardships were beyond bearing. Re-

422

CHAP. XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 423

peatedly we hear of serfs in great number deserting their farms and losing

themselves in Poland or the Urals or the Caucasus; thousands of them died on

the way, thousands were hunted and captured by soldiery. Every now and

then peasants rose in armed revolt against masters and government, and gave

desperate battle to the troops. Always they were defeated, and the survivors

crept back to their tasks of fertilizing the women with their seed and the soil

with their blood.

Some serfs were trained to arts and crafts, and supplied nearly all the needs

of their masters. At a feast given to Catherine II (the Comte de Segur tells

us) the poet and the composer of the opera, the architect who had built the

auditorium, the painter who decorated it, the actors and actresses in the

drama, the dancers in the ballet, and the musicians in the orchestra were all

serfs of Count Cheremetyev. 7 In the long winter the peasants made the cloth-

ing and the tools they would need in the coming year. Town industry was

slow in developing, partly because every home was a shop, and partly be-

cause difficulties of transportation usually limited the market to the pro-

ducer's vicinity. The government encouraged industrial enterprises by offer-

ing monopolies to favorites, sometimes by providing capital, and it approved

participation by nobles in industry and trade. An incipient capitalism ap-

peared in mining, metallurgy, and munitions, and in factory production of

textiles, lumber, sugar, and glass. Entrepreneurs were permitted to buy serfs

to man their factories; such "possessional peasants," however, were bound

not to the owner but to the enterprise; a governmental decree of 1736

required them, and their descendants, to remain in their respective factories

until officially permitted to leave. In many cases they lived in barracks, often

isolated from their families. 8 Hours of labor ran from eleven to fifteen per

day for men, with an hour for lunch. Wages ranged from four to eight rubles

per day for men, from two to three rubles for women; but some employers

gave their workers food and lodging, and paid their taxes for them. After

1 7 34 "free"— non-serf —labor increased in the factories, as giving more stim-

ulus to the workers and more profits to the employer. Labor was too cheap

to favor the invention or application of machinery; but in 1748 Pulzunov

used a steam engine in his ironworks in the Urals. 9

Between the nobles and the peasants a small and politically powerless

middle class slowly took form. In 1725 some three per cent of the population

were merchants: tradesmen in the villages and towns and at the fairs; im-

porters of tea and silk from China, of sugar, coffee, spices, and drugs from

overseas, and of the finer textiles, pottery, and paper from Western Europe;

exporters of timber, turpentine, pitch, tallow, flax, and hemp. Caravans

moved to China via Siberian or Caspian routes; ships went out from Riga,

Revel, Narva, and St. Petersburg. Probably more traffic went on the rivers

and canals than on the roads or the sea.

At the center of that internal commerce was Moscow. Physically it was

the largest city in Europe, with long, broad streets, 484 churches, a hundred

palaces, thousands of hovels, and a population of 277,535 in 1780; 10 here

Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, Greeks, Italians, English, Dutch, and Asi-

4 2 4 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVII

atics talked their own languages and freely worshiped their own gods. St.

Petersburg was the citadel of government, of a Frenchified aristocracy, of

literature and art; Moscow was the hub of religion and commerce, of a half-

Oriental, still-medieval life, and of a jealously and conscientiously Slavic

patriotism. These were the rival foci around which Russian civilization re-

volved, sometimes tearing the nation in two like a dividing cell, sometimes

making it the tense complexity that would, before the end of the century, be-

come the terror and arbiter of Europe.

It was impossible that a people so used up and brutalized by the conflict

with nature, so lacking in facilities of communication or in security of life,

with so little opportunity for education and so little time for thought, should

enjoy, except in the isolated villages, the privileges and perils of democracy.

Some form of feudalism was inevitable in the economy, some mode of

monarchy in central rule. It was to be expected that the monarchy would be

subject to frequent overturns by noble factions controlling their own mili-

tary support; that the monarchy should seek to make itself absolute; and that

it should depend upon religion to help its soldiery, police, and judiciary to

maintain social stability and internal peace.

Corruption clogged every avenue of administration. Even the wealthy

nobles who surrounded the throne were amenable to "gifts." "If there be a

Russian proof against flattery," said the almost contemporary Castera, "there

is not one who can resist the temptation of gold." 11 Nobles controlled the

palace guard that made and unmade "sovereigns"; they formed a caste of

officers in the army; they manned the Senate which, under Elizabeth, made

the laws; they headed the collegia, or ministries, that ruled over foreign rela-

tions, the courts, industry, commerce, and finance; they appointed the clerks

who carried on the bureaucracy; they guided the ruler's choice of the gov-

ernors who managed the "guberniyas" into which the empire was divided,

and (after 1761) they chose the voevodi who governed the provinces. Over

all branches of the government loomed the mostly middle-class Fiscal, a

federal bureau of intelligence, authorized to discover and punish peculation;

but, despite its large use of informers, it found itself foiled, for if the mon-

arch had dismissed every official guilty of venality the machinery of the

state would have stopped. The tax collectors had such sticky fingers that

scarcely a third of their gleanings reached the treasury. 12

II. RELIGION AND CULTURE

Religion was especially strong in Russia, for poverty was bitter, and mer-

chants of hope found many purchasers. Skepticism was confined to an upper

class that could read French, and Freemasonry had many converts there. 13

But the rural, and most of the urban, population lived in a supernatural world

of fearful piety, surrounded by devils, crossing themselves a dozen times a

day, imploring the intercession of saints, worshiping relics, awed by miracles,

trembling over portents, prostrating themselves before holy images, and

moaning somber hymns from stentorian breasts. Church bells were immense

CHAP.XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 425

and powerful; Boris Godunov had set up one of 288,000 pounds, but the

Empress Anna Ivanovna outrang him by having one cast of 432,000 pounds. 14

The churches were filled; the ritual was more solemn here, and the prayers

were more ecstatic, than in half-pagan papal Rome. The Russian priests— each

of them a papa, or pope— wore awesome beards and flowing hair, and dark

robes reaching to their feet (for legs are an impediment to dignity). They

seldom mingled with the aristocracy or the court, but lived in modest simplic-

ity, celibate in their monasteries or married in their rectories. Abbots and

priors governed the monks, abbesses the nuns; the secular clergy submitted to

bishops, these to archbishops, these to provincial metropolitans, these to the

patriarch in Moscow; and the Church as a whole acknowledged the secular

sovereign as its head. Outside the Church were dozens of religious sects,

rivaling one another in mysticism, piety, and hate.

Religion served to transmit a moral code that barely availed to create order

amid the strong natural impulses of a primitive people. The nobles of the

court adopted the morals, manners, and language of the French aristocracy;

their marriages were transactions in realty, and were alleviated with lovers

and mistresses. The women of the court were better educated than the men,

but in moments of passion they could erupt in hot words and murderous vio-

lence. Among the people language was coarse, violence was frequent, and

cruelty corresponded with the strength of the frame and the thickness of the

skin. Everyone gambled and drank according to his means, and stole accord-

ing to his station, 15 but everyone was charitable, and huts exceeded palaces in

hospitality. Brutality and kindness were universal.

Dress varied from the fashions of Paris at the court to the fur caps, sheep-

skins, and thick mittens of the peasantry; from the silk stockings of the noble

to the woolen bands that encased the legs and the feet of the serf. In sum-

mer the common people might bathe nude in the streams, sex ignored. Rus-

sian baths, like the Turkish, were heroic but popular. Otherwise hygiene was

occasional, sanitation primitive. Nobles shaved; commoners, despite the

ukases of Peter the Great, kept their beards.

Nearly every home had a balalaika, and St. Petersburg, under Elizabeth

and Catherine II, had opera imported from Italy and France. Here came

famous composers and conductors, and the finest singers and virtuosi of the

age. Musical education was well financed, and justified itself in the outburst

of musical genius in the second half of the nineteenth century. From all

Russia promising male voices were sent to the leading churches to be trained.

As the Greek rite allowed no instruments in choirs, the voices had free play,

and attained such depths of unison and harmony as were hardly equaled

elsewhere in the world. Boys took the soprano parts, but it was the bassos that

astonished many a foreigner with their nether reach, and their range of feel-

ing from whispers of tenderness to waves of guttural power.

Who composed this moving music for Russia's choirs? Adostly obscure

monks, unknelled and unknown. Two stand out in the eighteenth century.

Sozonovich Berezovsky was a Ukrainian lad whose voice seemed designed

for the adoration of God. Catherine II sent him to Italy at state expense to

get the best musical education; he lived for years at Bologna, and under

426 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVII

Padre Martini he learned the art of composition. Returning to Russia, he

wrote religious music that combined Russian intensity with Italian elegance.

His efforts to reform the singing of the choirs met with orthodox resistance;

he fell into morbid melancholy, and killed himself at the age of thirty-two

(1777). 16 Still more famous was Dmitri Bortniansky. When only seven years

old he was admitted to the Court Church Choir; the Empress Elizabeth com-

missioned Galuppi to tutor him; when Galuppi returned to Italy Catherine II

sent Dmitri with him to Venice; thence he passed to Padre Martini, and then

to Rome and Naples, where he composed music in the Italian style. In 1779

he returned to Russia; he was soon appointed director of the Court Church

Choir, and he kept this post till his death (1825). For the choir he composed

a Greek Mass, and settings in four and eight parts for forty-five Psalms. It

was due especially to his training that the choir reached the excellence which

made it one of the wonders of the musical world. In 1901 St. Petersburg cel-

ebrated with pomp the 1 50th anniversary of his birth.

French influence dominated Russian art, but the leading figure was an

Italian, Francesco (or Bartolomeo) Rastrelli. His father, Carlo, had been

called to Russia by Peter the Great (17 15), and had cast in bronze an eques-

trian statue of Peter, and a full-length figure of the Empress Anna Ivanovna.

The son inherited the Louis Quinze Style that Carlo had brought from

France; he added to it some inspiration from the baroque masterpieces of

Balthasar Neumann and Fischer von Erlach in Germany and Austria; and

he adapted these influences so harmoniously with Russian needs and styles

that he became the architectural favorite of Czarina Elizabeth. Almost every

Russian building of artistic note from 1741 to 1765 was designed by him or

his aides. On the left bank of the Neva he raised (1732-54) the Winter

Palace, which was burned down in 1837 but was conjecturally restored on

the original plan: a monstrous mass of windows and columns in three layers,

topped by statues and battlements. More to Elizabeth's taste was the Palace

of Tsarskoe Selo (i.e., the Czar's village), on a hill fifteen miles south of St.

Petersburg. At its left he built a church; in the interior of the palace a cere-

monial stairway led to a Grande Galerie which was illuminated by immense

windows during the day and by fifty-six chandeliers at night; at the farther

end were the throne room and the apartments of the Empress. A Chinese

Room paid the usual homage of the eighteenth century to Chinese art; an

Amber Room was paneled with plaques of amber, given to Peter the Great

by Frederick William I in exchange for fifty-five tall grenadiers; and a pic-

ture gallery housed some of the imperial collections. The interior was mostly

in rococo decoration, which an English traveler described as a "mixture of

barbarism and magnificence." 17 Catherine II, who was chaste if only in her

taste, had the golden ornaments of the f agade removed.

Literature developed more slowly than art. The paucity of readers gave it

little encouragement, censorship by Church and state cramped expression,

and the Russian language had not yet refined itself, in grammar or vocabu-

lary, into a literary vehicle. And yet, even before the accession of Elizabeth

(1742), three writers left their names on the face of history. Vasili Tatish-

chev was a man of action and thought, a traveler and historian, a diplomat

CHAP.XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 427

and philosopher, loving Russia but opening his mind eagerly to economic and

intellectual developments in the West. He was one of several promising

youths whom Peter sent abroad for intellectual insemination. He came back

with dangerous ideas: he had read, directly or in summaries, Bacon, Des-

cartes, Locke, Grotius, and Bayle; his Orthodox faith had withered, and he

supported religion only as an aide to government. 18 He served Peter in

dangerous campaigns, became governor of Astrakhan, and was accused of

peculation. 19 In his wanderings he gathered a store of geographical, ethno-

logical, and historical data, which he used in a History of Russia. The book

offended the clergy; no one dared print it till the early and liberal years of

Catherine IFs reign ( 1 768-74) .

Prince Antioch Cantemir continued the revolt against theology. Son of a

Moldavian hospodar (governor) , he was brought to Russia in his third year,

learned to speak six languages, served in embassies to London and Paris, met

Montesquieu and Maupertuis, and, returning, wrote satires of those "Pan-

Slavic" patriots who opposed the contamination of Russian life with Western

ideas. Here is a bit of his poem "To My Mind":

Immature mind, fruit of recent studies, be quiet, urge not the pen into my

hands. . . . Many easy paths lead in our days to honors; the least acceptable is

the one the nine barefoot sisters [the Muses] have laid out. . . . You have to

toil and moil there, and while you labor people avoid you as a pestilence, rail

at you, loathe you. . . . "Who pores over books becomes an atheist"; thus

Crito grumbles, his rosary in his hands, . . . and bids me see how dangerous is

the seed of learning that is cast among us: our children, ... to the horror of

the Church, have begun to read the Bible; they discuss all, want to know the

cause of all, and put little faith in the clergy; . . . they place no candles before

the images, they observe no feasts. . . .

O Mind, I advise you to be dumber than a dumpling. . . . Complain not of

your obscurity. ... If gracious Wisdom has taught you anything, . . . explain

it not to others. 20

Kantemir offended further by translating Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la

pluralite des mondes. The book was denounced as Copernican, heretical,

blasphemous, but Kantemir foiled his persecutors by dying at thirty-six

(1744). Not till 1762 did his satires find a publisher.

Under Czarina Elizabeth Russian literature began to assert itself as some-

thing more than an echo of the French. Mikhail Lomonosov felt rather the

German influence; having studied at Marburg and Freiburg, he married a

Fraulein, and brought with her to St. Petersburg a heavy load of science. He

became the lion of the Academy, adept in everything, even in drinking. 21 He

refused to specialize; he became a metallurgist, geologist, chemist, electrician,

astronomer, economist, geographer, historian, philologist, orator; Pushkin

called him "the first Russian university." 22 Amid all this he was a poet.

His chief rival for the applause of the intelligentsia was Alexis Sumarokov,

who published a volume of odes by himself and by Lomonosov to display

the latter's inferiority. [The difference was negligible.] The real distinction

of Sumarokov was his establishment of a Russian national theater (1756). For

it he wrote plays echoing those of Racine and Voltaire. Elizabeth compelled

the courtiers to attend; but as they paid no admission, Sumarokov complained

428 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVII

that his salary of five thousand rubles per year did not suffice to keep both

his theater and himself alive. "What was once seen at Athens, what is now

to be seen in Paris, is also seen in Russia, by my care. ... In Germany a

crowd of poets has not produced what I have succeeded in doing by my own

efforts." 23 In 1760 he tired of his labors and moved to Moscow, but there his

flair for quarreling soon left him moneyless. He appealed to Catherine II to

send him abroad at state expense, and assured her: "If Europe were described

by such a pen as mine, an outlay of 300,000 rubles would seem small." 24

Catherine bore with him till he died of drink (1777).

Let us enliven our pages with the romance of a princess. Natalia Borisovna

Dolgorukaya was the daughter of Count and Field Marshal Boris Chere-

metyev, comrade in arms of Peter the Great. At the age of fifteen (1729),

"radiantly beautiful," and "one of the greatest heiresses in Russia," 25 she

was betrothed to Vasili Lukich Dolgoruki, the prime favorite of Czar

Peter II. Before they could be married Peter died, and his successor banished

Vasili to Siberia. Natalia insisted on marrying him and following him into

exile. She lived with him for eight years in Tobolsk, and bore him two chil-

dren. In 1739 he was put to death. After three more years of exile she was

allowed to return to European Russia. Having completed the education of

her children, she entered a convent at Kiev. There, at the request of her son

Mikhail, she composed her Memoirs (1768), which her poet grandson, Prince

Ivan Mikhailovich Dolgoruki, published in 18 10. Three Russian poets have

celebrated her memory, and Russia, honors her as the type of the many

Russian women who ennobled revolution with their heroism and constancy.

All in all, Russian civilization was a mixture of unavoidable discipline and

callous exploitation, of piety and violence, of prayer and profanity, of music

and vulgarity, of fidelity and cruelty, of servile obsequiousness and indomi-

table bravery. These people could not develop the virtues of peace because

they had to fight, through long winters and long winter nights, a bitter war

against the arctic winds that crossed unhindered over their frozen plains.

They had never known the Renaissance or the Reformation, and so— except

in their artificial capital— they were still imprisoned in medieval swaddling

clothes. They comforted themselves with pride of race and surety of faith:

not yet a territorial nationalism, but a fierce conviction that while the West

was damning itself with science, wealth, paganism, and unbelief, "Holy

Russia" remained loyal to the Christianity of the patriarchs, was more en-

deared to Christ, and would someday rule and redeem the world.

III. RUSSIAN POLITICS: 1725-41

Between Peter the Great and Elizaveta Petrovna Russian history is a dreary

and confusing record of intrigue and palace revolutions; here, if anywhere,

we may with a good conscience save space and time. Nevertheless, some ele-

ments of the melange must be noted if we are to understand the position,

character, and conduct of Catherine the Great.

CHAP.XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 429

The natural heir to the throne in 1725 was Piotr Alexeevich, the ten-year-

old boy of Peter's slain son Alexis. But Peter's widow, who could neither read

nor write, persuaded the palace guard (by paying their long-overdue wages)

that he had designated her as his successor; and with their support she pro-

claimed herself (February 27, 1725) Catherine I, Empress of All the

Russias. This lesser Catherine then took to drink and adultery, achieved

stupor every evening, retired regularly by 5 a.m., and left the government to

her former lover Prince Alexander Danilovich Menshikov and a Supreme

Council. Count Andrei Ostermann, of German birth, took charge of foreign

affairs and directed Russia into friendship with Germany and Austria and

hostility to France. Following the plans of Peter I, Catherine married her

daughter Anna Petrovna to Karl Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp; the

couple went to live in Kiel, where Anna bore the future Peter III. Catherine

herself, exhausted with pleasure, died May 6, 1727, having nominated as her

heir that same Piotr Alexeevich whose throne she had usurped.

Peter II was still only twelve; Menshikov continued to govern, and used

his power to feather his nest. A group of nobles, led by the brothers Ivan

and Vasili Lukich Dolgoruki, overthrew Menshikov and banished him to

Siberia, where he died in 1729. A year later Peter II was carried off by small-

pox, and the male branch of the Romanov dynasty ended. It was this contre-

temps that allowed Russia to be ruled for sixty-six years by three women

who rivaled or exceeded, in executive capacity and political results, most

contemporary kings, and outpaced all of them but Louis XV in sexual prom-

iscuity.

The first of these czarinas was Anna Ivanovna, the thirty-five-year-old

daughter of Ivan Alexeevich, the feeble-minded brother of Peter the Great.

The Council chose her because she had acquired a protective reputation for

humility and obedience. Dominated by the Dolgorukis and the Golitsyns, the

Council drew up "Conditions" which they sent to Anna, then in Kurland,

as prerequisite to her confirmation as empress. She signed (January 28, 1730).

But neither the army nor the clergy wished to replace autocracy with

oligarchy. A delegation of the palace guard went out to meet Anna, and

petitioned her to take absolute power. Emboldened by their arms, she tore

up the "Conditions" in the presence of the court.

Distrusting the Russian nobles, Anna brought in from Kurland the Ger-

mans who had pleased her there. Ernst von Biihren, or Biron, who had been

her lover, became the head of her government; Ostermann was restored to for-

eign affairs; Count Christoff von Munnich reorganized the army; Lowen-

wolde, Korff, and Keyserling helped to give the new regime some German

efficiency. Taxes were collected with careful rigor; education was extended

and improved; an instructed civil service was prepared. With similar effec-

tiveness the new administration imprisoned, banished, or executed the Dol-

gorukis and the Golitsyns.

Satisfied with two lovers (Biron and Lowenwolde), Anna lived a relatively

regular life, rose at eight, gave three hours to government, and smiled ap-

proval as her Germans expanded Russian power. An army under Munnich

430 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVII

invaded Poland, deposed the French-oriented Stanislas Leszczynski, en-

throned the Saxon Augustus III, and took the first step toward binding Po-

land to Russia. France countered by urging Turkey to attack Russia; the

Sultan demurred, being busy on his Persian front; Russia thought it a good

time to declare war against Turkey; so began (1735) sixty years of conflict

for control of the Black Sea. Anna's diplomats explained that the Turks, or

their dependents in South Russia, held the outlets of the five great rivers-

Dniester, Bug, Dnieper, Don, Kuban— which were the main channels of

south-bound Russian commerce; that the semibarbarous Moslem tribes in-

habiting the lower basins of these streams were a standing threat to the Chris-

tians of Russia; that the northern shores of the Black Sea were a natural and

necessary part of Russia; and that a great and growing nation like Russia

should no longer be blocked from free access to the Black Sea and the Med-

iterranean. This remained the theme song of Russia through the remainder of

the century, and beyond.

The first objective was the Crimea, the almost-island that stood as a Turk-

ish stronghold on the northern front of the Black Sea. To take that peninsula

was the goal of Munnich's campaign in 1736. His chief foes were space and

disease. He had to cross 330 miles of wilderness in which not one town

could provide food or medicine for his 57,000 troops; eighty thousand wagons

had to accompany them in a long line subject at any point and moment to

attack by Tatar tribes. With brilliant generalship Miinnich in twenty-nine

days took Perekop, Koslov, and Bakhchisarai (the Crimean capital) ; but in

that month dysentery and other ailments spread such misery and mutiny

among his men that he had to abandon his conquests and retreat into the

Ukraine. Meanwhile another of Anna's generals took Azov, which controlled

the mouth of the Don.

Miinnich marched south again in April, 1737, with seventy thousand men,

and captured Ochakov, near the mouth of the Bug. In June Austria joined

in attacking the Turks, but its campaign so miscarried that it signed a

separate peace; and Russia, suddenly left to face the full Turkish army,

and expecting war with Sweden, signed (September 18, 1739) a peace that

restored to the Turks almost all that had been won in three campaigns. This

treaty was celebrated in St. Petersburg as a splendid triumph, which had cost

only a hundred thousand lives.

Anna survived the war by a year. Shortly before her death (October 17,

1740) she named as heir to the throne the eight-week-old Ivan VI, son of

her German-born niece Anna Leopoldovna and Prince Anton Ulrich of

Brunswick, Biron to be regent till Ivan reached seventeen. But Miinnich

and Ostermann had now had enough of Biron; they joined with Ulrich and

Leopoldovna to send him to Siberia (November 9, 1 740) . Anna Leopoldovna

became regent, with Miinnich as "first minister." Fearing the total domina-

tion of Russia by Teutons, the French and Swedish ambassadors aroused

and financed a revolt of the Russian nobles. They chose as their secret candi-

date for the throne Elizaveta Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great and

Catherine I.

CHAP. XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 43 1

Elizabeth, as we shall call her, was thirty-two years old, but was at the

height of her beauty, courage, and vivacity. She loved athletics and violent

exercise, but also she was fond of amorous delight, and entertained a succes-

sion of gallants. She had little education, wrote Russian with difficulty, spoke

French well. She seems to have had no thought of gracing the throne until

Anna Leopoldovna and Ostermann set her aside in favor of foreigners. When

the Regent ordered the St. Petersburg regiments to Finland, and the soldiers

grumbled at facing a winter war, Elizabeth seized the opportunity; she put

on military garb, went to the barracks at 2 a.m. December 6, 1741, and ap-

pealed to the soldiers to support her. At the head of a regiment she sledged

over the snow to the Winter Palace, awakened the Regent, and sent both

her and the baby Czar to prison. When the city awoke it found that it had a

new ruler, a thoroughly Russian Empress, a daughter of the great Peter.

Russia and France rejoiced.

IV. ELIZABETH PETROVNA: 1741-62

It is difficult to make her out through the mists of time and prejudice.

Catherine II, meeting her in 1744, was "struck by her beauty and the majesty

of her bearing. ... In spite of being very stout, she was not in the least dis-

figured by her size, nor embarrassed in her movements, . . . though she

wore an immense hoop when she dressed up." 26 She was privately skeptical

to the verge of atheism; 27 publicly she was zealously orthodox. A French

observer noted her "pronounced taste for liquor," 28 but we must remember

that Russia is cold and vodka warms. She refused marriage, fearing that it

would divide her power and multiply disputes; some say that she secretly

married Alexis Razumovsky; if so, he was merely primus inter pares. She

was vain, loved finery, had fifteen thousand dresses, heaps of stockings, 2,500

pairs of shoes; 29 some of these she used as missiles in argument. She could up-

braid her servants and courtiers in the language of a sergeant. She sanctioned

some cruel punishments, but she was basically kind. 30 She abolished the death

penalty except for treason ( 1 744) ; torture was allowed only in the gravest

trials; flogging remained, but Elizabeth felt that some way had to be found

to discourage the criminals who made the highways and city streets unsafe

at night. She was both restless and indolent. She had a keen natural intelli-

gence, and gave her country as good a government as the condition of Rus-

sian education, morals, manners, and economy allowed.

Having banished Ostermann and Munnich to Siberia, she restored the

Senate to administrative leadership, and entrusted foreign affairs to Alexei

Petrovich Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Catherine II described him as "a great in-

triguer, suspicious, firm and intrepid in his principles, an implacable enemy,

but the true friend of her friends." 31 He was fond of money, as those usually

are who know that their high state invites a fall. When England sought to

bribe him it estimated his integrity as costing 100,000 crowns. 32 We do not

know if the purchase went through, but Bestuzhev generally took an Eng-

43 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVII

lish line; this, however, was a natural retort to French support of Sweden

and Turkey against Russia. Frederick the Great in his turn offered Bestuzhev

100,000 crowns if he would ally Russia with Prussia; the offer was refused; 33

instead, Bestuzhev allied Russia with Austria (1745) and England (1755).

When England followed this by an alliance with Prussia (January 16, 1756),

Bestuzhev's house of chancelleries fell apart, and Elizabeth henceforth ig-

nored his advice. A new ministry bound Russia to the Franco-Austrian "re-

versal of alliances," and the Seven Years' War was on.

We have seen— far back!— how the Russian general Apraksin defeated

the Prussians at Gross-Jagersdorf (1757), and then withdrew his army into

Poland. The French and Austrian ambassadors convinced Elizabeth that

Bestuzhev had ordered Apraksin's retreat and was conspiring to depose her.

She ordered the arrest of both the Chancellor and the general (1758).

Apraksin died in jail. Bestuzhev denied both charges, and later knowledge

has cleared him. His foes wished to torture him into confession; Elizabeth

forbade this. Mikhail Vorontsov replaced Bestuzhev as chancellor.

Amid the balls, gambling, intrigues, jealousies, and hatreds of the court,

Elizabeth encouraged her aides to advance Russian civilization. Her young

favorite Ivan Shuvalov opened a university at Moscow, established primary

and secondary schools, sent students abroad for graduate study in medicine,

and imported French architects, sculptors, and painters for the Academy of

Arts (Akademia Iskustv) which he set up in the capital (1758). He cor-

responded with Voltaire, and induced him to write a History of the Russian

Empire under Peter the Great (1757). His brother Piotr Shuvalov helped the

economy by removing tolls on internal trade. Meanwhile, however, to con-

sole the Pan-Slavists, Elizabeth allowed religious intolerance to grow; she

closed some mosques in the Tatar regions, and banished 35,000 Jews.

Her proudest achievement was that her armies and generals repeatedly de-

feated Frederick II, stopped the Prussian advance, and were on the point of

crushing him when her physical decline weakened her power to hold the

Franco- Austro-Russian alliance together. As early as 1755 the British am-

bassador reported: "The health of the Empress is bad; she is affected with

spitting of blood, shortness of breath, constant coughing, swollen legs, and

water on the chest; yet she danced a minuet with me." 34 Now she paid

heavily for having preferred promiscuity to marriage. Childless, she had long

sought someone of royal blood who could face the external and internal

problems of Russia, and, inexplicably, her choice had fallen upon Karl

Friedrich Ulrich, son of her sister Anna Petrovna and of Karl Friedrich, duke

of Holstein-Gottorp. It was the greatest error of her reign, but she re-

deemed it by her choice for his mate.

V. PETER AND CATHERINE: 1 743-6 1

Piotr Feodorovich, as Elizabeth renamed her heir, was born at Kiel in 1728.

As grandson of both Peter I and Charles XII, he was eligible to both the

CHAP.XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 433

Russian and the Swedish thrones. Of feeble health, he was kept at home till

he was seven; then, by a sudden change, he was assigned to the Holstein

Guards, and was raised to be a soldier. He became a sergeant at nine, marched

proudly in field parades, and learned the language and morals of army offi-

cers. At eleven he was given a German tutor who brought him up unforget-

tably in the Lutheran faith, and disciplined him into neurosis. Browbeaten

by this pedagogue, he shrank into timidity and secrecy, took to cunning and

deceit, 35 became "permanently irritable, stubborn, quarrelsome." 36 Rousseau

might have cited him as illustrating the notion that man is good by nature

but is deformed by a bad environment; Peter had a kind heart, and a longing

to do the right, as we shall see by his royal decrees; but he was ruined by

being cast for parts he was not fitted to play. Catherine II, meeting him

when he was eleven, described him as "good-looking, well-mannered, cour-

teous," and she "felt no repugnance at the idea" of becoming his wife. 37

In 1743 Elizabeth had him brought to Russia, made him grand duke, con-

verted him, apparently, to the Orthodox faith, and tried to train him for

rule. But she "stood aghast" at the inadequacy of his education and the in-

stability of his character. At St. Petersburg he added drunkenness to his

other faults. Elizabeth hoped that before she herself died this strange youth,

if mated to a healthy and intelligent woman, might beget a competent future

czar. With that lack of ethnic prejudice which marked the European aris-

tocracies even during the rise of nationalistic states, Elizabeth looked out-

side Russia and chose an undistinguished princess from one of the smallest

German principalities. The wily Frederick II had recommended this choice,

hoping to have a friendly German czarina in a Russia already fearsome to

Germany.

At this point we are confronted by the memoirs of Catherine the Great.

There is no doubt of their authenticity; they were not printed till 1859, but

the French manuscript, in Catherine's own hand, is preserved in the national

archives in Moscow. Are they trustworthy? By and large the story they tell

is confirmed by other sources. 38 Their fault is not mendacity but partiality;

they are a tale told well with wit and verve, but they are in part an apologia

for having dethroned her husband, and for bearing with such equanimity the

news that he had been killed.

She was born in Stettin, Pomerania, April 21, 1729, and was christened

Sophia Augusta Frederika after three of her aunts. Her mother was Princess

Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp; through her Catherine was a cousin

to Peter. Her father was Christian August, prince of Anhalt-Zerbst in central

Germany, a major general in Frederick's army. Both parents were disap-

pointed by the birth of a girl; the mother mourned as if it had been a mis-

carriage. Catherine atoned for her sex by developing the virility of a general

and the statesmanship of an emperor, all the while remaining the most sought

and found mistress in Europe.

She had a variety of childhood sicknesses, one so severe that it left her

apparently deformed for life, "the backbone running zigzag," the "right

shoulder much higher than the left"; she now "assumed the shape of the letter

434 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVII

Z." The local hangman, who had become a specialist in dislocations, encased

her in a corset "which I never removed day or night except when changing

my underclothes"; and "after eighteen months I began to show signs of

straightening out." 39 She was so often told that she was ugly that she de-

termined to develop intelligence as a substitute for beauty; she was another

case of a felt defect stimulating compensatory powers. Her ugliness disap-

peared as puberty rounded out her angles into curves. Despite her tribula-

tions she was of "a happy disposition," and of such natural vivacity "as

needed to be restrained." 40

She was educated by tutors, especially by a Lutheran clergyman who suf-

fered from her questions. Was it not unfair, she asked, "that Titus, Marcus

Aurelius, and all the great men of antiquity, virtuous though they might be,

should have been damned because they did not know about Revelation?" She

argued so well that her teacher proposed to flog her, but a governess inter-

vened. She especially wanted to know what that chaos had been like which,

according to Genesis, had preceded the Creation. "His replies never seemed

to satisfy me," and "we both lost our tempers." He was still further harassed

by her insistence on his explaining "just what was circumcision?" 41 Her

other teachers and the governess were French, so that she learned that lan-

guage well; she read Corneille, Racine, and Moliere, and was clearly ready

for Voltaire. She became one of the best-educated women of her time.

News of this bright princess reached the Empress Elizabeth, eager for a

girl who might give Peter intelligence by osmosis. On January i, 1744, an

invitation came to Sophia's mother to come with her for a visit to the Russian

court. The parents hesitated; Russia seemed dangerously unstable and primi-

tive; but Sophia, surmising that she was being considered as a wife for the

Grand Duke, pleaded for an affirmative reply. On January 12 they began

the long and difficult journey through Berlin, Stettin, East*" Prussia, Riga, and

St. Petersburg to Moscow. At Berlin Frederick entertained them, and took a

fancy to Sophia, "asking me a thousand questions, and talking about opera,

comedy, poetry, dancing, everything, in short, that one could possibly imag-

ine in conversing with a girl of fourteen." 42 At Stettin "my father tenderly

took leave of me, and this was the last time I saw him; I cried bitterly."

Mother and daughter, with a lavish entourage, reached Moscow on February

9, after a sleigh ride of fifty-two hours from St. Petersburg.

That evening she met Peter for the second time, and again was favorably

impressed, until he confided to her that he was a convinced Lutheran, and

was in love with one of the ladies in waiting at the court. 43 She noticed that

his German accent and manners were distasteful to the Russians; for her part

she resolved to learn Russian thoroughly, and to accept the Orthodox faith

in toto. She felt "little more than indifference" toward Peter, but "I was not

indifferent to the Russian crown." She was given three teachers— for the lan-

guage, for the religion, and for Russian dances. She studied so earnestly—

once getting out of bed in the middle of the night to study her lessons— that

on February 22 she was bedded with pleurisy. "I remained between life and

death for twenty-seven days, during which I was bled sixteen times, some-

CHAP.XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 435

times four times a day." 44 Her mother lost favor at court by asking that a

Lutheran clergyman be summoned; Sophia won many hearts by asking for

a Greek priest. At last, on April 21, she was able to appear in public. "I had

become as thin as a skeleton; . . . my face and features were drawn, my hair

was falling out, and I was totally pale." 45 The Empress sent her a pot of

rouge.

On June 28 Sophia underwent, with impressive piety, the ceremony of

conversion to the Orthodox faith. Now to her existing names were added

Ekaterina Alexeevna; henceforth she was Catherine. The next morning, in

the great cathedral, Ouspenski Sobor, she was formally betrothed to Grand

Duke Peter. All who saw her were pleased with her tactful modesty; even

Peter began to love her. After fourteen months of apprenticeship they were

married, August 21, 1745, at St. Petersburg. On October 10 Catherine's

mother left for home.

Peter was now seventeen, his wife sixteen. She was beautiful and he was

plain, having suffered from smallpox in their betrothal year. She was intel-

lectually avid and alert; he "displayed," said Soloviev, "every symptom of

mental backwardness, and resembled a grown-up child." 46 He played with

dolls and marionettes and toy soldiers; he was so fond of dogs that he kept

several of them in his apartment; Catherine was not clear which was worse,

their barking or their stench. 47 He did not improve the situation by playing

his violin. His taste for liquor increased; "from 1753 he got drunk almost

daily." 48 The Empress Elizabeth often reproved him for his faults, but she

did not add example to precept. She was more disturbed by his unconcealed

dislike of Russia, which he called "an accursed land"; 49 by his scorn of the

Orthodox Church and clergy; above all, by his idolatry of Frederick the

Great, even when Russia and Prussia were in deadly war. He surrounded

himself with a "Holsteiner Guard" of soldiers nearly all German; in his pleas-

ure house at Oranienbaum he dressed his attendants in German uniforms, and

put them through Prussian drills. When the Russian generals Fermor and

Saltykov defeated the Prussians in 1759 they refrained from pursuing their

victories for fear of offending Peter, 50 who might at any moment become

czar.

The marriage became almost a conflict of cultures, for Catherine was fur-

thering her education by studying the literature of France. It seems incredible

that this young woman, in her unhappy years as grand duchess, read Plato,

Plutarch, Tacitus, Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot, and Montesquieu, whose Spirit

of Laws, she said, should be "the breviary of every sovereign of common

sense." 51 Such books must have finished Catherine's religious beliefs— though

she continued assiduously her observation of the Orthodox ritual; and they

gave her that conception of "enlightened despotism" which Frederick had

imbibed from Voltaire a generation before.

Meanwhile (if we may believe her firsthand report) "the marriage between

me and the Grand Duke had not been consummated." 52 Castera, who in 1 800

wrote a well-informed and hostile biography of Catherine, thought that "Pe-

ter had a defect which, though easy to remove, seemed so much the more

43^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVII

cruel; the violence of his love, his reiterated efforts, could not accomplish the

consummation of his marriage" 53 — a remarkable parallel with Louis XVI and

Marie Antoinette. Perhaps the distaste that Catherine, during their long be-

trothal, had come to feel for Peter had become evident to him, and made him

psychologically impotent. He soon turned to other women, and took a suc-

cession of mistresses, who hoped to replace Catherine as grand duchess. In

her account these first years of marriage were years of misery for her. One

day (according to Horace Walpole), when the Empress asked her why no

issue had come of her union, she replied that none should be expected— which

in effect announced her husband's impotence. "Elizabeth replied that the

state demanded successors, and left the Grand Duchess to procure them by

whose assistance she pleased. A son and a daughter were the fruits of her obe-

dience." 54 Mme. Maria Choglokova, appointed by Elizabeth to be lady in

waiting to Catherine, explained to the Grand Duchess (according to the

Grand Duchess) that there were important exceptions to the rule of marital

fidelity; she promised to keep the secret if Catherine took a lover; 55 and

"there can be little doubt that this shameful suggestion came not from the

lady in waiting, but from the Empress herself." 56 We must see these matters

in the perspective of a Russian court long accustomed to polyandrous queens,

a French court inured to polygynous kings, and a Saxon-Polish court with

the 1 50 children of Augustus III.

Did Catherine follow these exemplars to excess? After her accession, yes.

Before her accession she seems to have limited herself stoically to three lov-

ers. First— some six years after marriage— came Sergei Saltykov, a lusty young

officer. Catherine explains her response:

If I may venture to be frank, ... I combined, with the mind and tempera-

ment of a man, the attractions of a lovable woman. I pray to be forgiven for

this description, which is justified by its truthfulness. ... I was attractive;

consequently one half of the road to temptation was already covered, and it is

only human in such situations that one should not stop halfway. . . . One can-

not hold one's heart in one's hand, forcing it or releasing it, tightening or re-

laxing one's grasp at will. 57

In 1 75 1 she became pregnant, but had a miscarriage; and this painful ex-

perience was repeated in 1753. In 1754 she gave birth to the future Emperor

Paul I. Elizabeth rejoiced, gave Catherine a present of 100,000 rubles, and

sent Saltykov to safe obscurity in Stockholm and Dresden, where, Catherine

tells us, he was "frivolous with all the women he met." 58 Peter drank more,

and took fresh mistresses, finally settling down with Elizaveta Vorontsova,

niece of the new Chancellor. Catherine quarreled with him, and made public

fun of him and his friends. 59 In 1756 she accepted the attentions of a hand-

some Pole, twenty-four years old, Count Stanislas Poniatowski, who had

come to St. Petersburg as attache to Sir Charles Hanbury- Williams, the Brit-

ish ambassador. Stanislas' autobiography describes her in 1755:

She was five-and-twenty years old; . . . she was at that perfect moment

which is generally, for women who have beauty, the most beautiful. She had

black hair, a dazzlingly white skin, long black eyelashes, a Grecian nose, a

CHAP.XVIl) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 437

mouth that seemed made for kisses, perfect hands and arms, a slim figure rather

tall than short, an extremely active bearing, yet full of nobility. The sound of

her voice was pleasant, and her laugh was as merry as her disposition. 60

Gazing at her, he "forgot that there was a Siberia." This was the most deeply

felt of her many loves, and his; long after she had taken other suitors her

heart remained with Poniatowski, and he never quite recovered from his in-

fatuation, however sorely tried by her policies. When she went to stay with

Peter at Oranienbaum, Stanislas risked his life by secretly visiting her there.

He was detected, and Peter gave orders that he be hanged. Catherine inter-

ceded with Peter's mistress, who, softened by a gift, appeased the Grand

Duke. Finally, in a burst of good nature, Peter not only forgave Poniatowski

but called Catherine to join her lover, and entered with them and Elizaveta

Vorontsova into an amiable menage a quatre, with many gay suppers to-

gether. 61

On December 9, 1758, Catherine gave birth to a daughter. The court gen-

erally believed that Poniatowski was the father, 62 but Peter took the credit,

accepted congratulations, and organized festivities to celebrate his achieve-

ment; 63 however, the child died four months later. The Empress had Ponia-

towski recalled to Poland, and Catherine was briefly loveless. But she was

charmed by the adventures, in love and war, of Grigori Grigorievich Orlov,

aide-de-camp to Piotr Shuvalov. Orlov had made a reputation by keeping to

his post in the battle of Zorndorf despite three wounds. He had the build of

an athlete and "the face of an angel"; 64 but his only morality was to win

power and women by any available means. Shuvalov had a mistress, Princess

Elena Kurakin, one of the fairest and loosest beauties of the court; Orlov

won her away from his superior; Shuvalov vowed to kill him, but died before

attending to the matter. Catherine admired Orlov's courage, and noted that

in the guards he had four brothers all tall and strong; these five warriors

would be useful in an emergency. She arranged a meeting with Grigori, then

another, and another; soon she displaced Kurakin. By July, 1761, she was

pregnant; in April, 1762, she gave birth, as secretly as possible, to Orlov's

son, who was brought up as Alexis Bobrinsky.

In December, 1761, it became apparent that the Empress was entering

upon her final illness. Attempts were made to bring Catherine into a plot to

prevent the accession of Peter; she was warned that Peter, as czar, would cast

her aside and make Elizaveta Vorontsova his wife and queen; but Catherine

refused to join in the plot. On January 5, 1762 (N.S.), the Empress Elizabeth

died, and Peter, without open opposition, mounted the throne.

vi. peter 111: 1762

He astonished everyone by the generosity of his measures. The good na-

ture that had been blurred by coarse and thoughtless manners came to the

fore in a burst of gratitude for his peaceful accession to power. He pardoned

enemies, he retained most of Elizabeth's ministers, and he tried to be kind to

43$ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVII

Catherine. In the royal palace he allowed her comfortable quarters at one

end, housed himself at the other, and assigned to his mistress the intermediate

rooms; it was a mortal affront, of course, but Catherine was secretly pleased

to be at a distance from him. He provided her with an ample allowance, and

paid her extensive debts without inquiring into their origin. 65 In official cere-

monies he gave her equal standing with himself, sometimes yielded her prece-

dence. 66

He recalled from exile the men and women whom previous rulers had sent

to Siberia; now Munnich returned, aged eighty-two, to be welcomed by

thirty-two grandsons; Peter restored him to his rank as field marshal; Mun-

nich vowed to serve him to the end, and did. The happy Emperor freed the

nobles from the obligation that Peter the Great had laid upon them to give

many years of their lives to the state; they proposed to build a statue of him

in gold; he bade them use the metal more sensibly. 67 A decree of February 2 1

abolished the universally hated secret police, and forbade arrest on political

charges until these had been reviewed and sanctioned by the Senate. On

June 25 Peter issued a ukase that adultery should henceforth be exempt from

official censure, "since in that matter even Christ had not condemned"; 68 the

court was delighted. Merchants were pleased by a lowering of export dues;

the price of salt was reduced; the buying of serfs for factory labor was

stopped. Old Believers, who had fled from Russia to avoid persecution under

Elizabeth, were invited to return and enjoy religious freedom. The clergy,

however, was incensed by decrees of February 1 6 and March 2 1 nationalizing

all the lands of the Church, and making all Orthodox clergymen salaried em-

ployees of the government. The serfs on these secularized domains were

freed, and serfs on the estates of the nobility expected that they too would

soon be freed. Amid all these reforms— suggested to him by various ministers

—Peter continued to drink heavily.

The most startling of his measures, and the one that gave him the greatest

happiness, was his termination of the war with Prussia. Even before his acces-

sion he had done much to help Frederick, secretly transmitting to him the

military plans of Elizabeth's Council; now he boasted of having done this. 69

On May 5 he bound Russia with Prussia in defensive and offensive alliance.

He instructed the commander of the Russian forces then with the Austrian

army to put them at the service of "the King my master." 70 He donned a

Prussian uniform, and ordered the local soldiery to do the same; he estab-

lished Prussian discipline in the army; he organized military exercises every

day for his court, and compelled every male courtier to participate regardless

of age and gout. 71 He gave his own "Holsteiner Guard" precedence over the

proud regiments of the capital.

The Russian army was not averse to peace, but it was shocked by Russia's

precipitate desertion of her French and Austrian allies, and her surrender of

all terrain won from Prussia during the war. It was alarmed when Peter an-

nounced that he proposed to send a Russian host against Denmark to recover

that duchy of Schleswig which Denmark had taken from the dukes of Hol-

stein, who included Peter's father. The troops made it clear that they would

CHAP. XVII ) RUSSIAN INTERLUDE 439

refuse to fight such a war; when Peter asked Kirill Razumovsky to lead an

army to Denmark, the general answered, "Your Majesty must first give me

another army to force mine to advance." 72

Suddenly, despite his brave and remarkable reforms, Peter found himself

unpopular. The army hated him as a traitor, the clergy hated him as a Lu-

theran or worse, the unfreed serfs clamored for emancipation, and the court

ridiculed him as a fool. Upon all this came the general suspicion that he in-

tended to divorce Catherine and marry his mistress. 73 "That young woman"

(according to Castera), "destitute of everything like address, but stupidly

proud, . . . had the art of obtaining from the Czar— sometimes by flattery,

sometimes by chiding, and sometimes even by beating him— a renewal of the

promise he had made her, ... to marry her and place her, instead of Cather-

ine, upon the throne of Russia." 74 As power and liquor went more and more

to his head, he treated Catherine harshly, even to publicly calling her a fool. 75

The Baron de Breteuil wrote to Choiseul: "The Empress [Catherine] is in

the crudest state, and is treated with the utmost contempt. ... I should not

be surprised, knowing her courage and violence, if this were to drive her to

some extremity . . . Some of her friends are doing their best to pacify her,

but they would risk everything for her if she required it." 76

St. Petersburg and its environs were full of Catherine's partisans. She was

popular with the army, the court, and the populace. Next to her ladies in

waiting and Grigori Orlov, her closest intimate in these critical days was Eka-

terina Romanovna, Princess Dashkova. This bold and enterprising lady was

only nineteen years old, but, as niece to Chancellor Vorontsov and sister to

Peter's mistress, she was already prominent in the affairs of the court. Peter,

in his simplicity or his cups, had revealed to her his intention to depose Cath-

erine and enthrone Elizaveta Vorontsova. 77 Dashkova carried the news to

Catherine, and begged her to join in a plot to put Peter aside. But Catherine

had already organized a conspiracy with Nikita Panin, tutor to her son Paul,

and Kirill Razumovsky, hetman of the Ukraine, and Nikolai Korff, head of

the police, and the Orlov brothers, and P. B. Passek, an officer in a local regi-

ment.

On June 14 Peter ordered Catherine's arrest; he canceled the order, but

bade her retire to Peterhof, twelve miles west of the capital. Peter himself

withdrew to Oranienbaum with his mistress. He left instructions that the

army should prepare to sail for Denmark, and promised to join it in July. On

June 27 Lieutenant Passek was arrested for making derogatory speeches

against the Emperor. Fearing that he would be tortured into confessing the

plot, Grigori and Alexei Orlov decided that they must act at once. Early on

the twenty-eighth Alexei rode in haste to Peterhof, roused Catherine from

her sleep, and persuaded her to ride back with him to St. Petersburg. On the

way they stopped at the barracks of the Ismailovsky Regiment; the soldiers

were summoned by a drum roll; Catherine appealed to them to save her from

the threats of the Emperor; they swore to protect her; "they rushed to kiss

my hands and feet, the hem of my dress, calling me their savior" (so Cather-

ine wrote to Poniatowski 78 )— for they knew that she would not send them to

44° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVII

Denmark. Escorted by two regiments and the Orlovs, she proceeded to the

Kazan Cathedral, where she was proclaimed autocrat of Russia. The Preo-

brazhensky Regiment joined her there, and begged her to "forgive us for

being the last to come." 79 The Horse Guards fell in, and fourteen thousand

troops accompanied her to the Winter Palace; there the Church Synod and

the Senate officially announced the dethronement of Peter and the accession

of Catherine. Some high dignitaries protested, but the army frightened them

into swearing allegiance to the Empress.

She donned the uniform of a captain of the Horse Guards, and rode at the

head of her troops to Peterhof . Peter had come there that morning to see

her; informed of the revolt, he fled to Kronstadt; Miinnich offered to go with

him to Pomerania and organize an army to restore him; Peter, unable to de-

cide, returned to Oranienbaum. When Catherine's forces approached he

spent a day in pleas for a compromise; then, on June 29 (O. S.), he signed his

abdication; "he allowed himself to be overthrown," said Frederick, "as a

child lets himself be sent to bed." 80 He was imprisoned at Ropsha, fifteen

miles from St. Petersburg. He begged Catherine to let him keep his Negro

servant, his lapdog, his violin, and his mistress. He was allowed all but the

last. Elizaveta Vorontsova was banished to Moscow, and disappeared from

history.

CHAPTER XVIII

Catherine the Great

1762-96

I. THE AUTOCRAT

CATHERINE was victorious, but exposed to all the hazards of a chaotic

change. To reward the soldiers who had escorted her to power, she

ordered the drinking establishments of the capital to supply them with beer

and vodka free of charge; the result was a general drunkenness that for a time

almost dissolved the military basis of her power. At midnight of June 29-30

Catherine, who was having her first sleep in forty-eight hours, was awakened

by an officer who told her, "Our men are terribly drunk. A hussar has

shouted to them, 'To arms! Thirty thousand Prussians are coming to take

away our mother [Catherine]!' So they have armed themselves, and are

coming here to see how you really are." Catherine dressed, went out, denied

the rumor about the Prussians, and persuaded her warriors to go to bed. 1

Her son Paul, now eight years old, endangered her. Panin, many nobles,

and most of the clergy felt that legitimacy required the coronation of Paul

as emperor, with Catherine as regent. She feared that this would put the gov-

ernment in the hands of an aristocratic oligarchy, which would seek to de-

pose or dominate her. She officially declared Paul heir to the throne, but his

supporters continued their agitation; and the son grew up to hate his mother

as having cheated him of the crown.

As news of the coup d'etat spread through Russia it became evident that

public opinion outside the capital was hostile to Catherine. The capital had

known Peter's faults at first hand, and generally agreed that he was unfit to

rule; but the Russian people outside St. Petersburg knew him chiefly through

the liberal measures that had given some nobility to his reign. The populace

of Moscow, too distant to feel Catherine's charm, remained sullenly opposed

to her accession. When Catherine took Paul to Moscow (the stronghold of

orthodoxy), Paul was fervently applauded, Catherine was coolly received.

Many provincial regiments denounced the Petersburg soldiery as usurpers of

national power.

We do not know if the wide sympathy for Peter was a factor in his death.

Broken in spirit, the fallen Czar sent humble petitions to his wife to "have

pity on me, and give me my only consolation"— his mistress— and to let him

return to his relatives in Holstein. Instead of receiving such comfort he was

confined to a single room, and was always under surveillance. Alexei Orlov,

chief of those who guarded him, played cards with him, and lent him money. 2

On July 6, 1762 (N. S.), Alexei rode in haste to St. Petersburg and informed

441

44 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVIII

Catherine that Peter had quarreled with him and other attendants, and in the

ensuing scuffle had died. As to the mode of his death history has only rumors,

none confirmed: that he was poisoned or strangled, 3 that he was fatally

beaten, 4 that he died of "inflammation of the bowels and apoplexy"; 5 "the

details of the murder," the latest historian concludes, "were never fully re-

vealed, and the part played in it by Catherine remains uncertain." 6 It is im-

probable that Catherine ordered the deed, 7 but she punished no one for it,

concealed it from the public for a day, went through two days of visible

weeping, and then reconciled herself to the fait accompli. Nearly all Europe

held her guilty of murder, but Frederick the Great, who had so much to

lose by Peter's dethronement, exonerated her: "The Empress was quite ig-

norant of this crime, and she heard of it with a despair which was not feigned,

for she justly foresaw the judgment that everybody passes upon her today." 8

Voltaire agreed with Frederick. Catherine's son Paul, after reading the

private papers left by his mother at her death, concluded that Alexei had

killed Peter without any order or request from Catherine. 9

The event created, as well as solved, problems for Catherine: it inspired a

succession of conspiracies to depose her, and left her harassed and imperiled

amid the administrative chaos that surrounded her. She later wrote of this

period: "The Senate remained lethargic and deaf to the affairs of state. The

seats of legislation had reached a degree of corruption and disintegration

that made them scarcely recognizable." 10 Russia had just emerged from a

victorious but costly war; the treasury owed thirteen million rubles, and was

running a deficit of seven million rubles per year; the condition of the fisc

had been signalized by the refusal of Dutch bankers to lend Russia money.

The pay of the troops was many months in arrears. The army was so dis-

organized that Catherine feared at any moment an invasion of the Ukraine

by the Tatars of South Russia. The court was agitated with plots and coun-

terplots, with dread of losing, or hope of gaining, offices of profit or power.

Shortly after Peter's fall, the Prussian ambassador considered it "certain that

the reign of the Empress Catherine is not to be more than a brief episode in

the history of the world." 11 This was wishful thinking, for Frederick de-

plored the death of his worshipful ally, and Catherine was annulling Peter's

orders to help Frederick.

The Empress sought to quiet ecclesiastical opposition by deferring the op-

eration of Peter's ukases for the secularization of Church lands. She warmed

the ardor of her partisans with rich rewards; Grigori Orlov received fifty

thousand rubles, and access to the royal bed. Bestuzhev was recalled from

exile and restored to comfort but not to office. Those who had opposed her

were treated leniently. Munnich made his submission, was readily forgiven,

and was appointed governor of Esthonia and Livonia. These measures may

have helped to keep her on her slippery seat, but the chief factors^were her

own courage and intelligence. Seventeen years as the neglected wife of the

heir to the throne had taught her, against her youthful vivacity, a degree of

patience, prudence, self-control, and statesmanly dissimulation. Now, defy-

ing Panin's advice, and suspicious of the Senate's loyalty, integrity, and com-

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 443

petence, she decided to center all rule in herself, and to face the absolute

monarchs of Europe with an absolutism that would rival Frederick's com-

bination of militarism with philosophy. She took no husband. Since the

nobility controlled the Senate, the choice was between the autocracy of the

sovereign and the fragmentary absolutism of feudal lords— precisely the

choice faced by Richelieu in seventeenth-century France.

Catherine surrounded herself with able men, and won their loyalty, fre-

quently their love. She made them work hard, but she paid them well, per-

haps too well; the splendor and luxury of her court became a major drain

upon the revenues. It was a heterogeneous court, rooted in barbarism, ve-

neered with French culture, and ruled by a German woman superior to her

aides in education and intellect. Her lavish rewards for exceptional service

begot emulation without checking corruption. Many members of her en-

tourage took bribes from foreign governments; some achieved impartiality

by accepting bribes from opposite sides. In 1762 Catherine issued to the na-

tion a remarkable confession:

We consider it as our essential and necessary duty to declare to the people,

with true bitterness of heart, that we have for a long time heard, and now in

manifest deeds see, to what degree corruption has progressed in our Empire,

so that there is hardly an office in the government in which . . . justice is not

attacked by the infection of this pest. If anyone asks for place, he must pay

for it; if a man has to defend himself against calumny, it is with money; if

anyone wishes falsely to accuse his neighbor, he can by gifts insure the success

of his wicked designs. 12

Of the conspiracies that multiplied around her, some aimed to replace her

with Ivan VI. Deposed by the coup d'etat of December, 1741, he had now

suffered twenty-one years of imprisonment. In September, 1762, Voltaire

voiced apprehension that "Ivan may overthrow our benef actress"; 13 and he

wrote, "I am afraid that our dear Empress will be killed." 14 Catherine visited

Ivan, and found him "a human derelict reduced to idiocy by long years of

incarceration." 15 She left orders with his guards that if any attempt, not au-

thorized by herself, should be made to release him, they should put Ivan to

death rather than surrender him. At midnight of July 5-6, 1764, an army

officer, Vasili Mirovich, appeared at the prison with a paper purporting to

be an order of the Senate that Ivan should be turned over to him. Supported

by several soldiers, he knocked at the door of the cell in which two guards

slept with Ivan, and demanded entrance. Refused, he ordered cannon to be

brought up to demolish the door. Hearing this, the guards slew Ivan. Miro-

vich was arrested; a document found on him declared that Catherine had

been deposed, and that Ivan VI was henceforth czar. At his trial he refused

to reveal the names of his accomplices. He was put to death. Public opinion

generally accused Catherine of murdering Ivan. 16

Conspiracies continued. In 1768 an officer named Choglokov, asserting

that he had been commissioned by God to avenge the death of Peter III,

armed himself with a long dagger, found entry to the royal palace, and hid

himself at the turn of a passage where Catherine usually passed. Grigori

444 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVIII

Orlov heard of the plot, and arrested Choglokov, who proudly confessed his

intent to kill the Empress. He was banished to Siberia.

II. THE LOVER

Surrounded by nobles whom she could not trust, and harassed by intrigues

that disordered administration, Catherine invented a new form of rule by

making her successive lovers the executives of the government. Each of her

lovers was, during his ascendancy, her prime minister; she added her person

to the emoluments of the office, but she exacted competent service in return.

"Of all places in the government," wrote Masson (one of Catherine's many

French enemies), "there was not one of which the duties were so scrupu-

lously fulfilled. . . . Nor, perhaps, was there any post in which the Empress

displayed more choice and discernment. I believe no instance occurred of its

having been filled by a person incapable of it." 17 It would be a mistake to

think of Catherine as a debauchee; she observed all the external amenities,

never indulged in risque conversation, never allowed it in her presence. 18 To

most of her lovers she gave a faithful— to some a tender— attachment; her let-

ters to Potemkin are almost girlishly devoted, and the death of Lanskoi

afflicted her with a desolating grief.

She approached with both art and science the task of choosing a new

favorite. She watched for men who combined political with physical ca-

pacity; she invited a prospect to dinner, sampled his manners and mind; if he

passed this scrutiny she had him examined by the court physician; if he sur-

vived this test she appointed him her aide-de-camp, gave him a succulent

salary, and admitted him to her bed. Being quite devoid of religious belief,

she allowed no Christian ethic to interfere with her unique manner of choos-

ing ministers. She explained to Nikolai Saltykov: "I am serving the Empire

in educating competent youths." 19 The treasury paid heavily for these favor-

ites—though probably much less than France paid for the mistresses and con-

cubines of Louis XV. Castera reckoned that the five Orlovs received seven-

teen million rubles, Potemkin fifty million, Lanskoi 7,260,000. Some of this

outlay came back to Russia in effective service; Potemkin, the most pampered

of her lovers, added lucrative territory to the empire.

But why did she change her paramours so often, taking twenty-one in

forty years? Because some failed in one or the other of their double duties;

some died; some proved unfaithful; some were needed in distant posts. One,

Rimsky-Korsakov, she surprised in her own apartments in the arms of her

maid of honor; Catherine merely dismissed him; another, Mamonov, left her

for a younger mate; the Empress resigned him without revenge. 20 "It is a

very remarkable feature in the character of Catherine," said Masson, "that

none of her favorites incurred her hatred or her vengeance, though several

of them offended her, and their quitting their office did not depend upon

herself. No one [of them] was ever seen to be punished. ... In this respect

Catherine appears superior to all other women." 21

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 445

After the accession Grigori Orlov retained his ascendancy for ten years.

Catherine amorously extolled him:

Count Grigori has the mind of an eagle. I have never met a man who has a

finer grasp of any matter that he undertakes or even that is suggested to him.

. . . His honesty is proof against any assault. ... It is a pity that education

has had no chance to improve his qualities and talents, which are indeed

supreme, but which his haphazard life has allowed to lie fallow. 22

"This one," she wrote elsewhere, "would have remained [her lover and

favorite] forever had he not been the first to tire." 23 Grigori labored for the

emancipation of the serfs, proposed the liberation of Christians from the

Ottoman yoke, served capably during the wars, offended the court by pride

and insolence, and played truant from Catherine's arms. He was banished in

1772 to wealth and comfort on his estates. His brother Alexei became grand

admiral, led the Russian fleet to victory over the Turks, remained in favor

throughout the reign, and lived to lead his regiments against Napoleon.

Grigori was succeeded as favorite by an obscure Adonis, Alexis Vassil-

chik, whom a court faction foisted upon Catherine to divert her mind from

the banished Orlov, but she found him politically and otherwise inept and

replaced him (1774) with Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin. He was an

officer in the Horse Guards, whose uniform she had donned (1762) to lead

them against Peter. Noticing that. her sword lacked the tassel proudly worn

by the Guards, Potemkin tore his from the hilt, rode boldly out of the ranks,

and presented the decoration to her; she accepted it, forgave his audacity,

admired his handsome face and muscular frame. His father, a retired colonel

in the lesser nobility, had destined him for the priesthood; Potemkin received

considerable education in history, classics, and theology, and distinguished

himself at the University of Moscow. But he found army life more suitable

than a seminary to his wild and imaginative temperament. Of course he was

hypnotized by Catherine's union of beauty and power; "when she enters an

unlit room," he said, "she lights it up." 24 In the war of 1768 he led his cavalry

regiment with such reckless courage that Catherine sent him a personal com-

mendation. Back in St. Petersburg, he fretted with jealousy of the Orlovs

and Vassilchik. He quarreled with the Orlovs, and in a brawl with them he

lost an eye. 25 To get the Empress out of his mind— or to get himself into hers

—he left the court, isolated himself in a suburb, studied theology, let his hair

and beard grow, and declared that he would become a monk. Catherine took

pity on him, sent him word that she had a high regard for him, and invited

him to return. He cut his beard, trimmed his hair, donned his military uni-

form, appeared at court, and thrilled to imperial smiles. When Catherine

found Vassilchik inadequate she opened her arms to Potemkin, then twenty-

four, at the peak of his masculine vigor and dashing charm. Soon she was as

infatuated with him as he with her. She showered favors, rubles, land, serfs,

upon him, and when he was absent she sent him billets-doux quite innocent

of majesty.

How odd it is! Everything I used to laugh at has now happened to me, for

my love for you has made me blind. Sentiments that I thought idiotic, exag-

446 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

gerated, and scarcely natural I am now experiencing myself. I can't keep my

silly eyes off you. . . .

We can meet only during the next three days, for then comes the first week

of Lent, which is reserved for prayers and fasting, and ... it would be a

great sin to meet. The mere thought of this separation makes me cry. 26

He proposed marriage to her; some historians believe they were secretly

wed; in several letters she calls him "my beloved husband," and speaks of her-

self as "your wife" 27 — though we must never conclude to reality from words.

He seems to have tired of her, perhaps because of her unchecked fondness;

the call of adventure proved stronger than the invitation to assault a citadel

already won. His influence over her remained so great that most of the favor-

ites who succeeded him did so only after his approval had been secured.

It was so with Piotr Zavadovsky, who basked in her boudoir from 1776 to

1777; with Simon Zorich ( 1777-78) , and Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov ( 1 778-80) .

Not until she took Alexis Lanskoi (1780) did she have again an affair of the

heart. He was not only handsome and accomplished, he was a man of poetic

sensibility and humane beneficence, an intelligent friend to letters and arts.

"Everybody seemed to share the Sovereign's predilection for him." 28 Sud-

denly he was seized with unbearable pain in the bowels; the court suspected

Potemkin of having poisoned him; despite all medical aid and Catherine's

devoted care, he died, breathing his last breath in her arms. She passed three

days in seclusion and grief. We hear the woman behind the ruler— the heart

behind history— in her letter of July 2, 1 784:

I thought I should die of irreparable loss. ... I had hoped that he would be

the support of my old age. He was attentive, he learned much, he had ac-

quired all my tastes. He was a young man whom I was bringing up, and who

was grateful, kind, and good. . . . Lanskoi is no more, . . . and my room, so

pleasant before, has become an empty den, in which I can just drag myself

about like a shadow. ... I cannot look upon a human face without my voice

choking. ... 1 cannot sleep or eat. ... I know not what will become of me. 29

For a year she denied herself a lover; then she yielded to Alexis Ermolov

(1785-86), who so displeased Potemkin that he was quickly replaced by

Alexis Mamonov. Alexis soon tired of his fifty-seven-year-old mistress; he

asked permission to marry Princess Sherbatov; Catherine gave the couple a

court marriage, and sent them off loaded with presents (1789). 30 The last on

the list was Platon Zubov (1789-96), a lieutenant in the Horse Guards,

muscular and mannerly. Catherine was grateful for his services; she took

upon herself the care of his education, and ended by treating him as a son. He

stayed with her till her death.

III. THE PHILOSOPHER

Between love and war, statesmanship and diplomacy, this astonishing

woman found time for philosophy. We get a measure of the high repute won

by the French philosophes when we see the two ablest rulers of the eight-

CHAP.XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 447

eenth century proud to correspond with them, and competing for their

praise.

Long before her accession Catherine had relished the style, wit, and irrev-

erencies of Voltaire, and had dreamed of becoming the "enlightened des-

pot" of his dreams. She must have liked Diderot too, for in September, 1762,

she offered to print the Ency elope die in St. Petersburg if the French govern-

ment continued to outlaw it. Only one letter survives of those that she wrote

to Voltaire before 1765; it replied to some lines that he had sent her in Octo-

ber, 1763:

For the first time 1 regret that I am not a poet, and that 1 must answer your

verses in prose. But I may tell you that since 1746 I have been under the

greatest obligations to you. Before that period I read nothing but romances,

but by chance your works fell into my hands, and ever since then I have never

ceased to read them, and have had no desire for books less well written than

yours, or less instructive. ... So I return continually to the creator of my

taste as to my deepest amusement. Assuredly, monsieur, if I have any knowl-

edge I owe it to you. I am now reading the Essai sur Vhistoire generate, and 1

should like to learn every page of it by heart. 31

Throughout her life, or till their deaths, Catherine corresponded with

Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, Mme. Geoffrin, Grimm, and many more

French notables. She contributed to the funds Voltaire raised for the Calas

and the Sirvens. We have seen how she ordered large shipments of watches

from Ferney, and of stockings knitted by Voltaire's workers, sometimes (if

we may believe the old fox) by Voltaire himself. It was a feather in his skull-

cap that crowned heads should so honor him, and he repaid Catherine by

becoming her press agent in France. He exonerated her from complicity in

the death of Peter III; "I know," he wrote, "that Catherine is reproached

with some bagatelle about her husband; but these are family matters in which

I do not mix." 32 He pleaded with his friends to support him in supporting

Catherine; so to d'Argental:

I have another favor to ask of you; it is for my Catherine. We must establish

her reputation in Paris among worthy people. I have strong reasons for be-

lieving that MM. the Dukes of Praslin and Choiseul do not regard her as the

most scrupulous woman in the world. Nevertheless I know . . . that she had

no part in the death of that drunkard of hers. . . . Besides, he was the greatest

fool that ever occupied a throne. . . . We are under obligations to Catherine

for having had the courage to dethrone her husband, for she reigns with wis-

dom and with glory, and we ought to bless a crowned head who makes re-

ligious toleration universal through 135 degrees of longitude. . . . Say, then,

much good for Catherine, I pray you. 33

Mme. du Deffand thought this exculpation of the Empress quite shameful;

Mme. de Choiseul and Horace Walpole denounced it. 34 Praslin and Choiseul,

who were directing the foreign relations of France, could not be expected to

admire an Empress who was opposing French influence in Poland and defy-

ing it in Turkey. Voltaire himself had occasional doubts; when he learned

that Ivan VI had been slain, he admitted sadly that "we must moderate a little

our enthusiasm" for Catherine. 35 But soon he was praising her legislative

44** ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

program, her patronage of the arts, her campaign for religious liberty in

Poland; now (May 18, 1767) he gave her the title of "Semiramis of the

North." When she went to war with Turkey he interrupted his attack upon

rinfdme (the Catholic Church) to applaud her crusade to save Christians

from Mohammedans.

Diderot was equally fascinated by beauty on the throne, and with sub-

stantial reasons. When Catherine heard that he was planning to sell his

library in order to raise a dowry for his daughter, she instructed her Paris

agent to buy it at whatever price Diderot should ask; he asked and received

sixteen thousand livres. Then she requested Diderot to keep the books till his

death, and to be their custodian for her at a salary of a thousand livres per

year; moreover, she paid his salary twenty-five years in advance. Diderot

overnight became a rich man and a defender of Catherine. When she invited

him to visit her he could hardly refuse. "Once in a lifetime," he said, "one

must see such a woman." 36

Having arranged the finances of his wife and daughter, he set out, aged

sixty (June 3, 1773), on the long, rough journey to St. Petersburg. He dallied

two months in The Hague, sipping fame; proceeded via Dresden and Leip-

zig; carefully avoiding Berlin and Frederick, about whom he had made some

barbed remarks. Twice on the trip he fell violently sick of colic. He reached

St. Petersburg on October 9, and was received by the Czarina on the tenth.

"Nobody knows better than she," he reported, "the art of putting everyone

at his ease." 37 She invited him to speak frankly, "as man to man." He did, and

gestured in his accustomed way, driving points home by slapping the imperial

thighs. "Your Diderot," Catherine wrote to Mme. Geoffrin, "is an extraordi-

nary man. I emerge from interviews with him with my thighs bruised and

quite black. I have been obliged to put a table between us to protect myself

and my members." 38

For a while he tried, like Voltaire with Frederick, to play the diplomat,

and turn Russia from alliance with Austria and Prussia to alliance with

France; 39 she soon diverted him to topics nearer to his trade. He told her in

some detail how Russia could be transformed into Utopia; she listened gaily,

but remained skeptical. Later she recalled these conversations in a letter to

Comte Louis-Philippe de Segur:

I talked much and frequently with him, but with more curiosity than profit.

If I had believed him everything would have been turned upside down in my

kingdom; legislation, administration, finance— all would have been turned topsy-

turvy to make room for impractical theories. . . . Then, speaking openly to

him, I said: "Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all

that your brilliant intellect has inspired. With all your high principles one

would make fine books, but very bad business. . . . You work only upon

paper, which endures all things; . . . but I, poor Empress as I am, work on the

human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a different degree." . . . There-

after he talked only about literature. 40

When she came upon some notes that he had made "On the Instructions of

her Imperial Majesty . . . for the Drawing up of Laws," she described

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 449

them (after his death) as "veritable babble, in which one could find neither

knowledge of realities nor prudence, nor insight." 41 Nevertheless she enjoyed

his vivacious conversation, and talked with him almost every day during his

long stay.*

After five months of ecstasy in her friendship, and discomfort at her court,

Diderot turned homeward. Catherine ordered a special carriage built for

him, in which he could recline at ease. She asked him what gifts she should

send him; he answered, None, but he reminded her that she had not yet kept

her promise to reimburse him for the expenses of his trip; he calculated these

at fifteen hundred rubles, she gave him three thousand and a costly ring, and

assigned an officer to accompany him to The Hague. On his return to Paris

he eulogized her gratefully.

Catherine made no approaches to Rousseau, who was painfully antipodal

to her in temper and ideas. But she cultivated Melchior Grimm, for she knew

that his Correspondance litteraire reached influential Europeans. He took the

first step by offering (1764) to send her his periodical letters; she agreed,

and paid him fifteen hundred rubles per year. He first saw her when he went

to St. Petersburg (1773) in the retinue of the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt to

attend the marriage of the Prince's sister to Grand Duke Paul. Catherine

found him much more realistic than Diderot, and very usefully informed on

all aspects of that Parisian world which fascinated her with its literature,

philosophy, art, women, and salons. She invited him to chat with her almost

every day during the winter of 1773-74. About these meetings she wrote to

Voltaire: "M. Grimm's conversation is a delight to me; but we have so many

things to say to each other that thus far our interviews have been marked

by more eagerness than order or sequence." In the ardor of these conversa-

tions she had repeatedly to remind herself that (as she put it) she must return

to her gagne-pain— earn her bread by attending to the business of govern-

ment. 43 Grimm came back to Paris dripping with enthusiasm for Catherine as

"the nourishment of my soul, the consolation of my heart, the pride of my

mind, the joy of Russia, and the hope of Europe." 44 He visited St. Petersburg

again in 1776, and saw her almost daily for a year. She begged him to remain

and supervise the reorganization of education in Russia, but he became lone-

some for Paris and Mme. d'£pinay. Catherine was not jealous; when she

learned that Mme. d'£pinay was in financial straits she sent her, with delicate

indirectness, enough to meet her wants. 45 From 1777 Grimm served as

Catherine's agent in France for art purchases and confidential missions. His

friendship for her lasted untroubled till her end.

What were the results of this flirtation between autocracy and philosophy?

Insofar as she cultivated the philosophes as her press agents in France, the

political effect was nil; French policy, and consequently French historians,

remained bitterly hostile to a Russia that was balking French aims in Eastern

Europe. But her admiration for the heroes of the French Enlightenment was

sincere, having begun long before her accession to power; if it had been an

* The story that Euler confused Diderot before the Russian court with an imaginary algebraic

proof of God's existence is probably apocryphal. 42

45° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

affectation it would not have borne such long confrontations with Diderot

and Grimm. Her liaison with French thought helped to Europeanize literate

Russia, and to modify the Western view of Russia as a colossal brute. Many-

Russians followed Catherine's lead, corresponded with French writers, and

felt the influence of French culture, manners, and art. A growing number of

Russians visited Paris, and though many spent their time in sexual adventures,

many frequented the salons, the museums, and the court, read French liter-

ature and philosophy, and brought back with them ideas that shared in pre-

paring the outburst of Russian literature in the nineteenth century.

IV. THE STATESMAN

We can hardly doubt the good intentions of Catherine in the early years

of her reign.

In her copy of Fenelon's Telemaque were found these resolutions:

Study mankind, learn to use men without surrendering to them unreservedly.

Search for true merit, be it at the other end of the world, for usually it is modest

and retiring.

Do not allow yourself to become the prey of flatterers; make them under-

stand that you care neither for praise nor for obsequiousness. Have confidence

in those who have the courage to contradict you, . . . and who place more

value on your reputation than on your favor.

Be polite, humane, accessible, compassionate, and liberal-minded. Do not let

your grandeur prevent you from condescending with kindness toward the small,

and putting yourself in their place. See that this kindness, however, does not

weaken your authority nor diminish their respect. . . . Reject all artificiality.

Do not allow the world to contaminate you to the point of making you lose

the ancient principles of honor and virtue. . . .

I swear by Providence to stamp these words into my heart. 46

She informed herself assiduously on every relevant subject, and wrote de-

tailed instructions on a thousand topics from army training and industrial

operations to the toilette of her court and the production of operas and plays.

Said one of her earliest and least friendly biographers:

Ambition extinguished not in Catherine's soul an ardent relish for pleasure.

But she knew how to renounce pleasure, and to make the transition to employ-

ments the most serious, and application the most indefatigable to the affairs of

government. She assisted at all the deliberations of the Council, read the dis-

patches of her ambassadors, and dictated, or indicated . . . the answers to be

returned. She entrusted her ministers with only the details of business, and

still kept her eye on the execution. 47

The task of governing her vast area was made almost impossible by the

number (ten thousand), diversity, contradictions, and chaos of existing laws.

Hoping to play Justinian to Russia, and to consolidate her power, Catherine,

on December 14, 1766, summoned to Moscow administrative agents and

legal experts from every part of the empire, to undertake a thorough revision

and codification of Russian law. In preparation for their coming she per-

sonally prepared a Nakaz, or Instructions, describing the principles upon

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 45 1

which the new code should be formed. These reflected her reading of Mon-

tesquieu, Beccaria, Blackstone, and Voltaire. She began by declaring that

Russia must be thought of as a European state, and should have a constitution

based upon "European principles." This did not, in her understanding, mean

a "constitutional government" subordinating the sovereign to a legislature

chosen by the people; the educational level of Russia would not permit even

so limited an electoral franchise as existed in Britain. It meant a government

in which the ruler, though ultimately the sole source of law, ruled in obedi-

ence to law. Catherine upheld the feudal system— i.e., the system of mutual

loyalty and services between peasant and vassal, vassal and liege lord, lord

and sovereign— as indispensable to economic, political, and military order in

the Russia of 1766 (a land of communities almost isolated from one another,

and from the center of government, by difficulties of communication and

transport) ; but she urged that the rights of masters over their serfs should

be defined and limited by law, that serfs should be allowed to own property,

and that the trial and punishment of serfs should be transferred from the

feudal lord to a public magistrate responsible to a provincial court respon-

sible to the sovereign. 48 All trial should be open, torture should not be used,

capital punishment should be abolished in law as well as in fact. Religious

worship should be free; "amongst so many difFerent creeds the most injurious

error would be intolerance." 49 The Nakaz, before being printed, was sub-

mitted by her to her advisers; they warned her that any sudden change from

existing custom would plunge Russia into disorder; and she allowed them to

modify her proposals, especially those for the gradual emancipation of the

serfs. 50

Even as so bowdlerized the Instructions, published in Holland in 1767,

stirred the European intelligentsia to enthusiastic praise. The Empress sent a

copy direct to Voltaire, who made his usual obeisance. "Madame, last night

I received one of the guarantees of your immortality— your code in a German

translation. Today I have begun to translate it into French. It will appear in

Chinese, in every tongue; it will be a gospel for all mankind." 51 And he

added in later letters: "Legislators have the first place in the temple of

glory; conquerors come behind them. ... I regard the Instructions as the

finest monument of the century." 52 The French government forbade the

sale of the Instructions in France.

The modified Nakaz was presented to the "Committee for Drafting a

New Code," which met on August 10, 1767. It was composed of 564 mem-

bers elected by various groups: 161 from the nobility, 208 from the towns,

79 from the free peasantry, 54 from the Cossacks, 34 from non-Russian

tribes (Christian or not), and 28 from the government. The clergy was not

represented as a class, and the serfs were not represented at all. In some ways

the Committee corresponded to the States-General that was to meet in Paris

in 1789; and, as in that more famous assembly, the delegates brought to the

government lists of grievances and proposals for reform from their constitu-

ents. These documents were transmitted to the Empress, and they offered

her and her aides a valuable survey of the condition of the realm.

45 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

The Committee was empowered not to pass laws, but to advise the sover-

eign on the state and needs of each class or district, and to offer suggestions

for legislation. The delegates were guaranteed freedom of speech and in-

violability of person. Some of them proposed the emancipation of all serfs,

some asked that the right to own serfs be more widely extended. In Decem-

ber, 1767, the Committee recessed; in February, 1768, it moved to St. Peters-

burg; altogether it held 203 sessions; on December 18, 1768, it was adjourned

sine die because the outbreak of war with Turkey called many delegates to

the front. The task of drafting proposed legislation was deputed to subcom-

mittees, some of which continued to meet till 1775; but no code of laws was

formulated. Catherine was not altogether displeased with this inconclusive

result. "The Committee," she said, ". . . has given me light and knowledge

for all the Empire. I know now what is necessary, and with what I should

occupy myself. It has elaborated all parts of the law, and has distributed the

affairs under heads. I should have done more had it not been for the war with

Turkey, but a unity hitherto unknown in the principles and methods of

discussion has been introduced." 53 Meanwhile she had shown the nobles on

how broad a base her power rested. The Committee, before adjourning, pro-

posed to confer upon her the appellation "Great"; she refused, but consented

to be called "Mother of the Country."

Two of Catherine's recommendations became law: the abolition of torture

and the establishment of religious toleration. This was widely extended: it

allowed the Roman Catholic Church to compete with the Greek Orthodox;

it protected the Jesuits even after the dissolution of their order by Pope

Clement XIV ( 1 77 3 ) ; it permitted the Volga Tatars to rebuild their mosques.

Catherine admitted the Jews into Russia, but she subjected them to special

taxes, and (possibly for their safety) confined them to specific areas. She left

the Raskolniki— religious dissenters— free to practice their rites unhindered;

"we have indeed," she wrote to Voltaire, "fanatics who, as they are no longer

persecuted by others, burn themselves; but if those of other countries did the

same, no great harm would result." 54

The philosophes were especially pleased by Catherine's subordination of

the Russian Church to the state. Some of them complained that she still at-

tended religious services (so did Voltaire); the older of them recognized that

her attendance was indispensable to retaining the allegiance of the people.

By a decree of February 26, 1764, she turned into state property all the lands

of the Church. The salaries of the Orthodox clergy were henceforth paid

by the state— so ensuring their support of the government. Many monasteries

and nunneries were closed; those that remained were forbidden to accept

more than a prescribed number of novices, and the legal age for taking vows

was raised. The surplus revenues from ecclesiastical institutions were applied

to the foundation of schools, asylums, and hospitals. 55

Both the clergy and the nobility opposed the extension of popular educa-

tion, fearing that the spread of knov/ledge among the masses would lead to

heresy, unbelief, and factionalism, and would imperil social order. Here, as

elsewhere, Catherine began with liberal aspirations. She appealed to Grimm:

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 453

Listen a moment, my philosophical friends: you would be charming, ador-

able, if you would have the charity to map out a plan for young people, from

ABC to university. ... I, who have not studied and lived in Paris, have neither

knowledge nor insight in the matter. ... I am very much concerned about an

idea for a university and its management, a gymnasium [secondary school]

and an elementary school. . . . Until you accede to my request I shall hunt

through the Ency elope die. Oh, I shall be certain to draw out what I want! 56

Meanwhile she was moved by the pedagogical enthusiasm of Ivan Betsky,

who had traveled in Sweden, Germany, Holland, Italy, and France, had

frequented the salon of Mme. Geoff rin, had studied the Encyclopedic, and

had met Rousseau. In 1763 she organized at Moscow a school for foundlings,

which by 1796 had graduated forty thousand students; in 1764 a school for

boys was opened in St. Petersburg, and in 1765 a school for girls; in 1764

the Smolny Monastery was transformed into the Smolny Institute for girls

of the nobility— an echo of Mme. de Maintenon's St.-Cyr; Catherine was the

first Russian ruler to do anything for the education of women. Baffled by

the dearth of qualified teachers, she sent Russian students to study pedagogy

in England, Germany, Austria, and Italy. A teachers' college was founded

in 1786.

She admired Joseph IPs reforms of education in Austria, and asked him to

lend her someone familiar with his procedure. He sent her Theodor Yanko-

vich, who drew up for her a plan which she promulgated as a "Statute of

Popular Schools" (August 5, 1786). An elementary school was established

in the chief town of each county, and a high school in each of the principal

cities of twenty-six provinces. These schools were open to all children of any

class; corporal punishment was not allowed in them; teachers and textbooks

were provided by the state. The project was largely frustrated by the reluc-

tance of the parents to send their children to school rather than use them for

labor at home. In the ten years between their foundation and Catherine's

death the "popular schools" grew slowly from forty to 3 16; the teachers from

136 to 744; the pupils from 4,398 to 17,341. In 1796 Russia was still far be-

hind the West in public instruction.

Higher education was scantily provided by the University of Moscow,

and by special academies. A School of Commerce was founded in 1772, an

Academy of Mines in 1773. The old Academy of Sciences was enlarged and

was provided with ample funds. In 1783, on urging by Princess Dashkova,

and under her presidency, a Russian Academy was organized for the im-

provement of the language, the encouragement of literature, and the study

of history; it issued translations, published periodicals, and compiled a dic-

tionary which appeared in six installments between 1789 and 1799.

Appalled by the high death rate in Russia, and the primitive character of

public sanitation and personal hygiene, Catherine brought in foreign physi-

cians, established a College of Pharmacy at Moscow, and provided funds for

the production of surgical instruments. She opened in Moscow three new

hospitals, a foundling asylum, and an insane asylum, and in St. Petersburg

three new hospitals, including a "Secret Hospital" for venereal diseases. 57 In

454 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVIII

1768 she introduced into Russia inoculation for smallpox, and quieted public

fears by serving, aged forty, as the second Russian subject of the treatment;

soon Catherine reported to Voltaire that "more people had been inoculated

here in one month than in Vienna in a year." 58 (In 1772 Naples had its first

inoculation, and in 1774 Louis XV, z/mnoculated, died of smallpox.)

V. THE ECONOMIST

One of Catherine's basic measures (1765) provided for a survey of all

Russian land. The operation met with much resistance from landlords; by the

end of the reign it had covered twenty out of fifty provinces, but it was not

completed till the middle of the nineteenth century. As it proceeded the

Empress realized with discouraging clarity how the economy of Russia

rested upon the organization of agriculture by a feudal system of lords and

serfs. In 1766 she offered a prize of a thousand ducats for the best essay on

the emancipation of the serfs. The winner was Bearde de P Abbaye of Aix-la-

Chapelle, who argued that "the whole universe demands of sovereigns that

they should emancipate the peasants," and predicted that agricultural pro-

duction would be immensely increased by "making the farmers the owners

of the land they cultivate." 59 The noble landowners, however, warned

Catherine that unless the peasant was bound to the land and his landlord he

would migrate to the towns or, more irresponsibly, from village to village,

creating chaos, disrupting production, and interfering with the conscription

of sturdy peasant sons for the army or the fleet.

The puzzled Czarina proceeded cautiously, for the nobles had the money

and the arms to overthrow her, and in such an attempt they could rely upon

the support of a clergy resenting the loss of their lands and their serfs. She

feared the disorder that might come from a wholesale movement of liberated

peasants to towns unprepared to house or feed or employ them. She made

moves toward emancipation. She renewed the edict of Peter III forbidding

the purchase of serfs for factory labor, and she required employers to pay

their workers in cash and to maintain conditions of work as determined by

the officials of the town or the mir; 60 even so, the status of industrial serfs

remained one of heartless and stupefying slavery. Catherine forbade serfdom

in the towns that she founded, 61 and, on their payment of a small fee, she

freed the serfs on lands taken over from the Church. 62 These improvements,

however, were outweighed by her repeated grants of state lands to men who

had served her well as generals, statesmen, or lovers; in this way over 800,000

free peasants became serfs. The proportion of serfs in the rural population

rose from 52.4 per cent at the outset of the reign to 55.5 per cent at its close,

and the number of serfs rose from 7,600,000 to 2o,ooo,ooo. 63 By her "Let-

ters of Grace to the Nobility" (1785) Catherine completed her surrender

to the nobles: she reaffirmed their exemption from the poll tax, corporal

punishment, and military service, and their right to be tried only by their

peers, to mine their lands, to own industrial enterprises, and to travel abroad

CHAP.XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 455

at will. She forbade the landlords to be tyrannical or cruel, but she nullified

this prohibition by forbidding the serfs to send her their complaints.

The peasants, so silenced, resorted to flight, rebellion, or assassination. Be-

tween 1760 and 1769 thirty landlords were killed by their peasants; between

1762 and 1773 there were forty peasant revolts. 64 These were quickly sup-

pressed until a rebel leader arose who knew how to turn resentment into

organization, and peasant arms into victories. Emelyan Pugachev was a Don

Cossack who had fought in Russian ranks against the Prussians and the

Turks. He asked for discharge, was refused, deserted, was captured, de-

serted again, and accepted the life of an outlaw. In November, 1772, en-

couraged by discontented monks, he proclaimed that he was Peter III, who

had miraculously survived all attempts to kill him. He attracted peasants and

brigands to his standard, until he felt strong enough to declare open rebel-

lion against the usurper Catherine (September, 1773). Cossacks of the Urals,

the Volga, and the Don; thousands of men who had been condemned to

force-labor in the mines and smelters of the Urals; hundreds of Old Be-

lievers eager to overthrow the Orthodox Church; local Tatar, Kirghiz, and

Bashkir tribes who had not forgiven Elizabeth's dragooning of them into

Christianity; serfs who had fled from their masters, and prisoners who had

escaped from jail: these flocked to Pugachev's standard, until he had twenty

thousand men under his command. They moved triumphantly from town to

town, defeated the forces sent against them by local governors, captured im-

portant cities like Kazan and Saratov; they conscripted supplies, killed land-

lords, forced reluctant peasants to join them, and marched up the Volga

basin toward Moscow. Pugachev announced that there he would place not

himself but Grand Duke Paul on the throne. But— probably with grim humor

—he called his peasant wife queen, and named his chief lieutenants after

Catherine's: Count Orlov, Count Panin, Count Vorontsov.

Catherine at first made fun of "le marquis Pugachev," but when she

learned that the rebels had taken Kazan, she sent a substantial force under

General Piotr Ivanovich Panin to suppress the rebellion. The nobles, seeing

the whole feudal structure endangered, came to her aid; soon General Alex-

ander Vasilievich Suvorov joined Panin with cavalry freed by peace with

the Turks; the insurgents were thrown into disorder by their encounter with

disciplined troops under imperial officers; they retreated from one position

to another, exhausted their provisions, and began to starve. Some of their

leaders, hoping to earn bread and pardon, made Pugachev their prisoner

and delivered him to the victors. He was brought to Moscow in an iron

cage, was tried in the Kremlin, was beheaded and then quartered, and his

head was exhibited on a pole in four sections of the city, pour decourager

les azures. Five of his captains were executed, others were knouted this side

of death, and were sent to Siberia. One result of the revolt was to strengthen

the alliance of the Empress with the nobility.

In some measure she challenged the nobility by favoring the growth of a

business class. Convinced by the arguments of the physiocrats, she established

free trade in agricultural products (1762), later in everything; she put an end

45^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVIII

(1775) to government-sanctioned monopolies by ruling that any man should

be free to undertake and operate an industrial enterprise. The growth of a

middle class was retarded by the predominance of cottage and manorial

industry, and the participation of nobles in industrial and commercial ven-

tures. Factories multiplied from 984 to 3,161 during Catherine's reign, but

these were mostly small shops employing only a few workers. Urban popu-

lation increased from 328,000 in 1724 to 1,300,000 in 1796— still less than

four per cent of the population. 65

The busy Empress, with only grudging support from her noble entourage,

did what she could to promote commerce. Roads were terrible, but rivers

were many, and canals bound them into a beneficent web. Under Catherine

a canal was begun between the Volga and the Neva to join the Baltic with

the Caspian Sea, and she planned another to join the Caspian and Black

Seas. 66 By negotiation or by war she secured the unhindered passage of Rus-

sian commerce into the Black Sea and thence into the Mediterranean. She

prodded her diplomats to arrange trade treaties with England (1766), Poland

(1775), Denmark (1782), Turkey (1783), Austria (1785), and France

(1787). Foreign commerce grew from 21,000,000 rubles in 1762 to 96,000,-

000 in 1796. 67

In such figures we must allow for the currency inflation with which gov-

ernments pay for their wars. To finance her campaigns against Turkey

Catherine borrowed, at home and abroad, 130,000,000 rubles; she issued

paper money far beyond any gold collateral; during her reign the ruble lost

thirty-two per cent of its value. In the same period, despite a rise of revenues

from 17,000,000 to 78,000,000 rubles, the national debt rose to 215,000,-

ooo. 68 Most of this was due to the wars that broke the power of Turkey, and

carried the borders of Russia to the Black Sea.

VI. THE WARRIOR

Like any philosopher, Catherine had begun with pacific aims. She an-

nounced that the internal problems of the empire would absorb her attention,

and that she would, if unmolested, avoid all conflict with foreign powers.

She confirmed Peter Ill's peace with Prussia, and ended his war with Den-

mark. She rejected in 1762 the temptation to conquer Kurland or to interfere

in Poland; "I have people enough to make happy," she said, "and that little

corner of the earth will add nothing to my comfort." 69 She reduced the

army, neglected the arsenals, and sought to negotiate with Turkey a treaty

of perpetual peace.

But the more she studied the map, the more fault she found with the

boundaries of Russia. On the east the empire was well protected by the Urals,

the Caspian Sea, and the weakness of China. On the north it was protected by

ice. But on the west Sweden held part of Finland, from which at any mo-

ment an attack might be expected from a nation still resenting its losses to

Peter the Great; and Poland and Prussia barred the way into "Europe" and

Europeanization. On the south the Tatars, under a Moslem and Turkish-

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 457

controlled khan, barred the way to the Black Sea. What abortions of history

had given Russia such geography, such anomalous boundaries? Old General

Munnich, new general Grigori Orlov, whispered to her how much more

rational it would be if the Black Sea were the southern boundary, and how

sweet it would be if Russia could take Constantinople and control the Bos-

porus. Nikita Panin, her foreign minister from 1763 to 1780, pondered ways

of promoting Russia's influence in Poland and preventing that defenseless

land from falling under Prussian domination.

Catherine was moved by their arguments. And she itched to give her

adopted country a place in politics commensurate with its place on the map.

Within a year of her accession she sallied forth upon a foreign policy that

aimed at nothing less than to make Russia the pivotal power on the Con-

tinent. "I tell you," she wrote to Count Keyserling, her ambassador at War-

saw, "that my aim is to be joined in bonds of friendship with all the powers,

in armed alliance, so that I may always be able to range myself on the side

of the oppressed, and so become the arbiter of Europe." 70

At times she came close to her goal. By taking Russia out of the Seven

Years' War she in effect decided that Continent-wide conflict in favor of

Frederick. In 1764 she signed with Frederick a treaty that presaged the dis-

memberment of Poland. She took advantage of Denmark's need of Russian

support against Sweden to dominate the foreign policy of the Danes. In

1779 she served as arbiter between Frederick and Joseph at the Peace of

Teschen, and became protectress of the German Imperial Constitution. In

1 780 she bound Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Austria, and Portugal with Russia

in a "League of Armed Neutrality" to protect neutral shipping in the war of

England with the American colonies: neutral ships were to be free from

attack by either combatant unless they carried munitions of war; and a

blockade, to be legal and respected, must be real, and no mere paper declara-

tion.

Long before that second reversal of alliances the irrepressible conflict

had begun for control of the Black Sea. Catherine's first Turkish war origi-

nated as a strange by-product of her invasion of Poland. She had sent troops

there to help the non-Catholics in their struggle for equal rights with the

Catholic majority; the Catholics moved a papal nuncio to explain to Turkey

that now was an opportune time for Turkey to attack Russia; France sec-

onded the suggestion, and urged Sweden and the Khan of the Crimea to join

in the attack. 71 Voltaire mourned for his endangered Empress. "That a nun-

cio enlists the Turks in his crusade against you," he wrote to her, "is worthy

of an Italian farce: Mustafa the worthy ally of the Pope!"— the situation

almost persuaded him to be a Christian. Indeed, in a letter of November,

1 768, he proposed to Catherine a holy war against the infidels:

You force the Poles to be tolerant and happy despite the nuncio, and you

seem to be having trouble with the Mussulmen. If they wage war on you, per-

haps Peter the Great's idea of making Constantinople the capital of the Rus-

sian Empire may take shape. ... I think that if ever the Turks are expelled

from Europe it will be by the Russians. ... It is not enough to humiliate them;

they must be sent back forever. 72

458 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

Sweden refused to share in the assault upon Russia, but the Crimean Tatars

ravaged the newly settled Russian colony of Novaya Serbia (January, 1769) .

A Turkish army of 100,000 men advanced toward Podolia to join the army

of the Polish Confederation. Catherine refused to withdraw her forces from

Poland. She sent thirty thousand men under Alexander Golitsyn and Piotr

Rumiantsev to repulse the Tatars and check the Turks; told that these were

too numerous, she replied, "The Romans did not concern themselves with the

number of their enemies; they only asked, 'Where are they?' " 73 The Tatars

were driven back; Azov and Taganrog, at the mouth of the Don, were taken;

seventeen thousand Russians defeated 150,000 Turks at Kagul (1770); Ru-

miantsev advanced as far as Bucharest, where he was received with joy by

the Orthodox population. In 1771 Vasili Mikhailovich Dolgoruki overran

the Crimea and put an end to Turkish rule there. Even more spectacular was

the exploit of Alexei Orlov, who led a Russian fleet through the English

Channel, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, defeated the Turkish navy off

Chios, and annihilated it at Chesme (July, 1770); but the damage to his own

ships was too severe to let him follow up his victories.

Some other events were less comforting to Catherine. A plague broke out

in the Russian army along the Danube and spread back to Moscow, where, in

the summer of 1770, it took a thousand lives a day. She knew that Frederick

looked askance at the extension of her realm and power; that Joseph II was

disturbed by the advance of Russia to the Austrian frontier in the Balkans;

that France was leaving no stone unturned to strengthen her Turkish ally;

that England would vigorously oppose Russian control of the Bosporus; and

that Sweden was merely awaiting her opportunity. Catherine invited the

Turks to a conference; they came, but balked at her insistence on the inde-

pendence of the Crimea; and in 1773 the war was resumed.

In January, 1774, Mustafa III died; his successor decided that Turkey had

reached a condition of chaos and exhaustion that threatened her existence as

a European state. By the Peace of Kuchuk Kainarji (in Romania), July 21,

1774, Turkey recognized the independence of the Crimea (which remained

under Tatar rule), ceded Azov, Kerch, Yenikale, and Kilburun (at the

mouth of the Dnieper) to Russia, opened the Black Sea, the Bosporus, and

the Dardanelles to Russian shipping, paid Russia a war indemnity of 4,500,-

000 rubles, granted amnesty to Christians involved in insurrections against

their Turkish governors, and acknowledged the right of Russia to protect

Christians in Turkey. Altogether, this was one of the most advantageous

treaties ever made by Russia. 74 Russia was now a Black Sea power; the Crimea

and the other Tatar regions in South Russia were left open to early Russian

conquest, and the skeptical Empress could pose as the defender of the faith.

Drunk with success, Catherine dreamed of liberating— i.e., conquering—

Greece, and crowning her grandson Constantine at Constantinople as head of

a new empire. She gladdened Voltaire's aging heart with visions of Olympic

Games restored; "we will have the ancient Greek tragedies enacted by Gre-

cian players in the theater of [Dionysius at] Athens." Then, mindful of

armies and treasury exhausted, she added: "I must practice moderation, and

say that peace is better than the finest war in the world." 75

CHAP.XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 459

She was now replacing Frederick as the most famous sovereign in Europe;

everyone marveled at her resolute pursuit of her aims, and the awesome ex-

tension of her power. Joseph II of Austria, who had so long bowed to the

genius of Frederick, traveled to Mogilev, and thence all the way to St. Pe-

tersburg, to meet the Czarina and solicit her alliance. In May, 1 781, she signed

with Joseph a pact for united action in Poland and against Turkey.

Meanwhile Potemkin was making a name for himself in the south. He or-

ganized, equipped, and fed a new army of 300,000 men, built a Black Sea

fleet, with harbors at Sevastopol and Odessa and an arsenal at Kherson, colon-

ized the sparsely settled regions of South Russia, founded towns and villages,

established manufactures, and supplied the colonists with cattle, tools, and

seed— all with a view to having bases of supplies in a campaign to add the Cri-

mea to Catherine's crown, and perhaps win a crown for himself. The Tatars

of the Crimea quarreled and divided; Potemkin softened their leaders with

bribes; when, at last, he invaded the peninsula (December, 1782), he found

only negligible resistance, and on April 8, 1783, over Turkey's futile protests,

the Crimea was absorbed into the Russian realm. Potemkin was made field

marshal, president of the College of War, Prince of Tauris, and governor

general of the Crimea. The Empress added a pourboire of 100,000 rubles;

Potemkin used them on mistresses, liquor, and food.

Catherine too thought it time for relaxation. She combined pleasure with

business by arranging a stately "progress" over land and water to inspect her

conquests and impress their people— and all Europe— with the wealth and

splendor of her court. On January 2, 1787, muffled in furs, she left the Win-

ter Palace and began the long journey in a berline, or coach, large enough to

contain— besides her now spacious self— her current favorite Mamonov, her

chief lady in waiting, a lapdog, and a small library. She was followed by

fourteen carriages and 170 sleighs, bearing the ambassadors of Austria, Brit-

ain, and France— Cobenzl, Fitzherbert, and the Comte de Segur— plus the

Prince de Ligne and an army of officials, courtiers, musicians, and servants.

Potemkin had gone some days in advance to prepare the route, to light it by

hundreds of torches, and to arrange for each evening's meals and sleeping

quarters for all. At major towns the cortege rested for one or two days while

the Czarina met the local dignitaries, surveyed conditions, asked questions,

distributed censure or reward. Every town on the route, warned and in-

structed by Potemkin, was on its best behavior, washed and dressed as never

before, happy for a day.

At Kiev Potemkin superintended the transfer of the mobile court to

eighty-seven vessels which he had equipped and adorned. On these the im-

perial horde moved down the Dnieper. Along the river Catherine saw the

"Potemkin villages" which the clever Prince of Tauris had primed and pol-

ished for her pleasure, and perhaps to impress the diplomats with the prosper-

ity of Russia. Some of the prosperity had been improvised by Potemkin,

some of it was real. "That he constructed sham villages along the banks, and

marshaled the peasantry to create the illusion of progress was the fantastic

invention of a Saxon diplomatist." 76 The Prince de Ligne made several excur-

sions ashore to see behind the fagades; he reported that while Potemkin had

460 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

used some legerdemain, he (Ligne) had been impressed by the "superb estab-

lishments in their infancy, growing manufactures, villages with regular streets

lined by trees." 77 Catherine herself was probably not deceived, but she may

have concluded, as Segur did, that even if half the prosperity and neatness of

those towns was a passing show, the actuality of Sevastopol— town, forts, and

port, built on Crimean shores in two years— was enough to merit Potemkin

praise. The Prince de Ligne, who had known almost everyone of account in

Europe, called him "the most extraordinary man I have ever met." 78

At Kaniov Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland, came to offer his homage

to the woman who had given him her love and his throne. Farther down the

Dnieper, at Kaidaky, Joseph II joined the procession, which thence went ov-

erland to Kherson and into the Crimea. There the Empress, the Emperor, and

the Governor General fondled their dreams of driving the Turks from Eu-

rope: Catherine of capturing Constantinople, Joseph of absorbing the Bal-

kans, Potemkin of making himself king of Dacia (Romania). England and

Prussia advised Sultan Abdul-Hamid to strike at the Russians while they were

off guard, with their military preparations incomplete. 79 The insolence of the

Russian ambassador at Constantinople provided an additional stimulus; the

Sultan jailed him, declared a holy war, and demanded the restoration of Cri-

mea as the price of peace. In August, 1787, the main Turkish army crossed

the Danube and marched into the Ukraine.

Potemkin had celebrated too soon; Russia was not yet prepared for the

ultimate test; he advised the Empress to surrender the Crimea. She reproved

him for his unwonted timidity; she ordered him, Suvorov, and Rumiantsev

to marshal all their available forces and go forth to meet the invaders; she her-

self retreated to St. Petersburg. Suvorov routed the Turks at Kilburun, and

Potemkin besieged Ochakov, which commanded the outlets of both the

Dniester and the Bug. While jihad and crusade came face to face in South

Russia, Sweden decided that now at last the time had come to recapture her

lost provinces. Encouraged by England and Prussia, 80 Gustavus III renewed

an old alliance with the Turks, and demanded of Catherine the return of Fin-

land and Karelia to Sweden, and of the Crimea to Turkey. Of that war we

may speak later; it is enough to say here that on July 9, 1799, a Swedish fleet

decisively defeated the Russians in the Baltic; the roar of Swedish cannon

could be heard from the Winter Palace; Catherine thought of evacuating her

capital. Soon, however, her agents persuaded Sweden to peace (August 15,

1790).

Now she was free to concentrate forces against the Turks, and Austria

joined Russia in the war. Potemkin ended the siege of Ochakov by ordering

his men to attack at whatever price; the victory cost the Russians eight thou-

sand lives; and the fury of battle ended in indiscriminate massacre (Decem-

ber 17, 1788). Potemkin went on to take Bender, the Austrians captured Bel-

grade, Suvorov routed the Turks at Rimnik (September 22, 1789). Turkey

seemed doomed.

The Western powers felt that the situation called for united action against

Catherine if the strategic Bosporus was not to fall into her hands and make

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 46 1

Russia the master of Europe. Frederick the Great having died (1786), his

successor, Frederick William II, saw with dismay the movement of Russia

toward Constantinople, and of Austria into the Balkans; between Russia and

Austria so strengthened, Prussia would be at their mercy. On January 3 1 ,

1790, he bound his government with the Porte in a pact that committed him

to declare war upon both Russia and Austria in the spring, and not to lay

down arms till all Turkey's lost territory had been restored.

The political tide seemed to be turning against Catherine. Revolt in the

Austrian Netherlands and disorder in Hungary weakened Joseph II; he died

on February 20, 1790, and his successor signed an armistice with the Turks.

England and Prussia again urged Catherine to make peace on the basis of re-

storing all terrain won in the war; she refused; the capture of Ochakov had

cleared Russian access to the Black Sea; she would not surrender that vital

gain. Moreover, her generals were moving from victory to victory, culminat-

ing in the capture of Izmail (December 22, 1790) by Suvorov and Potemkin;

in taking that Turkish stronghold on the Danube the Russians lost ten

thousand men, the Turks thirty thousand. After that feast of blood Potem-

kin, exhausted, relapsed into luxurious indolence and shameless incest with

his nieces; and on October 15, 1791, he died on a road near Jassy. Catherine

fainted three times on the day that she heard of his death.

In March, 1791, William Pitt the Younger proposed to Parliament that an

ultimatum be dispatched to Russia requiring her to return to Turkey all

territory taken in the present conflict, and he prepared to send a British fleet

into the Baltic as a promise of war. Catherine made no reply, and Parliament,

hearing British merchants mourn the loss of Russian trade, dissuaded Pitt

from his enterprise. Turkey, exhausted, gave up the struggle, and signed at

Jassy (January 9, 1792) a treaty that confirmed Russia's control of the

Crimea and the basins of the Dniester and the Bug. Catherine had not

reached Constantinople, but she had risen to the zenith of her career as the

most powerful ruler in Europe, and the most remarkable woman of her

century.

VII. THE WOMAN

Was she a woman, or a monster? We have seen that at the beginning of

her reign she was physically attractive; by 1780 she had grown stout, but

this merely added weight to her majesty. The Prince de Ligne (who was

among the first to call her "the Great 7 ' 81 ) described her gallantly:

She still [in 1780] looked well. One saw that she had been beautiful rather

than pretty. ... It needed no Lavater to read on her forehead, as in a book,

genius, justice, courage, depth, equanimity, sweetness, calm, and decision. Her

fine bust had been acquired at the expense of her waist, once so terribly thin;

but people generally grow fat in Russia. . . . One never noticed that she

was short. 82

Castera, writing shortly after her death, pictured her as modestly dressed in

a green robe. "Her hair, lightly powdered, floated over her shoulders, and

4^2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVIII

was surmounted by a small cap covered with diamonds. In the last years of

her life she put on a great deal of rouge, for she still had pretensions not to

allow the traces of time to appear on her face; and it is probable that only

these pretensions were the cause of her living in the utmost temperance." 83

She was vain, visibly conscious of her accomplishments and her power.

"Vanity is her idol," Joseph II told Kaunitz; "luck and exaggerated compli-

ments have spoiled her." 84 Frederick the Great thought that if Catherine

were corresponding with God she would claim at least equal rank. 85 Yet she

talked with Diderot as "man to man," and begged Falconet to omit compli-

ments. She was as amiable (barring a few possible murders and the sanctified

slaughters of war) as Charles II of England and Henry IV of France. She

daily threw from her windows bread for the thousands of birds that came

regularly to her to be fed. 86 In the ending years of her reign she indulged

now and then in fits of rage unbefitting omnipotence, but she took care not

to give an order or sign a paper in these volcanic moods; soon she grew

ashamed of such outbursts, and schooled herself to self-control. As to her

courage Europe discarded all doubt.

She was unquestionably and imperturbably sensual, but her amours offend

us less than the Pare aux Cerfs of Louis XV. Like all the rulers of her time

she subordinated morality to politics, and suppressed personal feelings when

these impeded the aggrandizement of her state. Where there was no such con-

flict she had all the tenderness of a woman, loving children, gamboling with

them, teaching them, making toys for them. On her tours she was always care-

ful that drivers and servants were properly fed. 87 Among the papers found on

her table after her death was an epitaph she had composed for herself: "She

forgave easily, and hated no one. Tolerant, understanding, of a gay disposi-

tion, she had a republican spirit and a kind heart." 88

She was not kind to her first son; partly because Paul had been taken from

her soon after birth, and had been brought up by Panin and others under

Elizabeth's supervision; partly because the conspiracies to unseat her some-

times proposed to make him emperor with a regency; partly because Paul

long suspected his mother as Peter's murderer; and also because Paul "was

always brooding over the theft of his rights" to succeed his presumptive fa-

ther on the throne. But Catherine took to her heart Paul's charming sons

Alexander and Constantine, personally attended to their education, tried to

alienate them from their father, and schemed to have Alexander, not Paul,

inherit her crown. 89 Paul, happily mated with a second wife, looked with

manifest disgust upon the concatenation of paramours that amused his

mother and drained the revenues of the state.

Mentally Catherine surpassed all her favorites. She indulged their greed,

but rarely allowed them to determine her policy. She absorbed French liter-

ature to a point where she could correspond with its leaders as ojie philo-

sophe to another; indeed, her letters to Voltaire excelled his in good sense,

and rivaled them in grace and wit. Her correspondence was almost as volu-

minous as Voltaire's, though written in the interstices of court intrigues,

domestic insurrections, critical diplomacy, and map-remaking wars. Her

CHAP.XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 463

conversation kept Diderot on his toes, and moved Grimm to ecstasy: "One

must have seen, at those moments, this singular head, composed of genius and

grace, to form an idea of the fire that swayed her, the shafts that she let fly,

the sallies that pressed . . . one upon another . . . Had it only been in my

power to take down these conversations literally, the whole world would

have possessed a precious and perhaps unique fragment in the history of the

human mind." 90 There was, however, a hurried confusion and instability in

the torrent of her ideas; she plunged too quickly into projects that she had

not thought through, and she was sometimes defeated by the urgency of

events and the multiplicity of her tasks. Even so, the result was immense.

It seems incredible that in a career of such political and military excitement

Catherine found time to write poems, chronicles, memoirs, plays, opera

librettos, magazine articles, fairy tales, a scientific treatise on Siberia, a his-

tory of the Roman emperors, and extensive Notes on Russian History. In

1769-70 she edited anonymously a satirical journal to which she was the

chief contributor. One of her sketches described a religious hypocrite who

attended Mass every day, lit candles before holy images, and mumbled prayers

intermittently, but cheated tradesmen, maligned neighbors, beat servants,

denounced current immorality, and mourned the good old days. 91 Catherine's

fairy tale Prince Khlor told of a youth who went through perilous adven-

tures to find a fabled rose without thorns, only to discover in the end that

there was no such rose but virtue; this story became a classic in Russian liter-

ature, and was translated into many languages. Two of her plays were his-

torical tragedies imitating Shakespeare; most of them were unpretentious

comedies ridiculing charlatans, dupes, misers, mystics, spendthrifts, Caglio-

stro, Freemasons, religious fanatics; these pieces lacked subtlety but they

pleased the audiences, though Catherine concealed her authorship. On the

curtain of the theater that she built in the Hermitage she placed an inscrip-

tion, Ridendo castigat mores— "He chastizes manners with laughter"; this

well expressed the aim of her comedies. Oleg, the best of her dramas, was a

remarkable succession of scenes from Russian history, enlivened by seven

hundred performers in dances, ballets, and Olympic games. Most of Cathe-

rine's literary work was revised by secretaries, for she never mastered Rus-

sian spelling or grammar, and she did not take herself too seriously as an

authoress; but literature took courage from the imperial example, and gave a

final and tarnished glory to her reign.

VIII. LITERATURE

Russia was becoming aware of its intellectual immaturity. A host of au-

thors humbly copied foreign models, or translated works that had won fame

in France, England, or Germany. Catherine allowed five thousand rubles

from her privy purse to further this exotic flow; she herself translated Mar-

montel's Belisaire. With Russian enthusiasm for vast enterprises, Rachmani-

nov, a landowner in Tambov, translated the works of Voltaire, and Verevkin,

464 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

director of the College of Kazan, turned into Russian the Encyclopedic of

Diderot. Others translated the plays of Shakespeare, the Greek and Latin

classics, the Gerusalenrme liber ata of Tasso . . .

Gavril Romanovich Derzhavin was the most successful poet of the reign.

Born lowly in eastern Orenburg, with Tatar blood in his veins, he served for

ten years in the Preobrazhensky Regiment, saw Catherine's ride to power,

took part as an officer in suppressing Pugachev's revolt, and worked his way

up to a seat in the Senate. Noting that the Empress had used the name Felitza

for a benevolent princess in Prince Khlor, Derzhavin, in a famous ode

(1782), gave the same name to "the godlike Queen of the Kirghiz-Kazakh

horde," and begged this sultana to "teach me how to find the rose without

thorns, . . . how to live pleasantly but justly." 92 When the poet apostro-

phized Felitza as one "from whose pen flows bliss to all mortals," he was ob-

viously extolling Catherine. When he reproved himself for "sleeping till

noon, smoking tobacco, drinking coffee, . . . and making the world tremble

with my looks," or indulging in "sumptuous feasts at a table sparkling with

silver and gold," all the court knew that this was a hit at Potemkin. Derzhavin

rose to raptures in praising the "Empress" Felitza, who "creates light from

darkness," injures no one, treats small faults forgivingly, lets people speak

freely, "writes fables for the instruction" of her people, and "teaches the

alphabet to Khlor" (grandson Alexander). And the poet concluded: "I pray

the great prophet that I may touch the dust of your feet, that I may enjoy

the sweet stream of your words and your look. I entreat the heavenly powers

to extend their sapphire wings and invisibly guard you, . . . that the re-

nown of your deeds may shine in posterity like the stars in the sky." 93 Der-

zhavin protested that he wished no reward for bringing so much honey, but

Catherine promoted him, and soon he was so close to her that he could see

her faults; he wrote no more lauds. He turned to a higher throne and indited

an "Ode to the Deity," congratulating Him on being "three-in-one," and on

keeping the heavens in such good order. At times he descended to meta-

physics, and echoed Descartes' proof of God's existence: "Surely I am, hence

Thou too art." 94 This ode remained for half a century unrivaled in popular-

ity until Pushkin came.

Denis Ivanovich von Visin startled the capital with two lively comedies:

The Brigadier and The Minor. The success of the latter was so complete

that Potemkin advised the author to "die now, or never write again"— i.e.,

anything further would dim his fame. 95 Visin rejected the advice and saw

its implied prophecy come true. In his later years he traveled in Western

Europe and sent home some excellent letters, one of which contained a proud

prediction: "We [the Russians] are beginning; they [the French] are end-

in s-" 96

The most interesting figure in the literature of Catherine's reign was Niko-

lai Ivanovich Novikov. Dismissed from the University of Moscow for lazi-

ness and backwardness, he developed into a man of incessant intellectual ac-

tivity. At the age of twenty-five (1769), in St. Petersburg, he edited a

magazine, The Drone, impishly so called to counter Sumarokov's periodical,

The Industrious Bee. In lively style Novikov attacked the corruption preva-

CHAP. XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 465

lent in the government; he assailed the Voltairean irreligion of the upper

classes as destructive of morals and character; he lauded by contrast what he

supposed to have been the unquestioning faith and exemplary morals of the

Russians before Peter the Great. "It is as if the old Russian rulers had fore-

seen that, through the introduction of arts and sciences, the most precious

treasure of the Russians— their morality— would be irretrievably lost"; 97 here

too Rousseau was at war with Voltaire. Catherine gave The Drone some

sour looks, and it ceased publication in 1770. In 1775 Novikov joined the

Freemasons, who in Russia were turning to mysticism, Pietism, and Rosicru-

cian fancies while their brothers in France were playing with revolution. In

1779 he moved to Moscow, took charge of the university press, and pub-

lished more books in three years than had come from that press in twenty-

four. Financed by a friend, he acquired additional presses, formed a publish-

ing house, opened bookstores throughout Russia, and scattered broadcast his

gospel of religion and reform. He established schools, hospitals, and dispen-

saries, and model housing for workingmen.

When the French Revolution turned Catherine from an enlightened into

a frightened despot, she feared that Novikov was subverting the existing

order. She directed Platon, the Metropolitan of Moscow, to examine Novi-

kov's ideas. The prelate reported: "I implore the all-merciful God that there

may be, not only in the flock entrusted to me by God and you but through-

out the world, such Christians as Novikov." 98 Suspicious nevertheless, the

Empress ordered Novikov's imprisonment in the fortress of Schlusselburg

(1792). There he remained till Catherine's death. Released by Paul I, he

retired to his estate of Tikhvin, and passed his remaining years in works of

piety and charity.

A worse fate fell to Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev. Sent by Cath-

erine to the University of Leipzig, he picked up some works of the philo-

sophes, and was especially moved by Rousseau's Social Contract and Raynal's

exposure of European brutality in colonial exploitation and the slave trade.

He returned to St. Petersburg fired with social ideals. Put in charge of the

customshouse, he learned English to deal with British merchants, took up

English literature, and was especially influenced by Sterne's Sentimental

Journey. In 1790 he published one of the classics of Russian literature, Jour-

ney from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It professed orthodoxy, but denounced

the impositions of priests upon popular credulity; it accepted monarchy but

justified revolt against a ruler who violated the "social contract" by over-

riding the law. It described the dismemberment of families by conscription,

and the abuse of serfs by masters; at one place, said Radishchev, he had been

told of a landlord who had violated sixty peasant maidens. He denounced

censorship, and pleaded for freedom of the press. He did not advocate revo-

lution, but he asked for a merciful understanding of its advocates. He ap-

pealed to the nobles and the government to end serfdom. "Let yourselves be

softened, you hardhearted ones; break the fetters of your brethren, open the

dungeons of slavery. The peasant who gives us health and life has a right to

control the land which he tills." 99

Strange to say, the book was passed by the censor. But Catherine in 1790

466 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

was fearful that her people might imitate the French Revolution. She made

note to punish the violator of sixty virgins, but she ordered Radishchev to

be tried for treason. Passages were found in his book about the storming of

fortresses and the uprising of soldiers against a cruel czar; and there were

eulogies of the English for resisting an unjust king. The Senate condemned

the author to death; the Empress commuted this to ten years in Siberia. Em-

peror Paul I allowed Radishchev to return from exile (1796); Alexander I

invited him to St. Petersburg (1801). There, a year later, thinking, without

reason, that he was to be banished again, he killed himself. His fate and that

of Novikov are among the many blots on a brilliant reign.

IX. ART

Catherine did a little more for art than for literature, for art appealed only

to the upper classes, and sounded no tocsin of revolt. Popular music, how-

ever, was unwittingly revolutionary, for nearly all of it consisted of sad

songs, in a minor key and with plaintive accompaniment, telling not only of

hearts broken in love but of lives worn out with toil. The nobles rarely

heard those songs, but they enjoyed the Italian operas that were brought to

St. Petersburg by Galuppi, Paisiello, Salieri, and Cimarosa, all paid by the

state. Catherine herself did not care much for opera. "In music," she said, "I

can recognize no tones but those of my nine dogs, who in turn share the

honor of being in my room, and whose individual voices I can recognize

from a distance." 100

She confessed, too, that she had no understanding of art. She did what she

could to develop such understanding in Russia. She provided the funds with

which Betsky set into actual functioning (1764) the Academy of Arts that

had been organized under Elizabeth (1757). She bought acknowledged

masterpieces abroad, and displayed them in her galleries; so she gave 1 80,000

rubles for the collection of Count von Briihl in Dresden, ^40,000 for the

collection of Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton Hall, 440,000 francs for

Choiseul's collection, and 460,000 for Crozat's. Without knowing it, she

made fine bargains, for these gleanings included eleven hundred pieces by

Raphael, Poussin, Vandyck, Rembrandt, and other perennials, whose value

has grown with the advance of time and the retreat of currency. Through

Grimm and Diderot (whose Salons she followed carefully) she gave com-

missions to French artists— Vernet, Chardin, Houdon. She had life-size copies

made of Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican, and built a special gallery for

them in the Hermitage.

She gave few commissions to native artists, for to her French taste there

was little of lasting worth in the Russian art of her time. However, she pro-

vided funds for the education and support of students in the Academy of

Arts, and sent several of them to study in Western Europe. From that

Academy came the history painter Anton Losenko and the portrait painters

Dmitri Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky. After five years in Paris and

three in Rome, Losenko returned to St. Petersburg (1769) to teach in the

CHAP. XVIII ) CATHERINE THE GREAT 467

Academy. He made a stir with Vladimir before Rogneda, but— perhaps too

burdened with academic duties— he failed to produce the masterpieces ex-

pected of him, and death took him at thirty-six (1773). — Catherine em-

ployed Levitsky to portray some of the young women who were studying

at the Smolny Institute; the result is a testimony to their beauty. His portrait

of Catherine concealed her amplitude under flowing robes. She sat also for

Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, who was one of many French artists whom she invited

to give Gallic grace to Russian art.

The greatest of her imported artists was Falconet. He came in 1766, and

stayed twelve years. Catherine asked him to design, and cast in bronze, an

equestrian statue of Peter the Great. He had brought with him a young

woman, Marie-Anne Collot, who modeled the colossal head. Falconet dared

the laws of physics by representing the horse as springing into the air, with

only its hind feet touching terra firma— an immense boulder brought from

Karelia to symbolize the massive resistance that Peter had overcome; to se-

cure equilibrium Falconet showed a brass serpent— symbol of envy— biting

the horse's tail. This chef-d'oeuvre kept its poise while St. Petersburg

changed into Petrograd and then into Leningrad. Falconet took longer with

this work than Catherine had expected; she lost interest in it, and neglected

the sculptor, who returned to Paris disappointed with her, Russia, and life.

In 1758 Nicolas-Frangois Gillet came from France to teach sculpture at

the Academy. Three of his pupils achieved excellence in Catherine's reign:

Chubin, Kozlovsky, and Shchedrin. Chubin was commissioned by Potemkin

to carve a Catherine 11 for the rotunda of the Taurida Palace; experts called

it "lifeless and cold"; 101 so too seems the statue Chubin made of Potemkin.

Kozlovsky achieved similar rigidity in his tomb for Marshal Suvorov, and

even in his Cupid. Shchedrin's main work was done under Alexander I: to

1 81 2 belongs the Caryatids Holding Up the Celestial Sphere— woman bears

the world. Ivan Petrovich Martos specialized in funerary monuments; ceme-

teries in St. Petersburg were peopled with his pleurants; "he made marble

weep." Native sculpture lagged except in imitation of foreign styles. Ortho-

dox churches excluded statuary, and the nobles were content with such

artists as they found among their serfs.

But architecture flourished under Catherine, for she was resolved to leave

her mark upon her capital. "Great buildings," she said, "declare the greatness

of a reign no less eloquently than great actions." 102 "You know," she wrote

in 1779, "that the mania for building is stronger with us than ever, and no

earthquake ever demolished as many structures as we have set up. . . . This

mania is an infernal thing; it runs away with money, and the more one builds,

the more one wants to build; it is a disease, like drunkenness." 103 Though she

told Falconet, "I can't even draw," she had her own mind in art, or a mind

influenced by the Roman excavations at Herculaneum and the books of

Caylus and Winckelmann. She turned her back upon the ornate baroque and

flowery rococo that had reigned under Elizabeth, and cast her vote for the

chaster neoclassic style. Some contemporaries credited her with providing

explicit instructions and preliminary sketches for her architects. 104

Finding no native artists who could realize her conceptions, she called to

468 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XVIII

Western Europe for men who had inherited the classical tradition. So came

Jean-Baptiste Vallin de La Mothe, who built for her on the Neva the Palace

of the Academy of Arts (1765-72)— a Renaissance fa§ade of coated bricks

and classic portico, and, within, a majestic semicircular stairway leading to

a rotunda under a dome. As an adjunct to the Winter Palace Vallin built the

famous Hermitage, which Catherine thought of as a refuge from court eti-

quette, but which became her art gallery, and is now one of the principal

museums of the world. Catherine described it to Grimm in 1790 as "my

little retreat, so situated that to go there and back from my room is just

three thousand paces. There I walk about amid a quantity of things that I

love and delight in, and those winter walks are what keep me in health." 105

From France, too, came the Scot Charles Cameron, who had studied classic

ornament there. Catherine was delighted with the brilliance and delicacy

with which he adorned— with silver, lacquer, glass, jasper, agate, and poly-

chrome marble— the private apartment that she reserved for herself, her

lovers, and her dogs in the Grand Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. "I have never seen

the equal of these newly decorated rooms," she wrote; "during the last nine

weeks I have never tired of contemplating them." 106 Around this palace she

had a park designed in the "natural" and "English" style, which she de-

scribed in a letter to Voltaire: "I now madly love the jar dins a Vanglaise, the

short lines, the curved lines, the gently graded slopes, the pools and lakes.

... I have a profound aversion to straight lines; in a word, Anglomania

dominates my plantomania." 107 For her son Paul and his lovely second wife

Cameron built in Pavlovsk (another suburb of the capital) a palace in Italian

villa style; here the Grand Duke and Maria Feodorovna housed the art col-

lected in their West-European tours.

From Italy came Antonio Rinaldi, who raised two luxurious mansions as

gifts from Catherine to Grigori Orlov: the Marble Palace on the Neva, and,

near Tsarskoe Selo, the Gatchina Palace, which became the favorite resi-

dence of Paul I. And from Italy came Giacomo Quarenghi, who had been

fascinated by the Greek temples at Paestum and the masterpieces of Palladio

in Vicenza. In 1780 he submitted to Catherine, through Grimm, plans and

models for various structures that he hoped to build. Catherine was attracted,

and from that date till 1815 Quarenghi raised, in or near St. Petersburg, a

profusion of buildings in classic style: the theater of the Hermitage, the

Smolny Institute (which he added to the Smolny Monastery of Rastrelli),

the Bank of the Empire, the Chapel of the Malta Order, the English Palace

at Peterhof, and the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. This was designed

for Catherine's grandson the future Alexander I, who moved into it in 1793,

two years after its completion. "It is one of the masterpieces of eighteenth-

century architecture." 108 *

But were there no Russian architects fit to spend Catherine's rubles? Yes.

Hoping to leave a monument to her memory at Moscow, she commissioned

* It was the favorite residence of Czar Nicholas II; from it he fled to Siberia and death in 191 7.

The Soviets transformed it into a museum. It was severely damaged in the Second World War,

but has been restored.

CHAP.XVIIl) CATHERINE THE GREAT 469

Vasili Bazhenev to design a stone Kremlin to replace the brick Kremlin of

Ivan the Great. Bazhenev conceived an immensity that would have dwarfed

Versailles; those who saw the wooden model— which itself cost sixty thou-

sand rubles— marveled at its architectural excellence. But the foundations laid

for it sank as the soil subsided through the action of the Moscow River, and

Catherine withdrew from the enterprise. However, she found fundi? that

enabled Ivan Starov to build, on the left bank of the Neva, the Taurida

Palace; this splendor she presented to Potemkin to commemorate his con-

quest of the Crimea.

Whatever the cost of her buildings, Catherine achieved her object. The

contemporary Masson wrote: "A Frenchman, after winding along the inhos-

pitable shores of Prussia and traversing the wild and uncultivated plains of

Livonia, is struck with astonishment and rapture at finding again, in the

midst of a vast desert, a large and magnificent city, in which the society,

amusements, arts and luxuries abound which he had supposed to exist no-

where but in Paris." 109 And the Prince de Ligne, after seeing nearly all Eu-

rope, concluded that "in spite of Catherine's shortcomings her public and

private edifices make St. Petersburg the finest city in the world." 110 The

flesh and blood of ten million peasants had been turned into brick and stone.

X. JOURNEY S END

Catherine, like rulers throughout the ages, would have explained that since

men must die in any case, why should not genius be employed by statesmen

to direct those harassed lives and certain deaths to making the country strong

and its cities great? Years of power, the challenges of revolt and war, the

fluctuations of victory and defeat, had accustomed her to bear unflinchingly

the sufferings of others, and to turn aside from the exploitation of the weak

by the strong as beyond her means to cure.

Disturbed by a dozen conspiracies to unseat her, and frightened by

Pugachev's revolt, she was terrified by the French Revolution. She bore with

it complacently when it promised to be only the overthrow of an idle aris-

tocracy and an incompetent government; but when a Paris mob forced Louis

XVI and Marie Antoinette to leave Versailles and live in the Tuileries amid

an unchained populace— when the Constituent Assembly declared itself su-

preme, and Louis consented to be merely its executive officer— Catherine

shuddered at the encouragement so given to those who sought similar action

in Russia. She allowed the clergy to forbid the publication of her once be-

loved Voltaire's works (1789) ; U1 she herself soon proscribed all French pub-

lications; she had the busts of Voltaire removed from her chambers to a

lumber room (1792). 112 She banished the idealistic Radishchev (1790), im-

prisoned the public-spirited Novikov (1792), and established an inquisitorial

censorship over literature and plays. When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

were guillotined (1793) she broke off all relations with the French govern-

ment, and urged the European monarchies to form a coalition against France.

470 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XVIII

She herself did not join in that coalition; she used it to keep the Western

powers busy while she completed her absorption of Poland. "Many of my

enterprises are unfinished," she told one of her diplomats; "the courts of

Berlin and Vienna must be occupied so as to leave us unfettered." 113

Some vestiges of her early liberalism survived till 1793. In that year a

courtier reported to her that Frederic-Cesar de Laharpe, who had been tutor-

ing her grandsons, was an unregenerate republican. She sent for him and told

him of the report; he answered: "Your Majesty knew, before entrusting me

with the education of the Grand Dukes, that I was a Swiss, and therefore a

republican." He asked her to examine his pupils, and from their conduct

judge his work. But she already knew how well he had taught them. "Mon-

sieur," she said, "be a Jacobin, a republican, or what you please; I believe you

are an honest man, and that is enough for me. Stay with my grandchildren,

retain my complete confidence, and instruct them with your wonted zeal." 114

Amid the turmoil she took her last lover (1789). Platon Zubov was

twenty-five, she was sixty-one. She wrote to her amant-en-titre, Potemkin:

"I have returned to life like a fly that the cold had benumbed." 115 Her new

"pupil" proposed a three-pronged attack upon Turkey: a Russian army

under his twenty-four-year-old brother Valerian was to cross the Caucasus

into Persia and shut off all overland trade between Turkey and the East; an-

other army, under Suvorov, was to go through the Balkans to besiege Con-

stantinople; and Russia's new Black Sea Fleet, led by the Empress herself,

was to capture control of the Bosporus. After years of preparation this epic

enterprise was begun (1796); Derbent and Baku were taken; and Catherine

looked forward to victories that would complete her program and crown her

career.

On the morning of November 17, 1796, she seemed as gay as ever. After

breakfast she retired to her room. As time passed and she did not reappear,

her female attendants knocked at the door. Receiving no answer, they en-

tered. They found the Empress stretched out on the floor, the victim of the

rupture of an artery in the brain. She was twice bled, and for a moment re-

covered consciousness, but she could not speak. At ten o'clock that evening

she died.

Her enemies felt that she had not deserved so merciful a death. They never

forgave her the contradictions between her liberal professions and her abso-

lutist rule, her intolerance of opposition, her failure to carry out her pro-

posed reform of Russian law, her surrender to the nobility in her extension

of serfdom. Families impoverished by high taxes, or mourning the loss of

sons in her wars, did not thank her for her victories. But the people as a

whole applauded her for expanding Russia to wider and safer boundaries.

She had added 200,000 square miles to Russia's area, had opened new ports

to Russia's trade, had raised the population from nineteen to thirty-six mil-

lion souls. She had been unscrupulous in her diplomacy— perhaps, in her

absorption of Poland, a little more so than most other rulers of that time.

Her greatest achievement lay in carrying on the efforts of Peter the Great

to bring Russia into Western civilization. Whereas Peter had thought of

CHAP. XVIII ) CATHERINE THE GREAT 47 1

this chiefly in terms of technology, Catherine thought of it principally in

terms of culture; by the force and courage of her personality she drew the

literate classes of Russia out of the Middle Ages into the orbit of modern

thought in literature, philosophy, science, and art. She was ahead of her

Christian compeers (excepting the un-Christian Frederick II) in establishing

religious toleration. A French historian compared her favorably with Le

Grand Monarque:

The generosity of Catherine, the splendor of her reign, the magnificence of

her court, her institutions, her monuments, her wars, were precisely to Russia

what the age of Louis XIV was to Europe; but, considered individually, Cath-

erine was greater than this Prince. The French formed the glory of Louis;

Catherine formed that of the Russians. She had not, like him, the advantage of

reigning over a polished people; nor was she surrounded from infancy by

great and accomplished characters. 116

In the estimate of an English historian Catherine was "the only woman ruler

who has surpassed England's Elizabeth in ability, and equaled her in the en-

during significance of her work." 117 "She was," said a German historian,

"every inch a 'political being,' unmatched by anyone of her sex in modern

history, and yet at the same time a thorough woman and a great lady." 118

We may apply to her the magnanimous principle laid down by Goethe: her

faults were an infection from her time, but her virtues were her own.

CHAPTER XIX

The Rape of Poland

I. POLISH PANORAMA: I 7 I 5-64

GEOGRAPHY, race, religion, and politics were the natural enemies of

Poland. The country was as large as France, extending in 1 7 1 5 from

the Oder in the west almost to Smolensk and Kiev in the east; but it had no

natural boundary— no mountains or broad river— on either front to protect it

from invasion; it was named from pole, a plain. It had only one outlet to the

sea— at Danzig; and the Vistula that found its exit there was no defense

against adjacent Prussia. The nation had no ethnic unity: the Polish majority

of its 6,500,000 souls (17 15) was in intermittent strife with German, Jewish,

Lithuanian, and Russian minorities; here the Teutons and the Slavs came face

to face in spontaneous hostility. There was no religious unity: the Roman

Catholic majority ruled and oppressed the "Dissidents"— themselves conten-

tiously divided between Protestants, Greek Orthodox, and Jews. There was

no political unity, for the jealously sovereign power lay in a Sejm, or Diet,

composed exclusively of nobles each of whom had, through the liberum

veto, the authority to nullify any proposal of all the rest, and at will bring

any session, any elected Diet, to an end. The king was chosen by the Diet,

and was subject to "conventions" signed by him as a condition of his election;

he could pursue no long-term policy with any assurance of transmitting his

crown or receiving steady support. The nobles demanded such limitless

power over legislation because each wished to be completely free in ruling

his lands and his serfs. But limitation is the essence of liberty, for as soon as

liberty is complete it dies in anarchy. The history of Poland after Jan So-

bieski was a chronicle of anarchy.

Nearly all the soil was tilled by serfs in a feudal subjection from which

there was no appeal. The master was sometimes kind, but he was always

absolute. His serfs not only owed him such part of their produce as he might

demand; they were required also to give him gratis two or three days of

work each week on his manor. Fortunately the well-watered land was fertile,

and the peasants had enough to eat, but Coxe described them as "poorer,

humbler, and more miserable than any people we have yet observed on our

travels." 1 Their local masters were the lower nobility, or gentry (szlachta*),

and these squires in turn were subject to some hundred magnates owning or

controlling immense areas. The gentry held most of the executive offices in

* English readers may pronounce Polish c usually as ts\ cz as ch; sz as sh\ and w as v.

47 2

CHAP. XIX ) THERAPEOFPOLAND 473

the state, and theoretically they dominated the Sejm; actually Polish politics

was a strife of magnates or their families, manipulating szlachta groups by

economic influence or direct bribery. 2

In Poland the family still retained its primitive priority over the state. The

Radziwills, the Potockis, the Czartoryskis were severally united by a senti-

ment of family solidarity more intense than any national bond; here patriotism

was literally reverence for the father, and above all for the oldest father. The

family was strong as an institution because it was the unit of economic pro-

duction and moral discipline; there was no economic individualism scattering

the sons over the country; normally the son remained on the patrimonial

estate, subject to paternal command as long as the father lived; the family

flourished through that same unity of authority whose absence weakened the

state. All the wealth of the family was under centralized patriarchal control;

in many cases it grew from year to year through the reinvested profits of ex-

ploitation and exportation, and in several cases it exceeded the wealth of the

king. Twenty Polish families in the eighteenth century spent, each of them,

over 200,000 livres per year on their households. 3 Powerful families called

their homes courts, with retainers, private armies, numerous servants, and

semiroyal displays; so Prince Karol Radziwill, whose estate was half as large

as Ireland, gave in 1789 a feast to four thousand guests at a cost of a million

marks. 4

The most famous of Polish families— so well-known that it was called "the

Family"— was the Czartoryskis. It had held princely rank since the fifteenth

century, and was related to the house of Jagiello, which had ruled Poland

from 1 384 to 1572. Prince Kasimierz Czartoryski (d. 1741), vice-chancellor

of Lithuania, married Isabella Morstin, who brought a further infusion of

French culture into the family. By her he had three children of note: (1)

Fryderyk Michal Czartoryski, who became grand chancellor of Lithuania;

(2) Alexander Augustus Czartoryski, who became Prince Palatine of "Red

Russia"; and (3) Konstantia, who married Stanislas Poniatowski I, and bore

to him Stanislas Poniatowski II, the most tragic figure in Polish history.

It was an added distinction of the Czartoryskis that their liberalism grew

with their wealth. They had long been known for their humane treatment

of their serfs; "if I had been born a serf," said a contemporary, "I should

wish to be the serf of Prince [Alexander] Augustus Czartoryski." 5 They or-

ganized schools for children, supplied them with textbooks, built chapels,

hospitals, model cottages. To their estate and mansion in Pulawy (near Lub-

lin) they brought teachers and scholars who trained promising youths, from

any class, for the service of the state. Politically the Family opposed the

liberum veto as making effective government impossible. Against them were

ranged many families which felt that the veto was their sole protection

against a centralized autocracy. Strongest of these were the Potockis, led by

Prince Felix Potocki, who could ride thirty miles in one direction without

leaving his land— three million acres in the Ukraine.

Industry and commerce, which in the sixteenth century had shared in

making Poland great and its towns prosperous, had been retarded by the

474 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIX

hostility of the landowners and their obedient Diet. Many towns were

wholly within the private property of a magnate who, fearing the rise of an

independent middle class, favored agriculture against industry. The com-

petition of serf handicrafts on the manors had depressed the artisans of the

towns. "The ruin of the cities," wrote Antoni Potocki in 1744, "is so evident

that with the single exception of Warsaw the first ones in the country can

well be compared to dens of robbers." 6 Grass grew in the streets of Lvov,

some city squares had become open fields, and Cracow, formerly one of the

great cultural centers of Europe, had declined to a population of nine thou-

sand, and its famous university to six hundred students. 7

The decay of the towns was due in part to the Catholic reconquest of

Poland. Many of the displaced Protestants had been merchants or artisans;

their diminution in all but western Poland (where many Germans remained)

left the Polish scene to the landlords; and these were either Roman Catholics

or, in the east, Greek Orthodox or Uniates (Catholics using the Eastern ritual

but acknowledging the pope of Rome). The Dissidents— Protestants, Greek

Orthodox, and Jews, numbering eight per cent of the population—were

excluded from public office and the Diet; all suits against them were tried be-

fore completely Catholic courts. 8 Religious hostility reached the point where,

in 1724, in predominantly Protestant Torun (Thorn), the populace, infuri-

ated by the behavior of a Jesuit student, desecrated the Host and trampled

upon an image of the Virgin. Nine of the raiders were put to death. The

Protestants of Poland appealed to Prussia, the Greek Orthodox appealed to

Russia; Prussia and Russia offered protection, from which they progressed

to invasion and partition.

Polish morals resembled the German at table and the French in bed. The

peasants were inured to monogamy by care of the soil and their brood, but

in the capital it was made difficult by the beauty and the "seductive man-

ners" 9 of the women, who did not allow their superior education to interfere

with their charm. The ladies of Warsaw, we are told, were sexually as lax as

those of Paris. 10 Poniatowski assures us that he was a virgin till twenty-two, 11

but he adds that such continence was exceptional in his class. — Drunkenness

was endemic, and made no class distinctions. Among the peasants it gave

periodic amnesia from poverty, hardship, or cold; among the nobles it solaced

isolation and ennui; and in all ranks the males looked upon it as not a vice

but an accomplishment. Pan Komarczewski was honored because he could

empty a bucket of champagne at one draft without losing his head or his feet;

Poniatowski was warned that he would never be popular unless he got drunk

twice a week. 12 Hospitality was universal, but it was judged by the amount

of food and drink provided for the guests. Sometimes a magnate mortgaged

a town to pay for a banquet.

The literate Poles colored the scene with their dress. The peasant, in sum-

mer, made shift with shirt and knee breeches of coarse linen, without stock-

ings or shoes, and in winter he bundled himself up with no care for color and

no time for art; but the gentry, numbering some 725,000, wore boots, sword,

plumed hat, a colored robe of silk or lace, and, around the waist, a broad sash

CHAP.XIX) THE RAPE OF POLAND 475

of patterned fabrics in rich hues. This proudly national garb had come up

from Islam through the contact of the Lithuanians with Turks in the

Ukraine; it reflected the occasional alliance of Poland with Turkey against

Austria or Russia; and perhaps it expressed an Asiatic element in Polish man-

ners and character.

Culturally Poland, from 1697 to 1763, was retarded by the indifference of

its Saxon kings to Slavic literature and art, and by two devastating wars. The

Catholic Church was not only the chief patron of the arts, it was also the

dispenser of education and the main repository of learning and literature. It

carefully quarantined Poland from the movement of science and philosophy

in the West, but within its limits it spread and cultivated knowledge. Jozef

Zaluski, bishop of Kiev, gathered 200,000 volumes at Warsaw into one of the

greatest libraries of the age; in 1748 he opened it to the public and presented

it to the nation; meanwhile he himself lived frugally, and sacrificed himself

in the struggle to preserve Poland's independence.

It was he who turned the eager young priest Stanislas Konarski to the study

of history and law. In 173 1 Konarski issued the first of four volumes— Volu-

mina legum— which codified Polish legislation from Casimir the Great to his

own time. These and other researches revealed to Konarski how tragically

Poland had fallen from her Renaissance flowering. Convinced that regenera-

tion could come only from the top, he established in Warsaw ( 1 740) a Col-

legium Nobilium, where pedigreed youths could receive an education not

only in mathematics and the classic languages and literatures (which the Jes-

uits taught well) but also in the natural sciences and modern languages. It

was an heroic task, for he had neither money nor textbooks, neither teachers

nor students; yet after fifteen years of labor he had made his College of

Nobles a famous and honored institution, one of the sources of the cultural

revival under Poniatowski, and of the enlightened constitution of 1791. He

appealed for a reform of the Polish language, seeking to rid it of Latin phrases

and flowering rhetoric; the nation protested, still it learned. Konarski

crowned his work by publishing (1760-63) the most important political

treatise of the century in Poland, innocently entitled On the Effective Con-

duct of Debates; however containing a blast against the liberiim veto. Again

there were many protests, but after 1 764 no Diet was dissolved by the liberum

veto. It was with Konarski's aid that Poniatowski began the reform of the

Polish constitution.

Before that brilliant and fitful resurrection Poland suffered sixty-seven

years of disorder, disgrace, and decline under Saxon kings.

II. THE SAXON KINGS*. I 697— I 763

Other pages 13 have told how the Polish Diet passed over the son of the

great Sobieski to give the crown of Poland to Frederick Augustus, Elector of

Saxony, who embraced Catholicism overnight to become Augustus II (the

"Strong") of Poland; how Charles XII of Sweden replaced him with Stanis-

476 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIX

las Leszczynski (1704), and how the defeat of Charles at Poltawa (1709)

allowed Augustus to regain his throne. He enjoyed few of the legislative

powers of an eighteenth-century monarch, but all the sexual privileges of

royalty. Failing to rule Poland, he turned his love back to Saxony, beautified

Dresden, filled himself with beer, and depleted himself with mistresses; he

added insult to injury by taking only one of these from the Polish belles.

Toward the end of his reign he planned to partition Poland among Austria,

Prussia, and Saxony, but he died (February 1, 1733) before effecting this

deviltry. On his deathbed he said, "My whole life was one ceaseless sin." 14

In morte Veritas.

In the interregnum that ensued during the assembling of an electoral Diet,

French emissaries lavished livres to win deputies to the restoration of Lesz-

czynski. Since his deposition Stanislas had lived in peace and hope in Alsace.

In 1725 his daughter Marie had become queen of France by marrying

Louis XV; now Louis expected his father-in-law, if enthroned, to follow the

French policy of aligning Poland with Prussia and Turkey in a cordon

around Austria. Feeling that such an alliance would weaken Russia in her

inevitable conflicts with Turkey and Prussia, the Russian government dis-

patched rubles to Warsaw to prevent the election of Leszczynski. The livres

outweighed the rubles, and on September 10, 1733, Leszczynski became King

Stanislas I of Poland.

A minority refused to recognize his election, and put themselves under the

protection of a Russian army that advanced to the Vistula and proclaimed the

Saxon Elector as King Augustus III of Poland (October 6). So began the

War of the Polish Succession, and the first decisive interference of Russia in

Polish affairs. Stanislas looked for a Polish army to defend him; none existed

except on paper; he fled to Danzig and appealed to France for aid. The

French government was then led by Cardinal Fleury, who had no stomach

for a war with distant Russia; he sent a detachment of 2,400 soldiers; the

Russians, with twelve thousand men, overwhelmed it. Stanislas escaped from

Danzig and retired to Lorraine. In January, 1736, he signed his abdication; in

July Augustus III was acknowledged king.

But he was no more fit than Leszczynski to guide a nation which had chaos

built into its constitution. For a time he co-operated with the Czartoryskis in

attempts to end the liberum veto; the Potocki repeatedly used the veto to

preserve it; Augustus gave up, comforted himself in Dresden, and rarely

visited Poland. Corruption continued and flourished; unable to stop it, the

King shared in it, selling offices to the highest bidder. Magnates controlled the

courts and the armed forces; they negotiated directly with foreign powers,

and received subsidies from them. 15 France, Austria, Prussia, Russia maneu-

vered to see which could profit most from the imminent dissolution of the

Polish state.

Before and after the death of Augustus III (October 5, 1763), the compe-

tition to name and rule his successor ran through every device of diplomacy

to the brink of war. The Potockis pleaded for a standing army of 100,000

to protect Poland from foreign domination. The Czartoryskis resigned them-

CHAP. XIX ) THE RAPE OF POLAND 477

selves to a Russian protectorate, and negotiated with Catherine II. Russia

claimed the right to protect the Greek Orthodox minority in Poland, and

stretched its memory to recall that the eastern Polish provinces had been

taken from Russia by St. Vladimir (956?-ioi5) eight hundred years before.

France favored the son of Augustus III to succeed him; if Russia mastered

Poland the whole structure of French foreign policy in the East would col-

lapse. Frederick the Great, who had just concluded seven years of bitter war

against France and Austria, needed the friendship of Catherine, by whose

permission he had escaped disaster; he agreed to support her candidate for

the Polish crown; moreover, he signed with her (April n, 1764) a treaty

secretly binding both of them to oppose any changes in the constitution of

either Poland or Sweden, lest an increase in the royal power should make one

or both of these countries dangerously strong; they proposed to defend chaos

in the name of liberty. The Czartoryskis were appeased by Catherine's prom-

ise to curtail the liberum veto after stability had been restored, and by her

choice of a Czartoryski protege as her candidate for the throne. On Septem-

ber 7, 1764, by the unanimous vote of a Diet convinced by rubles and a Rus-

sian arrtiy only three miles away, Stanislas Poniatowski was chosen king.

III. PONIATOWSKI

He was born to Stanislas Poniatowski the elder, governor of Cracow, and

to Konstantia Czartoryski, January 17, 1732. "I was brought up very

strictly," he told Mme. Geoffrin, "by a mother the like of whom you will

scarce find anywhere nowadays, while my father only preached to me by

his example." 16 At the age of sixteen he began extensive travels. In 1753 he

captivated Mme. Geoffrin, her salon, and nearly all Paris by his figure, his

manners, and his youth. A few years later, following a fashion of the time,

he composed a self-portrait that accorded fairly with the facts:

I should be content with my figure if only I were an inch taller, . . . and

my nose less hooked, and my mouth a little smaller. With these reservations I

believe that my face is noble and expressive, my figure not without distinction.

. . . My shortsightedness often makes me look awkward, but only for an in-

stant. Indeed I am rather apt to offend by the opposite extreme— too haughty

a demeanor. An excellent education enables me to conceal my mental and

bodily defects, so that many people perhaps expect more from me than I can

readily give. I have wit enough to take part in any conversation, but not enough

to converse long and frequently. However, my natural sympathy and amiabil-

ity often come to my assistance. I have a natural penchant toward art. . . . My

indolence prevents me from going as far as I should like to go in the arts and

sciences. I work either overmuch or not at all. I can judge very well of affairs,

. . . but I am very much in need of good counsel to carry out any plan of my

own. I am very impressionable, but far more affected by sorrow than by joy.

I am the first to be depressed. . . . When I love I love too passionately. . . .

I am not vindictive. Though in the first moment of irritation I may long to

avenge myself upon my enemies, I am never able to carry out my desire; com-

passion always comes between. 17

478 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIX

To see— and express— himself so well suggests that Poniatowski was born

to think and write rather than to plan and do. He had met Montesquieu and

read Voltaire; he had acquired the intellectual polish and subtlety of French

society along with a degree of that "sensibility" which was finding expres-

sion in Rousseau. He was extremely sensitive to women, and felt that what

they gave him, in body and soul, was beyond price. Rumor said that in Paris

he was arrested for debt, and was released after an hour's imprisonment upon

payment of 100,000 livres by Mme. Geoffrin. 18

After five months in Paris, and having learned English, he went to Eng-

land, attended some sessions of Parliament, and aspired to remold the Polish

situation in the image of England as interpreted by Montesquieu. Back from

his travels (1754), he was appointed high steward of Lithuania. A year later

he accompanied Sir Charles Hanbury- Williams to Russia, with results already

noted. He returned home in 1756, but went to St. Petersburg in 1757 as

Polish ambassador. He shared in the intrigue against Elizabeth in 1758, and

was forced to leave Russia at short notice. Catherine mourned his departure,

but when she supported him for the throne of Poland it was not because she

still loved him, but because (she said) he had less right than any other candi-

date, and should therefore be all the more grateful. 19 As for himself, he never

quite recovered from that exciting liaison; he remembered Catherine before

she had been hardened by power, and that fascination survived even when

she made him her tool in the subjection of his people.

Two days after his election he sent the news to Mme. Geoffrin:

My Dear Mama: It seems to me that I have greater pleasure in calling you

by that name since the day before yesterday. [His own mother was now dead.]

In all our history there has never been an election so tranquil and so unani-

mous. . . . All the principal ladies of the kingdom were present on the Field

of Election amid the squadrons of the nobility. ... I had the satisfaction of

being proclaimed by the voices of all the women as well as by those of all the

men. . . . Why were you not there? You would have named your son. 20

We have seen how "Mama" braved the roads of Europe to visit her "son"

in his palace at Warsaw (1766). Having no realistic conception of the gap

between French and Polish civilization, she longed to have him pull Poland

up a century in a year; her advice became troublesome, and strained Ponia-

towski's filial devotion; he was relieved when she left, though he soothed her

with compliments and a picture of himself set in diamonds. She kept the pic-

ture and sent back the diamonds. Once away, her love for him returned to

full fervor, and she wrote to him from Vienna affirming for him "an affection

which is a necessity of my life." 21

Stanislas did his best. He gave himself dutifully, in these first years, to the

chores of government. He attended daily the deliberations of his ministers,

and worked till late at night on problems which he undertook in conscien-

tious detail. He succeeded in good measure in training a civil-service corps of

unusual competence and startling integrity. 22 He made himself easily acces-

sible, and charmed all by his amiability, not all by his enthusiasm for reform.

But his energy was diluted by a sense of his dependence upon Catherine,

CHAP. XIX ) THE RAPE OF POLAND 479

even upon the Russian troops that she had left in Poland as a guarantee of his

security and obedience. Her ambassador, Count Otto von Stackelberg,

watched over him lest he forget his Russian strings.

He was surrounded by enemies far and near. The Polish nobility was di-

vided into two factions: one, led by the Potockis, agitated for independence

before reform, and wished to check the royal power by keeping the aristoc-

racy strong; the other, under the Czartoryskis, asked for reform first, arguing

that in its present disorder Poland was too weak to throw off the Russian pro-

tectorate. The Czartoryskis were hesitant in the support of Poniatowski, for

they deplored his extravagances and his mistresses. The Diet allowed him

2,200,000 thalers per year, and raised this, by 1786, to 6,143,000 gulden— one

third of the government's revenue. He spent more than this allowance, having

borrowed from banks at home and abroad. Twice the state paid his debts;

yet in 1790 he still owed 1 1,500,000 gulden. 23 Like Catherine, he aspired to

make his reign memorable for fine buildings; he divided himself and his

retinue between two costly palaces; he gave expensive entertainments, and

lavished gifts upon artists, writers, and women.

His attractiveness was costly. Thirty-two at his accession, handsome, cul-

tured, generous, and unmarried, he gathered about him a swarm of belles

eager for his hand and his purse. Several who could not marry him were glad

to share his bed, and some Parisian actresses joined in amusing the King. The

Czartoryskis protested; he confessed his sins and continued them. Finally one

mistress, Pani Grabowska, led him to the altar in a secret marriage. There-

after his sexual life was under strict surveillance, and he could give more

attention to government, literature, and the arts.

He took a personal interest in the works and the lives of the artists and

authors of the time. Like Catherine, he collected pictures, statuary, and

books, built a gallery and a library, and gave prominence, in the latter, to a

statue of Voltaire. He found work for native artists, and brought in others

from France, Italy, and Germany. Piranesi and Canova could not come, but

they executed works for him in Italy. He transformed half the royal palace

into a school of art, and provided funds to enable promising young artists to

study abroad. He established near Warsaw a porcelain industry whose prod-

ucts ranked with those of Meissen and Sevres. He inspired well-to-do Poles

—Adam Czartoryski, Elizabeth Lubomirska, Helen Radziwill, and others— to

collect art, to commission artists, and, in building and decorating their palaces,

to replace the rococo of the Saxon period with variations of the neoclassical

style. He himself favored a mixture of baroque and classical; in this style

Domenico Merlini designed the Lazienki Palace on the outskirts of War-

saw. Meanwhile foreign painters were training a new generation of Polish

artists, who came to maturity after Polish liberty had disappeared.

The first moves toward that catastrophe were the obstacles placed by Fred-

erick the Great in the path of Poland's self-reform. Thus far (1767) Cather-

ine seems to have had no intention to dismember a Poland so obviously sub-

ject to Russian influence; partition would enlarge Prussia into a much more

formidable barrier than Slavic Poland could be to Russian participation in the

480 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIX

affairs and culture of Western Europe. She was content to demand the admis-

sion of the Dissidents to full civil rights. But Frederick wanted more. He

could never reconcile himself to the fact that West Prussia, predominantly

German and Protestant, was subject to Polish and Catholic rule. Hence some

partition of Poland was with him an unforgettable objective. Any strength-

ening of Poland, political or military, would hinder his aims; therefore his

agents supported the liberum veto, opposed the formation of a Polish national

army, and welcomed the quarrels of Catholics and Dissidents as offering a

ground for invasion.

The intolerance of the Roman Catholic hierarchy co-operated with Fred-

erick's schemes. It resisted every attempt to admit the Dissidents to civil

rights. In "White Russia"— which was then a part of Poland, and included

Minsk— the Roman Catholic authorities took two hundred churches from

their Greek Orthodox congregations and gave them to the Uniates; the Or-

thodox communities were forbidden to repair their old churches and to build

new ones. In many cases children were separated from their parents to be

brought up in the Roman obedience. Orthodox priests were ill-treated, and

some were put to death. 24 Poniatowski, child of the philosophes, favored

toleration, 25 but he knew that the Diet would fight, with force if necessary,

any move to admit non-Roman Catholics to its membership; and he felt that

such proposals should be deferred until some modification of the liberum veto

could strengthen his hand. Frederick and Catherine replied that they were

asking no more of Poland than they themselves were granting to their own

religious minorities. To the Diet that met in October Snd November, 1766,

Prussia, Russia, Denmark, and Great Britain presented a petition that their

coreligionists in Poland should receive full civil rights.

Aroused by the eloquence of Bishop Kajetan Soltyk of Cracow, the depu-

ties rose to their feet in anger and demanded not only the rejection of the

petition, but the prosecution of its Polish supporters as traitors to Poland and

God. 26 A member who tried to defend the petition narrowly escaped death. 27

Poniatowski sought to quiet the assembly by issuing (November, 1766) a

pamphlet called Considerations of a Goold Citizen, calling upon all Poles for

national unity, and warning them that a divided nation invited conquest. At

the same time he begged the Polish ambassador at St. Petersburg to detach

Russia from the petitioning powers. "If this [petition] be persisted in," he

wrote, "I can see nothing but a St. Bartholomew's Eve [Massacre] for the

Dissidents, and a harvest of Ravaillacs [assassins] for myself. . . . The Em-

press would make of my royal mantle a robe of Nessus. I shall have to choose

between renouncing her friendship and being an enemy to my country."

Catherine answered, through Nikolai Repnin, her ambassador at Warsaw:

"I cannot conceive how the King can fancy himself a traitor to his country

by simply supporting the demands of equity." 28 She was too far from Poland,

in space and education, to feel the consuming heat of Polish passion and pride.

When a group of Protestant nobles formed a confederacy at Thorn, and a

Czartoryski faction formed a confederacy at Radom, Catherine bade Repnin

offer them the protection of Russia. Under this pretext he brought eighty

CHAP. XIX ) THERAPEOFPOLAND 48 1

thousand Russian troops to the Polish border, and some of them into Warsaw

itself.

The Diet reconvened in October, 1767. Bishops Zaluski and Soltyk ex-

horted the deputies to stand firm against any change in the constitution. Go-

ing over Poniatowski's head, Repnin arrested the bishops and two laymen on

the charge of having insulted the Empress, and had them transported to

Kaluga, ninety miles southwest of Moscow. The Diet protested; Repnin

announced that if further opposed he would deport not four but forty mag-

nates. On February 24, 1768, the Diet surrendered to threats of war and

signed with Russia a treaty accepting all of Catherine's demands: full free-

dom of religious worship, and eligibility to the Diet and public office, were

granted to the Dissidents; suits between Catholics and Dissidents were to be

tried before mixed courts. The Diet, Catherine, and Frederick were pleased

that the treaty confirmed the liberum veto, with some exceptions for eco-

nomic legislation. The Diet humbly accepted Catherine as the protectress of

this new constitution. In return she guaranteed the territorial integrity of

Poland so long as this entente continued. She rejoiced that she had not only

given Poland a greater degree of religious liberty than even England enjoyed,

but had foiled Frederick's plan for partition. Poniatowski received the con-

gratulations of the philosophers and the scorn of his people.

IV. THE FIRST PARTITION: 1 768-72

Polish patriots and priests agreed with Frederick in not accepting the situa-

tion. The Roman Catholic clergy forcefully condemned the surrender of

Poland's autonomy to a Russian infidel. Adam Krasinski, bishop of Kamien-

iec, and Jozef Pulaski (father of the Casimir Pulaski who fought for Amer-

ica) roused the Poles, by sermons and pamphlets, to reassert their political

freedom and religious dictatorship. Within a week after the surrender of the

Diet to Repnin a group of Poles formed (February 29, 1768) the Confedera-

tion of Bar— a town on the Dniester in the Polish Ukraine. The magnates

who financed the movement were inspired by hatred of Catherine and the

King; the "imbecile mass," as Frederick called their followers, burned with

zeal for the one true faith; and this ardor was voiced by poets lamenting, in

somber threnodies, the humiliation of Poland and the "apostasy" of its King.

Arms and funds were sent to the patriots by Turkey and Austria, and Du-

mouriez came from France to organize them into fighting units. Poles who

wished to restore the Saxon dynasty entered the movement, which soon

spread to scattered points throughout the land; "All Poland is on fire," Rep-

nin reported to Catherine. Poniatowski thought of joining the Confederation,

but the hotheads in it frightened him away by demanding his deposition, if

not his death. 29 If we may believe Voltaire, 30 thirty confederates took an oath

at Czestochowa:

We, excited by a holy and religious zeal, having resolved to avenge the

Deity, religion, and our country, outraged by Stanislas Augustus, a despiser of

482 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIX

laws both divine and human, a favorer of atheists and heretics, do promise and

swear, before the sacred and miraculous image of the Mother of God, to ex-

tirpate from the face of the earth him who dishonors her by trampling upon

religion. ... So help us God!

Repnin ordered Russian troops to suppress the rebellion. They drove the

confederates over the Turkish border, and burned a Turkish town; Turkey

declared war upon Russia (1768), and demanded Russian evacuation and

liberation of Poland. Cossacks took advantage of the turmoil to invade the

Polish Ukraine, killing landlords, Jewish stewards, Roman Catholic or Prot-

estant peasants in an orgy of indiscriminate slaughter; in one town they slew

sixteen thousand men, women, and children. The confederates retaliated by

murdering all available Russians and Dissidents, so that Protestants and Jews

suffered double jeopardy. Altogether in those years (1768-70), fifty thou-

sand inhabitants of Poland died by massacre or war. 31

All sides now began to talk of partition. The confederates were charged

by their enemies with having agreed to divide Poland between themselves

and their allies. 32 In February, 1769, Frederick sent to St. Petersburg a pro-

posal for dividing Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria; Catherine re-

plied that if Prussia and Austria would help Russia to expel the Turks from

Europe, she would consent to Prussian appropriation of that part of Poland

which separated mainland Prussia from East Prussia— the remainder of Poland

to be under a Russian protectorate; 33 Frederick demurred. Choiseul, for

France, suggested to Austria that it should seize Polish territory adjoining

Hungary: Austria thought it a good idea in a good time, and in April, 1769, it

occupied the Polish province of Spiz, which had been mortgaged to Poland

by Hungary in 141 2 and had never been redeemed. 34 In 1770 the Turks, then

at war as a defender of Poland, proposed to Austria a partition of Poland

between Austria and Turkey. 35

While these negotiations were proceeding, the Western powers resigned

themselves to the partitioning of Poland as the fated result of her political

chaos, her religious animosities, and her military impotence; "the catastrophe

was recognized as inevitable by every Continental statesman. ,,3e But the anti-

Confederation Poles at this time sent a member of the Diet to ask the socialist

philosophe Mably and the antiphilosophe Rousseau to draw up tentative con-

stitutions for a new Poland. Mably submitted his recommendations in 1770-

71; Rousseau finished his Constitution of Poland in April, 1772— two months

after the first partition treaty had been signed.

The Confederation of Bar had some moments of ecstasy before its collapse.

In March, 1770, from the Turkish city of Varna, it proclaimed the deposi-

tion of Poniatowski. On November 3, 1771, some confederates intercepted

him as he was leaving the house of an uncle at night, overpowered his escort,

shot one of them dead, dragged the King out of his carriage, cut his head with

a saber blow, and abducted him from the capital. In the forest of Bielny they

were attacked by a patrol; in the melee Poniatowski escaped, and communi-

cated with the Royal Guards, who came and escorted him, disheveled and

bloody, back to his palace at five o'clock in the morning. All chances of

CHAP.XIX) THE RAPE OF POLAND 483

reconciliation between the government and the Confederation disappeared.

Poniatowski fell back upon Russian aid, and the Confederation was sup-

pressed, leaving a remnant in Turkey— the Crescent protecting the Cross

0772). 37

Meanwhile the advance of Russia's armies to the Black Sea and the Danube

disturbed both Prussia and Austria. Neither Frederick II nor Joseph II took

pleasure in contemplating Russian control of the Black Sea, much less of

Constantinople. By treaties of 1764 and 1766 Prussia had pledged help to

Russia if Russia should be attacked; Turkey was formally the aggressor in

the Russo-Turkish war of 1768; Prussia was now endangering its solvency

by sending subsidies to Russia. Austria, resenting the entry of Russian forces

into Wallachia, was threatening to ally itself with Turkey against Russia; in

that case Russia would expect Prussia to attack Austria. But Frederick had

had enough of war. He had fought two wars to take and hold Silesia; why

risk it now? He preferred diplomacy. Perhaps the three powers could be

appeased with servings of Polish soil? As things were going, with the Russian

ambassador the real ruler of Poland, it was only a matter of time till Russia

would completely absorb the country, under whatever phrase. Was it still

possible to prevent this? Yes, if Catherine would consent to take only eastern

Poland, to let Frederick take western Poland, and to withdraw from the

Danube. Would a share in the spoils moderate Joseph's belligerency?

In January, 177 1, Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, proposed the plan to

the Russian diplomats at St. Petersburg. Panin objected that Russia had

guaranteed the territorial integrity of Poland; he was reminded that this

guarantee was conditional upon Poland's adherence to her new constitution

and her alliance with Russia, and this adherence had ceased when so many

deputies joined the rebellious Confederation of Bar. Even so, Catherine was

reluctant. Why give Frederick a part of Poland when she might soon take

all? Why strengthen Prussia with additional territory, resources, Baltic ports,

and more six-foot troops? But she did not want to fight Frederick; he had

180,000 men in arms; she preferred to have him keep Joseph from uniting

with Turkey against Russia. Her present goal was not Poland but the Black

Sea. On January 8, 1771, almost casually at a party, she indicated to

Henry her tentative consent to Frederick's scheme.

A year passed before negotiation could settle the division of the spoils.

Frederick wanted Danzig; Catherine objected; so did Britain, whose Baltic

commerce anchored on that port. Meanwhile Austria mobilized, and secretly

allied itself with Turkey. On February 17, 1772, Frederick and Catherine

signed a "convention" for the partition of Poland. Catherine softened Joseph

by renouncing all Russian claims to Wallachia and Moldavia; and the failure

of the 1 77 1 harvest had made it impossible for him to feed his troops. On the

other hand, Maria Theresa was using all her tears to keep her son from join-

ing in the rape. Frederick and Catherine forced his hand by beginning actual

seizure of their self -assigned terrain. On August 5, 1772, Joseph added his

signature to the partition pact.

The treaty, after invoking the Blessed Trinity, agreed to let Poland keep

484 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIX

two thirds of her soil and one third of her population. Austria took southern

Poland between Volhynia and the Carpathians, with Galicia and western

Podolia— 27,000 square miles, 2,700,000 souls. Russia took "White Russia"

(eastern Poland to the Dvina and the Dnieper)— 36,000 square miles, 1,800,-

000 souls. Prussia took "West Prussia," excepting Danzig and Thorn— 13,000

square miles, 600,000 souls. Frederick took the smallest share, but he had

bound the conspirators to peace, and had "sewed together," as he put it, West

Prussia and East Prussia with Brandenburg. After all, said the patriotic Treit-

schke, this was merely restoring to Germany "the stronghold of the . . .

Teutonic Order, the lovely Weichsal Valley, which in days of yore the

German knights had wrested from the barbarians." 38 Frederick reminded

Europe that the population of West Prussia was predominantly German and

Protestant, and Catherine pointed out that the region she had taken was

peopled almost entirely by Russian-speaking Greek Catholics. 39

The three powers soon occupied their shares with troops. Poniatowski ap-

pealed to the Western powers to prevent the partition; they were too busy;

France was expecting war with England, and hesitated to oppose her ally

Austria; England faced incipient revolt in iVmerica, with danger from France

and Spain; George III advised Poniatowski to pray to God. 40 The partitioning

powers demanded that a Diet be called to confirm the new geography;

Poniatowski temporized for a year; Anally he summoned a Diet to meet at

Grodno. Many nobles and prelates refused to attend; some who came and

protested were sent to Siberia; others accepted bribes; the rump Diet changed

itself into a confederation (in which majority rule was permitted by Polish

law) , and signed the treaty ceding the expropriated territories (September

18, 1773). Poniatowski, like Maria Theresa, wept and signed.

Western Europe accepted the first partition as the only alternative to the

complete absorption of Poland by Russia. Some diplomats, we are told, "were

startled by the moderation of the partners, who took only a third when the

whole was theirs for the asking." 41 The philosophes rejoiced that an intoler-

ant Poland had been chastened by their enlightened despots; Voltaire hailed

the partition as an historic repulse of rinfdme. 42 It was, of course, the triumph

of organized power over reactionary impotence.

V. THE POLISH ENLIGHTENMENT: 1773-91

Poniatowski had to choose now between Russia and Prussia as his protector

and master. He chose Russia, for it was farther away, and only Russia could

prevent Frederick from taking Danzig and Thorn. Catherine was anxious to

prevent the further aggrandizement of Prussia, whose army was the greatest

obstacle to Russian aggrandizement in the West. She ordered her ambassador

in Warsaw to help Poniatowski in every way consonant with Russian inter-

ests, and she sent to the King the proposals that Panin had drawn up for a

more workable Polish constitution. It retained elective monarchy and the

liberum veto, but it increased the royal power by establishing, under his

CHAP. XIX ) THE RAPE OF POLAND 485

presidency and as his executive arm, a Permanent Council of thirty-six mem-

bers, divided into ministries of police, justice, finance, foreign affairs, and

war; and it provided for a regular army of thirty thousand men. The nobles

feared that such an army would endanger their domination of the King; they

reduced the figure to eighteen thousand; but, with this and some minor ex-

ceptions, the Diet of 1775 ratified the new constitution, and Poniatowski

could now proceed to restore some health to the nation.

Corruption continued but anarchy diminished, guerrilla bands were over-

come, and the national economy grew. Rivers were deepened for large

vessels, canals were dug between rivers, and a "Royal Canal," completed in

1783, connected the Baltic with the Black Sea. Between 17 15 and 1773 the

population of Poland grew from 6,500,000 to 7,500,000, and the state revenue

was doubled. A system of national schools was established, textbooks were

prepared and provided, the universities of Cracow and Wilno were re-

endowed and revitalized, and teachers' colleges were established and financed

by the state. Poniatowski liked to surround himself with poets, journalists,

and philosophers. "The King," reported Coxe, "gives a dinner every Thurs-

day to the men of letters who are most conspicuous for learning and abilities,

and his Majesty himself presides at table," 43 leading the discussion of books

and ideas. He took three authors to live with him, and quietly added to the

income of others. 44 Thousands of Poles, while making their courteous obei-

sance to the Church— even while serving as its priests— read Locke, Montes-

quieu, Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, and Rousseau. The foundations were

laid of the Polish, or Stanislavian, Enlightenment.

Adam Naruszewicz, a Jesuit, caught the ear of the King by his poems; he

was raised to a bishopric, but continued to indite lyrics to nature; his "Hymn

to the Sun" and his "Four Seasons" still endear him to those who can read

him in the original. His Satires used a popular vocabulary sometimes Rabe-

laisian or profane. Stanislas asked him to write a readable but scholarly his-

tory of Poland; Naruszewicz gave nine years to the task, and in six volumes

(1780-86) produced a work remarkable for its discriminate documentation.

He lost heart after the second partition, fell into melancholy, and survived

the final partition by only a year. 45

The outstanding Polish writer of the period was Ignacy Krasicki. In his

travels he won the friendship of Voltaire and Diderot. 46 He became a priest,

ultimately an archbishop, but Stanislas urged him to give rein to his poetic

gifts. In a mock-heroic Monsiad (1775) he satirized the wars of his time as

battles between rats and mice; in Monomachia (1778) he made fun of monas-

tic disputes— the deadly weapons being theological tomes. Turning to prose,

he told, in The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Find-Out (1776), how a young

Polish noble, equipped with all fashionable attainments and sentiments, and

wrecked on a strange island, discovered how men and women, though in a

"state of nature," could be industrious and virtuous. Having followed the

lead of Homer, Swift, and Defoe in these works, Krasicki took up the style

of Addison, and produced a series of genre pictures, Pan Podstoli (1778 f.),

describing the life of a model gentleman and citizen. In Fables and Parables

486 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XIX

(1779) he challenged Phaedrus and La Fontaine, and struck with trenchant

irony at the dishonesty and brutality that flourished about him. His final ad-

vice was Horatian: seek a quiet corner, and let happiness come by stealth. 47

Although the influence of the French Enlightenment upon Naruszewicz

and Krasicki was sacerdotally subdued, it appeared decisively in Stanislas

Trembecki, who never mentioned religion except with hostility. His poetry

idolized nature, but not in those pleasant aspects that most often stir senti-

ment; he liked rather her wilder phases— her mad profusion of plants and

animals, her storms and torrents, the strife of life with life, of eaten with

eater; his fables took their form from La Fontaine but their spirit from Lu-

cretius. The power, subtlety, and finish of his verse won him a high place

in this literary flowering. Poniatowski supported him through all his trials,

and when the King was deposed the poet accompanied him into exile, and

stayed with him till death.

There was much religious poetry, for religion was the ultimate consolation

of the Poles in their personal and national misfortunes. Franciszek Karpinski's

"Morning Song," "Evening Song," and "Christ Is Being Born" are literature

as well as piety. Franciszek Kniaznin passed readily between those ancient

enemies, religion and sex: on the verge of ordination he discovered Anacreon

and love; he published Erotica (1770), pursued worldly happiness, returned

to religion, and died insane. The attempt to reconcile opposites may lead to

madness as well as to philosophy.

In the drama the dominant figure was Wojciecz Boguslawski, whom his

countrymen honor as "the father of the Polish theater"; we might call him

the Garrick of Poland, but the Poles would call Garrick the Boguslawski of

England. He was apparently the first Pole who gave his entire career to the

stage— as actor, dramatist, and producer, as director of permanent theaters in

Warsaw and Lvov, and as manager of companies that spread an appreciation

of the drama throughout the provinces and over the frontiers. He presented

Shakespeare and Sheridan in translation, and himself wrote comedies some of

which still hold the Polish stage. The best play of this period was The

Deputy's Return, by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, himself a deputy; here the

two sides of the political crisis were dramatically pictured in the devotion of

a reform deputy to a girl whose parents defend the privileges of the magnates

and the ways of the past.

Last and greatest of the Polish illumines was Hugo Kollontaj. His educa-

tion infected him with the ideas of the philosophes, but he concealed his

heresies sufficiently to secure a comfortable canonry at Cracow. Poniatowski

appointed him (1773) to an Education Committee, for which Kollontaj, aged

twenty-three, drew up a program of educational reform quite up to the best

of its time. At twenty-seven he was entrusted with the reorganization of Cra-

cow University; he carried this through in a few years, and then remained

as rector. In Letters of an Anonymous Writer to the President of the Diet

(1788-89), and in The Political La*w of the Polish Nation (1790), he offered

proposals which became the basis of the constitution of 179 1.

Prodded by its poets and publicists, Poland struggled to transform itself

into an effective and defensible state. An opportunity came when, to the

CHAP.XIX) THE RAPE OF POLAND 487

"Four Years' Diet" of 1788-92, Frederick IFs successor, Frederick Wil-

liam II, offered an alliance that pledged protection by the powerful Prussian

army against any foreign interference. Russia was busy with war against

both Turkey and Sweden; now Poland might deliver itself from its long sub-

servience to Catherine, and from such depredations as Russian soldiers had

committed on Polish soil during the last twenty-five years. Over Poniatow-

ski's protests the Diet dissolved his Permanent Council, voted to raise, subject

to the Diet, an army of 100,000 men, and ordered Russian troops to leave

Poland at once (May, 1789). Catherine, needing all her forces elsewhere,

made no resistance, but vowed revenge. On March 29, 1790, the Diet signed

alliance with Prussia.

By this time Poniatowski too was intoxicated with the air of freedom.

Throwing off his allegiance to Catherine, he took the lead in drafting a new

constitution. Its terms made the monarchy hereditary, but assured the suc-

cession, after the childless Poniatowski's death, to the house of Saxony. The

executive powers of the Crown were to be enlarged by giving the king a

suspensive veto— i.e., the right to prevent a measure passed by one Diet from

becoming law until reaffirmed by the next. The king was to appoint his min-

isters and the bishops, and to have command of the army. A small number of

burghers and other townsmen were to be elected as deputies. The Diet was

to consist of two chambers: a House of Deputies, which alone could originate

laws; and a Senate— composed of bishops, provincial governors, and the king's

ministers— whose consent was to be necessary to any law. The liberum veto

was to be replaced by majority rule. Roman Catholicism was to be recognized

as the prevailing religion of the nation, and apostasy from it was made a

crime; but otherwise freedom of worship was guaranteed to all. Serfdom re-

mained, but peasants might now appeal from the patrimonial to a provincial

or national court. The influence of the constitution adopted by the United

States of America (1787-88) was evident in these recommendations; Poles

who had fought for the American colonies had prepared the mind of Ponia-

towski, and he had not forgotten his reading of Locke, Montesquieu, and the

philosophies.

To ensure the ratification of his proposals Poniatowski resorted to a ruse.

Many members of the Diet went home for the Easter holy days of 1791; the

King summoned it to reconvene on May 3, too soon to let distant members

return to Warsaw for the reopening; those nearby deputies who arrived on

time were mostly liberals who could be depended upon to support the new

constitution. It was offered to them in the royal palace as soon as they con-

vened; it was received with wild acclaim, and was ratified by a large majority.

That day, May 3, 1791, was proudly remembered by patriotic Poles, and was

celebrated in Polish literature, art, and song.

VI. DISMEMBERMENT: 1 792-95

All the powers except Russia recognized the new constitution. Edmund

Burke called it "the noblest benefit received by any nation at any time," and

488 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION . ( CHAP. XIX

declared that Stanislas II had earned a place among the greatest kings and

statesmen in history; 48 but this enthusiasm may have reflected England's

pleasure at Catherine's defeat.

The Empress concealed for a time her hostility to the new Poland. But she

did not forgive the expeditious expulsion of her troops, nor the replacement

of Russian with Prussian influence in Polish affairs. When the Peace of Jassy

(January 9, 1792) ended her war with Turkey, and the involvement of

Prussia and Austria in war against Revolutionary France (April, 1792) freed

her from fear of her former accomplices, she looked around for another

opening into Poland.

It was provided for her by conservative Poles. They quite agreed with

Catherine that Poniatowski's constitution had been approved by a Diet so

hastily assembled that many nobles had been unable to attend. Felix Potocki

and other magnates were furious at the abandonment of that liberum veto

which had insured their power against any central authority, and they were

unwilling to surrender their right to elect— and therefore dominate— the king.

Refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the new charter, Potocki led a group

of nobles to St. Petersburg and asked the Empress to help them restore the

older constitution (of 1775) which she had promised to protect. She an-

swered that she did not care to interfere in Poland at the request of a few

individuals, but that she would consider an appeal from a substantial organ-

ized Polish minority. Informed of these negotiations, Frederick William II,

involved against France and unwilling to wage war against Russia, informed

the Polish government (May 4, 1792) that if it intended to defend its new

constitution by force of arms, it must not expect support from Prussia. 49

Potocki returned to Poland, formed (May 14, 1792) in a little town of the

Ukraine the Confederation of Targowica, and invited to his standard all those

who wished to restore the old constitution. His followers called themselves

Republicans, condemned the alliance of Poland with Prussia, praised Cath-

erine, and begged for her blessing and her troops.

She sent both, and, so strengthened, the confederates marched toward

Warsaw. Their propaganda for "freedom" made some impression, for several

towns received them as liberators; and at Teresapol (September 5) Potocki

was hailed as in effect the new king of Poland. Poniatowski called upon the

Diet to give him all powers needed for defense. It appointed him dictator,

summoned all adult male Poles to military service, and adjourned. Stanislas

made his nephew, the twenty-nine-year-old Prince Jozef Poniatowski, com-

mander in chief of the army, which he found untrained and miserably

equipped. Jozef ordered all detachments of the army to join him at Lubar on

the River Slucz; but many had been surrounded by Russian forces, and

could not come, and those that came were too weak to withstand the Russian

advance. The young commander withdrew to Polonne, his center of supplies,

in an orderly retreat made possible by the valiant rear-guard action of

Thaddeus Kosciusko, who had fought for the colonies in America, and was

already, at forty-six, old in the honors of patriotism and war.

On June 17, 1792, the Poles encountered a major Russian army at Zielence,

CHAP. XIX ) THE RAPE OF POLAND 489

and defeated it in the first pitched battle won by Poland since Sobieski's days.

Here again Kosciusko proved his skill, by seizing a hill from which his artil-

lery commanded the field; and Jozef, hitherto distrusted by subordinates

twice his age, won their respect by leading his reserves in person to force the

retreat of the Russians. The report of this victory rejoiced Poniatowski, but

was almost outweighed by news that Prince Ludwig of Wurttemberg, a

Prussian-army commander in charge of the Polish forces in Lithuania, had

deserted his post, leaving his troops in such disarray that on June 1 2 the Rus-

sians easily captured Wilno, the Lithuanian capital.

Jozefs army remained the sole defense of Poland. Its supplies were so low

that some of its regiments fasted for twenty-four hours, and only a dozen

charges of ammunition were left in the artillery. The Prince ordered retreat

to Dubno; accused of cowardice, he took a stand at Dubienka (July 18),

and with 12,500 men fought 28,000 Russians to a draw. He fell back in good

order to Kurow, where he awaited the reinforcements and supplies that had

been promised him by the King.

But Stanislas had given up. The refusal of Frederick William II to honor

the terms of the Prusso-Polish alliance, the treachery of Prince Ludwig, the

hundreds of desertions from the army that he had collected at Praga, had

been too much for his never very valiant spirit. He sent a personal appeal to

Catherine for some honorable terms; her reply (July 23) was an ultimatum

requiring him to join the Confederation of Targowica, and to restore the

constitution of 1775. He was shocked by her uncompromising tone; was this

the same woman who had once responded to his reckless love?

It was his tenderness that now dominated him. He had thought of resisting,

of arming himself and going to the front to lead a forlorn defense; but his

wife, his sister, and his niece wept so copiously at the thought of his death

and their own desolation that the King promised he would yield. And, after

all, of what use would resistance be? Now that no help— now that attacks on

the undefended western front— could be expected from Prussia, how could

Poland stand against Russia? Had he not striven to dissuade the Diet from

flouting Catherine and risking all on the promises of Prussia? Had he not

pleaded for a large army properly equipped, and had not the Diet, after vot-

ing the men, refused the funds? Even if the existing Polish army won a vic-

tory or two over the Russians, could not Catherine, surfeited with soldiers by

peace with Turkey, send wave after wave of disciplined and well-armed

troops against his scattered and disorganized remnants? Why sacrifice more

lives, and surrender half of Poland to devastation, when surrender would be

the end in any case?

The new Russian ambassador, Yakov Sievers, sent to his sister a sympa-

thetic picture of Poniatowski in this hour of physical and spiritual collapse:

The King is still [at sixty] a handsome man who wears well, though his face

is pale, but one can see that a dark veil has been drawn over his soul. He speaks

well, and even eloquently, and is courteous and attentive always and to every-

one. He is lodged badly, slighted, despised, and betrayed; and yet he is the

most amiable of men. Leaving his high position out of the question, and re-

49° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIX

garding him simply from the personal point of view, I may say that his good

?[ualities outweigh his bad ones. Certainly, after Louis XVI, he is the most un-

ortunate of monarchs. He loves his kinsfolk most tenderly, and it is just these

very people who have been the cause of all his misfortunes. 50

On July 24, 1792, Poniatowski read the Russian ultimatum to his privy

councilors, and advised them to trust to Catherine's magnanimity. Many

councilors protested against such simplicity. One of them, Malachowski,

offered to raise within an hour 100,000 gulden for defense, and urged that

even if Warsaw had to be abandoned, the Polish troops could retreat to Cra-

cow and raise a new army in the populous south. Poniatowski's motion to

surrender was defeated in the Council by a vote of twenty to seven. By his

authority as dictator he overruled them, and ordered his nephew to make

no further resistance. Jozef replied that instead of such capitulation the King

should hasten to the front with what forces he could gather, and fight to the

end. When Stanislas insisted that the army must join the Confederation, all

the officers but one sent in their resignations, and Jozef returned to his former

home in Vienna. On August 5 a Russian army occupied Praga. In October

Jozef sent a plea to his uncle to abdicate before every shred of honor had

gone. In November Potocki, with the advance guard of the Confederation,

made a triumphal entry into Warsaw, and lectured Poniatowski on the duties

of a king. But Potocki's victory was soon seen to be a calamity, for in Janu-

ary, 1793, Prussian troops entered Poland, and then moved on to occupy

Danzig and Thorn, without Potocki's Russian allies raising a musket to pre-

vent them. It became clear that Russia and Prussia had agreed to partition

Poland again.

Catherine and Frederick William had signed such an agreement on Janu-

ary 23, but they kept it secret till February 28. Potocki appealed to Poles of

all parties to rise in defense of Poland; they laughed at him; Jozef denounced

him as the betrayer of his country, and challenged him to single combat;

Stanislas forbade the duel.

By the second partition Russia took 89,000 square miles of eastern Poland,

with 3,000,000 population, including Wilno and Minsk; Prussia took 23,000

square miles of western Poland, with 1,000,000 population, including Danzig

and Thorn; Poland retained 80,000 square miles and 4,000,000 souls— approx-

imately one half of what had been left to her in 1773. Austria had no share

in this second spoliation, but was mollified by Russo-Prussian promises to aid

her in acquiring Bavaria. The Western powers, still absorbed in the struggle

with Revolutionary France, took no action against this second rape, which

Catherine explained to them as made necessary by the development of revolu-

tionary agitation in Warsaw, endangering all monarchies.

To give the theft a garb of legality she ordered Poniatowski to summon

a Diet to meet at Grodno, and bade him come there in person to sign an alli-

ance with Russia. At first he declined to go, but when she offered to pay his

debts— which now amounted to 1,566,000 ducats— he accepted this added

humiliation for the sake of his creditors. The Russian ambassador was sup-

plied with funds to bribe a sufficient number of deputies to attend the Diet,

CHAP. XIX ) THERAPEOFPOLAND 49 1

and he found it easy to corrupt several members of the King's suite to report

every word and action of their master. This "Last Diet" (June 17 to Novem-

ber 24, 1793) was persuaded to sign a treaty with Russia, but it refused for

months to ratify the second partition. Told that they would not be allowed

to leave the hall till they had signed, the members still refused, and sat in

silence for twelve hours. Then the marshal put the question to a vote, and,

hearing no answer, declared that silence was consent (September 25). The

residue of Poland became again a Russian protectorate; the constitution of

1775 was restored.

If one man could redeem the nation it was Kosciusko. Financed by the

Czartoryskis, he went to Paris (January, 1793), and besought the help of

France for a Poland warmly sympathetic with the French Revolution. He

promised that if help came the Polish peasants would rise against serfdom, the

townsmen against the nobility; Poniatowski would abdicate in favor of a

republic, and a Polish army would support France in its war with Prussia. 51

The French leaders welcomed his proposals, but the outbreak of war with

England (February, 1793), and the invasion of France by the Allies, ended

all chance of aid to Poland.

During Kosciusko's absence some burghers, Freemasons, and army officers

raised a new Polish army (March, 1794). Kosciusko hurried from Dresden to

Cracow to join it; he was appointed commander in chief with dictatorial

powers; he ordered every five houses in Poland to send him a foot soldier,

every fifty houses a cavalryman, and bade these recruits to bring whatever

weapons they could muster, even pikes and scythes. On April 4, with four

thousand regulars and two thousand peasant recruits, Kosciusko attacked a

force of seven thousand Russians at Raclawice, near Cracow, and defeated it

partly by his generalship, partly by the effectiveness of the peasants' scythes.

On hearing of this victory the radical, or "J ac °t>in," element in Warsaw

organized an insurrection. Middle-class leaders hesitantly joined it. On April

17 these rebels attacked the Russian garrison of 7,500 men, slew many of

them, and defeated a Prussian contingent of 1,650 troops; the occupation

forces fled, and for a moment Warsaw was under Polish control. A similar

uprising freed Wilno (April 23), hanged the Grand Hetman of Lithuania,

and regained parts of Poland almost to Minsk. On May 7 Kosciusko promised

liberation to the serfs, and guaranteed ownership of the lands they tilled. So

many volunteers and conscripts came to his standard that by June of 1794 he

commanded 1 50,000 men, only 80,000 of them properly equipped.

Against them came wave after wave of disciplined Russian or Prussian

troops. On June 6 an allied army of 26,000 surprised the Poles near Szczeko-

ciny; Kosciusko had time to bring up only 14,000 men. He was beaten with

heavy losses; he sought death in battle, but it evaded him; the Polish remnant

retired to Warsaw. On June 1 5 the Prussians took Cracow; on August 1 1 the

Russians recaptured Wilno; on September 19 a Polish army of 5,500 men was

annihilated at Teresapol by a Russian force of 12,500 seasoned soldiers under

Suvorov; on October 10 Kosciusko himself, with 7,000 Poles, was over-

whelmed by 13,000 Russians at Maciejowice; he was seriously wounded and

49 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XIX

was taken prisoner. He did not, as legend supposed, utter the despairing cry

"Finis Poloniae!" but that defeat was the end of the heroic revolt.

Suvorov, uniting various Russian armies, stormed the entrenched" camp of

the Poles at Praga, and his battle-crazed troops slaughtered not only the de-

fenders but the civilian population of the town. Poniatowski surrendered

Warsaw to avoid a greater massacre. Suvorov dispatched Kosciusko and

other rebel leaders to imprisonment at St. Petersburg, and sent the King to

Grodno to await the pleasure of the Empress. There, on November 25, 1795,

he signed his abdication. He appealed to Catherine to let some part of Poland

survive, but she determined to solve the Polish question by putting an end, as

she thought, to the Polish nation. After fifteen months of dispute Russia,

Prussia, and Austria signed the Third Partition Treaty (January 26, 1797).

Russia took Kurland, Lithuania, and western Podolia and Volhynia— 181,000

square miles; Austria took "Little Poland," with Cracow and Ludlin— 45,000

square miles; Prussia received the remainder, with Warsaw— 57,000 square

miles. By all three partitions Russia absorbed some 6,000,000 of Poland's 12,-

200,000 souls ( 1797), Austria 3,700,000, Prussia 2,500,000.

Thousands of Poles fled from their country; aliens received the confiscated

properties. Poniatowski remained in Grodno, playing at botany and writing

memoirs. After Catherine's death Paul I invited him to St. Petersburg and

assigned him the Marble Palace and 100,000 ducats a year. There he died,

February 12, 1798, in his sixty-sixth year. Kosciusko was freed by Emperor

Paul in 1796, returned to America, then to France, and continued his efforts

for Polish liberation till his death (181 7). Jozef Poniatowski escaped to

Vienna, joined in Napoleon's campaign against Russia, was wounded at

Smolensk, fought valiantly at Leipzig, was made a marshal in the French

army, and died in 181 3, honored even by his enemies. Poland ceased to be a

state, but continued to be a people and a civilization, sullied by religious

persecution, but distinguished by great poets, novelists, musicians, artists, and

scientists, and never abandoning the resolve to rise again.

BOOK V

THE PROTESTANT NORTH

1756-89

CHAPTER XX

Frederick's Germany

1756-86

I. FREDERICK VICTORIOUS

WHO was this ogre, internationally feared and admired, who had stolen

Silesia, defeated half of Europe united against him, laughed at religion,

snubbed marriage, given lessons in philosophy to Voltaire, and torn off a limb

from Poland if only to keep Russia from absorbing it all?

He looked more like a ghost than an ogre when he returned, sad and vic-

torious, from the Seven Years' War and entered Berlin (March 30, 1763)

amid the plaudits of a destitute populace. "I return to a city," he wrote to

d'Argens, "where I shall know only the walls, where I shall find none of my

acquaintances, where an immense task awaits me, where I shall before long

leave my bones in a place of refuge troubled by neither war nor calamities

nor the villainy of man." 1 His skin was parched and wrinkled, his blue-gray

eyes were somber and swollen, his face was lined with battle and bitterness;

only the nose had retained its pristine majesty. He thought that he could not

long survive the drain made by the protracted war upon his resources of

body, mind, and will, but his temperate habits preserved him for twenty-three

years more. He ate and drank sparingly, and knew no luxury; he lived and

dressed in his Potsdam New Palace as if he were still in camp. He grudged

the time given to the care of his person; in his later years he gave up shaving,

merely clipping his beard now and then with scissors; and gossip said that

he did not often wash. 2

The war completed that hardening of his character which had begun as a

defense against his father's cruelty. He looked on with stoic calm as con-

demned soldiers ran the gauntlet thirty-six times. 3 He harassed his officials

and generals with secret spies, sudden intrusions, abusive language, stinted

pay, and such detailed commands as stifled initiative and interest. He never

won the love of his brother Prince Henry, who served him so effectively and

loyally in diplomacy and war. He had some women friends, but they feared

rather than loved him, and none of them was admitted to his inner circle. He

respected the silent suffering of his neglected Queen, and on his return from

the war he surprised her with a present of 25,000 thalers; but it is doubt-

ful if he ever shared her bed. She learned to love him nevertheless, seeing

him heroic in adversity and devoted in government; she spoke of him as "our

dear King," "this dear Prince whom I love and adore." 4 He had no children,

but he was deeply attached to his dogs; usually two of them slept in his room

at night, probably as a guard; sometimes he took one of them into his bed to

495

49^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

warm him with animal heat. When the last of his favorite dogs died he "wept

all day long." 5 He was suspected of homosexuality, 6 but of this we have only

surmise.

Beneath his martial carapace there were elements of tenderness which he

rarely exposed to public view. He wept abundantly over the death of his

mother, and he repaid with sincere affection the devotion of his sister Wilhel-

mine. He spread little inconspicuous kindnesses among his nieces. He laughed

at Rousseau's sentiment, but he forgave his hostility and offered him asylum

when the Christian world cast him out. He passed from the stern drilling of

his troops to blowing melodies from his flute. He composed sonatas, con-

certos, and symphonies which he shared in performing before his court. The

learned Burney heard him there, and reported that he played with "great

precision, a clean and uniform attack, brilliant fingering, a pure and simple

taste, a great neatness of execution, and equal perfection in all his pieces";

Burney adds, however, that "in some of the difficult passages ... his Maj-

esty was obliged, against the rules, to take a breath in order to finish the

passage." 7 * In later years his increasing shortness of breath, and the loss of

several front teeth, compelled him to give up flute playing, but he resumed

study of the clavier.

Next to music, his favorite diversion was philosophy. He liked to have a

philosopher or two at his table to flay the parsons and stir the generals. He

held his own in exchanges with Voltaire, and remained a skeptic when most

of the philosophes developed dogmas and fantasies. He was the first avowedly

agnostic ruler of modern times, but he made no public attack upon religion.

He thought that "we have sufficient degrees of probability to reach the cer-

tainty that post mortem nihil est" 9 but he rejected the determinism of d'HoI-

bach, insisting (like a man who was will incarnate) that the mind acts

creatively upon sensations, and that our impulses can, through education, be

controlled by reason. 10 His favorite philosophers were "my friend Lucretius,

. . . my good Emperor Marcus Aurelius"; nothing of any importance, he

thought, had been added to them. 11

He agreed with Voltaire in believing that the "masses" bred too fast, and

worked too hard, to allow time for real education. Disillusionment with their

theology would only incline them to political violence. "The Enlighten-

ment," said Frederick, "is a light from heaven for those who stand on the

heights, and a destructive firebrand for the masses"; 12 here was a history of

the September Massacres of 1792 and the Terror of 1793 before the French

Revolution had begun. And to Voltaire in April, 1759: "Let us admit the

truth: philosophy and the arts are diffused amongst only a few; the great

masses . . . remain as nature made them, malevolent animals." 13 He called

mankind (half in humor) "diese verdammte Rasse"— this damned race— and

laughed at Utopias of benevolence and peace:

Superstition, self-interest, vengeance, treason, ingratitude, will produce

bloody and tragic scenes until the end of time, because we are governed by

* In i889Breitkopf and Hartel published 120 compositions by Frederick the Great. Several are

available on records. His Sinfonia in D for Two Flutes and Orchestra was revived in Berlin

in 1928 and in New York in 1929.8

chap.xx) Frederick's Germany 497

passions and very rarely by reason. There will always be wars, lawsuits, devas-

tations, plagues, earthquakes, bankruptcies. . . . Since this is so, I presume it

must be necessary. . . . But it seems to me that if this universe had been made

by a benevolent being, he should have made us happier than we are. . . . The

human mind is weak; more than three fourths of mankind are made for sub-

jection to the most absurd fanaticism. Fear of the Devil and of hell fascinates

their eyes, and they detest the wise man who tries to enlighten them. ... In

vain do I seek in them that image of God which the theologians assert they bear

upon them. Every man has a wild beast in him; few can restrain it; most men

let loose the bridle when not restrained by terror of the law. 14

Frederick concluded that to allow governments to be dominated by the

majority would be disastrous. A democracy, to survive, must be, like other

governments, a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by a minor-

ity. Frederick thought like Napoleon that "among nations and in revolutions

aristocracy always exists." 15 He believed that an hereditary aristocracy would

develop a sense of honor and loyalty, and a willingness to serve the state at

great personal cost, which could not be expected of bourgeois geniuses

formed in the race for wealth. So, after the war, he replaced with Junker

most of the middle-class officers who had risen in the army. 16 But since these

proud nobles could be a source of fragmentation and chaos, and an instru-

ment of exploitation, the state should be protected against division, and the

commonalty from class injustice, by a monarch wielding absolute power.

Frederick liked to picture himself as the servant of the state and the people.

This may have been a rationalization of his will to power, but he lived up to

the claim. The state became for him the Supreme Being, to which he would

sacrifice himself and others; and the demands of that service overrode, in his

view, the code of individual morality; the Ten Commandments stop at the

royal doors. All governments agreed with this Realpolitik, and some mon-

archs accepted the view of kingship as a sacred service. Frederick had the

latter notion through contact with Voltaire; and through contact with Fred-

erick the philosophes developed their these royale— that the best hope for

reform and progress lay in the enlightenment of kings.

So, despite his wars, he became the idol of the French philosophers, and

softened the hostility even of the virtuous Rousseau. D'Alembert long re-

fused Frederick's invitations, but did not withhold his praise. "The philoso-

phers and men of letters in every land," he wrote to Frederick, "have long

looked upon you, Sire, as their leader and their model." 17 The cautious math-

ematician at last succumbed to repeated calls, and spent two months with

Frederick at Potsdam in 1763. Intimacy (and a pension) did not diminish

d'Alembert's admiration. He was delighted with the King's disregard of eti-

quette, and with his remarks— not only on war and government, but also on

literature and philosophy; this, he told Julie de Lespinasse, was finer converse

than one could then hear in France. 18 When, in 1776, d'Alembert was deso-

late over Julie's death, Frederick sent him a letter which shows the ogre in a

wise and tender vein:

I am sorry for the misfortune which has befallen you. . . . The wounds of

the heart are the most sensitive of all, and . . . nothing but time can heal

them. ... I have, to my misery, had only too much experience of the suffering

49^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

caused by such losses. The best remedy is to put compulsion upon oneself in

order to divert one's mind. . . . You should choose some geometrical in-

vestigation which demands constant application. . . . Cicero, to console him-

self for the death of his dear Tullia, threw himself into composition. ... At

your age and mine we should be the more readily consoled because we shall

not long delay to join the objects of our regrets. 19

He urged d'Alembert to come again to Potsdam. "We will philosophize to-

gether concerning the nothingness of life, . . . concerning the vanity of

stoicism. ... I will feel as happy in allaying your grief as if I had won a

battle." Here was, if not quite a philosopher king, at least a king who loved

philosophers.

This no longer applied to Voltaire. Their quarrels in Berlin and Potsdam,

and the arrest of Voltaire in Frankfurt, had left wounds deeper than grief.

The philosopher remained bitter longer than the King. He told the Prince de

Ligne that Frederick was "incapable of gratitude, and never had any except

for the horse on which he ran away at the battle of Mollwitz." 20 The corre-

spondence between these two most brilliant men of the century reopened

when Voltaire wrote to dissuade the desperate warrior from suicide. Soon

they were exchanging reproaches and compliments. Voltaire reminded Fred-

erick of the indignities which the philosopher and his niece had suffered at

the hands of the King's agents; Frederick answered: "If you had not had to

do with a man madly enamored of your fine genius, you would not have

gotten off so well. . . . Consider all that as done with, and never let me hear

again of that wearisome niece." 21 But then the King stroked the philosophic

ego bewitchingly:

Do you want sweet things? Very good; I will tell you some truths. I esteem

in you the finest genius that the ages have borne; I admire your poetry, I love

your prose. . . . Never has an author before you had a touch so keen, a taste

so sure and delicate. . . . You are charming in conversation; you know how to

amuse and instruct at the same time. You are the most seductive being that I

know. . . . All depends for a man upon the time when he comes into the

world. Though I came too late, I do not regret it, for / have seen Voltaire, . . .

and he writes to me. 22

The King supported with substantial contributions Voltaire's campaigns

for the Calas and the Sirvens, and applauded the war against Finfdme, but he

did not share the philosopher trust in the enlightenment of mankind. In the

race between reason and superstition he predicted the victory of superstition.

So, to Voltaire, September 13, 1766:

Your missionaries will open the eyes of a few young people. . . . But how

many fools there are in the world who do not think! . . . Believe me, if the

philosophers founded a government, within half a century the people would

create new superstitions. . . . The object of adoration may change, like your

French fashions; [but] what does it matter whether people prostrate them-

selves before a piece of unleavened bread, before the ox Apis, before the Ark

of the Covenant, or before a statue? The choice is not worth the trouble; the

superstition is the same, and reason gains nothing. 23

Having accepted religion as a human need, Frederick made his peace with

it, and protected all its peaceful forms with full toleration. In conquered

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 499

Silesia he left Catholicism undisturbed, except that he opened to all faiths the

University of Breslau, which had previously admitted only Catholics. He

welcomed, as valuable teachers, the Jesuits who, expelled by Catholic kings,

sought refuge under his agnostic rule. He protected as well Mohammedans,

Jews, and atheists; and in his reign and realm Kant practiced that freedom of

speech and teaching and writing which was so sharply rebuked and ended

after Frederick's death. Under this toleration most forms of religion declined

in Prussia. In 1780 there was one ecclesiastic per thousand population in Ber-

lin; in Munich there were thirty. 24 Frederick thought that toleration would

soon put an end to Catholicism. "It will take a miracle to restore the Catholic

Church," he wrote to Voltaire in 1767; "it has been struck by a terrible

apoplexy; and you will yet have the consolation of burying it and writing its

epitaph." 25 The most thorough of skeptics had forgotten for a moment to be

skeptical of skepticism.

II. REBUILDING PRUSSIA

No ruler in history ever worked so hard at his trade, except perhaps his

pupil Joseph II of Austria. Frederick disciplined himself as he did his troops,

rising usually at five, sometimes at four, working till seven, breakfasting, con-

ferring with his aides till eleven, reviewing his palace guard, dining at twelve-

thirty with ministers and ambassadors, working till five, and only then

relaxing into music, literature, and conversation. The "midnight" suppers,

after the war, began at half past nine, and were over at twelve. He allowed no

family ties to distract him, no court ceremonies to burden him, no religious

holidays to interrupt his toil. He watched the work of his ministers, dictated

almost every move of policy, kept an eye on the treasury; and over all the

government he established a Fiscal, or bureau of accounts, empowered to

examine any department at any time, and instructed to report any suspicion

of irregularity. He punished malfeasance or incompetence so rigorously that

official corruption, which flourished everywhere else in Europe, almost dis-

appeared from Prussia.

He prided himself on this, and on the rapid recovery of his devastated

country. He began with domestic economies that earned him gibes from the

extravagant courts of defeated Austria and France. The royal household was

as frugally managed as a tradesman's home. His wardrobe was a soldier's uni-

form, three old coats, waistcoats soiled with snuff, and one ceremonial robe

that lasted him all his life. He dismissed his father's retinue of huntsmen and

hunting dogs; this warrior preferred poetry to the hunt. He built no navy,

sought no colonies. His bureaucrats were poorly paid, and he provided with

like parsimony for the modest court that he maintained at Berlin— while he

stayed in Potsdam. Yet the Earl of Chesterfield judged it "the politest, the

most shining, the most useful court in Europe for a young fellow to be at,"

and added, "You will see the arts and wisdom of government better in that

country now [1752] than in any other in Europe." 28 Twenty years later,

however, Lord Malmesbury, the British minister to Prussia, perhaps with a

500 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

view to consoling London, reported that there was "in that capital [Berlin]

neither an honest man nor a chaste woman." 27

Frederick checked his parsimony when national defense was concerned.

By persuasion and conscription he soon restored his army to its prewar

strength; only with that weapon in hand could he maintain the territorial

integrity of Prussia against the ambitions of Joseph II and Catherine II. That

army, too, had to buttress the laws that gave order and stability to Prussian

life. Organized central force, he felt, was the only alternative to disorganized

and disruptive force in private hands. He hoped that obedience through fear

of force would grow into obedience through habituation to law— which was

force reduced to rules and hiding its claws.

He renewed his behest to jurists to codify into one system of law— an

"Allgemeine Preussische Landrecht"— the divers and contradictory legisla-

tion of many provinces and generations^ this task, interrupted by the death

of Samuel von Cocceji (1755) and by the war, was resumed by Chancellor

Johann von Carmer and Privy Councilor K. G. Svarez, and was completed

in 1 79 1. The new code took feudalism and serfdom for granted, but within

those limitations it sought to protect the individual against private or public

oppression or injustice. It abolished superfluous courts, reduced and quick-

ened legal procedure, moderated penalties, and raised the requirements for

appointment to magistracies. No sentence of death could be executed without

sanction by the king, and appeal to the king was open to all. He won a repu-

tation for impartial justice, and Prussian courts were soon acknowledged to

be the most honest and efficient in Europe. 28

In 1763 Frederick issued a "Generallandschulreglement" confirming and

extending the compulsory education proclaimed by his father in 17 16-17.

Every child in Prussia, from his fifth to his fourteenth year, was to attend

school. It was characteristic of Frederick that Latin was dropped from the

elementary curriculum, that old soldiers were appointed as schoolmasters, and

that most learning was by semimilitary drill. 29 The King added: "It is a good

thing that the schoolmasters in the country teach the youngsters religion and

morals. ... It is enough for the people in the country to learn only a little

reading and writing. . . . Instruction must be planned ... to keep them in

the villages and not to influence them to leave." 30

Economic reconstruction received priority in time and money. Using at

first the funds that had been collected for another, now unneeded, campaign,

Frederick financed the rebuilding of towns and villages, the distribution of

food to hungry communities, the provision of seed for new sowings; he dis-

persed among the farms sixty thousand horses that could be spared from the

army. Altogether 20,389,000 thalers were spent in public relief. 31 War-

ravaged Silesia was excused from taxes for six months; eight thousand houses

were built there in three years; a land bank advanced money to Silesian farm-

ers on easy terms. Credit societies were established at various centers to en-

courage agricultural expansion. The marshy area along the lower Oder was

drained, providing cultivatable land for fifty thousand men. Agents were

sent abroad to invite immigrants; 300,000 came. 32

chap. xx) Frederick's Germany 501

As serfdom bound the peasant to his lord, there was not in Prussia that

freedom to move to the towns which, in England, made possible the rapid

development of industry. Frederick worked in a hundred ways to overcome

this handicap. He lent money on easy terms to entrepreneurs; he permitted

temporary monopolies; he imported workmen; he opened technical schools;

he set up a porcelain factory in Berlin. He strove to establish a silk industry,

but the mulberry trees languished in the northern cold. He promoted vigor-

ous mining in Silesia, which was rich in minerals. On September 5, 1777, he

wrote to Voltaire as one businessman to another: "I am returning from

Silesia, with which I am well content. . . . We have sold to foreigners

5,000,000 crowns' worth of linen, 1,200,000 crowns' worth of cloth. ... A

much simpler process than that of Reaumur has been discovered for making

iron into steel." 33

To facilitate trade the King abolished internal tolls, widened harbors, dug

canals, and built thirty thousand miles of new roads. Foreign trade was held

back by high duties on imports and by embargoes on the export of strategic

goods; international chaos compelled the protection of home industry to en-

sure industrial adequacy in war. Nevertheless Berlin grew as the hub of trade

as well as government: in 1721 it had 60,000 population; in 1777 it had

i4o,ooo; 34 it was preparing to be the capital of Germany.

To finance this amalgam of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and autocracy

Frederick drew from his people in taxation almost as much as he returned to

them in social order, subsidies, and public works. He kept for the state a

monopoly on salt, sugar, tobacco, and (after 1781) coffee, and he owned a

third of the arable land. 35 He taxed everything, even street singers, and

brought in Helvetius to devise an inescapable system of taxgathering. "The

new projects of excise [taxation]," wrote an English ambassador, "have

really alienated the affections of the people from their sovereign." 36 At his

death Frederick left in the treasury 51,000,000 thalers— two and a half times

the annual revenue of the state.

Mirabeau fils, having made three visits to Berlin, published in 1788 a devas-

tating analysis De la Monarchie prussienne sous Frederic le Grand. Inheriting

from his father the free-enterprise principles of the physiocrats, he con-

demned the Frederician regime as a police state, a bureaucracy choking all

initiative and invading every privacy. Frederick might have replied that in

the chaotic condition of Prussia after the Seven Years' War laissez-faire

would have annulled his victory with economic anarchy. Direction was im-

perative; he was the only one who could effectively command; and he knew

no other form of command than that of a general to his troops. He saved

Prussia from defeat and collapse, and paid by losing the love of his people.

He realized this result, and comforted himself with righteousness:

Mankind move if you urge them on, and stop as soon as you leave off driving

them. . . . Men read little, and have no desire to learn how anything can be

managed differently. As for me, who never did them anything but good, they

think that I want to put a knife to their throats, so soon as there is any ques-

tion of introducing a useful improvement, or, indeed, any change at all. In

502 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XX

such cases I have relied on my honest purpose and my good conscience, and

on the information in my possession, and have calmly pursued my way. 37

His will prevailed. Prussia, even in his lifetime, grew rich and strong. Popu-

lation doubled, education spread, religious intolerance hid its head. It is true

that this new order depended upon enlightened despotism, and that when,

after Frederick's death, the despotism remained without the enlightenment,

the national structure was weakened and collapsed at Jena before a will as

strong as Frederick's own. But the Napoleonic edifice too, depending upon

one will and brain, collapsed; and in the long run it was Frederick's distant heir

and beneficiary Bismarck who chastened the France of Napoleon's heir, and

made from Prussia and a hundred principalities a united and powerful

Germany.

III. THE PRINCIPALITIES

We remind ourselves again that in the eighteenth century Germany was

not a nation but a loose federation of nearly independent states, which for-

mally accepted the "Holy Roman" emperor at Vienna as their head, and sent

representatives occasionally to a Reichstag, or Imperial Diet, whose chief

functions were to hear speeches, suffer ceremonies, and elect an emperor. The

states had a common language, literature, and art, but differed in manners,

dress, coinage, and creed. There were some advantages in this political frag-

mentation: the multiplicity of princely courts favored a stimulating diversity

of cultures; the armies were small, instead of being united for the terror of

Europe; and a considerable degree of tolerance in religion, custom, and law

was forced upon state, church, and people by the ease of emigration. Theo-

retically the power of each prince was absolute, for the Protestant faith sanc-

tioned the "divine right of kings." Frederick, who recognized no divine right

but that of his army, satirized "most small princes, particularly German

ones," who "ruin themselves by reckless extravagance, misled by the illusion

of their imagined greatness. . . . The youngest son of the youngest son of

an appanaged dynasty imagines he is of the same stamp as Louis XIV. He

builds his Versailles, keeps mistresses, and has an army . . . strong enough to

fight ... a battle on the stage of Verona." 38

The most important of the principalities was Saxony. Its age of art and

glory ended when Elector Frederick Augustus II allied himself with Maria

Theresa against Frederick the Great; the merciless King bombarded and

ruined Dresden in 1760; the Elector fled to Poland as its Augustus III, and

died in 1763. His grandson Frederick Augustus III inherited the electorate

at the age of thirteen, earned the name of "Der Gerechte" (The Just), made

Saxony a kingdom (1806), and through many vicissitudes kept his throne till

his death (1827).

Karl Eugen, duke of Wurttemberg, comes into our story chiefly as the

friend and enemy of Schiller. He taxed his subjects with inexhaustible in-

genuity, sold ten thousand of his troops to France, and maintained what Casa-

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 503

nova thought "the most brilliant court in Europe," 39 with a French theater,

Italian opera, and a concatenation of concubines. More important to our

narrative is Karl August, reigning duke of Saxe- Weimar from 1775 to 1828;

but we shall see him to better advantage surrounded by the stars who bright-

ened his reign— Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. He was one of several

minor "enlightened despots" who in this age, feeling the influence of Voltaire

and the example of Frederick, contributed to the awakening of Germany.

The archbishops who ruled Munster, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, and Wurzburg-

Bamberg fell in line by multiplying schools and hospitals, checking court

extravagance, softening class distinctions, reforming prisons, extending poor

relief, and bettering the conditions of industry and trade. "It is not easy,"

wrote Edmund Burke, "to find or to conceive governments more mild and

indulgent than these church sovereignties." 40

Class distinctions, however, were emphasized in most of the German states,

as part of the technique of social control. Nobles, clergy, army officers, pro-

fessional men, merchants, and peasants constituted separate classes; and

within every category there were grades each of which stiffened itself with

scorn of the next beneath. Marriage outside one's class was almost unthink-

able, but some merchants and financiers bought nobility. The nobles held a

monopoly of the higher posts in the army and the government, and many of

them earned their privileges by bravery or competence; but many were para-

sites, composed of uniforms, competing for social precedence at the court,

and following French fashions in language, philosophy, and mistresses.

It is to the credit of the princes, prelates, and nobles of western Germany

that by 1780 they had freed their peasants from serfdom, and on terms that

made possible a wide spread of rural prosperity. Reinhold Lenz thought the

peasants finer human beings— simpler, heartier, more elemental— than the

penny-counting tradesmen or the prancing young aristocrats. 41 Heinrich

Jung's autobiography (1777) idealized village life in its daily labor as well as

its seasonal festivals; Herder found the folk songs of the peasantry to be truer

and profounder than the poetry of the books; and Goethe, in his Dichtung

und Wahrheit, described the vintage celebration as "pervading a whole dis-

trict with jubilation," fireworks, song, and wine. 42 This was one side of the

German scene; the other was hard labor, high taxes, women old at thirty,

illiterate children dressed in rags and begging in the streets. "At one station,"

Eva Konig told Lessing in 1770, "there crowded around me . . . eighty

beggars; ... in Munich whole families ran after me, exclaiming that surely

one would not let them starve." 43

In the eighteenth century the family was more important than the state

or the school. The German home was the source and center of moral disci-

pline, social order, and economic activity. There the child learned to obey a

stern father, take refuge with a loving mother, and share at an early age in

the diverse and formative tasks that filled the day. Schiller's "Song of the

Bell" gave an ideal picture of "the housewife so modest, . . . wisely govern-

ing the circle of the family, training the girls, restraining the boys, and using

all spare moments to ply the loom." 44 The wife was subject to the husband,

504 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

but she was the idol of her children. Outside the home, except at the courts,

men usually excluded women from their social life, and so their conversation

tended to be either dull or profane. At the courts there were many women

of culture and fine manners; some, Eckermann thought, "write an excellent

style, and surpass, in that respect, many of our most celebrated authors." 45

As in France, so in Germany, the women of the upper classes had to learn

swooning as part of their technique, and a readiness for sentiment melting

into tears.

Court morals followed French models in drinking, gambling, adultery, and

divorce. Titled ladies, according to Mme. de Stael, changed husbands "with

as little difficulty as if they were arranging the incidents of a drama," and

with "little bitterness of spirit." 46 The princes set the pace for immorality by

selling their soldiers to foreign rulers; so the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel built

an elegant palace, and maintained a sumptuous court, from the proceeds of

his Soldatenhandel— commerce in soldiery. Altogether, during the American

Revolution, German princes sold— or, as they put it, "lent"— thirty thousand

troops to England for some ^500,000; 12,500 of these men never returned. 47

Outside of Prussia the Germans of the eighteenth century— recalling the hor-

rors of the seventeenth— showed little inclination to war. Apparently "na-

tional character" can change from one century to another.

Religion in Germany was more subordinate to the state than in Catholic

lands. Divided into sects, it had no awesome pontiff to co-ordinate its doc-

trine, strategy and defense; its leaders were appointed by the prince, its in-

come depended upon his will. In the middle and lower classes it was a strong

faith; only the nobles, the intellectuals, and a few clergymen were affected

by the waves of unbelief that swept in from England and France. The Rhine

region was mostly Catholic, but it was there that this period saw the rise of

a movement boldly challenging the authority of the popes.

In 1763 Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim, auxiliary bishop of Trier, pub-

lished, under the pseudonym Justinus Febronius, a treatise De Statu Ec-

clesiae et legitima Pote state romani Pontificis (On the State of the Church,

and the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff) . The book was translated

into German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, and made a stir

throughout Western Europe. "Febronius" accepted the primacy of the pope,

but only as one of honor and executive administration; the pope is not in-

fallible; appeal should be possible from his decision to a general council,

which should have the ultimate legislative authority in the Church. The

author distrusted the secret conservative influence of the Roman Curia, and

suggested that the excessive centralization of ecclesiastical power had pro-

duced the Reformation; decentralization might ease the return of Protestants

to the Catholic Church. In matters of human, not divine, law secular princes

were entitled to refuse obedience to the papacy; if necessary, they might

rightfully separate their national churches from Rome. The Pope condemned

the book (February, 1764), but it became "the breviary of the govern-

ments." 48 We have seen its influence on Joseph II.

The archbishops of Cologne, Trier, Mainz, and Salzburg favored the views

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 505

of "Febronius"; they wished to be independent of the pope as the other prin-

cipalities were of the emperor. On September 25, 1786, they issued the

"Punctation [preliminary statement] of Ems" (near Coblenz), which, if it

had been put into effect, would have created a new Reformation:

The pope is and remains the highest authority in the Church, . . . but those

[papal] privileges which do not spring from the first Christian centuries but

are based on the false Isadoran Decretals, and are disadvantageous to the bishops,

. . . can no longer be considered valid; they belong among the usurpations of

the Roman Curia; and the bishops are entitled (since peaceful protests are of

no avail) themselves to maintain their lawful rights under the protection of the

Roman-German Emperor. There should no longer be any appeals [from the

bishops] to Rome. . . . The [religious] orders should take no directions from

foreign superiors, nor attend general councils outside Germany. No contribu-

tions should be sent to Rome. . . . Vacant benefices should be filled not by

Rome but by a regular election of native candidates. ... A German national

council should regulate these and other matters. 49

The German bishops, fearing the financial power of the Curia, gave no sup-

port to this declaration; moreover, they hesitated to replace the distant over-

lordship of Rome with the immediate and less evadable authority of the

German princes. The incipient revolt collapsed; Hontheim retracted (1788);

the archbishops withdrew their "punctation" (1789), and all was as before.

IV. THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT

Not quite. Education, except in the ecclesiastical principalities, had passed

from church to state control. University professors were appointed and paid

(with shameful parsimony) by the government, and held the status of public

officials. Although all teachers and students were required to subscribe to the

religion of the prince, the faculties, until 1789, enjoyed a growing measure

of academic freedom. German replaced Latin as the language of instruction.

Courses in science and philosophy multiplied, and philosophy was spaciously

defined (at the University of Konigsberg in Kant's day) as "the ability to

think, and to investigate the nature of things without prejudices or sectarian-

ism." 50 Karl von Zedlitz, the devoted Minister of Education under Frederick

the Great, asked Kant to suggest means of "holding back the students in the

universities from the bread-and-butter studies, and making them understand

that their modicum of law, even their theology and medicine, will be much

more easily acquired and safely applied if they are in possession of philo-

sophical knowledge." 51

Many poor students obtained public or private aid for a university educa-

tion; pleasant is Eckermann's story of how he was helped by kind neighbors

at every step of his development. 52 There were no class distinctions in the

student body. 53 Any graduate was allowed to lecture under university aus-

pices, for whatever fees he could collect from his auditors; Kant began his

professorial career in this way; and such competition from new teachers kept

$o6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

old pundits on their toes. Mme. de Stael judged the twenty-four German

universities to be "the most learned in Europe. In no country, not even Eng-

land, are there so many means of instruction, or of bringing one's capacities

to perfection. . . . Since the Reformation the Protestant universities have

been incontestably superior to the Catholic; and the literary glory of Ger-

many depends upon these institutions." 54

Educational reform was in the air. Johann Basedow, inspired by reading

Rousseau, issued in 1774 a four- volume Elementariverke, which outlined a

plan for teaching children through direct acquaintance with nature. They

were to acquire health and vigor through games and physical exercises; they

were to receive much of their instruction outdoors instead of being tied to

desks; they were to learn languages not through grammar and rote but

through naming objects and actions encountered in the day's experience;

they were to learn morals by forming and regulating their own social groups;

and they were to prepare for life by learning a trade. Religion was to enter

into the curriculum, but not as pervasively as before; Basedow openly

doubted the Trinity. 55 He established at Dessau (1774) a sample Philan-

thropinum, which produced pupils whose "sauciness and pertness, omnis-

cience and arrogance" 56 scandalized their elders; but this "progressive educa-

tion" harmonized with the Enlightenment, and spread rapidly throughout

Germany.

Experiments in education were part of the intellectual ferment that agitated

the country between the Seven Years' War and the French Revolution.

Books, newspapers, magazines, circulating libraries, reading clubs, multiplied

enthusiastically. A dozen literary movements sprouted, each with its ideol-

ogy, journal, and protagonists. The first German daily, Die LeipzigerZeitung,

had begun in 1660; by 1784 there were 217 daily or weekly newspapers in

Germany. In 175 1 Lessing began to edit the literary section of the Vossische

Zeitung in Berlin; in 1772 Merck, Goethe, and Herder issued Die Frankfur-

ter gelehrte Anzeigen, or Frankfurt Literary News; in 1773-89 Wieland

made Der teutsche Merkur the most influential literary review in Germany.

There were three thousand German authors in 1773, six thousand in 1787;

Leipzig alone had 133. Many of these were part-time writers; Lessing was

probably the first German who, through many years, made a living by litera-

ture. Almost all authors were poor, for copyright protected them only in

their own principality; pirated editions severely limited the earnings of au-

thor and publisher alike. Goethe lost money on Gotz von Berlichingen, and

made little on Werther, the greatest literary success of that generation.

The outburst of German literature is among the major events of the second

half of the eighteenth century. D'Alembert, writing from Potsdam in 1763,

found nothing worthy of report in German publications; 57 by 1790 Germany

rivaled, perhaps surpassed, France in contemporary literary genius. We have

noted Frederick's scorn of the German language as raucous and coarse and

poisoned with consonants; yet Frederick himself, by his dramatic repulse of

so many enemies, inspired Germany with a national pride that encouraged

German writers to use their own language and stand up before the Voltaires

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 507

and the Rousseaus. By 1763 German had refined itself into a literary lan-

guage, and was ready to voice the German Enlightenment.

This Aufklarung was no virgin birth. It was the painful product of English

deism coupled with French free thought on the ground prepared by the

moderate rationalism of Christian von Wolff. The major deistic blasts of

Toland, Tindal, Collins, Whiston, and Woolston had by 1743 been translated

into German, and by 1755 Grimm's Correspondance was disseminating the

latest French ideas among the German elite. Already in 1756 there were

enough freethinkers in Germany to allow the publication of a Freidenker-

lexikon. In 1763-64 Basedow issued his Philalethie (Love of Truth), which

rejected any divine revelation other than that of nature itself. In 1759 Chris-

toph Friedrich Nikolai, a Berlin bookseller, began Brief e die neueste Literatur

betreffend; enriched with articles by Lessing, Herder, and Moses Mendels-

sohn, these Letters concerning the Latest Literature continued till 1765 to

be a literary beacon of the Aufklarung, warring against extravagance in liter-

ature and authority in religion.

Freemasonry shared in the movement. The first lodge of Freimaurer was

founded at Hamburg in 1733; other lodges followed; members included

Frederick the Great, Dukes Ferdinand of Brunswick and Karl August of

Saxe- Weimar, Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Klopstock, Goethe, Kleist. Gen-

erally these groups favored deism, but avoided open criticism of orthodox

belief. In 1776 Adam Weishaupt, professor of canon law at Ingolstadt, organ-

ized a kindred secret society, which he called Perfektibilisten, but which later

took on the old name of Illuminati. Its ex-Jesuit founder, following the model

of the Society of Jesus, divided its associates into grades of initiation, and

pledged them to obey their leaders in a campaign to "unite all men capable

of independent thought," make man "a masterpiece of reason, and thus attain

the highest perfection in the art of government." 58 In 1784 Karl Theodor,

elector of Bavaria, outlawed all secret societies, and the Order of the Illu-

minati suffered an early death.

Even the clergy were touched by the "Clearing Up." Johann Semler, pro-

fessor of theology at Halle, applied higher criticism to the Bible: he argued

(precisely contrary to Bishop Warburton) that the Old Testament could

not be inspired by God, since, except in its final phase, it ignored immortal-

ity; he suggested that Christianity had been deflected from the teachings of

Christ by the theology of St. Paul, who had never seen Christ; and he advised

theologians to consider Christianity as a transient form of the effort of man

to achieve a moral life. When Karl Bahrdt and others of his pupils rejected

all of Christian dogma except belief in God, Semler returned to orthodoxy,

and held his chair of theology from 1752 to 1791. Bahrdt described Jesus as

simply a great teacher, "like Moses, Confucius, Socrates, Semler, Luther, and

myself." 59 Johann Eberhard also equated Socrates with Christ; he was ex-

pelled from the Lutheran ministry, but Frederick made him professor of

philosophy at Halle. Another clergyman, W. A. Teller, reduced Christianity

to deism, and invited into his congregation anyone, including Jews, who be-

lieved in God. 60 Johann Schulz, a Lutheran pastor, denied the divinity of

508 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XX

Jesus, and reduced God to the "sufficient ground of the world"; 61 he was dis-

missed from the ministry in 1792.

These vocal heretics were a small minority; perhaps silent heretics were

many. Because so many clergymen offered a welcome to reason, because

religion was much stronger in Germany than in England or France, and be-

cause the philosophy of Wolff had provided the universities with a com-

promise between rationalism and religion, the German Enlightenment did not

take an extreme form. It sought not to destroy religion, but to free it from

the myths, absurdities, and sacerdotalism that in France made Catholicism so

pleasing to the people and so irritating to the philosophers. Following Rous-

seau rather than Voltaire, German rationalists recognized the profound ap-

peal that religion makes to the emotional elements in man; and the German

nobility, less openly skeptical than the French, supported religion as an aid

to .norals and government. The Romantic movement checked the advance

->f rationalism, and prevented Lessing from being to Germany what Voltaire

had been to France.

V. GOTTHOLD LESSING: I 7 29-8 I

His great-grandfather was burgomaster of a small town in Saxony; his

grandfather was for twenty-four years burgomaster of Kamenz, and wrote

a plea for religious toleration; his father was the head Lutheran pastor in

Kamenz, and wrote a catechism which Lessing learned by heart. His mother

was the daughter of the preacher to whose pastorate his father had succeeded.

It was natural for her to intend him for the ministry, and for him, sated with

piety, to rebel.

His early education, at home and in a grammar school at Meissen, was a

mixture of German discipline and classic literature, of Lutheran theology and

Latin comedy. "Theophrastus, Plautus, and Terence were my world, which

I studied with delight." 62 At seventeen he was sent to Leipzig on a scholar-

ship. He found the town more interesting than the university; he sowed some

wild oats, fell in love with the theater and an actress, was allowed behind the

scenes, learned the machinery of the stage. At nineteen he wrote a play, and

managed to get it produced. Hearing of this sin, the mother wept, the father

angrily summoned him home. He smiled them out of their grief, and talked

them into paying his debts. His sister, coming upon his poems, found them

wondrously improper, and burned them; he threw snow into her bosom to

cool her zeal. He was sent back to Leipzig to study philosophy and become

a professor; he found philosophy deadly, incurred incurable debts, and fled

to Berlin (1748).

There he lived as a literary journeyman, writing reviews, making transla-

tions, and joining with Christlob Mylius in editing a short-lived magazine of

the theater. By the age of nineteen he was an addict of free thought. He read

Spinoza and found him, despite geometry, irresistible. He composed a drama

(1749?), Der Freigeist (The Free Spirit); it contrasted Theophan, a kindly

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 509

young clergyman, with Adrast, a harsh and raucous freethinker and some-

thing of a rogue; here Christianity had much the better of the argument. But

about this time Lessing wrote to his father: "The Christian faith is not some-

thing which one should accept on trust from one's parents." 63 Now he com-

posed another play, Die Juden, discussing the intermarriage of Christian and

Jew: a rich and honorable Hebrew, named simply "The Traveler," saves the

lives of a Christian noble and his daughter; the nobleman, as reward, offers him

his daughter in marriage, but withdraws the offer when the Jew reveals his

race; the Jew agrees that the marriage would be unhappy. It was not until five

years later (1754) that Lessing, over a game of chess, made the acquaintance

of Moses Mendelssohn, who seemed to him to embody the virtues that he had

ascribed to "Der Reisende."

Early in 175 1 Voltaire, or his secretary, engaged Lessing to translate into

German some material which the expatriate philosopher wished to use in a

suit against Abraham Hirsch. The secretary allowed Lessing to borrow part

of a manuscript of Voltaire's Le Steele de Louis XIV. Later in that year Les-

sing went to Wittenberg, and took the manuscript with him. Fearing that

this uncorrected copy might be used for a pirated edition, Voltaire sent

Lessing a politely urgent request for the return of the sheets. Lessing com-

plied, but resented the urgent tone; and this may have colored his subsequent

hostility to Voltaire's works and character.

Lessing received the master's degree at the University of Wittenberg in

1752. Back in Berlin, he contributed to various periodicals articles of such

positive thought and pungent style that by 1753 he had won an audience

large enough to pardon his publishing, at the age of twenty-four, a six-

volume collected edition of his work. These included a new play, Miss Sara

Sampson, which was a milestone in the history of the German stage. Till this

time the German theater had presented native comedies, but rarely a native

tragedy. Lessing urged his fellow playwrights to turn from French to Eng-

lish models, and to write their own tragic dramas. He praised Diderot for

defending the comedy of sentiment and the middle-class tragedy, but it was

from England— from George Lillo's The London Merchant ( 17 3 1 ) and Sam-

uel Richardson's Clarissa (1748)— that he took his inspiration for Miss Sara

Sampson.

The play was performed at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in 1755, and was well

received. It had all the elements of drama: it began with a seduction, ended

with a suicide, and connected them with a river of tears. The villain Mellefont

(Honeyface) is Richardson's Lovelace; he is a hardened hand at defloration,

but deprecates monogamy; he promises marriage to Sara, elopes with her,

sleeps with her, then postpones marriage; a former mistress tries to win him

back, fails, poisons Sara; Sara's father arrives, ready to forgive everything and

accept Mellefont as his son, only to find his daughter dying; Mellefont, quite

out of character, kills himself, as if to exemplify Lessing's quip that in tragic

dramas the protagonists die of nothing but the fifth act. 64

He thought that now he could butter his bread by writing for the stage;

and as Berlin had no theater he moved to Leipzig (1755). Then the Seven

5IO ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

Years' War broke out, the theater was closed, the book trade languished,

Lessing was penniless. He moved back to Berlin, and contributed to Nikolai's

Brief e die neueste Literatur betrejfend articles that marked a new height in

German literary criticism. "Rules," said his Letter xix, "are what the masters

of the art choose to observe." In 1760 the Austro-Russian army invaded

Berlin; Lessing fled to Breslau as secretary to a Prussian general. During his

five years there he haunted taverns, gambled, studied Spinoza, the Christian

Fathers, and Winckelmann, and wrote Laokoon. In 1765 he returned to Ber-

lin, and in 1 766 he sent his most famous book to the press.

Laokoon, oder Vber die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoon, or On

the Boundaries between Painting and Poetry) derived its immediate stimulus

from Winckelmann's Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting

and Sculpture (1755). When Lessing had written half of his manuscript

Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (1764) reached him; he interrupted

his essay and wrote: "The History of Art by Herr Winckelmann has ap-

peared. I will not venture a step further without having read this work." 65

He took as his starting point Winckelmann's conception of classic Greek art

as characterized by serene dignity and grandeur, and he accepted Winckel-

mann's claim that the Laocoon statuary group in the Vatican Gallery pre-

served these qualities despite mortal pain. (Laocoon, priest of Apollo at

Troy, suspected that there were Greeks in the "Trojan horse," and hurled a

spear at it; the goddess Athena, favoring the Greeks, persuaded Poseidon to

send up from the sea two huge serpents that twined themselves murderously

around the priest and his two sons.) Winckelmann supposed that the Lao-

coon— now reckoned as a work of Rhodian sculptors in the last century be-

fore Christ— belonged to the classic age of Pheidias. Why Winckelmann,

who had seen and studied the work, ascribed calm grandeur to the distorted

features of the priest is a mystery; Lessing accepted the description because

he had never seen the statue. 66 He agreed that the sculptor had moderated the

expression of pain; he proceeded to inquire into the reason for this artistic

restraint; and he proposed to derive it from the inherent and proper limita-

tions of plastic art.

He quoted the dictum of the Greek poet Simonides that "painting is silent

poetry, and poetry is eloquent painting." 67 But, he added, the two must keep

within their natural bounds: painting and sculpture should describe objects

in space, and not try to tell a story; poetry should narrate events in time, and

not try to describe objects in space. Detailed description should be left to the

plastic arts; when it occurs in poetry, as in Thomson's The Seasons or Haller's

Die Alpen, it interrupts the narrative and obscures the events. "To oppose

this false taste, and to counteract these unfounded opinions, is the principal

object of the following observations." 68 Lessing soon forgot this purpose,

and lost himself in a detailed discussion of Winckelmann's History. Here he

was without experience or competence, and his exaltation of ideal beauty as

the object of art had a sterilizing effect upon German painting. He confused

painting with sculpture, applying to both of them the norms proper chiefly

to sculpture, and so encouraging the cold formality of Anton Raphael Mengs.

chap.xx) Frederick's Germany 511

But his influence on German poetry was a blessing; he freed it from long de-

scriptions, scholastic didacticism, and tedious detail, and guided it to action

and feeling. Goethe gratefully acknowledged the liberating effect of the

Laocoon.

Lessing found himself more at home when (April, 1767) he moved to

Hamburg as playwright and dramatic critic at eight hundred thalers per

year. There he produced his new play, Minna von Barnhelm. Its hero, Major

Tellheim, returning with honors from the war to his estates, wins betrothal

to the wealthy and lovely Minna. A turn of fortune and hostile intrigues

reduce him to poverty; he withdraws from his engagement as being no longer

a fit husband for the heiress to a great fortune. He disappears; she pursues

him and begs him to marry her; he refuses. Perceiving his reason, she con-

trives a hoax whereby she becomes attractively penniless; now the major

offers himself as a mate. Suddenly two messengers enter, one announcing that

Minna, the other that Tellheim, has been restored to affluence. Everybody

rejoices, and even the servants are precipitated into marriage. The dialogue

is sprightly, the characters are improbable, the plot is absurd— but nearly all

plots are absurd.

On the same day (April 22, 1767) that saw the opening of the National

Theater at Hamburg Lessing issued the prospectus of his Hamburgische

Dramaturgie. Periodically, in the next two years, these essays commented on

the plays produced in Germany, and on the theory of drama in the philoso-

phers. He agreed with Aristotle in judging drama to be the highest species

of poetry, and he accepted with reckless inconsistency the rules laid down in

the Poetics: "I do not hesitate to confess . . . that I deem it as infallible as

the Elements of Euclid" 69 (who has ceased to be infallible). Yet he implored

his countrymen to abandon their subserviency to Corneille, Racine, and Vol-

taire, and to study the art of drama as revealed in Shakespeare (who ignored

Aristotle's rules). He felt that the French drama was too formal to effect that

catharsis of the emotions which Aristotle had found in the Greek drama;

Shakespeare, he thought, had accomplished this purge better in Lear, Othello,

and Hamlet by the intensity of the action and the force and beauty of his

language. Forgetting Desdemona's handkerchief, Lessing stressed the need

of probability: the good dramatist will avoid dependence upon coincidences

and trivialities, and he will so build up each character that the events will

follow inevitably from the nature of the persons involved. The dramatists of

the Sturm-und-Drang period agreed to take Shakespeare as a model, and

gladly liberated the German drama from the French. The nationalist spirit,

rising with the victories of Frederick and the defeat of France, inspired and

seconded Lessing's appeal, and Shakespeare dominated the German stage for

almost a century.

The Hamburg experiment collapsed because the actors quarreled among

themselves and concurred only in resenting Lessing's critiques. Friedrich

Schroder complained: "Lessing was never able to devote his attention to an

entire performance; he would go away and come back, talk with acquaint-

ances, or give himself up to thought; and from traits which excited his pass-

512 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XX

ing pleasure he would form a picture that belonged rather to his own mind

than to the reality." 70 This perceptive judgment well described Lessing's

wayward life and mind.

Shall we stop him here in mid-career and look at him? He was of medium

height, proudly erect, strong and supple through regular exercise; with fine

features, dark-blue eyes, and light-brown hair that kept its color till his death.

He was warm in his friendships, hot in his enmities. He was never so happy

as in controversy, and then he dealt wounds with a sharp pen. "Let a critic,"

he wrote, ". . . first seek out someone with whom he can quarrel. Thus he

will gradually get into a subject, and the rest will follow as a matter of

course. I frankly admit that I have selected primarily the French authors for

this purpose, and among them particularly M. de Voltaire" 71 — which was

brave enough. He was a brilliant but reckless talker, quick in repartee. He had

ideas about everything, and they were too many and forceful to let him

give them order, consistency, or full effect. He enjoyed the pursuit of truth

more than the dangerous delusion of having found it. Hence his most re-

nowned remark:

Not the truth of which a man is— or believes himself to be— possessed, but

tjie sincere effort he has made to reach it, makes the worth of a man. For not

through the possession, but through the investigation, of truth does he develop

those energies in which alone consists his ever-growing perfection. Possession

makes the mind stagnant, indolent, proud. If God held enclosed in His right

hand all truth, and in His left hand simply the ever-moving impulse toward

truth, although with the condition that I should eternally err, and said to me,

"Choose!," I should humbly bow before His left hand, and say, "Father, give!

Pure truth is for Thee alone." 72

Two precious friendships remained from the Hamburg fiasco. One was

with Elise Reimarus, daughter of Hermann Reimarus, who was professor of

Oriental languages in the Hamburg Academy. She made her home a center

for the most cultivated society in the city; Lessing joined her circle, and

Mendelssohn and Jacobi came when they were in town; we shall see the vital

part that this association played in Lessing's history. Still more intimate was

his attachment with Eva Konig. Wife of a silk merchant, mother of four

children, she was, Lessing tells us, "bright and animated, gifted with womanly

tact and graciousness," and "still had some of the freshness and charm of

youth." 73 She too gathered about her a salon of cultured friends, of whom

Lessing was facile princeps. When her husband left for Venice in 1769 he

said to Lessing, "I commend my family to you." It was hardly a provident ar-

rangement, for the dramatist had no asset but genius, and owed a thousand

thalers. And in October of that year he accepted an invitation from Prince

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick to take charge of the ducal library at

Wolfenbuttel. This town had declined to some six thousand souls since the

removal (1753) of the reigning Duke's residence to Brunswick, seven miles

away, but Casanova reckoned the collection of books and manuscripts to be

"the third greatest library in the world." 74 Lessing was to receive six hundred

thalers a year, with two assistants and a servant, and free residence in the old

ducal palace. In May, 1770, he settled in his new home.

chap.xx) Frederick's Germany 513

He was not a successful librarian; still he pleased his employer by discover-

ing, amid the manuscripts, a famous but lost treatise by Berengar of Tours

(998-1088), questioning transubstantiation. In his now sedentary life he

missed the strife and stimulus of Hamburg and Berlin; poring over bad print

in poor light weakened his eyes and brought on headaches; his health began

to fail. He consoled himself by writing another drama, Emilia Galotti, which

expressed his resentment of aristocratic privileges and morals. Emilia is the

daughter of an ardent republican; their sovereign, the Prince of Guastalla,

desires her, has her fiance murdered, and abducts her to his palace; the father

finds her, and, at her insistence, stabs her to death; then he surrenders him-

self to the Prince's court and is condemned to die, while the Prince con-

tinues his career only momentarily disturbed. The passion and eloquence of

the play redeemed its finale; it became a favorite tragedy on the German

stage; Goethe dated from its premiere (1772) the resurrection of German

literature. Some critics hailed Lessing as a German Shakespeare.

In April, 1775, Lessing went to Italy as cicerone to Prince Leopold of

Brunswick. For eight months he enjoyed Milan, Venice, Bologna, Modena,

Parma, Piacenza, Pavia, Turin, Corsica, Rome; there he was presented to

Pope Pius VI, and may have seen, belatedly, the Laocoon. By February,

1776, he was again at Wolfenbiittel. He thought of resigning, but was per-

suaded to stay by an increase of two hundred thalers in his salary, and by

receiving a hundred louis d'or per year as adviser to the Mannheim theater.

Now, aged forty-seven, he proposed to the widowed Eva Konig that she

become his wife and bring her children with her. She came, and they were

married (October 8, 1776). For a year they experienced a quiet happiness.

On Christmas Eve, 1777, she gave birth to a child, who died the next day.

Sixteen days later the mother died, too. Lessing lost his savor for life.

Controversy sustained him. On March 1, 1768, Hermann Reimarus passed

away, leaving his wife a voluminous manuscript which he had never dared to

print. We have said a word elsewhere 75 about this "Schutzschrift fur die

vernunftigen Verehrer Gottes" (Apology for the Rational Worshipers of

God). Lessing had seen some of this remarkable work; he asked Frau Rei-

marus to let him publish parts of it; she agreed. As librarian he had authority

to publish any manuscript in the collection. He deposited the "Schutzschrift"

in the library, and then published a part of it in 1774 as The Toleration of

Deists, . . . by an Anonymous Writer. It made no stir. But the supernatural

experts were aroused by the second portion of Reimarus' manuscript, which

Lessing issued in 1 777 as Something More from the Papers of the Anonymous

Writer, concerning Revelation. It argued that no revelation addressed to a

single people could win universal acceptance in a world of so many diverse

races and faiths; only a minority of humanity had yet, after seventeen hun-

dred years, heard of the Judaeo-Christian Bible; consequently it could not

be accepted as God's revelation to mankind. A final fragment, The Aims of

Jesus and His Disciples (1778), presented Jesus not as the Son of God but

as a fervent mystic who shared the view of some Jews that the world as then

known would soon end, and be followed by the establishment of God's king-

5H ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

dom on earth; the Apostles (said Reimarus) so understood him, for they

hoped to be appointed to thrones in this coming kingdom. When the dream

collapsed with Jesus' despairing cry on the Cross— "My God, my God, why

hast Thou forsaken me?"— the Apostles (Reimarus supposed) invented the

fable of his resurrection to conceal his defeat, and pictured him as the re-

warding and avenging judge of the world.

The shocked theologians attacked these "Wolfenbiittel Fragments" in over

thirty articles in the German press. Johann Melchior Goeze, chief Ham-

burg pastor, charged Lessing with secretly agreeing with the "Anonymous

Writer"; this hypocrite, he urged, should be punished by both Church and

state. Milder opponents reproved Lessing for publishing in intelligible Ger-

man doubts that should have been expressed, if at all, in Latin to an esoteric

few. Lessing replied in eleven pamphlets (1778) that rivaled Pascal's Lettres

provinciates in gay sarcasm and deadly wit. "No head was safe from him,"

said Heine; "many a skull he struck off from pure wantonness, and then he

was mischievous enough to hold it up to the public to show that it was

empty." 76 Lessing reminded his assailants that freedom of judgment and dis-

cussion was a vital element in the program of the Reformation; moreover,

the people had a right to all available knowledge; otherwise one Roman pope

would be preferable to a hundred Protestant prophets. After all (he argued),

the worth of Christianity will remain even if the Bible be a human document

and its miracles mere pious fables or natural events. — The ducal government

confiscated the Wolfenbiittel Fragments and the Reimarus manuscript, and

ordered Lessing to publish nothing further without the approval of the

Brunswick censor.

Silenced in his pulpit, Lessing turned to the stage, and wrote his finest play.

Made insolvent again by the expenses involved in the sickness and death of

his wife, he borrowed three hundred thalers from a Hamburg Jew to provide

the leisure to finish Nathan der Weise. He placed the action in Jerusalem

during the Fourth Crusade. Nathan is a pious Jewish merchant whose wife

and seven sons are slaughtered by Christians demoralized through years of

war. Three days later a friar brings him a Christian infant whose mother has

just died, and whose father, recently slain in battle, has on several occasions

saved Nathan from death. Nathan names the child Recha, brings her up as

his daughter, and teaches her only those religious doctrines on which Jews,

Christians, and Moslems are agreed.

Eighteen years later, while Nathan is away on business, his house burns

down; Recha is rescued by a young Knight Templar who disappears without

identifying himself; Recha thinks him a miraculous angel. Nathan, returning,

searches for the rescuer to reward him, is insulted by him as a Jew, but per-

suades him to come and receive Recha's gratitude. He comes, falls in love

with her and she with him; but when he learns that she was of Christian birth

and is not being reared as a Christian, he wonders is he not bound by his

knightly oath to report the matter to the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem.

He describes his problem to the Patriarch without naming individuals; the

Patriarch guesses they are Nathan and Recha, and vows to have Nathan put

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 515

to death. He sends a friar to spy on the Jew. But this is the same friar who

brought Recha to Nathan eighteen years before; he has observed, through

these years, the kindly wisdom of the merchant; he tells him of his danger,

and deplores the religious animosity that has made men so murderous.

Saladin, now governor of Jerusalem, is in financial straits. He sends for

Nathan, hoping to arrange a loan. Nathan comes, senses Saladin's need, and

offers the loan before being asked. The Sultan, knowing Nathan's reputation

for wisdom, inquires which of the three religions he considers best. Nathan

answers with a judicious variation of the story that Boccaccio had ascribed

to the Alexandrian Jew Melchizedek: A precious ring is passed down from

generation to generation to designate the legitimate heir of a rich estate. But

in one of these generations the father loves his three sons with such equal

fervor that he has three similar rings made, and privately gives one to each

son. After his death the sons dispute as to which ring is the original and only

true one; they bring the matter to court— where it is still undecided. The

loving father was God; the three rings are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam;

history has not yet decided which creed is the true law of God. Nathan gives

a new turn to the tale: the original ring was supposed to make its wearer

virtuous; but as none of the three sons is more virtuous than other men, it is

likely that the original ring was lost; each ring— each faith— is true only inso-

far as it makes its wearer virtuous. Saladin so admires Nathan's answer that

he rises and embraces him. — Shortly after this philosophical parley an Arabic

manuscript turns up which shows that the Templar and Recha are children

of the same father. They mourn that they cannot marry, but rejoice that they

may now love each other as brother and sister, blessed by Nathan the Jew

and Saladin the Mohammedan.

Was Nathan modeled on Moses Mendelssohn? There are resemblances

between the two, as we shall see in a later chapter; and, despite many differ-

ences, it is probable that Lessing found in his friend much to inspire his

idealization of the merchant of Jerusalem. Perhaps Lessing, in his eagerness

to preach toleration, painted the Jew and the Moslem with more sympathy

than the Christian; the Templar is, in his first meeting with Nathan, fanati-

cally harsh, and the Patriarch (Lessing's memory of Goeze?) hardly does

justice to the kindly and enlightened bishops who were then governing Trier,

Mainz, and Cologne. The Christian public of Germany repudiated the play

as unfair when it was published in 1779; several of Lessing's friends joined in

the criticism. Nathan the Wise did not reach the stage till 1783, and on the

third night the house was empty. In 1801 a version prepared by Schiller and

Goethe was well received at Weimar, and thereafter the play remained for

a century a favorite in German theaters.

A year before his death Lessing issued his final appeal for understanding.

He couched it in religious terms, as if to mollify resistance and provide a

bridge from old ideas to new. In some aspects the essay The Education of

the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlects, 1780) justifies the

old ideas; then we perceive that the apology is a plea for the Enlightenment.

All history may be viewed as a divine revelation, as a gradual education of

516 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XX

mankind. Every great religion was a stage in that step-by-step illumination;

it was not, as some Frenchmen had supposed, a trick imposed upon credulous

people by self-seeking priests; it was a world theory intended to civilize

humanity, to inculcate virtue, decency, and social unity. In one stage (the

Old Testament) religion sought to make men virtuous by promising them

worldly goods in a long life; in another stage (the New Testament) it sought

to overcome the discouraging discrepancy between virtue and earthly suc-

cess by promising rewards after death; in both cases the appeal was adjusted

to the limited understanding of the people at the time. Each religion con-

tained a precious kernel of truth, which may have owed its acceptance to the

coating of error that sweetened it. If, around the basic beliefs, theologians

developed dogmas hard to understand, like original sin and the Trinity, these

doctrines too were symbols of truth and instruments of education: God may

be conceived as one power with many aspects and meanings; and sin is

original in the sense that we are all born with a tendency to resist moral and

social laws. 77 But supernatural Christianity is only a step in the evolution of

the human mind; a higher stage comes when the race learns to reason, and

when men grow strong and clear enough to do the right because it is seen

to be right and reasonable, rather than for material or heavenly rewards.

That stage has been reached by some individuals; it has not yet come to the

race, but "it will come! It will assuredly come, . . . the time of a new, eter-

nal Gospel!" 78 Just as the average individual recapitulates in his growth the

intellectual and moral development of the race, so the race slowly passes

through the intellectual and moral development of the superior individual.

To put it Pythagoreanly, each of us is reborn and reborn until his education

—his adjustment to reason— is complete.

What were Lessing's final views on religion? He accepted it as an immense

aid to morality, but he resented it as a system of dogmas demanding accept-

ance on pain of sin, punishment, and social obloquy. He thought of God as

the inner spirit of reality, causing development and itself developing; he

thought of Christ as the most ideal of men, but only metaphorically an in-

carnation of this God; and he hoped for a time when all theology would have

disappeared from Christianity, and only the sublime ethic of patient kindness

and universal brotherhood would remain. In the draft of a letter to Mendels-

sohn he declared his adherence to Spinoza's view that body and mind are the

outside and inside of one reality, two attributes of one substance identical

with God. "The orthodox conceptions of deity," he told Jacobi, "no longer

exist for me; I cannot endure them. Hen kai pan— One and All! I know of

nothing else." 79 In 1780 Jacobi, visiting him at Wolfenbiittel, asked him for

help in refuting Spinoza, and was shocked by Lessing's reply: "There is no

other philosophy but Spinoza's. ... If I were to call myself after someone,

I know of no other name." 80

Lessing's heresies, and his occasional truculence in controversy, left him

lonely in his final years. He had a few friends in Brunswick, with whom, now

and then, he came to chat and play chess. His wife's children lived with him

in Wolfenbiittel; he devoted entirely to them the little legacy she had left.

But his adversaries denounced him throughout Germany as a monstrous

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 517

atheist. He defied them, and dared to oppose the man who paid his salary:

when Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, now (1780) duke of Brunswick, threw into

prison a young Jew who had incurred his displeasure, Lessing visited the

youth in jail, and later took him into his house to win back health.

His own health was gone. His eyesight was now so dim that he could

hardly read. He suffered from asthma, weakening of the lungs, hardening of

the arteries. On February 3, 1 781, on a visit to Brunswick, he experienced a

severe asthmatic attack, and vomited blood. He instructed his friends:

"When you see me about to die, call a notary; I will declare before him that

I die in none of the prevailing religions." 81 On February 1 5, as he lay in bed,

some friends gathered in the next room. Suddenly the door of his room

opened; Lessing appeared, bent and weak, and raised his cap in greeting; then

he sank to the floor in an apoplectic stroke. A theological journal announced

that at his death Satan bore him away to hell as another Faust who had sold

his soul. 82 He left so little money that the Duke had to pay for his funeral.

He was the herald of Germany's greatest literary age. In the year of his

passing Kant published the epochal Critique of Pure Reason, and Schiller

published his first play. Goethe looked up to Lessing as the great liberator,

the father of the German Enlightenment. "In life," said Goethe to Lessing's

shade, "we honored you as one of the gods; now that you are dead your spirit

reigns over all souls."

VI. THE ROMANTIC REACTION

Goethe spoke for a small minority; the great majority of the German peo-

ple clung to their Christian heritage, and they hailed as divinely inspired the

poet who sang their faith. Six years after Handel stirred at least Ireland with

the heavenly strains of Messiah, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock won the heart

of Germany with the first fervent cantos of Der Messias ( 1 748-7 3 ) .

Born in 1724, Klopstock antedated Lessing by five years, survived him

by twenty-two. Lessing, the son of a clergyman, became a freethinker; Klop-

stock, the son of a lawyer, took as a main mission of his life the composition

of an epic poem on the life of Christ. He was so aflame with his theme that

he published the first three cantos when still a lad of twenty-four. These

unrhymed hexameters won so grateful an audience that when, a year later,

he proposed to his cousin, letters came to her from various parts of Germany

urging her to accept him; she refused. But Frederick V of Denmark, on the

recommendation of his minister Johann von Bernstorff, invited Klopstock to

come and live at the Danish court and finish his epic at four hundred thalers

a year. On his way to Copenhagen the poet took kindly to a Hamburg ad-

mirer, Margareta Moller; in 1754 he married her; in 1758 she died, breaking

his heart and darkening his verse. He commemorated her in the fifteenth

canto of The Messiah, and in some of the most moving of his odes. He stayed

in Copenhagen twenty years, fell from favor when Bernstorff was dismissed,

returned to Hamburg, and in 1773 published the final cantos of his massive

poem.

5*8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

It began with an invocation echoing Milton; then through twenty cantos it

told the sacred story from the meditations of Christ on the Mount of Olives

to his ascension into heaven. After taking almost as long to write his epic as

Jesus had taken to live it, Klopstock concluded with a grateful Te Deum:

Lo, I have reached my goal! The stirring thought

Thrills through my spirit. Thine all-powerful arm,

My Lord, my God, alone hath guided me

By more than one dark grave, ere I might reach

That distant goal! Thou, Lord, hast healed me still,

Hast shed fresh courage o'er my sinking heart,

Which held with death its near companionship;

And if I gazed on terrors, their dark shapes

Soon disappeared, for thou protectedst me!

Swiftly they vanished. — Savior, I have sung

Thy Covenant of Mercy. I have trod

My fearful path! My hope hath been in Thee! 83

The Messiah was welcomed by orthodox Germany as the best poetry yet

written in the German language. Goethe tells of a Frankfurt councilor who

read the first ten cantos "every year in Passion Week, and thus refreshed

himself for the entire year." As for himself, Goethe could enjoy the epic

only by "discarding certain requirements which an advancing cultivation

does not willingly abandon." 84 Klopstock poured his piety so profusely into

his verse that his poem became a succession of lyrics and Bachian chorales

rather than the fluent narrative that an epic should be; and we find it difficult

to follow a lyric flight through twenty cantos and twenty-five years.

As Voltaire generated his opposite in Rousseau, so Lessing, by his skepti-

cism, rationalism, and intellectualism, made Germany feel the need of writers

who would, in contrast, recognize the place and rights of feeling, sentiment,

imagination, mystery, romance, and the supernatural in human life. In some

Germans of this period, especially women, the cult of Emp finds amkeit (sen-

sibility) became a religion as well as a fashion. Darmstadt had a "Circle of

Sensitives" whose members made a principle and ritual of sentiment and emo-

tional expression. Rousseau was the Messiah of these spirits. His influence in

Germany was far greater than Voltaire's; Herder and Schiller acknowledged

him as a fountainhead; Kant's Critique of Practical Reason was suffused with

Rousseau; Goethe began with Rousseau ("Gefiihl ist Alles"), went on to

Voltaire ("Gedenke zu leben!"), and ended by knocking their heads to-

gether. From England, meanwhile, came the poets of feeling, James Thom-

son, William Collins, Edward Young, and the novelists of feeling, Rich-

ardson and Sterne. The Reliques of Percy and the "Ossianic" poems of

Macpherson aroused interest in medieval poetry, mystery, and romance;

Klopstock and Heinrich von Gerstenberg brought to life the pre-Christian

mythology of Scandinavia and Germany.

Johann Georg Hamann, before 1781, was the Kapellmeister of the revolt

against reason. Born, like Kant, in cloudy Konigsberg, strongly imbued by

his father with religious feeling, educated in the university, he labored in

poverty as a tutor, and found solace in a Protestant faith resilient to all the

blows of the Enlightenment. Reason, he contended, is only a part of man,

chap.xx) Frederick's Germany 519

lately developed and not fundamental; instinct, intuition, feeling, are deeper;

and a true philosophy will base itself upon the whole nature and gamut of

man. Language originated not as a product of reason but as a gift of God for

the expression of feeling. Poetry is deeper than prose. Great literature is

written not by knowledge and observance of rules and reasons, but by that

indefinable quality called genius, which, guided by feeling, overleaps all

rules.

Friedrich Jacobi agreed with Hamann and Rousseau. Spinoza's philosophy,

he said, is perfectly logical if you accept logic, but it is false because logic

never reaches the heart of reality, which is revealed only to feeling and faith.

God's existence cannot be proved by reason, but feeling knows that without

belief in God the life of man is a tragic and hopeless futility.

With this exaltation of feeling and poetry, the Teutonic soul was primed

for such flights of imaginative literature as made the second half of the eight-

eenth century in Germany recall the fervor and fertility of Elizabethan

England. Magazines of poetry multiplied, suffering their usual brief tenure

of fife. Johann Heinrich Voss, besides translating Homer, Virgil, and Shake-

speare, wrote a tender novel in verse, Luise (1783-95), which won the heart

of Germany and stirred Goethe to rivalry. Salomon Gessner gained an inter-

national audience with his delicate lyrics and prose pastorals. Matthias Clau-

dius touched a hundred thousand mothers with idyllic songs of domesticity,

like his "Wiegenlied bei Mondenschein zu singen" (Lullaby to Sing by the

Light of the Moon) :

So schlafe nun, du Kleinef Sleep now, my little girl!

Was weinest du? Why do you cry?

Sanft ist im Mondenscheine Soft in the moonlight,

Und suss die Ruh. And sweet, is rest.

Auch kommt der Schlaf geschwinder, Then sooner comes sleep,

Und sonder Miih. And without pain.

Der Mond freut sich der Kinder, The moon rejoices in children,

Und liebet sie. And loves you. 85

Gottfried Burger had all the qualities of a romantic genius. Son of a pastor,

he was sent to Halle and Gottingen to study law, but his dissolute life led to

his withdrawal from college. In 1773 he won universal absolution of his sins

by his ballad "Lenore." Lenore's lover goes off with Frederick's army to the

siege of Prague. Each morning she starts up from her dreams and asks, "Wil-

helm, are you faithless, or dead? How long will you tarry?" The war ends;

the troops return; wives and mothers and children greet them with joy and

thanks to God.

Sie frug den Zug wohl auf und ab She questioned all in that parade,

Und frug nach alien Women, And begged of each his name,

Doch keiner war der Kundschaft gab But there was none who gave her word,

Von alien, so da kamen. None of all who came.

Als nun das Heer voruber war, And when the soldiers all were gone

Zerraufte sie ihr Rabenhaar, She tore her raven hair,

Und warf sich bin zur Erde And threw herself upon the ground

M it wiitiger Gebarde. In throes of wild despair.

520 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XX

Her mother tells her that "what God does is well done"; Lenore answers that

this is a delusion, and she begs for death. The mother talks to her of heaven

and hell; Lenore replies that heaven is to be with Wilhelm, hell is to be with-

out him. All day long she raves. At night a rider draws up at her door, gives

no name, bids her come with him and be his bride. She rides behind him on

his black horse, rides all through the night. They come to a cemetery; ghosts

dance around them. Suddenly the horseman turns into a corpse; Lenore finds

herself clinging to a skeleton. While she hovers between life and death spirits

wail these words:

Geduld 9 Geduld! Wenn's Herz auch Patience, patience! Even when the heart

bricht! breaks!

Mit Gott im Himmel hadre nicht. With God in heaven quarrel not.

Des Leibes bist du ledig; Of your body you are shorn;

Gott sei der Seele gnadig/ God have mercy on your soul!

86

VII. STURM UND DRANG

From the piety of Klopstock and the tenderness of Gessner the Romantic

movement surged on to the irreverent individualism, the "storming and striv-

ing" of German youth in the ecstasy of moral and social revolt. The stiff

aristocracy of the courts, the fading dogmas of the preachers, the dreary

money-grubbing of the business class, the dulling routine of bureaucrats, the

pompous pedantry of pundits— all aroused the resentment of young Germans

conscious of ability and deprived of place. They listened to Rousseau's cry

for naturalness and freedom, but took no stock in his apotheosis of the "gen-

eral will." They agreed with him in rejecting materialism, rationalism, and

determinism, and with Lessing in preferring the lusty irregularity of Shake-

speare to the cramping classicism of Corneille and Racine. They relished

Voltaire's wit, but thought they found a desert where he had passed. They

were thrilled by the rebellion of the American colonies against England.

"We wished the Americans all success," Goethe recalled; "the names of

Franklin and Washington began to shine and sparkle in the firmament of pol-

itics and war." 87 These Stiirmer und Dranger felt the intoxication of physical

adolescence and mental awakening, and bemoaned the incubus of the old upon

the young, of the state upon the soul. They were all for originality, for direct

experience and unhindered expression, and some of them believed that their

genius exempted them from the law. They felt that time was on their side,

that the near future would see their victory. "Oh," exclaimed Goethe, "that

was a good time when Merck and I were young! " 88

Some rebels expressed their philosophy by defying the conventions of

dress and replacing them with conventions of their own; so Christoph Kauf-

mann went about with head uncovered, hair uncombed, and shirt open to

the navel. 89 But this was exceptional; most of the protagonists, barring a sui-

cide or two, avoided such inverted sartorial display; and some of them were

well-to-do. Goethe himself was one of the progenitors of Sturm und Drang

chap.xx) Frederick's Germany 521

with his play Gotz von Berlichingen (1773); and in the following year his

Werther became the triumphant standard of Romanticism; Schiller joined the

movement with Die R'duber (1781); but these complex and evolving spirits

soon left the campaign to more impassioned and weakly-rooted youths.

Johann Merck was one of the founding fathers. To all appearances he was

sane and strong; he had gone through university, was persona grata at the

court of Hesse-Darmstadt, became paymaster general of the army, and had a

reputation for both sharp intelligence and practical ability. Goethe, meeting

him in 177 1, was favorably impressed, and shared with him and Herder in

maintaining a critical review, the Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen; hence the

rebels were at first called "Frankfurters." 90 Familiar with business and poli-

tics, traveling through Germany and into Russia, Merck saw and satirized

the vanities of wealth, the tedium of courts, and the exploitation of the peas-

antry. Finding himself powerless to reform these conditions, he became bitter

and cynical. Goethe called him "Mephistopheles Merck," and took himself

and Merck as part models for the protagonists in Faust. Reverses in business

and misery in marriage unsettled Merck's mind. He sank into debt, from

which the Duke of Saxe- Weimar, at Goethe's request, rescued him. He fell

a prey to persistent melancholy, and killed himself at the age of fifty ( 1791).

Even more tragic was the career of Reinhold Lenz. Son of a Lutheran

pastor in Livonia, his weak nerves and excitable temperament were affected

in childhood by stress on the doctrines of sin and hell. 91 He was helped for a

time by hearing Kant's lectures in Konigsberg; Kant introduced him to

Rousseau's writings, and soon Lenz spoke of La Nouvelle Helo'ise as the best

book ever printed in France. At Strasbourg he met Goethe, was fascinated

by his positive character, imitated him in thought and style, wrote lyrics so

much like Goethe's that they were included in some editions of Goethe's

works. He went on to Sesenheim, fell in love (after Goethe) with Friederike

Brion, and composed fervent poems in her praise. He assured her that unless

she returned his love he would kill himself; she did not and he did not. He

moved to Weimar, was befriended by Goethe, envied Goethe's success,

mocked Goethe's relation with Charlotte von Stein, and was invited by the

Duke to leave the duchy. He had considerable talent as poet and dramatist.

One of his plays, Die Soldaten, sharply satirized class distinctions and bour-

geois life; its central character is a middle-class girl who, aspiring in vain to

marry an officer, becomes a prostitute and solicits her unrecognized father

in the streets. Himself too unstable to find a firm footing in life, Lenz wan-

dered from post to post and failure to failure, suffered spells of madness,

repeatedly tried suicide, and died insane (1792).

Maximilian von Klinger was the cleverest of the Stiirmer. He denounced

the world and rose to high place in it; he indulged in violent speech in his

plays, and became curator of the University of Dorpat; he enjoyed all the

oats and follies of youth and lived to be seventy-nine. It was of him that

Goethe wrote the perceptive line, "In girls we love what they are, but in

young men what they promise to be." Klinger's most famous play, Sturm

und Drang (1776), written at the age of twenty-four, gave its name and

522 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XX

mood to the movement. It showed European rebels expatriating themselves

to America in the hope of finding free outlets for their individualities; its

language was that of passion run wild; its gospel was that of genius liberated

from all rules. Klinger served in the Austrian and Russian armies, married a

natural daughter of Catherine the Great, subsided into a professorship, and

congealed into a pillar of the state.

Wilhelm Heinse capped Sturm und Drang with a novel, Ardinghello

(1787), which united anarchism, nihilism, communism, fascism, amoralism,

and will to power in a revel of sensuality and crime. Crime is not crime, says

the hero, if it is brave; the only real crime is weakness; the truest virtues are

strength and courage of body and will. Life is the manifestation of elemental

instincts, and we miss the mark if we brand these as immoral. So Ardinghello

seduces and murders at opportunity or whim, and sees in his unshackled pas-

sions nature's highest law. He describes the exploits of Hannibal, honors him

as a superman, and asks: "What are millions of men— who all their lives have

not had a single hour like his— compared with this one man?" 92 He founds a

communistic society with communism of women, woman suffrage, and the

worship of the elements as the only religion.

In the confused whirlwind of Sturm und Drang some dominating ideas

gave the movement character and influence. Most of its leaders came from

the middle class, and began their revolt as a protest against the privileges of

birth, the insolence of office, and the luxury of prelates feasting on peasants'

tithes. They all agreed in commiserating the lot, and idealizing the character,

of the peasant, serf or free. They challenged women to discard their fashions

and farthingales, their sentiment and swooning and submissive piety, and

summoned them to come and share the exciting life of the emancipated mind

and the roaming male. They redefined religion as a divine afflatus in a soul

whose genius is part of the creative urge and mystery of the world. They

identified nature with God, and concluded that to be natural was to be divine.

They took the medieval legend of Faust as a symbol for the intellectual hun-

ger and burning ambition that breaks through all barriers of tradition, con-

vention, morals, or laws. So "Maler Miiller," long before Goethe, wrote a

drama, Fausts Leben, "because I early recognized him as a great fellow . . .

who feels all his power, feels the bridle that fate has put upon him, and tries

to throw it off, who has the courage to hurl everything down that steps in

his way." 98

The enthusiasm and exaggerations of Sturm und Drang marked it as an

expression of intellectual adolescence, the voice of a minority condemned to

grow up and simmer down. The movement won no popular support, for

tradition and the people have always supported each other. Finding them-

selves without a base in the structure of German life, the Stormers made their

peace with the princes, and, like the philosophes, trusted that enlightened

rulers would lead the way to intellectual liberation and social reform. Her-

der, Goethe, and Schiller touched the movement in their youth, withdrew

from the consuming fire, clipped their claws and folded their wings, and

gratefully accepted the protection of Weimar's genial dukes.

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 523

VIII. THE ARTISTS

The Germans of this age were quite equal to the French and Italians in

art. They took baroque from Italy and rococo from France, but they gave

Winckelmann and Mengs to Italy, and their expatriates David Roentgen,

"Jean" Riesener, and Adam Weisweiler were preferred to French cabinet-

makers by French kings and queens; so Louis XVI paid eighty thousand

livres for a secretaire by Roentgen. 94 The Residenz at Munich, Frederick's

Neues Palais at Potsdam, and the homes of well-to-do Germans were

crowded with massive furniture elaborately carved, until, at the end of this

age, a lighter style came in from England's Chippendale and Sheraton. — The

Meissen factories had been injured in the war, but Nymphenburg, Ludwigs-

burg, Potsdam, and other centers carried on the arts of porcelain and faience.

German shelves, mantels, tables, and desks smiled with jolly, graceful danc-

ing, singing, kissing figurines.

On a larger scale there was admirable statuary.. Martin Klauer made a bust

of Goethe in the early Weimar days— eager, bright-eyed, confident. 95 Mar-

tin's son Ludwig did not do so well with Schiller; 96 better is the Schiller now

in a square at Stuttgart, by Johann von Dannecker. Supreme in German

sculpture in this age was Johann Gottfried Schadow, who became court

sculptor at Berlin in 1788. In 1791 he made a head of Frederick; in 1793 he

carved him in full length; in 181 6 he cast in bronze a smaller Frederick 97 — an

unforgettable masterpiece. He cast the bronze Quadriga of Victory for the

Brandenburg Gate, and achieved an almost classical loveliness in the marble

group of Crown Princess Luise and her sister Friederike.

Germany had so many painters that she could afford to surrender a dozen

of them to Italy and still have good ones left. Tischbeins were so numerous

in the brotherhood of the brush that we can confuse them with ease. Johann

Heinrich Tischbein, painter to the court of Hesse-Cassel, made a fine portrait

of Lessing. His nephew Johann Friedrich Tischbein painted in Cassel, Rome,

Naples, Paris, Vienna, The Hague, Dessau, Leipzig, and St. Petersburg, and

made a charming group of the children of Duke Karl August of Saxe-

Weimar. Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein lived in Italy 1787-99, painted

a famous picture, Goethe in the Roman Campagna, and returned to be court

painter to the Duke of Oldenburg.

One source of the German Drang nach Italien was Adam Friedrich Oeser,

sculptor, painter, etcher, teacher, champion of art reform on classic lines;

Winckelmann lived with him for a time in Dresden, criticized his drawing,

admired his character, and said, "He knows as much as one can know outside

of Italy." 98 In 1764 Oeser was made director of the art academy at Leipzig;

Goethe visited him there, and caught the Italian fever.

Of those artists who remained in Germany Daniel Chodowiecki led the

list, and he was a Pole. Born in Danzig, left an orphan, he learned to support

himself by drawings, engravings, and paintings. In 1743 he moved to Berlin,

524 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

and became German in all but name. He told the life of Christ in superb

miniatures which gave him a national reputation; then, in a more Voltairean

mood, he painted Jean Galas and His Family. His drawings were in such de-

mand that for years hardly any major work of literature was published in

Prussia without illustrations from his hand. In the finest of his etchings he

sketched his own household: himself at work, his wife proudly surveying

her five children, the walls covered with art. With a red crayon he drew the

figure of Lotte Kestner, whom Goethe loved and lost. In his work there is

a grace of line and a tenderness of feeling that distinguish him from Hogarth,

to whom he was often compared because of his many pictures of common

life; but he rightly deprecated such a correlation. Often he was inspired by

Watteau; A Gathering in the Zoological Garden^ has Watteau's flair for the

open air and the entrancing swirl of feminine robes.

Anton Graff left a portrait of Chodowiecki 100 — all smiles and curls and

avoirdupois— and a portrait of himself 101 looking up from his work but

dressed as for a ball. He put more spirit into his lovely portrait of his wife, 102

caught the pride of the actress Korpna Schroter, 103 and glorified with golden

raiment the overflowing form of Frau Hofrat Bohme. 104

Last of the line in this half century was Asmus Jakob Carstens; who ab-

sorbed Winckelmann's gospel in letter and spirit, and completed the classic

revival in German painting. Born in Schleswig, schooled in Copenhagen and

Italy, he worked chiefly in Liibeck and Berlin; but he went back to Italy in

1792, and feasted on the remains of ancient sculpture and architecture. He

did not know that time had washed away the color from Greek art, leaving

only line; so, like Mengs, he reduced his brush to a pencil, and aimed only

at perfect form. He was disturbed by the physical imperfections of the

models who posed in the studios; he decided to trust to his imagination; and

he delighted in picturing Greek gods, and scenes from Greek mythology, as

he and Winckelmann conceived them. From these he passed to illustrating

Dante and Shakespeare. Always his passion for line and form missed color

and life; and even when he achieved an almost Michelangelesque vision of

godlike figures, as in The Birth of Light, 105 we can only praise him for re-

membering the Sistine Chapel's paintings as accurately as Mozart remem-

bered its music. Rome returned his affection, and gave his work (1795) one

of the most extensive and celebrated exhibitions that any modern artist had

ever received. There, three years later, he died, still only forty-four years

old. Art, like sex, can be a consuming fire.

The neoclassic mood dominated the architectural embellishment of Pots-

dam and Berlin under Frederick the Great. He had begun the Neues Palais

in 1755; he did not let the war deter him from the project. Three architects

— Biiring, Gontard, and Manger— shared in designing it; they mingled classic

with baroque in an imposing edifice that recalled the palaces of ancient Rome;

and in the interior decoration they rivaled the finest specimens of French

rococo. The Franzosische Kirche, or French Church, in Berlin had a classic

portico; Gontard and his pupil Georg Unger added a classic tower (1780-

85). Unger augmented the majesty of Berlin with a Konigliche Bibliothek,

chap.xx) Frederick's Germany 525

or Royal Library, in 1774-80. The Brandenburger Tor, or Brandenburg

Gate, raised by Karl Langhans in 1788-91, was frankly modeled on the

Propylaea of the Acropolis; it barely survived the Second World War, but

lost the famous Quadriga, the four-horse chariot with which Schadow had

crowned it.

Other German cities were minting monuments to house princes, nobles,

and cadavers. Frederick's sister Wilhelmine beautified Bayreuth with a palace

of charming rococo (1744-73). At Cassel Simon-Louis du Ry designed

(1769 f.) the sumptuous dance hall and Blue Room in the Schloss of the

Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. On the Rhine near Diisseldorf Nikolaus von

Pigage built the lordly Schloss Benrath (1755-69); and near Ludwigsburg

Philippe de La Guepiere raised the pretty Palace of Monrepos (1762-64).

IX. AFTER BACH

Germany was blessed and excited with music beyond any other nation but

Italy. A family without musical instruments was an abnormality. Schools

taught music almost on a par with religion and reading. Church music was in

decline because science and philosophy, cities and industry, were secularizing

minds; the great Lutheran hymns still resounded, but song was passing from

church choirs to lieder, Singspiele, and opera. Johann Peter Schulz opened a

new era in song with his Lieder im Volkston (1782); henceforth Germany

enjoyed an unquestioned leadership in this application of music to lyric

poetry.

The mechanical improvement of the piano stimulated the spread of con-

certs and the rise of instrumental virtuosi. Performers like Johann Schobert,

Abt Vogler, and Johann Hummel conquered a dozen cities. On March 10,

1789, Hummel, then eleven years old, gave a piano recital at Dresden; he did

not know that Mozart was to be in the audience; during the concert he saw

and recognized his former teacher; as soon as his piece was finished he made

his way through the applauding assemblage and embraced Mozart with

warm expressions of homage and joy. 106 Abt (i.e., Abbot) Vogler won his

title by being ordained as a priest (1773); at Mannheim he was both court

chaplain and music director. As a writer on music he was one of the most

original and influential of the century; as a virtuoso on the organ he won the

jealousy of Mozart; as a teacher he formed Weber and Meyerbeer; as a papal

legate he made Mannheim laugh by wearing blue stockings, carrying his

breviary with his music, and sometimes keeping his audience waiting while

he finished his prayers.

Mannheim's orchestra was now a group of seventy-six select musicians,

ably led by Christian Cannabich as teacher, conductor, and solo violinist.

Famous was Lord Fordyce's remark that Germany stood at the head of the

nations for two reasons: the Prussian army and the Mannheim orchestra.

Only less renowned was the Gewandhaus orchestra in Leipzig. Concerts

were gigantic— three or four, sometimes six, concertos on one program; and

526 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XX

they were everywhere— in theaters, churches, universities, palaces, taverns,

and parks. The symphony now competed with the concerto in the orchestral

repertoire; by 1770— even before Haydn— it was accepted as the highest form

of instrumental music. 107

Half the famous composers of this period came from the strong heart and

loins of Johann Sebastian Bach. By his first wife he had seven children, of

whom two, Wilhelm Friedemann and Karl Philipp Emanuel, achieved inter-

national celebrity. By his second wife he had thirteen children, of whom two,

Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, became prominent in

music. Johann Christoph Friedrich begot a minor composer, Wilhelm Fried-

rich Ernst Bach, so that Johann Sebastian gave the world five men who se-

cured a place in music history. A distant relative, Johann Ernst Bach, studied

with the master at Leipzig, became Kapellmeister at Weimar, and left several

compositions to oblivion.

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was born at Weimar. The first part of his

father's Wohltemperirte Klavier was written for his instruction. He pro-

gressed rapidly, and was already a composer at sixteen. At twenty-three he

was appointed organist at the Sophienkirche in Dresden; and as his duties

there were light, he wrote several sonatas, concertos, and symphonies. He

rose in stipend and fame by being chosen (1746) organist at the Liebfrauen-

kirche in Halle. There he remained eighteen years; so he came to be called

the "Halle Bach." He loved drink only next to music; he resigned in 1764, and

for twenty years he drifted from town to town, living literally from hand

to mouth by giving recitals and taking pupils. In 1774 he settled in Berlin,

where he died in poverty in 1784.

Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach was lefthanded, and so had to confine his musi-

cal performance to the organ and the piano. In 1734, aged twenty, he entered

the University of Frankfurt; there he enjoyed the friendship of Georg

Philipp Telemann, who had been one of his godfathers and had given him

part of his name. In 1737 he played some of his compositions before an audi-

ence that included Frederick William I of Prussia. Knowing that Crown

Prince Frederick loved music, he went to Rheinsberg and presented himself,

with no immediate result; but in 1740 Frederick, now king, appointed him

cembalist in the chapel orchestra at Potsdam. He found it irritating to accom-

pany Frederick's temperamental flute and to accept his royal authority in

music. After sixteen years of service in the orchestra he retired to specialize

in teaching. His Versuch uber die wahre Art das Klavier zu spielen (1753 f.)

marked the beginning of modern pianoforte technique; Haydn formed his

piano artistry on this manual, and because of it Mozart said of this "Berlin

Bach": "He is the father, we are his boys (Buben); those of us who know

anything correctly have learned from him, and any [student] who does not

confess this is a rascal [Lu77tp]." 108 In his compositions Emanuel consciously

diverged from his father's contrapuntal style to a simpler homophonic treat-

ment and melodic line. In 1767 he accepted the post of director of church

music at Hamburg; there he spent the remaining twenty-one years of his

life. In 1795 Haydn came to Hamburg to see him, only to find that the great-

est of Johann Sebastian's sons was seven years dead.

chap.xx) Frederick's Germany 527

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, after studying with his father and at the

University of Leipzig, became at eighteen (1750) Kammermusikus at Biicke-

burg to Wilhelm, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe; at twenty-six he was Kon-

zertmeister. The great event in his twenty-eight years at this court was the

coming of Herder (177 1) as preacher; Herder provided him with inspiring

texts for oratorios, cantatas, and songs. Johann Christoph followed his fa-

ther's methods and spirit, and was lost in the changefulness of time.

In contrast, the youngest son, Johann Christian Bach, gave his musical

allegiance to Italy. Only fifteen when his father died, he was sent to Berlin,

where his half-brother Wilhelm Friedemann gave him support and instruc-

tion. At nineteen he went to Bologna, where Conte Cavaliere Agostino Litta

paid for his studies under Padre Martini. The youth was so charmed by

Italian life and Catholic music that he became a convert, and for six years

devoted his compositions chiefly to the Church. In 1760 he was made organ-

ist in the Milan cathedral, and became the "Milan Bach." Meanwhile Italian

opera had aroused his ambition to excel in secular as well as ecclesiastical

music; he produced operas at Turin and Naples (1761), and his Milan em-

ployers complained that the galanterie of these compositions discorded with

his position in the cathedral. Johann Christian changed his foot of earth to

London (1762), where his operas had unusually long runs. Soon he was ap-

pointed music master to Queen Charlotte Sophia. He welcomed the seven-

year-old Mozart to London in 1764, and frolicked with him at the piano. The

boy loved the now fully accomplished musician, and took many hints from

him in composing sonatas, operas, and symphonies. In 1778 Bach went to

Paris to present his Amadis des Gaules; there he again met Mozart, and the

youth of twenty-two was as delighted with him as he had been fifteen years

before. "He is an honest man, and does people justice," Wolfgang wrote to

his father; "I love him from my heart." 109

All in all, this Bach dynasty, from the Veit Bach who died in 16 19 to the

Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach who died in 1845, is the most remarkable in

cultural history. Of some sixty Bachs known by name among the relatives of

Johann Sebastian, fifty-three were professional musicians; eight of his ances-

tors and five of his progeny were of sufficient caliber to warrant special

articles in a dictionary of music. 110 Several of the sons won greater fame and

reputation in their lifetimes than Johann Sebastian had enjoyed. Not that they

monopolized musical fame; the executants, as usual, received the greater ac-

claim when alive, and were sooner forgotten when dead; and composers like

Karl Friedrich Fasch and Christian Friedrich Schubart rivaled Bach's sons in

renown.

Looking back upon this second half of the eighteenth century we perceive

some special lines of musical evolution. The growing range and power of the

piano freed music from subservience to words, and encouraged instrumental

compositions. The widened audience for concerts, and the lessening of eccle-

siastical dominance, led composers away from the polyphony of Johann

Sebastian Bach to the more easily appreciated harmonies of his successors.

The influence of Italian opera made for melody even in instrumental pieces,

while, by a contrasting movement, the lieder gave a new complexity to song.

528 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XX

The revolt against Italian opera culminated in Gluck, who proposed to sub-

ordinate music to drama, but rather ennobled drama with music; by another

avenue the revolt developed the Singspiel, which reached its peak in The

Magic Flute. The concerto grosso passed into the concerto for one solo

instrument and orchestra; the sonata, in Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach and

Haydn, took its classic form, and the quartet evolved into the symphony.

Everything was prepared for Beethoven.

X. DER ALTE FRITZ

Over all this varied life of politics, religion, industry, amusement, music,

art, science, philosophy, philanthropy, and sin loomed the aging hero whom

Germany called Der Alte Fritz— not loving him, but honoring him as the

most amazing Teuton of his time. Not content with ruling his kingdom and

his orchestra, he envied Voltaire's pen, and longed to be lauded as a poet

and historian. He bequeathed to posterity thirty volumes of writings: seven

of history, six of poetry, three of military treatises, two of philosophy,

twelve of correspondence; all in French. His poems were mostly of the

"fugitive" kind, and have escaped remembrance. He was one of the leading

historians of the age. Early in his reign he wrote the history of his ancestors

— Memoir es pour servir a Vhistoire de la maison de Brandebourg (1751).

Like most historians, he claimed impartiality: "I have risen above all preju-

dice; I have regarded princes, kings, relatives, as ordinary men"; 111 but he rose

to rapture when describing Frederick William, the Great Elector.

His literary masterpiece was UHistoire de mon temps, recording his own

rule. He began it soon after the close of the First Silesian War (1740-42),

and continued it at intervals till late in life. Probably under the influence of

Voltaire— though writing much of this book before the appearance of Vol-

taire's Le Siecle de Louis XIV and UEssai sur les mo eurs— Frederick in-

cluded the history of science, philosophy, literature, and art. He apologized

for spending space on "imbeciles clothed in purple, charlatans crowned with

a tiara. . . . But to follow the discovery of new truths, to grasp the causes

of change in morals and manners, to study the processes by which the dark-

ness of barbarism has been lifted from the minds of men— these, surely, are

subjects worthy to occupy all thinking men." 112 He praised Hobbes, Locke,

and the deists in England, Thomasius and Wolff in Germany, Fontenelle

and Voltaire in France. "These great men and their disciples struck a mortal

blow at religion. Men began to examine what they had stupidly adored;

reason overthrew superstition. . . . Deism, the simple worship of the Su-

preme Being, gained many followers." 113 Despising the French government

but loving French literature, Frederick rated Voltaire's Henriade above the

Iliad, and Racine above Sophocles; he equaled Boileau with Horace, and

Bossuet with Demosthenes. He laughed at the language and literature,

praised the architecture, of Germany. He labored to excuse his invasion of

Silesia: a statesman, he felt, may violate the Ten Commandments if the vital

chap. xx ) Frederick's Germany 529

interests of his state require it; "it is better that the sovereign should break

his word than that the people should perish" 114 — which he hoped we would

believe had been the danger to Prussia in 1740. He admitted making many

mistakes as a general, but he thought it unnecessary to record his flight at

Mollwitz. All in all, these two volumes rank with the best historical writing

of modern Europe before Gibbon.

Hardly had the Seven Years' War been concluded when Frederick set

himself to writing his Histoire de la guerre de Sept Ans. Like Caesar he

aspired to be the best historian of his own campaigns, and like Caesar he

avoided embarrassment by speaking of himself in the third person. Again,

and perhaps with better reason, he sought to justify the bold initiative with

which he had opened hostilities. He lauded his great enemy, Maria Theresa,

in all that concerned her domestic government, but in foreign relations he

condemned her as "this proud woman" who, "devoured by ambition, wished

to reach the goal of glory by every path." 115 Amid his fairly impartial record

of the campaigns, he stopped to mourn the death of his mother in 1757 and

of his sister in 1758; the page in which he described Wilhelmine is an oasis

of love in a waste of war.

He concluded that history is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. "It is

in the nature of man that no one learns from experience. The follies of the

fathers are lost on their children; each generation has to commit its own." 116

"Whoever reads history with application will perceive that the same scenes

are often repeated, and that one need only change the names of the ac-

tors." 117 And even if we could learn, we should still be subject to unpredict-

able chance. "These Memoirs convince me more and more that to write

history is to compile the follies of men and the strokes of fortune. Every-

thing turns on these two articles." 118

Twice (1752, 1768) in a Last Testament, he tried to convey some of the

lessons of his own experience to his heirs. He urged them to study the aims

and resources of the various states, and the methods available for protecting

and developing Prussia. He followed his father in stressing the need of keep-

ing the army in good order. He cautioned his successors against spending

beyond revenue; he predicted political trouble for fiscally reckless France;

and he advised that revenues be increased not by imposing new taxes but

by stimulating the productivity of the economy. All religions should be

protected if they kept the peace— though "all religions, when one looks into

them, rest on a system of fable more or less absurd." 119 The royal power

should be absolute, but the king should consider himself the first servant of

the state. Since Prussia was endangered by her smallness amid large states

like Russia, France, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the king should

seize upon any opportunity to enlarge and unify Prussia— preferably by con-

quest of Saxony, Polish Prussia, and Swedish Pomerania. "The first concern

of a prince is to maintain himself; the second is to extend his territory. This

demands suppleness and resource. . . . The way to hide secret ambitions

is to profess pacific sentiments till the favorable moment arrives. This has

been the method of all great statesmen." 120

53° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP.XX

The king should prepare his successor for government; he should have

him educated by enlightened men, not by ecclesiastics, for these will stuff

him with superstitions calculated to make him a docile tool of the church. 121

Such an education produces a mediocre mind soon crushed by the respon-

sibilities of state. "That is what I have seen, and if I except the Queen of

Hungary [Maria Theresa] and the King of Sardinia [Charles Emmanuel I],

all the princes of Europe are merely illustrious imbeciles." 122 This was writ-

ten when Elizabeth ruled Russia; the Testament of 1768 was more polite, for

Catherine had already shown her mettle; now Frederick prophesied that

Russia would be the most dangerous power in Europe. 123

As he aged he began to wonder if his nephew and presumptive heir-

Frederick William II— was fit to inherit the government. "I labor for you,"

he wrote, "but one must think of keeping what I make; if you are idle and

indolent, what I have accumulated with so much trouble will melt away in

your hands." 124 And in 1782, still more pessimistic, he wrote: "If, after my

death, my nephew goes soft, . . . within two years there will no longer be

a Prussia." 125 The prediction was verified at Jena in 1 806, not so much be-

cause Frederick William II was soft, but because Napoleon was hard.

Frederick himself, in his final decade, became unendurably hard. He

curbed much of the freedom that he had allowed to the press before 1756.

"Your Berlin freedom," Lessing wrote to Nikolai in 1769, "reduces itself

... to the freedom to bring to market as many absurdities against religion

as you like. . . . But let someone . . . raise his voice on behalf of subjects,

and against exploitation and despotism, . . . and you will soon discover

which is the most servile land in Europe today." 126 Herder hated his native

Prussia, and Winckelmann turned in "horror" from that "despotic land." 127

When Goethe visited Berlin in 1778 he was surprised by the unpopularity

of the King. Yet the people reverenced Frederick as an old man who

through forty-five years had not missed a day of service to the state.

War and peace alike had worn him out. His attacks of gout and asthma, of

colic and hemorrhoids, had increased in frequency and severity, and his pre-

dilection for heavy meals and highly spiced foods intensified his ailments.

On August 22-25, 1778, near Breslau, he reviewed his Silesian army. On the

twenty-fourth, dressed only in his usual uniform, he sat on his horse for six

hours in a heavy rain; he returned to his quarters drenched and shivering; he

was never well again. In June, 1786, he summoned Dr. Zimmermann from

Hanover. He balked at the drugs prescribed for him, and preferred lively

conversations about literature and history; to keep him quiet Zimmermann

prescribed Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 128 Dropsy was

added to his troubles, and incisions made to reduce the swellings developed

gangrene. Pneumonia completed the siege, and on August 17, 1786, Freder-

ick died, aged seventy-four. He had asked to be buried in the garden of

Sanssouci near the graves of his dogs and his favorite horse; this parting edict

on humanity was ignored, and he was interred beside his father in the Garri-

son Church at Potsdam. When Napoleon, after defeating the Prussians at

Jena, came and stood before Frederick's tomb, he said to his generals, "If he

were alive we should not be here." 129

CHAPTER XXI

Kant

1724.-1804

I. PROLEGOMENA

IF Frederick the Great had not lived we might never have had Immanuel

Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason and Religion within the Limits of

Reason Alone were made possible by Frederick's skepticism and toleration;

within two years after Frederick's death Kant was silenced by the Prussian

government.

Like Frederick, Kant was a child of the Enlightenment, and— despite all

his strategic wavering— held by reason to the end; but also, like Rousseau, he

was part of the Romantic movement, laboring to reconcile reason with feel-

ing, philosophy with religion, morality with revolt. He received an infusion

of Pietism from his parents, and crossed it with the rationalism of Christian

von Wolff; he absorbed the heresies of the philosophes, and crossed them

with the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" in Smile; he inherited

the subtle psychology of Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and used it

in an attempt to save science from Hume and religion from Voltaire. He

ordered his life with bourgeois regularity, and hailed the French Revolution.

Isolated in East Prussia, he felt and summed up all the mental currents of his

time.

He was born in Konigsberg (April 22, 1724), far from clarity-loving

France and misty with the sea. Some doubt has been cast upon the Scottish

origin of the family, but Kant himself tells us that his grandfather, "at the

end of the last . . . century (I know not for what cause) emigrated from

Scotland to Prussia." 1 His father, Johann Georg Cant, married Anna Reuter;

Immanuel (i.e., God with us) was the fourth of their eleven children. He

took his Christian name from the saint of his birth day; he changed his sur-

name from Cant to Kant to prevent the Germans from pronouncing it

"Tsant." 2 All the family was brought up in the Pietist sect, which, like Eng-

lish Methodism, stressed faith, repentance, and immediate appeal to God, as

against the orthodox Lutheran worship in church with a mediating priest.

A Pietist preacher had established at Konigsberg a Collegium Frederici-

anum; Immanuel attended this from his eighth to his sixteenth year. The

school day began at 5: 30 a.m. with a half hour of prayer; every class hour

ended with prayer; an hour every morning was devoted to religious instruc-

tion, with emphasis on the fires of hell; history was taught chiefly from the

Old Testament, Greek solely from the New. Sunday was given largely to

religious devotions. It was an education that produced virtue in some of its

graduates, hypocrisy in others, and perhaps a somber spirit in most. Kant

53 1

53 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

later resented this heavy dose of piety and terror; fear and trembling, he

said, overcame him when he recalled those days. 3

In 1 740 he moved on to the University of Konigsberg. Here his favorite

teacher was Martin Knutzen, who, though a Pietist, introduced Kant to the

"rationalism" of Wolff. Knutzen had read the English deists; he condemned

them but he discussed them, and he left some deistic doubts in at least one

pupil. When, after six years at the university, Kant was invited to enter the

Lutheran ministry, he refused despite the promise of early advancement to

a comfortable post. 4 Instead, for nine years, he lived in poverty, tutoring in

private families, and continuing to study. His interest till 1770 was rather in

science than in theology. Lucretius was one of his favorite authors. 5

In 1755 Kant received the doctoral degree, and was allowed to lecture in

the university as a Frivatdozent, or private teacher, recompensed only by

such fees as his students chose to pay. He continued in that insecure status

for fifteen years. Twice in that long novitiate his applications for a profes-

sorship were rejected. He remained poor, moving from one boardinghouse

to another, never daring to marry, never having a home of his own till he

was fifty-nine. 6 He lectured on a wide variety of topics, probably to attract

a greater range of students, and he had to make himself clear in order to sur-

vive. Kant as a teacher must have been quite different from Kant the author,

so famous for obscurity. Herder, who was one of his pupils (1762-64), de-

scribed him thirty years later with grateful memory:

I have had the good fortune to know a philosopher who was my teacher. In

the prime of life he possessed the joyous courage of youth, and this also, as I

believe, attended him to extreme old age. His open, thoughtful brow was the

seat of untroubled cheerfulness and joy, his conversation was full of ideas and

most suggestive. He had at his service jest, witticism, and humorous fancy,

and his lectures were at once instructive and most entertaining. With the

same spirit in which he criticized Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, . . . and

Hume, he investigated the natural laws of Newton, Kepler, and the physicists.

In the same way he took up the writings of Rousseau. . . . No cabal or sect,

no prejudice or reverence for a name, had the slightest influence with him in

opposition to the extension and promotion of truth. He encouraged and gently

compelled his hearers to think for themselves; despotism was foreign to his

disposition. This man, whom I name with the greatest gratitude and reverence,

is Immanuel Kant; his image stands before me, and is dear to me. 7

If we were to remember Kant chiefly by his work before his fifty-seventh

year (1 781), we should think of him as rather a scientist than a philosopher

—though these two terms were not yet separate. His first published work,

Gedanken von der ivahren Schatzung der lebendigen Krafte (Thoughts on

the True Evaluation of Dynamic Forces, 1747), is a learned discussion of

whether the force of a body in motion is to be measured (as Descartes and

Euler held) by mv, the mass times the velocity, or (as Leibniz held) by mv 2 ,

the mass times the square of the velocity; a remarkable performance for a

lad of twenty-three. Seven years later came an essay on whether the time

of the earth's daily rotation is altered by the ebb and flow of the tides. In the

same year Kant published Die Frage y ob die Welt veralte (The Question

CHAP.XXl) KANT 533

Whether the Earth Is Aging) ; here we have our modern solicitude over the

sun's daily loss of energy and the future congealing of our earth.

In a brilliant treatise of 1755, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie

des Himmels, the venturesome youth of thirty-one offered "a general history

of nature and theory of the heavens." It was published anonymously and

was dedicated to Frederick the Great; perhaps Kant feared trouble from the

theologians and hoped for protection from the King. He reduced all the

operations of earth and sky to mechanical laws, but argued that the result,

by its co-ordination and beauty, proved the existence of a supreme intelli-

gence. To explain the origin of the solar system Kant proposed his "nebular

hypothesis":

I assume that all the material of our solar system . . . was, at the beginning

of all things, decomposed into its primary elements, and filled the whole space

... in which the bodies formed out of it now revolve. ... In space so filled,

a universal repose could last only a moment. . . . The scattered elements of a

denser kind, by their attractive force, gather from . . . around them all the

matter of less specific gravity; these elements themselves, together with the

material which they have united with them, collect in those points where par-

ticles of a still denser kind are found; these in like manner join still denser

particles, and so on. . . .

But nature has other forces, ... by which these particles repel one another,

and which, by their conflict with attractions, bring forth that movement which

is, as it were, the lasting life of nature. . . . This force of repulsion is mani-

fested in the elasticity of vapors, the effluence of strong-smelling bodies, and

the diffusion of all spirituous matters. It is by this force that the elements,

which may be falling to the point that attracts them, are turned sideways . . .

from their movement in a straight line; and their perpendicular fall thereby

issues in a circular movement around the center to which they are falling. 8

Kant believed that all the stars had been gathered— or were being gathered

—into such systems of planets and suns; and he added a significant phrase:

"Die Schopfung ist niemals vollendet"— creation is never complete; it is ever

going on. 9

This nebular hypothesis of 1755, as well as its emendation by Laplace

(1796), is as rich in difficulties as most subsequent theories of origins; yet in

the judgment of a famous living astronomer, "Kant's treatise on cosmogony

was, I believe, the finest objective summary of science up to that time." 10

For us the significance of the essay is in its indication that Kant was no mys-

tic metaphysician but a man fascinated by science, and struggling to recon-

cile scientific method with religious belief. This is the essence of his labors to

the end.

In 1756, stirred like Voltaire to the depths of his philosophy by the Lisbon

disaster of 1755, Kant published three essays on earthquakes, and one on a

theory of winds. In 1757 he issued an "Outline and Announcement of a

Course of Lectures on Physical Geography"; and in 1758, a "New Doctrine

of Motion and Rest." Then, his interest widening, he sent to the press short

treatises on optimism (1759), the syllogism (1762), and "diseases of the

head" (1764)— here suggesting that the increasing division of labor might by

534 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

monotonous repetitions produce insanity. In 1763 he moved into theology

with a treatise, The Only Possible Ground for Proving the Existence of

God; obviously he was uncomfortable over the tottering of his religious

faith. In 1764, eight years after Burke's similar disquisition, he offered Ob-

servations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime.

At times he thought of extending his evolutionary cosmogony to biology;

he was familiar with the idea that new forms had evolved from older ones

through changes in the conditions of life; 11 and he accepted the view that

the human anatomy was originally adapted to four-legged locomotion. 12 Yet

he drew back from a fully mechanistic biology. "I also have at times steered

into the gulf, assuming here blind natural mechanics as the ground of ex-

planation, and I believed I could discover a passage to the simple and natural

conception. But I constantly made shipwreck of reason, and I have there-

fore preferred to venture upon the boundless ocean of ideas." 13 Rudolph

Raspe (author of Baron Munchausen's Travels) had recently discovered,

and had in 1765 published, Leibniz' long-lost Nouveaux Essais sur Pentende-

ment humain; Kant could read this in French; it shared in turning him to-

ward epistemology. He did not quite abandon his interest in science; as late

as 1785 he composed an essay On Volcanoes in the Moon. But the internal

conflict between his scientific studies and his inherited theology impelled

him to seek a reconciliation in philosophy.

Probably his new direction was caused in part by the offer (1770) of a

professorship in logic and metaphysics. The salary was small for a man of

forty-six— 167 thalers per year, rising slowly to 225 in 1786; incidental serv-

ices as "senator" and "senior of the faculty" raised this in 1789 to 726 thalers.

Custom required a newly appointed professor to deliver in Latin an inaugu-

ral discourse. Kant chose a difficult subject— De Mundi sensibilis et intelligi-

bilis Forma et Principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and

Intelligible World). Kant used the Scholastic terminology that still pre-

vailed in the German universities. By "sensible world" he meant the world

as perceived by the senses; he would later call this also the phenomenal

world, or world of appearances. By "intelligible world" he meant the world

as conceived by the intellect or reason; this he would later call the "nou-

menal," or thinkable, world. We seek to understand the sensible world by

applying to it the subjective concepts of space and time through mathematics

and the sciences; we seek to understand the conceivable world by going be-

yond the senses, through intellect and metaphysics, to the supersensual

sources and causes of the sensible world. Here Kant already laid down his

basic theses: that space and time are not objective or sensible objects, but

are forms of perception inherent in the nature and structure of the mind;

and that the mind is no passive recipient and product of sensations, but is an

active agent— with inherent modes and laws of operation— for transforming

sensations into ideas.

Kant considered this seminal dissertation as "the text on which something

further is to be said in the following work." This statement, in a letter of

177 1 to Marcus Herz, shows that the philosopher was already planning the

CHAP.XXl) KANT 535

Kritik der reinen Vermmft. After twelve years of work on that immense

treatise he gave it to the world in 178 1, dedicated to Karl von Zedlitz, min-

ister of education and ecclesiastical affairs under Frederick the Great. Zed-

litz, like the King, was a child of the Aufklarung, and supported the free-

dom of the press. His protection would be precious if the theologians should

perceive, behind Kant's esoteric vocabulary and apparently orthodox con-

clusions, one of the most destructive analyses that the Christian theology has

ever received.

II. CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, 1 78 I

If the world finds this book difficult, it may be because of Kant's method

of work. He wrote to Moses Mendelssohn (August 16, 1783) that though

the volume was "the result of reflection which occupied me for at least

twelve years, I brought it to completion in the greatest haste within four or

five months, giving the closest attention to the contents, but with little

thought of the exposition, or of rendering it easy of comprehension by the

reader— a decision which I have never regretted, since otherwise, had I

longer delayed and sought to give it a more popular form, the work would

probably never have been completed at all." 14 Clarity takes time, and Kant

was not sure that he had the time. He deliberately omitted illustrative exam-

ples lest they swell his book; "these are necessary only from a popular point

of view, and this work can never be made suitable for popular consump-

tion." 15 So he wrote for the trade, and trusted to others to dilute him into

digestibility. Though Christian von Wolff had preceded him in writing phi-

losophy in German, that language was still crude in phrasing shades of

thought, and it had not established a technical terminology. At almost every

step Kant had to invent a German translation of a Latin term, and in many

cases even Latin lacked terms for the distinctions and subtleties he wished

to express. He confused his readers by giving new meanings to old words,

and sometimes forgetting his redefinitions. The first hundred pages are toler-

ably clear; the rest is a philosophical conflagration in which the untutored

reader will see nothing but smoke.

The title itself needed clarification. Who could have known that Kritik

der reinen Vernunft meant a critical and judicial examination of reason as

independent of experience? Kritik meant not only analysis and exposition, it

also meant judgment, as in its Greek parent krinein, to judge. Kant proposed

to describe sensation, perception, idea, and reason, and to set, for each of

these, its proper bounds and jurisdiction. Further, he hoped to show that

reason can give us knowledge independently of any confirmatory experi-

ence, as when we know that six times six equals thirty-six, or that an effect

must have a cause. These are examples of "pure reason"— i.e., of a priori

knowledge— i.e., of knowledge requiring no experiential proof. "The faculty

of knowledge from a priori principles may be called pure reason, and the

general investigation of its possibility and bounds [constitutes] the critique

of pure reason." 16 Kant believed that such an investigation would involve all

53<5 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

the problems of metaphysics, and he was confident that "there is not a single

metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of

which the key at least has not been supplied" in this Critique. 17 He thought

that his only danger was "not that of being refuted, but of not being under-

stood." 18

What had drawn him into so heroic an adventure? One might have sup-

posed that the exaltation of reason by the French Enlightenment— the as-

sumption of the philosophes that faith must submit to reason— and the havoc

so inflicted upon Christian theology, had been the provocative cause of

Kant's determination to study the origin, operation, and limits of reason.

That motive played its part, as stated in Kant's preface to the second edi-

tion; 19 but that same preface made it clear that his chosen enemy was all

"dogmatism" whatever— i.e., all systems of thought, orthodox or heretical,

evolved by an unscrutinized reason. He named as "the greatest of all dog-

matical philosophers" Christian von Wolff, who had undertaken to prove

the doctrines of Christianity, and the philosophy of Leibniz, by reason alone.

All attempts to demonstrate the truth or falsity of religion by pure reason

were, to Kant, forms of dogmatism; and he condemned as "the dogmatism of

metaphysics" any system of science or philosophy or theology that had not

first submitted to a critical examination of reason itself.

He accused his own thinking, till 1770, as guilty of such dogmatism. From

such unscrutinized speculations, he tells us, he was awakened by reading

Hume— probably the Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding, of

which a German translation had appeared in 1755. Hume had argued that all

reasoning depended upon the notion of cause; that in actual experience we

perceive not causation but only sequence; and that therefore all science, phi-

losophy, and theology rest on an idea— cause— which turns out to be an in-

tellectual supposition, not a perceived reality. "I freely admit," wrote Kant,

"it was David Hume's remark that first, many years ago, interrupted my

dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my inquiries

in the field of speculative philosophy." 20 How could the concept of cause

be rescued from the lowly status of uncertain supposition in which Hume

had left it? Only, said Kant, by showing that it is a priori, independent of

experience, one of those categories, or forms of thought, which, though not

necessarily innate, are part of the inherent structure of the mind.* So he set

himself to overcome both the dogmatism of Wolff and the skepticism of

Hume by a criticism— a critical examination— that would at once describe,

delimit, and restore the authority of reason. These three stages— dogmatism,

skepticism, criticism— were, in Kant's view, the three ascending phases in the

evolution of modern philosophy.

Loving definitions, distinctions, and classifications, using long words to

shorten speech, Kant divided all knowledge into empirical (dependent upon

• In a letter to Garve, 1798, Kant gave a later explanation of his "awakening": "The antinomies

of pure reason [the difficulties involved in either believing or disbelieving in God, free will, or

immortality] . . . first aroused me from my dogmatic slumber and drove me to a critique of

reason." 21

CHAP.XXl) KANT 537

experience) and transcendental (independent of, and therefore transcending,

experience). He agreed that all knowledge begins with experience, in the

sense that some sensation must precede and arouse the operations of thought;

but he believed that the moment experience begins it is molded by the struc-

ture of the mind through its inherent forms of "intuition" (perception) or

conception. The inherent forms of "intuition" are the universal forms that

experience takes in our outward sensation as space, and in our inward sensi-

bility as time.

Likewise there are inherent forms of conception or thought, which are in-

dependent of experience and mold it; Kant called them categories, and

divided them with fond and suspicious symmetry into four triplets: three

categories of quantity— unity, plurality, and totality; three categories of

quality— reality, negation, and limitation; three twin categories of relation-

substance and quality, cause and effect, activity and passivity; and three twin

categories of modality— possibility and impossibility, existence and nonexist-

ence, necessity and contingency. Every perception falls into one or more of

these basic forms or molds of thought. Perception is sensation interpreted by

the inherent forms of space and time; knowledge is perception transformed

by the categories into a judgment or an idea. Experience is not a passive ac-

ceptance of objective impressions upon our senses; it is the product of the

mind actively working upon the raw material of sensation.

Kant tried to counter Hume's skepticism of causation by making the cause-

and-effect relation not an objective reality but an intrinsic form of thought;

as such it is independent of experience, and is not subject to the uncertainty

of empirical ideas. Yet it is a necessary part of all experience, since we cannot

understand experience without it. Hence "the concept of cause involves the

character of necessity, which no experience can yield." 22 Kant supposed

that by this leger-de-plume he had saved science from that humiliating limita-

tion to probability to which Hume had condemned it. Indeed, he argued, it

is the human mind, and not nature, that establishes the universal "laws of

nature," by endowing some of our generalizations— like those of mathe-

matics—with qualities of universality and necessity not objectively perceived.

"We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which

we entitle 'nature.' We could never find them in appearances had we not our-

selves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there." 23 The "laws

of nature" are not objective entities but mental constructs useful in handling

experience.

All knowledge takes the form of ideas. In this sense the idealist is right:

the world, for us, is merely our ideas. Since we know matter only as and

through ideas, materialism is logically impossible, for it attempts to reduce

the directly known (ideas) to the unknown or indirectly known. But the

idealist is wrong if he believes that nothing exists except our ideas; for we

know that ideas can be produced by sensations, and we cannot explain all

sensations without assuming, for many of them, an external cause. As our

knowledge is limited to phenomena or appearances— i.e., to the form the

external cause takes after being molded by our modes of perception and con-

ception—we can never know the objective nature of that external cause; 24 it

538 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

must remain for us a mysterious Ding-an-sich> a thing-in-itself , a "noumenon"

conceived but never perceived. The external world exists, but in its ultimate

reality it is unknowable. 25

The soul too is real but unknowable. We never perceive it as an entity

additional to the mental states that we perceive; it too is a noumenon, neces-

sarily conceived as the reality behind the individual self, the moral sense, and

the forms and processes of the mind. The sense of self mingles with every

mental state, and provides continuity and personal identity. The conscious-

ness of self ("apperception") is the most intimate of all our experiences; and

by no feat of the imagination can we conceive it as material. 26 It seems im-

possible that an immaterial soul should act upon— and be acted upon by— a

material body; but we may believe that the unknowable reality behind mat-

ter "may not, after all, be so different in character" from that inner thing-in-

itself which is the soul. 27

We cannot prove by pure or theoretical reason (as Wolff tried to do)

that the individual soul is immortal, or that the will is free, or that God ex-

ists; but neither can we by pure reason disprove these beliefs (as some skeptics

thought to do). Reason and the categories are equipped to deal only with

phenomena or appearances, external or internal; we cannot apply them to

the thing-in-itself— the reality behind sensations or the soul behind ideas.

When we try to prove or disprove the dogmas of faith we fall into "para-

logisms" (fallacies) or "antinomies"— inherent contradictions. We end in

equal absurdities if we hold that the world had or had not a beginning; that

the will is or is not free; or that a necessary or supreme being does or does

not exist. Kant expressed with unwonted eloquence the argument from de-

sign, 28 but he concluded that "the utmost that the argument can prove is an

architect . . . who is always very much hampered by the adaptability of the

material in which he works, not a creator ... to whose idea everything is

subject." 20

And yet how can we rest content with so baffling a conclusion— that free

will, immortality, and God can be neither proved nor disproved by pure

reason? There is (Kant urges) something in us deeper than reason, and that

is our irrefutable consciousness that consciousness, mind, and soul are not

material, and that the will is in some measure, however mysteriously and il-

logically, free; and we cannot be long content to think of the world as a

senseless sequence of evolution and dissolution without moral significance or

inherent mind. How can we justify our will to believe? Partly (says Kant)

by the intellectual usefulness of belief —by its offering us some guidance in the

interpretation of phenomena, as well as some philosophical sanity and re-

ligious peace.

The things of the world must be viewed as if they received their existence

from a highest intelligence. The idea [of God] is thus really a heuristic, not an

ostensive, concept [it is an assumption helpful to discovery and understanding,

but it is not a demonstration]. ... In the domain of theology we must view

everything as if the sum of all appearances (the sensible world itself) had a

single, highest, and all-sufficient ground beyond itself— namely, a self-subsistent,

CHAP.XXl) KANT 539

original, creative reason. For it is in the light of this idea of a creative reason

that we so guide the empirical employment of our reason as to secure its great-

est possible extension. . . . The only determinate concept which the purely

speculative reason gives us of God is, in the strictest sense, deistic; that is, reason

does not determine the objective validity of such a concept, but yields only the

idea of something which is the ground of the highest and necessary unit of all

empirical reality. 30

But a more imperative reason for religious belief, in Kant's view, is that

such belief is indispensable to morality. "If there is no primordial being dis-

tinct from the world, if the world is . . . without an Author, if our will is

not free, if the soul is . . . perishable like matter, then moral ideas and prin-

ciples lose all validity." 31 If moral character and social order are not to depend

entirely on fear of the law, we must support religious belief, if only as a regu-

lative principle; we must act as if ive knew that there is a God, that our souls

are immortal, that our wills are free. 32 Moreover, as an aid to thought and

morals, "we are justified in representing the cause of the world in terms of a

subtle anthropomorphism (without which we could not think anything

whatever in regard to it), namely, as a being that has understanding, feel-

ings of pleasure and displeasure, and desires and volitions corresponding to

these." 33

So the famous Critique concludes, leaving opposite schools of thought

comforted and displeased. The skeptics could argue that Kant had justified

agnosticism, and could scorn his reinstatement of God as a supplement to the

police. The buffeted theologians reproached him for admitting so much to

the infidels, and rejoiced that religion had apparently survived its perilous

passage through Kant's labyrinthine mind. In 1786 Karl Reinhold described

the turmoil:

The Critique of Pure Reason has been proclaimed by the dogmatists as the

attempt of a skeptic who undermines the certainty of all knowledge; by the

skeptics as a piece of arrogant presumption that undertakes to erect a new form

of dogmatism upon the ruins of previous systems; by the supernaturalists as a

subtly plotted artifice to displace the historical foundations of religion, and to

establish naturalism without polemic; by the naturalists as a new prop for the

dying philosophy of faith; by the materialists as an idealistic contradiction of

the reality of matter; by the spiritualists as an unjustifiable limitation of all

knowledge to the corporeal world, concealed under the name of the domain

of experience . . , 34

Almost all these schools of thought attacked the book, giving it fame if only

as a succes de scandale. Even its difficulty exalted it, making it a challenge

that every up-to-date mind had to meet. Soon the sesquipedalia verba of Kant

were in every learned mouth.

He could not understand why his critics could not understand him. Had

he not defined every basic term over and over again? (Yes, and how vari-

ously!) In 1783 he answered the attacks by rephrasing the Critique in what

he thought was a simpler form; and he defiantly entitled his rejoinder Pro-

legomena to Every Future Metaphysic That Will Be Able to Appear as

540 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

Science. Before his Critique, he claimed, there had been no real metaphysics

at all, for no system had prefaced itself with a critical scrutiny of its instru-

ment—reason. If some readers could not understand the Kritik, that might be

because they were not quite up to it; "in such a case one should apply one's

mental gifts to another object"; after all, "there is no need for everybody to

study metaphysics." 35 The old professor had humor and pride, and temper

too. As it proceeded, the Prolegomena became as difficult as the Critique.

The controversy continued under the tolerant regime of Frederick the

Great. Kant had written in the Critique some eloquent passages on the no-

bility of reason, and its right to freedom of expression. 36 In 1784, still relying

on protection by Frederick and Zedlitz, he published an essay entitled Was

ist Aufklarung? He defined the Enlightenment as freedom and independence

of thought, and took as his motto and counsel Sapere aude— "Dare to know."

He regretted that intellectual liberation was so retarded by the conservatism

of the majority. "If we ask whether we live in an enlightened [aufgeklart]

age, the answer is no"; we live only "in an age of enlightening" (Aufklar-

ung) . He hailed Frederick as the embodiment and protector of the German

Enlightenment, as the one monarch who had told his subjects, "Reason as you

will." 37

This may have been written in the hope that Frederick's successor would

keep to the policy of toleration. But Frederick William II (1786-97) was

more interested in the power of the state than in the freedom of the mind.

When a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason was prepared (1787)

Kant modified some passages, and tried to soften his heresies with an apolo-

getic preface: "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge [of things in

themselves] in order to make room for faith. . . . Criticism alone can sever

the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking, fanaticism, and super-

stition." 38 He had reason for caution. On July 9, 1788, Johann Christian von

Wollner, "minister for the Lutheran Department," issued a Religions edikt

which explicitly rejected religious toleration as responsible for the loosening

of morals, and threatened with expulsion from their pulpits or chairs all

preachers or teachers who deviated from orthodox Christianity. It was in this

atmosphere of reaction that Kant published his second Critique.

III. CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON, 1 788

Since the first Critique had argued that pure reason could not prove the

freedom of the will, and since, in Kant's view, morality required such free-

dom, the operations of reason seemed to have left morality, like theology,

without a rational basis. Worse yet, the Enlightenment had sapped the reli-

gious foundation of morals by questioning the existence of a rewarding and

punishing God. How could civilization survive if these traditional supports

of morality collapsed? Kant felt that he himself, as an avowed disciple of the

Aufklarung, was obligated to find some rational ground for a moral code. In

a preliminary essay, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals

CHAP.XXl) KANT 54 1

(Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785), he rejected the attempt of

freethinkers to base morality upon the experience of the individual or the

race; such an a posteriori derivation would deprive moral principles of that

universality and absoluteness which, in his judgment, a sound ethic required.

With characteristic self-confidence he announced: "It is clear that all moral

conceptions have their seat and origin completely a priori in the reason." 39

His second major work, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, proposed to find

and elucidate that seat and origin. It would analyze the a priori elements in

morality as the first Critique had analyzed the a priori elements in knowledge.

Every individual (Kant argues) has a conscience, a sense of duty, a con-

sciousness of a commanding moral law. "Two things fill the mind with ever

new and increasing admiration and awe . . . : the starry heavens above, and

the moral law within." 40 This moral consciousness often conflicts with our

sensual desires, but we recognize that it is a higher element in us than the

pursuit of pleasure. It is not the product of experience, it is a part of our in-

herent psychological structure, like the categories; it is an internal tribunal

present in every person in every race. 41 And it is absolute; it commands us

unconditionally, without exception or excuse, to do the right for its own sake,

as an end in itself, not as a means to happiness or reward or some other good.

Its imperative is categorical.

That categorical imperative takes two forms. "Act so that the maxim of

thy will can always hold good as a principle of universal legislation"; act in

such a way that if all others should act like you, everything would be well;

this [variation of the Golden Rule] is the "fundamental law of the pure prac-

tical reason," 42 and is "the formula of an absolutely good will." 43 In a second

formulation, "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in

that of any other, in every case as an end, never only as a means," 44 Kant pro-

claimed a principle more revolutionary than anything in the American or

French declaration of the rights of man.

The sense of moral obligation is additional evidence for some freedom of

the will. How could we have this consciousness of duty if we were not free

to do or not to do, if our actions were merely links in an unbreakable chain

of mechanical cause and effect? Without free will personality is meaning-

less; if personality is meaningless, so is life; and if life is meaningless, so is the

universe. 45 Kant recognizes the apparently inescapable logic of determinism;

and how can a free choice intervene in an objective world which (he con-

fesses) is apparently governed by mechanical laws? 46 His reply is a master-

piece of obscurity. Mechanical law, he reminds us, is a mental construct, a

scheme which the mind, through its category of causality, imposes upon the

world of space and time as a device for dealing with it consistently. Since we

have limited the categories to the world of phenomena, and since we have

admitted that we do not know the nature of the noumenal world— the thing-

in-itself behind the phenomena— we cannot assume that the laws which we

construct for the phenomena hold also for the ultimate reality. And as we

have admitted that we know, in ourselves, only the phenomenal self— only the

world of perceptions and ideas— and do not know the nature of the inner

54^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

and noumenal soul, we cannot assume that the laws of cause and effect that

seem to govern the actions of our bodies (including our brains) apply also

to the volitions of the ultimate spiritual reality behind our mental processes.

Behind the mechanisms of the phenomenal world of space and of ideas in time

there may be freedom in the spaceless and timeless noumenal world of ulti-

mate outer or inner reality. Our actions and ideas are determined once they

enter the world of perceivable physical or mental events; they may still be

free in their origin in the unperceivable soul; "in this way freedom and nature

. . . can exist together." 47 We cannot prove this, but we may legitimately

assume it as implied by the imperative character of our moral sense; our moral

life would die without it.

After all (says Kant), why should we not give primacy to the practical

over the speculative reason? Science, which seems to reduce us to automata,

is ultimately a speculation— a gamble on the permanent validity of conclusions

and methods that are always changing. We are justified in feeling that the

will in man is more basic than the intellect; the intellect is an instrument

forged by the will for dealing with the external and mechanical world; it

should not be the master of the personality that uses it. 48

But if the moral sense warrants us in assuming a measure of free will, it

also warrants us in believing in the immortality of the soul. For our moral

sense urges us on to a perfection that is repeatedly frustrated by our sensual

impulses; we cannot achieve this perfection in our short earthly life; we must

assume, if there is any justice in the world, that we shall be granted, for our

moral fulfillment, a continued life after death. If this also assumes that a just

God exists, this too is warranted by practical reason. Earthly happiness does

not always accord with virtue; we feel that somewhere the balance between

virtue and happiness will be restored; and this is possible only by supposing

that there is a deity who will effect this reconciliation. "Accordingly the

existence of a cause of all nature, distinct from nature itself, and containing

the principle of . . . the exact harmony of happiness with morality, is also

postulated" by the practical reason. 49

Kant inverted the usual procedure: instead of deriving the moral sense and

code from God (as the theologians had done), he deduced God from the

moral sense. We must conceive our duties not as "arbitrary ordinances of a

foreign will, but as essential laws of every free will in itself"; however, since

that will and God both belong to the noumenal world, we should accept

these duties as divine commands. "We shall not look upon [moral] actions as

obligatory because they are commands of God, but we shall regard them as

divine commands because we have an inward obligation to them." 50

If all this will-ful thinking is slightly obscure, it may be because Kant was

not very enthusiastic about his attempt to reconcile Voltaire with Rousseau.

The Critique of Pure Reason had gone even further than Voltaire in con-

fessing that pure reason cannot prove free will, immortality, or God. But

Kant had found in Rousseau's doctrines— of the weakness of reason, the pri-

macy of feeling, and the derivation of religion from man's moral sense— a

possible escape from agnosticism, moral disintegration, and Wollner's police.

CHAP.XXl) KANT 543

He thought that Rousseau had awakened him from "dogmatic slumber" in

ethics as Hume had done in metaphysics. 51 The first Critique belonged to the

Aufklarung; the second belonged to the Romantic movement; the attempt to

combine both was one of the subtlest performances in the history of philoso-

phy. Heine credited the attempt to solicitude for popular needs: the professor

saw his faithful servant Lampe weeping over the death of God; "then Im-

manuel Kant had compassion, and showed himself not only a great philoso-

pher but also a good man, and half kindly, half ironically he said: 'Old Lampe

must have a God, or he cannot be happy; ... for my part the practical rea-

son may, then, guarantee the existence of God.' " 52

IV. CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, 1790

Kant himself must have been dissatisfied with his arguments, for in a

Kritik der Urteilskraft he returned to the problem of mechanism versus free

will, and advanced to the conflict between mechanism and design; to which

he added complex dissertations on beauty, sublimity, genius, and art. It is

not an appetizing brew.

Urteilskraft— the power of judgment— "is in general the faculty of thinking

the particular as contained in the universal"; it is the act of bringing an ob-

ject, idea, or event under a class, or principle, or law. The first Critique had

tried to bring all ideas under the a priori universal categories; the second had

sought to bring all ethical concepts under a universal a priori moral sense;

the third undertook to find a priori principles for our aesthetic judgments—

of order, beauty, or sublimity in nature or art. 53 "I venture to hope that the

difficulty of unraveling a problem so involved in its nature may serve as an

excuse for a certain amount of hardly avoidable obscurity in its solution." 54

"Dogmatic" philosophy had attempted to find an objective element in

beauty; Kant feels that here, especially, the subjective element is pre-eminent.

Nothing is beautiful or sublime but feeling makes it so. We ascribe beauty to

any object the contemplation of which gives us disinterested pleasure— i.e., a

pleasure free from all personal desire; so we derive aesthetic, but no other,

satisfaction from a sunset, a Raphael, a cathedral, a flower, a concerto, or a

song. But why do certain objects or experiences give us this disinterested

pleasure? Probably because we see in them a union of parts functioning suc-

cessfully in a harmonious whole. In the case of the sublime we are pleased by

grandeur or power that does not threaten us; so we feel sublimity in the sky

or the sea, but not if their turbulence endangers us.

Our appreciation of beauty or sublimity is increased by accepting teleol-

ogy— i.e., by recognizing in organisms an inherent adaptation of parts to the

needs of the whole, and by feeling in nature a divine wisdom behind the co-

ordination and harmony, the grandeur and power. And yet science aims at

just the opposite— to show that all objective nature operates through mechan-

ical laws, without submission to any external design. How can w©> reconcile

these two approaches to nature? By accepting both mechanism and teleology

544 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXI

insofar as they help us as "heuristic" principles— as assumptions that facilitate

understanding or research. The mechanical principle helps us most in investi-

gating inorganic substances; the teleological principle serves best in studying

organisms. In these there are powers of growth and reproduction that baffle

mechanical explanation; there is a visible adaptation of parts to the purposes

of the organ or the organism, as of the claws for grasping and of the eyes for

sight. It would be wise to recognize that neither mechanism nor design can

be shown to be universally true. In a sense science itself is teleological, since

it assumes an intelligible order, regularity, and unity in nature, as if a divine

mind had organized it and sustains it. 55

Kant acknowledged many difficulties in viewing man and the world as

products of divine design.

The first thing that would have to be expressly arranged in a system ordered

with a view to a final whole of natural beings on the earth would be their

habitat— the soil or element on or in which they are intended to thrive. But a

more intimate knowledge of the nature of this basic condition of all organic

production shows no trace of any causes but those acting altogether without

design, and in fact tending toward destruction rather than calculated to pro-

mote genesis of forms, order, and ends. Land and sea not only contain memori-

als of mighty primeval disasters that have overtaken them and all their brood of

living forms, but their entire structure— the strata of the land and the coast lines

of the sea— has all the appearances of being the outcome of the wild and all-

subduing forces of a nature working in a state of chaos. 56

And yet again, if we abandon all notion of design in nature we take all moral

meaning out of life; life becomes a silly succession of painful births and

agonizing deaths, in which, for the individual, the nation, and the race, noth-

ing is certain except defeat. We must believe in some divine design if only

to maintain our sanity. And since teleology proves merely a struggling artifi-

cer instead of a divine and omnipotent benevolence, we must rest our faith

in life upon a moral sense that has no warrant except through belief in a just

God. With that creed we may believe— though we cannot prove— that the

just man is the final end of creation, the noblest product of the grand and

mysterious design. 57

V. RELIGION AND REASON, 1 793

Kant was never content with his hesitant as if theology. In 1 791, in a little

book On the Failure of All Philosophical Attempts at Theodicy, he repeated

that "our reason is altogether incapable of giving insight into the relation be-

tween the world . . . and the highest Wisdom." He added a caution, per-

haps to himself: "The philosopher should not play the part of a special

pleader in this matter; he should not defend any cause whose justice he is

unable to grasp, and which he cannot prove by means of the modes of

thought peculiar to philosophy." 58

He returned to the problem again in a series of essays which brought him

into open defiance of the Prussian government. The first of them, "On Radi-

CHAP.XXl) KANT 545

cal Evil," was printed in the Berliner Monatsschrift for April, 1792. The

censor allowed its publication on the ground that "only deep-thinking schol-

ars read the writings of Kant," 59 but he refused to allow the second essay,

"On the Contest between the Good and Evil Principles for the Control of

Man." Kant resorted to a stratagem. German universities had the privilege of

sanctioning books and articles for publication; Kant submitted the second,

third, and fourth essays to the philosophical faculty at the University of Jena

(then controlled by Goethe and Duke Karl August of Saxe- Weimar, and

having Schiller on its staff) ; the faculty gave its imprimatur; and with this

all four essays were printed at Konigsberg in 1793 under the title Die Reli-

gion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Religion within the Lim-

its of Reason Alone) .

The first lines announce the pervading theme: "So far as morality is based

upon the conception of man as a free agent, who, just because he is free,

blinds himself through his reason to unconditioned laws, it stands in need

neither of the idea of another Being over him for him to apprehend his duty,

nor of an incentive, other than the law itself, for him to do it. . . . Hence

for its own sake morality does not need religion at all." 60 Kant promises

obedience to the authorities, and admits the need of censorship, but he urges

that censorship "shall create no disturbance in the field of the sciences." 61

The invasion of science by theology, as in the case of Galileo, "might arrest

all the endeavors of human reason. . . . Philosophical theology . . . must

have complete freedom so far as its science reaches." 62

Kant derives the problems of morality from man's twofold inheritance of

good and evil tendencies. "That a corrupt propensity must indeed be rooted

in man need not be formally proved in view of the multitude of crying ex-

amples which experience . . . puts before our eyes." 63 He does not agree

with Rousseau that man is born good or was good in a "state of nature," but

he concurs with him in condemning the "vices of culture and civilization" as

"the most offensive of all." 64 "Indeed, it is still a question whether we should

not be happier in an uncivilized condition . . . than we are in the present

state of society" 65 with all its exploitation, hypocrisy, moral disorder, and

wholesale homicide in war. If we wish to know the real nature of man we

need only observe the behavior of states.

How did the "radical evil in human nature" begin? Not through "original

sin"; "surely of all the explanations of the spread and propagation of this evil

through all members and generations of our race, the most inept is that which

describes it as descending to us as an inheritance from our first parents." 66

Probably the "evil" propensities were strongly rooted in man by their neces-

sity to his survival in primitive conditions; only in civilization— in organized

society— do they become vices; and there they require not suppression but

control. 67 "Natural inclinations, considered in themselves, are good, that is,

not a matter for reproach; and not only is it futile to want to exterminate

them, but to do so would be harmful and blameworthy. Rather let them be

tamed, and instead of clashing with one another they can be brought into that

harmony in a wholeness which is called happiness." 68

546 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

Moral good is also innate, as evidenced by the universal moral sense; but

it is at first only a need, which must be developed by moral instruction and

arduous discipline. The best religion is not one that excels in the careful

observance of ritual worship but rather one that most influences men toward

a moral life. 69 A religion of reason bases itself not upon a divine revelation,

but upon a sense of duty interpreted as the divinest element in man. 70 Religion

may legitimately organize itself into a church, 71 it may seek to define its creed

through sacred scriptures, it may rightly worship Christ as the most Godlike

of men, it may promise heaven and threaten hell, 72 and "no religion can be

conceived which involves no belief in a future life." 73 But it should not be

necessary for a Christian to affirm faith in miracles, or the divinity of Christ,

or the atonement, by Christ's crucifixion, for the sins of mankind, or the pre-

destination of souls to heaven or hell by divine grace given with no regard to

good or evil works. 74 It is "necessary carefully to inculcate some forms of

prayer in children (who still stand in need of the letter)"; 75 but petitional

"prayer ... as a means of [winning divine] grace is a superstitious illu-

sion." 76

When a church becomes an institution for compelling belief or worship;

when it assumes to itself the sole right to interpret Scripture and define mo-

rality; when it forms a priesthood claiming exclusive approaches to God and

divine grace; when it makes its worship a magic ritual possessing miraculous

powers; when it becomes an arm of the government and an agent of intel-

lectual tyranny; when it seeks to dominate the state and to use secular rulers

as tools of ecclesiastical ambition— then the free mind will rise against such a

church, and will seek outside of it that "pure religion of reason" which is the

pursuit of the moral life. 77

This last major work of Kant was marked with the vacillation and obfusca-

tion natural to a man who had no passion for imprisonment. There is much

scholastic verbiage in it, some wondrous logic-chopping and fantastic theol-

ogy. The wonder remains that a man of sixty-nine should still display such

vigor of thought and speech, and such courage in combat with the united

powers of church and state. The conflict between the philosopher and the

King came to a head when (October 1, 1794) Frederick William II sent him

the following "order in council."

Our Most High Person has for a long time observed with great displeasure

how you misuse your philosophy to undermine and debase many of the most

important and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and Christianity;

how, namely, you have done this in your book, Religion within the Limits of

Reason Alone. . . . We demand of you immediately a most conscientious

answer, and expect that in the future, toward the avoidance of our highest

disfavor, you will give no such cause for offense, but rather, in accord with

your duty, employ your talents and authority so that our paternal purpose may

be more and more attained. If you continue to resist you may certainly expect

unpleasant consequences to yourself. 78

Kant gave a propitiatory reply. He pointed out that his writings were ad-

dressed only to scholars and theologians, whose freedom of thought should

CHAP.XXl) KANT 547

be preserved in the interest of the government itself. His book had admitted

the inadequacy of reason to judge the final mysteries of religious faith. He

concluded with a pledge of obedience: "I hereby, as your Majesty's most

faithful servant, solemnly declare that henceforth I will entirely refrain from

all public statements on religion, both natural and revealed, either in lectures

or in writings." When the King died (1797) Kant felt released from his

promise; moreover, Frederick William III dismissed Wollner (1797), abol-

ished the censorship, and repealed the Religionsedikt of 1788. After the battle

Kant summed up its issues in a booklet, Der Streit der Fakultaten (The Con-

flict of the Faculties, 1798), in which he repeated his claim that academic

freedom was indispensable to the intellectual growth of a society. Essentially

the little professor in a far-off corner of the world had won his battle against

a state having the strongest army in Europe. That state was soon to collapse,

but by 1 800 Kant's books were the most influential in the intellectual life of

Germany.

VI. THE REFORMER

He retired from lecturing in 1797 (aged seventy-three), but till 1798 he

continued to issue essays on vital themes. Despite his isolation he kept in

touch with world affairs. When the Congress of Basel assembled in 1795 to

arrange peace among Germany, Spain, and France, Kant took the occasion

(as the Abbe de Saint-Pierre had done with the Congress of Utrecht in 171 3)

to publish a brochure Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace) .

He began modestly by describing "eternal peace" as a fit motto for a

cemetery, and assuring statesmen that he did not expect them to take him as

anything more than a "scholastic pedant who can bring no danger to the

state." 79 Then, setting aside as temporizing trivia the articles of peace signed

at Basel, he drew up, as a committee of one, "six preliminary articles" out-

lining the conditions prerequisite to a lasting peace. Article I outlawed all

secret reservations or addenda to a treaty. Article II forbade the absorption

or domination of any independent state by another. Article III called for the

gradual elimination of standing armies. Article IV held that no state might

"interfere by force with the constitution of another." Article VI required

that no state at war with any other should "permit such acts of hostility as

would make mutual trust, in case of a future peace, impossible, such as the

employment of assassins or poisoners, . . . and the instigation of rebellion

in the enemy state."

Since no durable peace can be made between states that acknowledge no

limits to their sovereignty, persistent efforts must be made to develop an

international order and so provide a legal substitute for war. So Kant drew

up some "definite articles" for a lasting peace. First, "the constitution of

every state must be republican." Monarchies and aristocracies tend to fre-

quent wars, because the ruler and the nobles are usually protected from loss

to their lives and property in war, and so engage in it too readily as "the

sport of kings"; in a republic "it rests with the citizens to determine whether

54^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXI

war shall be declared or not," and they will bear the consequences; hence "it

is not likely that the citizens of a state [a republic] would ever enter on so

costly a game." 80 Second, "all international right must be grounded upon a

federation of free states." 81 This should not be a superstate; "indeed, war is

not so incurably bad as the deadness of a universal monarchy." 82 Each people

should determine its own government, but the separate states (at least of Eu-

rope) should unite in a confederation empowered to govern their external

relations. The ideal never to be abandoned is the practice by states of the

same moral code that they require of their citizens. Could such a venture pos-

sibly produce more evil than the perpetual practice of international deceit

and violence? In the end, Kant hoped, Machiavelli would be proved wrong;

there need be no contradiction between morality and politics; only "morals

can cut the knot which politics cannot unloose." 83

Kant obviously had delusions about republics (which have joined in the

most terrible wars of all) ; but we should note that by "republic" he meant con-

stitutional government rather than a complete democracy. He distrusted the

wild impulses of unchained men, 84 and feared universal suffrage as the em-

powerment of unlettered majorities over progressive minorities and noncon-

forming individuals. 85 But he resented hereditary privilege, class arrogance,

and the serfdom encompassing Konigsberg. He welcomed the American

Revolution, which, as he saw it, was creating a federation of independent

states along the lines that he had proposed for Europe. He followed the

French Revolution with almost youthful enthusiasm, even after the Septem-

ber Massacres and the Terror.

But, like nearly all followers of the Enlightenment, he put more faith in

education than in revolution. Here, as in so many fields, he felt the influence

of Rousseau and the Romantic movement. "We must allow the child from

his earliest years perfect liberty in every respect, . . . provided that . . .

he does not interfere with the liberty of others." 86 Soon he hedged on this

perfect liberty; some measure of discipline, he admitted, is necessary in the

formation of character; "neglect of discipline is a greater evil than neglect

of culture, for this last can be remedied later in life." 87 Work is the best dis-

cipline, and should be required at all stages of education. Moral education is

indispensable, and should begin early. Since human nature contains the seed

of both good and evil, all moral progress depends upon weeding out the evil

and cultivating the good. This should be done not through rewards and pun-

ishments, but by stressing the concept of duty.

Education by the state is no better than education by the church; the state

will seek to make obedient, pliable, patriotic citizens. It would be better to

leave education to private schools led by enlightened scholars and public-

spirited citizens; 88 hence Kant applauded the principles and schools of Johann

Basedow. He deplored the nationalistic bias of state schools and textbooks,

and hoped for a time when all subjects would be treated impartially. In 1784

he published an essay, Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in iveltburger-

licher Absicht {Ideas for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Stand-

point) ; it sketched the progress of mankind from superstition to enlighten-

CHAP. XXI ) KANT 549

ment, allowed only a minor role to religion, and called for historians who

would rise above nationalism.

Like the philosophies, he warmed his heart with faith in progress, moral as

well as intellectual. In 1793 he chided Moses Mendelssohn for saying that

every advance is canceled by retrogression.

Many proofs may be given that the human race on the whole, and especially

in our own as compared with all preceding times, has made considerable ad-

vances morally for the better. Temporary checks do not prove anything

against this. The cry of the continually increasing degradation in the race arises

just from this, that when one stands on a higher step of morality he sees fur-

ther before him, and his judgment on what men are, as compared with what

they ought to be, is more strict. 89

As Kant entered his last decade (1794) his early optimism suffered darken-

ing, perhaps because of reaction in Prussia and the coalition of the powers

against Revolutionary France. He retired into himself, and secretly wrote

that gloomy Opus postumum which was to be his last testament to mankind.

VII. POSTHUMOUS

Physically he was one of the smallest men of his time— just a little above

five feet in height, and made still shorter by a forward curvature of the spine.

His lungs were weak, his stomach ailed; he survived only by a regular and

abstemious regimen. It was characteristic of him that at seventy he wrote an

essay "On the Power of the Mind to Master the Feeling of Illness by Force

of Resolution." He stressed the wisdom of breathing through the nose; one

could avoid many colds, and other mishaps, by keeping his mouth shut. 90

So, in his daily walks, he walked alone, shunning conversation. He went to

bed punctually at ten, rose at five, and in thirty years (he assures us) never

overslept. 91 Twice he thought of marriage, twice he retreated. But he was not

unsociable; usually he invited one or two guests, most often his pupils— never

any woman— to share his dinner at 1 p.m. He was a professor of geography,

but rarely moved outside Konigsberg; he never saw a mountain, and prob-

ably—near though it was— never saw the sea. 92 He was sustained through pov-

erty and censorship by a pride that only outwardly yielded to any authority

other than his own reason. He was generous, but he was severe in his judg-

ments, and lacked that sense of humor which should save philosophy from

taking itself too seriously. His moral sense rose at times to an ethical pedantry

that held all pleasures suspect until they had proved themselves virtuous.

He cared so little for organized religion that he attended church only when

his academic functions required it. 93 He seems never to have prayed in his

mature life. 94 Herder reported that Kant's students based their religious skep-

ticism on Kant's teaching. 95 "It is indeed true," Kant wrote to Mendelssohn,

"that I think many things with the clearest conviction, and to my great satis-

faction, which I never have the courage to say, but I never say anything that

I do not think." 96

55° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXI

Till his last years he strove to improve his work. In 1798 he told a friend:

"The task with which I now busy myself has to do with the transition from

the metaphysical basis of the natural sciences to physics. This problem must

be solved, or otherwise here is a gap in the system of critical philosophy." 97

But in that letter he described himself as "incapacitated for intellectual

work." He entered into a long period of physical decline, accumulating ail-

ments, and the loneliness of unmarried old age. He died on February 12,

1804. He was buried in the Konigsberg cathedral, in what is now known as

the Stoa Kantiana; and over his grave were inscribed his words, "The starry

heavens above me; the moral law within me."

At his death he left a confused mass of writings which were published as

his Opus postumum in 1882-84. In one of these he described the "thing-in-

itself"— the unknowable substratum behind phenomena and ideas— as "not a

real thing, . . . not an existing reality, but merely a principle ... of the

synthetic a priori knowledge of the manifold sense-intuition." 98 He named it

a Gedankending, a thing existing only in our thought. And he applied the

same skepticism to the idea of God:

God is not a substance existing outside me, but merely a moral relation

within me. . . . The categorical imperative does not assume a substance issuing

its commands from on high, conceived therefore as outside me, but is a com-

mandment or a prohibition of my own reason. . . . The categorical imperative

represents human duties as divine commandments not in the historical sense, as

if [a divine being] had given commands to men, but in the sense that reason

. . . has power to command with the authority and in the guise of a divine

person. . . . The Idea of such a being, before whom all bend the knee, etc.,

arises out of the categorical imperative, and not vice versa. . . . The Ens

Summum [Supreme Being] is an ens rationis [a creation of reason], . . . not

a substance outside me."

So the Kantian philosophy, to which Christianity clung so long, in Germany

and later in England, as the last, best hope of theism, ended in a bleak con-

ception of God as a useful fiction developed by the human mind to explain

the apparent absoluteness of moral commands.

Kant's successors, not knowing his Opus postumu?n, acclaimed him as the

savior of Christianity, the German hero who had slain Voltaire; and they

magnified his achievement until his influence exceeded that of any other

modern philosopher. One disciple, Karl Reinhold, predicted that within a

century Kant's reputation would rival that of Christ. 100 All Protestant Ger-

mans (except Goethe) accepted Kant's claim that he had effected a "Co-

pernical revolution" in psychology: that instead of having the mind (the

sun) revolve around the object (the earth) he had made the object (things)

revolve around— and depend upon— the mind. The human ego was flattered

by being told that its intrinsic modes of perception were the determining

constituents of the phenomenal world. Fichte concluded (even before Kant

died) that the external world is a creation of the mind, and Schopenhauer,

accepting Kant's analysis, began his massive treatise The World as Will and

Idea with the announcement "The world is my idea"— which rather sur-

prised Mme. de Stael.

CHAP.XXl) KANT 55 1

Idealists rejoiced that Kant had made materialism logically impossible by

showing mind to be the only reality directly known to us. Mystics were

happy that Kant had restricted science to phenomena, had barred it from the

noumenal and really real world, and had left this shady realm (whose exist-

ence he secretly denied) as the private park of theologians and philosophers.

Metaphysics, which the philosophes had banished from philosophy, was re-

instated as the judge of all science; and Jean Paul Richter, conceding mastery

of the sea to Britain, and of the land to France, assigned to Germany the

mastery of the air. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel built metaphysical castles

upon the transcendental idealism of Kant; and even Schopenhauer's master-

piece took its start from Kant's emphasis upon the primacy of the will. "See,"

said Schiller, "how a single rich man has given a living to a number of

beggars." 101

German literature, too, soon felt Kant's influence, for the philosophy of

one age is likely to be the literature of the next. Schiller buried himself for

a while in Kant's tomes, wrote a letter of homage to their author, and, in his

prose essays, achieved an almost Kantian obscurity. Obscurity became a

fashion in German writing, a coat of arms attesting membership in the an-

cient order of web weavers. "On the whole," said Goethe, "philosophical

speculation is an injury to the Germans, as it tends to make their style vague,

difficult, and obscure. The stronger their attachment to certain philosophical

schools, the worse they write." 102

One would not readily think of Kant as romantic, but his learned-hazy

passages on beauty and sublimity became one of the founts of the Romantic

movement. Schiller's lectures at Jena, and his Letters on the Aesthetic Edu-

cation of Mankind ( 1 795)— milestones in that movement— grew out of study-

ing Kant's Critique of Judgment. The subjectivist interpretation of Kant's

theory of knowledge gave a philosophical basis to the romantic individualism

that flaunted its flag in Sturm und Drang. The Kantian literary influence

crossed to England, and affected Coleridge and Carlyle; it crossed to New

England and gave a name to the Transcendentalist movement of Emerson

and Thoreau. 103 The bent little professor of geography shook the world as he

trod the "Philosopher's Walk" in Konigsberg. Certainly he offered to phi-

losophy and psychology the most painstaking analysis of the knowledge

process that history has ever known.

CHAPTER XXII

Roads to Weimar

x 733- 8 7

I. THE ATHENS OF GERMANY

WHY did the supreme age of German literature make Weimar its

home? Germany had no one capital to concentrate her culture, as

France and England had, and no concentrated wealth to finance it. Berlin

and Leipzig had been weakened— Dresden had been almost destroyed— by the

Seven Years' War; Hamburg gave its money first to opera, then to the thea-

ter. In 1774 Weimar, capital of the duchy of Saxe- Weimar-Eisenach, was a

quiet little town of some 6,200 souls; even after it had become famous Goethe

spoke of it as "this small capital, which, as people jokingly say, has ten thou-

sand poets and a few inhabitants." 1 Was its glory made by great individuals?

From 1758 to 1775 Weimar was governed by a niece of Frederick the

Great, the vivacious Dowager Duchess Anna Amalie, who, at the age of

nineteen, had been widowed by the death of Duke Konstantin, and had be-

come regent for their one-year-old son Karl August. It was she who opened

a door between government and literature by inviting Wieland to come and

tutor her sons (1772). She was one of several cultivated women who, under

her lead, and till her death in 1807, stimulated poets, dramatists, and historians

with sex and praise. After 1776 she made her home a salon, and there— though

all spoke French as well— she encouraged the use of German as a language of

literature.

In 1775 the Weimar court included some twenty-two persons and their

servitors. The poet Count Christian zu Stolberg found a pleasant informality

there in that year of Goethe's arrival. "The old Duchess [then thirty-six]

is the very personification of good sense, and yet most agreeable and natural.

The Duke is a wonderful lad and full of promise; so is his brother. And many

excellent people." 2 In 1787 Schiller described "the Weimar ladies" as "very

sensitive; there is scarcely one of them that has not had an affaire de coeur.

They all strive to make conquests. ... A quiet, scarcely perceptible gov-

ernment allows everyone to live, and to bask in the air and sunshine. If one

is disposed to gaiety, every opportunity is offered." 3

Karl August assumed the government of the duchy on September 3, 1775,

at the age of eighteen. Shortly thereafter, having pensioned his mistress, 4

he took a wife, Princess Luise of Hesse-Darmstadt, and captured Goethe on

the way. He hunted with fury, drove his carriage wildly through the quiet

town, and passed hurriedly from woman to woman; but his impetuosity was

checked by an intellect that slowly matured into good judgment. He studied

55 2

CHAP.XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 553

and fostered agriculture and industry, cultivated the sciences, helped litera-

ture, and labored for the good of his principality and its people. Hear Mme.

de Stael, who toured Germany in 1803:

Of all the German principalities there is none that makes us feel more than

Weimar the advantages of a small state, when its sovereign is a man of strong

understanding, and is capable of endeavoring to please all classes of his subjects

without losing anything in their obedience. . . . The military talents of the

Duke are universally respected, and his lively and reflective conversation con-

tinually brings to our recollection that he was formed by the great Frederick.

It is by his own and his mother's reputation that the most distinguished men

of learning have been attracted to Weimar. Germany, for the first time, has a

literary metropolis. 5

11. wieland: 1733-75

Christoph Martin Wieland is the least known, but perhaps the most lov-

able, of the four men who made Weimar's fame. Almost all the influences of

the time played upon him and tuned his lyre in their turn. Son of a pastor in

Oberholzheim (near Biberach in Wiirttemberg) , he was nurtured in piety

and theology. When he discovered poetry, he made the virtuous Klopstock

his ideal, and then turned to Voltaire for relief. At nearby Warthausen he

found the extensive library of Count von Stadion; he plunged into French

and English literature, and sloughed off so much theology that in a romance,

Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764), he held up his boyhood faith to ridicule. He

published prose translations of twenty plays by Shakespeare (1762-66),

thereby giving Germany for the first time a view of Shakespeare as a whole,

and providing German playwrights with an escape from the classic formula

of French drama. Meanwhile Winckelmann and others were spreading the

Hellenic gospel; Wieland made his own version of it, adopted a light epi-

curean tone in Komische Erzdhlungen {Comic Tales, 1765), and made a

fictitious Greek the protagonist of his main prose work, Geschichte des Aga-

thon ( 1 766-67) . Lessing called it "the only novel for thinking men." 8

In its wandering pages Wieland (aged thirty-three) proposed to expound

his philosophy of life, exemplified in the physical and intellectual adventures

of an Athenian of the Periclean age. "Our plan," said the preface, "required

that our hero should be represented in a variety of trials," whose effect would

be to educate a man in integrity and wisdom without the use of religious

incentives or supports. 7 Agathon (i.e., Good), young and handsome, resists

the attempt of a Delphic priestess to seduce him; instead he develops for the

simple maiden Psyche (Soul) a pure though passionate love. He enters poli-

tics, becomes disgusted by the factionalism of parties, denounces the voters

for their lack of principle, and is banished from Athens. Wandering in the

mountains of Greece, he comes upon a band of Thracian women who are

celebrating the feast of Bacchus with wild and sensual dances. They mistake

Agathon for Bacchus, and almost stifle him with their embraces; he is rescued

by a pirate band, which sells him as a slave in Smyrna to Hippias, a Sophist

554 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXII

of the fifth century B.C. Wieland expounds the philosophy of the Sophists

with indignation:

The wisdom of which the Sophists made a profession was in quality, as well

as in effect, the exact opposite of that professed by Socrates. The Sophists

taught the art of exciting other men's passions [through oratory] ; Socrates in-

culcated the art of controlling one's own. The former showed how to appear

wise and virtuous, the latter how to be so. The former encouraged the youth of

Athens to assume control of the state; the latter pointed out to them that it

would take half their lifetime to learn how to rule themselves. The Socratic

philosophy took pride in going without riches; the philosophy of the Sophists

knew how to acquire them. It was complaisant, prepossessing, versatile; it

glorified the great, . . . dallied with women, and flattered everybody who

paid for it. It was everywhere at home, a favorite at court, in the boudoir, with

the aristocracy, even with the priesthood, while Socrates' doctrines . . . would

be pronounced unprofitable by the busy, insipid by the idle, and dangerous

by the devout. 8

Hippias, as Wieland pictures him, embodies all the ideas and vices of the

Sophists. He is a philosopher, but he has seen to it that he is also a millionaire.

He resolves to bring the upright Agathon to an epicurean way of thought and

life. The wisest policy, he argues, is to pursue pleasant sensations, and "all

pleasures are in reality sensual." 9 He laughs at those who deny themselves

mundane joys to gain heavenly delights that may never materialize. "Who

has ever seen those gods, and those spiritual beings, whose existence it [re-

ligion] asserts?" All that is a trick the priests play upon us. 10 Agathon con-

demns this philosophy as ignoring the spiritual element in man and the needs

of social order. Hippias introduces him to the rich and lovely Danae, encour-

ages her to seduce him, and conceals from him Danae's hetaera past. She

dances, and the grace of her body, added to the charm of her conversation

and the music of her voice, leads Agathon to offer her his full but virtuous

love. Danae spoils Hippias' plot by returning Agathon's love in kind. She, who

had passed through many arms, finds a new experience and happiness in Aga-

thon's devotion. Tired of soulless loves, she aspires to begin with Agathon a

new and purer life. She buys him from Hippias, frees him, and invites him

to share her wealth. Hippias, in revenge, reveals to Agathon Danae's career

as a courtesan. Agathon takes ship to Syracuse.

There he gains such repute for wisdom and integrity that he becomes

chief minister to the dictator Dionysius. By this time he has surrendered some

of his idealism:

He did not now have as highflown conceptions of human nature as before.

Or, rather* he had come to know the infinite distance between the metaphysi-

cal man, of whom one thinks or dreams in speculative solitude, or the natural

man as he proceeds in crude simplicity from the hands of the universal mother,

and the artificial man whom society, laws, opinions, needs, dependence, and

continual struggle of his desires with his circumstances, of his own advantage

with the advantage of others, and the consequent necessity of continual dis-

simulation and masking of his true intentions, have falsified, degraded, distorted,

and disguised, in a thousand unnatural and deceptive forms. He was no longer

the youthful enthusiast who imagined that it would be as easy to carry out a

CHAP. XXII ) ROADS TO WEIMAR 555

great undertaking as to conceive it. He had learned how little one ought to ex-

pect from others, how little one ought to count on their co-operation, and

(what is most important) how little one ought to trust oneself. . . . He had

learned that the most perfect plan is often the worst [and] that in the moral

world, as in the material, nothing moves in a straight line; in short, that life is

like a voyage, where the pilot must adapt his course to wind and weather,

where he is never sure that he will not be delayed or drifted aside by contrary

currents; and that everything depends upon this: amid a thousand deviations

from one's course, yet to hold one's mind unbendingly fixed upon the port of

destination. 11

Agathon serves Syracuse well and accomplishes some reforms, but a court

cabal deposes him, and he retires to Tarentum. There he is welcomed by his

father's old friend the Pythagorean philosopher and scientist Archytas (fl.

400-365 B.C.), who realizes Plato's dream of a philosopher-king. There Aga-

thon finds his youthful love Psyche, but, alas, she is married to Archytas'

son, and turns out to be Agathon's sister. However (with the magic wand of a

novelist) Danae is brought from Smyrna to Tarentum; she has abandoned her

epicurean ways to live in a demure modesty. Agathon, realizing that he had

sinned in deserting her, begs her forgiveness; she embraces him, but refuses

marriage; she has resolved to atone for the meandering morals of her past by

living her remaining years in continence. The story ends with Agathon in-

credibly content with sisters.

The book has a hundred faults. The structure is loose, the coincidences are

lazy evasions of artistry; the style is agreeable but diffuse; in many paragraphs

the subject avoids the predicate until it is forgotten; a critic greeted the au-

thor's birthday by wishing him a life as long as his sentences. Even so, The

History of Agathon is one of the major works of the Frederician age. Its

conclusions indicated that Wieland had reconciled himself with the world,

and could now be trusted to teach and tame stormy and stressful youths. In

1769 he was made professor of philosophy at Erfurt. Thence, three years

later, he issued Der goldene Spiegel {The Golden Mirror), which expressed

his ideas on education. Anna Amalie was charmed; she invited him to try his

pedagogy on her sons. He came, and spent the rest of his life in Weimar. In

1773 he founded Der teutsche Merkur (The German Herald), which under

his leadership was for a generation (1773-89) the most influential literary

review in Germany. He was the intellectual star of Weimar till Goethe came;

and when, in 1775, th e dashing young author of Wert her took the city by

storm, Wieland welcomed him without jealousy, and was to remain his

friend for thirty-six years.

III. GOETHE PROMETHEUS: 1 749-7 5

/. Growth

From the time when he trod the streets of Frankfurt-am-Main as con-

sciously the grandson of its mayor, to his septuagenarian years when his

casual conversation made the renown of his Boswell Eckermann, Johann

$$6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXII

Wolfgang von Goethe ran a full gamut of experience, absorbing all that life,

love, and letters could give him, and returning it gratefully in wisdom and

art.

Frankfurt was a "free city," dominated by merchants and fairs, but also

the imperially designated seat for the coronation of German kings and Holy

Roman emperors. In 1749 it contained 33,000 souls, nearly all pious, well-

behaved, and gemutlich. Goethe's birthplace was a substantial four-story

house (destroyed by fire in 1944, rebuilt in 195 1 ). His father, Johann Kaspar

Goethe, was the son of a prosperous tailor and innkeeper; he ruined his po-

litical career by pride and arrogance, and retired from the practice of law

to a life of amateur scholarship in his elegant library. In 1748 he married

Katharina Elisabeth, daughter of Johann Wolfgang Textor, Schultheiss or

Bur germeister of Frankfurt. Her son never forgot that through her he be-

longed to the untitled patriciate that had ruled the city for generations.

When he was seventy-eight he told Eckermann, "We Frankfurt patricians

always considered ourselves equal to the nobility; and when I held in my

hands the diploma of nobility [granted him in 1782], I had nothing more, in

my own opinion, than I had possessed long ago." 12 He felt that "nur die

Lumpe sind bescheiden"— only rascals are modest. 13

He was the eldest of six children, of whom only he and his sister Cornelia

survived childhood; in those days much parentage was love's labor lost. It

was not a happy household; the mother was of a kindly nature, inclined to

humor and poetry, but the father was a pedantic disciplinarian who alienated

his offspring by the harshness and impatience of his temper. "With my fa-

ther," Goethe recalled, "there could be no pleasant relation." 14 From him, as

well as from experience as a privy councilor, Goethe may have derived some-

thing of the stiffness that showed in his later life. From his mother he may

have taken his poetic spirit and his love of the drama. She built a marionette

theater in her home; her son never recovered from its fascination.

The children received their first education from their father, then from

tutors. Wolfgang acquired a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Eng-

lish, some Hebrew, and the ability to speak French and Italian. He learned

to play the harpsichord and the violoncello, to sketch and paint, to ride and

fence and dance. But he took life as his best teacher. He explored all quarters

of Frankfurt, including the Judengasse; he ogled the pretty Jewish girls,

visited a Jewish school, attended a circumcision, formed some notion of Jew-

ish holydays. 15 The Frankfurt fairs, by bringing into the city exotic faces

and goods, added to his education; so did the French officers in the Goethe

home during the Seven Years' War. In 1764 the fifteen-year-old boy saw the

coronation of Joseph II as King of the Romans; he sucked in every bit of it,

and spent twenty pages describing it in his autobiography. 16

At fourteen he had the first of the many love affairs that engendered half

of his poetry. He had already won a reputation for his facility in writing

verses. Some boys with whom he occasionally mingled asked him to compose

a poetic letter in the style of a girl to a youth; he did so well that they had it

delivered to a lovelorn member of the group as coming from the object of

CHAP.XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 557

his devotion. This lad wished to answer in kind but lacked wit and rhymes;

would Goethe compose a reply for him? Goethe consented, and in gratitude

the lover paid the expenses of an outing for the group to a suburban inn. The

waitress there was a lass in her teens, called Margarete— Gretchen for short;

Goethe gave that name to the heroine of Faust. Perhaps because of the ro-

mances he had read and the letters he had written, he was in a mood to

appreciate the charm of girlhood. "The first propensities to love in an un-

corrupted youth," he wrote at sixty, "take altogether a spiritual direction.

Nature seems to desire that one sex may by the senses perceive goodness and

beauty in the other. And so, by the sight of this girl, and by my strong in-

clination for her, a new world of the beautiful and the excellent was revealed

to me." 17 He never lost that world; one woman after another stirred his

sensitive spirit, almost always with reverence as well as desire; at the age of

seventy-three he fell in love with a girl of seventeen.

For a while he was too awed to speak to the charmer. "I went to church

for love of her, and . . . during the long Protestant service I gazed my fill

at her." 18 He saw her again at her inn, seated, like another Gretchen, at a

spinning wheel. Now she took the initiative, and gaily signed the second love

letter that he had fabricated as from a girl. Then one of the group, whom

Goethe had recommended to his grandfather, was caught falsifying bonds

and wills; Wolfgang's parents forbade him further association with those

boys; Gretchen moved to a distant town, and Goethe never saw her again.

He was much put out when he learned that she had said, "I always treated

him as a child." 19

He was quite content now (1765) to leave Frankfurt and study law at the

University of Leipzig. Like any eager youth he read widely outside of his

assigned subjects. He had already, in his father's library, browsed in Bayle's

Dictionnaire historique et critique, with much damage to his religious faith;

"and as soon as I reached Leipzig I tried to free myself altogether from my

connection with the church." 20 For a time he delved into mysticism, alchemy,

even magic; this too entered Faust. He tried his hand at etching and wood-

cuts, studied the picture collection at Dresden, frequently visited the painter

Oeser in Leipzig. Through Oeser he became acquainted with the writings of

Winckelmann; through these, and Lessing's Laokoon, he received his first

infusions of reverence for the classic style. He and other students were pre-

paring a hearty reception for Winckelmann at Leipzig when the news came

that Winckelmann had been murdered in Trieste ( 1768) .

The sense of beauty was predominant in his approach to the world. In re-

ligion he liked only its colorful and dramatic sacraments. He did not care

for philosophy as written by philosophers, except Spinoza; he shuddered at

logic and fled from Kant. He loved drama, wrote a worthless one at Leipzig,

and composed poetry almost every day, even while listening to lectures on

law. The poems which he published as Das Leipziger Liederbuch are in the

style of Anacreon, playful, sometimes erotic:

Yet I'm content, and full of joy,

If she'll but grant her smile so sweet,

558 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXII

Or if at table she'll employ,

To pillow hers, her lover's feet;

Give me the apple that she bit,

The glass, from which she drank, bestow,

And, when my kiss so orders it,

Her bosom, veiled till then, will show. 21

Was this merely wishful thinking? Apparently not. He had found in Leip-

zig a pretty head— Annette Schonkopf— who was willing to enter at least the

vestibule of love. She was the daughter of a wine merchant who served a

midday meal to students; Goethe ate there frequently, and fell in desire with

her. She returned his ardor with judicious reserve, and allowed other men to

be attentive to her; he grew jealous, and took to spying on her; they quarreled

and made up, quarreled and made up, quarreled and parted. Even in these

ecstasies he reminded himself that he was the grandson of a Bur germeister,

and that he had in him a daimon— the urge and drive of an omnivorous genius

that demanded freedom for its full development to its own imperative des-

tiny. Annette accepted another suitor.

Goethe counted this a defeat, and tried to forget it in dissipation. "I had

lost her really, and the frenzy with which I revenged my fault upon myself

by assaulting in various frantic ways my physical nature, in order to inflict

some hurt on my moral nature, contributed very much to the bodily maladies

under which I lost some of the best years of my life." 22 He sank into melan-

choly, suffered from nervous indigestion, developed a painful tumor in the

neck, and woke up one night with an almost fatal hemorrhage. He left Leip-

zig without taking his degree, and returned to Frankfurt (September, 1768)

to face paternal reproofs and maternal love.

During his long convalescence he made the acquaintance of Susanne von

Klettenberg, an ailing, kindly Moravian Pietist. "Her serenity and peace of

mind never left her; she looked upon her sickness as a necessary element of

her transient earthly existence." 23 He described her, years later, with sym-

pathy and skill in the "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul" which he inserted

into Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, but he recorded very debonairly her claims

that his nervousness and melancholy were due to his failure to reconcile him-

self to God.

Now I had believed, from my youth upward, that I stood on very good

terms with my God— nay, I even fancied . . . that he might be in arrears to

me, as I was daring enough to think that I had something to forgive him. This

presumption was grounded on my infinite good will, to which, it seemed to

me, he should have given better assistance. It may be imagined how often I

got into disputes on this subject with my friends, which, however, always

terminated in the friendliest way. 24

Nevertheless he experienced stray moments of piety, even to attending some

sessions of the Moravian Brethren; but he was repelled by the "mediocre

intelligence" of these simple people, 25 and soon returned to his casual com-

bination of pantheistic faith and rationalistic doubt.

In April, 1770, he departed for Strasbourg, hoping to get his law degree.

A fellow student described him (then twenty-one) as "a handsome figure,

CHAP. XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 559

with a magnificent forehead and great, flashing eyes," but added, "All would

not be smooth sailing with this young man, for he seemed to have a wild and

unsettled air." 26 Perhaps his long illness had unnerved him; his "daimon" was

too unsettling to let him gain stability; but what youth with fire coursing in

his blood can enjoy repose? When he stood before the great cathedral he

hailed it patriotically as not Catholic but "German architecture, our archi-

tecture, for the Italians can boast of none like it, still less the French." 27 (He

had not yet seen Italy or France.) "Alone I climbed to the highest peak of

the tower, . . . and ventured at that elevation to step out on a platform

which measured scarcely a square yard. ... I inflicted this terror and tor-

ture upon myself so many times until the experience became a matter of

indifference to me." 28 One of his professors noted that "Herr Goethe behaved

himself in a way which caused him to be regarded as a meretricious pre-

tender to scholarship, a frantic opponent of all religious teaching ... It

was the well-nigh universal opinion that he had a slate loose in the upper

story." 29

A dozen new experiences served to feed his flame. He met Herder several

times during the latter's stay in Strasbourg. Herder, five years older, domi-

nated these encounters; Goethe, in a modest interlude, called himself a

"planet" revolving around Herder's sun. He was disturbed by Herder's dic-

tatorial tendency, but was stimulated by him to read old ballads, Macpher-

son's "Ossian," and (in Wieland's translation) Shakespeare. But also he read

Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. Besides pursuing his work in law, he took

courses in chemistry, anatomy, obstetrics . . . And he continued his study

of women.

He felt their charm with all the keen sensitivity of a poet, all the electric

incandescence of youth. Forty-seven years later he told Eckermann that he

believed in a mysterious magnetic effect of one person upon another, and

most of all through difference of sex. 30 He was stirred by the light and

prancing walk of girls, by the music of their voices and laughter, by the

color and rustle of their dress; and he envied the intimacy of the flower they

sometimes wore in their corsage or their hair. One after another of these

magic creatures called to his blood, grew in his imagination, and moved his

pen. There had already been Gretchen and Annette; soon there would be

Lotte and Lili and Charlotte; later Minna and Ulrike. But now, at Sesenheim

(near Strasbourg), there was the most appealing of them all, Friederike

Brion.

She was the younger daughter (nineteen in 1771) of the town pastor,

whom Goethe compared to Goldsmith's virtuous Vicar of Wakefield. The

pages about Friederike in Goethe's autobiography are the finest prose he

ever wrote. 31 Several times he rode out from Strasbourg to enjoy the un-

spoiled simplicity of this rural family. He took Friederike for long walks,

for she was most at home in the open air. She fell in love with him, and gave

him all that he asked. "In a lonely place in the forest we embraced each other

with deep emotion, and gave each other the most faithful assurance that each

loved the other from the bottom of the heart." 32 Soon he was confessing to a

560 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXII

friend that "one is not happier by a hair's breadth by attaining the object of

his wishes."

Meanwhile he was writing, in Latin, his doctoral thesis, which affirmed

(like "Febronius") the right of the state to be independent of the church. It

won the approval of the university faculty; he passed the examinations, and

on August 6, 177 1, he received his degree as a licentiate at law. The time had

come to leave Strasbourg. He rode out to Sesenheim to say goodbye to

Friederike. "When from my horse I reached her my hand, the tears stood in

her eyes, and I felt very uneasy. . . . Having at last escaped the excitement

of a farewell, I, in a quiet and peaceful journey, pretty well regained my self-

possession." 33 Remorse came later. "Gretchen had been taken away from me;

Annette had left me; now for the first time I was guilty. I had wounded the

most lovely heart to its very depths; and the period of a gloomy repentance—

with the absence of a refreshing love, to which I had become accustomed—

was most agonizing." 34 It is sadly self-centered; but which of us, in the trial

and error of love, has not wounded one or two hearts before winning one?

Friederike died unmarried, April 3, 181 3.

2. Gotz and Werther

In Frankfurt the new licentiate grudgingly practiced law. He visited

Darmstadt occasionally, and felt the influence of its cult of sentiment. He

was now in a strong reaction against France, against French drama and its

rigid rules, even against Voltaire. More and more he relished Shakespeare,

who had put the nature of man, lawful or lawless, upon the stage. In this

mood, and in the exuberant vigor of youth, he was ripe for Sturm und Drang.

He sympathized with its rejection of authority, its exaltation of instinct over

intellect, of the heroic individual over the tradition-imprisoned masses. And

so, in 1772-73, he wrote Gotz von Berlichingen.

It was a remarkable performance for a lad of twenty-three: a drama unit-

ing war, love, and treachery in a story warm with zeal for liberty, exuding

vitality, and holding the interest from beginning to end. Gotz was a knight

whose right hand had been shot off in battle when he was twenty-four

( 1 504) ; an iron hand had been attached to his arm, and with it he wielded his

sword as lethally as before. Refusing to acknowledge any overlord but the

Emperor, he became one of those "robber barons" who, in the name of free-

dom, claimed full authority on their lands, even to pillaging wayfarers and

waging private war. In 1495 Emperor Maximilian I had issued an edict against

private wars, under the double penalty of ban by the Empire and excom-

munication by the Church. Gotz of the Iron Hand rejected the ban as con-

travening traditional rights, and the play turned at first on the struggle be-

tween the rebel knight and the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg. Goethe, loving

women much more than war, let the center of interest pass to Adelaide von

Walldorf, whose beauty and wealth fired a dozen men with reckless pas-

sion. For her Adelbert von Weislingen, another "free" knight, broke his

alliance with Gotz and his troth with Gotz's sister Maria, and went over to

CHAP.XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 561

the Bishop. Perhaps in Weislingen's vacillating love Goethe remembered his

own unfaithfulness. He sent a copy of the play to Friederike by a friend,

saying, "Poor Friederike will feel somewhat consoled when she sees that the

faithless lover is poisoned." 35

The author colored history to suit his drama; Gottfried von Berlichingen

was not so noble and magnanimous as Goethe's Gotz; but such emendations

are poetic licenses, like tortured rhymes. Forgivable, too, is the rough, wild

speech which Goethe ascribed to his hero as echoing virility. When the play

was produced in Berlin (1774) Frederick the Great condemned it as a "de-

testable imitation" of the "barbarism" that he, like Voltaire, saw in Shake-

speare, and he called upon German dramatists to seek their models in France.

Herder at first agreed with Frederick, and told Goethe, "Shakespeare has

ruined you"; 36 but he sent the published version to his friends with high

praise: "You have hours of enchantment before you. There is an uncommon

degree of authentic German power, depth, and sincerity in the piece, though

now and then it is merely an intellectual exercise." 37 The younger generation

hailed Gotz as the supreme expression of Sturm und Drang. German readers

were glad to hear of medieval knights, symbols of the mighty German char-

acter. Protestants relished the echoes of Luther in "Brother Martin," who

complains that his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are unnatural,

who describes woman as "the glory and crown of creation," welcomes wine

as "rejoicing the heart of man," and overturns an old adage by saying that

"joyousness is the mother of every virtue." 38 Even Goethe's father, who had

to help him with his law and regarded him as a deterioration of the paternal

stock, admitted that perhaps there was something in the lad after all.

In May, 1772, the young advocate had to go on legal business to Wetzlar,

seat of the Imperial Appellate Court. Not at all absorbed in law, he wandered

through fields, woods, and boudoirs, drawing, writing, absorbing. In Wetzlar

he met Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, poet and mystic, and Georg Christian Kest-

ner, a notary whom Goethe described as "distinguished by a calm and

equable demeanor, clearness of view, . . . serene and tireless activity," 39 and

so confident of advancement that he was already engaged to marry. Kestner

described Goethe magnanimously:

Twenty-three years old, the only son of a very wealthy father. According

to his father's intention he was to practice law at the court here; according to

his own he was to study Homer and Pindar and whatever else his genius, his

taste, and his heart should inspire. . . . Indeed, he has true genius, and is a man

of character. He possesses an imagination of extraordinary vividness, and ex-

presses himself in images and similes . . . His feelings are violent, but he is

usually master of them. His convictions are noble. He is quite free from preju-

dice, and acts as he likes without caring whether it pleases others, or is the

fashion, or is permissible. All compulsion is hateful to him. He loves children,

and can play with them for hours. . . . He is a quite remarkable man. 40

On June 9, 1772, at a country dance, Goethe met Kestner's betrothed,

Charlotte Buff. The next day he visited her, and found a new charm in

womanhood. "Lotte," then twenty, was the eldest sister in a family of eleven.

The mother was dead, the father was busy earning a living; Lotte served as

562 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXII

mother to the brood. She not only had the bright gaiety of a healthy girl, she

had also the attractiveness of a young woman who, simply but neatly dressed,

performed the duties of her place with competence, affection, and good

cheer. Goethe soon fell in love with her, for he could not remain long with-

out some feminine image warming his imagination. Kestner saw the situation,

but, sure of his possession, showed an amiable tolerance. Goethe allowed

himself almost the privileges of a rival wooer, but Lotte always checked him,

and reminded him that she was engaged. Finally he asked her to choose be-

tween them; she did, and Goethe, his pride only momentarily shaken, left

Wetzlar the next day (September 11). Kestner remained his loyal friend till

death.

Before returning to Frankfurt Goethe stopped at Ehrenbreitstein on the

Rhine, the home of Georg and Sophie von La Roche. Sophie had two daugh-

ters, "of whom the eldest," Maximiliane, "soon particularly attracted me.

... It is a very pleasant sensation when a new passion begins to stir in us

before the old one is quite extinct. Thus, when the sun is setting, one likes to

see the moon rise on the opposite side." 41 Maximiliane, however, married

Peter Brentano, and bore a lively daughter Bettina, who fell in love with

Goethe thirty-five years later. Goethe resigned himself to Frankfurt and law.

Not quite, for at times he thought of suicide.

Among a considerable collection of weapons I possessed a handsome, well-

polished dagger. This I laid every night by my bed, and before extinguishing

the candle I tried whether I could succeed in plunging the sharp point a cou-

ple of inches deep into my heart. Since I could never succeed in this, I at last

laughed myself out of the notion, threw off all hypochondriacal fancies, and re-

solved to live.

To be able to do this with cheerfulness I was obliged to solve a literary

problem, by which all that I had felt . . . should be reduced to words. For this

purpose I collected the elements which had been at work in me for a few

years; I rendered present to my mind the cases which had most affected and

tormented me; but nothing would come to a definite form. I lacked an event,, a

fable, in which they could be seen as a whole. 42

A fellow advocate at Wetzlar provided the amalgamating event. On Oc-

tober 30, 1772, Wilhelm Jerusalem, having borrowed a pistol from Kestner,

killed himself in despair over his love for the wife of a friend. "All at once,

[when] I heard the news of Jerusalem's death," Goethe recalled, ". . . the

plan of Werther was formed, and the whole ran together from all sides." 43

Perhaps so, but it was not until fifteen months later that he began to write

the book. Meanwhile he carried on with Maximiliane Brentano— who had

moved with her husband to Frankfurt— a flirtation so persistent that the hus-

band protested, and Goethe withdrew.

A variety of abortive literary projects distracted him. He dallied with the

idea of retelling the story of the Wandering Jew; he planned to have him

visit Spinoza, and to show that Satan, to all appearances, was triumphing over

Christ in Christendom; 44 but he wrote only ten pages of Der etvige Jude. He

composed some satires on Jacobi, Wieland, Herder, Lenz, and Lavater, but

managed to win their friendship nevertheless. He contributed to Lavater's

CHAP.XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 563

Physio gnomische Fragmente, and allowed him to physiognomize his head,

with flattering results: "Intelligence is here, with sensibility to kindle it,"

judged the Swiss. "Observe the energetic brow, . . . the eye so swiftly

penetrating, searching, enamored, . . . and the nose, in itself enough to pro-

claim the poet. . . . With the virile chin, the well-opened vigorous ear—

who could question the genius in this head?" 45 — and who could live up to

such a cephalogram? Jacobi thought it could be done, for, after visiting

Goethe in July, 1773, he described him in a letter to Wieland as "from head

to toe all genius; a man possessed, who is destined to act according to the

dictates of the individual spirit." 48

At last, in February, 1774, Goethe wrote the book that gave him a Euro-

pean renown— Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. He had thought of it so

long, had so long rehearsed it in brooding and fancy, that now he dashed it

off, he tells us, "in four weeks. ... I isolated myself completely, I forbade

the visits of my friends." 47 Fifty years later he said to Eckermann, "That was

a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart." 48

He killed Werther to give himself peace.

He was inspired in making the book brief. He used the letter form, partly

in imitation of Richardson's Clarissa and Rousseau's Julie, partly because it

lent itself to the expression and analysis of emotion, and perhaps because in

that form he could use some of the letters he had written from Wetzlar to his

sister Cornelia or to his friend Merck. He shocked Charlotte and Kestner by

giving her actual name, Lotte, to the object of a love obviously describing

Goethe's passion for Kestner's bride. Kestner became "Albert," and was

favorably portrayed. Even the meeting at the dance, and the morrow's visit,

were in the story as they had been in fact. "Since that day sun, moon, and

stars can go calmly about their business, but I am conscious neither of day

nor of night, and the whole world around me is fading away. ... I have no

more prayers to say except to her." 49 Werther is not quite Goethe: he is more

sentimental, more given to tears and gushing words and self-commiseration.

In order to lead the narrative to its tragic denouement, Werther had to be

changed from Goethe to Wilhelm Jerusalem. The final touches echo his-

tory: Werther, like Jerusalem, borrows Albert's pistol for his suicide, and

Lessing's Emilia Galotti lies on his desk as he dies. "No clergyman escorted

him" to his grave.

The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774) was an event in the history of

literature and of Germany. It expressed and promoted the romantic element

in Sturm und Drang, as Gotz von Berlichingen had expressed the heroic. Re-

bellious youth acclaimed it with praise and imitation; some dressed in blue

coat and buff vest like Werther, some wept like Werther; some committed

suicide as the only fashionable thing to do. Kestner protested at the invasion

of his privacy, but was soon appeased, and we are not told that Charlotte

complained when Goethe told her, "Your name is uttered in reverence by

thousands of adoring lips." 50 The German clergy did not join in the applause.

A Hamburg preacher denounced Werther as an apology for suicide; Pastor

Goeze, Lessing's enemy, blasted the book, and Lessing condemned it for its

564 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXII

sentimentality and lack of classic restraint. 51 At a public dinner the Reverend

J. C. Hasenkampf censured Goethe to his face for "that wicked piece of

writing," and added, "May God improve your perverse heart!" Goethe de-

flated him with a soft answer: "Remember me in your prayers." 52 Mean-

while the little book swept through Europe in a dozen translations, three in

France in three years; now for the first time France admitted that Germany

had a literature.

3. The Young Atheist

The clergy had some excuse for worrying about Goethe, for he was in

this stage openly hostile to the Christian Church. "He reveres the Christian

religion," Kestner wrote in 1772, "but not in the form our theologians give

it. . . . He does not go to church, nor to Communion, and he rarely

prays." 53 Goethe was especially averse to the Christian emphasis on sin and

contrition; 54 he preferred to sin without remorse. He wrote to Herder (about

1774) : "If only the whole teaching of Christ were not such bilge that I, as a

human being, a poor limited creature of desires and needs, am infuriated by

it!" 55 He planned a drama on Prometheus as a symbol of man defying the

gods; he wrote little more than a prologue, which shocked Jacobi and pleased

Lessing. What remains of it is the most radical of Goethe's antireligious out-

bursts. Prometheus speaks:

Cover thy heaven, Zeus, with cloudy mist,

And disport yourself ^like a child who cuts off thistle heads—

On oaks and mountain peaks!

My earth you must still let stand,

And my cottage, which you did not build,

And my hearth, whose glow you envy me.

I know nothing poorer under the sun than you, O gods!

You nourish your majesty with difficulty

From sacrifices and votive prayers,

And it would starve,

Were not children and beggars such hopeful fools.

When I was but a child, and knew not what to think,

My erring eyes turned to the sun,

As if there might be an ear to hear my plaint,

A heart like mine

To pity a troubled soul.

Who helped me against the Titans' insolence?

Who rescued me from death, from slavery?

Has not my own holy, glowing heart

Accomplished all this by itself, but, young and good,

And deceived, gives thanks to that Sleeping One up there?

Honor thee? Why?

Have you ever lightened the sorrows of the heavy-laden?

Have you ever dried the tears of the anguish-stricken?

Have I not been molded into a man

By almighty Time and everlasting Fate—

My masters and yours? . . .

CHAP. XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 565

Here sit I, forming men after my image,

A race that may be like me,

To grieve and weep, to enjoy and be glad,

And to disdain you, as I do.

From this nadir of proud atheism Goethe moved slowly to the gentler

pantheism of Spinoza. Lavater reported that "Goethe told us many things

about Spinoza and his writings. ... He had been an extremely just, upright,

poor man. . . . All modern deists had drawn primarily from him. . . . His

correspondence, Goethe added, was the most interesting in the whole world

as concerned uprightness and love of humanity." 56 Forty-two years later

Goethe told Karl Zelter that the writers who had most influenced him were

Shakespeare, Spinoza, and Linnaeus. 57 On June 9, 1785, he acknowledged

the receipt of Jacobi's book On the Teachings of Spinoza; his discussion of

Jacobi's interpretation reveals considerable study of the Jewish philosopher-

saint. "Spinoza," he wrote, "does not demonstrate the existence of God; he

demonstrates that existence [the matter-mind reality] is God. Let others call

him an atheist on this account; I am inclined to call him and praise him as

most godly, and even most Christian. ... I receive from him the most

wholesome influences upon my thinking and acting." 58 In his autobiography

Goethe remarked on his reply to Jacobi:

Happily I had already prepared myself, . . . having in some degree appro-

priated the thoughts and mind of an extraordinary man. . . . This mind,

which had worked upon me so decisively, and was destined to affect so deeply

my whole mode of thought, was Spinoza. After looking through the world

in vain to find a means of development for my strange nature, I at last fell upon

the Ethics of this philosopher. ... I found in it a sedative for my passions;

and a free, wide view over the sensible and moral world seemed to open before

me. ... I was never so presumptuous as to think that I understood perfectly

a man who . . . raised himself, through mathematical and rabbinical studies,

to the highest reach of thought, and whose name, even at this day, seems to

mark the limit of all speculative efforts. 59

He gave added warmth to his Spinozistic pantheism by the intensity with

which he loved nature. It was not merely that he found delight in bright

fields, or mystic woods, or plants and flowers multiplying with such exuber-

ant diversity; he also loved nature's sterner moods, and liked to fight his way

through wind or rain or snow, and up to perilous mountaintops. He spoke of

nature as a mother from whose breast he sucked the sap and zest of life. In

a prose-poem rhapsody, Die Natur (1780), he expressed with religious feel-

ing his humble surrender to, his happy absorption in, the generative and

destructive forces that envelop man.

Nature! By her we are surrounded and encompassed— unable to step out of

her, and unable to enter deeper into her. She receives us, unsolicited and un-

warned, into the circle of her dance, and hurries along with us, till we are ex-

hausted, and drop out of her arms. . . .

She creates ever new forms; what now is, was never before; what was, comes

not again; all is new, and yet always the old. . . .

She seems to have contrived everything for individuality, but cares nothing

566 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXII

for individuals. She is ever building, ever destroying, and her workshop is in-

accessible . . .

She has thought, and is constantly meditating; not as a man, but as nature.

She has an all-embracing mind of her own; no one can penetrate it. . . .

She lets every child tinker with her, every fool pass judgment on her; thou-

sands stumble over her and see nothing; she has her joy in all. . . .

She is kindly. I praise her with all her works. She is wise and quiet. One can

tear no explanation from her, extort from her no gift which she gives not of

her own free will. . . .

She has placed me here, she will lead me away. I trust myself to her. She

may do as she likes with me. She will not hate her work. 60

In December, 1774, Duke Karl August stopped at Frankfurt en route to

seek a bride at Karlsruhe. He had read and admired Gotz von Berlichingen;

he invited the author to meet him. Goethe came and made a favorable impres-

sion; the Duke wondered might not this handsome and mannerly genius be an

ornament of the Weimar court. He had to hurry on, but asked Goethe to

meet him again on his return from Karlsruhe.

Goethe spoke often of destiny, too little of chance. He might have an-

swered that it was destiny, not chance, that brought him to the Duke, and

that it turned him from the loveliness of Lili Schonemann to Weimar's un-

known perils and opportunities. Lili was the only daughter of a rich mer-

chant in Frankfurt. Goethe, now a social lion, was invited to a reception in

her home. She performed brilliantly at the piano; Goethe leaned over a

corner of it and drank in her sixteen-year-old charms as she played. "I was

sensible of feeling an attractive power of the gentlest kind. . . . We grew

into the habit of seeing each other. . . . We were now necessary to each

other. . . . An irresistible longing dominated me" 61 — so rapidly can that

famous fever rise, blown up by a poet's sensitivity. Before* he quite realized

what it meant, he was officially engaged (April, 1775). Then Lili, thinking

him securely captured, coquetted with others. Goethe saw and fumed.

Just at this time two friends, Counts Christian and Friedrich zu Stolberg,

came to Frankfurt on their way to Switzerland. They suggested that Goethe

join them. His father urged him to go, and to continue on into Italy. "With

some intimation, but without leavetaking, I separated myself from Lili." 62

He started out in May, 1775; at Karlsruhe he met the Duke again, and was

definitely invited to Weimar. He went on to Zurich, where he met Lavater

and Bodmer. He climbed St. Gotthard, and looked longingly at Italy. Then

the image of Lili regained ascendancy; he left his companions, turned home-

ward, and in September had Lili in his arms. But, back in his room, he felt

again his old dread of marriage as imprisonment and stagnation. Lili resented

his vacillation; they agreed to break off their betrothal; in 1776 she married

Bernhard von Tiirckheim.

The Duke, briefly at Frankfurt on his way back from Karlsruhe, offered

to send a coach to take Goethe to Weimar. Goethe consented, made his

arrangements, and waited for the appointed day. The coach did not come.

Had he been played with and deceived? After some days of fretful delay, he

started out for Italy. But at Heidelberg the promised coach caught up with

CHAP.XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 567

him; the Duke's emissary made explanations and apologies; Goethe accepted

them. On November 7, 1775, he reached Weimar, aged twenty-six, torn as

always between Eros and Destiny, longing for woman, but resolved to be

great.

iv. herder: 1744-76

Hardly a month after Goethe's arrival at Weimar he passed on to the

Duke, with warm approval, Wieland's suggestion that the vacant post of

Generalsuperintendent of the clergy and the schools of the duchy be offered

to Johann Gottfried Herder. The Duke agreed.

Born at Mohrungen in East Prussia (August 25, 1744), Herder was, by

geography and Baltic mists, akin to Immanuel Kant. His father was a poor

schoolmaster and Pietist cantor, so that the boy had all the uses of adversity.

From the age of five he suffered from a fistula in the right eye. Soon required

to add to the family income, he left school to become secretary and servant

to Sebastian Trescho, who made •<: good living by writing handbooks of

piety. Trescho had a library, which johann consumed. At eighteen he was

sent to Konigsberg to have the fistula removed, and to study medicine at the

university. The operation failed, and the dissection classes so upset the

youth's stomach that he turned from medicine to theology.

He formed a friendship with Hamann, who taught him English, using

Hamlet as a text; Herder learned almost all the play by heart. He attended

Kant's lectures on geography, astronomy, and Wolff's philosophy; Kant

liked him so much that he excused him from the fees charged for the courses.

Herder supported himself by translating and tutoring, and from the age of

twenty to twenty-five he taught in the cathedral school at Riga. At twenty-

one he was ordained a Lutheran minister; at twenty-two he became a Free-

mason; 63 at twenty-three he was appointed adjutant pastor in two churches

near Riga. He broke into print at twenty-two with a volume Vber die

neuere deutsche Litteratur; he added a second and third tome to it a year

later; Kant, Lessing, Nikolai, and Lavater were impressed by the young

author's learning, and they commended his appeal for a national literature

liberated from foreign tutelage.

Herder anticipated the Werther fashion by falling hopelessly in love with

a married woman; he suffered so severe a physical and mental depression

that he was given a leave of absence with promise of re-employment at a

better salary on his return. He borrowed money, left Riga (May 23, 1769),

and never saw it again. He went by ship to Nantes, stayed there four months,

and passed to Paris. He met Diderot and d'Alembert, but he was never won

to the French Enlightenment.

His bent was aesthetic rather than intellectual. In Paris he began to collect

primitive poetry, and found in it more delight than in the classic literature

of France. He read Macpherson's "Ossian" in a German translation, and

pronounced these skillful imitations superior to most modern English verse

after Shakespeare. He began in 1769 those essays in artistic and literary criti-

568 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXII

cism which he called Waldchen (groves) ; three volumes of these he pub-

lished in his lifetime as Kritische Wilder (Critical Woods). In February,

1770, he spent fourteen days in fruitful contact with Lessing at Hamburg.

Then he joined the Prince of Holstein-Gottorp as tutor and companion, and

traveled with him through western Germany. In Cassel he met Rudolph

Raspe, professor of archaeology and soon to be author of Baron Mun-

chausen's Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia

(1785). Raspe had called the attention of Germany to Thomas Percy's

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in the year of its appearance (1765).

Herder was strengthened in his belief that poets should abandon the Win-

ckelmann-Lessing call for imitation of Greek classics, and should rather cling

to the popular sources of their nation's traditions in folk poetry and ballad

history.

Passing with the Prince to Darmstadt, Herder met its "Circle of Sensi-

tives," took kindly to their exaltation of sentiment, and especially appreci-

ated the sentiments of Caroline Flachsland, the orphaned sister-in-law of

Privy Councilor Andreas von Hesse. He was invited to preach in a local

church. She heard him and was moved; they walked in the woods; they

touched hands and he was moved. He proposed. She warned him that she

lived on the charity of her sister, and could bring him no dowry; he replied

that he was heavily in debt, ha<J only the dimmest prospects, and was com-

mitted to accompany the Prince. They pledged each other no formal troth,

but agreed to love each other by mail. On April 27, 1770, his party left for

Mannheim.

When it reached Strasbourg Herder, though he longed to see Italy, left

the Prince. The fistula in his lachrymal gland blocked the tear duct to the

nostril, causing constant pain. Dr. Lobstein, professor of gynecology at the

university, promised that an operation would clear up the matter in three

weeks. Herder submitted, without anesthetics, to repeated drilling of a chan-

nel through the bone to the nasal passage. Infection set in, and for almost

six months Herder was confined to his hotel room, discouraged by the fail-

ure of the operation, and gloomy with doubts of his future. It was in this

mood of suffering and pessimism that he met Goethe (September 4, 1770).

"I was able to be present at the operation," Goethe recalled, "and to be serv-

iceable in many ways." 64 He was inspired by Herder's view that poetry

arose instinctively among the people, not from "a few refined and cultivated

men." 65 When Herder left, his funds quite exhausted, Goethe "borrowed a

sum of money for him," which Herder later repaid.

Reluctantly he accepted an invitation from Count Wilhelm zu Lippe,

ruler of the little principality of Schaumburg-Lippe, in northwest Germany,

to serve him as court preacher and consistory president in his modest capital,

Biickeburg. In April, 1771, Herder left Strasbourg, visited Caroline at Darm-

stadt and Goethe at Frankfurt, and reached Biickeburg on the twenty-

eighth. He found the Count an "enlightened despot" of a rigid disciplinarian

cast. The town was provincial in everything but music, which was well sup-

plied by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. Herder resigned himself to isola-

CHAP.XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 569

tion from the mainstream of German thought; but the books that he issued

from his foot of earth powerfully affected that stream, and shared in forming

the literary ideas of Sturm und Drang. He assured German authors that if

they were to seek their inspiration in the roots of the nation and the life of

the people they would in time outshine all that the French had done. In

philosophy and science this prediction was verified.

His Abhandlung uber den Ur sprung der Sprache {Treatise on the Origin

of Language, 1772) won the prize that had been offered by the Berlin Acad-

emy in 1770. While sincerely professing piety, Herder rejected the notion

that language was a special creation of God; it was a human creation, natu-

rally resulting from the processes of sensation and thought. Originally, he

suggested, language and poetry were one as expressions of emotion, and

verbs, expressing action, were the first "part of speech." — Another volume,

Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte {One More Philosophy of History,

1774), presented history as "the natural philosophy of successive events."

Each civilization was a biological entity, a plant with its own birth, youth,

maturity, decline, and death; it should be studied from the standpoint of its

own time, without moral prepossessions based on another environment and

age. Like the Romantics in general, Herder admired the Middle Ages as the

age of imagination and feeling, of popular poetry and art, of rural simplicity

and peace; by contrast, post-Reformation Europe was the worship of the

state, of money, urban luxury, artificiality, and vice. He criticized the En-

lightenment as the idolatry of reason, and compared it unfavorably with

the classic cultures of Greece and Rome. In all the historic process Herder,

like Bossuet, saw the hand of God, but sometimes the eloquent pastor forgot

his theology, and thought that "the general change of the world was guided

far less by man than by a blind fate." 66

His loneliness moved him, despite his meager income, to ask Caroline and

her brother-in-law might he come and make her his wife. They consented,

and the lovers were married at Darmstadt on May 2, 1773. They returned

to Biickeburg, and Herder borrowed money to make his rectory a pleasant

home for his mate. She gave him a lifelong service and devotion. Through

her a coolness that had developed between Herder and Goethe was ended,

and when Goethe found himself in a position to recommend the pastor to a

more remunerative post, he was happy to do it. On October 1, 1776, Herder

and Caroline arrived in Weimar, and moved into the house that Goethe had

prepared for them. Now only one member had yet to come of the quadrum-

virate that was to make Weimar's fame.

V. SCHILLER'S WANDER) AHRE: 1 759-87

Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller was born on November 10, 1759, at

Marbach in Wiirttemberg. His mother was the daughter of the landlord of

the Lion Inn. The father was a surgeon— later a captain— in the army of Duke

Karl Eugen; he moved about with his regiment, but his wife stayed mostly

57° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXII

in Lorch or Ludwigsburg. In those towns Friedrich received his education.

His parents intended him for the ministry, but were persuaded by the Duke

to send him, aged fourteen, to the Karlsschule at Ludwigsburg (later at

Stuttgart), where the sons of officers were prepared for law, medicine, or an

army career. The discipline was rigorously military; the studies were uncon-

genial to a lad almost femininely sensitive. Schiller reacted by imbibing all

the rebel ideas that he could find, and pouring them (1779-80) into Die

Riiuber (The Robbers), a drama that surpassed Gotz von Berlichingen as

an expression of Sturm und Drang.

In 1780 Schiller was graduated in medicine, and became surgeon to a regi-

ment at Stuttgart. His salary was slight; he lived in one room with Lieutenant

Kapf ; they prepared their own meals, chiefly of sausage, potatoes, and let-

tuce, and, on gala occasions, wine. He tried hard to be a man in the soldier's

sense of battle, beer, and bordellos; he visited the prostitutes who attended

the camp; 67 but he had no taste for vulgarity, for he idealized women as

sacred mysteries to be approached with trembling reverence. His landlady,

Luise Vischer, was a thirty-year-old widow, but when she played the harp-

sichord "my spirit left its mortal clay," 68 and he wished he could be "fixed

forever to thy lips, . . . thy breath to drink," 69 — a novel way of suicide.

He tried in vain to find a publisher for The Robbers; failing, he saved

and borrowed, and paid for its printing himself (1781). Its success aston-

ished even the twenty-two-year-old author. Carlyle thought it marked "an

era in the Literature of the World;" 70 but respectable Germany was shocked

to find that the play left hardly any aspect of current civilization undamned.

Schiller's preface pointed out that the denouement showed the grandeur of

conscience and the wickedness of revolt.

Karl Moor, elder son of the aging Count Maximilian von Moor, is espe-

cially beloved by his father for his idealism and generosity, and is therefore

envied and hated by his brother Franz. Karl goes off to the University of

Leipzig, and imbibes the rebellious sentiments that were seething in the

youth of Western Europe. Dunned for his debts, he denounces the heartless

money-grubbers who "damn the Sadducee who fails to come to church reg-

ularly, although their own devotion consists in reckoning up their usurious

gains at the very altar." 71 He loses all faith in the existing social order, joins

a robber band, becomes its captain, pledges to be loyal to it till death, and

comforts his conscience by playing Robin Hood. One of the band describes

him:

He does not commit murder, as we do, for the sake of plunder, and as to

money ... he seems not to care a straw for it; his third of the booty, which

belongs to him of right, he gives to orphans, or to support promising youths

at college. But should he happen to get into his clutches a country squire who

grinds his peasants like cattle, or some gold-laced villain who warps the law to

his own purposes, ... or any other chap of that kidney— then, my boy, he is

in his element, and rages like a very devil. 72

Karl denounces the clergy as sycophants of power and secret worshipers of

Mammon; "the best of them would betray the whole Trinity for ten shek-

els." 73

CHAP.XXIl) ROADS TO WEIMAR 57 1

Meanwhile Franz arranges that a false message should announce to the

Count that Karl is dead. Franz becomes heir to the estate, and offers mar-

riage to Amelia, who loves Karl alive or dead. Franz poisons his father, and

quiets his qualms with atheism: "It has not yet been proved that there is an

eye above this earth to take account of what passes on it. . . . There is no

God." 74 Karl hears of his brother's crimes, leads his band to the paternal

castle, besieges Franz, who prays desperately to God for help, and, none

coming, kills himself. Amelia offers herself to Karl if he will leave his life of

robbery; he longs to do so, but his followers remind him of his pledge to re-

main with them till death. He respects his pledge and turns away from Ame-

lia; she begs him to kill her; he accommodates her; then, having arranged

that a poor workingman should receive the reward for capturing him, he

gives himself up to the law and the gallows.

All this, of course, is nonsense. The characters and events are incredible,

the style is bombastic, the speeches unbearable, the conception of woman

romantically ideal. But it is powerful nonsense. There is in nearly all of us a

secret sympathy with those who defy the law; we too sometimes feel our-

selves "squeezed into stays" by the thousands of laws and ordinances that

bind or mulct us; we are so accustomed to the benefits of law that we take

them for granted; we have no natural sympathy with the police until lawless-

ness makes us its victim. So the printed play found fervent readers and ap-

plause, and the complaints of preachers and lawmakers that Schiller had

idealized crime did not deter a reviewer from hailing Schiller as promising

to be a German Shakespeare, 75 nor producers from proposing to stage the

play.

Baron Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg offered to present it in the Na-

tionaltheater at Mannheim if Schiller would provide a happier ending. He

did: Moor marries Amelia instead of killing her. Without asking permission

of Duke Karl Eugen, his military commander, Schiller slipped away from

Stuttgart to attend the premiere on January 13, 1782. People came from

Worms, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, and elsewhere to see the performance; Au-

gust Iffland, one of the finest actors of that generation, played Karl; the audi-

ence shouted and sobbed its approval; no other German drama had ever re-

ceived such an ovation; 76 it was a high-water mark in Sturm und Drang.

After the play Schiller was feted by the actors and courted by a Mannheim

publisher; he found it hard to return to Stuttgart and resume his life as

regimental surgeon. In May he escaped again to Mannheim to see another

performance of The Robbers, and to discuss with Dalberg plans for a second

drama. Back again with his regiment, he received a reproof from the Duke,

and was forbidden to write any more plays.

He could not accept such a prohibition. On September 22, 1782, accom-

panied by a friend, Andreas Streicher, he fled to Mannheim. He offered

Dalberg a new play— Die Verschworung des Fiesko zu Genua (The Con-

spiracy of Fiesko at Genoa). He read it to the actors; they pronounced it a

sad decline from The Robbers; Dalberg thought he might produce the play

if Schiller revised it; Schiller spent weeks on this task; Dalberg rejected the

result. Schiller found himself penniless. Streicher spent, in supporting him,

572 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXII

the money he had saved to study music in Hamburg. When this ran out,

Schiller welcomed an invitation to stay in Bauerbach in a cottage owned by

Frau Henrietta von Wolzogen. There he wrote a third play, Kabale und

Liebe {Intrigue and Love), and fell in love with Fraulein Lotte von* Wolzo-

gen, aged sixteen. She preferred a rival. Meanwhile Fiesko, published, had a

good sale. Dalberg repented, and sent Schiller an invitation to be resident

playwright for the Mannheim theater at three hundred florins per year. He

agreed (July, 1783).

Despite many unpaid debts, and one serious illness, Schiller, modestly

lodged in Mannheim, had a year of precarious bliss. Fiesko received its pre-

miere January 11, 1784; the incredibly happy ending which Dalberg had

insisted upon spoiled it, and the play aroused no enthusiasm. But Kabale und

Liebe was better constructed, had fewer orations, and showed a growing

sense of the theater; some have pronounced it, from the theatrical point of

view, the best of all German tragedies. 77 After the initial performance (April

15, 1784) the audience gave it such tumultuous applause that Schiller rose

from his seat in a box and bowed.

His happiness was extreme and brief. He was not temperamentally fit to

deal with actors, who were almost as high-strung as himself; he judged their

acting strictly, and reproved them for not accurately memorizing their

lines. 78 He was unable to finish a third play, Don Carlos, by the stipulated

time. When his contract as Theaterdichter neared expiration in September,

1784, Dalberg refused to renew it. Schiller had saved nothing, and was

again faced with destitution and impatient creditors.

About this time he published some letters, Philosophische Brief e, which

indicate that religious doubts were added to his economic embarrassments.

He could not accept the old theology, and yet his poetic spirit was revolted

by such materialistic atheism as d'Holbach had expressed in Systeme de la

nature (1770). He could no longer pray, but he envied those who could,

and he described with a sense of great loss the comfort that religion was

bringing to thousands of souls in suffering, grief, and the nearness of death. 79

He kept his faith in free will, immortality, and an unknowable God, basing

all, like Kant, on the moral consciousness. And he expressed memorably the

ethic of Christ: "When I hate, I take something from myself; when I love,

I become richer by what I love. To pardon is to receive a property that has

been lost. Misanthropy is a protracted suicide." 80

Amid these complications Christian Gottfried Korner brought into Schil-

ler's life one of the finest friendships in literary history. In June, 1784, he

sent to Schiller from Leipzig a letter of warm admiration, accompanied by

portraits of himself, his fiancee Minna Stock, her sister Dora, and Dora's

fiance Ludwig Huber, and a wallet that Minna had embroidered. Korner

had been born in 1756 (three years before Schiller) to the pastor of that

same Thomaskirche where Bach a generation earlier had conducted so much

enduring music. The youth became a licentiate in law at the age of twenty-

one, and was now counselor to the Upper Consistory in Dresden. Schiller,

pressed with troubles, delayed reply till December 7. Korner answered:

CHAP. XXII ) ROADS TO WEIMAR 573

"We offer you our friendship without reserve. Come to us as soon as pos-

sible." 81

Schiller hesitated. He had made friendships in Mannheim, and had had

several amours, especially (1784) with Charlotte von Kalb, who had been

married only a year before. At Darmstadt, in December, 1784, he met Duke

Karl August of Saxe- Weimar, read to him the first act of Don Carlos, and

received the title of Rat, or honorary councilor; but no offer came of a place

in the Weimar firmament. He decided to accept Korner's invitation to Leip-

zig. On February 10, 1785, he sent to his unknown admirer an emotional

appeal that shows him near the breaking point:

While half of Mannheim is rushing to the theater ... I fly to you, dearest

friends. . . . Since your last letter the thought has never left me that we were

meant for each other. Do not misjudge my friendship because it may seem

somewhat hasty. Nature waives ceremony in favor of certain beings. Noble

souls are held together by a delicate thread which often proves lasting. . . .

If you will make allowances for a man who cherishes great ideas and has

performed only small acts; who as yet can only surmise from his follies that

Nature has destined him for something; who demands unbounded love and

yet knows not what he can offer in return; but who can love something beyond

himself, and has no greater torment than the thought that he is very far from

being what he desires to be; if a man of this stamp may aspire to your friend-

ship ours will be eternal, for I am that man. Perhaps you will love Schiller;

even should your esteem for the poet have declined.

This letter was interrupted, but was resumed on February 22.

I cannot remain any longer in Mannheim. ... I must visit Leipzig, and make

your acquaintance. My soul thirsts for new food— for better men— for friend-

ship, affection, and love. I must be near you, and, by your conversation and

company, freshness will be breathed into my wounded spirit. . . . You must

give me new life, and I shall become more than I ever was before. I shall be

happy— I never yet was happy. . . . Will you welcome me? 82

Korner answered on March 3, "We will welcome you with open arms";

and he paid G. J. Goschen, a Leipzig publisher, to send Schiller an advance

payment for future essays. 83 When the poet reached Leipzig (March 17,

1785) Korner was absent in Dresden, but his fiancee, her sister, and Huber

revived Schiller with food and solicitous hospitality. Goschen took to him

at once. "I cannot describe to you," he wrote, "how grateful and accommo-

dating Schiller is when given critical advice, and how much he labors at his

own moral development." 84

Korner met Schiller for the first time at Leipzig on July 1, and then re-

turned to Dresden. "Heaven brought us together in a wonderful manner,"

Schiller wrote to him, "and our friendship is a miracle." But he added that

he was again approaching bankruptcy. 85 Korner sent him money, assurance,

and advice:

Should you be in want of more, write to me, and by return post I will send

you any amount ... If I were ever so rich, and could . . . place you above

ever wanting the necessaries of life, still I would not dare do it. I know that

you are capable of earning wherewith to provide for all your wants as soon

574

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

(CHAP. XXII

as you put your hand to the work. But allow me at least for one year to place

you above the necessity of working. I can spare it without being worse off

myself; and you can repay me, if you like, at your own convenience. 86

Korner's generosity was all the more remarkable since he was preparing

for marriage. The wedding took place at Dresden on August 7, 1785. In

September Schiller joined them, and he lived with them, or at their expense,

till July 20, 1787. It was about this time— perhaps amid the happiness of the

newlyweds— that he composed his most famous poem, An die Freude, the

Ode to Joy that became the crown of the Ninth Symphony. Everyone

knows Beethoven's stirring melody, but few of us, outside of Germany,

know Schiller's words. They began with a call to universal love, and ended

with a summons to revolution:

Freude, schoner Gotterfunken

Tochter aus Elysium,

Wir betreten feuertrunken

Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.

Deine Zauber binden ivieder

Was die Mode streng gesteilt,

Alle Menschen iverden Bruder

Wo dein sanfter Fliigel nveilt.

Chorus: Seid umschlungen, Millionen!

DiesenKuss der ganzen Welt!

Bruder— uberm Sternenzelt

Muss ein lieber Voter ivohnen.

Went der grosse Wurf gelungen

Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,

Mische seinen Jubel ein!

Ja—iver auch nur eine Seele

Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund,

Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle

Weinend sich aus diesem Bund.

Chorus: Was den grossen Ring be-

ivohnet,

Huldige der Sympathie!

Zu den Sternen leitet sie

Wo der Unbekannte thronet. . . .

Festen Mut in schiveren Leiden

Hilfe ivo die Unschuld iveint.

Eivigkeit geschivornen Eiden,

Wahrheit gegen Freund und Feind,

Manner stolz vor Konigsthronen,

Bruder, gait es Gut und Blut;

Dem Verdienste seine Kronen,

Untergang der Lilgenbrut!

Chorus: Schliesst den heilgen Zirkel

dichter,

Schivort bei diesem goldnen Wein,

Dem Gelubde treu zu sein,

Schivort es bei dem Sternenrichter!

Joy of flame celestial fashioned,

Daughter of Elysium,

By that holy fire impassioned

To thy sanctuary we come.

Thine the spells that reunited

Those estranged by custom dread;

Every man or brother plighted

Where thy gentle wings are spread.

Chorus: Millions in our arms we gather;

To the world our kiss is sent!

Past the starry firmament,

Brothers, dwells a loving Father.

Who that height of bliss has proved

Once a friend of friends to be,

Who has won a maid beloved,

Join us in our jubilee.

Whoso holds a heart in keeping-

One in all the world his own—

Who has failed, let him with weeping

From our fellowship be gone.

Chorus: All the mighty globe con-

tained!

Homage to Compassion pay!

To the stars she leads the way

Where the unknown Godhead reign-

eth. . . .

Hearts in direst need unquailing,

Aid to innocence in woe;

Troth eternally unfailing,

Loyalty to friend and foe!

Fronting kings, and manly spirit,

Though it cost us wealth and blood!

Crowns to naught save noblest merit,

Death to all the Liars' brood!

Chorus: Close the holy circle. Ever

Swear it by the wine of gold!

Swear these sacred vows to hold,

Swear it by the stars' Lawgiver!

CHAP. XXII ) ROADS TO WEIMAR 575

For two years Korner supported Schiller, hoping that the poet would beat

into presentable shape the drama that was to portray the conflict between

Philip II and his son Carlos. But Schiller dallied so long with the play that he

lost the mood in which he had begun it; perhaps more reading of history had

altered his view of Philip; in any case, he changed the plot out of unity and

sequence. Meanwhile (February, 1787) he fell in love with Henrietta von

Arnim, and love letters consumed his ink, while Henrietta shopped for a

richer suitor. Korner persuaded Schiller to isolate himself in a suburb until

he had finished his play. At last it was complete (June, 1787), and the Ham-

burg theater offered to produce it. Schiller's spirits and pride revived; per-

haps now he might be judged worthy to join the galaxy of literary lights

that shone around Duke Karl August. Korner, relieved, agreed that there

was no future for the poet in Dresden. Besides, Charlotte von Kalb was in

Weimar, husbandless and beckoning. On July 20, after many farewells,

Schiller drove out from Dresden into a new life. On the morrow he was in

Weimar, and the great circle was complete.

CHAPTER XXIII

Weimar in Flower

1775-1805

I. WIELAND SEQUEL: 1775-1813

MOZART, seeing Wieland at Mannheim in 1777, described his face as

"frightfully ugly, covered with pockmarks, and he had a long nose;

... aside from that he is ... a most gifted fellow. . . . People stare at

him as if he had dropped from heaven." 1 The stormy petrels of Sturm und

Drang disliked him because he laughed at their rebel ecstasies, but Weimar

liked him because he sweetened his satires with grace and a general absolu-

tion for mankind, and because he bore with good humor the repeated irrup-

tion of new stars in the literary sky where he could have claimed priority.

Goethe's autobiography commemorated him gratefully. 2 Schiller at first

encounter thought him vain and melancholy; but "the footing on which he

at once placed himself toward me shows confidence, love, and esteem." 3

"We will shortly open our hearts to each other," said the older to the

younger poet; "we will assist each other in turn"; 4 and he proved faithful to

this promise. "Wieland and I draw daily closer together. . . . He never

omits an occasion for saying a kind word." 5

Wieland competed successfully with the newcomers by issuing in 1780

a poetic romance, Oberon, about a knight who is rescued from a hundred

fairies, and from the quagmire charms of an overheated queen, by the magic

wand of the prince of fairies. When Goethe had to sit for a portrait, and

wished to remain quiet for an hour, he asked Wieland to read parts of the

epic to him. "Never," Wieland reported, "have I seen anyone so happy

over the work of another as Goethe was." 6 John Quincy Adams translated

the poem while he was United States minister to Prussia in 1 797-1 801, and

James Planche took from it the libretto for Weber's opera (1826).

The March, 1798, number of Wieland's Neue teutsche Merkur contained

an article— presumably by Wieland— which remarkably presaged coming

events. It noted the chaos into which France had fallen since 1789; it recom-

mended the appointment of a dictator, as in the crises of republican Rome;

and it nominated young Bonaparte, then having trouble in Egypt, as clearly

fitted for the task. When Napoleon had in effect conquered Germany he

met Wieland in Weimar and in Erfurt (1808), talked with him about Greek

and Roman history and literature, and honored him, among German authors,

as second only to Goethe. 7

On January 25, 181 3, Goethe wrote in his diary, "Wieland buried today,"

and sent the news to a friend at Karlsbad: "Our good Wieland has left us.

576

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 577

. . . On September 3 we still quite festively celebrated his eightieth birth-

day. There was a beautiful balance of tranquillity and activity in his life.

With a remarkable deliberateness, without any impassioned striving or cry-

ing, he contributed an infinite amount to the intellectual culture of the na-

tion." 8

II. HERDER AND HISTORY: 1777-1803

"I have just left Herder," Schiller wrote in July, 1787. ". . . His conver-

sation is brilliant, his language warm and powerful; but his feelings are

swayed by love and hate." 9

Herder's duties at Weimar were multifarious, and allowed him little time

for writing. As chaplain to the Duke he performed the baptisms, confirma-

tions, marriages, and funerals of the ducal family and the court. As General-

superintendent of the duchy he supervised clerical conduct and appoint-

ments, attended consistory meetings, and preached sermons as orthodox as

his private doubts would permit. The schools of the duchy were under his

management, and became a model for all Germany. These responsibilities,

added to his fistula and general ill-health, made him irritable, and gave his

conversation, now and then, what Goethe called a "vicious bite." 10 For three

years (1780-83) he and Goethe avoided each other; the Duke resented some

of Herder's sermons ("After such a sermon," said Goethe, "there's nothing

left for a prince but to abdicate" 11 ); and the amiable Wieland remarked, in

1777, "I'd like to have a dozen pyramids between Herder and me." 12 Weimar

learned to make clinical allowances for its Dean Swift, and his pleasant wife

Caroline counteracted some of his bite. On August 28, 1783, Goethe took

advantage of this being the birthday of himself and Herder's eldest son to

invite the Herders to dinner; councilor and Generalsuperintendent were rec-

onciled, and Goethe wrote that "the wretched clouds that so long separated

us have been dispelled, and, I am convinced, forever." 13 A month later he

added: "I know no one of a nobler heart or a more liberal spirit"; 14 and

Schiller noted in 1787, "Herder is a passionate admirer of Goethe— he almost

idolizes him." 15 In time Wieland and Herder became understanding friends, 16

and in the salon of Anna Amalie it was these two, rather than Goethe or

Schiller, who led the conversation and won the Dowager Duchess's heart. 17

Amid his administrative chores Herder pursued primitive poetry, gath-

ered specimens from a dozen nations, and from Orpheus to Ossian, and pub-

lished them in an anthology, Volkslieder (1778), which became a fountain-

head of the Romantic movement in Germany. While Goethe was preparing

a return to classical ideals, forms, and styles, and to restraint of emotion by

intellect, Herder counseled a reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism

and seventeenth-century formalism to medieval faith, legends, lays, and

ways.

In 1778 the Bavarian Academy offered a prize for the best essay "On the

Effects of Poetry upon the Customs and Morals of the Nations." Herder's

contribution was crowned, and was published by the Academy in 1781. It

57^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIII

traced what the author considered the deterioration of poetry, among the

Hebrews, the Greeks, and the North Europeans, from an early bardic ex-

pression of popular history, feelings, and ideas, in free and flowing rhythms,

into a "refined" and scholastic exercise, counting syllables, wrenching

rhymes, venerating rules, and losing the vitality of the people in the deaden-

ing artificialities of city life. The Renaissance, Herder held, had taken liter-

ature away from the people and imprisoned it in courts, and printing had

replaced the living minstrel with the book. In another essay, "On the Spirit

of Hebrew Poetry" (1783), Herder, who had made himself a good Hebra-

ist, proposed that the Book of Genesis should be read as poetry, not as sci-

ence; and he suggested that such poetry could convey as much truth through

symbolism as science does through "fact."

His religious faith struggled to maintain itself despite his wide reading in

science and history. In his first year at Weimar he was suspected of being an

atheist, a freethinker, a Socinian, an "enthusiast" (mystic). 18 He had read the

Wolfenbuttel Fragments of Reimarus as published by Lessing, and was suf-

ficiently impressed to doubt the divinity of Christ. 19 He was not an atheist,

but he accepted Spinoza's pantheism. He told Jacobi in 1784, "I do not rec-

ognize an extramundane God." 20 He followed Lessing in studying and de-

fending Spinoza; "I must confess that this philosophy makes me very

happy." 21 He devoted to Spinoza the opening chapters of Gott, einige Ge-

spriiche (God, Some Conversations, 1787); in this treatise God lost personal

form and became the energy and spirit of the universe, unknowable except

in the order of the world and the spiritual consciousness of man. 22 However,

in tracts addressed to the clergy Herder accepted the supernatural quality

of Christ's miracles, and the immortality of the soul. 23

He brought the scattered elements of his philosophy into a comparatively

ordered whole in a massive masterpiece which he modestly entitled Ideen

zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit {Ideas for a Philosophy of

the History of Mankind), one of the epochal, seminal books of the eight-

eenth century. It appeared in four parts in 1784, 1785, 1787, and 1791. That

so vast an undertaking should have neared completion amid Herder's official

responsibilities is evidence of a strong character and a good wife. So Herder

wrote to Hamann, May 10, 1784: "In my whole life I have not written any

work with so many troubles and exhaustions from within, and so many dis-

turbances from without, as I have this one; so that if my wife, who is the

real autor autoris [author of the author] of my writings— and Goethe, who

accidentally got to see Book I— had not incessantly encouraged me and

urged me on, everything would have remained in the Hades of the un-

born." 24

Part I begins with a frankly secular story of "creation," based on current

astronomy and geology, and making no use of the Bible except as poetry.

Life did not evolve from matter, for matter itself is alive. Body and mind are

not separate and opposed substances, they are two forms of one force, and

every cell in every organism contains, in some degree, both forms. There is

no external design visible in nature, but there is an internal design— the mys-

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 579

terious and "perfect determination" of each seed to develop into a specific

organism with all its own complex and characteristic parts. Herder does not

derive man from lower animals, but he sees him as a member of the animal

kingdom, fighting like other organisms for sustenance and survival. Man be-

came man by taking erect stature, which developed in him a sensory system

based upon sight and hearing rather than upon smell and taste; forefeet be-

came hands, free for grasping, manipulation, comprehension, thought. The

highest product of God or nature is the conscious mind acting with reason

and freedom, and destined to immortality.

Part II of the Ideen starts with the assumption that man is by nature

good; it renews the argument for the relative excellence and happiness of

primitive societies, and deprecates the Kantian— later Hegelian— notion that

the state is the goal of human development. Herder despised the state as he

knew it. "In great states," he wrote, "hundreds must go hungry so that one

can strut and wallow in luxury; tens of thousands are oppressed and driven

to death so that one crowned fool or wise man can carry out his fancy." 25

In Part III Herder praised Athens for its comparative democracy, which

allowed culture to spread into many strata of the population. Rome, building

its wealth on conquest and slavery, developed a narrow culture that left the

people in poverty and ignorance. In all this history Herder saw no Provi-

dence; it was too evil to be divine. God, being one with nature, lets matters

take their course according to natural law and human stupidity. Neverthe-

less, by the very struggle for existence, some progress emerges from the

chaos; mutual aid, social order, morals, and law are developed as means of

survival, and man moves slowly toward a humane humanity. Not that there

is a continuous line of progress; this cannot be, for each national culture is a

unique entity, with its own inherent character, its own language, religion,

moral code, literature, and art; and, like any organism, each culture, barring

accidents, tends to grow to its natural maximum, after which it declines and

dies. There is no guarantee that later cultures will excel earlier ones, but the

contributions of each culture are better transmitted to its successors, and so

the human heritage grows.

Part IV lauds Christianity as the mother of Western civilization. The me-

dieval papacy served a good purpose in checking the despotism of rulers and

the individualism of states; the Scholastic philosophers, though they wove

meaningless webs with ponderous words, sharpened the terms and tools of

reason; and the medieval universities gathered, preserved, and transmitted

much of Greek and Roman culture, something even of Arabic and Persian

science and philosophy. So the intellectual community grew too numerous

and subtle for the custodians of power; the cake of custom was broken, and

the modern mind declared itself free.

Between the third and fourth installments of the Ideen Herder realized his

long-deferred hope of seeing Italy. Johann Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg,

Catholic privy councilor to the Archbishop-Elector of Trier, invited Her-

der to accompany him on a grand tour, all expenses paid. The Duke of Saxe-

Weimar— and Caroline— gave him leave of absence, and Herder left Weimar

580 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIII

August 7, 1788. When he joined Dalberg in Augsburg he found that Dal-

berg's mistress was an important member of the party. Her presence and her

demands shared with ill-health in souring the trip for Herder. In October

Anna Amalie arrived in Rome; Herder left Dalberg and joined her entour-

age. He liked Angelica Kauffmann too much for Caroline's liking, and Caro-

line's letters spoke too often and fondly of Goethe. Herder, having heard of

Goethe's life in Rome, resumed his bite: "My journey here," he wrote, "has

unfortunately made Goethe's selfish existence, which is inwardly altogether

unconcerned about others, clearer to me than I could desire. He can't help

it, so let him be." 26

He returned to Weimar July 9, 1789. Five days later the Bastille fell, and

Herder changed his writing plans. He completed Part IV of the Ideen, then

put the book aside, and, instead, wrote Brief e zur Beforderung der Humani-

t'dt (Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, 1793-97). He began with

cautiously approving the French Revolution; he welcomed the collapse of

French feudalism, and shed no tears over the secularization of the Catholic

Church in France. 27 When the Duke and Goethe went off to face the French

at Valmy, and came back sore with defeat, Herder suppressed those early

Brief e, and devoted the remainder to praise of geniuses safely dead.

In his old age he lost none of his relish for intellectual combat. He coun-

tered Kant's criticism of the Ideen with an incisive attack upon the Critique

of Pure Reason. He called that book a monstrous jugglery of words with

metaphysical phantoms, like "synthetic judgments a priori"; he denied the

subjectivity of space and time; and he accused Kant of bringing back into

psychology the "faculties" into which the Scholastic philosophers had alleg-

edly divided the mind. He suggested, prophetically, that philosophy might

make a new approach through a logical analysis of language— for reasoning

is internal speech.

Goethe largely agreed with Herder's criticism of Kant, but this did not

protect him from an occasional bite. When the two were staying under the

same roof at Jena in 1803 Goethe read, to a gathering that included Herder,

some parts of his new drama, Die natiirliche Tochter. Herder praised the

play to others, but when the author asked for his opinion he could not resist

a pun about the boy that Goethe's mistress had borne him: "I like your natu-

ral son better than your Natural Daughter." Goethe did not appreciate the

wit. The two men never saw each other again. Herder retired into the seclu-

sion of his Weimar home, and died there December 18, 1803— two years be-

fore Schiller, ten before Wieland, twenty-nine before Goethe. Duke Karl

August, who had often been offended by him, had him buried with high

honors in the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul.

III. GOETHE COUNCILOR: 1775-86

Goethe was welcomed to Weimar by all but the politicians. "I must tell

you," wrote Wieland to Lavater, November 1 3, 1775, "that Goethe has been

CHAP. XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 58 1

with us since Tuesday last, and that within three days I have conceived so

deep an affection for this magnificent person— I so thoroughly see into him,

feel and understand him— as you can far better imagine than I can de-

scribe." 28 In that same month a member of the court wrote to Goethe's par-

ents: "Conceive of your son as the most intimate friend of our dear Duke,

. . . loved to adoration, too, by all the good ladies hereabout." 29

But there were clouds. The Duke relished wild hunts and drinking; Goethe

at first accompanied him in both; Klopstock publicly charged the poet with

corrupting a virtuous prince. Luise feared that Goethe would alienate her

husband from her; actually he used his influence to bring the Duke back to

the Duchess despite the fact that the marriage had not been one of love.

Some officials distrusted Goethe as a Sturm und Drang radical with pagan

beliefs and romantic dreams. Several gladiators of that movement— Lenz,

Klinger, and more— rushed to Weimar, introduced themselves as Goethe's

friends, and clamored for plums. When Goethe took a fancy to a garden

house— outside the city gate but near the ducal castle— Karl August lost

Goethe some public good will by evicting the tenants so that Goethe might

move in (April 21, 1776). There the poet found relief from court etiquette,

and learned to grow vegetables and flowers. For three years he lived there

all the year round, then only in the summer till 1782, when he moved to a

spacious mansion in the town to attend to his mounting duties as a member

of the government.

The Duke had thought of him as a poet, and had invited him to Weimar

as a literary ornament to his court. But he perceived that the twenty-six-

year-old author of a rebel play and a tearful romance was becoming a man

of practical judgment. He appointed Goethe to a Bureau of Works, and

asked him to look into the condition and operation of the mines at Ilmenau.

Goethe did this with such assiduity and intelligence that Karl August deter-

mined to add him to the Privy Council that administered the duchy. A sen-

ior member protested against this sudden infusion of poetry, and threatened

to resign. The Duke and the Dowager appeased him, and on June 11, 1776,

Goethe became Geheimer Legationsr at— privy councilor of legation— at an

annual salary of twelve hundred thalers. He reduced his attentions to the

ladies. "For long now," Wieland informed Merck on June 24, "from the

moment that he decided to devote himself to the Duke and the Duke's af-

fairs, he has behaved with faultless wisdom and with worldly circumspec-

tion." 30 In 1778 Goethe was advanced to the then peaceful post of minister

of war, and in 1799 to full membership in the Privy Council. He attempted

some reforms, but found himself thwarted by vested interests at the top and

public apathy below; soon he himself was a complete conservative. In 1781

he was made president of the Ducal Chamber. In 1782 he was given by Jo-

seph II a patent of nobility, and became von Goethe. "In those days," he told

Eckermann forty-five years later, "I felt so satisfied with myself that if I had

been made a prince I should not have thought the change so very remark-

Interwoven with his political career was the most lasting, intense, and

582 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIII

poignant love affair in his life. Hear Dr. Johann Zimmermann's quite un-

medical description of one of his patients in November, 1775:

The Baroness von Stein, wife of the Chamberlain and Master of the Horse, has

extraordinarily large black eyes of the highest beauty. Her voice is gentle and

repressed. No one can fail to mark on her face . . . seriousness, gentleness,

kindliness, . . . virtue, and profound sensibility. The manners of the court,

which she possesses to perfection, have been transformed in her case into rare

and high simplicity. She is very pious, with a touching and almost ecstatic ele-

vation of soul. From her exquisite carriage and her almost professional skill in

dancing one would hardly infer the tranquil moonlight . . . which fills her

heart with peace. She is thirty-three years old. She has several children, and

weak nerves. Her cheeks are red, her hair quite black, her complexion ... of

an Italian hue. 32

Born in 1742, Charlotte von Schardt had married Baron Josias Gottlob

von Stein in 1764. By 1772 she had borne seven children, of whom four were

now dead. When Goethe met her she was still ailing from repeated pregnan-

cies, and her sense of frailty entered into the modesty and diffidence of her

character. Goethe idealized her, for he had the blood of a youth and the

imagination of a poet, accustomed and commissioned to embellish reality;

yet he did not exceed her physician in glorifying her. She was something

new in his rosary of women: she was an aristocrat, in whom fine manners

seemed inborn, and Goethe saw her as enshrined in nobility. It was one re-

sult of their relationship that she transmitted to him the manners of her

class, and schooled him in self-possession, ease, moderation, and courtesy.

She was grateful for his love as restoring her interest in life, but she accepted

it as a woman of breeding receives the adoration of a youth seven years

younger than herself— as the growth pains of an eager spirit seeking experi-

ence and fulfillment.

It was not love at first sight; six weeks after joining the Weimar circle he

was still writing verses about "lovely Lili" Schonemann. 33 But on December

29, 1775, Dr. Zimmermann remarked Goethe's awakening to "new virtues

and beauties in Charlotte." By January 15 he was trying to resist the incipi-

ent enthrallment; "I am glad to get away and wean myself from you," he

told her; by January 28 he had quite surrendered. "Dear Angel," he wrote

to her, "I'm not coming to the court. I feel too happy to stand the crowd.

. . . Suffer me to love you as I do." And on February 23: "I must tell you,

O you chosen among women, that you have placed a love in my heart which

makes me joyful." 34

She wrote many letters in return, but from this first period only one sur-

vives. "I had so detached myself from the world, but now it grows dear to

me again, dear through you. My heart reproaches me; I feel that I torment

both myself and you. Six months ago I was so ready to die, and I am ready

no longer." 35 He was in ecstasy. "There is no explanation for what this

woman does to me," he told Wieland, ". . . unless you accept the theory

of transmigration. Oh, yes, once we were man and wife!" 36 He took the

matrimonial privilege of quarreling and making up. Charlotte to Zimmer-

mann, May, 1776: "He stormed away from me a week ago, and then re-

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 583

turned with overflowing love. . . . What will he end by making of me?" 37

Apparently she insisted upon their love remaining Platonic, and he was too

passionate to leave it so. "If I am not to live with you," he told her, "your

love avails me no more than that of others who are absent." 38 But on the

next day: "Forgive me for making you suffer. I'll try hereafter to bear it

alone." 39

He was desolate when she went to far-north Pyrmont for a cure, but

when she returned she visited him at Ilmenau (August 5-6, 1776). On Au-

gust 8 he wrote: "Your presence has had a wondrous effect upon me. . . .

When I think that you were here in my cave with me, and that I held your

hand, while you leaned over me . . . Your relationship to me is both sacred

and strange. . . . There are no words for it, and the eyes of men cannot

perceive it." 40 Almost five years after their first meeting he was still warm.

So, on September 12, 1780, lonely in Zillbach: "Whenever I awake from

my dreams, I find that I still love you and long for you. Tonight, as we were

riding along and saw the lit windows of a house ahead, I thought: If only

she were there to be our hostess. This is a rotten hole, and yet, if I could

live quietly here all winter long with you, I'd like it very well." 41 And on

March 12, 1781:

My soul has so grown into yours that, as you know, I am inseparably tied to

you, and neither height nor depth can part us. I wish there were some vow or

sacrament which would bind me to you visibly and according to some law.

How precious that would be! And surely my novitiate was long enough for me

to take all due thought . . . The Jews have cords which they bind about their

arms in the act of prayer. Thus I bind about my arm your dear cord when I

address my prayer to you, and desire you to impart to me your goodness, wis-

dom, moderation, and patience.

Some have interpreted the expired "novitiate," or period of probation, as

indicating Charlotte's physical surrender; 42 and yet he wrote to her, six

years later: "Dear Lotte, you do not know what violence I have done to

myself, and still do, and how the thought that I do not possess you . . . ex-

hausts and consumes me." 43 If consummation came the secret was well kept.

Baron von Stein, who did not die till 1793, bore with the liaison with the

courtesy of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Occasionally Goethe ended

his letters with "Regards to Stein." 44

He had learned to love her children too, feeling more and more keenly

the lack of his own. In the spring of 1783 he persuaded her to allow her ten-

year-old boy, Fritz, to stay with him for extended visits, even to accompany

him on long trips. One of her letters to Fritz (September, 1783) shows her

maternal side, and the human hearts behind the dehumanized facade of his-

tory:

I am so glad that you don't forget me out in the beautiful world, and that

you write me in tolerably, though not very well-formed, letters. Since you're

staying much longer than I expected, I'm afraid that your clothes won't be

looking very well. If they get soiled, and you too, tell Privy Councilor Goethe

just to throw my dear little Fritz into the water. . . . Try to appreciate your

good luck, and do your best to please the Councilor by your behavior. Your

father wishes to be remembered to you. 45

584 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIII

By 1785 Goethe's passion had subsided into long silences. In May, 1786,

Charlotte complained that "Goethe thinks a great deal and says nothing." 46

She was now forty-four, he was thirty-seven, and was retiring into himself.

Often he went to Jena to get away from the Weimar court and seek reju-

venation among students. He had always refreshed himself with nature,

climbing the Brocken (a 3, 747 -foot peak in the Harz Mountains, long asso-

ciated with the Faust legend), and traveling with the Duke in Switzerland

(September, 1779, to January, 1780). Sometimes, in retrospect, he felt that

"during the first ten years of my official and court life at Weimar I scarcely

accomplished anything" 47 in the way of literature or science. But it was good

that the poet had been crossed with the administrator, and that the half-

spoiled youth and faithless lover had been disciplined by the responsibilities

of office and the deferment of amorous victory. He made use of every experi-

ence, and grew with every defeat. "The best thing about me is that deep

inner stillness in which I live and grow, despite the world, and through

which I gain what the world can never take from me." 48 Nothing was lost

on him; everything found expression somewhere in his works; finally he was

all the best of intellectual Germany fused into an integrated whole.

Two of his greatest poems belong to this period: the marriage of philos-

ophy and religion, poetry and prose, in Die Natur; and the most perfect of

his lyrics— the second of those called "Wanderers Nachtlied"— which he

carved on the walls of a hunting lodge on September 7, 1780, 49 perhaps in a

mood of restless longing:

Uber alien Gipfeln O'er all the hilltops

1st Ruh; Is quiet now;

In alien Wipfeln In all the treetops

Spiirest du Hearest thou

Kaum einen Hauch; Hardly a breath;

Die Vogelein schiveigen im Walde. The birds are asleep in the trees.

Wane nurl Balde Wait: soon like these

Ruhest du auch. Thou too shalt rest. 50

Another of Goethe's famous lyrics belongs to this stage of his development:

the somber "Erlkonig" which Schubert put to music. When has the child's

sense of mystic beings pervading nature been more vividly expressed than

in this swift fantasy of the dying child who sees the "king of the elves" com-

ing to snatch it from the arms of its father?

Now, too, Goethe wrote in prose three dramas: Eg?nont (1775), Iphige-

nie auf Tauris (1779), and Torquato Tasso (1780)— fruit enough for five

political years. Egmont was not produced till 1788. Iphigenie was presented

at the Weimar theater on April 6, 1779 (six weeks before the premiere of

Gluck's opera of the same name) ; but it was so transformed, as well as versi-

fied, during Goethe's stay in Rome that it will be better viewed as a product

of Goethe's classic phase. Tasso also was remodeled and versified in Italy,

but it belongs here as part of Goethe's enchantment with Charlotte von

Stein. On April 19, 1781, he wrote to her: "All that Tasso says is addressed

to you." 51 Taking him at his word, she identified herself with Leonora,

Goethe with Tasso, and Karl August with the Duke of Ferrara.

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 585

Goethe readily accepted the legend that Tasso's mental breakdown at the

Ferrara court was intensified, if not brought on, by an unhappy love affair

with a sister of Alfonso II (r. 1 5 59-97 ) 52 He doubtless had himself in mind

when he described the working of Tasso's poetic mind:

His eye scarce lingers on this earthly scene;

To nature's harmony his ear is tuned.

What history offers, and what life presents,

His bosom promptly and with joy receives.

The widely scattered is by him combined,

And his quick feeling animates the dead. . . .

Thus, moving in his own enchanted sphere,

The wondrous man doth still allure us on

To wander with him and partake his joy.

Though seeming to approach us, he remains

Remote as ever; and perchance his eye,

Resting on us, sees spirits in our place. 53

And Leonora, the stately princess who accepts the poet's love but bids him

restrain his ardor within protocol, may well be Charlotte von Stein holding

Goethe's passion this side of adultery. Tasso proclaims— and here both poets

speak—

Whatever in my sonp doth reach the heart

And find an echo there, I owe to one,

And one alone! No image undefined

Hovered before my soul, approaching now

In radiant glory, to retire again.

I have myself, with mine own eyes, beheld

The type of every virtue, every grace. 54

Duke Alfonso resembles Karl August in patience with the poet's tantrums,

amours, and reveries, and, like him, mourns the poet's delay in finishing a

promised masterpiece:

After each slow advance he leaves his task;

He ever changeth, and can ne'er conclude 55 —

which well describes Goethe's piecemeal composition, and his procrastina-

tion with Wilhelm Meister and Faust, Another princess praises Alfonso-

Karl August for giving Tasso-Goethe a chance to mature by contact with

affairs: and here rise famous lines:

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille;

Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.

"Talent forms itself in quiet; character takes form in the stream of the

world." 56 But the correlation between the two poets fades at the end: Tasso

shows none of Goethe's capacity for swimming in the worldly stream; he

sinks into his realm of dreams, throws caution and proportion to the winds,

clasps the startled princess in his arms, and goes insane when she removes

herself from his embrace and his life. Perhaps Goethe felt that he had

skirted that precipice.

He often thought of Italy as an escape from a situation that threatened

his mind. About this time, in the first form of Wilhelm Meister, he com-

5^6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIII

posed for Mignon a song of longing that fitted his own hopes rather than

Mignon's:

Kennst du das Land, wo die Xitronen bluhn,

Im dunken Laub die Gold-Orangen gluhn,

Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,

Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht:

Kennst du es wohl? Dahin/ Dahinf

Mocht ich mit dir, O mein Geliebte, ziehn!*

Weimar was beautiful, but it was not warm. And the cares of office rasped

the poet's soul; " 'tis a bitter way of earning one's bread to have to try to es-

tablish harmony among the discords of the world." 57 Court life wearied him;

"I have nothing in common with these people, nor they with me." 58 He had

been partly estranged from the Duke, unable to keep the ducal pace of hunt-

ing and wenching. His one great love had been worn thin by time and quar-

rels. He felt that he had to break away from these many bonds, to seek a

new orientation and perspective. He asked the Duke for a leave of absence.

The Duke consented, and agreed to continue Goethe's salary. To raise ad-

ditional funds Goethe sold to Goschen of Leipzig the right to publish an edi-

tion of his collected works. Only 602 sets were bought; Goschen lost 1,720

thalers in the enterprise.

On September 1, 1786, Goethe wrote to Charlotte from Karlsbad:

Now a final farewell. I want to repeat to you that I love you dearly . . . and

that your assurance that you are again taking pleasure in my love renews the

joy of my life. I have borne much in silence hitherto, but I have desired noth-

ing more intensely than that our relationship might take a form over which

no circumstance could have power. If that cannot be, I would not dwell where

you are, but rather be alone in that world into which I now go forth. 59

IV. GOETHE IN ITALY: 1 786-88

He traveled under a pseudonym, "M. Jean-Philippe Moller," for he

wished to be freed from the inconveniences of fame. He was thirty-seven

years old, but he came with even more than the bright expectancy of youth,

and much better prepared, knowing something of Italy's history and art.

On September 18 he wrote to Herder, "I hope to return a newborn person,"

and to Karl August, "I hope to bring back a thoroughly cleansed and far

better equipped human being." To these and other friends he sent "Letters

from Italy" that still have in them the allegrezza of Italian life. He prefaced

them with the old motto Auch in Arkadien—he too was now in Arcady. We

have seen elsewhere how grateful he was for the sunshine; "I believe in God

again!" he cried out as he entered Italy. 60 But he loved the Italian people too,

their open faces and hearts, the naturalness of their lives, the passion and

jollity of their speech. Being a scientist as well as a poet, he made note of

* "Know you the land where the lemon trees bloom, where the golden oranges glow in the

dark foliage, where a soft wind blows from the blue sky, and the quiet myrde and the lofty bay

tree stand: do you know it well? There, there would I go with you, O my beloved! "

CHAP. XXIII ) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 587

meteorological peculiarities, geological formations, mineral specimens, vari-

eties of animals and plants; he liked even the lizards that darted over the

rocks.

He was so eager to reach Rome that he passed hurriedly through Venezia,

Lombardy, and Tuscany. But he stopped long enough in Vicenza to feel the

classic simplicity and power of Palladio's architecture. He strongly reaf-

firmed his antipathy to Gothic: "from all taste for those . . . tobacco-pipe

shafts, our little steeple-crowned towers and foliated terminals, ... I am

now, thank God, set free forever! . . . Palladio has opened the road for

me to every . . . art." 61 Through that road he went back to Vitruvius,

whom he studied in an edition by Galiani, our witty friend from Naples and

Paris. The classical style now became a passion with him, coloring his works

and thought, re-forming some past productions, like Iphigenie and Tasso y

into classic mold and line. In Venice the baroque palaces seemed immodestly

garish, too femininely elegant; and even from the Renaissance fa£ades he

turned to the relics of classic architecture and statuary in the museums. But

his warm blood responded to the color and pride of Veronese and Titian.

In Ferrara he sought in vain the palace where Tasso had been confined.

After three days in Bologna and only three hours in Florence, he rushed on

through Perugia and Terni and Citta di Castello, and on October 29, 1786,

he rode through the Porta del Popolo into Rome. Now he felt a passing mo-

ment of modesty. "All roads are open to me, because I walk in a spirit of

humility." 62

Not yet master of spoken Italian, he sought out the German colony, and

especially the artists, for he aspired to learn at least the elements of drawing,

painting, and sculpture. Angelica Kauffmann admired his enthusiasm and

good looks; she painted a portrait of him, stressing his black hair, lofty fore-

head, and clear eyes. He formed an intimate friendship with Johann Hein-

rich Wilhelm Tischbein, who handed him down to us, in the famous Goethe

in der Campagna™ reclining at ease as if he had conquered Arcady. Long

before coming to Italy Goethe had corresponded with this painter; they met

for the first time on November 3, when they converged in the Piazza San

Pietro; the poet recognized the artist, and introduced himself simply: "I am

Goethe." 64 Tischbein described him in a letter to Lavater:

I found him to be quite what I had expected. The only thing that surprised

me was the gravity and tranquillity of one of such vivid sensibility, and also

that he is able to be at ease and at home in all circumstances. What pleases

me still more is the simplicity of his life. All he asked me to provide for him

was a little room where he could sleep and work without interruption; and

the very simplest fare. . . . Now he sits in that little room and works at his

Iphigenie from early in the morning till nine o'clock. Then he goes out to

study the great works of art. 65

Tischbein often guided him in these explorations, had drawings made for

him, and secured for him copies of the more famous paintings; Goethe him-

self made sketches of what he especially wished to recall. He tried his hand

at sculpture, and modeled a head of Hercules. He admitted that he had no

588 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP.XXIII

talent for the plastic arts, but he felt that these experiments gave him a bet-

ter sense of form, and helped him to visualize what he wished to describe. 66

He pored over Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art\ "Here on the spot

I find it highly valuable. . . . Now at last my mind can rise to the greatest

and purest creations of art with calm consideration." 67 "The history of the

whole world attaches itself to this spot, and I reckon a . . . true new birth

since the day I entered Rome. ... I think I am changed to the very mar-

row." 68 Meanwhile he seems to have enjoyed the living art provided by the

"dainty" models who posed in the studios. 69 His stay in Rome completed

that de-romantification which had begun with the responsibilities of office.

Now the lawlessness of Gotz and the tears of Werther seemed to the matur-

ing Goethe signs of an unbalanced mind; "romanticism is a disease," he said;

"classicism is health." 70 There was something romantic in his new enthusiasm

for classic marbles, columns, capitals, and pediments, and the pure lines of

Greek statuary. "If we really want a pattern, we must always return to the

ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly repre-

sented." 71 Like Winckelmann, Goethe saw only the "Apollonian" side of

Greek civilization and art— the exaltation of form and restraint; he now al-

most ignored that "Dionysian" ecstasy which so warmly colored Greek

character, religion, and life, and which, in Goethe himself, had spoken

through his "daimon" and his loves.

It was in this classic rapture that he rewrote Iphigenie auf Tauris in verse

(1787), resolved to rival Racine, even Euripides himself. Still cherishing the

embers of the fire that Charlotte von Stein had ignited in him, he poured

into the speeches of the Greek princess something of the tenderness and self-

control of the German baroness. He told the old story well, with all its

complications of mythology and genealogy; he intensified the drama by por-

traying the Scythian king favorably; and he dared to change the ending to

accord with the idea— rare among the Greeks— that one has moral obligations

even to "barbarians." Only those who can read German fluently can appre-

ciate Goethe's performance; yet Hippolyte Taine, a Frenchman, a supreme

critic, and presumably familiar with Racine's dramas, said: "I place no mod-

ern work above Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris" 72

The memories of Charlotte in this play, and still more in Torquato Tasso,

which he rewrote in Rome, revived his feeling for her. She had been deeply

wounded by his sudden flight to Italy, and by his leaving her boy in charge

of a servant; she at once took Fritz back, and demanded the return of all the

letters she had written to Goethe. He wrote apologetically from Rome (De-

cember 8, 13, and 20, 1786); she sent him (December 18) a note of "bitter-

sweet" reproof; he answered (December 23): "I cannot express to you how

it pierces my heart that you are ill, and ill through my fault. Forgive me. I

myself fought with death and life, and no tongue can speak the things that

went on within me." Finally, she relented. "Now," he wrote on February 1,

1787, "I can go to work in a happier mood, since I have a letter from you in

which you say that you love and take delight in my letters."

In that month he and Tischbein went to Naples. He ascended Vesuvius

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 589

twice; on his second attempt a minor eruption covered his head and shoul-

ders with ashes. He reveled in the classic ruins at Pompeii, and marveled at

the simple majesty of the Greek temples at Paestum. Returning to Rome, he

took ship to Palermo, went on to study the classic temples at Segeste and

Girgenti (Agrigento), stood in the Greek theater at Taormina, and was

back in Rome in June. More and more in love with "the most remarkable

city in the whole world," 73 he persuaded Duke Karl August to continue his

salary to the end of 1787. When that extension expired, he slowly recon-

ciled himself to the North. He left Rome on April 25, 1788, traveled lei-

surely through Florence, Milan, and Como, and reached Weimar on June 18.

Every day he wondered how the Duke, the court, and Charlotte would re-

ceive a Goethe who felt himself transformed.

V. GOETHE WAITING: 1 788-94

With the absent poet's consent the Duke had appointed a new president

of the Council; now, at his own request, Goethe was relieved of all official

duties except as minister of education, and henceforth he served the Council

only in an advisory capacity. The Duke was kind, but he had taken other in-

timates, and he did not like the semirepublican sentiments of the rewritten

Egmont. The reading public had almost forgotten Goethe; it had taken up

a new poet called Schiller, and had enthusiastically applauded a play, The

Robbers, full of that Sturm-und-Drang rebelliousness and violence which

now seemed absurd and immature to a poet ready to preach classic order and

restraint. Charlotte von Stein received him coldly; she resented his long ab-

sence, his leisurely return, his persistent rapture about Italy; and perhaps

she had heard of those models in Rome. Their first meeting after his arrival

was "utterly false in tone," she wrote, "and nothing but boredom was ex-

changed between us." 74 She left for a stay in Kochberg, and Goethe was

free to think of Christiane Vulpius.

She came into his life on July 12, 1788, bearing a message from her

brother. She was twenty-three years old, and worked in a factory making

artificial flowers. Goethe was struck with her fresh spirit, her simple mind,

her budding womanhood. He invited her to his garden house as his house-

keeper, and soon made her his mistress. She had no education, and "cannot

understand poetry at all," said Goethe, 75 but she yielded herself trustfully,

and gave him the physical fulfillment that Charlotte had apparently refused.

In November, 1789, when she was nearing motherhood, he took her into

his Weimar home, and openly made her his wife in all but name. Charlotte

and the court were shocked at his crossing class lines and his failure to veil

the illicit relation; this reaction caused him and Christiane much grief; but

the Duke, an old hand with mistresses, served as godfather to the child that

was born on Christmas Day, 1789, and Herder, stern but forgiving, chris-

tened it August.

Goethe, so often a lover but only now a father, found much happiness in

59° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIII

"the little man" and "das kleine Weib" the little woman. She kept house for

him, she listened to him lovingly even when she did not understand him, and

she gave him health. "Since she first crossed this threshold," he told a friend,

"I have had nothing but joy of her." 76 Her only fault in his eyes was that

she loved wine even more than he did, and that it sometimes led her to al-

most uncontrolled merriment. She frequented the theater, and went to many

dances while Goethe stayed home and celebrated her in his Romische Ele-

gien (1789-90), written in the manner of Propertius and with the morals of

Catullus. There is nothing mournful about these "Roman elegies"; they get

their names from their "elegiac" meter of alternating hexameters and pentam-

eters; and they concern not Rome but a merry widow through whose dis-

guise we see Christiane herself.

All that thy sacred walls, eternal Rome, hold within them

Teemeth with life; but to me all is still silent and dead.

Oh, who will whisper unto me?— when shall I see at the casement

That one beauteous form, which, while it scorcheth, revives? . . .

Do not repent, mine own love, that thou so soon didst surrender!

Trust me; I deem thee not bold; reverence only I feel. . . .

Alexander and Caesar and Henry and Frederick, the mighty,

On me would gladly bestow half of the glory they earned,

Could I but grant unto them one night on the couch where I'm lying;

But they by Orcus' night sternly, alas, are heicTdown.

Therefore rejoice, O thou living one, blest in thy love-lighted homestead,

Ere the dark Lethe's sad wave wetteth thy fugitive foot. 77

That pretty widow may have been a Roman memory, but the warmth of

these lines came from Christiane. After all, was he not studying art?

Yet it is studious too with sensitive hand

To mark her bosom's lovely curves, and let

Wise fingers glide down the smooth thigh, for thus

I master the antique sculptor's craft, reflect,

Compare, and apprehend to come and see

With feeling eye, and feel with seeing hand. 78

The Weimar ladies were not pleased by this cheapening exposure of their

charms, and the stately Charlotte mourned the degeneration of her Galahad.

Even Karl August was a bit disturbed, but was soon appeased. When the

Dowager Duchess was returning from Italy he sent Goethe to Venice to

escort her home. His stay there (March to June, 1790) was protracted un-

comfortably; he longed for Christiane, and vented his irritation with Italian

shopkeepers and hygiene in Venezianische Epigramme—the least attractive

of his works.

On his return from Venice he found that the French Revolution was

arousing the youth of Germany to ecstasy, and the rulers to fear. Many of

his friends, including Wieland and Herder, were applauding the overthrow

of monarchical absolutism in France. Goethe, perceiving that all thrones

were threatened, took his stand beside the Duke, and counseled caution; so

many people, he said, were "running about with bellows in their hands,

when, it seems to me, they had better be looking for cold-water jugs" to

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 591

control the fire. 79 He obeyed the order of Karl August to accompany him

in the campaign of the First Coalition against France. He was present at the

battle of Valmy (September 20, 1792), stood calmly under fire, and shared

in the defeat. A German officer recorded in his diary that when the poet-

councilor was asked to comment on the event, he answered, "From today

and from this place begins a new epoch in the history of the world" 80 ; we

have no confirmation of this story. In any case, back in Weimar, Goethe

wrote vigorously against the Revolution, which was entering the period

(1792-94) of its excesses and savagery.

These developments confirmed in Goethe the natural turn of the matur-

ing mind from a zest for liberty to a love of order. As any fool can be origi-

nal, so Goethe felt that "any fool can live arbitrarily," 81 safely violating

customs or laws because others observe them. He had no enthusiasm for

democracy; if ever such a system should actually be practiced it would be

the sovereignty of simplicity, ignorance, superstition, and barbarity. He was

kindly and generous within his sphere, and spent part of his income in secret

charities, 82 but he shrank from the crowd. In the presence of multitudes or

strangers he withdrew proudly and timidly within himself, and found his

only happiness in his home. In these unsettling years (1790-94) he fell into

a somber torpor from which he was aroused by the touch of Schiller's ardent

youth and the competition of his pen.

VI. SCHILLER WAITING: 1 787-94

When Schiller reached Weimar Goethe was in Italy. The almost penniless

poet admitted jealousy of the absent councilor. "While he is painting in

Italy, the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys are sweating for him like beasts of bur-

den. He is squandering a salary of 1,800 thalers there, and here they have to

work double tides for half the money." 83 On August 12, 1787, he wrote

more favorably:

Goethe is spoken of here by many with a sort of devotion, and is even

more loved and admired as a man than as an author. Herder says he has a

most clear judgment, great depth of feeling, and the purest sentiments. . . .

According to Herder, Goethe is free from all spirit of intrigue; he has never

done harm to anyone. ... In his political transactions he acts openly and

boldly. . . . Herder says that as a man of affairs Goethe is more deserving

of admiration than as a poet, . . . that he has a mind large enough for any-

thing. 84

The Duke was away when Schiller came, but Anna Amalie and Charlotte

von Stein received him cordially. Wieland told him that he "was wanting in

polish, clearness, and taste," 85 and offered to polish him; soon the eager poet

was contributing to Wieland's Teutsche Merkur. He found more intimate

entertainment with Charlotte von Kalb, who, like the other Charlotte, had

a broad-minded husband. "People begin to whisper pretty loudly here about

my connection with Charlotte. . . . Herr von Kalb has written to me. He

59 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIII

comes here at the end of September, and his arrival will greatly influence

my arrangements. His friendship for me remains unchanged, which is aston-

ishing, for he loves his wife, and is aware of my intimacy with her. . . .

But he can never for one moment doubt her fidelity. . . . He still remains

the honest, goodhearted fellow he always was." 86

On August 27, 1787, Don Carlos had its premiere in Hamburg. Schiller

was too fond of Weimar to attend. This, his first play in verse, was both

praised and condemned as a surrender to the style of French tragedy, but it

lacked the dramatic unity required by Aristotelian rules. It began with the

conflict between Philip II and his son for the love of Elizabeth of Valois;

then, mid-play, the center of interest shifted to the struggle of the Nether-

lands to free themselves from Spanish suzerainty and Alva's cruelty. Schiller

tried to give an impartial portrait of Philip, and Protestant readers applauded

the appeal of Marquis Posa to the King:

Your Majesty,

I lately passed through Flanders and Brabant—

So many rich and blooming provinces,

Filled with a valiant, great, and honest people!

To be the father of a race like this

I thought must be divine indeed! And then

I stumbled on a heap of burned men's bones! . . .

Restore us all you have deprived us of,

And, generous and strong, let happiness

Flow from your horn of plenty; let man's mind

Ripen in your vast empire, . . . and become

Amidst a thousand kings a king indeed! . . .

Let every subject be what once he was—

The end and object of the monarch's care,

Bound by no duty save a brother's love. 87

Despite the success of Don Carlos, Schiller for a long time abandoned

drama. In 1786 he had written to Korner: "History has with each successive

day new attractions for me. ... I wish I had studied nothing else for ten

years together; I think I should have been another sort of being. Do you

think there is yet time to make up for what I have lost?" 88 He could not sup-

port himself, much less a family, on the proceeds of occasional plays that

even after an applauded premiere might wither to an early death. Perhaps

some successful work of history would give him sufficient reputation as a

scholar to win a professorship in the University of Jena. There he would be

only fourteen miles from Weimar, and still within the jurisdiction and

bounty of the Duke.

So, after finishing Don Carlos, he gave his pen to a Geschichte des Abfalls

der Vereinigten Niederlande (History of the Fall of the United Nether-

lands) . As Schiller could not read Dutch, he relied on secondary authorities,

from whose narratives he put together a compilation of no lasting worth.

Korner criticized Volume I (1788) with his usual honesty: "The present

work, with all its talent, does not bear the stamp of that genius of which you

are capable." 89 Schiller abandoned the Netherlands; no second volume came.

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 593

On July 1 8, 1788, Goethe returned from Italy, and in September met

Schiller in suburban Rudolstadt. Schiller reported to Korner: "The high

idea I had conceived of him is not lessened in the slightest degree, . . . but

I doubt if we shall ever draw very close to each other. . . . He is so far

ahead of me . . . that we cannot meet on the road. His whole life from the

very beginning has run in a direction contrary to mine. His world is not my

world. On some points our notions are diametrically opposed." 90 And indeed

the two poets seemed providentially designed to dislike each other. Goethe,

thirty-nine, had arrived and matured; Schiller, twenty-nine, was climbing

and experimenting; only in proud egotism did they agree. The younger man

was of the people, poor, writing semirevolutionary lines; the other was rich,

a man of rank and state, a privy councilor deprecating revolution. Schiller

was just emerging from Sturm und Drang; he was the voice of feeling, senti-

ment, freedom, romance; Goethe, wooing Greece, was all for reason, re-

straint, order, and the classic style. In any case, it is not natural for authors

to like one another; they are reaching for the same prize.

When they returned to Weimar, Goethe and Schiller lived only a short

walk from each other, but they did not communicate. Matters were wors-

ened by the appearance of Schiller's hostile review of Goethe's Egmont.

Goethe decided that "little Athens" was not large enough to contain both

of them. In December, 1788, he recommended Schiller for a chair in history

at Jena. Schiller gladly accepted, and called on Goethe to thank him, but in

February, 1 789, he wrote to Korner:

It would make me unhappy to be a great deal in Goethe's society. He never

warms even toward his best friends; nothing attaches him. I verily believe he is

an egotist of the first water. He possesses the talent of putting men under an

obligation to him by small as well as great acts of courtesy, but he always

manages to remain free himself. ... I look upon him as the personification

of a well-calculated system of unbounded selfishness. Men should not tolerate

such a being near them. He is hateful to me for this reason, though I cannot

do otherwise than admire his mind, and think nobly of him. He has aroused

in me a curious mixture of hatred and love. 91

On May 11, 1789, Schiller took up his duties at Jena, and on May 26 he

delivered his "inaugural address" on "What Is, and to What End Does One

Study, Universal History?" Admission being free, the audience proved far

too large for the room assigned, and the professor moved with his auditors

in a gay stampede to a hall at the other end of town: This lecture was

highly praised; "the students gave me a serenade that night, and three rounds

of cheers"; 92 but enrollment for the course— for which admission was

charged— was small, and Schiller's scholastic income was meager.

He added to it by writing. In 1789-91 he brought out, in three install-

ments, Geschichte des Dreissigjdhrigen Krieges (History of the Thirty

Years' War) . Here he was at home at least with the language, though again

he was too harassed to go to the primary sources, and his predilection for

judging and philosophizing colored and halted the tale. Nevertheless Wie-

land hailed the work as indicating Schiller's "capacity for rising to a level

594 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIII

with Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon." 93 Seven thousand copies of Volume I

were sold in its first year.

Schiller now felt that he could indulge his longing for a home, and for a

woman to give him love and care. He had had a brief glimpse of Charlotte

and Caroline von Lengefeld at Mannheim in 1784. He saw them again at

Rudolstadt in 1787; "Lotte" was living there with her mother, and Caroline,

unhappily married, was living next door. "Both, without being pretty,"

Schiller wrote to Korner, 94 "are interesting, and please me exceedingly.

They are well read in the literature of the day, and give proofs of a highly

finished education. They are good performers on the piano." Frau von

Lengefeld frowned upon the idea of her daughter marrying an impecunious

poet, but Karl August gave him a small pension of two hundred thalers, and

the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen secured him a patent of nobility. He warned

Lotte that he had many faults; she told him she had noticed them, but added:

"Love is loving people as we find them, and, if they have weaknesses, ac-

cepting them with a loving heart." 95 They were married on February 22,

1790, and took a modest home in Jena. Lotte brought her own income of

two hundred thalers a year, gave him four children, and proved, through all

his tribulations, a patient and tender wife. "My heart swims in happiness,"

he wrote, "and my mind draws fresh strength and vigor." 98

He worked hard, preparing two lectures a week, writing articles, poems,

and history. For months he labored fourteen hours a day. 97 In January, 1791,

he suffered two spells of "catarrhal fever," involving gastric pains and ex-

pectoration of blood. For eight days he lay in bed, his stomach rejecting all

food. Students helped Lotte to care for him, and "vied with one another as

to who should sit up with me at night. . . . The Duke sent me half a dozen

of old Madeira, which, with some Hungarian wine, has done me good serv-

ice." 98 In May he was attacked by "a fearful spasm, with symptoms of suffo-

cation, so that I could not but think that my last moment had come. ... I

took farewell of my loved ones, and thought to pass away any minute. . . .

Strong doses of opium, camphor, and musk, and the application of blisters,

relieved me most." 99

A false report of his death alarmed his friends, and reached even to Copen-

hagen. There— on suggestions from Karl Reinhold and Jens Baggesen— two

Danish noblemen, Duke Friedrich Christian of Holstein-Augustenburg and

Count Ernst von Schimmelmann, offered Schiller an annual gift of a thou-

sand thalers for three years. He received it gratefully. The university ex-

cused him from teaching, but he lectured to a small private circle. Part of his

new leisure he gave, at Reinhold's urging, to the study of Kant's philosophy,

which he accepted almost completely, to Goethe's amusement and Herder's

disgust, and perhaps with some detriment to Schiller's poetry.

Now (1793) he sent forth his long essay On Grace and Dignity, which

began the romantic cultivation of die schone Seele. "A beautiful soul" he de-

fined as one in which "reason and the senses, duty and inclination, are in

harmony, and are outwardly expressed in grace." 100 The Copenhagen donors

must have been alarmed to receive, as some return for their gift, a little vol-

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 595

ume entitled Brief e iiber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen {Letters

on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, 1793-94) . Starting with Kant's con-

ception of the sense of beauty as a disinterested contemplation of harmonious

forms, Schiller argued (with Shaftesbury) that "the feeling developed by

the beautiful refines manners," and the aesthetic sense becomes one with

morality. — It is a consolation to read, in this pronouncement from Weimar's

halcyon days, that Schiller (like Goethe) thought his generation decadent,

sunk in "profound moral degradation." 101

When he turned back from philosophy to poetry he found it difficult to

recapture "that boldness and living fire I formerly possessed; . . . critical

discussion has spoiled me." 102 But he insisted that "the poet is the only au-

thentic human being; the best philosopher is a mere caricature compared

with him"; 103 and he exalted to the plane of celestial inspiration the function

of the poet to teach and raise mankind. In a long ode, Die Kunstler {The

Artists, 1789), he described poets and artists as guiding mankind to the union

of beauty with morality and truth. In another poem, Die G otter Griec hen-

lands {The Gods of Greece, 1788) he lauded the Greeks for their aesthetic

sensibility and artistic creations, and argued, with cautious obscurity, that

the world had become gloomy and ugly since the replacement of Hellenism

by Christianity. He was already falling under Goethe's spell, as Goethe had

fallen under Winckelmann's.

Probably in both Schiller and Goethe the romantification of Hellas was

an escape from Christianity. Despite some pious passages Schiller, as well as

Goethe, belonged to the Aufklarung; he accepted the eighteenth-century

faith in salvation by human reason rather than by divine grace. He retained

a deistic belief in God— personal only in poetry— and a misty immortality.

He rejected all churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. He could not bear

sermons, even Herder's. In an epigram entitled "Mein Glaube" (My Faith)

he wrote two famous lines:

Welche Religion ich bekenne? Keine von alien

Die du mir nennst. Und warum keine? Aus Religion.

—"Which religion do I acknowledge? None of all those that you name to

me. And why none? Because of religion." 104 He wrote to Goethe, July 9,

1796: "A healthy and beautiful nature— as you yourself say— requires no

moral code, no law for its nature, no political metaphysics. You might as

well have added that it requires no godhead, no idea of immortality where-

with to support and maintain itself." Nevertheless there were factors of

imagination and tenderness in him that drew him back toward Christianity:

I find that Christianity virtually contains the first elements of what is highest

and noblest; and its various outward forms seem distasteful and repulsive to us

only because they are misrepresentations of the highest. . . . No sufficient

emphasis has been placed upon what this religion can be to a beautiful mind, or

rather what a beautiful mind can make of it. . . . This explains why this re-

ligion is so successful with feminine natures, and why it is that only in women

is it at all supportable. 105

59<5 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIII

Schiller was not, like Goethe, physically built for thorough paganism. His

face was handsome but pale, his frame tall but thin and frail. He distrusted

the diurnal vacillations of the weather, and preferred to sit in his room

smoking and taking snuff. He contrasted himself with Goethe as idea versus

nature, imagination versus intellect, sentiment versus objective thought. 106

He was at once timid and proud, shrinking from hostility but always fight-

ing back; occasionally irritable and impatient, 107 perhaps because aware that

his time was running out; often critical of others, sometimes envious. 108 He

had a tendency to moralize about everything, and to take a high idealistic

tone. It is a relief to find him enjoying the eroticism of Diderot's Les Bijoux

indiscrets. 109 He analyzed his own talent well in an early letter to Goethe:

The poetic mind generally got the better of me when I ought to have phi-

losophized, and my philosophical mind when I wished to poetize. Even now

it often happens that imagination intrudes upon my abstractions, and cold rea-

son upon my poetical productions. If I could obtain such mastery over these

two powers as to assign to each its limits [as Goethe did], I might yet look for-

ward to a happy fate. But, alas, just when I have begun to know and to use

my moral energies rightly, illness seizes me, and threatens to undermine my

physical powers. 110

His ailment returned with fury in December, 1793; he recovered, but the

sense that he could not be cured, and must expect recurrent seizures, dark-

ened his mood. On December 10 he wrote to Korner: "I struggle against

this with all the force of my mind, . . . but I am always driven back. . . .

The uncertainty of my prospects; . . . doubts of my own genius, which is

not sustained and encouraged by contact with others; the total absence of

that intellectual conversation which has become a necessity to me": these

were the mental accompaniments of his physical trials. He looked with long-

ing, from Jena to Weimar, to the enviably healthy Goethe, that mens sana

in corpore sano; there, Schiller felt, was the man who could give him stimu-

lus and support, if only the ice between them would melt, if only that four-

teen-mile barrier would fall away!

VII. SCHILLER AND GOETHE: 1794-1805

It fell for a moment when, in June, 1794, both men attended in Jena a

session of the Society for Natural History. Encountering Goethe as they

left the hall, Schiller remarked that the biological specimens exhibited at the

conference lacked life, and could offer no real help to understanding nature.

Goethe emphatically agreed, and the conversation kept them together till

they reached Schiller's home. "The talk induced me to go in" with him,

Goethe later recalled. "I expounded to him . . . The Metamorphosis of

Plants"— a treatise in which Goethe had argued that all plants were varia-

tions of one primitive type, the Urpflanze, and that nearly all parts of a plant

were variations or developments of the leaf. "He heard ... all this with

much interest and distinct apprehension; but when I had done he shook his

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 597

head and said, 'This is not experiment, it is an idea' "; i.e., it was a theory not

yet verified by observation or test. The comment nettled Goethe, but he saw

that Schiller had a mind of his own, and his respect for him grew. Schiller's

wife, "whom I had loved and valued since her childhood, did her best to

strengthen our reciprocal understanding." 111

In May of 1794 Schiller had signed a contract to edit a literary monthly

to be called Die Horen. (The Horae, in Greek mythology, were the god-

desses of the seasons.) He hoped to enlist as contributors Kant, Fichte, Klop-

stock, Herder, Jacobi, Baggesen, Korner, Reinhold, Wilhelm von Hum-

boldt, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, and— best catch of all— Goethe. On

June 3 he sent to Weimar a letter addressed to "Hochwohlgeborener Herr,

Hochzuverehrender Herr Geheimer Rat" (High and Wellborn Sir, Highly

Honored Sir Privy Councilor) a prospectus of the proposed magazine, and

added: "The enclosed paper expresses the wish of a number of men, whose

esteem for you is unbounded, that you would honor the periodical with con-

tributions from your pen, in regard to the value of which there can be but

one voice among us. We feel, your Excellency, that your consent to support

this undertaking will be a guarantee of its success." 112 Goethe replied that

he would gladly contribute, and was "certain that a closer connection with

the sterling men who form your committee will arouse to new life much that

is now stagnant within me." 113

So began a correspondence that is among the treasures of literary history,

and a friendship whose exchange of respect and aid, lasting for eleven years

—till Schiller's death— should enter into our estimate of mankind. Perhaps

the most revealing of the 999 extant letters is the fourth (August 23, 1794),

in which Schiller, after several meetings with Goethe, analyzed with both

courtesy and candor, both modesty and pride, the differences between their

minds:

My recent conversations with you have put the whole store of my ideas in

motion. . . . Many things about which I could not come to a right understand-

ing with myself have received new and unexpected light from the contempla-

tion I have had of your mind (for so I call the general impression of your

ideas upon me). I needed the object, the body, to several of my speculative

ideas, and you have put me on the track for finding it. Your calm and clear way

of looking at things keeps you from getting lost in the side roads into which

speculation, as well as arbitrary imagination . . . are so apt to lead me astray.

Your correct intuition grasps all things, and that far more perfectly than what

is laboriously sought for by analysis. . . . Minds like yours seldom know how

far they have penetrated, and how little cause they have to borrow from phi-

losophy, which in fact can only learn from them. . . . Although I have done

so at a distance, I have long watched the course which your mind has pur-

sued. . . . You seek for the necessary in nature, but . . . you look at nature

as a whole when seeking to get light thrown on her individual parts; you look

for the explanation of the individual in the totality of all her various manifesta-

tions. 114

Goethe's answer (August 27) cleverly avoided an analysis of Schiller's

mind:

59** ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIII

For my birthday, which occurred this week, I could have received no more

agreeable gift than your letter, in which, with a friendly hand, you sum up my

existence, and in which, by your sympathy, you encourage me to a more

assiduous and active use of my powers. ... It will be a pleasure to unfold to

you at leisure what your conversation has been to me; how I too regard those

days as an epoch in my life; for it seems to me that after so unexpected a meet-

ing we cannot but wander on in life together.

Goethe followed this up (September 4) with an invitation to Schiller to

come and spend some days with him in Weimar. "You could take up any

kind of work you like without being disturbed. We would converse to-

gether at convenient hours, . . . and I think we would not part without

some profit. You should live exactly as you like, and as much as possible as

if you were in your own home." Schiller readily accepted, but warned

Goethe that "the asthmatic spasms from which I suffer oblige me to stay in

bed all morning, since they leave me no peace at night." So, from September

14 to 28, Schiller was Goethe's guest, almost his patient. The older man took

tender care of the ailing poet, guarded him against annoyance, gave him

dietetic counsel, taught him to love fresh air. Back in Jena, Schiller wrote

(September 29): "I find myself at home again, but my thoughts are still in

Weimar. It will take me a long time to unravel all the ideas which you have

awakened in me." Then (October 8), with characteristic eagerness, he

urged: "It seems to me necessary that we should come at once to some clear

understanding about our ideas of the beautiful."

There followed three months of preparation for the first number of Die

Hor en. This appeared on January 24, 1795; the second, on March 1; the rest

monthly for three years. Goethe reported from Weimar (March 18): "Peo-

ple are running after it, snatching the numbers from one another's hands;

we could not want more for a beginning." On April 10 Schiller informed

Goethe: "Kant has written me a very friendly letter, but begs for a delay

in sending his contributions. ... I am glad we have induced the old bird

to join us." Goethe asked that his own pieces be unsigned, for they included

several of his Roman Elegies, and he knew that their lusty sensuality would

seem unbecoming in a privy councilor.

In the rash enthusiasm of success Schiller persuaded Goethe to join him in

another periodical, Der Musenahnanach, which appeared yearly from 1796

to 1 800. The liveliest pieces in this were the Xenien that the two poets wrote

on the model of Martial's Xenia— epigrams written as gifts to guests. Schiller

described the project to Korner: "The whole affair consists in a conglomera-

tion of epigrams, of which each is a single couplet. They are chiefly wild

and impish satires, especially against authors and their works, interspersed

here and there by sudden flashes of poetical or philosophical ideas. There

will be no less than six hundred of such monodistichs." 115 Goethe had sug-

gested this plan as a way to strike back at their critics, to make fun of pom-

pous authors and bourgeois tastes, and to stir the German reading public to a

keener interest in literature; they would send these "gifts" into the camp of

the Philistines "like foxes with burning tails." 116 The epigrams were un-

CHAP. XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 599

signed, and some of them were the joint product of the two conspirators.

Since many of these burning tails were directed at authors or controversies

now forgotten, time has extinguished their fire; but one of them, by Goethe,

especially merits remembrance:

hnmer strebe zum Ganzen, and kannst du selber kein Ganzes

Werden, als dienendes Glied schliess an ein Ganzes dich an!

—"Always strive for the whole, and if you yourself cannot become a whole,

tie yourself to some whole as a serving part." Another distich, usually cred-

ited to Schiller, extends the thought:

Vor dem Tod erschrickst du? Du wiinschest unsterblich zu leben?

LeV im Ganzen! Wenn du lange dahin bist, es bleibt.

—"You are frightened by death? You wish to live undying? Live in the

Whole! When you are long gone hence, it will remain." The satirical part

of the Xenien brought counterattacks, which made Schiller suffer and Goe-

the laugh. Goethe advised Schiller to let his work be his sole reply. "After

our mad venture with the Xenien, we must take pains to work only on great

and dignified works of art, and shame all our adversaries by transforming

our Protean natures into noble forms." 117

It was done. In these years of their developing friendship Goethe and

Schiller wrote some of their finest poems: Goethe "The Bride of Corinth"

and "The God and the Bayadere"; Schiller "The Walk" (1795), "The

Cranes of Ibycus" (1797), and "The Song of the Bell" (1800). Schiller

added a major essay Vber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795), and

Goethe sent forth Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ( 1 796) .

By "naive and sentimental poetry" Schiller meant poetry born of objec-

tive perception versus poetry developed by reflective feeling; secretly he was

comparing Goethe and Schiller. The "naive" poet is not simple or superficial

or deluded; he is one who is so readily adjusted to the external world that he

feels no opposition between himself and nature, but approaches reality

through direct and unhesitating intuition; Schiller cites Homer and Shake-

speare as examples. As civilization becomes more complex and artificial,

poetry loses this objective immediacy and subjective harmony; conflict en-

ters the soul, and the poet has to recapture through imagination and feeling

—as an ideal remembered or hoped for— this concord and union of the self

with the world; poetry becomes reflective, clouded with thought. 118 Schiller

believed that most Greek poetry was of the naive or direct sort, and most

modern poetry the result of discord, disunity, and doubt. The ideal poet is

he who will fuse both the simple and the reflective approaches in one vision

and poetic form. Goethe later pointed out that this essay became a fountain-

head of the debate between classical and Romantic literature and art.

The embryology of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre illustrates Goethe's

method of creation. He conceived the story in 1777, completed Book I in

1778, put it aside, and did not finish Book II until July, 1782. He worked on

Book III until November of that year, and on Book IV till November, 1783;

600 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIII

Books V and VI dragged along for three years more. He called these six

books "Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung," and read parts of them to

friends; then he laid them aside. He took up the tale again in 1791 on the

urging of Herder and Anna Amalie; added two books by June, 1794; sub-

mitted the growing manuscript to Schiller, who sent back criticisms, sug-

gestions, and encouragement as the pages came; it was almost a picture of a

midwife assisting at a long-overdue birth. At last, in 1796, the whole was

delivered to the press. No wonder the final product was slightly deformed,

weak in structure, adipose and confused, excellent only in parts and in its

mirroring of Goethe's uncertain wandering amid conflicting interests and

vague ideals. That decisiveness and self-confidence which Schiller ascribed

to him were the proud concealment of internal vacillation and strife.

Lehrjahre— "learning years"— expressed the period of apprenticeship in

the German guilds; through that time of tutelage Wilhelm became Meister,

master; so the meandering theme of the novel is Wilhelm's slow and painful

apprenticeship in the guild of life. Because of the puppet shows Goethe had

loved as a child, and his continuing interest in the theater, he tied the tale to

a troupe of actors passing through a dozen towns and a hundred vicissitudes

as lessons in living and pictures of German ways. Faithful to his own un-

faithfulness, he made his hero enter upon the scene by deserting his mistress

Marianne. Wilhelm is not an alluring character. He lets himself be carried

from one situation or idea to another by the whim of circumstance or the

power of personality; it is the woman who takes the initiative in his love af-

fairs. Born a bourgeois, he flounders in admiration for men of noble birth,

and humbly hopes that these will someday recognize the aristocracy of the

mind. Philine is more attractive: a pretty actress who waltzes lightly from

love to love, but graces her erotic tourism with a contagious gaiety and an

absolving unconsciousness of sin. Unique is little Mignon, who follows her

old father dutifully as he strums his harp in penny-gathering peregrinations.

Goethe describes her as speaking "very broken German," 119 but puts into

her mouth that perfect song, "Kennst du das Land." She falls in adolescent

love with Wilhelm, who loves her as a child, and she dies in grief when she

sees him in Theresa's arms. Ambroise Thomas plucked her out of these eight

hundred pages to make of her a sad and delightful opera ( 1 866) .

Schiller praised the calm serenity of the style in Wilhelm Meisters Lehr-

jahre, and the truth to life in the description of a wandering troupe; but he

pointed out contradictions in chronology, psychological improbabilities, of-

fenses against taste, and faults in characterization and design. 120 He proposed

changes in the plot, and gave his ideas as to how the story should end. 121

Goethe assured him, "I shall certainly comply with your just wishes as far

as I possibly can"; 122 but he confessed to Eckermann, thirty-three years later,

that it was all he could do to protect his novel from Schiller's influence. 123

Other critics were less friendly; one described the book as a brothel on tour;

and Charlotte von Stein complained that "when Goethe deals with lofty

emotions he always flings some dirt at them, as if to deprive human nature of

any pretensions to the divine." 124 The novel did not deserve these indiscrimi-

CHAP. XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 6oi

nate censures; it has many pleasant pages, and can still carry the interest of

readers freed from the tumult of the world.

On March 23, 1796, Schiller went again to Weimar as Goethe's giiest.

There they worked together for the theater. Goethe was a strict manager,

chose the plays to be presented, and trained the actors. "All that was morbid,

weak, lachrymose, or sentimental, as well as all that was frightful, horrible,

or offensive to decorum, was utterly excluded." 125 The audience was usually

confined to the court, except when some students were invited from Jena.

August von Schlegel remarked, acidly: "Germany has two national theaters

—Vienna, with a public of fifty thousand, and Weimar, with a public of

fifty." 126

Schiller returned to Jena April 1 2, stimulated by his renewed contact with

the stage to revert from history, philosophy, and incidental poetry to the

drama. He had long thought of writing a play on Wallenstein; Goethe urged

him to proceed with it. In November Goethe went to Jena, and lived for

some time in daily communication with Schiller. Back in Weimar, Goethe

wrote: "Do not fail to make use of your best hours, so as to get on with your

tragedy, that we may begin to discuss it." 127

While Schiller worked on Wallenstein, Goethe, stirred to rivalry by the

success of Johann Heinrich Voss's verse idyl of German life and sentiment,

Luise (1795), tried his hand at this favorite genre, and published in 1798

Hermann und Dorothea. Hermann is the strong and healthy, shy and quiet

son of a bilious father and tender mother, who keep the Golden Inn and an

extensive farm in a village near the Rhine. They learn that hundreds of refu-

gees are approaching from a frontier town captured by the French; the fam-

ily make up parcels of clothing and food, which Hermann conveys to the

refugees. He finds among them a lass with "swelling bosom" and "neatly

shaped ankles," 128 who is serving them with aid and comfort. He falls in love

with her, and, after due tribulations, brings her home to his parents as his

bride. The story is told in fluent hexameters; vignettes of rural life give color

to the tale; calls for the expulsion of the French invaders pleased patriotic

Germans who had found Iphigenie auf Tauris and Torquato Tasso foreign

and recondite; and the little epic gave new popularity to an author who,

since Werther, had had few readers outside the Saxe- Weimar duchy.

Schiller's star was in the ascendant from 1798 to 1800. On November 28,

1796, he wrote to Korner: "I am still brooding seriously over Wallenstein,

but the unfortunate work is still before me, shapeless and endless." He began

it in prose, put it aside, then started it again in verse. The material was partly

familiar to him from his studies for his History of the Thirty Years' War,

but it was so abundant, so complex in characters and events, that he aban-

doned the attempt to compress it into five acts. He decided to preface the

drama with a one-act prologue called Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein' s

Camp), and to divide the remainder into two plays. Die Piccolomini ex-

pounded the plot to depose the rebellious general, and set it off with a fiery

love affair between Wallenstein's daughter and the son of a leader in the

plot. The final and essential drama would be Wallensteins Tod.

602 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIII

When Goethe read the prologue he was so struck by the realistic por-

trayal of an army camp, and the clever preparation for later developments,

that he insisted on staging W allensteins Lager in the Weimar theater (Octo-

ber 12, 1798) before Die Ficcolomini was complete; perhaps it was a subtle

way of keeping the poet to his task. Early in 1799 Schiller went to Weimar

to stage Die Viccolormni; it had its premiere on January 30, and was well re-

ceived; he returned to Jena and worked feverishly on The Death of W alien-

stein. A letter of March 19, 1799, reveals the mood of a writer emerging

from the ardor of creation: "I have long dreaded the moment when I should

be rid of my work, much as I wished that moment would come; and in fact

I feel my present freedom to be worse than the state of bondage that I have

been in heretofore. The mass which has hitherto drawn and held me to it has

now gone, and I feel as if I were hanging indefinitely in empty space."

Excitement enough came with the rehearsals and premiere (April 20,

1799) of W allensteins Tod. Its success was complete; even the highly criti-

cal Weimar audience felt that it had witnessed a masterpiece of dramatic

presentation. Schiller had now reached the peak of his development. He had

shortened the speeches and intensified the action; he had drawn all the lead-

ing characters with vitality and power; he had brought all the threads of the

plot together in the tragic denouement— the ignominious death of a great

man ruined by limitless ambition and pride. Schiller felt that he could now

stand on an equality with Goethe; 129 and in the field of drama he was justi-

fied. Probably at Goethe's suggestion, the Duke added two hundred thalers

to Schiller's pension, and invited him to reside in Weimar. On December 3,

1799, the family moved to a house so close to Goethe's that for a time the

two poets saw each other every day. 130

Meanwhile, carried onward by his triumph, Schiller had flung himself

into another play. "Thank God!" he wrote to Korner on May 8, 1799, "I

have already hit upon a new subject for a tragedy." For his Maria Stuart he

studied the historical background, but he laid no claim to writing history; he

proposed to write a play using history as material and background. He re-

arranged events and chronology for dramatic consistency and effect; he

stressed the unpleasant elements in Elizabeth's character, and made Mary

an almost immaculate heroine; and he brought the two queens face to face

in a dramatic confrontation. History knows of no such meeting, but the

scene is one of the most powerful in the literature of the stage. When it was

presented at Weimar, June 14, 1800, Schiller was again exalted with success.

By July he was at work on Die Jungfrau von Orleans. Here too he revised

history to his purpose: in place of burning the Maid he pictured Joan as es-

caping from her English captors, rushing into battle to rescue her king, and

dying in victory on the field. The premiere at Leipzig (September 18, 1801)

was the greatest triumph that Schiller ever had.

Was Goethe jealous of his friend's sudden rise to ascendancy on the Ger-

man stage? He rejoiced over it, and twenty-eight years later he still judged

W allensteins Tod "so great that there is nothing else like it of the kind." 131

However, he did not rank his rival as high in poetry as in drama; he felt that

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 603

Schiller had clouded his poetry with philosophy, and had never quite mas-

tered the music of verse. 132 When some admirers of Schiller wished to stage

a tribute to him in the Weimar theater, Goethe forbade it as too ostenta-

tious. 133 In July, 1800, he went to Jena for seclusion and study, while Schiller

remained in Weimar; but on November 23 Schiller still spoke in terms of

friendship unimpaired. He ranked Goethe as "the most gifted man since

Shakespeare. ... In the six years of our intimacy no slightest doubt of his

integrity ever arose. He possessed the highest veracity and sense of honor,

and the deepest earnestness in the pursuit of what is right and good." 134 "I

wish," he added, "that I could justify Goethe as warmly in respect of his

domestic relations! . . . Through false notions of what constitutes domestic

happiness, and through an unhappy fear of marriage, he has slipped into an

entanglement which oppresses him and makes him wretched in his very

home, and which he is too weak and softhearted to shake off. This is his only

vulnerable spot." Schiller's wife, like the other ladies of Weimar, would not

receive Christiane in her home, and Schiller rarely mentioned Christiane in

his extant communications with Goethe.

Despite these flaws in the friendship of the Dioskuren, as they were some-

times called, it at least proved that a classic and a Romantic genius might live

in harmony. They sent messages to each other almost every day; they fre-

quently had supper together; Goethe often put his carriage at Schiller's dis-

posal; he sent to Schiller "a portion of the order which my wine merchant

has just delivered." 135 "Let us have a walk together toward evening," Goethe

wrote on April 20, 1801; and on June 11; "Farewell; give my kind greetings

to your dear wife, and gladden me, on my return [from Gottingen], by

showing me some fruits of your industry"; and on June 28, 1802: "A key

to my garden and garden house will be given you; I want you to have as

good a time there as possible." Twenty-two years after Schiller's death Goe-

the said to Eckermann, "It was fortunate for me . . . that I found Schiller;

for, different as our natures were, our tendencies were still toward one point,

which made our connection so intimate that one really could not live with-

out the other." 136

In the final years of their alliance each was handicapped by disease. For

the first three months of 1801 Goethe suffered from nervousness, sleepless-

ness, violent influenza, and abscesses that for a time closed his eyes. At one

stage he was unconscious for so long that Weimar expected his death. On

January 12 Charlotte von Stein wrote to her son Fritz: "I did not know that

my former friend Goethe was still so dear to me, and that a serious illness,

which overcame him nine days ago, would so shake me to the very core." 137

She took Christiane's boy, August, into her home for a while to ease the

burdens that Goethe's sickness had laid upon his mistress, who tended him

tirelessly. His recovery was slow and painful. "It is hard," he wrote to Char-

lotte, "to find the way back." 138

In 1802 Schiller, now prosperous from the rising proceeds of his acted and

published plays, bought a home in Weimar for 7,200 gulden, and Goethe,

then in Jena, helped him to sell the house he had lived in there. On March 17,

6°4 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIII

1803, Schiller produced Die Braut von Messina, a self-confessed 139 attempt

to rival Sophocles' Oedipus by portraying, with a divided chorus, the strife

of two brothers in love with a woman who turns out to be their sister. The

play did not please. Goethe experienced a similar setback when, in 1803, he

staged Die naturliche Tochter.

Among the spectators at a performance of The Natural Daughter was a

brilliant and volatile lady, Germaine Necker, Mme. de Stael, who was gath-

ering material for her book De rAllemagne. She saw Schiller for the first

time in December, 1803,

in the salon of the Duke and Duchess of Weimar, in a society as enlightened

as it is exalted. He read French very well, but he had never spoken it. I main-

tained with some warmth the superiority of our dramatic system over that of

all others; he did not refuse to enter the lists with me, without feeling any un-

easiness from the difficulty and slowness with which he expressed himself in

French. ... I soon discovered so many ideas through the impediment of his

words, I was so struck with the simplicity of his character, ... I found him so

modest, ... so animated, that I vowed him, from that moment, a friendship

full of admiration. 140

Schiller prepared Goethe for her: "She represents the intellectual culture of

France in its purity. . . . The only trouble with her is her quite extraordi-

nary volubility. One has to turn oneself into one concentrated organ of hear-

ing in order to follow her." 141 He brought her to Goethe on December 24.

Goethe reported: "A most interesting hour. I didn't get a chance to say a

word. She speaks well, but far too much." Her own report was identical ex-

cept for a slight change: she said that Goethe had talked so much that she

had not had a chance to speak one syllable. 142 Her book served as a revelation

to France of Germany as "the native land of thought." "It is impossible," she

wrote, "that the German writers, the best-informed and the most reflecting

men in Europe, should not deserve a moment's attention to be bestowed upon

their literature and their philosophy." 143

Resolved to win back the audience that had rejected The Bride of Mes-

sina, Schiller, at Goethe's suggestion, chose for his next drama the popular

story of William Tell. He was soon on fire with the theme. "After he had

gathered all necessary material," Goethe recalled in 1820, "he sat down to

work and . . . did not get up from his chair until the play was finished. If

weariness overcame him he laid his head on his arm and slept a while. So

soon as he awoke he asked ... for strong black coffee to keep himself

awake. So the play was written in six weeks." 144

Schiller accepted as history the legend of a William Tell who had led the

revolt of the Swiss against Austria in 1308. The revolt was real; so was

Gessler, the hated Austrian bailiff. Gessler, in the legend, promised Tell full

pardon if he proved his famed prowess with bow and arrow by shooting an

apple from his boy's head. Tell placed two arrows in his belt; with the first

he shot the apple; Gessler asked for what he had intended the second; Tell

answered, "For you if the first should strike my son." The play was ac-

claimed at Weimar on March 17, 1804, and soon thereafter everywhere;

CHAP.XXIIl) WEIMAR IN FLOWER 605

Switzerland adopted it as part of its national lore. Published, the play sold

seven thousand copies in a few weeks. Schiller was now more famous than

Goethe.

But he had less than a year of life left to him. In July, 1804, he had so

violent an attack of colic that his doctor feared for his death and Schiller

hoped for it. He recovered slowly, and began another play, Demetrius (the

"false Dmitri" of Russian history). On April 28, 1805, he saw Goethe for

the last time; from that meeting Goethe returned to his home and himself

fell seriously ill with colic. On the twenty-ninth Schiller's final sickness be-

gan. Heinrich Voss reported: "His eyes were sunk deep in his head, and

every nerve twitched convulsively." 145 The unhealthy tensions of literary

effort, the inflammation of his bowels, and the decay of his lungs joined to

destroy him. "Schiller never drank much," said Goethe later; "he was very

temperate, but in such hours of bodily weakness he was obliged to stimulate

his powers with spirituous liquors." 146 On May 9 Schiller met death with a

strange calm: he bade farewell to his wife, his four children, and his friends;

then he fell asleep, and did not wake again. An autopsy showed the left lung

completely destroyed by tuberculosis, the heart degenerated, the liver, the

kidney, and the intestines all diseased. The doctor told the Duke: "Under

the circumstances we cannot help wondering how the poor man could have

lived so long." 147

Goethe was so ill at the time that no one dared tell him of Schiller's death.

On May 10 Christiane's sobbing revealed it to him. "I thought I was losing

my own life," he wrote to Zelter, "and instead I lost a friend who was the

very half of my existence." 148 With what remained he came to his own ful-

fillment.

CHAPTER XXIV

Goethe Nestor

1805-32

I. GOETHE AND NAPOLEON

SHALL we, honoring our stated limits, leave Goethe suspended at this

point, with Faust on his pen and wisdom in his age, or shall we, burden-

ing space and risking time, pursue this ever-evolving Olympian to his end?

Die eivige Weisheit zieht uns hinan: timeless wisdom draws us on. 1

On October 14, 1806, Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena. Duke Karl

August, allied with Prussia, had led his own little army against the French

in that battle. The routed survivors, and then the hungry victors, entered

Weimar, sacked the stores, and quartered themselves in private homes. Six-

teen Alsatian troops took over Goethe's house; Christiane gave them food,

drink, and beds. That night two other soldiers, intoxicated, forced their way

in, and, finding no more beds available on the lower floor, ran upstairs into

Goethe's room, brandished their swords in his face, and demanded accom-

modations. Christiane placed herself between these soldiers and her mate,

persuaded them to leave, and then bolted the door. On the fifteenth Bona-

parte reached Weimar and restored order; instructions were issued that "the

distinguished scholar" was not to be disturbed, and that "all measures should

be taken to protect the great Goethe and his home." 2 Marshals Lannes, Ney,

and Augereau stayed with him for a while, and then left with apologies and

compliments. Goethe thanked Christiane for her bravery, and said to her,

"God willing, we shall be man and wife." On October 19 they were mar-

ried. His good mother, who had borne lovingly with all his faults, and mod-

estly with all his honors, sent them renewed blessings. She died on Septem-

ber 12,1 808, and Goethe inherited half of her estate.

In October, 1 808, Napoleon presided over a meeting of six sovereigns and

forty-three princes at Erfurt, and remade the map of Germany. Duke Karl

August attended, taking Goethe in his retinue. Bonaparte asked Goethe to

visit him on October 2; the poet came, and spent an hour with the con-

queror, Talleyrand, two generals, and Friedrich von Miiller, a Weimar mag-

istrate. Napoleon complimented him on his vigor (Goethe was then fifty-

nine), inquired about his family, and launched into a spirited critique of

Werther. He condemned current dramas that emphasized fate. "Why talk

about fate? Politics are fate. . . . QiCen dit Monsieur Goet?— What does

Monsieur Goethe say about it?" We do not know Goethe's reply, but Miil-

ler reported that as Goethe was leaving the room Napoleon remarked to his

generals, "Voila un homme!" (Behold a man/) 3

606

CHAP.XXIV) GOETHE NESTOR 607

On October 6 Napoleon returned to Weimar, taking with him a company

of actors from Paris, the great Talma among them. They played, in Goethe's

theater, Voltaire's La Mort de Cesar. After the performance the Emperor

took Goethe aside and discussed tragedy. "The serious drama," he said,

"could very well be a school for princes as well as for the people, for in cer-

tain ways it is above history. . . . You ought to portray the death of Caesar

more magnificently than Voltaire has done, and show how happy Caesar

[Napoleon] would have made the world if the people had only granted him

time in which to carry out his lofty plans." And a little later: "You must

come to Paris! I make this definite request of you! You will there obtain

a larger view of the world, and you will find a wealth of themes for your

poetry." 4 — When Napoleon passed through Weimar again, after his disas-

trous retreat from Moscow, he asked the French ambassador to convey his

greetings to Goethe.

The poet felt that in Bonaparte he had met, as he expressed it, "the great-

est mind the world has ever seen." 5 He quite approved Napoleon's rule of

Germany; after all (Goethe had written in 1807), there was no Germany,

only a farrago of petty states, and the Holy Roman Empire had ceased to

exist in 1806; it seemed good to Goethe that Europe should be united, espe-

cially under so brilliant a head as Bonaparte's. He did not rejoice over Napo-

leon's defeat at Waterloo, though his Duke again led the Weimar regiments

against the French. His culture and concern were too universal to let him

feel much patriotic glow; and he could not find it in him, though often asked

to do so, to write songs of nationalistic fervor. In his eightieth year he said

to Eckermann:

How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? And, between our-

selves, I never hated the French, although I thanked God when we were rid

of them. How could I, to whom the only significant things are civilization

[Kultur] and barbarism, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in

the world, and to which I owe a great part of my own culture? In any case

this business of hatred between nations is a curious thing. You will always

find it most powerful and barbarous on the lowest levels of civilization. But

there exists a level at which it wholly disappears, and where one stands, so

to speak, above the nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people

as though it were one's own. This level was appropriate to my nature; I had

reached it long before my sixtieth year. 6

Would that there had been, in every major state, a million such "good Eu-

ropeans"!

II. FAUST: PART I

Goethe did not accept Napoleon's invitation to move to Paris or to write

about Caesar; he had long nurtured in his mind and his manuscripts a subject

that moved him more deeply than even the most majestic political career:

the struggle of the soul toward understanding and beauty, the defeat of the

soul by the brevity of beauty and the elusiveness of truth, and the peace ob-

6°8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIV

tainable by the soul through narrowing the goal and broadening the self. But

how to vision all this in a modern parable and dramatic form? For fifty-eight

years Goethe tried.

He had learned the story of Faust 7 in his childhood through chapbooks

and puppet shows, and he had seen pictures of Faust and the Devil on the

walls of Auerbach's cellar in Leipzig. He himself, in youth, had meddled

with magic and alchemy. His own restless search for understanding went

into his conception of Faust; his reading of Voltaire and his contact with

Herder's sarcasms went into Mephistopheles; the Gretchen whom he had

loved in Frankfurt, and the Friederike Brion whom he had deserted in Se-

senheim, gave name and form to Margaret.

How deeply the story of Faust moved Goethe, how varied the forms it

took in his thought, shows in the fact that he began to write the play in 1773,

and did not finish it till 1831. Of his meeting with Herder in 1771 he wrote

in his autobiography:

I most carefully concealed from him my interest in certain subjects which

had rooted themselves in me, and were, little by little, molding themselves into

poetic form. These were Gotz von Berlichingen and Faust. . . . The significant

puppet show of the latter resounded and vibrated, many-toned, within me. I too

had wandered about in all sorts of science, and had early enough been led to

see its vanity. I had, moreover, tried all sorts of ways in real life, and had al-

ways returned unsatisfied and troubled. Now these things, as well as many

others, I carried about with me, and delighted myself with them in solitary

hours, but without writing anything down. 8

On September 17, 1775, he told a correspondent: "I felt fresh this morning,

and wrote a scene of my Faust" 9 Later in that month Johann Zimmermann

asked him how the play was progressing. "He brought in a bag filled with

a thousand fragments of paper, and threw it on the table. 'There,' he said, 'is

my Faust.' " 10 When he went to Weimar (November, 1775) the first form

of the drama was complete. 11 Dissatisfied with it, he put it aside; this Urfaust,

or Original Faust, never reached print till 1887, w hen a manuscript copy

made by Fraulein von Gochhausen was found in Weimar. 12 Through fifteen

more years he revised and expanded it. Finally he published it (1790) as

Faust, ein Fragment, which now runs to sixty-three pages; 13 this was the

first printed form of the most famous play since Hamlet.

Still discontent with it, Goethe dropped the theme till 1797. On June 22

he wrote to Schiller: "I have determined to take up my Faust again, . . .

breaking up what has been printed, arranging it in large masses, . . . and

further preparing the development. ... I only wish that you would be so

good as to think the matter over on one of your sleepless nights, and tell me

what you would demand of the whole, and to interpret my dreams to me

like a true prophet." Schiller replied the next day: "The duality of human

nature, and the unsuccessful endeavor to unite in man the godlike and the

physical, is never lost sight of. . . . The nature of the subject will force you

to treat it philosophically, and the imagination will have to accommodate

itself to serve a rational idea." Goethe's imagination was too rich, his vividly

remembered experiences too many; he inserted many of them into the Frag-

CHAP.XXIV) GOETHE NESTOR 609

ment, doubling its size, and in 1808 he gave the world what we now call

Faust, Part I.

Before letting his puppet say a word, he prefixed to the drama a tender

Zueignung— dedication— to his dead friends; and a droll "Prologue in the

Theater" between manager, playwright, and jester; and a "Prologue in

Heaven" wherein God bets Mephistopheles that Faust cannot be perma-

nently won to sin. Then at last Faust speaks, in simplest doggerel:

Habe nun, achl Fhilosophie, I have studied, alas, philosophy,

Juristerei und Medizin, Jurisprudence, and medicine too,

Und leider auch Theologte And, saddest of all, theology,

Durchaus studiert, mit heissem Be- With ardent labor, through and

miihn. through.

Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor! And here I stick, as wise, poor fool,

Und bin so king als ivie zuvor. As when my steps first turned to

school.

Heisse Magister, heisse Doktor gar, Master they style me, nay, Doctor

forsooth,

Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr And nigh ten years, over rough and

smooth

Herauf, herab, und quer und krumm And up and down, and acrook and

across,

Meine Schiller an der Nase herum, I lead my pupils by the nose,

Und sehe dass ivir nichts ivissen kon- And know that in truth we can know

nen. naught. 14

This four-foot meter, handed down from Hans Sachs's playlets, proved to

be just the rippling rhythm for a drama that chastened philosophy with fun.

Faust, of course, is Goethe, even to being a man of sixty years; and, like

Goethe, he was still, at sixty, thrilled by feminine loveliness and grace. His

double aspiration for wisdom and beauty was the soul of Goethe; it chal-

lenged the avenging gods by its presumption, but it was noble. Faust and

Goethe said Yea to life, spiritual and sensual, philosophical and gay. By

contrast, Mephistopheles (who is not Satan but only Satan's philosopher) is

the devil of denial and doubt, to whom all aspiration is nonsense, all beauty

a skeleton wearing skin. In many moments Goethe was this mocking spirit

too, or he could not have given him such wit and life. At times Mephistoph-

eles seems to be the voice of experience, of realism and reason checking the

romantic desires and delusions of Faust; indeed, Goethe told Eckermann,

"the character of Mephistopheles is ... a living result of an extensive ac-

quaintance with the world." 15

Faust does not sell his soul unconditionally; he agrees to go to hell only if

Mephistopheles shows him a pleasure so durably satisfying that he will be

glad to stay with it forever:

If ever on the bed of sloth I loll contented ever,

Then with that moment end my race! . . .

Should I to any moment say,

"Tarry a while, you are so fair! "*

Then may you into fetters cast me;

Then will I gladly go down there.

* Verweile doch, du bin so schon!

6io

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

(CHAP. XXIV

On this condition Faust signs the compact with his blood, and cries reck-

lessly, "Our glowing passions in a sensual sea now will we quench!" 16

So Mephistopheles takes him to Margaret-"Gretchen." Faust finds in her

all the charm of that simplicity which departs with knowledge and returns

with wisdom. He woos her with jewels and philosophy:

MARGARET.

FAUST.

MARGARET.

FAUST.

MARGARET.

FAUST.

MARGARET.

FAUST.

Tell me, how is't with thy religion, pray?

Thou art a good and kindly man,

And yet, I think, small heed thereto dost pay.

Enough, dear child! I love thee, thou dost feel.

For those I love my blood and life I'd spill,

Nor of his faith, his church, would any man bereave.

That is not right! We must believe! . . .

Dost thou believe in God?

What man can say, my dearest,

"I believe in God"? ...

Then thou believest not?

Thou winsome angel-face, mishear me not!

Who can name Him? Who thus proclaim him?

I believe Him?

Who that has feeling, his bosom steeling,

Can say, "I believe Him not"?

The All-embracing, the All-sustaining;

Clasps and sustains He not

Thee, me, Himself?

Springs not the vault of heaven above us?

Lieth not earth, firm-'stablished, 'neath our feet? . .

Great though it be, fill thou therefrom thine heart,

And when in the feeling wholly blest thou art,

Call it then what thou wilt!

Call it Bliss, Heart, Love, God!

I have no name for it.

Feeling is all [Gefiihl ist alles] !

Name is but sound and smoke

Clouding the glow of heaven. . . .

It seemeth fair in these words of thine,

But yet . . . thou hast no Christianity.

Dear child! 17

She is moved not by his cloudy pantheism but by the fine figure and raiment

with which Mephistopheles' magic has endowed his restored youth. She sings

at her spinning wheel a song of wistful longing:

Meine Ruh ist bin,

Mein Herz ist schwer,

Ich finde sie nimmer

Und nimmermehr. . . .

Nach ihm nur schau ich

Zum Fenster hinaus,

Nach ihm nur geh ich

Aus dem Haus.

Sein hoher Gang,

Sein* edle Gestalt,

Seines Mundes Lacheln,

My peace is fled,

My heart is sore,

I shall find it never,

And nevermore. . . .

Him only I watch for,

The window near;

Him only I look for

When forth I fare.

His lofty gait,

His lordly guise,

The smile of his lips,

CHAP. XXIV ) GOETHE NESTOR 6ll

Seiner Augen Gewalt. . . . The might of his eyes. . . .

Mein Busen drangt My bosom yearns

Sich nach ihm hin. For him, for him.

Ach, diirft ich fassen Ah, could I clasp him

Und halten ihn, And cling to him,

Und kiissen ihn, And kiss him, as fain

So ivie ich nvollt, I would, then I,

An seinen Kiissen Faint with his kisses,

Verge hen sollt! Should swoon and die! 18

All the Western world knows the rest of the story, if only through Gou-

nod. Margaret, in order to kiss and swoon unchaperoned, gives her mother

a sleeping potion, from which the mother never wakes. Faust kills Margaret's

brother Valentine in a duel, and then disappears; Margaret, in shame and

grief, kills her fatherless child; she is arrested and condemned to death.

Faust visits her in her dungeon and begs her to escape with him; she em-

braces him, but refuses to leave her cell. Mephistopheles draws Faust away,

while a voice from heaven cries, "She is redeemed."

Only slowly did the reading public realize that this Faust of 1 808 was the

finest drama and the finest poetry that Germany had yet produced. But

some alert few recognized it at once as fit to stand among the peaks of the

world's literature. Friedrich Schlegel compared Goethe with Dante, Jean

Paul Richter equaled him with Shakespeare; Wieland gave him in the realm

of poetry the same sovereignty that Napoleon then held in government and

war. 19

III. NESTOR IN LOVE

In the years 1 8 1 8-2 1 Goethe had two soul-stirring romances, not counting

Bettina Brentano. On April 23, 1807, Bettina, twenty-two, came to the aging

poet with a letter of introduction from Wieland. She was the granddaughter

of Sophie von La Roche, who had loved Wieland, and she was the daughter

of Maximiliane Brentano, who had flirted with Goethe; she felt that she

had a primogenital lien on Goethe's heart. Soon after entering his room she

flung herself into his arms. He accepted her as a child, and thereafter corre-

sponded with her in that sense; but he enclosed with his letters the latest

love poems he had written, and though they were not addressed to her she

treated them as declarations of passion, and gave them that color in the

Goethes Briefivechsel mit einem Kinde (Goethe's Correspondence with a

Child) which she published in 1835.

Most of the poems had been inspired by Wilhelmine Herzlieb. Minna, as

Goethe soon called her, was the daughter of a Jena bookseller. He had

known her as a child, but in 1808 she was nineteen, modest, tender, and

blooming. She hung on every word that he spoke, and mourned that age and

status forbade her to love and possess him. He perceived her feeling, re-

sponded to it, wrote sonnets to her, punning on her name as a loving heart;

but he recalled that he had only recently made Christiane his wife. He seems

6l2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIV

to have had Minna in mind when he portrayed the shy, highstrung, affection-

ate Ottilie of the Elective Affinities ( 1 809) .

This remarkable novel— Die Wahlverwandtschaf ten— is, as its author

thought, 20 his best work of prose fiction, far better organized and more com-

pactly told than either of the Wilhelm Meister circumambulations. Note

Goethe's words to Eckermann (February 9, 1829): "In the whole of the

Elective Affinities there is not a line which I myself did not actually live, and

there is far more behind the text than anyone can assimilate at a single read-

ing." Indeed, the fault of the book is that there is too much Goethe in it, too

much philosophizing put into unlikely mouths. (He makes the girl Ottilie

keep a diary in which he deposits some of his maturest obiter cogitata, such

as, "Against great excellence in another there is no way of defending our-

selves except love." 21 ) But it is because there is so much of Goethe in this

book that it is warm with life and rich in thought: because the Charlotte of

the story is again Charlotte von Stein, tempted, but refusing, to be unfaithful

to her husband; because the Captain is Goethe in love with his friend's wife;

because Edward, the fifty-year-old husband infatuated with Ottilie, is

Goethe drawn to Minna Herzlieb; and because the novel is Goethe's attempt

to analyze his own erotic sensitivity.

He here proposed to think of sexual attraction in chemical terms. He may

have taken his title from the Elective Affinities published by the great Swed-

ish chemist Torbern Olof Bergman in 1775. The Captain describes to Ed-

ward and Charlotte the attractions, repulsions, and combinations of material

particles: "You ought yourselves to see these substances— which seem so

dead and are yet so full of energy and force— at work before your eyes. Now

they seek each other out, . . . seize, crush, devour, destroy one another,

and then suddenly they reappear ... in fresh, renovated, unexpected

forms." 22 So, when Edward invites his friend the Captain, and Charlotte in-

vites her niece Ottilie, to stay with them for long visits, the Captain falls in

love with Charlotte, and Edward falls in love with Ottilie. When Edward

has intercourse with his wife he thinks of Ottilie, and Charlotte thinks of the

Captain, in a kind of psychological adultery. The offspring looks strangely

like Ottilie, and Ottilie takes to the child as if her own. Then, apparently by

accident, she lets it drown; in remorse she starves herself to death. Edward

dies of a broken heart; the Captain disappears; Charlotte survives, spiritually

dead. A town philosopher concludes: "Marriage is the beginning and end

of all civilization. It tames the savage, and gives to the most cultivated their

best opportunity for gentleness. It should be indissoluble, for it brings so

much happiness that its incidental tribulations count for nothing in the

scale." 23 Four pages later, however, one character suggests trial marriage, in

which the contract is for only five years at a time.

In 1 810 we find Goethe at Karlsbad taking the waters and flirting with

young women, while Christiane, four years married, remained at home,

flirting with young men. The sixty-one-year-old poet won the passionate

love of a darkly beautiful Jewess, Marianne von Eybenberg; then he fled

from her with blond Silvie von Ziegesar. In a poem addressed to Silvie he

CHAP. XXIV ) GOETHE NESTOR 613

called her "daughter, mistress, darling, white, and slim." 24 Christiane sent

him appeals for fidelity:

And have Bettina and that Frau von Eybenberg arrived in Karlsbad yet?

They say here that Silvie and the Gotters are to be there, too. So what will you

do, between all your flirtations? Rather too many! But you won't forget your

oldest one, will you? Think of me a little, too, now and then. I mean to trust

you absolutely, whatever people may say. For you are the only one, you know,

who thinks of me at all. 25

He sent her little gifts.

He found time almost every day to compose some poetry or prose. About

1 809 he began to write his autobiography. He called it Aus meinem Leben

Dichtung und Wahrheit (Fiction and Truth pom My Life). The title hand-

somely admitted that he might now and then, intentionally or not, have

mingled imagination with reality. He touched only lightly and delicately on

his love for Charlotte Buff, but told more fully of his romance with Frieder-

ike Brion; both of these women still lived. He analyzed well and generously

many friends of his youth— Lenz, Basedow, Merck, Herder, Jacobi, Lavater.

Of himself he spoke modestly; his private notes complained that the auto-

biographer is expected to confess his faults but not to reveal his virtues. 26 The

book is the history of a mind rather than of a life; incidents in it are few, re-

flections abound. It is his greatest book of prose.

In 1 8 1 1 he received from Beethoven a letter of admiration, with the Over-

ture to Egmont. Poet and composer met at Teplitz in July, 1812; Beethoven

played for Goethe, and took walks with him. If we may trust the novelist

August Frankl, "wherever they went, the people on the promenade respect-

fully made way for them and saluted them. Goethe, annoyed by these con-

stant interruptions, said, 'What a nuisance! I can never avoid this sort of

thing!' With a smile, Beethoven answered, 'Don't let it bother your Excel-

lency; the homage is probably meant for me.' " Goethe wrote to Zelter

(September 2, 181 2): "Beethoven's talent astonished me; his personality,

alas, is wholly ungovernable. He is not wrong ... in finding the world

detestable, but this attitude renders it more enjoyable neither to him nor to

others. Much of it is to be excused on the deplorable ground that he is losing

his hearing." 27 Beethoven's comment on Goethe: "What patience the great

man has had with me! What good he has done me!" But "the court atmos-

phere suits him too well." 28

Court appearances and conduct were part of Goethe's official life, for he

was still active in administration. His home life had lost its charm: August,

twenty-two in 1812, was an unsalvageable mediocrity, and Christiane was

fat and taking to drink. She had some excuse, for his flirtations continued.

During his visits to Frankfurt he often stayed at the suburban villa of Johann

von Willemer, and admired Willemer's wife, Marianne. In the summer of

1 8 1 5 he spent almost four weeks with them. Marianne was thirty-one, but

she was in the fullness of womanly beauty. She sang Goethe's lyrics and

Mozart's arias enchantingly, wrote excellent verse, and exchanged with

Goethe a series of poems in imitation of Hafiz, Firdausi, and other Persian

6 14 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIV

bards. (Hafiz had been translated into German in 1812.) Some of the poems

are frankly sensual and tell of mutual joy in physical embraces, but this li-

cense may be merely poetic. The three met again in September at Heidel-

berg; the two poets took long walks together, and Goethe wrote Marianne's

name in Arabic letters in the dust around the castle fountain. They never

saw each other again after that day, but they corresponded through the sev-

enteen remaining years of his life. Willemer seems to have cherished his wife

all the more for having charmed so famous a man, and for answering

Goethe's verse with poems scarcely inferior to his own. Goethe included

hers with his in the Westostlicher Diwan (West-Eastern Book of Many

Leaves) that he published in 1 8 1 9.

While this correspondence was proceeding in prose and rhyme, Christi-

ane died (June 6, 1816). Goethe noted in his diary: "Her death struggle was

dreadful. . . . Emptiness and deathly silence within and around me." 29 A

profound depression clouded these years. When Charlotte Kestner, the lost

beloved of his youth, now the sixty-four-year-old wife of the successful

Councilor Kestner of Hanover, visited him with her daughter (September

25, 1 8 16), no emotion seemed to stir in him, and all his talk was courteous

triviality. But in 181 7 his son August, interrupting a career of dissipation,

married Ottilie von Pogwisch; Goethe invited them to live with him; Ottilie

brought the gaiety of youth into the household, and soon gave the aging

poet grandchildren who made his heart beat again.

Ulrike von Levetzow helped. She was one of the three daughters of Ama-

lie von Levetzow, whom Goethe had known in Karlsbad. At Marienbad in

August, 182 1, he met Ulrike, who later recalled: "As I had been for some

years in a French boarding school at Strasbourg, and was only seventeen, I

had never heard of Goethe, and had no idea that he was a famous man and

a great poet. So I wasn't at all shy with the friendly old gentleman. . . .

The very next morning he asked me to take a walk with him. . . . He took

me along on his walk nearly every morning." 30 He returned to Marienbad

in 1822, and "all that summer Goethe was very friendly to me." A year

later they met in Karlsbad, and soon they stirred the gossip of the spa. By

this time the poet had decided that his love was more than paternal. Duke

Karl August urged Ulrike to marry Goethe; if she would do this a fine

house would be given to her family in Weimar, and after the poet's death

she would receive a pension of ten thousand thalers a year. 31 Mother and

daughter refused. Goethe returned desolate to Weimar, and drowned his

disappointment in ink. Ulrike lived to be ninety-five.

In that year 1821 which led Goethe to Ulrike, Karl Zelter, music director

at Jena, brought to him in Weimar a twelve-year-old pupil, Felix Mendels-

sohn. Zelter had opened Goethe's soul to the world of music, and had even

taught him to compose. Now the skill of the young pianist astonished and

gladdened the old poet, who insisted on having him stay with him for sev-

eral days. "Every morning," Felix wrote on November 6, "the author of

Faust and Werther kisses me. In the afternoon I play for him for about two

hours, partly fugues of Bach, partly my improvisations." On November 8

CHAP.XXIV) GOETHE NESTOR 615

Goethe held a reception to introduce Felix to Weimar society. On Novem-

ber 10 Felix wrote: "Every afternoon he opens the piano and says, 'I have

not heard you at all today. Come, make a little noise for me!' Then he

sits down next to me and listens. You have no idea how kind and affectionate

he is." When Zelter wished to take Felix back to Jena, Goethe persuaded

him to let his pupil remain a few days more. "Now," wrote the happy boy,

"gratitude to Goethe rose on all sides, and the girls and I kissed his lips and

hands. Ottilie von Pogwisch threw her arms around his neck; and since she

is very pretty, and he flirts with her all the time, the effect was excellent." 32

There are happy moments in history behind the drama of tragedy, and be-

neath the notice of historians.

IV. THE SCIENTIST

Let us go back to his younger years, when, with alert attention and omniv-

orous interest, he had begun his lifelong pursuit of science. Few of us have

known that Goethe devoted more time to scientific investigation and com-

positions than to all his poetry and prose combined. 33 He had studied medi-

cine and physics at Leipzig, chemistry at Strasbourg; he took up anatomy in

1 781; and for years he wandered about Thuringia gathering mineral and

botanical specimens and observing geological formations. In his travels he

noted not merely men, women, and art, but also fauna and flora, optical and

meteorological phenomena. He took a leading part in establishing laborato-

ries in Jena. He rejoiced or grieved as intensively over his victories or defeats

in science as over his successes or failures in literature.

He did something about the weather. He organized meteorological obser-

vation stations in the duchy of Saxe-Weimar, helped to set up others

throughout Germany, 34 and prepared instructions for them. He wrote essays

on "The Theory of Weather" and "The Causes of Barometric Fluctua-

tions." He persuaded Duke Karl August to begin the collections that formed

the core of the Museum of Mineralogy at Jena. After studying the geologi-

cal strata at Ilmenau he argued that they confirmed Abraham Werner's the-

ory that all the rocky formations on the earth's crust were the result of the

slow action of water. (This "Neptunist" theory has had to be combined

with the "Vulcanist" theory of change by violent action.) He was among

the first to suggest that the age of strata might be judged from the fossils

imbedded in them, and to defend the view that the great boulders now er-

ratically distributed in high places had been swept up there by surges of ice

coming down from the Arctic Zone. 35

In 1791-92 Goethe published in two volumes Beitrdge zur Optik (Con-

tributions to Optics). "My purpose," he wrote, "has been to assemble all

that is known in this field, and to undertake all the experiments myself, vary-

ing them as much as possible, making them easier to follow, and keeping

them within the scope of the ordinary person." 36 During the years from

1790 to 1 8 10 he made numberless experiments to explain color; the Goethe

6l6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIV

Museum at Weimar still preserves the instruments he used. The result ap-

peared in 1810 in two large volumes of text, and one of plates, entitled Zur

Farbenlehre (On the Theory of Color); this was his major work as a scien-

tist.

He studied colors as due not only to the chemical composition of objects

but to the structure and operation of the eye. He analyzed the adaptation

of the retina to darkness and light, the physiology of color blindness, the

phenomena of color shadows and afterimages, the effects of color contrasts

and combinations in sensation and in art. He mistakenly thought of green as

a blend of yellow and blue. (They do blend so on the artist's palette, but

when the blue and yellow of the color spectrum combine they yield gray

and white.) He repeated many of the experiments described in Newton's

Opticks (1704), found in several cases results different from those there re-

ported, and ended by accusing Newton of incompetence and occasional

deceit. 37 He opposed Newton's view that white is a composition of colors,

and held that their combination regularly produced not white but gray. —

Neither his contemporaries nor his successors in the field of optics accepted

his conclusions. They praised his experiments and discarded many of his

theories. In 1 8 1 5 Arthur Schopenhauer, who admired Goethe as a poet and

as a philosopher, sent him an essay ably defending Newton's conception of

white as a composition of colors; the old man never forgave him. The gen-

eral rejection of the Farbenlehre added to the gloom of his final years.

A man so sensitive to color as Goethe was could not but be fascinated by

the world of plants. At Padua in 1786 he was thrilled by the botanical gar-

dens; here was a richer and more varied collection than he had ever seen.

He saw how different the plants of the south were from those of the north,

and he resolved to study the influence of environment upon the form and

growth of plants. Nor had he ever felt so deeply the mysterious and over-

whelming capacity of nature to develop each form, with its unique pattern

of structure, texture, color, and line, out of apparently simple and similar

seeds. What fertility, and what originality! But were there some common

elements in all the diversity of individuals, and in all the evolution of organs

and parts? The idea came to him that these genera, species, and varieties were

variations of a basic archetype; that all these plants, for example, were

formed on some fundamental and original— even if imaginary— model, an

Urpflanze, or First Plant, the mother of them all. "The same law" or theory,

he wrote to Herder, "will be applicable to all that lives"— i.e., to animals as

well as plants; they too are variations on one structural theme. 38 And as the

individual organism, with all its uniqueness, is an imitation of a primal arche-

type, so the parts of an organism may be variations of one fundamental

form. Goethe noticed in Padua a palmetto whose leaves were in diverse

stages of development; he studied the visible transitions from the simplest

leaf to the complete, majestic fan; and he conceived the idea that all the

structures of a plant— except the axis, or stem— were variations and stages of

the leaf.*

* Caspar Friedrich Wolff had come to the same conclusion in 1768.

CHAP.XXIV) GOETHE NESTOR 6lJ

After his return to Weimar Goethe published his theory in an eighty-six-

page book entitled An Attempt by /. W. von Goethe, Privy Councilor of

the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants ( 1 790) .

Botanists laughed at it as the dreams of a poet, and advised the poet to stick

to his trade. 39 He took them at their word, and rephrased his views in a poem,

"The Metamorphosis of Plants." Gradually the theory accumulated evidence

and supporters. In 1830 faienne Geoff roy Saint-Hilaire presented Goethe's

essay to the French Academy of Sciences as a work of careful research and

creative imagination confirmed by the progress of botany. 40

Applying his theory to anatomy, Goethe suggested (1790) that the skull

is a variation and continuation of the vertebrae, enclosing the brain as the

spine encloses the spinal cord. There is no agreement today on this concep-

tion. One definite and brilliant achievement is credited to Goethe in anatomy

—the demonstration of an intermaxillary bone in man. (This is the bone,

between the maxillae, or jaw bones, that carries the upper incisor teeth.)

The anatomists had recognized such a bone in animals, but had questioned

its existence in man; Goethe's discovery narrowed the structural difference

between man and the ape. Hear the poet proclaim his success in a letter from

Jena to Charlotte von Stein, March 27, 1784— the lover and the scientist all

compact: "A few lines to my Lotte by way of saying good morning. . . .

I have been granted a delightful satisfaction. I have made an anatomical dis-

covery that is at once beautiful and important. You shall have your share

in it, but do not say a word about it." 41 He announced his finding in a manu-

script monograph sent to divers scientists in 1784 and entitled "Versuch, aus

der vergleichenden Knochenlehre, dass der Zwischenknochen der oberen

Kinnlade dem Menschen mit den tibrigen Thieren gemein sei" (An Attempt,

Based on Comparative Osteology, to Show That the Intermaxillary Bone in

the Upper Jaw is Common to Man and the Higher Animals). This was "the

first treatise ever written that can be properly described as lying in the field

of comparative anatomy, and thus it is a milestone in the history of this sci-

ence." 42 (The French anatomist Felix Vicq d'Azyr published the same dis-

covery in the same year 1784.)

In his essay Goethe wrote: "Man is very closely akin to the brute crea-

tion. . . . Every creature is only a tone, a modification, in a mighty har-

mony." 43 Like many scientists and philosophers before him, he thought of

man as part of the animal kingdom, and wrote a poem, "The Metamorpho-

sis of Animals." But he was not an evolutionist in the Darwinian sense.

Following Linnaeus, he assumed the fixity of species; so his Urpflanze was

not an actual primitive plant from which all plants had evolved, but only a

general type of which all plants were modifications. Goethe did not, like his

contemporaries Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, think of species evolving

from other species by the environmental selection of favorable variations.

Was Goethe a real scientist? Not in the professional sense; he was a zeal-

ous and enlightened amateur, a scientist between poems, novels, amours,

artistic experiments, and administrative chores. He used extensive equipment,

collected a large library of science, made useful observations and careful

6 J 8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP.XXIV

experiments; Helmholtz testified to the factual accuracy of the objective

processes and experiments that Goethe described. 44 He avoided teleological

explanations. But he was not accepted as a scientist by professionals, for

these looked upon him as a dilettante who depended too trustfully upon

intuition and hypothesis. He passed too quickly from one subject or investi-

gation to another, touching each at some special point, and achieving no-

where, except in optics and the theory of color, a survey of the field. But

there was something ideal and heroic in his divergent and polymorphous

persistence. Said Eckermann in 1825: "Goethe will be eighty years old in a

few years, but he is not tired of inquiries and experiments. He is always on

the track of some great synthesis." 45 And perhaps the poet was right in

thinking that the chief aim of science should not be to equip old desires with

new tools, but to enlarge wisdom with knowledge for the enlightenment

of desire.

V. THE PHILOSOPHER

As in science, so in philosophy he was a lover, not a professor— though

it was he who secured the appointment of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel to

chairs of philosophy at Jena. He had very little interest in the debates of the

schools, but he was endlessly concerned with the interpretation of nature

and the meaning of life. As he became older he grew through science and

poetry into a sage. He found illumination about the whole from every ob-

ject, moment, and part: "Alles Vergiingliche ist nur ein Gleichnis"— every-

thing transient is but a symbol. 46 The Spruche in Pros a, or incidental apo-

thegms, which he left unprinted at his death, ooze wisdom on every page.

He offered no system of logic, but he suggested, pragmatically, that "that

alone is true which is fruitful," 47 and that "in the beginning was [not the

word but] the deed" (Im Artfang war die That 48 ); we find truth in action

rather than in thought; thought should be an instrument, not a substitute,

for action. He did not take to Kant as Schiller did; he acknowledged that

the ultimate nature of reality is beyond our ken, but he did not feel that this

committed him to orthodoxy; on the contrary, he recommended ignoring

the unknowable; "the unfathomable is of no practical value"; the perceived

world is enough for our lives. 49 He had no epistomological qualms about ad-

mitting the existence of an external world. After reading Kant and Schelling

he wrote to Schiller: "I willingly concede that it is not nature [in itself]

that we perceive, but that nature is comprehended by us merely according

to certain forms and faculties of our mind. . . . But the appropriateness

[adjustment] of our organic natures to the outer world . . . [indicates] a

determination from without, a relation toward things" 50 "Many people re-

sist acknowledging reality, only because they would collapse if they ac-

cepted it." 51

But Goethe rejected materialism as well as subjectivist idealism. D'Hol-

bach's Sy steme de la nature "appeared to us [students at Strasbourg] so dark,

CHAP.XXIV) GOETHE NESTOR 619

... so deathlike, that we found it a trouble to endure its presence, and

shuddered at it as at a specter." 52 That was in youth, but in old age he felt

likewise, writing to Knebel, April 8, 1812:

A man who does not grasp the fact, nor rise to the vision, that spirit and mat-

ter, soul and body, thought and extension, ... are the necessary twin ingredi-

ents of the universe, and will forever be; and that these two have equal rights,

and may therefore be considered in their togetherness as the representatives of

God: he who has not grasped this might as well employ his days with the idle

gossip of the world.

This, of course, is Spinoza, and Goethe usually follows Spinoza into determin-

ism— "We belong to the laws of nature, even when we rebel against

them"; 53 but at times he inclines to agree with Kant that "our lives, like the

universe to which we belong, are mysteriously composed of freedom and

necessity." 54 He felt a force of destiny working in him— of qualities com-

pelling and determining his development; but he co-operated with it, like

some free agent serving a cause that moves and includes him.

His religion was an adoration of nature, and a desire to collaborate with

her creative forces— her multiform productivity and her obstinate perse-

verance; however, he took long to acquire her patience. He vaguely per-

sonified Nature, seeing mind and will in her, but a mind quite unlike ours,

and a will indifferently neutral as between men and fleas. Nature has no

moral feelings in our sense of the obligation of the part to co-operate with

the whole, for she is the whole. In the poem "Das Gottliche" (1782) Goethe

described nature as without feeling or mercy. She destroys as exuberantly as

she makes. "All your ideals shall not prevent me [Goethe] from being genu-

ine, and good and bad, like Nature." 55 Her only ethic is, Live and make live.

Goethe recognized the need many souls have for supernatural support, but

he felt no such need until his final years. "He has religion [enough] who has

art or science; who has not art or science needs religion." 56 "As a poet and

artist I am a polytheist [personifying the separate forces of nature], while

in my role as scientist I incline to pantheism [seeing one God in every-

thing]." 57

"Resolutely pagan" in religion and morals, he had no sense of sin, felt no

need of a god dying to atone for him, 58 and resented all talk of the cross. He

wrote to Lavater, August 9, 1782: "I am no anti-Christian, no un-Christian,

but very decidedly a non-Christian. . . . You accept the Gospel, as it

stands, as divine truth. Well, no audible voice from heaven would convince

me that a woman bears a child without a man, and that a dead man arises

from the grave. I regard all these as blasphemies against God and his revela-

tion of himself in nature." 59 Lavater pressed him (Goethe tells us), and "at

last came out with the hard dilemma, 'Either Christian or atheist!' Upon this

I declared that if he would not leave me my own Christianity as I had hith-

erto cherished it, I could readily decide for atheism, especially as I saw that

nobody knew precisely what either term meant." 60 Goethe thought that "the

Christian religion is an abortive political revolution that turned moral." 61

There are in literature "a thousand pages as beautiful and useful" as in the

620 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIV

Gospels. 62 "Yet I regard all four Gospels as quite genuine, for in them is

evident the reflected splendor of the sublime power which emanated from

the person of Christ and his nature, which was as divine as ever the divine

has appeared on earth. ... I bow before him as a divine manifestation of

the highest principle of morality." 63 But he proposed to worship the sun as

much as Christ, as equally a manifestation of divine power. 64 He admired

Luther, and praised the Reformation for breaking the shackles of tradition,

but he regretted its relapse into dogma. 65 He suspected that Protestantism

would suffer for lack of inspiring, habit-forming ceremonies, and he thought

Catholicism wise and beneficent in symbolizing spiritual relations and devel-

opments with impressive sacraments. 66

Goethe's views on immortality were a function of his years. On February

2, 1789, he wrote to Friedrich zu Stolberg: "For my own part I cling more

or less to the teachings of Lucretius, and confine myself and all my hopes

to this life." But on February 25, 1824, he told Eckermann: "I would by no

means dispense with the happiness of believing in a future existence; and in-

deed I would say, with Lorenzo de' Medici, that those who hope for no other

life are dead even in this one"; and on February 4, 1825: "I hold the firm

conviction that our spirit is something altogether indestructible." 67 He read

Swedenborg, accepted the conception of a spirit sphere, 68 and played with

hopes of transmigration. He studied the Cabala and Pico della Mirandola,

and even drew an occasional horoscope. 69 More and more, as he aged, he ad-

mitted the rights of faith:

Strictly speaking, I can have no knowledge of God except such as I derive

from the limited vision of my sensory perceptions on this single planet. Such

knowledge is a fragment of a fragment. I do not admit that this limitation,

which is applicable to our observation of nature, need be applicable in the ex-

ercise of faith. The contrary is the case. It may well be that our knowledge,

necessarily imperfect, demands supplementation and perfecting through an act

of faith. 70

In 1820 he regretted that he had written the rebellious Prometheus in his

youth, for the young radicals of the day were quoting it against him. 71 He

turned away from Fichte when Fichte was accused of atheism. 72 "It is our

duty," he now held, "to tell others no more than they are able to receive.

Man grasps only what is to his measure." 73

Like his views of religion, his conception of morality changed with age.

Bouncing with youthful energy and pride, he had interpreted life as purely

a theater for self-development and display. "This craving to raise as high as

possible the pyramid of my life, the base of which has been given and estab-

lished for me, outweighs all else, and scarcely permits of a moment's re-

lapse." 74 We have seen him hurting some tender souls in this process. As he

matured through political office he perceived that human life is a co-opera-

tive process; that the individual survives by mutual aid, and that self-seeking

actions, though still the basic force, must be limited by the needs of the

group. Faust, in Part I, is individualism incarnate; in Part II he finds "salva-

tion," health of soul, through working for the general good. Wilhelm Meis-

GOETHE NESTOR

621

CHAP. XXIV)

ter in the Lehrjahre seeks to educate and develop himself, though by nature

and training he often aids his fellow men; in the Wanderjahre he seeks to

further the happiness of the community. Goethe balked at the behest to love

one's enemies, but he defined nobility nobly in one of his greatest poems:

Edel sei der Mensch,

Hiilfreich und gut.

Denn das allein

Unterscheidet ihn

Von alien Wesen

Die ivir kennen . . .

Denn unfzihlend

1st die Natur:

Es leuchtet die Sonne

Ueber Bos' und Gute,

Und dem Verbrecher

Gl'dnzen, wie dem Besten,

Der Mond und die Sterne.

Wind und Strome,

Donner und Ha gel,

Rauschen ihren Weg,

Und ergreifen

Voriibereilend,

Einen und den Andern. . .

Nach eivigen, ehrnen,

Grossen Gesetzen

Miissen wir Alle

Unseres Daseins

Kreise vollenden.

Nur allein der Mensch

Vermag das Unmogliche;

Er under scheidet,

Wahlet und richtet;

Er kann dem Augenblick

Dauer verleihen.

Er allein darf

Den Guten lohnen,

Den Bosen strafen,

Heilen und retten,

Alles Irrende, Schweifende

Niltzlich verbinden. . . .

Der edle Mensch

Sei hiilfreich und gut.

Let man be noble,

Helpful and good.

For that alone

Marks him off

From all beings

That we know. . . .

Quite unfeeling

Is Nature:

The sun shines

Upon the base and the good;

And upon the lawbreaker

Gleam, as upon the best,

The moon and the stars.

Winds and streams,

Thunder and hail,

Roar on their way,

And snatch up

And sweep before them

One after another. . . .

By eternal, ironclad

Great laws

Must we all,

Of our existence,

Fulfill the round.

But man alone

Can do the impossible;

He distinguishes,

Chooses, and judges;

He can to the fleeting moment

Give duration.

He alone can

Reward the good,

Punish the bad,

Heal and save.

And to the erring and straying

Bring wise counsel.

Let the noble man

Be helpful and good.

To become noble one must beware of debasing influences, and "all is in-

fluence except ourselves." 75 "Never mind studying contemporaries and

those who strive with you; study the great men of the past, whose works

have maintained their value and stature for centuries. A truly gifted man

will naturally so incline, and the desire to delve into the great precursors is

the very mark of a higher endowment." 76 Reverence libraries as the heritage

left by these men. "Contemplating a library, one feels as though in the pres-

ence of vast capital silently yielding incalculable interest." 77 But intellect

without character is far worse than character without intellect; "anything

622 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIV

that liberates the mind without giving us dominion over ourselves is perni-

cious." 78 Plan your living— gedenke zu lebenf— but seek a balance between

thought and action; thought without action is a disease. "To know and prac-

tice a craft lends greater culture than half-knowledge a hundred times

over." 79 "No blessing is equal to the blessings of work." 80 Above all, be a

whole or join a whole. "Only mankind is the true man, and the individual

can be joyous and happy only when he has the courage to feel himself in

the whole." 81

So the young man who inherited comfort and security, and set the Stras-

bourg students laughing at his rich and fancy dress, learned, through the

philosophers, the saints, and the experience of life, to think kindly of the

poor, and to wish that the fortunate would share their wealth more gener-

ously. Nobles should be taxed in proportion to their income, and should let

their dependents benefit from "the advantages which expanding knowledge

and prosperity are bringing." 82 Even after attaining European fame, Goethe

felt the bourgeois' envy of noble birth. "In Germany no one except a noble-

man has an opportunity for acquiring a well-rounded . . . personal cul-

ture." 83 He observed all the usual obeisances in his behavior toward his su-

periors. Everyone knows the story of Goethe and Beethoven at Teplitz,

July, 1 812; but its sole source is the unreliable Bettina Brentano von Arnim,

who claimed to be quoting Beethoven's account:

Kings and princes can indeed bestow titles and orders, but they cannot make

great men, who therefore must be held in respect. When two come together,

such as Goethe and I, then these highborn gentlemen must observe what it is

that counts for great with such as we. Yesterday we met the whole Imperial

Family [of Austria], and Goethe disengaged himself from my arm in order to

stand aside. I pressed my hat down on my head and went through the thickest

of the crowd with my arms hanging at my sides. Princes and courtiers drew

up in a double line; the Duke of Weimar took off his hat to me, and the Em-

press greeted me first. Much to my amusement I saw the procession file by

Goethe, who stood at one side, bowing with his hat in his hand. I took him

roundly to task for it afterward. 84

Our reaction to this story will vary with our age. Goethe felt than an

aristocracy functioning actively and with public spirit provided the best

government then possible in Europe, and deserved the respect required for

social order and control. Abuses should be reformed, but without violence

or precipitancy; revolutions cost more than they are worth, and usually

end where they began. So Mephistopheles to Faust:

Alack! Away! Forbear of yonder squabble

'Twixt tyranny and slavery to babble!

It irks me. Scarce 'tis ended when de novo

With the whole farce they start ab ovo. 85

And so Goethe to Eckermann in 1824: "It is quite true that I was no friend

of the French Revolution. Its horrors were too immediate, . . . while its

beneficial effects were not yet visible. . . . But I was just as little a friend

of the arbitrary rule that had preceded it. I was convinced even then that

CHAP. XXIV ) GOETHE NESTOR 623

no revolution is the fault of the people, but always the fault of the govern-

ment." 86 He welcomed Napoleon as a boon to order in France and Europe

after a decade of convulsions. He distrusted democracy, for "nothing is

worse than active ignorance"; 87 and "it is unthinkable that wisdom should

ever be popular." 88

He laughed at the oscillation of power between parties. "In politics, as

on a sickbed, men toss from side to side in the hope of lying more com-

fortably." 89 He opposed freedom of the press on the ground that it subjected

society and government to perpetual disturbance by immature and irrespon-

sible writers. The cry for freedom seemed to him, in his declining years, to

be merely the hunger of the unplaced for power and plums. "The sole ob-

ject is for power, influence, and fortune to pass from one hand to the next.

Freedom is the whispered password of secret conspirators, the clamorous

battle cry of the avowed revolutionary, indeed the slogan of despotism itself

as it leads its subjugated masses forward against the foe, promising surcease

from external oppression for all time." 90

Goethe fulfilled to the maximum the obligation of the old to serve as a

brake upon the energy of the young.

VI. FAUST: PART II

He poured his aging philosophy into Part II of Faust. At the end of Part I

he had left his alter ego, broken and desolate, in the power of Mephistoph-

eles— desire punished for its excess. But could that be all, and the sum of

wisdom? Faust had not quite lost his wager; the Devil had not yet found for

him any delight that could calm his striving and fill his life. Was there any-

where such a fulfillment? Through twenty-four years Goethe struggled to

find for the story a continuation and a culmination that should contain or

symbolize the conclusions of his thought, and should give to his hero a

noble and inspiring end.

At last, aged seventy-eight, he faced the task. On May 24, 1827, he wrote

to Zelter, who had grown old with him and was to die with him: "I want

quietly to confess to you that ... I have gone to work at Faust again. . . .

Tell no one." The dramatic finale of Byron in the Greek War of Liberation

had stirred Goethe; now he could make Byron, as Euphorion [Well-Being],

son of Faust and Helen, represent the healing of the torn and questioning

modern mind through union with the calm beauty of classic Greece. He

labored in the morning hours, achieving at best a page a day, until, in Au-

gust of 183 1, seven months before his death, he announced to Eckermann

that the consuming task was complete— fifty-nine years after its first concep-

tion. "The happiest man," he had written, "is he who is able to integrate the

end of his life with its beginning." 91 And now he said: "Whatever of life

remains to me I can regard henceforth as a gift; and it does not really matter

whether I accomplish anything more or not." 92

Only in the assurance of eighty years can one take time to read all of

624 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIV

Faust, Part II, today. From the opening scene, in which Faust, awaking in

spring fields, describes the sunrise with no word-worn eloquence, the action

repeatedly stops for lyric paeans to nature's beauty or grandeur or terror; it

is well done, but too often; Goethe, preaching classic restraint, here sins

against "nothing too much." He poured into the drama almost everything

that cluttered his teeming memory: Greek and German mythologies, Leda

and the swan, Helen and her train, witches and knights and fairies and

gnomes, griffins and pygmies, dryads and sirens, dissertations on "Neptu-

nian" geology, long speeches by heralds, flower girls, garden nymphs, wood-

cutters, punchinellos, drunkards, pages, seneschals, wardens, a charioteer

and a sphinx, an astrologer and an emperor, fauns and philosophers, the

cranes of Ibycus, and a "little man" (homunculus) chemically created by

Faust's pupil Wagner. The farrago is more confusing than a tropical jungle,

for it adds the supernatural to the natural, and endows everything with ora-

tory or song.

What a comfort it is when, in Act III, Helen appears, still miraculously

dia gynaikon— goddess among women— conquering men with the grace of

her movement or the glance of her eyes. The story takes on new force, and

the chorus rises to a Sophoclean tone, when Helen hears that Menelaus, as

punishment for "beauty insolently bold," has ordered her and her attendant

women to be surrendered to the lusts of a "barbarian" horde invading Hellas

from the north. Their leader is Faust himself, transformed by Mephistoph-

elean art into a medieval knight, handsome in figure, face, and garb. Goethe

reaches the apex of his dramatic art as he describes the meeting of Helen

and Faust— classic Greece confronting medieval Germany. Let these two

unite!— this is the burden of the tale. Faust, enthralled like all men, lays at

Helen's feet all the wealth and power that magic and war have given him.

She yields herself to his entreaties; after all, this was hardly a fate worse

than death. But Menelaus approaches with his army and interrupts their

bliss; Faust turns in a trice from love to war, calls his men to arms, and leads

them to the conquest of Sparta (a memory of the "Franks" conquering the

Morea in the thirteenth century) .

The scene changes; years have flown by; Euphorion is a happy youth,

gladdening Faust and Helen with "caresses, playful banter, sportive calls," 93

leaping recklessly from cliff to cliff, gently cautioned by his parents, danc-

ing wildly with nymphs entranced by his charm (Byron in Italy? ) ; he seizes

one of them rapturously, only to have her burst into flame in his arms. Hear-

ing with welcome the tocsin of war, he rushes off, falls from a precipice,

and, dying, summons his mother to join him in the nether world.

helen [to Faust']. Woe is me! An ancient adage proves on me its truth—

That fortune weds with Beauty never abidingly.

Asunder rent the bond of life is, as of love,

And, both bewailing, anguished, I say farewell,

Upon thy bosom casting me yet once again.

Receive, Persephone, the child and me.

(She embraces Faust; her corporeal part vanishes; robes

and veil remain in his arms.)

CHAP.XXIV) GOETHE NESTOR 625

So ends the third and finest act of this second Faust, This was the part that

Goethe wrote first, which he called Helena, and which for a time he thought

of as a separate and finished whole; he might have done well to leave it so.

Here, by some heroic draft upon his surviving powers, Goethe rose for the

last time to the peak of his poetry, mingling drama with music as in Periclean

days, and raising to life and blood the figures of a complex allegory for the

healing of the modern mind.

From that height Faust II slips down to a war between an emperor and a

contender for the Holy Roman throne. Faust and Mephistopheles, using

their magic arts, win the war for the emperor; Faust asks and receives, as

reward, great stretches of the Empire's northern coast, with such land as he

can wrest from the sea. In Act V Faust, a hundred years old, is master of a

vast domain, but not yet of himself. The cottage of a peasant couple, Phile-

mon and Baucis, obstructs the view from his mansion; he offers them a bet-

ter home elsewhere; they refuse; he asks Mephistopheles and his agents to

drive them out; meeting resistance, they set fire to the cottage; the old couple

die of fright. Faust is soon haunted by visions of avenging Furies— gray hags

named Want, Guilt, Care, Need, and Death. Care breathes into his face and

blinds him. A partly unselfish thought raises him out of despair: he orders

Mephistopheles and his devils to dike the sea, drain the swamps, and build,

on the new land, a thousand homes amid green fields; he visions this re-

claimed terrain, and feels that if he could "with a free people stand on a free

soil," he would at last say to such a moment, "Tarry a while, thou art so

fair." 94 He hears the sounds of picks and spades, and thinks that his grand

design is progressing; actually the devils are digging his grave. Exhausted, he

falls dying to the ground; Mephistopheles gloats over him as a horde of devils

prepares to take Faust's soul to hell; but a host of angels swoops down from

heaven, and while Mephistopheles is distracted with admiration of their legs

they "bear aloft the mortal remains of Faust." In heaven Faust, new-clothed

in a transfigured body, is greeted by a glorified Gretchen, who begs the Vir-

gin Mother: "Grant me to teach him!" The Virgin bids her lead him up-

ward, and a Chorus Mysticus ends the play:

Alles V ergdngliche Everything transitory

1st nur ein Gleichnis; Is only a symbol;

Das Unzulangliche The ever unfinished

Hier wirds Ereignis; Here is completed;

Das Unbeschreibliche The indescribable

Hier ist es getan; Is here accomplished;

Das Ewig-Weibliche The eternal womanly

2*ieht uns hinan. Draws us upward and on.

VII. FULFILLMENT: 1 82 5-3 2

In 1823 Johann Peter Eckermann, aged thirty-one, became Goethe's secre-

tary, and began to note the old man's conversation for posterity. The re-

626 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIV

sultant Gesprache mit Goethe (three volumes, 1836-48)— partly revised by

Goethe— contains more wisdom than is to be found in most philosophers.

In September, 1825, Weimar celebrated the semicentennial of Karl Au-

gust's accession. Goethe attended the ceremony. The Duke grasped his hand,

and murmured to him, "Together to the last breath." 95 On November 7 the

court celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's coming to Weimar,

and the Duke sent him a letter which was also made a public proclamation:

With profound pleasure I would mark the fiftieth return of this day as the

jubilee not only of the premier servant of my state but of the friend of my

youth, who has accompanied me through all the mutability of life with un-

changed affection, loyalty, and steadfastness. I owe the happy outcome of my

most important undertakings to his circumspect counsel, his ever-living sympa-

thy and beneficent service. To have attached him permanently to myself I re-

gard as one of the highest ornaments of my reign. 96

Now came those sadly aging years when friend after friend disappears.

On August 26, 1826, two days before Goethe's seventy-seventh birthday,

Charlotte von Stein, eighty-four years old, sent her last known letter to her

lover of half a century before: "All my best wishes and blessings on this day.

May the guardian angels in the heavenly parliament command that all that

is good or beautiful be granted to you, my very dear friend. I continue to

remain yours in hope and without fear, while I beg of you for myself your

freely given kindness during the brief span that remains to me." 97 She died

on January 6, 1827. Hearing of it, Goethe wept. On June 15, 1828, the Duke

died, and Weimar knew that its golden age was ending. Goethe prepared

for his turn by working feverishly on Faust. But he was not next in line. His

only surviving child, August, after forty years of failure, twenty of dissipa-

tion, died in Rome, October 27, 1830. A post-mortem showed a liver five

times the normal size. When the news was brought to Goethe he said, "Non

ignoravi me mortalem genuisse—l was not unaware that I had begotten a

mortal." 98 "I tried to absorb myself in work," he wrote; "I forced myself to

continue Volume IV of Poetry and Truth" 99

At eighty he began to narrow his interests. In 1829 he stopped reading

newspapers. "I can't begin to tell you," he wrote to Zelter, "the time I have

gained, and the things I have accomplished, during the six weeks that I have

left all French and German papers unopened." 100 "Fortunate is he whose

world lies in his home." 101 He enjoyed love and care from August's widow,

Ottilie, and he took delight in her children. Sometimes, however, he with-

drew even from them, and sought full privacy, praising solitude as the nurse

and test of a well-furnished mind.

His face now showed its eighty years: deep wrinkles across the forehead

and around the mouth; silver hair receding; eyes quiet and wondering; but

his stature was erect and his health was good. He prided himself on having

avoided coffee and tobacco, both of which he condemned as poisons. He was

vain of his looks and his books, honestly relished praise, gave it frugally.

When, in 1830, a young poet sent him a volume of verse, Goethe acknowl-

edged it caustically: "I have glanced through your little book. Since, how-

CHAP. XXIV ) GOETHE NESTOR 627

ever, in an epidemic of cholera, one must protect oneself against weakening

influences, I have laid it aside." 102 Mediocrity offended him. He grew more

and more irritable as the years threw him back into himself, and he admitted

as much: "Everyone who, judging by my work, considered me amiable,

found himself greatly deceived when he came in contact with a man of cold-

ness and reserve." 103 Visitors described him as slow to thaw, a bit formal

and stiff, perhaps out of embarrassment, or grudging time taken from his

tasks. Yet many of his letters show tenderness and consideration.

He was now famous throughout Europe. Carlyle acclaimed him, long be-

fore Goethe's death, as one of the great figures in world literature. Byron

dedicated Werner to him; Berlioz dedicated The Damnation of Faust to

"Monseigneur Goethe"; kings sent him gifts. But in Germany his reading

public was small, the critics were hostile, his rivals belittled him as a pompous

councilor affecting to be a poet and a scientist. Lessing condemned Gotz and

Werther as romantic trash; Klopstock scorned Hermann und Dorothea as

commonplace, and Iphigenie as a "stiff" imitation of the Greeks. Goethe re-

acted with repeated expressions of contempt for Germany— for its climate,

scenery, history, language, and mind. He complained that he had "to write

in German, and thereby . . . squandered life and art on the worst mate-

rial." 104 He told his friends that "these fools of Germans" had quite deserved

their defeat by Napoleon at Jena, 105 and Germany had the laugh on him

when the allies overcame Bonaparte at Waterloo.

Detached from the main (Romantic) stream of literature in his old age, he

consoled himself with deepened contempt of the world and man. "Viewed

from the heights of reason, all life looks like some malignant disease, and the

world like a madhouse." 106 "A few days ago," he wrote to Zelter on March

26, 1 8 16, "I came upon a copy of the first edition of Werther, and that long-

silenced song began to rise again. It was hard for me to understand how a

man could endure the world for forty years when he had seen its absurdity

even in his youth." 107 And he looked for no substantial betterment in the

future. "Men exist only to trouble and kill one another; so was it, so is it, so

will it ever be." 108 Like most of us after sixty, he thought that the new gen-

eration was degenerate. "The incredible arrogance in which the young are

growing up will show its results in a few years in the greatest follies. . . .

Yet much is stirring that in after years may be cause for rejoicing." 109

On March 15, 1832, he caught a cold while out driving. On the eighteenth

he seemed recovered, but on the twentieth the infection had sunk into his

chest, catarrhal fever consumed him, and his face was distorted with pain.

On the twenty-second he noted that spring had begun; "perhaps this will

help me to get well." The room had been darkened to ease his eyes; he pro-

tested, "Let in more light." Still oppressed by the gloom, he ordered his

valet, "Open the blind of the other window, so that more light may come

in." These were apparently his last words. He had asked Ottilie, "Little

woman, give me your little paw." He died in her arms and holding her hand,

at noon, March 22, 1832, aged eighty-two years and seven months. 110

Eckermann saw the corpse on the next day.

628 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIV

The body lay naked, wrapped only in a white sheet. . . . The valet drew

aside the sheet, and I was astonished at the godlike magnificence of the limbs.

The breast was powerful, broad, and arched; the arms and thighs were full, and

softly muscular; the feet were elegant, and of the most perfect shape; nowhere

on the whole body was there a trace either of fat or of leanness or decay. A

perfect man lay in great beauty before me; and the rapture which the sight

caused me made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had left this

abode. 111

So ended a great age, from Frederick's somber triumph in 1763 through

Lessing and Kant, Wieland and Herder, to Schiller and Goethe. Not since

Luther had the German mind been so active, so various, so rich in independ-

ent thought. It was no disaster for Germany that it was not an expanding em-

pire like Britain's, absorbed in conquest and trade; nor a centralized mon-

archy like the French, falling apart through the failure of government; nor

a despotism like Russia's, gorging itself with land or stupefying itself with

holy water. Politically, Germany was not yet born, but in literature she was

challenging, and in philosophy she was leading, the Western world.

CHAPTER XXV

The Jews

1715-89

I. THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

"The Jews," said Rousseau,

afford an astonishing spectacle. The laws of Solon, Numa, and Lycurgus are

dead; those of Moses, much more ancient, continue to live. Athens, Sparta, and

Rome have perished and left no offspring on the earth. But Zion, destroyed, has

not lost her children; they are preserved, they multiply, they spread through-

out the world. . . . They mingle with all peoples, yet are not confused with

them; they have no rulers, yet they are always a people. . . . What must have

been the force of a legislator capable of effecting such marvels! Of all the sys-

tems of legislation now known to us, only this one has undergone all tests, has

always been steadfast. 1

Perhaps the Mosaic Code owed its survival not so much to its inherent

wisdom as to its service in maintaining order and stability in communities

living dangerously amid hostile creeds and alien laws. In the Dispersion the

synagogue had to be both church and government, and the rabbis held their

people together through all vicissitudes by giving the sanction of a proud

religious faith to a code that regulated every phase of Jewish life. The Penta-

teuch became the constitution— the Talmud became the supreme court— of

an invisible state stronger even than human hate.

Anti-Semitism lost some of its religious bases as orthodoxy declined. An

enlightened minority saw the absurdity and cruelty of punishing an entire

people, generation after generation, for the ancient sin of a handful of indi-

viduals collected on his way from Temple to court by an old priest who re-

sented the admiration given to Christ by the great majority of those who

knew of him. Careful readers of the Gospels remembered that Jesus had

always remained loyal to Judaism even while critical of its pious hypo-

crites. Those who had learned some history were aware that almost every

people in Christendom had at one time or another persecuted heretics, not

by one crucifixion but by wholesale massacre, inquisitions, or pogroms.

Voltaire knew all this. 2 He repeatedly denounced the Christian persecu-

tion of the Jews. His epic Henriade spoke of

Madrid's and Lisbon's horrid fires,

The yearly portion of unhappy Jews

By priestly judges doomed to temporal flames

For thinking their forefathers' faith the best.

629

630 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXV

He praised the Jews' "sober and regular way of life, their abstinence, their

toil." He recognized that European Jews had taken to trade because, pro-

hibited from owning land, they had been "unable to establish themselves

permanently"— securely— "in any country." 3 Yet Voltaire became violently

anti-Semitic. He had unfortunate dealings with Jewish financiers. When he

went to England he carried letters of exchange on the London banker Me-

dina, who meanwhile went bankrupt owing Voltaire twenty thousand

francs. 4 In Berlin, as we have seen, he employed Abraham Hirsch to buy de-

preciated bonds in Saxony, planning to import them (illegally, as Hirsch

warned him) into Prussia and there have them redeemed at a sixty-five-per-

cent profit. 5 Philosopher and financier quarreled, went to court, and ended

with mutual hate. In his Essai sur les moeurs Voltaire let himself go; he de-

scribed the ancient Hebrews as "a petty nation, a brigand people, atrocious,

abominable, whose law is the law of savages, and whose history is a tissue of

crimes against humanity." 6 A Catholic priest protested that this was a ridicu-

lously savage indictment. 7 Isaac Pinto, a learned Portuguese Jew, published

in 1762 Reflections criticizing the anti-Semitic passages in the article "The

Jews" in the Dictionnaire philosophique; Voltaire admitted that he had

been "wrong to attribute to a whole nation the vices of some individuals,"

and promised to alter the offending passages in future printings; but this

slipped his mind. 8 French writers in general sided against Voltaire in this

matter. 9 Rousseau spoke of the Jews with understanding sympathy. 10

The Jews in France had no civil rights before the Revolution, but they

developed some thriving communities and influential leaders. One of these

bought a seigniory that included Amiens; he exercised his feudal right to

appoint the canons of the cathedral; the bishop protested; the Parlement of

Paris upheld the Jewish seigneur (1787). The French government grate-

fully acknowledged the help of Jewish financiers in the wars of the Spanish

and Polish successions, and Jews played a large part in reviving the Compa-

gnie des Indes after the collapse of Law's venture in 1720. 11 The Jews of

Bordeaux were especially prosperous; their merchants and bankers were

known for their integrity and their liberality; but they prided themselves on

their Sephardic descent, and succeeded in excluding all Ashkenazi Jews from

Bordeaux.

There were no professed Jews in eighteenth-century Spain. In the first

years of the Spanish Bourbons some small groups presumed on the supposed

enlightenment of Philip V to resume secret observance of Judaic worship;

many cases were discovered; the Inquisition, between 1700 and 1720, put to

death three Jews in Barcelona, five in Cordova, twenty-three in Toledo, five

in Madrid. Enraged by these revelations, the Inquisition flared up in re-

newed activity; in the 868 cases tried by its tribunals between 1721 and

1727 over eight hundred were for Judaism, and of those condemned seventy-

five were burned. Thereafter such instances were extremely rare. In the

final years of its career, 1 780-1 820, the Spanish Inquisition tried some five

thousand defendants, of whom only sixteen were accused of Judaism, and

ten of these were foreigners. 12 The laws of Spain continued to exclude from

CHAP.XXV) THE JEWS 63 1

civic or military office all persons who could not prove their limpieza— the

purity of their blood from all tincture of Jewish ancestry. Reformers com-

plained that this requirement denied to the Spanish army and government

the services of many able men; and in 1783 Charles III relaxed these laws. 13

In Portugal the Inquisition burned twenty-seven Jews for refusing to

apostatize from Judaism (1717). 14 Antonio da Silva, whom Southey rated

the best Portuguese dramatist, came to Lisbon in 17 12 from Rio de Janeiro;

he and his mother were arrested as Jews in 1726; the mother was burned,

the son abjured and was released; apparently he relapsed, for he was burned

in 1739, aged thirty-five. 15 The Marques de Pombal, among his many re-

forms, ended all legal distinctions between Old and New (converted) Chris-

tians (1774). 16

In Italy Venice led the way in liberating the Jews: in 1772 the Jews of the

republic were declared free and equal with the rest of the population. Rome

lagged; the ghetto there was the worst in Europe. High fertility, encouraged

by the rabbis, increased the poverty and squalor; at one time ten thousand

Jews lived in the space of one square kilometer. 17 Annually the Tiber over-

flowed, covering the ghetto's narrow streets and filling the cellars with pesti-

lential mud. Excluded from most trades, the Roman Jews took to tailoring;

in 1700 three fourths of their adult males were tailors, 18 setting a custom

that endured till our time. In 1775 Pope Pius VI issued an "Editto sopra gli

Ebrei," renewing the old disabilities of the Jews and adding new ones: they

must not ride in carriages, nor sing dirges at funerals, nor erect tombstones

over their dead. 19 The Jews of Rome had to wait for Napoleon to bring

them freedom.

In Austria Maria Theresa felt that piety compelled her to confine the Jews

to certain narrow districts, and to exclude them from crafts, office, and the

ownership of realty. 20 Her son Joseph, touched by the French Enlighten-

ment, proposed to the Council of State in 1781 a project for "rendering use-

ful to society the large class of Israelites in our hereditary lands" (Austria,

Hungary, and Bohemia). They should be encouraged to learn— and, after

three years, be required to use— the national language in all legal, political,

or business affairs. The Jews were "not to be troubled in any way in the

exercise of their ritual or doctrine." They should be invited to take up agri-

culture, to enter industry and business, to practice the arts— but they still

could not become masters in the guilds, for this required an oath of Christian

belief. All humiliating distinctions, and all constraints hitherto imposed upon

the Jews, were to be abrogated, "as well as all external marks whatever."

The Council of State and the provincial administrators objected to the pro-

gram as too broad and sudden for public acceptance. Joseph compromised

by issuing on January 2, 1782, a "Toleranzpatent" for the Jews of Vienna

and Lower Austria: they received the right to send their children to state

schools and colleges, and to enjoy economic liberty except as to owning

real estate; however, they must not maintain a separate communal organiza-

tion, they should not build synagogues in the capital, and they were forbid-

den to reside in certain towns— perhaps because anti-Semitism there was

<$3 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXV

dangerously keen. Joseph counseled his Christian subjects to respect the per-

sons and rights of Jews as their fellow men; any insult or violence offered to

a Jew "will be sternly punished," and there must be no compulsory conver-

sions. Soon the Emperor issued similar edicts for Bohemia, Moravia, and

Austrian Silesia. He appreciated Jewish contributions to his treasury; he

raised several Jews to the nobility, and employed several as state financiers. 21

But his reforms, reported the French envoy at Vienna, "arouse a universal

cry of disapproval; ... the great facilities accorded to the Jews are con-

sidered as assuring ruin to the state." 22 Christian merchants deplored the new

competition, and priests condemned the edicts as tolerating open heresy.

Some rabbis objected to Jewish children attending state schools, fearing that

these would lure Jewish youth from Judaism. Joseph persisted, and a year

before his death he extended the Patent of Toleration to Galicia; there one

town, Brody, had so many Jews (eighteen thousand) that the Emperor

called it the modern Jerusalem. By the time Joseph died (1790) Vienna had

accustomed itself to the new dispensation, and the ground was prepared for

the brilliant Judaeo-Christian culture of Vienna in the nineteenth century.

By and large the Jews fared better in Islam than in Christendom. With

presumably some exaggeration Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described

their condition in the Turkey of 17 17:

The Jews . . . are in incredible power in this country. They have many

privileges above all the natural Turks themselves, . . . being judged by their

own laws. They have drawn the whole trade of the Empire into their hands,

partly by the firm union among themselves, partly by the idle temper and want

of industry of the Turk. Every pasha has his Jew, who is his homme d'af-

faires. . . . They are the physicians, the stewards, and the interpreters of all

the great men. . . . There are many of them vastly rich. 23

Quite different was the fate of the few Jews who were found in Russia

—chiefly in the "border provinces" confronting Poland— on the death of

Peter the Great. In 1 742 the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna ordered that "from

our whole Empire ... all Jews shall ... be immediately deported, . . .

and shall henceforth under no pretext be admitted into our Empire . . . un-

less they . . . accept the Christian religion of the Greek persuasion." By

1753 nearly 35,000 Jews had been expelled. 24 Some Russian businessmen

pleaded with the Empress to relax the edict, arguing that the expulsion had

depressed the economy of the provinces by deflecting trade from these to

Poland and Germany; Elizabeth refused to relax.

When Catherine II acceded she wished to let the Jews re-enter, but felt

too insecure on her throne to face the opposition of the clergy. The first

partition of Poland, however, brought the problem to a new phase: what

was to be done with the 27,000 Jews long established in that part of Poland

which Russia had now acquired? Catherine declared (1772) that "the Jewish

communities residing in the cities and territories now incorporated into the

Russian Empire will be left in the enjoyment of all those liberties which they

possess at present." 25 A large measure of self-government was allowed to

these Polish Jews, and they were made eligible to municipal office; however,

CHAP. XXV ) THEJEWS 633

they were forbidden to emigrate from the "Pale of Settlement" (the for-

merly Polish provinces) into the Russian interior. In 1791 the Jews were

permitted to settle in the provinces of Kherson, Taurida, and Ekaterinoslav,

as a means of rapidly populating these recently conquered regions and mak-

ing them easier to defend. Meanwhile the economic anti-Semitism of most

Russian businessmen, and the religious anti-Semitism of the Russian com-

monalty, made life difficult and dangerous for the Jews in the empire.

In 1766 there were 621,000 Jews in Poland. 26 Protective "privileges"

granted them by previous rulers were ratified by Augustus II and Augustus

III, but these Saxons, busy with two realms and two faiths (not to mention

their mistresses), had little time to counter the racial hostility of the Polish

populace. The government laid extra taxes upon the Jews, the gentry sought

to reduce them to serfdom, and the local administrators made them pay

heavily for protection from mob violence. The priests denounced the Jews

for "stubbornly clinging to irreligion"; an ecclesiastical synod in 1720 de-

manded that the government forbid "the building of new synagogues and

the repair of old ones"; a synod of 1733 repeated the medieval maxim that

the only reason for tolerating the Jews was that they might serve as a "re-

minder of the tortures of Christ, and be an example, by their enslaved and

miserable condition, of the just chastisement inflicted by God upon infi-

dels." 27

In 1 7 1 6 a converted Hebrew, Serafinovich, published an Exposure of the

Jewish Ceremonies, in which he charged the Jews with using the blood of

Christians for various magical purposes: to smear the doors of Christians, to

mix in the matzoth eaten at Passover, to soak a cloth containing an incanta-

tion designed to protect a house or bring business success. . . The Jews

challenged Serafinovich to defend his allegations, and assembled a board of

rabbis and bishops to hear him; he did not appear, but republished his book. 28

Repeatedly the Jews were accused of killing children to get Christian blood;

Polish Jews were summoned to trial on such charges in 17 10, 1724, 1736,

1747, 1748, 1753, 1756, 1759, 1760; in many cases they were tortured, in

some cases to death; some were flayed alive; some died slowly by impale-

ment. 29 The terrorized Jews appealed to Pope Benedict XIV to stop these

accusations; the evidence pro and con was laid before Cardinal Campanelli;

after receiving a report from the papal nuncio in Warsaw, he issued a mem-

orandum to the effect that in none of the cases had guilt been proved. The

Roman tribunal of the Inquisition supported the Cardinal's memorandum.

The nuncio informed the Polish government (1763) that "the Holy See,

having investigated all the foundations of this aberration— that the Jews need

human blood for the preparation of their unleavened bread," had concluded

that "there was no evidence whatever testifying to the correctness of that

prejudice." 30 Pope Innocent IV had made a similar pronouncement in 1247.

The aberration persisted.

Fear of massacre was a frequent element in the life of the Polish Jew. In

1734, 1750, and 1768 bands of Cossacks and Russian Orthodox peasants,

organized as haidamacks (rioters), ravaged many towns and villages in the

^34 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXV

provinces of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia, pillaging estates and slaying Jews.

In 1768 the raiders carried a "golden charter" falsely ascribed to Catherine

II, inviting them "to exterminate the Poles and the Jews, the desecrators of

our holy religion"; in one town, Uman, they slaughtered twenty thousand

Poles and Jews. Catherine sent a Russian army to co-operate with Polish

forces to suppress the raiders. 31

In Germany the Jews were relatively safe and prosperous, though they

suffered various disabilities in economic and political life. Special taxes were

levied upon them in most of the principalities. 32 The law allowed only a

limited number of Jews to live in Berlin, but the law was loosely enforced,

and the Berlin community grew in number and wealth; similar Jewish settle-

ments existed in Hamburg and Frankfurt. Over a thousand Jewish mer-

chants attended the Leipzig fair in 1789. 33 German rulers, even Catholic

prince-bishops, employed Jews to manage their finances or provision their

armies. Joseph Oppenheimer (i692?-i738), known as "Jew Suss," served

in these and other capacities the Elector Palatine at Mannheim and Karl

Alexander, duke of Wiirttemberg. His skill and industry enriched him and

the Duke, and earned him many enemies. Accused of malfeasance at the

mint, he was exonerated by a board of investigators, and was raised to mem-

bership in the Duke's Privy Council, where he soon became the dominant

power. He invented new taxes, established royal monopolies, and apparently

accepted bribes— which he divided with the Duke. 34 When the Duke pro-

posed that all church moneys should be deposited in a central state bank, the

Protestant clergy joined with the nobility in opposition to the Duke and his

minister. On March 3, 1737, the Duke suddenly died; army and civil leaders

arrested Oppenheimer and all Stuttgart Jews. Oppenheimer was tried and

convicted; on February 3, 1738, he was strangled, and his corpse was sus-

pended in a cage in a public square. 35

We have noted Goethe's sallies into the Judengasse in Frankfurt. One of

the oldest families there took its later name, Rothschild, from the red shield

that distinguished its dwelling. In 1755, on the death of his parents, Meyer

Amschel of the Rot Schild became head of the family at the age of eleven.

The numerous states of Germany, each with its independent coinage, made

money changing a frequent necessity for travelers; Meyer learned in his boy-

hood the interstate monetary equivalents, and earned a small fee for each ex-

change. As a side interest he studied numismatics and collected rare coins; he

guided another collector, Prince Wilhelm of Hanau, and secured from him

the title of "crown agent," which helped him in his Frankfurt business. He

married in 1770, and thereafter begot five sons, who later developed branches

of the Rothschild firm in Vienna, Naples, Paris, and London. Meyer earned

a reputation for judgment, integrity, and reliability. When Wilhelm of

Hanau succeeded his father as landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, more court busi-

ness came to Meyer Amschel, so that by 1790 he had a yearly income of

three thousand gulden— six hundred more than that of Goethe's prosperous

father. 36 The family wealth grew rapidly during the French Revolutionary

Wars; Meyer engaged in provisioning armies, and was entrusted with the

concealment, sometimes the investment, of princely fortunes.

CHAP.XXV) THE JEWS 635

The Jews continued to enjoy a relative freedom in the Netherlands and

Scandinavia. The Amsterdam congregation flourished. In Denmark ghettos

were unknown; the Jews moved about freely, and mixed marriages were al-

lowed. Altona, a commercial city across the Elbe from Hamburg but then

belonging to Denmark, had one of the most prosperous Jewish communities

in Europe. In Sweden Gustavus III protected the Jews in the peaceful prac-

tice of their religion.

Many Jews, fleeing from persecution in Poland or Bohemia, found refuge

in England. Their number there rose from 6,000 in 1734 to 26,000 in 1800,

of whom London had 20,000. Their poverty was extreme, but they took

care of their own poor, and maintained their own hospitals. 37 Jew-baiting

was a popular sport; it declined when the Jews took up boxing and one of

their number became the national pugilistic champion. 38 The requirement of

a Christian oath excluded Jews from civil or military office. Sampson Gid-

eon, having accepted conversion, became one of the governors of the Bank

of England. In 1745, when the Young Pretender was advancing upon Lon-

don with a Scottish army pledged to depose George II and restore the

Stuarts, and the public, losing confidence in the security of the government,

fell into panic and threatened a run on the bank, Gideon led the Jewish

merchants and magnates to the rescue; they poured their private funds into

the bank, and bound themselves to accept the notes of the bank at face value

in their commercial transactions; the bank met its obligations, confidence was

restored, the Pretender was repulsed. 39

The Whig ministry expressed its appreciation by introducing into Parlia-

ment (1753) a bill offering naturalization and citizenship to all foreign-born

Jews who had resided in England or Ireland for three years. (Jews born

there were naturalized by birth. 40 ) The lords and the bishops approved the

bill; the Commons passed it ninety-six to fifty-five. But the British public,

which knew, or understood, little of the role which the Jews had played in

saving the bank, rose overwhelmingly against the measure. Protests came to

Parliament from almost every town in Britain; pulpits and taverns united in

their condemnation; merchants complained that Jewish commercial competi-

tion would become intolerable; the bishops who had voted for the bill were

insulted in the streets; old legends of ritual murder of Christians by Jews

were revived; hundreds of hostile pamphlets, ballads, caricatures, and lam-

poons were circulated; women decorated their dresses and bosoms with

crosses, and wore ribands bearing the motto "No Jews, Christianity For-

ever." 41 The Whig leaders, fearing defeat in the coming election, secured

repeal of the law (1754).

II. THE MYSTIC SOLACE

From their earthly sufferings many Jews, especially in Poland, retreated

into supernatural consolations. Some ruined their eyes studying the Talmud;

some lost their wits in the Cabala; some "Sabbataians," despite the apostasy

and death of the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, still believed in his divinity, and

636 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXV

abandoned Talmudic Judaism for heretical hopes and rites. Jankiew Leibo-

wicz, who came to be known by the name the Turks gave him, Jacob Frank,

persuaded hundreds of Polish Jews to accept him as a reincarnation of Zevi;

he taught them a doctrine akin to the amiable Christian heresy that conceived

the Trinity as composed of God the Father, Mary the Mother, and the Mes-

siah their Son; finally he led his followers into the Catholic Church (1759).

The lowly state of Polish Judaism was in some measure redeemed by the

Hasidic movement. The founder of this "doctrine of piety" was Israel ben

Eliezer, known as Baal Shem-Tob ("Master of the Good Name"), and,

for short, from his initials, Besht. He wandered from place to place as a

teacher of children; he lived in cheerful poverty, prayed rapturously, and

made "miraculous" cures with mountain herbs. He asked his followers to pay

les5 attention to synagogue rites and Talmudic lore, to approach God di-

rectly in humble but intimate communion, to see and love God in all forms

and manifestations of nature, in rocks and trees as well as in good fortune

and pain; he bade them enjoy life in the present instead of mourning the sins

and miseries of the past. Sometimes his simple sayings resembled those of

Christ. "A father complained to the Besht that his son had forsaken God, and

asked, Rabbi, what shall I do? The Besht answered, 'Love him more than

ever.' " 42

In some ways the Hasidic movement in Poland corresponded to the Mo-

ravian Brethren, the German Pietists, and the English Methodists; it agreed

with these in bringing religion out of the temple and into the heart; but it

rejected asceticism and gloom, and bade its adherents dance, enjoy the em-

braces of their spouses, and even, now and then, drink to the brim of ecstasy.

When Baal Shem-Tob died (1760) his flock was shepherded, and some-

times fleeced, 43 by a succession of Zaddikim ("Righteous Men"). Orthodox

Talmudists, led by the scholarly but fanatical Elijah ben Solomon of Wilna,

fought the Hasidim with exhortations and excommunications, but their num-

ber increased as Poland died (1772-92), and by the end of the century they

claimed 100,000 souls. 44

A life so harassed on earth, and souls so fixed in heaven, could not con-

tribute much to secular literature, science, or philosophy. Almost every-

where the Jews were excluded from the universities by the oath of Christian

faith required of all students. Their Mosaic Code barred them from the prac-

tice of pictorial art, and dulled their appreciation. Writing in a Hebrew

understood only by a small minority, or in a Yiddish which had not yet be-

come a literary language, they had little stimulus to produce any literature

beyond religious commentaries or popular trivialities. One memorable con-

tribution they made to practical arts in this fallow age: Jacob Rodrigue

Pereire of Bordeaux invented a sign language for the deaf and dumb, earn-

ing the praise of Diderot, d'Alembert, Rousseau, and Buffon. And one Jew-

ish poet illuminated the gloom.

Moses Chayim Luzzatto was born in Italy (1707), of parents rich enough

to give him a good education. He derived from the Latin poets, and from

CHAP. XXV ) THE JEWS 637

Italian poets like Guarini, such skill in poetic meters that he was able to give

to his Hebrew verse a fluent ryhthm and delicate charm hardly known in

that language since Jehuda Halevy. In his seventeenth year he composed a

drama on Samson and the Philistines. Then he took to studying the Zohar,

Bible of the Cabala; his imagination was caught by its mystic fancies; he

turned some of them into poetry, and they turned his head with the notion

that he was divinely inspired. He wrote a second Zohar, and announced that

he was the Messiah promised to the Jews. The rabbis of Venice excommuni-

cated him (1734); he fled to Frankfurt-am-Main, where the rabbis made him

promise to renounce his messianic illusions; he moved to Amsterdam, where

the Jewish community welcomed him; he supported himself, like Spinoza,

by polishing lenses; and he resumed his cabalistic studies. In 1743 he com-

posed a Hebrew drama, La-Yesharim Tehilla {Glory to the Virtuous),

which, despite the abstractions used as dramatis persojiae, earned lauds from

those competent to judge. Popular Ignorance, maintained by Craft and De-

ceit, generates Folly, which repeatedly frustrates Wisdom, and deprives

Merit of its crown, until Reason and Patience at last overcome Deceit by

revealing Truth; however, by Truth Luzzatto meant the Cabala. In 1744 he

went to Palestine, hoping to be acclaimed as the Messiah, but he died at Acre

of plague (1747), aged thirty-nine. He was the last eloquent voice of Judaic

medievalism, just as

III. MOSES MENDELSSOHN

was the first major voice of a Judaism emerging from protective isolation into

contact with modern thought.

Friend and opponent of Kant, friend and inspirer of Lessing, the grand-

father of Felix Mendelssohn was one of the noblest figures of the eighteenth

century. His father, Menahem Mendel, was a clerk and teacher in a Jewish

school at Dessau. Born there on September 6, 1729, the "third Moses" grew

up with such a passion for study that he suffered a lasting curvature of the

spine. At fourteen he was sent to Berlin for further study of the Talmud;

there he followed almost literally the Talmudic command "Eat bread with

salt, drink water by measure, sleep on the hard earth, live a life of privations,

and busy thyself with the Law." 45 For seven years he contented himself with

a garret room, marked his weekly loaf of bread with lines for his daily allow-

ance, 46 and earned a pittance by copying documents in his elegant hand. In

Berlin he pored over the works of Maimonides, found courage in the career

of that "second Moses," and learned from him and life to control his pride

to modesty and cool his hot temper to gentleness and courtesy. His Berlin

associates taught him Latin, mathematics, and logic; he read Locke in a Latin

translation, passed on to Leibniz and Wolff, and was soon enamored of phi-

losophy. He learned to write German with a smooth clarity rare in the litera-

ture of his country in his time.

His poverty ended when, aged twenty-one, he became tutor in the family

638 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXV

of Isaac Bernhard, who owned a silk plant in Berlin. Four years later he was

made bookkeeper, then a traveling agent of the firm, finally a partner. He

kept this business relation actively to the end of his life, for he was resolved

not to be dependent upon the popularity and monetary returns of his books.

Probably in 1754 he met Lessing, apparently in a game of chess; so began a

friendship that endured, despite philosophical differences, till Lessing's death.

On October 16, 1754, Lessing wrote to another friend: "Mendelssohn is a

man of five-and-twenty, who, without any [university 1 education, has ac-

quired great attainments in languages, mathematics, philosophy, and poetry.

I foresee in him an honor to our nation if he is allowed to come to maturity

by his co-religionists. . . . His candor and his philosophical spirit cause me

to regard him, in anticipation, as a second Spinoza." 47 For his part Mendels-

sohn said that a friendly word or look from Lessing banished from his mind

all grief or gloom. 48

In 1755 Lessing arranged the publication of Mendelssohn's Philosophische

Gesprache, which expounded and defended both Spinoza and Leibniz. In

the same year the two friends collaborated in an essay, Pope ein Meta-

physiker!, in which they argued that the English poet had had no philosophy

of his own, but had merely versified Liebniz. Also in 1755 Mendelssohn pub-

lished Brief e fiber die Empfindungen (Letters on the Feelings) ; this antici-

pated Kant's view that the sense of beauty is quite independent of desire.

These publications won the young Jew full welcome into the not quite

"serene brotherhood of philosophes" in Berlin. Through Lessing he met

Friedrich Nikolai; he and Nikolai studied Greek together, and soon he was

reading Plato in the original. He helped Nikolai to establish the Bibliothek

der Schonen Wissenschaften und der Freien Kilnste (Library of Belles-

Lettres and Fine Arts), and contributed to this and other periodicals articles

that strongly influenced current ideas in the criticism of literature and art.

Mendelssohn now felt sufficiently secure to set up a home of his own. In

1762, thirty-three years old, he married Fromet Gugenheim, twenty-five.

Both had reached the age of reason, and the union brought them much hap-

piness. On their honeymoon he began work in competition for a prize of-

fered by the Berlin Academy for the best essay on "Whether the Metaphysi-

cal Sciences Are Susceptible of Such Evidence as the Mathematical." Among

other contestants was Immanuel Kant. Mendelssohn's contribution won

(1763), bringing him fifty ducats and international renown.

One of the contestants was Thomas Abt, a professor in Frankfurt-am-

Oder. In a long correspondence with Mendelssohn he expressed doubts as to

the immortality of the soul, and mourned that the loss of that belief might

undermine the moral code and deprive misfortune of its last consolation.

Partly as a result of this exchange, Mendelssohn composed his most famous

work: Phaidon, oder Vber die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. Like its Platonic

exemplar, it was cast in dialogue form and popular style. The soul of man

(ran the argument) is clearly different from matter; we may therefore be-

lieve that it does not share the body's fate; and if we believe in God we can

hardly suppose that he would deceive us by implanting in our minds a hope

CHAP.XXV) THE JEWS 639

without basis in truth. Moreover [as Kant was to hold] the soul has a na-

tural drive toward self-perfection; this cannot be attained in our lifetime;

God must surely allow the soul to survive the death of the body. "Without

God, Providence, and immortality," Mendelssohn felt, "all the goods of life

would lose their worth in my eyes, and our earthly life would be . . . like

wandering in wind and weather without the consoling prospect of finding

cover and protection at night." 49 The demonstrations were fragile, but the

style of the work delighted many readers; the charm of Plato's dialogues

seemed to have been recaptured; indeed, "the German Plato" became an-

other name for Mendelssohn. The little book ran through fifteen editions,

and was translated into nearly all European languages as well as Hebrew; it

was, in its time, the most widely read nonfiction book in Germany. Herder

and Goethe joined in its praise. Lavater visited the author, examined his head

and face, and announced that every bump and line revealed the soul of Soc-

rates. 50

Christians of diverse sects applauded the eloquent Jew, and two Benedic-

tine friars asked for his spiritual counsel. But in 1769 Lavater, who was as

ardent a theologian as he was a phrenologist, caused a flurry by making a

public appeal to Mendelssohn to become a Christian. Mendelssohn replied in

Schreiben an den Herrn Diaconus Lavater (1770). He admitted defects in

Judaism and Jewish life, but pointed out that such abuses develop in every

religion in the course of its history; he asked Lavater to consider the hard-

ships suffered by the Jews in Christendom, and added: "He who knows the

state in which we now are, and has a humane heart, will understand more

than I can express"; and he concluded: "Of the essentials of my faith I am

so firmly . . . assured that I call God to witness that I will adhere to my

fundamental creed as long as my soul does not assume another nature." 51

Lavater was moved, and humbly apologized for having issued his appeal. 52

But a swarm of pamphleteers denounced Mendelssohn as an infidel, and some

orthodox Jews condemned him for admitting that abuses had crept into Jew-

ish religious usages. 53 For a time the controversy generated more discussion

than national politics or the decline of Frederick's health.

Mendelssohn's own health suffered from the turmoil; for several months

in 1 77 1 he had to refrain from all mental activity. On recovering his strength

he devoted more of his time than before to the relief of his co-religionists.

When some cantons in Switzerland were preparing further restrictions

against the Jews he asked Lavater to interfere; Lavater did, with good ef-

fect. When the Dresden authorities planned to expel several hundred Jews

Mendelssohn used his friendship with a local official to secure an accom-

modation. 54 He began in 1778 to publish his German translation of the

Pentateuch; issued in 1783, this aroused another storm. To write some of

the commentaries on the text Mendelssohn had engaged Herz Homberg,

who was associated with Berlin Jews quite estranged from the synagogue.

Several rabbis banned the translation, but it found its way into the Jewish

communities; young Jews learned German from it, and the next generation

of Jews moved into active participation in German intellectual life. Mean-

640 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXV

while (1779) Lessing published his drama Nathan der Weise, which hun-

dreds of readers interpreted as an exaltation of his Jewish friend.

Now at the height of his fame and influence Mendelssohn persuaded

Marcus Herz to translate into German that Vindication of the Jews which

Manasseh ben Israel had addressed to the English people in 1656. To the

translation he added a preface on "The Salvation of the Jews" (1782), in

which he pleaded with the rabbis to abandon their right of excommunica-

tion. He followed this in 1783 with an eloquent work called Jerusalem, oder

Vber religiose Macht und Judenthum. (On Religious Authority and Juda-

ism), in which he reaffirmed his Judaic faith, called upon the Jews to come

out of the ghetto and take their part in Western culture, urged the separa-

tion of church and state, condemned any compulsion of belief, and proposed

that states be judged by the degree in which they relied on persuasion rather

than force. Kant, now too at his zenith, wrote to the author a letter that de-

serves a place in the annals of friendship:

I consider this book the herald of a great reform, which will affect not alone

your people but also others. You have succeeded in combining your religion

with such a degree of freedom of conscience as was never imagined possi-

ble. . . . You have, at the same time, so clearly and thoroughly demonstrated

the necessity of unlimited freedom of conscience in every religion, that ulti-

mately our [Lutheran] Church will also be led to consider how to remove

from its midst everything that disturbs or oppresses conscience. 55

The book was attacked by orthodox leaders Christian or Jewish, but it con-

tributed immensely to the liberation and Westernization of the Jews.

In 1783 Mendelssohn was only fifty-four, but he had always been frail in

physique and health, and he felt that he had not much longer to live. In his

final years he delivered to his children and some friends lectures defining his

religious creed; these were published in 1785 as Morgenstunden, oder Vor-

lesungen fiber das Dasein Gottes (Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Exist-

ence of God). In his last year he was shocked to learn, from a book by

Jacobi, that his dear friend Lessing, now dead, had long adhered to Spinoza's

pantheism. He could not believe it. He wrote a passionate defense of Lessing

— An die Freunde Lessings. While taking the manuscript to the publishers he

caught a cold; and in the course of that sickness he died of an apoplectic

stroke, January 4, 1786. Christians joined with Jews in erecting a statue to

him in Dessau, the city of his birth.

He was one of the most influential figures of his generation. Inspired by

his writings and his successful crossing of religious frontiers, young Jews

came out of the ghetto, and soon made their mark in literature, science, and

philosophy. Marcus Herz went to the University of Konigsberg as a medical

student; he took several of Kant's courses, and became the great episte-

molog's assistant and friend; it was he who, reading the Critique of Pure

Reason in manuscript, stopped halfway for fear that if he continued he

would go insane. Back in Berlin, he developed a large practice as a physician,

and gave lectures in physics and philosophy to audiences of Christians and

Jews. His wife, Henrietta, beautiful and accomplished, opened a salon which,

CHAP.XXV) THE JEWS 641

at the turn of the century, was a leading rendezvous of intellectual Berlin;

there came Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel,

Mirabeau fits . . . The resultant mixture of ideas might not have pleased

Mendelssohn. Several of his children became converts to Christianity. Two

of his daughters joined Henrietta Herz and others in a "Tugenbund," or

Band of Virtue, which honored "elective affinities" above marital fidelity.

Henrietta carried on a liaison with Schleiermacher; Dorothea Mendelssohn

left her husband to be the mistress and then loyal wife of Friedrich Schlegel,

and ended as a Roman Catholic; Henrietta Mendelssohn also accepted the

Roman creed; and Abraham Mendelssohn caused his children, including

Felix, to be baptized as Lutherans; the orthodox rabbis claimed that their

fears had been justified. These were incidental results of the new freedom;

the more lasting aspects of Mendelssohn's influence appeared in the intellec-

tual, social, and political liberation of the Jews.

IV. TOWARD FREEDOM

Intellectually, the liberation took at this time the form of the Haskalah— a

word which meant wisdom, but which came in this context to signify the

Jewish Enlightenment, the revolt of a rising number of Jews against rabbini-

cal and Talmudic domination, and their resolve to enter actively into the

stream of modern thought. These rebels learned German, and some of them,

especially in the families of merchants or financiers, learned French; they

read German freethinkers like Lessing, Kant, Wieland, Herder, Schiller, and

Goethe, and many of them delved into Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helve-

tius, and d'Holbach. A division arose between liberal Jews, eager for mod-

ernity, and conservative Jews who felt that devotion to the Talmud and the

synagogue was the only way to preserve the religious, ethnical, and ethical

integrity of the Jewish people.

The Haskalah movement spread from Germany southward into Galicia

and Austria, eastward into Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. In Austria it was

accelerated by Joseph IPs Toleranzpatent, which invited the Jews to enter

non-Jewish schools. When conservative rabbis opposed this, Naphtali Wes-

sely, a Jewish poet of Hamburg, pleaded with them, in an eloquent Hebrew

manifesto, to sanction the participation of Jews in secular education; he

urged the younger generation to replace Yiddish with Hebrew and German,

and to study science and philosophy as well as the Bible and the Talmud.

His views were rejected by the rabbis of Austria; they were accepted by

Jewish leaders in Trieste, Venice, Ferrara, and Prague. From that time to

ours the Jews have contributed to science, philosophy, literature, music, and

law far beyond their proportion in the population.

Intellectual and economic developments promoted Jewish emancipation.

Catholic scholars like Richard Simon made rabbinical learning known to

Christian students of the Bible, and the Protestant theologian Jacques Bas-

nage wrote a friendly History of the Religion of the Jews (1707). The

642 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXV

growth of commerce and finance brought Christians and Jews into contacts

that sometimes stimulated, but often reduced, racial hostility. Jewish finan-

ciers played helpful and patriotic roles in several governments.

Christian voices now rose to propose an end to religious persecution. In

1 78 1 Christian Wilhelm Dohm, a friend of Mendelssohn, published at his

suggestion the epochal tract Vber die biirgerliche Verbesserung der Juden

in Deutschland (On the Civil Betterment of the Jews in Germany). The

occasion for it was a plea sent to Mendelssohn by Alsatian Jews, asking him

to formulate a protest against their disabilities. Dohm undertook the task,

and enlarged it into a general appeal for Jewish liberation. He described in

impressive detail the handicaps suffered by the Hebrews in Europe, and

pointed out what a loss it was to Western civilization that it made so little

use of the intellectual gifts of the Jews. "These principles of exclusion,

equally opposed to humanity and politics, bear the stamp of the Dark Ages,

and are unworthy of the enlightenment of our times." 56 Dohm proposed that

the Jews be admitted to full freedom of worship, to educational institutions,

to all occupations, and to all civil rights except, for the present, eligibility to

office, for which they were not yet prepared.

His treatise aroused comment in many countries. Some opponents charged

him with having sold his pen to the Jews, but several Protestant clergymen

came to his defense. Johannes von Miiller, the Swiss historian, supported

him, and asked that the works of Maimonides be translated into German or

French. The Toleration Patent of 1782 in Austria and the political emanci-

pation of the Jews in the United States (1783) gave impetus to the liberation

movement. The French government responded meagerly by removing

(1784) personal taxes that had burdened the Jews. The Marquis de Mira-

beau shared with Malesherbes in securing this relief; and his son, the Comte

de Mirabeau, helped with his essay On Mendelssohn and the Political Re-

form of the Jews (1787). The Abbe Henri Gregoire advanced the matter

with a prize-winning essay, Sur la regeneration physique, morale, et politique

des Jutfs (1789).

Final political emancipation came only with the Revolution. The Declara-

tion of the Rights of Man proclaimed by the National Assembly (August 27,

1789) implied it, and on September 27, 1791, the Constituent Assembly

voted full civil rights to all the Jews of France. The armies of the Revolu-

tion or of Napoleon brought freedom to the Jews of Holland in 1796, of

Venice in 1797, of Mainz in 1798, of Rome in 18 10, of Frankfurt in 181 1.

For the Jews the Middle Ages had at last come to an end.

CHAPTER XXVI

From Geneva to Stockholm

i. the swiss: 1754-98

THOSE of us who have enjoyed peace amid the scenic paradise of Swit-

zerland, and inspiration in the courage and integrity of its people, find

it difficult to realize that beneath the calm character, patient husbandry,

and steady industry that Europe admired then, and does now, there lay the

natural conflicts of race against race, language against language, creed against

creed, canton against canton, class against class. On their modest scale the

Swiss had very nearly realized the ideal pictured by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre

and dreamed of by Rousseau and Kant: a confederation of states independ-

ent in their internal affairs but pledged to united action in their relations with

the surrounding world. In 1760 the Helvetic Union (Helvetische Gesell-

schaft) was formed to promote national rather than cantonal dedication, and

to unite the scattered movements for political reform.

Voltaire, living close by, estimated the population of Switzerland in 1767

at 720,000.* Most of them tilled the soil or trained the vine, terracing the

slopes almost to the mountaintops. The textile industry was growing, espe-

cially in the province of St. Gallen and the canton of Zurich; other manu-

facturing centers were taking form in Glarus, Bern, and Basel; and Geneva

and Neuchatel were the great centers of watchmaking. Agents spreading

over Europe from London to Constantinople (which had eighty-eight of

them) developed for Geneva an export trade that rapidly enriched the city

on the Rhone. Banks multiplied, for the Swiss financiers had won an inter-

national reputation for fidelity.

As everywhere, the majority of abilities was contained in a minority of

men, and led to a concentration of wealth. Generally the cantons were ruled

by oligarchies, which behaved like any ruling class. The patricians were gen-

erous patrons of literature, science, and art, but they resisted every move to

extend the franchise. Gibbon, dwelling in Lausanne, accused the Bernese

oligarchy of discouraging industry in their dependent provinces, and of

keeping down the standard of living there, on the principle that "poor and

obedient subjects are preferable to rich and recalcitrant ones." 2 Societies for

the abolition of economic or political privilege were repeatedly organized,

but were kept in check by state and church allied. 3 Class war agitated

Geneva, on and off, throughout the eighteenth century. Relative peace pre-

vailed there from 1737 to 1762, but the burning of Emile by the municipal

council (1762) set off an agitation for widening the franchise. Rousseau and

Voltaire both aided this movement, and after much controversy the patri-

ciate yielded to the middle classes a minor share in the government.

This left quite voteless three fourths of the population— the natifs, persons

643

644 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVI

born in Geneva but of non-native parents. These were excluded also from

most of the professions, from military office, and from mastership in the

guilds; and they were forbidden to address petitions to the Grand Conseil

and the Petit Conseil that ruled the republic. But they were heavily taxed.

On April 4, 1766, a delegation of natifs went to Ferney and asked Voltaire

to help them secure the franchise. He told them:

My friends, you constitute the most numerous class of an independent, indus-

trious community, and you are in slavery. You ask only to be able to enjoy

your natural advantages. It is just that you be accorded so moderate a request.

I shall serve you with all the influence I have; . . . and if you are forced to

leave a country which prospers through your labor, I shall be able to serve and

protect you elsewhere. 4

Aristocracy and bourgeoisie united to resist the appeal of the natifs, and

all that Voltaire could do was to welcome into his industrial colony as many

of the discontented artisans as came to him (1768). In 1782 the natifs rose

in a revolt that overthrew the patriciate and established a representative gov-

ernment. But the aristocrats appealed to France, Bern, and Sardinia; these

powers intervened, the rebellion was put down, the oligarchy was restored.

The natifs had to wait for the French Revolution to bring them freedom.

The cantons produced in this third of a century some personages of inter-

national renown. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was one of those rare individ-

uals who take the New Testament as a guide to conduct. He agreed with

Rousseau that civilization had corrupted man, but he felt that reform could

come not through new laws and institutions, but through the remaking of hu-

man conduct by education. All through his life he welcomed children, espe-

cially the poor and, above all, the homeless; he gave them shelter and school-

ing, and in their instruction he applied the libertarian principles of Rousseau's

Smile, along with some ideas of his own. He expounded his views in one of

the most widely read books of that generation. The heroine of Lionhard rind

Gertrud (1781-87) reforms an entire village by trying to deal with people

as Christ would have done, and by educating her children with patient con-

sideration of their natural impulses and aptitudes. Pestalozzi proposed to give

the children as much freedom as the rights of others would permit. Early

education should begin by example, and should teach by objects, the senses,

and experience rather than by words, ideas, or rote. Pestalozzi practiced his

methods in various Swiss schools, chiefly at Yverdon. There Talleyrand,

Mme. de Stael, and others visited him, and thence his theories spread through

Europe. Goethe, however, complained that Pestalozzi's schools were form-

ing insolent, arrogant, and undisciplined individualists. 5

Angelica Kauffmann, born in the Grisons canton, rivaled Mme. Vigee-

Lebrun as the most renowned woman artist of their time. Even at the age of

twelve, besides being a good musician, she painted so well that bishops and

nobles sat to her for their portraits. At the age of thirteen (1754) she was

taken by her father to Italy, where she continued her studies and was every-

where feted for her accomplishments and her personal charm. Invited to

England in 1766, she made a stir by her portrayal of Garrick. Sir Joshua

CHAP.XXVl) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 645

Reynolds became very fond of "Miss Angel," painted her portrait, and was

painted in turn. She joined in the establishment of the Royal Academy of

Arts, which in 1773 appointed her, with others, to decorate St. Paul's. In

1 78 1 she retired to Rome, where (1788) she numbered Goethe among her

devoted friends. She died there in 1807; her funeral, arranged by Canova,

was one of the events of the age; the entire art community followed her to

her tomb.

The outstanding Swiss of the generation after Rousseau was Johann

Kaspar Lavater. Born at Zurich in 1741, he became a Protestant pastor, and

retained throughout his life the most fervent attachment to orthodox Chris-

tianity. We have seen his attempts to convert Goethe and Mendelssohn. But

he was not dogmatic; he maintained friendships across religious and national

boundaries, and all who knew him respected him; many loved him. 6 He

wrote works of mystical piety, expounded the Book of Revelations fanci-

fully, believed in the miraculous powers of prayer and Cagliostro, and gave

his wife hypnotic treatments on prescriptions by Mesmer. His most charac-

teristic claim was that character can be judged from the features of the face

and the contours of the head. He interested Goethe and Herder in his views,

and they contributed articles to his book Physiognomische Fragmente

( 1775—78) . He studied the looks, heads, and figures of prominent individuals,

and correlated cranial and facial features with specific qualities of mind and

character. His analyses and conclusions were widely accepted but are now

generally rejected; his general principle, that psychological qualities share

(with air, environment, diet, occupation, etc.) in molding the body and the

face, retains a substantial measure of truth. Every face is an autobiography.

Lavater was part of a Swiss efflorescence which included Rousseau, the

poet and scientist Albrecht von Haller, the poet and painter Salomon Gess-

ner, the historian Johannes von Miiller, and Horace de Saussure, who started

the sport of mountain climbing by scaling Mont Blanc in 1787 after twenty-

seven years of trying. Meanwhile the cantons felt the winds of revqlution

blowing across the border from France. In 1797 Frederic Cesar de Laharpe,

who had tutored the grandchildren of Catherine the Great, joined with Peter

Ochs, a guild merchant of Basel, in calling upon the French Revolutionary

government to help them establish a democratic republic in Switzerland.

Local revolts in Bern and Vaud (January, 1798) paved the way; a French

army crossed the frontier on January 28; most of the Swiss population wel-

comed it as a liberator from oligarchy; on March 19 the "One and Indivisible

Helvetic Republic" was proclaimed, abolishing all privileges of canton, class,

or person, and making all Swiss equal before the law. Zurich resisted longest,

and in the turmoil that ensued honest old Lavater was shot (1799). He died

in 1 80 1 as the slow effect of the wound.

II. THE DUTCH: 1715-95

Everybody liked the Dutch. The Danish dramatist Holberg, who visited

the United Provinces ("Holland") and "Belgium" in 1704, enthused espe-

646 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVI

cially over their canals, whose boats, he said, "transport me from one place

to another" in dulcet peace, and "enable me to spend every night in a town

of considerable size, so that of an evening I have been able to go to the opera

or the theater directly upon arrival." 7 Twelve years later Lady Mary Wort-

ley Montagu was similarly pleased:

The whole country [Holland] appears a large garden; the roads all well

paved, shaded on each side with rows of trees, and bordered with large canals

full of boats passing and repassing. . . . All the streets [in Rotterdam] ... so

neatly kept that ... I walked almost all over town yesterday, incognita, in my

slippers, without receiving one spot of dirt; and you may see the Dutch maids

washing the pavement . . . with more application than ours do our bedcham-

bers. . . . The merchants' ships come [on the canals] to the very doors of the

houses. The shops and warehouses are of a surprising neatness and magnifi-

cence, filled with an incredible quantity of fine merchandise. 8

But these rosy reports described Holland before she had felt the economic

effects of her victory over Louis XIV in the War of the Spanish Succession.

Then she had bled her men and money close to exhaustion; her public debt

was enormous; much of her carrying trade had been lost to her military allies

but commercial competitors— and to Germany. The dividends of the Dutch

East India Company fell from forty per cent in 1 7 1 5 to twelve and a half per

cent in 1737, those of the Dutch West India Company from five per cent in

1700 to two per cent in 1740. 9 The Seven Years' War brought further dam-

age. The bankers of Amsterdam grew rich on high interest loans to the war-

ring powers, but the peace of 1763 ended this boon, and many Dutch banks

failed, leaving every major business harmed. Boswell, in Holland in 1763,

reported "many of the principal towns sadly decayed. . . . You meet with

multitudes of poor creatures who are starving in idleness." 10 Taxes were

raised, leading to the emigration of capital and sturdy human stock; now

Dutch and German colonists mingled their blood in South Africa, slowly

forming the Boers.

Recovery came through Dutch character, industry, and integrity. A calm,

strong, frugal people tilled the land, oiled their windmills, tended their cows,

cleaned their dairies, and produced delectable malodorous cheeses; Holland

led Europe in scientific farming. 11 Delft recaptured its market for porcelain.

The Dutch and Jewish bankers of Amsterdam regained their reputation for

reliability and resourcefulness; they lent at low interest and risk, received

lucrative contracts to pay and provision troops; governments and business

applied to Amsterdam for loans, and rarely went away empty; through

nearly all that turbulent century the bourse in Amsterdam was the financial

center of the Western world. Said Adam Smith about 1775: "The province

of Holland, ... in proportion to the extent of its territory and the number

of its people, is a richer country than England." 12

What most impressed Voltaire in 1725 13 was the almost peaceful cohabi-

tation of diverse faiths. Here were orthodox Catholics and Jansenist Catho-

lics (had not Jansen himself been Dutch?), Arminian free-will Protestants

and Calvinist predestination Protestants, Anabaptists and Socinians, Mora-

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 647

vian Brethren and Jews, and a sprinkling of freethinkers basking in the

French Enlightenment. 14 Most of the magistrates were Protestant, but they

"regularly took money from the Catholics," says a Dutch historian, "for

conniving at their religious exercises, and allowing them to hold office." 15

The Catholics were now a third of the three million population. The upper

classes, acquainted through commerce with a dozen faiths, were skeptical of

them all, and did not allow them to interfere with gambling, drinking, gour-

mandizing, and some discreet adultery in Gallic style. 16

French was the language of the cultured. Schools were numerous, and the

University of Leiden was famous for its courses in medicine, which remem-

bered the great Boerhaave. Nearly all towns had art societies, libraries, and

"chambers of rhetoric" with periodic contests in poetry. Dutch art dealers

had a European reputation for their treasures and frauds. 17 The great age of

Dutch painting had ended with Hobbema (d. 1709), but Cornelis Troost

was at least an echo of its glory. Perhaps the most brilliant product of Dutch

art in this age was glass delicately stippled, or engraved with diamond

points. 18 Amsterdam was a nest of publishers, some of them gentlemen, some

pirates. Creative activity in literature sank to a low level in the first half of

the eighteenth century; but toward 1780 a revival of letters nourished a real

poet, Willem Bilderdijk.

One of Boswell's friends told him that he would find the Dutch "happy

in their own dullness"; 19 but Boswell reported from Utrecht: "We have

brilliant assemblies twice a week, and private parties almost every evening.

. . . There are so many beautiful and amiable ladies in our circle that a

quire of paper could not contain their praises." 20 The most fascinating pages

in Boswell's Holland jottings are those that describe his hesitant romance

with "Zelide," or "Belle de Zuylen"— i.e., Isabella van Tuyll. She belonged

to an old and distinguished family; her father, "lord of Zuilen and West-

broek," was one of the governors of Utrecht province. She received more

education than she could hold, became proudly heterodox, and flouted con-

ventions, morals, religion, and rank, but she charmed any number of men

with her beauty, gaiety, and exciting candor. She shrank from genteel and

dutiful marriage. "If I had neither father nor mother I would not get mar-

ried. ... I should be well pleased with a husband who would take me as

his mistress; I should say to him, 'Do not look upon faithfulness as a duty.

You should have none but the rights and jealousies of a lover.' " 21 To which

Boswell, the most assiduous fornicator in Europe, replied, "Fie, my Zelide,

what fancies are these?" She persisted: "I would prefer being my lover's

laundress, and living in a garret, to the arid freedom and good manners of

our great families." 22

Zelide passed through a succession of love affairs that left her single and

permanently scarred. Already at twenty-four she was quieting her nerves

with opium. At thirty ( 177 1 ) she married Saint-Hyacinthe de Charriere, a

Swiss tutor, and went to live with him near Lausanne. Finding him intellec-

tually inadequate, she fell in love in her forties with a man ten years younger

than herself; he used her and left her. She sought catharsis in writing a novel,

648 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVI

Caliste (1785-88), which sent Sainte-Beuve into raptures. At forty-seven,

in Paris, she met Benjamin Constant, aged twenty, and seduced him with

her mind (1787). "Mme. de Charriere," he wrote, "had so original and lively

a manner of looking at life, so deep a contempt for prejudice, so powerful an

intellect, and so vigorous and disdainful a superiority over the common run

of men, that, . . . bizarre and arrogant like her, I discovered in her con-

versation a pleasure I had not known before. . . . We became intoxicated

with our scorn of the human race." 23 This went on till 1 794, when Benjamin

found a fresh intoxication with Mme. de Stael. Zelide retired into a bitter

seclusion, and died at sixty-five, having created and exhausted the emptiness

of life.

She could have found food for pessimism in the political history of the

United Provinces in the eighteenth century. After the death of William III

(1702) the government was monopolized by an oligarchy of business lead-

ers devoted to taxation, nepotism, and intrigue. "The citizens," complained

a Dutch writer in 1737, "are shut out of the administration, . . . and no

advice or vote is asked in affairs of state." 24 The military incompetence of

this regime was exposed when Holland entered the War of the Austrian

Succession (1743): a French army invaded Holland, and met with little re-

sistance; many towns surrendered without argument; Marechal de Noailles

reported, "We have to do with some very obliging people." 25 Not all; most

of the citizens cried out for a martial leader to save the country, as William

III had done in 1672; his collateral descendant William IV, Prince of Or-

ange, was made stadholder of the seven provinces, captain of the army,

admiral of the navy (May 3, 1747); in October these offices were made

hereditary in his family; in effect monarchy was restored. But the fourth

William was too much of a Christian to be a good general; he was unable

to re-establish discipline in the army; defeat followed defeat; and in the

Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) Holland was lucky to survive territorially

intact but again economically desolate. William died of erysipelas at forty

( 1 7 5 1 ) ; his widow, Princess Anne, served as regent till her death (1759);

Prince Ludwig Ernst of Brunswick- Wolfenbiittel ruled sternly but ably

till William V came of age (1766).

In the war between England and the American colonies Holland pro-

tested British interference with Dutch shipping, and joined Russia in the

"Armed Neutrality" of 1780; England declared war, and captured nearly

all Dutch shipping. In the Treaty of Paris (1783) the interests of Holland

were almost ignored; she surrendered Negapatam (in south India) to Eng-

land, and allowed the English free navigation through the Moluccas. Hol-

land ceased to play a part among the powers.

These disasters destroyed the popularity of William V. Moreover, the

success of the revolt in America stimulated democratic ideas in the Nether-

lands, and led to the rise of a party of "Patriots" hostile to the ruling family.

Through every change of government the moneyed minority had so ab-

sorbed the declining wealth of the nation that many men turned to begging,

and many women to prostitution, in once flourishing and orderly towns. In

1783 companies of "free shooters" were secretly formed in Amsterdam and

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 649

The Hague to prepare revolution. In 1787 the Patriots seized power, but

William V was restored by armed intervention from Prussia. The French

Revolution revived the ardor of the Patriots; they invited France to come

to their aid. In 1794 French troops invaded Holland; the Dutch army was

overwhelmed; William V fled to England; and the Dutch revolutionists

joined with the French in organizing the Batavian Republic (1 795-1 806).

In 1 8 1 5 the son of William V restored the house of Orange-Nassau to power

as King William I. His descendants reign in the Netherlands today (1967).

III. THE DANES: 1715-97

The first official census of Denmark (1769) reckoned its population at

825,000 souls, with another 727,600 in Norway, which remained till 18 14

under the Danish kings. Nearly all the peasants in Norway owned their

lands, and were as proud as Vikings. In Denmark half the peasantry were

serfs, and the other half were subject to feudal dues. The kings labored to

check this feudalism, but they were financially dependent upon the mag-

nates, and serfdom continued till 1787. In this regime little encouragement

was given to commerce or industry; no significant middle class developed;

and the opening of the Kiel Canal (1783) benefited English and Dutch

traders rather than the Danes. In 1792 Denmark was the first European

power to abolish the slave trade in its dominions.

As the nobles ruled the state, so the Lutheran Church ruled the pulpit, the

press, and, hopefully, the mind. A severe censorship, maintained from 1537

to 1849, outlawed all print or speech not in accord with Lutheran ortho-

doxy, and many nontheological books, like Goethe's Werther, were pro-

scribed as imperiling public morality. The development of literature was

further hampered by the use of German at court, Latin at the universities,

and French in belles-lettres— of which there was almost none. To have in-

augurated Danish literature by writing in the vernacular, and to have

brought some rays of the Enlightenment into Denmark, were among the

accomplishments of the most brilliant Dane of the eighteenth century.

Norway as well as Denmark can claim Ludvig von Holberg, for he was

born in Bergen (December 3, 1684). After studying at the local Latin

school, he crossed the water to enter the University of Copenhagen. Soon

his funds ran short; he returned to Norway and served as tutor in the family

of a country parson. Having saved sixty thalers, he set out to see the world.

In 1704 he was in Holland; in 1706-8 he was educating himself in the libra-

ries of Oxford. Back in Copenhagen, he gave lectures which brought him

little more than self-instruction; meanwhile he lived by tutoring, and fed on

ambition. In 17 14 the university appointed him to a professorship, without

pay, but a private gift enabled him to wander through Italy and France for

two years, mostly on foot. Returning from this grandest of grand tours, he

was made professor of metaphysics, which he hated, then of Latin and

rhetoric, at last ( 1 7 30) of history and geography, which he loved.

In his leisure moments he created Danish literature. Till his time there had

650 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVI

been, in Danish, hardly anything but ballads, farces, hymns, and works of

popular piety. Holberg produced a small library of poems, satires, novels,

and treatises in Danish on politics, law, history, science, and philosophy.

Only Voltaire rivaled him in versatility. Like Voltaire he used laughter as

a scourge of pompous professors worshiping the classics, lawyers hobbling

justice with technicalities, clergymen scrambling for money and place, phy-

sicians easing patients into eternity. Nearly all these pillars of society were

pilloried in his first major work, a mock epic, Peder Paars (17 19). Some

great Danes felt the sting, and urged King Frederick IV to suppress the book

as offensive to morals and making fun of priests; the King had the first canto

read to him, and judged it "a harmless, amusing work"; but the royal council

informed Holberg that it would have been better if the poem had never

been written. 26

So he turned to the stage. In 1720 a French actor, £tienne Capion, opened

in Copenhagen the first Danish theater. Finding no Danish plays meriting

production, he imported dramas from France and Germany. He saw from

Peder Paars that Holberg had the materials and talent for comedy; he ap-

pealed to him to provide the new theater with vernacular plays; within a

year Holberg composed five, within eight years twenty, and all so rich in'

pictures of local mores that his great successor, Adam Oehlenschlager, said

of him: "He knew how to paint the bourgeois life of his Copenhagen so

faithfully that if this city were to be swallowed up, and if after two hundred

years the comedies of Holberg were rediscovered, one would be able to re-

construct the epoch from them, just as from Pompeii and Herculaneum we

know the times of ancient Rome." 27

Holberg took forms and ideas from Plautus, Terence, Moliere, and the

Commedia dell' Arte, which he had seen in Italy. Some of his comedies are

one-act trivialities that have lost their thrust, like SganarePs Journey to the

Land of the Philosophers?* some still have force, like Jeppe of the Hill, from

which we learn that peasants, when they acquire power, are more brutal

than their lords. Some are full-length plays, like Rasmus Montanus; this is a

rollicking satire of scholastic pedantry, theological dogmatism, and popular

ignorance, with a sly touch of rural candor, as when Lisbed, hearing that

her fiance is returning from university, tells her father, "Then my dream

has come true. ... I dreamed that I slept with him last night." 29 Despite

these lively comedies, the Copenhagen theater closed in 1727 for lack of

public support. The final performance was Holberg's The Funeral of Dan-

ish Comedy.

He had shocked his university confreres by writing for the stage; now he

mollified them with historical works presenting to Danish readers the results

of West-European scholarship. A Description of Denmark and Norway

(1729), A History of Denmark (1732-35), a Universal Church History

(1727-47), and A History of the Jews were compilations, but they were

well done. From these labors Holberg sought relief in his masterpiece— Nico-

lai Klirmi Iter subterraneum (1741). He wrote it in Latin prose to reach a

European audience; it did, but through translations: Jens Baggesen turned

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 65 1

it into Danish, in which it ran through three editions; in German it had ten,

in Swedish, Dutch, and English, three, in French and Russian two, in Hun-

garian one. It was this Subterranean Journey of Niels Klim that made Hol-

berg the Swift as well as the Voltaire of Denmark.

The noises from a cave rouse Niels's curiosity; he resolves to investigate;

his friends lower him by a rope, which breaks; "with amazing velocity I

was hurried down into the abyss." 30 Within the crust of the earth he finds

an open space or firmament, containing a sun, its planets, and many stars.

Falling toward one of these planets, he becomes its satellite, and revolves

around it helplessly; but he catches hold of an eagle and is carried with it to

make a soft landing on the planet Potu ("Utop[ia]" reversed). Here the

trees are the ruling species, rich in sapient sap; unfortunately "that very tree

which I climbed upon . . . was the wife of the sheriff." 31 Potu has some ex-

cellent laws. People who "dispute publicly about the qualities and essence of

the Supreme Being are looked upon as slightly insane"; they are treated by

bloodletting to reduce their fever, and then are kept in confinement until

they "emerge from this delirium." 32 Mothers in Potu nurse their infants—

twenty-one years before Rousseau's appeal to maternal breasts. In the prov-

ince of Cocklecu (Cuckoldy) the women govern the state, the men keep

house or become prostitutes, the Queen has a harem of three hundred hand-

some youths. The philosophers in Cocklecu spend their time trying to get

to the sun, and pay little attention to earthly affairs. In the province of Mi-

kolac all the people are atheists, and "do whatever evil they can conceal

from the police." 33 Niels comes upon a book entitled Tainan's Journey to

the Superterranean World, which describes Europe and its strange customs:

heads covered with enormous wigs, hats worn under the arm (as among the

nobles of France), "little cakes or wafers that are carried about the streets,

and which the priests say are gods; the very men who baked them . . . will

take their oaths that these wafers created the world." 34

The Iter subterraneum contained some satires of Christian dogma, and

called for freedom of worship for all sects; but it recommended belief in

God, heaven, and hell as necessary supports for a moral code continually

battered by the demands of the ego and the flesh. 35 King Frederick V made

the reformed reformer a baron in 1747; Holberg had the pleasure-of rebel-

lion in his youth and of acceptance in old age, which ended in 1754. He re-

mains to this day the dominating figure in the literature of Denmark.

Some would give that place rather to Johannes Ewald, whose career

matched those of Byron, Keats, and Shelley in adventure, suffering, and

brevity. Born in Copenhagen in 1743, son of a Lutheran minister, he rebelled

against his puritanic elders, fell in love at sixteen with Arense Hulegaard,

abandoned a theological career as too tardy in its rewards, enlisted in the

Prussian and then the Austrian army, resolved to win the wealth and glory

that would make Arense his bride. But privations and disease destroyed his

health; he returned to Copenhagen and theology; Arense married a promp-

ter fortune, and Ewald poured out his heart in poetry and prose. He wrote

the first original Danish tragedy, Rolf Krage (1770), and reached the zenith

652 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVI

of Danish poetry in the eighteenth century with Balder' s Death (1773), an

heroic drama in verse. His work brought him hardly enough bread to live

on; he retired to rural solitude, nursed a succession of ailments, and was at

last revived by a pension from the government. He rewarded it with a play,

The Fishers (1779), containing the patriotic ballad "King Christian Stood

by the Lofty Mast," which became the favorite national song of the Danes J 6

It was Ewald's call to glory and his farewell to life; he died after a long and

painful illness in 1781, aged thirty-eight. Scandinavians rank him as "one of

the greatest lyric poets of the North, perhaps the very greatest." 37

As the eighteenth century progressed, the political history of Denmark

became part of the unending modern drama between tradition and experi-

ment. Christian VI (r. 1730-46) mingled the opposed forces. He and his

ministers advanced economic development by importing weavers and spin-

ners to establish a textile industry, by forming national companies to trade

with Asia and America, and by opening the Bank of Copenhagen (1736).

They brought Greenland under the Danish crown (1744). They spread

primary and secondary schools, and founded academies for the promotion of

letters and learning. However, they renewed an old ordinance requiring Sun-

day attendance at Lutheran services; they closed all theaters and dance halls,

banished actors, forbade masquerades.

Christian's son Frederick V (r. 1746-66) allowed these laws to stand, but

softened them by his genial spirit and sensual life. In 1751 he secured from

Hanover Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff, who, as chief minister,

raised the honesty and competence of administration, restored the army and

navy, kept them out of the Seven Years' War, and stirred the still waters

of Danish culture by importing professors, poets, artists, and scientists; we

have seen Klopstock accepting such an invitation. In 1767 Count von Bern-

storff crowned his pacific foreign policy by persuading Catherine the Great

to sign an agreement releasing Holstein-Gottorp to Denmark.

Frederick V, worn out with pleasure, died at forty-three (1766). His

son Christian VII (r. 1 766-1 808) was hurried into marriage at the age of

seventeen with Caroline A4atilda, sister of England's George III; she bright-

ened the social life of the capital, but her half-insane husband neglected her

for a life of profligacy, and Caroline slipped into a tragic amour with the

court physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee. Son of a theology professor at

Halle, Struensee studied medicine there, and, like most physicians, lost his

religious faith. He owed his influence with the King to his skill in treating

the clinical results of royal amours, and with the Queen to his success in

bringing Christian VII sufficiently to her bed to beget an heir. As the King's

mind sank into apathetic gloom, the Queen's power in the government grew;

and as she allowed her physician to direct her policies as well as to enjoy

her favors, he became (1770) the real ruler of the state. Orders went out

from the royal palace signed by Struensee in the name of the non-compos-

mentts King. Bernstorff was dismissed, and retired peacefully to his estates

in Germany.

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 653

Struensee had read the philosophes, and on their principles he proposed

to remodel Danish life. He abolished the abuses of noble privilege, ended

censorship of the press, established schools, cleansed the civil service of cor-

ruption and jobbery, emancipated the serfs, forbade judicial torture, pro-

claimed toleration for all religions, encouraged literature and art, reformed

the law and the courts, the police, the university, the finances, municipal

sanitation . . . To reduce the public debt he canceled many pensions, and

appropriated the revenues of pious foundations to public ends.

The nobles plotted his fall, and used the freedom of the press to sap his

popularity. Pious Danes resented religious toleration as atheism, and spoke

of Struensee as a foreigner whose sole source of authority was the bed of

the Queen. On January 17, 1772, a group of army officers persuaded the

King that Struensee and the Queen were planning to kill him. He signed

an order for their arrest. Caroline was deported to Hamlet's Castle of Kron-

borg; Struensee was cast into a dungeon, and, after five weeks of suffering,

confessed adultery with the Queen. On April 28, 1772, he was hacked to

pieces on a scaffold in the presence of an approving multitude. Caroline, on

the insistence of George III, was allowed to retire to Celle in Hanover,

where she died on May 10, 1775, aged twenty-four.

The successful conspirators raised to power Ove Guldberg, tutor of

Prince Frederick. During twelve years of rule Guldberg led a patriotic re-

action against foreign influence in government, language, and education,

opened office to commoners, restored serfdom, judicial torture, the suprem-

acy of the Lutheran Church, and the religious orientation of the university.

Count von BernstorfFs nephew and protege Andreas Peter von BernstorfF

was put in charge of foreign affairs. When Prince Frederick made himself

regent (1784) Guldberg was dismissed; Andreas von Bernstorff became

chief minister, and remained so till his death. Under his prudent guidance

serfdom was again abolished (1787), the slave trade was ended in Danish

dominions, economic enterprise was freed. When BernstorfF died (1797)

Denmark had been set firmly on the road to that peaceful prosperity which

made her the envy of the world.

IV. THE SWEDES

1. Politics: iji8-ji

The dramatic career of Charles XII had been a tragedy for Sweden. His

aims had consulted his thirst for glory rather than the resources of his coun-

try. The Swedish people had borne with him valiantly while he exhausted

their manpower and their wealth, but they had known, long before he died,

that he was doomed to fail. By the Treaties of Stockholm ( 17 19-20) Sweden

yielded the duchies of Bremen and Verden to Hanover, and the larger part

of Pomerania to Prussia. By the Peace of Nystad ( 1 7 2 1 ) she surrendered

Livonia, Esthonia, Ingermanland, and east Karelia to Russia. Sweden's power

654 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVI

on the mainland was ended, and she was compelled to withdraw into a pen-

insula rich in minerals and national character, but demanding arduous labor

and persistent skill as the price of life.

The defeat of Charles weakened the monarchy, and allowed the nobles

to regain control of the government. The constitution of 1720 gave domi-

nant power to a Riksdag, or Diet, made up of four "estates": a Riddarhus, or

House of Nobles, composed of the heads of all noble families; a House of

Priests— the bishops plus some fifty delegates elected by and from the parish

clergy; a House of Burgesses— some ninety delegates representing the admin-

istrative officials and business leaders of the towns; and a House of Peasants

—approximately a hundred delegates chosen by and from the free landown-

ing farmers. Each estate sat separately, and no measure could become law

unless three estates approved; in effect the peasant estate had no legislative

power except by consent of two other estates. During the meetings of the

Riksdag a "Secret Committee" of fifty nobles, twenty-five priests, and

twenty-five burgesses prepared all bills, chose the ministers, and controlled

foreign policy. The nobles were free from taxation, and had exclusive right

to the higher offices in the state. 38 When the Riksdag was not in session the

government was led by a Rad (Council) of sixteen or twenty-four men

chosen by the Riksdag and responsible to it. The king presided over this

Council and could cast two votes; otherwise he had no lawmaking power.

Russia, Prussia, and Denmark collaborated to support this constitution, on

the ground that it favored a policy of peace and checked the martial pro-

pensities of strong kings.

The monarchy ceased to be hereditary, became elective. At the death of

Charles XII (November 30, 17 18) the throne would have passed by hered-

ity to Karl Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, a son of Charles's eldest

sister; but the Riksdag, assembling in January, 17 19, for the first time in

twenty years, gave the crown to Ulrika Eleanora, another sister of Charles,

on her agreement to renounce the royal absolutism that her brother had ex-

ercised. Even so, she proved hard to manage, and in 1720 she was persuaded

to abdicate in favor of her husband, Landgrave Frederick I of Hesse-Cassel,

who now became King Frederick I of Sweden. Under the prudent guidance

of Count Arvid Bernhard Horn as chancellor, Sweden was allowed eighteen

years of peace in which to recover from the wounds of war.

Proud Swedes ridiculed his pacifism, and called his partisans "Nightcaps"

—"Caps" for short— implying that they were dotards sleeping while Sweden

fell behind in the parade of the powers. Against these a party of "Hats" was

formed by Count Carl Gyllenborg, Karl Tessin, and others; this captured

the Riksdag in 1738, and Gyllenborg replaced Horn. Resolved to restore

Sweden to her former place among the powers, he renewed the lapsed alli-

ance with France, which sent her subsidies in return for opposition to the

aims of Russia; and in 1741 the government declared war against Russia,

hoping to regain those Baltic provinces which had been lost to Peter the

Great. But neither the army nor the navy had been sufficiently prepared;

the navy was incapacitated by disease, and the army yielded all Finland to

the Russian advance. Czarina Elizabeth, anxious to win Sweden's support,

CHAP. XXVl) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 655

agreed to restore most of Finland if her cousin, Adolphus Frederick of Hol-

stein-Gottorp, was named heir to the Swedish throne. On these terms the

Peace of Abo ended the war (1743). When Frederick I died ( 1 75 1 ) Ad-

olphus Frederick became king.

The estates soon taught him that he was king in name only. They disputed

his right to name new peers, or to choose the members of his household; they

threatened to dispense with his signature if he objected to signing certain

measures or documents. The King was docile, but he had a proud and com-

manding consort, Louisa Ulrika, sister of Frederick the Great. King and

Queen attempted a revolt against the power of the estates. It failed; its agents

were tortured and beheaded; the King was spared because the people loved

him. Louisa Ulrika consoled and distinguished herself by becoming Queen

of Letters: she befriended Linnaeus, and gathered about her a circle of poets

and artists through whom she spread the ideas of the French Enlightenment.

The Riksdag appointed a new tutor for her ten-year-old son, with instruc-

tions to inform the future Gustavus III that in free states kings exist only on

sufferance; that they are invested with splendor and dignity "more for the

honor of the realm than for the sake of the person who may happen to oc-

cupy the chief place in the pageant," and that "as the glare and glitter of a

court" might mislead them into delusions of grandeur, they would do well

to visit the huts of the peasantry now and then, and see the poverty that

pays for the royal pomp. 39

On February 12, 1771, Adolphus Frederick died, and the Council sum-

moned Gustavus III to come from Paris and accept the forms of royalty.

2. Gustavus III

He was the most attractive king since Henry IV of France. Handsome

and gay, loving women, the arts, and power, he flashed through Swedish

history like an electric charge, bringing to action all the vital elements in the

nation's life. He had been well educated by Karl Tessin, and had been

spoiled by his fond mother. He was intellectually precocious and keen, well

endowed with imagination and aesthetic sense, restless with ambition and

pride; it is not easy to be a humble prince. His mother transmitted to him

her love of French literature; he read Voltaire avidly, sent him homage,

learned the Henriade by heart. The Swedish ambassador at Paris forwarded

to him each volume of the Encyclopedic as it appeared. He studied history

with attention and fascination; he was thrilled by the careers of Gustavus

Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII; after reading of these men he could

not bear to be a do-nothing king. In 1766, without consulting him, and with-

out the consent of his parents, the Council married him to Princess Sophia

Magdalena, daughter of Denmark's Frederick V. She was shy, gentle, pious,

and thought the theater a place of sin; he was skeptical, loved the drama, and

never forgave the Council for projecting him into this uncongenial marriage.

The Council appeased him for a time by a handsome grant for a trip to

France (1770-71).

He stopped at Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Brunswick, but Paris was his

656 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVI

goal. He braved the anger of Louis XV by calling upon the banished Choi-

seul, and he violated the conventions by visiting Mme. du Barry in her

chateau at Louveciennes. He met Rousseau, d'Alembert, Marmontel, and

Grimm, but was disillusioned; "I have made the acquaintance of all the

philosophers," he wrote to his mother, "and find their books much more

agreeable than their persons." 40 He shone as a northern star at the salons of

Mmes. Geoffrin, du Deffand, de Lespinasse, d'fipinay, and Necker. Amid

his triumphs he received word that he had become king of Sweden. He did

not hurry back; he stayed in Paris long enough to secure large subsidies for

Sweden from the almost bankrupt government of France, and 300,000 livres

for his own use in managing the Riksdag. On his way home he stopped to

see Frederick the Great, who warned him that Prussia would defend— if

necessary by arms— that Swedish constitution which so strictly limited the

powers of the king.

Gustavus reached Stockholm on June 6. On the fourteenth he opened his

first Riksdag with amiable words strangely like those with which another

hampered king, George III, had opened his first Parliament in 1760. "Born

and bred among you, I have learned from my tenderest youth to love my

country, and I hold it the highest privilege to have been born a Swede, and

the greatest honor to be the first citizen of a free people." 41 His eloquence

and patriotism won a warm response from the nation, but it left the politi-

cians unmoved. The Caps, friends of the constitution and Russia, and

financed by forty thousand pounds from Catherine II, won a majority in

three of the four estates. Gustavus countered by borrowing 200,000 pounds

from Dutch bankers to buy the election of his nominee as marshal of the

Riksdag. But he had still to be crowned, and the Cap-controlled estates re-

vised the coronation oath to pledge the king to abide by the decision of "a

majority of the estates," and to base all preferments on merit alone. Gustavus

resisted for half a year this move toward democracy; then (March, 1772) he

signed it. Secretly he resolved to overthrow this ungracious constitution as

soon as opportunity came.

He prepared his ground by establishing popularity. He made himself ac-

cessible to all; he "bestowed favors as if receiving them"; he sent no one

away discontent. Several army leaders agreed with him that only a strong

central government, untrammeled by a venal Riksdag, could save Sweden

from domination by Russia and Prussia— which at this very time (August 5,

1772) were partitioning Poland. Vergennes, the French ambassador, con-

tributed 500,000 ducats to the expenses of the coup. On August 18 Gustavus

arranged that army officers should meet him at the arsenal the next morning.

Two hundred came; he asked them to join him in overthrowing a regime

of corruption and instability fostered by Sweden's enemies; all but one

agreed to follow him. The exception, Governor-General Rudbeck, rode

through the streets of Stockholm calling upon the people to protect their

freedom; they remained apathetic, for they admired Gustavus, and had no

love for a Riksdag that, in their view, covered an oligarchy of nobles and

businessmen with democratic forms. The young King (now twenty-six)

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 657

led the officers to the barracks of the Stockholm Guards; to these he spoke

so persuasively that they pledged him their support. He seemed to be re-

peating, step by step, the procedure by which Catherine II had reached

power in Russia ten years before.

When the Riksdag met on August 2 1 it found its Rikssaal surrounded by

grenadiers, and the hall itself held by troops. Gustavus, in a speech that made

history, reproved the estates for having debased themselves with party

quarrels and foreign bribery, and he ordered read to them the new constitu-

tion that his aides had prepared. It retained a limited monarchy, but widened

the powers of the king; it gave him control of the army, navy, and foreign

relations; he alone could appoint and depose ministers; the Riksdag was to

assemble only at his call, and he could dismiss it at will; it could discuss only

such measures as he laid before it, but no measure could become law without

the Riksdag's consent, and it would retain control of the purse through the

Bank of Sweden and the right to tax. The king was not to engage in a war

of offense without the Riksdag's concurrence. Judges were to be named by

the king and be then irremovable; and the right of habeas corpus would pro-

tect all arrested persons from the delays of the law. Gustavus asked the dele-

gates to accept this constitution; the bayonets convinced them; they ac-

cepted, and swore loyalty. The King thanked the Riksdag and dismissed it,

promising to recall it within six years. The Hats and Caps parties disappeared.

The coup d'etat was effected with bloodless expedition, and apparently to the

satisfaction of the people; they "hailed Gustavus as their liberator, and

loaded him with blessings; . . . men embraced one another with tears of

joy." 42 France rejoiced, Russia and Prussia threatened war to restore the old

constitution. Gustavus stood his ground; Catherine and Frederick retreated,

lest war should endanger their Polish spoils.

In the ensuing decade Gustavus behaved as a constitutional monarch— i.e.,

subject to constituted law. He carried out beneficent reforms, and earned a

place among the "enlightened despots" of the century. Voltaire hailed him

as "the worthy heir of the great name of Gustavus." 43 Turgot, frustrated in

France, had the satisfaction of seeing his economic policies succeed in Swe-

den, where free trade was legalized in grains, and industry was released from

the cramping regulations of the guilds. Commerce was stimulated by the

organization of free ports on the Baltic and free market towns in the interior.

Mirabeau pere was asked for advice on improving agriculture; Lemercier

de la Riviere was commissioned to draw up a plan for public education. 44

Gustavus sent to Voltaire a copy of the ordinance guaranteeing freedom of

the press (1774), and wrote: "It is you that humanity has to thank for the

destruction of those obstacles which ignorance and fanaticism have opposed

to its progress." 45 He reformed the law and the judiciary, abolished torture,

reduced penalties, and stabilized the currency. He lowered the taxes of the

peasantry. He reorganized the army and the fleet. Ending the Lutheran

monopoly on Swedish piety, he granted toleration to all Christian sects and,

in three major cities, to Jews. When he summoned the Riksdag in 1778, his

first six years of rule were approved by it without a single dissenting voice.

658 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVI

Gustavus wrote to a friend: "I have reached the happiest stage of my career.

My people are convinced that I desire nothing but to promote their welfare

and establish their freedom." 46

3. The Swedish Enlightenment

Amid this activity of legislation and administration, the King contributed

with all his heart to the magnificent outburst of literature and science that

put Sweden fully abreast of European intellectual developments in the

eighteenth century. This was the age of Linnaeus in botany, of Scheele and

Bergman in chemistry; we have elsewhere paid them honor. But perhaps we

should have included under science one of the most remarkable Swedes of

the age, Emanuel Swedenborg, for it was as a scientist that he first earned

fame. He did original work in physics, astronomy, geology, paleontology,

mineralogy, physiology, and psychology. He improved the air pump by

using mercury; he gave good accounts of magnetism and phosphorescence;

he proposed a nebular hypothesis long before Kant and Laplace; he antici-

pated modern research on the ductless glands. He showed, 150 years before

any other scientist, that the motion of the brain is synchronous with the

respiration rather than with the pulse. He localized in the cortex of the brain

the higher operations of the mind, and assigned to specific parts of the brain

the control of specific parts of the body. 47 He addressed the House of

Nobles on the decimal system, the reform of the currency, the balance of

trade. All his genius seemed directed to science. But when he concluded

that his studies were leading him to a mechanistic theory of mind and life,

and that this theory led to atheism, he reacted strongly away from science

toward religion. In 1745 he began to have visions of heaven and hell; he

came to trust these visions literally, and he described them in his treatise

Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell. He informed his thousands of readers

that in heaven they would not be disembodied spirits but real flesh-and-

blood men and women, enjoying the physical as well as the spiritual delights

of love. He did not preach, nor did he found a sect; but his influence spread

throughout Europe, affecting Wesley, William Blake, Coleridge, Carlyle,

Emerson, and Browning; and finally (1788) his followers formed the "New

Jerusalem Church."

Despite his opposition Sweden gave its mind more and more to the En-

lightenment. The import or translation of French and English works rapidly

produced a secularization of culture and a refinement of literary taste and

forms. Under Gustavus III and his mother the new liberalism found wide

acceptance in the middle and upper classes, even among the higher clergy,

who began to preach toleration and a simple deistic creed. 48 Everywhere the

watchwords were reason, progress, science, liberty, and the good life here

on earth. Linnaeus and others organized the Swedish Royal Academy of

Sciences in 1739; Karl Tessin founded the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in

1733. A Royal Academy of Belles-Lettres had had a brief existence under

Queen Louisa Ulrika; Gustavus revived it (1784) with a rich endowment,

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 659

and directed it to award yearly a medal worth twenty ducats for the best

Swedish work in history, poetry, or philosophy; he himself won the first

award with his panegyric of Lennart Torstenson, the most brilliant of

Gustavus Adolphus' generals. In 1786 the King established (to use his own

words) "a new academy for the cultivation of our own language, on the

model of the Academie Frangaise. It is to be called the Swedish Academy,

and will consist of eighteen members." This and the Academy of Belles-

Lettres were provided with funds for pensions to Swedish scholars and

authors. 49 Gustavus personally helped men of letters, of science, or of music;

he made them feel that his bounty was their due; he gave them new social

status by inviting them to his court; and he stimulated them by his competi-

tion.

There had been drama in Sweden before him, especially under encourage-

ment by his mother, but it had been provided by French actors presenting

French plays. Gustavus dismissed the alien troupe, and called upon native

talent to produce plays for a really Swedish theater. He himself collaborated

with Johan Willander in writing an opera, Thetis och Yelee; this had its

premiere on January 18, 1773, and ran for twenty-eight nights. Then for

eight years the King gave himself to politics. In 1781 he took up the pen

again, and composed a series of plays which still rank high in Swedish

literature. The first of them, Gustaf Adolf s Adelmod (Gustavus Adolphus'

Magnanimity, 1782) marked the beginning of the Swedish drama. The King

took his subjects from historical records, and taught his people the history

of their country as Shakespeare had taught the English. In 1782, at state ex-

pense, a superb theater was built for both drama and music. Gustavus wrote

his plays in prose, had them versified by Johan Kellgren, and had native or

foreign composers put them to music; so his plays became operas. The best

results of this collaboration were Gustaf Adolf och Ebba Brake, celebrating

the great commander's love story, and Gustaf Vasa, which told how the

first Gustavus had freed Sweden from Danish domination.

With such royal leadership, and three universities (Uppsala, Abo, and

Lund), Sweden moved into its own Enlightenment. Olof von Dalin provided

an Addisonian prelude by writing anonymously, and periodically publish-

ing (1733-34), Den svenska Argus, discussing everything except politics,

in the genial style of the Spectator. Nearly every reader was pleased. The

Riksdag voted a reward to the author, who forthwith came out of hiding.

Queen Louisa Ulrika made him court poet and tutor to the future Gustavus

III. This fettered and dulled his Muse, but it allowed him time and money

to write his chef-d'oeuvre, Svea Rikes Historia, the first critical history of

the Swedish realm.

The most interesting figure in the new Plei'ade was a woman, Hedvig

Nordenflycht, the Sappho, Aspasia, and Charlotte Bronte of Sweden. She

alarmed her puritan parents by reading plays and poetry; they punished her,

she persisted, and wrote verses so charming that they resigned themselves

to the scandal. But they compelled her to marry the overseer of their estate,

who was wise and ugly; "I loved to listen to him as a philosopher, but the

660 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVI

sight of him as a lover was unendurable." 50 She learned to love him, only to

have him die in her arms after three years of marriage. A handsome young

clergyman ended her mourning by courting her; she became his wife, and

enjoyed "the most blissful life that any mortal can have in this imperfect

world"; but he died within a year, and Hedvig went almost insane with

grief. She isolated herself in a cottage on a small island, and voiced her sor-

row in poems that were so well received that she moved to Stockholm and

issued annually (1744-50) Aphorisms for Women, by a Shepherdess of the

North. Her home became a salon for the social and intellectual elite. Young

poets like Fredrik Gyllenborg and Gustaf Creutz followed her in adopting

the classic French style and in espousing the Enlightenment. In 1758, aged

forty, she fell in love with Johan Fischerstrom, twenty-three; he confessed

that he loved another, but when he saw Hedvig desolate he proposed mar-

riage to her. She refused the sacrifice, and to simplify matters she tried to

drown herself. She was rescued, but she died three days later. Shepherdess

of the North is still a classic in the literature of Sweden.

Creutz followed her romantic flight with an exquisite cycle of songs,

Atis och Camilla (1762), which remained for many years the most admired

poem in the language. Camilla, as a priestess of Diana, is vowed to chastity;

Atis, a hunter, sees her, longs for her, wanders through the woods in despair.

Camilla too is stirred, and asks Diana, "Is not nature's law as holy as your

decree?" She comes upon a wounded hart; she tends and comforts it; it licks

her hand; Atis begs similar privileges; she rebukes him; he jumps from a

high cliff, seeking death; Cupid breaks his fall; Camilla tends him and ac-

cepts his embrace; a serpent buries its fang in her alabaster breast; she dies

in Atis' arms. Atis sucks the poison from her wound, and nears death. Diana

relents, revives them both, and releases Camilla from her virgin vows; all is

well. This idyl was acclaimed by literate Sweden and by Voltaire, but

Creutz turned to politics and became chancellor of Sweden.

If Hedvig Nordenflycht was the Sappho of Sweden, Karl Bellmann was

its Robert Burns. Brought up in comfort and piety, he learned to prefer the

jolly songs of the taverns to the somber hymns of his home. In the taverns

the realities of life and feeling were revealed with little concern for conven-

tion and propriety; there eacn soul was bared by liquor, and let truth come

out between fancy and wrath. The most tragic figure in this human wreck-

age was Jan Fredman, once clockmaker to the court, now trying to, forget

in drink the failure of his marriage; and the gayest was A4aria Kiellstrom,

queen of the lower depths. Bellmann sang their songs with them, composed

songs about them, sang these before them to music composed by himself.

Some of his songs were a bit loose, and Kellgren, the uncrowned poet

laureate of the age, reproved him; but when Bellmann prepared Fredmans

Epistlar for the press (1790), Kellgren chaperoned these verse letters with

an enthusiastic preface, and the volume received an award from the Swedish

Royal Academy. Gustavus III heard Bellmann gladly, called him "the Anac-

reon of the North," and gave him a sinecure in the government. The assassina-

tion of the King (1792) left the poet without income; he sank into poverty,

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 66 1

was imprisoned for debt, was released by friends. Dying of consumption at

the age of fifty-five, he insisted on a last visit to his favorite tavern; there he

sang till his voice failed him. He died soon afterward, February ir, 1795.

Some rank him as "the most original of all Swedish poets," and "by all odds

the greatest in the circle of poets" that honored this reign. 51

But the man whom his contemporaries recognized as second only to the

King in the intellectual life of the time was Johan Henrik Kellgren. Son of

a clergyman, he discarded the Christian creed, marched with the French

Enlightenment, and welcomed all the pleasures of life with a minimum of

remorse. His earliest book, Mina Lojen (My Laughter) was an extended ode

to joy, erotic joys included; Kellgren hailed laughter as "the one divine, dis-

tinguishing mark of humanity," and invited it to accompany him to the

end of his days. 52 In 1778, aged twenty-seven, he joined with Karl Peter

Lenngren in founding the Stockholmsposten; for seventeen years his lively

pen made this journal the dominant voice in Swedish intellectual life; in its

pages the French Enlightenment held full sway, the classic style was hon-

ored as the supreme norm of excellence, German romanticism was laughed

out of court, and Kellgren's mistresses were exalted in poems that scandal-

ized the conservatives of the hinterland. The assassination of his beloved

King took the heart out of the poet's hedonistic philosophy. In 1795 one of

his amours ran out of control and deepened into love. Kellgren began to

acknowledge the rights of romance, idealism, and religion; he retracted his

condemnation of Shakespeare and Goethe, and he thought that, after all, the

fear of God might be the beginning of wisdom. However, when he died

(1795), aged only forty-four, he asked that no bells be tolled for him; 53 he

was, at the end, again a son of Voltaire.

A charming aspect of his character was his willingness to open the col-

umns of the Posten to opponents of his views. The most vigorous of them

was Thomas Thorild, who declared war on the Enlightenment as the im-

mature idolatry of superficial reason. At the age of twenty-two Thorild

startled Stockholm with Passionerna (The Passio??s), which, he said, "con-

tains the full force of my philosophy and all the splendor of my imagina-

tion— unrhymed, ecstatic, marvelous." He declared that "his whole life was

consecrated to . . . revealing nature and reforming the world." 54 Around

him gathered a group of literary rebels who fed their fires with Sturm und

Drang, ranked Klopstock above Goethe, Shakespeare above Racine, Rous-

seau above Voltaire. Failing to win Gustavus III to these views, Thorild

migrated to England (1788), nourished his soul with James Thomson, Ed-

ward Young, and Samuel Richardson, and joined the radicals who favored

the French Revolution. In 1790 he returned to Sweden and published po-

litical propaganda that stirred the government to banish him. After two

years in Germany he was readmitted into Sweden, and subsided into a pro-

fessorial chair.

There were several other stars in this literary firmament. Carl Gustaf af

Leopold pleased the King with the classic form and courtly tone of his

verse. Bengt Lidner, like Thorild, preferred romance. He was expelled

662 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVI

from the University of Lund because of his escapades (1776); continued

his studies and irregularities at Rostock; was put on a ship bound for the

East Indies, escaped from it, returned to Sweden, and attracted the attention

of Gustavus with a volume of poetic fables. He was appointed secretary to

Count Creutz in the embassy at Paris; there he studied women more than

politics, and was sent home, where he died in poverty at the age of thirty-

five (1793). He redeemed his life by three volumes hot with Byronic fire. —

And there was modest Anna Maria Lenngren, wife of Kellgren's collabora-

tor on the Stockholmsposten. To that periodical she contributed verse that

won her a special commendation by the Swedish Royal Academy. But she

did not let her Muse interfere with her household chores, and in a poem

addressed to an imaginary daughter she counseled her to avoid politics and

society and content herself with the tasks and joys of the home.

Was there, in Swedish art, any movement answering to the literature and

the drama? Hardly. Karl Gustaf of Tessin decorated in rococo (c. 1750)

the royal palace that his father, Nicodemus Tessin, had built in 1693-97,

and he gathered a rich collection of paintings and statuary, which is now

part of the Stockholm National Museum. Johan Tobias Sergei carved a

Venus and a Drunken Faun in classic style, and commemorated in marble

the robust features of Johan Pasch. The Pasch family included four painters:

Lorenz the Elder, his brother Johan, his sister Ulrica, and Lorenz the

Younger; each of these painted royalty and nobility. They were a modest

part in the brilliant Enlightenment that graced this reign.

4. Assassination

It was the King himself who brought the bright flowering to a tragic end.

The American Revolution, so powerfully aided by France, seemed to him

a threat to all monarchies; he called the colonists "rebellious subjects," and

vowed that he would never recognize them as a nation until the King of

England had absolved them from their oath of allegiance. 55 More and more

in his final decade he strengthened the royal power, surrounded it with cere-

mony and etiquette, and replaced able aides of independent mind with

servitors who obeyed his wishes without hesitation or dissent. He began to

restrict the freedom that he had given to the press. Finding his wife dull, he

indulged in flirtations 56 that shocked public opinion, which expected the

kings of Sweden to give the nation a model of marital affection and fidelity.

He alienated the people by establishing a governmental monopoly in the

distillation of liquor; the peasants, accustomed to distill their own, evaded

the monopoly by a hundred expedients. He spent increasingly on the army

and navy, and was visibly preparing for war with Russia. When he as-

sembled his second Riksdag (May 6, 1786) he found no longer, in the estates,

the approval that the Riksdag of 1778 had given to his measures; almost all

of his proposals were rejected, or were amended to futility, and he was

compelled to surrender the government's liquor monopoly. On July 5 he

dismissed the Riksdag, and resolved to rule without its consent.

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 663

That consent, by the constitution of 1772, was necessary for any war

but one of defense, and Gustavus was meditating an attack upon Russia.

Why? He knew that Russia and Denmark had signed (August 12, 1774) a

secret treaty for united action against Sweden. He visited Catherine II at

St. Petersburg in 1777, but their mutual pretenses of friendship deceived

neither the hostess nor her guest. As Russian victories against Turkey

mounted, Gustavus feared that if nothing were done to end them the Em-

press would soon direct her immense armies westward in the hope of sub-

jecting Sweden to her will as she had done with Poland. Was there any way

of frustrating that design? Only, the King felt, by aiding Turkey with a

flank attack upon St. Petersburg. The Sultan helped him decide by offering

Sweden a subsidy of a million piasters annually for the next ten years if she

would join in the effort to check Catherine. Perhaps now Sweden could

recover what she had surrendered to Peter the Great in 172 1. In 1785 Gus-

tavus began to prepare his army and navy for war. In 1788 he sent to Russia

an ultimatum demanding the restoration of Karelia and Livonia to Sweden,

and of the Crimea to Turkey. On June 24 he embarked for Finland. On

July 2, at Helsingfors, he took charge of his assembled forces, and began

to drive toward St. Petersburg.

Everything went wrong. The fleet was stopped by a Russian flotilla in an

indecisive battle off the island of Hogland (July 17). In the army 113

officers mutinied, charging that the King had violated his pledge to make no

offensive war without the Riksdag's consent; they sent an emissary to

Catherine offering to place themselves under her protection and to co-

operate with her in making both Swedish and Russian Finland an independ-

ent state. Meanwhile Denmark dispatched an army to attack Goteborg, the

richest city in Sweden. Gustavus accepted this invasion as a challenge that

would arouse the spirit of his people; he appealed to the nation, and es-

pecially to the rugged peasants of the mining districts called the Dales, to

give him a new and more loyal army; he went in person, dressed in the

Dalesmen's characteristic garb, to address them from that same churchyard,

in the village of Mora, where Gustavus Vasa had asked for their aid in 1521.

The people responded; volunteer regiments were formed in a hundred

towns. In September the King, fighting for his political life, rode 250 miles

in forty-eight hours, made his way into Goteborg, and inspired the garrison

to continue its defense against twelve thousand besieging Danes. Fortune

turned in his favor. Prussia, unwilling to let Sweden fall subject to Russia,

threatened war upon Denmark; the Danes withdrew from Swedish soil.

Gustavus returned in triumph to his capital.

Now, emboldened by a new army dedicated to him, he summoned the

Riksdag to assemble on January 26, 1789. Of 950 men in the House of

Nobles, seven hundred supported the mutinous officers, but the other

houses— clergy, burgesses, and peasants— were overwhelmingly for the King.

Gustavus declared political war against the nobles by submitting to the

Riksdag an "Act of Unity and Security" which ended many privileges of

the aristocracy, opened nearly all offices to commoners, and gave the King

664 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVI

full monarchical powers over legislation, administration, war, and peace.

The three lower estates accepted the act, the Riddarhus rejected it as un-

constitutional. Gustavus arrested twenty-one nobles, including Count Fred-

rik Axel von Fersen and Baron Karl Fredrik von Pechlin— one honorable

and ineffective, the other clever and treacherous. But the power of the

purse still remained with the Riksdag, and appropriations required the con-

sent of all four chambers. The three lower orders voted the King, for as

long as he might consider necessary, the funds he asked for continuing the

war against Russia; the House of Nobles refused to vote supplies beyond

two years. On April 17 Gustavus entered the Riddarhus, took the chair,

and put to the nobles the question of accepting the decision of the three

other houses. The noes preponderated, but the King announced that his pro-

posal had won. He thanked the nobles for their gracious support, and with-

drew, having risked assassination by the infuriated magnates.

He now felt free to prosecute the war. During the remainder of 1789 he

rebuilt the army and the fleet. On July 9, 1790, his navy met the Russian in

the Svensksund part of the Gulf of Finland, and won the most decisive vic-

tory in Sweden's naval history; the Russians lost fifty-three ships and 9,500

men. Catherine II, still busy with the Turks, was ready for peace; by the

Treaty of Varala (August 15, 1790) she agreed to end her efforts to control

the politics of Sweden, and prewar boundaries were restored. On October

19, 1 79 1, Gustavus persuaded her to sign with him a defensive alliance

which pledged her to send Sweden 300,000 rubles per year.

Doubtless their common fear of the French Revolution turned the old

foes to this new partnership. Gustavus remembered gratefully that France

had been Sweden's faithful friend through 250 years, and that Louis XV

and Louis XVI had supported him with 38,300,000 livres between 1772 and

1789. He proposed a League of Princes to invade France and restore the

monarchy to power; he sent Hans Axel von Fersen (son of his enemy Count

von Fersen) to arrange the flight of Louis XVI from Paris; he himself

went to Aix-la-Chapelle to lead the allied army; and he offered asylum in

his camp to the French emigres. Catherine gave money but no men, Leopold

II refused to co-operate, and Gustavus returned to Stockholm to protect his

throne.

The nobles whose political supremacy he had ended were not reconciled

to defeat. They looked upon Gustavus' absolute rule as a plain violation of

the constitution that he had sworn to support. Jakob Ankarstrom brooded

over the fall of his class. "I bethought me much if perchance there was any

fair means of getting the King to rule his land and people according to law

and benevolence, but every argument was against me. . . . 'Twere better

to venture one's life for the commonweal." In 1790 he was tried for sedition.

"This misfortune . . . knit my resolve rather to die than live a wretched

life, so that my otherwise sensitive and affectionate heart became altogether

callous as regards this horrible deed." 57 Pechlin, Count Karl Horn, and others

joined in the conspiracy to kill the King.

On March 16, 1792, a date ominously recalling Caesar, Gustavus received

CHAP. XXVI ) FROM GENEVA TO STOCKHOLM 665

a letter warning him not to attend a masquerade ball scheduled for that night

in the French Theater. He went half masked, but the decorations on his

breast revealed his rank. Ankarstrom recognized him, shot him, and fled.

Gustavus was carried to a coach and led through an excited crowd to the

royal palace. He was bleeding dangerously, but he jokingly remarked that

he resembled a pope borne in procession through Rome. Within three hours

of the attack Ankarstrom was arrested; within a few days, all the ring-

leaders. Horn confessed that the plot had had a hundred accomplices. The

populace cried out for their execution; Gustavus recommended clemency.

Ankarstrom was scourged, beheaded, and quartered, Gustavus lingered for

ten days; then, told that he had only a few hours of life left to him, he

dictated documents for a regency to govern the country and the capital. He

died on March 26, 1792, aged forty-five. Nearly all the nation mourned

him, for it had learned to love him despite his faults, and it realized that

under his lead Sweden had lived through one of the most glorious ages in

her history.

BOOK VI

JOHNSON'S ENGLAND

1756-89

CHAPTER XXVII

The Industrial Revolution

I. CAUSES

WHY did the Industrial Revolution come to England first? Because

England had won great wars on the Continent while keeping its own

soil free from war's devastation; because it had secured command of the

seas and had thereby acquired colonies that provided raw materials and

needed manufactured goods; because its armies, fleets, and growing popula-

tion offered an expanding market for industrial products; because the guilds

could not meet these widening demands; because the profits of far-flung

commerce accumulated capital seeking new avenues of investment; because

England allowed its nobles— and their fortunes— to engage in commerce and

industry; because the progressive displacement of tillage by pasturage drove

peasants from the fields to the towns, where they added to the labor force

available for factories; because science in England was directed by men of

a practical bent, while on the Continent it was predominantly devoted to

abstract research; and because England had a constitutional government

sensitive to business interests, and vaguely aware that priority in the Indus-

trial Revolution would make England for over a century the political leader

of the Western world.

British command of the seas had begun with the defeat of the Spanish

Armada; it had been extended by victories over Holland in the Anglo-

Dutch wars, and over France in the War of the Spanish Succession; and the

Seven Years' War had made oceanic commerce almost a British monopoly.

An invincible navy made the English Channel a protective moat for "this

fortress built by Nature . . . against infection and the hand of war." 1 The

English economy was not only spared the ravages of soldiery, it was nour-

ished and stimulated by the needs of British and allied armies on the Conti-

nent; hence the special expansion of the textile and metallurgical industries,

and the call for machines to accelerate, and for factories to multiply, pro-

duction.

Command of the seas facilitated the conquest of colonies. Canada and the

richest parts of India fell to England as fruit of the Seven Years' War.

Voyages like those of Captain Cook (1768-76) secured for the British Em-

pire islands strategically useful in war and trade. Rodney's victory over de

Grasse (1782) confirmed British dominion over Jamaica, Barbados, and the

Bahamas. New Zealand was acquired in 1787, Australia in 1788. Colonial

and other overseas trade gave British industry a foreign market unrivaled in

the eighteenth century. Commerce with the English settlements in North

America employed 1,078 vessels and 29,000 seamen. 2 London, Bristol, Liver-

pool, and Glasgow flourished as chief ports for this Atlantic trade. The colo-

669

670 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVII

nies took manufactured articles and sent back food, tobacco, spices, tea,

silk, cotton, raw materials, gold, silver, and precious stones. Parliament re-

stricted with high tariffs the import of foreign manufactures, and discour-

aged the development of colonial or Irish industries competitive with those

of Britain. No internal tolls (such as those that hampered domestic trade in

France) impeded the movement of goods through England, Scotland, and

Wales; these lands constituted the largest free-trade area in Western Europe.

The upper and middle classes enjoyed the highest prosperity, and a purchas-

ing power that was an added stimulus to industrial production.

The guilds were not competent to meet the demands of expanding mar-

kets at home and abroad. They had been instituted chiefly to supply the

needs of a municipality and its environs; they were shackled by old regula-

tions that discouraged invention, competition, and enterprise; they were not

equipped to procure raw materials from distant sources, or to acquire capital

for enlarged production, or to calculate, obtain, or fill orders from abroad.

Gradually the guild master was replaced by "projectors" (entrepreneurs)

who knew how to raise money, to anticipate or create demand, to secure

raw materials, and to organize machines and men to produce for markets in

every quarter of the globe.

The money was provided by the profits of commerce or finance, by the

spoils of war and privateers, by the mining or import of gold or silver, by

the great fortunes made in the slave trade or the colonies. Englishmen went

out poor, some came back rich. As early as 1744 there were fifteen men

who, returning from the West Indies, had money enough to buy election to

Parliament; 3 and by 1780 the "nabobs" who had acquired riches in India

were a power in the House of Commons. Much of this exotic pelf was avail-

able for investment. And whereas in France the nobles were forbidden, in

England they were permitted, to engage in commerce or industry; and

wealth rooted in land grew through investment in business enterprise; so the

Duke of Bridgewater risked his patrimony in mining coal. Thousands of

Britons were depositing their savings in banks, which lent at low rates of

interest. Moneylenders were everywhere. Bankers had discovered that the

easiest way to make money is to handle other people's money. There were

twenty banks in London in 1750, fifty in 1770, seventy in 1800. 4 Burke

reckoned twelve banks outside of London in 1750; in 1793 there were four

hundred. 5 Papex money added to the fertilizing pollen; in 1750 it was two

per cent of the currency; in 1 800 it was ten per cent. 6 Hoarded money ven-

tured into investment as commerce and industry announced their rising

dividends.

The multiplying shops and factories needed men. The natural supply of

labor was augmented by the rising number of rural families that could no

longer make a living on the farm. The flourishing wool industry demanded

wool; more and more land was withdrawn from tillage and given to pas-

turage; sheep replaced men; Goldsmith's Auburn was not the only deserted

village in Britain. Between 1702 and 1760 there had been 246 acts of Parlia-

ment authorizing the removal of four hundred acres from planting; between

CHAP. XXVIl) THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 6 J I

1760 and 1 8 10 there were 2,438 such acts, affecting nearly five million

acres. 7 As agricultural machinery improved, small holdings became unde-

sirable, because they could not use or pay for the new machines; thousands

of farmers sold their land and became hired hands on large-scale farms or

in rural mills or in the towns. The large farms, with better methods, organ-

ization, and machines, produced more per acre than the farms of the past,

but they almost wiped out the yeomen, or peasant proprietors, who had

been the economic, military, and moral backbone of England. Meanwhile

immigration from Ireland and the Continent added to the men, women, and

children who competed for jobs in the factories.

Science played only a modest part in the economic transformation of

eighteenth-century England. The researches of Stephen Hales on gases, of

Joseph Black on heat and steam, helped Watt to improve the steam engine.

The Royal Society of London was composed mostly of practical men, who

favored studies that promised industrial application. The British Parliament

too had a mind for material considerations; though it was dominated by

landowners, several of these took a hand in commerce or industry, and

most of the members were amenable to the pleas and gifts of businessmen

for relaxing the restrictions that earlier governments had laid upon the econ-

omy. The advocates of free enterprise and free trade— and of wages and

prices left free to rise or fall with the laws of supply and demand— won the

support of several parliamentary leaders, and the legal barriers to the spread

of commerce and manufactures were slowly broken down. All the condi-

tions prerequisite to English priority in the Industrial Revolution were ful-

filled.

II. COMPONENTS

The material elements of the Industrial Revolution were iron, coal, trans-

portation, machinery, power, and factories. Nature played its part by pro-

viding England with iron, coal, and liquid roads. But iron as it came from

the mines was permeated with impurities, from which it had to be freed by

smelting— melting or fusing with fire. Coal too was alloyed with impurities;

these were removed by heating or "cooking" coal till it became coke. Iron

ore heated and purified to diverse degrees by burning coke became wrought

iron, cast iron, or steel.

To increase the heat Abraham Darby built (1754 f.) blast furnaces in

which extra air was supplied to the fire from a pair of bellows worked by a

water wheel. In 1760 John Smeaton replaced the bellows with a compressed-

air pump driven partly by water, partly by steam; the constant high-pressure

blast raised the production of industrial iron from twelve tons to forty tons

per furnace per day. 8 Iron became cheap enough to be used in hundreds of

new ways; so, in 1763, Richard Reynolds built the first known railway— iron

tracks that enabled cars to replace pack horses in transporting coal and ore.

Now began an age of famous ironmasters who dominated the industrial

672 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVII

scene and made great fortunes by using iron for purposes that seemed quite

alien to that metal. So John Wilkinson and Abraham Darby II spanned the

River Severn with the first iron bridge (1779). Wilkinson amused England

by proposing an iron ship; some said he had lost his mind; but, relying upon

principles established by Archimedes, he put together with metal sheets the

first iron vessel known to history (1787). Businessmen came from abroad

to see and study the great works set up by Wilkinson, Richard Crawshay, or

Anthony Bacon. Birmingham, close to extensive deposits of coal and iron,

became the leading center of England's iron industry. From such shops new

tools and machines, stronger, more durable and reliable, were poured into

Britain's shops and factories.

Coal and iron were heavy, costly to convey except by water. A richly

indented coastline allowed maritime transport to reach many major cities

of Britain. To bring materials and products to towns distant from the coast

and navigable streams a revolution in transportation had to be effected. The

movement of goods overland was still difficult despite the network of turn-

pikes built between 175 1 and 1771. (They took their name from the pike-

studded turnstiles that obstructed passage until toll was paid.) 9 These toll

roads doubled the speed of transit and quickened internal trade. Pack horses

were superseded by horse-drawn carts, and travel by horseback gave way

to stage coaches. The turnpikes, however, were left to private enterprise for

their maintenance, and rapidly deteriorated.

So commercial traffic still preferred the waterways. Streams were dredged

to bear heavy vessels, and rivers and towns were bound with one another by

canals. James Brindley, without formal or technical education, grew from

a letterless millwright into the most remarkable canal engineer of the time,

solving by his mechanical bent the problems of carrying canals through

locks and tunnels and over aqueducts. In 1759-61 he built a canal that

brought to Manchester the coal from the mines of the Duke of Bridgewater

at Worsley; this cut in half the cost of coal at Manchester, and played a

principal part in making that city an industrial metropolis. One of the most

picturesque sights in eighteenth-century England was a ship moving along

the Brindley-Bridgewater canal carried by an aqueduct ninety-nine feet

high over the River Irwell at Barton. In 1766 Brindley began the Grand

Trunk Canal, which, by connecting the Rivers Trent and Mersey, opened

a water route across mid-England from the Irish to the North Sea. Other

canals bound the Trent with the Thames, and Manchester with Liverpool.

In a period of thirty years hundreds of new canals greatly reduced the cost

of commercial traffic in Britain.

Given materials, fuels, and transportation, the Industrial Revolution had

next to multiply goods. The demand for machines to accelerate production

was greatest in textiles. People wanted to be clothed, and soldiers and lasses

had to be hypnotized with uniforms. Cotton was entering England in rapidly

rising amounts— three million pounds in 1753, thirty-two million in 1789; 10

hand labor could not process this into finished goods in time to meet demand.

The division of labor that had developed in the clothing trades suggested

and promoted the invention of machines.

CHAP. XXVIl) THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 673

John Kay had begun the mechanization of weaving by his "flying shuttle"

(1733), and Lewis Paul had mechanized spinning by a system of rollers

(1738). In 1765 James Hargreaves of Blackburn, Lancashire, changed the

position of the spinning wheel from vertical to horizontal, placed one wheel

on top of another, turned eight of them by one pulley and belt, and wove

eight threads at once; he added more power to more spindles until his "spin-

ning jenny" (Jenny was his wife) wove eighty threads at a time. Hand

spinners feared that this contraption would throw them out of work and

food; they broke up Hargreaves' machines; he fled for his life to Notting-

ham, where a shortage of labor allowed his jennies to be installed. By 1788

there were twenty thousand of them in Britain, and the spinning wheel was

on its way to becoming a romantic ornament.

In 1769 Richard Arkwright, using the suggestions of various mechanics,

developed a "water frame" by which water power moved cotton fibers be-

tween a succession of rollers that pulled and stretched the fibers into tighter,

harder yarn. About 1774 Samuel Crompton combined Hargreaves' jenny

and Arkwright's rollers into a hybrid machine which English wit called

"Crompton's mule": an alternate backward and forward motion of the ro-

tating spindles stretched, twisted, and wound the thread, giving it greater

fineness and strength; this procedure remained till our time the principle of

the most complex textile machinery. The jenny and the water frame had

been made of wood; the mule, after 1783, used metal rollers and wheels, and

became sturdy enough to bear the speed and strain of power operation.

Power looms worked by cranks and weights had been used in Germany

and France, but in 1787 Edmund Cartwright built at Doncaster a small fac-

tory in which twenty looms were operated by animal motion. In 1789 he

replaced this power plant by a steam engine. Two years later he joined

with some Manchester friends to set up a large factory in which four hun-

dred looms were run by steam. Here too the workers rebelled; they burned

the factory to the ground and threatened to kill the promoters. In the en-

suing decade many power looms were built, rioters smashed some of them,

some survived and multiplied; the machines won.

England had been helped to industry through water power from numer-

ous streams fed by abundant rain. So, in the eighteenth century, mills were

erected not so much in the towns as in the countryside, along streams that

could be dammed to create waterfalls of sufficient force to turn great

wheels. At this point a poet might wonder had it not been better if steam had

never replaced water as a motive force, and industry, instead of being con-

gregated in cities, had been mingled with agriculture in the rural scene. But

the more effective and profitable method of production displaces the less,

and the steam engine (which also, till lately, had a romantic glow) promised

to produce or transport more goods and gold than the world had ever seen

before.

The steam engine was the culmination, not quite a product, of the Indus-

trial Revolution. Not to go back to Hero of Alexandria (a.d. 200?), Denis

Papin described all the components and principles of a practical steam en-

674 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVII

gine in 1690. Thomas Savery built a steam-driven pump in 1698. Thomas

Newcomen developed this (1708-12) into a machine in which steam gen-

erated by heated water was condensed by a jet of cold water, and the alter-

nation of atmospheric pressure drove a piston up and down; this "atmos-

pheric engine" remained the standard until James Watt transformed it into

a true steam engine in 1765.

Unlike most inventors of that time, Watt was a student as well as a prac-

tical man. His grandfather was a teacher of mathematics; his father was an

architect, shipbuilder, and magistrate in the borough of Greenock in south-

west Scotland. James had no college education, but he had creative curiosity

and a mechanical bent. Half the world knows the story that an aunt re-

proved him: "I never saw such an idle boy as you are: ... for the last hour

you have not spoken one word, but you have taken off the lid of that kettle,

and put it on again, and, holding now a cap and now a silver spoon over the

steam, watching how it rises from the spout, and catching and counting the

drops." 11 This has the odor of legend. However, an extant manuscript in

James Watt's hand describes an experiment in which "the straight end of a

pipe was fixed on the spout of a Tea Kettle"; and another manuscript reads:

"I took a bent glass tube and inverted it into the nose of a tea kettle, the

other end being immersed in cold water." 12

At the age of twenty (1756) Watt tried to set up in Glasgow as a maker

of scientific instruments. The city guilds refused him a license on the ground

that he had not completed the full term of apprenticeship, but the Univer-

sity of Glasgow gave him a workshop within its grounds. He attended the

chemistry lectures of Joseph Black, won his friendship and aid, and was

especially interested in Black's theory of latent heat. 13 He learned German,

French, and Italian to read foreign books, including metaphysics and poetry.

Sir James Robison, who knew him at that time (1758), was struck by Watt's

varied knowledge, and said, "I saw a workman and expected no more; I

found a philosopher." 14

In 1763 the university asked him to repair a model of Newcomen's engine

used in a physics course. He was surprised to find that three fourths of the

heat supplied to the machine were wasted: after each stroke of the piston

the cylinder lost heat through the use of cold water to condense the new

supply of steam entering the cylinder; so much energy was lost that most

manufacturers had judged the machine unprofitable. Watt proposed to con-

dense the steam in a separate container, whose low temperature would not

affect the cylinder in which the piston moved. This "condenser" increased

by some three hundred per cent the efficiency of the machine in the propor-

tion of fuel used to work done. Moreover, in Watt's reconstruction, the

piston was moved by the expansion of steam, not of air; he had made a true

steam engine.

The passage from plans and models to practical application consumed

twelve years of Watt's life. To make successive samples and improvements

of his engine he borrowed over a thousand pounds, chiefly from Joseph

Black, who never lost faith in him. John Smeaton, himself an inventor and

CHAP. XXVIl) THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 675

engineer, predicted that Watt's engine could "never be brought into general

use because of the difficulty of getting its parts manufactured with sufficient

precision." 15 In 1765 Watt married, and had to earn more money; he put aside

his invention and took to surveying and engineering, drawing up plans for

harbors, bridges, and canals. Meanwhile Black introduced him to John Roe-

buck, who was looking for a more effective engine than Newcomen's for

pumping water from the coal mines that supplied fuel for his ironworks at

Carron. In 1767 he agreed to pay Watt's debts and provide capital for build-

ing engines to Watt's specifications, in return for two thirds of the profits

from installations or sales. To protect their investment Watt in 1769 asked

Parliament for a patent that would give him sole right to produce his engine;

it was granted him till 1783. He and Roebuck set up an engine near Edin-

burgh, but poor workmanship by the smiths made it a failure; in some cases

the cylinders made for Watt were an eighth of an inch greater in diameter

at one end than at the other.

Pressed by reverses, Roebuck sold his share of the partnership to Matthew

Boulton (1773). Now began an alliance notable in the history of friendship

as well as of industry. Boulton was no mere moneymaker; he was so inter-

ested in improving his modes and mechanisms of production that in achiev-

ing this he lost a fortune. In 1760, aged thirty-two, he married a rich woman

and might have retired on her income; instead he built at Soho, near Bir-

mingham, one of England's most extensive industrial plants, manufacturing

a great variety of metal articles from shoe buckles to chandeliers. To operate

the machines in the five buildings of his factory he had relied on water

power. He proposed now to try steam power. He knew that Watt had

shown the inefficiency of the Newcomen engine, and that Watt's engine

had failed because of inaccurately bored cylinders. He took a calculated

risk that this defect could be overcome. In 1774 he moved Watt's engine to

Soho; in 1775 Watt followed it. Parliament extended the patent from 1783

to 1800.

In 1775 ironmaster Wilkinson invented a hollow cylindrical boring bar

that enabled Boulton and Watt to produce engines of unprecedented power

and competence. Soon the new firm was selling engines to manufacturers

and mine owners throughout Britain. Boswell visited Soho in 1776, and re-

ported:

Mr. Hector was so good as to accompany me to see the great works of Mr.

Boulton. ... I wished Johnson had been with us, for it was a scene which I

should have been glad to contemplate by his light. The vastness and the con-

trivances of some of the machinery would have "matched his mighty mind." I

shall never forget Mr. Boulton's expression to me: "I sell here, Sir, what all the

world desires to have— power." He had about seven hundred people at work. I

contemplated him as an iron chieftain, and he seemed to be a father to his

tribe. 16

Watt's engines were still unsatisfactory, and he constantly labored to

improve them. In 1781 he patented a device by which the reciprocal motion

of the piston was converted into rotating motion, thereby adapting the en-

676 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVII

gine for driving ordinary machinery. In 1782 he patented a double-acting

engine, in which both ends of the cylinder received impulses from the

boiler and the condenser. In 1788 he patented a "fly-ball governor" that

adjusted the flow of steam to promote uniform speed in the engine. During

these experimental years other inventors were making competitive engines,

and it was not till 1783 that Watt's sales paid off his debts and began to bring

in gains. When his patent expired he retired from active work, and the firm

of Boulton and Watt was carried on by their sons. Watt amused himself

with minor inventions, and lived into a cheerful old age, dying in 18 19 at

the age of eighty-three.

There were many other inventions in this exuberant age, when, as Dean

Tucker said, "almost every master manufacturer hath a new invention of

his own, and is daily improving on those of others." 17 Watt himself devel-

oped a duplicating process by using a glutinous ink and pressing the written

or printed page against a moistened sheet of thin paper (1780). One of his

employees, William Murdock, applied Watt's engine to traction, and built

a model locomotive that traveled eight miles an hour (1784). Murdock

shared with Philippe Lebon of France the distinction of using coal gas for

illumination; he so lighted the exterior of the Soho factory (1798). The

central view of the English economy at the end of the eighteenth century

is one of the steam engine leading and quickening the pace, harnessing itself

to machines in a hundred industries, luring textile works from water to

steam power (1785 f.), changing the countryside, invading the towns, dark-

ening the sky with coal dust and fumes, and hiding in the bowels of ships to

give new force to England's mastery of the seas.

Two other elements were needed to make the revolution complete: fac-

tories and capital. The components— fuel, power, materials, machines, and

men— could co-operate best when brought together in one building or plant,

in one organization and discipline, under one head. There had been factories

before; now, as the widened market called for regular and large-scale pro-

duction, they multiplied in number and size, and "the factory system" be-

came one name for the new order in industry. And as industrial machinery

and plants became more costly, the men and institutions that could collect

or furnish capital rose to power, the banks surmounted the factories, and

the entire complex took the name of capitalism— an economy dominated by

the providers of capital. Now, with every stimulus to invention and com-

petition, with enterprise increasingly freed from guild restrictions and leg-

islative barriers, the Industrial Revolution was ready to remake the face and

sky and soul of Britain.

III. CONDITIONS

Both employer and employee had to change their habits, skills, and rela-

tions. The employer, dealing with ever more men, and in a faster turnover,

lost intimacy with them, and had to think of them not as acquaintances en-

gaged in a common task, but as particles in a process that would be judged

CHAP. XXVIl) THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 677

by profits alone. Most artisans, before 1760, worked in guild shops or at

home, where the hours of labor were not inflexible, and intervals of rest

might be allowed; and in an earlier age there had been holy days in which

all gainful labor was forbidden by the Church. We must not idealize the

condition of the common man before the Industrial Revolution; nevertheless

we may say that the hardships to which he was subjected were such as had

tradition, habituation, and in many cases the open air to soften them. As

industrialization advanced, the hardships of the employee were mitigated by

shorter hours, higher wages, and wider access to the increasing flow of

goods from the machines. But the half century of transition from craft and

home to factory, after 1760, was for the laborers of England one of inhuman

subjection somf times worse than slavery.

Most factors in that period required twelve to fourteen hours of work

per day six days a week. 18 Employers argued that the laborer had to be kept

for long hours because he could not be relied upon to report regularly:

many workers drank too heavily on Sunday to come in on Monday; some

others, after working for four days, stayed home the next three. Adam

Smith explained that "excessive application during four days of the week is

frequently the real cause of the idleness of the other three"; he warned that

prolongation or high speed of work might lead to physical or mental break-

down; and he added that "the man who works so moderately as to be able

to work constantly not only preserves his health the longest, but in the

course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work." 19

Real wages, of course, can be estimated only in connection with prices. In

1770a four-pound loaf of bread in Nottingham cost about sixpence, a pound

of cheese or pork fourpence, a pound of butter sevenpence. Adam Smith,

toward 1773, calculated the average wage of London workers at 10 shillings,

in smaller centers 7 shillings, in Edinburgh 5 shillings. 20 Arthur Young, about

1770, reported the weekly wages of English industrial workers as varying

geographically from six shillings sixpence to 1 1 shillings. Wages were evi-

dently much lower in relation to prices than now, but some employers added

fuel or rent to the wages, and some employees gave part of their time to

agricultural work. After 1793, when England began her long war with

Revolutionary France, prices rose much faster than wages, and poverty be-

came desperate.

Many eighteenth-century economists recommended low wages as a stim-

ulus to steady work. Even Arthur Young, who was disturbed by the poverty

that he saw in some districts of France, declared: "Everyone but an idiot

knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be in-

dustrious." 21 Or, as one J. Smith put it:

It is a fact well known to those who are conversant in this matter, that scar-

city, to a certain degree, promotes industry, and that the manufacturer [i.e.,

manual worker] who can subsist on three days' work, will be idle and drunk

the remainder of the week. . . . Upon the whole we can fairly aver that a re-

duction of wages in the woolen manufacture would be a national blessing, and

no real injury to the poor. By this means we might keep our trade, uphold our

rents [revenues], and reform the people into the bargain. 22

678 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVII

Women and children were employed in the factories, usually for unskilled

operations. Some skilled women weavers made as much as their men, but the

usual earnings of factory women averaged three shillings sixpence— rarely

more than half the wage of men. 23 Textile mills alone, in 1788, employed

59,000 women and 48,000 children. 24 Sir Robert Peel had over a thousand

children in his Lancashire factories. 25 Child labor was no new practice in

Europe; it had been taken for granted on the farms and in domestic industry.

Since universal education was frowned upon by conservatives as leading to a

surplus of scholars and a dearth of manual laborers, very few Englishmen in

the eighteenth century saw any evil in children going to work instead of to

school. When machines were simple enough to be tended by children, fac-

tory owners welcomed boys and girls five years old or more. Parish authori-

ties, resenting the cost of supporting orphans or pauper children, gladly

farmed them out to industrialists, sometimes in lots of fifty, eighty, or a hun-

dred; in several cases they stipulated that the employer should take one idiot

to every twenty children. 26 The usual working day for child laborers was

from ten to fourteen hours. They were often housed in groups, and in some

factories they worked in twelve-hour shifts, so that the machines rarely

stopped and the beds were seldom unoccupied. Discipline was maintained

by blows or kicks. Disease found defenseless victims in these factory appren-

tices; many were deformed by their labor, or were maimed by accidents;

some killed themselves. A few men were delicate enough to condemn such

child labor; however, it diminished not because men became more humane

but because machines became more complex.

Children, women, and men were subjected in the factories to conditions

and disciplines not known to them before. The buildings were often of hasty

or flimsy construction, assuring many accidents and much disease. Rules

were severe, and violations of them were punished by fines that might forfeit

the wages of a day. 27 Employers argued that the proper care of the ma-

chinery, the necessity of co-ordinating different operations, and the lax

habits of a population not accustomed to regularity or speed required a

rigorous discipline if confusion and waste were not to cancel profits and to

price the product out of the market at home or abroad. The discipline was

endured because an unemployed artisan faced hunger and cold for himself

and his family, and the employee knew that the unemployed were eager for

his job. Hence it was to the advantage of the employer to have a pool of un-

employment from which to take replacements for workers disabled, dissatis-

fied, or dismissed. Even the well-behaved and competent employee faced

dismissal when "overproduction" saturated the available market beyond its

buying power, or when peace put an end to the blessed willingness of armies

to order more and more goods and to destroy them as rapidly as possible.

Under the guild system the workers were protected by guild or municipal

ordinances, but in the new industrialism they had little protection by the

law, or none at all. The propaganda of the physiocrats for leaving the econ-

omy free from regulation had made headway in England as in France; the

employers convinced Parliament that they could not continue their opera-

CHAP. XXVIl) THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 679

tions, or meet foreign competition, unless wages were governed by the laws

of supply and demand. In village mills the justices of the peace retained some

control over wages; in the factories, after 1757, they had none. 28 The upper

and middle classes saw no reason for interfering with the captains of in-

dustry; the swelling flood of exports was conquering new markets for British

trade; and Englishmen who could pay were pleased with the abundance of

manufactured goods.

But the workers did not share in this prosperity. Despite the multiplication

of goods by the machines they tended, they themselves remained as poor in

1 800 as they had been a century before. 29 They no longer owned the tools

of their trade, they had little part in designing the product, they took no

profit from the widening of the market they fed. They added to their pov-

erty by continuing the high fertility that had paid living dividends on the

farm; they found in drink and sex their chief consolation, and their women

were still rated by the number of children they bore. Pauperism spread; the

expenditure for poor relief rose from ,£600,000 in 1742 to ,£2,000,000 in

1784. 30 The growth of housing could not keep up with the immigration or

multiplication of industrial workers; these had often to live in tumble-down

dwellings that crowded one another in dismal and narrow streets. Some la-

borers lived in cellars, whose dampness added to the causes of disease. By

1800 all the larger towns had developed slums in which living conditions

were worse than anything known in the previous history of England.

The workers tried to better their lot by riots, strikes, and organization.

They attacked the inventions that threatened them with unemployment or

drudgery. Parliament in 1769 made the destruction of machinery a capital

crime. 31 Nevertheless in 1779 the workers in Lancashire factories formed

themselves into a mob that grew from five hundred to eight thousand men;

they collected firearms and ammunition, melted their pewter dishes to make

bullets, and swore to demolish every machine in England. At Bolton they

completely wrecked a factory and its equipment; at Altham they took by

storm the textile factory of Robert Peel (father of Sir Robert the minister),

and smashed its costly equipment. They were on their way to attack the

plant of Arkwright at Cromford when troops sent from Liverpool came up

with them, whereupon they fled in a rout. Some of them were caught and

were sentenced to be hanged. The justices of the peace explained that "de-

stroying machines in this country would only be the means of transferring

them to other countries, ... to the detriment of the trade of Britain." 32

An anonymous "Friend of the Poor" bade the workers be more patient: "All

improvements by machines do at first produce some difficulties to some par-

ticular persons. . . . Was not the first effect of the printing press to deprive

many copyists of their occupation?" 33

The law forbade the formation of labor unions for collective bargaining;

however, "journeymen's associations" existed, some dating from the seven-

teenth century. In the eighteenth they were numerous, especially among

textile workers. They were primarily social clubs or mutual-benefit so-

cieties, but as the century advanced they became more aggressive; and some-

680 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVII

times, when Parliament rejected their petitions, they organized strikes. In

1767-68, for example, there were strikes of sailors, weavers, hatters, tailors,

glass grinders; and several of these walkouts were accompanied by armed

violence on both sides. 34 Adam Smith summarized the results to 1776:

It is not difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary

occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into compli-

ance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much

more easily, and the law . . . does not prohibit their combinations, while it

prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against com-

bining to lower the price [wages] of work, but many against combining to

raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. . . . Many

workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a

year, without employment. 35

The employers had their way, both in the factories and in Parliament; in

1799 the Commons declared illegal any associations aiming to secure higher

wages, to alter the hours of work, or to decrease the quantity of work re-

quired of the workers. Employees entering into such combinations were

punishable by imprisonment, and informers against such men were to be

indemnified. 36 The triumph of the employers was complete.

IV. CONSEQUENCES

The results of the Industrial Revolution were almost everything that fol-

lowed in England, barring literature and art; they could not be adequately

described without writing a history of the last two centuries. We must note

merely the peaks of the continuing and unfinished process of change.

1 . The transformation of industry itself by the proliferation of inventions

and machines— a process so manifold that our present ways of producing and

distributing goods differ more from those of 1 800 than these did from the

methods prevalent two thousand years before.

2. The passage of the economy from regulated guilds and home industry

to a regime of capital investment and free enterprise. Adam Smith was the

British voice of the new system; Pitt II gave it governmental sanction in

I796 *

3. The industrialization of agriculture— the replacement of small farms by

large tracts of land capitalistically managed, using machinery, chemistry, and

mechanical power on a large scale to grow food and fibers for a national or

an international market— goes on today. The family-tilled farm joins the

guild among the casualties of the Industrial Revolution.

4. The stimulation, application, and diffusion of science. The primary en-

couragement was to practical research, but studies in pure science led to im-

mense practical results; so abstract research too was financed, and science

became the distinctive feature of modern, as religion had been of medieval,

life.

5. The Industrial Revolution (and not Napoleon, as Pitt II expected) re-

CHAP. XXVIl) THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 68 1

made the map of the world by assuring for 150 years the British control of

the seas and the most profitable colonies. It furthered imperialism by leading

England— and, later, other industrial states— to conquer foreign areas which

could provide raw materials, markets, or facilities for commerce or war. It

compelled agricultural nations to industrialize and militarize themselves in

order to obtain or maintain their freedom; and it created economic, political,

or military interrelations that made independence imaginary and interde-

pendence real.

6. It changed England in character and culture by multiplying its popu-

lation, industrializing half of it, shifting it northward and westward to towns

near deposits of coal or iron, or near waterways or the sea; so grew Leeds,

Sheffield, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol . . . The

Industrial Revolution transformed large expanses of England, and of other

industrialized countries, into blotches of land fuming with factories, chok-

ing with gases and dust; and it deposited its human slag into reeking and

hopeless slums.

7. It mechanized, extended, and depersonalized war, and vastly improved

man's ability to destroy or kill.

8. It compelled better and faster communication and transportation.

Thereby it made possible greater industrial combinations, and the govern-

ment of larger areas from one capital.

9. It generated democracy by raising the business class to predominant

wealth, and, in gradual consequence, to political supremacy. To effect and

protect this epochal shift of power, the new class enlisted the support of an

increasing segment of the masses, confident that these could be kept in line

by control of the means of information and indoctrination. Despite this con-

trol, the people of industrial states became the best-informed publics in mod-

ern history.

10. Since the developing Industrial Revolution required ever more edu-

cation in workers and managers, the new class financed schools, libraries,

and universities on a scale hardly dreamed of before. The aim was to train

technical intelligence; the by-product was an unprecedented extension of

secular intelligence.

1 1 . The new economy spread goods and comforts among a far greater

proportion of the population than any previous system, for it could sustain

its ever-rising productivity only by ever-widening purchasing power in the

people.

12. It sharpened the urban mind, but dulled the aesthetic sense; many

cities became depressingly ugly, and at last art itself renounced the pursuit

of beauty. The dethronement of the aristocracy removed a repository and

court of standards and tastes, and lowered the level of literature and art.

13. The Industrial Revolution raised the importance and status of eco-

nomics, and led to the economic interpretation of history. It habituated men

to think in terms of physical cause and effect, and led to mechanistic theories

in biology— the attempt to explain all the processes of life as mechanical op-

erations.

682 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVII

14. These developments in science, and similar tendencies in philosophy,

combined with urban conditions and expanding wealth to weaken religious

belief.

15. The Industrial Revolution transformed morality. It did not change

the nature of man, but it gave new powers and opportunities to old instincts

primitively useful, socially troublesome. It emphasized the profit motive to

a point where it seemed to encourage and intensify the natural selfishness of

man. The unsocial instincts had been checked by parental authority, by

moral instruction in the schools, and by religious indoctrination. The Indus-

trial Revolution weakened all these checks. In the agricultural regime the

family was the unit of economic production as well as of racial continuance

and social order; it worked together on the land under the discipline of the

parents and the seasons; it taught co-operation and molded character. Indus-

trialism made the individual and the company the units of production; the

parents and the family lost the economic basis of their authority and moral

function. As child labor became unprofitable in the cities, children ceased to

be economic assets; birth control spread, most among the more intelligent,

least among the less, with unexpected results to ethnic relations and theo-

cratic power. As family limitation, and mechanical devices, freed woman

from maternal cares and domestic chores, she was drawn into factories and

offices; emancipation was industrialization. As the sons took longer to reach

economic self-support, the lengthened interval between biological and eco-

nomic maturity made premarital continence more difficult, and broke down

the moral code that early economic maturity, early marriage, and religious

sanctions had made possible on the farm. Industrial societies found them-

selves drifting in an amoral interregnum between a moral code that was dy-

ing and a new one still unformed.

The Industrial Revolution is still proceeding, and it is beyond the capac-

ity of one mind to comprehend it in all its facets, or to pass moral judgment

upon its results. It has begotten new quantities and varieties of crime, and it

has inspired scientists with all the heroic dedication of missionaries and nuns.

It has produced ugly buildings, dismal streets, and squalid slums, but these

were not derived from its essence, which is to replace human labor with

mechanical power. It is already attacking its own evils, for it has found that

slums cost more than education, and that the reduction of poverty enriches

the rich. Functional architecture and mechanical excellence— as in a bridge-

can produce a beauty that mates science with art. Beauty becomes profitable,

and industrial design takes its place among the arts and embellishments

of life.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The Political Drama

1756-92

I. THE POLITICAL STRUCTURE

THE Industrial Revolution was the most basic process, the political strug-

gle was the most exciting drama, of the second half of the eighteenth

century in England. Now the giants of English oratory— Chatham, Burke,

Fox, and Sheridan— made the House of Commons the stage of bitter and mo-

mentous conflicts between Parliament and the king, between Parliament and

the people, between England and America, between the conscience of Eng-

land and the English rulers of India, and between England and the French

Revolution. The political structure was the frame and machinery of the play.

The government of Great Britain was a constitutional monarchy in the

sense that the king implicitly agreed to rule according to existing laws and

traditional usages, and to make no new laws without the consent of Parlia-

ment. The constitution was an accumulation of precedents, not a document,

with two exceptions. One was the Magna Carta signed by King John in

12 15. The other arose when the Westminster Convention in 1689, offering

the crown of England to William of Orange and Mary his wife, accompan-

ied the offer with an "Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Sub-

ject, and Settling the Succession of the Crown." This "Bill of Rights," as

brevity called it, asserted that the "power of suspending of laws or the exe-

cution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal";

that "levying money for or to the use of the Crown, by pretense of preroga-

tive, without grant of Parliament ... is illegal"; and it added: "Having

therefore an entire confidence that . . . the Prince of Orange will . . .

preserve them [the Parliament] from the violation of their rights which they

have here asserted, and from all other attempts upon their religion, rights

and liberties, the . . . Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons . . .

do resolve that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, be and be

declared King and Queen of England, France and Ireland." In accepting the

throne William III and A4ary II implicitly accepted the limitations which

the proud and powerful aristocracy of England, by this declaration, placed

upon the authority of the king. When, by a later "Act of Settlement"

(1701), and on certain conditions, Parliament offered the throne to the Han-

overian "Princess Sophia and the heirs of her body being Protestants," it

assumed that she and those heirs, by accepting the crown, agreed to a Bill of

Rights that took from them all power to make laws except by consent of

Parliament. While nearly all other European states were, till 1789, ruled by

683

684 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

absolute monarchs who made and unmade laws, England had a constitutional

government that was praised by philosophers and envied by half the world.

The census of 180 1 1 estimated the population of Great Britain at nine mil-

lion souls, divided into the following classes:

1. At the top, 287 temporal (secular) peers and peeresses, as heads of

families totaling some 7,175 persons. Within this class there were ranks in

descending order: princes of the [royal] blood, dukes, marquesses, earls,

viscounts, and barons. These titles carried down generation after generation

to the eldest son.

2. Twenty-six bishops— the "spiritual lords." These, with the 287 tem-

poral lords, were entitled to sit in the House of Lords. Together these 3 1 3

families constituted the nobility proper; to all of them except dukes and

princes the appellation "lord" could be properly applied. A less formal and

nontransmissible nobility could be acquired by appointment to the higher

offices in the administration, the army or the navy; but usually these ap-

pointments went to persons already ennobled.

3. Some 540 baronets, and their wives, entitled to prefix "Sir" and "Lady"

to their Christian names, and to transmit these titles.

4. Some 350 knights, and their wives, entitled to the same prefixes, but

not to transmit them.

5. Some six thousand (e) squires— the "gentry," or most numerous class

of landowners. The baronets, knights, and squires, and their wives, consti-

tuted the "lesser nobility," and were generally included with their superiors

in the "aristocracy."

6. Some twenty thousand "gentlemen" or "ladies" living on income with-

out manual work, having a coat of arms, and assumed to be of "gentle"

birth— i.e., born in the gens, or group of old and accepted families.

7. Below all these came the remainder of the population: the lower clergy,

civil servants, businessmen, farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, laborers, soldiers,

and sailors; also some 1,040,000 "paupers" receiving public relief, and about

222,000 "vagrants, gypsies, rogues, thieves, swindlers, counterfeiters of base

money, in or out of prison, and common prostitutes." 2

The aristocracy, with only occasional resistance, dominated the govern-

ment by its wealth (the 287 peers received twenty-nine per cent of the na-

tional income in 1801 3 ), by its prominence in high civil or military posts, by

the prestige of ancient rank, and by its control of parliamentary elections

and legislation. Electorally, England was divided into forty counties (rural

districts) and 203 boroughs (townships). Excluded from the franchise were

women, paupers, convicted criminals, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Jews,

agnostics, and others who could not swear allegiance to the authority and doc-

trines of the Church of England. In the counties only those Protestant land-

owners who paid forty shillings annual tax were entitled to vote for Parlia-

ment; these totaled about 160,000. As voting was public, very few voters

dared support any candidate other than the one nominated by the principal

landlords of the county; hence relatively few voters bothered to vote, and

many elections were decided by arrangement among the leaders without any

CHAP. XXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 685

balloting at all. The major landowners thought it only just that, having so

much at stake in the conduct of the government and the fate of the nation,

their representation in Parliament should be proportionate to their property;

and most of the lesser landlords agreed.

The boroughs displayed a confusing variety of electoral patterns. In the

city of Westminster (now central London) there were about nine thousand

voters; in the city of London as then constituted there were six thousand; in

Bristol, five thousand; only twenty-two boroughs had more than a thou-

sand. 4 In twelve boroughs all adult males could vote; in most of the others

only property holders; in several the candidates were chosen by the municipal

"corporation"— which has been defined as "an urban oligarchy of attor-

neys, merchants, brokers, and brewers entrenched in a self-electing corpora-

tion which had by royal charter exclusive control over the town's prop-

erty." 5 Some of these corporations gave their vote to the candidate (s) whose

sponsor (s) paid the highest price. In 1761 the borough of Sudbury openly

advertised its vote for sale; and in the following election the corporation of

Oxford formally offered to re-elect its M.P.s if they would pay the corpora-

tion's debts. 6 In some boroughs the privilege of choosing the candidate be-

longed by custom to specific individuals or families not necessarily residing

there; so Lord Camelford boasted that if he wished he could elect his Negro

butler to Parliament. 7 Such "pocket boroughs" were sometimes sold like

merchandise; Lord Egremont bought Midhurst for ^40,000.* In some "rot-

ten boroughs" a handful of voters could send one or more representatives

to Parliament, while the city of London returned only four. Even when the

franchise was almost universal the election was usually determined by bri-

bery, by violence, or by keeping a refractory voter too intoxicated to vote. 9

By various means 111 "patrons" controlled the elections in 205 boroughs. 10

There were some 85,000 voters in the boroughs, 160,000 in the counties—

245,000 in all.

From such varied elections came the 558 members of the House of Com-

mons in 1 76 1. Scotland sent forty-five, the counties of England and Wales

ninety-four, the boroughs 415, the two universities two each. The House

of Lords then contained 224 peers, temporal or spiritual. "Parliamentary

privilege" included the right of Parliament to pass on bills proposed for legis-

lation; to levy taxes and thereby hold the "power of the purse"; to judge

the credentials of persons claiming admission to it; to penalize— with impris-

onment if it so wished— any injury to its members or any disobedience to its

rules; and to enjoy full freedom of speech, including immunity from pun-

ishment for words uttered in Parliament.

The division of members into Tories or Whigs had by 1761 lost nearly all

significance; the real division was between supporters and opponents of the

current "government," or ministry, or of the king. By and large the Tories

protected the landed interest; the Whigs were willing now and then to con-

sider the desires of the business class; otherwise both Tories and Whigs were

equally conservative. Neither party legislated for the benefit of the masses.

No bill could become law unless approved by both houses of Parliament

686 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

and signed by the king. He possessed the "royal prerogative"— i.e., powers,

privileges, and immunities accorded him by English custom and law. He

had military powers: he was supreme commander of the army and navy; he

could declare war, but needed parliamentary appropriations to wage it; he

could negotiate treaties and make peace. He had some legislative rights:

he could withhold assent from a bill passed by Parliament— but it could

bring him to terms by its power of the purse, and so he never exercised

that right after 17 14; he could add to the laws by proclamation or by orders

in council, but he could not alter the common law, or create a new offense;

for the colonies he could legislate as he pleased. He had executive powers:

he alone could summon, prorogue, or dissolve Parliament; he appointed the

ministers who directed policy and administration. Part of the furor in the

first decades (1760-82) of George Ill's sixty-year reign concerned the ex-

tent of the royal prerogative in choosing ministers and determining policy.

The right of the king to legislate was narrowly limited, and the measures

proposed to Parliament by his ministers could be made into law only by per-

suading both houses of Parliament to accept them. This was done by political

bargains, by the promise or withholding of posts or pensions, or by bribery.

(In 1770 over 190 members of the House of Commons held appointive

places in the administration.) The pounds and plums required for these op-

erations were mostly supplied by the king's "civil list"— an account of his

expenses for himself and his family (the "privy purse"), for his houses and

servants, for salaries paid by him, and for pensions awarded. Parliament al-

lowed George III ^800,000 annually for this civil list; he often exceeded

this in his outlays; in 1769 Parliament added ^513,51 1, and in 1777 ^618,-

340, to pay the royal debts. Part of the king's money was used to buy votes

in parliamentary elections; 11 part was used to buy votes in Parliament itself.

Funds voted by Parliament for secret service were in many cases remitted to

Parliament in bribes. When we add to this royal traffic the money spent in

elections or legislation by "nabobs" returning to England with wealth

gleaned in India, or by businessmen seeking governmental contracts or es-

cape from governmental interference, we get a picture of political corrup-

tion hardly rivaled west of the Oder, and unpleasantly instructive on the

nature of man.

Some minor details of the British system should be noted. Taxes were

levied upon all landowners, great or small; perhaps this entered into the re-

spect that the commonalty paid to the peerage. No standing army— only a

militia— was allowed by Parliament; this was a minor factor in England's

superior prosperity at a time when France was supporting a permanent army

of 180,000 men, Prussia 190,000, Russia 224,000. In wartime, however, the

armed forces were rigorously recruited by enlistment and impressment; the

violations of personal liberty by this custom, and the brutalizing cruelties of

army and navy life, were dark shadows on the English scene.

Blackstone felt (c. 1765) that the political structure of England was the

best the nature and education of men permitted at that time. He quoted the

classical opinion that the best form of government would be one that com-

CHAP. XXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 687

bined monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and he found all these "well

and happily united" in the British constitution.

For as with us the executive power of the laws is lodged in a single person,

they have all the advantages of strength and dispatch that are to be found in

the most absolute monarchy; and as the legislature of the kingdom is entrusted

to three distinct powers entirely independent of each other; first the king; sec-

ondly, the lords spiritual and temporal, which is an aristocratical assembly of

persons selected for their piety, their birth, their wisdom, their valor, or their

property; and thirdly, the House of Commons, freely chosen by the people

among themselves, which makes it a kind of democracy; as this aggregate body,

activated by different springs and attentive to different interests, . . . has the

supreme disposal of everything, there can no inconvenience be attempted by

either of the three branches but will be withstood by the other two; each

branch being armed with a negative power sufficient to repel any innovation

which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous. Here, then, is lodged the sover-

eignty of the British constitution, and lodged as beneficially as is possible for

society. 12

We may smile at the patriotic conservatism of an eminent jurist viewing the

matter from a comfortable eminence; but very probably his judgment would

have been ratified by ninety per cent of the English people under George III.

II. THE PROTAGONISTS

The persons of the drama were among the most famous in English his-

tory. At the top was George III, who held the throne for the fateful years

( 1 760-1 820) that saw England through the American and French Revolu-

tions and the Napoleonic Wars. He was the first of the Hanoverian mon-

archs to be born in England, to think of himself as an Englishman, and to

take an absorbing interest in English affairs. He was the grandson of George

II, and son of the unruly Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, who had died

in 1 75 1. The future George III was then twelve years old. His mother, Prin-

cess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, frightened by the "ill-educated and vicious

young people of quality" 13 whom she met, kept him in quarantine from

such company, and brought him up— one of nine children— in an aseptic

isolation from the games, joys, turmoil, and thought of his peers and his

time. He grew up timid, lethargic, pious, poorly educated, and unhappy.

"If I ever have a son," he told his censorious mother, "I will not make him

so unhappy as you make me." 14 She transmitted to him her scorn of his

grandfather for having tolerated the supremacy of Parliament; repeatedly

she bade him, "George, be a king! "—recapture active leadership of the gov-

ernment. A tradition often questioned credits the youth with being influ-

enced by Bolingbroke's Idea of a Patriot King (1749), which exhorted rul-

ers "to govern as well as to reign," and (while "letting Parliament retain the

powers it possessed") to initiate measures for improving English life. 15 One

of George's teachers, Lord Waldegrave, described him in 1758 as "strictly

honest, but wants that frank and open behavior which makes honesty ami-

688 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

able. ... He does not want resolution, but it is mixed with too much obsti-

nacy. . . . He has a kind of unhappiness in his temper, which . . . will be a

source of frequent anxiety." 16 These qualities remained with him to the end

of his sanity.

After the death of George's father the widow formed a close friendship

with John Stuart, Earl of Bute, groom of the stole in the princely household.

Bute was thirty-eight in 175 1, and was already fifteen years married to Mary

Wortley Montagu, daughter of the famous Lady Mary of that name. In the

last years before George became king he accepted Bute as his chief precep-

tor and confidant. He admired the Scot's learning and integrity, gratefully

received his advice, and was encouraged by him to prepare for aggressive

leadership in government. When the royal youth thought of proposing mar-

riage to the fifteen-year-old beauty Lady Sarah Lennox, he yielded sadly

but affectionately to Bute's admonition that he must marry some foreign

princess who would help to cement a useful political alliance. "I surrender

my future into your hands," he wrote, "and will keep my thoughts even

from the dear object of my love, grieve in silence, and never trouble you

more with this unhappy tale; for if I must either lose my friend or my love I

will give up the latter, for I esteem your friendship above every earthly

joy." 17 George took Bute with him when he ascended the throne.

His reign was one of the most calamitous in England's history, and he

shared in the blame. Yet he himself was emphatically a Christian and usu-

ally a gentleman. He accepted the theology of the Anglican Church, ob-

served its rites with unostentatious devotion, and rebuked a court preacher

who praised him in a sermon. He imitated his political enemies in the use of

bribery, and bettered their instruction, but he was a paragon of virtue in

his private life. In a generation noted for sexual license he gave to England

an example of husbandly fidelity that quietly contrasted with the adulteries

of his predecessors and the irregularities of his brothers and sons. He was the

soul of kindness in everything but religion and politics. Though lavish in

gifts, he was a man of simple habits and tastes. He forbade gambling at his

court. He toiled resolutely at government, attending to minute details, and

sending messages of instruction to his aides and ministers a dozen times a day.

He was no somber Puritan: he liked the theater, music, and the dance. He

was not wanting in courage: he fought his political foes tenaciously for

half a century; he faced a violent mob bravely in 1780, and kept his com-

posure in two attempts upon his life. He frankly recognized the defects of

his education; to the end he remained relatively innocent of literature, sci-

ence, and philosophy. If he was a bit weak in the mind it may have been due

to some quirk in the genes or some negligence in his teachers, as well as to

the thousand strains that hedge a king.

One of George's faults was a suspicious jealousy of ability and independ-

ence. He could never forgive William Pitt I for conscious pre-eminence

in political vision and understanding, penetration of judgment, force and elo-

quence of speech. We have seen elsewhere 18 the career of this extraordinary

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 689

man from his entry into Parliament (1735) to his triumph in the Seven

Years' War. He could be arrogant and obstinate— far more so than George

III; he felt himself to be the proper custodian of the empire that had been

created under his leadership, and when the king in name met the king in deed

there followed a duel for the throne. Pitt was personally honest, untouched

by the bribery that flourished around him, but he thought of politics purely

in terms of national power, and allowed no sentiment of humanity to divert

his resolve to make England supreme. He was called "the Great Com-

moner" because he was the greatest man in the House of Commons, not be-

cause he thought of improving the lot of the commonalty; however, he rose

to defend Americans and the people of India against oppression by English-

men. Like the King he resented criticism, and was "unapt to forget or to

forgive." 19 He would not serve the King unless he could rule him; he re-

signed from the ministry (1761) when George III insisted on violating Eng-

land's compact with Frederick and making a separate peace with France. If

in the end he was defeated it was by no other foe than gout.

Pitt's influence on English politics was matched by Edmund Burke's in-

fluence on English thought. Pitt disappeared from the scene in 1778; Burke

appeared on it in 1761, and held the attention of educated England, inter-

mittently, till 1794. The fact that he was born in Dublin (1729), the son

of an attorney, may have handicapped him in his struggle for political office

and power; he was not an Englishman except by adoption, and not a mem-

ber of any aristocracy except that of the mind. The fact that his mother

and sister were Catholics must have entered into his lifelong sympathy for

the Catholics of Ireland and England, and his persistent emphasis upon re-

ligion as an indispensable bulwark of morality and the state. He received

his formal education at a Quaker school in, Ballitore, and at Trinity College,

Dublin. He learned enough Latin to admire Cicero's orations and to make

them the foundation of his own forensic style.

In 1750 he passed to England to study law at the Middle Temple. Later

he praised law as "a science which does more to quicken and invigorate

the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together," but he

thought it "not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to

liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion." 20 About 1775 his father

withdrew Edmund's allowance on the ground that he was neglecting his

legal studies for other pursuits. Apparently Edmund had developed a taste

for literature, and was frequenting the theaters and the debating clubs of

London. A legend arose that he fell in love with the famous actress Peg

Woffington. He wrote to a friend in 1757: "I have broken all rules; I have

neglected all decorum"; and he described his "manner of life" as "chequered

with various designs; sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of

the country, sometimes in France, and shortly, please God, to be in Ameri-

ca." Otherwise we know nothing about Burke in those experimental years,

except that in 1756, in uncertain sequence, he published two remarkable

books, and married.

69O ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

One book was entitled A Vindication of Natural Society, or a View of

the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind from Every Species of Artificial

Society. A Letter to Lord . By a late Noble Writer. The essay, some

forty-five pages long, is on its face a vigorous condemnation of all govern-

ment, far more anarchistic than Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of In-

equality, which had appeared only a year before. Burke defined "natural

society" as "society founded in natural appetites and instincts, and not in any

positive institution." 21 "The development of laws was a degeneration." 22

History is a record of butchery, treachery, and war; 23 and "political society

is justly charged with much the greater part of this destruction." 24 All gov-

ernments follow the Machiavellian principles, reject all moral restraints, and

give the citizens a demoralizing example of greed, deceit, robbery, and homi-

cide. 25 Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of gov-

ernment, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues

to win admiration from gullible majorities. Law is injustice codified; it pro-

tects the idle rich against the exploited poor, 26 and adds a new evil— lawyers. 27

"Political society has made the many the property of the few." 28 Look at the

condition of the miners of England, and consider whether such misery could

have existed in a natural society— i.e., before the making of laws. — Should

we nevertheless accept the state, like the religion that upholds it, as being

made necessary by the nature of man? Not at all.

If we are resolved to submit our reason and our liberty to civil usurpation,

we have nothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the vulgar [pop-

ular] notions which are connected with this, and take up the theology of the

vulgar as well as their politics. But if we think this necessity rather imaginary

than real, we shall renounce their dreams of society together with their visions

of religion, and vindicate ourselves into perfect liberty. 29

This has the bold ring and angry sincerity of a young radical, a youth re-

ligious in spirit but rejecting the established theology, and sensitive to the

poverty and degradation that he had seen in England; a talent conscious of

itself but as yet without place and standing in the stream of the world. Every

alert youngster passes through this stage on his way to position, possessions,

and such frightened conservatism as we shall find in Burke's Reflections on

the Revolution in France. We note that the author of the Vindication cov-

ered his tracks with anonymity, even to playing dead. Nearly all readers, in-

cluding William Warburton and the Earl of Chesterfield, understood the

tract as a genuine attack upon current evils, 30 and many ascribed it to Vis-

count Bolingbroke, who, having died in 175 1, was "a late Noble Writer."

Nine years after publishing the essay Burke ran for election to Parliament.

Fearing that his youthful ebullition would be held against him, he reprinted

it in 1765 with a preface that said in part: "The design of the following

little piece was to show that . . . the same [literary] engines which were

employed for the destruction of religion might be employed with equal

success for the subversion of government." 31 Most biographers of Burke

have accepted this explanation as sincere; we cannot join them, but we can

understand the effort of a political candidate to protect himself against

CHAP.XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 691

popular prejudice. Which of us would have a future if his past were known?

Just as eloquent as the Vindication, and much subtler, was Burke's other

publication in 1756: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sub-

lime and Beautiful; to which in a second edition he added A Discourse on

Taste. We must admire the courage of the twenty-seven-year-old youth

who pursued these elusive subjects a full decade before Lessing's Laokoon.

He may have taken a lead from the opening of Book II of Lucretius' De

rerum natura: "Pleasant it is, when the winds are troubling the waters in a

mighty sea, to witness from the land another's great toil; not because it is a

delight to behold anyone's tribulation, but because it is sweet to see from

what evils you yourself are free." So Burke wrote: "The passions which

belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful

when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have

an idea of pain and danger without being actually in such circumstances.

. . . Whatever excites this delight I call sublime." Secondarily, "all works

of great labor, expense, and magnificence are sublime, . . . and all buildings

of very great richness and splendor, ... for in contemplating them the

mind applies the ideas of the greatness of exertion necessary to produce such

works, to the works themselves." 32 Gloom, darkness, mystery help to arouse

a sense of sublimity; hence the care of medieval builders to let only dim and

filtered light enter their cathedrals. Romantic fiction, as in Horace Walpole's

Castle of Otranto (1764) or Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),

profited from these ideas.

"Beauty," said Burke, "is a name I shall apply to all such qualities in things

as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion the

most nearly resembling these." 33 He rejected the classical reduction of these

qualities to harmony, unity, proportion, and symmetry; we all agree that

the swan is beautiful, though its long neck and short tail are quite dispropor-

tionate to its body. Usually the beautiful is small (and thereby contrasts

with the sublime). "I do not now recollect anything beautiful that is not

smooth"; 34 a broken or rugged surface, a sharp angle or sudden projection,

will disturb us and limit our pleasure even in objects otherwise beautiful.

"An air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty. An appear-

ance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it." 35 Color adds

to beauty, especially if it is varied and bright, but not glaring or strong. —

Strange to say, Burke did not ask whether a woman is beautiful because

she is small, smooth, delicate, and colorful, or whether these qualities seem

beautiful because they remind us of woman, who is beautiful because she is

desired.

In any case June Nugent was desirable, and Burke married her in this fe-

cund year 1756. She was the daughter of an Irish physician; she was a Catho-

lic, but she soon conformed to the Anglican worship. Her mild and gentle

disposition soothed her husband's irascible temperament.

The impression made by the style, if not the arguments, of the Vindica-

tion and the Enquiry opened doors to Burke. The Marquis of Rockingham

engaged him as secretary, despite the Duke of Newcastle's warning that

692 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

Burke was a wild Irishman, a Jacobite, a secret papist and Jesuit. 36 Late in

1765 Burke was elected to Parliament from the borough of Wendover

through the influence of Lord Verney, "who owned it." 37 In the House of

Commons the new member acquired the reputation of an eloquent, yet not

persuasive, orator. His voice was harsh, his accent Hibernian, his gestures

awkward, his jests occasionally coarse, his denunciations unduly passionate.

Only in reading him did men perceive that he was creating literature as he

spoke— by his command of the English language, his luminous descriptions,

his range of knowledge and illustrations, his ability to bring philosophic per-

spective to the issues of the day. Perhaps these qualities were handicaps in the

House. Some hearers, Goldsmith tells us, "loved to see him wind into his sub-

ject like a serpent," 38 but many others were impatient with his excessive de-

tail, his digressions into theory, his ornate declamations, his massive periodic

sentences, his flights into literary elegance; they wanted practical considera-

tions and immediate relevance; they praised his diction, but ignored his

advice. So, when Boswell said that Burke was like a hawk, Johnson coun-

tered, "Yes, sir, but he catches nothing." 39 Almost to the end of his career he

defended policies unpalatable to the people, the ministry, and the King. "I

know," he said, "that the road I take is not the road to preferment." 40

Apparently, during the years of his climb, he read much and judiciously.

One contemporary described him as an encyclopedia, from whose stores ev-

eryone received instruction. Fox paid him an unmeasured compliment: "If

he [Fox] were to put all the political information which he had learned from

books, all which he had gained from science, and all which any knowledge

of the world and its affairs had taught him, into one scale, and the improve-

ment which he had derived from his right honorable friend's instruction and

conversation were placed in the other, he should be at a loss to decide to

which to give the preference." 41 Johnson, who usually administered praise in

small doses, agreed with Fox: "You could not stand five minutes with that

man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be convinced you had been

standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen." 42

Burke joined the Johnson-Reynolds circle about 1758. He rarely entered

into debate with the invincible debater, probably fearing his own temper as

well as Johnson's; but when he did, the Great Cham drew in his horns.

When Johnson was sick, and someone mentioned Burke, the Doctor cried

out, "That fellow calls forth -all my powers; were I to see Burke now it

would kill me." 43 Yet the two men agreed on almost all basic questions of

politics, morals, and religion. They accepted the aristocratic rule of Britain,

though both were commoners; they scorned democracy as the enthronement

of mediocrity; they defended orthodox Christianity and the Established

Church as irreplaceable bastions of morality and order. Only the revolt of

the American colonies divided them. Johnson called himself a Tory, and de-

nounced Whigs as criminals and fools; Burke called himself a Whig, and

gave a stronger, better-reasoned defense of Tory principles than any other

man in English history.

He seemed at times to uphold the most questionable elements of the exist-

CHAP.XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 693

ing order. He opposed changes in the rules for the election of members or

the enactment of laws. He thought "rotten" or "pocket" boroughs for-

givable, since they sent good men like himself to Parliament. Instead of

widening the suffrage he would, "by lessening the number, add to the weight

and independency, of our voters." 44 Nevertheless he espoused a hundred lib-

eral causes. He advocated freedom of trade before Adam Smith, and attacked

the slave trade before Wilberforce. He advised removing the political dis-

abilities of Catholics, and supported the petition of the Dissenters for full

civil rights. He tried to soften the barbarous severity of the penal code, and

the handicaps of a soldier's life. He vindicated the freedom of the press

though he himself had felt its sting. He stood up for Ireland, America, India

in the face of chauvinistic majorities. He championed Parliament against the

King with a candor and audacity that forfeited all chance of political office.

We may debate his views and his motives, but we can never doubt his cour-

age.

The last crusade of Burke's career— against the French Revolution— cost

him the friendship of a man whom he had long admired and loved. Charles

James Fox returned his affection and shared with him the dangers of battle

in a dozen causes, but differed from him in almost every quality of mind and

character except humanity and bravery. Burke was Irish, poor, conservative,

religious, moral; Fox was English, rich, radical, and kept only so much re-

ligion as comported with gambling, drinking, mistresses, and the French

Revolution. He was the third but favorite son of Henry Fox, who inherited

one fortune, squandered it, married another, accumulated a third as paymas-

ter of the forces, helped Bute to buy M.P.s, was rewarded by being created

Baron Holland, and was denounced as "the public defaulter of unaccounted

millions." 45 His wife, Caroline Lennox, was granddaughter of Charles II by

Louise de Keroualle, so that Charles James had in his veins the diluted blood

of a rakish Stuart king and a Frenchwoman of complaisant morals. His very

names were Stuart memories, and must have grated on Hanoverian ears.

Lady Holland tried to bring up her sons to integrity and responsibility,

but Lord Holland indulged Charles in every humor, and inverted old maxims

for him: "Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow, nor ever do

yourself what you can get anyone else to do for you." 46 When the boy was

barely fourteen his father took him from Eton College for a tour of Con-

tinental casinos and spas, and allowed him five guineas per night for play.

The youth returned to Eton a confirmed gambler, and kept this up at Ox-

ford. He found time to read much, both in classical and in English literature,

but he left Oxford after two years to spend two years in travel. He learned

French and Italian, lost ;£ 16,000 * n Naples, visited Voltaire at Ferney, and

received from him a list of books to enlighten him on Christian theology. 47

In 1768 the father bought a borough for him, and Charles took a seat in Par-

liament at the age of nineteen. This was quite illegal, but so many members

were impressed by the youth's personal charm and presumptive wealth that

no protest made itself heard. Two years later, through his father's influence,

6 94 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

he was made a lord of the admiralty in the ministry of Lord North. In 1774

the father, the mother, and an elder son died, and Charles became the master

of a large fortune.

His physical appearance in his mature years was as careless as his morals.

His stockings were loosely tied, his coat and waistcoat were rumpled, his

shirt was open at the neck, his face was puffed and ruddy with food and

drink, and his swelling paunch, when he sat, threatened to tumble over his

knees. When he fought a duel with William Adam he rejected the advice of

his second to assume the customary sideways stance, for he said, "I am as

thick one way as the other." 48 He took no pains to conceal his faults. It was

common gossip that he proved to be an amiable victim of sharpers. Once

(Gibbon tells us) he played for twenty-two hours at a sitting, and lost in

that time ,£200,000. Fox remarked that the greatest pleasure in life, next to

winning, was losing. 49 He kept a stable of racing horses, bet heavily on them,

and (we are asked to believe) won more on them than he lost. 50

Sometimes he was as careless of his political principles as of his morals and

his dress; more than once he let his personal interests or animosity determine

his course. He tended to indolence, and did not prepare his parliamentary

speeches or measures with that care and study which distinguished Burke.

He had few graces as an orator, and sought none; his addresses were often

formless and repetitious, sometimes shocking the grammarians; he "threw

himself into the middle of his sentences," said the scholar Richard Porson,

"and left it to God Almighty to get him out again." 51 But he was gifted with

such quickness of mind and power of memory that he became, by general

consent, the ablest debater in the House. "Charles Fox," wrote Horace Wal-

pole, "has tumbled old Saturn [Chatham] from the throne of oratory." 52

Fox's contemporaries were lenient with his faults since these were so

widely shared, and they almost unanimously testified to his virtues. Through

most of his life after 1774 he followed liberal causes at reckless sacrifice of

preferment and popularity. Burke, who scorned vice, nevertheless loved Fox

because he saw that Fox was unselfishly devoted to social justice and human

liberty. "He is a man made to be loved," said Burke, "of the most artless,

open, candid, and benevolent disposition; disinterested in the extreme, of a

temper mild and placable to a fault, without one drop of gall in his whole

constitution." 53 Gibbon agreed: "Perhaps no human being was ever more

perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood." 54

Only George III was immune to that spontaneous charm.

Bound with Burke and Fox in leading the liberal factor of the Whigs was

a second Irishman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His grandfather, Thomas

Sheridan I, published translations from Greek and Latin, and an Art of Pun-

ning which may have infected the grandson. The father, Thomas Sheridan

II, was by some ranked second only to Garrick as actor and theatrical man-

ager. He married Frances Chamberlaine, a successful playwright and novel-

ist. He received degrees from Dublin, Oxford, and Cambridge; lectured at

Cambridge on education; was instrumental in getting Johnson a royal pen-

CHAP. XXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 695

sion, and got one for himself. He wrote an entertaining Life of Swift, and

dared to publish a General Dictionary of the English Language (1780) only

twenty-five years after Johnson's. He helped his son manage Drury Lane

Theatre, and saw him rise in romance, literature, and Parliament.

So Richard had wit and drama in his milieu, if not in his blood. Born in

Dublin (175 1 ), he was sent to Harrow at the age of eleven, stayed there six

years, and acquired a good classical education; at twenty he echoed his

grandfather by publishing translations from the Greek. In that year 1771,

while living at Bath with his parents, he fell into raptures over the lovely

face and voice of Elizabeth Ann Linley, seventeen, who sang in the con-

certs presented by her father, composer Thomas Linley. Those who have

seen any of Gainsborough's portraits of her 55 will understand that Richard

had no alternative but rapture. Neither had she, if we may believe his sister,

who thought him irresistibly handsome and lovable. "His cheeks had the

glow of health; his eyes the finest in the world. ... A tender and affection-

ate heart. . . . The same playful fancy, the same sterling and innoxious wit,

that was shown afterwards in his writings, cheered and delighted the family

circle. I admired— I almost adored— him. I would most willingly have sacri-

ficed my life for him." 56

Elizabeth Ann had many suitors, including Richard's elder brother

Charles. One of them, Major Mathews, rich but married, annoyed her to

such aggravation that she took laudanum to kill herself. She recovered, but

lost all desire for life until Richard's devotion revived her spirits. Mathews

threatened to force her; half in fear, half in love, she eloped with Sheridan

to France, married him (1772), and then took refuge in a convent near Lille

while Richard returned to England to conciliate his father and hers. He

fought two duels with Mathews; victor in the first, he spared Mathews' life;

drunk in the second, he disarmed his adversary, allowed the duel to degen-

erate into a wrestling match, and returned to Bath smeared with blood, wine,

and mud. His father disowned him, but Thomas Linley brought Elizabeth

Ann back from France, and sanctioned her marriage (1773).

Too proud to let his wife support him by public singing, Richard, twenty-

two, undertook to make a fortune by writing plays. On January 17, 1775, his

first comedy, The Rivals, was produced at Covent Garden. It was poorly

acted and poorly received; Sheridan secured a better actor for the leading

role, and a second performance (January 28) began a series of dramatic

successes that brought Sheridan fame and wealth. Soon all London was talk-

ing about Sir Anthony Absolute, Sir Lucius O'Trigger, and Miss Lydia Lan-

guish, and was imitating Mrs. Malaprop's mangling of words ("Forget this

fellow, illiterate him quite from your memory"; 57 "as headstrong as an al-

legory on the banks of the Nile."). 58 Sheridan had a mint of sallies in his

brain, scattering them on every page, dowering lackeys with wit, and

making fools talk like philosophers. Critics complained that the characters

were not always consistent with their speech, and that the wit, crackling in

every scene, bubbling in almost every mouth, dulled its point by excess; no

matter; audiences relished the merriment, and relish it to this day.

696 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

Even greater was the success of The Duenna, which had its premiere at

Co vent Garden on November 2, 1775; it ran for seventy-five nights in its

first season, breaking the record of sixty-three nights set by The Beggar's

Opera in 1728. David Garrick, at the Drury Lane Theatre, was alarmed by

this lively competition, but could find no better riposte than to revive The

Discovery, a play by Sheridan's lately deceased mother. Flushed with suc-

cess, Sheridan offered to buy Garrick's half share of the Drury Lane; Gar-

rick, feeling his years, agreed for £35,000; Sheridan persuaded his father-

in-law and a friend to contribute £ 10,000 each; he himself invested £ 1,300

in cash; the remainder he raised on a loan (1776). Two years later he

gathered together another £35,000, took ownership of the theater with his

partners, and assumed the management.

Many thought thit his confidence had overreached itself, but Sheridan

went on to another triumph by producing (May 8, 1777) The School for

Scandal, the greatest dramatic success of the century. The author's father,

who had been pouting ever since Richard's elopement five years before, was

now reconciled with his son. After these victories there was a pause in Sheri-

dan's ascent. The offerings at the Drury Lane proved unpopular, and the

specter of bankruptcy frightened the partners. Sheridan saved the situation

with a farce, The Critic, a satire of tragic dramas and dramatic pundits.

However, his wonted dilatoriness intervened, and two days before the sched-

uled opening he had not yet written the final scene. By some ruse his father-

in-law and others lured him to a room in the theater, gave him paper, pen,

ink, and wine, bade him finish the play, and locked him in. He emerged with

the desired denouement; it was rehearsed and found adequate; the premiere

(October 29, 1779) was another smile of fortune for the ebullient Irishman.

He looked around for new worlds to conquer, and decided to enter Par-

liament. He paid the burgesses of Stafford five guineas for their vote, and in

1780 he took his seat in the House of Commons as an ardent liberal. He

shared with Fox and Burke in prosecuting Warren Hastings, and in one

brilliant day outshone them both. Meanwhile he lived with his accomplished

wife in happiness and luxury, famed for his conversation, his wit, his exuber-

ance, his kindness, and his debts. Lord Byron summed up the marvel: "What-

soever Sheridan has done, or chooses to do, has been par excellence, always

the best of its kind. He has written the best comedy, the best drama, . . .

the best farce, . . . the best address [a Monologue on Garrick], and, to

crown all, delivered the very best oration . . . ever conceived or heard in this

country." 59 And he had won and kept the love of the loveliest woman in Eng-

land.

Sheridan was all romance; it is hard to picture him in the same world and

generation as William Pitt II, who recognized only reality, stood above sen-

timent, and ruled without eloquence. He was born (1759) at the height of

his father's career; his mother was sister to George Grenville, chief minister

1763-65; he was nursed on politics, and grew up in the odor of Parliament.

Frail and sickly in childhood, he was kept from the rigors and socializing

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 697

contacts of "public" school; he was tutored at home under the careful super-

vision of his father, who taught him elocution by making him recite Shake-

speare or Milton every day. By the age of ten he was a classical scholar and

had written a tragedy. At fourteen he was sent to Cambridge, soon fell ill,

returned home; a year later he went again, and, being a peer's son, he was

graduated as Master of Arts in 1776 without examination. He studied law at

Lincoln's Inn, practiced law briefly, and was projected into Parliament at the

age of twenty-one from a pocket borough controlled by Sir James Lowther.

His maiden speech so well supported Burke's proposal for economic reforms

that Burke called him "not a chip of the old block but the old block itself." 60

Being a second son, he was allowed only £300 a year, with occasional

help from his mother and uncles; these conditions encouraged a stoic sim-

plicity in his conduct and character. He avoided marriage, having pledged

himself indivisibly to the pursuit of power. He took no pleasure in gambling

or the theater. Though he later used liquor in excess to dull his nerves after

the tumult of politics, he earned a reputation for purity of life and incor-

ruptibility of purpose; he could buy, but he could not be bought. He never

sought wealth, and seldom made concessions to friendship; only an intimate

few discovered, behind his cold aloofness and self-control, a friendly gaiety,

even at times an affectionate tenderness.

Early in 1782, when Lord North's ministry was about to resign, "the

boy," as some members condescendingly called Pitt, included in one of his

speeches a rather unusual announcement: "For myself, I could not expect to

form part of a new administration; but were my doing so within my reach,

I feel myself bound to declare that I never would accept a subordinate posi-

tion"; 61 that is, he would accept no place lower than the six or seven seats

that constituted what came to be called the cabinet. When the new ministry

offered to appoint him vice-treasurer of Ireland at £5,000 a year, he de-

clined, and continued to live on his £300. He was confident of advance-

ment, and hoped to win it on his own merits; he worked hard, and became

the best-informed man in the House on domestic politics, industry, and

finance. A year after his proud pronouncement the King turned to him not

merely to join but to head the government. No man before him had ever

been chief minister at the age of twenty-four; and few ministers have left a

deeper mark on English history.

III. THE KING VERSUS PARLIAMENT

George II completed his reign of thirty-three years with a decided distaste

for English politics. "I am sick to death of all this foolish stuff, and wish with

all my heart that the Devil may take all your bishops, and the Devil take your

ministers, and the Devil take your Parliament, and the Devil take the whole

island, provided I can get out of it and go to Hanover." 62 He found peace on

October 25, 1760, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The accession of George III on the day of his grandfather's death was

698 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

welcomed enthusiastically by nearly all Englishmen except a few who still

hankered after the Stuarts. He was twenty-two, handsome, industrious, and

modest. (He was the first English king since Henry VI to omit in his title a

claim to the sovereignty over France.) In his first address to Parliament he

added, to the text prepared for him by his ministers, words that neither of

his Hanoverian predecessors could have spoken: "Born and educated in this

country, I glory in the name of Briton." "The young King," wrote Horace

Walpole, "has all the appearance of being amiable. There is great grace to

temper much dignity, and extreme good nature, which breaks out on all oc-

casions." 63 He added to his popularity by the proclamation that he issued on

October 3 1 "for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and for preventing

and punishing of vice, profaneness, and immorality." In 1761 he married

Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz; adjusting himself to her

charmlessness, he begot fifteen children by her, and found no time for adul-

tery. This was unprecedented for a Hanoverian king.

He did not like the Seven Years' War, then four years old, and felt that

some adjustment could be made with France. William Pitt I, secretary of

state for the Southern Department, and the dominant figure in the ministry

of the Duke of Newcastle, insisted on continuing the war until France

should be weakened beyond any likelihood of her challenging the empire

that had been created by British victories in Canada and India; moreover, he

urged, no peace should be made except in concert with England's ally, Fred-

erick the Great. In March, 1761, the Earl of Bute was made secretary of

state for the Northern Department, and proceeded with the plan for a sepa-

rate peace. Pitt resisted in vain, and on October 5 he resigned. George mol-

lified him with a pension of ^3,000 for himself and his heir, and a peerage

for his wife, who became Baroness of Chatham. Pitt (till 1766) refused a

peerage for himself, since this would have excluded him from his favorite

battlefield, the House of Commons. As he had spoken of pensions with

scorn, he was severely criticized for accepting these emoluments, but they

were less than he had earned, and others who had earned far less received far

more.

On May 26, 1762, the Duke of Newcastle gave up his post after forty-

five years of prominence in politics. Three days later Bute succeeded him as

chief minister. Now the purposes of the young King took form and drive.

He and Bute considered it part of the royal prerogative to determine the

major lines of policy, especially in foreign affairs. Furthermore, he was eager

to break the hold which a few rich families had taken on the government. In

1 76 1 an old Whig, William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, in an anonymous pam-

phlet, urged the King not to be content with the "shadow of royalty," but

to use his "legal prerogatives" to check the "illegal claims of factious oli-

garchy." 64

The majority in the House of Commons held that the King should choose

his ministers from the acknowledged leaders of the party or faction victori-

ous in the elections; George insisted on his legal right to choose his ministers

regardless of party, with no restrictions except his responsibility to the na-

CHAP. XXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 699

tion. 65 The Whigs had engineered the accession of the Hanoverian Elector

to the throne of England; some Tories had negotiated with the exiled Stu-

arts; inevitably the first two Georges had taken only Whigs into their gov-

ernment; most of the Tories had retired to their estates. But in 1760 they ac-

cepted the new dynasty, and came in considerable number to offer their

homage to the British-born King. George welcomed them, and saw no rea-

son why he should not appoint able Tories, as well as able Whigs, to office.

The Whigs protested that if the King were free to choose ministers and de-

termine policy without responsibility to Parliament, the "Bill of Rights" of

1689 would be violated, the authority of the King would remount to the

level claimed by Charles I, and the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 would be

nullified. The party system had its faults, but (the leaders argued) it was in-

dispensable to responsible government; it offered to each ministry an opposi-

tion that watched it, criticized it, and (when the electors so desired) could

replace it with men equipped to alter the direction of policy without dis-

turbing the stability of the state. So the lines formed for the first major con-

flict of powers in the new reign.

Bute bore the brunt of the battle. Criticism mostly spared the King, but

not his mother; lampoons accused her of being Bute's mistress; this calumny

roused the King to uncompromising wrath. Bute concluded a separate peace

with France, and to force Frederick's acquiescence he ended England's sub-

sidies to Prussia; Frederick called him a scoundrel, and fought on. The Eng-

lish people, though glad to have the war ended, denounced the peace as too

lenient to defeated France; Pitt fulminated against it, and predicted that

France, with her navy left intact, would soon resume war on England—

which she did in 1778. The House of Commons ratified the treaty, 319 to 65.

George's mother rejoiced that the royal will had prevailed; "Now," she said,

"my son is really King of England." 66

Hitherto the new sovereign had enjoyed a reputation for integrity. But

when he saw that the Whigs were buying parliamentary votes, and were

engaging journalists to attack his policies, he resolved to better the instruc-

tion. He used his funds and his power of patronage to induce authors like

Smollett to defend the aims and actions of the ministry. Perhaps Bute had

such services in view when, in July, 1762, he persuaded the King to give a

pension to Samuel Johnson, and he was not disappointed. But no partisan of

the minister could offset the clever diatribes of John Wilkes, the savage sat-

ires of Charles Churchill, or the anonymous vituperation of "Junius." "Li-

bels on the court, exceeding in audacity and rancor any that had been pub-

lished for many years, now appeared daily, in both prose and verse." 67

Parliament took the King's money and gave him votes, but it disliked his

chief minister as a Scot who had not risen to power through long service to

some party in the House. Feeling against Scotland ran high in an England

that still remembered the Scottish invasion of 1745. Moreover, Bute had

given political plums to his countrymen: he had made Robert Adam court

architect and Allan Ramsay court painter (ignoring Reynolds) ; he had pen-

sioned John Home, the Scottish playwright, while refusing a professorship

7°° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

to Thomas Gray. The London populace expressed its feelings by hanging or

burning a jackboot (as a pun for Bute), and by attacking the minister's car-

riage; he had to hide his face when he attended the theater. A tax on cider

alienated the rural population, and left Bute the most unpopular minister in

English history. Unable to breast the torrent, broken in health and spirits, and

realizing his unfitness for the agitation and intrigues of politics, Bute resigned

(April 8, 1763), after less than a year as chief minister to the King.

His successor, George Grenville, suffered three misfortunes: he was at-

tacked in the press by the invincible John Wilkes (1763 f.); he put through

Parliament (March, 1765) the Stamp Act that began the alienation of the

American colonies; and George III had his first fit of insanity. The failure

and resignation of Bute had broken the King's nerves and resolution; his mar-

riage had brought him no happiness; and Grenville was painfully independ-

ent, almost domineering. George soon recovered, but he no longer felt strong

enough to resist the Whig oligarchy that controlled most of Parliament and

the press. He compromised by inviting a Whig, the Marquis of Rockingham,

to form a new ministry.

Perhaps on suggestions from his secretary, Edmund Burke, the Marquis in

a year put through Parliament several mollifying measures. The cider tax

was abolished or modified; the stamp tax was repealed; a treaty with Russia

furthered trade; the agitation over Wilkes was subdued; and apparently no

bribery was used to advance this legislation. The King resented the repeal of

the tax, and the concessions to Wilkes. On July 12, 1766, he dismissed the

Rockingham ministry, offered a peerage to Pitt, and asked him to take

charge of the government. Pitt agreed.

But the "Great Commoner" had lost his health, almost his mind. Now he

sacrificed what remained of his popularity by accepting ennoblement as Earl

of Chatham, thereby abandoning his place in the House. He had some ex-

cuse: he felt too weak to bear the tensions and conflicts of the Commons; in

the Lords he would have more leisure and less strain. He took a relatively

quiet post as lord of the privy seal, and allowed his friend, the Duke of Graf-

ton, to fill the nominally pre-eminent post as first lord of the treasury. His

colleagues, however, noted that he determined policy without consulting

them, or over their opposition, and many were relieved when he went to

Bath to seek some easing of his gout. He achieved this, but with drugs that

disordered his mind. When he returned to London he was in no condition to

attend to politics. In October, 1768, he resigned, and Grafton became chief

minister.

It was in this period of political anarchy (1766-68) that a group known

as "the King's Friends" associated themselves to further the aims of the King.

They guided George in his distribution of favors for political support, and

used every means to elect candidates, and advance ministers, pledged to the

royal views. When Grafton enmeshed himself in difficulties and blunders

they compounded his confusion until he resigned (January 27, 1770). On

February 10 they achieved their greatest victory when Frederick North

(known to us as Lord North, though he fell heir to this title only in 1790)

began his twelve years of service as first lord of the treasury.

CHAP.XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 70I

North was a weak, but not a bad, man. It was his sense of loyalty and pity

that kept him in office and earned him so unpleasant a place in history. Born

to fortune as son of the Earl of Guilford, he received all the advantages of

education and association, entered the House of Commons at the age of

twenty-two, and kept his seat there for nearly forty years. He made many

friends by his modesty, kindliness, affability, and humor.* But he followed

the conservative side too consistently to please anyone but the King. He

supported the Stamp Act, the expulsion of Wilkes, and (until its last stages)

the war with America. He defended the policies of George III even when

he doubted their wisdom; he considered himself the agent of the King, not

of the Parliament, much less of the people, and he seems to have been sincere

in his conviction that the sovereign had the legal right to choose ministers

and direct policy. Through North, and his tact in managing the House of

Commons— and through the use of funds voted by Parliament— George III

for a decade ruled England. Through his agents he bought seats and votes,

sold pensions and posts, subsidized journalists, and tried to shackle the press.

It is a measure of his courage and his obstinacy that it took a combination of

John Wilkes, "Junius," Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Franklin, and Washington to

defeat him.

IV. PARLIAMENT VERSUS THE PEOPLE

We read in Gibbon's ]ournal under September 23, 1762:

Colonel Wilkes dined with us. ... I scarcely ever met with a better com-

panion. He has inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humor, and a great deal of

knowledge, but is a thorough profligate in principle as in practice. His character

is infamous, his life strained with every vice, and his conversation full of blas-

phemy and bawdy. These morals he glories in— for shame is a weakness he has

long since surmounted. He told us himself that in this time of public dissension

he was resolved to make his fortune. 69

This was the view of a conservative who voted with the government in all

his eight years as a member of the House of Commons, and who could not

readily sympathize with a confessed and colorful enemy of Parliament and

the King. Wilkes, however, would have admitted most of the indictment.

He had discarded the ethics as well as the theology of Christianity, and en-

joyed flaunting his hedonism in the face of M.P.s who shared his morals but

were alarmed by his candor.

John Wilkes was the son of a malt distiller in Clerkenwell, north London.

He received a good education at Oxford and Leiden, enough to surprise

Johnson with his knowledge of the classics and his "manners of a gentle-

man." 70 At twenty he married "a lady half as old again as myself," but "of a

large fortune." 71 She was a Dissenter given to a solemn piety; he took to

* When one speaker complained that North slept through the oration, North replied that

it was unjust to complain of his taking a remedy which the honorable gentleman himself had

supplied. When an irate member demanded his head he answered that he would gladly sur-

render it provided he did not have to accept the member's head in exchange. 68

701 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

drink and mistresses. About 1757 he joined Sir Francis Dashwood, Bubb

Dodington, George Selwyn, the poet Charles Churchill, and the fourth Earl

of Sandwich in a "Hell-Fire Club" that met in the old Cistercian Abbey of

Medmenham on the banks of the Thames near Marlow. There, as "the Mad

Monks of Medmenham," they caricatured Roman Catholic rites by cele-

brating a "Black Mass" to Satan, and indulging their profane and Priapean

bent. 72

Through the influence of his associates, and by the expenditure of ,£7,000,

Wilkes was elected M.P. for Aylesbury (1757). He attached himself at

first to the elder Pitt, and, after 1760, to the foes of Bute. As Bute was sub-

sidizing Smollett's journal The Briton, Wilkes, aided by Churchill, began in

June, 1762, a counter weekly, The North Briton, which gained a wide read-

ership through the verve and wit of its style, and the virulence of its attacks

upon the ministry. In one number he denied at length— i.e., he spread— the

rumor that Bute had made a mistress of the King's mother. In No. 45 (April

23, 1763) he inveighed against Bute for violating England's agreement with

Prussia by concluding a separate peace with France, and for pretending, in a

"speech from the throne" presented by the minister in the name of the King,

that this treaty had the sanction of Frederick the Great.

This week has given the public the most abandoned instance of ministerial

effrontery ever attempted ... on mankind. The minister's speech of last

Tuesday is not to be paralleled in the annals of this country. I am in doubt

whether the imposition is greater on the sovereign or on the nation. Every

friend of his country must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable

qualities . . . can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the

most odious measures, and to the most unjustifiable public declarations. ... I

am sure all foreigners, especially the King of Prussia, will hold the minister in

contempt and abhorrence. He had made our sovereign declare: "My expecta-

tions have been fully answered by the happy effects which the several allies of

my crown have derived from the Definitive Treaty. The powers at war with

my good brother the King of Prussia have been induced to agree to such terms

of accommodation as that great prince has approved." The infamous fallacy of

this whole sentence is apparent to all mankind, for it is known that the King of

Prussia . . . was basely deserted by the Scottish prime minister of England.

... As to the "entire approbation" of Parliament which is so vainly boasted

of, the world knows how that was obtained. The large debt on the Civil List

. . . shows pretty clearly the transactions of the winter. 73

Though Wilkes had interpreted the "King's speech" as really Bute's,

George III took the article as a personal affront, and ordered Lords Hali-

fax and Egremont, then secretaries of state, to arrest all persons involved in

the publication of The North Briton's No. 45. They issued a general war-

rant— i.e., one not naming the persons to be apprehended; and on its vague

terms forty-nine persons were imprisoned, including Wilkes (April 30,

1763), despite his claim of immunity as a member of Parliament. Williams,

printer of the journal, was put in the pillory, but a crowd cheered him as a

martyr and raised ^200 for his relief. Wilkes applied to the Court of Com-

mon Pleas for a writ of habeas corpus, obtained it, argued his case, and won

CHAP. XXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 703

from Chief Justice Charles Pratt (a friend of Pitt) an order for his release on

the ground that his arrest violated parliamentary privilege. Wilkes sued

Halifax and others for illegal arrest and property injury, and obtained

^5,000 in damages. Pratt's condemnation of general warrants ended an abuse

almost as obnoxious to Britons as lettres de cachet to the French.

Tempting fate, Wilkes collaborated with Thomas Potter (son of the

Archbishop of Canterbury) in composing an Essay on Woman as a po-

etic parody of Pope's Essay on Man. It was a medley of obscenity and blas-

phemy, equipped with learned notes in the same key, ascribed to Bishop

William Warburton, who had added notes to Pope's poem. The little piece

was printed by Wilkes's press in his own home; it was not published, but

thirteen copies were struck off for a few friends. The King's ministers se-

cured the proof sheets, and persuaded the Earl of Sandwich to read them to

the House of Lords. The Earl did (November 15), to the amusement of the

peers, who knew his reputation for profligacy. Walpole tells us that they

"could not keep their countenance" 74 as Sandwich proceeded, but they

agreed that the poem was "a scandalous, obscene, and impious libel," and

asked the King to prosecute Wilkes for blasphemy. When Sandwich told

Wilkes that he would die either on the gallows or from venereal disease,

Wilkes answered, "That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your

principles or your mistress." 75

On that same November 1 5 Wilkes rose in the Commons to enter a com-

plaint of breach of privilege in his arrest. He was voted down, and Parlia-

ment ordered the hangman to publicly burn No. 45 of The North Briton.

On the seventeenth Samuel Martin, who had been abused in that issue, chal-

lenged Wilkes to a duel. They met in Hyde Park; Wilkes was seriously

wounded, and was bedded for a month. The people of London condemned

Martin as a hired assassin; they rioted when the hangman tried to burn No.

45; "Wilkes and liberty!" and "Number Forty-five" became watchwords of

a rising popular rebellion against both King and Parliament. 76 After a fren-

zied Scot tried to kill him, Wilkes left for France (December 26). On Jan-

uary 19, 1764, he was formally expelled from Parliament. On February 21

he was judged guilty, in the Court of King's Bench, for reprinting No. 45

and for printing the Essay on Woman; he was summoned to appear for sen-

tencing; he did not come, and on November 1 he was declared an outlaw.

For four years Wilkes wandered in France and Italy, fearing life imprison-

ment if he returned to England. In Rome he saw much of Winckelmann; in

Naples he met Boswell, who found him interesting company. "His lively and

energetic sallies on moral questions gave to my spirits a not unpleasant agita-

tion." 77 On the way back to Paris Wilkes visited Voltaire at Ferney, and

charmed the wittiest man in Europe with his wit.

The return of the liberals to power under Rockingham and Grafton led

Wilkes to hope for a pardon. He received private assurances that he would

not be molested if he remained quiet. He returned to England (1768), and

announced his candidacy for Parliament from London. Losing that contest,

he sought election from Middlesex, and received a substantial plurality after

704 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

a riotous campaign; that county, largely urbanized (it now includes north-

west London), was known for its radical leanings and its hostility to the

rising capitalism. On April 20 Wilkes submitted to the court, expecting to

have his sentence of outlawry annulled; it was, but he was condemned to a

fine of £ 1,000 and imprisonment for twenty-two months. An angry crowd

rescued him from the officers and bore him in triumph through the streets of

London. Having escaped from his admirers, he gave himself up to jail in St.

George's Fields. A mob assembled there on May 10 and proposed to free him

again. Soldiers fired upon the rioters; five were killed, fifteen wounded.

On February 4, 1769, the House of Commons again expelled him; Middle-

sex again elected him (February 16); he was again expelled; Middlesex again

elected him (April 13), this time by a vote of 1,143 to 2 9^ f° r Henry Lut-

trell; Parliament gave the seat to Luttrell on the ground that Wilkes, having

been expelled from Parliament, was legally disqualified during the tenure of

that Parliament. Luttrell was attacked as he left the House; he did not dare

appear on the streets. 78 Seventeen counties and many boroughs sent up ad-

dresses to the throne, complaining that the rights of freeholders to choose

their representatives in the House of Commons had been flagrantly violated.

The King, who had vigorously supported the expulsions, ignored the peti-

tions, whereupon one member, Colonel Isaac Barre, said in Parliament that

disregard of petitions "might teach the people to think of assassination." 79 *

John Home Tooke, a young parson who had surrendered his faith to the

charm of Voltaire, unfrocked himself and declared, after the repeated dis-

barments of Wilkes, that he would dye his (ministerial) black coat red.

Tooke led in organizing the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights

(1769), whose immediate purpose was to free Wilkes from jail, pay his

debts, and restore him to Parliament. In public meetings it agitated for the

dissolution of the current Parliament as irreclaimably corrupt, and as un-

responsive to the general will; it called for annual Parliaments elected by

universal adult male suffrage, and for the responsibility of ministries to Par-

liament in their policies and expenditures. 80 Every candidate for Parliament

should take oath never to accept any form of bribe, nor any post or pension

or other emolument from the Crown; and every member must defend the

views of his constituents even if contrary to his own. The grievances of Ire-

land should be redressed, and the American colonies should alone have the

right to tax their people. 81

In July, 1769, William Beckford, as lord mayor of London, and the city's

"livery," or uniformed officials, presented to the King an address censuring

the conduct of his ministers as subverting the constitution on which the

house of Hanover had been given the throne of England. On March 14,

1770, they sent up to the King a remonstrance that used the language of rev-

olution: "Under the secret and malign influence which, through each suc-

cessive administration, has defeated every good and suggested every bad

intention, the majority of the House of Commons have deprived your people

* The city of Wilkes-Barre, in Pennsylvania, was named for Wilkes and Barre, who strongly

supported the cause of the colonies in Parliament.

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 705

of their dearest rights. They have done a deed more ruinous in its conse-

quences than the levying of ship money by Charles I, or the pensioning

power assumed by James II." 82 It appealed to the King to restore "constitu-

tional government, . . . remove those evil ministers forever from your

councils," 83 and dissolve the present Parliament. The infuriated monarch,

laying his hand on his sword, exclaimed, "Sooner than yield to a dissolution,

I will have recourse to this." 84 London, rather than Paris, seemed near to rev-

olution in 1770.

Into this fiery vortex of politics "Junius" dropped the most incendiary

letters in the history of England. He kept his identity so secret, even from

his publishers, that to this day no one knows who he was, though most

guesses name Sir Philip Francis, whom we shall meet as the unrelenting foe

of Warren Hastings. The author had already signed some letters "Lucius,"

some "Brutus"; now he took the middle name of that Lucius Junius Brutus

who, according to Livy, had deposed a king (c. 5 10 b.c.) and founded the Ro-

man Republic. The virile command of English in these letters indicates that

"Junius" had the education, if not the manners, of a gentleman. He was

probably a man of means, for he took no money for the letters, whose force

and sting profitably enlarged the circulation of The Public Advertiser, in

which they appeared from November 21, 1768, to January 21, 1772.

In a "Dedication to the English Nation," which he prefixed to the col-

lected Letters of Junius (1772), the author proclaimed his purpose to "assert

the freedom of election, and vindicate your exclusive right to choose your

representatives." He took as his starting point the repeated disbarment of

Wilkes, and the arrest, by a general warrant, of everybody connected with

The North Briton's No. 45. "The liberty of the press is the Palladium of all

the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman; and the right of

juries ... is an essential part of our constitution." From this standpoint the

author reviewed the foundations of the British government. "The power of

the King, Lords, and Commons is not an arbitrary power. They are the

trustees, not the owners, of the estate. The fee simple is in us. ... I am per-

suaded you will not leave it to the choice of seven hundred persons, notori-

ously corrupted by the Crown, whether seven million of their equals shall be

freemen or slaves." 85

Junius proceeded to charge the administration of Grafton (1768-70)

with selling offices and corrupting Parliament by favors and bribes. Here the

attack became direct, and rose to such heat as to suggest a resolve to avenge

some personal injury or affront.

Come forward, thou virtuous minister, and tell the world by what interest

Mr. Hine has been recommended to so extraordinary a mark of his Majesty's

favor; what was the price of the patent he has bought? . . . You are basely

setting up the royal patronage to auction. . . . Do you think it possible such

enormities should escape without impeachment? It is indeed highly your inter-

est to maintain the present House of Commons. Having sold the nation in gross,

they will undoubtedly protect you in the detail, for while they patronize your

crimes, they feel for their own. 86

Jo6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

The attack continued long after Grafton had resigned, as in the letter of June

22, I771:

I cannot, with any decent appearance of propriety, call you the meanest and

the basest fellow in the Kingdom. I protest, my Lord, I do not think you so.

You will have a dangerous rival in that kind of fame ... as long as there is one

man living who thinks you worthy of his confidence, and fit to be trusted with

any share in his government.

This seemed to name George III himself as "the basest fellow in the King-

dom." Already, in Letter xxxv, Junius had proposed to attack the King

"with dignity and firmness, but not with respect": "Sir, it is the misfortune

of your life . . . that you should never have been acquainted with the lan-

guage of truth until you heard it in the complaints of your people. It is not,

however, too late to correct the error of your education." Junius advised

George to dismiss his Tory ministers, and to allow Wilkes to hold the seat

to which he had been elected. "The Prince, while he plumes himself upon

the security of his title to the crown, should remember that as it was acquired

by one revolution, it may be lost by another." 87

Henry Woodfall, who published this letter in The Public Advertiser, was

arrested on a charge of seditious libel. The jury, reflecting the feelings of the

middle class, refused to convict him, and he was released on payment of

costs. Junius had now reached the apex of his temerity and power. But the

King stood his ground, and strengthened his position by giving the chief

ministry to the amiable and immovable Lord North. Junius continued his

letters till 1772, and then left the field. We note that in 1772 Sir Philip Francis

left the War Office (of whose affairs Junius had shown intimate knowl-

edge), and departed for India.

The letters belong to the literary as well as the political history of Eng-

land, for they are a living example of the style to which many British states-

men could rise, or stoop, when passion inflamed— and anonymity protected

—them. Here is sterling English alloyed with abuse, but the abuse itself is

often a masterpiece of subtle thrust or piercing epigram. There is no mercy

here, no generosity, no thought that the accuser's own party shared in sin

and guilt with the accused. We sympathize with Sir William Draper, who,

answering Junius' letter of January 21, 1769, wrote: "The kingdom swarms

with such numbers of felonious robbers of private character and virtue that

no honest man is safe, especially as these cowardly base assassins stab in the

dark, without having the courage to sign their real names to their malevo-

lent, wicked productions." 88

The passage of the British press to ever greater freedom and influence was

marked by another conflict in these years. Toward 1768 some newspapers

began to print reports of the major speeches delivered in Parliament. Most

of these reports were partisan and inaccurate, some were imaginary, some

were scurrilous. In February, 1771, Colonel George Onslow complained to

the House of Commons that a journal had referred to him as "the little

CHAP. XXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 707

scoundrel" and "that paltry insignificant insect." On March 12 the House

ordered the arrest of the printers. They resisted, arrested their would-be

captors, and brought them before two aldermen (one of whom was Wilkes)

and the Lord Mayor, Brass Crosby. The latter voided the attempted appre-

hension of the printers on the ground that the charters of the city forbade

the arrest of a Londoner except on warrant issued by a city magistrate. The

Lord Mayor was committed to the Tower by order of Parliament, but the

populace rose in his support, attacked the carriages of M.P.s, threatened the

ministers, hissed the King, and invaded the House of Commons. The Lord

Mayor was released, and was acclaimed by an immense crowd. Newspapers

resumed their reports of parliamentary debates; Parliament ceased to prose-

cute the printers. In 1774 Luke Hansard, with the consent of Parliament, be-

gan to publish with promptness and accuracy the Journals of the House of

Commons, and he continued these till his death in 1828.

This historic victory of the British press affected the character of parlia-

mentary debates, and contributed to make the second half of the eighteenth

century the golden age of English eloquence. Orators became more cau-

tious, perhaps more dramatic, when they felt that they were being heard

throughout the British Isles. Some advance toward democracy was inevita-

ble now that political information and intelligence were more widely spread.

The business class, the intellectual community, and the rising radicals found

in the press a voice that became increasingly bold and effective, until it sub-

dued monarchy itself. Electors could know now how well their representa-

tives had defended them and their interests in the making and unmaking of

laws. Corruption continued, but diminished, for it could be more openly ex-

posed. The press became a third force that could sometimes hold the balance

between classes in the nation or parties in Parliament. Men who could buy or

control newspapers became as powerful as ministers.

The new freedom, like most liberties, was frequently abused. Sometimes

it became the instrument of aims more selfish and partisan, of opposition

coarser and more violent, than any that had appeared in Parliament; then it

deserved the name that Chatham gave it— "a chartered libertine." 89 In its turn

it had to be chastened by a fourth voice, public opinion, of which, however,

the press was partly the source, often the seducer, sometimes the voice.

Armed with broader knowledge, untitled men and women began to speak

out on the policies and methods of the government; they gathered in public

meetings, and their debates occasionally rivaled those of Parliament in influ-

ence on history. Now money as well as birth could claim the right to rule;

and occasionally, between the combatants, the people would be heard.

Wilkes was released from jail on April 17, 1770. Many houses were il-

luminated as for a festival, and the Lord Mayor displayed before his Man-

sion House a sign bearing the word liberty in letters three feet high. 90 Soon

Wilkes was elected alderman, then lord mayor, and in 1774 he was again

sent to Parliament by Middlesex. Now the Commons did not dare refuse

him his seat, and he kept it through all elections till 1790. He led a small

7° 8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

group of "radicals" in Parliament, who urged parliamentary reform and the

enfranchisement of the "lower orders."

Every free agent in this kingdom should, in my wish, be represented in Par-

liament. The mean and insignificant boroughs, so emphatically styled the rotten

part of our constitution, should be lopped off, and the rich, populous trading

towns— Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, and others— be permitted to

send deputies to the great council of the nation. ... I wish, Sir, an English

Parliament to speak the free, unbiased sense of the body of the English people. 91

Parliament waited fifty-six years to accept these reforms.

Wilkes refused to stand for re-election in 1790, and retired into private

life. He died in 1797, aged seventy, as poor as he was born, for he had been

scrupulously honest in all his offices. 9 ^

, 92

V. ENGLAND VERSUS AMERICA

In 1750 the population of the English colonies in North America was ap-

proximately 1,750,000; the population of England and Wales was some

6,i4o,ooo. 93 As the rate of growth in the colonies was much higher than in

the mother country, it was only a matter of time when the offspring would

rebel against the parent. Montesquieu had predicted this in 1730, even to

specifying that the break would be caused by British restrictions on Ameri-

can trade. The Marquis d'Argenson, about 1747, foretold that the colonies

would rise against England, form a republic, and become one of the great

powers. Vergennes, soon after England had taken Canada from France in

the Seven Years' War, told an English traveler: "England will soon repent

of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. They

stand no longer in need of her protection. She will call upon them to con-

tribute to the burdens they have helped to bring upon her, and they will an-

swer by striking off all dependence." 94

The British Crown claimed authority to veto laws passed by the colonial

assemblies. It did not often use that power; but when the Assembly of South

Carolina, "sensible of the great social and political danger arising from the

enormous multiplication of Negroes in the colony," passed a law imposing a

heavy duty upon the importation of slaves, the law was rescinded by the

Crown, for "the slave trade was one of the most lucrative branches of Eng-

lish commerce." 95 In economic matters Parliament assumed the right to legis-

late for all the British Empire, and usually its acts favored the motherland at

the expense of the colonies. Its aim was to make America a source of articles

not readily produced in England, and a market for British manufactured

goods. 96 It discouraged the growth of colonial industries that would compete

with England's. It forbade the colonists to manufacture cloth, hats, leather

wares, or iron products; 97 so the Earl of Chatham, otherwise so friendly to

the colonies, declared that he would not allow a single nail to be made in

America without the permission of Parliament. 98 The colonies were for-

bidden to set up steel furnaces or rolling mills.

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 709

Many checks were put upon American merchants. They could ship goods

only in British vessels; they could sell tobacco, cotton, silk, coffee, sugar,

rice, and many other articles only to British dominions; they could import

goods from the European Continent only after these had first been landed in

England, had paid a port duty, and had been transferred to British vessels.

To protect the export of English woolens to American colonies, colonial

merchants were prohibited from selling colonial woolens outside the colony

that had produced them." A heavy tax was laid by Parliament (1733) upon

American imports of sugar or molasses from any but British sources. The

colonists, especially in Massachusetts, evaded some of these regulations by

smuggling, and by secret selling of American products to foreign nations,

even to the French during the Seven Years' War. Of 1,500,000 pounds of tea

imported yearly into the American colonies, only some ten per cent con-

formed to the requirement of passing through English ports. 100 Much of the

whiskey produced by the sixty-three distilleries of Massachusetts in 1750

used sugar and molasses smuggled in from the French West Indies. 101

In justification of the restrictions, the British pointed out that other Euro-

pean nations, to protect or reward their own people, laid similar restraints

upon their colonies; that many American products enjoyed a virtual monop-

oly of the English market through their exemption from import dues; and

that England deserved some economic return for the cost of the protection

which her navy gave to colonial shipping, and which her armies gave to the

colonists against the French and the Indians in America. The expulsion of

French power from Canada, and of Spanish power from Florida, had freed

the English from dangers that had long troubled them. England felt war-

ranted in asking America to help her pay off the enormous debt— £140,-

000,000— which Great Britain had incurred in the Seven Years' War. The

colonists replied that they had furnished twenty thousand troops for that

war, and had themselves incurred a debt of ,£2,500,000.

In any case England decided to tax the colonies. In March, 1765, Gren-

ville proposed to Parliament that all colonial legal documents, all bills, diplo-

mas, playing cards, bonds, deeds, mortgages, insurance policies, and newspa-

pers be required to bear a stamp for which a fee would have to be paid to the

British government. Patrick Henry in Virginia, Samuel Adams in Massachu-

setts, advised rejection of the tax on the ground that by tradition— Magna

Carta, the Great Rebellion against Charles I, the "Bill of Rights"— English-

men could justly be taxed only with their consent or the consent of their au-

thorized representatives. How, then, could English colonials be taxed by a

Parliament in which they had no representation? Britons answered that dif-

ficulties of travel and communication made American representation in Par-

liament impracticable; and they pointed out that millions of adult English-

men had for centuries loyally accepted taxation by Parliament though they

had had no vote in electing it; they felt what Americans should feel— that

they were virtually represented in Parliament, because its members con-

sidered themselves as representing the whole British Empire.

The colonists were not convinced. Since Parliament had retained the

7 IQ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

power of taxing as the fulcrum of control over the king, so the colonies de-

fended their exclusive right to tax themselves as the only alternative to finan-

cial oppression by men whom they had never seen, and who had never

touched American soil. Lawyers evaded the requirement to use stamped

documents; some newspapers carried a death's head where the stamp should

have appeared; Americans began to boycott British goods; merchants can-

celed orders for British products, and some refused payment of their debts

to England till the Stamp Act should be repealed. 102 Colonial maidens

pledged themselves to accept no suitors who would not denounce the Stamp

Act. 103 Popular resentment rose to the pitch of rioting in several cities; in

New York the governor (appointed by the King) was hanged in effigy; in

Boston the home of the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, was

burned down; the distributors of the stamps were forced, under threat of

hanging, to resign their offices. Feeling the boycott, British merchants called

for a repeal of the act; petitions were sent to the government from London,

Bristol, Liverpool, and other cities, stating that without repeal many English

manufacturers would be ruined; already thousands of workers had been dis-

missed because of lack of orders from America. Perhaps it was in recognition

of these appeals that Pitt, after a long illness, made a dramatic return to Parlia-

ment, and declared (January 14, 1766), "It is my opinion that this kingdom

has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies." He ridiculed the "idea that the

colonies are virtually represented in the House." When George Grenville

interrupted and implied that Pitt was encouraging sedition, Pitt answered

defiantly, "I rejoice that America has resisted." 104

On March 18 Lord Rockingham persuaded Parliament to repeal the stamp

tax. To appease "the King's Friends" he added to the repeal a "declaratory

act" reaffirming the authority of the king, with the consent of Parliament, to

make laws binding on the colonies, and the authority of Parliament to tax

the British colonies. The Americans accepted the repeal, and ignored the

declaratory act. Reconciliation now seemed possible. But in July the Rock-

ingham ministry fell, and in the Grafton ministry that followed it the Chan-

cellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, renewed the attempt to make

the colonies pay for the administrative and military forces needed to protect

them against internal disorder or external attack. On May 13, 1767, he pro-

posed to Parliament that new duties be laid upon glass, lead, paper, and tea

imported into America. The revenue from these imposts was to be used by

the King to pay the salaries of the governors and judges appointed by him

for America; any surplus would be directed to maintain the British troops

there. Parliament approved. Townshend died a few months later.

The Americans resisted the new duties as disguised taxation. They had

kept the royal troops and governors under control by making them largely

dependent for their sustenance upon funds voted by the colonial assemblies;

to surrender this power of the purse to the King would be to yield the di-

rection of the American government to royal authority. The assemblies

united in urging a renewed boycott of British goods. Efforts to collect the

new duties were violently resisted. Lord North sought a compromise by

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 7 1 I

canceling all the Townshend imposts except for a threepence-per-pound

duty on tea. The colonies relaxed their boycott, but resolved to drink only

such tea as had been smuggled in. When three ships of the East India Com-

pany tried to land 298 chests of tea at Boston, half a hundred irate colonials,

disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the vessels, overpowered the crews,

and emptied the cargoes into the sea (December 16, 1773). Riots in other

American ports frustrated further efforts to bring in the company's tea.

The rest of the story belongs mostly to America, but the part played in it

by British statesmen, orators, writers, and public opinion forms a vital ele-

ment in the history of England. Just as in America a numerous and active

minority called for loyalty to the mother country and its government, so in

England, while the public generally supported the martial measures of Lord

North's ministry, a minority, represented in Parliament by Chatham, Burke,

Fox, Horace Walpole, and Wilkes, labored for peace on terms favorable to

America. Some saw in this division of English opinion a revival of the oppo-

sition between Royalists and Parliamentarians in 1642. The Anglican Church

fully supported the war against the colonies; so did the Methodists, following

Wesley's lead; but many other Dissenters regretted the conflict, for they

remembered that a majority of the colonists had come from Dissenting

groups. Gibbon agreed with Johnson in condemning the colonies, but David

Hume, nearing death, warned Britain that the attempt to coerce America

would lead to disaster. 105 The business interests veered to support of the

King as war orders brought them profits. War, Burke mourned, "is indeed

become a substitute for commerce. . . . Great orders for provisions and

stores of all kinds . . . keep up the spirits of the mercantile world, and in-

duce them to consider the American war not so much their calamity as their

resource." 106

The liberals feared that the war would strengthen the Tories against the

Whigs, and the King against Parliament; one liberal, the Duke of Richmond,

thought of moving to France to escape royal despotism. 107 George III gave

some excuse for such fears. He took full charge of the war, even of its mili-

tary details; Lord North and the other ministers, often against their private

judgment, obeyed the royal lead. The King felt that if the Americans suc-

ceeded England would face revolt in other colonies, and would finally be

confined to its island. The Earl of Chatham, however, warned Parliament

that the forcible suppression of America would be a victory for the princi-

ples of Charles I and James II. On November 20, 1777, when British armies

had suffered many defeats in America, and France was sending subsidies to

the colonies, Chatham, coming to the House of Lords as if from the grave,

heard with mounting impatience the ministerial "address from the throne,"

and rose to make one of the greatest speeches in the records of British elo-

quence. Here history and literature unite:

I rise, my lords, to declare my sentiments on this most solemn and serious

subject. ... I cannot concur in a blind and servile address which approves,

and endeavors to sanctify, the monstrous measures that have heaped disgrace

and misfortune upon us— that have brought ruin to our doors. This, my lords,

712 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

is a perilous and tremendous moment! It is not a time for adulation. The

smoothness of flattery cannot now avail. ... It is now necessary to instruct

the throne in the language of truth. . . . This, my lords, is our duty; it is the

proper function of this noble assembly, sitting upon our honors in this House,

the hereditary council of the Crown. And who is the minister— where is the

minister— that has dared to suggest to the throne the contrary, unconstitutional

language this day delivered from it? The accustomed language from the throne

has been application to Parliament for advice. . . . But on this day, and in this

extreme momentous exigency, no reliance is reposed on our constitutional

counsels, no advice is asked from the sober and enlightened care of Parlia-

ment, but the Crown, from itself and by itself, declares an unalterable deter-

mination to pursue measures . . . dictated and forced upon us, . . . which

have reduced this late flourishing Empire to ruin and contempt. "But yester-

day, and England might have stood against the world; now none so poor to do

her reverence." . . .

My lords, you cannot conquer America. . . . You may swell every expense

and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance

you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German

prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles . . .; your efforts are

forever vain and impotent— doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you

rely, for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies.

... If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was

landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms— never— never-

never! 108

Burke used all his powers of reasoning in the effort to dissuade Parliament

and the ministry from a policy of force against America. From 1774 to 1780

he represented in Parliament the city of Bristol, whose merchants at first

opposed war with America; 109 he was also at this time a salaried agent of the

state of New York. 110 He did not, like Chatham, deny the right of Parlia-

ment to tax the colonies, and he did not support the appeal of the colonists

to abstract theories of "natural right." He brought the question down to

where hardheaded men of action could understand him: Was it practical to

tax America? In his speech on American taxation (April 19, 1774) he con-

demned not only the Townshend Acts but the threepence tax on tea; he

warned that if taxes were added to the industrial and commercial restrictions

already laid upon America the colonists would persist in a revolt that would

break up the nascent British Empire and tarnish the prestige of the Parlia-

ment.

Beaten on this issue, he renewed, on March 22, 1775, his plea for concilia-

tion. He pointed out that trade with America had grown tenfold between

1704 and 1772, 111 and he asked was it wise to disrupt, perhaps sacrifice, that

commerce with war. He feared that war with the colonies would leave Eng-

land open to attack by a foreign enemy; this happened in 1778. He agreed

that American representation in Parliament was made impracticable by the

sea; opposuit natura\ he asked only that England rely not upon taxation but

upon voluntary grants from the colonial assemblies; such grants might well

exceed the proceeds of direct taxation after the costs of forcible collection

had been deducted. 112

His motion to this effect was rejected 270 to 78, but he had the solace of

CHAP.XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 713

winning to his cause the eloquence and skill of Charles James Fox; so began

a friendship cemented by the American Revolution and sundered by the

French. Gibbon called Fox's speech of October 31, 1776, the most masterly

that he had ever heard, and Horace Walpole declared it "one of his [Fox's]

finest and most animated orations." 113 Walpole ranged himself on the side of

conciliation; he deplored the collapse of British statesmanship under Lord

North; and on September 1 1, 1775, he wrote to Horace Mann:

The Parliament is to meet on the 20th of next month and vote 26,000 sea-

men. What a paragraph of blood is there! With what torments must liberty be

preserved in America! In England what can save it? Oh, mad, mad England!

What frenzy, to throw away its treasures, lay waste its empire of wealth, and

sacrifice its freedom, that its prince may be the arbitrary lord of boundless des-

erts in America, and of an impoverished, depopulated, and thence insignificant

island in Europe! 114

Not the fervor of Chatham, Burke, and Fox, but the victories and diploma-

cies of the colonies persuaded the English people, and then their government,

to thoughts of peace. Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga (October 17, 1777)

was the turning point; for the first time England appreciated Chatham's

warning, "You cannot conquer America." When France recognized the

"United States of America," and joined in war against England (February 6,

1778), the judgment of French statesmen confirmed Chatham's, and the

weight of French arms and of a restored French navy was added to the bur-

den borne by the British nation. Lord North himself lost heart, and begged

permission to resign; the King, loading him with gifts, bade him stay on.

Many prominent Englishmen now felt that only a government led by the

Earl of Chatham could win the colonies back from the French alliance to

union with England. But George would not hear of it. "I solemnly declare,"

he told North, "that nothing shall bring me to treat personally with Lord

Chatham." 115 The Earl came to the House of Lords for the last time on April

7, 1778, supported by crutches and his son William, his face ghastly with

the nearness of death, his voice so weak as to be barely heard. Again he

counseled conciliation, but stood out "against the dismemberment of this

ancient and most noble monarchy" by a grant of independence to Amer-

ica. 116 The Duke of Richmond answered that only by such a grant could

America be won away from France. Chatham tried to rise and speak again,

but he collapsed in an apoplectic fit. He died on May 11, 1778. Parliament

voted him a public funeral, with a tomb and monument in Westminster

Abbey. He was, by general consent, the greatest Englishman of his time.

Events hurried to complete the catastrophe that he had predicted. In June,

1779, Spain joined France in war against England; it laid siege to Gibraltar,

and sent its fleet to share in the attack upon British shipping. In August a

combined flotilla of sixty French and Spanish vessels entered the English

Channel; England feverishly prepared to resist invasion; sickness disabled

the hostile fleet and compelled it to retire to Brest. In March, 1780, Russia,

Denmark, and Sweden united in a "Declaration of Armed Neutrality,"

which vowed to resist England's practice of boarding neutral vessels in

7H ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

search of enemy goods; soon other neutrals signed the declaration. English

search of Dutch vessels continued; it found evidence of secret agreements

between the city of Amsterdam and an American negotiator. England de-

manded the punishment of the Amsterdam officials; the Dutch government

refused; England declared war (December, 1780). Now almost all the Baltic

and Atlantic states were allied against the England that only recently had

ruled the seas.

The mood of Parliament reflected the multiplication of disasters. Resent-

ment was mounting against the King's frustration of his minister's desire to

end the war. On April 6, 1780, John Dunning had offered to the House of

Commons a motion declaring "that the influence of the Crown has increased,

is increasing, and ought to be diminished"; the motion was approved by a

vote of 233 to 215. On January 23, 1781, the younger Pitt took his seat in

the House; in his second speech he denounced the war with America as

"most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diaboli-

cal." 117 Fox joyfully welcomed Pitt to the ranks of the opposition, not fore-

seeing that this youth was soon to be his strongest foe.

On October 19, 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at

Yorktown. "Oh, God, it is all over!" exclaimed Lord North, but the King

insisted that the war must go on. In February and March, 1782, news came

that Minorca had been taken by the Spaniards, and several West Indian

islands by the French. Public meetings throughout England clamored for

peace. North's majority in the Commons fell to twenty-two, to nineteen,

to one— on a motion "that the House could no longer repose confidence in

the present ministers" (March 15, 1782); this set an historic precedent for

Parliament's procedure in forcing a change of ministry. On March 1 8 North

wrote to George III a letter telling him, in effect, that both the royal policy

toward America and the attempt to establish the supremacy of the king over

Parliament had failed.

Your Majesty is well apprized that in this country the Prince on the throne

cannot, with prudence, oppose the deliberate resolution of the House of Com-

mons. . . . The Parliament have uttered their sentiments, and their sentiments,

whether just or erroneous, must ultimately prevail. Your Majesty . . . can lose

no honor if you yield. 118

On March 20, 1782, after twelve years of patient service and submission,

Lord North resigned. George III, his spirit broken, wrote a letter of abdi-

cation, but did not send it. He accepted a ministry of triumphant liberals:

Rockingham, the Earl of Shelburne, Charles James Fox, Burke, and Sheri-

dan. When Rockingham died (July 1), Shelburne succeeded him as first

lord of the treasury. Fox, Burke, and Sheridan, disliking Shelburne, resigned.

Shelburne proceeded to arrange a treaty of peace (Paris, November 30,

1782; Paris and Versailles, January 20 and September 3, 1783) that surren-

dered Minorca and Florida to Spain, and Senegal to France, and acknowledged

not only the independence of the American colonies but their right to all the

territory between the Alleghenies, Florida, the Mississippi, and the Great

Lakes.

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 715

The English people had been eager for peace, but they resented the ces-

sion of so much terrain to the colonies. Criticism of Shelburne reached such

bitterness that he submitted his resignation (February 24, 1783). As the

quarrel between Shelburne and Fox had divided the liberal Whigs into fac-

tions neither of which was strong enough to control Parliament, Fox agreed

to form a coalition ministry with his old enemy Lord North. Burke again

became paymaster of the forces. Sheridan, who was always in debt, was

made secretary of the treasury. Both Fox and Burke had for some time been

studying the behavior of Englishmen in India, and that country now re-

placed America as the most urgent problem in British politics.

VI. ENGLAND AND INDIA

The British East India Company had been reorganized in 1709 as the

"United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies." Its

charter from the British government entitled it to a monopoly of British

trade with India. It was managed by a chairman and twenty-four directors

annually elected by a "Court of Proprietors" in which every holder of

^500 or more of stock had one vote. In India the company became a mili-

tary as well as a commercial organization, and fought Dutch, French, and

native armies for pieces of the crumbling empire of the Moguls. It was in one

of these wars that Siraj-ud-daula, the Nawab (Viceroy) of Bengal, captured

Calcutta from the company, and imprisoned 146 Europeans in the "Black

Hole of Calcutta"— a room eighteen by fourteen feet, with only two small

windows; 123 of the prisoners died overnight (June 20-^21, 1756) from heat

or asphyxiation.

Robert Clive, governor of Fort St. David, led a small force to recapture

Calcutta for the company. He joined in the plot of Mir Jafar, a noble at

Siraj-ud-daula's court, to overthrow the Viceroy; with nine hundred Euro-

pean and 2,300 native troops he defeated fifty thousand men at Plassey

(June 23, 1757); Siraj-ud-daula was put to death, and Mir Jafar was set up

in his place as nawab of Bengal. Clive entered the capital, Murshidabab, as a

conqueror. It seemed to him equal to London in size and perhaps superior in

wealth. In the Nawab's treasury he saw an incredible accumulation of ru-

pees, jewels, gold, silver, and other riches. Invited to name his reward for

enthroning Mir Jafar, he asked £ 160,000 for himself, £ 500,000 for his army

and navy, £ 24,000 for each member of the company's governing board, and

£ 1 ,000,000 as indemnity for damage to the company's property in Calcutta.

It was to this occasion that Clive referred when he told the House of Com-

mons that he marveled at his own moderation. 119 He received a total of

;£ 200,000 as presents from Mir Jafar, 120 and was acknowledged as British

governor of Bengal. The company, by paying a yearly rental of ^27,000

to Mir Jafar, was recognized as supreme landlord of 882 square miles around

Calcutta. In 1759, in return for aid in suppressing a rebellion, Mir Jafar

agreed to remit to Clive annually the rental paid by the company.

7 l 6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

Secure from competition, the company exploited with scant mercy the

natives subject to its rule. Armed with superior weapons, it made Indian

rulers pay heavily for British protection. Far from supervision by the British

government, and immune to the Ten Commandments east of Suez, its senior

officials made huge profits in trade, and returned to England as nabobs capa-

ble of buying, without serious injury to their capital, a pocket borough or a

member of Parliament.

Clive came home to England in 1760, aged thirty-five, expecting to enjoy

fame and wealth. He bought enough boroughs to command a bloc in the

Commons, and was himself elected from Shrewsbury. Some directors of the

East India Company, feeling that he had stolen beyond his years, attacked

him for using forged documents in dealing with Siraj-ud-daula and Mir Ja-

far; but when word reached London that native revolts, official venality, and

administrative incompetence were endangering the position of the company

in India, Clive was hurried back to Calcutta (1765) as governor of Bengal.

There he labored to stem corruption among his aides, mutiny among his

troops, and recurrent uprisings of native rulers against the company. On

August 12, 1765, he persuaded the helpless Mogul Shah Alam to give the

company full financial control of the provinces of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa,

with a population of thirty million souls and an annual revenue of ,£4,000,-

000. This, and Clive's victory at Plassey, created the British Empire in India.

His health shattered by two years of strife, Clive returned to England in

January, 1767. The attack upon him by company directors was renewed,

and was seconded by officials whose extortions he had checked. News of a

great famine in India, and of native attacks upon company strongholds,

shared in causing a panic in which prominent Englishmen suffered severe

losses. In 1772 two parliamentary committees investigated Indian affairs, and

revealed such exactions and cruelties that Horace Walpole cried out: "We

have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! We have murdered, deposed, plun-

dered, usurped. Nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three

millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by the servants

of the East India Company?" 121 In 1773 one of the investigating committees

called upon Clive to account to the House of Commons for his methods and

gains in India. He admitted nearly all the facts, defended them as warranted

by local customs and the necessities of the situation, and added that when the

members came to judge of his honor they should not forget their own. The

House voted, 155 to 95, that he had received ,£234,000 during his first ad-

ministration of Bengal, but that he "did at the same time render great and

meritorious services to his country." 122 A year later, aged forty-nine, Clive

killed himself (November 22, 1774).

In 1773 Lord North put through Parliament a regulatory act that ad-

vanced a loan of ,£1,400,000 to the company to save it [and its parliamen-

tary shareholders] from bankruptcy, and brought all company-ruled terri-

tory in India under the presidency of Bengal, which in turn would be re-

sponsible to the British government. Warren Hastings was appointed gover-

nor of Bengal.

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 717

He had risen to this position from lowly origins. His mother died in giving

him birth; his father went off to adventure and death in the West Indies. An

uncle sent the boy to Westminster School, but in 1 749 the uncle died, and

Warren, aged seventeen, sailed to seek fortune in India. He enrolled as a

volunteer under Clive, shared in the recapture of Calcutta, showed diligence

and ability in administration, and was appointed to the council governing

company affairs in Bengal. In 1764 he returned to England. Four years later

the directors persuaded him to join the Council of Madras. On his way to

India he met Baron Imhof and his wife, Marion, who became Hastings' mis-

tress and then his wife. He did well in Madras, and in 1774 he began his

turbulent rule as governor of Bengal.

He worked hard, but his methods were dictatorial, and some of his meas-

ures provided material for attacks upon him by Sir Philip Francis in the

Bengal Council, as later by Burke in Parliament. When Maratha tribes re-

stored Shah Alam to the Mogul throne at Delhi, and he made over to them

those districts of Kora and Allahabad which Clive had assigned to him, Has-

tings sold the districts to the Nawab of Oudh for fifty lacs of rupes ($20,-

000,000?), and assigned company troops to help the Nawab recover the

region. He allowed the Nawab to use company troops to invade and

appropriate the territory of Rohilkhand, whose chief (said the Nawab)

owed him money; the company received a large sum for these soldiers. Has-

tings' action clearly violated orders given him by the directors; 123 however,

those directors reckoned the worth of a governor by the money he sent back

to England.

An Indian official, Nuncomar, accused Hastings of accepting a bribe.

Francis and other councilors credited the charge, and alleged that there was

"no species of peculation from which the Honorable Governor has thought

it reasonable to abstain." 124 Nuncomar was arrested on a charge of forgery,

was convicted, and was put to death (1775). Hastings was suspected of hav-

ing influenced the chief justice, Sir Elijah Impey (formerly a fellow student

at Winchester), to exact an unusually severe penalty. In 1780 Hastings

promoted Impey to an additional post bringing £ 6,500 a year. Mutual re-

crimination between Hastings and Francis led to a duel in which Francis

was seriously wounded.

Haidar Ali, maharajah of Mysore, thought the quarrels between Hastings

and his council offered an opportunity for expelling the company from In-

dia. Supported by the French, he attacked company strongholds, and won

some alarming victories (1780). Hastings sent troops and money from

Bengal to oppose him; Haidar Ali died (1782), but his son Tipu Sahib car-

ried on the war till his final defeat in 1792. Probably it was to finance these

campaigns that Hastings resorted to money-raising schemes that led to his

impeachment.

He demanded from Chait Singh, rajah of Benares, a war subsidy addi-

tional to the revenue which that district annually paid to the company. The

Rajah pleaded inability to comply. Hastings led a small force to Benares

(1781), deposed Chait Singh, and exacted double the revenue from Chait's

7 18 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

successor. — The Nawab of Oudh, remiss in his payments to the company,

explained that he could make these payments if the company would help him

compel his mother and grandmother, the begums (princesses) of Oudh, to

release to him some of the ^2,000,000 left them by the Nawab's father. The

mother had already yielded him a large sum on his promise to ask for no

more; the company, over Hastings' protest, made a like promise. Hastings

advised the Nawab to ignore the promise. He sent company troops to Fyza-

bad; by torture and near-starvation they forced the eunuch servitors of the

princesses to surrender the treasure (1781). Out of this the Nawab paid his

dues to the company. 125

Meanwhile Sir Philip Francis, having recovered from his wounds, re-

turned to England (1781), and expounded to the directors and to his friends

in Parliament what he considered to be the crimes of Hastings. In 1782 the

House of Commons censured Hastings and other company agents as having

"in sundry instances acted in a manner repugnant to the honor and policy of

the nation," and ordered the directors to recall them. The directors issued

such an order, but the Court of Proprietors countermanded it, probably be-

cause the Mysore revolt was continuing.

In November, 1783, Charles James Fox, as secretary of state for foreign

affairs in the coalition ministry, offered Parliament an "India Reform Bill"

that would have put the East India Company under control of commission-

ers appointed by the ministry. Critics moaned that the bill would give the

Fox-Burke Whigs a rich well of patronage. It passed the House, but the

King sent word to the Lords that he would consider as his enemy any man

who voted for the measure; they voted against it, 95 to 76. The Commons

filed a formal protest that this royal interference with legislation was a scan-

dalous breach of parliamentary privilege. The King, claiming that the coali-

tion ministry had lost the confidence of Parliament, dismissed it (December

18, 1783), and invited William Pitt, aged twenty-four, to form a new gov-

ernment. Believing that he could win a national election, George III dis-

solved the Parliament (March 23, 1784), and ordered his agents to spread

the royal wishes and plums among the electorate to insure the return of a

conservative majority. The Parliament that assembled on May 18 was over-

whelmingly for Pitt and the King.

Pitt was a master of political administration and management. His meticu-

lous devotion to his task, his detailed knowledge of affairs, his habit of care-

ful reflection and prudent judgment gave him a superiority which nearly all

his fellow ministers soon conceded. Now for the first time since Robert

Walpole (for whom his son had used the term in 1773 126 ), England had a

"prime" minister, for no important action was taken by Pitt's colleagues

without his consent. In effect he established "cabinet government"— the as-

sembled deliberation and united responsibility of the leading ministers under

one leadership. Though Pitt had assumed office as favoring the royal au-

thority, his hard work and wide information gradually raised him to a posi-

tion where he guided rather than followed the King. After George Ill's

second seizure (1788) it was Pitt who ruled England.

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 719

His special acquaintance with business and finance enabled him to restore

a treasury dangerously burdened by two major wars in one generation. Pitt

had read Adam Smith; he listened to merchants and manufacturers; he re-

duced import dues, negotiated a treaty of lowered tariffs with France

(1786), and delighted industrial leaders by declaring that manufacturers

should in general be free from taxes. He made up for this by taxing con-

sumption: ribbons, gauzes, gloves, hats, candles, couches, salt, wine, bricks,

tiles, paper, windows; many houses boarded up some windows to reduce the

tax. 127 By 1788 the budget was balanced, and England had escaped the gov-

ernmental bankruptcy that was leading France to revolution.

Before the election Pitt had introduced his "First India Bill," which had

been defeated. Now he offered a second bill: a Board of Control appointed

by the King was to manage the political relations of the East India Company,

while commercial relations and patronage were left in company hands, sub-

ject to royal veto. The bill was passed (August 9, 1784), and governed

British-Indian affairs till 1858.

Fox and Burke considered this arrangement a shameful surrender to a

company notorious for corruption and crime. Burke had special reasons for

dissatisfaction. His patron Lord Verney, his brother Richard Burke, and his

relative William Burke had invested in the East India Company, and had

suffered heavy losses in the fluctuations of its stock. 128 When William Burke

went to India Edmund recommended him to Sir Philip Francis as one whom

he loved tenderly; William was made a paymaster, and proved "as corrupt as

any." 129 Francis, back in England, gave Burke and Fox his version of Has-

tings' administration; he was one source of Burke's remarkable knowledge of

Indian affairs. The attack upon Hastings by the liberal Whigs was pre-

sumably motivated in part by desire to discredit and overthrow Pitt's min-

istry. 130

In January, 1785, Hastings resigned, and returned to England. He hoped

that his long years of administration, his restoration of the company to sol-

vency, and his rescue of British power in Madras and Bombay would be

rewarded with a pension, if not with a peerage. In the spring of 1786 Burke

asked the House of Commons for the official records of Hastings' rule in

India. Some were refused, some were given him by the ministers. In April

he laid before the House a bill of charges against the ex-governor of Bengal.

Hastings read to the House a detailed reply. In June Burke presented charges

relating to the Rohilkhand war, and asked for the impeachment of Hastings;

the Commons refused to prosecute. On June 1 3 Fox told the story of Chait

Singh, and asked for impeachment. Pitt surprised his cabinet by voting with

Fox and Burke; many of his party followed his lead, which may have been

designed to dissociate the ministry from Hastings' fate. The motion to im-

peach was carried 1 19 to 79.

The prorogation of Parliament and the pressure of other issues interrupted

the drama, but it was resumed with eclat on February 7, 1787, when Sheri-

dan made what Fox and Burke and Pitt called the best speech ever heard in

the House of Commons. 131 (Sheridan was offered ^1,000 for a corrected

7 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

copy of the address; he never found time to do this, and we know it only

from subdued summaries.) With all the art of a man born to the theater, and

all the fervor of a romantic spirit, Sheridan recounted the spoliation of the

begums of Oudh. After speaking for over five hours, he demanded that

Hastings be impeached. Again Pitt voted for the prosecution; the motion was

carried, 175 to 68. On February 8 the House appointed a committee of

twenty— with Burke, Fox, and Sheridan at their head— to prepare the articles

of impeachment. These were presented, and on May 9 the House ordered

"Mr. Burke, in the name of the House of Commons, ... to go to the bar of

the House of Lords and impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, ... of high

crimes and misdemeanors." Hastings was arrested and brought before the

peers, but was released on bail.

After a long delay the trial began, February 13, 1788, in Westminster

Hall. All lovers of literature will recall Macaulay's gorgeous description 132

of that historic assemblage: the lords sitting in ermine and gold as the high

court of the realm; before them Hastings, pale and ill, aged fifty-three,

height five feet six inches, weight 122 pounds; the judges under their great

ear-lapping wigs; the family of the King; the members of the House of Com-

mons; the galleries crowded with ambassadors, princesses, and duchesses;

Mrs. Siddons in her stately beauty; Sir Joshua Reynolds amid so many no-

tables whom he had portrayed; and on one side the committee, now called

the "managers," ready to present the case for impeachment. Clerks read the

charges and Hastings' reply. For four days, in the most powerful speech of

his career, Burke laid upon the accused an overwhelming mass of accusa-

tions. Then, on February 15, he made the historic hall ring with his passion-

ate demand:

I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, . . . whose

Parliamentary trust he has betrayed. . . .

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and

liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he

has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name, and by the virtue, of those eternal laws of jus-

tice which he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly out-

raged, injured, and oppressed in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and

condition of life. 133

With a hundred interruptions the trial proceeded, as Burke, Fox, Sheridan,

and others told the story of Hastings' administration. When it became

known that at noon on June 3 Sheridan would present the evidence con-

cerning the begums of Oudh, the streets leading to Westminster Hall were

crowded from eight in the morning with persons, many of high rank, anx-

ious to find admittance. Some who had secured cards of admission sold them

for fifty guineas ($1,500?) each. Sheridan understood that a dramatic per-

formance was expected of him; he gave it. He spoke at four sittings; on the

final day (June 13, 1788), after holding the floor for five hours, he sank

exhausted into the arms of Burke, who embraced him. Gibbon, who was in

the gallery, described Sheridan as "a good actor," and remarked how well

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 72 1

the orator looked when the historian called upon him the next morning. 134

That speech was the climax of the trial. Each of the score of charges re-

quired investigation; the lords took their time, and may have dallied to let

the effect of eloquence wear off, and let interest in the case be diverted to

other events. These came. In October, 1788, King George went mad, quite

seriously mad, borne down by the stress of the trial and the misconduct of

his son. George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, was fat, good-natured,

generous, wasteful, and amorous. He had maintained a succession of mis-

tresses, and had accumulated debts which his father or the nation paid. In

1785 he had privately married Mrs. Maria Anne Fitzherbert, a devout Ro-

man Catholic, already twice widowed, and six years older than the Prince.

The Whigs, led by Fox, proposed to set up a regency under the Prince, who

sat up through two nights waiting for the King to be declared incompetent.

George III confused matters by having lucid intervals, in which he talked

of Garrick and Johnson, sang snatches of Handel, and played the flute. In

March, 1789, he recovered, shed his strait jacket, and resumed the forms of

rule.

The French Revolution provided another diversion from the trial. Burke

gave up the chase of Hastings and ran to the aid of Marie Antoinette. The

immoderation of his speeches ended the remains of his popularity; he com-

plained that the members of Parliament slipped away when he began to

speak. Most of the press was hostile to him; he charged that £20,000 had

been used in buying journalists to attack him and defend Hastings; and un-

questionably a large part of Hastings' fortune had been so spent. 135 It must

have been no surprise to Burke when, at last, eight years after the impeach-

ment, the House of Lords acquitted Hastings (1795). The general feeling

was that the verdict was just: the accused had in many respects been guilty,

but he had saved India for England, and had been punished by a trial that

had broken his health and his hopes and had left him tarnished in reputation

and ruined in purse.

Hastings survived all his accusers. The East India Company rescued him

from insolvency by voting him a gift of £90,000. He bought back his

family's ancestral estate at Daylesford, restored it, and lived in Oriental lux-

ury. In 181 3, aged eighty-one, he was asked to testify on Indian affairs be-

fore the House of Commons; he was received there with acclamation and

reverence, his services remembered, his sins washed away by time. Four

years later he passed away, and of his tumultuous generation only one re-

mained—the blind and imbecile King.

VII. ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

After almost exhausting himself in his war against the East India Com-

pany, Burke took on the French Revolution as his personal enemy, and in

the course of this new campaign he made a major contribution to political

philosophy.

He had predicted the Revolution twenty years before its coming. "Under

7 22 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

such extreme straitness and distraction labors the whole of French finances,

so far does their charge outrun their supply in every particular, that no man,

. . . who has considered their affairs with any degree of attention or infor-

mation, but must hourly look for some extraordinary convulsion in that

whole system; the effect of which on France, and even on all Europe, it is

difficult to conjecture." 136 In 1773 he visited France; at Versailles he saw

Marie Antoinette, then dauphine; he never forgot that vision of youthful

beauty, happiness, and pride. He formed a favorable opinion of the French

nobility, and still more of the French clergy. He was shocked by the anti-

Catholic, often antireligious, propaganda of the philosophes, and on his re-

turn to England he warned his countrymen against atheism as "the most

horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society." 137

When the Revolution came he was alarmed by the acclaim it received

from his friend Fox, who hailed the fall of the Bastille as "the greatest event

that ever happened in the world, and ... the best." 138 Radical ideas stem-

ming from the campaigns of Wilkes and the Society of Supporters of the

Bill of Rights had slowly spread in England. One obscure writer, in 1761,

proposed communism as a cure for all social ills except overpopulation,

which, he feared, might cancel all attempts to relieve poverty. 139 A Society

for Commemorating the Revolution (of 1688) had been formed in 1788;

its membership included prominent clergymen and peers. At its meeting on

November 4, 1789, it was so stirred by a Unitarian preacher, Richard Price,

that it sent an address of congratulations to the National Assembly at Paris,

expressing the hope that "the glorious example given in France" might "en-

courage other nations to assert the inalienable rights of mankind." 140 The

message was signed by the third Earl Stanhope, president of the society and

brother-in-law of William Pitt.

That sermon and that message aroused Burke to fear and wrath. He was

now sixty years old, and had reached the right to be conservative. He was

religious, and owned a large estate. The French Revolution seemed to him

not only "the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world," 141

but the most outrageous attack upon religion, property, order, and law. On

February 9, 1790, he told the House of Commons that if any friend of his

should concur in any measures tending to introduce into England such

democracy as was taking form in France, he would renounce that friendship,

however long established and dearly cherished. Fox soothed the orator with

his famous compliment to Burke as his best educator; the break between the

two was postponed.

In November, 1790, Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in

France, in the form of a letter (365 pages long) to "a gentleman in Paris."

Leader of the liberals during the American Revolution, Burke was now the

hero of conservative England; George III expressed his delight with his old

enemy. The book became the bible of courts and aristocracies; Catherine the

Great, once the friend and darling of the philosophes, sent her congratula-

tions to the man who had set out to dethrone them. 142

Burke began with a reference to Dr. Price and the Society for Commemo-

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 723

rating the Revolution. He deplored the entry of clergymen into political dis-

cussions; their business was to guide souls to Christian charity, not to politi-

cal reform. He had no trust in the universal male suffrage that Price pleaded

for; he thought the majority would be a worse tyrant than a king, and that

democracy would degenerate into mob rule. Wisdom lies not in numbers

but in experience. Nature knows nothing of equality. Political equality is a

"monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations

into men destined to travel in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only

to aggravate that real inequality, which it never can remove." 143 Aristocracy

is inevitable; and the older it is, the better it will fulfill its function of silently

establishing that social order without which there can be no stability, no

security, and no liberty. 144 Hereditary monarchy is good because it gives to

government a unity and continuity without which the legal and social rela-

tions of the citizens would fall into a hectic and chaotic flux. Religion is

good, because it helps to chain those unsocial impulses which run like sub-

terranean fire beneath the surface of civilization, and which can be con-

trolled only by the constant co-operation of state and church, law and

creed, fear and reverence. Those French philosophers who undermined

religious belief in the educated ranks of their people were foolishly loosing

the reins that had kept men from becoming beasts.

Burke was revolted by the triumph of the mob at Versailles over "a mild

and lawful monarch," treating him with "more fury, outrage, and insult

than ever any people" raised "against the most illegal usurper and the most

sanguinary tyrant." 145 Here came the famous page that thrilled our youth:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the

Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she

hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the

horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in

—glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh, what

a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion

that elevation and that fall!* Little did I dream, when she added titles of ven-

eration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be

obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom;

little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her

in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I

thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge

even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.

That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of

Europe is extinguished forever. 146

Sir Philip Francis laughed at all this as romantic moonshine, and assured

Burke that the Queen of France was a Messalina and a jade. 147 So thought

many patriotic Englishmen; Horace Walpole, however, affirmed that Burke

had pictured Marie Antoinette "exactly as she appeared to me the first time

I saw her when Dauphiness." 148

* I.e., the compulsion laid upon Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, by the mob at Versailles,

to march back with it to Paris and to live under popular surveillance in the Tuileries (Oct.

5-6, 1789).

7 2 4 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXVIII

As the Revolution proceeded Burke continued his attack with a Letter to

a Member of the National Assembly (January, 1791). In this he suggested

that the governments of Europe should unite to check the revolt, and to

restore the King of France to his traditional power. Fox was alarmed at this

proposal, and in the House of Commons, on May 6, the friends who had

fought shoulder to shoulder in so many campaigns came to a dramatic part-

ing of the ways. Fox reiterated his praise of the Revolution. Burke rose in

protest. "It is indiscreet," he said, "at any period, but especially at my time

of life, to provoke enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me. Yet

if my firm and steady adherence to the British constitution place me in

such a dilemma I am ready to risk it." Fox assured him that no severance of

friendship was involved in their differences. "Yes, yes," answered Burke,

"there is a loss of friends. I know the price of my conduct. . . . Our friend-

ship is at an end." 149 He never spoke to Fox again, except formally in their

constrained union in the Hastings trial.

In his writings on the French Revolution Burke gave a classical expression

to a conservative philosophy. Its first principle is to distrust the reasoning of

an individual, however brilliant, if it conflicts with the traditions of the race.

Just as a child cannot understand the reasons for parental cautions and pro-

hibitions, so the individual, who is a child compared with the race, cannot

always understand the reasons for customs, conventions, and laws that em-

body the experience of many generations. Civilization would be impossible

"if the practice of all moral duties, and the foundations of society, rested

upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individ-

ual." 150 Even "prejudices" have their use; they prejudge present problems

on the basis of past experience.

So the second element of conservatism is "prescription": a tradition or an

institution should be doubly reverenced and rarely changed if it is already

written or embodied in the order of the society or the structure of the gov-

ernment. Private property is an example of prescription and of the apparent

irrationality of wisdom: it seems unreasonable that one family should own

so much, another so little, and even more unreasonable that the owner should

be allowed to transmit his property to successors who have not lifted a hand

to earn it; yet experience has found that men in general will not bestir them-

selves to work and study, or to laborious and expensive preparation, unless

they may call the results of their efforts their own property, to be trans-

mitted, in large measure, as they desire; and experience has shown that the

possession of property is the best guarantee for the prudence of legislation

and the continuity of the state.

A state is not merely an association of persons in a given space at a given

moment; it is an association of individuals through extensive time. "Society

is indeed a contract, ... a partnership not only between those who are

living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who

are to be born"; 151 that continuity is our country. In this triune whole a

present majority may be a minority in time; and the legislator must consider

the rights of the past (through "prescription") and of the future as well as

CHAP. XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 725

those of the living present. Politics is, or should be, the art of adjusting the

aims of clashing minorities with the good of the continuing group. More-

over, there are no absolute rights; these are metaphysical abstractions un-

known to nature; there are only desires, powers, and circumstances; and

"circumstances give to every political principle its distinguishing color and

discriminating effect." 152 Expediency is sometimes more important than

rights. "Politics ought to be adjusted not to [abstract] human reasonings but

to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the

greatest part." 153 "We must make use of existing materials." 154

All these considerations are illustrated by religion. The doctrines, myths,

and ceremonies of a religion may not conform to our present individual

reason, but this may be of minor moment if they comport with the past,

present, and presumed future needs of society. Experience dictates that the

passions of men can be controlled only by the teachings and observances of

religion. "If we should uncover our nakedness [release our instincts] by

throwing off that Christian religion which has been . . . one great source

of civilization amongst us, . . . we are apprehensive (being well aware that

the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrad-

ing superstition might take place of it." 155

Many Englishmen rejected Burke's conservatism as a cult of stagnation, 156

and Thomas Paine answered him vigorously in The Rights of Man (1791-

92). But the England of Burke's old age generally welcomed his ancestor

worship. As the French Revolution went on to the September Massacres,

the execution of the King and the Queen, and the Reign of Terror, the great

majority of Britons felt that Burke had well predicted the results of revolt

and irreligion; and for a full century England, though eliminating her rotten

boroughs and widening her suffrage, kept resolutely to its constitution of

king, aristocracy, Established Church, and a Parliament thinking in terms of

imperial powers rather than of popular rights. After the Revolution France

returned from Rousseau to Montesquieu, and Joseph de Maistre rephrased

Burke for the repentant French.

Burke continued to the end his campaign for a holy war, and he rejoiced

when France declared war on Great Britain (1793). George III wished to

reward his old enemy for recent services with a peerage, and with that title

of Lord Beaconsfield which Disraeli later graced; Burke refused, but ac-

cepted a pension of ,£2,500 (1794). When talk arose of negotiations with

France, he issued four Letters on a Regicide Peace (1797 f.)> passionately

demanding that the war go on. Only death cooled his fire (July 8, 1797).

Fox proposed that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but Burke had left

instructions that he should have a private funeral and be interred in the little

church at Beaconsfield. Macaulay thought him the greatest Englishman

since Milton— which may have slighted Chatham; and Lord Morley more

prudently called him "the greatest master of civil wisdom in our tongue" 157

—which may have slighted Locke. In any case Burke was what conservatives

had longed for in vain throughout the Age of Reason— a man who could

defend custom as brilliantly as Voltaire had defended reason.

726 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXVIII

VIII. THE HEROES RETIRE

As the French Revolution advanced, Charles James Fox found himself

in a diminishing minority in Parliament and in the country. Many of his

allies were won to the view that England must join Prussia and Austria in

fighting France. After the execution of Louis XVI Fox himself turned

against the Revolution, but he still opposed entry into the war. When war

came nevertheless, he consoled himself by drinking, by reading the classics,

and by marrying (1795) his (and Lord Cavendish's, Lord Derby's, and

Lord Cholmondeley's) former mistress, Mrs. Elizabeth Armstead, who paid

his debts. 158 He welcomed the Peace of Amiens (1802), traveled in France,

was acclaimed there with civic and popular honors, and was received by

Napoleon as a patriot of civilization. In 1 806 he served as foreign secretary

in a "Ministry of All the Talents"; he labored to keep the peace with France,

and decisively supported Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade.

When he learned of a plot to assassinate Napoleon he sent the Emperor a

warning through Talleyrand. Had Fox's health not broken down, he might

have found a means of reconciling Bonaparte's ambition with England's se-

curity. But in July, 1 806, he was disabled by dropsy. A succession of painful

operations failed to stay the progress of the disease; he made his peace with

the Established Church, and on September 13 he died, mourned by his

friends and his enemies, and even by the King. He was the most widely

loved man of his time.

The younger Pitt, prematurely old, preceded him to the Abbey's vaults.

He too found that he could bear the pace of political life only through the

occasional amnesia of drink. The precarious sanity of George III was a con-

stant problem; any serious conflict of views between King and minister

might throw the crowned head out of balance and bring in a regency by the

Prince of Wales, who would sack Pitt and call in Fox. So Pitt abandoned

his plans for political reform, and withdrew his opposition to the slave trade,

when he found that on these, as on many other matters, George was fretfully

resolved to perpetuate the past. Pitt concentrated his genius on economic

legislation, in which he served the rising middle class. Much to his distaste,

he led England in war against what he called "a nation of atheists." 159 He did

not do well as a war minister. Fearing a French invasion of Ireland, he tried

to appease the Irish with a program of parliamentary union and Catholic

emancipation; the King balked, and Pitt resigned (1801). He returned

(1804) to head his second ministry; Napoleon proved too much for him;

and when the news came of the French victory at Austerlitz (December 2,

1805), which made Napoleon master of the Continent, Pitt broke down in

body and spirit. Seeing a large map of Europe, he bade a friend, "Roll up

that map; it will not be wanted these ten years." 160 He died January 23, 1806,

honorably poor, and only forty-six years old.

CHAP.XXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DRAMA 727

Life took longer to destroy Sheridan. He had joined with Burke and Fox

in the defense of America and the battle of Hastings; he supported Fox in

applauding the French Revolution. Meanwhile that wife whose charm and

gentle nature were favorite themes among his friends, and who had put her

beauty on the hustings to help him win a seat in Parliament, died of tubercu-

losis in her thirty-eighth year (1792). Sheridan broke down. "I have seen

him," said an acquaintance, "night after night cry like a child." 161 He found

some consolation in the daughter she had borne him; but she died in the same

year. During those months of grief he faced the task of rebuilding the Drury

Lane Theatre, which had become too old and weak for safety; and to finance

this operation he incurred heavy liabilities. He had accustomed himself to

luxurious living, which his income could not maintain; he borrowed to con-

tinue that style. When his creditors came to dun him he treated them like

lords, entertained them with liquor, courtesy, and wit, and sent them away

in a humor that almost forgot his debts. He remained active in Parliament

till 181 2, when he failed of re-election. As a member of the House he had

been immune to arrest; now his creditors closed in upon him, appropriated

his books, his pictures, his jewels; finally they were about to carry him off

to jail when his physician warned them that Sheridan might die on the way.

He succumbed on July 7, 18 16, in his sixty-fifth year. He was rich again in

his funeral, for seven lords and one bishop bore him to the Abbey.

The half-mad King survived them all, survived even the triumph of Eng-

land at Waterloo, though he knew it not. By 1783 he recognized that he had

failed in his attempt to make the ministers responsible to him rather than to

Parliament. The long struggles with the House of Commons, with America,

and with France proved too much for him, and in 1801, 1804, and 18 10 he

relapsed into insanity. In his old age the people came to recognize his cour-

age and his sincerity, and the popularity that had been denied him in his days

of strife came to him at last, tinged with pity for a man who had seen Eng-

land suffer so many defeats and was not permitted to witness her victory.

The death of his favorite daughter, Amelia (18 10), completed his divorce

from reality; in 181 1 he became incurably insane as well as blind, and he

remained in seclusion, under guard, till his death (January 29, 1820) .

CHAPTER XXIX

The English People

1756-89

I. ENGLISH WAYS

SO much for the government; let us now consider the people.

First, look at their figures. Doubtless Reynolds idealized them, show-

ing us mostly the titled fortunate, and glorifying their corpulence with the

robes and insignia of dignity. But hear Goethe on the Englishmen he saw

in Weimar: "What fine, handsome people they are!"— and he worried lest

these confident young Britishers, bearing empire in their stride, would disen-

chant German girls with German men. 1 Several of these youths kept their

figures into later years, but many of them, as they passed from the play-

grounds of their schools to the pleasures of the table, swelled in paunch and

jowls, blossomed like a red, red rose, and fought in the still of the night the

gout they had fed in the jovial day. Some Elizabethan robustness had been

lost in Restoration roistering. English women, by contrast, were more beauti-

ful than ever, at least on the easels: refined features, flowered and ribboned

hair, mysteries in silk, poems of stately grace.

Sartorial class distinctions were disappearing on the streets as a new plenty

of cotton clothing issued from the multiplying mills, but on formal occasions

they remained; Lord Derwentwater rode to his execution in a scarlet coat

and waistcoat laced with gold. 2 Wigs were waning, and they vanished when

Pitt II taxed the powder that deodorized them; they survived on doctors,

judges, barristers, and Samuel Johnson; most men were now content with

their own hair, gathered at the back of the neck in a ribboned queue. About

1785 some men extended their breeches from knees to calves; in 1793, in-

spired by the triumphant French sans-culottes, they let them reach the ankle,

and modern man was born. Women still laced their bosoms to the verge of

suffocation, but the hoopskirt was losing fashion and breadth, and dresses

were assuming those flowing lines that fascinated our youth.

Cleanliness was next to godliness in rarity, for water was a luxury. Rivers

were lovely but usually polluted; the Thames was a drainage canal. 3 Most

London houses had water piped into them three times a week for three

shillings per quarter; 4 some had mechanical toilets; a few had bathrooms with

running water. Most privies (whose current name was "J ei i c hos") W ere ex-

tramural, built over open pits that sent their seepage through the soil to wells

from which much of the drinking water came. 5 Nevertheless public sanita-

tion was improving; hospitals were multiplying; infantile mortality fell from

seventy-four per hundred births in 1749 to forty-one in 1809. 6

728

CHAP.XXIX) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 729

No one drank water if he could get something safer. Beer was considered

a food, necessary for any vigorous work; wine was a favorite medicine,

whiskey was a portable stove, and drunkenness was a venial sin, if not a

necessary part of social conformity. "I remember," said Dr. Johnson, "when

all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the

worse thought of." 7 Pitt II came drunk to the House of Commons, and Lord

Cornwallis went drunk to the opera. 8 Some hackney coachmen added to

their incomes by cruising the streets at late hours, picking up gentlemen

who were "as drunk as a lord," and delivering them to their homes. Drunk-

enness declined as the century advanced; tea took up some of the task of

warming the vitals and loosing the tongue. Tea imports rose from a hundred

pounds in 1668 to fourteen million pounds in 1786. 9 The coffeehouses now

served more tea than coffee.

Meals were hearty, bloody, and immense. Dinner came about four in the

afternoon for the upper classes, and was progressively deferred till six as the

century declined. A hurried man might ease his hunger with a sandwich.

This contraption took its name from the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who, not

to interrupt his gambling with dinner, ate two slices of bread divided by

meat. Vegetables were eaten under protest. "Smoking has gone out [of

fashion]," Johnson told Boswell in 1773; but tobacco was taken in the form

of snuff. Opium was widely used as a sedative or a cure.

At table the Englishman could drink himself into loquacity, and then the

conversation might rival that of the Paris salons in wit and excel it in sub-

stance. One day (April 9, 1778), as Johnson, Gibbon, Boswell, Allan Ram-

say, and other friends gathered in the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the

Doctor remarked: "I question if in Paris such a company as is sitting around

this table could be got together in less than half a year." 10 Aristocratic gath-

erings preferred wit to learning, and Selwyn to Johnson. George Selwyn

was the Oscar Wilde of the eighteenth century. He had been expelled from

Oxford (1745) because "he did impiously affect to personate the Blessed

Saviour, and did ridicule the institution of the Holy Sacrament," 11 but this

did not prevent him from getting several lucrative sinecures in the adminis-

tration, or from sitting and sleeping in the House of Commons from 1747

to 1780. He had a host of friends, but never married. He had a passion for

executions, but skipped that of a namesake of Charles James Fox, a political

enemy for whom he hopefully awaited a Tyburn elevation— "I make a point

of never attending rehearsals." 12 He and Horace Walpole were intimate

friends for sixty-three years, without a cloud or a woman between them.

Those who did not enjoy executions could choose among a hundred other

amusements, from whist or bird-watching to horse races or prize fights.

Cricket was now the national game. The poor squandered their wages in

taverns, the rich gambled their fortunes in clubs or in private homes; so Wal-

pole, at Lady Hertford's, "lost fifty-six guineas before I could say an Ave

Maria." 13 James Gillray, in famous caricatures, called such hostesses "Faro's

daughters." 14 To take losses calmly was a prime requisite of an English gen-

tleman, even if he ended by blowing out his brains.

730 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIX

It was a man's world, legally, socially, and morally. Men took most of

their social pleasures with other men; not till 1770 was a club organized for

bisexual membership. Men discouraged intellect in women, and then com-

plained that women were incapable of intellectual conversation. Some

women, nevertheless, managed to develop intellects. Mrs. Elizabeth Carter

learned to speak Latin, French, Italian, and German, studied Hebrew, Por-

tuguese, and Arabic, and translated Epictetus with a Greek scholarship that

drew Johnson's praise. She protested against the reluctance of men to discuss

ideas with women, and she was one of those ladies who made the "blue-

stockings" the talk of literate London.

The name was first given to the mixed gatherings at the home of Mrs.

Elizabeth Vesey in Hertford Street, Mayfair. At these evening assemblies

card playing was banned and discussion of literature was encouraged. Meet-

ing, one day, Benjamin Stillingfleet, who had a momentary reputation as

poet, botanist, and philosopher, Mrs. Vesey invited him to her next "rout."

He excused himself on the ground that he had no clothes fit for a party. He

was wearing blue hose. "Don't mind dress," she told him; "come in your

blue stockings." He came. "Such was the excellence of his conversation,"

Boswell relates, "that ... it used to be said, 'we do nothing without the

blue stockings'; and thus by degrees the title was established," 15 and Mrs.

Vesey's group came to be called the Bas Bleu Society. There came Garrick

and Walpole, and there one evening Johnson awed all with pontifical dis-

course.

But "the Queen of the Blues," as Johnson called her, was Elizabeth Robin-

son Montagu. She was married to Edward Montagu, grandson of the first

Earl of Sandwich and relative of Edward Wortley Montagu, husband of the

volatile Lady Mary whom we celebrated in pages gone by. 16 Elizabeth was

a wit, a scholar, an author; her essay The Writings and Genius of Shake-

speare (1769) indignantly defended the national bard against the strictures

of Voltaire. She was rich, and could afford to entertain in style. She made the

Chinese Room in her Berkeley Square home the favorite center of London's

intellect and beauty; there came Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Gar-

rick, Horace Walpole, Fanny Burney, Hannah More; there artists met law-

yers, prelates met philosophers, poets met ambassadors. Mrs. Montagu's

"excellent cook" put them all in good humor, but no liquor was served, and

intoxication was taboo. She played Maecenas to budding authors, and scat-

tered bounty. Other London ladies— Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs.

Monckton— opened their homes to talent and charm. London society became

bisexual, and began to rival Paris in the fame and genius of its salons.

II. ENGLISH MORALS

"In every society," said Adam Smith, "where the distinction of ranks has

once been completely established, there have always been two different

schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which one may

CHAP. XXIX ) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 731

be called the strict or austere, the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose

system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people,

the latter . . . more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of

fashion." 17 John Wesley, who belonged to the austere class, described Eng-

lish morality in 1757 as a medley of smuggling, false oaths, political corrup-

tion, drunkenness, gambling, cheating in business, chicanery in the courts,

servility in the clergy, worldliness among Quakers, and private embezzle-

ment of charitable funds. 18 It is an old refrain.

Then, as now, sexual differentiation was far from complete. Some women

tried to be men, and almost succeeded; we hear of cases where women dis-

guised themselves as men and maintained the deception till death; some

joined the army or navy as men, drank, smoked, and swore like men, fought

in battle, and bore flogging manfully. 19 Toward 1772 "Macaronis" became

prominent on London streets; they were young men who wore their hair in

long curls, dressed in rich materials and striking colors, and "wenched with-

out passion"; Selwyn described them as "a kind of animal neither male nor

female, but of the neuter gender." 20 Homosexualism had its brothels, though

homosexual acts, if detected and proved, were punishable with death.

The double standard flourished. A thousand bordellos served tumescent

men, but those men branded female unchastity as a crime for which only

death could atone. So the gentle Goldsmith:

When lovely woman stoops to folly

And finds too late that men betray,—

What charm can soothe her melancholy,

What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover

And wring his bosom, is— to die. 21

Early marriage was advised as a preventive of such calamities. The law al-

lowed girls to marry at twelve, boys at fourteen. Most women of the edu-

cated classes married young, and deferred their deviations; but then the

double standard checked them. Hear Johnson on adultery (1768):

Confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime, and therefore the

woman who breaks her marriage vows is much more criminal than a man who

does it. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of God, but he does not do

his wife a very material injury if he does not insult her; if, for instance, from

mere wantonness of appetite, he steals privately to her chambermaid. Sir, a wife

ought not greatly to resent this. I would not receive home a daughter who had

run away from her husband on that account. A wife should study to reclaim

her husband by more attention to please him. Sir, a man will not, once in a

hundred instances, leave his wife and go to a harlot, if his wife has not been

negligent of pleasing. 22

In Boswell's own circle it was taken as quite ordinary that men should

occasionally go to a prostitute. In the aristocracy— even in the royal family-

adultery was widespread. The Duke of Grafton, while chief minister, lived

openly with Nancy Parsons, and took her to the opera in the face of the

732 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIX

Queen. 23 Divorce was rare; it could not be obtained except by act of Parlia-

ment, and as this cost "several thousand pounds," it was a luxury of the rich;

only 132 such grants were recorded in the years 1 670-1 800. 24 It was gener-

ally supposed that the morals of the commonalty were better than those of

the aristocracy, but Johnson thought otherwise (1778): "There is as much

fornication and adultery amongst farmers as amongst noblemen," and "so

far as I have observed, the higher in rank, the richer ladies are, they are the

better instructed, and the more virtuous." 25 The literature of the day, as in

Fielding and Burns, pictured the peasant as celebrating almost every week-

end with a carouse, spending half his pay in taverns, and some on tarts. Each

class sinned according to its ways and means.

The poor fought one another with fists and cudgels, the rich with pistols

and swords. Dueling was a point of honor in the nobility; Fox fought Adam,

Shelburne fought Fullerton, Pitt II fought Tierney; it was difficult to get

through a titled life without at least one puncture. Many stories attest the

sang-froid of British gentlemen in these encounters. Lord Shelburne, having

received a wound in the groin, assured his anxious seconds, "I don't think

Lady Shelburne will be the worse for it." 26

Worse than the looseness of sexual morals was the brutality of industrial

exploitation: the merciless consumption of human life in the grasp for

profits; the use of children six years of age in factories or as chimneysweeps;

the reduction of thousands of men and women to such destitution that they

sold themselves into pay less bondage for passage to America; the govern-

mental protection of the slave trade as a precious source of England's

wealth . . .

From Liverpool, Bristol, and London— as from Holland and France-

merchants sailed to Africa, bought and captured Negroes, shipped them to

the West Indies, sold them there, and returned to Europe with lucrative

cargoes of sugar, tobacco, or rum. By 1776 English traders had carried three

million slaves to America; add 250,000 who died in passage and were thrown

into the sea. The British government granted an annual subsidy of ;£ 10,000

to the African Company and its successor, the Regulated Company, toward

the maintenance of their forts and posts in Africa, on the ground that they

were "the most beneficial to this island of all the Companies that were ever

formed by our merchants." 27 George III (1770) forbade the governor of

Virginia "to assent to any law by which the importations of slaves should

be in any respect prohibited or obstructed." 28 In 1771 there were in England

about fourteen thousand Negroes, who had been brought in by their colonial

masters, or had escaped from them; some were used as domestic servants

with no right to wages; 29 some were sold at public auction, as in Liverpool

in 1766. 30 In 1772, however, an English court ruled that a slave automatically

became a free man the moment he touched English soil. 31

Slowly the conscience of England awoke to the contradiction between

this traffic and the simplest dictates of religion or morality. The finest spirits

in Britain denounced it: George Fox, Daniel Defoe, James Thomson, Rich-

ard Steele, Alexander Pope, William Paley, John Wesley, William Cowper,

CHAP. XXIX) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

733

Francis Hutcheson, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Josiah Wedgwood,

Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox. The

first organized opposition to slavery was by the Quakers in England and

America; in 1761 they excluded from their membership all persons engaged

in the traffic; in 1783 they formed an association "for the relief and liberation

of the Negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the

slave trade on the coast of Africa." 32 In 1787 Granville Sharp formed a com-

mittee to advance abolition; in 1789 William Wilberforce began his long

campaign in the House of Commons to end the English trade in slaves. The

merchants repeatedly persuaded the House to defer action; it was not till

1807 ^at Parliament enacted that no vessel should carry slaves from any

port within the British dominions after May 1, 1807, or to an y British colony

after March 1, 1808. 33

In political morality England now touched nadir. The rotten-borough

system flourished, and the nabobs outbid all other purchasers. Franklin de-

plored the American war for a peculiar reason: "Why did they not let me

go on? If they [the colonies] had given me a fourth of the money they have

spent on the war, we should have had our independence without spending

a drop of blood. I would have bought all the Parliament, the whole govern-

ment of Britain." 34 Corruption ruled in the Church, the universities, the

judiciary, the civil service, the army and navy, and the councils of the King.

Military discipline was more rigorous than in any other European country 35

with the possible exception of Prussia; and when the men were demobilized

nothing was done to ease their transition into a useful and law-abiding life.

Social morality hovered between the essential good nature of the individ-

ual Englishman and the irresponsible brutality of mobs. Between 1765 and

1780 there were nine major riots, nearly all in London; we shall see an ex-

ample presently. Crowds ran to a hanging as a holiday, and sometimes bribed

the hangman to be especially thorough in flogging a prisoner. 36 The penal

code was the severest in Europe. Language in nearly all classes tended to

violence and profanity. The press engaged in orgies of vituperation and cal-

umny. Almost everyone gambled, if only in the national lottery, and almost

everyone drank to excess.

The faults of the English character were allied to its basic quality— a

hearty, lusty vigor. The peasant and the factory laborer expended it in toil,

the nation showed it in every crisis but one. Out of that vigor came the

voracious appetite, the high spirits, the resort to prostitutes, the brawls in

the pubs and the duels in the park, the passion of parliamentary debate, the

capacity for suffering silently, the proud claim of every Englishman that

his home was his castle, not to be entered except by due process of law.

When, in this age, England was defeated, it was by Englishmen who had

transplanted to America the English passion for freedom. Mme. du Deffand

noted the diversity of individuals in the Englishmen whom she met, and

most of whom she never saw. "Each one," she said, "is original; there are

no two alike. We [French] are just the opposite; when you have seen one

of our courtiers you have seen all." 37 And Horace Walpole agreed: "It is

734 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIX

certain that no other country produces so many singular and discriminate

characters as England." 38 Look at Reynolds' men: they agree only in their

pride of country and class, their ruddy faces, their bold confronting of the

world. It was a powerful breed.

III. FAITH AND DOUBT

The English masses remained faithful to their various forms of the Chris-

tian creed. The most widely read book, next to the Bible, was Nelson's

Festivals and Fasts, a guide to the ecclesiastical year. 39 Johnson's Prayers and

Meditations, published after his death, went through four editions in four

years. In the upper classes religion was respected as a social function, an aid

to morals, and an arm of government, but it had lost private credence and

all power over policy. The bishops were named by the king, and the parsons

were appointees and dependents of the squires. The deistic attack on reli-

gion had so far subsided that Burke could ask in 1790: "Who, born within

the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal,

and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Free-

thinkers?" 40 But if no one rose to answer him it may be because those rebels

had won the battle, and educated men shrugged off the old questions as

settled and dead. Boswell in 1765 (forgetting the commonalty) described

his time as "an age when mankind are so fond of incredulity that they seem

to pique themselves in contracting their circle of belief as much as possi-

ble." 41 We have seen Selwyn mocking religion at Oxford, and Wilkes at

Medmenham Abbey. The younger Pitt, according to Lady Hester Stanhope,

"never went to church in his life." 42 And one did not have to believe in order

to preach. "There are," Boswell wrote in 1763, "many infidels in orders,

who, considering religion merely as a political institution, accept of a bene-

fice as of any civil employment, and contribute their endeavors to keep up

the useful delusion." 43 "The forms of orthodoxy, the articles of faith," said

Gibbon, "are subscribed with a sigh or a smile by the modern clergy." 44

Private clubs offered relief from public conformity. Many aristocrats

joined one or another of the Freemason lodges. These condemned atheism

as stupid, and required of their members a belief in God, but they inculcated

toleration of differences on all other doctrines of religion. 45 In the Lunar

Society of Birmingham manufacturers like Matthew Boulton, James Watt,

and Josiah Wedgwood heard without horror the heresies of Joseph Priestley

and Erasmus Darwin. 46 Nevertheless the furor of deism had passed, and

nearly all freethinkers accepted a truce by which they would not interfere

with the propagation of the faith if the Church allowed some latitude to sin.

The English upper classes, with their sense of order and moderation, avoided

the reckless radicalism of the French Enlightenment; they recognized the

intimate union of religion and government, and were too economical to re-

place a supernatural morality with an infinitude of police.

Since they were now servants of the state, the Anglican bishops, like the

Catholic cardinals, thought themselves entitled to a measure of worldly en-

CHAP. XXIX) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 735

joy men t. Cowper satirized in bitter lines 47 the clergymen who scrambled like

politicians for richer or additional benefices; but many others led lives of

quiet attention to their duties, and several were scholarly and able defenders

of the faith. William Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy

(1785) displayed a generous spirit of doctrinal latitude and toleration, and

his Evidences of Christianity (1794) persuasively presented the argument

from design. He welcomed into holy orders men of freethinking tendencies

so long as they preached the essentials of religion and served as moral leaders

in their communities. 48

Dissenters— Baptists, Presbyterians, and Independents (Puritans)— enjoyed

religious toleration provided they adhered to Trinitarian Christianity; but

no one could hold political or military office, or enter Oxford or Cambridge,

without accepting the Anglican Church and its Thirty-nine Articles. Meth-

odism continued to spread among the lower classes. In 1784 it broke its

tenuous ties with the Established Church, but meanwhile it had inspired

the "Evangelical movement" in a minority of Anglican clergymen. These

men admired Wesley, and agreed with him that the Gospel, or Evangel,

should be preached precisely as handed down in the New Testament, with

no concessions to rationalist or textual criticism.

England's memory of the Gunpowder Plot, the Great Rebellion, and the

reign of James II still kept on the statute books the old laws against Roman

Catholics. Most of these laws were no longer enforced, but many disabilities

remained. Catholics could not legally buy or inherit land except through a

subterfuge and payment of a double tax on their property. They were ex-

cluded from the army and navy, from the legal profession, from voting or

standing for Parliament, and from all governmental posts. Even so, their

number was growing. In 1781 they included seven peers, twenty-two baron-

ets, 150 "gentlemen. " Mass was celebrated in private homes, and only two

or three arrests for this offense are recorded in the sixty years of George

Ill's reign.

In 1778 Sir George Savile offered Parliament a bill for "Catholic relief,"

legalizing the purchase and inheritance of land by Catholics, and allowing

Catholics to enlist in the armed forces without renouncing their religion.

The bill was passed, and met with no serious opposition from the Anglican

bishops in the House of Lords. It applied only to England, but in 1779 Lord

North moved that it be extended to Scotland. When news of this proposal

reached the Lowlands, riots broke out in Edinburgh and Glasgow (January,

1779); several houses inhabited by Catholics were burned to the ground;

the shops of Catholic tradesmen were looted and wrecked; the houses of

Protestants— like Robertson the historian— who expressed sympathy for the

Catholics were likewise attacked, and the outbreak ended only when Edin-

burgh magistrates announced that the Act for Catholic Relief would not be

applied to Scotland.

A Scottish member of Parliament, Lord George Gordon, took up the

"No-Popery" cause in England. On May 29, 1780, he presided over a meet-

ing of the "Protestant Association," which planned a mass march to present

a petition for repeal of the Relief Act of 1778. On June 2 sixty thousand

736 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIX

men, wearing blue cockades, surrounded Parliament House. Many members

were mauled on their way in; the carriages of Lords Mansfield, Thurlow,

and Stormont were demolished; some noble lords reached their seats wigless,

disheveled, and trembling. 49 Gordon and eight of his followers entered the

House of Commons; they presented a petition, allegedly bearing 120,000

signatures, calling for repeal, and demanded immediate action as the sole

alternative to invasion of the House by the mob. The members resisted.

They sent for troops to check the crowd; they locked all doors; a relative

of Gordon declared that he would kill him the moment any outsider forced

his way into the chamber; then the House voted to adjourn till June 6.

Troops arrived and cleared a way for the members to return to their homes.

Two Catholic chapels, belonging to Sardinian and Bavarian ministers, were

gutted, and their furniture made a bonfire in the streets. The crowd dis-

persed, but on June 5 rioters looted other foreign chapels, and burned sev-

eral private homes.

On June 6 the mob regathered, broke into Newgate Gaol, freed the pris-

oners, captured an arsenal, and marched, armed, through the capital. Nobles

barricaded themselves in their homes; Horace Walpole complimented himself

on guarding a duchess in his "garrison" in Berkeley Square. 50 On June 7

more houses were looted and burned; distilleries were entered, and thirst

was freely quenched; several rioters were cremated as they lay intoxicated

in burning buildings. The London magistrates, who alone had legal author-

ity over the municipal guard, refused to order them to fire upon the crowd.

George III called out the citizen militia, and bade them shoot whenever the

mob used or threatened violence. Alderman John Wilkes earned forgiveness

from the King, and lost his popularity with the populace, by mounting a

horse and joining with the militia in attempting to disperse the assemblage.

The militia, attacked by the rioters, fired upon them, killing twenty-two.

The crowd fled.

On June 9 the riot flared again. Houses— whether of Catholics or of Prot-

estants—were pillaged and burned, and firemen were prevented from extin-

guishing the flames. 51 Troops suppressed the uprising at the cost of 285 men

killed and 173 wounded; 1 35 rioters were arrested, twenty-one were hanged.

Gordon was arrested in flight toward Scotland; he proved that he had taken

no part in the riots; he was freed. Burke secured the approval of the Com-

mons for reaffirmation of the Act for Catholic Relief in England. An act of

1 79 1 extended legal toleration to Catholic worship and education, but no

Catholic church was to have a steeple or a bell. 52

IV. BLACKSTONE, BENTHAM, AND THE LAW

A learned jurist thought "the publication of Blackstone's Commentaries

... in some ways the most notable event in the history of the law." 53 This

is patriotic, but it serves to point the reverential awe with which English-

speaking students, till our time, approached the Commentaries on the Laws

of England which William Blackstone published in four volumes and two

CHAP. XXIX ) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 737

thousand pages in 1765-69. Despite or because of its size it was acclaimed

as a monument of learning and wisdom; every lord had it in his library, and

George HI took it to his heart as the apotheosis of kings.

Blackstone was the son of a London tradesman rich enough to send him

through Oxford and the Middle Temple to the practice of law. His lectures

at Oxford (1753-63) reduced the contradictions and absurdities of the stat-

utes to some order and logic, and expounded the result with clarity and

charm. In 1761 he was elected to Parliament; in 1763 he was appointed so-

licitor general to Queen Charlotte; in 1770 he began service as judge in the

Court of Common Pleas. Addicted to study and hating locomotion, he sank

into a gentle but premature decomposition, and died in 1780 at the age of

fifty-seven.

His opus maximum had the virtues of his lectures: logical arrangement,

lucid exposition, and a gracious style. Jeremy Bentham, his passionate oppo-

nent, praised him as the man who had "taught jurisprudence to speak the

language of the scholar and the gentleman, put polish on that rugged science,

cleansed her from the dust and cobwebs of the office." 54 Blackstone defined

law as "a rule of action dictated by some superior being"; 55 he had an ideal

and static conception of law as serving in a society the same function that

the laws of nature served in the world, and he tended to think of the laws of

England as rivaling the laws of gravitation in their majesty and eternity.

He loved England and Christianity just as he found them, and would

hardly admit any flaw in either. He was more orthodox than Bishop War-

burton, and more royalist than George III. "The King of England is not

only the chief, but properly the sole, magistrate of the nation. . . . He may

reject what bills, may make what treaties, . . . may pardon what offenses

he pleases, unless the Constitution hath expressly, or by evident consequence,

laid down some exception or boundary." 56 Blackstone placed the king above

Parliament and above the law; the king "is not only incapable of doing

wrong, but even of thinking wrong"— by which, however, Blackstone meant

that there was no law above the king by which the king could be judged.

But he warmed the pride of all England when he defined "the absolute rights

of every Englishman: the right of personal security, the right of personal

liberty, and the right of private property." 57

Blackstone's conception of English law as a system permanently valid

because ultimately grounded on the Bible as the word of God eminently

pleased his time, but it discouraged the growth of English jurisprudence and

the reform of penology and prisons; it is to his credit, however, that he ap-

plauded the efforts of John Howard to ameliorate the conditions in British

jails. 58

Howard took Christianity not as a system of law but as an appeal to the

heart. Appointed sheriff at Bedford (1773), he was appalled by conditions

in the local prison. The jailer and his aides received no salary; they lived on

fees exacted from the prisoners. No man was released, after serving his term,

until he had paid all fees required of him; many men remained incarcerated

for months after the court had found them innocent. Traveling from county

to county, Howard found similar abuses, or worse. Defaulting debtors and

738 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIX

first offenders were thrown in with hardened criminals. Most prisoners wore

chains, heavy or light according to the fee they paid. Each prisoner was

allowed one- or twopenceworth of bread daily; for additional food he had

to pay, or rely on relatives or friends. Three pints of water were allowed

to each inmate daily for drinking and washing. No heat was provided in

winter, and there was little ventilation in summer. The stench in these dun-

geons was so strong that it clung to Howard's clothes long after he emerged.

"Prison fever" and other diseases killed many prisoners; some died of slow

starvation. 59 At Newgate Gaol in London fifteen to twenty men lived in a

room twenty-three by twenty-five feet.

In 1774 Howard presented to Parliament his report on fifty prisons visited;

the House of Commons passed an act requiring hygienic reforms in the jails,

providing salaries for the jailers, and freeing all prisoners against whom the

grand jury had failed to find a true bill. In 1775-76 Howard visited Conti-

nental prisons. He found those of Holland best equipped and relatively

humane; among the worst were those in Hanover, ruled by George III. The

publication of Howard's book The State of the Prisons in England and

Wales, . . . and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons (1777) stirred the

sleeping conscience of the nation. Parliament voted funds for two "peni-

tentiary houses," in which an attempt was made to redeem prisoners by in-

dividual treatment, supervised labor, and religious instruction. Howard re-

sumed his travels, and reported his findings in new editions of his book. In

1789 he toured Russia; at Kherson he caught camp fever, and died (1790).

His efforts for reform produced only modest results. The act of 1774 was

ignored by most jailers and justices. Descriptions of London prisons in 1804

and 18 17 showed no improvement since Howard's time; "perhaps the condi-

tion of things had become worse instead of better." 60 Reform had to wait

for Dickens' account of the New Marshalsea Prison in Little Dorrit (1855).

Jeremy Bentham's diverse labors for reform in law, government, and

education fall mostly after this period, but his Fragment on Government

(1776) belongs here, as being principally a criticism of Blackstone. He

scorned the jurist's worship of tradition; he pointed out that "whatever now

is established, once was innovation"; 61 present conservatism is reverence of

past radicalism; consequently those who advocate reforms are quite as pa-

triotic as those who tremble at the thought of change. "Under a government

of laws, what is the motto of a good citizen? To obey punctually, to censure

freely ." 62 Bentham rejected Blackstone's view of royal sovereignty; a good

government will distribute powers, encourage each of these to check the

others, and allow freedom of the press, of peaceable assemblage and opposi-

tion. In the last resort, revolution may do less damage to the state than a

dulling submission to tyranny. 63 This little book was published in the year

of the American Declaration of Independence.

In the same essay Bentham expounded that "greatest-happiness principle"

to which John Stuart Mill in 1863 gave the name "utilitarianism." "It is the

greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and

wrong." 64 By this "principle of utility" all moral and political proposals and

CHAP. XXIX ) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 739

practices should be judged, for "the business of government is to promote

the happiness of society." 65 Bentham derived this "principle of happiness"

from Helvetius, Hume, Priestley, and Beccaria, 66 and his general viewpoint

was formed from reading the philosophes. 67

In 1780 he wrote, and in 1789 he published, An Introduction to the Prin-

ciples of Morals and Legislation, giving a more detailed and philosophical

exposition of his ideas. He reduced all conscious action to the desire for

pleasure or the fear of pain, and he defined happiness as "the enjoyment of

pleasure, security from pain." 68 This seemed to justify complete selfishness,

but Bentham applied the happiness principle to individuals as well as states:

did the individual's action make for his greatest happiness? In the long run,

he thought, the individual obtains most pleasure or least pain by being just

to his fellow men.

Bentham practiced what he preached, for he devoted his life to a long

series of reform proposals: universal literate male adult suffrage, secret ballot,

annual Parliaments, free trade, public sanitation, the amelioration of prisons,

the cleansing of the judiciary, the abolition of the House of Lords, the

modernization and codification of the law in terms intelligible to laymen, and

the extension of international law (Bentham invented this term 69 ). Many of

these reforms were effected in the nineteenth century, largely through the

efforts of "utilitarians" and "philosophical radicals" like James and John

Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, and George Grote.

Bentham was the last voice of the Enlightenment, the bridge between the

liberating thought of the eighteenth century and the reforms of the nine-

teenth. Even more than the philosophes he trusted to reason. He remained

a bachelor to the end of his life, though he was one of the most lovable of

men. When he died (June 6, 1832), aged eighty-four, he willed that his

body should be dissected in the presence of his friends. It was, and the

skeleton is still preserved in University College, London, wearing Bentham's

habitual dress. 70 On the day after his death the historic Reform Bill that

embodied many of his proposals was signed by the King.

V. THE THEATER

1. The Performance

This second half of the eighteenth century was rich in theater, poor in

drama. It saw some of the finest actors in history, and produced only two

dramatists whose works have escaped the Reaper: Sheridan, whom we have

already laid to rest, and Goldsmith, who will get a niche of his own under

the rubric of literature. Perhaps the dearth of serious plays was cause and

effect of the Shakespearean revival, which continued till the end of the

century.

The dramatists suffered from the tastes of the audience. There was much

discussion of histrionic, little of dramatic, technique and art. The author

received, usually as his only material reward, the profits of the third per-

74<> ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIX

formance, if this arrived; some actors and actresses, however, became as rich

as prime ministers. Hired claques could damn a good play with hostile noise,

or make a worthless play an exciting success. A run of twenty nights in a

season was attained only by the most favored dramas. Performances began

at six or six-thirty, and ordinarily included a three-hour play and a farce or

a pantomime. Seats cost one to five shillings; there were no reservations ex-

cept by sending a servant to buy and hold a place till the master or lady

came. All seats were backless benches. 71 Some favored spectators sat on the

stage, until Garrick ended this abomination (1764). All lighting was by

candles in chandeliers, which remained lit throughout the program. Cos-

tumes, before 1782, were eighteenth-century English regardless of the play's

time or place; Cato, Caesar, and Lear were shown in knee breeches and wigs.

Despite opposition by the clergy, and the competition of opera and cir-

cuses, the theater flourished, both in London and in the "provinces." Bath,

Bristol, Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester, Birmingham, York, Edinburgh,

and Dublin had good playhouses; some had their own companies; and since

the major companies went on tour, nearly every town saw good acting.

London was kept on edge by the lively rivalry of two principal theaters. In

1750 both of these played Romeo and Juliet nightly for the same two weeks,

with Spranger Barry and Susannah Cibber at Covent Garden, and Garrick

and Miss Bellamy at Drury Lane. Samuel Foote had his own Little Theatre

in the Haymarket, where he specialized in satirical mimicry; his imitations

of Garrick were long a misery in David's life.

Never had the English stage seen so many first-class performers. Charles

Macklin opened the great age in 1741 with his productions of Shakespeare;

he was the first actor to present Shylock as a serious character, though still

as a merciless villain. (Not till Henry Irving was Shylock interpreted with

some sympathy.) John Philip Kemble closed this century-long revival of

Shakespeare. His supreme hours were when he and his sister Sarah played

Macbeth at Drury Lane in 1785.

Some memorable actresses now graced the stage. Peg Woffington was

gifted with stirring beauty of figure and face, but she lived loosely, suffered

a paralytic stroke in mid-play (1757), and died prematurely old at forty-six

(1760). Kitty Clive stayed with Garrick's company twenty-two years; she

astonished London by her exemplary morals; after quitting the stage (1769)

she lived sixteen years in a house that Horace Walpole gave her in Twicken-

ham. Mrs. Hannah Pritchard was the foremost tragedienne before Mrs. Sid-

dons surpassed her as Lady Macbeth; she absorbed her life in her acting, and

(it was said) never read a book; Johnson called her "an inspired idiot"; 72

but she outlasted many belles, acting till within a few months of her death.

Mrs. Frances Abington starred as Beatrice, Portia, Ophelia, and Desdemona,

but her most famous role was as Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal.

Mary Robinson acquired her popular name "Perdita" from acting that part

so well in A Winter's Tale; she served as mistress to the Prince of Wales

and lesser lovers, and sat for Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney .

The conscious goddess of the stage was Sarah Kemble Siddons. Born to a

CHAP. XXIX ) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

74 1

traveling actor in a hostelry in Wales (1755), she married at eighteen the

actor William Siddons, and starred at nineteen in Otway's Venice Preserved.

Garrick engaged her a year later, but critics pronounced "her powers not

equal to a London stage," and Henry Woodward, who played comic parts

for Garrick, advised her to go back to country theaters for a while. She did,

and for six years she played in provincial towns. Recalled to Drury Lane in

1782, she surprised everyone by her development as an actress. She was the

first to adopt in her roles the dress of the period represented. Soon Garrick

favored her for Shakespearean roles, and London marveled at the dignity

and pathos with which she elevated the part of Lady Macbeth. Her private

life won the respect and friendship of eminent contemporaries; Johnson

wrote his name on the hem of her robe in Reynolds' picture of her as the

Tragic Muse, and was struck by her "great modesty and propriety" when

she called on him. 73 Two of her brothers, one of her sisters, and two of her

nieces continued the Kemble dynasty in the theater till 1893. Through her

and Garrick the social status of actors was raised, even in an England that

made class distinctions the soul and machinery of government.

2. Garrick

All who know of Johnson will recall that David Garrick was born in

Lichfield (17 17), attended Johnson's school at Edial (1736), and accom-

panied him in their historic migration to London (1737). Seven years

younger, he never won Johnson's full friendship, for the older man could

not forgive David for being an actor and rich.

On reaching London Garrick joined his brother in importing and selling

wine. This involved frequent visits to taverns; there he met actors; their talk

fascinated him; he followed some of them to Ipswich, where they let him

take minor parts. He learned the histrionic art so rapidly that soon he under-

took to play the lead in Richard III at an unlicensed theater in Goodman's

Fields in the East End of London. He relished that role because he was small,

like the hunchback King, and because he enjoyed dying on the stage. His

performance was so well received that he abandoned the vintner business, to

the shame and chagrin of his Lichfield relatives. But William Pitt the Elder

came backstage to compliment him, and Alexander Pope, as crippled as

Richard, said to another spectator, "That young man never had his equal,

and he will never have a rival." 74 Here was an actor who poured all his body

and soul into the part that he played; who became Richard III in face and

voice and hands and broken frame and sly mind and evil aims; who did not

cease to act his part when others spoke, and with difficulty forgot it when

he left the stage. Soon he was the talk of theatergoing London. Aristocracy

came to see him; lords dined with him; "there are a dozen dukes a night at

Goodman's Fields," wrote Thomas Gray. 75 The Garricks of Lichfield

proudly claimed David as their own.

He tried Lear next (March 11, 1742). He failed; he was too active in his

movements to portray an octogenarian, and he had not acquired the dignity

742 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXIX

of a king. The failure chastened him, and proved invaluable. He gave up the

part for a while, studied the play, practiced the facial expressions, the feeble

gait, the ailing vision, the shrill and plaintive tones of the unhappy Lear. In

April he tried again. He was transformed; the audience wept and cheered;

Garrick had created another of the roles that for almost a century would

recall his name. Everybody applauded but Johnson, who decried acting as

mere pantomime, and Horace Walpole, who thought Garrick's expressive-

ness excessive, and Gray, who mourned the fall from classic restraint to ro-

mantic emotionalism and sentiment. Scholars complained that Garrick

played not an unadulterated Shakespeare but versions revised and bowdler-

ized, sometimes by Garrick himself; half the lines of his Richard III were

written by Colley Cibber, 76 and the last act of his Hamlet was changed to

provide a tender finale.

In that season 1741-42 Garrick offered eighteen roles— a feat suggesting

almost incredible powers of memory and attention. When he performed,

the theater was filled; when he was not billed it was half empty. The licensed

theaters suffered reduced attendance. By some backstage politics the play-

house in Goodman's Fields was forced to close. Garrick, lost without a stage,

signed a contract with the Drury Lane Theatre for 1742-43 at ^500— a

record salary for an actor. Meanwhile he left for a spring season in Dublin.

Handel had just captured that city with his Messiah (April 13, 1742); now

Garrick and Peg Woffington conquered it with Shakespeare. When they

returned to London they set up housekeeping together, and Garrick bought

a wedding ring. But she resented his parsimony and he her extravagance. He

began to wonder what kind of wife would emerge from Peg's miscellaneous

past. He kept the ring, and they parted ( 1 744) .

His acting at Drury Lane marked an era in the art. He gave to each role

all the force of his energy, and constant care that every motion of his body,

every inflection of his voice, should be in character. He made the alarm

and terror of Macbeth so vivid that this, more than any other of his roles,

remained in the public memory. He replaced the declamation of older tra-

gedians with a more natural speech. He achieved a sensitivity of facial ex-

pression that varied with the slightest change of thought or mood in the

text. Years later Johnson remarked, "David looks much older than he is, for

his face has had double the business of any other man's; it is never at rest." 77

And there was his versatility. He played comic parts with almost all the care

and finish that he had given to his Macbeth or Hamlet or Lear.

After five seasons as an actor Garrick signed (April 9, 1747) a contract

to divide the management of Drury Lane with James Lacy: Lacy to take

charge of business affairs, Garrick to choose the plays and the actors and

direct the rehearsals. During his twenty-nine years as manager he produced

seventy-five different plays, wrote one himself (in collaboration with

George Colman), revised twenty-four of Shakespeare's dramas, composed

a great number of prologues, epilogues, and farces, and wrote for the press

anonymous articles promoting and praising his work. He appreciated money,

and tempered his choice of plays to the greatest happiness of the greatest

CHAP. XXIX ) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 743

paying number. He loved applause, as actors and writers must, and he ar-

ranged parts to get most of it. His actors thought him tyrannical and stingy,

and complained that he underpaid them while he was becoming rich. He

established order and discipline among jealous and hypersensitive individuals

each of whom verged or brooded on genius. They grumbled, but they were

glad to stay, for no other company weathered so well the winds of fortune

and the tides of taste.

In 1 749 Garrick married Eva Maria Weigel, a Viennese dancer who had

come to England as "Mile. Violette," and had earned plaudits for her per-

formances in opera ballets. She was, and remained, a pious Catholic; Garrick

smiled at her belief in the story of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand vir-

gins, 78 but he respected her faith since she lived up to its moral code. She

did much, by her devotion, to ease the strain of an actor-manager's life. He

lavished his wealth upon her, took her on Continental tours, and bought for

her an expensive home in Hampton village. There, and in his London house

on Adelphi Terrace, he entertained sumptuously, and many lords and dis-

tinguished foreigners were happy to be his guests. There he romped with

Fanny Burney, and sheltered Hannah More.

In 1763 he gave up acting except for special occasions. "Now," he said,

"I will sit down and read Shakespeare." 79 In 1768 he suggested, planned, and

supervised the first Shakespeare festival at Stratford-on-Avon. He continued

to manage Drury Lane, but found the tempers and quarrels of the actors

ever harder on his aging nerves. Early in 1776 he sold his share of the part-

nership to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and on A4arch 7 he announced that he

would soon retire. For three months thereafter he gave farewell perform-

ances of his favorite roles, and enjoyed such a succession of triumphs as

probably no other actor in history has ever known. His departure from the

stage caused as much talk in London as the war with America. On June 10,

1776, he closed his theatrical career with a benefit for the Decayed Actors'

Fund.

He survived three years more. He died on January 20, 1779, aged sixty-

two. On February 1 his corpse was borne to Westminster Abbey by mem-

bers of Britain's highest nobility, and was deposited in the Poets' Corner at

the foot of Shakespeare's monument.

VI. LONDON

Johnson's first view of London (1737) was one of virtuous horror:

Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,

And now a rabble rages, now a fire;

Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,

And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;

Here falling houses thunder on your head,

And here a female Atheist talks you dead.* 80

* Lady Mary Wortley Montagu?

744 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXIX

These, of course, were but some aspects of London, chosen to feed the rage

of unplaced youth. Three years later Johnson described London as "a city

famous for wealth and commerce and plenty, and for every other kind of

civility and politeness, but which abounds with such heaps of filth as a

savage would look on with amazement." 81 The civic authorities, at that time,

left street cleaning to the citizen, who was commanded to keep in neat re-

pair the pavement— or earth— before his house. In 1762 the Westminster

Paving Acts arranged for municipal cleaning of streets, collection of rub-

bish, paving and repair of main thoroughfares, and establishment of an

underground sewerage system; soon other sections of London followed suit.

Elevated footpaths protected pedestrians, and gutters drained the streets.

New streets were laid out in straight lines, houses were built more durably,

and the venerable metropolis effused a more genteel odor.

There was no public fire department, but insurance companies maintained

private hose brigades to limit their losses. Coal dust and fog sometimes col-

laborated to blanket the city with a pall so thick that one could not tell

friend from foe. When the sky was visible certain streets were bright with

colorful shops. On the Strand the largest and richest stores in Europe dis-

played behind their windows the products of half the world. Not far away

were a thousand shops of a hundred crafts, and here and there were potteries,

glass factories, smithies, breweries. The noises of artisans and tradesmen, of

carriages and horses, of hawkers and street singers, contributed to the din

and sense of life. If one wished a quieter scene and cleaner air he could

saunter in St. James's Park, or watch fascinating ladies swing their spreading

skirts and show their silken shoes on the Mall. In the morning one could

buy fresh milk from maids who milked cows on the park green. In the eve-

ning he might prowl, like Boswell, for a fille de joie, or wait for the night to

cover a multitude of sins. Farther west one could ride or drive in Hyde

Park. And there were the great amusement resorts: Vauxhall with its color-

ful crowds, its acres of gardens and arbored walks, and Ranelagh with its

spacious tiered Rotunda, where Mozart performed when a child of eight.

The poor had alehouses, the middle and upper classes had clubs, and there

were taverns for all. There was the Boar's Head, and the Mitre, where the

Great Cham supped, and the Globe, dear to Goldsmith, and the Devil's Tav-

ern, which had entertained famous figures from Jonson to Johnson. There

were two Turk's Heads— one a coffee shop on the Strand, the other a tavern

in Gerrard Street, which became the home of The Club. Women as well as

men came to taverns, and some were for sale. In clubs like White's or Al-

mack's (which became Brooks's) the well-to-do could drink and gamble in

select privacy. And there were the theaters, with all the excitement of their

competition and the radiance of their stars.

Near the theaters were brothels. Preachers complained that "to the said

plays and interludes great numbers of mean, idle, and disorderly people do

commonly resort, and after the performance is over from thence they go to

bawdy houses." 82 Nearly all classes who could afford it patronized prosti-

tutes, and agreed in condoning the habit as unavoidable in the current state

of male development. There were some colored courtesans who drew cus-

CHAP.XXIX) THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

745

tomers even from the nobility; Boswell describes Lord Pembroke as ex-

hausted after a night in "a black bawdy house." 83

Slums continued. In the lower orders it was not unusual for a family to

live in one room of a tenement. The very poor lived in damp, unheated

cellars, or in garrets with leaky roofs; some slept on bunks or in doorways or

under booths. Johnson told Miss Reynolds that "as he returned to his lodg-

ings about one or two o'clock in the morning he often saw poor children

asleep on thresholds and stalls and that he used to put pennies into their hands

to buy them a breakfast." 84 A magistrate informed Johnson that in any week

over twenty Londoners died of starvation. 85 Now and then epidemics ran

through the city. Even so, its population rose from 674,000 in 1700 to 900,-

000 in 1800, 86 presumably due to immigration by landless peasants, and to

the growth of commerce and industry.

The Thames and its docks were crowded with merchantmen and their

cargoes. "The whole surface of the Thames," wrote a contemporary, "is

covered with small vessels, barges, boats, and wherries, passing to and fro,

and, below the three bridges, such a forest of masts for miles together, that

you would think all the ships of the universe were here assembled." 87 Two

new bridges were added in this period: Blackfriars and Battersea. Canaletto,

coming to London from Venice (1746, 175 1), painted magnificent views of

city and river; prints from these vedute enabled educated Europeans to re-

alize how London had grown to be the chief port of the Christian world.

Never since ancient Rome (excepting Constantinople) had history known

so vast and rich and complex a city. In St. James's Palace the King and

Queen and their attendants, the court and its ceremonies; in the churches fat

prelates mumbling hypnotic formulas, and humble worshipers resting from

reality and begging divine aid; in Parliament House the Lords and the Com-

mons playing the game of politics with souls as their pawns; in Mansion

House the Lord Mayor and his liveried aides laying down ordinances about

chapels and brothels, and wondering how to control the next epidemic or

mob; in the barracks soldiers gaming, wenching, and profaning the air; in the

shops the tailors curving their spines, plumbers inhaling lead, jewelers, watch-

makers, cobblers, hairdressers, vintners, hurrying to meet the demands of ladies

and gentlemen; in Grub Street or Fleet Street the hack writers puffing up

clients, tumbling ministries, challenging the King; in the prisons men and

women dying of infection or graduating to greater crimes; in the tenements

and cellars the hungry, the unfortunate, and the defeated multiplying their

like eagerly and forever.

With all this both Johnson and his biographer loved London. Boswell ad-

mired "the liberty and the whims . . . and curious characters, the immense

crowd and hurry and bustle of business and diversion, the great number of

public places of entertainment, the noble churches and the superb buildings,

. . . the satisfaction of pursuing whatever plan is most agreeable without

being known or looked at" 88 — the protective, erosive anonymity of the

crowd. And Johnson, relishing and deepening "the full flow of London

talk," settled the matter with one authoritative line: "When a man is tired

of London he is tired of life." 89

CHAPTER XXX

The Age of Reynolds

1756-90

I. THE MUSICIANS

THIS England loved great music, but could not produce it.

Appreciation abounded. In Zoffany's picture The Coivper and Gore

Families we see the part that music played in cultivated homes. We hear of

the hundreds of singers and performers that were brought together for the

Handel Commemoration Concert in 1784. The Morning Chronicle of De-

cember 30, 1790, announced, for the ensuing months, a series of "Profes-

sional Concerts," another of "Ancient Concerts," "Ladies' Subscription

Concerts" for Sunday evenings, oratorios twice a week, and six symphony

concerts to be conducted by the composer himself— Joseph Haydn; 1 this

rivaled the musical wealth of London today. Just as Venice made choirs

from orphans, so the "Charity Children" of St. Paul's Cathedral gave annual

performances, of which Haydn wrote, "No music has ever moved me so

much in my life." 2 Concerts and light operas were presented in the Ranelagh

Rotunda and the Marylebone Gardens. A dozen societies of amateur musi-

cians gave public performances. The English predilection for music was so

widely known that a score of virtuosos and composers came to the island

— Geminiani, Mozart, Haydn, Johann Christian Bach; and Bach remained.

The taste for serious opera declined in England after Handel's surfeit.

Some enthusiasm returned when Giovanni Manzuoli opened the 1764 season

in Ezio; Burney described his voice as "the most powerful and voluminous

soprano that has been heard on our stage since Farinelli." 3 This was appar-

ently the last triumph of Italian opera in England in that century. When the

Italian opera house in London was burned down (1789), Horace Walpole

rejoiced, and hoped it would never be rebuilt. 4

If there were now no memorable British composers, there were two emi-

nent historians of music, whose works appeared in the same year, 1776— the

annus mirabile of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and The

Wealth of Nations, not to speak of the American Declaration of Independ-

ence. Sir John Hawkins' five-volume General History of the Science and

Practise of Music was a work of careful scholarship, and though he himself

—attorney and magistrate— was not a musician, his appraisals have stood well

amid the flux of critical opinion. Charles Burney was organist at St. Paul's

and the most sought-for musical teacher in England. His handsome face and

amiable personality, added to his accomplishments, won him the friendship

746

CHAP. XXX ) THE AGE OF REYNOLDS 747

of Johnson, Garrick, Burke, Sheridan, Gibbon, and Reynolds— who made an

attractive portrait of him gratis. 5 He traveled through France, Germany,

Austria, and Italy to get materials for his General History of Music, and

spoke with firsthand knowledge of the leading composers who were then

alive. About 1780 he reported that "old musicians complain of the extrava-

gance of the young, and these again of the dryness and inelegance of the

II. THE ARCHITECTS

English builders now offered a lively contest between Gothic and classical

revivals. The grandeur of the old cathedrals, the vestigial splendor of stained

glass, the ivied ruins of medieval abbeys in Britain, stirred the imagination to

idealize the Middle Ages, and fell in with the developing Romantic reaction

against classic couplets, cold columns, and oppressive pediments. Horace

Walpole engaged a succession of second-rate architects to rebuild his

"Strawberry Hill" at Twickenham in Gothic form and ornament (1748-

73); he gave years of finical care to making his home the very palladium of

the anti-Palladian style. Year after year he added rooms, until there were

twenty-two; one, "the Gallery," housing his art collections, was fifty-six

feet long. Too often he used lath and plaster instead of stone; even a first

glance reveals a fragility forgivable in interior decoration but unpardonable

in external structure. Selwyn called Strawberry Hill "gingerbread Gothic," 7

and another wit reckoned that Walpole had outlived three sets of crenellated

battlements, 8 which had to be repeatedly restored.

Despite these experiments, Palladio and Vitruvius remained the tutelar

deities of English architecture in the second as in the first half of the eight-

eenth century. The classic spirit was reinforced by the excavations at Her-

culaneum and Pompeii, and it was spread by descriptions of classic ruins in

Athens, Palmyra, and Baalbek. Sir William Chambers defended the Palladian

view in his Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759), and added example to pre-

cept by rebuilding Somerset House (1776-86) with a vast fa$ade of Renais-

sance windows and Corinthian porticoes.

A remarkable family of four brothers, John, Robert, James, and William

Adam, came out of Scotland to dominate English architecture in this half

century. Robert left the strongest impress upon his time. After studying in

the University of Edinburgh he spent three years in Italy, where he met

Piranesi and Winckelmann. Noting that the private palaces praised by Vi-

truvius had disappeared from the Roman scene, and learning that one re-

mained relatively intact, the palace of Diocletian at Spalato (now Split in

Yugoslavia), he made his way to that ancient Dalmatian capital, spent five

weeks making measurements and drawings, was arrested as a spy, was freed,

wrote a book about his researches, and came back to England resolved to use

Roman styles in British building. In 1768 he and his brothers leased for

ninety-nine years a tract of sloping land between the Strand and the Thames,

748 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXX

and erected on it the famous Adelphi Terrace— a district of fine streets and

handsome houses on an embankment supported by massive Roman arches

and vaults; here some dramatic notables lived, from Garrick to Bernard

Shaw. Robert designed also some famous mansions, like Bute's Luton Hoo

(i.e., house at Luton, thirty miles north of London) . "This," said Johnson,

"is one of the places I do not regret having come to see"; 9 and he was hard

to please.

By and large the classic orders won the battle against the Gothic revival.

Many of the great palaces of this age, like Carlton House in London and

Harewood House in Yorkshire, were in the neoclassic style. Walpole did

not live to see Gothic return in triumph and splendor in the Houses of Par-

liament (1840-60).

III. WEDGWOOD

The Adam brothers were not content with designing buildings and in-

teriors; they built some of the loveliest furniture of the time. But the great

name here is Thomas Chippendale. In 1754, at the a g e °f thirty-six, he pub-

lished The Gentleman and Cabinet Makers Director, which was to the art

of furniture what Reynolds' Discourses were to painting. His characteristic

products were chairs with slim "ribbon backs" and charming legs. But also

he delighted the lords and ladies of George Ill's reign with cabinets, writing

tables, commodes, bookcases, mirrors, tables, and fourposter beds— all ele-

gant, mostly novel, generally frail.

The frailty continued in the work of Chippendale's rival, George Hepple-

white, and their successor, Thomas Sheraton; they seemed converted to

Burke's theory that in art, as in life, beauty must be frail. Sheraton carried

lightness and grace to their apex. He specialized in satinwood and other

beautifully grained products; he polished them patiently, painted them deli-

cately, and sometimes inlaid them with metal ornaments. In his Cabinet Dic-

tionary (1802) he listed 252 "master cabinet makers" working in or near

London. The upper classes in England now rivaled the French in the refine-

ment of their furniture and interior appointments.

They were giving a lead to the French in designing gardens and parks.

Lancelot Brown earned the nickname "Capability" because he was so quick

to see the "capabilities" offered by his clients' grounds for fantastic— and ex-

pensive—designs; in this spirit he laid out gardens at Blenheim and Kew. The

fashion in gardens ran now to the exotic, unexpected, or picturesque. Minia-

ture Gothic temples and Chinese pagodas were used as outdoor ornaments;

Sir William Chambers, in decorating the Kew Gardens (1757-62), intro-

duced Gothic shrines, Moorish mosques, and Chinese pagodas. Funerary urns

were favorite garden glories, sometimes holding the ashes of departed friends.

The ceramic arts had an almost revolutionary development. England was

producing glass as fine as any in Europe. 10 The Chelsea and Derby potteries

turned out delightful figures in porcelain, usually in the styles of Sevres. But

CHAP. XXX ) THE AGE OF REYNOLDS 749

the busiest ceramic center was the "Five Towns" in Staffordshire— chiefly

Burslem and Stoke-on-Trent. Before Josiah Wedgwood the industry was

poor in methods and earnings; the potters were coarse and letterless; when

Wesley first preached to them they pelted him with mud; their houses were

huts, and their market was restricted by impassable roads. In 1755 a rich

deposit of kaolin— hard white clay like that used by the Chinese— was discov-

ered in Cornwall; but that was two hundred miles from the Five Towns.

Wedgwood began at the age of nine (1739) to work at the potter's wheel.

He received little schooling, but he read much; and his study of Caylus'

Recueil (Tantiquites egyptiemtes, etrusques, gi-ecques, romaines, et gauloises

(1752-67) inspired him with ambition to reproduce and rival classic ceramic

forms. In 1753 he started his own business at the Ivy House Works, and

built around it, near Burslem, a town which he called Etruria. He attacked

with the energy of a warrior and the vision of a statesman the conditions

that hampered the industry. He arranged better transport for the kaolin of

Cornwall to his factories; he campaigned— and helped to pay— for the im-

provement of roads and the building of canals; he was resolved to open ave-

nues from the Five Towns to the world. Heretofore the English market for

fine pottery had been dominated by Meissen, Delft, and Sevres; Wedgwood

captured the domestic, then much of the foreign, trade; by 1763 his pot-

teries were annually exporting 550,000 pieces to the Continent and North

America. Catherine the Great ordered a dinner set of a thousand pieces.

By 1785 the Staffordshire potteries were employing fifteen thousand

workers. Wedgwood introduced specialization of labor, established factory

discipline, paid good wages, built schools and libraries. He insisted on good

workmanship; an early biographer described him as stamping about his shops

on his wooden leg, and breaking with his own hand any pot that showed the

least flaw; usually, in such cases, he chalked on the careless artisan's bench

the warning "This won't do for Josiah Wedgwood." 11 He developed preci-

sion tools, and bought steam engines to power his machines. As a result of

his large-scale production of commercial pottery, pewter went out of gen-

eral use in England. His output ranged from earthenware pipes for London

drains to the most exquisite vessels for Queen Charlotte. He divided his

offerings between "Useful" and "Ornamental." For the latter he frankly

imitated classic models, as in his luxurious agate vases; but also he developed

original forms, especially the famous jasper ware with Greek figures deli-

cately embossed in white on a base of blue.

His interest and enthusiasm ranged far beyond pottery. In experiments to

find more satisfactory mixtures of earth and chemicals, and better methods

of firing, he invented a pyrometer for measuring high temperatures; this and

other researches won him entry into the Royal Society (1783). He was an

early member of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery; he designed and

made the seal. He campaigned for universal male suffrage and parliamentary

reform. He supported the American colonies from the beginning to the end

of their revolt. He hailed the French Revolution as promising a happier and

more prosperous France.

75° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXX

He had the good sense to employ John Flaxman to provide new and re-

fined designs for his pottery. From this work Flaxman went on to illustrate

Homer, Aeschylus, and Dante with drawings based on the art of the Greek

vase painters. They are admirable in line, but, lacking body and color, they

are as attractive as a woman without flesh. Something of this cold quality

was carried into Flaxman's sculpture, as in his monument to Nelson in St.

Paul's; but in the marble Cupid and Marpessa 12 he achieved full-blooded

forms in one of the best imitations of classic statuary. Funerary monuments

became his specialty; he raised them to Chatterton at Bristol, to Reynolds in

St. Paul's, to Paoli in Westminster Abbey. He served in England the same

role as Canova in Italy— the neoclassic attempt to recapture the smooth and

voluptuous grace of Praxiteles.

We find less beauty but more life in the portrait busts that Joseph Nolle-

kens made of famous Englishmen. Born in London of Flemish parents, he

studied there till he was twenty-three, then went to Rome. He lived and

worked there for ten years, selling real and counterfeit antiques. 13 Returning

to England, he made so successful a bust of George III that he was soon in

general demand. Sterne, Garrick, Fox, Pitt II, and Johnson sat for him, some-

times to their sorrow, for Nollekens carved no compliments. Johnson grum-

bled that the sculptor had made him look as if he had taken physic. 14

It was an age of popular engravers. The public was intensely interested

in the powerful personalities that trod the political and other stages; prints

of their figures and faces were scattered throughout England. James Gill-

ray's caricatures were almost as lethal as the letters of Junius; Fox confessed

that such drawings did him "more mischief than the debates in Parliament." 15

Thomas Rowlandson caricatured men as beasts, but also he drew pleasant

landscapes, and he amused several generations with his Tours of Dr. Syntax.

Paul Sandby and Edmund Dayer developed water color to almost finished

excellence.

Britons returning from the grand tour brought back prints, engravings,

paintings, and other works of art. The appreciation of art spread; artists

multiplied, raised their heads, their fees, and their status; some were knighted.

The Society for the Encouragement of Art, Manufacture, and Commerce

(1754) gave good sums in prizes to native artists, and presented exhibitions.

The British Museum opened its collections in 1759. In 176 1 a separate Soci-

ety of Arts began annual displays. Soon it divided into conservatives and

innovators. The conservatives, formed the Royal Academy of London, with

a charter and £5,000 from George III, and made Joshua Reynolds its presi-

dent for twenty-three years. The great age of English painting began.

IV. JOSHUA REYNOLDS

Richard Wilson led the way. Son of a Welsh clergyman, he came to Lon-

don at fifteen, and made a living by painting portraits. In 1 749 he went to

Italy; there and in France he absorbed the heritage of Nicolas Poussin and

CHAP. XXX ) THE AGE OF REYNOLDS 75 I

Claude Lorrain, and learned to value historical and landscape painting above

portraiture. Back in England, he painted landscapes luminous with atmos-

phere but cluttered with gods, goddesses, and other classic ruins. Especially

beautiful is The Thames at Twickenham™ which catches the spirit of an

English summer day— bathers lolling, trees and sailboats hardly moved by

the quiet breeze. But the English would not buy landscapes; they wanted

portraits to preserve their faces in their prime. Wilson persisted. He lived in

poverty in a half-furnished room in Tottenham Court Road, and sweetened

his bitterness with alcohol. In 1776 the Royal Academy rescued him by mak-

ing him its librarian. The death of a brother left him a small property in

Wales; he spent his final years there in such obscurity that no journal men-

tioned his death (1782).

By contrast the career of Reynolds was a lifelong pageant of honors and

prosperity. He was fortunate in being born (1723) to a Devonshire clergy-

man who kept a Latin school and loved books. Among these Joshua found

an Essay on the Whole Art . . . of Painting (17 19) by Jonathan Richard-

son. This inflamed him with a desire to be a painter, and his sympathetic

parents indulged his choice; they sent him to London to study with Thomas

Hudson, a Devon man who had married Richardson's daughter and was then

the most courted portrait painter in England. In 1746 the father died, and

the young artist set up house with his two sisters in what is now Plymouth.

In that famous port he met sailors and commanders, painted their portraits,

and made precious friendships. When Captain Augustus Keppel was com-

missioned to take gifts to the Dey of Algiers he offered Joshua free passage

to Minorca, for he knew that the youth longed to study in Italy. From Mi-

norca Reynolds made his way to Rome ( 1750) .

He remained in Italy three years, painting and copying. He labored to

discover the methods used by Michelangelo and Raphael in achieving line,

color, light, shade, texture, depth, expression, and mood. He paid a price,

for while copying Raphael in some unheated rooms of the Vatican he caught

a cold that apparently damaged his inner ear. Passing to Venice, he studied

Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and learned how to endow any sitter with

the dignity of a doge. On his way home he stopped for a month in Paris, but

he found contemporary French painting too feminine for his taste. After a

month in Devon he established himself with his sister Frances in London

(1753), and remained there for the rest of his life.

Almost at once he caught attention with another portrait of Captain Kep-

pel 17 — handsome, eager, masterful; here the Vandyck tradition was restored

to make portraits as resplendent images of aristocracy. Within two years

Reynolds had received 120 sitters, and was recognized as the finest painter

in England. His facility was his limitation. He became so absorbed and ex-

pert in portraiture that he lacked the time and skill for historical, mythologi-

cal, or religious pictures. He did well a few, like The Holy Family and The

Three Graces™ but his inspiration was not in them. Nor did his patrons

want such pictures; they were nearly all Protestants, who discountenanced

religious paintings as encouraging idolatry; they loved nature, but as an ad-

75 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXX

junct to their personalities or their hunts; they wished to see themselves age-

less on their walls, impressing themselves upon posterity. So they came to

Reynolds, two thousand of them, and they sent him their wives and children,

sometimes their dogs. None went away grieved, for Reynolds' amiable

imagination could always supply what nature had failed to give.

Never has a generation or a class been so fully preserved as in Reynolds'

630 surviving portraits. Here are the statesmen of that lusty age: Bute in a

splendor of color; 19 Burke rather somber for thirty-eight; Fox potbellied,

wistful, and noble at forty-four . . . Here are the writers: Walpole, Sterne,

Goldsmith 20 looking really like "Poor Poll," Gibbon with those fat cheeks

which the Marquise du Deffand, who could see only with her hands, mis-

took for "the sitting part of a child," 21 and Boswell 22 as proud as if he had

created Johnson, and Johnson himself, lovingly painted five times, and sitting

in 1772 for the best-known of Reynolds' portraits of men. 23 Here are the

deities of the stage: Garrick "torn between the rival Muses of Tragedy and

Comedy," Mary Robinson as Perdita, Mrs. Abington as the Comic Muse,

and Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse; 24 an enthusiast paid Reynolds seven

hundred guineas ($18,200?) for this proud masterpiece.

Most numerous in this incomparable gallery are the aristocrats who gave

social order to an individualistic people, triumphant strategy to foreign pol-

icy, and a controlling constitution to the king. See them first in their hand-

some youth, like twelve-year-old Thomas Lister— a picture which, as Reyn-

old's Brown Boy, challenges the Blue Boy of Gainsborough. Many of them

swelled in the girth when their dangerous days were over, like that same

Augustus Keppel who had been so presentable as a captain in 1753, but was

so full-filled as an admiral in 1780. Despite such rotundities, and the silk and

lace of their investiture, Reynolds succeeded in transforming intangible

courage and pride into color and line. Take, as example, the powerful form

and personality of Lord Heathfield, bold in British red and holding the key

to Gibraltar, which he had invincibly defended against a four-year siege by

the Spanish and the French.

And so we come to those diai gynaikon, goddesses among women, whom

Reynolds found in the wives and daughters of the British aristocracy. Un-

married, he was free to love all of them with his eyes and brush, to straighten

their noses, refine their features, arrange their luxuriant hair, and transfigure

them with such fluffy, flowing raiment as would make Venus long to be

clothed. See Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Marchioness of Tavistock, wearing the

courtly robes she had worn years ago as bridesmaid to Queen Charlotte;

what would she be without those folds of painted silk enveloping legs that,

after all, could not be much different from Xanthippe's? Sometimes Reyn-

olds tried what he could do with a woman in simple garb; he pictured Mary

Bruce, Duchess of Richmond, dressed in a common cloak, and sewing a

pattern into a cushion; 25 this is a face that could haunt a philosopher's

dreams. Almost as simple in dress and seraphic in profile is Mrs. Bouverie

listening to Mrs. Crewe. 26 There was a still profounder beauty in the quiet

and gentle face of Emma Gilbert, Countess of Mount Edgcumbe; 27 this

CHAP. XXX ) THE AGE OF REYNOLDS 753

lovely portrait was destroyed by enemy action in the Second World War.

Nearly all these women had children, for part of the aristocratic obliga-

tion was to maintain the family and the property in undivided continuity. So

Reynolds painted Lady Elizabeth Spencer, Countess of Pembroke, with her

six-year-old son, Lord Herbert to be; 28 and Mrs. Edward Bouverie with her

three-year-old Georgiana; 29 and this daughter, become Duchess of Devon-

shire (the gay beauty who with kisses bought votes for Fox in his campaign

for Parliament), with her three-year-old daughter, another Georgiana, the

future Countess of Carlisle. 30

Finally, and perhaps the most attractive of all, the children themselves, a

full gallery of them, nearly all individualized as unduplicable souls, and sym-

pathetically understood in the insecurity and wonderment of youth. The

world knows Reynolds' masterpiece in this sector, The Age of Innocence* 1

which he painted in 1788, in the last years of his vision; but how soon his

understanding of childhood reached an almost mystic intuition can be seen

in his indescribably beautiful portrait of Lord Robert Spencer, aged eleven, 32

painted in 1758. Thereafter he painted them at every age: at age one Prin-

cess Sophia Matilda; at two years Master Wynn with his lamb; at three Miss

Bowles with her dog; at four Master Crewe in a perfect imitation of Henry

VIII, and, about the same age, the "Strawberry Girl"; 33 at five the Brum-

mell boys William and George ("Beau Brummel" to be); at six Prince

William Frederick; at seven Lord George Conway; at eight Lady Caroline

Howard; at nine Frederick, Earl of Carlisle; and so on to youth and mar-

riage and children.

Reynolds admitted that he preferred titled sitters; "the slow progression

of things naturally makes elegance and refinement the last effect of opulence

and power" 34 and only the rich could pay the £ 300 that he asked for "a

whole length with two children." 35 In any case he had struck gold, and soon

earned ,£16,000 a year. In 1760 he bought a house at 17 Leicester Square,

then the most select quarter of London; he furnished it luxuriously, collected

Old Masters, and took for his studio a chamber as large as a ballroom. He had

his own coach, with painted panels and gilded wheels; he asked his sister to

drive in it about town, for he believed that such an advertisement of pros-

perity would bring more. 36 In 1761 he was knighted. He was received every-

where, and himself played host to genius, beauty, and class; he had more

literary men at his table than any other man in England. 37 To him Gold-

smith dedicated The Deserted Village, and Boswell the Life of Samuel

Johnson. It was Reynolds who in 1764 founded "The Club" to give Johnson

a forum of his peers.

He must have loved Johnson, he made so many portraits of him. He made

even more of himself. He was not blessed with good looks: his face was

florid and scarred by childhood smallpox; his features were blunt, his upper

lip had been disfigured by a fall in Minorca. At thirty he pictured himself

shading his eyes and trying to pierce a maze of light and shade to catch the

soul behind a face. 38 He painted himself at fifty in his doctoral robes, 39 for

Oxford had just made him a doctor of civil law. Finest of the series is the

754 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXX

portrait in the National Gallery, about 1775; his face is now more refined,

but his hair is gray and his hand is cupped to his ear, for he was going deaf.

When the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768 Reynolds was

by common consent made its president. For fifteen years he opened its sea-

sons with a discourse to the students. Boswell was among the friends who sat

in the front row at the first discourse (January 2, 1769). Many who heard

these addresses were surprised at their literary excellence; some thought that

Burke or Johnson had written them, but Sir Joshua had learned much from

his associations, and had developed a style, as well as a mind, of his own. Nat-

urally, as an Academician, he stressed the importance of study; he depre-

cated the notion that genius may dispense with schooling and hard work;

he derided "this phantom of inspiration," and insisted that "labor is the only

price of solid fame." 40 Furthermore, "every opportunity should be taken to

discountenance that false and vulgar opinion— that rules are the fetters of

genius." 41 There should be three stages in the normal development of an

artist: first, tutelage— learning the rules, draftsmanship, coloring, modeling;

second, studying those masters who have received the approbation of time;

through such studies "those perfections which lie scattered among various

masters are now united in one general idea, which is henceforth to regulate

the student's taste and enlarge his imagination. . . . The third and last pe-

riod emancipates the student from subjection to any authority but what he

shall himself judge to be supported by reason." 42 Only then should he inno-

vate. "Having well established his judgment and stored his memory, he may

now without fear try the power of his imagination. The mind that has been

thus disciplined may be indulged in the wildest enthusiasm, and venture to

play on the borders of the wildest extravagance." 43

Hogarth had rejected the Old Masters as "Black Masters," and had ad-

vised a realistic portrayal of nature. Reynolds thought that this should be

merely a preparation for a more idealistic art. "Nature herself is not to be

too closely copied. . . . The wish of the genuine painter must be more

extensive: instead of endeavoring to amuse mankind with the minute neat-

ness of his imitations, he must endeavor to improve them by the grandeur of

his ideas. . . . [He] must strive for fame by captivating the imagination." 44

Everything in nature is imperfect from the standpoint of beauty, has in it

some blemish or defect; the artist learns to eliminate these from his creations;

he combines in one ideal the excellences of many deficient forms; "he corrects

nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. . . . This idea

of the perfect state of nature, which the artist calls the Ideal Beauty, is the

great leading principle by which the works of genius are conducted." To

distinguish the faulty from the perfect, the noble from the base, and to

school and chasten and exalt the imagination, the artist must enlarge himself

with literature and philosophy, and by "the conversation of learned and in-

genious men." 45 So Reynolds had done.

In 1782 he suffered a paralytic stroke, from which he partially recovered.

For seven years more he continued to paint. Then his left eye clouded, and

soon lost its vision; in 1789 the right eye began to fail, and he put down his

CHAP.XXX) THE AGE OF REYNOLDS 755

brush, despondent that almost total blindness was to be added to the semi-

deafness which since his twenty-seventh year had forced him to use an ear

trumpet. On December 10, 1790, he delivered the last of his discourses. He

reaffirmed his faith in the academic and conservative precepts of his earlier

addresses, and renewed his counsel to study line before color, and the classic

painters before attempting innovation. He ended with a paean to Michelan-

gelo:

Were I now to begin the world again, I would tread in the steps of that

great master; to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his per-

fections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man. ... I

reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admira-

tion of that truly divine man; and I should desire that the last word which I

should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name of

Michael Angelo. 46

The repentant portraitist died on February 23, 1792, and nine noblemen

were proud to bear his remains to St. Paul's.

V. THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH

Reynolds was a man of the world, ready to make the obeisances required

for social acceptance; Gainsborough was a passionate individualist who raged

at the sacrifices demanded of his personality and his art as the price of suc-

cess. His parents were Dissenters; Thomas inherited their independence of

spirit without their piety. Stories are told of his playing truant from school

in his native Sudbury to roam the countryside, sketching trees and sky, and

the cattle grazing in the fields or drinking at a pond. Having by the age of

fourteen drawn all the trees in the neighborhood, he obtained permission

from his father to go to London and study art. There he studied the women

of the town, as we gather from his later advice to a young actor: "Don't run

about London streets, fancying you are catching strokes of nature, at the

hazard of your constitution. It was my first school, and deeply read in petti-

coats I am; therefore you may allow me to caution you." 47

Suddenly, still but nineteen, he found himself married to a Scottish girl of

sixteen, Margaret Burr. She was, by most accounts, the illegitimate daughter

of a duke, but she had an income of ^200 a year. 48 In 1748 they settled in

Ipswich. He joined a music club there, for he was fond of music, and played

several instruments. "I make portraits for a living, landscapes because I love

them, and music because I cannot help myself." 49 In the work of the Dutch

"landskip" painters he found a reinforcement of his interest in nature. Philip

Thicknesse, governor of the nearby Landguard Fort, commissioned him to

paint the fort, the neighboring hills, and Harwich; then he advised him to

seek a richer and wider clientele in Bath.

Arrived there (1759), Gainsborough sought out the musicians rather than

the artists, and soon numbered Johann Christian Bach among his friends. He

had the soul and sensitivity of a musician, and in his paintings he turned

75<5 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXX

music into warmth of color and grace of line. Bath had some good collec-

tions; now he could study landscapes by Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Pous-

sin, and portraits by Vandyck; he became the inheritor of Vandyck's Eng-

lish manner— portraits that added the highest refinement of art to distinction

of personality and elegance of dress.

In Bath he did some of his best work. The Sheridans were living there;

Gainsborough painted Richard's lovely young wife. 50 He lavished all his

maturing artistry on The Honorable Mrs. Graham? 1 whose red robe, in its

wrinkles and folds, allowed him to display the most delicate gradations of

color and shade. When this portrait was exhibited in the Royal Academy

at London (1777) it seemed to many observers to outshine anything that

Reynolds had done. About 1770 Gainsborough transfigured Jonathan But-

tal, son of an ironmonger, into The Blue Boy, for which the Huntington

Art Gallery paid $500,000. Reynolds had expressed his conviction that no

acceptable portrait could be done in blue; his rising rival met the challenge

triumphantly; blue became henceforth a favorite color in English painting.

Now every notable in Bath wished to sit for Gainsborough. But "I'm sick

of portraits," he told a friend, "and wish very much to take my viol-da-

gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips and

enjoy the fag end of life in quietness and ease." 52 Instead he moved to Lon-

don (1774) and rented sumptuous rooms in Schomberg House, Pall Mall, at

£ 300 a year; he was not to be outdone by Reynolds' display. He quarreled

with the Academy on the hanging of his pictures; for four years (1773-77)

he refused to exhibit there; and after 1783 his new work could be seen only

at the annual opening of his studio. Art critics began an ungracious war of

comparisons between Reynolds and Gainsborough; Reynolds was generally

rated superior, but the royal family favored Gainsborough, and he painted

them all. Soon half of the blue bloods of England flocked to Schomberg

House, seeking the precarious immortality of paint. Now Gainsborough por-

trayed Sheridan, Burke, Johnson, Franklin, Blackstone, Pitt II, Clive . . .

To establish himself, and pay his rent, he had to resign himself to portraiture.

His sitters found him hard to please. One lord put on all his airs as he

posed; Gainsborough sent him away unpainted. Garrick's features were so

mobile and changeful (for this was half the secret of his superiority as an

actor) that the artist could find no expression that lasted long enough to re-

veal the man. He had the same trouble with Garrick's rival Samuel Foote.

"Rot them for a couple of rogues," exclaimed Gainsborough; "they have

everybody's face but their own." 53 He found a different difficulty with Mrs.

Siddons: "Damn your nose, madam! There's no end to it." 54 He was at his

best with women; he felt their sexual attraction strongly, but he sublimated

this into a poetry of soft colors and dreamy eyes.

When his expensive establishment allowed him he painted landscapes, for

which there was little demand. Often he placed his sitters— or standees—

against a rustic scene, as in Robert Andrews and His Wife (which brought

$364,000 at an auction in i960). Too busy to go and sketch in the face of

living nature, he brought into his studio stumps, weeds, branches, flowers,

CHAP. XXX ) THE AGE OF REYNOLDS 757

animals, and arranged them— with dressed-up dolls to serve as people— into a

tableau; 55 from these objects, from his memories, and from his imagination,

he painted landscapes. There was a certain artificial quality in them, a for-

malism and regularity seldom found in nature; even so the result conveyed an

air of rural fragrance and peace. In his later years he painted some "fancy

pictures," in which he made no pretense to realism, but indulged his romantic

temper; one of these, Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, has all the senti-

ment of Greuze's La Cruche cassee {The Broken Pitcher); both were

painted in 1785. 56

Only an artist can measure Gainsborough's worth. In his own time he was

ranked below Reynolds; his drawing was criticized as careless, his composi-

tion as lacking unity, his figures as improperly posed; but Reynolds himself

praised the shimmering brilliance of his rival's coloring. There was a poetry

and music to Gainsborough's work that the great portraitist could not

warmly understand. Reynolds had a more masculine intellect, and succeeded

better in portraying men; Gainsborough was a more romantic spirit, who

preferred to paint women and boys. He had missed the classical training

that Reynolds had received in Italy, and he lacked the stimulating associa-

tions that enriched Reynolds' mind and art. Gainsborough did little reading,

had few intellectual interests, shunned the circle of wits that gathered

around Johnson. He was generous but impulsive and critical; he could never

have listened with patience to Reynolds' lectures or Johnson's decrees. Yet

he kept Sheridan's friendship to the end.

As he grew older he turned melancholy, for the romantic spirit, unless it

is religious, is helpless in the face of death. In many Gainsborough land-

scapes a dead tree intrudes itself as a memento mori amid rich foliage and

lush grass. Probably he surmised that cancer was consuming him, and felt

a rising bitterness at the thought of so prolonged an agony. A few days be-

fore he died he wrote a letter of reconciliation to Reynolds and asked the

older man to visit him. Reynolds came, and the two men, who had not so

much quarreled as been the subject of lesser men's disputes, engaged in a

friendly chat. When they parted Gainsborough remarked, "Goodbye till

we meet in the hereafter, Vandyck in our company." 57 He died on August

2, 1788, in his sixty-first year.

Reynolds joined Sheridan in carrying the body to Kew Churchyard. Four

months later Reynolds, in his Fourteenth Discourse, paid him a just tribute.

He frankly noted defects as well as excellences in Gainsborough's work, but

he added: "If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire

to us the honorable distinction of an English School, the name of Gains-

borough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of art, among the

very first of that rising name." 58

George Romney struggled to reach the popularity of Reynolds and

Gainsborough, but his defects of education, health, and character kept him

to a more modest role. Without schooling after the age of twelve, he worked

in his father's carpentry shop in Lancashire till he was nineteen. His draw-

758 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXX

ings won him instruction in painting from a local wastrel. At twenty-two

he fell seriously ill; recovering, he married the nurse; soon restless, he left

her to seek his fortune; he saw her only twice in the next thirty-seven years,

but he sent her a part of his earnings. He made enough to visit Paris and

Rome, where he was influenced by the neoclassical trend. Back in London,

he attracted patronage by his ability to clothe his sitters in grace or dignity.

One of these was Emma Lyon, the future Lady Hamilton; Romney was so

captivated by her beauty that he portrayed her as goddess, Cassandra, Circe,

Magdalen, Joan of Arc, and saint. In 1782 he painted a portrait of Lady

Sutherland, for which he received £18; it was recently sold for $250,000.

In 1799, broken in body and mind, he returned to his wife; she nursed him

again, as she had done forty-four years before. He lingered through three

years of paralysis, and died in 1802. Through him and Reynolds and Gains-

borough England was now, in this half century, in painting as well as in

politics and literature, in the full stream of European civilization.

A

CHAPTER XXXI

England's Neighbors

1756-89

I. GRATTAN'S IRELAND

N English traveler, visiting Ireland in 1764, explained why the poor

were taking to crime:

What dread of justice or punishment can be expected from an Irish peasant

in a state of wretchedness and extreme penury, in which, if the first man that

met him were to knock him on the head and give him an everlasting relief from

his distressed and penurious life, he might have reason to think it a friendly and

meritorious action? . . . That many of them bear their . . . abject state with

patience is to me a sufficient proof of the natural civility of their disposition. 1

The landlords, who were almost all Protestants, were not the direct or

most brutal oppressors of the peasants, who were almost all Catholics; usu-

ally the owners lived in England and did not see the blood on the rents

exacted by the middlemen to whom they leased their land; it was the middle-

men who drew every possible penny from the peasants, until these had to

feed on potatoes and dress in rags.

In 1758, because disease was decimating cattle in England, Ireland was

allowed for five years to export livestock to Britain. Many acres in Ireland-

including common lands formerly used by the tenant farmers— were changed

from tillage to grazing or pasturage; the rich were enriched, the poor were

further impoverished. They added to their problems by marrying early—

"upon the first capacity," as Sir William Petty put it; 2 presumably they

hoped that children would soon earn their keep and then help pay the rent.

So, despite a high death rate, the population of Ireland grew from 3,191,000

in 1754 to 4,753,000 in 1791. 3

The industrial picture was brightening. Many Protestants and some Cath-

olics had gone into the production of linens, woolens, cotton goods, silk, or

glass. In the final quarter of the century, after Grattan had secured a moder-

ation of British restrictions on Irish manufactures and commerce, a middle

class developed which provided economic leverage for liberal politics and

cultural growth. Dublin became one of the leading centers of education, mu-

sic, drama, and architecture in the British Isles. Trinity College was becoming

a university, and already had a long roster of distinguished graduates. If

Ireland had kept her shining lights at home— Burke, Goldsmith, and Sheri-

dan as well as Swift and Berkeley— she would have shone with the most

brilliant nations of the age. After 1766 the lord lieutenant made Dublin his

permanent home instead of paying brief visits once a year. Now majestic

759

7^0 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

public buildings rose, and elegant mansions. Dublin's theaters rivaled Lon-

don's in the excellence of their productions; here Handel's Messiah received

its first performance and welcome (1742), and Thomas Sheridan staged

many successful plays, some of them written by his wife.

Religion, of course, was the pervading issue in Ireland. Dissenters— i.e.,

Presbyterians, Independents (Puritans), and Baptists— were excluded from

office and from Parliament by the Test Act, which required reception of

the Sacrament according to the Anglican rite as a precondition to eligibility.

The Toleration Act of 1689 was not extended to Ireland. The Presbyterians

of Ulster protested in vain against these disabilities; thousands of them emi-

grated to America, where many of them fought devotedly in the Revolu-

tionary armies.

The population of Ireland was eighty per cent Catholic, but no Catholic

could be elected to Parliament. Only a few Catholics owned land. Protestant

tenants were given leases for their lives, Catholic tenants for no more than

thirty-one years; and they had to pay two thirds of their profits as rent. 4

No Catholic schools were allowed, but the authorities did not enforce the

law forbidding the Irish to seek education abroad. Some Catholic students

were admitted to Trinity College, but they could not receive a degree. Cath-

olic worship was permitted, but there were no legal means of preparing

Catholic priests; candidates for the priesthood, however, might go to semi-

naries on the Continent. Some of these students adopted the genial manners

and liberal views of the hierarchy in France and Italy; returning to Ireland

as priests, they were welcomed at the tables of educated Protestants, and

helped to soften bigotry on both sides. By the time that Henry Grattan en-

tered the Irish Parliament (1775) the movement for Catholic emancipation

had won the support of thousands of Protestants in both England and Ire-

land.

In 1760 Ireland was governed by a lord lieutenant, or viceroy, appointed

by and responsible to the king of England; and by a Parliament dominated

in the House of Lords by Anglican bishops, and in the House of Commons

by Anglican landowners and governmental placemen, or pensioners. Elec-

tions to Parliament were subject to the same system of "rotten" and "pocket"

boroughs as in England; a few leading families, known as "the Undertakers,"

owned the vote of their boroughs as they owned their homes. 5

Catholic resistance to English rule was sporadic and ineffective. In 1763

bands of Catholics called "Whiteboys"— from the white shirts they wore

over their clothes— roamed the countryside, tearing down enclosure fences,

crippling cattle, and assaulting the collectors of taxes or tithes; the leaders

were caught and hanged, and the rebellion collapsed. The movement for

national liberation fared better. In 1776 most British troops were taken from

Ireland for service in America; at the same time the Irish economy was de-

pressed by cessation of trade with America; to guard against domestic revolt

or foreign invasion the Protestants of Ireland formed an army called the

Volunteers. These grew in number and power until, by 1780, they were a

redoubtable force in politics. It was through support by these forty thou-

chap.xxxi) England's neighbors 761

sand armed men that Henry Flood and Henry Grattan won their legislative

victories.

Both of them were officers in the Volunteers, and both were among the

greatest orators in a country which could send Burke and Richard Sheridan

to England and still have a store of eloquence left. Flood entered the Irish

Parliament in 1759. He led a brave campaign to reduce venality in a House

where half the members were indebted to the government. He was defeated

by wholesale bribery, and surrendered (1775) by accepting the office of

vice-treasurer at a salary of £ 3,500.

In that year Henry Grattan was elected to the Parliament by a Dublin

constituency. He soon took Flood's place as leader of the opposition. He

announced an ambitious program: to secure relief to Irish Catholics, to free

Dissenters from the Test Act, to end English restrictions on Irish trade, and

to establish the independence of the Irish Parliament. He pursued these aims

with an energy, devotion, and success that made him the idol of the nation,

Catholic or Protestant. In 1778 he secured passage of a bill enabling Catholics

to take leases of ninety-nine years, and to inherit land on the same condi-

tions as Protestants. A year later, on his urging, the Test Act was repealed,

and full civil rights were assured to Dissenters. He and Flood persuaded the

Irish Parliament and the Viceroy that the continuance of British obstructions

to Irish trade would lead to revolutionary violence. Lord North, then head-

ing the British government, favored repeal of the restrictions; English manu-

facturers bombarded him with petitions against repeal; he yielded to them.

The Irish began to boycott British goods. The Volunteers assembled before

the Irish Parliament House with arms in their hands and cannon labeled

"Free Trade or This." The English manufacturers, hurt by the boycott,

withdrew their opposition; the English ministry withdrew its veto; the Free

Trade Act was passed (1779).

Grattan next pressed for the independence of the Irish Parliament. Early

in 1780 he moved that only the king of England, with the consent of the

Parliament of Ireland, could legislate for Ireland, and that Great Britain and

Ireland were united only by the bond of a common sovereign. His motion

was defeated. The Volunteers, meeting at Dungannon 25,000 strong (Feb-

ruary, 1782), announced that if legislative independence were not granted,

their loyalty to England would cease. In March Lord North's aged ministry

fell; Rockingham and Fox came into power. Meanwhile Cornwallis had sur-

rendered at Yorktown (1781); France and Spain had joined America in war

against England; Britain could not afford to face an Irish revolution at this

time. On April 16, 1782, the Irish Parliament, led by Grattan, declared its

legislative independence; a month later this was conceded by England. The

Irish Parliament voted a grant of £ 100,000 to Grattan, who was a relatively

poor man; he accepted half.

This, of course, was a victory for the Protestants of Ireland, not for the

Catholics. When Grattan— strongly supported by the Anglican Bishop Fred-

erick Hervey— went on to campaign for a measure of Catholic emancipation,

the best he could do (in what historians call "Grattan's Parliament") was to

7^2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

win the franchise for propertied Catholics (1792); these few received the

right to vote but not the right to be elected to Parliament, to municipal of-

fice, or to the judiciary. Grattan went to England, secured election to the

British Parliament, and there continued his campaign. He died in 1820, nine

years before that Parliament passed the Catholic Relief Act, which admitted

Catholics to the Irish Parliament. Justice is not only blind, it limps.

II. THE SCOTTISH BACKGROUND

When the Union of 1707 merged Scotland with England through a joint

Parliament, London quipped that the whale had swallowed Jonah; when

Bute (1762 f.) brought a score of Scots into the British government the wits

grumbled that Jonah was swallowing the whale. 6 Politically the whale won:

the sixteen Scottish peers and forty-five commoners were engulfed by 108

English peers and 513 commoners. Scotland submitted its foreign policy,

and in large measure its economy, to legislation dominated by English money

and minds. The two countries did not forget their former enmity: the Scots

complained of commercial inequalities between Jonah and the whale, and

Samuel Johnson spoke for the whale in biting at Jonah with chauvinistic

iteration.

Scotland in 1760 had a population of some 1,250,000 souls. The birth rate

was high, but the death rate followed close. Said Adam Smith, toward 1770:

"It is not uncommon, I have been told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a

mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive." 7 The High-

land chieftains owned nearly all the land outside the towns, and kept the

tenant farmers primitively poor on a rocky soil harassed by summer down-

pours, and by winter snow from September to May. Rents were repeatedly

raised— on one farm from five pounds to ^20 in twenty-five years. 8 Many

peasants, seeing no escape from poverty at home, emigrated to America; so,

said Johnson, "a rapacious chief could make a wilderness of his estate." 9 The

landlords pleaded depreciation of the currency as their excuse for raising

rents. Conditions were even worse in the coal mines and salt pits, where,

until 1775, workers were bound to their jobs as long as they lived. 10

In the Lowland towns the Industrial Revolution brought prosperity to an

expanding and enterprising middle class. Southwest Scotland was dotted

with textile factories. Glasgow, through industries and foreign trade, grew

from a population of 12,500 in 1707 to eighty thousand in 1800; it had rich

suburbs, slum tenements, and a university. In 1768-90 a canal was dug con-

necting the Rivers Clyde and Forth, so establishing an all-water commercial

route between the industrial southwest and the political southeast. Edinburgh

—which had some fifty thousand inhabitants in 1 740— was the focus of Scot-

land's government, intellect, and fashion; every well-to-do Scottish family

aspired to spend at least a part of the year there; here came Boswell and

Burns, here lived Hume and Robertson and Raeburn; here were renowned

chap. xxxi) England's neighbors 763

lawyers like the Erskines, and a prestigious university, and the Royal Soci-

ety of Edinburgh. And here were the headquarters of Scottish Christianity.

Roman Catholics were few, but enough, as we have seen, to cause trepida-

tion in a land still reverberating with echoes of John Knox. The Episcopal

Church had many adherents- among the affluent, who liked the bishops and

ritual of the Anglican communion. But the allegiance of the great majority

went to the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Kirk, which rejected bish-

ops, minimized ritual, and accepted in religion and morals no other rule than

that of its parish sessions, its district presbyteries, its provincial synods, and

its General Assembly. Probably nowhere else in Europe except Spain was a

people so thoroughly imbued with theology. The kirk session, composed of

elders and minister, could levy fines and inflict penalties for misconduct and

heresy; it could sentence fornicators to stand up and be publicly rebuked

during the service; Robert Burns and Jean Armour were thus chastened in

a kirk session on August 6, 1786. The Calvinist eschatology dominated the

common mind, making free thought a danger to life and limb; but a group

of "Moderate" clergymen— led by Robert Wallace, Adam Ferguson, and

William Robertson— tempered the intolerance of the people sufficiently to

allow David Hume a natural death.

Perhaps a hard religion was required to counter the revels of a people so

cold that they drank to intoxication, and so poor that their only pleasure lay

in sexual pursuit. The career of Burns indicates that the men drank and for-

nicated despite the Devil and the dominies, and that willing girls were not

rare. In the final quarter of the eighteenth century there was a marked de-

cline in religious belief and in adherence to the traditional morality. William

Creech, an Edinburgh painter, noted that in 1763 Sunday had been a day of

religious devotion; in 1783 "attendance on church was greatly neglected,

and particularly by the men"; and at night the streets were noisy with loose

and riotous youth. "In 1763 there were five or six brothels; ... in 1783 the

number of brothels had increased twenty-fold, and the women of the town

more than a hundred-fold. Every quarter of the city and the suburbs was

infected with multitudes of females abandoned to vice." 11 Golf was luring

men from church to the links on Sundays, and on weekdays men and women

danced (formerly a sin), went to theaters (still a sin), attended horse races,

and gambled in taverns and clubs.

The Kirk was the chief source of democracy and education. The congre-

gation chose the elders, and the minister (usually chosen by a "patron") was

expected to organize a school in every parish. The hunger for education was

intense. Of the four universities, that of St. Andrews was in decay, but

claimed to have the best library in Britain. Johnson found the University

of Aberdeen flourishing in 1773. The University of Glasgow had on its

faculty Joseph Black, physicist, Thomas Reid, philosopher, and Adam

Smith, economist, and was sheltering James Watt. Edinburgh University

was the youngest of the four, but it was alive with the excitement of the

Scottish Enlightenment.

7^4 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXI

III. THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT

Only the growth of trade with England and the world, and the rise of

industry in the Lowlands, can explain the outburst of genius that illuminated

Scotland between Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Bos well's

Life of Johnson (1791). In philosophy Francis Hutcheson, David Hume,

and Adam Ferguson; in economics Adam Smith; in literature John Home, 12

Henry Home (Lord Karnes), William Robertson, James Macpherson, Rob-

ert Burns, James Boswell; in science Joseph Black, James Watt, Nevil Mas-

kelyne, James Hutton, Lord Monboddo; 13 in medicine John and William

Hunter: 14 here was a galaxy to rival the stars that shone in England around

the Great Bear! Hume, Robertson, and others formed in Edinburgh a "Se-

lect Society" for weekly discussions of ideas. These men and their like kept

in touch with French rather than English thought, partly because France

had for centuries been associated with Scotland, partly because the lingering

hostility between Englishmen and Scots impeded the fusion of the two cul-

tures. Hume had a low opinion of the English mind in his time until, in the

year of his death, he gratefully acclaimed The Decline and Fall of the Ro-

man Empire.

We have already discharged our debt to Hutcheson and Hume. 15 Now

we look at Hume's genial enemy, Thomas Reid, who strove to bring philos-

ophy back from idea-listic metaphysics to an acceptance of objective reality.

While teaching at Aberdeen and Glasgow he wrote his Inquiry into the

Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764). Before publishing

it he sent the manuscript to Hume with a courteous letter conveying compli-

ments, and explaining his regret that he had to oppose the older man's skep-

tical philosophy. Hume replied with characteristic amiability, and bade him

publish without fear of reproach. 16

Reid had formerly yielded to Berkeley's view that we know only ideas,

never things; but when Hume, by similar reasoning, contended that we

know only mental states, never a "mind" additional to them, Reid felt that

such a finical analysis undermined all distinctions between true and false,

right and wrong, and all belief in God or immortality. To avoid this debacle,

he thought, he had to refute Hume, and to refute Hume he had to reject

Berkeley.

So he ridiculed the notion that we know only our sensations and ideas; on

the contrary, we know things directly and immediately; it is only "from an

excess of refinement" that we analyze our experience of a rose, for example,

and reduce it to a bundle of sensations and ideas; the bundle is real, but so is

the rose, which maintains an obstinate persistence when our sensations of it

cease. Of course the primary qualities— size, shape, solidity, texture, weight,

motion, number— belong to the objective world, and are subjectively altered

only through subjective illusions; and even the secondary qualities have an

objective source insofar as physical or chemical conditions in the object or

chap.xxxi) England's neighbors 765

the environment give rise to the subjective sensations of smell, taste, warmth,

brightness, color, or sound. 17

Common sense tells us this, but "the principles of common sense" are not

the prejudices of unlettered multitudes; they are the instinctive "principles

. . . which the constitution of our nature [the sense common to us all] leads

us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the

common concerns of life." 18 Compared with this universal sense, daily tested

and a thousand times confirmed, the airy reasonings of metaphysics are

merely a game played in solitary flight from the world; even Hume, as he

confessed, abandoned this intellectual game when he left his study. 19 But the

same return to common sense restores reality to the mind: it is not only

ideas that exist; there is an organism, a mind, a self, that has the ideas. Lan-

guage itself testifies to this universal belief: every language has a first-person-

singular pronoun; it is / who feel, remember, think, and love. "It seemed

very natural to think that the Treatise of Human Nature required an author,

a very ingenious one too; but now we learn that it is only a set of .ideas which

came together and arranged themselves by certain associations and attrac-

tions." 20

Hume took all this good-naturedly. He could not accept Reid's theologi-

cal conclusions, but he respected his Christian temper, and perhaps he was

secretly relieved to learn that after all, despite Berkeley, the external world

existed, and that, despite Hume, Hume was real. The public too was re-

lieved, and bought three editions of Reid's Inquiry before he died. Boswell

was among the comforted; Reid's book, he tells us, "settled my mind, which

had been very uneasy from speculations in the abstruse and skeptical style." 21

Art added color to Scotland's Age of Light. The four Adam brothers,

who left their mark on English architecture, were Scots. Allan Ramsay (son

of the poet Allan Ramsay), failing to win honors in his native Edinburgh,

migrated to London (1752), and, after years of labor, became painter-in-

ordinary to the King, much to the fury of English artists. He made a good

portrait of George III, 22 but a still better one of his own wife. 23 The disloca-

tion of his right arm ended his career as a painter.

Sir Henry Raeburn was the Reynolds of Scotland. Son of an Edinburgh

manufacturer, he taught himself oil painting, and portrayed a widowed

heiress to such satisfaction that she married him and dowered him with her

fortune. After two years of study in Italy he returned to Edinburgh (1787).

Soon he had more patrons than he had time to paint: Robertson, John Home,

Dugald Stewart, Walter Scott, and, best of his portraits, Lord Newton— an

immense body, a massive head, a character of iron mingled with balm. At

opposite poles is the modest loveliness that Raeburn found in his wife. 24

Sometimes he rivaled Reynolds in picturing children, as in the Drummond

Children in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Raeburn was knighted in

1822, but died a year later, aged sixty-seven.

The Scottish Enlightenment excelled in historians. Adam Ferguson shared

in founding the study of sociology and social psychology with his Essay on

7<56 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXI

the History of Civil Society (1767), which had seven editions in his lifetime.

History (Ferguson argued) knows man only as living in groups; to under-

stand him we must see him as a social but competitive creature, composed of

gregarious habits and individualistic desires. Character development and so-

cial organization are determined by the interplay of these contrary tenden-

cies, and are seldom affected by the ideals of philosophers. Economic rivalry,

political oppositions, social inequalities, and war itself are in the nature of

man; they will continue; and by and large they advance the progress of man-

kind.

Ferguson in his day was as famous as Adam Smith, but their friend Wil-

liam Robertson won still wider renown. We recall Wieland's hope that

Schiller as historian would "rise to a level with Hume, Robertson, and Gib-

bon." 25 Horace Walpole asked in 1759: "Can we think that we want writers

of history while Mr. Hume and Mr. Robertson are living? . . . Robert-

son's work is one of the purest style, and of the greatest impartiality, that I

have ever read." 26 Gibbon wrote in his Memoirs: "The perfect composition,

the nervous language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson influenced

me to the ambitious hope that I might one day tread in his footsteps"; 27 and

he was "elated as often as I find myself ranked in the triumvirate of British

historians" with Hume and Robertson. 28 He ranked these two with Guic-

ciardini and Machiavelli as the greatest of modern historians, and later

called Robertson "the first historian of the present age." 29

Like Reid, Robertson was a clergyman son of a clergyman. Installed as

minister at Gladsmuir at the age of twenty-two (1743), he was elected two

years later to the General Assembly of the Kirk. There he became the leader

of the Moderates, and protected heretics like Hume. After six years of labor,

and careful study of documents and authorities, he issued in 1759 a History

of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of James VI until His

Accession to the Crown of England; he modestly ended where Hume's His-

tory of England had begun. It pleased Scotland by avoiding idolatry of Mary

Queen of Scots, and pleased Englishmen with its style— though Johnson was

amused to find in it some Johnsonianly cumbrous words. The book went

through nine editions in fifty-three years.

But Robertson's masterpiece was his three- volume History of the Reign of

the Emperor Charles V (1769). We may judge of the reputation that he

had won from the price paid him by the publishers, ,£4,500, as compared

with the £600 he had received for the History of Scotland. All Europe ac-

claimed the new book in its various translations. Catherine the Great carried

it with her on her long journeys; "I never leave off reading it," she said,

"especially the first volume"; 30 like all of us she was delighted with the long

prologue, which reviewed medieval developments leading to Charles V. The

book has been superseded by later research, but no later presentation of the

subject can compare with it as a piece of literature. It is pleasant to note that

the praise which the book received, considerably greater than that accorded

to Hume's History, did not cool the friendship of the minister and the

heretic.

chap. xxxi ) England's neighbors 767

More famous than either was James Macpherson, who was ranked with

Homer by Goethe, and above Homer by Napoleon. 31 In 1760 Macpherson,

then twenty-four years old, announced that an epic of some length and

splendor existed in scattered Gaelic manuscripts, which he would under-

take to collect and translate if he could secure some financial aid. Robertson,

Ferguson, and Hugh Blair (eloquent Presbyterian minister of Edinburgh)

raised the money; Macpherson and two Gaelic scholars toured the High-

lands and the Hebrides, gathering old manuscripts; and in 1762 Macpherson

published Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, . . . Composed by

Ossian, the Son of Fingal, Translated from the Gaelic Language. A year

later he issued another epic, Temora, allegedly by Ossian; and in 1765 he

published both as The Works of Ossian.

Ossian, in Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) legend, was the poet son of the

warrior Finn MacCumhail; 32 he lived, we are told, three hundred years, long

enough to express his pagan opposition to the new theology brought to

Ireland by St. Patrick. Some poems attributed to him were preserved in

three fifteenth-century manuscripts, chiefly in The Book of Lismore, which

James Macgregor compiled in 15 12; Macpherson had these manuscripts. 33

Fingal told how the young warrior, having defeated Scottish invaders of

Ireland, invited them to a feast and a song of peace. The story is vividly

told, warmed by the Scots' appreciation of Irish girls. "Thou art snow on the

heath," says one warrior to Morna, daughter of King Cormac; "thy hair is

the mist of Cromla when it curls on the hill, when it shines to the beam of

the west! Thy breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams;

thy arms like two white pillars in the halls of the great Fingal." 34 We meet

other bosoms, less rocky: "white bosom," "high bosom," "heavy bosom"; 35

they are a bit distracting; but soon the tale turns from love to the hatreds of

war.

Macpherson's Ossian made a stir in Scotland, England, France, and Ger-

many. Scots hailed it as a page from their heroic medieval past. England,

which in 1765 was welcoming Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,

was ripe for the romance of Gaelic legend. Goethe, toward the end of

Werther (1774), showed his hero reading to Lotte six pages of Ossian.

These were the story of the tender maiden Daura, as told by her father,

Armin: how the wicked Erath lured her out to a rock in the sea by promis-

ing that her lover, Armar, would meet her there; how Erath abandoned her

on the rock, and no lover came. "She lifted up her voice; she called for her

brother and her father: 'Arindal! Armin!' " Arindal rowed out to rescue her,

but an arrow well aimed by a hidden enemy slew him. Lover Armar came

to the shore, tried to swim out to Daura; "sudden a blast from the hill came

over the waves; he sank, and he rose no more." The father, too old and weak

to go to her, cried out in horror and despair.

Alone on the sea-beat rock my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent

and loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the

shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon. . . . Loud was the wind; the

rain beat hard on the hill. Before morning appeared her voice was weak. It

7<58 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXI

died away like the evening breeze among the grass of the rocks. Spent with

grief she expired.

Gone is my strength in war! fallen my pride among women! When the

storms aloft arise, when the north wind lifts the wave on high, I sit by the

sounding shore, and look on the fatal rock. Often, by the setting moon, I see

the ghosts of my children. . . . Will none of you speak in pity? 36

Controversy soon arose: was Ossian really a translation from old Gaelic

ballads, or was it a series of poems by Macpherson and foisted upon a poet

who perhaps never lived? Herder and Goethe in Germany, Diderot in

France, Hugh Blair and Lord Karnes in Scotland, credited Macpherson's

claim. But in 1775 Samuel Johnson, in A Journey to the Western Islands of

Scotland, after some inquiries in the Hebrides (1773), declared of the

"Ossianic" poems: "I believe they never existed in any other form but that

which we have seen. The editor, or author, never could show the original,

nor can it be shown by any other." 37 Macpherson wrote to Johnson that

only the Englishman's age protected him from a challenge or a beating.

Johnson replied: "I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I

think a cheat, by the meanness of a ruffian. ... I thought your book an

imposture, I think it an imposture still. . . . Your rage I defy." 38 Hume,

Horace Walpole, and others joined in Johnson's doubts. Asked to produce

the originals which he claimed to have translated, Macpherson delayed; but

at his death he left the manuscripts of Gaelic ballads, some of which he had

used in contriving the plot and setting the tone of his poems. Many phrases

and names he took from these texts; the two epics, however, were his own

composition. 39

The deception was not so complete or so heinous as Johnson supposed; let

us call it poetic license on too grand a scale. Taken in themselves, the two

prose-poetry epics warranted some of the admiration they received. They

conveyed the beauty and terrors of nature, the fury of hatred, and the zest

of war. They were tenderly sentimental, but they had some of the nobility

that Sir Thomas Malory had conveyed in Le Morte d' Arthur (1470). They

rose to fame on the Romantic wave that engulfed the Enlightenment.

IV. ADAM SMITH

Next to Hume, Adam Smith was the greatest figure in the Scottish En-

lightenment. His father, controller of the customs at Kirkaldy, died some

months before Adam's birth (1723). Almost the only adventure the econo-

mist had in his life came when, a child of three years, he was kidnapped by

gypsies, who, being pursued, abandoned him beside the road. After some

schooling at Kirkaldy, and attending the courses of Hutcheson at Glasgow,

Adam went down to Oxford (1740), where he found the teachers as lazy

and worthless as Gibbon would describe them in 1752. Smith educated him-

self by reading, but the college authorities confiscated his copy of Hume's

Treatise of Human Nature as quite unfit for a Christian youth. One year

with the dons was enough; loving his mother better, he returned to Kirkaldy,

chap.xxxi) England's neighbors 769

and continued to absorb books. In 1748 he moved to Edinburgh, where he

lectured independently on literature and rhetoric. His discourses impressed

influential persons; he was appointed to the chair of logic in the University

of Glasgow (175 1 ), and a year later became professor of moral philosophy

—which included ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy. In 1759 he

published his ethical conclusions in Theory of Moral Sentiments, which

Buckle, ignoring Aristotle and Spinoza, pronounced "the most important

work that has ever been written on this interesting subject." 40

Smith derived our ethical judgments from our spontaneous disposition to

imagine ourselves in the position of others; thereby we echo their emotions,

and by this sympathy, or fellow feeling, we are moved to approve or con-

demn. 41 The moral sense is rooted in our social instincts, or in the mental

habits developed by us as members of a group; but it is not inconsistent with

self-love. The summit of a man's moral development comes when a man

learns to judge himself as he judges others, "to command himself according

to the objective principles of equity, natural law, prudence, and justice." 42

Religion is not the source nor the mainstay of our moral sentiments, but

these are strongly influenced by belief in the derivation of the moral code

from a rewarding and punishing God. 43

In 1764 Smith, now forty-one, was engaged as tutor and guide to accom-

pany the eighteen-year-old Duke of Buccleuch on a tour of Europe. The

f ee > ^3 00 a y ear f° r hfe, gave Smith the security and leisure for his master-

piece, which he began to write during an eighteen-month stay in Toulouse.

He visited Voltaire at Ferney, and in Paris he met Helvetius and d'Alembert,

Quesnay and Turgot. Returning to Scotland in 1766, he lived for the next

ten years contentedly with his mother in Kirkaldy, working on his book.

The Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared

in 1776, and was greeted with a letter of praise from Hume, who died

shortly thereafter.

Hume himself, in his essays, had helped to form the economic as well as

the ethical views of Adam Smith. He had ridiculed the "mercantile system,"

which favored protective tariffs, trade monopolies, and other governmental

measures to ensure an excess of exports over imports, and the accumulation

of precious metals as a nation's basic wealth. This policy, said Hume, was

like toiling to keep water from seeking its natural level; and he called for

liberation of the economy from the "numberless bars . . . and imposts

which all nations of Europe, and none more than England, have put upon

trade." 44 Of course Smith was acquainted with the campaign of Quesnay

and other French physiocrats against the obstructive regulations of industry

and trade by guilds and governments, and their demand for a laissez-faire

policy that would let nature take its course, and all prices and wages find

their level in free competition. The revolt then rising in America against

British restrictions on colonial trade was part of the background of Smith's

thought. If the freedom of trade which he proposed had guided the British

government, the year of his book might not have seen the Declaration of In-

dependence.

77° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

Smith had some ideas about the strife between Britain and America. He

considered the English monopoly of colonial trade to be one of the "mean

and malignant expedients of the mercantile system." 45 He proposed that if

the colonists refused to be taxed to support the expenses of the British Em-

pire, America should be given its independence without further quarrel. "By

thus parting good friends, the natural affection of the colonists to the mother

country . . . would quickly revive. It might dispose them ... to favor us

in war as well as in trade, and, instead of turbulent and factious subjects, to

become our most faithful . . . and generous allies." 46 And he added: "Such

has hitherto been the rapid progress of that country in wealth, population,

and improvement, that in the course of little more than a century, perhaps,

the produce of America might exceed that of British taxation. The seat of

empire would then naturally remove itself to that part of the empire which

contributed most to the general defense and support of the whole." 47

Smith defined the wealth of a nation not as the amount of gold or silver

it possessed, but as the land with its improvements and products, and the

people with their labor, services, skills, and goods. His thesis was that, with

some exceptions, the greatest physical wealth results from the greatest eco-

nomic liberty. Self-interest is universal, but if we let this powerful motive

operate with the greatest economic freedom it will stimulate such industry,

enterprise, and competition as will generate more riches than any other sys-

tem known to history. (This was Mandeville's Fable of the Bees 48 worked

out in detail.) Smith believed that the laws of the market— especially the law

of supply and demand— would harmonize the liberty of the producer with

the welfare of the consumer; for if a producer made excessive profits, others

would enter the same field, and the mutual competition would keep prices

and profits within fair limits. Moreover, the consumer would enjoy a kind

of economic democracy: by buying or refusing to buy he would in great

measure determine what articles would be produced, what services would

be offered, in what quantity and at what price, instead of having all these

matters dictated by a government.

Following the physiocrats (but judging the products of labor and the

services of trade to be wealth as real as the produce of the land), Smith

called for an end to feudal tolls, guild restrictions, governmental economic

regulations, and industrial or commercial monopolies, as all limiting that

freedom which— by allowing the individual to work, spend, save, buy, and

sell at his pleasure— keeps the wheels of production and distribution in mo-

tion. The government must laisser faire, must let nature— the natural pro-

pensities of men— operate freely; it must allow the individual to shift for

himself, to find by trial and error the work that he can do, the place that he

can fill, in the economic life; it must let him sink or swim.

According to this system of natural liberty, the sovereign [or the state] has

only three duties to attend to: ... first, the duty of protecting the society

from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the

duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the in-

justice or oppressions of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing

chap. xxxi ) England's neighbors 771

an exact administration of justice; and thirdly, the duty of maintaining certain

public works and public institutions which it can never be for the interest of

any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect or maintain. 49

Here was the formula of Jeff ersonian government, and the outline of a state

that would enable the new capitalism to grow and flourish exceedingly.

There was a loophole in the formula: what if the duty of preventing in-

justice should imply the obligation to prevent the inhumane usage of the

simple or the weak by the clever or the strong? Smith answered: such in-

justice can come only through monopolies in restraint of competition or

trade, and his principles called for the suppression of monopolies. We must

rely upon the competition of employers for workers, and of these for jobs,

to regulate wages; all attempts of governments to regulate them are sooner

or later frustrated by the laws of the market. Though labor (and not land,

as the physiocrats held) is the sole source of wealth, 50 it is a commodity, just

like capital, and is subject to the laws of supply and demand. "Whenever the

law has attempted to regulate the wages of workers, it has always been rather

to lower them than to raise them"; 51 for "whenever the legislature attempts

to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its coun-

selors are always the masters." 52 This was written at a time when English law

allowed employers, but forbade employees, to organize themselves to protect

their economic interests. Smith denounced this partiality of the law, and

foresaw that better wages would be obtained not through governmental reg-

ulation but by the organization of labor. 53

The supposed herald of capitalism almost always took the side of the

workers against the employers. He warned against letting merchants and

manufacturers determine the policy of the government.

The interest of the dealers, ... in any particular branch of trade or manu-

factures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that

of the public. . . . The proposal of any new law, or regulation of commerce,

which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great pre-

caution. ... It comes from an order of men . . . who have generally an in-

terest to deceive, and even to oppress, the public and who . . . have, upon

many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. 54

Is this Adam Smith or Karl Marx? But Smith defended private property as

an indispensable stimulus to enterprise, and he held that the number of avail-

able jobs, and the wages paid, will depend above all upon the accumulation

and application of capital. 55 Nevertheless, he advocated high wages as profit-

able to employer and employee alike, 56 and urged the abolition of slavery on

the ground that "the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than

that performed by slaves." 57

When we consider Smith himself, in his appearance, habits, and character,

we wonder that a man so removed from the processes of agriculture, indus-

try, and trade should have written about these esoteric complexities with

such realism, insight, and audacity. He was as absent-minded as Newton,

and cared little for convention. Usually mannerly and mild, he was capable

of meeting Samuel Johnson's rudeness with a four-word retort that ques-

77 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

tioned the Great Cham's legitimacy. After publishing The Wealth of Na-

tions he spent two years in London, where he enjoyed the acquaintance of

Gibbon, Reynolds, and Burke. In 1778 he-apostle of free trade- was ap-

pointed commissioner of customs from Scotland. Thereafter he lived in

Edinburgh with his mother, remaining a bachelor to the end. She died in

1784; he followed her in 1790, aged sixty-seven.

His achievement lay not so much in the originality of his thought as in the

mastery and co-ordination of data, the wealth of illustrative material, the

illuminating application of theory to current conditions, a simple, clear, and

persuasive style, and a broad viewpoint that raised economics from a "dismal

science" to the level of philosophy. His book was epochal because it sum-

marized and explained— of course it did not produce— the facts and forces

that were changing feudalism and mercantilism into capitalism and free en-

terprise. When Pitt II reduced the duty on tea from 1 19 to twelve and a half

per cent, and tried in general to bring about freer trade, he acknowledged

his indebtedness to The Wealth of Nations. Lord Rosebery tells how, at a

dinner attended by Pitt, the whole company rose when Smith entered, and

Pitt said, "We will stand till you are seated, for we are all your scholars." 58

Sir James Murray-Pulteney predicted that Smith's work "would persuade

the present generation and govern the next." 59

V. ROBERT BURNS

"My ancient but ignoble blood," said Scotland's greatest poet, "has crept

through scoundrels since the Flood." 60 We shall go no further back than

William Burnes, no scoundrel but a hard-working, irascible tenant farmer.

In 1757 he married Agnes Brown, who presented him Robert in 1759. Six

years later William took lease of a seventy-acre farm at Mount Oliphant;

there the multiplying family lived "sparingly" in an isolated house. Robert

received tutoring at home and attended a parish school, but from the age of

thirteen he worked on the farm. When he was fourteen "a bonnie, sweet,

sonsy [jolly] lass initiated me into a certain delicious passion, which, in spite

of acid disappointment, ginhorse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I

hold to be the finest of human joys." 61 At fifteen he met a second "angel,"

and spent feverish nights thinking of her. His brother recalled that Robert's

"attachment [to women] became very strong, and he was constantly the

victim of some fair enslaver." 62

In 1777, in a spell of reckless courage, William Burnes leased the Lochlie

farm, 1 30 acres, in Tarbolton, for which he contracted to pay £ 1 30 a year.

Now Robert, eighteen, the eldest of seven children, became the chief

worker, for William, broken by unrewarding toil, was prematurely old.

Father and son drew apart as the one narrowed into puritanism and the other

eased into a broader code. Despite parental prohibition Robert attended a

dancing school; "from that instance of rebellion," the poet recalled, "he took

a kind of dislike to me, which I believe was one cause of that dissipation

chap.xxxi) England's neighbors 773

which marked my future years." 63 At the age of twenty-four Robert joined

a Freemason lodge. In 1783 the farm was attached for default of rent. Robert

and his brother Gilbert pooled their poverty to lease a farm of 1 1 8 acres for

ninety pounds a year; there for four years they labored, allowing themselves

seven pounds each per year for personal expenses; and there they supported

their parents, sisters, and brothers. The father died in 1784 of tuberculosis.

In the long winter evenings Robert read many books, including Robert-

son's histories, Hume's philosophy, and Paradise Lost. "Give me a spirit like

my favorite hero, A4ilton's Satan." 64 Resenting the Kirk's censorship of

morals, he found no difficulty in discarding its theology and keeping only a

vague faith in God and immortality. He laughed at "Orthodox, orthodox,

who believe in John Knox," and he suspected that the dominies, between

Sundays, were secretly as sinful as himself. 65 In "The Holy Fair" (about a

religious revival meeting) he described a succession of preachers flaying sin

and brandishing hell, while harlots outside waited confidently for the con-

gregation's patronage.

Burns's dislike for clergymen gained fervor when one of them sent an

agent to rebuke and fine him for sleeping unwed with Betty Paton. It be-

came anger when his kindly landlord, Gavin Hamilton, was censured by the

kirk session of Mauchline (1785) for repeated absence from church services.

Now the poet wrote his sharpest satire, "Holy Willie's Prayer," which ridi-

culed the Pharisaic virtue of William Fisher, an elder of the Mauchline kirk.

Burns pictured him addressing God:

I bless and praise Thy matchless might,

When thousands Thou hast left in night,

That I am here afore thy sight,

For gifts an* grace

A burning and a shining light

To a' this place. . . .

O Lord! yestreen, Thou kens, wi' Meg—

Thy pardon I sincerely beg—

O! may't never be a livin' plague

To my dishonor,

An' I'll ne'er lift a lawless leg

Again upon her.

Besides I farther maun* avow

Wi' Leezie's lass three times, 1 trow-

But Lord, that Friday I was f out

When I cam near her,

Or else, Thou kens, Thy servant true

Wad never steer her. . . .

Lord, mind Gau'n Hamilton's deserts,

He drinks an' swears, an' plays at cartes,

Yet hae sae mony takin' arts

Wi' great an' sma',

* Must.

+ Drunk.

774 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXI

Frae God's ain priest the people's hearts

He steals awa'. . . .

Lord, in Thy day of vengeance try him;

Lord, visit them who did employ him,

And pass not in Thy mercy by them,

Nor hear their pray'r;

But, for Thy people's sake, destroy them,

An' dinna spare.

But, Lord, remember me an' mine

Wi' mercies temporal an' divine,

That I for grace an' gear* may shine

Excell'd by nane,

And a' the glory shall be Thine.

Amen, Amen!

Burns did not dare publish this poem; it reached print three years after his

death.

Meanwhile he was giving the Kirk plenty of reason for reproof. He called

himself a "fornicator by profession." 66 Every second maiden stirred him:

"charming Chloe, tripping o'er the pearly lawn," Jean Armour, Highland

Mary Campbell, Peggy Chalmers, "Clarinda," Jenny Cruikshank, Jenny of

Dairy "comhV thro' the rye," "bonnie wee" Deborah Davies, Agnes Flem-

ing, Jeanie JafFrey, Peggy Kennedy of "bonnie Doon," Jessie Lewars, Jean

Lorimer ("Chloris"), Mary Morison, Anna Park, Anna and Polly Stewart,

Peggy Thomson— and there were more. 67 Only their bright and laughing

eyes and soft hands and bosoms of "driven snaw" reconciled him to the toils

and griefs of life. He excused his sexual meandering on the ground that all

things in nature change, and why should man be an exception? 68 But he

warned women never to trust the promises of a male. 69 We know of five

children begotten by him in wedlock, and nine others outside it. "I have a

genius for paternity," he said, and he surmised that only emasculation could

cure him. 70 As for the reproaches of ministers and the laws of Scotland—

The Kirk an' State may join an' tell,

To do sic things I maunna;t

The Kirk an' State may gae to hell,

And I'll gae to my Anna. 71

When Betty Paton bore him a child (May 22, 1785) Burns offered to

marry her; her parents rejected the offer. He turned to Jean Armour and

gave her a written promise of marriage; soon she was pregnant. On June 25,

1786, he appeared before the kirk session and admitted his responsibility; he

had (he said) considered himself married to Jean, and would stand by his

pledge; but her father refused to let her marry a seventeen-year-old farmer

already burdened with an illegitimate child. On July 9, in his pew at church,

Burns humbly received public reproof. On August 3 Jean bore twins. On

August 6 he and Jean accepted rebuke before the congregation, and were

* Wealth.

t To do such things I must not.

chap. xxxi ) England's neighbors 775

"absolved from the scandal." The father swore out a warrant for Burns's

arrest; the poet went into hiding, and planned to take ship to Jamaica. The

warrant was not executed, and Robert returned to his farm. In that same

summer he promised to marry Mary Campbell and take her to America; she

died before they could act on the plan; Burns celebrated her in "Highland

Mary" and "To Mary in Heaven." 72

In that prolific year 1786 he published at Kilmarnock, by subscription, his

first volume of verse. He omitted poems likely to offend the Kirk or the

morals of the folk; he delighted his readers with his Scottish dialect and his

descriptions of familiar scenery; he pleased the peasants by raising the details

of their life into intelligible verse. Probably no other poet ever expressed

such fellow feeling for animals sharing the burden of the farmer's day, or

the "silly sheep" bewildered in the driving snow, or the mouse dislodged

from his nest by the advancing plow.

But, mousie, thou art no thy lane*

Tn proving foresight may be vain;

The best laid schemes o' mice and men

Gang aft a-gley.

Almost as proverbial are the lines that end the poem "To a Louse on Seeing

One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church":

O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us. 73

To make sure that his little book would be welcomed, Burns capped it with

"The Cotter's Saturday Night": the farmer resting after a week of heavy

toil; his wife and children gathering about him, each with a tale of the day;

the oldest daughter timidly introducing the shy courter; the happy sharing

in the simple fare; the Bible-reading by the father; the united prayer. To

this pleasant picture Burns added a patriotic apostrophe to "Scotia, my dear,

my native soil!" — Of the 612 copies printed all but three were sold in four

weeks, netting Burns twenty pounds.

He had thought of using the proceeds to pay for passage to America; in-

stead he devoted them to a sojourn in Edinburgh. Arriving there on a bor-

rowed horse in November, 1786, he shared a room and bed with another

rural youth. Some noisy harlots occupied the floor above them. 74 The favor-

able reception of his book by Edinburgh reviewers opened doors to him; for

a season he was an idol of polite society. Sir Walter Scott described him:

I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-87 when Burns came first to Edinburgh. ... I

saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson, where there were

several gentlemen of literary reputation. ... His person was strong and ro-

bust; his wanness rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and sim-

plicity. . . . His countenance massive, . . . the eye large and of a dark cast,

which glowed . . . when he spoke. . . . Among the men, who were the most

learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness,

but without the least forwardness. 75

* Not alone.

77 6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

Burns was encouraged to issue an enlarged edition of his poems. To give

the new volume kidded substance he proposed to include one of his major

productions, "The Jolly Beggars," which he had not ventured to print in the

Kilmarnock volume. It described an assemblage of tramps, paupers, crimi-

nals, poets, fiddlers, harlots, and crippled, derelict soldiers in Nancy Gibson's

alehouse at Mauchline. Burns, put into their mouths the most candid and un-

repentant autobiographies, and ended the medley with a drunken chorus:

A fig for those by law protected!

Liberty's a glorious feast!

Courts for cowards were erected,

Churches built to please the priest. 76

Hugh Blair, scholar and preacher, expressed alarm at the thought of publish-

ing such a snub to the virtues; Burns yielded, and later forgot that he had

written the poem; 77 a friend preserved it, and it saw the light in 1799.

The Edinburgh editor sold some three thousand copies, netting Burns

^450. He bought a mare and rode out (May 5, 1787) into the Highlands,

and then across the Tweed to sample England. On June 9 he visited his rela-

tives at Mossgiel, and called on Jean Armour; she received him warmly, and

conceived again. Back in Edinburgh, he met Mrs. Agnes M'Lehose. At

seventeen she had married a Glasgow surgeon; at twenty-one (1780) she left

him, taking her children with her, and settled down to "frugal decency" in

the capital. She invited Burns to her home; he fell in love with her without

delay; apparently she did not give herself to him, for he continued to love

her. They exchanged letters and poems, his signed "Sylvander," hers "Cla-

rinda." In 1791 she decided to go and rejoin her husband in Jamaica; Burns

sent her, as his farewell, some tender lines:

Ae* fond kiss, and then we sever!

Ae farewell, and then forever! . . .

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,

Had we never lov'd sae blindly,

Never met nor never parted,

We had ne'er been brokenhearted. 78

She found her husband living with a Negro waitress; she returned to Edin-

burgh.

His passion for her being unfulfilled, Burns sought companionship and

revelry with a local club, the Crochallan Fencibles— men pledged to the de-

fense of their city. There wine and women were the lares et penates, and

bawdy reigned. For them Burns collected old Scots songs, and added some

of his own; several of these found anonymous and esoteric publication in

1 800 as The Merry Muses of Caledonia. Burns's membership in this club, his

open scorn of class distinctions, 79 and his frank expression of radical views in

religion and politics rapidly ended his welcome in Edinburgh society.

He tried to secure a post as a tax collector; repeatedly put off, he resigned

•One.

chap. xxxi) England's neighbors 777

himself to another venture in farming. In February, 1788, he rented the

Ellisland farm, five miles from Dumfries, twelve from Carlyle's Craigen-

puttock. The owner, who candidly described the soil as "in the most miser-

able state of exhaustion," 80 advanced the poet ^300 to build a farmhouse

and fence the field; Burns was to pay fifty pounds annually for three years,

then seventy pounds. Meanwhile Jean Armour gave birth to twins (March

3, 1788), who soon died. Some time before April 28 Burns married her; with

her one surviving child of the four she had borne him she came to serve him

faithfully as wife and housekeeper at Ellisland. She gave him another child,

whom Burns called "my chef-d'oeuvre in that species of manufacture, as I

look upon 'Tarn o'Shanter' to be my standard performance in the political

line." 81 In 1790 he became intimate with Anna Park, waitress in a Dumfries

tavern; in March, 1791, she bore him a child, which Jean took and brought

up with her own. 82

Life was hard at Ellisland. Nevertheless he continued to write great po-

etry. There he added two famous stanzas to an old drinking song, "Auld

Lang Syne." Burns worked until he too, like his father, broke down. He

was glad to be appointed (July 14, 1788) an exciseman, and so to travel about

the country gauging casks, examining victualers, chandlers, and tanners, and

reporting to the Excise Board in Edinburgh. Despite frequent bouts with

John Barleycorn he seems to have satisfied the board. In November, 1791,

he sold his farm at a profit, and moved with Jean and the three children to

a house in Dumfries.

He offended the respectable folk of the town by frequenting the taverns,

and coming home drunk, on many occasions, to patient Jean. 83 He contin-

ued to be a great poet; in those five years at Dumfries he composed "Ye

banks an' braes o' bonnie Doon," "Scots wha' hae wi' Wallace bled," and

"O my hive's like a red, red rose." Finding no mental mate in his wife, he

corresponded with— sometimes visited— Mrs. Frances Dunlop, who had in

her veins some residue of Wallace's blood; she strove to tame Burns's morals

and vocabulary, not always to the benefit of his verse. He appreciated better

the five-pound notes she sent him now and then. 84

He endangered his commission as exciseman by his radical views. He told

George III, in fifteen excellent stanzas, to get rid of his corrupt ministers,

and advised the Prince of Wales to end his dissipations, and his "rattlin' dice

withe Charlie [Fox]," if he wished to inherit the throne. 85 In a letter to the

Edinburgh Courant he applauded America's Declaration of Independence,

and in 1789 he was an "enthusiastic votary" of the French Revolution. In

1 795 he sent out a blast against rank distinctions:

Is there for honest poverty

That hings* his head and a' that?

The coward slave, we pass him by;

We dare be poor for a' that!

For a' that, an' a' that,

Our toils obscure, an' a' that,

* Hangs.

77^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

The rank is but the guinea's stamp,

The man's the gowd* for a' that.

The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,

Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkiet ca'd a lord,

Wha' struts an' stares, an' a' that;

Tho' hundreds worship at his word,

He's but a cooft for a' that. . . .

Then let us pray that come it may,

As come it will for a* that,

That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,

Shall bear the gree§ an* a' that.

For a' that an' a' that,

It's coming yet, for a' that,

That man to man the world o'er

Shall brithers be for a' that.

Complaints were made to the Excise Board that such a radical was no fit

man to check chandlers and gauge casks, but the commissioners forgave him

for his love and praise of Scotland. The ninety pounds a year his post

brought him hardly sufficed to keep him in oats and ale. He continued to

roam sexually, and in 1793 Mrs. Maria Ridell, who confessed his "irresistible

power of attraction," bore him a child. His repeated intoxication at last

weakened his mind and his pride. Like Mozart in this same decade, he sent

begging letters to his friends. 86 Stories went around that he had syphilis, and

had been found, one bitter morning in January, 1796, lying drunken in the

snow. 87 These reports have been criticized as unconfirmed heresy, and Scot-

tish doctors describe Burns's final illness as rheumatic fever impairing the

heart. 88 Three days before his death he wrote to his father-in-law: "Do, for

Heaven's sake, send Mrs. Armour here immediately. My wife is hourly ex-

pecting to be put to bed. Good God! What a situation for her to be in, poor

girl, without a friend!" 89 Then he took to his bed, and on July 21, 1796, he

died. While he was being buried his wife gave birth to a son. Friends raised

a fund to care for her, and she, strong of frame and heart, lived till 1834.

VI. JAMES BOSWELL**

1. The Cub

He had royal blood in him. His father, Alexander Boswell, Laird of Au-

chinleck in Ayrshire and judge of the Scottish Court of Session, was de-

*Gold. t Fellow. % Dolt. § Prize.

**The discovery of Boswell's journals was among the most exciting events in the literary

history of our time. He had bequeathed his papers to his heirs, who judged them too scan-

dalous for publication. One bundle, containing the London Journal, was found at Fettercairn

House, near Aberdeen, in 1930; a larger treasure was ferreted out from the chests and closets

chap. xxxi ) England's neighbors 779

scended from the Earl of Arran, a great-grandson of James II of Scotland.

His mother was descended from the third Earl of Lennox, who was grand-

father of Lord Darnley, who was father of James VI. James Boswell was

born in Edinburgh October 29, 1740. As the eldest of three sons he was heir

to the modest estate of Auchinleck (which he pronounced "Affleck"); but,

since his father lived till 1782, James had to be discontent with such income

as the Laird allowed him. Brother John suffered in 1762 the first of several

attacks of insanity. Boswell himself was oppressed with spells of hypochon-

dria, for which his cures were the amnesia of alcohol and the warmth of

female forms. His mother taught him the Presbyterian Calvinist creed,

which had a warmth of its own. "I shall never forget," he later wrote, "the

dismal hours of apprehension that I have endured in my youth from narrow

notions of religion, while my mind was lacerated with infernal horror." 90

Throughout his life he oscillated between faith and doubt, piety and venery,

and never achieved more than momentary integration or content.

After some tutoring at home, he was sent to the University of Edinburgh,

then to Glasgow, where he attended the lectures of Adam Smith and studied

law. At Glasgow he met actors and actresses, some of them Catholic. It

seemed to him that their religion was more compatible than Calvinism with

a jolly life; he liked especially the doctrine of purgatory, which allowed a

sinner to be saved after a few aeons of burning. Suddenly James rode off to

London (March, 1760), and joined the Roman Church.

His alarmed father sent a plea to the Earl of Eglinton, an Ayrshire neigh-

bor living in London, to take James in hand. The Earl pointed out to the

youth that as a Catholic he could never practice law, or enter Parliament, or

inherit Auchinleck. James returned to Scotland and the Kirk, and lived

under the paternal roof and eye; but, as the judge was busy, his son managed

to "catch a Tartar" 91 — the first of his many bouts with venereal disease.

Fearing that this reckless youth, on inheriting Auchinleck, would squander

the estate in revelry, the father persuaded him, in return for an annuity of

£ 1 00, to sign a document giving the future management of the property to

trustees named by Boswell Senior.

On October 29, 1761, James came of age, and his annuity was doubled.

In the following March he impregnated Peggy Doig; in July he passed his

bar examination. On November 1, 1762, leaving ten pounds to Peggy, he set

out for London. (Her child was born a few days later; Boswell never saw

it.) In London he took a comfortable room in Downing Street. By Novem-

ber 25 he "was really unhappy for want of women"; 92 but he remembered

his infection, and "the surgeons' fees in this city are very high." 93 So he

steeled himself to continence "till I got some safe girl, or was liked by some

woman of fashion." 94 His impression was that London provided every va-

of Malahide Castle, near Dublin, in 1925-40. Most of the papers were bought by Colonel Ralph

Isham, and were acquired from him by Yale University. Professor Frederick A. Pottle edited

them for the McGraw-Hill Book Company, which has sole publishing rights. We are grateful

for permission received, from editor and publisher, to quote some passages from the journals.

Professor Pottle's James Boswell: The Earlier Years appeared after this section was written.

7 8 ° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

riety of courtesan, "from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night down

to the civil nymph . . . who . . . will resign her engaging person to your

honor for a pint of wine and a shilling." 95 He developed a connection with

"a handsome actress," Louisa, whose long resistance seemed to attest hygiene.

Finally he persuaded her, and achieved quintuple ecstasy; "she declared I

was a prodigy." 96 Eight days later he discovered that he had gonorrhea. By

February 27 he felt cured; on March 25 he picked up a streetwalker, and

"engaged her in armor" (with a prophylactic sheath). On March 27 "I

heard service at St. Dunstan's Church." On March 3 1 "I strolled into the

Park and took the first whore I met." 97 During the next four months Bos-

well's London Journal records similar bouts— on Westminster Bridge, in

Shakespeare's Head Tavern, in the park, in a tavern on the Strand, in the

Temple law courts, in the girl's home.

This, of course, is only one side of the picture of a man, and to group

these scattered episodes in one paragraph gives a false impression of Bos-

well's life and character. The other side of him was his "enthusiastic love of

great men." 98 His first catch in this pursuit was Garrick, who sipped Bos-

well's compliments and took to him readily. But James aimed at the top. In

Edinburgh he had heard Thomas Sheridan describe the erudition and meaty

conversation of Samuel Johnson. It would be a "kind of glory" to meet this

pinnacle of London's literary life.

Chance helped him. On May 16, 1763, Boswell was drinking tea in

Thomas Da vies' bookshop in Russell Street when "a man of most dreadful

appearance" entered. Boswell recognized him from a portrait of Johnson

by Reynolds. He begged Davies not to reveal that he came from Scotland;

Davies "roguishly" revealed it at once. Johnson did not lose the opportunity

to remark that Scotland was a good country to come pom; Boswell winced.

Johnson complained that Garrick had refused him a free ticket for Miss Wil-

liams to a current play; Boswell ventured to say, "Sir, I cannot think that

Mr. Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you." Johnson bore down on him:

"Sir, I have known David Garrick longer than you have done, and I know

no right you have to talk to me on the subject." This hardly promised a life-

long friendship; Boswell was "stunned" and "mortified"; but after some

more conversation "I was satisfied that though there was a roughness in his

manner, there was no ill-nature in his disposition." 99

Eight days later, encouraged by Davies, and fortified by his pachyderma-

tous audacity, Boswell presented himself at Johnson's rooms in the Inner

Temple, and was received with kindness if not with charm. On June 25 bear

and cub supped together at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street. "I was quite

proud to think on whom I was with." On July 22 "Mr. Johnson and I had

a room at the Turk's Head Coffee-house." "After this," Boswell wrote in his

journal, "I shall just mark Mr. Johnson's memorabilia as they rise up in my

memory." 100 So the great biography began.

When, at his father's urging, Boswell left for the Netherlands (August

6, 1763) to study law, master and man jibed so well that Johnson, aged fifty-

three, accompanied Boswell, aged twenty-two, to Harwich to see him off.

chap. xxxi) England's neighbors 781

2. Bosivell Abroad

He settled in Utrecht, studied law, learned Dutch and French, and (he

tells us) read all of Voltaire's Essai sur les moenrs. He suffered at the outset

a severe attack of melancholy, upbraided himself as a worthless philanderer,

and thought of suicide. He blamed his recent dissipation on his loss of reli-

gious faith. "I was once an infidel; I acted accordingly; I am now a Christian

gentleman." 101 He drew up an "Inviolable Plan" of self-reform: he would

prepare himself for the duties of a Scottish laird; he would "be steady to the

Church of England," and cleave to the Christian moral code. "Never talk

of yourself," but "reverence thyself. . . . Upon the whole you will be an

excellent character." 102

He regained his interest in life when he was accepted in the homes of the

well-to-do Dutch. Now he dressed "in scarlet and gold, . . . white silk

stockings, handsome pumps, . . . Barcelona handkerchief, and elegant

toothpick case." 103 He fell in love with Isabella van Tuyll, known to her ad-

mirers as "Belle de Zuylen," and also as "Zelide"; we have already paid our

respects to her as one of many brilliant women in the Holland of those

years. But she avoided marriage, and Boswell convinced himself that he had

rejected her. He tried Mme. Geelvinck, a pretty widow, but found her "de-

licious and impregnable." 104 Finally "I determined to take a trip to Amster-

dam and have a girl." Arrived there, he "went to a bawdy house. ... I was

hurt to find myself in the sinks of gross debauchery." The next day "I went

to a chapel and heard a good sermon. ... I then strolled through mean

brothels in dirty lanes." 105 He regained "the dignity of human nature" on

receiving from a friend a letter of introduction to Voltaire.

Having carried out his promise to his father that he would study faith-

fully at Utrecht, he received paternal permission and funds for the usual

grand tour that crowned a young English gentleman's education. He bade

farewell to Zelide, sure she had tears of love in her eyes, and on June 18,

1764, he crossed the border into Germany. For almost two years thereafter

he and Belle corresponded, exchanging compliments and barbs. From Berlin,

July 9, he wrote:

As you and I, Zelide, are perfectly easy with each other, I must tell you that I

am vain enough ... as to imagine that you really was in love with me. ... I

am too generous not to undeceive you. ... I would not be married to you to

be a king. . . . My wife must be a character directly opposite to my dear

Zelide, except in affection, in honesty, and in good humor. 108

She did not answer. He wrote again on October 1, assuring her that she

loved him; she did not answer. He wrote again on December 25:

Mademoiselle, I am proud, and I shall be proud always. You ought to be

flattered by my attachment. I know not if I ought to have been equally flattered

by yours. A man who has a heart and mind like mine is rare. A woman with

many talents is not so rare. . . . Perhaps you are able to give me an explanation

of your conduct toward me. 107

782 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXI

Her reply deserves a place in the history of woman:

I received your letter with joy and read it with gratitude. ... All those

expressions of friendship and all those promises of eternal regard and of con-

stantly tender recollection which you have collected [from her past words to

him] are acknowledged and renewed by my heart at this moment. . . . You

went on repeating . . . that I was in love with you. . . . You would have me

admit this, you were determined to hear me say it and say it again. I find this

a very strange whim in a man who does not love me and thinks it incumbent

upon him (from motives of delicacy) to tell me so in the most express and

vigorous terms. ... I was shocked and saddened to find, in a friend whom I

had conceived of as a young and sensible man, the puerile vanity of a fatuous

fool.

My dear Boswell, I will not answer for it that never at any moment may my

talk, my tone, or my look have kindled with you. If it happened, forget it.

. . . But never lose the memory of so many talks when the pair of us were

equally lighthearted: I well content in the flattery of your attachment, and

you as happy to count me your friend as if there were something rare about a

woman with many talents. Keep the memory, I say, and be sure that my tender-

ness, my esteem, I would even say my respect, are yours always. 108

This letter chastened Boswell transiently; he kept his peace for a year.

Then (January 16, 1766) he wrote from Paris to Zelide's father, asking for

her hand. "Would it not be a pity if so fortunate an alliance were unreal-

ized?" 109 The father answered that Zelide was considering another offer. A

year later Boswell sent her a direct proposal. She replied, "I read your be-

lated endearments with pleasure, with a smile. Well, so you once loved

me!" 110 — and she refused his offer.

While this epistolary game was going on, Boswell had sampled many

countries and women. In Berlin he saw Frederick on the paradeground, but

no nearer. He took to his bed a pregnant chocolate vendor; she seemed a

safe port. In Leipzig he met Gellert and Gottsched; at Dresden he visited

"the grand gallery of pictures, which I was told is the noblest in Europe." 111

He passed down through Frankfurt, Mainz, Karlsruhe, and Strasbourg into

Switzerland. We have already accompanied him on his visits to Rousseau

and Voltaire. In those exalted days the aura of genius and the fever of fame

subdued the lust of youth.

On January 1, 1765, he left Geneva to cross the Alps. He spent nine ex-

hilarating months in Italy, saw every major city, and sampled feminine wares

at every stop. In Rome he sought out Winckelmann, kissed the Pope's slip-

pered foot, prayed in St. Peter's, and caught his favorite disease again. He

ascended Vesuvius with John Wilkes. In Venice he shared the same courte-

san with Lord Mountstuart (son of the Earl of Bute), and renewed his in-

fection. In a month at Siena he courted Porzia Sansedoni, the mistress of his

friend Mountstuart; he urged her not to let any sentiment of fidelity inter-

fere with generosity, for "my Lord is so formed that he is incapable of

fidelity himself, and does not expect it of you." 112

His better side showed in his next exploit. From Livorno he took ship to

Corsica (October 11, 1765). Paoli had liberated the island from Genoa in

1757, and was now in the eighth year of his rule of the new state. Boswell

chap. xxxi) England's neighbors 783

reached him at Sollacaro, and presented a letter of introduction from Rous-

seau. He was at first suspected as a spy, but "I took the liberty to show him

a memorial I had drawn up on the advantages to Great Britain from an alli-

ance with Corsica"; thereafter he dined regularly with the General. 113 He

took many notes that served him later in writing his Account of Corsica

(1768). He left the island on November 20, and traveled along the Riviera

to Marseilles. There "a tall and decent pimp" secured for him "an honest,

safe, and disinterested girl." 114

From Aix-en-Provence he began to send to The London Chronicle news

paragraphs to be released in successive issues from January 7, 1766, inform-

ing the British public that James Boswell was approaching England with

firsthand data on Corsica. Arriving in Paris (January 12), he received word

from his father that his mother had died. He undertook to escort Rousseau's

Therese Levasseur to London; if we may believe him she gave herself to him

en route. He dallied in London for three weeks, saw Johnson on several

occasions, and finally presented himself to his father in Edinburgh (March

7, 1766). His three years and four months of independence and travel had

done something to mature him. It had not weakened his lust nor tempered

his vanity, but it had broadened his knowledge and perspective, and had

given him a new poise and self-confidence. He was now "Corsican Boswell,"

a man who had dined with Paoli, and who was writing a book that might

stir England to go to the Liberator's aid and make the island a British strong-

hold in a strategic sea.

5. Boswell at Home

On July 29, 1766, he was admitted to the Scottish bar, and for the next

twenty years his life was centered in Edinburgh, with many forays into Lon-

don and one to Dublin. Helped perhaps by his father's position as a judge,

but also by his readiness in debate, he "came into great employment," and

"made sixty-five guineas" in his first winter before the courts. 115 An exuber-

ant generosity mingled with his self-esteem; he defended the lowliest crim-

inals, spent his florid eloquence on obviously guilty persons, lost most of his

cases, and dissolved his fees in drink. After those sunny months in Italy he

felt to his bones the cold of Scotland, for which there seemed no cure but

alcohol.

He continued his sexual wandering. He took a Mrs. Dodds as his mistress,

but to supplement her services he "lay all night with ... a common girl,"

and presently "discovered that some infection had reached me." 116 Three

months later, in a vertigo of intoxication, he tells us that he "went to a

bawdy house, and passed a whole night in the arms of a whore. She was a

fine, strong, spirited girl, a whore worthy of Boswell, if Boswell must have

a whore." 117 Another infection. Obviously marriage was the only device

that could save him from physical and moral degeneration. He courted

Catherine Blair; she rejected him. He fell in love with Mary Ann Boyd, an

Irish lass with a Grecian form and a rich father. He followed her to Dublin

7 8 4 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXI

(March, 1769), lost his passion on the way, got drunk, went to an Irish

prostitute, contracted venereal disease again. 118

In February, 1768, he sent to the press An Account of Corsica, The Jour-

nal of a Tour to That Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli. Its plea for Brit-

ish aid to Paoli caught the imagination of England, and prepared public

opinion to approve the action of the British government in sending secret

arms and supplies to the Corsicans. The book sold ten thousand copies in

England; it was translated into four languages, and gave Bos well more fame

on the Continent than Johnson enjoyed. On September 7, 1769, the author

appeared at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford in the garb of a Corsican

chief, with "Corsican Boswell" inscribed on his hat; but, as this was for a

masquerade ball, it did not quite deserve the ridicule it received.

His cousin Margaret Montgomerie had accompanied him to Ireland, and

had borne humbly with his Irish courtship and revelry. She was two years

older than he, and her £ 1,000 made her no equal match (as Boswell Senior

urged) for the heir of Auchinleck, but when he contemplated her patient

devotion to him it dawned upon him that she was a good woman and would

make a good wife; moreover, his reputation for lechery and drinking had

narrowed his choice. The judge himself was contemplating marriage, which

would put a stepmother between father and son, and might eat into the es-

tate. Boswell begged his father not to marry; the father persisted; they quar-

reled; Boswell thought of going to America. On July 20, 1769, he wrote to

"Peggy" Montgomerie asking would she marry him and consent to go with

him to America and live on his £ 100 a year and the interest on her £ 1,000.

He warned her that he was subject to periods of melancholy. Her reply

(July 22) deserves remembrance:

I have thought fully, as you desired, and ... I accept your terms. . . . J. B.

with £"100 a year is every bit as valuable to me as if possessed of the estate of

Auchinleck. . . . Free of ambition, I prefer real happiness to the splendid ap-

pearance of it. . . . Be assured, my dear Jamie, you have a friend that would

sacrifice everything for you, who never had a wish for wealth till now, to

bestow it on the man of her heart. 119

On November 19 the father married; on November 25 the son. The

younger couple set up a separate household, and in 177 1 they rented a flat

from David Hume. James strove for sobriety, worked hard as an advocate,

and rejoiced in the children his wife bore him. Apparently she discouraged

his marital approaches during the later months of her repeated pregnancies.

On October 27, 1772, he went to a prostitute after having "too much

wine." 120 He excused himself by arguing that concubinage was permitted

by Scripture. He resumed his drinking, and added gambling. His journal

noted, October 5, 1774: "Drank to intoxication." November 3: "Many of

us drank from dinner till ten at night." November 4: "Much intoxicated;

. . . fell with a good deal of violence." November 8: "Drunk again." No-

vember 9: "I was very ill, and could not get up till about two." December

24: "I was very drunk, . . . stayed above an hour with two whores at their

lodging in a narrow dirty stair in the Bow. I found my way home about

chap. xxxi ) England's neighbors 785

twelve. I had fallen." 121 His wife forgave him, and cared for him in his ill-

nesses.

His drinking had many causes: his many failures at the bar, his difficulties

with his father, his shame of his infidelities, his awareness that he had not

realized the dreams of his vanity, and his distaste for life in Scotland. Almost

yearly he ran off to London, partly to plead cases there, partly to savor the

conversation of Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, and Burke. In 1773 he was

admitted to "the Club." In the fall of that year he proudly walked the streets

of Edinburgh with Dr. Johnson at his side, as a prelude to their tour of the

Hebrides.

At first, on these London trips, he remained faithful to his wife, and wrote

to her fondly; but by 1775 he had resumed his patronage of promiscuity.

He was especially busy toward the end of March, 1776. "When I got into

the street the whoring rage came upon me. I thought I would devote a night

to it." His devotion continued for several nights. "I thought of my valuable

spouse with the highest regard and warmest affection, but had a confused

notion that my corporeal connection with whores did not interfere with my

love for her." 122 Another venereal infection sobered him transiently.

These exploits, and his subservience to Johnson, earned him scornful com-

ments from men like Horace Walpole, and (posthumously) a lethal lashing

by Macaulay, 123 but they did not leave him friendless. "My character as a

man of parts and extensive acquaintance makes people fond of my atten-

tion." 124 Most Londoners agreed with Boswell that no woman had a right

to a whole man. If men like Johnson and Reynolds liked him, and many

London homes were open to him, he must have had many amiable traits.

These men of discernment knew that he passed from woman to woman, and

from idea to idea, like a hasty traveler, scratching many surfaces but never

reaching to the heart of the matter, never feeling the bruised soul behind

the sacrificial flesh. And he knew it, too. "I have really a little mind with all

my pride," he said; "my brilliant qualities are like embroidery upon

gauze." 125 "There is an imperfection, a superficialness, in all my notions. I

understand nothing clearly, nothing to the bottom. I pick up fragments, but

never have in my memory a mass of any size." 126

It was those fragments, and that memory, that redeemed him. He made

amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could

not achieve for himself; by attending upon them humbly, by remembering

their words and deeds, and, at last, with no minor artistry, placing them in

an order and a light that made an unrivaled picture of a man and an age.

And may we never be disrobed, in body and mind, in secret lust and inde-

fatigable vanity, as thoroughly as this man, half lackey and half genius, re-

vealed himself for posterity.

CHAPTER XXXII

The Literary Scene

1756.89

I. THE PRESS

IN the background were newspapers, magazines, publishers, circulating

libraries, theaters, all multiplying recklessly, bringing to an ever wider

public the conflicts of parties and talents. Several journals were now born:

The Literary Magazine and The Critical Review in 1756, The Public Ledger

in 1760. Johnson's Rambler began in 1750; The Gentleman's Magazine,

which fed Johnson in his struggling years, had begun in 1 73 1, and was

to survive till 1922. The London newspapers doubled their number and

total circulation in this period. The Monitor began in 1755, The North

Briton in 1761, The Morning Chronicle in 1769, The Morning Herald in

1780, The Daily Universal Register in 1785, becoming The Times in 1788.

The Public Advertiser struck gold in the letters of Junius; its circulation

rose from 47,500 to 84,000. Most of the other dailies subsisted on narrow

clienteles; so the circulation of The Times in 1795 was only 4,800. They

were more modest in size than in speech— usually four pages, one of which

was given to advertisements. Johnson in 1759 thought that newspaper ad-

vertising had reached its limit.

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused,

and it is therefore necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promise, and

by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic. . . . The vendor of

the beautifying fluid sells a lotion that repels pimples, washes away freckles,

smooths the skin, and plumps the flesh. . . . The trade of advertising is now

so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every

art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but

propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they

do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions? *

Printers, booksellers, and publishers were still largely confused in one

profession. Robert Dodsley had published Pope and Chesterfield, and now

printed Walpole and Goldsmith. Thomas Davies had a popular bookshop,

where he allowed leisurely browsing, and Johnson and others came there to

sample the books and ogle the pretty wife. William Strahan won fame by

publishing Johnson's Dictionary, Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Gibbon's

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire— the latter two in the annus mirabilis

1776. Oxford established the Clarendon Press in 1781. Booksellers paid well

for good books, but could get hacks to prepare articles and compilations

for a pittance. Says a bookseller in Henry Brooke's The Tool of Quality

786

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 787

(1766): "I can get one of these gentlemen, ... on whose education more

money has been spent than . . . would maintain a decent family to the end

of the world— I can get one of them to labor like a hackney horse from

morning to night at less wage than I could hire ... a porter or shoe-boy

for three hours." 2 Authors multiplied to saturation of the market, fought

desperately for their starveling share, and satirized one another with poi-

soned ink. Women added to the competition: Mrs. Anna Barbauld, Sarah

Fielding, Mrs. Amelia Opie, Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald, Mrs. Elizabeth Mon-

tagu, Fanny Burney, Hannah More. A country parson entered the game

and walked away with the prize.

II. LAURENCE STERNE

He was not made for a parson; he was the son of a soldier, and was

dragged from post to post for ten years; then and afterward he picked up

enough military lore to make Uncle Toby talk like an old general about

sieges and forts. His mother he later described as "the daughter of ... a

poor sutter [peddler] who followed the camp in Flanders." 3 However, his

great-grandfather had been archbishop of York, and the Sterne family man-

aged to get Laurence to Cambridge on a scholarship. He took his degree

there in 1737, but a lung hemorrhage in 1736 foretold a lifelong struggle

with tuberculosis. Ordained an Anglican priest (1738), he was given a

modest vicarage at Sutton-in-the-Forest, near York. In 1741 he married

Elizabeth Lumley, and took her to live with him in his tattered rectory. She

entrusted to him her forty pounds a year; he invested some of it in land, and

it grew.

Otherwise they were miserable. Both were consumptives, and both were

made of nerves. Mrs. Sterne soon concluded that "the largest house in Eng-

land could not contain them both, on account of their turmoils and dis-

putes." 4 Her cousin, "bluestocking" Elizabeth Montagu, described her as a

fretful porcupine, "with whom one could avoid a quarrel only by keeping

at a distance." 5 Two children came; one died, the other, Lydia, became con-

spicuously attached to her mother. Unhappiness increased when Sterne's

mother and sister, who had been living in poverty in Ireland, came to York

and appealed to him to settle eight pounds a year upon them out of his wife's

income. The idea aroused no enthusiasm. Sterne gave his mother some

money and begged her to go back to Ireland. She remained in York. When

she was arrested for vagrancy Sterne refused to bail her out.

After eighteen years of arduous marriage the vicar felt that any really

Christian soul would allow him a little adultery. He fell in love with Cather-

ine Fourmantelle, and swore, "I love you to distraction, and will love you

to eternity." 6 His wife accused him of infidelity; he denied it; she came so

close to insanity that he put her and Lydia in care of "a lunatic doctor,"

and continued the liaison.

Amid the tumult he wrote one of the most famous books in English litera-

788 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

ture. His friends, having read some of the manuscript, begged him to elimi-

nate "gross allusions which could be matter of just offense, especially when

coming from a clergyman." Sorrowfully he deleted some 150 pages. The

remainder he sent to the press anonymously; it was published in January,

1760, as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. Enough scandal

and whimsical humor remained in the two volumes to make them the literary

event of the London year. Far off in Ferney the furor echoed: "A very un-

accountable book," Voltaire reported, "and an original one; they run mad

about it in England." 7 Hume called it "the best book that has been writ by

any Englishman these thirty years, bad as it is." 8 At York, where Sterne's

authorship was an open secret and many local figures were recognized in the

leading characters, two hundred copies were sold in two days.

It is hard to describe the book, for it has no form or subject, no head or

tail. The title is a trick, for the "Gent." who tells the story, and whose "life

and opinions" were to be presented, does not get born until page 209 of Vol-

ume IV (of the original nine-volume edition). The substance of the tale is

what happened, or was said, while he was being conceived, and while he

was growing leisurely in the womb. The first page is the best:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were

in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they

begot me; had they duly considered how much depended 1 a jn what they were

doing;— that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it,

but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps

his genius and the very cast of his mind, . . . might take their turn from the

humors and dispositions which were then uppermost;— Had they duly weighed

and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I

should have made a quite different figure in the world.

"Pray, my Dear," quoth my mother, "have you not forgot to wind up the

clock?"— "Good G— !" cried my father, . . . "Did ever woman, since the crea-

tion of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?"

From that contretemps onward the book consists of digressions. Sterne

had no tale to tell, much less that tale of love which is the burden of most

fiction; he wished to amuse himself and the reader with whimsical discourse

on everything, but in no order; he galloped around the big and little prob-

lems of life like a frisky horse in a field. After writing sixty-four chapters

he bethought himself that he had given his book no preface; he inserted one

at that point; this allowed him to make fun of his critics. He called his

method "the most religious, for I begin with writing the first sentence, and

trusting to Almighty God for the second," 9 and to free association for the

rest. Rabelais had done something of the sort; Cervantes had allowed Rosi-

nante to lead him from episode to episode; Robert Burton had roamed the

world before anatomizing melancholy. But Sterne raised inconsequence to

a method, and freed all novelists from the need to have a subject or a plot.

The leisure classes of Britain were delighted to see how much ado could

be made about nothing, and how a book could be written in Anglo-Saxon

English in the age of Johnson. Lusty Britons welcomed the jolly novelty of

a clergyman talking about sex and flatulence, and the slit in Uncle Toby's

pants. In March, 1760, Sterne went down to London to sip his success; he

CHAP.XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 789

was happy to find the two volumes sold out; he took £630 for them and

two to come. Even the Sermons of Mr. Yorick, published four months after

Tristram, found ready sale when it was known that Yorick was Sterne. In-

vitations came to the author from Chesterfield, Reynolds, Rockingham, even

Bishop Warburton, who surprised him with fifty guineas, perhaps to escape

adorning some satiric page in future volumes. Sterne bought a carriage and

team, and drove in merry triumph back to York, where he preached in the

great minster. He was presented to a richer parsonage at Coxwold, fifteen

miles from York; he took his wife and daughter to live with him there; and

there, with inconsequential facility, he wrote Volumes III— IV of Tristram.

In December of that year 1760 he went to London to see these volumes

through the press. They were adversely reviewed, but the edition was sold

out in four months. Now Tristram reached birth by forceps, which de-

formed his nose; whereupon the author sailed forth on a long discourse on

the philosophy of noses, in the style of the most learned pundits. The shape

of a child's nose, said one authority, was determined by the softness or hard-

ness of the nursing breast: "by sinking into it, . . . as into so much butter,

the nose was comforted, nourished, plumped up, refreshed, refocillated." 10

After half a year in London Sterne returned to his wife, who told him

she had been happier without him. He withdrew into his manuscript, and

wrote Volumes V-VI; in these Tristram was almost forgotten, and Uncle

Toby and Corporal Trim, with their war memories and toy forts, occupied

the stage. In November, 1761, the parson went off again to London, and on

the last day of the year he saw V-VI published. They were well received.

He flirted with Mrs. Elizabeth Vesey, one of the "bluestockings"; vowed he

would give the last rag of his priesthood for a touch of her divine hand; 11

had a lung hemorrhage, and fled to the south of France. He stopped long

enough in Paris to attend some dinners at d'Holbach's "synagogue of athe-

ists," where Diderot took a lasting fancy to him. Hearing that his wife was

ill, and that Lydia was developing asthma, Sterne invited them to join him

in France. All three settled down near Toulouse (July, 1 762 ) .

In March, 1764, he left his wife and daughter, with their consent, and re-

turned to Paris, London, and Coxwold. He wrote Volumes VII- VIII of

Tristram, received advance payment for them, and sent part of the proceeds

to Mrs. Sterne. The new volumes appeared in January, 1765, to waning ac-

claim; the Shandy-Toby vein was running thin. In October Sterne began a

tour of eight months in France and Italy. On his way north he joined his

family in Burgundy; they asked to remain in France; he paid their expenses

and returned to Coxwold (July, 1766). Between hemorrhages he wrote

Volume IX. He went to London to see it born (January, 1767), and enjoyed

the furor caused by his skirting the brink of sex in describing Uncle Toby's

wooing of Mrs. Wadman. Scandalized readers wrote to newspapers and the

Archbishop of York, demanding that this shameless parson be unfrocked

and evicted; the prelate refused. Sterne meanwhile collected subscriptions,

totaling ,£1,050, for a promised Sentimental Journey. He sent more money

to his wife, and made love to Elizabeth Draper.

She was the wife of an East India Company official then (March, 1767)

79° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXII

stationed in India. She had married him at fourteen, when he was thirty-four.

Sterne sent her his books, and proposed to follow them with his hand and

his heart. For a while they saw each other daily, and exchanged tender mis-

sives. The ten "Letters to Eliza" voice the last sad passion of a man dying of

tuberculosis. " 'Tis true, I am ninety-five in constitution, and you but twenty-

five; . . . but what I want in youth I will make up in wit and good humor.

Not Swift so loved his Stella, Scarron his Maintenon, or Waller his Sacha-

rissa, as I will love and sing thee, my wife elect!"— for "my wife cannot live

long." 12 Ten minutes after dispatching this letter he had a severe hemorrhage,

and he bled till four in the morning. In April, 1767, Mrs. Draper, summoned

by her husband, sailed for India. From April 1 3 to August 4 Sterne kept a

"Journal to Eliza," a "diary of the miserable feelings of a person separated

from a Lady for whose society he languished." "I will take thee on any

terms, Eliza! I shall be ... so just, so kind to thee, I will deserve not to be

miserable hereafter." 13 In the journal under April 2 1 : "Parted with twelve

ounces of blood." A doctor told him he had syphilis; he protested it was "im-

possible, . . . for I have had no commerce whatever with the sex— not even

with my wife, . . . these fifteen years." "We will not reason about it," said

the physician, "but you must undergo a course of mercury." 14 Other doctors

confirmed the diagnosis; one assured him that "taints of the blood laid dor-

mant twenty years." He yielded, protesting his virtue.

By June he had recovered, and returned to Coxwold. While writing A

Sentimental Journey he suffered more hemorrhages, and realized that he had

not long to live. He went to London, saw the little book published (Febru-

ary, 1768), and for the last time enjoyed the undiminished affection of his

friends. As Tristram had recalled Rabelais, so the new volume reflected the

rising influence of Richardson and Rousseau. But Sterne's virtue was less

irrefragable than Richardson's, and his tears less hot and sincere than Rous-

seau's. Perhaps it was this book, and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling

(177 1 ), that made sentiment and sentimental fashionable words in England.

Byron thought that Sterne "preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a

living mother." 15

While Sterne was enjoying his final triumph in London he caught a cold,

which grew into pleurisy. He wrote to a Mrs. James a pitiful letter asking her

to care for Lydia if Mrs. Sterne should die. Death came to him on March 1 8,

1768, in an inn on Old Bond Street, with no friends near. He was fifty-two

years old. He had a bit of the mountebank in him, and made himself "a motley

to the view"; but we can understand his sensitivity to women, and the strain

that an unhappy marriage placed upon a man capable of such subtle percep-

tions and delicate artistry. He suffered much, gave much, and wrote one of

the most peculiar books in all the history of literature.

III. FANNY BURNEY

A woman briefly rivaled his success in fiction. She was born in 1752 to

Charles Burney, the future historian of music. She was brought up on notes

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 79 1

rather than on letters; till she was eight she could not read; 16 no one dreamed

that she would be a writer. Her mother died when Frances was nine. As

almost all the musicians who performed in London came to her father's

home, and attracted to it a good portion of the elite, Fanny acquired edu-

cation by listening to words and music. She matured slowly, was shy and

plain, and took forty years to find a husband. When her famous novel was

published (January, 1778) she was twenty-five, and was so fearful lest it

displease her father that she concealed her authorship. Evelina, or A Young

Lady's Entrance into the World, made a stir. Anonymity aroused curiosity;

rumor said a girl of seventeen had written it. Johnson, who had been praised

in its preface, praised it, and recommended it to Dr. Burney. Mrs. Thrale

complained that it was too short. When Mrs. Thrale learned the secret it

spread over London; Fanny became a lioness of society; everybody read her

book, and "my kind and most devoted father was so happy in my happi-

ness." 17

Her art lay in describing, with lingering memory and lively imagination,

how the world of London society appeared to an orphaned girl of seventeen

who had been brought up by a rural parson not at all like Laurence Sterne.

Doubtless Fanny too had thrilled to Garrick's acting, and had felt as Evelina

wrote to her guardian: "Such ease! such vivacity in his manner! such grace

in his motions! such fire and meaning in his eyes! . . . And when he danced,

O, how I envied Clarinda! I almost wished to have jumped on the stage and

joined them." 18 London, wearying of its vice, felt cleansed by the fresh wind

blowing from these youthful pages.

That once famous novel is dead, but the diary that Fanny kept is still a

living part of English literature and history, for it offers a near view of

celebrities from Johnson and George III to Herschel and Napoleon. Queen

Charlotte made Miss Burney her keeper of the robes (1786), and for the

next five years Fanny dressed and undressed her Majesty. The constrained

and narrow life nearly stifled the authoress; at last her friends rescued her,

and in 1793, youth quite gone, she married a ruined emigre, General d'Ar-

blay. She supported him by her writings and her income; for ten years she

lived with him in France and obscurity, isolated by the intensity of the Rev-

olutionary and Napoleonic wars. In 18 14 she was allowed to return to Eng-

land and receive the last blessing of her father, who died at the age of eighty-

eight. She herself lived to that age, into quite a different world, which did

not realize that the famous Jane Austen (died 181 7) had taken her inspira-

tion from the forgotten novels of a forgotten lady who was still alive in 1840.

IV. HORACE WALPOLE

"This world," he said, "is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those

who feel." 19 So he learned to smile at the world, even to humor his gout. He

chronicled his time, but washed his hands of it. He was son of a prime min-

ister, but had no pleasure in politics. He loved women, from Fanny Burney

to the grandest duchesses, but he would have none of them for a wife, nor

79 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

(so far as we know) for a mistress. He studied philosophy, but thought the

philosophers the bane and bore of the century. One author he admired with-

out reserve for her fine manners and unaffected art— Mme. de Sevigne; her

alone he sought to emulate; and if his letters did not catch her gay charm

and grace, they became, far more than hers, a living daily history of an age.

Though he called them annals of Bedlam, 20 he wrote them with care, hoping

that some of them would give him a nook in man's remembrance; for even

a philosopher who is reconciled to decay finds it hard to accept oblivion.

Horatio (so he was baptized in 17 17) was the youngest of five children

presented to Sir Robert Walpole, the doughty Premier who sacrificed his

reputation by preferring peace to war, but hardly hurt it by preferring

adultery to monogamy. 21 Perhaps to avenge his first wife, gossipers for a

time ascribed Horace's paternity to Carr, Lord Hervey, brother to the ef-

feminate John, Lord Hervey of Ickworth— who accused Sir Robert of at-

tempting to seduce Lady Hervey. 22 These matters are too intricate for

present adjudication; we can only say that Horace was brought up with no

imputation, by his relatives, of any undue origin. He was treated with busy

indifference by the Prime Minister, and (he tells us) was "indulged" with

"extreme fondness" by his mother. 23 He was a very handsome boy, and was

dressed like a prince, but he was frail and diffident, and as sensitive as a girl.

When his mother died (1737) many feared that the twenty-year-old youth

would die of grief. Sir Robert comforted him with governmental sinecures

that paid for his son's fine clothing, elegant living, and costly collection of

art. Horace kept to the end of his life a latent hostility to his father, but

always defended his politics.

At ten he was sent to Eton, where he learned Latin and French and

formed a friendship with the poet Gray. At seventeen he entered King's

College, Cambridge; there he learned Italian, and imbibed deism from Con-

yers Middleton. At twenty-two, without taking a degree, he set out with

Gray on a tour of Italy and France. After some wandering they settled for

fifteen months in a Florentine villa as guests of the British charge d'affaires,

Sir Horace Mann. Walpole and Mann never met again, but they corre-

sponded during the next forty-five years (1741-85). At Reggio Emilia Gray

and Walpole quarreled, for Horace had paid all the bills, and the poet could

not forgive the superior attentions received by the son of the man who was

ruling England. In retrospect Horace took the blame: "I was too young, too

fond of my own diversions, . . . too much intoxicated by indulgence, van-

ity, and the insolence of my situation, . . . not to have been inattentive and

insensible to the feelings of one I thought below me; of one, I blush to say

it, that I knew was obliged to me." 24 They parted; Walpole nearly died of

remorse, or quinsy; he arranged for Gray's passage home. They were recon-

ciled in 1745, and most of Gray's poems were printed by Walpole's press

at Strawberry Hill. Meanwhile, at Venice, Walpole posed for a lovely

pastel portrait by Rosalba Camera.

Before reaching England (September 12, 1741), Walpole had been elected

to Parliament. There he made a modest and futile speech against the opposi-

CHAP.XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 793

tion that was bringing to an end his father's long and prosperous ministry.

He was regularly re-elected till 1767, when he voluntarily withdrew from

active politics. Generally he supported the liberal Whig program: he re-

sisted extension of the royal power, recommended a compromise with

Wilkes, and denounced slavery (1750) nine years before Wilberforce was

born. He opposed the political emancipation of English Catholics on the

ground that "papists and liberty are contradictions." 25 He rejected the Amer-

ican case against the Stamp Act, 26 but he defended the claim of the American

colonies to freedom, and prophesied that the next zenith of civilization would

be in America. 27 "Who but Machiavel," he wrote (1786), "can pretend

that we have a shadow of title to a foot of land in India?" 28 He hated war,

and when the Montgolfier brothers made their first balloon ascension

(1783) he predicted with horror the extension of war to the skies. "I hope,"

he wrote, "these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the

learned or the idle, and not be converted into engines of destruction to the

human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science." 29

Finding himself too often on the losing side, he decided to spend most of

his time in the country. In 1747 he rented five acres and a small house near

Twickenham. Two years later he bought the property, and transformed the

building in neo-Gothic style— as we have seen. Into this medievalized castle

he gathered a variety of objects distinguished by art or history; soon his

home was a museum that required a catalogue. In one room he installed a

printing press, where he published in elegant formats thirty-four books,

including his own. Chiefly from Strawberry Hill he sent out the 3,601 let-

ters that survive. He had a hundred friends, quarreled with nearly all of

them, made up, and was as kind as his delicate irritability would allow.

Every day he set out bread and milk for the squirrels who courted him. He

guarded his sinecures and angled for more, but when his cousin Henry Con-

way was dismissed from office Walpole proposed to share his income with

him.

He had a thousand faults, which Macaulay meticulously accumulated in

a brilliant and ungenerous essay. Walpole was vain, fussy, secretive, capri-

cious, proud of his ancestry, and disgusted with his relatives. His humor

tended to satire with sharp teeth. He carried to his grave, and into his his-

tories, his scorn of all who had shared in deposing his father. He was often

wildly biased, as in his descriptions of Lady Pomfret 30 or Lady Mary Wort-

ley Montagu. 31 His fragile frame inclined him to be something of a dilet-

tante. If Diderot, in Sainte-Beuve's illuminating phrase, was the most Ger-

man of all Frenchmen, Walpole was the most French of all Englishmen.

He was fearlessly candid about his uncommon tastes and views; he thought

Virgil a bore, and a fortiori, Richardson and Sterne; he called Dante "a

A4ethodist in Bedlam." 32 He affected to disdain all authors, and insisted, like

Congreve, that he wrote as a gentleman for his own amusement, not as a

literary laborer dependent upon the merchandizing of his words. So he

wrote to Hume: "You know in England we read their works, but seldom or

never take any notice of authors. We think them sufficiently paid if their

794 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

books sell, and of course leave them to their colleges and obscurity, by which

means we are not troubled by their vanity and impertinence. ... I, who am

an author, must own this conduct very sensible; for in truth we are a most

useless tribe." 33

But, as he admitted, he too was an author, vain and voluminous. Bored in

his castle, he explored the past as if wishing to sink the roots of his mind into

the richest seams. He drew up a Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors

of England (1758)— their nobility would excuse their authorship, and first-

rate men like Bacon and Clarendon could qualify. He had three hundred

copies printed, and gave most of them away; Dodsley risked an edition of

two thousand copies; they sold readily, and brought^ Walpole such fame as

must have made him hang his head in shame. He compounded his indignity

with five volumes of Anecdotes of Fainting in England (1762-71), an en-

gaging compilation which won Gibbon's praise.

As if in recreation from such laborious scholarship, Walpole composed a

medieval romance, The Castle of Otranto (1764), which became the mother

of a thousand stories of supernatural wonders and terrors. He combined

mystery with history in Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King

Richard III. He contended, like others after him, that Richard had been

maligned by tradition and Shakespeare; Hume and Gibbon called his argu-

ments unconvincing; Walpole repeated them till his death. Turning to

events of which he had firsthand knowledge, he composed memoirs of the

reigns of George II and George III; they are illuminating but partisan. Im-

prisoned in his prejudices, he took a dark view of his time: "treacherous

ministers, mock patriots, complacent parliaments, fallible princes." 34 "I see

my country going to ruin, and no man with brains enough to save it"; 35 this

was written in 1768, when Chatham had just created the British Empire.

Fourteen years later, when the King and Lord North seemed to have ruined

it, Walpole concluded: "We are totally degenerated in every respect, which

I suppose is the case of all falling states"; 36 a generation later the little island

defeated Napoleon. All mankind seemed to Walpole a menagerie of "pigmy,

short-lived, . . . comical animals." 37 He found no comfort in religion. He

supported the Established Church, for it upheld the government that paid

his sinecures, but he frankly termed himself an infidel. 38 "I begin to think

that folly is matter, and cannot be destroyed. Destroy its form, it takes an-

other." 39

For a while he thought he could find stimulation in France (September,

1765). All doors were opened to him; Mme. du Deffand welcomed him as

a replacement for d'Alembert. She was sixty-eight, Walpole was forty-eight,

but the interval disappeared as their kindred souls met in an affectionate ex-

change of despair. She was pleased to find that Walpole agreed with most

of what Voltaire said, but would have gone to the stake to prevent him from

saying it; for he trembled to think what would happen to Europe's govern-

ments if Christianity collapsed. He deprecated Voltaire, but he ridiculed

Rousseau. It was on this trip to Paris that he wrote the letter, supposedly from

Frederick the Great, inviting Rousseau to come to Berlin and enjoy more

CHAP. XXXII ) THE LITERARY SCENE 795

persecutions. "The copies have spread like wildfire," and "behold me a la

mode!" 40 — he succeeded Hume as the lion of the salons. He learned to love

the gay and merciless excitement of Paris, but he was consoled to find "the

French ten times more contemptible than we [English] are." 41

After reaching home (April 22, 1766) he began his long correspondence

with Mme. du Deffand. We shall see later how he fretted lest her affection

make him ridiculous; yet it was probably to see her again that he revisited

Paris in 1767, 1769, 177 1, 1775. Her love made him forget his age, but the

death of Gray (July 30, 177 1 ) reminded him of his own mortality. He sur-

prised himself by surviving till 1797. He had no financial worries; he had

in 1784 an income of ,£8,000 ($200,000?) a year; 42 and in 1791 he succeeded

to the title of Lord Orford. But his gout, which had begun when he was

twenty-five, continued to be his tribulation till the end. Sometimes, we are

told, accumulations of "chalk" broke out from his fingers. 43 He grew

parched and stiff in his final years, and occasionally he had to be carried by

his servants from room to room; but he kept on working and writing, and

when visitors came they marveled at the bright interest in his eyes, the alert-

ness of his courtesy, the gaiety of his speech, the alacrity and clarity of his

mind. Almost every day distinguished people came to see his famous home

and varied collection; Hannah More in 1786, Queen Charlotte in 1795.

Yet it was not at Strawberry Hill, but at his town house in Berkeley

Square that he passed away, March 2, 1797, in his eightieth year. As if re-

gretting that his memoirs and letters contained so many lines with a sting, he

ordered his manuscripts to be locked in a chest not to be opened "till the

first Earl of Waldegrave that shall attain the age of thirty-five years shall

demand it." 44 So the memoirs came to be published only in or after 1822,

when all who might have taken offense would be dead. Some of the letters

were published in 1778, more in 181 8, 1820, 1840, 1857. . . . All over the

English-reading world there are men and women who have read every word

of those letters, and who treasure them as among the most delightful legacies

of the illuminating century.

V. EDWARD GIBBON

"Good historians," Walpole wrote to one of them, Robertson, "are the

most scarce of all writers, and no wonder! A good style is not very com-

mon; thorough information is still more rare; and if these meet, what a

chance that impartiality should be added to them!" 45 Gibbon did not quite

meet the last test, but neither did Tacitus, who alone can stand with him

among the supreme historians.

1. Preparation

Gibbon wrote or began six autobiographies, which his literary executor,

the first Earl of Sheffield, sewed into remarkably well-knit, but unduly puri-

796 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

fied, Memoirs (1796), sometimes known as his Autobiography. Also Gibbon

kept a journal, begun in 176 1 and continued under diverse titles till January

28, 1763. These prime sources for his development have been judged rea-

sonably accurate, except for his pedigree.

He spent eight pages detailing a distinguished ancestry; cruel genealogists

have taken it from him. 46 His grandfather, Edward Gibbon I, was among

those directors of the South Sea Company who were arrested for malfea-

sance after that "Bubble" exploded (1 721). Of his estate, which he reckoned

at >£ 106,543, all was confiscated except ,£ 10,000; on this, the historian tells

us, he "erected the edifice of a new fortune . . . not much inferior to the

first." 47 He did not approve the marriage of his son, Edward II; hence his

will left the major part of his wealth to his daughters, Catherine and Hester.

Catherine's daughter married Edward Eliot, who later bought a seat in

Parliament for Edward Gibbon III; Hester became a rich devotee of Wil-

liam Law, 48 and long vexed her nephew by her dilatory dying. Edward II

was tutored by Law, passed through Winchester School and Cambridge,

married Judith Porten, and had seven children, of whom only Edward III

survived childhood.

He was born at Putney in Surrey, May 8, 1737. His mother died in 1747

of her seventh pregnancy. The father moved to a rural estate at Buriton, in

Hampshire, fifty-eight miles from London, leaving the boy to be cared for

by an aunt in the grandfather's house in Putney. There the future scholar

made much use of the well-stored library. His frequent illnesses interrupted

his progress at Winchester School, but he occupied his convalescent days

with eager reading, mostly of history, especially of the Near East. "Ma-

homet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention; . . . I was led from one book

to another, till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental history. Before I

was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be learned in English of the Arabs

and Persians, the Tartars and Turks." 49 Hence those fascinating chapters on

Mohammed and the early caliphs, and the capture of Constantinople.

When, aged fifteen, he was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, "I arrived

with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of

ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed." He was too

sickly to engage in sports, too shy to mingle at ease with other students. He

would have been an apt pupil to a competent teacher. But, eager to learn,

he found no professor eager to teach. Most of the faculty allowed their

scholars to attend the lectures or not, and to spend half their time in "the

temptations of idleness." 50 They indulged his "improprieties of conduct, ill-

chosen company, late hours, and inconsiderate expense"— even excursions to

Bath or London. However, he "was too young and bashful to enjoy, like a

manly Oxonian in town, the taverns and bagnios of Covent Garden." 51

The faculty members were all clergymen, who taught and took for

granted the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church. Gibbon was com-

bative and questioned his teachers. It seemed to him that the Bible and history

justified the Catholic Church in its claim to a divine origin. A Catholic ac-

quaintance procured him some unsettling books, chiefly Bossuet's Exposi-

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 797

tion of the Catholic Doctrine and the History of the Protestant Variations;

these "achieved my conversion, and I surely fell by a^noble hand." 52 With

youthful precipitation he confessed to a Catholic priest, and was received

into the Church of Rome (June 8, 1753).

He notified his father, and was not surprised to be summoned home, for

Oxford accepted no Catholic students, and, according to Blackstone, for a

Protestant to be converted to Roman Catholicism was "high treason." The

scandalized parent hastily banished the youth to Lausanne, and arranged to

have him stay with a Calvinist pastor. There Edward lived at first in a mood

of sullen obstinacy. But M. Pavilliard, though not indulgent, was kind, and

the boy slowly warmed to him. Moreover, the pastor was a good classical

scholar. Gibbon learned to read and write French as readily as English, and

acquired an easy familiarity with Latin. Soon he was received into cultured

families, whose manners and conversation were a better education than Ox-

ford had given him.

As his French improved he felt the breezes of French rationalism blowing

into Lausanne. When only twenty (1757) he attended with delight the plays

presented by Voltaire in nearby Monrion. "I sometimes supped with the ac-

tors." 53 He met Voltaire, he began to read Voltaire, he read Voltaire's re-

cently published Essai sur Vhistoire generate (Essai sur les moeurs). He

pored over Montesquieu's Esprit des his (1748), and the Considerations

sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence (1734) be-

came the starting point of the Decline and Fall. In any case the influence of

the French philosophers, added to his reading of Hume and the English

deists, undermined Gibbon's Christianity as well as his Catholicism, and M.

Pavilliard's victory for the Reformation was canceled by Gibbon's secret

acceptance of the Enlightenment.

It must have been exhilarating to meet, in the same year (1757), both Vol-

taire and Suzanne Curchod. She was twenty, blond, beautiful, gay, and

lived with her Protestant parents at Crassy, four miles from Lausanne. She

was the leading spirit in the Societe du Printemps— a group of fifteen or

twenty young women who met at one another's homes, sang, danced, acted

comedies, and flirted judiciously with young men; Gibbon assures us that

"their virgin chastity was never sullied by the breath of scandal or suspi-

cion." Let him tell the story.

In her short visits to some relations at Lausanne the wit, the beauty, and

erudition of Mile. Curchod were the theme of universal applause. The report of

such a prodigy awakened my curiosity; I saw and loved. I found her learned

without pedantry, lively in conversation, pure in sentiment, and elegant in man-

ners. . . . Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable. . . . She

permitted me to make her two or three visits at her father's house. I passed some

happy days there, . . . and her parents honorably encouraged the connection.

... I indulged my dream of felicity. 54

Apparently they were formally engaged in November, 1757, 55 but Suzanne's

consent was conditional on Gibbon's promise to live in Switzerland. 56

Meanwhile his father, confident that his son was now a good Protestant,

79** ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

bade him return home and hear the plans that had been made for him. Gib-

bon was not eager to go back, for the father had taken a second wife; but he

obeyed, and reached London May 5, 1758. "I soon discovered that my fa-

ther would not hear of this strange alliance, and that without his consent I

was myself destitute and helpless. After a painful struggle, I yielded to my

fate: I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." 57 He conveyed this sigh to Su-

zanne by a letter of August 24. His father settled upon him an annuity of

£300. His stepmother earned his gratitude by bearing no children, and

soon he developed an affection for her. He spent a large part of his income

on books, and "gradually formed a numerous and select library, the founda-

tion of my works, and the best comfort of my life." 58

He had begun at Lausanne, he finished at Buriton (where he spent his

summers), an Ess at sur V etude de la litterature, which was published in Lon-

don in 1 76 1 and in Geneva in 1762. Written in French, and dealing chiefly

with French literature and philosophy, it made no stir in England, but was

received on the Continent as a remarkable performance for a youth of

twenty-two. It had some significant ideas on the writing of history. "The

history of empires is that of the misery of man. The history of knowledge

is that of his greatness and happiness. ... A host of considerations makes the

last order of study precious in the eyes of the philosopher." 59 Hence, "if

philosophers are not always historians, it is at least desirable that historians

should be philosophers." 60 In his Memoirs Gibbon added: "From earliest

youth I aspired to the character of an historian." 61 He cast about for a sub-

ject that would lend itself to philosophy and literature as well as to history.

In the eighteenth century history made no pretense to be a science; rather,

it longed to be an art. Gibbon felt that it was as a philosopher and an artist

that he wished to write history: to deal with large subjects in a large perspec-

tive, and to give to the chaos of materials philosophical significance and ar-

tistic form.

Suddenly he was called from scholarship to action. During the Seven

Years' War England had been repeatedly in danger of invasion from France.

To prepare against such an emergency the English gentry formed a militia

for defense against invasion or rebellion. Only propertied persons could

serve as officers. Gibbon Senior and Junior were commissioned as major and

captain in June, 1759. Edward III joined his company in June, 1760, and

stayed with it, on and off, till December, 1762, moving from camp to camp.

He was ill suited to military life, and "tired of companions who had neither

the knowledge of scholars nor the manners of gentlemen." 62 Amid his mili-

tary career he found his scrotum expanding with fluid. "I was obliged to-

day [September 6, 1762] to consult Mr. Andrews, a surgeon, in relation to

a complaint I had neglected for some time; it was a swelling in my left testi-

cle, which threatens being a serious affair." 63 He was bled and physicked,

with only temporary relief. This "hydrocele" was to torment him until it

caused his death.

On January 25, 1763, he set out upon a Continental tour. He stopped

some time in Paris, where he met d'Alembert, Diderot, Raynal, and other

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE

799

luminaries of the Enlightenment. "Four days in a week I had a place ... at

the hospitable tables of Mesdames Geoffrin and Boccage, of the celebrated

Helvetius, and of the Baron d'Olbach. . . . Fourteen weeks insensibly stole

away; but had I been rich and independent I should have prolonged, and

perhaps have fixed, my residence at Paris." 64

In May, 1763, he reached Lausanne, where he remained almost a year. He

saw Mile. Curchod, but, finding her well courted, he made no attempt to

renew his friendship with her. In this second stay in Switzerland, he con-

fesses, "the habits of the militia and the example of my countrymen betrayed

me into some riotous intemperance; and before my departure I had de-

servedly forfeited the public opinion which had been acquired by my better

days." 65 He lost substantial sums in gambling. But he continued his studies

in preparation for Italy, poring over ancient medals, coins, itineraries, and

maps.

In April, 1764, he crossed the Alps. He spent three months in Florence,

then went on to Rome. "In the daily labor of eighteen weeks" a Scotch ex-

patriate guided him among the remains of classical antiquity. "It was at

Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of

the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of

Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started

to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the

city rather than of the Empire." 66 He came to think of that fateful disin-

tegration as "the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of

mankind." 67 After visiting Naples, Padua, Venice, Vicenza, and Verona he

returned through Turin and Lyons and Paris ("another happy fortnight")

to London (June 25, 1765).

Spending most of his time now at Buriton, he let himself be diverted into

beginning, in French, a history of Switzerland. Hume, having seen the

manuscript in London, wrote to Gibbon (October 24, 1767) begging him

to use English, and predicting that English would soon surpass the French

language in spread and influence; moreover, he warned Gibbon that his use

of the French tongue had led him "into a style more poetical and figurative

and more highly colored, than our language seems to admit of in historical

productions." 68 Gibbon later admitted: "My ancient habits . . . encour-

aged me to write in French for the continent of Europe, but I was conscious

myself that my style, above prose and below poetry, degenerated into a ver-

bose and turgid declamation." 69

The death of his father (November 10, 1770) left him an ample fortune.

In October, 1772, he took up permanent residence in London. "No sooner

was I settled in my house and library than I undertook the composition of

the first volume of my history." 70 He allowed himself many distractions-

evenings at White's, attendance at Johnson's "Club," trips to Brighton, Bath,

Paris. In 1774 he was elected to Parliament from a "pocket borough"

controlled by a relative. He kept silence amid the debates in the House of

Commons. "I am still mute," he wrote (February 25, 1775); "it is more tre-

mendous than I imagined; the great speakers fill me with despair, the bad

800 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

ones with terror"; 71 but the "eight sessions that I sat in Parliament were a

school of civil prudence, the first and most essential virtue of an historian." 72

Surrounded by the controversy on America, he voted regularly for the pol-

icy of the government; he addressed to the French nation a Memoire justifi-

catif (1779) presenting England's case against her revolting colonies; and he

received as reward a seat on the Board of Trade and Plantations, bringing

him ^750 a year. Fox accused him of profiting by the same kind of political

corruption which he indicated as one cause of the decline of Rome. 73 The

wits said George III had bought Gibbon lest the author record the decline

and fall of the British Empire. 74

2. The Book

After 1772 Gibbon's absorbing concern was his history, and he found it

difficult to think seriously about anything else. "Many experiments were

made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a

rhetorical declamation. Three times did I compose the first chapter, and

twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their ef-

fect." 75 He was resolved to make his history a work of literature.

In 1775 Gibbon offered the manuscript of the first sixteen chapters to a

publisher, who refused it as necessitating a prohibitive price. Two other

booksellers, Thomas Caldwell and William Strahan, pooled their risks in

printing (February 17, 1776) Volume I of The Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire. Though it was priced at a guinea ($26.00?), the thousand

copies were sold by March 26. A second edition, of fifteen hundred copies,

issued on June 3, was exhausted in three days. "My book was on every table,

and almost on every toilette." 76 The literary world, usually rent with fac-

tional jealousies, united in praising it. William Robertson sent generous

compliments; Hume, in this year of his death, wrote to the author a letter

which, said Gibbon, "overpaid the labor of ten years." 77 Horace Walpole, on

the day after publication, announced to William Mason: "Lo, there is just

appeared a truly classic work."

The book began logically and bravely with three scholarly chapters de-

tailing the geographical extent, the military organization, the social struc-

ture, and the legal constitution of the Roman Empire at the death of Marcus

Aurelius (a.d. i 80) . The preceding eighty-four years, Gibbon felt, had seen

the Empire at its peak of official competence and public content.

If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during

which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he

would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian

[96] to the accession of Commodus [180]. The vast extent of the Roman Empire

was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.

The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive em-

perors whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The

forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan,

Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were

pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws.

CHAP.XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 8oi

. . . The labors of these monarchs were overpaid by the . . . honest pride of

virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which

they were the authors. 78

But Gibbon recognized the "instability of a happiness which must depend

on the character of a single man. The fatal moment was perhaps approach-

ing, when some licentious youth or some jealous tyrant would abuse . . .

that absolute power." 79 The "good emperors" had been chosen by adoptive

monarchy— each ruler transmitting his authority to a chosen and trained

member of his entourage. Marcus Aurelius allowed the imperial power to

pass down to his worthless son Commodus; from that accession Gibbon

dated the decline.

Gibbon thought that the rise of Christianity had contributed to that de-

cline. Here he abandoned the lead of Montesquieu, who had said nothing

like this in his Greatness and decadence of the Romans; Gibbon, rather, fol-

lowed Voltaire. His attitude was thoroughly intellectual; he had no sym-

pathy for mystic rapture or hopeful faith. He expressed his view in a passage

that has a Voltairean flavor: "The various modes of worship which prevailed

in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by

the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. And

thus toleration produced religious concord." 80 Gibbon usually avoided any

direct expression of hostility to Christianity. There were still laws on the

statute books of England making such expression a serious crime; e.g., "if

any person educated in the Christian religion shall by writing . . . deny

the Christian religion to be true, he shall ... for the second offense . . .

suffer three years' imprisonment without bail." 81 To avoid such inconven-

ience Gibbon developed subtle suggestion and transparent irony as elements

in his style. He carefully pointed out that he would discuss not the primary

and supernatural sources of Christianity, but only the secondary and natural

factors in its origin and growth. Among these secondary factors he listed

"the pure and austere morals of the Christians" in their first century, but he

added, as another cause, "the inflexible (and, if we may use the expression,

the intolerant) zeal of the Christians." 82 And while he praised "the union and

discipline of the Christian republic," he noted that "it gradually formed an

independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman Empire." 83 In

general he reduced the early progress of Christianity from a miracle to a

natural process; he removed the phenomenon from theology to history.

How had Christianity made for the decline of Rome? First, by sapping the

faith of the people in the official religion, and thereby undermining the state

which that religion supported and sanctified. [This, of course, was precisely

the argument of the theologians against the philosophes.] The Roman gov-

ernment distrusted the Christians as forming a secret society hostile to mili-

tary service, and diverting men from useful employments to concentration

on heavenly salvation. (The monks, in Gibbon's judgment, were idlers who

found it easier to beg and pray than to work.) Other sects could be tolerated

because they were tolerant and did not imperil the unity of the nation; the

Christians were the only new sect that denounced all others as vicious and

802 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

damned, and openly predicted the fall of "Babylon"-i.e., Rome. 84 Gibbon

attributed much of this fanaticism to the Judaic origin of Christianity, and

he followed Tacitus in denouncing the Jews at various points in his narra-

tive. He proposed to interpret Nero's persecution of the Christians as really

a persecution of the Jews; 85 this theory has no supporter today. With more

success he followed Voltaire in reducing the number of Christians martyred

by the Roman government; he reckoned them to be two thousand at most;

and agreed with Voltaire "that the Christians, in the course of their intestine

dissensions [since Constantinel, have inflicted far greater severities on each

other than they have experienced from the zeal of infidels"; and "the Church

of Rome defended by violence the empire she had acquired by fraud." 86

These concluding chapters (xv-xvi) of Volume I aroused many replies

accusing Gibbon of inaccuracy, unfairness, or insincerity. Ignoring his crit-

ics for the time being, he treated himself to an extended vacation in Paris

(May to November, 1777). Suzanne Curchod, become the wife of the

banker and finance minister Jacques Necker, invited him to their home. She

was now too comfortable to resent his having "sighed as a lover, obeyed as

a son"; and M. Necker, so far from being jealous, often left the former

lovers alone and went to business or bed. "Could they insult me more

cruelly?" Gibbon complained. "What an impertinent security!" Suzanne's

daughter, Germaine (the future Mme. de Stael), found him such good com-

pany that she (aged eleven) tried her budding arts on him, and offered to

marry him so as to keep him in the family. 87 At the Neckers' he met the

Emperor Joseph II; at Versailles he was presented to Louis XVI, who was

said to have shared in translating Volume I into French. He was feted in the

salons, particularly by the Marquise du Deffand, who found him "gentle and

polite, . . . superior to nearly all the persons among whom I live," but pro-

nounced his style "declamatory, oratorical," and "in the tone of our pro-

fessed wits." 88 He rejected an invitation from Benjamin Franklin, with a

card saying that though he respected the American envoy as a man and a

philosopher, he could not reconcile it with his duty to his King to have any

conversation with a revolted subject. Franklin replied that he had such high

regard for the historian that if ever Gibbon should consider the decline and

fall of the British Empire as a subject, Franklin would be happy to furnish

him with some relevant materials. 89

Back in London, Gibbon prepared a reply to his critics— A Vindication of

Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779). He dealt briefly and cour-

teously with his theological opponents, but he rose to some temper in han-

dling Henry Davies, a youth of twenty-one, who had in 284 pages accused

Gibbon of inaccuracies. The historian admitted some mistakes, but denied

"willful misrepresentations, gross errors, and servile plagiarisms." 90 The

Vindication was generally received as a successful rebuttal. Gibbon made

no further reply to criticism except casually in the Memoirs, but he found

place for some conciliatory compliments to Christianity in his later volumes.

His writing was accelerated by the loss of his seat in Parliament (Septem-

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 803

ber 1, 1780). Volumes II and III of the History were published on March i,

1 78 1. They were quietly received. The barbarian invasions were an old

story, and the long and expert discussions of the heresies that had excited

the Christian Church in the fourth and fifth centuries were of no interest to

a generation of worldly skeptics. Gibbon had sent an advance copy of Vol-

ume II to Horace Walpole; he visited Walpole in Berkeley Square, and was

chagrined to be told that "there is so much of the Arians and Eunomians

and semi-Pelagians . . . that though you have written the story as well as

it could be written, I fear few will have patience to read it." "From that

hour to this," Walpole wrote, "I have never seen him, though he used to call

once or twice a week." 91 Gibbon later agreed with Walpole. 92

Volume II recovered life when Constantine came to the front. Gibbon

interpreted the famous conversion as an act of statesmanship. The Emperor

had perceived that "the operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and pre-

carious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice." Amid

the chaos of morals, economy, and government in the disrupted Empire, "a

prudent magistrate might observe with pleasure the progress of a religion

which diffused among the people a pure, benevolent, and universal system

of ethics, adapted to every duty and every condition of life, recommended

as the will and reason of the supreme Deity, and enforced by the sanction

of eternal rewards or punishments." 93 That is, Constantine recognized that

the aid of a supernatural religion was a precious aid to morality, social order,

and government. Then Gibbon penned 150 eloquent and impartial pages on

Julian the Apostate.

He ended Chapter xxxvin and Volume III with a footnote praising

George Ill's "pure and generous love of science and of mankind." In June,

1 78 1, by the aid of Lord North, Gibbon was re-elected to Parliament, where

he resumed his support of the ministry. The fall of Lord North (1782)

brought an end to the Board of Trade, and to Gibbon's post therein; "I was

stripped of a convenient salary of ^750 a year." 94 When North took a

place in the coalition ministry (1783), Gibbon applied for another sinecure; he

received none. "Without additional income I could not long or prudently

maintain the style of expense to which I was accustomed." 95 He calculated

that he could afford that style in Lausanne, where his pounds sterling had

twice the purchasing power they had in London. He resigned his seat in

Parliament, sold all his impersonal effects except his library, and on Septem-

ber 15, 1783, he left London— "its smoke and wealth and noise"— for Lau-

sanne. There he shared a comfortable mansion with his old friend Georges

Deyverdun. "Instead of looking on a paved court twelve feet square, I com-

mand a boundless prospect of vale, mountain, and water." 96 His two thou-

sand books reached him after some delay, and he proceeded with Volume

IV.

He had originally planned to end The Decline and Fall with the conquest

of Rome in 476. But after publishing Volume III he "began to wish for the

daily task, the active pursuit, which gave a value to every book, and an

object to every inquiry." 97 He decided to interpret "Roman Empire" to

804 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXII

mean the Eastern as well as the Western Empire, and to continue his narra-

tive to the destruction of Byzantine rule through the conquest of Constan-

tinople by the Turks in 1453. So he added a thousand years to his scope, and

undertook hundreds of new subjects requiring arduous research.

Volume IV included masterly chapters on Justinian and Belisarius, a chap-

ter on Roman law which won high praise from jurists, and a dreary chapter

on the further wars within Christian theology. "I wish," wrote Walpole,

"Mr. Gibbon had never heard of Monophysites, Nestorians, or any such

fools!" 98 In Volume V Gibbon turned with evident relief to the rise of

Mohammed and the Arab conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire, and he

lavished upon the Prophet and the martial caliphs all the impartial under-

standing that had failed him in the case of Christianity. In Volume VI the

Crusades gave him another stirring theme, and the capture of Constantinople

by Mohammed II provided the climax and crown of his work.

In the final chapter he summarized his labors in a famous sentence: "I

have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." 99 Like his unac-

knowledged teacher, Voltaire, he saw nothing in the Middle Ages but

crudity and superstition. He pictured the ruinous state of Rome in 1430, and

quoted Poggio's lament, "This spectacle of the world, how it is fallen, how

changed, how defaced!"— the destruction or dilapidation of classic monu-

ments and art, the Forum Romanum overgrown with weeds and possessed

by cattle and swine. And Gibbon concluded sadly: "It was among the ruins

of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused

and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate

to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the pub-

lic." And in his Memoirs he recalled that hour of ambivalent deliverance:

It was on the . . . night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of

eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer house

in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in ... a covered

walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the

mountains. ... I will not dissemble the emotions of joy on the recovery of my

freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon

humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that

I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that

whatever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must

be short and precarious. 100

3. The Man

Gibbon at sixteen was described by M. Pavilliard as "a thin little figure

with a large head." 101 Hating exercise and loving food, 102 he soon developed

a rotundity of body and face, a portly belly sustained by spindly legs; add

red hair curled at the side and tied at the back, gentle cherubic features, a

button nose, puffy cheeks, multiple chin, and, above all, a broad, high fore-

head promising "enterprises of great pith and moment," majesty, and scope.

He rivaled Johnson in appetite and Walpole in gout. His scrotum swelled

painfully year by year to proportions which his tight breeches set off to

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 805

disconcerting prominence. Despite his handicaps he was vain of his appearance

and his dress, and prefaced Volume II with his portrait by Reynolds. He

carried a snuffbox at his waist, and tapped it when nervous or wishing to be

heard. He was self-centered, like any man with an absorbing purpose. But

he truthfully claimed: "I am endowed with a cheerful temperament, a mod-

erate sensibility [but no sentiment! ], and a natural disposition to repose." 103

In 1775 he was elected to "the Club." He attended frequently but rarely

spoke, disliking Johnson's idea of conversation. Johnson commented too

audibly on Gibbon's "ugliness"; 104 Gibbon called the Great Bear an "oracle,"

"an unforgiving enemy," "a bigoted though vigorous mind, greedy of every

pretext to hate and persecute those who dissent from his creed." 105 Boswell,

feeling no mercy for an infidel, described the historian as "an ugly, affected,

disgusting fellow," who "poisons our Literary Club for me." Nevertheless

Gibbon must have had many friends, for in London he dined out almost

every night.

He came from Lausanne to London in August, 1787, to supervise the pub-

lication of Volumes IV- VI. They appeared on his fifty-first birthday, May

8, 1788, and brought him £4,000, one of the highest fees paid to an author

in the eighteenth century. "The conclusion of my work was generally read,

and variously judged. . . . Yet, upon the whole, the History of the Decline

and Fall seems to have struck root, both at home and abroad, and may, per-

haps, a hundred years hence, still continue to be abused." 106 Already Adam

Smith ranked him "at the head of the whole literary tribe at present existing

in Europe." 107 On June 1 3, 1788, during the trial of Hastings in Westminster

Hall, Gibbon, in the gallery, had the pleasure of hearing Sheridan, in one of

his most dramatic addresses, refer to "the luminous pages of Gibbon." 108 Ac-

cording to an unlikely story, Sheridan later claimed to have said "volumi-

nous"; 109 but that adjective could hardly be applied to pages, and "luminous"

was surely the fitting word.

In July, 1788, Gibbon returned to Lausanne. A year later Deyverdun

died, leaving his home to Gibbon for the duration of the historian's life.

There, with several servants and an income of £ 1,200 a year, Gibbon lived

at ease, drank much wine, and added to his gout and girth. "From February

9 to July 1, 1790, I was not able to move from my house or chair." 110 To

this period belongs the legend that he knelt at the feet of Mme. de Crousaz

with a declaration of love, that she bade him rise, and that he could not, be-

ing too heavy. 111 The sole source of the story is Mme. de Genlis, whom

Sainte-Beuve described as "a woman with a malicious tongue"; 112 and her

own daughter rejected the tale as due to a confusion of persons. 113

The French Revolution interfered with Gibbon's tranquillity. Revolu-

tionary sentiments were voiced in the Swiss cantons, and word came of simi-

lar agitation in England. He had good reason to fear the collapse of the

French monarchy, having invested £1,300 in a French government loan. 114

In 1788, in an unlucky prophecy, he had written of the French monarchy

that "it stood founded, as it might seem, on the rock of time, force, and opin-

ion, supported by the triple Aristocracy of the Church, the Nobility, and

806 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXII

the Parliaments." 115 He rejoiced when Burke issued Reflections on the Revo-

lution in France (1790); he wrote to Lord Sheffield advising against any re-

form in the British political structure; "if you admit the smallest and most

specious change in our parliamentary system, you are lost." 116 Now he de-

plored the success of the philosophes in combating religion; "I have some-

times thought of writing a dialogue of the dead, in which Lucian, Erasmus,

and Voltaire should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old

superstition to the contempt of the blind and fanatical multitude." 117 He

urged some Portuguese leaders not to abandon the Inquisition during this

crisis that threatened all thrones. 118

Partly to escape the French Revolutionary army that was nearing Lau-

sanne, partly to seek English surgery, and proximately to comfort Lord

Sheffield on the death of his wife, Gibbon left Lausanne (May 9, 1793) and

hurried to England. There he found Sheffield so busy with politics as to have

rapidly recovered from his grief; "the patient was cured," Gibbon wrote,

"before the arrival of the doctor." 119 The historian himself now submitted

to the physicians, for his hydrocele had grown "almost as big as a small child.

... I crawl about with some labor and much indecency." 120 One operation

drained four quarts of "transparent watery liquid" from the affected testicle.

But the fluid collected again, and a second tapping drew three quarts. Gib-

bon was temporarily relieved, and resumed dining out. Once more the hy-

drocele formed; now it became septic. On January 13, 1794, a third tapping

was made. Gibbon seemed to be recovering rapidly; the doctor allowed him

meat; Gibbon ate some chicken, and drank three glasses of wine. He was

seized with severe gastric pains, which, like Voltaire, he sought to ease with

opium. On January 16 he died, aged fifty-six.

4. The Historian

Gibbon was not inspiring in his visible person, character, or career; his

greatness was poured into his book, into the grandeur and courage of its

conception, the patience and artistry of its composition, the luminous maj-

esty of the whole.

Yes, Sheridan's word was right. Gibbon's style is as luminous as irony

would allow, and it shed light wherever it turned, except where prejudice

darkened his view. His diction was molded by his Latin and French studies;

he found simple Anglo-Saxon words unsuitable to the dignity of his manner,

and often he wrote like an orator— Livy sharpened with the satire of Tacitus,

Burke brightened with the wit of Pascal. He balanced clauses with the skill

and delight of a juggler, but played the game so often that sometimes it

neared monotony. If his style seems pompous, it fitted the reach and splendor

of his theme— the thousand-year crumbling of the greatest empire the world

had ever seen. The venial sins of his style are lost in the masculine march of

the narrative, the vigor of the episodes, the revealing portraits and descrip-

tions, the magisterial summations that cover a century in a paragraph, and

marry philosophy to history.

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 807

Having undertaken so extensive a subject, Gibbon felt justified in narrow-

ing its limits. "Wars, and the administration of public affairs," he said, "are

the principal subjects of history." 121 He excluded the history of art, science,

and literature; so he had nothing to say about Gothic cathedrals or Moslem

mosques, about Arabic science or philosophy; he crowned Petrarch, but

passed Dante by. He paid almost no attention to the condition of the lower

classes, the rise of industry in medieval Constantinople and Florence. He lost

interest in Byzantine history after the death of Heraclius (641). "He

failed," in the judgment of Bury, "to bring out the momentous fact that

[till] the twelfth century the [Eastern Roman] Empire was the bulwark of

Europe against the East; nor did he appreciate its importance in preserving

the heritage of Greek civilization." 122 Within his set limits Gibbon achieved

greatness by connecting effects with natural causes, and by reducing the

immensity of his materials to intelligible order and a guiding perspective of

the whole.

His scholarship was immense and detailed. His footnotes are a treasury of

learning lightened with wit. He studied the most recondite aspects of classi-

cal antiquity, including roads, coins, weights, measures, laws. He made mis-

takes which specialists have corrected, but the same Bury who pointed out

his errors added: "If we take into account the vast range of his work, his

accuracy is amazing." 123 He could not (like professional historians confining

themselves to a small area of subject, place, and time) burrow into unprinted

original sources; to get his work done he restricted himself to printed ma-

terial, and frankly relied in part on secondary authorities like Ockley's His-

tory of the Saracens or Tillemont's Histoire des empereurs and Histoire

ecclesiastique; and some of the authorities he relied upon are now rejected

as untrustworthy. 124 He declared his sources in honest detail, and thanked

them; so, when he passed beyond the time that Tillemont treated, he said in

a footnote: "Here I must take leave forever of that incomparable guide." 125

What conclusions did Gibbon reach from his study of history? Sometimes

he followed the philosophes in accepting the reality of progress: "We may

acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age in the world has increased

and still increases the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps

the virtue, of the human race." 126 But in less amiable moments— and perhaps

because he had taken war and politics (and theology) as the substance of

history— he judged history to be "indeed little more than the register of the

crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."* 127 He saw no design in his-

tory; events are the outcome of unguided causes; they are the parallelogram

of forces of different origin and composite result. In all this kaleidoscope of

events human nature seems to remain unchanged. Cruelty, suffering, and in-

justice have always afflicted mankind, and always will, for they are written

in the nature of man. "Man has much more to fear from the passions of his

fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements." 129

Child of the Enlightenment, Gibbon longed to be a philosopher, or at

* Cf. Voltaire: "All history, in short, is little else than a . . . collection of crimes, follies,

and misfortunes . . ." 128

808 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXII

least to write history en philosophe. "An enlightened age requires from the

historian some tincture of philosophy and criticism." 130 He loved to interrupt

his narrative with philosophical comments. But he did not profess to reduce

history to laws, or to formulate a "philosophy of history." On some basic

questions, however, he took a stand: he confined the influence of climate to

the early stages of civilization; he rejected race as a determining factor; 131

and he acknowledged, within limits, the influence of exceptional men. "In

human life the most important scenes will depend upon the character of a

single actor. . . . An acrimonious humor falling upon a single fiber of one

man may prevent or suspend the misery of nations." 132 When the Koreish

could have assassinated Mohammed "the lance of an Arab might have

changed the history of the world." 133 If Charles Martel had not defeated

the Moors at Tours (732) the Moslems might have overrun all Europe; "the

interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford,

and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and

truth of the revelation of Mahomet. From such calamities was Christendom

delivered by the genius and fortune of one man." 134 However, for maximum

influence on his time, the exceptional individual must stand upon some wide

support. "The effects of personal valor are so inconsiderable, except in

poetry or romance, that victory . . . must depend upon the degree of skill

with which the passions of the multitude are combined and guided for the

service of a single man." 135

All in all, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire may be ranked as

the supreme book of the eighteenth century, with Montesquieu's VEsprit

des lois as its closest competitor. It was not the most influential; it could not

compare in effect upon history with Rousseau's Social Contract or Adam

Smith's Wealth of Nations, or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But as a work

of literary art it was unsurpassed in its time or kind. When we ask how Gib-

bon came to produce such a masterpiece, we perceive that it was the acci-

dental combination of ambition with money, leisure, and ability; and we

wonder how soon such a combination can be expected to recur. Never, said

another historian of Rome, Barthold Niebuhr; "Gibbon's work will never

be excelled." 138

VI. CHATTERTON AND COWPER

Who would now suppose that in 1760 the most popular of living English

poets was Charles Churchill? Son of a clergyman, and himself ordained an

Anglican priest, he took to the pleasures of London, dismissed his wife,

rolled up debts, and wrote a once famous poem, The Rosciad (1761), which

enabled him to pay his debts, to settle an allowance on his wife, and to "set

up in glaringly unclerical attire as a man about town." 137 His poem took its

name from Quintus Roscius, who had dominated the Roman theater in

Caesar's day; it satirized the leading actors of London, and made Garrick

wince; one victim "ran about the town like a stricken deer." 138 Churchill

CHAP.XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 809

joined Wilkes in the ribald rites of Medmenham Abbey, helped him write

The North Briton, and went to France to share Wilkes's exile; but he died

at Boulogne (1764) of a drunken debauch, and "with epicurean indiffer-

ence." 139

Another clergyman, Thomas Percy, lived up to his cloth, became bishop

of Dromore in Ireland, and made a mark on European literature by rescuing,

from the hands of a housemaid who was about to burn it, an old manuscript

that provided one source for his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765). These

ballads from medieval Britain appealed to old memories, and encouraged the

romantic spirit— so long subdued by rationalism and the classic temper— to

express itself in poetry, fiction, and art. Wordsworth dated from these Re-

liques the rise of the Romantic movement in English literature. Macpherson's

Ossian, Chatterton's poems, Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Strawberry

Hill, Beckford's Vathek and Fonthill Abbey, were varied voices joining in

the cry for feeling, mystery, and romance. For a time the Middle Ages cap-

tured the modern soul.

Thomas Chatterton began his attempt to medievalize himself by brooding

over old parchments which his uncle had found in a Bristol church. Born in

that city (1752) soon after his father's death, the sensitive and imaginative

boy grew up in a world of his own historic fancies. He studied a dictionary

of Anglo-Saxon words, and composed, in what he thought was fifteenth-

century language, poems which he pretended to have found in St. Mary

Radcliffe Church, and which he ascribed to Thomas Rowley, an imaginary

fifteenth-century monk. In 1769, aged seventeen, he sent some of these

"Rowley poems" to Horace Walpole— who had himself published Otranto

as a medieval original five years before. Walpole praised the poems and in-

vited more; Chatterton sent more, and asked for help in finding a publisher,

and some remunerative employment in London. Walpole submitted the

verses to Thomas Gray and William Mason, both of whom pronounced

them forgeries. Walpole wrote to Chatterton that these scholars "were by

no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed mss;" and he advised

him to put poetry aside until he could support himself. Then Walpole went

off to Paris, forgetting to return the poems. Chatterton wrote three times

for them; three months passed before they came. 140

The poet went to London (April, 1770) and took an attic room in Brook

Street, Holborn. He contributed pro-Wilkes articles, and some of the Row-

ley poems, to various periodicals, but was so poorly paid (eightpence per

poem) that he could not sustain himself on the proceeds. He tried and failed

to secure a post as surgeon's assistant on an African trader. On August 27 he

composed a bitter valedictory to the w^orld:

Farewell, Bristolia's dingy piles of brick,

Lovers of Mammon, worshipers of trick!

Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,

And paid for learning with your empty praise.

Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,

By nature fitted for corruption's tools! . . .

8lO ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXII

Farewell, my mother!— cease, my anguish'd soul,

Nor let distraction's billows o'er me roll!

Have mercy, Heaven! when here I cease to live,

And this last act of wretchedness forgive.

Then he killed himself by drinking arsenic. He was seventeen years and

nine months old. He was buried in a pauper's grave.

His poems now fill two volumes. Had he called them imitations instead of

originals he might have been recognized as a genuine poet, for some of the

Rowley pieces are as good as most originals of the same genre. When he

wrote in his own name he could indite satiric verses almost rivaling Pope's,

as in "The Methodist" 141 or— bitterest of all— seventeen lines lashing Walpole

as a heartless sycophant. 142 When his surviving manuscripts were published

(1777) the editor charged Walpole as partly responsible for the poet's death;

Walpole defended himself on the ground that he had felt no obligation to

help a persistent impostor. 143 Some warmhearted souls like Goldsmith in-

sisted that the poems were genuine; Johnson laughed at his friend, but said:

"This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowl-

edge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." 144 Shelley

briefly commemorated the boy in Adonais^ and Keats inscribed Endymion

to his memory.

Chatterton escaped from the rugged realities of Bristol and London via

medieval legends and arsenic; William Cowper fled from the London that

Johnson loved into rural simplicity, religious faith, and periodic insanity. His

grandfather was acquitted of murder and became a judge; his father was an

Anglican clergyman; his mother belonged to the same family that had pro-

duced John Donne. She died when he was six, leaving him melancholy

memories of fond solicitude; fifty-three years later, when a cousin sent him

an old picture of her, he recalled, in a tender poem, 146 the efforts she often

made to calm the fears that darkened his childhood nights.

From those indulgent hands he passed, in his seventh year, to a boarding

school where he became the timid fag of a bully who spared him no humil-

iating task. He suffered from inflammation of the eyes, and for years he had

to be under an oculist's care. In 1741, aged ten, he was sent off to West-

minster School in London. At seventeen he began three years' service as

clerk in a solicitor's office in Holborn. He was ripe now for romance; as his

cousin Theodora Cowper lived nearby, she became the idol of his day-

dreams. At twenty-one he took quarters in the Middle Temple, and at

twenty-three he was admitted to the bar. Disliking law, and timid before

courts, he fell into a mood of hypochondria, which was deepened when

Theodora's father forbade her any further association with her cousin.

Cowper never saw her again, never forgot her, and never married.

In 1763, faced with the necessity to appear before the House of Lords, he

broke down, became deranged, and tried to kill himself. Friends sent him to

an asylum at St. Albans. After eighteen months he was released, and took to

an almost solitary life at Huntingdon, near Cambridge; now, he said, he "de-

CHAP.XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 8ll

sired no other communion than with God and Jesus Christ." 147 He accepted

the Calvinist creed literally, and thought much of salvation and damnation.

By some happy chance he fell in with a local family whose religion brought

peace and kindness rather than fear: the Reverend Morley Unwin, his wife

Mary, his son William, and his daughter Susannah. Cowper compared the

father with Parson Adams in Fielding's Joseph Andrews; he saw a second

mother in A4rs. Unwin, who was seven years his senior. She and the daughter

treated him as son and brother, and gave him delicate feminine attentions

that almost made him love life again. They invited him to live with them;

he did ( 1 765) , and found healing in their simple life.

This bliss was suddenly ended when the father was killed by a fall from

a horse. The widow and her daughter, taking Cowper with them, moved to

Olney in Buckinghamshire, to be near the famous evangelical preacher John

Newton. He persuaded Cowper to join him in visiting the sick and writing

hymns. One of these "Olney Hymns" contained famous lines:

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform;

He plants his footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm. 148

But Newton's hellfire sermons, which had "thrown more than one of his

parishioners off their balance," intensified rather than allayed the poet's

theological fears. 149 "God," said Cowper, "is always formidable to me but

when I see Him disarmed of His sting by having sheathed it in the body of

Christ Jesus." 150 He proposed to A4rs. Unwin, but a second attack of in-

sanity (1773) prevented the marriage; he recovered after three years of lov-

ing care. In 1779 Newton left Olney, and Cowper's piety took a milder

turn.

Other women helped Mary Unwin to keep the poet in contact with

earthly things. Lady Austin, widowed but merry, gave up her London

house, moved to Olney, associated with the Unwins, and brought gaiety

where there had been too long a concentration on the occasional tragedies

of life. It was she who told Cowper the story which he turned into "The

Diverting History of John Gilpin" 151 and his wild unwilling ride. A friend

of the family sent the rollicking ballad to a newspaper; an actor who had

succeeded Garrick at the Drury Lane Theatre recited it there; it became the

talk of London, and Cowper had his first taste of renown. He had never

taken himself seriously as a poet; now Lady Austin urged him to write some

substantial work. But on what subject? On anything, she answered; and,

pointing to a sofa, she assigned him the task of celebrating it in verse. Pleased

to be commanded by a charming woman, Cowper wrote The Task. Pub-

lished in 1785, it found welcome among people who were tired of war and

politics and city strife.

It would be a real task to write or read six "books" about a sofa unless

one had the morals of Crebillon fils; 152 Cowper was sane enough to use it

only as a starting post. After making it the climax in a humorous history of

8l2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXII

chairs, he slipped into his favorite subject, which might be summed up in the

poem's most famous line: "God made the country, and man made the

town." 153 The poet admitted that art and eloquence flourished in London;

he praised Reynolds and Chatham, and marveled at the science that "meas-

ures an atom and now girds the world"; 154 but he reproached the "queen of

cities" for punishing some small thefts with death while lavishing honors

on "peculators of the public gold."

Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness,

Some boundless contiguity of shade,

Where rumor of oppression and deceit,

Of unsuccessful or successful war,

Might never reach me more! My ear is pain'd,

My soul is sick, with every day's report

Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. 155

He was horrified by the traffic in slaves; his was one of the first English

voices to denounce the man who

finds his fellow guilty of a skin

Not colored like his own; and having power

To enforce the wrong, . . .

Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey. . . .

Then what is man? And what man, seeing this,

And having human feelings, does not blush,

And hang his head, to think himself a man? 156

And yet, he concluded, "England, with all thy faults I love thee still." 157

He felt that these faults would be mitigated if England would return to

religion and a rural life. "I was a stricken deer that left the herd"— i.e., he

had left London, where "prostitutes elbow us aside"— and had found healing

in faith and nature. Come to the countryside! See the River Ouse, "slow

winding through a level plain"; the placid cattle, the peasant cottage and its

sturdy family, the village spire pointing grief and hope; hear the splash of

waterfalls, and the morning converse of the birds. In the country every sea-

son has its joy; the spring rains are a blessing, and the winter snow is clean.

How pleasant it is to tramp through the snow and then gather about the

evening fire!

Cowper wrote little of value after The Task. In 1786 he removed to

nearby Weston Underwood; there he had another half year of insanity. In

1792 Mrs. Unwin suffered a paralytic stroke; for three years she lingered

as a helpless invalid; Cowper nursed her as she had nursed him, and in her

last month he wrote his lines "To Mary Unwin":

Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,

Are still more lovely in my sight

Than golden beams of orient light,

My Mary! 158

In 1794, overcome with care, and with work on his unsuccessful translation

of Homer, he again went mad, and tried to destroy himself. He recovered,

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 813

and was relieved from financial distress by a governmental pension of £ 300.

But on December 17, 1796, Mary Unwin died, and Cowper felt quite lost

and desolate, though he had found a new friend in Theodora's sister, Lady

Harriet Cowper Hesketh. His final days were obsessed with religious fears.

He died on April 25, 1800, aged sixty-eight.

He belonged to the Romantic movement in literature, and to the evan-

gelical movement in religion. He ended the reign of Pope in poetry, and pre-

pared for Wordsworth; he brought into poetry a naturalness of form and

a sincerity of feeling that stopped the torrent of artificial couplets which

the Augustan Age had let loose upon England. His religion was a curse to

him in its picture of a vengeful God and an unforgiving hell; yet it may have

been religion, as well as maternal instincts, that led those kindly women

to care for this "stricken deer" through all his griefs and darkenings.

VII. OLIVER GOLDSMITH

"Poor Poll" too had his tragedies, but they were not deepened by a sadistic

creed, and were relieved by triumphs in prose and poetry and on the stage.

His father was a humble Anglican curate in an Irish village, who, by add-

ing tillage to theology, earned forty pounds a year. When Oliver was two

years old (1730) the curate was made rector of Kilkenny West, and the

family moved into a house on a main road near Lissoy, which later renamed

itself Auburn in confidence that Goldsmith had had it in mind when he

wrote The Deserted Village.

Oliver went through a succession of elementary schools, and remembered

best a quartermaster turned schoolmaster, who could never forget his wars,

but also told absorbing tales of fairies, banshees, and ghosts. At the age of

nine the boy nearly died of smallpox, which further disfigured one of the

least beautiful faces ever given to a lovable soul. At fifteen he entered Trin-

ity College in Dublin as a sizar, or working student, wearing a distinguishing

costume, performing menial services, and harassed by a tyrannical tutor. He

ran away to Cork, planning to find passage to America, but his older brother

Henry overtook him and beguiled him back to college. Oliver did well with

the classics, but proved impervious to science; however, he managed to get

his bachelor's degree.

He applied for admission to minor ecclesiastical orders, but astonished

the bishop by appearing in scarlet breeches. Rejected, he became a tutor,

quarreled with his pupil, and again headed for Cork and America. An uncle

intervened by advancing him fifty pounds to go to London; Oliver lost it all

in a gambling house. His relatives were dismayed by his shiftless incompe-

tence, but were charmed by his gaiety, flute, and songs. A fund was raised

to finance his study of medicine in Edinburgh, then in Leiden. He made

some progress, but left Leiden without a degree. At Paris (he tells us) he

attended the chemical lectures of Rouelle. Then he set out leisurely (1755),

walking through France, Germany, Switzerland, and north Italy, playing

814 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXII

his flute at country dances, earning haphazard meals, receiving alms at mon-

astery gates. 159 In January, 1756, he returned to England.

He practiced medicine in London, corrected proofs for Samuel Richard-

son, taught school in Surrey, then settled down in London as a hack writer,

doing odd literary jobs and contributing to magazines. He wrote in four

weeks a Life of Voltaire. In 1759 he persuaded Dodsley to publish a super-

ficial Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe. Its comments on

theatrical managers gave lasting offense to Garrick. It argued that ages of

creative literature tend to be followed by ages of criticism, which deduce

rules from the practice of creators, and tend to cramp the style and imagina-

tion of new poets. Goldsmith thought that Europe was in such a state in

'759-

A year later he wrote for Newbery's Public Ledger some "Chinese Let-

ters," which were republished in 1762 as The Citizen of the World. The

scheme was old: to imagine an Oriental traveler reporting with amusement

and horror the ways of Europeans. So Lien Chi Altangi, in letters to a

friend at home, describes Europe as a disorderly theater of avarice, ambi-

tion, and intrigue. Goldsmith issued the book anonymously, but the denizens

of Fleet Street recognized his style in the simple language, lively descriptions,

and amiable tone. Feeling his fame, he moved to better quarters at No. 6 Wine

Office Court. Having complimented Johnson in the "Chinese Letters," he

ventured to invite the lexicographer (who lived just across the way) to

supper. Johnson came, and their long friendship began (May 31, 1761).

One day in October, 1762, Johnson received an urgent message from

Goldsmith, asking for help. He sent a guinea, came shortly afterward, and

found that Goldsmith was about to be arrested for failure to pay his rent. He

asked his friend had he nothing of value to pawn or sell. Goldsmith gave him

a manuscript entitled The Vicar of Wakefield. Johnson (according to John-

son's account 160 ) bade the landlady wait, brought the novel to John New-

bery, a bookseller, sold it for £60, and took the money to Goldsmith, who

paid his rent and celebrated with a bottle of wine. The bookseller kept the

manuscript unpublished for four years.

In December, 1764, Goldsmith sent forth his first major poem, The Trav-

eller, or A Prospect of Society. He retraced his Continental wanderings, de-

scribed the faults and virtues of each land, and noted that each country

thought itself the best. He gloried in the power of England (which had just

won the Seven Years' War), and described the M.P.s:

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,

I see the lords of human kind pass by;

but he warned that avarice was tarnishing British rule, that selfish enclosures

were impoverishing the peasantry and driving England's sturdiest sons to

America. He had shown the manuscript to Johnson, who contributed nine

lines, chiefly toward the end, belittling the influence of politics on the indi-

vidual's happiness, and lauding domestic joys.

The success of the poem surprised all but Johnson, who helped it by pro-

claiming, "There has not been so fine a poem since Pope's time" 161 — which

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 815

slighted Gray. The publisher made a handsome profit on repeated editions,

but yielded only twenty guineas to the author. Goldsmith moved to better

rooms in the Temple; he bought a new outfit, with purple breeches, scarlet

cloak, a wig, and a cane, and resumed with this dignity the practice of medi-

cine. The experiment did not prosper, and the success of The Vicar of

Wakefield brought him back to literature.

The bookseller who had bought the manuscript from Johnson felt that the

fresh fame of Goldsmith would carry the strange novel to acceptance. It

appeared in a small edition on March 27, 1766; this was sold out in two

months, and a second edition in three months more; but not till 1774 did the

sales repay the publisher's investment. As early as 1770 Herder recom-

mended it to Goethe, who rated it "one of the best novels ever written." 162

Walter Scott agreed. 163 Washington Irving marveled that a bachelor home-

less since his childhood could draw "the most amiable picture of domestic

virtue and all the endearments of the married state." 164 Perhaps it was Gold-

smith's exclusion from family life that made him idealize the home, his un-

willing bachelordom that made him idealize young womanhood, and his

anonymous amours that made him exalt feminine chastity as more precious

than life. His fond memories of his father and his brother furnished the

portrait of Dr. Primrose, who, as "a priest, an husbandman, and the father

of a family, . . . unites in himself the three greatest characters on earth." 165

His own wanderings reappeared in son George, who, like Goldsmith, had

ended his travels as a hack writer in London. The story is incredible and

charming.

The proceeds from The Traveller and The Vicar of Wakefield were

soon spent, for Goldsmith was a sieve for currency, and always lived in the

future. He looked with envy upon the fame and fortune that might come

from a successful play. He set his pen to the difficult genre, called the result

The Good-Natured Man, and offered it to Garrick. David tried to forget

the derogatory remarks that Goldsmith had made about him; he agreed to

produce the play. However, it laughed at sentimental comedies, and these

were Garrick's moneymakers. He proposed changes, Goldsmith rejected

them; Garrick advanced the author forty pounds, but dallied so long that

the reckless author turned the manuscript over to Garrick's rival, George

Colman, who managed the Covent Garden Theatre. Colman's actors dis-

paraged the play; Johnson gave it all his support, attended rehearsals, wrote

the prologue. The drama had its premiere on January 29, 1768; it ran ten

nights, and was then withdrawn as only a moderate success; even so it netted

the author £s°°-

Flush for a year, Goldsmith, against Johnson's advice, moved to a hand-

some apartment in Brick Court, and fitted it so well that he had to return to

hack writing to meet his bills. Now he turned out popular histories of Rome,

Greece, England, and a History of Animated Nature— all of them poor in

scholarship but enriched with gracious prose. When someone asked why he

wrote such books, he answered that they enabled him to eat, while poetry

let him starve. Nevertheless, on May 26, 1770, he sent forth his masterpiece,

The Deserted Village, for which he received a hundred guineas— a fair price

8l6 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXII

at that time for a poem only seventeen pages long. It sold out four editions in

three months.

Its theme was the desertion of the countryside by farmers who had lost

their lands through enclosures. It pictured

Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,

Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain;

it lent all the rosy colors of Goldsmith's urban imagination to the peasant

prosperity that (he presumed) had preceded the enclosures. He described

the rural scenes, the diverse flowers, "the sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,"

the village sports and dances, the "bashful virgin" and the pimpled youth,

and the happy families where piety and virtue reigned. Again he saw his

father ministering at Kilkenny West:

A man he was to all the country dear,

And passing rich with forty pounds a year-

enough to let him feed the vagrant, save the spendthrift, house the broken

soldier, visit the sick, and comfort the dying.

At church, with meek and unaffected grace,

His looks adorned the venerable place;

Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway,

And fools who came to scoff remained to pray.

That schoolmaster who had disciplined the poet's boyhood was transformed

in recollection into a teacher "stern to view":

Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught,

The love he bore to learning was in fault; . . .

In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill,

For e'en though vanquished he could argue still; . . .

With words of learned length and thundering sound

Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;

And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,

That one small head could carry all he knew.

This paradise had been ruined, Goldsmith thought, by enclosures; the peas-

ant farm had been turned to pasturage, the peasant families had fled to the

towns or the colonies, and the rural fount of honest virtue was drying up.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Having written the best poem of that generation, Goldsmith now returned

to drama. In 177 1 he offered to Colman a new comedy, She Stoops to Con-

quer. Colman dallied as Garrick had done, until Johnson intervened and

almost commanded the manager to stage the play. Garrick, reconciled, wrote

the prologue. After tribulations that almost broke the author's spirit, the

piece was produced, March 15, 1773. Johnson, Reynolds, and other friends

attended the premiere and led the applause; Goldsmith himself wandered

meanwhile in St. James's Park, until someone found him and assured him

that his play was a great success. It had a long run; the benefit nights brought

Goldsmith a year of prosperity.

CHAP. XXXIl) THE LITERARY SCENE 817

He had now raised himself to a place second only to Johnson among the

English writers of the day, and even to foreign fame. He was a leading

figure in the Club, and dared to differ from Johnson frequently. When

there was talk about animal fables he remarked that it was especially diffi-

cult to make fishes talk like fishes; and "this," he told Johnson, "is not so

easy as you seem to think; for if you were to make little fishes talk they

would all talk like whales." 166 The Great Bear sometimes clawed him cruelly,

but loved him none the less, and the affection was returned despite Gold-

smith's envy of Johnson's conversational mastery. He himself had never put

his learning in order; he could not draw on it readily or aptly; he "wrote

like an angel," said Garrick, "and talked like poor Poll." 167 Boswell tended

to belittle Goldsmith, but many contemporaries— Reynolds, Burke, Wilkes,

Percy— protested against this as unjust. 168 It was observed that Goldsmith

often spoke well in gatherings where Johnson was not present. 169

His accent, his manners, and his appearance were against him. He had

never lost his Irish brogue. He dressed too carelessly, and sometimes he

sported incongruous polychrome finery. He was vain of his accomplish-

ments, and did not admit Johnson's superiority to him as a writer. He was

five feet five inches tall, and resented Johnson's height and bulk. His good

nature shone through his homely face. Reynolds' portrait did not idealize

him; here were thick lips, a receding forehead, an advancing nose, and wor-

ried eyes. Caricaturists like Henry Bunbury widened Oliver's mouth and

prolonged his nose; the London Packet described him as an orangutan; 170 a

hundred stories traveled the town about his blunders of speech and action,

and his secret love for pretty Mary Horneck.

His friends knew that his faults were on the surface, concealing a spirit of

good will, affection, and almost ruinous generosity. Even Boswell described

him as "the most generous-hearted man that exists; and now that he has had

a large supply of gold by his comedy, all the needy draw upon him." 171

When he had no more money to give he borrowed to meet the demands of

the poor who applied to him. 172 He appealed to Garrick (whose forty

pounds had not been repaid) to advance him sixty pounds on the promise

of another play; Garrick sent the sum. Goldsmith owed ,£2,000 at his

death. "Was ever poet," Johnson asked, "so trusted before?" 173

In 1774, as he was about to leave for one of the several clubs to which he

belonged, he was stricken with fever. He insisted on prescribing for himself,

forgetting Beauclerk's advice that he should prescribe only for his enemies;

he took a patent medicine, and grew worse. A doctor was called, too late

to save him. He died on April 4, only forty-five years old. A crowd of

mourners gathered about the corpse, simple men and women who had al-

most lived on his charity. He was buried in the churchyard of the Temple,

but his friends insisted that some memorial to him should be set up in the

Abbey. Nollekens carved the monument, Johnson wrote the epitaph. Better

would have been the poet's own lines in The Good-Natured Man: "Life at

the greatest and best is but a forward child, that must be humored and

coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over." 174

CHAPTER XXXIII

Samuel Johnson

1709-84

I. DEFORMATIVE YEARS: 1709-46

HE was unique and yet typical; unlike any Englishman of his time, yet

summarizing John Bull in body and soul; surpassed in every literary

field (except lexicography) by his contemporaries, yet dominating them for

a generation, reigning over them without raising anything but his voice.

Let us record briefly the blows that beat him into his peculiar form. He

was the first child born to Michael Johnson, bookseller, printer, and sta-

tioner in Lichfield, 1 1 8 miles from London. The mother, nee Sarah Ford,

was of slightly genteel stock. She was thirty-seven when, in 1706, she mar-

ried Michael, who was fifty.

Samuel was a sickly child, so weak at birth that he was baptized at once,

lest, dying unchristened, he should, by the laws of theology, be lodged

forever in Limbo, the gloomy vestibule of hell. He soon showed signs of

scrofula. When he was thirty months old his mother, though pregnant with

her second son, took him on the long ride to London to be "touched for the

king's evil" by Queen Anne. The Queen did her best, but the disease cost

Johnson the use of one eye and one ear, and shared with other tribulations

in disfiguring his face. 1 Nevertheless he grew strong in muscle and frame;

and his strength as well as his bulk supported that absolutism which, as Gold-

smith complained, turned the republic of letters into a monarchy. Samuel

thought that he had inherited from his father the "vile melancholy which

has made me mad all my life, at least not sober." 2 Perhaps, as in Cowper's

case, his hypochondria had a religious as well as a physical basis; Johnson's

mother was a firm Calvinist, who thought that eternal damnation was just

around the corner. Samuel suffered from fear of hell to the day of his death.

From his father he derived his Tory politics, Jacobite leanings, and a pas-

sion for books. He read eagerly in his father's store; later he told Boswell, "I

knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now." 3 After some elementary in-

struction he passed on to Lichfield grammar school, where the headmaster

was "so brutal that no man who had been educated by him sent his son to

the same school"; 4 however, when asked in after years how he had acquired

so good a command of Latin, he answered: "My master whipt me very

well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing." 5 In old age he deplored

the obsolescence of the rod. "There is now less flogging in our great schools

than formerly, but then less is learned there, so that what the boys get at one

end they lose at the other." 6

818

CHAP. XXXIII ) SAMUEL JOHNSON 819

In 1728 his parents found means to send him to Oxford. There he de-

voured the Greek and Latin classics, and harassed his teachers by insubor-

dination. In December, 1729, he hurried back to Lichfield, perhaps because

parental funds ran out, or because his hypochondria had come so close to

madness that he needed medical treatment. He received this at. Birmingham;

then, instead of returning to Oxford, he helped in his father's shop. When

the father died (December, 173 1) Samuel went to work as assistant teacher

in a school at Market Bosworth. Soon tiring of this, he moved to Birming-

ham, lived with a bookseller, and made five guineas by translating a book

about Abyssinia; this was a distant source of Rasselas. In 1734 he returned

to Lichfield, where his mother and brother were carrying on the store. On

July 9, 1735, two months short of twenty-six, he married Elizabeth Porter,

a widow of forty-eight with three children and ,£700. With her money he

opened a boarding school at nearby Edial. David Garrick, a Lichfield boy,

was one of his pupils, but there were not enough to reconcile him to ped-

agogy. Authorship was fermenting in him. He wrote a drama, Irene, and

sent word to Edward Cave, editor of The Gentleman's Magazine, explain-

ing how that periodical could be improved. On March 2, 1737, he rode off

to London, with David Garrick and one horse, to sell his tragedy and carve

out a place for himself in the cruel world.

His appearance was against him. He was thin and tall, but with a large

bony frame that made him a mass of angles. His face was blotched with

scrofula and was frequently agitated by a convulsive twitch; his body was

subject to alarming starts; his conversation was illustrated by odd gesticula-

tions. One bookseller to whom he applied for work advised him to "get a

porter's knot and carry trunks." 7 Apparently he received some encourage-

ment from Cave, for in July he went back to Lichfield, and brought his wife

to London.

He was not without subtlety. When Cave was attacked in the press John-

son wrote a poem in his defense and sent it to him; Cave published it, gave

him literary commissions, and joined Dodsley in issuing (May, 1738) John-

son's London, for which they gave him ten guineas. The poem frankly imi-

tated Juvenal's Third Satire, and therefore emphasized the lamentable as-

pects of the city that the author soon learned to love; it was also an attack

upon the administration of Robert Walpole, whom Johnson later described

as "the best minister this country ever had." 8 The poem was in part the angry

blast of a country youth who, after a year in London, was still uncertain of

tomorrow's food; hence the famous line "Slow rises worth, by poverty de-

pressed." 9

In those days of struggle Johnson turned his pen to every genre. He wrote

Lives of Eminent Persons (1740), and various articles for The Gentleman's

Magazine, including imaginary reports of parliamentary debates. Since re-

porting of the debates was as yet forbidden, Cave hit on the expedient of

pretending that his magazine was merely recording debates in the "Senate

of Magna Lilliputia." In 1741 Johnson took over this task. From general in-

820 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

formation as to the course of discussion in Parliament he composed speeches

which he ascribed to characters whose names were anagrams for the main

contenders in the House. 10 The debates bore such an air of verisimilitude

that many readers took them as verbatim reports, and Johnson had to warn

Smollett (who was writing a history of England) not to rely on them as

factual. Once, hearing praise of a speech ascribed to Chatham, Johnson re-

marked, "That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street." 11 When someone

commended the impartiality of his reports, he confessed: "I saved appear-

ances tolerably well, but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the

best of it." 12

How was he paid for his work? He once called Cave a "penurious pay-

master," but he frequently professed affection for his memory. Between

August 2, 1738, and April 21, 1739, Cave paid him forty-nine pounds; and

in 1744 Johnson estimated fifty pounds a year as "undoubtedly more than

the necessities of life require." 13 However, Johnson has been traditionally

described as living in dire poverty in London in those years. Boswell be-

lieved that "Johnson and Savage were sometimes in such extreme indigence

that they could not pay for a lodging, so that they wandered whole nights

in the streets"; 14 and Macaulay assumed that those months of penury habitu-

ated Johnson to slovenliness of dress and a "ravenous greediness" in eating. 15

Richard Savage claimed, unconvincingly, to be the son of an earl, but he

had become a wastrel when Johnson met him in 1737. They roamed the

streets because they loved taverns more than their rooms. Boswell mentions

"with all possible respect and delicacy" that Johnson's

conduct after he came to London, and had associated with Savage and others,

was not so strictly virtuous, in one respect, as when he was a younger man. It

was well known that his amorous inclinations were uncommonly strong and

impetuous. He owned to many of his friends that he used to take women of the

town to taverns, and hear them relate their history— In short, it must not be

concealed that, like many other good and pious men [did Boswell have Boswell

in mind?], . . . Johnson was not free from propensities which were ever "war-

ring against the law of his mind"— and that in his combats with them he was

sometimes overcome. 16

Savage left London in July, 1739, and died in a debtor's prison in 1743. A

year later Johnson issued The Life of Richard Savage, which Henry Field-

ing called "as just and well written a piece as, of its kind, I ever saw." 17 It

presaged (and was later included in) the Lives of the Poets. It was published

anonymously, but literary London soon discovered Johnson's authorship.

The booksellers began to think of him as the man to compile a dictionary

of the English language.

II. THE DICTIONARY: 1 746-5 5

Hume had written in 1741: "We have no dictionary of our language, and

scarcely a tolerable grammar." 18 He was mistaken, for Nathaniel Bailey had

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 82 1

published An Universal Etymological English Dictionary in 172 1, and this

had had predecessors semi-lexicographical. The proposal for a new diction-

ary was apparently made by Robert Dodsley in the presence of Johnson,

who said, "I believe I shall not undertake it." 19 But when other booksellers

joined Dodsley in offering Johnson £1,575 if he would assume the obliga-

tion, he signed the contract, June 18, 1746.

After much rumination he drew up a thirty-four-page Plan for a Diction-

ary of the English Language, and had it printed. He sent this to several

persons, among them Lord Chesterfield, then secretary of state, with some

hopeful praise of the Earl's excellence in English and other departments.

Chesterfield invited him to call. Johnson did; the Earl gave him ten pounds

and a word of encouragement. Later Johnson called again, was kept waiting

an hour, left in anger, and abandoned the idea of dedicating his work to

Chesterfield.

He went to his task leisurely, then more diligently, for his fee was meted

out to him in installments. When he reached the word lexicographer he de-

fined it as "a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge . . ." He had hoped

to finish in three years; he took nine. In 1 749 he moved to Gough Square, off

Fleet Street. He hired— and himself paid for— five or six secretaries, and set

them to work in a third-floor room. He read the recognized English authors

of the century from 1558 to 1660— from the accession of Elizabeth I to that

of Charles II; he believed that the English language had in that period

reached its highest excellence, and he proposed to take that Elizabethan-Ja-

cobean speech as a standard by which to establish good usage. He drew a

line under each sentence that he proposed to quote as illustrating the use of

a word, and noted in the margin the first letter of the word to be defined.

His aides were instructed to copy each marked sentence on a separate slip,

and insert this at its alphabetical place in Bailey's dictionary, which served

as a starting point and guide.

During these nine years he took many holidays from definitions. Some-

times he found it easier to write a poem than to define a word. On January

9, 1 749, he issued a twelve-page poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Like

the London of a decade earlier, it was in form an imitation of Juvenal, but

it spoke with a power that was his own. He still resented his poverty, and

Chesterfield's neglect:

There mark what ills the scholar's life assail—

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol.

How vain are the warrior's victories! See Charles XII of Sweden:

He left the name, at which the world grew pale,

To point a moral, or adorn a tale. 20

How foolish, then, to pray for long life when we see the vanity, deceptions,

and pains of old age: the mind wandering in repeated anecdotes, fortune

shaking with every day's events, children scheming for a legacy and mourn-

ing death's delay, while "unnumbered maladies the joints invade, lay siege

822 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

to life, and press the dire blockade." 21 From vain hopes and sure decay there

is only one escape: prayer, and faith in a redeeming, rewarding God.

Yet this pessimist had happy moments. On February 6, 1749, Garrick

staged Irene. It was a great event for Johnson; he washed himself, bound

his paunch in a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold lace, flourished a hat

likewise adorned, and watched his friend play Mohammed II to Mrs. Cib-

ber's Irene. The tragedy ran for nine nights, and brought Johnson ^200; it

was never revived, but Dodsley gave him another ^100 for the copyright.

He was now (1749) sufficiently famous and opulent to found a club: not

The Club, which came fifteen years later, but the "Ivy Lane Club," so

named from the street where, at the King's Head Tavern, Johnson, Hawkins,

and seven others met on Tuesday evenings to eat beefsteak and to barter

prejudices. "Thither," said Johnson, "I constantly resorted." 22

Every Tuesday and Friday from March 21, 1750, to March 14, 1752, he

wrote a little essay published by Cave as The Rambler, for which he re-

ceived four guineas a week. The essays sold fewer than five hundred copies,

and Cave lost money on the venture, but when they were collected into a

book they achieved twelve editions before Johnson's death. Shall we confess

that the only numbers that we found interesting are 170 and 171, 23 in which

Johnson made a prostitute point a moral and adorn her tale? Critics com-

plained that the style and vocabulary were too sesquipedalianly Latinesque;

but Boswell, between sins, found comfort in Johnson's exhortations to piety. 24

Johnson was under special strain in those years, for his mind was fatigued

by definitions, and his spirits were depressed by the deterioration of his wife.

"Tetty" calmed the pains of age and solitude with alcohol and opium. Often

she kept Johnson from her bed. 25 He rarely took her with him when he

dined out. Dr. Taylor, who knew both of them intimately, said she "was the

plague of Johnson's life, was abominably drunken and despicable in every

way, and Johnson frequently complained ... of his situation with such a

wife." 26 Her death (March 28, 1752) made him forget her faults, and he

developed a post-mortem uxoriousness that amused his friends. He extolled

her virtues, lamented his loneliness, and hoped she would intercede for him

with Christ. 27 "He told me," Boswell recalled, "that he generally went

abroad at four in the afternoon, and seldom came home till two in the morn-

ing. . . . His place of frequent resort was the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street,

where he loved to sit up late." 28

To be alone was terror. So Johnson, after his wife's death, took into his

Gough Square home (1752) Anna Williams, a Welsh poetess who was

losing her sight. An operation to cure her failed, and she became completely

blind. Except for short intervals she stayed with Johnson till her death

(1783), superintending the household and the kitchen, and carving the roast

—and judging the fullness of cups with no other guide than her fingers. To

care for his more intimate needs Johnson (1753) took a Negro servant, Frank

Barber, who remained with him twenty-nine years. Johnson sent him to

school, labored to have him learn Latin and Greek, and left him a substantial

legacy. To complete the establishment Johnson invited a derelict doctor,

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 823

Robert Levett, to live with him (1760). The three formed a quarrelsome

menage, but Johnson was thankful for their company.

In January, 1755, he sent the final sheets of the Dictionary to the printer,

who thanked God that he was nearly finished with such a job and such a

man. News of the approaching publication reached Chesterfield, who hoped

for a dedication. He tried to atone for his former invisibility by writing, for

a magazine, two articles hailing the expected work, and praising Johnson as

one whom he would be glad to accept as dictator of good English usage.

The proud author sent the Earl (February 7, 1755) a letter which Carlyle

described as "that far-famed Blast of Doom proclaiming that patronage

should be no more":

My Lord:

I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of The World, that two papers,

in which my Dictionary is recommended to the Publick, were written by your

Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honor, which, being little accustomed

to favors from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms

to acknowledge. . . .

Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward room,

or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on

my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have

brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one

word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect,

for I never had a Patron before. . . .

Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling

for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with

help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it

been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and

cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do

not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations

where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should

consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do

for myself.

Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favorer

of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be

possible, with less. For I have been long wakened from that dream of hope in

which I once boasted myself, with so much exaltation,

My Lord,

Your Lordship's most humble,

Most obedient servant,

Sam. Johnson 29

Chesterfield's only comment on the letter was that it was "very well writ-

ten." And indeed it is a masterpiece of eighteenth-century prose, quite free

from the Latin derivatives that had sometimes clogged and burdened John-

son's style. Its author must have felt and pondered it deeply, for he recited

it to Boswell from memory twenty-six years later. 30 It was not published till

after Johnson's death. Presumably his resentment discolored his condemna-

tion of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son— that "they teach the morals of a

whore, and the manners of a dancing master." 31

Johnson went up to Oxford early in 1755, partly to consult the libraries,

824 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIII

but also to suggest to his friend Thomas Warton that it would help float the

Dictionary if its author could put a degree after his name. Warton. managed

it, and in March Johnson was made an honorary Master of Arts. So at last

the Dictionary was published, in two large folio volumes of almost 2,300

pages, priced at four pounds ten. In ending the preface Johnson proclaimed

that

the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and

without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or

under the shelter of academic bowers, but amid inconvenience and distraction,

in sickness and in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism

to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in

an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed. ... I have pro-

tracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the

grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with

frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or praise.

The critics could not be expected to realize that Johnson's Dictionary

marked a crest and watershed in the English literature of the eighteenth

century, as the Encyclopedic (1751-72) of Diderot and d'Alembert marked

a crest and turning point in the literature of France. Much fun was made of

incidental defects in Johnson's work. Among the forty thousand entries

there were oddities like gentilitious and sygilate (which are respectfully

preserved by Webster). There were angry definitions like that of pension:

"An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is gen-

erally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his

country." Or excise: "a hateful tax on commodities." There were personal

quirks, as in the definition of oats: "a grain which in England is generally

given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"— which was quite true.

Boswell asked Johnson "if civilization was a word; he said No, but civility

was." 32 Many of Johnson's etymologies are now rejected; he had much Latin

and less Greek, but was poorly acquainted with modern languages; he ad-

mitted frankly that etymology was his weak point. 33 He defined pastern as

"the knee of a horse" (it is part of a horse's foot) ; when a lady asked him

how he came to make such a mistake he answered, "Ignorance, madam, pure

ignorance." 34 In so large a work, whose every page gave a dozen openings to

error, he could not escape missteps.

Johnson's achievement was appreciated abroad. The French Academy

sent him a copy of its Dictionnaire, and the Accademia della Crusca of Flor-

ence sent him its Vocabolario. 35 The Dictionary sold well enough to please

the booksellers, who paid Johnson to prepare an abbreviated edition. The

larger form remained standard until Noah Webster replaced it in 1828. It

placed Johnson at the head of English authors in his time; he actually ac-

quired, except for aristocrats like Horace Walpole, a dictatorship over Eng-

lish letters. The reign of the "Great Cham of Literature" began.*

* Cham meant khan. The phrase was apparently first used by Smollett in a letter to Wilkes,

March 16, 1759.

CHAP. XXXIII ) SAMUEL JOHNSON 825

III. THE CHARMED CIRCLE

However, he was not above being arrested for debt. He had spent his pay-

ment for the Dictionary as fast as it came. On March 16, 1756, he wrote to

Samuel Richardson: "Sir, I am obliged to entreat your assistance. I am now

under arrest for five pounds eighteen shillings. ... If you will be so good

as to send me this sum, I will gratefully repay you, and add it to all former

obligations." 36 Richardson sent six guineas. He earned his bread at this time

by writing magazine articles, by composing sermons at two guineas for less

articulate clergymen, by taking advance subscriptions to his promised edi-

tion of Shakespeare, and by contributing to The Universal Chronicle a

weekly essay (April 15, 1758, to April 5, 1760) under the name of "The

Idler." These were in a lighter vein than The Rambler, but still too grave

and ponderous for those who must run as they read. One denounced vivisec-

tion; another exposed debtors' prisons; No. 5 lamented the separation of sol-

diers from their wives, and proposed squads of "Lady Hussars," who would

handle commissary and nursing, and otherwise comfort their men.

In January, 1759, he learned that his ninety-year-old mother, whom he had

not seen in twenty-two years, was nearing death. He borrowed money from

a printer, and sent her six guineas in a tender letter. She died on January 23.

To pay for her funeral and her debts he wrote in the evenings of one week

(so he told Reynolds) The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. He

sent it to the printer part by part, and received £ 100 for it. On its publica-

tion in April the critics hailed it as a classic, and contrasted it patriotically

with Voltaire's Candide, which appeared almost at the same time and dealt

with the same problem— Can life bring happiness? Johnson did not delay his

answer: "Ye who listen with phantoms of hope, who expect that old age

will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present

day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas." 37

It was the custom of Abyssinian kings (Johnson tells us) to confine the

heir to the throne to a pleasant and fertile valley until the time came for his

accession. Everything was supplied him: a palace, good food, animal pets,

intelligent companions. But in his twenty-sixth year Rasselas wearies of these

delights. He misses not only liberty but struggle. "I should be happy if I had

something to pursue." He ponders how he may escape this peaceful valley to

see how other men seek and find happiness.

A skillful mechanic proposes to build a flying machine that will lift the

Prince and himself above the encircling mountains to freedom. He explains:

He that can swim needs not despair to fly; to swim is to fly in a grosser

fluid, and to fly is to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power

of resistance to the different density of matter through which we pass. You

will be necessarily upborne by the air if you can renew any impulse upon it

faster than the air can recede from the pressure. . . . The labor of rising from

the ground will be great, . . . but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction,

and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region

where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.

826 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

Rasselas encourages the mechanic, who agrees to make a plane, "but only on

this condition, that the art shall not be divulged, and that you shall not re-

quire me to make wings for any but ourselves." "Why," asks the Prince,

"should you envy others so great an advantage?" "If men were all virtuous,"

the mechanic replies, "I should with great alacrity teach them to fly. But

what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade

them from the sky?" He builds a plane, tries to fly, and falls into a lake, from

which the Prince rescues him. 38

Rasselas likes better to talk with Imlac the philosopher, who has seen many

lands and men. They find a cave that leads to a passage into the outer world;

they escape from their paradise, with the Prince's sister Nekayah and her

maid. Armed with jewels as universal currency, they visit Cairo, join its

pleasures, and tire of them. They hear a Stoic philosopher discourse on the

conquest of passions; a few days later they find him wild with grief over his

daughter's death. Having read pastoral poetry, they presume that shepherds

must be happy; but they discover that the hearts of these men are "cankered

with discontent" and with "malevolence toward those that are placed above

them." 39 They come upon a hermit, and learn that he secretly longs for the

delights of the city. They inquire into domestic felicity, and find every

home darkened with discord and "the rude collisions of contrary desires." 40

They explore the Pyramids and judge them the summit of folly. They learn

about the happy life of scholars and scientists; they meet a famous astron-

omer, who tells them that "integrity without knowledge is weak and use-

less, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful"; 41 but the

astronomer goes mad. They conclude that no way of life on earth leads to

happiness, and Imlac comforts them with a discourse on the immortality of

the soul. They resolve to return to Abyssinia and accept the vicissitudes of

life calmly in the confidence of a blessed resurrection.

It is an old story in one of its finest incarnations. What amazes us is the

graceful flow and clarity of the style, far removed from the ponderous

vocabulary of Johnson's essays, and even of his conversation. It seemed im-

possible that the learned lexicographer had written this simple tale, and quite

incredible that he had turned out these 141 pages in seven days.

Meanwhile he had moved again, from Gough Square to Staple Inn

(March 23, 1759); soon he would move to Gray's Inn, then to Inner Tem-

ple Lane. These changes were probably motivated by economy; but in July,

1762, Johnson was suddenly lifted into relative affluence by a pension of

£ 300 a year granted him by George III on the advice of Lord Bute. Why

this beneficence fell upon a man who had persistently opposed the Han-

overian dynasty, had belabored the Scots at every turn, and had described

a pension as "pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country," has

been the subject of many mystery stories. Johnson's enemies charged him

with preferring money to principle, and assumed that Bute was looking for

a mighty pen to answer Wilkes, Churchill, and others who were denigrating

him with ink. Johnson claimed that he had accepted the pension on the ex-

plicit understanding, twice confirmed by Bute, that he would not be asked

CHAP. XXXIII ) SAMUEL JOHNSON 827

to write in support of the government. 42 He confided to Boswell that "the

pleasure of cursing the House of Hanover, and drinking King James's health,

was amply overbalanced by ^300 a year." 43 In any case he earned the pen-

sion many times over, not so much by the political tracts of later years, but

by enriching English literature with pen and speech, with wisdom and

cleansing wit.

He had enough friends to afford a scattering of enemies. "Friendship," he

said, "is the cordial drop to make the nauseous draft of life go down." 44 In

almost every gathering that he attended he became the center of conversa-

tion, not so much because he forced his way to it, but because he was the most

individual personality in the literary circles of London, and could be relied

upon to say something whenever he spoke. It was Reynolds who suggested

the formation of "the Club," which Boswell later called "the Literary Club";

Johnson seconded the motion, and on April 16, 1764, the new group began

its Monday-evening meetings at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho.

The original members were Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Christo-

pher Nugent, Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, Anthony Chamier, and

Sir John Hawkins. Others were added later by vote of the Club: Gibbon,

Garrick, Sheridan, Fox, Adam Smith, Dr. Burney . . .

Boswell did not win admission till 1773, partly, it may be, because he was

only occasionally in London. During the twenty-one years between his

meeting with Johnson and Johnson's death, he spent no more than two years

and a few weeks within reach of his idol. The unconcealed warmth of his

admiration, and Johnson's awareness that Boswell was planning a biography

of him, made the older man forgive the Scot's almost sycophantic idolatry.

A good talker and a good listener make a happy couple. Johnson had no

high regard for Boswell's brains. When "Bozzy," as he called him, remarked

that the wine he had drunk in the course of their conversation had given him

a headache, Johnson corrected him: "Nay, sir, it was not the wine that made

your head ache, but the sense that I put into it." "What, sir," Boswell ex-

claimed, "will sense make the head ache?" "Yes, sir, when it is not used to

it." 45 (There are passages in the Life where Boswell seems to be talking bet-

ter sense than Johnson.) Praising Pope's Dwiciad, Johnson noted that it had

given some dunces a lasting fame, and continued his fun: "It was worth

while being a dunce then. Ah, sir, hadst thou lived in those days!" 46 But the

aging bear soon learned to like his cub. "There are few people whom I take

so much to as you," he told him in 1763. 47 "Boswell," he said, "never left a

house without leaving a wish for his return." 48 In 1775 Boswell was given a

room in Johnson's lodgings to sleep in when the conversation had kept him

late. 49

On March 31, 1772, he wrote in his journal: "I have constant plan to

write the life of Mr. Johnson. I have not told him of it yet, nor do I know if

I should tell him." But Johnson knew of it by April, 1773, if not sooner. 50

Others knew of it, and resented Boswell's way of raising controversial ques-

tions with the evident aim of drawing the old master out and getting some

new gem for the biography. The inquisitive Scot boasted that "the fountain

828 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

was at times locked up till I opened the spring." 51 The Johnson that we

know and relish might never have taken form without the stimulus of Bos-

well's fond provocation and tireless pursuit. How different is the Johnson

that we find in Hawkins' Life, or even in the lively Anecdotes of Mrs.

Thrale!

It was in January, 1765, that Johnson began with the Thrales an associa-

tion that played a larger part in his life than his friendship for Boswell.

Henry Thrale was a brewer, son of a brewer. He had received a good edu-

cation, had traveled, and was to certify his status by being elected to Parlia-

ment. In 1763 he married Hester Lynch Salusbury, a Welsh girl only five

feet tall but vivacious and intelligent. Henry, twelve years her senior, ab-

sorbed himself in his business, but attended to his wife sufficiently to make

her pregnant annually between 1764 and 1778, and to convey to her his

venereal infection. 52 She bore him twelve children, of whom eight died in

infancy. She solaced herself with literature, and when her husband brought

home with him the famous Samuel Johnson, she used all her feminine arts

and graces to attach him to the family. Soon he was dining with the Thrales

every Thursday in their Southwark home; and from 1766 onward he usually

spent the summer with them in their country villa at Streatham in Surrey.

With Johnson as a center, Mrs. Thrale made her home a salon, to which

came Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick, Burke, the Burneys, and finally and

jealously Boswell— for he learned that Mrs. Thrale was gathering notes about

her lion's looks and ways and words. So the Life was to have a rival.

IV. URSUS MAJOR

What was the Great Bear like? Boswell, after their first meeting (1763)

wrote: "Mr. Johnson is a man of a most dreadful appearance. ... A very

big man, troubled with sore eyes, the palsy [a nervous tic] and the king's

evil. He is very slovenly in his dress, and speaks with a most uncouth

voice." 53 Mrs. Thrale described him in his later years: "His stature was re-

markably high, and his limbs exceedingly large. . . . His features strongly

marked, his countenance particularly rugged. . . . His sight was near, and

otherwise imperfect; yet his eyes . . . were so wild, so piercing, and at

times so fierce, that fear was, I believe, the first emotion in the eyes of all his

beholders." 54

He deplored as "a waste of time" the hours spent in sitting for a portrait;

however, he did this ten times for Reynolds, and once for a bust by Nolle-

kens. In 1756 Sir Joshua showed him as already stout and indolent; 55 in 1770

he painted him in profile and made him look like Goldsmith; 56 in 1772 the

most famous of the portraits delivered him to posterity as a man of ungainly

bulk, enormous wig, large full face, lowering brows over puzzled eyes, mas-

sive nose, thick lips, and double chin. His wig was repeatedly dislodged by

convulsive movements of his head, shoulders, and hands. 57 He was careless in

his dress; "fine clothes," he told Boswell, "are good only as they supply the

CHAP. XXXIII ) SAMUEL JOHNSON 829

want of other means of procuring respect." 58 Not until he became a guest of

the Thrales did he bother much about personal hygiene.

He ate voraciously, having much space to fill, and perhaps recalling hun-

gry years. Boswell reported:

I never knew any man who relished good eating more than he did. When at

table he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment; his looks seemed

riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one

word, or pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied

his appetite; which was so fierce . . . that the veins of his forehead swelled, and

generally a strong perspiration was visible. 59

He ate fish with his fingers, "because I am shortsighted, and afraid of

bones." 60 He could hardly bear the sight of vegetables. In his heartier days

he "loved to exhilarate himself with wine, but was never intoxicated but

once." 61 When Mrs. Williams denounced drunkenness, saying, "I wonder

what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves," Johnson re-

torted, "I wonder, madam, that you have not penetration enough to see the

strong inducement to this excess, for he who makes a beast of himself gets

rid of the pain of being a man." 62 But drinking, he said, "does not improve

conversation; it alters the mind so that you are pleased with any conversa-

tion." 63 In later life he shunned all liquor, and contented himself with choco-

late, lemonade, and countless cups of tea. He never smoked. "It is a shocking

thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes,

and noses, and having the same thing done to us." He explained the habit of

smoking as "preserving the mind from utter vacuity." 64

His boorish manners were partly a relic of his days and nights in the lower

depths, partly the result of physical irritations and mental fears. He was

strong, and proud of it; he could knock down a bookseller with little fear

of retaliation; he could pick up and throw aside a man who had dared to

occupy a chair that Johnson had temporarily vacated; he mounted a horse

and joined Thrale in a fifty-mile cross-country foxhunt. But he had diffi-

culty in carrying his own weight. "When he walked the streets, what with

the constant roll of his head, and the concomitant motion of his body, he

appeared to make his way by that motion, independent of his feet." 65 When

he rode "he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if

in a balloon." 66

He suffered, after 1776, from asthma, gout, and dropsy. These and other

physical difficulties must have intensified his melancholy, which at times so

depressed him that "I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my

spirits." 67 He would not believe that any man was happy; of one who

claimed to be so he said, "It is all cant; the dog knows he is miserable all the

time." 68 A physician having told him that hypochondria sometimes led to in-

sanity, Johnson feared that he would go insane. 69 "Of the uncertainties of

our present state," he made Imlac say in Rasselas, "the most dreadful and

alarming is the uncertain continuance of reason." 70

Being nearsighted, he found little pleasure in the beauty of women, na-

ture, or art. 71 He thought sculpture was overrated. "The value of statuary

830 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a

carrot." 72 He tried to learn some musical instrument, "but I never made out

a tune." "Pray, sir," he asked, "who is this Bach? Is he a piper?" 73 — referring

to Johann Christian Bach, then ( 177 1 ) the most famous pianist in England.

He felt that music was being spoiled by digital acrobatics. Hearing a violin-

ist praised because the feats he performed were so difficult, Johnson ex-

claimed, "Difficult— I wish it had been impossible." 74

So vigorous a man must have found it troublesome to deal with the sexual

fancies that agitate even the normal mind. When he attended the premiere

of Irene, and was brought by Garrick into the "greenroom" where the

players waited between scenes, he rejected a suggestion that he repeat this

visit. "No, David, I will never come back. For the white bubbies and the silk

stockings of your actresses excite my genitals." 75 Boswell was astonished to

hear him say, one day in the Hebrides, "I have often thought that if I kept

a seraglio . . ." 76

In general his faults were more obvious than his virtues, which were quite

as real. We might justly invert Horace Walpole's comment that "though he

was good-natured at bottom he was very ill-natured at top." 77 Goldsmith

said the same thing more graciously: "Johnson has a roughness in his man-

ner, but no man alive has a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear

but the skin." 78 Untidy, indolent, superstitious, rude, dogmatic, proud, he

was also kind, humane, generous, quick to ask forgiveness and to forgive.

Mrs. Thrale reckoned that Johnson gave away ^200 of his £ 300 pension; 79

and she added:

He nursed whole nests of people in his house. . . . Commonly spending the

middle of the week at our house, he kept his numerous family in Fleet Street

upon a settled allowance, but returned to them every Saturday to give them

three good dinners, and his company, before he came back to us on the Monday

night— treating them with the same, or perhaps more ceremonious civility than

he would have done by as many people of fashion. 80

He wrote prefaces, dedications, sermons, even legal opinions, for others,

often gratis. He labored by word and pen to save Dr. William Dodd from

the gallows. Seeing a prostitute lying in the street he (then seventy-five)

took her on his back, carried her to his rooms, cared for her till she was well,

and "endeavored to put her in a virtuous way of living." 81 George Steevens,

who collaborated with him in editing Shakespeare, said: "Could the many

bounties he studiously concealed, the many acts of humanity he performed

in private, be displayed with equal circumstantiality [as his frailties], his de-

fects would be so far lost in the blaze of his virtues that the latter only would

be regarded." 82

In the last nineteen years of his life he wrote only one substantial book—

Lives of the Poets; otherwise he substituted the tongue for the pen. He de-

scribed himself as "a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk." 83

If we leave eating aside, he lived most when he was talking to an intelligent

company. He had gathered, by observation and reading, an extraordinary

fund and range of knowledge about human affairs; he carried much of it in

his lumber room of memory, and he welcomed a chance to unburden him-

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 83 1

self. Yet he seldom initiated any serious discussion; he spoke up only when

someone raised a subject or a challenge. He was always tempted to oppose

what another had said; he was ready to defend any proposition or its op-

posite; he relished debate, knowing himself invincible; and he was resolved

to win the argument, even if truth should perish beneath his blows. He knew

that this was not the finest kind of conversation, but he was sure that it was

the most interesting. In the heat and zest of the conflict he found little place

for courtesy. "He spared none of us," said Boswell. 84 To one disputant: "I

have found you an argument, but I am not obliged to find you an under-

standing." 85 "There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith; "for if his

pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt." 86 "When I called upon

Dr. Johnson next morning," Boswell relates, "I found him highly satisfied

with his colloquial powers the preceding evening. 'Well (said he), we had a

good talk.' Boswell. 'Yes, Sir, you tossed and gored several persons.' " 87

Thomas Sheridan called him a bully, 88 and Gibbon called him a bigot. 89

Lord Monboddo called him "the most invidious and malignant man I have

ever known, who praised no author or book that other people praised [he

praised Fanny Burney's Evelina], and . . . could not with any patience

hear any other person draw the attention of the company for ever so short

a time." 90 Horace Walpole, secure in his sinecures, shuddered at thought of

him, and summed him up as seen by the son of a Whig prime minister:

With a lumber of learning and some strong points, Johnson was an odious

and mean character. By principle a Jacobite, arrogant, self-sufficient, and over-

bearing. . . . He had prostituted his pen to party even in a dictionary, and had

afterwards, for a pension, contradicted his own definitions. His manners were

sordid, supercilious, and brutal, his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious, and

in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness of a country

schoolmaster. . . . What will posterity think of us when it reads what an idol

we adored? 91

Ideally, of course, the best conversation is in a small unhurried group

where all are informed and courteous; or, as Johnson put it in an amiable in-

terlude: "That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no

vanity, but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments"; 92 but when did he have

that experience? "Treating your adversary with respect," he told Boswell,

presumably with a twinkle in his eyes, "is giving him an advantage to which

he is not entitled." 93 We who never felt his butt forgive him all those blows

and insults and prejudices because his wit and humor and penetration, his

preference of realities to pretenses, of candor to cant, and his capacity for

concentrating wisdom in a phrase, make him one of the most dominating

characters in English history.

V. THE CONSERVATIVE MIND

Shall we give him the floor? He had something interesting to say on al-

most everything under the sun. He thought life a misfortune which no one

would want to repeat, and which most people "supported with impatience

and quitted with reluctance." 94 When Lady McLeod asked him "if no man

832 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

was naturally good," he answered, "No, madam, no more than a wolf." 95

"Men are evidently ... so corrupt that all the laws of heaven and earth are

insufficient to restrain them from crimes." 96 "Men hate more sturdily than

they love; and if I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the

better of this by saying many things to please him." 97

He did not often discuss economics. He denounced the exploitation of

colonial peoples, 98 and strongly condemned slavery; once, at Oxford, he

astonished some professors by proposing a toast to "the insurrection of the

Negroes in the West Indies." 99 However, he thought that "raising the wages

of day laborers is wrong; for it does not make them live better, but [said

the Idler] only makes them idler, and idleness is a very bad thing for human

nature." 100 Like Blackstone, he upheld the sanctity of property rights; and

like his antipodes, Voltaire, he defended luxury as giving work to the poor,

instead of corroding them with charity. 101 He anticipated Adam Smith in

advocating free enterprise. 102 But the multiplication of merchants irritated

him. "I am afraid the increase of commerce, and the incessant struggle for

riches which commerce excites, gives no prospect of an end speedily to be

expected of artifice and fraud. . . . Violence gives way to cunning." 103 He

made no pretense of despising money, having suffered from its lack, and

he thought that "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money" 104

—which underestimated vanity.

He felt (recall the lines he added to Goldsmith's Traveller) that we

exaggerate the importance of politics. "I would not give half a crown to

live under one form of government rather than another." 105 Hence "most

schemes of political improvement are very laughable things." 106 Yet he had

been hot against the "Whig dogs," and it took a pension to reconcile him to

the Hanoverians. He called patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel," 107

but he defended with patriotic warmth the right of Britain to the Falkland

Islands (1771), and he had an almost chauvinistic scorn of the Scots and the

French.

He quite anticipated, in 1763, Burke's apologia for conservatism. "Human

experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of

truth. A system built on the discoveries of a great many minds is always of

more strength than what is produced by the mere workings of any one

mind." 108 After 1762 he was quite content with the status quo. He praised

the British government as "approaching nearer to perfection than anything

that experience has shown us, or history related." 109 He admired aristocracy

and class distinctions and privileges as necessary for social order and prudent

legislation. 110 "I am a friend to subordination. It is most conducive to the

happiness of society. . . . Submission is the duty of the ignorant, and con-

tent the virtue of the poor." 111 He mourned, like every generation, that

subordination is sadly broken down in this age. No man now has the same

authority which his father had— except a gaoler. No master has it over his serv-

ants; it is diminished in our colleges, nay, in our grammar schools. . . . There

are many causes, the chief of which is, I think, the great increase of money.

. . . Gold and silver destroy feudal subordination. But, besides, there is a gen-

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 833

eral relaxation of reverence. No son now depends upon his father, as in former

times. . . . My hope is that as anarchy produces tyranny, this extreme relaxa-

tion will produce freni strictio [a tightening of the reins]. 112

Contemplating the London populace, Johnson judged that democracy

would be a disaster. He laughed at liberty and equality as impracticable

shibboleths. 113 "So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that

no two people can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident

superiority over the other." 114 In 1770 he wrote a pamphlet, The False

Alarm, condemning radicalism, and justifying the exclusion of Wilkes from

Parliament.

In another pamphlet, The Patriot (1774), Johnson renewed his attack on

Wilkes, and moved on to what Boswell called "an attempt to reduce our

fellow subjects in America to unconditional submission." 115 In earlier writings

Johnson had spoken with occasional impartiality on the American colonies.

These had been "snatched upon no very just principles of policy," largely

because other European states were snatching too much, 116 and England

wished to protect herself from a France and a Spain made dangerously

strong by absorbing America. He had praised the French colonists for treat-

ing the Indians humanely and intermarrying with them, and he had con-

demned the British colonists for defrauding the Indians and oppressing the

Negroes. 117 But when the colonists talked of liberty, justice, and natural

rights, Johnson scorned their claims as specious cant, and asked, "How is it

that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" 118

He stated the case against the emancipation of the colonies in a powerful

brochure, Taxation No Tyranny (1775). This was apparently written at

the request of the ministry, for Johnson complained (says Boswell) that his

pension had been given him "as a literary character," and now he had been

"applied by the administiation to write political pamphlets." 119

By accepting the protection of Great Britain (Johnson argued) the colo-

nists had implicitly recognized the right of the British government to tax

them. Taxation, to be just, did not require the direct representation of the

taxed persons in the government; half the population of England was with-

out representatives in Parliament, and yet it accepted taxation as a fair return

for the social order and legal protection provided by the government. Haw-

kins, who had supplied Johnson with arguments, 120 thought that Taxation

No Tyranny "has never received an answer," 121 but Boswell, remembering

Corsica, took the American side, deplored the "extreme violence" of John-

son's pen, and said: "That this pamphlet was written at the desire of those

who were then in power I have no doubt; and indeed he owned to me that

it had been revised and curtailed by some of them." 122 One passage deleted

by the ministry predicted that the Americans would, "in a century and a

quarter, be more than equal to the inhabitants of [Western] Europe." 123

There were some liberal elements in his political philosophy. He preferred

Fox to Pitt II, and was induced to dine with Wilkes, who overcame John-

son's political principles by helping him to some fine veal. 124 And in one pas-

sage the old Tory flirted with revolution:

834 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIII

When we consider in abstracted speculation the unequal distribution of the

pleasures of life, . . . when it is apparent that many want the necessaries of

nature, and many more the comforts and conveniences of life; that the idle live

at ease by the fatigues of the diligent, and the luxurious are pampered with

delicacies untasted by those who supply them; . . . when the greater number

must always want [lack] what the smaller are enjoying and squandering without

use; it seems impossible to conceive that the peace of society can long subsist; it

were natural to expect that no man would be left long in possession of super-

fluous enjoyments while such numbers are destitute of real necessaries. 125

His conservatism returned to full force when he spoke of religion. After

a youthful year of skepticism 126 he gave increasingly ardent support to the

doctrines and privileges of the Established Church. Sometimes he inclined

to Catholicism: he liked the idea of purgatory, and when he heard that an

Anglican clergyman had been converted to the Roman Church he said,

"God bless him!" 127 "He defended the Inquisition," Boswell tells us, "and

maintained that false doctrine should be checked on its first appearance; that

the civil power should unite with the Church in punishing those who dare to

attack the established religion, and that such only were punished by the In-

quisition." 128 He hated Dissenters, and applauded the expulsion of Methodists

from Oxford. 129 He refused to speak to a lady who left the Established

Church to join the Quakers. 130 He reproved Boswell for his mild friendship

with the "atheist" Hume. When Adam Smith assured him that Hume led an

exemplary life, Johnson cried out, "You lie!" To which Smith retorted,

"You are a son of a bitch." 131 Johnson felt that religion was indispensable to

social order and morality, and that only the hope of a happy immortality

could reconcile one to the tribulations of earthly life. He believed in angels

and devils, and thought that "we are all to reside hereafter either in the

regions of horror or bliss." 132 He accepted the reality of witches and ghosts;

he believed that his dead wife had appeared to him. 133

He did not care for science; he praised Socrates for trying to turn investi-

gation from the stars to man. 134 He abhorred vivisection. He took no interest

in exploration; the discovery of unknown lands would only lead to "con-

quest and robbery." 135 He thought philosophy was an intellectual labyrinth

leading either to religious doubt or to metaphysical nonsense. So he refuted

Berkeley's idealism by kicking a stone, and defended free will by telling

Boswell, "We know our will is free, and there's an end on 't. . . . All the-

ory is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it." 136

He rejected with disgust the whole philosophy of the French Enlighten-

ment. He denied the right of an individual mind, however brilliant, to sit in

judgment on institutions that the trial-and-error experience of the race had

built up to protect social order against the unsocial impulses of men. He felt

that the Catholic Church, with all its faults, was performing a vital function

in preserving French civilization, and he condemned as shallow fools the

philosophes who were weakening the religious supports of the moral code.

Voltaire and Rousseau seemed to him two varieties of imbecile: Voltaire an

intellectual fool, Rousseau a sentimental fool; but the difference between

them was so slight that it was "difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 835

between them." 137 He reproved Boswell for courting Rousseau in Switzer-

land, and deplored the hospitality that England was offering the author of

Bmile (1766). "Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sen-

tence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from the

Old Bailey these many years. Yes, Sir, I should like to have him work in the

plantations." 138

Johnson was not as conservative as his opinions. He gaily broke a hundred

conventions in conduct, speech, and dress. He was not a prig; he laughed at

the Puritans, he favored dancing, cardplaying, the theater. However, he con-

demned Fielding's Tom Jones, and was shocked to hear that prim Hannah

More had read it. 139 He was afraid of sensuality in literature because he had

difficulty in suppressing his own sensual impulses and imagination. One

would have supposed from his doctrines that he had not enjoyed life, but

we can see in Boswell that he relished "the full tide of human existence." He

pronounced life painful and worthless, but, like most of us, he prolonged it

as much as he could, and faced with angry reluctance his declining years.

vi. autumn: 1763-80

In 1765 he moved from the Inner Temple to a three-story house at No. 7

Johnson's Court in Fleet Street; it was named after an earlier resident. There

Boswell found him on returning from the Continent. In July he was given

the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Dublin; now

for the first time he was Dr. Johnson, but he never attached the title to his

name. 140

In October, 1765, he issued in eight volumes his edition of Shakespeare,

eight years later than he had promised it to his subscribers. He dared to point

out faults, absurdities, and childish verbal conceits in the Bard; he censured

him for having no moral purpose; he thought that Shakespeare had left "per-

haps not one play which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contem-

porary writer, would be heard to the conclusion." 141 But he praised the poet

for subordinating the love interest in the greater dramas, and for making his

protagonists not heroes but men; and he vigorously defended, against Vol-

taire, Shakespeare's neglect of the unities of time and place. 142 Critics chal-

lenged many of his comments and corrections; the edition was superseded

by Edmund Malone's in 1790; but Malone acknowledged that his own edi-

tion was based on Johnson's, and he overvalued Johnson's preface as "per-

haps the finest composition in our language." 143

In 1767, while visiting Buckingham Palace, Johnson came upon George

III; they exchanged compliments. Meanwhile the friendship with Boswell

warmed to such a degree that in 1773 Johnson accepted his admirer's invita-

tion to join him in a tour of the Hebrides. It was a brave undertaking for a

man of sixty-four. It began with a long and arduous stagecoach ride from

London to Edinburgh. There he met Robertson, but refused to meet Hume.

On August 18 he and Boswell and a servant started north in a post chaise

836 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

along the east coast to Aberdeen; thence they struck across the rugged High-

lands through Banff to Inverness, and then mostly on horseback through

Anoch to Glenelg on the west coast. There they took a boat to the island of

Skye, which they toured rather thoroughly from September 2 to October 3.

They encountered many hardships, which Johnson took with glum courage;

he slept upon hay in barns, evaded vermin, clambered over rocks, and rode

with precarious dignity on ponies hardly larger than himself. At one stop a

lady of the Macdonald clan sat on his knee and kissed him. "Do it again," he

said, "and let us see who will tire first." 144 On October 3 the party left by open

boat for a forty-mile ride to the island of Coll and thence to the island of

Mull. They crossed back to the mainland on October 22, and then traveled

through Argyllshire via Dumbarton and Glasgow to Auchinleck (Novem-

ber 2 ) . There Johnson met Boswell's father, who entertained him honorably,

though lamenting his anti-Scot prejudices; they had a debate so violent that

Boswell refused to record it. Boswell Senior afterward dubbed Johnson

"Ursa Major," which the son gracefully interpreted as meaning not Great

Bear but "a constellation of genius and learning." 145 The travelers reached

Edinburgh November 9, eighty-three days after leaving it. Looking back

upon their hardships, they "heartily laughed at the ravings of those absurd

visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the specious advantages of

a state of nature." Johnson left Edinburgh November 22, and reached Lon-

don on the twenty-sixth. In 1775 he published A Journey to the Western

Islands of Scotland; it was not as racy as even the bowdlerized account that

Boswell issued in 1785 as A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel

Johnson, for philosophy is less interesting than biography; but some pas-

sages 146 have a placid beauty that reveal Johnson again as a master of English

prose.

On April 1, 1775, Oxford finally came around to giving Johnson the hon-

orary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. In March, 1776, he moved for the last

time, to No. 8 Bolt Court, taking his motley family with him. In a strange

mood of exuberance he wrote to the Lord Chamberlain (April 11, 1776)

asking for an apartment in Hampton Court Palace: "I hope that to a man

who has had the honor of vindicating his Majesty's government, a retreat in

one of his houses may not be improperly or unworthily allowed." 147 The

Lord Chamberlain regretted that there was a surfeit of applicants.

One more achievement remained. Forty London booksellers joined in pre-

paring a many-volumed edition of the English poets, and asked Johnson to

introduce each poet with a biography. They let him name his terms; he re-

quired ^200; had he "asked one thousand, or even fifteen hundred guineas,"

said Malone, "the booksellers, who knew the value of his name, would

doubtless have readily given it." 148 Johnson had thought of writing "little

lives"; he forgot that one of the laws of composition is that a pen in motion,

like matter in Newton's first law, continues in motion unless it is compelled

to change that state by forces impressed upon it from without. Of the minor

poets he wrote with laudable brevity, but with Milton, Addison, and Pope

he let himself go, and wrote essays— of sixty, forty-two, 102 pages— that are

among the finest specimens of literary criticism in the English language.

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 837

His view of Milton was colored by his dislike of the Puritans, their poli-

tics, and their regicide. He read Milton's prose as well as his verse, and called

him "an acrimonious and surly republican." 149 The essay on Pope (which in

the original edition ran to 373 pages) was the last blow struck for the classic

style in English poetry, by the greatest inheritor of that style in English

prose. He, who knew Greek well, supposed that Pope's translation of the

Iliad had improved upon Homer. He praised Gray's "Elegy," but dismissed

the odes as cluttered with mythological machinery. When the ten volumes

of The Lives of the Poets were published (1779-81), some readers were

shocked by Johnson's unorthodox but pontifical judgments, his insensitivity

to the subtler graces of poetry, his tendency to rate and berate poets accord-

ing to the moral tendency of their poems and their lives. Walpole declared,

"Dr. Johnson has indubitably neither taste nor ear nor criterion of judgment

but his old woman's prejudices," 150 and laughed at "this weight on stilts,"

who "seems to have read the ancients with no view but of pilfering poly-

syllables." 151 Why, then, are these Lives more widely and fondly read than

any other product of Johnson's pen? Perhaps because of those very preju-

dices and the candor of their expression. He made literary criticism a living

force, and almost raised the dead with his chastisements.

VII. RELEASE: 1781-84

There is a secret pride in surviving our contemporaries, but we are pun-

ished with loneliness. The death of Henry Thrale (April 4, 1781) was the

beginning of the end for Johnson. He served as one of four executors of the

brewer's will, but thereafter his visits to the Thrale family lessened. LongHbe-

fore her husband's death Mrs. Thrale had begun to weary of the strains put

upon her by Johnson's need for attentions and attentive ears. Thrale had

kept his captive bear in reasonably good behavior, but (the widow com-

plained), "when there was nobody to restrain his [Johnson's] dislikes it was

extremely difficult to find anybody with whom he could converse without

living always on the verge of a quarrel. . . . Such accidents occurred too

often, and I was forced ... to retire to Bath, where I knew Mr. Johnson

would not follow me." 152

The Morning Post made matters worse by announcing that a treaty of

marriage between Johnson and Mrs. Thrale was "on tap." 153 Boswell com-

posed a burlesque "Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale upon Their Sup-

posed Approaching Nuptials." 154 But in 1782 Johnson was seventy-three and

Mrs. Thrale was forty-one. It was not of her own will that she had married

Thrale; he had often neglected her, and she had never learned to love him.

Now she claimed a right to love and be loved, and to find a mate for the sec-

ond half of her life. She was at an age when a woman urgently longs for

some physical and understanding companionship. Even before her husband's

death she had developed a fondness for Gabriel Piozzi, who was giving mu-

sic lessons to her daughters. Born in Italy, he had taken up residence in Eng-

land in 1776, and was now about forty-two years old. When she first met

838 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

him, at a party given by Dr. Burney, she mimicked his mannerisms as he per-

formed at the piano. But his elegant manners, his amiable temper, and his

musical accomplishments made him a relieving contrast to Johnson. Now

that she was free she abandoned herself to romance. She confessed to her

four surviving daughters her desire for remarriage. They were alarmed; re-

marriage would affect their financial expectations; marriage to a musician

—worse yet, a Roman Catholic— would hurt their social standing. They

pleaded with their mother to reconsider; she tried and failed. Piozzi behaved

like a gentleman: he went off to Italy (April, 1783), and stayed away almost

a year. When he returned (March, 1784) and found Mrs. Thrale still eager,

he yielded. The daughters refused their consent, and moved to Brighton.

On June 30 Mrs. Thrale sent Johnson an announcement that she and

Piozzi were to be married. He replied (July 2, 1784):

Madam:

If I interpret your letter aright, you are ignominiously married; if it is yet

undone, let us once more talk together. If you have abandoned your children

and your religion, God forgive your wickedness; if you have forfeited your

fame [reputation] and your country, may your folly do no further mischief. If

the last act is yet to do, I, who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you,

and served you, I who long thought you the first of womankind, entreat that,

before your fate is irrevocable, I may once more see you.

I was, I once was, Madam, most truly yours,

Sam. Johnson 155

Mrs. Thrale resented the word "ignominious" as a slur on her fiance. She an-

swered Johnson on July 4: "Till you have changed your opinion of Mr.

Piozzi let us converse no more." She married Piozzi on July 23. All Lon-

don agreed with Johnson in condemning her. On November 1 1 Johnson told

Fanny Burney, "I never speak of her, and I desire never to hear of her

more." 156

These events must have taken a toll of Johnson's failing vitality. He found

it increasingly difficult to sleep, and resorted to opium to ease his pains and

quiet his nerves. On January 16, 1782, his "doctor in ordinary," Robert

Levett, died; whose turn would it be next? Johnson had always feared

death; now this and his belief in hell made his final years a mixture of heavy

dinners and theological terrors. "I am afraid I may be one of those who shall

be damned," he told Dr. William Adams, master of Pembroke College; and

when Adams asked what he meant by "damned" he cried out, "Sent to hell,

sir, and punished everlastingly." 157 Boswell could not help contrasting the

calm with which the unbelieving Hume had approached his end. 158

On June 17, 1783, Johnson suffered a mild stroke— "a confusion and indis-

tinctness in my head, which lasted, I suppose, half a minute. . . . My speech

was taken from me. I had no pain." 159 A week later he was well enough to

dine at the Club, and in July he astonished his intimates by making excur-

sions to Rochester and Salisbury. "What a man am I," he exclaimed to Haw-

kins, "who have got the better of three diseases— the palsy, the gout, and the

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 839

asthma— and can now enjoy the conversation of my friends! " 160 But on Sep-

tember 6 Mrs. Williams died, and his loneliness became intolerable. Finding

the Club insufficient— for several of the old members (Goldsmith, Garrick,

Beauclerk) were dead, and some of the new ones were distasteful to him—

he founded (December, 1783) the "Evening Club," which met at an ale-

house in Essex Street; there any decent person, by paying threepence, might

come in and hear him talk, three nights a week. He invited Reynolds to join;

Sir Joshua refused. Hawkins and others thought the new club a "degrada-

tion of those powers which had given delight" to more august persons. 161

On June 3, 1784, he was well enough to journey with Bos well to Lichfield

and Oxford. Returning to London, Boswell persuaded Reynolds and other

friends to ask the Chancellor to provide money whereby Johnson might be

enabled to take a trip to Italy for his health; Johnson said he would prefer a

doubling of his pension. The Chancellor refused. On July 2 Boswell left for

Scotland. He never saw Johnson again.

The asthma that had been overcome returned, and dropsy was added.

"My breath is very short," he wrote to Boswell in November, 1784, "and

the water is now increasing upon me." 162 Reynolds, Burke, Langton, Fanny

Burney, and others came to bid him a last goodbye. He wrote his will; he left

;£ 2,000, of which £ 1,500 were bequeathed to his Negro servant. 163 Several

doctors treated him, refusing any fee. He begged them to lance his legs more

deeply; they would not; when they were gone he plunged lancets or scissors

deep into his calves, hoping to release more water and reduce the painful

swelling; some water came, but also ten ounces of blood. That evening, De-

cember 1 3, 1784, he died. A week later he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

He was the strangest figure in literary history, stranger even than Scarron

or Pope. It is at first acquaintance hard to like him; he covered his tenderness

with brutality, and the coarseness of his manners rivaled the propriety of his

books. No one received so much adulation and gave so little praise. But the

older we become, the more wisdom we find in his words. He surrounded his

wisdom with platitudes, but he elevated platitudes to epigrams by the force

or color of his speech. We might compare him with Socrates, who also talked

at the slightest provocation, and is remembered for his spoken words. Both

were stimulating gadflies, but Socrates asked questions and gave no answers,

Johnson asked no questions and answered all. Socrates was certain about

nothing, Johnson was certain about everything. Both appealed to science to

leave the stars alone and study man. Socrates faced death like a philosopher

and with a smile; Johnson faced it with religious tremors rivaling his enervat-

ing pains.

No one now idealizes him. We can understand why the English aristoc-

racy—excepting Langton and Beauclerk— avoided him and ignored his pon-

tificate. We realize what a John Bull he would have been in the china shop

of the nobility, or amid the precious bric-a-brac of Strawberry Hill. He was

not designed for beauty, but he served to frighten some of us out of cant,

hypocrisy, and gush, and to make us look at ourselves with fewer delusions

about the nature of man or the ecstasies of freedom. There must have been

840 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIII

something lovable in a man to whom Reynolds and Burke and Goldsmith

could listen through a thousand and one nights, and something fascinating

in one who could inspire a great biography, and fill its twelve hundred pages

with enduring life.

VIII. BOSWELL MOR1TURUS

When the Great Bear was dead the literary flock swarmed about him to

draw some sustenance from his corpse. Boswell himself did not hurry; he

worked for seven years on the Life; but he issued in 1785 his Journal of a

Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson; it reached a third edition in one

year. Hester Thrale Piozzi had gathered material about Johnson's words and

ways; now, from these Thraliana, she compiled Anecdotes of the Late Sam-

uel Johnson, LL.D., during the Last Twenty Years of His Life ( 1 786) . The

little book presented a less amiable picture of her guest than she had drawn

day by day in her diary; doubtless the final letters of Johnson had left a last-

ing wound.

Next in the arena— barring a dozen entries now forgotten— was The Life

of Samuel Johnson, published in five sumptuous volumes by Sir John Haw-

kins in 1787. Hawkins had had sufficient success as an attorney to be

knighted (1772), and sufficient learning to write a good History of Music

(1776). He joined with Johnson in organizing the Ivy Lane Club (1749),

and was one of the original members of "the Club." He left this after an ar-

gument with Burke, which caused Johnson to dub him "an unclubbable

man"; but Johnson remained his friend, often sought his advice, and ap-

pointed him one of the executors of his will. Soon after Johnson's death a

group of booksellers asked Hawkins to edit an edition of the Doctor's works,

and to introduce it with a biography. This was criticized as revealing John-

son's faults without mercy, and Boswell later questioned its accuracy; but

"the charges against it cannot be sustained in a fair hearing." 164 Nearly all

the faults ascribed to Johnson by Hawkins were noted by other contempo-

raries.

Mrs. Piozzi returned to the feast with Letters to and from the Late Sam-

uel Johnson (1788), all fascinating, for Johnson's letters (except the last one

to his lost lady) were far more humane than his speech. Meanwhile Boswell

was laboring patiently, between lawsuits and carouses, on what he was re-

solved to make an incomparable biography. He had begun to make memo-

randa of Johnson's conversation soon after their first meeting (1763); he

planned the Life as early as 1772; so lengthy and laborious was this gestation.

He rarely took notes on the spot, and he could not write shorthand; but he

made it a principle to jot down, on returning to his room, his memory of

what had happened or had been said. He began writing The Life of Samuel

Johnson in London on July 9, 1786. He ran about the city seeking data from

Johnson's surviving friends. Edmund Malone, the Shakespearean scholar,

helped him to sort out his huge chaos of notes, and buttressed his courage

CHAP. XXXIIl) SAMUEL JOHNSON 841

when Boswell, broken down by dissipation, grief, and the death of his wife,

seemed about to abandon himself to women and drink. Boswell wrote in

1789: "You cannot imagine what labor, what perplexity, what vexation I

have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials, in supply-

ing omissions, in searching for papers buried in different masses, and all this

besides the exertion of composing and polishing. Many a time have I thought

of giving it up." 165 He took from William Mason's Life and Letters of Gray

(1774) the idea of interspersing his hero's letters with the story. He deliber-

ately accumulated details, feeling that these would add up to a full and vivid

picture. The fragments were woven into a chronological narrative -^and a

consistent whole.

Was he accurate? He claimed to be. "I am so nice in recording him that

every trifle must be authentic." 166 Where we can check his report of John-

son's words with other accounts it seems factually correct, though not verba-

tim. A comparison of his Notebook with the Life shows that Boswell turned

his own summary of Johnson's speech into direct quotation, which he some-

times expanded, sometimes compressed, sometimes improved, 167 sometimes

purified, elongating certain four-letter words to respectable proportions. Oc-

casionally he omitted facts unfavorable to himself. 168 He did not claim to

have told the whole truth about Johnson, 169 but when Hannah More begged

him "to mitigate some of Johnson's asperities," he replied that he "would not

cut off Johnson's claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody." 170 Actu-

ally he revealed his master's faults as fully as others had done, but in a large

perspective that reduced their prominence. He tried to show as much of the

complete man as affection and decency would permit. "I am absolutely cer-

tain," he said, "that my mode of biography, which gives not only a history

of Johnson's visible progress through the world, and of his publication, but

a view of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that

can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet

appeared." 171

At last it came from the press, in two large volumes, in May, 1 791. It was

not at once recognized as a unique treasury. Many persons resented Boswell's

reporting of their private conversation, not always admirable: Lady Diana

Beauclerk was able to read how Johnson had called her a whore; Reynolds

saw where Johnson had reproved him for drinking too much; Burke learned

that Johnson had questioned his political integrity and had thought him

capable of picking up a prostitute; Mrs. Piozzi and Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu

winced. "Dr. Blagden," wrote Horace Walpole, "says justly that it is a new

kind of libel, by which you may abuse anybody by saying some dead person

said so and so of somebody alive." 172 Others found the detail excessive, many

letters trivial, some pages dull. Only gradually did England realize that Bos-

well had achieved a masterpiece, and had given some nobility to his life.

His father had died in 1782, leaving him Laird of Auchinleck with an in-

come of ,£ 1,600 a year. He proved to be a kindly master, but he was too

accustomed to city life to remain long in Auchinleck. In 1786 he was ad-

mitted to the English bar, and thereafter he spent most of his time in Lon-

842 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIII

don. Reynolds portrayed him in that year— confident and insolent, with

a nose fit to ferret out any secret. At times his wife accompanied him to

London, but usually she lived at Auchinleck. There she died in 1789, aged

fifty-one, worn out by the care she had given Boswell and his children. He

survived her by six years— years of deepening degradation. He tried again

and again to overcome his need for liquor, but failed. He died in London

May 19, 1795, aged fifty-six, and his body was taken to Auchinleck for

burial. His sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them

when we read again the greatest of all biographies.

Looking back over this eighteenth century in English literature, we per-

ceive that it was above all a century of prose, from Addison, Swift, and De-

foe to Sterne, Gibbon, and Johnson, just as the seventeenth century was an

age of poetry, from Hamlet and Donne to Dryden and Paradise Lost. The

rise of science and philosophy, the decline of religion and mystery, the re-

vival of classic unities and restraints, had chilled the warmth and clogged the

flow of imagination and aspiration; and the triumph of reason was the defeat

of poetry, in France as well as in England. Nevertheless the vitality and

versatility of England's prose literature in the eighteenth century amply

compensated for the frigid formality prevailing in its verse. Through Rich-

ardson and Fielding the novel, which had been, before them, an episodic

concatenation of picaresque adventures, became a description and criticism

of life, a study of manners, morals, and character, more illuminating than

the records of the historians, who lost the people in the state. And what liter-

ary influence could equal, in that age, the effect of Richardson on Prevost,

Rousseau, Diderot, and Goethe?

If the literature of England in the eighteenth century could not equal that

of the seventeenth, or match the Elizabethan flight, the total life of England

recovered its upward swing after the failure of national courage and policy

in the Restoration. Not since the defeat of the Armada had England felt

such a surge of enterprise and politics; the years from the rise of Chatham to

the death of his son saw the Industrial Revolution put England far ahead of

its rivals in economic inventiveness and power, and saw the English Parlia-

ment conquering continents while checking its kings. Now the immense

British Empire was built, now the halls of the House of Commons rang with

such eloquence as Europe had not heard since Cicero. Now, while France

bankrupted itself to free America, and decapitated itself to realize its dreams,

England brought all its resources of mind and will to evolve without revolu-

tion, and enter the nineteenth century, in economy and statesmanship, vic-

torious and supreme.

BOOK VII

THE COLLAPSE OF FEUDAL FRANCE

1774-89

CHAPTER XXXIV

The Final Glory

1774-83

I. THE HEIRS TO THE THRONE: 1 7 54-74

LOUIS XVI was the third son of the Dauphin Louis de France, who

r was the only legitimate son of Louis XV. The Dauphin was called Louis

the Fat, for he liked to eat. He tried to overcome his obesity by hunting,

swimming, felling trees, sawing wood, and busying himself with manual

arts. 1 He retained through life his reverence for the Church; his dearest

friends were priests, and he was deeply ashamed of his father's adulteries. He

read much, including Montesquieu and Rousseau; he adopted the view that

"the monarch is nothing but the steward of the state's revenues"; 2 he denied

himself a trip through France because "my whole person is not worth what

it would cost the poor people." 3 It is remarkable how much of his character,

habits, and ideas passed down to Louis XVI.

His wife, Marie-Josephe of Saxony, virtuous and strong, bore him eight

children, including Louis-Joseph, Due de Bourgogne, who was killed by an

accident in 1761; Louis- Auguste, Due de Berry, born on August 23, 1754,

who was to be Louis XVI; Louis-Stanislas, Comte de Provence, born in 1755,

who was to be Louis XVIII; and Charles-Philippe, Comte d'Artois, born in

1757, who was to be Charles X. When their father died, in 1765, Louis-Au-

guste, aged eleven, became heir to the throne.

He was a sickly child, timid and shy, but years of country life and simple

food gave him health and strength. Like his father he was good rather than

bright. He envied the superior cleverness of his brothers, who quite ignored

his seniority. Too modest to fight back, he absorbed himself in sports and

crafts. He learned to shoot with perfect accuracy, and to rival workingmen

in using his hands and tools. He admired the skills of the artisans who served

the court; he liked to talk and work with them, and he took on something

of their manners and speech. But also he loved books. He developed a special

fondness for Fenelon; at the age of twelve he installed a printing press in the

palace at Versailles, and, with the help of his brothers (then nine and eleven),

he set the type for a little volume which he published in 1766 as Maximes

morales et politiques threes de Telemaque. His grandfather did not like the

maxims. "Look at that big boy," said Louis XV. "He will be the ruin of

France and of himself, but at any rate I shall not live to see it." 4

How could this princely workingman be transformed into a king? Could

a stimulating mate be found to give him courage and pride, and to bear him

future Bourbons? The present ruler was too busy with Mme. du Barry to

845

846 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIV

attend to this matter; but Choiseul, minister for foreign affairs, remembered

his days at the court of Vienna, and a lively archduchess, Maria Antonia

Josepha, then (1758) three years old; perhaps her marriage with Louis- Au-

guste would give new life to that Austrian alliance which had been weak-

ened by France's separate peace with England (1762). Prince von Kaunitz

had confided similar ideas to Count Florimund Mercy d'Argentau, a Liege

aristocrat of great wealth and good heart, who was Austrian ambassador at

Versailles. Louis XV took their concerted advice, and sent (1769) a formal

request to Maria Theresa asking the hand of Maria Antonia for Louis-Au-

guste. The Empress was happy to sanction a union which she too had long

ago designed. The Dauphin, who had not been consulted in the matter, obe-

diently accepted the choice made for him. When he was told that his fiancee

was a beautiful princess, he said quietly, "If only she has good qualities." 5

She was born in Vienna November 2, 1755. She was not a pretty child;

her forehead was too high, her nose was too long and sharp, her teeth were

irregular, her lower lip was too full. But she soon knew that her blood was

royal; she learned to walk like a destined queen, and nature, with the mys-

terious fluids of puberty, refashioned her winsomely until, with silken blond

hair, and complexion "of lilies and roses," 6 and sparkling, playful blue eyes,

and a "Grecian neck," she became, if not a morsel for a king, at least a dainty

for a dauphin. Three of her five older sisters had been maneuvered by the

Empress into cozy berths: Maria Christina had married Prince Albert of Sax-

ony, who became duke of Saxe-Teschen; Maria Amalia had married Ferdi-

nand, duke of Parma; Maria Carolina had become queen of Naples. Brother

Joseph was co-emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and brother Leopold was

grand duke of Tuscany. There was nothing left for Maria Antonia but to be-

come queen of France.

As the youngest of Maria Theresa's surviving children, she had been some-

what neglected. At thirteen she had learned some Italian, but she could write

neither German nor French correctly, she knew almost nothing of history,

and, though Gluck was her teacher, she had made only modest progress in

music. When Louis XV decided to accept her as a granddaughter he insisted

that she be inoculated against smallpox, and he sent the Abbe Vermond to

accelerate her education. Vermond reported that "her character, her heart

are excellent," and "she is more intelligent than has been generally sup-

posed," but "she is rather lazy and extremely frivolous, and hard to teach.

. . . She would learn only so long as she was being amused." 7 But she loved

to dance, and to romp in the woods with her dogs.

The careworn Empress knew that she was entrusting the fate of the alli-

ance to hands too frail for such a responsibility. For two months before the

contemplated marriage she had Maria Antonia sleep in the same room with

her, so that in the intimacy of their nights she might instill into her daughter

something of the wisdom of life and the art of royalty. She drew up for her

a list of regulations to guide her conduct in morals and politics. She wrote to

Louis XV asking his indulgence for the shortcomings of the immature bride

she was sending to his grandson. To the Dauphin she addressed a letter warm

with a mother's solicitude and fears:

CHAP. XXXIV) THE FINAL GLORY 847

As she has been my delight, so I hope she will be your happiness. I have

brought her up for this, because for a long time I have foreseen that she would

share your destiny. I have inspired in her a love for her duties to you, a tender

attachment, and the ability to know and practice the means of pleasing you.

. . . My daughter will love you, I am sure of it, because I know her. . . .

Adieu, my dear Dauphin; be happy, make her happy. ... I am all bathed in

tears. . . . Your tender mother. 8

On April 19, 1770, in the Church of the Augustines at Vienna, the radiant,

thoughtless girl, aged fourteen, was married by proxy to Louis-Auguste of

France; her brother Ferdinand took the Dauphin's place. Two days later a

long cavalcade of fifty-seven carriages and 366 horses led the Dauphine past

the Palace of Schonbrunn, and the Empress bade her a last goodbye. "Be so

good to the French," she whispered, "that they can say that I have sent them

an angel." 9 The cortege included 132 persons— ladies in waiting, hairdressers,

dressmakers, pages, chaplains, surgeons, apothecaries, cooks, servants, and

thirty-five men to take care of the horses, which were changed four or five

times a day on the long journey to Paris. In sixteen days the procession

reached Kehl, on the Rhine opposite Strasbourg. On an island in the river

Maria changed her Austrian attire for French garments; her Austrian attend-

ants left her to return to Vienna, and were replaced by an entourage of

French ladies and servants; henceforth Maria Antonia was Marie Antoinette.

After much ceremony she was brought into Strasbourg while cannon pealed

and church bells rang and all the people cheered. She wept and smiled and

went through the long ritual patiently. When the burgomaster began a

speech in German she interrupted him: "Do not speak German, gentlemen;

from today I understand no language but French." Having allowed her a

day of rest, the pageant began its transit of France.

It had been arranged that the King and the Dauphin, with much of the

court, should go to Compiegne, fifty-two miles northeast of Paris, to meet the

Dauphine's cortege. This arrived on May 14. The bride leaped from her

coach, ran to Louis XV, bowed to the ground, and remained so till the King

raised her and put her at her ease with a gracious remark: "You are already

a member of the family, madame, for your mother has the soul of Louis

XIV." 10 After kissing her on both cheeks he introduced the Dauphin, who

did likewise but with perhaps less relish. On May 15 the combined proces-

sions started for Versailles. There, on May 16, 1770, an official marriage

confirmed the proxy wedding of a month before. That night there was a

great feast in the new opera house. The King warned Louis-Auguste that he

was eating too much. The Dauphin replied, "I always sleep better after a

good supper." 11 He did, falling asleep soon after entering the marriage bed.

He slept with the same readiness on successive nights, and on successive

mornings he rose early to go hunting. Mercy d'Argentau suggested that the

recent rapid growth of Louis-Auguste had retarded his sexual development,

and that there was nothing to do but wait. Maria Theresa, informed of the

situation, wrote to her daughter: "You are both so young! As far as your

health is concerned it is all for the best. You will both gain strength." 12 Some

of the Dauphin's physicians made matters worse by telling him that exercise

848 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

and good meals would stimulate amorous development; on the contrary,

they made him stouter and sleepier. Finally, late in 1770, the Dauphin tried

to consummate the marriage, but failed; the only result was a disenchanting

pain. The Count of Aranda, the Spanish ambassador, reported to his King:

"They say that an impediment under the foreskin makes the attempt at coi-

tus too painful," or "that the foreskin is so thick that it cannot expand with

the elasticity necessary to an erection." 13 Surgeons offered to remove the

difficulty by an operation akin to circumcision, but the Dauphin refused. 14

He made repeated attempts, with no effect but to agitate and humiliate him-

self and his wife. This situation continued till 1777. The sense of his marital

deficiency deepened the Dauphin's feeling of inferiority, and may have

shared in making him so hesitating and diffident a king.

Probably those seven years of marital frustration affected the character

and conduct of Marie Antoinette. She knew that the men and women of the

court made merciless fun of her misfortune, and that most of France, not

knowing the cause, charged her with barrenness. She consoled herself with

trips to the opera or the theater in Paris, and indulged herself in costly ex-

travagance of dress. She rebelled against frequent mingling with the court,

with all its ceremony and protocol; she preferred intimate friendships with

sympathetic souls like the Princesse de Lamballe. For a long time she refused

to speak to Mme. du Barry, whether through distaste for her morals or

through envy that another woman should be so competently loved and so

influential with the King.

On May 10, 1774, Louis XV died. The courtiers rushed to the apartments

of the Dauphin. They found him and the Dauphine on their knees weeping

and praying. "O God," the nineteen-year-old youth cried, "protect us! We

are too young to rule!" And to a friend he said, "What a burden! I have

learned nothing. It seems that the universe will fall upon me." 15 All day long,

through Versailles and Paris, and then as far in France as the news was car-

ried, men, women, and children cried joyfully, "Le Rot est mart, vive le

Roi!" Some hopeful Parisian inscribed upon a statue of Henry IV the word

Resurrexit; 16 the great King had risen from the dead to rescue France again

from chaos, corruption, bankruptcy, and defeat.

II. THE GOVERNMENT

What was wrong with the government? It was not as despotic as Prussia's,

not as corrupt as England's; its bureaucracy and provincial administration

contained some good and many able men. Nevertheless the Bourbon mon-

archy had failed to keep up with the economic and intellectual development

of the people. Revolution came to France sooner than elsewhere because the

middle classes had reached a higher stage of intelligence than in any other

contemporary nation, and the alert and aroused mind of her citizenry made

sharper demands upon the state than any government of the time had to

meet.

CHAP. XXXIV ) THE FINAL GLORY 849

Frederick II and Joseph II, devotees of philosophy and absolute monarchy,

had brought into the political management of Prussia and Austria a degree

of order and competence not then present in a France that loved a Latin

laxity and ease. "Confusion and chaos reigned everywhere." 17 At Versailles

the King's Council conflicted in jurisdiction with the departmental ministers,

who conflicted with one another because their functions overlapped, because

they competed for the same public funds, and because no authority was su-

perimposed to bring their policies into accord. The nation was divided in one

way (bailliages or senechaussees) for the judiciary; in another (generalites)

for finance, in another (gouvernements) for the army, in another (paroisses

and provinces) for the Church. In each generalite the intendant conflicted

with the governor and the regional parlement. Throughout France the inter-

ests of rural producers conflicted with those of urban consumers, the rich

conflicted with the poor, the nobles with the bourgeoisie, the parlements

with the king. A unifying cause and a commanding will were needed; the

cause did not come till 1792, the will not till 1799.

One of the worst aspects of French life was the law, and yet one of the

best was the judiciary. South France kept Roman law, north France kept

common and feudal law. "Justice," said de Tocqueville, was "complicated,

costly, and slow" 18 — though this is a universal plaint. Prisons were filthy,

punishments were barbarous; judicial torture was still allowed in 1774. The

judges were irremovable, usually unbribable and just; Sir Henry Maine

thought that the jurists of France, "in all the qualities of the advocate, the

judge, and the legislator, far excelled their compeers throughout Europe." 19

They held their office for life, and were entitled to transmit it to a son.

The ablest among them found their way into the regional parlements, and

the most wealthy and influential were chosen to the Parlement of Paris. By

1774 the "nobility of the robe"— the hereditary magistrates— had come to

consider itself only slightly below the "nobility of the sword" in dignity and

deserts. It admitted to the parlements only persons born into one or the other

of the two aristocracies.

Montesquieu had argued that "intermediate bodies" between the king and

the people would be useful brakes on autocratic power; he had specified the

landed nobility and the magistracy as two such powers. In order to serve

this braking function the parlements claimed authority to ratify (registrer)

or reject any royal decree as in their judgment it accorded or conflicted with

established laws and rights. Several provincial parle?nents, especially those

of Grenoble, Rouen, and Rennes, voiced semidemocratic doctrines, some-

times with Rousseauian phrases about "the general will" and "the free con-

sent of the nation"; so the Parlement of Rennes in 1788 proclaimed "that

man is born free, that originally men are equal," and "that these truths have

no need of proof." 20 Generally, however, the parlements were strong de-

fenders of class distinctions and privileges. Their contests with the royal

power shared in preparing the Revolution, but as this approached they sided

with the Old Regime, and fell with its fall.

Theoretically the royal power was absolute. By Bourbon tradition the king

850 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIV

was the sole legislator, the chief executive, and the supreme court. He could

have any person in France arrested and indefinitely confined without giving

a reason or allowing a trial; even the kindly Louis XVI sent out such lettres de

cachet. The King had inherited a costly establishment, which considered

itself indispensable to the administration and prestige of the government.

In 1774 the court at Versailles included the royal family and 886 noblemen,

with their wives and children; add 295 cooks, fifty-six hunters, forty-seven

musicians, eight architects, sundry secretaries, chaplains, physicians, couriers,

guards . . . ; altogether some six thousand persons, with ten thousand

soldiers stationed nearby. Each member of the royal family had his or her

separate court; so did some special nobles, like the Princes de Conde and

de Conti and the Dues d'Orleans and de Bourbon. The King maintained sev-

eral palaces— at Versailles, Marly, La Muette, Meudon, Choisy, St.-Hubert,

St.-Germain, Fontainebleau, Compiegne, and Rambouillet. It was customary

for him to move from palace to palace, with parts of the court following him

and requiring to be housed and fed. The expenses of the King's table in 1780

ran to 3,660,491 livres. 21

The salaries of court officials were moderate, but the perquisites were elas-

tic; so M. Augeard, a secretary in one of the ministries, was paid only nine

hundred livres a year, but admitted that the post netted him 200,000 livres

annually. A hundred sinecures brought the courtiers money while subordi-

nates did the work; M. Machault received eighteen thousand livres for sign-

ing his name twice a year. 22 A hundred pensions totaling 28,000,000 livres

annually went to persuasive nobles or their proteges. 23 A hundred intrigues

were carried on to determine who should receive the careless bounty of the

King. He was expected to relieve old titled families fallen into straitened

finances, and to provide dowries for noble daughters on their marriage.

Each of Louis XV's surviving children received approximately 150,000

livres per year. Each minister of state was paid up to 150,000 livres as annual

salary, for he was expected to entertain expansively. All this prodigality,

these pensions, gifts, salaries, and sinecures were paid out of revenues drawn

from the economic life of the nation. In sum the court cost France fifty mil-

lion livres a year— a tenth of the total income of the government. 24

III. THE VIRGIN QUEEN

Marie Antoinette was the most extravagant member of the court. At-

tached to an impotent husband, cheated of romance, indulging in no liaisons,

she amused herself, till 1778, with costly dresses, gems, and palaces, with

operas, plays, and balls. She lost fortunes in gambling, and gave fortunes to

favorites in reckless generosity. She spent 252,000 livres on her wardrobe in

one year (1783). 25 Designers brought her fancy garments named "Indiscreet

Pleasures," "Stifled Signs," or "Masked Desires." 26 Hairdressers worked for

hours over her head, training her hair to such heights that her chin seemed

to be the mean point of her height; this haute coiffure, like almost every-

CHAP. XXXIV ) THE FINAL GLORY 85 1

thing about her, set a fashion for the ladies of the court, then of Paris, then

of the provincial capitals.

Her longing for jewelry became almost a mania. In 1774 she bought from

Bohmer, official jeweler to the Crown, gems valued at 360,000 livres. 27 Louis

XVI gave her a set of rubies, diamonds, and bracelets costing 200,000 livres. 28

In 1 776 Mercy d'Argentau wrote to Maria Theresa:

Although the King has given the Queen, on various occasions, more than

100,000 ecus' worth of diamonds, and although her Majesty already has a pro-

digious collection, she nevertheless resolved to acquire . . . chandelier ear-

rings from Bohmer. I did not conceal from her Majesty that under present

economic conditions it would have been wiser to avoid such a tremendous ex-

penditure, but she could not resist— although she handled the purchase care-

fully, keeping it a secret from the King. 29

Maria Theresa sent her daughter a stern reproof; the Queen compromised

by wearing her jewelry only on state occasions; but the public never for-

gave her this intemperate expenditure of its taxes, and later it would believe

the story that she had agreed to buy the famous diamond necklace.

The King indulged his wife in her foibles because he admired and loved

her, and because he was grateful for her patience with his impotence. He

paid her gambling debts out of his own purse. He encouraged her trips to

the Paris opera, though he knew that her gaiety in public disturbed a people

accustomed to royal dignity and reserve. The government paid for three

theatrical performances, two balls, two formal suppers almost every week

at court; in addition the Queen attended masked balls in Paris or in private

homes. These years, 1774-77, were a period of what her mother frankly

called dissipation. Deriving nothing but aroused and unsatisfied passion from

her husband's nocturnal approaches, the Queen encouraged him to go to

sleep early (sometimes setting the clock ahead to advance his retirement), so

that she could join her friends in games that might last all night. She took no

interest in literature, little in art, more in drama and music; she sang and acted

well, played the harp, and performed some Mozart sonatas on the clavi-

chord. 30

In all these faults only one was fundamental— a thoughtless extravagance

derived from boredom and frustration, and from a childhood and youth ac-

customed to riches and ignorant of poverty. The Prince de Ligne (who may

have been more of a gentleman than an historian) claimed that she soon

outgrew her love of costly raiment, that her gambling losses were exagger-

ated, and that her debts were due as much to unwise generosity as to reckless

expenditure. 31 The court and the salons were hostile to her as an Austrian;

the alliance with Austria had never been popular; Marie Antoinette, called

"L'Autrichienne," personified that alliance, and was suspected, with some

reason, of favoring Austrian interests, sometimes at the cost of France. Even

so, her youthful vitality, her gaiety and kindliness, won many hearts. Mme.

Vigee-Lebrun, many months pregnant, came to paint her portrait (1779);

while at work the artist dropped some tubes of color; the Queen at once

told her not to stoop, for "you are too far along," and herself picked up the

852 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

tubes. 32 Antoinette was usually considerate, but occasionally, in her thought-

less merriment, she made fun of other people's mannerisms or defects. And

she responded too readily to every appeal; "she did not yet know the dan-

ger of yielding to every gracious impulse." 33

So vivacious a creature, to whom life and movement were synonyms, was

not made for the slow and careful pace of court etiquette. Soon she rebelled

against it, and sought simplicity and ease in and around the Petit Trianon, a

mile from the Palace of Versailles. In 1778 Louis XVI offered the Queen

undisputed possession of this trysting place; there she might retire with her

intimates, and Louis promised that he would not intrude upon them except

by invitation. As there were only eight rooms in the building, the Queen

had some cottages built near it for her friends. She had the surrounding gar-

dens designed in the "natural" style— with winding paths, varied trees, sur-

prises, and a brook, and for this she had water piped in from Marly at great

cost. To complete the illusion of a Rousseauian return to nature, she had

eight small farms set up in the adjoining park, each with its rustic cottage,

peasant family, dung heap, and cows. There she dressed like a shepherdess in

white gown, gauze kerchief, and straw hat, and loved to see milk coaxed

from choice udders into vessels of Sevres porcelain. Within the Petit Trianon

she and her friends played music or games, and on the lawn they gave ban-

quets to the King or to distinguished visitors. There, as well as in the royal

palace, the Queen staged dramas, in some of which she played major roles-

Suzanne in he Manage de Figaro, Colette in Le Devin du village, delighting

the King with her versatility and charm.

Fearing scandal if she mingled too freely with men, she formed with

women some friendships so close that scandal took another line. First came

Marie-Therese de Savoie-Carignan, Princesse de Lamballe, gentle, sad, and

frail. Twenty-one, she was already two years a widow. Her husband, son

of Louis XIV's grandson the Due de Penthievre, went off to mistresses or

prostitutes soon after his marriage; he contracted syphilis and died of it after

confessing his sins to his wife in revolting detail. She never recovered from

the long ordeal of that marriage; she suffered from nervous convulsions and

fainting spells until, in 1792, she was torn to pieces by a Revolutionary mob.

Marie Antoinette first took to her out of pity, then learned to love her fer-

vently, seeing her every day, writing to her letters of endearment sometimes

twice a day. In October, 1775, she made the Princess superintendent of the

Queen's Household, and persuaded the King, over Turgot's protests, to pay

her a yearly salary of 150,000 livres. Moreover, the Princess had relatives and

friends, who begged her to use her influence with the Queen, and through

her with the King, to obtain posts or gifts. Antoinette, after a year, let her

love fade, and took another friend.

Yolande de Polastron, wife of Comte Jules de Polignac, was of ancient

family and straitened means; pretty, petite, natural; no one would, seeing

her, suspect her of such financial voracity that Turgot despaired of balanc-

ing the budget while the Queen found pleasure in her witty company. When

the Countess neared childbirth the Queen persuaded her to move to La

CHAP. XXXIV ) THE FINAL GLORY 853

Muette, a royal villa near the Versailles Palace; there she visited her daily,

almost always bearing gifts. When the Comtesse became a mother nothing

could be refused her: 400,000 livres to settle her debts, a dowry of 800,000

livres for her daughter, an embassy for her father, money, jewels, furs, works

of art for herself, and finally (1780) a dukedom and the estate of Bitche— for

the Count longed to be a duke. At last Mercy d'Argentau informed the

Queen that she was being exploited, and that the new Duchess did not return

her devotion. He proposed, and the Queen accepted, as a test, that she ask

Mme. de Polignac to dismiss from her entourage the Comte de Vaudreuil,

who was distasteful to Antoinette; Madame refused, and Marie turned to

other friendships. The Polignacs joined her enemies, and became a source of

the slanders with which the court and the pamphleteers besmirched the name

of the Queen.

Almost everything that she did made her enemies. The courtiers regretted

the gifts she gave to her favorites, since this meant less for themselves. They

complained that she so often absented herself from court functions that

these lost glamour and attendance. Many who had condemned the costly

wardrobe of her earlier years now censured her for setting a new fashion of

simplicity in dress; the silk merchants of Lyons and the couturiers of Paris

would be ruined. 34 She had induced the King to dismiss the Due d'Aiguillon

(1775), who had led the supporters of Mme. du Barry; the Duke had many

sympathizers, and these formed another nucleus of foes. After 1776 the Paris

pamphleteers— many of whom received material and money from members

of the court 35 — engaged in a campaign of merciless vituperation against the

Queen. 36 Some writers described her as the mistress, at one time or another,

of every available male at Versailles. 37 "How many times," asked a pamphlet

entitled A Reprimand to the Queen, "have you left the nuptial bed and the

caresses of your husband to abandon yourself to bacchantes or satyrs, and to

become one with them through their brutal pleasures?" 38 Another pamphlet

illustrated her extravagance by describing a wall in the Petit Trianon as cov-

ered with diamonds. 39 Rumor accused her of saying, during the bread riots

of 1788, "If they have no bread let them eat cake"; historians agree that she

was never guilty of that heartless remark; 40 on the contrary, she contributed

abundantly from her own purse to public relief. Even more cruel was the

general opinion, among the populace, that she was barren. Mme. Campan,

first lady of the bedchamber to the Queen, relates:

When in 1777 a son was born to the Comte cTArtois, the market women

and fishwives, asserting their prerogative to enter the royal palace at times of

royal births, followed the Queen to the very door of her apartments, shouting

in the coarsest and most vulgar terms that it was up to her, not to her sister-in-

law, to provide heirs to the French crown. The Queen hurried to close the

door upon these licentious harridans, and closeted herself in her room with me

to weep over her plight. 41

How could she explain to the people that the King was impotent?

France waited for the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to come and

clear this impasse. In April, 1777, Joseph II arrived at Versailles under the

854 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIV

pseudonym of Count von Falkenstein. He fell in love with the Queen. "If

you were not my sister," he told her, "I should not hesitate to marry again

in order to have such a charming companion." 42 And to their brother Leo-

pold he wrote:

I have spent hour after hour with her, and not noticed their passing. . . .

She is a charming and honorable woman, somewhat young, a little thoughtless,

but essentially decent and virtuous. . . . She also has spirit and a keenness

which surprised me. Her first reaction is always correct; if she would only act

according to it, . . . and pay less attention to the gossips, . . . she would be

perfect. She has a strong desire for pleasure, and since her tastes are known,

advantage is taken of her weakness. . . .

But she thinks only of her own pleasure, has no love for the King, and is

drunk with the extravagance of this country. . . . She drives the King by

force to the things he does not wish to do. ... In short, she does not fulfill the

duties of either a wife or a queen. 43

She explained why she and the King slept in separate rooms; he wished

to go to sleep early, and they both found it wise to avoid sexual excitement.

Joseph visited the King, and liked him well. "This man," he wrote to Leo-

pold, "is a little weak, but not an imbecile. He has ideas and a sound judg-

ment, but his mind and body are apathetic. He converses reasonably, but he

has no wish to learn, and no curiosity; ... in fact the fiat lux has not yet

come; the matter is still without form." 44 The Emperor talked to Louis as

no one had dared speak to him; he pointed out that the impediment in the

royal prepuce could be removed by a simple, though painful, operation, and

that the King owed it to his country to have children. Louis promised to

submit to the knife.

Before leaving Versailles Joseph wrote a sheet of "Instructions" for the

Queen. It is a remarkable document:

You are getting older, and no longer have youth as an excuse. What will

become of you if you delay any longer [to reform]? . . . When the King

caresses you, when he speaks to you, do you not show irritation, even re-

pugnance? Have you ever thought what effect your intimacies and friendships

. . . must have on the public? . . . Have you weighed the terrible conse-

quences of games of chance, the company they bring together and the tone

they set? . . .

And of her fondness for the masked balls in Paris:

Why mingle with a crowd of libertines, prostitutes, and strangers, listening

to their remarks, and perhaps making similar ones? How indecent! . . . The

King is left alone all night at Versailles, and you mix in society and mingle

with the riffraff of Paris! ... I really tremble for your happiness, for it can-

not turn out well in the long run, and there will be a cruel revolution [une

revolution cruelle] unless you take steps against it. 45

The Queen was moved by his reproaches. After he had gone she wrote to

her mother: "The Emperor's departure has left a gap I cannot fill. I was so

happy during that short time that now it all seems like a dream. But what

will never be a dream for me is all the good counsel ... he gave me, which

is engraved in my heart forever." 46 What really reformed her was not advice

CHAP.XXXIV) THE FINAL GLORY 855

but motherhood. For Louis, in that summer of 1777, submitted, apparently

without anesthetic of any kind, to an operation which proved completely

successful. He celebrated his twenty-third birthday (August 23, 1777)

by at last consummating his marriage. He was proud and happy. "I very

much enjoy this pleasure," he confided to one of his maiden aunts, "and

I am sorry to have been deprived of it for so long." 47 However, it was not

till April, 1778, that the Queen became pregnant. She announced this to the

King in her frolicsome way: "Sire, I have come to complain that one of your

subjects has been so bold as to kick me in the belly." 48 When Louis caught

her meaning he clasped her in his arms. Now more than ever he indulged

her whims and granted her requests. Ten times a day he visited her apart-

ments for the latest communique on the progress of the expected heir. And

Marie Antoinette, undergoing a mysterious transformation of body and

soul, told the King, "Henceforth I want to live otherwise than before. I

want to live as a mother, nurse my own child, and devote myself to its edu-

cation." 49

After grievous suffering, made worse by a clumsy accoucheur, the Queen

gave birth, December 19, 1778. The parents regretted that the child was a

girl, but the King was happy that the gates of life had been opened, and con-

fident that a son would come forth in time. The young mother rejoiced that

at last she had been fulfilled. To Maria Theresa (now entering her final

year) she wrote in 1779: "Dear Mamma may be very satisfied as to my con-

duct. If I was formerly to blame, it was because I was childish and giddy.

Now, however, I am much more sensible, and I am very well aware what

my duty is." 50 Neither the court nor the populace believed it, but "it is an

accepted fact," wrote the Comte de Segur, "that after the birth of her first

child she gradually began to lead a more regular existence, and to occupy

herself seriously. She is more careful to avoid anything that might give rise

to scandal. Her gay parties are less frequent, less lively. . . . Extravagance

gives place to simplicity; sumptuous robes are replaced by little linen

frocks." 51 It was part of Marie Antoinette's long punishment that the people

of France would not realize that the spoiled and reckless girl had become a

tender and conscientious mother. Nothing is lost, but everything has to be

paid for.

She knew that French law excluded women from the throne. She wel-

comed a second pregnancy, and prayed for a son; but she suffered a mis-

carriage so agonizing that she lost most of her hair. 52 She tried again, and on

October 22, 1781, she gave birth to a boy, who was named Louis-Joseph-

Xavier. Cynics questioned the child's paternity, but the happy King ignored

them. "My son the Dauphin! " he cried. "My son! "

IV. LE ROl BONHOMME™

Except in age Louis was everything that his wife was not. She was grace-

ful, agile, mobile, playful, impulsive, effervescent, frivolous, extravagant,

856 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

self-assertive, proud, always a queen; he was clumsy, inert, hesitant, serious,

quiet, industrious, thrifty, modest, diffident, every inch not a king. He loved

the day, his work, and the hunt; she loved the night, the card table, and the

dance. And yet, after those early tentative years, it was not an unhappy

marriage; the Queen was faithful, the King was fond, and when grief came it

made them firmly one.

His features were regular; he might have been handsome if he had con-

trolled his weight. He was tall, and might have been royal had he not walked

with swinging shoulders and heavy tread. His eyesight was poor, which con-

tributed to his awkwardness. His hair was seldom in order; "his person was

greatly neglected," reported Mme. Campan. 54 He was muscular and strong;

he lifted one of his pages with one arm. He ate avidly. He drank moderately,

but sometimes became drunk with food, and had to be helped to his bed. 55

He had few passions, few ecstasies of pleasure, few extremes of pain.

He was ill at ease with the Frenchmen who surrounded him, and who

were trained in alertness of mind and witty readiness of speech; however,

in private converse, he impressed men like Joseph II with his wide knowl-

edge and sane judgment. Hear Prince Henry of Prussia, brother to Frederick

the Great:

The King surprised me. ... I had been told that his education had been

neglected, that he knew nothing, had little spirit. I was astonished, in talking

with him, to see that he knew geography very well, that he had sound ideas

in politics, that the happiness of his people was always in his thoughts, and

that he was full of good sense, which is worth more in a prince than a brilliant

intellect; but he distrusted himself too much. 56

Louis had a good library, and used it. He read and in part translated Gib-

bon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 57 but he put it aside when he

perceived its anti-Christian tendency. He read and reread Clarendon's His-

tory of the Rebellion, as if in premonition that he would repeat the fate of

Charles I. "Had I been in his place," he said, "I should never have drawn the

sword against my people." 58 For the guidance of La Perouse's Pacific expe-

dition (1785) he composed detailed instructions which his ministers ascribed

to the savants of the Academie des Sciences. 59 He kept in close touch with

the various ministries, especially on foreign affairs. Washington and Frank-

lin admired his judgment. 60 His weaknesses were rather of will than of mind,

and may have been allied to his heaviness of diet and flesh. Basic was his in-

capacity to resist persuasion, or to conclude from reflection to action. He

himself practiced economy, but he was too amiable to force it upon others,

and he signed away hundreds of thousands of francs at the behest of his wife.

He had no lack of virtues. He took no mistress, and he was faithful in

friendship, perhaps except with Turgot. "It is quite probable that, next to

Turgot, he is the man of his day who loved the people most." 61 On the day

of his accession he bade the Controller General of Finance distribute 200,000

francs among the poor, and he added, "If, considering the needs of the state,

you find this too much, you will take it out of my pension." 62 He forbade

CHAP.XXXIV) THE FINAL GLORY 857

collection of the "coronation tax" which made the beginning of a reign a

new burden for the nation. In 1784, when Paris was suffering from inunda-

tions and epidemics, he allotted three million francs for public aid. During

a severe winter he allowed the poor, day after day, to invade his kitchen and

help themselves. He was a Christian in title, in fact, and in observance; he

followed all the ritual and regulations of the Church scrupulously; and

though he loved food, he kept all the fasts of Lent. He was religious without

fanaticism or display; it was he, orthodox and pious, who gave civil rights to

the Protestants of France. He tried to reconcile Christianity with govern-

ment, which is the most difficult thing in the world.

Despite his love of simplicity he had to live externally like a king: to go

through the formal levee, let himself be dressed by pages and courtiers, recite

his morning prayers in their presence, give audience, preside in council, issue

edicts, attend dinners, receptions, balls— though he did not dance. But so far

as his position and appetite allowed, he lived like any good citizen. He agreed

with Rousseau that every man should learn a manual craft; he learned sev-

eral, from lockmaking to masonry. Mme. Campan tells us that "he admitted

into his private apartment a common locksmith, with whom he made keys

and locks; and his hands, blackened by that sort of work, were often, in my

presence, the subject of remonstrances, and even sharp reproaches, from the

Queen." 63 He was fascinated by all that concerned construction; he helped

the palace workingmen to move materials, girders, paving blocks. He liked

to make repairs in his apartment with his own hands; he was a good middle-

class husband. One of his rooms contained geographical paraphernalia,

globes, maps— some of which he had drawn himself; another held instruments

for working in wood; another was equipped with a forge, anvils, and a great

variety of iron tools. He labored for months to manufacture a giant clock

that would record months, phases of the moon, seasons, and years. Several

rooms were occupied by his library.

France loved him, even to his death and beyond, for it was Paris, not

France, that guillotined him in 1793. In those early years the acclaim was

almost universal. "You have a very good king," wrote Frederick the Great

to d'Alembert, "and I congratulate you with all my heart. A king who is

wise and virtuous is more to be feared by his rivals than a prince who has

only courage." And d'Alembert replied: "He loves goodness, justice, econ-

omy, and peace. . . . He is just what we ought to desire as our king, if a

propitious fate had not given him to us." 64 Voltaire concurred: "All that

Louis has done since his accession has endeared him to France." 65 Goethe in

old age recalled the auspicious beginning:

In France a new and benevolent sovereign evinced the best intentions of

devoting himself to the removal of so many abuses, and to the noblest ends—

of introducing a regular and efficient system of political economy, of dispensing

with all arbitrary power, and of ruling by law and justice alone. The brightest

hopes spread over the world, and confident youth promised itself and to all

mankind a bright and noble future. 66

858 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIV

V. THE MINISTRY OF TURGOT: 1 774-76

The first task of Louis XVI was to find capable and upright ministers who

would repair the chaos in administration and finance. The people were

clamoring for the recall of the banished parlements; he recalled them, and

dismissed Maupeou, who had tried to replace them. For his chief minister he

brought back to Versailles Jean-Frederic Phelypeaux, Comte de Maurepas,

who had been minister of state from 1738 to 1749, had been deposed for

lampooning Mme. de Pompadour, and now returned to power at the age of

seventy-three. It was a benevolent but unfortunate choice, for Maurepas,

living for a decade on his rural estate, had lost touch with the development

of France in economy and thought, and had more wit than wisdom. For for-

eign affairs the twenty-year-old King chose Charles Gravier, Comte de Ver-

gennes; for the war ministry Comte Claude-Louis de Saint-Germain; and

for minister of marine Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne.

We have in previous pages seen him as a seminarian, a lecturer on Chris-

tianity and progress, a friend of physiocrats and philosophes, an enterprising

and beneficent intendant in Limoges. The devots at the court warned Louis

that Turgot was an unbeliever, who had contributed articles to the Encyclo-

pedic;* 1 nevertheless, on August 24, 1774, the King advanced him to the

most critical post in the government— controller general of finance. Turgot's

place at the navy was taken by Gabriel de Sartine, who spent prodigally in

building the fleets that were to help free America, and who relied on Turgot

to find the funds.

Turgot was such a Frenchman as Louis XIV had had in Colbert, dedicated

to the service of his country, farseeing in his views, tireless, incorruptible.

He was tall and handsome, but he lacked the graces of men polished in the

salons— though he was welcomed ardently by Mile, de Lespinasse. His

health had been sacrificed to his work; much of the time when he was labor-

ing to remake the French economy he was confined to his rooms with gout.

He tried to compress a quarter century of reforms into one brief ministry

because he felt that his tenure of office was precarious. He was forty-seven

when he came to power, forty-nine when he lost it, fifty-four when he died.

He believed with the physiocrats that industry and trade should be left

as free as possible from regulation by government or guilds; that land was

the only source of wealth; that a single tax on land was the fairest and most

practical way of raising revenue; and that all indirect taxes should be abol-

ished. From the philosophes he took their religious skepticism and toleration,

their trust in reason and progress, their hope for reform through an enlight-

ened king. If the monarch was a man or intelligence and good will, and

would accept philosophy as his guide, this would be a peaceful revolution,

far better than a violent and chaotic uprising which might destroy not only

old abuses but social order itself. Now this these royale of Voltaire was to

be put to the test. So the philosophes joined with the physiocrats in rejoicing

over Turgot's rise to power.

CHAP.XXXIV) THE FINAL GLORY 859

At Compiegne on August 24, 1774, Turgot went to thank Louis XVI for

appointment to the Ministry of Finance. "I give myself not to the king," he

said, "but to the honest man." Louis, taking Turgot's hands in his own, re-

plied, "You shall not be deceived." 68 That evening the minister sent to the

King a letter stating the essentials of his program:

No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised. . . .

No increase in taxes, the reason for this lying in the condition of your

people. . . .

No loans, . . . because every loan necessitates, at the end of a given time,

either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. . . .

To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure

below revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty

millions, to be applied to the redemption of the old debts. Without that, the

first gunshot will force the state into bankruptcy. 69

(Necker later resorted to loans, and the war of 1778 led France to bank-

ruptcy.)

After noting that the annual revenue of the government was 213,500,000

francs, and the annual expenditure 235,000,000 francs, Turgot ordered vari-

ous economies, and issued instructions that no payment should be made from

the treasury, for any purpose, without his knowledge and consent. He

sought to stimulate the economy by establishing, step by step, freedom of

enterprise, production, and trade. He began with an attempt to restore agri-

culture. Usually, to avoid discontent in the cities, the government had con-

trolled the trade in grain, regulating its sale by the farmer to the wholesaler

and by the wholesaler to the retailer, and limiting the price of bread. But

low prices to the peasant discouraged him from growing more grain, and

deterred others from farming; vast cultivable areas of France lay unsown,

and the potential wealth of the nation was being checked at its source. The

restoration of agriculture seemed to Turgot the first step in reviving France.

Freedom of the farmer to sell his grain at whatever price he could get would

raise his income, status, and purchasing power, and lift him out of the primi-

tive and bestial life that La Bruyere had described in the heyday of Louis

XIV. 70

So, on September 13, 1774, Turgot issued through the Royal Council an

edict freeing the grain trade everywhere except in Paris, where the urban

reaction would be critical. Du Pont de Nemours had written for the edict a

preamble explaining its purpose: "To animate and extend the cultivation of

the land, whose produce is the most real and certain wealth of the state; to

maintain abundance by granaries and the entry of foreign grain; . . . and

to remove monopoly ... in favor of full competition." Such an explana-

tory preface was itself an innovation, reflecting the rise of public opinion as

a political power. Voltaire hailed the edict as the beginning of a new eco-

nomic era, and predicted that it would soon raise the nation's prosperity. 71

He sent a note to Turgot: "The old invalid of Ferney thanks nature for

having made him live long enough to see the decree of September 13, 1774.

He presents his respects to the author, and prays for his success." 72

860 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

There was an ominous exception to the applause. In the spring of 1775

Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker living in Paris, came to Turgot with a manu-

script Sur la Legislation et le commerce des grains, and asked if it might be

published without detriment to the government. Necker's pamphlet argued

that some measure of governmental control over the economy was neces-

sary if the superior cleverness of the few was not to concentrate wealth at

one end and intensify poverty at the other. He proposed that if free trade

should raise the price of bread beyond a stated figure the government should

resume regulation. Turgot, confident in his theories, and favoring freedom

of the press, told Necker to publish and let the people judge. 73 Necker pub-

lished.

The city populace did not read him, but it agreed with him. As the price

of bread rose in the spring of 1775, riots broke out in several cities. In the

districts around Paris, controlling the flow of grain into the capital, men

went from town to town, rousing the people to revolt. Armed bands burned

down the granges of farmers and merchants and threw the stored grain into

the Seine; they tried to prevent imported grain from proceeding from Le

Havre to Paris; and on May 2 they led a crowd to the gates of the palace at

Versailles. Turgot believed that these bands were employed by the municipal

or provincial officials who had lost their posts through the end of regulation,

and who aimed to create in Paris a scarcity of grain that would raise the

price of bread and compel a return to controlled trade. 74 The King appeared

on a balcony and tried to speak; the noise of the crowd drowned out his

words. He forbade his troops to fire upon the people, and ordered a reduc-

tion in the price of bread.

Turgot protested that this interference with the laws of supply and de-

mand would ruin the attempt to test them; he was confident that, if they

were left free to operate, the competition among merchants and bakers

would soon bring down the price of bread. The King rescinded his order for

reducing the price. On May 3 angry crowds gathered in Paris and began to

pillage the bakeries. Turgot ordered the Paris militia to protect the bakeries

and granaries, and to fire upon any person who offered violence. Meanwhile

he saw to it that foreign grain reached Paris and the markets. Monopolists

who had held their grain in expectation of high prices were compelled, by

this imported competition, to release their stores; the price of bread fell, and

the rebellion subsided. Several of its leaders were arrested; two were hanged

by order of the police. Turgot emerged victorious from this "Guerre des Fa-

rines," but the King's faith in laissez-faire had been shaken, and he mourned

those two hangings in the Place de Greve.

He was pleased, however, with the reforms that Turgot was effecting in

the finances of the government. Only a day after the grain edict the hurried

minister began to issue ordinances for economy in state expenditures, for the

more efficient collection of taxes, and stricter control of the farmers general;

for transferring to the state the hitherto private monopolies in diligences,

post carriages, and the manufacture of gunpowder. He proposed, but had

no time to establish, a "Caisse d'Escompte," a bank to discount commercial

CHAP.XXXIV) THE FINAL GLORY 86l

paper, receive deposits, make loans, and issue notes payable on presentation;

this bank served as a model for the Bank of France organized by Napoleon

in 1800. By the end of 1775 Turgot had reduced expenses by 66,000,000

livres, and had lowered the interest on the national debt from 8,700,000 to

3,000,000 livres. The credit of the government was so restored that he was

able to borrow 60,000,000 livres from Dutch financiers at four per cent, and

so discharge debts on which the treasury had been paying from seven to

twelve per cent. He came close to balancing the budget, and he did this not

by raising taxes but by lessening corruption, extravagance, incompetence,

and waste.

In these and other reforms he received little aid from Maurepas, but much

from Chretien de Malesherbes, whom we have met as protector of the Ency-

clopedic and Rousseau. Now president of the Cours des Aides (which dealt

with indirect taxes), he sent to Louis XVI (May 6, 1775) a memoir— Re-

montrance— explaining the injustices involved in the collection of taxes by

the farmers general, and warning the King of the hatred generated by their

operation. He advised a simplification and clarification of the laws; "there

are no good laws," he said, "except simple laws." The King grew fond of

Malesherbes, and made him minister of the King's Household (July, 1775).

The aging liberal urged Louis to support Turgot, but advised Turgot not to

attempt too many reforms at once, for each reform would arouse new foes.

The Controller General answered, "What would you have me do? The

needs of the people are enormous, and in my family we die of gout at

fifty." 75

In January, 1776, Turgot startled France with six edicts issued in the

name of the King. One extended to Paris the freedom of trade in grain, and

ended a multitude of offices connected with that trade; the functionaries so

dislodged joined his enemies. Two of the edicts canceled or modified the

taxes on cattle and tallow; the peasants rejoiced. Another abolished the cor-

vee— the twelve or fifteen days of unpaid labor exacted from peasants yearly

to maintain bridges, canals, and roads; henceforth this work was to be paid

for by a tax upon all non-ecclesiastical property; the peasants rejoiced, the

nobles complained. Turgot aroused further resentment by the preamble that

he placed in the mouth of the King:

With the exception of a small number of provinces, . . . nearly all the roads

of the kingdom have been built by the unpaid labor of the poorest part of our

subjects. The whole burden has therefore fallen on those who have nothing

but their hands and are interested only in a very secondary degree in the roads;

those really interested are the landowners, almost all of them privileged per-

sons, the value of whose property is increased by the roads. When the poor

man alone is forced to maintain these roads, when he is forced to give his

time and his work without pay, the only resource he has against misery and

hunger is taken from him to make him work for the profit of the rich. 76

When the Paris Parlement indicated that it would refuse to register this

edict, Turgot almost proclaimed class war:

862 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

While as unfriendly to despotism as ever, I shall say constantly to the King,

to the Parlement, and, if necessary, to the whole nation, that this is one of those

matters that must be decided by the absolute will of the King, and for this

reason: at bottom this is a lawsuit between the rich and the poor. Now, of

what is the Parlement made up? Of men wealthy as compared with the

masses, and all noble, since their offices carry nobility. The court, whose

clamor is so powerful— of what is it composed? Of great lords, the majority of

whom own estates that will be subject to the tax. . . . Consequently neither

the remonstrance of the Parlement . . . nor even the clamor of the court

should in any wise prejudice the case. ... So long as the people shall have no

voice in the parlement s the King, after hearing these, must judge for himself,

and he must judge in favor of the people, for this class is the most unhappy. 77

The last of the six edicts abolished the guilds. These had become an aris-

tocracy of labor, for they controlled nearly all the crafts, they limited ad-

mission by requiring high entrance fees, and they still further restricted

eligibility to mastership. They obstructed invention, and hampered trade by

tolls or embargoes on competitive products entering their commune. The

rising class of entrepreneurs— men who supplied initiative, capital, and organ-

ization, but demanded liberty to hire any worker, whether guildsman or not,

and to sell their wares in any market they could reach— denounced the

guilds as monopolies in restraint of trade; and Turgot, anxious to promote

industrial development by freeing invention, enterprise, and commerce, felt

that the national economy would benefit by the suppression of the guilds.

The preamble of this edict read, in part:

In almost all towns the exercise of the different arts and trades was centered

in the hands of a small number of masters united in guilds, who alone had the

freedom to manufacture and sell the articles of the particular industry of

which they had the exclusive privilege. He who devoted himself to any part

or trade could not exercise it freely until after attaining the mastership, to

which he could be admitted only by submitting to long, tedious, and superfluous

tasks, and at the cost of multiplied exactions depriving him of a part of the

capital requisite for establishing a business or for fitting up a workshop. Those

who could not afford these expenses were reduced to a precarious existence

under the sway of the masters, with no choice but to live in penury, ... or to

carry to some foreign land an industry that might have been useful to their

country. 78

So far as we know, these charges against the guilds were justified. But

Turgot went on to prohibit all masters, journeymen, and apprentices from

forming any union or association. 79 He believed completely in freedom of

enterprise and trade, and did not foresee that the right of organization might

be the only means by which the workers could pool their individual weak-

ness into a collective strength capable of bargaining with organized em-

ployers. He felt that in the long run all classes would benefit by the libera-

tion of the businessman from feudal, guild, and governmental restraints on

enterprise. All persons in France— even foreigners— were declared free to en-

gage in any industry or trade.

On February 9, 1776, the six edicts were submitted to the Paris Parle-

ment. It agreed to only one, which abolished certain minor offices; it refused

CHAP. XXXIV ) THE FINAL GLORY 863

to approve or register the rest, and it especially opposed, as an infringement

of feudal rights, 80 the ending of the corvee. By this vote the Parlement,

which had professed to protect the people against the king, declared itself

the ally and voice of the nobility. Voltaire entered the lists with a pamphlet

attacking the corvee and the Parlement and supporting Turgot; Parlement

ordered the pamphlet suppressed. Some of the King's ministers defended

the Parlement; Louis, in a moment of fortitude, rebuked them, saying, "I see

well that there is no one here but Monsieur Turgot and myself who love the

people." 81 On March 1 2 he summoned the Parlement to a "bed of justice ,,

at Versailles, and ordered it to register the edicts. Parades of workingmen

celebrated Turgot's victory.

Exhausted by repeated crises, the Controller General slowed his revolu-

tion. When he extended freedom of internal trade to the wine industry

(April, 1776) only the monopolists complained. He urged the King to es-

tablish religious liberty. He instructed Du Pont de Nemours to draw up a

plan for electoral assemblies in each parish, chosen by men who owned land

to the value of six hundred livres or more; these local assemblies would elect

representatives to a cantonal assembly, which would elect representatives to

a provincial assembly, which would elect deputies to a national assembly.

Believing that France was not ready for democracy, Turgot proposed to

give these assemblies only advisory and administrative functions; legislative

power would remain solely in the king; but through these assemblies the

ruler would be informed of the condition and needs of the realm. Turgot

also offered the King a sketch of universal education as the necessary prelude

to an enlightened citizenship. "Sire," he said, "I venture to assert that in two

years your nation will no longer be recognizable, and through enlighten-

ment and good morals ... it will rise above all other states." 82 The minis-

ter had no time, the King had no money, to bring these ideas to fulfillment.

Turgot's edicts— and their preambles— had inflamed all the influential

classes against him except the merchants and manufacturers, who flourished

in the new freedom. Actually he was attempting to bring about peaceably

that emancipation of the businessman which was the basic economic result

of the Revolution. Yet some merchants secretly opposed him because he had

interfered with their monopolies. The nobility opposed him because he

wished to put all taxes upon the land, and was setting the poor against the

rich. The Parlement hated him for persuading the King to override its vetoes.

The clergy distrusted him as an unbeliever who rarely went to Mass and

was advocating religious liberty. The farmers general fought him because

he wished to replace them with governmental agents in collecting indirect

taxes. Financiers resented his getting loans from abroad at four per cent.

Courtiers disliked him because he frowned upon their extravagance, their

pensions, and their sinecures. Maurepas, his superior in the ministry, looked

with no pleasure upon the growing power and independence of the Con-

troller General of Finance. "Turgot," wrote the Swedish ambassador, "finds

himself the butt of a most formidable coalition." 83

Marie Antoinette had at first favored Turgot, and had tried to adjust her

864 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIV

expenditures to his economies. But soon she resumed (till 1777) her extrava-

gances in gowns and gifts. Turgot did not conceal his dismay at her drafts

upon the treasury. To please the Polignacs the Queen had secured the ap-

pointment of their friend the Comte de Guines to the French embassy in

London; there he engaged in questionable financial dealings; Turgot joined

Vergennes in advising the King to recall him; the Queen vowed revenge.

Louis XVI had his own reasons for losing confidence in his revolutionary

minister. The King respected the Church, the nobility, even the parlements;

these institutions had been mortised in tradition and sanctified by time; to

disturb them was to loosen the foundations of the state; but Turgot had

alienated them all. Could Turgot be right and all the others wrong? Louis

secretly complained about his minister: "Only his friends have merit, and

only his own ideas are good." 84 Almost daily the Queen or a courtier sought

to influence him against the Controller. When Turgot appealed to him to

resist these pressures and Louis made no answer, Turgot returned to his

home and wrote to the King (April 30, 1776) a letter that sealed his own

fate:

Sire:

I will not conceal from you the fact that my heart is deeply wounded by

your Majesty's silence last Sunday. ... So long as I could hope to retain your

Majesty's esteem by doing right, nothing was too hard for me. Today what is

my recompense? Your Majesty sees how impossible it is for me to make head

against those who injure me by the evil they do me, and by the good they

keep me from doing by thwarting all my measures; yet your Majesty gives me

neither aid nor consolation. ... I venture to say, Sire, that I have not de-

served this. . . .

Your Majesty ... has pleaded the lack of experience. I know that at the

age of twenty-two, and in your position, you have not the training in the

judging of men which private individuals obtain from habitual association with

equals; but will you have more experience in a week, in a month? And is your

mind not to be made up until this slow experience has come? . . .

Sire, I owe to M. Maurepas the place your Majesty has given me; never shall

I forget it, never shall I be wanting in due deference to him. . . . But, Sire, do

you know how weak is the character of M. de Maurepas?— how much he is

governed by the ideas of those around him? Everyone knows that Mme. de

Maurepas, who has infinitely less mind but much more character, constantly

inspires his will. ... It is this weakness that moves him to fall in so readily

with the clamor of the court against me, and that deprives me of almost all

power in my department. . . .

Forget not, Sire, that it was weakness that brought to the block the head of

Charles I, . . . that made Louis XIII a crowned slave, . . . and that brought

about all the misfortunes of the last reign. Sire, you are deemed weak, and

upon occasion I have feared lest your character had this defect; nevertheless I

have seen you, upon other more difficult occasions, exhibit genuine courage.

. . . Your Majesty cannot, without being untrue to yourself, yield out of

complaisance for M. de Maurepas. . . , 85

To this letter the King made no reply. He felt that now he had to choose

between Maurepas and Turgot, and that Turgot was asking almost complete

submission of the government to his own will. On May 12, 1 776, he sent Tur-

got an order to resign. On the same day, yielding to the Queen and the

CHAP. XXXIV ) THE FINAL GLORY 865

Polignacs, he made the Comte de Guines a duke. Malesherbes, hearing of

Turgot's removal, handed in his own resignation. "You are a fortunate man,"

Louis told him; "would that I too could leave my post." 86 Soon most of Tur-

got's appointees were discharged. Maria Theresa was shocked by these devel-

opments, and agreed with Frederick and Voltaire that the fall of Turgot

presaged the collapse of France; 87 she deplored the part that her daughter had

played in the matter, and would not believe the Queen's disclaimer of respon-

sibility. Voltaire wrote to Laharpe: "Nothing is left for me but to die, now

that M. Turgot has gone." 88

After his dismissal Turgot lived quietly in Paris, studying mathematics,

physics, chemistry, and anatomy. He often saw Franklin, and wrote for him

a Memoir e sur Fitnpdt. His gout became so severe that after 1778 he walked

only with crutches. He died on March 18, 1781, after years of pain and dis-

appointment. He could not foresee that the nineteenth century would accept

and implement most of his ideas. Malesherbes summed him up lovingly: "He

had the head of Francis Bacon and the heart of L'Hopital." 89

vi. necker's first ministry: 1776-81

Turgot was succeeded as controller of finances by Clugny de Nuis, who

re-established the corvee and many guilds, and did not enforce the grain

edicts. The Dutch bankers canceled their agreement to lend France sixty

million livres at four per cent; and the new minister discovered no better

way of luring money into the treasury than by establishing a national lot-

tery (June 30, 1776). When Clugny died (October), the bankers of Paris

persuaded the King to call to his service the man who had been the ablest

critic of Turgot.

Jacques Necker was a Protestant, born at Geneva in 1732. His father,

professor of law in the Geneva Academy, sent him to Paris to work as a clerk

in the bank of Isaac Vernet. When Vernet retired he advanced some funds

to Necker to start a bank of his own. Necker pooled his resources with an-

other Swiss; they prospered through loans to the government and specula-

tion in grains. At the age of thirty-two Necker was rich, dignified, and

unmarried. His desire now was not for more wealth but for high place, a

chance for distinguished service and national renown. For this he needed a

wife and a home as a point (Vappui, or base of operations. He courted the

widowed Marquise de Vermenoux; she refused him, but brought from

Geneva the pretty and talented Suzanne Curchod, who had recently escaped

marriage with Edward Gibbon. Necker fell in love with Suzanne, and

married her in 1764. Their mutual devotion through an eventful life is one

of the bright colors in the kaleidoscope of that troubled age. They made a

home over his bank, and there she opened a salon (1765) to which she in-

vited writers and men of affairs, hoping that these friendships would smooth

and illuminate her husband's way.

Necker himself itched to write. He began in 1773 with an Eloge de Col-

866 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

bert 9 which was crowned by the French Academy. Now he retired from

business, and entered the political fray with that essay Sur la Legislation des

grains which countered Turgot's policy of laissez-faire. The little book won

praise from Diderot, who may have relished a paragraph in which the

banker (who had read Rousseau) spoke like a socialist. Necker assailed

the power of the owning class, in exchange for labor, to pay the lowest pos-

sible wage, that which merely suffices for strict necessaries. . . . Almost all

civil institutions have been made by property owners. One might say that a

small number of men, having divided the earth among themselves, made laws

as a union and guarantee against the multitude. . . . The latter could say: "Of

what import to us are your laws of property?— we have no property; or your

laws of justice?— we have nothing to defend; or of liberty?— if we do not work

tomprrow we shall die!" 90

On October 22, 1776, on Maurepas' recommendation, Louis XVI ap-

pointed Necker "director of the Royal Treasury." It was an apologetic

appellation. Some prelates protested against letting a Swiss Protestant rule

the nation's money; Maurepas replied, "If the clergy will pay the debts of

the state they can share in choosing the ministers." 91 To cover the reality a

French Catholic, Taboureau de Reau, was made controller general of finance

as formally Necker's superior. Clerical opposition subsided as Necker made

his piety conspicuous. On June 29, 1777, Taboureau resigned, and Necker

was named director general of finance. He refused any salary; on the con-

trary, he lent to the treasury two million livres of his own. 92 He was still

denied the title of minister, and was not admitted to the Royal Council.

He did well within the limits of his character and his power. He had been

trained to deal with problems of banking rather than of state; he could

multiply money more successfully than he could manage men. In the finan-

cial administration he established better order, accountability, and economy;

he abolished over five hundred sinecures and superfluous posts. Having the

confidence of the financial community, he was able to float loans that

brought to the treasury 148,000,000 livres within a year. He promoted some

minor reforms, reducing inequities in taxation, improving hospitals, and or-

ganizing pawnshops to lend money to the poor at low interest. He continued

Turgot's endeavors to check the expenditures of the court, the King's

household, and the Queen. The collection of indirect taxes was restored to

the farmers general (1780), but Necker reduced their number, and sub-

jected them to sharper scrutiny and control. He prevailed upon Louis XVI

to allow the establishment of provincial assemblies in Berry, Grenoble, and

Montauban, and he set an important precedent by arranging that in these

gatherings the representatives of the Third Estate (the middle and lower

classes) should equal those of the nobility and the clergy combined. The

King, however, chose the members of these assemblies, and allowed them

no legislative authority. Necker won a substantial victory by inducing the

King to free all remaining serfs on the royal domain, and to invite all feudal

lords to do likewise. When they refused, Necker advised Louis to abolish

all serfdom in France, with indemnities to the masters, but the King, im-

CHAP. XXXIV) THE FINAL GLORY 867

prisoned in his traditions, replied that property rights were too basic an in-

stitution to be annulled by a decree. 93 In 1780, again on Necker's prompting,

he ordered an end to judicial torture, the disuse of subterranean prisons, and

the separation of prisoners duly convicted of crimes from those not yet

tried, and both of these groups from those arrested for debt. These and other

achievements of Necker's first ministry deserve more acknowledgment than

they have generally received. If we ask why he did not cut deeper and

faster, we should remember that Turgot had been censured for going too

fast and making too many simultaneous enemies. Necker was criticized for

floating loans instead of raising taxes, but he felt that the people had been

taxed enough.

Mme. Campan, always close to the developing drama, summarized well

the attitude of the King to his ministers: "Turgot, Alalesherbes, and Necker

judged that this prince, modest and simple in his habits, would willingly

sacrifice the royal prerogative to the solid greatness of his people. His heart

disposed him to reform, but his prejudices and fears, and the clamor of pious

and privileged persons, intimidated him, and made him abandon plans which

his love for the people had suggested." 94 Yet he dared to say, in a public

proclamation (1780) probably prepared by Necker, that "the taxes of the

poorest part of our subjects" had "increased in proportion much more than

all the rest," and he expressed his "hopes that rich people will not think

themselves wronged when, put back to the general level [of taxation], they

will have to meet the charges which long since they should have shared more

equally with others." 95 He shuddered at the thought of Voltaire, but his

liberal spirit, unwittingly, had been formed by the work that Voltaire, Rous-

seau, and the philosophes in general had done to expose old abuses and to stir

to new life the humanitarian sentiments formerly associated with Christian-

ity. In this first half of his reign Louis XVI began reforms which, if con-

tinued and gradually expanded, might have averted revolution. And it was

under this weak king that France, despoiled and humiliated by England

under his predecessors, struck boldly and with success at proud Britain, and,

in the process, helped to free America.

VII. FRANCE AND AMERICA

Philosophy for once agreed with diplomacy: the writings of Voltaire,

Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, and a hundred others had prepared the French

mind to support colonial as well as intellectual liberation, and many Ameri-

can leaders— Washington, Franklin, Jefferson— were sons of the French

Enlightenment. So, when Silas Deane came to France (March, 1776) to seek

a loan for the rebellious colonies, public opinion was strongly sympathetic.

The ebullient Beaumarchais sent memoir after memoir to Vergennes, urging

him to help America.

Vergennes was a nobleman who believed in monarchy and aristocracy,

and was no friend of republics or revolutions; but he longed to avenge

868 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

France against England. He would not sanction any open aid to America,

for the British navy was still stronger than the French despite Sartine's out-

lays, and in open war it could soon destroy French shipping. But he advised

the King to permit some secret aid. If (he argued) Britain crushed the revolt,

it would have, in or near America, a fleet capable of taking at will the French

and Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. If the revolt could be prolonged,

France would be strengthened, England would be weakened, and the French

navy could complete its renewal. Louis trembled at the thought of helping

a revolution, and he warned Vergennes against any overt act that might lead

to war with England. 96

In April Vergennes wrote to Beaumarchais:

We will secretly give you one million livres. We will try to obtain an equal

sum from Spain. [This was obtained.] With these two millions you will estab-

lish a commercial firm, and at your risk and peril you will supply the Ameri-

cans with arms, munitions, equipment, and all other things that they will need

to maintain the war. Our arsenal will deliver to you arms and munitions, but

you will either replace them or pay for them. You will not demand money

from the Americans, since they have none, but you will ask in return the

produce of their soil, which we will help you sell in this country. 97

With this money Beaumarchais bought cannon, muskets, gunpowder, cloth-

ing, and equipment for 25,000 men; these stores he sent to a port where

Deane had assembled and refitted several American privateers. The arrival

or assurance of this aid encouraged the colonists to issue their Declaration of

Independence (July 4, 1776). Translated into French, and circulated with

the tacit consent of the French government, this pronouncement was greeted

with enthusiasm and joy by the philosophes, and by Rousseau's disciples,

who recognized in it some echoes of the Contrat social. In September the

American Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee to proceed

as commissioners to France, join Deane, and seek not only more supplies,

but, if possibleTopen alliance.

It was by no means Franklin's first appearance in Europe. In 1724, not yet

nineteen, he went to England; he worked as a printer, published a defense

of atheism, 98 returned to Philadelphia and deism, married, joined the Free-

masons, and won international renown as inventor and scientist. In 1757 he

was sent to England to represent the Pennsylvania Assembly in a tax dispute.

He stayed in England five years, met Johnson and other notables, visited

Scotland, met Hume and Robertson, received a degree from the University

of St. Andrews, and was henceforth Dr. Franklin. He was again in England

from 1766 to 1775, addressed the House of Commons in opposition to the

Stamp Tax, attempted conciliation, and went back to America when he saw

that war was imminent. He shared in drafting the Declaration of Independ-

ence.

He reached France in December, 1776, bringing two grandchildren with

him. He was now seventy years old, and looked like wisdom itself; all the

world knows that massive head, the sparse white hair, the face like the full

moon at its beaming rise. The scientists covered him with honors, the phi-

CHAP. XXXIV ) THE FINAL GLORY 869

losophers and the physiocrats claimed him as their own, the admirers of an-

cient Rome saw in him Cincinnatus, Scipio Africanus, and both Catos, all

reborn. The ladies of Paris dressed their hair in a curly mass to imitate his

beaver cap; doubtless they had heard of his many amours. The courtiers

were startled by his simplicity of manners, dress, and speech; but instead of

his seeming ridiculous in his almost rustic garb, it was their own display of

velvet, silk, and lace that appeared now as a vain attempt to cover reality

with show. Yet they too accepted him, for he paraded no Utopias, talked

with reason and good sense, and showed full awareness of the difficulties

and the facts. He realized that he was a Protestant, a deist, and a republican

seeking help from a Catholic country and a pious King.

He went about his task cautiously. He offended no one, delighted every-

one. He paid his respects not only to Vergennes but to Mirabeau pere and

Mme. du Deffand; his bald head shone at the salons and at the Academie des

Sciences. A young noble, the Due de La Rochefoucauld, was proud to be

his secretary. Crowds ran after him when he appeared in the streets. His

books, translated and published as Oeuvres completes, had a wide welcome;

one volume, La Science du bonhomme Richard (Poor Richard's Almanac),

went through eight editions in three years. Franklin attended the Neuf

Soeurs Lodge of the Freemasons, and was made an honorary member; the

men he met there helped him to win France to an alliance with America.

But he could not ask at once for open support from the government. Wash-

ington's army was in retreat before Sir William Howe, and its morale

seemed shattered. While waiting for more propitious events Franklin settled

down in Passy, a pleasant suburb of Paris, and studied, negotiated, wrote

propaganda under pseudonyms, entertained Turgot, Lavoisier, Morellet,

and Cabanis, and flirted with Mme. d'Houdetot at Sannois and Mme. Hel-

vetius at Auteuil; for these women had a charm that made them agelessly

attractive.

Meanwhile Beaumarchais and others were sending supplies to the colonies,

and French army officers were enlisting for service under Washington. Silas

Deane wrote in 1776: "I am well-nigh harassed to death with applications of

officers to go out to America. . . . Had I ten ships here I could fill them

all with passengers for America. ,,99 All the world knows how the Marquis

de Lafayette, nineteen years old, left a devoted and pregnant wife to go

(April, 1777) and serve without pay in the colonial army. He confessed to

Washington, "The one thing for which I thirst is glory." 100 In that quest he

faced many dangers and humiliations, was wounded at Brandywine, shared

the hardships of Valley Forge, and earned warm affection from the usually

reserved Washington.

On October 17, 1777, a force of five thousand British soldiers and three

thousand German mercenaries, coming down from Canada, was over-

whelmed at Saratoga by a colonial army of twenty thousand men, and sur-

rendered. When news of this American victory reached France the plea of

Franklin, Deane, and Lee for an alliance found more acceptance among the

King's advisers. Necker opposed it, unwilling to see his almost balanced

870 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXIV

budget upset by the expenses of a war. Vergennes and Maurepas won reluc-

tant consent from Louis XVI by warning him that England— long since aware

and resentful of French aid to America— might make peace with her colonies

and turn her full military force against France. On February 6, 1778, the

French government signed two treaties with "the United States of Amer-

ica": one established relations of trade and assistance, the other secretly

stipulated that if England should declare war upon France the signatories

would join in defense; neither would make peace without the other's consent,

and both would continue to fight England until American independence

had been won.

On March 20 Louis received the American envoys; Franklin put on silk

stockings for this occasion. In April John Adams arrived to replace Deane;

he lived with Franklin at Passy, but found the old philosopher so occupied

with women that little time was left for official business. He quarreled with

Franklin, tried to have him recalled, failed, and returned to America. Frank-

lin was made minister plenipotentiary to France (September, 1779). In 1780,

aged seventy-four, he proposed, in vain, to Mme. Helvetius, aged sixty-one.

The war was popular with almost every Frenchman except Necker. He

had to raise the great sums that France lent to America: a million livres in

1776, three million more in 1778, another million in 1779, four in 1780, four

in 1 78 1, six in 1782. 101 He entered into private negotiations with Lord North

(December 1, 1779) in the hope of finding a formula of peace. 102 In addition

to these loans he had to raise money to finance the French government,

army, navy, and court. Altogether he borrowed, from bankers and the pub-

lic, 530,000,000 livres. 103 He coaxed the clergy into lending fourteen million,

repayable in installments of a million livres a year. He still refused to raise

taxes, though the prosperity of the upper classes might have made this com-

paratively painless; his successors were to complain that he left to them this

unavoidable necessity. The financiers favored him because he allowed them,

on their loans, the high interest rates which they demanded on the ground

that they were running increasing risks of never being repaid.

To foster confidence in the financial community, Necker, with the King's

consent, published in January, 1781, a Compte rendu au Roi y which pur-

ported to inform the King and the nation of the government's revenues and

expenses. It brightened the picture by excluding military outlays and other

"extraordinary" charges, and ignoring the national debt. The Compte rendu

was bought by the public at the rate of thirty thousand copies in twelve

months. Necker was acclaimed as a wizard of finance who had saved the

government from bankruptcy. Catherine the Great asked Grimm to assure

Necker of her "infinite admiration for his book and for his talents." 104 But

the court was angry that the Account Rendered to the King had exposed

so many fiscal abuses of the past, and so many pensions that went out from

the treasury. Some attacked the document as merely a eulogy of the minis-

ter by himself. Maurepas became as jealous of Necker as he had been of

Turgot, and joined several others in recommending his dismissal. The

Queen, though she had been vexed by Necker's economies, defended him,

CHAP.XXXIV) THE FINAL GLORY 87 1

but Vergennes called him a revolutionist, 105 and the intendants, who feared

that Necker planned to undermine them by establishing more provincial

assemblies, joined in the cry and hunt. Necker contrived his own fall by de-

claring that he would resign unless given the full title and authority of a

minister, with a seat on the Conseil du Roi. Maurepas told the King that if

this were done all the other ministers would abandon their posts. Louis

yielded, and let Necker go (May 19, 178 1). All Paris except the court

mourned his fall. Joseph II sent condolences; Catherine invited him to come

and direct the finances of Russia. 106

On October 12, 1779, Spain joined France against England, and the com-

bined French and Spanish fleets, 140 ships of the line, now almost equaled

the 150 vessels of the British navy, 107 and interrupted Britannia's rule of the

waves. This change in the balance of naval power vitally affected the Ameri-

can war. The main British army in America, seven thousand men under

Lord Cornwallis, held a fortified position at Yorktown on the York River

near Chesapeake Bay. Lafayette with five thousand men and Washington

with eleven thousand (including three thousand Frenchmen under the

Comte de Rochambeau) had converged on Yorktown and had captured all

feasible land approaches. On September 5, 1781, a French fleet under the

Comte de Grasse defeated an English squadron in the bay, and then shut off

all escape by water for Cornwallis' outnumbered force. Having exhausted

his provisions, Cornwallis surrendered with all his men (October 19, 1781).

France was able to say that de Grasse, Lafayette, and Rochambeau had

played major roles in what proved to be the decisive event of the war.

England asked for terms. Shelburne sent separate missions to the French

government and to the American envoys in France, hoping to play one ally

against the other. Vergennes had already ( 1781 ) meditated peace with Eng-

land on the basis of partitioning most of North America among England,

France, and Spain. 108 He entered into an understanding with Spain to keep

the Mississippi Valley under European control. 109 In November, 1782, he

proposed to support the English in their endeavor to exclude the American

states from the Newfoundland fisheries. 110 These negotiations were quite in

line with diplomatic precedents, but the American envoys, learning of them,

felt warranted in operating with similar secrecy. Vergennes and Franklin

agreed that each ally might deal separately with England, but that neither

should sign any treaty of peace without the other's consent. 111

The American negotiators— chiefly John Jay and Franklin— played the

diplomatic game brilliantly. They won for the United States not only inde-

pendence but also access to the Newfoundland fisheries, half of the Great

Lakes, and all the vast and rich area between the Alleghenies and the

Mississippi; these were far better terms than the American Congress had

expected to obtain. On November 30, 1782, Jay, Franklin, and Adams

signed a preliminary treaty with England. Formally this violated the agree-

ment with Vergennes, but it stipulated that it was not to have validity until

England had made peace with France. Vergennes complained, then accepted

the situation. On September 3, 1783, the definitive treaty was signed— "in

872 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXIV

the name of the most Holy and undivided Trinity" 112 — between England

and America at Paris, between England, France, and Spain at Versailles.

Franklin remained in France as United States ambassador till 1785. When

he died in Philadelphia, April 17, 1790, the French Constituent Assembly

wore mourning for three days.

The French government was made bankrupt by the war, and that bank-

ruptcy led to the Revolution. Altogether France had spent a billion livres

on the conflict, and the interest on the national debt was dragging the treas-

ury down day by day toward insolvency. Nevertheless that debt was an affair

between the government and the rich; it hardly affected the people, many

of whom had prospered from the stimulation of industry. The monarchy

was critically injured, but not the nation; otherwise how could history ex-

plain the success with which the economy and the armies of Revolutionary

France withstood half of Europe from 1792 to 1815?

Certainly the spirit of France was uplifted. Statesmen saw in the peace of

1783 a triumphant resurrection from the debasement of 1763. The philo-

sophes hailed the result as a victory for their views; and indeed, said de

Tocqueville, "The Americans seemed to have executed what our writers

had conceived." 113 Many Frenchmen saw in the achievement of the colonies

an inspiring presage of democracy spreading through Europe. Democratic

ideas infected even the aristocracy and the parlements. The Declaration of

Rights issued by the Virginia constitutional convention on June 12, 1776,

and the Bill of Rights added to the American Constitution, became part

models for the Declaration of the Rights of Man promulgated by the French

Constituent Assembly on August 26, 1789.

It was the final glory, the culminating chivalry, of feudal France that it

died in helping to establish democracy in America. It is true that most French

statesmen thought in terms of revitalizing France. But the enthusiasm of

nobles like Lafayette and Rochambeau was real; they risked their lives time

and again in serving the newborn state. "I was far from being the only one,"

wrote the young Comte de Segur, "whose heart palpitated at the sound of

the awakening of liberty, struggling to shake off the yoke of arbitrary

power." 114 The famous surrender of feudal rights by the aristocrats in the

Constituent Assembly (August 4, 1789) was here prefigured and prepared.

It was a brave hara-kiri. France gave money and blood to America, and re-

ceived in return a new and powerful impulse to freedom.

CHAPTER XXXV

Death and the Philosophers

1774-1807

I. VOLTAIRE FINALE

1. Twilight in Ferney

HE was eighty in 1774. He had some fainting spells in these years; we

call them little strokes, he called them petites avertissements. He

shrugged them off, being long since accustomed to dying; he lived on and

savored the adulation of kings and queens. Catherine the Great called him

"the most illustrious man of our age." 1 Frederick the Great reported in

1775: "People tear at one another in the struggle for the busts of Voltaire

at the manufactory of porcelain" in Berlin, "where they do not turn them

out fast enough to meet the demand." 2 Ferney had long since become a goal

of pilgrimage for intellectual Europe; now it was almost a religious shrine.

Hear Mme. Suard after her visit in 1775: "I have seen M. de Voltaire. The

transports of St. Theresa never surpassed those which I experienced on

seeing this great man. It seemed to me that I was in the presence of a god, a

god cherished and adored, to whom I had at last been able to show all my

gratitude and all my respect." 3 When he passed through Geneva in 1776 he

was nearly stifled by the enthusiastic crowd that surrounded him. 4

He continued, even in his eighties, to take an interest in politics and litera-

ture. He celebrated the accession of Louis XVI with an Bloge historique de

la raison in which, by the device of prediction, he suggested some reforms

that might endear the new ruler to posterity:

The laws will be made uniform. . . . Pluralities [several benefices held by

one ecclesiastic], superfluous expenditure, will be cut away. . . . To the poor

who work hard will be given the immense riches of certain idle men who

have taken a vow of poverty. The marriages of a hundred thousand [Protes-

tant] families useful to the state will no longer be regarded as concubinage,

nor the children held illegitimate. . . . Minor offenses will no longer be pun-

ished as great crimes. . . . Torture will no longer be employed. . . . There

will cease to be two powers [state and Church], because there can exist but

one—that of the king's law in a monarchy, that of the nation in a republic. . . .

Lastly, we shall dare to pronounce the word tolerance?

Louis accomplished many of these reforms, barring the ecclesiastical. Sin-

cerely pious, and convinced that the loyalty of the Church was an indispen-

sable support of his throne, he deplored the influence of Voltaire. In July,

1774, his government instructed the intendant of Burgundy to keep watch

on the aged heretic, and to seize all his papers immediately after his death;

Marie Antoinette sympathized with Voltaire, wept at a performance of his

873

874 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXV

Tancrede, and said she would like to "embrace the author"; 6 he sent her

some pretty verses.

He had an optimistic spell when his friend Turgot was made controller

general of finance; but when Turgot was dismissed he fell into a dark Pas-

calian pessimism about human affairs. He recovered happiness by adopting

a daughter. Reine Philiberte de Varicourt was introduced to him in 1775 as

a girl whose family, too poor to provide her with a dowry, was planning to

send her to a nunnery. Her innocent beauty warmed the old man's bones;

he took her into his menage, called her "Belle et Bonne," and found a hus-

band for her— the young and moneyed Marquis de Villette. They were mar-

ried in 1777, and spent their honeymoon at Ferney. "My young lovers are

a joy to see," he wrote; "they are working night and day to make a little

philosopher for me." 7 The childless octogenarian rejoiced at the thought of

being a father, if only by proxy.

Meanwhile he composed his last drama, Irene, and sent it to the Comedie-

Frangaise. Its reception (January, 1778) created a problem. The custom of

the company was to stage each play in t;he order of its acceptance; two other

dramas had been received and approved before Voltaire's— one by Jean-

Francois de Laharpe, one by Nicolas Barthe. Both authors at once waived

their prior rights to performance. Barthe wrote to the company:

A new play by Monsieur de Voltaire has been read to you. You were on

the point of considering U Homme personnel. There is only one thing for you

to do: do not think of my play any longer. I am aware ... of the prescribed

procedure. But what writer would dare to call upon the rule in a case like

this? Monsieur stands above the law like a king. If I am not to have the honor

of making my contribution to the pleasure of the public, the least I can do is

not to stand in the way of the public delight that will surely be occasioned by

a new drama from the pen that created Zaire and Merope. I hope you will stage

this play as soon as possible. May its author, like Sophocles, continue to write

tragedies until he is a hundred years old, and may he die as you, messieurs, live

—flooded with applause. 8

When news of this reached Voltaire he played lovingly with the idea of

going to Paris to direct the staging of his play. After all, there was no official

or express prohibition of his coming to Paris. What if the clergy should

attack him in their pulpits? He was accustomed to that. What if they per-

suaded the King to send him to the Bastille? Well, he was accustomed to

that too. What a joy it would be to see the great city again, now the capital

of the Enlightenment! How it must have changed since his last flight from

it twenty-eight years ago! And besides, Mme. Denis, who had long since

tired of Ferney, had often begged him to take her back to Paris. The Marquis

de Villette offered to put him up in comfort in his hotel on the Rue de

Beaune. A dozen messages from Paris cried out: Come!

He decided to go. If the trip killed him it would only advance the inevi-

table triflingly; it was time to die. The servants of his household, the care-

takers of his farm, the peasants on his land, the workers in his industrial

colony, protested and mourned; he promised to return in six weeks, but they

were sadly sure that they would never see him again; and what successor

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 875

would treat them as kindly as he had done? When the caravan left Ferney

(February 5, 1778) his dependents gathered about him; many of them wept,

and he himself could not hold back his tears. Five days later, after a three-

hundred-mile trip, he sighted Paris.

2. Apotheosis

At the city gates the officials checked the carriage for contraband. "By

my faith, gentlemen," Voltaire assured them, "I believe there is nothing here

contraband except myself." 9 Wagniere, his secretary, assures us that his

master "had enjoyed all the way the best of health. I never saw him in a more

agreeable humor; his gaiety was delightful." 10

Rooms had been prepared for him in the residence of M. de Villette at

the corner of the Rue de Beaune and the Quai des Theatins on the left bank

of the Seine. Immediately after alighting from his coach Voltaire walked

along the quay to the nearby home of his friend d'Argental, now seventy-

eight years old. The Count was not at home, but he soon appeared at the

Hotel Villette. "I have left off dying to come and see you," said Voltaire.

Another ancient friend sent a note of welcome; he replied with his usual

obituary flourish: "I arrive dead, and I wish to be revived only to throw

myself at the knees of Madame la Marquise du DefFand." 11 The Marquis de

Jaucourt brought word that Louis XVI was furious at Voltaire's coming to

Paris, but Mme. de Polignac came to assure him that Marie Antoinette would

protect him. 12 The clergy wished to have him expelled, but no official ban

forbidding Voltaire's visit could be found in the records, and Louis confined

himself to rejecting the Queen's plea that the world-famous writer be al-

lowed to present himself at court. 13

When news spread through Paris that the man who had set the intellectual

tone of the century had come out of his long exile, the room at the Hotel

Villette was turned into a veritable court and throne. On February 1 1 , it was

said, over three hundred persons called, including Gluck, Piccini, Turgot,

Talleyrand, Marmontel, and Mesdames Necker, du Barry, and du DefFand.

Franklin came with a seventeen-year-old grandson, and asked the blessing

of the patriarch for him; Voltaire raised his hands over the boy's head, and

said in English, "My child, God and liberty; remember these two words." 14

When the stream of visitors continued day after day Dr. Tronchin wrote

to the Marquis de Villette: "Voltaire is living now on his principal rather

than his interest, and his strength will soon be exhausted by such a way of

living." This note was published in the Journal de Paris on February 19,

apparently to keep the curious away. 15 Voltaire himself, at Ferney, had pre-

dicted what this triumph would cost him: "I would be dead in four days if

I had to live as a man of the world." 16

Some clergymen thought it would be a good stroke to secure his recon-

ciliation with the Catholic Church. He was half willing, for he knew that

only those who had died in the arms of the Church could be buried in con-

secrated ground; and all the cemeteries in France were consecrated ground.

876 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXV

So he welcomed a letter sent him on February 20 by Abbe Gaultier asking

for an interview. The abbe came on the twenty-first. They talked for a

while, to no known theological result; Mme. Denis begged the abbe to go;

Voltaire told him he might come again. On the twenty-fifth Voltaire suf-

fered a severe hemorrhage, spouting blood through mouth and nose when

he coughed. He bade his secretary summon Gaultier. Wagniere confesses:

"I avoided sending my letter, not wishing to have it said that M. de Voltaire

had shown weakness. I assured him that the abbe could not be found." 17

Wagniere knew that the skeptics in Paris were hoping that Voltaire would

not surrender to the Church at the last moment; and perhaps he had heard of

Frederick the Great's prediction, "He will dishonor us all." 18

Tronchin came and stopped the hemorrhage, but for the next twenty-two

days Voltaire spat blood. On the twenty-sixth he wrote to Gaultier: "I beg

you to come as soon as you can." 19 Gaultier came the next morning, found

Voltaire sleeping, and went away. On the twenty-eighth Voltaire handed

to Wagniere a confession of faith: "I die adoring God, loving my friends,

not hating my enemies, and detesting persecution." 20 Gaultier returned on

March 2; Voltaire asked to be confessed; the abbe answered that Jean de

Tersac, cure of St.-Sulpice, had required him to get a retraction before hear-

ing the confession. Wagniere protested. Voltaire asked for pen and paper,

and wrote with his own hand:

I, the undersigned, having been attacked for four months past with vomiting

blood, and being, at the age of eighty-four, no longer able to drag myself to

church; and the cure of St.-Sulpice, having wished to add to his good works

this of having sent M. l'Abbe Gaultier, priest; I have confessed myself to him;

and [declare] that if God disposes of me, I die in the Catholic religion in

which I was born, hoping in the divine mercy that it will pardon all my faults;

and that if I have ever scandalized the Church, I ask pardon of God and her.

—Signed, Voltaire, the 2nd of March, 1778, in the home of M. le Marquis de

Villette. 21

M. de Vielleville and Abbe Mignot (a nephew of Voltaire) signed the state-

ment as witnesses. Gaultier brought it to the Archbishop at Conflans (a

suburb) and to the cure of St.-Sulpice, both of whom pronounced it inade-

quate. 22 Nevertheless Gaultier prepared to administer Communion to Vol-

taire, but Voltaire suggested that this should be deferred, saying, "I am

continually coughing blood; we must guard against mingling my blood with

that of the good God." 23 We do not know in what spirit— pious or whimsical

—this was said.

On March 3 Diderot, d'Alembert, and Marmontel came to see the sick

man. When Gaultier called on that day, with instructions from his superior

to get a "less equivocal and more detailed" confession, he was told that Vol-

taire was in no condition to receive him. Gaultier returned several times, but

was each time turned away by the Swiss guard at the door. On March 4

Voltaire wrote to the cure of St.-Sulpice, apologizing for having dealt with

a subordinate. On March 1 3 the cure was received, but apparently nothing

came of this visit except an exchange of courtesies. 24 Meanwhile the hemor-

CHAP. XXXV )

DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

8 77

rhages had ceased; Voltaire felt his strength returning, and his piety declined.

On March 16 Irene was performed at the Theatre-Fran9ais. Nearly all

the court came, including the Queen. The play was not up to Voltaire's

standard, but it was acclaimed nevertheless as a marvelous production for a

man of eighty-four. Voltaire, too ill to attend, was kept notified, act by

act, of the audience's reaction; and on the seventeenth a deputation from

the French Academy brought him congratulations. By March 2 1 he felt well

enough to go out riding. He visited Suzanne de Livry, Marquise de Gou-

vernet, who had been his mistress sixty-three years before. On the twenty-

eighth he visited Turgot.

March 30 was his supreme day. In the afternoon he went to the Louvre

for a meeting of the Academy. "As he drove out from his house," reported

Denis von Visin, a Russian writer then in Paris, "the carriage was accom-

panied as far as the Academy by an endless throng of people who kept on

applauding. All the Academicians came out to meet him." 25 D'Alembert

welcomed him with a speech that brought tears to the old man's eyes. Vol-

taire was placed in the presidential chair, and was elected by acclamation

president for the April quarter. The session over, he was escorted to his car-

riage, which then moved with difficulty to the Theatre-Fran§ais through an

immense crowd that repeatedly cried out, "Vive Voltaire!"

When he entered the theater, audience and actors alike rose to greet him.

He found his way to the loge where Mme. Denis and the Marquise de Vil-

lette were awaiting him. He sat behind them; the audience appealed to him

to make himself more visible; he took a seat between the ladies. An actor

came to the loge and placed a laurel wreath on Voltaire's head; he took it off

and put it upon the head of the Marquise; she insisted on his accepting it.

Voices were heard in the audience: "Hail Voltaire!" "Hail Sophocles!"

"Honor to the philosopher who teaches men to think!" "Glory to the de-

fender of Calas!" 26 "This enthusiasm," said eyewitness Grimm, "this general

delirium, lasted more than twenty minutes." 27 Then Irene was performed

for the sixth time. At the close the audience demanded a few words from

the author; Voltaire complied. The curtain rose again; the actors had taken

a bust of Voltaire from the foyer and placed it on the stage; now they

crowned it with laurels, and Mme. Vestrice, who had played Irene, read to

Voltaire some laudatory verses:

Aux yenx de Far is enchant e

Regois en ce jour un hormnage

Que confirmera cTclge en Age

La severe posterite.

No77 y tu ri*as pas besoin

cTatteindre au noir rivage

Pour jouir de Vhonneur

de Vimmortalite.

Voltaire, regois la couronne

Que Von vient de te presenter;

11 est beau de la meriter

Quand c'est la France qui la donne. 28

Before the eyes of enchanted Paris

Receive on this day a homage

Which a severe posterity will

Confirm from age to age.

No, you need not

reach the dark shore

To enjov the honor

of immortality.

Voltaire, receive the crown

Which has been offered you;

It is beautiful to merit it

When it is France that gives it.

878 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXV

The audience asked that the verses be repeated; they were. During the ap-

plause Voltaire left his seat; all made way for him; he was led to his carriage

amid an enthusiastic multitude. Torches were brought, the coachman was

persuaded to drive slowly, and a crowd accompanied the carriage to the

Hotel de Villette. 29 So far as we know, there had never been such a scene in

all the history of French literature.

Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, who had witnessed all this, wrote: "The celebrated

old man was so thin and frail that I feared such strong emotions would

cause him mortal harm." 30 Tronchin advised him to return to Ferney as soon

as possible; Mme. Denis begged her uncle to make Paris his home. Intoxi-

cated by the reception given him, he agreed with her. He praised the people

of Paris as the gayest, most polite, enlightened, and indulgent in the world,

with the finest tastes, amusements, and arts; 31 for a moment he forgot the

"canaille." Soon he was driving about Paris looking for a house; on April 27

he bought one. Tronchin raged. "I have seen many fools in my life," he said,

"but never one madder than he. He is reckoning on a hundred years." 32

On April 7 Voltaire was taken to the "Nine Sisters" Lodge of the Free-

masons. He was initiated into membership without being required to pass

through the usual preliminary stages. A laurel wreath was put upon his head,

and the chairman made a speech: "We swear to help our brothers, but you

have been the founder of an entire colony which adores you and which

overflows with your benefactions. . . . You, much beloved brother, have

been a Freemason before you received the degree, . . . and you have ful-

filled the obligations of a Freemason before you promised to keep them." 33

On the eleventh he returned Mme. du Deffand's visit by going to see her in

her apartment at the Convent of St.-Joseph. She felt his face with her seeing

hands, and found only bones, but on the twelfth she wrote to Horace Wal-

pole: "He is as animated as ever. He is eighty-four, and verily I think he

will never die. He enjoys all his senses, none is weakened. He is a singular

being, and in truth far superior." 34 When the nuns heard of his visit they

denounced the Marquise for desecrating their cloister with the presence of

a man condemned by both Church and state. 35

On April 27 he went again to the Academy. The discussion turned on the

Abbe Delille's version of Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; Voltaire had read

the original, and complimented the abbe on his translation. He took the occa-

sion to suggest that the Dictiomry of the Academy be revised to enrich the

accredited language with hundreds of new words that had come into re-

spectable usage. On May 7 he returned to the Academy with a plan for the

new dictionary. He offered to take charge of all words beginning with A,

and proposed that each member undertake a letter. On adjourning he

thanked them "in the name of the alphabet"; the Marquis de Chastellux re-

plied, "And we thank you in the name of letters." 36 That evening he at-

tended, incognito, a performance of his Alzire; at the end of Act IV the

audience applauded the actor Larive; Voltaire joined audibly in the acclaim

by crying out, "Ah, que c'est bien!" (Ah, that is well done! ) The audience

recognized him, and for forty-five minutes the frenzy of March 30 was re-

newed.

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 879

Perhaps he did well to enjoy those last weeks of life at the expense of his

health, instead of shrinking into privacy to gain a few painful days. He

worked so ardently on his plan for a new dictionary, and drank so much

coffee— sometimes twenty-five cups in a day— that he could not sleep at

night. Meanwhile his stricture worsened; urination became more painful

and incomplete; toxic elements that should have been eliminated passed into

the blood, producing uremia. The Due de Richelieu sent him a solution of

opium, recommending it as an anodyne. Misunderstanding the directions,

Voltaire drank a whole flask of it at once (May 1 1). He fell into a delirium

that lasted forty-eight hours. His face was deformed with suffering. Tron-

chin was summoned, and gave him some relief, but for several days Voltaire

uttered no word and could hold no food. He begged to be taken back to

Ferney, but it was too late.

On May 30 Abbe Gaultier and the cure of St.-Sulpice came, prepared to

administer the final sacrament of the Church if Voltaire would add, to his

previous confession of faith, belief in the divinity of Christ. An uncorrobo-

rated story by Condorcet 37 described Voltaire as crying out, "In God's

name, do not talk to me of that man!" Laharpe reported Voltaire's response

as "Let me die in peace." Desnoiresterres accepted the usual account: the

priests found Voltaire delirious, and departed without offering him the sacra-

ment. 38 Tronchin claimed that the last hours of the philosopher were marked

by extreme agony and cries of fury. 39 Peace came at eleven o'clock that

night.

The Abbe Mignot, anticipating that his uncle's corpse would be refused

interment in a Paris cemetery, seated it upright in a carriage, and drove with

it no miles out to the Abbey of Scellieres in the village of Romilly-sur-

Seine. There a local priest gave the body the traditional religious ceremony,

sang a High Mass over it, and allowed its burial in the vault of the church.

An order of Louis XVI forebade the press to mention Voltaire's death. 40

The French Academy asked the Franciscan friars to have a Mass said for the

dead man; permission could not be obtained. Frederick the Great, as one

skeptic for another, arranged to have a Mass said for Voltaire in a Catholic

Church at Berlin; and he composed a warm eulogy of his friend and foe,

which was read to the Berlin Academy on November 26, 1778. Catherine

the Great wrote to Grimm:

I have lost two men whom I never saw, who liked me, and whom I honored-

Voltaire and Milord Chatham. Not for a very long time, perhaps never, will

they— especially the former— find their equals, and never their superiors. . . .

A few weeks ago Voltaire was publicly honored, and now they do not dare

to bury him. What a man! The first of his nation. Why did you not take

possession of his body in my name? You should have sent it to me embalmed.

He would have the most splendid tomb. ... If possible, buy his library and

his papers, including his letters. I will pay his heirs a good price. 41

Mme. Denis received 135,000 livres for the library, which was transported

to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

In July, 1 79 1, by order of the Constituent Assembly of the Revolution,

880 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXV

the remains of Voltaire were removed from the Abbey of Scellieres, were

taken to Paris, were carried through the city in a triumphal procession, and

were deposited in the Church of Ste.-Genevieve (soon to be renamed the

Pantheon). In the same year the Quai des Theatins was officially rechris-

tened the Quai de Voltaire. In May, 1814, during the Bourbon Restoration,

a group of pious ghouls secretly removed the bones of Voltaire and Rous-

seau from the Pantheon, put them in a sack, and buried them in a dumping

ground on the outskirts of Paris. No trace of them remains.

3. The Influence of Voltaire

It began with the anticlerical moments in Oedipe (17 18); it operates al-

most ecumenically today. We have seen it moving sovereigns: Frederick II,

Catherine II, Joseph II, Gustavus III, and in less degree Charles III of Spain

through Aranda, and Joseph II of Portugal through Pombal. In the intellec-

tual world of the last two hundred years it has been equaled only by the

influence of Rousseau and Darwin.

Whereas Rousseau's moral influence was toward tenderness, sentiment,

and the restoration of family life and marital fidelity, the moral influence of

Voltaire was toward humanity and justice, toward the cleansing of French

law and custom from legal abuses and barbaric cruelties; he, more than any

other individual, spurred on the humanitarian movement that became one

of the credits of the nineteenth century. To feel the influence of Voltaire

on literature we need only recall Wieland, Kellgren, Goethe, Byron, Shel-

ley, Heine, Gautier, Renan, Anatole France. Without Voltaire Gibbon

would have been impossible; and historians acknowledge his lead and inspira-

tion in giving less attention to the crimes of men and governments and more

to the development of knowledge, morals, manners, literature, and art.

Voltaire shared in begetting the French Revolution by weakening the re-

spect of the intellectual classes for the Church, and the belief of the aristoc-

racy in its feudal rights. But after 1789 Voltaire's political influence was

overwhelmed by Rousseau's. Voltaire seemed too conservative, too scornful

of the masses, too much of the seigneur; Robespierre rejected him; and for

two years the Social Contract was the bible of the Revolution. Bonaparte

felt the two influences in the usual sequence: "Until I was sixteen," he re-

called, "I would have fought for Rousseau against the friends of Voltaire;

today it is the opposite. . . . The more I read Voltaire the more I love him.

He is a man always reasonable, never a charlatan, never a fanatic." 42 After

the restoration of the Bourbons the writings of Voltaire became an instru-

ment of bourgeois thought against the revived nobility and clergy. Between

1 817 and 1829 there were twelve editions of Voltaire's collected works; in

those twelve years over three million volumes by Voltaire were sold. 43 The

Communist crusade under Marx and Engels once more gave the leadership

to Rousseau. In general the revolutionary movements since 1848 have fol-

lowed Rousseau rather than Voltaire in politics, Voltaire rather than Rous-

seau in religion.

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 88 1

The most profound and lasting influence of Voltaire has been on religious

belief. Through him and his associates France bypassed the Reformation, and

went directly from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Perhaps that is

one reason why the change was so violent; there was no pause at Protestant-

ism. Some enthusiasts felt that the Enlightenment as a whole was a deeper

reformation than that which Luther and Calvin had effected, for it chal-

lenged not merely the excesses of sacerdotalism and superstition, but the

very fundamentals of Christianity, even of all supernatural creeds. Voltaire

gathered into one voice all the varieties of anti-Catholic thought; he gave

them added force by clarity, repetition, and wit; and for a time it seemed as

if he had pulled down the Temple in which he had been reared. The intellec-

tual classes throughout Christendom were moved by the philosophes to a

polite deism or a secret atheism. In Germany the youth of Goethe's genera-

tion were profoundly influenced. Goethe thought that "Voltaire will always

be regarded as the greatest man in the literature of modern times, and per-

haps of all times." 44 In England a brilliant minority— Godwin, Paine, Mary

Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Byron, Shelley— felt Voltaire's influence, but by

and large English deism had anticipated him and dulled his point; moreover,

English gentlemen felt that no cultured mind would attack a religion that

gave such calming solace to the weaker classes and the weaker sex. In Amer-

ica the founding fathers were almost all disciples of Voltaire. There and in

England the influence of Darwin and modern biology has overlaid that of

Voltaire in impairing religious belief; and in our times the Christian theology

suffers most of all from the unparalleled barbarity of our wars, and the vic-

torious audacities of sciences that invade the very heavens that once housed

deities and saints.

To Voltaire, more than to any other individual, we owe the religious

toleration that now precariously prevails in Europe and North America. The

people of Paris thought of him not as the author of epochal books but as

the defender of the Calas and the Sirvens. After him no tribunal in Europe

would have dared to break a man on the wheel on such charges and evidence

as had condemned Jean Calas. Books like Emile were still banned and

burned, but their ashes helped to disseminate their ideas. Religious censor-

ship declined until it tacitly admitted defeat. If, as seems possible, our chil-

dren may have to fight all over again the battle for the freedom of the mind,

let them seek inspiration and encouragement in the ninety-nine volumes of

Voltaire. They will not find there one dull page.

II. ROUSSEAU EPILOGUE: 1 767-78

1. The Haunted Spirit

Arriving in France May 22, 1767, after his unhappy sojourn in England,

Rousseau, almost at the end of his sanity, found some comfort in the wel-

come given him by the cities through which he and Therese passed. Though

882 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXV

he traveled under the pseudonym of Jean-Joseph Renou, and was still legally

under the ban decreed against him in 1762, he was nevertheless recognized

and honored; Amiens gave him a triumphal reception, and other towns sent

him the vin de ville.

Many Frenchmen— all nobles— offered him a home. First, Mirabeau pere,

who gave him a choice of twenty estates; Rousseau chose Fleury-sous-Meu-

don, near Paris. But the Marquis pestered him to read the Marquis' books;

Rousseau fled, and took refuge with Louis-Frangois de Bourbon, Prince de

Conti, at Trye-le-Chateau, near Gisors (June 21, 1767). The Prince put the

entire castle at Jean-Jacques' disposal, and even sent musicians to play soft

music for him; Rousseau interpreted this as an imputation on his sanity. He

thought that Choiseul and the Comtesse de Boufflers (mistress of the Prince)

had joined Voltaire, Diderot, and Grimm in conspiring against him; and

indeed Voltaire had accused him of setting fire to the theater at Geneva,

which burned to the ground on January 29, 1768. 45 Rousseau believed that

everyone in Gisors looked upon him as a criminal. He longed to be restored

to Geneva, and wrote to Choiseul asking him to persuade the Genevan

Council to make reparation to Rousseau for past injuries. 46 Choiseul sent him

an official permit to travel anywhere in France, to leave it and to return to

it at will. 47 Rousseau now thought of going back to England; he wrote to

Davenport inquiring would he be allowed to occupy the house at Wooton

again; Davenport answered, By all means.

Fearing for his life at Trye, Rousseau fled from it in June, 1768, leaving

Therese at the chateau for her own safety. He went by public coach to

Lyons, and lived there for a while with relatives of the Daniel Roguin who

had given him a refuge in Switzerland in 1762. Soon, however, he isolated

himself in the Golden Fountain Inn at Bourgoin-en-Dauphine. On the door

of his room there he wrote a list of the people whom he believed to be con-

spiring against him. He sent for Therese, received her with joy and tears,

and decided at last to marry her. It was done by a civil ceremony at the inn

on August 30, 1768.

In January, 1769, they moved to a farmhouse at Mouquin, near Grenoble.

There he composed the final, half-insane pages of the Confessions, and

cooled his nerves with botany. Therese found his temper more and more

difficult; she herself was suffering from rheumatism and the vague ills some-

times accompanying "change of life." The newlyweds had a quarrel so seri-

ous that Rousseau departed on a long botanizing trip, leaving her a letter

that advised her to enter a convent (August 12, 1769). 48 When he returned

and found her waiting for him their love was renewed. Now he regretted

that he had disposed of her offspring. "Happy the man," he felt, "who can

rear his children under his own eyes!" 49 To a young mother he wrote: "The

sweetest way of life that can possibly exist is that of the home. . . . Nothing

is more strongly, more constantly, identified with us than our family and

our children. . . . But I who speak of family, children—. . . madame, pity

those whose iron fate deprives them of such happiness; pity them if they

are merely unfortunate; pity them more if they are guilty!" 50

CHAP.XXXV) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 883

The winter at Mouquin was hard to bear in a farmhouse subject to all the

winds. Therese begged for Paris. On April 10, 1770, the couple resumed

their odyssey. They spent a pleasant month at Lyons, where Rousseau's

operetta, he Devin du village, was performed as part of a celebration in his

honor. They moved by slow stages through Dijon, Montbard, Auxerre. At

last, on June 24, 1770, they reached Paris. They took rooms on the fourth

floor of his former lodgings at the Hotel Saint-Esprit, Rue Platriere— now

called the Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau— in one of the noisiest quarters of the

city.

He lived modestly and quietly, copying music for income, and studying

botany; now (September 21, 177 1 ) he wrote his letter of homage to Lin-

naeus. 51 When it became known that he was in Paris, old friends and new

devotees came to visit him: the Prince de Ligne (who offered him a home

on his estate near Brussels), Gretry and Gluck (who came to discuss music

with him), Goldoni the dramatist, Sophie Arnould the singer, Gustavus the

Crown Prince of Sweden, and young authors like Jean-Joseph Dusaulx and

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. In 1777 he received what Voltaire

had coveted and missed— a visit from the Emperor Joseph II. 52 His free entry

to the Opera (as a composer) was restored, and he went there occasionally,

especially to hear Gluck. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre described him (now sixty

years old) as slender, well-proportioned, with "lofty brow, and eyes full of

fire; . . . profound sadness in the wrinkles of the brow, and a keen and even

caustic gaiety." 53

Despite the promise he had made in 1762 to write no more books, Rous-

seau had been stung into renewed composition by the continued attacks of

his enemies. To answer these, and all the hostile gossip of Paris and Geneva,

he had undertaken the Confessions (1765). Now (November, 1770) this

was complete, and Rousseau, though as yet unwilling to publish it in its en-

tirety, was resolved that certain parts, relevant to the attacks, should be made

known in Paris. So in December he read to Dusaulx and others, in his room,

long passages from his greatest book; the reading lasted seventeen hours, in-

terrupted by two hasty collations. 54 In May, 1771, he held another reading,

before the Comte and Comtesse d'Egmont, Prince Pignatelli d'Egmont, the

Marquise de Mesme, and the Marquis de Juigne. He concluded with a fiery

challenge:

I have written the truth. If any person has heard of things contrary to those

I have just stated, were they a thousand times proved, he has heard calumny

and falsehood; and if he refuses thoroughly to examine and compare them

with me while I am alive, he is not a friend to justice or truth. For my part I

openly and without the least fear declare that whoever, even without having

read my works, shall have examined with his own eyes my disposition, char-

acter, manners, inclinations, pleasures, and habits, and pronounces me a dis-

honorable man, is himself one who deserves a gibbet. 55

Those who heard him concluded from his intense emotion that he was

nearing mental disorder. Dusaulx pronounced Rousseau's suspicions and

recriminations unworthy of "the generous, the virtuous Jean Jacques"; this

884 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXV

criticism ended their friendship. 56 Other hearers carried echoes of these read-

ings into the salons of Paris, and some sensitive souls felt that Rousseau had

maligned them. Mme. d'Cpinay wrote to the lieutenant general of police:

I must inform you again that the person of whom I spoke to you yesterday

morning read his work to Messrs. Dorat, de Pezay, and Dusaulx. Since he is

using these men as confidants of a libel, you have the right to let him know

what you think of it. I feel that you ought to speak to him with enough kind-

ness so that he should not complain, but with firmness enough so that he

won't repeat his fault. If you secure his word of honor I believe he will keep

it. Pardon me a thousand times, but my peace of mind was at stake. 57

The police asked Rousseau to give no more readings; he agreed. He con-

cluded that he could never get a fair hearing in his lifetime, and this feeling

of frustration helped to unhinge his mind. After 1772 he closed his door to

nearly all visitors but Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. On his solitary walks he

suspected an enemy in almost everyone whom he passed. Aside from such

specters of hostility his essential good nature remained. He subscribed, over

Voltaire's resistance, to the fund for a statue to Voltaire. When an abbe sent

him a brochure denouncing Voltaire he rebuked the writer: "Voltaire," he

told him, "is without doubt a bad man, whom I do not intend to praise; but

he has said and done so many good things that we should draw the curtain

over his irregularities." 58

When he could take his mind off the "conspiracy" that he saw around

him, he could write with as much clarity as before, and with surprising con-

servatism and practicality. We have seen how the Polish convention of 1769

asked his suggestions for a new constitution. He began his Considerations

sur le gouvernement de la Pologne in October, 177 1, and finished it in April,

1772. Our first impression of it is that it violates all the principles for which

he had fought so passionately. On rereading it in old age we are comforted

to see that Rousseau (then sixty) could also age and, as the old would like

to put it, mature. The same man who had cried out, "Man is born free, and

is everywhere in chains," now warned the Poles, whose "free veto" had con-

demned them to anarchy, that freedom is a trial as well as a dispensation,

and requires a self-discipline far more arduous than obedience to external

commands.

Liberty is a strong food, but it needs a stout digestion. ... I laugh at those

degraded peoples who rise in revolt at a word from an intriguer; who dare to

speak of liberty while in total ignorance of what it means; and who . . .

imagine that, to be free, it is enough to be a rebel. High-souled and holy

liberty! If these poor men could only know thee; if they could only learn what

is the price at which thou art won and guarded; if they could only be taught

how far sterner are thy laws than the hard yoke of the tyrant! 59

Life and Montesquieu had taught Rousseau that such discussions as his

Social Contract are flights in vacuo, abstract theories without a hinge on

reality. All states, he now admitted, are rooted in history and circumstance,

and will die if their roots are indiscriminately cut. So he advised the Poles

to make no sudden changes in their constitution. They should keep their

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 885

elective monarch but should limit their liberum veto; they should keep Ca-

tholicism as the state religion but develop an educational system independent

of the Church. 60 Poland, in the existing condition of its communications

and transport, seemed to him too large to be ruled from one center; better

divide it into three states federated only in mutual contacts and foreign af-

fairs. He who had once denounced private property as the source of all evils

now sanctioned Polish feudalism; he proposed to tax all land, but to leave

present property rights intact. He hoped th?' serfdom would one day be

abolished, but he did not advocate its early end; that, he thought, should

wait until the serf had had more education. Everything, he insisted, de-

pended upon the extension o. :ducation; to promote freedom faster than intel-

ligence and moral character would be an open sesame to chaos and partition.

The partition was effected before Rousseau could finish his essay; in Po-

land, as in Corsica, Realpolitik ignored his philosophical legislation. This

double frustration shared in embittering his final years, and it intensified his

scorn of those philosophes who had praised as enlightened despots and phi-

losopher kings those rulers— Frederick II, Catherine II, and Joseph II— who

were dismembering Poland.

In 1772 he began another attempt to answer his enemies. He called it

Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. He worked on this 540-page

book, on and off, for four years, and his mind darkened more and more as

he proceeded. The foreword begged the reader to read all three dialogues

thoroughly; "consider that this grace, which is asked of you by a heart

burdened with sorrow, is a debt of justice which Heaven imposes upon

you." 61 He admitted the "long-windedness, the repetitions, the verbiage, and

the disorder of this composition," 62 but for fifteen years past (he said) there

had been a conspiracy to defame him, and he must clear himself before dy-

ing. He denied any contradiction between the individualism of the Dis-

courses and the collectivism of the Social Contract; he reminded his readers

that he had never wished to destroy the sciences and the arts and return to

barbarism. He described his works— especially Julie and Smile— as rich in

virtue and tenderness, and asked how such books could have been written

by so diseased a roue as his detractors had pictured him to be. 63 He charged

his enemies with burning him in effigy, and with serenading him in mock-

ery. 64 Even now, he complained, they kept watch on all his visitors, and

stirred up his neighbors to insult him. 65 He repeated the story of his birth,

family, and youth, and described the gentleness and integrity of his charac-

ter, but he confessed to laziness, "a taste for reverie," 68 and a tendency to

create, on his solitary walks, an imaginary world in which for the moment

he could be happy. He comforted himself with the prediction, "A day will

come, I am confident, when good and honorable people will bless my mem-

ory and will weep over my fate." 67

To the final dialogue he added a chapter entitled "The History of This

Work." He told how, to bring his book to the attention of Paris and Ver-

sailles, he resolved to deposit a copy of the manuscript, with an address to

Providence, on the high altar in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. This he

886 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXV

tried to do on February 24, 1776. Finding the sanctuary barred by a railing,

he sought side entrances to it; finding these locked, he grew dizzy, ran out

of the church, and wandered in the streets in semi-delirium for hours before

reaching his rooms. 68 He composed a plea to the French people, entitled it

"To All Frenchmen Who Still Love Justice and Truth," copied it on hand-

bills, and distributed these to passers-by in the streets. Several of these re-

fused it, saying that it was not addressed to them. 69 He gave up his efforts,

and resigned himself to defeat.

His excitement abated now that he was reconciled. He wrote at this time

( 1777—78) his most beautiful book, Reveries (Tun promeneur solitaire. He

told how the people of Motiers had rejected him and had stoned his house,

and how he had retired to the lie de St.-Pierre in the Lake of Bienne. There

he had found happiness; and now, looking back upon that retreat, he pic-

tured the quiet water, the inflowing streams, the verdure-covered island, and

the polymorphous sky. He struck a new romantic note by suggesting that

the meditative spirit may always find in nature something responsive to its

mood. As we read those pages we ask ourselves, Could a man half insane

write so well, so lucidly, at times so serenely? But then the old plaints recur,

and Rousseau mourns again that he had cast off his children, that he had not

had the simple courage to bring up a family. He saw a child playing; he re-

turned to his room and "wept and expiated." 70

In those last years at Paris he envied the religious faith that lifted the life

of the common people about him into a drama of death and resurrection.

Sometimes he attended Catholic services. He visited a hermitage with Ber-

nardin de Saint-Pierre, and heard the monks reciting a litany. "Ah, how

happy the man who can believe!" 71 He could not believe, 72 but he tried to

behave like a Christian, giving alms, visiting and comforting the sick. 73 He

read and annotated Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ.

Bitterness diminished in him as he approached death. When Voltaire ar-

rived in Paris and received so many honors, Rousseau was jealous, but spoke

well of his old enemy. He rebuked an acquaintance who had ridiculed the

coronation of Voltaire at the Theatre-Frangais: "How dare you mock the

honors rendered to Voltaire in the temple of which he is the god, and by the

priests who for fifty years have been living off his masterpieces?" 74 When

he heard that Voltaire was dying he predicted, "Our lives were linked to

each other; I shall not survive him long." 75

When the spring of 1778 began to flower he asked that someone offer

him a home in the country. Marquis Rene de Girardin invited him to occupy

a cottage near his chateau at Ermenonville, some thirty miles from Paris.

Jean- Jacques and Therese went on May 20. There he gathered botanical

specimens, and taught botany to the Marquis' ten-year-old son. On July 1

he dined heartily with the family of his host. The next morning he suffered

an apoplectic stroke, and fell to the floor. Therese lifted him onto his bed,

but he fell from it, and struck the tiled floor so sharply that his head was cut

and blood poured out. Therese cried out for help; the Marquis came, and

found Rousseau dead.

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 887

Falsehoods pursued him to the end. Grimm and others spread the tale

that Rousseau had committed suicide; Mme. de Stael later added that he had

killed himself in grief over discovering Therese's infidelity. This was an es-

pecially cruel story, for Therese's comment, soon after his death, revealed

her love for him: "If my husband was not a saint, who could be one?" Other

gossip described Rousseau as dying insane; all who were with him in those

final days described him as serene.

On July 4, 1778, he was buried on the Isle of Poplars in a small lake on the

Girardin estate. For a long time this He des Peupliers was a goal of pious

pilgrimage; all the world of fashion— even the Queen— went out to worship

at Rousseau's tomb. On October 1 1, 1794, his remains were removed to the

Pantheon, and were laid near those of Voltaire. From that haven of neigh-

borly peace their spirits rose to renew their war for the soul of the Revolu-

tion, of France, and of Western man.

2. The Influence of Rousseau

So we end as we began, by contemplating, now in substantiation, the in-

credible effect of Rousseau upon the literature, pedagogy, philosophy, reli-

gion, morals, manners, art, and politics of the century that began with his

death. Today much that he wrote seems exaggerated, sentimental, or absurd;

only the Confessions and the Reveries move us; but till yesterday his every

word was being heard in one or another field of European or American

thought. Rousseau, said Mme. de Stael, "invented nothing, but he set every-

thing on fire." 76

First of all, of course, he was the mother of the Romantic movement. We

have seen many others sowing its seed: Thomson, Collins, Gray, Richard-

son, Prevost, and Christianity itself, whose theology and art are the most

marvelous romance of all. Rousseau matured the seeds in the hothouse of his

emotions, and delivered the offspring, full-grown and fertile from birth, in

the Discourses, La Nouvelle Heloise, the Contrat social, £mile, and the Con-

fessions.

But what shall we mean by the Romantic movement? The rebellion of

feeling against reason, of instinct against intellect, of sentiment against judg-

ment, of the subject against the object, of subjectivism against objectivity,

of solitude against society, of imagination against reality, of myth and legend

against history, of religion against science, of mysticism against ritual, of

poetry and poetic prose against prose and prosaic poetry, of neo-Gothic

against neoclassical art, of the feminine against the masculine, of romantic

love against the marriage of convenience, of "Nature" and the "natural"

against civilization and artifice, of emotional expression against conventional

restraints, of individual freedom against social order, of youth against au-

thority, of democracy against aristocracy, of man versus the state— in short,

the revolt of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, or, more pre-

cisely, of 1 760-1 859 against 1 648-1 760: all these are waves of the great

Romantic tide that swept Europe between Rousseau and Darwin.

888 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXV

Now nearly every one of these elements found voice and sanction in

Rousseau, and some support in the needs and spirit of the time. France had

wearied of classic reason and aristocratic restraint. Rousseau's exaltation of

feeling offered liberation to suppressed instincts, to repressed sentiment, to

oppressed individuals and classes. The Confessions became the bible of the

Age of Feeling as the Encyclopedic had been the New Testament of the

Age of Reason. Not that Rousseau rejected reason; on the contrary, he

called it a divine gift, and accepted it as final judge; 77 but (he felt) its cold

light needed the warmth of the heart to inspire action, greatness, and virtue.

"Sensibility" became the watchword of women and men. Women learned

to faint, men to weep, more readily than before. They oscillated between

joy and grief, and mingled both in their tears.

The Rousseauian revolution began at the mother's breasts, which were

now to be freed from stays; this part of the revolution, however, proved

the hardest of all, and was won only after more than a century of alternat-

ing imprisonment and release. After Smile French mothers nursed their in-

fants, even at the opera, between arias. 78 The child was freed from swaddling

clothes, and was brought up directly by the parents. When it went to school

it enjoyed— more in Switzerland than in France— education a la Rousseau.

Since man was now considered good by nature, the pupil was to be viewed

not as an imp of the perverse but as an angel whose wishes were the voice of

God. His senses were no longer condemned as the instruments of Satan, but

as doors to illuminating experiences and a thousand harmless delights. Class-

rooms were no longer to be prisons. Education was to be made natural and

pleasant, through the unfolding and encouragement of inherent curiosities

and powers. The stuffing of the memory with facts, the stifling of the mind

with dogmas, were to be replaced by training in the arts of perceiving, cal-

culating, and reasoning. As far as possible children were to learn not from

books but from things— from plants in the field, rocks in the soil, clouds and

stars in the skies. Enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational ideas stimulated

Pestalozzi and Lavater in Switzerland, Basedow in Germany, Maria Montes-

sori in Italy, John Dewey in America; "progressive education" is part of the

legacy of Rousseau. Inspired by Rousseau, Friedrich Froebel established the

kindergarten system in Germany, whence it spread throughout the Western

world.

Some breath of the Rousseauian afflatus reached art. The exaltation of

children influenced Greuze and A4me. Vigee-Lebrun; the paintings of the

Pre-Raphaelites in England reflected the cult of pathos and mystery. Deeper

was the effect on morals and manners. There was some growth in the

warmth and fidelity of friendship, in mutual sacrifices and solicitude. Ro-

mantic love captured literature and made its way into life. Husbands could

now love their wives without flouting convention; parents could love their

children; the family was restored. "People had been smiling at adultery;

Rousseau dared to make it a crime" 79 ; it continued, but was no longer de

rigueur. The idolatry of courtesans was replaced by pity for prostitutes.

Contempt for convention resisted the tyranny of etiquette. Bourgeois vir-

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 889

tues came into repute: industry, thrift, simplicity of manners and dress. Soon

France would lengthen its culottes into trousers and be sans-culottes in pants

as well as in politics. Rousseau shared with English horticulture in changing

French gardens from Renaissance regularity to romantic curves and surpris-

ing turns, and sometimes to wild and "natural" disarray. Men and women

went out from the city to the country, and married the moods of Nature

to their own. Men climbed mountains. They sought solitude and fondled

their egos.

Literature surrendered almost en masse to Rousseau and the Romantic

wave. Goethe bathed Werther in love, nature, and tears (1774), and made

Faust compress half of Rousseau in three words: "Gefiihl ist Alles"— feeling

is all. "Smile and its sentiments," he recalled in 1787, "had a universal influ-

ence on the cultivated mind." 80 Schiller stressed the revolt against law in The

Robbers (1781); he hailed Rousseau as a liberator and martyr, and compared

him with Socrates. 81 Herder, at a similar stage in development, cried, "Come,

Rousseau, and be my guide." 82 The eloquence of Rousseau helped to free

French poetry and drama from the rules of Boileau, the tradition of Cor-

neille and Racine, and the rigors of classic style. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,

fervent disciple of Rousseau, achieved a romantic classic in Paul et Virginie

(1784). After the Napoleonic interlude the literary influence of Jean-

Jacques triumphed in Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Hugo,

Gautier, Michelet, and George Sand. It mothered a brood of confessions,

reveries, and novels of sentiment or passion. It favored the conception of

genius as innate and lawless, the victor over tradition and discipline. In Italy

it moved Leopardi; in Russia, Pushkin and Tolstoi; in England, Words-

worth, Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; in America, Haw-

thorne and Thoreau.

Half the philosophy of the century between La Nouvelle Heloise (1761)

and Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) is colored with the revolt of Rous-

seau against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Indeed, in a letter of 175 1

to Bordes, Rousseau had already expressed his scorn of philosophy. 83 He

based this contempt on what he felt to be the impotence of reason to teach

men virtue. Reason seems to have no moral sense; it will labor to defend any

desire, however corrupt. Something else is needed— an inborn consciousness

of right and wrong; and even this conscience has to be warmed with feeling

if it is to engender virtue and make not a clever calculator but a good man.

This, of course, had been said by Pascal, but Pascal had been rejected by

Voltaire, and in Germany the "rationalism" of Wolff was rising in the uni-

versities. When Immanuel Kant became professor at Konigsberg he had

already been convinced by Hume and the philosophes that reason alone

could give no adequate defense of even the fundamentals of the Christian

theology. In Rousseau he found a way to save those fundamentals: deny the

validity of reason in the suprasensible world; affirm the independence of

mind, the primacy of will, and the absoluteness of innate conscience; and

deduce the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence

of God from man's feeling of unconditional obligation to the moral law.

89O ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXV

Kant acknowledged his debt to Rousseau, hung a picture of him on his study

wall, and declared him the Newton of the moral world. 84 Other Germans

felt the spirit of Rousseau upon them: Jacobi in his Gefiihlphilosophie,

Schleiermacher in his web-weaving mysticism, Schopenhauer in his en-

thronement of the will. The history of philosophy since Kant has been a con-

test between Rousseau and Voltaire.

Religion began by banning Rousseau, and went on to use him as its savior.

Protestant leaders joined Catholic in declaring him an infidel; he was classed

with Voltaire and Bayle as "spreading the poison of error and impiety." 85

Yet even in his lifetime there were laymen and clergymen who took comfort

in hearing that the Savoyard Vicar had accepted with ardor the cardinal

doctrines of Christianity, and had counseled doubters to return to their na-

tive faiths. On his flight from Switzerland in 1765 Rousseau was welcomed

by the bishop of Strasbourg. After his return from England he found some

French Catholics gratefully quoting him against unbelievers, and holding

hopes for his triumphant conversion.

The theorists of the French Revolution tried to establish a morality inde-

pendent of religious creeds; Robespierre, following Rousseau, gave up this

attempt as a failure, and sought the support of religious beliefs in maintain-

ing moral order and social content. He condemned the philosophes as re-

jecting God but keeping kings; Rousseau (said Robespierre) had risen above

these cowards, had bravely attacked all kings, and had spoken in defense of

God and immortality. 86

In 1793 the rival legacies of Voltaire and Rousseau came to decision in the

struggle between Jacques-Rene Hebert and Maximilien Robespierre. Hebert,

a leader of the Paris Commune, followed Voltairean rationalism, encouraged

the desecration of churches, and set up the public worship of the Goddess of

Reason (1793). Robespierre had seen Rousseau in the philosopher's final

stay in Paris. He apostrophized Jean- Jacques: "Divine man! ... I looked

upon your august features; ... I understood all the griefs of a noble life

devoted to the worship of truth." 87 When Robespierre rose to power he

persuaded the National Convention to adopt the Profession of Faith of the

Savoyard Vicar as the official religion of the French nation; and in May,

1794, he inaugurated, in memory of Rousseau, the Festival of the Supreme

Being. When he sent Hebert and others to the guillotine on a^rharge of athe-

ism, he felt that he was following to the letter the counsels of Rousseau.

The agnostic Napoleon agreed with Robespierre on the need of religion,

and realigned the French government with God (1802). The Catholic

Church was fully restored with the French Bourbon Restoration (1814); it

won the powerful pens of Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Lamartine, and La-

mennais; but now the old faith leaned more and more on the rights of feel-

ing rather than the arguments of theology; it fought Voltaire and Diderot

with Pascal and Rousseau. Christianity, which had seemed moribund in

1760, flourished again in Victorian England and Restoration France.

Politically we are only now emerging from the age of Rousseau. The first

sign of his political influence was in the wave of public sympathy that sup-

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 89 1

ported active French aid to the American Revolution. Jefferson derived the

Declaration of Independence from Rousseau as well as from Locke and

Montesquieu. As ambassador to France (1785-89) he absorbed much from

both Voltaire and Rousseau; he echoed Jean-Jacques in supposing that the

North American Indians "enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater

degree of happiness than those who live under European governments." 88

The success of the American Revolution raised the prestige of Rousseau's

political philosophy.

According to Mme. de Stael, Napoleon ascribed the French Revolution

more to Rousseau than to any other writer. 89 Edmund Burke thought that

in the French Revolutionary Constituent Assembly ( 1 789-9 1 )

there is a great dispute, among their leaders, which of them is the best re-

semblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble him. . . . Him they study,

him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the

laborious mischief of the day or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their

canon of Holy Writ; ... to him they erect their first statue. 90

Mallet Dupan in 1799 recalled that

Rousseau had a hundred times more readers among the middle and lower

classes than Voltaire. He alone inoculated the French with the doctrine of the

sovereignty of the people. ... It would be difficult to cite a single revolution-

ist who was not transported over these anarchical theories, and who did not

burn with ardor to realize them. ... I heard Marat in 1 788 read and comment

on the Contrat social in the public streets to the applause of an enthusiastic

auditory. 91

Throughout France orators quoted Rousseau in preaching the sovereignty

of the people; it was partly the ecstatic welcome given to this doctrine that

enabled the Revolution to survive for a decade despite its enemies and its

excesses.

Through all the alternations of revolutions and reaction, Rousseau's influ-

ence on politics continued. Because of his contradictions, and because of the

force and passion with which he proclaimed them, he served as prophet and

saint to anarchists and socialists alike; for both these opposed gospels found

nourishment in his condemnation of the rich and his sympathy for the poor.

The individualism of the first Discourse, and its rejection of "civilization,"

inspired rebels from Paine, Godwin, and Shelley to Tolstoi, Kropotkin, and

Edward Carpenter. "At fifteen," said Tolstoi, "I carried around my neck,

instead of the usual cross, a medallion with Rousseau's portrait." 92 The egali-

tarianism of the second Discourse provided a basic theme for the variations

of socialist theory from "Gracchus" Babeuf through Charles Fourier and

Karl Marx to Nikolai Lenin. "For a century now," said Gustave Lanson, "all

the progress of democracy, equality, universal suffrage, ... all the claims

of extreme parties that may be the wave of the future, the war against

wealth and property, all the agitations of the working and suffering masses,

have been in a sense the work of Rousseau." 93 He had not appealed to the

learned and lofty with logic and argument; he had spoken to the people at

large with feeling and passion in language that they could understand; and

892 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXV

the ardor of his eloquence proved, in politics as in literature, mightier than

the scepter of Voltaire's pen.

III. MARCHE FUNeBRE

Diderot, after seeing Voltaire in 1778, asked a friend, "Why must he

die?" 94 The funeral march of the philosophes, from the death of Helvetius

in 1 77 1 to that of Morellet in 18 19, seemed to be a sardonic commentary on

vanity and pride, but we might also wonder why some of these men lived

so long, inviting all the pains and humiliations of senility.

The more fortunate among them died before the Revolution, comforted

by a hundred signs that their ideas were approaching victory. Condillac

disappeared in 1780, Turgot in 1781. D'Alembert reluctantly survived the

death of Mile, de Lespinasse. She had left her papers to his care, and from

them it was evident that during the last twelve years of her life her love had

been given to Mora or Guibert, leaving for himself only a friendship some-

times tinged with irritation. "D'Alembert is badly hit," Condorcet told Tur-

got; "my whole hope for him now is that his life may prove bearable." 95 He

returned to his studies, but he wrote nothing more of importance. He at-

tended some of the salons, but the life had gone out of his once brilliant

conversation. He rejected Frederick's invitation to Potsdam, and Catherine's

invitation to St. Petersburg. He wrote to Frederick: "I feel like a man with

a long stretch of desert in front of him and the precipice of death at its end,

and no hope of coming across a single soul who would grieve if he saw him

fall into it, or give himself another thought after he had disappeared." 96

He was mistaken; many cared, if only those to whom he regularly sent

part of his income. Hume, in his will, left ^200 to d'Alembert, 97 confident

that it would be spread around. Despite various pensions, d'Alembert lived

simply to the last. In 1783 both he and Diderot were stricken with serious

illnesses— Diderot with pleurisy, d'Alembert with a disorder of the bladder.

Diderot recovered; d'Alembert died (October 29, 1783), aged sixty-seven.

Diderot had returned from his Russian adventure in October, 1774. The

long trip in a confining carriage had weakened him, but he correctly pre-

dicted that he had "ten years of life left in his sack." 98 He worked on a Vlan

of a University for the Government of Russia (which was not published

till 181 3); anticipating pedagogical developments by 150 years, he advocated

predominant attention to science and technology, and placed Greek, Latin,

and literature almost at the end of the list, with philosophy between. In 1778

he began an Essai stir les regnes de Claude et de Neron, et sur la vie et les

ecrits de Seneque. He digressed to beg the victorious Americans, in their

new commonwealth, to "prevent the enormous increase and unequal distri-

bution of wealth and luxury, idleness, and the corruption of morals." 99 And

in the section on Seneca he made place for a hot defense of Grimm, Mme.

d'£pinay, and himself against the charges that Rousseau had made in public

readings of the Confessions:

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 893

If, by a bizarrerie without exception, there should ever appear a work

where honest people are pitilessly torn to pieces by a clever criminal [un

artificieux scelerat], . . . look ahead and ask yourselves if an impudent fellow,

. . . who has confessed a thousand misdeeds, can be . . . worthy of belief.

What can calumny cost such a man?— what can one crime more or less add to

the secret turpitude of a life hidden during more than fifty years behind the

thickest mask of hypocrisy? . . . Detest the ingrate who speaks evil of his

benefactors; detest the atrocious man who does not hesitate to blacken his

old friends; detest the coward who leaves on his tomb the revelation of secrets

confided to him. ... As for me, I swear that my eyes shall never be sullied

by reading his work; 1 protest that I would prefer his invectives to his praise. 100

In 1783 Mme. d'fipinay died. Diderot felt this loss deeply, for he had

enjoyed her friendship and her salon. Grimm and d'Holbach were alive, but

his relations with them were tepid; each of the three was sinking into the

narrow egoism of old age; all they could talk of to each other was their

pains. Diderot's assortment included nephritis, gastritis, gallstones, and in-

flammation of the lungs; he could no longer climb the stairs from his fourth-

floor rooms to his fifth-floor library. He felt lucky now to have a wife; he

had reduced his infidelities to wistful memories, and she had worn out her

vocabulary; they lived in a peace of mutual exhaustion.

In 1784 he fell seriously ill. Jean de Tersac, the cure of St.-Sulpice, who

had failed with Voltaire, tried to redeem himself with Diderot, visited him,

begged him to return to the Church, and warned him that unless he received

the sacraments he could not enjoy burial in a cemetery. Diderot answered,

"I understand you, Monsieur le Cure. You refused to bury Voltaire because

he did not believe in the divinity of the Son. Well, when I am dead, they

can bury me wherever they like, but I declare that I believe neither in the

Father nor in the Holy Ghost, nor in any of the Family." 101

Hearing of his infirmities, the Empress Catherine secured for him and his

wife a splendid suite of rooms in the Rue de Richelieu. They moved into it

about July 18. He smiled as he saw new furniture being carried in; he could

use it, he said, for only a few days. He used it for less than two weeks. On

July 31, 1784, he ate a hearty meal, had an attack of coronary thrombosis,

and died at the table, aged seventy-one. His wife and his son-in-law per-

suaded a local priest to give Diderot a church burial despite his notorious

atheism. The corpse was buried in the Church of St.-Roch, from which, at

some unknown time, it mysteriously disappeared.

The procession continued. Mably died in 1785, Buffon in 1788, d'Holbach

in 1789. Raynal, as we have seen, outlived the Revolution, denounced its

barbarities, and surprised himself by dying a natural death (1796). Grimm

met all strokes of fortune with Teutonic patience. In 1775 Joseph II made

him a baron of the Holy Roman Empire, and in 1776 the Duke of Saxe-

Gotha made him minister to France. His Correspov dance Htteraire, after

1772, was mostly written by his secretary Jakob Meister, but Grimm con-

tributed trenchant articles on literature, art, religion, morals, politics, and

philosophy. He was the only thorough skeptic among the philosophes, for

894 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXV

he doubted philosophy too, and reason, and progress. While Diderot and

others of the faithful looked toward posterity with Utopia mirrored in their

eyes, Grimm noted that this was a very ancient mirage, "an illusion which

has been handed down from generation to generation"; and we have noted

his prediction, in 1757, of an imminent "fatal revolution." 102 When the Rev-

olution came and became murderous, he returned to his native Germany and

settled in Gotha (1793). Catherine relieved his poverty and made him her

minister at Hamburg (1796). On the death of his imperial benefactress he

went to live with £milie de Belsunce, granddaughter of his beloved Mme.

d'fipinay. He survived till 1807, chiefly on memories of those exciting days

when the mind of France was leading Europe to the dizzy brink of freedom.

IV. THE LAST PHILOSOPHE

Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, descendant of an

ancient family in Dauphine, was born in Picardy (1743), was educated by

the Jesuits at Reims and Paris, and for many years thought only of becoming

a great mathematician. At the age of twenty-six he was elected to the Aca-

demie des Sciences. Later, as its permanent secretary, he composed eloges

of departed members, as Fontenelle had done for the French Academy. Vol-

taire liked these memorial eulogies so well that he told Condorcet: "The

public wishes that an Academician might die every week or so that you

might have a chance to write about him." 103 He visited Voltaire at Ferney

(1770), edited an edition of Voltaire's works for Beaumarchais, and wrote

for it an ardent Vie de Voltaire, D'Alembert persuaded him to contribute

to the Ency elope die, and introduced him to Julie de Lespinasse, at whose

receptions he became, despite his shyness, a principal figure. Indeed, in Julie's

view, he stood next only to d'Alembert in the range of his intellect, and per-

haps above him in the warmth of his benevolence. He was among the first

to join the campaign against slavery (1781). Julie helped to free him from

his hopeless love for Mile. d'Usse, a coquette who took advantage of his de-

votion but did not return it. He consoled himself with the friendship of

Jean-Baptiste Suard and Mme. Suard, and lived with them in a contented

menage a trois.

In 1785 he published an Essai sur r application de V analyse anx probabilites.

In this he anticipated Malthus' theory that the growth of population tends

to outrun the production of food; but instead of advocating sexual absti-

nence as a remedy, he proposed birth control. 104

He welcomed the Revolution as opening the door to a future of universal

education, justice, and prosperity. In 1790 he was chosen to the municipal

council that had taken over the administration of Paris. He was elected to the

Legislative Assembly that ruled France from October 1, 1 791, to September

20, 1792. As chairman of the Committee on Public Instruction he drew up

a report advocating and outlining a national system of primary and sec-

ondary education, universal, free, equal for both sexes, and removed from

CHAP.XXXV) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 895

ecclesiastical influence. 105 He laid down the principle of the "welfare state":

"All social institutions should have for their aim the physical, intellectual,

and moral betterment of the most numerous and poorest class" of the popu-

lation. 106 The report was presented to the Assembly on April 21, 1792; action

on it was deferred by the Revolutionary Wars; but when Napoleon had

established his power he made Condorcet's report the basis of his epochal

reorganization of education in France.

In the National Convention that replaced the Legislative Assembly Con-

dorcet had less prominence, for he was distrusted by the conservative Gi-

rondins as a republican, and by the radical Jacobins as an aristocrat who was

trying to keep the Revolution under middle-class control. 107 He voted to

condemn Louis XVI as guilty of treason, but voted against his execution.

Appointed with eight others to a commission to formulate a new constitu-

tion, he submitted a draft that was rejected as too favorable to the bour-

geoisie. When the Convention, dominated by the Jacobins, adopted a more

radical constitution, Condorcet wrote an anonymous pamphlet advising the

citizens to repudiate it. On July 8, 1793, the Convention ordered his arrest.

For nine months he hid himself in a pension kept by the widow of the

painter Claude-Joseph Vernet. There, to distract his mind from fear of ap-

prehension, he wrote the little book that served both as a summary of the

Enlightenment and as a blueprint of the coming Utopia. The manuscript

bears the title Prospectus d'un tableau historique des progres de V esprit hu-

main. 10S He called it also Esquisse—z sketch; apparently he hoped someday to

write a fuller exposition of his philosophy.

He took his inspiration from the lecture in which Turgot, then a semi-

narian (December 1 1, 1750), had outlined "The Successive Advances of the

Human Mind." 109 Condorcet divided history into ten stages: (1) the union

of families into tribes; (2) pastoralism and agriculture; (3) invention of

writing; (4) the flowering of Greek culture to the time of Alexander; (5)

the development of knowledge during the rise and decline of Rome; (6) the

Dark Ages, from a.d. 476 to the Crusades; (7) the growth of science be-

tween the Crusades and the invention of printing; (8) from Gutenberg to

Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes, who "shook off the yoke of authority"; (9)

from Descartes to the foundation of the American and French republics;

(10) the age of the liberated mind. 110

Condorcet, like Voltaire, had no appreciation of the Middle Ages; he

thought of them as the domination of European thought by the Church, the

hypnotism of the people by the magic of the Mass, and the resurrection of

polytheism through the worship of the saints. 111 Though, again like Voltaire,

he retained a deistic belief in God, he relied on the progress and dissemina-

tion of knowledge to undermine the power of the Church, to extend de-

mocracy, and even to improve morals; sin and crime, he felt, were largely

the result of ignorance. 112 "The time will come when the sun will shine only

upon free men who know no other master but their reason." 113 He lauded

Voltaire for emancipating the mind, and Rousseau for inspiring men to build

a juster social order. He pictured the cornucopia that would flow in the nine-

896 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXV

teenth and twentieth centuries from the labors of the eighteenth: universal

education, freedom of thought and expression, liberation of colonies, equal-

ity before the law, and the redistribution of wealth. He vacillated a bit on

universal suffrage: generally he wished to limit the vote to owners of prop-

erty, however little this might be; 114 at times he feared that the simplicity of

the masses would enable a moneyed minority to indoctrinate them at will,

and so create a bourgeois oligarchy behind a democratic front; 115 but the

flight of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to Varennes, and fear that the

powers would seek to restore autocratic monarchy in France, led him back

to the advocacy of universal suffrage, including women. 116

From his hunted isolation he looked out in imagination upon a future of

glorious fulfillments. He predicted the rise of journalism as a check on gov-

ernmental tyranny; the development of a welfare state through national

insurance and pensions; the stimulation of culture by the emancipation of

women; the lengthening of human life by the progress of medicine; the

spread of federation among states; the transformation of colonialism into

foreign aid by developed to underdeveloped countries; the lessening of na-

tional prejudices by the spread of knowledge; the application of statistical

research to the illumination and formation of policies; and the increasing

association of science with government. 117 Since each age would add new

goals to its achievements, there could be no foreseeable end to progress; not

that man will ever become perfect, but that he will endlessly seek improve-

ment. "Nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; the

perfectibility of man is indefinite; and the progress of this perfectibility—

henceforth independent of any power that might wish to halt it— has no

other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us." 118

Toward the end of the Prospectus Condorcet faced the problem that

Malthus was to pose four years later in An Essay on the Principle of Popu-

lation (1798):

Might there not come a moment . . . when, the number of people in the

world exceeding the means of subsistence, there will in consequence ensue a

continual diminution of happiness, ... or at best an oscillation between good

and bad? Will it not show that a point has been reached beyond which still

further improvement is impossible— that the perfectibility of the human race

has, after long years, arrived at a term beyond which it may never go? ...

Who will take it upon himself to predict the condition to which the art of

converting the elements to the use of man may in time be brought? . . . Even

if we agree that the limit will one day arrive, . . . consider that, before all

this comes to pass, the progress of reason will have kept pace with that of the

sciences, and that the absurd prejudices of superstition will have ceased to cor-

rupt and degrade the moral code by its harsh doctrines. . . . We can assume

that by then men will know that they have a duty toward those that are not

yet born, a duty not to give them [mere] existence but happiness. 119

Condorcet's optimism was not quite blind. "We still see the forces of en-

lightenment in possession of no more than a very small portion of the globe,

and the truly enlightened vastly outnumbered by the great mass of men, who

are still given over to ignorance and prejudice. We still see vast areas in

CHAP. XXXV ) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 897

which men groan in slavery." 120 But "the friend of humanity" must not lose

hope in the face of these difficulties; think of the many noble things that

have already been done, of the immense development of knowledge and

enterprise; what may not a continuance and dissemination of these accom-

plishments produce? And so Condorcet ended his book with a vision that

provided his support in adversity, and served him, and a million others, in

place of a supernatural faith. This is the final and culminating word of the

Enlightenment:

How consoling for the philosopher— who laments the errors, the crimes, the

injustices which still pollute the earth, and of which he is so often the victim-

is this view of the human race, emancipated from its shackles, . . . advancing

with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness! It is the

contemplation of this prospect that rewards him for all his efforts to assist the

progress of reason and the defense of liberty. . . . Such contemplation is for

him an asylum into which the memory of his persecutors cannot pursue him.

There he lives in thought with man restored to his natural right and dignity,

and forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, fear, or envy. There he

lives with his peers in an Elysium created by reason, and graced by the purest

pleasures known to the love of mankind. 121

This profession of faith was almost the cry of a man conscious that death

was seeking him. Fearing that Mme. Vernet might suffer if she were found

sheltering him, Condorcet deposited his manuscript with her, and, over her

protests, left her house in disguise. After wandering on the outskirts of Paris

for several days, he asked for food at an inn. His appearance, and his lack

of identifying papers, aroused suspicion; he was soon identified as an aris-

tocrat, was arrested, and was taken to a jail in the town of Bourg-la-Reine

(April 7, 1794). The next morning he was found dead in his cell. His first

biographer thought that Condorcet had carried poison in a ring, and had

swallowed the poison; but the report of the medical officer who examined

the body ascribed Condorcet's death to a clot in a blood vessel. 122 The Con-

vention, having secured and read the Prospectus, ordered three thousand

copies of it to be printed by the state, and to be disseminated throughout

France.

V. THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE REVOLUTION

Burke, de Tocqueville, 123 and Taine 124 agreed that the philosophers of

France, from Bayle to Mably, were a major factor in bringing on the Rev-

olution. Can we accept the conclusions of these brilliant conservatives?

All the prominent philosophers were opposed to revolution against the

existing governments of Europe; on the contrary, several of them put their

faith in kings as the most practical instruments of reform; Voltaire, Diderot,

and Grimm maintained relations of friendship, if not of adoration, for one

or the other of the most absolute contemporary rulers— Frederick II, Cath-

erine II, Gustavus III; and Rousseau was happy to receive Joseph II of Aus-

tria. Diderot, Helvetius, and d'Holbach declaimed against kings in general,

898 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXV

but never, in their extant works, advocated the overthrow of the French

monarchy. 125 Marmontel and Morellet explicitly opposed revolution; 126 Ma-

bly, the socialist, declared himself a royalist; 127 Turgot, idol of the phi-

losophes, labored to save, not to destroy, Louis XVI. Rousseau advanced re-

publican ideas, but only for small states; the Revolution accepted his theories

and neglected his warning. When the revolutionists made France a republic

they did so in terms not of the French philosophers but of Plutarch's Greek

and Roman heroes; their idol was not Ferney but Sparta and republican

Rome.

The philosophers provided the ideological preparation for the Revolution.

The causes were economic or political, the phrases were philosophical; and

the operation of the basic causes was smoothed by the demolition work of

the philosophers in removing such obstacles to change as belief in feudal

privileges, ecclesiastical authority, and the divine right of kings. Until 1789

all European states had depended upon the aid of religion in inculcating the

sanctity of governments, the wisdom of tradition, the habits of obedience,

and the principles of morality; some roots of earthly power were planted in

heaven, and the state considered God as the chief of its secret police. Cham-

fort, while the Revolution was in process, wrote that "the priesthood was

the first bulwark of absolute power, and Voltaire overthrew it." 128 De

Tocqueville in 1856 thought that "the universal discredit into which all

religious belief fell at the end of the eighteenth century exercised, without

doubt, the greatest influence upon the whole course of the Revolution." 125

Gradually the skepticism that had riddled the old theology passed to the

scrutiny of secular institutions and affairs. The philosophers denounced

poverty and serfdom as well as intolerance and superstition, and labored to

reduce the power of feudal lords over the peasantry. Some aristocrats ac-

knowledged the force of the satires that attacked them, and many lost con-

fidence in their inborn superiority and traditional rights. Hear Comte Louis-

Philippe de Segur:

We were scornful critics of the old customs, of the feudal pride of our

fathers and their severe etiquette. . . . We felt disposed to follow with en-

thusiasm the philosophical doctrines professed by witty and bold writers. Vol-

taire attracted our intellect, and Rousseau touched our hearts. We took secret

pleasure in seeing them assail the old framework. . . . We enjoyed at the same

time the advantages of the patriciate and the amenities of a plebeian

philosophy. 130

These conscience-stricken nobles included such influential persons as Mira-

beau pere and fils, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Lafayette, Vicomte Louis-

Marie de Noailles, and "Philippe £galite," Due d'Orleans; and recall the aid

and comfort given to Rousseau by the Marechal de Luxembourg and Louis-

Frangois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti. This liberal minority, spurred by

peasant raids on feudal property, led the seigneurs, in the Constituent Assem-

bly, to renounce, for redemptions, most of their feudal dues (August 4,

1789). Even the royal family was touched by the semirepublican ideas that

the philosophers had helped to spread. The father of Louis XVI memorized

CHAP. XXXV) DEATH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 899

many passages from Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, read Rousseau's Social

Contract, and judged it "largely sound" except for its criticism of Christian-

ity. He taught his sons (three of whom became kings) that "the distinctions

which you enjoy were not given you by nature, which has created all men

equal." 181 Louis XVI, in his edicts, acknowledged "natural law" and "the

rights of man" 132 as following from man's nature as a rational being.

The American Revolution gave added prestige to republican ideas. That

Revolution, too, took its force from economic realities like taxation and

trade, and its Declaration of Independence owed as much to English think-

ers as to French; but it was noted that Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson

had been molded to free thought by the philosophes. Through those Ameri-

can sons of the French Enlightenment, republican theories graduated into

a government victorious in arms, recognized by a French King, and proceed-

ing to establish a constitution indebted in some measure to Montesquieu.

The French Revolution had three phases. In the first the nobles, through

the parlements, tried to recapture from the monarchy that dominance which

they had lost to Louis XIV; those nobles were not inspired by the philos-

ophers. In the second stage the middle classes won control of the Revolu-

tion; they had been deeply permeated by the notions of the philosophers, but

what they meant by "equality" was the equality of the bourgeois with the

aristocrat. In the third stage the directors of the city populace seized the

mastery. The masses remained pious, but their leaders had lost respect for

priests and kings; the masses loved Louis XVI to the end, but the leaders cut

off his head. After October 6, 1789, the Jacobins controlled Paris, and Rous-

seau was their god. On November 10, 1793, the triumphant radicals cele-

brated in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame the Feast of Reason. At Tours the

revolutionaries replaced the statues of saints with new figures called Mably,

Rousseau, and Voltaire. At Chartres in 1795, in the famous cathedral, a

Feast of Reason was opened by a drama in which Voltaire and Rousseau

were shown united in a campaign against fanaticism. 133

Therefore we cannot doubt that the philosophers profoundly affected

the ideology and the political drama of the Revolution. They had not in-

tended to produce violence, massacre, and the guillotine; they would have

shrunk in horror from those bloody scenes. They could properly say that

they had been cruelly misunderstood; but they were responsible insofar as

they had underestimated the influence of religion and tradition in restraining

the animal instincts of men. Meanwhile, under those striking pronounce-

ments and visible events, the real revolution was proceeding, as the middle

classes, using philosophy as one among a hundred instruments, took from

the aristocracy and the king the control of the economy and the state.

CHAPTER XXXVI

On the Eve

1774-89

I. RELIGION AND THE REVOLUTION

FINANCIALLY the Catholic Church was the soundest institution in

the country. It owned some six per cent of the land, and other property,

valued in sum at from two to four billion livres, with an annual income of

120,000,000 livres. 1 It received an additional 123,000,000 in tithes levied on

the produce and livestock of the soil. 2 These revenues, in the view of the

Church, were needed for its various functions of promoting family life, or-

ganizing education (before 1762), forming moral character, supporting

social order, distributing charity, tending the sick, offering to meditative or

unpolitical spirits a monastic refuge from the confusion of the crowd and

the tyranny of the state, and inculcating a judicious mixture of fear, hope,

and resignation in souls condemned, by the natural inequality of men, to

poverty, hardship, or grief.

All this it claimed to do through its clergy, which constituted about one

half of one per cent of the population. Their number had fallen since 1779, 3

and the monasteries were in serious decline. "Many monks," we are told,

"were favorable to the new ideas, and read the writings of the philos-

ophers." 4 Hundreds of monks abandoned the monastic life, and were not

replaced; between 1766 and 1789 their number in France fell from 26,000 to

17,000; in one monastery from eighty to nineteen, in another from fifty to

four. 5 A royal edict of 1766 closed all monasteries having fewer than nine

inmates, and raised the permitted age for taking vows from sixteen to twenty-

one for men, to eighteen for women. Monastic morals were lax. The

Archbishop of Tours wrote in 1778: "The Gray Friars [Franciscans] are

in a state of degradation in this province; the bishops complain of their de-

baucheries and disorderly life." 6 On the other hand the nunneries were in

good condition. There were 37,000 nuns in the 1,500 convents of France

in 1774; 7 their morals were good, and they actively fulfilled their tasks of

educating girls, serving in hospitals, and offering asylum to widows, spin-

sters, and women broken in the battle of life.

The secular clergy prospered in the sees and languished in the parishes.

There were many devoted and industrious bishops, some worldly idling

ones. Burke, visiting France in 1773, found a few prelates guilty of avarice,

but the great majority impressed him by their learning and integrity. 8 An

historian familiar with the literature of scandal concluded: "It may be

broadly stated that the vices which had infected the whole body of the

900

CHAP. XXXVI ) ON THE EVE 90 1

clergy during the sixteenth century had disappeared by the eighteenth. De-

spite the law of celibacy the country curates were, as a rule, moral, austere,

virtuous men." 9 These parish priests complained of the pride of class in the

bishops, who were all nobles; of the requirement to transmit to the bishop

the greater part of the tithes, and of the consequent poverty that compelled

the curates to till the soil as well as serve the Church. Louis XVI was moved

by their protests, and arranged that their salaries should be raised from five

hundred to seven hundred livres per year. When the Revolution came many

of the lower clergy supported the Third Estate. Some bishops, too, favored

political and economic reform, but most of them remained adamant against

any changes in the Church or the state. 10 When the treasury of France

neared bankruptcy the wealth of the Church offered a tempting contrast,

and bondholders, worried about the ability of the government to pay interest

or principal on their loans, began to see in the expropriation of church prop-

erty the only road to national solvency. The spreading rejection of the

Christian creed concurred with this economic urge.

Religious belief flourished in the villages, waned in the towns; and in these

the women of the middle and lower classes kept their traditional piety. "My

mother," Mme. Vigee-Lebrun recalled, "was very pious. I too was pious at

heart. We used always to hear High A4ass and attend the services of the

Church." 11 The churches were crowded on Sundays and holydays. 12 But

among the men unbelief had captured half the leading spirits. In the nobility

a gay skepticism had become fashionable, even among the women. "The

fashionable world for ten years past," wrote Mercier in his Tableau de

Paris in 1783, "has not attended Mass"; or, if they did go, it was "so as not

to scandalize their lackeys, who know that it is on their account." 13 The

upper middle class followed the lead of the aristocracy. In the schools "many

teachers were infected with unbelief after_i77i"; 14 many students neglected

Mass, and read the philosophes. In 1789 Father Bonnefax declared: "The

gravest scandal, and that which will entail the most fatal consequences, is the

almost absolute abandonment of religious teaching in the public schools." 15

In one college, it was said, "only three imbeciles" believed in God. 16

Among the clergy belief varied inversely with income. The prelates "ac-

cepted the 'utilitarian morality' of the philosophes, and kept Jesus only as a

discreet front." 17 There were hundreds of abbes like Mably, Condillac,

Aiorellet, and Raynal, who themselves were philosophes, or adopted the cur-

rent doubts. There were bishops like Talleyrand, who made little pretense

to Christian belief; there were archbishops like Lomenie de Brienne, of

whom Louis XVI complained that he did not believe in God. 18 Louis re-

fused to have a priest teach his son, lest the boy lose religious faith. 19

The Church continued to demand censorship of the press. In 1770 the

bishops sent to the King a memoir on "the dangerous consequences of lib-

erty of thinking and printing." 20 The government had relaxed, under Louis

XV, the laws against the entry of Protestants into France; hundreds of them

were now in the kingdom, living under political disabilities, in marriages un-

recognized by the state, and in daily fear that the old laws of Louis XIV

9° 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVI

would at any moment be enforced. In July, 1775, an assembly of the Catho-

lic clergy petitioned the King to forbid Protestant meetings, marriages, or

education, and to exclude Protestants from all public office; it also asked that

the age of permitted monastic vows be restored to sixteen. 21 Turgot pleaded

with Louis XVI to ignore these proposals, and to relieve the Protestants of

their disabilities; the hierarchy joined in the campaign to displace him. In

1 78 1 the second edition of Raynal's Histoire philosophique des deux Indes

was burned by order of the Parlement of Paris, and the author was banished

from France. Buffon was attacked by the Sorbonne for outlining a natural

evolution of life. In 1785 the clergy demanded life imprisonment for persons

thrice condemned of irreligion. 22

But the Church, weakened by a century of attacks, could no longer domi-

nate public opinion, and it could no longer rely on the "secular arm" to im-

plement its decrees. Louis XVI, after much worry about his coronation oath

to stamp out heresy, yielded to the pressure of liberal ideas, and issued in

1787 an edict of toleration prepared by Malesherbes: "Our justice does not

permit us to exclude any longer, from the rights of the civil state, those of

our subjects who do not profess the Catholic religion." 23 The edict still ex-

cluded non-Catholics from public office, but it gave them all other civil

rights, admitted them to the professions, legitimized their marriages past and

future, and allowed them to celebrate their religious services in private

homes. We should add that a Catholic bishop, M. de La Luzerne, vigorously

supported the emancipation of the Protestants, and full freedom of religious

worship. 24

No class in the cities of France was so disliked by the educated male

minority as the Catholic clergy. The Church was hated, said de Tocqueville,

"not because the priests claimed to regulate the affairs of the other world,

but because they were landed proprietors, lords of manors, tithe owners, and

administrators in this world." 25 A peasant wrote to Necker in 1788: "The

poor suffer from cold and hunger while the canons [cathedral clergy] feast

and think of nothing but fattening themselves like pigs that are to be killed

for Easter." 26 The middle classes resented the exemption of church wealth

from taxation.

Most previous revolutions had been against the state or the Church, rarely

against both at once. The barbarians had overthrown Rome, but they had

accepted the Roman Catholic Church. The Sophists in ancient Greece, the

Reformers in sixteenth-century Europe, had rejected the prevailing religion,

but they had respected the existing government. The French Revolution at-

tacked both the monarchy and the Church, and undertook the double task

and jeopardy of removing both the religious and the secular props of the

existing social order. Is it any wonder that for a decade France went mad?

II. LIFE ON THE EDGE

The philosophers had recognized that, having rejected the theological

foundations of morality, they were obligated to find another basis, another

CHAP. XXXVI ) ONTHEEVE 903

system of belief that would incline men to decent behavior as citizens, hus-

bands, wives, parents, and children. 27 But they were not at all confident that

the human animal could be controlled without a supernaturally sanctioned

moral code. Voltaire and Rousseau finally admitted the moral necessity of

popular religious belief. Mably, addressing to John Adams in 1783 some Ob-

servations sur le gouvernement . . . des tttats urns d^Amerique, warned him

that indifference in matters religious, however harmless it might be in en-

lightened and rational individuals, is fatal to the morals of the masses. A gov-

ernment, he suggested, must control and direct the thought of these "chil-

dren" just as parents do with the young. 28 Diderot, in the second half of his

life, pondered how to devise a natural ethic, and admitted his failure:' "I have

not even dared to write the first line; ... I do not feel myself equal to this

sublime work." 29

What sort of morality prevailed in France after forty years of attacks

upon supernatural beliefs? In answering this question we must not idealize

the first half of the eighteenth century. Fontenelle, shortly before his death

in 1757, said he wished he could live sixty years more "to see what universal

infidelity, depravity, and dissolution of all ties would turn to." 30 If that state-

ment (which was probably unfair to the middle and lower classes) gave a

true picture of upper-class morals in France before the Encyclopedic

(1751), we should hardly be justified in ascribing to the philosophes the

defects of morality in the second half of the century. Other factors than the

decline of religious belief were weakening the old moral code. The growth

of wealth enabled men to finance sins that had been too costly before. Restif

de La Bretonne showed a good bourgeois lamenting the deterioration of

French character by the passage of population from villages and farms to

cities; 31 young men escaped from the discipline of the family, the farm, and

the neighborhood to the corrosive contacts and opportunities of city life,

and the protective anonymity of city crowds. In Les Nuits de Paris Restif

described the Paris of the 1780s as a maelstrom of juvenile delinquents, petty

thieves, professional criminals, and prostitutes female and male. Taine sup-

posed that the France of 1756-88 was diseased with "vagrants, mendicants,

every species of refractory spirit, . . . foul, filthy, haggard, and savage, en-

gendered by the system; and upon each social ulcer they gathered like

vermin." 32 This human waste of the social organism was the product of

human nature and Bourbon rule, and can hardly be ascribed to philosophy

or the decay of religious belief.

Possibly some of the gambling that flourished in Paris (as in London) was

connected with unbelief; but everybody joined in it, pious and impious alike.

In 1776 all private lotteries were suppressed to be merged in the Loterie

Royale. Nevertheless, some part of the sexual chaos in the upper classes

could reasonably be attributed to atheism. In Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liai-

sons dangereuses (1782) we find fictional aristocrats exchanging notes on

the art of seduction, laying plans to have a fifteen-year-old girl deflowered

as soon as she left the convent, and professing a philosophy of moral nihilism.

The protagonist, the Vicomte de Valmont, argues that all men are equally

evil in their desires, but that most men fail to effect them because they allow

904 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVI

moral traditions to intimidate them. The wise man, Valmont holds, will

pursue whichever sensations promise him most pleasure, and will disdain all

moral inhibitions. 33 Some Greek Sophists, we recall, reached similar conclu-

sions after discarding the gods. 34

This philosophy of amoralism, as all the world now knows, was carried

ad nauseam by the Comte— usually miscalled Marquis— de Sade. Born in Paris

in 1740, he served twelve years in the army, was arrested and condemned to

death for homosexual offenses (1772), escaped, was captured, escaped again,

was captured again, and was committed to the Bastille. There he wrote sev-

eral novels and plays, as obscene as his imagination could make them: chiefly

Justine (1791) and Histoire de Juliette, ou Les Prosperites du vice (1792).

Since there is no God, he argued, the wise man will seek to realize every de-

sire so far as he can without incurring earthly punishment. All desires are

equally good; all moral distinctions are delusions; abnormal sexual relations

are legitimate, and are not really abnormal; crime is delightful if you avoid

detection; and there are few things more delicious than beating a pretty girl.

Readers were shocked less by de Sade's amoralism than by his suggestion

that the total destruction of the human race would afflict the cosmos so little

that "it would no more interrupt its course than if the entire species of rab-

bits or hares were extinguished." 35 In 1789 de Sade was removed to a lunatic

asylum at Charenton; he was released in 1790, was recommitted as incurable

in 1803, and died in 18 14.

The philosophers might plead that this amoralism was a sickly non sequitur

from their criticism of the Christian theology, and that a sane mind would

recognize moral obligations with or without religious belief. Many people

did. And among the normal population of France— even of Paris— there were

in these years many elements of moral regeneration: the rise of sentiment and

tenderness; the triumphs of romantic love over marriages of convenience;

the young mother proudly nursing her child; the husband courting his own

wife; the family restored to unity as the soundest source of social order.

These developments were often allied with some remnants of the Christian

creed, or with the semi-Christian philosophy of Rousseau; but the atheist

Diderot gave them enthusiastic support.

The death of Louis XV was followed by a reaction against his sensuality.

Louis XVI gave good example by his simple dress and life, his fidelity to his

wife, and his condemnation of gambling. The Queen herself joined in the

fashion of simplicity, and led the revival of sensibility and sentiment. The

French Academy annually awarded a prize for outstanding virtue. 36 Most

literature was decent; the novels of Crebillon fils were put aside, and Ber-

nardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie set the tone of moral purity in love.

Art reflected the new morality; Greuze and A4me. Vigee-Lebrun celebrated

children and motherhood.

Christianity and philosophy together nourished a humanitarianism that

spread a thousand works of philanthropy and charity. During the hard win-

ter of 1784 Louis XVI devoted three million livres to relief of the poor;

Marie Antoinette contributed 200,000 from her own purse; many others

CHAP. XXXVI ) ON THE EVE 905

followed suit. King and Queen helped to finance the Deaf and Dumb School

established by the Abbe de L'fipee in 1778 to teach his new deaf-and-dumb

alphabet, and the School for Blind Children organized by Valentin Haiiy in

1784. Mme. Necker founded (1778) an asylum and hospital for the poor,

which she personally superintended for ten years. The churches, monasteries,

and convents distributed food and medicines. It was in this reign that a cam-

paign took form to abolish slavery.

Manners, like morals, reflected the age of Rousseau; never, under the

Bourbons, had they been so democratic. Class distinctions remained, but

they were tempered with greater kindliness and wider courtesy. Untitled

men of talent, if they had learned to wash and bow, were welcomed in the

most pedigreed homes. The Queen leaped from her carriage to help a

wounded postilion; the King and his brother the Comte d'Artois put their

shoulders to the wheel to help a workman disengage his cart from the mud.

Dress became simpler: wigs disappeared, and gentlemen discarded, except

at court, their embroideries, laces, and swords; by 1789 it was difficult to

tell a man's class from his garb. When Franklin captured France even the

tailors surrendered to him; people appeared in the streets "dressed a la Frank-

lin, in coarse cloth . . . and thick shoes." 37

The ladies of the bourgeoisie dressed quite as handsomely as those of the

court. After 1780 the women abandoned the clumsy hoopskirt, but fortified

themselves with stiff petticoats worn one over the next like a Chinese puzzle.

Bodices were cut low in front, but the bosom was usually covered with a

triangular kerchief called a fichu (fastening); these could be thickened to

conceal underdevelopment; so the French called them trompeurs or men-

teurs— deceivers or liars. 38 Coiffures continued high, but when Marie An-

toinette lost much of her hair during one of her confinements she replaced

the tower style with curls, and the new fashion spread through the court to

Paris. There were two hundred styles of women's hats; some were precarious

edifices of wire, feathers, ribbons, flowers, and artificial vegetables; but in

their easier hours women followed the style affected by the Queen at the

Petit Trianon, covering the head with a simple scarf. In the greatest revolu-

tion of all, some women wore low heels or comfortable mules. 39

A healthier way of life accompanied the change to easier dress. A growing

minority went in for "natural living": no corsets, no servants, more outdoor

living, and, whenever possible, a retreat from the city to the country. Arthur

Young reported: "Everybody that have country seats is at them, and those

who have not visit those who have. This revolution in French manners is

certainly one of the best features they have taken from England. Its intro-

duction was the easier because of the magic of Rousseau's writings." 40 But

much of this "return to nature" was talk or sentiment rather than action or

reality; life in Paris still ran a dizzy race with concerts, operas, plays, horse

races, water sports, card games, dances, balls, conversation, and salons.

906 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVI

III. THE SALONNISRES

French women adorned the decline of feudalism not only with the charms

of their persons and their dress, but also with their unrivaled ability to make

French society no mere gathering of gossips but a vital part of the nation's

intellectual life. Gibbon, after renewing in 1777 his acquaintance with the

salons of Paris, wrote:

If Julian could now revisit the capital of France [where he had been born in

a.d. 331], he might converse with men of science and genius capable of under-

standing and instructing a disciple of the Greeks; he might excuse the graceful

follies of a nation whose martial spirit has never been enervated by the in-

dulgence of luxury; and he must applaud the perfection of that inestimable art

which softens and refines and embellishes the intercourse of social life. 41

And in a letter he added: "It has always seemed to me that in Lausanne, as

well as in Paris, the women are far superior to the men." 42

The older salonnieres were reluctantly leaving the scene. Mme. Geoffrin,

as we have seen, died in 1777. Mme. du Deffand almost spanned the century

by entering history as one of the Regent's mistresses 43 and opening a salon

that continued from 1739 to 1780. She had lost most of the literary lions to

Julie de Lespinasse and the new salons, and Horace Walpole, coming to her

for the first time in 1765, found her assortment of aging aristocrats unexcit-

ing. "I sup there twice a week, and bear all her dull company for the sake of

the Regent" 44 — i.e., for her lively memories of that remarkable interregnum

which had set the tone of French society and morals for the next sixty years.

But (Horace added) she herself "is delicious [at sixty-eight], as eager about

what happens every day as I am about the last century."

He admired her mind so rapturously— having never met such brilliance in

the still-suppressed women of England— that he went to her every day, and

paid her compliments that seemed to restore her golden days. She gave him

a special chair, which was always reserved for him; she had him pampered

with every form of womanly solicitude. Herself somewhat masculine, she

was not displeased by his almost effeminate delicacy. Unable to see him, she

could mold her image of him close to her heart's desire, and fell in love with

that image. Able to see her, he could never forget her age and her physical

helplessness. When he went back to England she wrote him letters almost as

warm with devotion as those of Julie de Lespinasse to Guibert, and written

in as fine a prose as that age could show. His replies tried to check her ela-

tion; he shivered at the thought of what the Selwyns of England would do

with such a juicy morsel for satire. She suffered his reproofs, reaffirmed her

love, agreed to call it friendship, but assured him that in France friendship

was often deeper and stronger than love. "I belong to you more than to my-

self. ... I wish I could send you my soul instead of a letter. I would will-

ingly give up years of my life to be sure of being alive when you come back

to Paris." She compared him to Montaigne, "and this is the highest praise I

could give you, for I find no mind as just or as clear as his." 45

CHAP.XXXVl) ON THE EVE 907

He went to Paris again in August, 1767. She awaited him with virginal

excitement. "At last, at last, no sea divides us. I cannot make myself believe

that a man of your importance, with Jiis hands on the wheel of a great gov-

ernment, and therefore of Europe, could . . . leave everything to come and

see an old sibyl in the corner of a convent. It is really too absurd, but I am

enchanted. . . . Come, my tutor! ... It is not a dream— I know I am

awake— I shall see you today!" She sent her carriage for him; he went to her

at once. For six weeks he gladdened her with his presence and saddened her

with his cautions. When he had gone back to England she could think only

of his returning to Paris. "You will make my sunset far more beautiful and

happy than my noon or my dawn. Your pupil, who is as submissive as a child,

only wishes to see you." 46

On March 30, 1773, he asked her to write no more. 47 Then he relented,

and the correspondence was resumed. In February, 1775, he asked her to re-

turn all his letters. She complied, with a delicate suggestion that he recipro-

cate. "You will have enough to light your fires for a long time if you add to

yours all those you have received from me. That would be only fair, but I

leave it to your prudence." 48 Of his eight hundred letters to her only nineteen

have survived; all of hers were preserved, and were published after Wal-

pole's death. When he heard that her pension had been discontinued he of-

fered to replace it out of his own income; she did not think it necessary.

The collapse of her romance darkened the natural pessimism of a woman

who missed the colors of life but knew its shallows and depths. Even in her

blindness she could see through all gallant surfaces to the indefatigable self-

ishness of the self. "My poor tutor," she asked Walpole, "have you met only

monsters, crocodiles, and hyenas? As for me I see only fools, idiots, liars, en-

vious and sometimes perfidious people. . . . Everyone I see here dries up

my soul. I find no virtue, no sincerity, no simplicity, in anyone." 49 Little reli-

gious belief survived to comfort her. Yet she continued her suppers, usually

twice a week, and often dined out, if only to avoid the boredom of days as

dark as the nights.

At last she, who had learned to hate life, stopped clutching at it, and re-

conciled herself to death. The illnesses that plague old age had mounted and

combined, and she felt too weak, at eighty-three, to combat them. She sum-

moned a priest and made, without much faith, her surrender to hope. In Au-

gust, 1780, she sent her last letter to Walpole:

I am worse today. ... I cannot think that this condition means anything

but the end. I am not strong enough to be frightened, and as I am not to see

you again I have nothing to regret. . . . Amuse yourself, my friend, as well as

you can. Do not distress yourself about my condition. . . . You will regret me,

for one is glad to know that one is loved. 50

She died on September 23, having left to Walpole her papers and her dog.

Many other salonnieres continued the great tradition: Mesdames d'Hou-

detot, d'fipinay, Denis, de Genlis, Luxembourg, Condorcet, Boufflers, Choi-

seul, Gramont, Beauharnais (wife of an uncle to Josephine). Add to all these

908 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVI

the last great pre-Revolutionary salon— Mme. Necker's. About 1770 she be-

gan her Friday receptions; later she received also on Tuesdays, when music

ruled; there the Gluck-Piccini war divided the diners, and Mile. Clairon

united them by reciting passages from her favorite roles. On Fridays one might

meet there Diderot, Marmontel, Morellet, d'Alembert (after Julie's death),

Saint-Lambert, Grimm (after Mme. d'£pinay's death), Gibbon, Raynal,

BufFon, Guibert, Galiani, Pigalle, and Suzanne's special literary friend, An-

toine Thomas. It was at one of these gatherings (April, 1770) that the idea

was broached of a statue to Voltaire. There Diderot muzzled his heresies,

and became almost refined. "It is regrettable to me," he wrote to Mme.

Necker, "that I did not have the good fortune of knowing you sooner. You

would certainly have inspired in me a sense of pureness and delicacy that

would have passed from my soul into my works." 51 Others did not report so

favorably. Marmontel, though he remained her friend for twenty-five years,

described Suzanne in his Memoirs: "Unacquainted with the manners and

customs of Paris, she had none of the charms of a young Frenchwoman. . . .

She had no taste in her dress, no ease in her demeanor, no charm in her po-

liteness, and her mind, as well as the expression of her face, was too com-

pletely adjusted to possess grace. Her most attractive qualities were those of

decorum, sincerity, and kindliness of heart." 52 Aristocratic ladies did not take

to her; the Baroness d'Oberkirch, who visited the Neckers with Grand Duke

Paul in 1782, put her down as "simply nothing more than a governess"; 53

and the Marquise de Crequi tore her to shreds in some charmingly spiteful

pages. 54 Mme. Necker must have had many good qualities to win the lasting

love of Gibbon, but she never quite overcame her Calvinist heritage; she re-

mained prim and puritan amid her wealth, and never acquired the sophisti-

cated gaiety that Frenchmen expected of women.

In 1766 she gave birth to the future A4me. de Stael. Germaine Necker,

growing up among philosophers and statesmen, became a pundit at ten. Her

precocious intelligence made her the pride of her parents until her willful

and excitable temperament proved hard on her mother's nerves. Suzanne,

more conservative every day, subjected Germaine to strict discipline; the

daughter rebelled, and discord in the elegant home rivaled the chaos in the

finances of the state. Necker's difficulties in trying to stave off governmental

bankruptcy despite the American war, and Mme. Necker's resentment of

every criticism that he received in the press, added to the mother's unhappi-

ness, and Suzanne began to long for the calm life that she had led in Switzer-

land.

In 1786 Germaine married, and took over part of the duties of hostess in

her mother's salon. But the French salon was now in decline; literary discus-

sion was giving way to eager and partisan politics. "I have no literary news to

give you," Suzanne wrote to a friend in 1786. "Such conversation is no

longer the fashion; the crisis is too great; people do not care to play chess on

the edge of a precipice." 55 In 1790 the family moved to Coppet, a chateau

which Necker had bought on the north shores of the Lake of Geneva. There

Mme. de Stael reigned, and Mme. Necker suffered for years a painful nerv-

ous disease, which put an end to her life in 1794.

CHAP. XXXVI ) ON THE EVE 909

IV. MUSIC

"As far as music is concerned," Mozart wrote from Paris on May i, 1778,

"I am surrounded by mere brute beasts. . . . Ask anyone you like— pro-

vided he is not a Frenchman born— and if he knows anything about the

matter he will say exactly the same. ... I shall thank Almighty God if I

escape with my taste unspoiled." 56 These were hard words, but Grimm and

Goldoni agreed with them; 57 however, all three critics were foreigners. The

musical taste of the upper-class Parisians reflected their manners, inclining

to restraint of expression and regularity of form; it still echoed the age of

Louis XIV. Yet it was precisely in these first years of the new reign that half

of Paris lost restraint, and perhaps good manners, in the excitement of the

battle over Piccini and Gluck. And note Julie de Lespinasse's letter of Sep-

tember 22, 1774: "I go constantly to Orfe et Eurydice. I long to hear a

dozen times a day that air which rends me, . . . 'J' a i perdu mon Eury-

dice.' " 58 Paris was not dead to music, though it imported more than it pro-

duced.

In 175 1 Frangois-Joseph Gossec, aged seventeen, came from his native

Hainaut to Paris with a letter of introduction to Rameau. The old master

secured for him a post as conductor of the private orchestra maintained by

Alexandre-Joseph de La Popeliniere. For that "band" Gossec composed

(1754 f.) symphonies antedating Haydn's first by five years, and in 1754

he published quartets antedating Haydn's by a year. In 1760 he presented

in the Church of St. Roch his Messe des Morts y which originated the idea of

playing the wind instruments of the Tuba mirum outside the church. There

was no end to Gossec's enterprise and versatility. In 1784 he founded the

£cole Royale du Chant, which became the nucleus of the renowned Paris

Conservatoire de Musique. He achieved a moderate success in opera, comic

and serious. He adjusted himself to the Revolution, and composed some of

its most famous songs, including the "Hymn to the Supreme Being" for

Robespierre's celebration (June 8, 1794). He survived all political modula-

tions, dying in 1 829 at the age of ninety-five.

The dominant figure in the French opera of this period was Andre

Gretry. Like so many others prominent in French music in the eighteenth

century, he was an alien, born at Liege in 1741, son of a violinist. On the day

of his first Communion, he tells us, he asked God to let him die at once un-

less he was destined to be a good man and a great musician. That day a rafter

fell on his head and severely wounded him; he recovered, and concluded

that a noble future was divinely promised him. 59 From the age of sixteen he

suffered periodically from internal hemorrhages, vomiting six cups of blood

in a day; he was subject to fevers and occasional delirium, and at times he

went almost mad from inability to stop some strain of music from turning

round and round in his head. Even bad music could be forgiven to a man

who was so tormented and yet kept his good cheer through seventy-two

years.

9 IQ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVI

At the age of seventeen he composed six symphonies, good enough to

secure from a cathedral canon the means of going to Rome. If we may be-

lieve the engaging Memoires which he published in 1797, he walked all the

way. 60 During his eight years in Italy he was influenced by the success of

Pergolesi to compose comic operas. Coming to Paris (1767), he received

encouragement from Diderot, Grimm, and Rousseau. He studied the dra-

matic art of Mile. Clairon, developed a special skill in adjusting his music to

the accents and inflexions of dramatic speech, and achieved in his operas a

lyric delicacy and tenderness that seemed to reflect the spirit of Rousseau,

and the return to simplicity and sentiment in French life. He continued to

be popular throughout the Revolution, which ordered his works to be pub-

lished at the government's expense; arias from his operas were sung by

revolutionary crowds. Napoleon gave him a pension. Everybody liked him

because he had so few of the stigmata of genius: he was kindly, affectionate,

sociable, modest, spoke well of his rivals, and paid his debts. He loved Rous-

seau, though Rousseau had offended him; in his old age he bought the

Hermitage, where Rousseau had lived. In that cottage, on September 24, 1 8 1 3,

while Napoleon was fighting all Europe, Gretry died.

V. ART UNDER LOUIS XVI

Now the style Louis Seize, which had begun almost with the birth of

Louis XVI (1754), continued its reaction against the sinuous irregularities

of baroque and the feminine delicacies of rococo, and moved toward the

masculine lines and symmetrical proportions of a neoclassical art inspired by

the excavations at Herculaneum and the Greco-Roman fervor of Winckel-

mann. The most famous example of the new style in architecture is the Petit

Trianon; it is amusing that Mme. du Barry and Marie Antoinette, who were

not on speaking terms, agreed in enjoying this modest tribute to classical order

and simplicity. Another pretty example is the present Palais de la Legion

d'Honneur, built as the Hotel Salm (1782) by Pierre Rousseau on the left

bank of the Seine. A more massive product of the style is the Palais de Justice

as rebuilt in 1776, with its magnificent wrought-iron grille fronting the Cour

de Mai. The Theatre National de POdeon (1779) took a somber Doric

form; more amiable is the theater raised at Amiens (1778) by Jacques Rous-

seau in a union of classical and Renaissance. At Bordeaux Victor Louis built

(1775) on classical lines an immense theater which Arthur Young described

as "by far the most magnificent in France; I have seen nothing that ap-

proaches it." 81

Interior decoration retained French elegance. Tapestry was going out of

fashion except as covering for armchairs and sofas; painted wallpaper was

coming in from China, but was used chiefly in bedrooms; the walls of salons

were generally divided into panels of treated wood, carved or painted with

figures or floral arabesques rivaling the best in Italy. The finest furniture in

the France of Louis XVI was designed and made by two Germans, Jean-

CHAP.XXXVl) ON THE EVE 91 I

Henri Riesener and David Roentgen; the Wallace Collection has some en-

viable examples made for Marie Antoinette and the Petit Trianon.

Sculpture flourished. Pigalle, Falconet, and Jean-Jacques Caffieri lived on

from the days of Louis XV. Augustin Pajou, who had begun work in that

reign, now came into his own. Under commissions from Louis XVI he

carved decorations for the Palais-Royal and the Palais-Bourbon. In his

Psyche Abandoned, 62 he tried to reconcile two elements in the new age-

tender sentiment and classic form. He transmitted his art— and gave his

daughter in marriage— to Clodion, whose real name was Claude Michel.

Clodion carved a way to prosperity with terra-cotta groups slightly erotic,

and reached his zenith with a statue of Montesquieu. 63 All the ecstasy of the

flesh sings in the Nymph and Satyr now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

in New York.

The supreme sculptor of the age was Jean-Antoine Houdon. His father

was a porter, but in an art school. Born in Versailles, Jean breathed sculpture

from the statues with which Louis XIV had peopled the gardens of Le

Notre. After studying with Pigalle he won the Prix de Rome at twenty, and

sallied off to Italy (1760). The St. Bruno that he carved in Rome so pleased

Clement XIV that he commented, "The Saint would speak, were it not that

the rules of his order impose silence." 64 In Paris he carved or cast a succession

of Dianas; one in bronze, in the Huntington Collection, is a marvel of classic

features and French grace. More famous is the bronze Diane Nue now in the

Louvre; it was refused a place in the Salon of 1785, perhaps because (said a

critic) "she was too beautiful and too nude to be exposed to the public," 65

more probably because the statue violated the traditional conception of

Diana as chaste.

Houdon, like so many artists of the eighteenth century, found more profit

in contemporary portraits than in inviolable goddesses. Nevertheless he re-

solved to be fair with the facts, and to show a character rather than a face.

He spent many hours in the dissecting rooms of medical schools, studying

anatomy. When possible he made careful measurements of the sitter's head,

and carved or cast the statue to correspond. When question arose as to

whether a corpse that had been exhumed in Paris was really, as claimed, that

of John Paul Jones, the shape and measurements of the skull were compared

with those of the portrait that Houdon had cast in 1781, and the agreement

was so close that the identity was accepted as confirmed. 66 He cut into the

marble of his Mirabeau all the ravages of smallpox, and showed every

shadow and wrinkle, even the fire and depth of the eyes, and the lips parted

in readiness to speak.

Soon all the Titans of the upheaval were glad to sit for him, and he trans-

mitted them to us with a fidelity that turned marble and bronze into the flesh

and soul of history. So we now can see Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alem-

bert, Buffon, Turgot, Louis XVI, Catherine II, Cagliostro, Lafayette, Na-

poleon, Ney. When Voltaire came to Paris in 1778 Houdon made several

statues of him: a bronze bust now in the Louvre, showing exhaustion and

weariness; a similar marble bust now in the Victoria and Albert Museum;

912 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVI

another in the Wallace Collection; an idealized smiling head ordered by

Frederick the Great; and, most famous of all, the statue presented by Mme.

Denis to the Comedie-Frangaise: Voltaire seated in a flowing robe, bony

fingers grasping the arms of the chair, thin lips, toothless mouth, some gaiety

still in the wistful eyes— this is one of the great statues in the history of art.

In that same year, hearing of Rousseau's death, Houdon hurried to Ermenon-

ville and took a death mask of Voltaire's rival; from this he made the bust

now in the Louvre; this too is a masterpiece.

There were American heroes also, and Houdon made such lifelike heads

of them that coins of the United States still bear his likenesses of Washing-

ton, Franklin, and Jefferson. When Franklin returned to America in 1785

Houdon went with him; he hastened to Mt. Vernon and persuaded the busy

and impatient Washington to sit for him, on and off, for a fortnight; so he

made the statue that adorns the state capitol at Richmond, Virginia— a man of

granite, sombered with costly victories and remaining tasks. Here again is

that union of body and soul which is the sign and seal of Houdon's art.

Such sculpture would have made painting a minor delicacy had it not been

that Greuze and Fragonard continued to work throughout the reign and the

Revolution, and that Jacques-Louis David, a painter, in a career as meteoric

as Napoleon's, rose to a dictatorship over all the arts in France. He learned

his technique from his great-uncle Frangois Boucher, and became a first-rate

draftsman, a master of line and composition rather than of color. Boucher

perceived that the change of morals since Pompadour and Du Barry to Ma-

rie Antoinette was reducing the market for bosoms and buttocks; he advised

David to go and pick up the chaste neoclassical style in the studio of Joseph

Vien, who was painting Roman soldiers and heroic women. In 1775 David

accompanied Vien to Rome. There he felt the influence of Winckelmann

and Mengs, of the antique sculptures in the Vatican Gallery, of the ruins

exhumed at Herculaneum and Pompeii. He accepted the neoclassical princi-

ples, and took Greek statuary as a model for his painting.

Back in Paris, he exhibited a succession of classical subjects severely

drawn: Andromache Weeping over the Dead Body of Hector (1783), The

Oath of the Horatii (1785), The Death of Socrates (1787), Brutus Return-

ing from Condemning His Sons to Death (1789). 67 (In the legend as told

by Livy, Lucius Junius Brutus, as praetor of the young Roman Republic

(509 B.C.), sentenced his own sons to death for conspiring to restore the

kings.) David had painted this last picture in Rome; when he offered it to

the Academy in Paris its exhibition was forbidden; the art public protested;

finally the canvas was shown, and added to the revolutionary fever of the

time. Paris saw in these paintings, and in the stern ethic they conveyed, a

double revolt— against aristocratic rococo and royal tyranny. David became

the radical hero of the Paris studios.

During the Revolution he was elected to the Convention, and in January,

1793, he voted for the execution of the King. Another deputy who had so

voted was slain by a royalist (January 20, 1793); the body was exhibited to

the public as that of a republican martyr; David painted The Last Moments

CHAP.XXXVl) ONTHEEVE 913

of Lepeletier; the Convention hung it in its chamber. When Marat was

slain by Charlotte Corday (July 13, 1793), David pictured the dead man

lying half immersed in his bath; seldom had art been so realistic, or so calcu-

lated to arouse feeling. These two paintings established the martyrology of

the Revolution. David worked enthusiastically for Danton and Robespierre;

in return he was made director of all art in Paris.

When Napoleon took power with the Roman title of consul, David

painted for him as zealously as he had done for the leaders of the Terror. He

saw Bonaparte as the Son of the Revolution, fighting to keep the kings of

Europe from restoring their like to France. When Napoleon made himself

emperor (1804) David's adoration was not subdued; and Napoleon made

him painter to the imperial court. The artist produced for him several fa-

mous pictures: Napoleon Crossing the Alps, The Coronation of Josephine

by Napoleon, and The Distribution of the Eagles; these immense paintings

were later placed on the walls of rooms in the palace at Versailles. Mean-

while David displayed his versatility with excellent portraits of Mme. Re-

camier and Pope Pius VI. 68 When the Bourbons were restored David was

banished as a regicide; he retired to Brussels, where his wife (who had left

him in 1791 because of his revolutionary ardor) came to share his exile.

Now he returned to classical subjects, and to the sculptural style of painting

favored by Mengs. In 1825, aged seventy-seven, he ended one of the most

spectacular careers in the history of art.

Among his portraits is one of Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, who rejected revolu-

tion and preferred kings and queens. Toward the end of her eighty-seven

years (1 755-1 842) she published memoirs giving a pleasant account of her

youth, a sad story of her marriage, an itinerary of her artistic odyssey, and

a picture of a good woman shocked by the violence of history. Her father,

a portrait painter, died when she was thirteen, leaving no fortune, but Elisa-

beth had been so apt a pupil that by the age of sixteen she was earning a

good income from her portraits. In 1776 she married another painter, Pierre

Lebrun, grandnephew of the Charles Le Brun who had been master of arts

for Louis XIV. Her husband (she tells us) squandered her fortune and his

through "his unbridled passion for women of bad morals, joined to his fond-

ness for gambling." 69 She bore him a daughter (1778), and soon thereafter

left him.

In 1779 she painted Marie Antoinette, who so fancied her as to sit for

twenty portraits. The two women became such friends that they sang to-

gether the tender airs with which Gretry was drawing tears from Paris eyes.

This royal favor, and the genteel elegance of her work, opened all doors to

the attractive painter. She made every woman beautiful, putting roses into

faded cheeks; soon every moneyed lady itched to sit. She received such high

fees that she was able to maintain an expensive apartment and a salon fre-

quented by the best musicians of Paris.

Despite her friendship with the Queen, she went out three times to por-

tray Mme. du Barry at Louveciennes. On the third occasion (July 14, 1789)

she heard the sound of cannon firing in Paris. She returned to the city to find

9 H ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVI

that the Bastille had been taken, and that the victorious populace was carry-

ing noble heads on bloody pikes. On October 5, while another mob was

tramping to Versailles to make the King and Queen their captives, she gath-

ered what she could of her belongings and began thirteen years of voluntary

exile. In Rome she made the familiar portrait of herself and her daughter. 70

At Naples she pictured Lady Hamilton as a bacchante. 71 She painted in

Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg; and when the Revolution had run its

course she returned to France (1802). There, triumphant over all vicissi-

tudes, she lived another forty years, wisely dying before revolution was re-

newed.

VI. LITERATURE

In the brief period between 1774 and 1789 French literature produced

some memorable works that still find readers and move minds: the Maximes

of Chamfort, the Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the Liaisons

danger euses of Choderlos de Laclos (of which we have said enough), and

the chaotic but revealing volumes of Restif de La Bretonne.

These were islands erupting from a literary sea of schools, libraries, read-

ing circles, lectures, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and books— such a

froth and ferment of ink as the world had never known before. Only a small

minority of the French people could read; 72 nevertheless millions of them

were thirsty for knowledge and bursting with ideas. Encyclopedias, com-

pendiums of science, outlines of knowledge, were in wide demand. The phil-

osophes and the reformers were investing high hopes in the spread of edu-

cation.

Though the Jesuits were gone and the schools were now controlled by the

state, most of the teaching was still in the hands of the clergy. The univer-

sities, rigidly orthodox in religion and politics, had fallen into torpor and

disrepute, and were only beginning, at the end of the century, to notice the

sciences. But public lectures on science were eagerly attended, and technical

schools were multiplying. In the colleges nearly all the students were of the

middle class; young nobles went rather to one or another of the twelve mili-

tary academies that Saint-Germain had set up in or after 1776. (In one of

these, at Brienne, Napoleon Bonaparte was studying.) College students, we

are told, "frequently formed organizations to support political demonstra-

tions"; 73 and as there were at this time more college graduates than the

French economy could use, the placeless ones became voices of discontent;

such men wrote pamphlets that stoked the fires of revolt.

The rich had private libraries, enviably housed, of books luxuriously

bound and sometimes read. The middle and lower classes used circulating li-

braries, or bought their books— nearly all paperbacks— from stalls or stores.

In 1774 the sale of books in Paris was estimated to be four times that of much

more populous London. 74 Restif de La Bretonne reported that reading had

made the workers of Paris "intractable." 75

CHAP. XXXVI ) ONTHEEVE 915

Newspapers were growing in number, size, and influence. The old Ga-

zette de France, established in 163 1, was still the official— and distrusted—

purveyor of political news. The Mercure de France, which had begun in

1672 as the Mercure galant, had in 1790 a circulation of thirteen thousand

copies, which was thought excellent; Mirabeau called it the ablest of the

French newspapers. 76 The Journal de Paris, the first French daily, began

publication in 1777; the more famous Moniteur did not appear till Novem-

ber 24, 1789. There were many provincial newspapers, like the Courier de

Provence, which was edited by Mirabeau fils.

Pamphlets were an inundation that finally swept everything before them.

In the last months of 1788 some 2,500 were published in France. 77 Some had

historic effect, like the Abbe Sieyes' Qiiest-ce que le Tiers-etat? or Camille

Desmoulins' La France libre. By July, 1789, the press was the strongest force

in France. Necker described it, in 1784, as "an invisible power which,

though without wealth, without weapons, and without an army, dictates

alike to town and court, and even in the palaces of kings." 78 Songs played a

part in the agitation; Chamfort called the government a monarchy limited

by popular airs. 79

Chamfort himself was snatched up into the revolutionary current, and

passed from being persona grata at court to taking part in storming the Bas-

tille. Born the son of a village grocer (1741), he came to Paris and lived on

his wits and wit. Women housed and fed him merely to have the stimulus of

his conversation. He wrote several dramas, one of which, performed at Fon-

tainebleau, so pleased Marie Antoinette that she persuaded the King to give

him a pension of twelve hundred livres. He was made secretary to a sister

of Louis XVI, and received an additional two thousand livres a year. Every-

thing seemed to bind him to the royal cause, but in 1783 he met Mirabeau,

and was soon changed into a caustic critic of the government. It was he who

gave Sieyes the catching title for his famous pamphlet.

Meanwhile, inspired by La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and Voltaire,

he jotted down "maxims" expressing his sardonic view of the world. Mme.

Helvetius, who for years kept him as a house guest at Sevres, said, "When-

ever I had a conversation with Chamfort in the morning, I was saddened for

the rest of the day." 80 He thought life a hoax upon hope. "Hope is a charla-

tan that always deceives us; and as for myself, my happiness began only

when I abandoned hope." 81 "If the cruel truths, the sad discoveries, the

secrets of society, which compose the knowledge of a man of the world

who has reached the age of forty, had been known to this same man at the

age of twenty, either he would have fallen into despair or he would have

deliberately become corrupt." 82 Coming at the end of the Age of Reason,

Chamfort laughed at reason as less a master of passion than a tool of evil.

"Man, in the actual state of society, seems more corrupted by his reason than

by his passions." 83 As for women, "whatever evil a man can think of them,

there is no woman who does not think still worse of them than he does." 84

Marriage is a snare. "Marriage and celibacy are both of them troublesome;

we should prefer that one whose inconveniences are not without remedy." 85

916 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVI

"Women give to friendship only what they borrow from love," 86 and "love,

such as it exists in society, is nothing but an exchange of fantasies and the

contact of two skins [contact de deux epidermes] ." 87

When Chamfort stepped out of palaces and mansions into the streets of

Paris his pessimism was intensified. "Paris, city of amusement and pleasure,

where four fifths of the people die of grief, ... a place that stinks and

where no one loves." 88 The only cure for these slums would be childlessness.

"It is unfortunate for mankind, fortunate for tyrants, that the poor and mis-

erable do not have the instinct or pride of the elephant, who does not repro-

duce in captivity." 89

Chamfort at times indulged in an ideal. "It is necessary to unite contraries:

the love of virtue with indifference to public opinion; the taste for work

with indifference to fame; and the care of one's health with indifference to

life." 90 For some years he thought to give meaning to life by dedicating him-

self to revolution, but five years of dealing with Mirabeau, Danton, Marat,

and Robespierre regenerated his despair. It seemed to him then that the Rev-

olutionary motto "Liberty, equality, fraternity" had come to mean "Be my

brother or I'll kill you." 91 He cast in his lot with the Girondins, and lashed

the more radical leaders with his reckless wit. He was arrested, but was soon

released. Threatened again with arrest, he shot and stabbed himself. He lin-

gered till April 13, 1794, an d died after saying to Sieyes, "I go at last out of

this world, where the heart must break or make itself bronze [Je vien vats

enfin de ce monde, oil il fain que le coeur se brise ou se bronze | ." 92

If the influence of Voltaire predominated in Chamfort, that of Rousseau

was complete and avowed in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. At

the age of thirty-one (1768) he went as an engineer on a governmental com-

mission to the He de France, now called Mauritius. In that mountainous,

rainy, fruitful island he found what he thought was Rousseau's "state of na-

ture"— men and women living close to the earth and free from the vices of

civilization. Returning to France (1771), he became a devoted friend of

Jean-Jacques, learned to tolerate his tantrums, and to think of him as another

saviour for mankind. In a Voyage a Pile de France (1773) he described the

simple life and sustaining religious faith of the island's population. The

bishop of Aix saw in this book a wholesome reaction against Voltaire, and

secured for the author a royal pension of a thousand livres. Bernardin re-

sponded with Etudes de la nature (1784) and Les Harmonies de la nature

(1796), in which he described the wonders of plant and animal life, and

argued that the many instances of apparent adaptation, purpose, and design

prove the existence of a supreme intelligence. He went beyond Rousseau in

exalting feeling above reason. "The further reason advances, the more it

brings us evidence of our nothingness; and far from calming our sorrows

by its researches, it often increases them by its light. . . . But feeling . . .

gives us a sublime impulsion, and in subjugating our reason it becomes the

noblest and most gratifying instinct in human life." 93

To a second edition of the Etudes (1788) Bernardin appended a romance,

CHAP. XXXVl) ON THE EVE 917

Paul et Virginie, which has remained a classic of French literature through

a dozen shifts of taste. Two pregnant Frenchwomen come to iMauritius, one

whose husband has died, the other whose lover has deserted her. One gives

birth to Paul, the other to Virginie. The children grow up in a mountain

valley, amid majestic scenery scented with natural flowers. Their morals are

formed by maternal devotion and religious teaching. As soon as they reach

puberty they fall in love with each other— no one else being around. Virginie

is sent to France to collect an inheritance— which does not often happen in

a state of nature. She is offered marriage and great fortune if she will stay

in France, but she rejects them to return to Mauritius and Paul. He runs

down to the shore to see her ship approaching; he is overjoyed with thoughts

of love and happiness; but the vessel runs into shallows, is grounded, and is

shattered by a storm; Virginie is drowned in trying to reach the shore. Paul

dies of grief.

The little book is a prose poem, told with a simplicity of style and a purity

and music of language nowhere surpassed in French literature. Its piety and

sentiment fell in with the mood of the time, and no one was disturbed by the

fact that these virtuous women and children had slaves. 94 Bernardin was

hailed as the authentic successor of Rousseau; women wrote to him in the

same tone of devout admiration with which they had comforted the author

of Emile. Like him, Bernardin did not take advantage of his fame; he

shunned society, and lived quietly among the poor. The Revolution left

him unharmed. Amid its violence he married, at fifty-five, Felicite Didot,

aged twenty-two; she gave him two children, who were named Paul and

Virginie. After Felicite's death he married again, at sixty-three, a young

woman, Desiree de Pellepou, who took care of him lovingly till his death

in 1 8 14. Before he departed he saw the rise of Chateaubriand, who took the

torch of French romanticism and piety from his hands, and carried it into

the nineteenth century.

There were in this age some minor books which are no longer read, but

which shared in giving voice and color to the time. Abbe Jean-Jacques Bar-

thelemy published at the age of seventy -two (1788), after working on it for

thirty years, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece, which purported to de-

scribe the physical appearance, the antiquities, institutions, customs, and

coins of Greece in the fourth century before Christ, as seen by a Scythian

traveler; it came on the crest of the classic wave, and was one of the out-

standing literary successes of the age. It almost established the science of nu-

mismatics in France.

Its popularity was rivaled by Les Ruines, on Meditations sur les revolu-

tions des empires, which Comte Constantin de Volney issued in 1791 after

four years of travel in Egypt and Syria. Seeing the shattered remnants of an-

cient civilizations, he asked, "Who can assure us that a like desolation will

not one day be the lot of our country?" We should now hesitate to give an

optimistic answer to this question, but Volney, coming at the close of the

Age of Reason, and inheriting, like Condorcet, all its hopes for mankind,

9 J 8 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVI

informed his readers that the collapse of those old empires had been due to

the ignorance of their peoples, and that this had been due to the difficulty of

transmitting knowledge from man to man and from generation to genera-

tion. But now these difficulties had been overcome by the invention of print-

ing. All that is needed henceforth to avert the ruin of civilization is the wide

dissemination of knowledge, which leads men and states to reconcile their

unsocial impulses with the common good. In this equilibrium of forces war

will give way to arbitration, and "the whole species will become one great

society, a single family governed by the same spirit and by common laws,

enjoying all the felicity of which human nature is capable." 95

We come to the incredible career of Nicolas-Edme Restif de La Bretonne,

called, by some contemporaries, "the Rousseau of the gutter" and "the Vol-

taire of the chambermaids"; author of some two hundred volumes, many of

them printed by his own hand and press, some deliberately pornographic,

all constituting a detailed picture of the morals and manners of the lower

classes in the reign of Louis XVI.

In La Vie de mon pere (1779) he gave a tenderly idealized account of his

father, Edmond, whom he remembered as having "the air of a Hercules and

the gentleness of a girl." 96 The son recorded his own life in sixteen meander-

ing volumes entitled Monsieur Nicolas (1794-97), f act an ^ fiction about his

vicissitudes, amours, and ideas. He was born in a farmhouse (1737) in Sacy

(one section of which was called La Bretonne), twenty miles from Auxerre.

At the age of eleven, he assures us, he first became a father. 97 At fourteen he

fell in love with Jeannette Rousseau, seventeen, and began his lifelong adora-

tion of female feet. "My feeling for her was as pure and tender as it was

intense. . . . Her pretty foot was irresistible to me." 98 Perhaps to disengage

him from such entanglements he was sent to Auxerre (1751 ) to serve as

apprentice to a printer. He soon seduced his master's wife; but for this he is

the sole authority. By the age of fifteen, he tells us, he had had fifteen "mis-

tresses." After four years of this pursuit he moved to Paris; there he was

employed as a journeyman printer, earning two and a half francs a day,

which enabled him to eat, and to pay for an occasional prostitute; sometimes,

when his funds were low, he slept with charcoal women. 99 In 1760, aged

twenty-six, he married a woman almost as experienced as himself, Agnes

Lebeque; each proved unfaithful. They were divorced in 1784, not because

of these peccadilloes, but because both had fallen into authorship, and they

were competing for paper, ink, and fame.

Nicolas had begun his career as a writer in 1767, with Le Pied de Fan-

chette, in which the piece de resistance was the lass's foot. His first literary

success was Le Paysan perverti (1775). It tells in letter form how the peas-

ant Edmond, moving to Paris, is perverted by city life and irreligion. A

freethinker, Gaudit d'Arras, teaches him that God is a myth and morality a

sham, that all pleasures are legitimate, that virtue is an unwarranted imposi-

tion upon the natural rights of our desires, and that our prime obligation is

CHAP. XXXVI ) ON THE EVE 919

to live as fully as possible. 100 Arras is arrested; Edmond tells him, "There

is a God"; Arras is hanged impenitent. One contemporary called the book

"the Liaisons dangereuses of the people"; 101 Restif thought it would live as

long as the French language. 102 In a companion volume, La Paysanne per-

vertie (1784), he continued his attack upon amoralism and the corruptions

of city life. He used his royalties to raise himself a notch or two on the

social scale of adultery.

Restifs most significant work was Les Contemporaines, which ran to

sixty-five volumes (1780-91). These short stories had an attractive subtitle:

"Aventures des plus jolies femmes de l'age present"— the lives, loves, and

manners of flower girls, chestnut sellers, charcoal vendors, seamstresses, hair-

dressers, described so realistically and accurately that actual persons recog-

nized themselves, and cursed the author when they met him in the streets. 103

Not till Balzac was so large a panorama of human life presented in French

literature. Critics condemned Restifs addiction to "low subjects," but Se-

bastien Mercier, whose Tableau de Paris (1781-90) was offering a more

systematic survey of the city, pronounced him "incontestably our greatest

novelist." 104

Just before the Revolution Restif began to record, in Les Nuits de Paris

(1788-94), the incidents that he witnessed (or imagined) on his nightly

walks. Again he noted chiefly the lower depths of Paris— beggars, porters,

pickpockets, smugglers, gamblers, drunkards, kidnapers, thieves, deviates,

prostitutes, pimps, and suicides. He claimed to have seen little happiness,

much misery, and he pictured himself as in many cases a rescuing hero. He

visited the cafes near the Palais-Royal, and saw the Revolution taking form;

he heard Camille Desmoulins' famous call to arms; saw the victorious mob

parading the severed head of de Launay, warden of the Bastille; saw the

women marching to capture the King at Versailles. 105 Soon he tired of the

violence, the terror, the insecurity of life. He was several times in danger of

arrest, but escaped by professions of revolutionary faith. Privately he de-

nounced it all, and wished that "good Louis XVI could be restored to

power." 106 He berated Rousseau for having unleashed the passions of the

young, the ignorant, and the sentimental. "It is Smile that has brought us

this arrogant generation, stubborn and insolent and willful, which speaks

loudly, and silences the elderly." 107

So he grew old, and repented the ideas, but not the sins, of his youth. In

1794 he was again a poor man, rich only in memories and grandchildren. He

drew up in Volume XIII of Monsieur Nicolas a calendrier of the men and

women in his life, including several hundred paramours, and he reaffirmed

his belief in God. In 1 800 the Comtesse de Beauharnais told Napoleon that

Restif was living in poverty, without heat in his room; Napoleon sent him

money, a servant, and a guard, and (1805) gave him a place in the ministry

of police. On February 8, 1 806, Restif died, aged seventy-two. The Countess

and several members of the Institute de France (which had refused him ad-

mission) joined the eighteen hundred commoners who followed his funeral.

920 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVI

VII. BEAUMARCHAIS

"The more I see of the French theater," wrote Arthur Young in 1788,

"the more I am forced to acknowledge its superiority to our own, in the

number of its good performers, ... in the quality of dancers, singers, and

persons on whom the business of the theater depends, all established on a

grand scale." 108 At the Theatre-Frangais, rebuilt in 1782, and in many pro-

vincial theaters, performances were given every night, including Sundays. In

acting there was now an interregnum: Lekain died, and Sophie Arnould re-

tired, in 1778; Talma, future favorite of Napoleon, made his debut with the

Comedie-Frangaise in 1787, and earned his first triumph in Marie-Joseph

Chenier's Charles IX in 1789. The most popular playwright of the time was

Michel-Jean Sedaine, who wrote sentimental comedies that kept the French

stage for a century. We salute him and pass on to the man who, with the

help of Mozart and Rossini, gave life to Figaro, and (as he saw it) freedom to

America.

Pierre-Augustin Caron, like Voltaire, lived twenty-four years without

knowing his historic name. His father was a watchmaker in the St.-Denis

suburb of Paris. After some rebellion he resigned himself to follow the pater-

nal trade. At the age of twenty-one he invented a new type of escapement

which enabled him to make "excellent watches as flat and as small as may be

thought fit." 109 He pleased Louis XV with a sample, and for Mme. de Pom-

padour made one so small that it fitted into her ring; this, he claimed, was

the smallest watch ever constructed. In 1755 he bought from its aging

holder, M. Franquet, a place among the "controllers of the royal pantry,"

who waited upon the King at his meals; it was no very exalted post, but it

gave Pierre entry to the court. A year later Franquet died; Pierre married the

widow (1756), six years older than himself; and, as she owned a small fief,

Pierre added its name to his own, and became Beaumarchais. When his wife

died (1757) he inherited her property.

He had never received any secondary education, but everyone— even the

aristocrats who resented his agile climb— recognized the alertness of his

mind and the quickness of his wit. In the salons and the cafes he met Diderot,

d'Alembert, and other philosophes, and imbibed the Enlightenment. An im-

provement that he had made in the pedal arrangement of the harp caught the

attention of Louis XV's unmarried daughters; in 1759 he began to give them

lessons on the harp. The banker Joseph Paris-Duverney asked Beaumarchais

to enlist the aid of Mesdames Royales in securing the support of Louis XV

for the Ecole Militaire, of which the financier was a director; Pierre suc-

ceeded in this, and Paris-Duverney gave him stocks worth sixty thousand

francs. "He initiated me," said Beaumarchais, "into the secrets of finance.

... I commenced making my fortune under his direction; by his advice

I undertook several speculations, in some of which he assisted me with his

money or his name." 110 So Beaumarchais, following in this as in so many

CHAP. XXXVI ) ONTHEEVE 92 1

other ways the precedents set by Voltaire, became a millionaire philosopher.

By 1 87 1 he was rich enough to buy one of the titular secretaryships to the

king, which brought him a title of nobility. He took a fine house in the Rue

de Conde, and installed in it his proud father and sisters.

Two other sisters were living in Madrid— one married, the other, Lisette,

engaged to Jose Clavigo y Fajardo, editor and author, who for six years

repeatedly postponed the marriage. In May, 1764, Beaumarchais began a

long ride by stagecoach, day and night, to the Spanish capital. He found

Clavigo, who promised to marry Lisette soon, but then eluded Beaumarchais

by moving from place to place. Pierre finally caught up with him, and de-

manded his signature for a contract of marriage; Jose excused himself on the

ground that he had just taken a purgative, and Spanish law held invalid any

contract signed by a person in such a condition. Beaumarchais threatened

him; Clavigo set the forces of government against him; the clever French-

man was defeated by manana. Abandoning that chase, he took up the pur-

suit of business and organized several companies, one for supplying Negro

slaves to Spanish colonies. (He forgot that only a year earlier he had written

a poem condemning slavery. 111 ) All these plans foundered on the Spanish gift

for procrastination. Meanwhile, however, Pierre enjoyed good company

and a titled mistress, and learned enough about Spanish manners to write his

plays about a barber of Seville. Lisette found another lover, and Beau-

marchais returned to France with nothing gained but experience. He com-

posed fascinating memoirs of his trip, from which, as we have seen, Goethe

made a drama, Clavigo (1775).

In 1770 Paris-Duverney died, after making a will acknowledging that he

owed Beaumarchais fifteen thousand francs. The chief heir, the Comte de La

Blache, contested this clause as a forgery. The matter was referred to the

Paris Parlement, which appointed Councilor Louis- Valentin Goezman to

pass on it. At this juncture Beaumarchais was in jail as a result of a violent

fracas with the Due de Chaulnes about a mistress. Temporarily released, he

sent a "present" of a hundred louis d'or, and a diamond-studded watch, to

Mme. Goezman as inducements to get him a hearing before her husband; she

asked an additional fifteen louis d'or for a "secretary"; he sent them. He

secured the interview; the Councilor decided against him; Mme. Goezman

returned all but the fifteen louis d'or; Beaumarchais insisted on her returning

these too; Goezman charged him with bribery. Pierre put the matter before

the public in a series of Memoirs so vivacious and witty that they won him

wide acclaim as a brilliant debater if not quite an honest man. Voltaire said

of them: "I have never seen anything stronger, bolder, funnier, more inter-

esting, more humiliating for his foes. He fights a dozen of them at a time,

and mows them down." 112 The Parlement ruled against his claim to the in-

heritance (April 6, 1773), in effect charged him with forgery, and con-

demned him to pay 56,300 livres in damages and debts.

Released from jail (A4ay 8, 1773), Beaumarchais engaged himself to Louis

XV as a secret agent on a mission to England to prevent the circulation of a

scandalous pamphlet against Mme. du Barry. He succeeded, and continued

92 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVI

in secret service under Louis XVI, who commissioned him to return to Lon-

don and bribe Guglielmo Angelucci to refrain from publishing a pamphlet

against Marie Antoinette. Angelucci surrendered the manuscript for 35,000

francs and departed for Nuremberg; Beaumarchais, suspecting him to have

another copy, pursued him through Germany, caught up with him near

Neustadt, and forced him to surrender the copy. Two brigands attacked

him; he fought them off, was wounded, made his way to Vienna, was ar-

rested as a spy, spent a month in jail, was freed, and rode back to France.

His next exploit has more right to a place in history. In 1775 Vergennes

sent him to London to report on the growing crisis between England and

America. In September Beaumarchais dispatched to Louis XVI a report

predicting the success of the American revolt, and emphasizing the pro-

American minority in England. On February 29, 1776, he addressed to the

King another letter, recommending secret French aid to America, on the

ground that France could protect herself from subjection only by weaken-

ing England. 113 Vergennes concurred with this view, and, as we have seen,

arranged to finance Beaumarchais in providing war materials to the English

colonies. Beaumarchais gave himself wholeheartedly to the enterprise. He

organized the firm of Rodrigue Hortalez and Company, and went from one

French port to another, buying and equipping ships, loading them with pro-

visions and weapons, recruiting experienced French officers for the Ameri-

can army, and spending (he claimed) several million livres of his own in

addition to the two million supplied him by the French and Spanish govern-

ments. Silas Deane reported to the American Congress (November 29,

1776) : "I should never have completed my mission but for the generous, in-

defatigable, and intelligent exertion of M. de Beaumarchais, to whom the

United States are, on every account, more indebted than to any other person

on this side of the ocean." 114 At the end of the war Silas Deane calculated

that America owed Beaumarchais 3,600,000 francs. The Congress, having

assumed that all the material was a gift from allies, rejected the claim, but in

1835 it P a id 800,000 livres to Beaumarchais' heirs.

During this feverish activity he found time to write more memorials, ad-

dressed to the public, protesting the decree of Parlement of April 6, 1773.

On September 6, 1776, that decree was annulled, and all of Beaumarchais'

civil rights were restored. In July, 1778, a court at Aix-en-Provence ruled

in his favor in the matter of Paris-Duverney's will, and Beaumarchais could

feel that at last he had cleared his name.

All his enterprises in love, war, business, and law were not enough for

Beaumarchais. There was a world of words, ideas, and print not yet quite

conquered. In 1767 he offered to the Comedie-Fran9aise his first play, Eu-

genie; it was presented on January 29, 1769, was well received by the aud-

ience, but was rejected by the critics. Another play, Les Deux Amis (Jan-

uary 13, 1770), failed despite the customary preparation; "I had filled the pit

with the most excellent workers, with hands like paddles, but the efforts of

the cabal" prevailed against him. 115 The literary confraternity, led by Freron,

opposed him as an intruder, a jailbird turned dramatist, just as the court at

CHAP. XXXVI ) ON THE EVE 923

Versailles was against him as a watchmaker turned noble. So, in his next play,

he made Figaro describe "the republic of letters" as "the republic of wolves,

continually at one another's throats; ... all the insects, gnats, mosquitoes,

and critics, all the envious journalists, booksellers, censors." 116

On the stage, as in life, Beaumarchais encountered a swarm of enemies,

and defeated them all. In the most creative moment of his multiform genius

he conceived Figaro: barber, surgeon, philosopher, dressed in satin vest and

breeches, his guitar slung over his shoulder, his quick mind ready to resolve

any difficulty, his wit piercing the cant, pretenses, and injustices of his time.

In one sense Figaro was not a creation, being a new name and form for the

stock figure of the clever servant in Greek and Roman comedy, in the

Commedia dell' Arte of Italy, in Moliere's Sganarelle; but as we know him

all but the music is Beaumarchais'. Even the music was originally his; he

first composed he Barbier de Seville as a comic opera, which he presented to

the Comedie-Italienne in 1772; it was rejected, but Mozart became ac-

quainted with this music while he was in Paris. 117 Beaumarchais remodeled

the opera into a comedy; this was accepted by the Comedie-Frangaise, and

was scheduled for production when the author's imprisonment (February

24, 1773) compelled a postponement. On his release it was again prepared

for presentation, but was adjourned because the author was under indict-

ment by the Parlement. The success of Beaumarchais' public self-defense in

his Memoirs led the theater again to plan the production; it was announced

for February 12, 1774; "all the boxes," Grimm reported, "were sold up to

the fifth performance." 118 At the last moment the government forbade the

play on the ground that it might prejudice the case still pending in the

Parlement.

Another year passed; a new King came, whom Beaumarchais served val-

iantly at the repeated risk of his life; permission was given; and on February

23, 1775, The Barber of Seville finally reached the stage. It did not go well; it

was too long; and the preliminary excitement had led the audience to expect

too much. In one day Beaumarchais revised and shortened it in a chef-

d'oeuvre of surgery; the comedy was cleared from confusing complications,

the wit was freed from excessive discourse; as Beaumarchais put it, he re-

moved the fifth wheel from the carriage. On the second evening the play

was a triumph. Mme. du Deffand, who was there, described it as "an ex-

travagant success, . . . applauded beyond all bounds." 119

The Prince de Conti challenged Beaumarchais to write a continuation

play which would show Figaro as a more developed character. The author

was now absorbed in his role as savior of America, but when that had been

accomplished he returned to the stage and produced a comedy that made

more dramatic history than even the Tartuffe of Moliere. In The Marriage

of Figaro the Count Almaviva and the Rosina of The Barber of Seville have

lived through several years of marriage; he has already tired of the charms

that lured him through so many complications; his present enterprise is to

seduce Suzanne, maid to his Countess and affianced to Figaro, who has be-

come premier valet to the Count and major-domo of the chateau. Cherubin,

924 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVI

a thirteen-year-old page, provides a graceful obbligato to the central theme

by his calf love for the Countess, who is twice his age. Figaro has become a

philosopher; Beaumarchais describes him as "la raison assaisormee de gaiete

et de saillies"— reason seasoned with gaiety and sallies 120 — which is almost a

definition of the esprit gaulois, and of the Enlightenment.

"I was born to be a courtier," he tells Suzanne; and when she supposes

this "is a difficult art," he replies, "Not at all. To receive, to take, to ask—

behold the secret in three words." 121 And in the soliloquy which Rossini has

made to resound throughout the world, he addresses the nobles of Spain

(and France) with almost revolutionary scorn: "What have you done for

so much good fortune? You gave yourselves the trouble to be born, and

nothing more; for the rest you are sufficiently ordinary! While I, lost in the

common crowd, have had to use more science and calculation merely to sub-

sist than have gone into governing all Spain these hundred years past." 122 He

laughs at soldiers who "kill and get themselves killed for interests quite un-

known to them. As for me, I want to know why I am furious." 123 Even the

human race gets its comeuppance: "To drink without being thirsty, and to

make love at all seasons— this alone distinguishes us from other animals." 124

There were miscellaneous strokes against the sale of public offices, the arbi-

trary power of ministers, the miscarriages of justice, the condition of prisons,

the censorship and persecution of thought. "Provided in my writings I men-

tion neither the authorities nor the state religion, nor politics, nor morals, nor

the officials, nor finances, nor the opera, nor . . . any person of conse-

quence, I may print whatever I like, subject to inspection by two or three

censors." 125 A passage which the actors deleted, perhaps as coming too close

to their own recreations, accused the male sex as responsible for prostitu-

tion: men by their demands create the supply, and by their laws punish the

women who meet the demand. 126 The plot itself did not merely show the

servant cleverer than his master— this was too traditional to offend— but it

revealed the noble count as an arrant adulterer.

The Marriage of Figaro was accepted by the Comedie-Fran§aise in 1781,

but it could not be produced till 1784. When it was read to Louis XVI he

bore with tolerant humor the incidental satire, but when he heard the

soliloquy, with derision of the nobility and the censorship, he felt that he

could not allow these basic institutions to be publicly abused. "This is de-

testable," he exclaimed; "it must never be played. To allow its representa-

tion would be equivalent to destroying the Bastille. This man laughs at ev-

erything that ought to be respected in a government." 127 He forbade the

staging of the piece.

Beaumarchais read parts of the play in private homes. Curiosity was

aroused. Some courtiers arranged that it be performed before the court; but

at the last minute this too was prohibited. At last the King yielded to protests

and requests, and agreed to sanction public performances after careful ex-

purgation of the text by censors. The premiere (April 27, 1784) was an

historic event. All Paris seemed bent on attending the first night. Nobles

fought with commoners for admission; iron gates were broken down, doors

CHAP. XXXVI ) ON THE EVE 925

were smashed, three persons were suffocated. Beaumarchais was there, happy

in the fracas. The success was so great that the play was performed sixty

times running, nearly always to a full house. The receipts were unprece-

dented. Beaumarchais gave all of his share— 41,999 livres— to charity. 128

History has thought of The Marriage of Figaro as a harbinger of revolu-

tion; Napoleon described it as "the Revolution already in action." 129 Some

of its lines entered into the ferment of the time. In the preface later attached

to the published play Beaumarchais denied any revolutionary intent, and he

quoted from his writings passages in defense of monarchy and aristocracy.

He asked not for the destruction of existing institutions but for the removal

of abuses attached to them; for equal justice to all classes, for greater free-

dom of thought and press, for protection of the individual against lettres de

cachet and other excesses of monarchical power. Like his idol, Voltaire, he

rejected revolution as an invitation to chaos and the mob.

Through all the varied turbulence that enveloped him he continued to

study the works of Voltaire. He recognized the similarities, though perhaps

not the distance, between himself and the patriarch: the same combination

of feverish intellectual activity with canny financial skill, the same scorn of

scruples and of moral delicacy, the same courage in fighting injustice and

adversity. He resolved to preserve and disseminate the works of Voltaire in

a collected and complete edition. He knew that this could not be done in

France, where many of Voltaire's writings were prohibited. He went to

Maurepas and told him that Catherine II had proposed to bring out a French

edition in St. Petersburg; he argued that this would be a disgrace to France;

the minister saw the point, and promised to allow the circulation of a com-

plete edition. Charles-Joseph Pancoucke, a Paris bookseller, had secured the

rights to Voltaire's unpublished manuscripts; Beaumarchais bought these for

160,000 francs. He collected all the published works of Voltaire that he

could find. He imported Baskerville type from England, and purchased

paper mills in the Vosges. He secured Condorcet as an editor and biographer.

He leased an old fort at Kehl, across the Rhine from Strasbourg, installed

presses, and, despite a thousand tribulations, brought out two editions, one

in seventy volumes octavo, the other in ninety-two volumes duodecimo

(1783-90). This was the largest publishing enterprise yet attempted in Eu-

rope, not excepting the Ency elope die. Expecting a ready sale, Beaumarchais

printed fifteen thousand sets; he sold only two thousand, partly because of

campaigns against the enterprise by the Parlement and the clergy, 130 partly

because of the political turmoil of 1788-90, and partly because the instabil-

ity of personal fortunes deterred individuals from buying so expensive a set.

Beaumarchais claimed to have lost a million livres in the venture. However,

he produced also an edition of Rousseau.

The Revolution which he had helped to prepare proved a misfortune for

him. In 1 789 he built for himself and his third wife a costly mansion opposite

the Bastille; he filled it with fine furniture and art, and surrounded it with

two acres of land. The mobs that repeatedly rioted in the area looked

askance at such luxury; twice his house was invaded, and Beaumarchais, now

926 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVI

deaf and prematurely old, was threatened as an aristocrat. He sent a petition

to the Commune of Paris professing his faith in the Revolution; nevertheless

he was arrested (August 23, 1792); though soon set free, he lived in daily

fear of assassination. Then the wheel of fortune turned, and he was com-

missioned by the Revolutionary government (1792) to go to Holland and

buy guns for the republic. The negotiations failed; and during his absence his

property was seized, and his wife and daughter were arrested (July 5, 1794).

He rushed back to Paris, secured their release, and was allowed to recover

his property. He lived three years more, broken in body but not in spirit,

and hailed the rise of Napoleon. He died on May 18, 1799, of an apoplectic

stroke, at the age of sixty-seven. Seldom even in French history had a man

led so full and varied and adventurous a life.

CHAPTER XXXVII

The Anatomy of Revolution

1774-89

WE HAVE examined the mind of France on the eve of the Revolution

—its philosophy, religion, morals, manners, literature, and art. But

these were frail flowers growing from an economic ground; we cannot

understand them without a knowledge of their roots. Much less can we

understand the political convulsion that ended the Old Regime without ex-

amining in turn, however briefly, each organ of the French economy, and

inquiring how its condition made for the great debacle.

In dealing once more with agriculture, industry, commerce, and finance,

we should remember that they are not dismal abstractions but living and

sensitive human beings: nobles and peasants organizing the production of

food; managers and workers manufacturing goods; inventors and scientists

forging new methods and tools; towns throbbing with shops and factories,

worried housewives and rebellious mobs; ports and ships alive with mer-

chants, navigators, sailors, and adventurous spirits; bankers risking, gaining,

losing money like Necker, life like Lavoisier; and, through all the agitated

mass, the flow and pressure of revolutionary ideas and discontent. It is a com-

plex and tremendous picture.

I. THE NOBLES AND THE REVOLUTION

France was 24,670,000 men, women, and children; so Necker reckoned

the population in 1784. 1 The number had grown from 17,000,000 in 17 15

through greater food production, better sanitation, and the absence of for-

eign invasion and civil war. The nation as a whole experienced a rise of pros-

perity during the eighteenth century, but most of the new affluence was

confined to the middle class. 2

All but two millions of the French were rural. Agricultural life was di-

rected by royal intendants, provincial administrators, and parish priests, and

by seigneurs— feudal lords— estimated in 1789 at some 26,000. These and their

sons served their country in war in their gallant, old-fashioned way (swords

were now more an ornament than a weapon). Only a small minority of the

nobles remained at the court; the majority lived on their estates, and claimed

to earn their keep by providing agricultural management, police surveillance,

courts, schools, hospitals, and charity. Most of these functions, however, had

been taken over by agents of the central government, ahd the peasant pro-

prietors were developing their own institutions for local administration. So

927

928 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVII

the nobility had become a vestigial organ, taking much blood from the social

organism, and giving little but military service in return. Even this service

aroused a public grievance, for the nobility persuaded Louis XVI (1781) to

exclude all but men with four generations of aristocracy behind them from

every major office in the army, the navy, and the government.

It was further alleged against the nobles that they left vast areas of their

estates uncultivated, while thousands of city dwellers were hungering for

bread. True of many parts of France was Arthur Young's description of the

Loire and Cher River sections: "The fields are scenes of pitiable manage-

ment, as the houses are of misery. Yet all this country [is] highly improv-

able, if they knew what to do with it." 3 * Not a few of the nobles were

themselves poor, some through incompetence, some through misfortune,

some through the exhaustion of their soil. Many of these appealed to the

King for help, and several received grants from the national purse.

Serfdom, in the sense of a person bound by law to a piece of land, and

permanently subject to its owner for dues and services, had largely disap-

peared from France by 1789; about a million serfs remained, chiefly on

monastic properties. When Louis XVI freed the serfs on the royal domain

(1779), the Parlement of Franche-Comte (in eastern France) delayed nine

months before registering his edict. The Abbey of Luxeuil and the Priory

of Fontaine, owning together eleven thousand serfs, and the Abbey of St.-

Claude in the present department of the Jura, with twenty thousand serfs,

refused to follow the King's example, despite appeals in which several ec-

clesiastics joined with Voltaire. 5 Gradually these serfs bought their freedom,

or gained it by flight; and Louis XVI, in 1779, abolished the owner's right

to pursue fugitive serfs outside his own domain.

Though ninety-five per cent of the peasants were free in 1789, the great

majority of these were still subject to one or more feudal dues, varying in

degree from region to region. They included a yearly rental (doubled in the

eighteenth century), a fee for the right to bequeath goods, and payment for

use of the lord's grist mills, bake ovens, wine presses, and fishponds— on all

of which he maintained a monopoly. He reserved the right to hunt his game

even into the peasant's crops. He enclosed more and more of the common

ground on which the peasant had formerly grazed his cattle and cut wood.

The corvee, in most of France, had been commuted for a money payment,

but in Auvergne, Champagne, Artois, and Lorraine the peasant was still re-

quired to give the local seigneur three or more days of unpaid labor every

year for the maintenance of roads, bridges, and waterways. 6 In sum and on

the average the surviving feudal dues took ten per cent of the peasant's

produce or income. The ecclesiastical tithe took another eight to ten per

cent. Add the taxes paid to the state, the market and sales taxes, and the fees

* Arthur Young, English gentleman farmer, traveled on the Continent in 1787, 1788, and 1789,

and reported his observations in Travels in France (1792). He had some English prejudices

("Take the mass of mankind, and you have more good sense in half an hour in England than in

half a year in France" 4 ) ; but he seems to have given a fair and reliable account of what he saw.

We shall find him reporting prosperity as well as poverty. His chief criticisms of France were

of its technological backwardness and its excessively centralized, ubiquitous, and autocratic

government.

CHAP. XXXVIl) THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION 929

paid to the parish priest for baptism, marriage, and burial, and the peasant

was left about half the fruit of his toil.

As the money payments received by the lords were reduced in value by

depreciation of the currency, the seigneurs sought to protect their income

by increasing the dues, by reviving dues long fallen into disuse, and by en-

closing more of the common lands. The collection of dues was usually

farmed out to professional agents, who were often heartless in their work.

When the peasant questioned the right to certain requisitions he was told

that they were listed on the rolls or registers of the manors. If he challenged

the authenticity of these rolls the matter was submitted to the manorial court

or the provincial parlement, whose judges were controlled by the seigneurs. 7

When Boncerf, secretly encouraged by Turgot, published (1776) a bro-

chure, The Disadvantages of the Feudal Rights, recommending the reduc-

tion of such rights, he was censured by the Parlement of Paris. Voltaire, aged

eighty-two, rose again to battle. "To propose the abolition of feudal rights,"

he wrote, "is tantamount to attacking the holdings of the gentlemen of the

Parlement themselves, most of whom possess fiefs. ... It is a case of the

Church, the nobility, and the members of the Parlement . . . united against

the common enemy— i.e., the people." 8

Something could be said for the feudal dues. From the noble's point of

view they were a mortgage freely assumed by the peasant as part of the price

at which he bought a parcel of land from its legal owner— who in many cases

had bought it in good faith from its previous possessor. Some poor nobles

depended upon the dues for their sustenance. The peasant suffered far more

from taxes, tithes, and the demands and ravages of war than from feudal

dues. Hear the greatest and noblest of French socialists, Jean Jaures: "If

there had been, in the society of eighteenth-century France, no other abuse

than the despicable remains of that [feudal] system, there would have been

no need of a revolt to heal the sore; a gradual reduction of feudal rights, a

liberation of the peasantry, would have accomplished the change peace-

ably." 9

The most remarkable feature of the French nobility was its acknowledg-

ment of guilt. Not only did many nobles join the philosophes in rejecting the

old theology; some, as we have seen, laughed at the outdated prerogatives of

their caste. 10 A year before the Revolution thirty nobles offered to renounce

their pecuniary feudal privileges. 11 All the world knows the idealism of the

young Lafayette, who not only fought for America, but, on returning to

France, vigorously engaged in the struggle for peaceful reform. He de-

nounced slavery, and devoted part of his fortune to freeing the slaves in

French Guiana. 12 The profession of liberal principles, and the advocacy of

reform, became fashionable in a section of the aristocracy, especially among

titled ladies like Mesdames de La Marck, de Boufflers, de Brienne, and de

Luxembourg. Hundreds of nobles and prelates took an active part in cam-

paigns for equalizing taxes, checking governmental extravagance, organizing

charities, ending the corvee. 13 Some nobles, like the Duchesse de Bourbon,

gave most of their wealth to the poor. 14

All this, however, was only a graceful ornament on the visible fact that

930 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVII

the French nobility had ceased to earn its keep. Many nobles tried to fulfill

their traditional responsibilities, but the contrast between the luxurious idle-

ness of rich seigneurs and the hardships of a populace repeatedly on the

verge of famine aroused hostility and scorn. Long ago a great noble himself

had passed sentence of death upon his caste. Hear Rene-Louis de Voyer,

Marquis d' Argenson, secretary of state ( 1 744-47 ) , writing about 1752:

The race of great lords must be destroyed completely. By great lords I

understand those who have dignities, property, tithes, offices, and functions,

and who, without deserts and without necessarily being adults, are none the less

great, and for this reason often worthless. ... I notice that a breed of good

hunting dogs is preserved, but once it deteriorates it is done away with. 15

It was these lords, rich, proud, and often functionless, who initiated the

Revolution. They looked fondly back to the days before Richelieu, when

their order was the ruling power in France. When the parlements asserted

their right to annul royal edicts, the nobilities of race and sword joined with

the nobility of the robe— the hereditary magistrates— in an attempt to sub-

ordinate the king. They cheered the parlement orators who raised the cry

for liberte; they encouraged the people and the pamphleteers to denounce

the absolute power of Louis XVI. We cannot blame them; but by weaken-

ing the authority of the monarch they made it possible for the National As-

sembly of 1789, controlled by the bourgeoisie, to seize the sovereignty in

France. The nobles threw the first spadeful of earth that dug their grave.

II. THE PEASANTS AND THE REVOLUTION

On the fifty-five per cent of the French soil owned by the nobility, the

clergy, and the king, most of the agricultural work was done by metayers,

who received stock, tools, and seed from the owner, and paid him, usually,

half the yield. These sharecroppers were so poor generally that Arthur

Young pronounced the system "the curse and ruin of the whole country"; 16

not so much because the owners were cruel, but because incentives were

weak.

The majority of the peasant proprietors who tilled forty-five per cent of

the soil were condemned to poverty by the small size of their holdings,

which limited the profitable use of machinery. Agricultural technology in

France lagged behind that of England. There were schools of agriculture,

and model farms, but only a few farmers took advantage of them. Probably

sixty per cent of the peasant proprietors owned less than the five hectares

(about thirteen acres) needed to support a family, and the men were driven

to hire themselves out as laborers on large farms. Wages of farm laborers

rose twelve per cent between 1771 and 1789, but in the same period prices

rose sixty-five per cent or more. 17 While agricultural production rose during

the reign of Louis XVI, the hired laborers grew poorer, and formed a rural

proletariat which, in periods of slack employment, served as a breeding

ground for a multitude of beggars and vagabonds. Chamfort thought it "in-

CHAP.XXXVIl) THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION 93 1

contestable that there are in France seven million men who beg alms, and

twelve million who are unable to give alms." 18

Probably the poverty of the peasants was exaggerated by travelers because

they noticed chiefly the visible conditions, and did not see the currency and

goods concealed to avoid the eye of the tax assessor. Contemporary estimates

conflict. Arthur Young found areas of poverty, brutality, and filth, as in

Brittany, and areas of prosperity and pride, as in Beam. 19 By and large, pov-

erty in rural France in 1789 was not as bad as in Ireland, no worse than in

Eastern Europe or in the slums of some "affluent" cities of our time, but

worse than in England or in the ever bountiful valley of the Po. The latest

studies indicate that "there was, at the end of the Old Regime, an agrarian

crisis." 20 When drought and famine came, as in 1788-89, the sufferings of

the peasantry, particularly in the south of France, were such that only the

charities distributed by the government and the clergy kept half the popula-

tion from starving.

The peasant had to pay for the state, the Church, and the aristocracy. The

taille, or land tax, fell almost entirely upon him. He supplied almost all the

manpower of the army's infantry. He bore the brunt of the government's

monopoly on salt. His labor maintained roads, bridges, and canals. He might

have paid the tithe more cheerfully, for he was a pious "God-fearing" man,

and the tithe was collected with mercy, and seldom took a literal tenth; 21

but he saw most of the tithe leaving the parish to support a distant bishop,

or an ecclesiastical idler at the court, or even a layman who had bought a

share of future tithes. The direct tax burden on the peasant was reduced by

Louis XVI; the indirect taxes were in many districts increased. 22

Was the poverty of the peasants the cause of the Revolution? It was a

dramatic factor in a complex of causes. The very poor were too weak to

revolt; they could cry out for relief, but they had neither the means nor the

spirit to organize rebellion, until they were aroused by the more prosperous

farmers, by the agents of the middle class, and by uprisings of the Paris pop-

ulace. Then, however, when the powers of the state had been reduced by

the intellectual development of the people, when the army was dangerously

infected with radical ideas, and local authorities could no longer rely on

military support from Versailles— then the peasants became a revolutionary

force. They assembled, exchanged complaints and vows, armed themselves,

attacked the chateaux, burned the homes of unyielding seigneurs, and de-

stroyed the manorial rolls which were quoted as sanctioning the feudal dues.

It was that direct action, threatening a nationwide destruction of seignorial

property, that frightened the nobles into surrendering their feudal privileges

(August 4, 1 789), and so bringing a legal end to the Old Regime.

III. INDUSTRY AND THE REVOLUTION

Here especially the pre-Revolutionary picture is complex and obscure.

( 1 ) Domestic industry— of men, women, and children in the home— served

93 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVII

merchants who provided the material and bought the product. (2) Guilds-

masters, journeymen, and apprentices— produced handicraft goods, chiefly

for local needs. The guilds survived till the Revolution, but by 1789 they

had been fatally weakened by the growth of (3) capitalistic free enterprise

—companies free to collect capital from any source, to hire anybody, to in-

vent and apply new methods of production and distribution, to compete

with anybody, and to sell anywhere. These establishments were usually

small, but they were multiplying; so Marseilles alone, in 1789, had thirty-

eight soap factories, forty-eight for hats, eight for glass, twelve sugar re-

fineries, ten tanneries. 23 In textiles, building, mining, and metallurgy, capital-

ism had expanded into large-scale enterprises, usually through joint-stock

companies— societes anonymes.

France was slow to adopt the textile machines that were inaugurating the

Industrial Revolution in England, but large textile factories were operating

in Abbeville, Amiens, Reims, Paris, Louviers, and Orleans, and the silk in-

dustry flourished at Lyons. The building trades were raising those massive

blocks of apartment houses that still give French cities their characteristic

physiognomy. Shipbuilding employed thousands of workers in Nantes, Bor-

deaux, Marseilles. Mining was the most advanced of French industries. The

state kept all rights to the subsoil, leased the mines to concessionaires, and

enforced a code of safety for the miners. 24 Companies sank shafts to depths

of three hundred feet, installed expensive equipment for ventilation, drain-

age, and transport, and made millionaires. The Anzin firm (1790) had four

thousand workmen, six hundred horses, and twelve steam engines, and mined

310,000 tons of coal per year. The mining of iron and other metals supplied

material for an expanding metallurgical industry. In 1787 the Creusot stock

company raised ten million livres of capital to apply the latest machinery in

the production of ironware; steam engines operated bellows, hammers, and

drills, and railways enabled one horse to pull what had required five horses

before.

Some startling inventions were developed by Frenchmen in these years.

In 1776 the Marquis de JoufFroy d'Abbans amused crowds along the River

Doubs with a sidewheeler boat propelled by a steam engine, thirty-one years

before Fulton's Clermont steamed up and down the Hudson. Even more

spectacular were the first steps in the conquest of the air. In 1766 Henry

Cavendish had shown that hydrogen has a lower density than air; Joseph

Black concluded that a bladder filled with hydrogen would rise. Joseph and

fitienne Montgolfier worked on the principle that air loses density when

heated; on June 5, 1783, at Annonay, near Lyons, they filled a balloon with

heated air; it rose to a height of sixteen hundred feet, and descended ten

minutes later when its air had cooled. A hydrogen-filled balloon, designed

by Jacques- Alexandre Charles, made an ascent from Paris on August 27,

1783, before 300,000 cheering spectators; when it came down fifteen miles

away a village crowd tore it to pieces on the theory that it was a hostile in-

vader from the sky. 25 On October 1 5 Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier made

the first recorded human flight, using a Montgolfier balloon with heated air;

this ascent lasted four minutes. On January 7, 1785, Francois Blanchard, a

CHAP. XXXVIl) THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION 933

Frenchman, and John Jeffries, an American physician, flew in a balloon

from England to France. People began to talk of flying to America. 26

Nourished with industry and commerce, the towns of France prospered

during the fatal reign. Lyons hummed with shops, factories, and enterprise.

Arthur Young was amazed by the splendor of Bordeaux. Paris was now a

business rather than a political center; it was the hub of an economic com-

plex that controlled half the capital, and so half the economy, of France. In

1789 it had a population of some 6oo,ooo. 27 It was not then an especially

beautiful city; Voltaire described much of it as worthy of Goths and Van-

dals. 28 Priestley, visiting it in 1774, reported: "I cannot say that I was much

struck with anything except the spaciousness and magnificence of the public

buildings, and to balance this I was exceedingly offended by the narrowness,

dirt, and stench of almost all the streets." 29 Young gave a similar account:

The streets are nine-tenths dirty, and all without foot pavements. Walking,

which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here

a toil and a fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman.

The coaches are numerous, and what is much worse, there are an infinity of

one-horse cabriolets, which are driven by young men of fashion and their imi-

tators, . . . with such rapidity as to . . . render the streets exceedingly dan-

gerous. ... I have been myself many times blackened with mud. 30

In the cities and towns a proletariat was taking form: men, women, and

children working for wages with tools and materials not their own. There

are no statistics of them, but they have been estimated, for the Paris of 1789,

at 75,000 families, or 300,000 individuals; 31 and there were proportionate

masses in Abbeville, Lyons, and Marseilles. Hours of work were long and

wages were low, for a ruling of the Paris Parlement (November 12, 1778)

forbade the workers to organize. Between 1741 and 1789 wages rose twenty-

two per cent, prices sixty-five per cent; 32 the condition of the workers seems

to have deteriorated in the reign of Louis XVI. 33 When demand slackened,

or (as in 1786) foreign competition became severe, workingmen in great

number were discharged, and became a burden on charity. A rise in the

price of bread— which constituted half the food of the Parisian populaces-

put thousands of families close to starvation. At Lyons in 1787 thirty thou-

sand persons were on public relief; at Reims in 1788, after an inundation,

two thirds of the population were destitute; at Paris, in 1791, a hundred

thousand families were listed as indigent. 35 "In Paris," wrote A4ercier about

1785, "the [common] people are weak, pallid, diminutive, stunted, and ap-

parently a class apart from other classes in the state." 36

Defying prohibitions, laborers formed unions and went on strike. In 1774

the silk workers of Lyons quit work, alleging that the cost of living was ris-

ing much faster than wages, and that the unregulated laws of supply and

demand were driving workers to a level of mere subsistence. The employers,

with well-stocked larders, waited for hunger to bring the strikers to terms.

Frustrated, many workers left Lyons for other towns, even for Switzerland or

Italy; they were halted at the frontier and were brought back by force to their

homes. The workers rose in revolt, seized municipal offices, and established

a brief dictatorship of the proletariat over the commune. The government

934 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVII

called in the army; the revolt was suppressed; two leaders were hanged; the

strikers returned to their shops beaten, but hostile now to the government as

well as to their employers. 37

In 1786 they struck again, protesting that even with eighteen hours' work

per day they could not support their families, and complaining that they

were treated "more inhumanly than domestic animals, for even these are

given enough to keep them in health and vigor." 38 The city authorities

agreed to a rise in pay, but forbade any meeting of more than four persons.

A battalion of artillery took charge of enforcing this prohibition; soldiers

fired upon the strikers, killing several. The strikers returned to work. The

increase in pay was later revoked. 39

Riots against the cost of living occurred sporadically throughout the sec-

ond half of the eighteenth century. In Normandy there were six between

1752 and 1768; in 1768 the rioters captured control of Rouen, sacked the

public granaries, pillaged the stores. Similar riots occurred at Reims in 1770,

Poitiers in 1772, Dijon, Versailles, Paris, Pontoise in 1775, Aix-en-Provence

in 1785, and again at Paris in 1788 and 1789. 40

What role did the poverty of the proletariat, or of the urban populace in

general, play in bringing on the Revolution? On the surface it was a proxi-

mate cause; the bread shortages and consequent riots in Paris in 1788-89

raised the fever of the people to a point where they were willing to risk their

lives in defying the army and attacking the Bastille. But hunger and wrath

can give motive force; they do not give leadership; it is likely that the riots

would have been calmed by a lowering of the price of bread if leadership

from higher strata had not directed the rioters to take the Bastille and march

on Versailles. The masses had as yet no idea of overturning the government,

of deposing the King, of establishing a republic. The proletariat talked hope-

fully of natural equality, but it did not dream of taking possession of the

state. It demanded, whereas the bourgeoisie opposed, state regulation of the

economy, at least to fixing the price of bread; but this was a return to the

old system, not an advance toward an economy dominated by the working

class. It is true that when the time for action came it was the populace of

Paris which, moved by hunger and roused by orators and agents, took the

Bastille and thereby deterred the King from using the army against the As-

sembly. But when that Assembly remade France it was under the guidance,

and for the purposes, of the bourgeoisie.

IV. THE BOURGEOISIE AND THE REVOLUTION

The outstanding feature of French economic life in the eighteenth cen-

tury was the rise of the business class. It had begun to prosper under Louis

XIV and Colbert; it benefited most from the excellent roads and canals that

facilitated trade; it grew rich on commerce with the colonies; it rose to

prominence in administrative posts (till 1781); it controlled the finances of

the state.

CHAP. XXXVIl) THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION 935

But it was harassed to the point of revolt by the tolls exacted for seigneurs

or the government on roads and canals, and by the time-consuming examina-

tion of the cargo at each toll station. There were from thirty-five to forty

such tolls to be paid by a boat carrying cargo from south France to Paris. 41

Businessmen demanded free trade within frontiers, but they were not sure that

they wanted it between nations. In 1786, moved by physiocratic theories,

the government reduced tariffs on textiles and hardware from England, in

return for reduction of English tariffs on French wines, glassware, and other

products. One result was a blow to the French textile industry, which could

not meet the competition of English mills equipped with later machinery.

Unemployment in Lyons, Rouen, and Amiens reached an explosive point.

Nevertheless, the lowering of tariffs promoted foreign trade, and filled

the coffers of the merchant class. That trade almost doubled between 1763

and 1787, rising to over a billion francs in 1780. 42 The port cities of France

swelled with merchants, shippers, sailors, warehouses, refineries, distilleries;

in those towns the business class was supreme long before the Revolution

sanctioned its national supremacy.

Part of mercantile prosperity, as in England, came from the capture or

purchase of African slaves, their transport to America, and their sale there for

work on the plantations. In 1 788 French slave dealers shipped 29,506 Negroes

to St.-Domingue (Haiti) alone. 43 French investors owned most of the soil

and industries there and in Guadeloupe and Martinique. In St.-Domingue

thirty thousand whites used 480,000 slaves. 44 A Societe des Amis des Noirs

was formed in Paris in 1788, under the presidency of Condorcet, and includ-

ing Lafayette and Mirabeau fils, for the abolition of slavery, but the shippers

and planters overwhelmed the movement with protests. In 1789 the Chamber

of Commerce of Bordeaux declared: "France needs its colonies for the

maintenance of its commerce, and consequently it needs slaves in order to

make agriculture pay in this quarter of the world, at least until some other

expedient may have been found." 45

Industrial, colonial, and other enterprises required capital, and generated

a spreading breed of bankers. Joint-stock companies offered shares, the gov-

ernment floated loans, speculation developed in the sale and purchase of

securities. Speculators hired journalists to disseminate rumors designed to

raise or lower the price of stocks. 46 A4embers of the ministries joined in the

speculation, and so became subject to pressure or influence by the bankers.

Every war made the state more dependent upon the financiers, and made

the financiers more vitally concerned with the policy and solvency of the

state. Some bankers enjoyed a personal credit superior to that of the govern-

ment; hence they could borrow at a low rate, lend to the government at a

higher rate, and increase their wealth merely by bookkeeping— provided

their judgment was good and the state paid its debts.

The farmers general (financiers who bought, by an advance to the state,

the right to collect indirect taxes) were especially rich and especially hated,

for the indirect taxes, like sales taxes in general, were most burdensome to

those who had to spend much of their income on the necessaries of daily

93^ ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVII

life. Some of these fermiers generaux, like Helvetius and Lavoisier, were men

of relative integrity and public spirit, contributing abundantly to charity,

literature, and art. 47 The government recognized the evils of the tax-farming

system, and reduced the number of farmers general from sixty to forty in

1780, but public animosity continued. The tax farm was abolished by the

Revolution, and Lavoisier's was one of the heads that fell in the process.

As taxation played a leading role among the causes of the Revolution, we

must once more call to mind the various taxes paid by Frenchmen. ( 1 ) The

taille was a tax on land and personal property. Nobles were exempted from

it because of their military service; the clergy were excused because they

maintained social order and prayed for the state; magistrates, head adminis-

trators, and university officials were exempt; almost all the taille fell upon

the landowners of the Third Estate— therefore chiefly upon the peasants. (2)

The capitation, or poll, tax was laid upon every head of a household; here

only the clergy were exempt. (3) The vingtieme, or twentieth, was a tax on

all property, real or personal; but the nobles escaped a large part of this and

the poll tax by using private influence, or engaging lawyers to find loopholes

in the law; and the clergy avoided the vingtieme by making a voluntary pay-

ment periodically to the state. (4) Every town paid a tax {octroi) to the

government, and passed it on to its citizens. (5) Indirect taxes were levied

through (a) transport tolls; (b) import and export dues; (c) excise taxes

{aides) on wines, liquors, soap, leather, iron, playing cards, etc.; and (d)

governmental monopolies on the sale of tobacco and salt. Every individual

was required to buy annually a stated minimum of salt from the government

at a price fixed by it, always higher than the market price. This salt tax

(gabelle) was one of the chief miseries of the peasant. (6) The peasant paid

a tax to escape the corvee. Altogether the average member of the Third

Estate paid from forty-two to fifty-three per cent of his income in taxes. 48

If we take together merchants, manufacturers, financiers, inventors, engi-

neers, scientists, minor bureaucrats, clerks, tradesmen, chemists, artists, book-

sellers, teachers, writers, physicians, and untitled lawyers and magistrates as

constituting the bourgeoisie, we can understand how by 1789 it had become

the richest and most energetic part of the nation. It probably owned as much

rural land as the nobility, 49 and it could acquire nobility merely by buying

a noble fief or a post as one of the many "secretaries" to the king. While the

nobility lost numbers and wealth through idleness, extravagance, and biolog-

ical decay, and the clergy lost ground through the rise of science, philoso-

phy, and an urban epicurean life and code, the middle classes grew in money

and power by the development of industry, technology, commerce, and

finance. They filled with their products or imports the boutiques, or stores,

whose splendor astonished foreign visitors to Paris, Lyons, Reims, or Bor-

deaux. 50 While wars were bankrupting the government they enriched the

bourgeoisie, which provided transport and materiel. The growing prosperity

was almost confined to the towns; it eluded the peasantry and the proletariat,

and appeared most visibly in merchants and financiers. In 1789 forty French

merchants had a combined wealth of sixty million livres; 51 and one banker,

Paris-Montmartel, amassed a hundred million. 52

CHAP. XXXVIl) THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION 937

The essential cause of the Revolution was the disparity between economic

reality and political forms— between the importance of the bourgeoisie in

the production and possession of wealth and its exclusion from governmental

power. The upper middle class was conscious of its abilities and sensitive to

its slights. It was galled by the social exclusiveness and insolence of the

nobility— as when the brilliant Mme. Roland, invited to stay for dinner in

an aristocratic home, found herself served in the servants' quarters. 53 It saw

the nobility milking the coffers of the state for extravagant expenditures

and feasts while denying political or military office or promotion to those

very men whose inventive enterprise had expanded the tax-yielding economy

of France, and whose savings were now supporting the treasury. It saw the

clergy absorbing a third of the nation's income in maintaining a theology

that almost all educated Frenchmen considered medieval and infantile.

The middle classes did not wish to overthrow the monarchy, but they

aspired to control it. They were far from desiring democracy, but they

wanted a constitutional government in which the intelligence of all classes

could be brought to bear upon legislation, administration, and policy. They

demanded freedom from state or guild regulation of industry or commerce,

but they were not averse to state subsidies, or to support from the peasants

and the city populace in achieving middle-class aims. The essence of the

French Revolution was the overthrow of the nobility and the clergy by a

bourgeoisie using the discontent of peasants to destroy feudalism, and the

discontent of urban masses to neutralize the armies of the king. When, after

two years of revolution, the Constituent Assembly had become supreme, it

abolished feudalism, confiscated the property of the Church, and legalized

the organization of merchants, but forbade all organizations or gatherings of

workingmen (June 14, 1791). 54

Specifically and immediately the financiers were alarmed by the possibility

that the government to which they had lent so much money might declare

bankruptcy— as it had done, in whole or in part, fifty-six times since Henry

IV. 55 The holders of government bonds lost faith in Louis XVI; contractors

who worked on state enterprises were uncertain of their payment, or of its

value when it came. Businessmen in general felt that the only escape from

national bankruptcy was (and so it proved to be) the full taxation of all

classes, especially of the wealth accumulated by the Church. When Louis

XVI hesitated to extend the taille to the privileged classes, lest he lose their

support for his shaking throne, the bondholders, almost unconsciously, and

despite their generally conservative principles, became a revolutionary force.

The Revolution was due not to the patient poverty of the peasants but to the

endangered wealth of the middle class.

V. THE GATHERING OF THE FORCES

All these revolutionary forces were subject to the influence of ideas, and

used them to clothe and warm desires. In addition to the propaganda of the

philosophers and the physiocrats, there were scattered communists who con-

93** ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVII

tinued and extended the socialism expounded in the preceding generation by

Morelly, Mably, and Linguet. 56 Brissot de Warville, in Recherches philoso-

phiques sur le droit de propriete (1780), anticipated Pierre Proudhon's "La

propriete, Jest le vol" by arguing that private property is theft of public

goods. There is no "sacred right ... to eat the food of twenty men when

one man's share is not enough." The laws are "a conspiracy of the stronger

against the weaker, of the rich against the poor." 57 Brissot later apologized

for his early books as schoolboy ebullitions; he became a leader of the Gi-

rondins, and was guillotined for moderation (1793).

In 1789, shortly before the taking of the Bastille, Francois Boissel issued a

Catechisme du genre humain, which went the whole distance to communism.

All evils are due to "the mercenary, homicidal, and antisocial class which has

governed, degraded, and destroyed men till now." 58 The strong have en-

slaved the weak, and have established the laws to govern them. Property,

marriage, and religion have been invented to legitimize usurpation, violence,

and deceit, with the result that a small minority own the land, while the

majority live in hunger and cold. Marriage is private property in women.

No man has a right to more than he needs; everything above this should be

distributed to each according to his need. Let the rich idlers go to work or

cease to eat. Turn the monasteries into schools. 59

The most interesting and influential of these radicals was Francois-Smile

Babeuf. After serving nobles and clergy in their assertion of feudal rights

against the peasants, 60 he sent to the Academy of Arras (March 21, 1787) a

proposal that it offer a prize for the best essay on the question "With the

general sum of knowledge now acquired, what would be the condition of a

people whose social instincts were such that there should reign among them

the most perfect equality; . . . where everything should be in common?" 61

The Academy did not respond; so Gracchus Babeuf (as he later called him-

self), in a letter of July 8, 1787, explained that by nature all men are equal,

and in the state of nature all things were in common; all later history was

degeneration and deceit. During the Revolution he gathered a numerous fol-

lowing, and was about to lead a revolt against the Directory when he was

arrested by its agents and sentenced to death (1797).

Such ideas played only a modest part in engendering the Revolution.

There was hardly a trace of socialist sentiment in the cahiers (bills of griev-

ances) that came to the States-General from all quarters of France in 1789;

none of them contained attacks upon private property or the monarchy. The

middle class was in control of the situation.

Were the Freemasons a factor in the Revolution? We have noted the rise

of this secret society in England (17 17), and its first appearance in France

(1734). It spread rapidly through Protestant Europe; Frederick II favored it

in Germany, Gustavus III in Sweden. Pope Clement XII (1738) forbade

ecclesiastic or secular authorities to join or help the Freemasons, but the

Paris Parlement refused to register this bull, so depriving it of legal effect in

France. In 1789 there were 629 Masonic lodges in Paris, usually with fifty to

a hundred members. 62 These included many nobles, some priests, the broth-

CHAP. XXXVIl) THE ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION 939

ers of Louis XVI, and most leaders of the Enlightenment. 63 In 1760 Helve-

tius founded the Loge des Sciences; in 1770 the astronomer Lalande ex-

panded this into the Loge des Neuf Soeurs, or Lodge of the Nine Sisters

(i.e., the Muses) . Here gathered Berthollet, Franklin, Condorcet, Chamfort,

Greuze, Houdon, and, later, Sieyes, Brissot, Desmoulins, Danton. 64

Theoretically the Freemasons excluded the "godless libertine" and the

"stupid atheist"; 65 every member had to profess belief in "the Great Archi-

tect of the Universe." No further religious creed was required, so that in

general the Freemasons limited their theology to deism. They were appar-

ently influential in the movement to expel the Jesuits from France. 66 Their

avowed purpose was to establish a secret international brotherhood of men

bound in fellowship by assemblage and ritual, and pledged to mutual aid,

religious toleration, and political reform. Under Louis XVI they entered

actively into politics; several of their aristocratic members— Lafayette, Mira-

beau pere et fils, the Vicomte de Noailles, the Due de La Rochefoucauld-

Liancourt, and the Due d'Orleans— became liberal leaders in the National

Assembly. 67

Last came the definitely political clubs. Organized at first on the English

model— for eating, conversation, and reading— they became, toward 1784,

centers of semi-revolutionary agitation. There, said a contemporary, "they

hold forth loudly and without restraint on the rights of man, on the advan-

tages of freedom, on the great abuses of inequality of condition." 68 After the

assembling of the States-General the deputies from Brittany formed the

Club Breton; this soon widened its membership to include non-Bretons like

Mirabeau fils, Sieyes, and Robespierre. In October, 1789, it moved its head-

quarters to Paris, and became the Societe des Jacobins.

So, as with most pivotal events in history, a hundred diverse forces con-

verged to produce the French Revolution. Fundamental was the growth of

the middle classes in number, education, ambition, wealth, and economic

power; their demand for a political and social status commensurate with

their contribution to the life of the nation and the finances of the state; and

their anxiety lest the treasury render their governmental securities worthless

by declaring bankruptcy. Subsidiary to this factor, and used by it as aids and

threats, were the poverty of millions of peasants crying out for relief from

dues and taxes and tithes; the prosperity of several million peasants strong

enough to defy seigneurs, tax collectors, bishops, and regiments; and the

organized discontent of city masses suffering from the manipulation of the

bread supply, and from the lag of wages behind prices in the historic spiral

of inflation.

Add to this a maze of contributory factors: the costly extravagance of

the court; the incompetence and corruption of the government; the weaken-

ing of the monarchy by its long struggle with the parlements and the nobil-

ity; the absence of political institutions through which grievances could be

legally and constructively expressed; the rising standards of administration

expected by a citizenry whose intellect had been sharpened beyond that of

any contemporary people by schools and books and salons, by science,

94° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVII

philosophy, and the Enlightenment. Add the collapse of press censorship

under Louis XVI; the dissemination of reform or revolutionary ideas by

Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, d'Holbach, Helvetius, Morellet,

Morelly, Mably, Linguet, Mirabeau pere, Turgot, Condorcet, Beaumarchais,

Mirabeau fils, and a thousand other writers whose sum and brilliance and

force had never been equaled, and whose propaganda penetrated into every

class but the peasantry, into the barracks of the army, the cells of monas-

teries, the palaces of the nobility, the antechambers of the King. Add the

catastrophic decline of faith in the credibility of a Church that had upheld

the status quo and the divine right of kings, had preached the virtues of

obedience and resignation, and had amassed a hoard of enviable wealth while

the government could not find the means to finance its expanding tasks. Add

the spread of belief in a "natural law" that required a humane justice for

every rational being regardless of birth, color, creed, or class, and in a boun-

tiful "state of nature" in which all men had once been equal, good, and free,

and from which they had fallen because of the development of private prop-

erty, war, and caste-oriented law. Add the rise and multiplication of lawyers

and orators ready to defend or attack the status quo, and to arouse and

organize public sentiment; the profusion and fury of pamphleteers; the secret

activity of political clubs; the ambition of the Due d'Orleans to replace his

cousin on the throne of France.

Bring all these factors together in the reign of a gentle and benevolent,

weak and vacillating King bewildered by the maze of conflicts about him,

and the contradictory motives within him; let them operate upon a people

more keenly conscious of its grievances, more passionate, excitable, and

imaginative than almost any other people known to history; and all that

would be needed to unite and ignite these forces in a disruptive explosion

would be some event affecting multitudes, and reaching deeper than thought

to the most powerful instincts of men. Perhaps that was the function of the

drought and famine of 1788, and the cruel winter of 1788-89. "Hunger

alone will cause this great revolution," the Marquis de Girardin had pre-

dicted in 1 78 1. 69 Hunger came to the countryside, to the towns, to Paris; it

was sharp enough in the masses to overcome tradition, reverence, and fear,

and to provide an instrument for the aims and brains of well-fed men. The

dykes of law and custom and piety broke, and the Revolution began.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The Political Debacle

1783-89

I. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE: 1 785

IN June, 1783, Axel von Fersen, after gallant fighting for America, and

having earned distinction at Yorktown, returned to France, and found

Marie Antoinette as fascinating as when he had left her three years before.

Even in 1787, when she was thirty-two, Arthur Young thought her "the

most beautiful woman" he had seen at the court that day. 1 She readily sec-

onded the request of Gustavus III that Louis XVI appoint the handsome

Fersen colonel of the Royal Swedish Regiment in the French army— which

would allow him to spend considerable time at Versailles. Axel confessed to

his sister Sophie that he loved the Queen, and he believed that his love was

returned. Certainly she felt a warm affection for him, and eight years later,

after his brave attempt to get her and the King out of France, they ex-

changed tender letters; but her invitation to Sophie to come and live near

him suggests a resolve to keep her feeling for him within proper bounds. 2

Hardly anyone at the court except her husband believed her innocent. A

song popular among the populace admitted no doubt of her guilt:

Veux-tu connaitre Would you know

Un cocu, un bfitard, une catin? A cuckold, a bastard, a whore?

Voyez le Roi, la Reine, See the King, the Queen,

Et Monsieur le Dauphin? And Monsieur the Dauphin.

Louis-Philippe de Segur summed up the matter: "She lost her reputation but

preserved her virtue." 4

On March 25, 1785, Marie Antoinette gave birth to a second son, who was

named Louis-Charles. The King was so pleased that he gave her the Palace

of St.-Cloud, which he had bought from the Due d'Orleans for six million

livres. The court condemned the extravagance of his appreciation, and Paris

nicknamed the Queen "Madame Deficit." 5 She used her power over her hus-

band to influence his appointment of ministers, ambassadors, and other digni-

taries. She tried, and failed, to change his distaste for the alliance with Aus-

tria, and her efforts increased her unpopularity.

Only against the background of this public hostility to "L'Autrichienne"

can we understand the credence given to the story of the diamond necklace.

This collier was itself incredible: a string of 647 diamonds allegedly weigh-

ing 2,800 carats. 6 # Two court jewelers, Charles Bohmer and Paul Bassenge,

* At the 1965 valuation of $1,200 per carat the diamond necklace would be worth $3,360,000.

941

94 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVIII

had bought diamonds from half the world to make a necklace for Mme. du

Barry, confident that Louis XV would buy it for her. But Louis XV died,

and who now would buy so expensive an adornment? The jewelers offered

it to Marie Antoinette for 1,600,000 livres; she rejected it as too costly. 7

Cardinal Prince Louis-Rene-£douard de Rohan came to the fore.

He was a ripe product of one of France's oldest and richest families; he

had, it was said, an income of 1,200,000 livres per year. Ordained a priest in

1760, he was appointed coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Stras-

bourg; in that capacity he officially welcomed Marie Antoinette when she

first entered France (1770). Finding Strasbourg too narrow a field for his

ambitions, Rohan lived mostly in Paris, where he joined the faction hostile

to Austria and the Queen. In 1771 Louis XV sent him to Vienna as special

envoy to ferret out Austrian' maneuvers in the partition of Poland. Maria

Theresa was offended by the lavish fetes that he gave, and by his dissemina-

tion of scandalous gossip about the new Dauphine. Louis XVI recalled him

to Paris, but powerful relatives induced the King to make him grand almoner

—head disburser of the royal alms (1777). A year later the gay and hand-

some priest was raised to the cardinalate, and in 1779 he became archbishop

of Strasbourg. There he met Cagliostro, and was charmed into believing the

impostor's magic claims. Having risen so high so soon, it seemed to Rohan

that he might aspire to be chief minister to Louis XVI, if only he could atone

for his years of opposition to the Queen.

Among his amusements in Paris was the attractive and ingenious Mme.

de La Motte-Valois. Jeanne de St.-Remy de Valois claimed descent from

Henry II of France by a mistress. Her family lost its property, and Jeanne

was reduced to begging in the streets. In 1775 the government confirmed

her royal lineage, and gave her a pension of eight hundred francs. In 1780

she married Antoine de La Motte, an army officer with a penchant for in-

trigue. He had deceived her about his income; their marriage, as she put it,

was a union of drought with famine. 8 He appropriated the title of count,

which made Jeanne the Comtesse de La Motte. As such she fluttered around

Paris and Versailles, making conquests by what she called her "air of health

and youth (which men call radiance), and an extraordinarily vivacious per-

sonality." 9 Having become mistress to the Cardinal (1784), 10 she pretended

to high intimacy at the court, and offered to win the Queen's approval of

his aims. She engaged Retaux de Villette to imitate her Majesty's handwrit-

ing, and brought to the Cardinal affectionate letters allegedly from Marie

Antoinette; finally she promised to arrange an interview. She trained a pros-

titute, the "Baroness" d'Oliva, to impersonate the Queen. In the "Grove of

Venus" at Versailles, in the dark of night, the Cardinal briefly met this

woman, mistook her to be Antoinette, kissed her foot, and received from her a

rose as token of reconciliation (August, 1784) ; or so the "Countess" relates. 11

Mme. de La Motte now ventured upon a bolder plan which, if successful,

would put an end to her poverty. She forged a letter from the Queen au-

thorizing Rohan to buy the necklace in her name. The Cardinal presented

this letter to Bohmer, who surrendered the gems to him (January 24, 1785)

on his written promise to pay 1,600,000 francs in installments. Rohan took

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 943

the brilliants to the Countess, and at her request he turned them over to an

alleged representative of the Queen. Their further history is uncertain; ap-

parently they were taken by the "Comte" de La Motte to England and sold

piece by piece. 12

Bohmer sent a bill for the necklace to the Queen, who replied that she had

never ordered it and had never written the letter that bore her name. When

the date arrived for payment of the first installment (July 30, 1785), and

Rohan offered only thirty thousand of the 400,000 francs then due, Bohmer

laid the matter before the Baron de Breteuil, minister of the King's Household.

Breteuil informed the King. Louis summoned the Cardinal and invited him

to explain his actions. Rohan showed him some supposed letters from the

Queen. The King saw at once that they were forgeries. "This," he said, "is

not in the Queen's handwriting, and the signature is not even in proper

form." 13 He suspected that Rohan and others of the faction hostile to his

wife had plotted to discredit her. He ordered the Cardinal to the Bastille

(August 15), and bade the police find Mme. de La Motte. She had fled to a

succession of hiding places, but she was apprehended, and she too was sent

to the Bastille. Also arrested were "Baronne" d'Oliva, Retaux de Villette,

and Cagliostro, who was wrongly suspected of having planned the intrigue;

actually he had done his best to discourage it. 14

Believing that an open trial was necessary to convince the public of the

Queen's innocence, Louis submitted the case to his enemies, the Paris Parle-

ment. The trial was the cause celebre of the century in France, as that of

Warren Hastings became in England three years later. The judgment of the

Parlement was pronounced on May 31, 1786. Cardinal Rohan was declared

innocent, as more deceived than deceiving, but the King deprived him of his

state offices and exiled him to the Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu. Two accom-

plices received sentences of imprisonment; Cagliostro was freed. Mme. de La

Motte was publicly stripped and whipped in the Cour de Mai before the

Palais de Justice; she was branded with a V (for voleuse, thief), and was

condemned for life to the notorious Salpetriere women's prison. After a year

in this maddening confinement she escaped, joined her husband in London,

wrote an autobiography explaining everything, and died in 1 79 1 .

The nobility and the Paris populace rejoiced over the acquittal of the

Cardinal, and blamed the Queen for bringing the matter to a public trial; the

general feeling was that her known appetite for jewelry had excused the

Cardinal for believing the forged letters. Gossip went so far as to accuse her

of being Rohan's mistress, 15 though she had not seen him in the ten years be-

fore his arrest. Once more she had preserved her virtue and suffered damage

to her reputation. "The Queen's death," said Napoleon, "must be dated from

the Diamond Necklace Trial." 16

11. calonne: 1783-87

On November 10, 1783, the King appointed Charles- Alexandre de

Calonne controller general of finance. Calonne had served successfully as

944 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVIII

intendant at Metz and Lille, and had earned repute for engaging manners,

buoyant spirits, and monetary skill— though he himself, like the government

that he was called to rescue, was hopelessly in debt. 17 He found only 360,000

francs in the treasury, against a floating debt of 646,000,000, increasing by

fifty million francs a year. Like Necker he decided against additional taxa-

tion, fearing that this would arouse revolt and depress the economy; instead

he negotiated a lottery, which brought in a hundred million livres. He ap-

pealed to the clergy, and won from it a don gratuit of eighteen million livres

on his promise to suppress Beaumarchais' edition of Voltaire. He reminted

the gold coins, making a profit of fifty million for the treasury. He borrowed

1 25,000,000 from the bankers. Hoping to stimulate business, he allotted great

sums for city sanitation and the improvement of roads, canals, and harbors;

Le Havre, Dunkirk, Dieppe, and La Rochelle benefited; the great docks at

Cherbourg began. On the theory that a government must always put up a

prosperous front, he allocated funds readily to courtiers, and asked no

questions about the expenses of the King's brothers and the Queen. The

King himself, despite good intentions, allowed the outlay for his household

to rise from 4,600,000 livres in 1 775 to 6,200,000 in 1 787. 18

The more Calonne spent, the more he borrowed; the more he borrowed,

the more interest had to be paid on the debt. In August, 1786, he confessed

to the bewildered King that all expedients had been exhausted, that the na-

tional debt and the annual deficit were greater than ever, and that only the

extension of taxation in the nobility and the clergy could save the govern-

ment from financial disaster. Knowing that the Paris Parlement, now in un-

disguised alliance with the nobility of the sword, would resist this sugges-

tion, he proposed that a group of distinguished men, to be chosen by him

from all three classes throughout France, be summoned to Versailles to con-

sult for the financial salvation of the state. The King agreed.

The Assembly of Notables convened on February 22, 1787: forty-six

nobles, eleven ecclesiastics, twelve members of the Royal Council, thirty-

eight magistrates, twelve deputies from the pays d'etat (regions enjoying spe-

cial privileges), and twenty-five municipal officials; 144 in all. Calonne ad-

dressed them with courageous candor about abuses which, however deeply

rooted in time and prejudice, must be abolished because "they bear heavily

upon the most productive and laborious class." He condemned the general

inequality of subsidies, and "the enormous disproportion in the contributions

of different provinces and subjects of one same sovereign." 19 He expounded

proposals more radical than Turgot's, and presented them as having been

approved by the King. Had they been adopted they might have averted the

Revolution. Some of them, carried over from Turgot, were accepted by the

Notables: a reduction in the salt tax, the removal of tolls on internal com-

merce, the restoration of free trade in grains, the establishment of provincial

assemblies, and an end to the corvee. But his request for a new and universal

tax on land was rejected. The noble and ecclesiastical members argued that

this subvention territoriale would require a survey of all land, and a census

of all landowners, in France; this would take a year, and could have no effect

on the current crisis.

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 945

Calonne appealed to the people by publishing his speeches; neither the

nobles nor the clergy relished this resort to public opinion. The Assembly

retaliated by demanding from Calonne a full account of revenues and ex-

penditures during his ministry. He refused to comply, knowing that a revela-

tion of his methods and outlays would ruin him. The Assembly insisted that

economy in expenditures was more needed than a revision of the tax struc-

ture; moreover, it questioned its authority to establish a new system of taxa-

tion; such authority belonged only to a States-General (£tats Generaux—

i.e., a national conference of deputies chosen by the three etats, or classes).

No such meeting had been called since 1614.

Lafayette, one of the Notables, approved most of Calonne's proposals, but

distrusted the man. He accused Calonne of having sold some of the royal

lands without the King's knowledge; Calonne challenged him to prove the

charge; Lafayette proved it. 20 Louis XVI had resented Calonne's appeal to

the public over the heads of the government; he realized, from a succession

of disclosures, that Calonne had deceived him about the condition of the

treasury, and he saw that he could get no co-operation from the Notables

as long as Calonne was controller. When Calonne asked for the dismissal of

his critic the Baron de Breteuil, who was a personal friend of Marie An-

toinette, she advised the King to dismiss Calonne instead. Wearied with the

turmoil, he took her advice (April 8, 1787). Calonne, learning that the Parle-

ment of Paris was planning to investigate his administration and his private

affairs, decamped to England. On April 23 Louis sought to appease the

Notables by promising governmental economies, and publicity of state

finances. On May 1, again on the advice of the Queen, he appointed one of

the Notables to be chief of the Council of Finance.

III. LOMENIE DE BRIENNE: 1 787-88

He was archbishop of Toulouse, but so notoriously a freethinker that the

philosophes hailed his advent to power. When, six years before, he had been

recommended to succeed Christophe de Beaumont in the metropolitan see,

Louis XVI had protested, "We must at least have an archbishop of Paris

who believes in God." 21 One of his most satisfying coups as minister of

finance was to have himself transferred to the archbishopric of Sens, which

was much richer than that of Toulouse. He persuaded the Notables to ap-

prove his plan for raising eighty million francs by a loan, but when he asked

consent to the new land tax they again pleaded lack of authority. Seeing that

the Notables would do no more, Louis politely dismissed them (May 25,

J 7 8 7)-

Brienne attempted economies by asking cuts in the expenditures of each

department; the departmental heads resisted; the King did not sustain his

minister. Louis reduced his household expenses by a million francs, and the

Queen accepted a similar reduction (August 11). Brienne had the courage

to refuse monetary demands by the court, by the friends of the Queen, by a

brother of the King. It is to his credit that he carried through the reluctant

94<5 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVIII

Parlement (January, 1788), against the resistance of most of his fellow prel-

ates, the royal edict extending civil rights to Protestants.

He was unfortunate in having come to power at a time when crop fail-

ures and the competition of British imports had spread an economic reces-

sion that lasted till the Revolution. In August, 1787, hungry rioters in Paris

shouted revolutionary slogans and burned some ministers in effigy. "The

feeling of everybody," noted Arthur Young on October 13, "seems to be

that the Archbishop will not be able to exonerate the state from the burden

of its present situation; . . . that something extraordinary will happen; and

a bankruptcy is an idea not at all uncommon." 22 And on the seventeenth:

"One opinion pervaded the whole company, that they are on the eve of some

great revolution in the government; ... a great ferment in all ranks of

men, who are eager for some change; . . . and a strong leaven of liberty,

increasing every hour since the American Revolution." 23

The reforms which Calonne and Brienne had advocated, and which the

King had accepted, had yet to be registered and recognized as law by the

parlements. The Paris Parlement agreed to freeing the grain trade and com-

muting the corvee into a monetary payment, but it refused to sanction a

stamp tax. On July 19, 1787, it sent to Louis XVI a declaration that "the

Nation, represented by the States-General, alone has the right of granting

to the King the resources which might prove indispensable." 24 The Paris

public approved this pronouncement, forgetting that the States-General, as

thus far known in French history, was a feudal institution heavily weighted

in favor of the privileged classes. Not forgetting this, the nobility of the

sword approved the declaration, and henceforth allied itself with the parle-

ments and the noblesse de robe in that revoke nobiliaire which prepared the

Revolution. Louis hesitated to call the States-General, lest it should end the

absolutism of the Bourbon monarchy by asserting legislative powers.

In August, 1787, he presented to the Parlement an edict for a tax on all

land in all classes. The Parlement refused to register it. Louis summoned

the members to a lit de justice at Versailles, and ordered the registration; the

members, returning to Paris, declared the registration void, and again de-

manded a States-General. The King banished them to Troyes (August 14).

The provincial parlements rose in protest; riots broke out in Paris; Brienne

and the King yielded, and the Parlement was recalled (September 24) amid

popular rejoicing.

The conflict was renewed when the Parlement refused to sanction

Brienne's proposal to raise a loan of 120,000,000 livres. The King called a

"royal session" of the Parlement (November n, 1 787 ) , at which his ministers

presented arguments for registering the measure. The Parlement still refused,

and the Due d'Orleans cried out, "Sire, it is illegal!" Louis, in an unusually

reckless burst of temper, answered, "That makes no difference! It is legal

because I wish it"— thus plainly asserting absolutism. He ordered the edict

registered; it was done; but as soon as he had left the hall the Parlement re-

voked the registration. Informed of this, Louis exiled the Due d'Orleans to

Villers-Cotterets, and sent two of the magistrates to the Bastille (November

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 947

20). Protesting these and other arrests without trial, the Parlement sent to

the King (March n, 1788) "remonstrances" containing words that pleased

nobles and commoners alike: "Arbitrary acts violate irremovable rights. . . .

Kings rule either by conquest or by law. . . . The nation asks from his

Majesty the greatest good that a king can give to his subjects— liberty." 25

The ministry thought to pacify the Parlement by yielding to its demand

for publication of the government's revenues and expenditures. This made

matters worse by revealing a deficit of 160,000,000 livres. The bankers re-

fused to lend more to the state unless the Parlement sanctioned the loan; the

Parlement vowed it would not. On May 3, 1788, it issued a "Declaration of

Rights" which reminded Louis XVI and his ministers that France was "a

monarchy governed by the king, following the laws," and that Parlement

must not surrender its ancient right to register royal edicts before these could

become laws. It again called for a States-General. The ministers ordered the

arrest of two Parlement leaders, d'£premesnil and Goislard (May 4) ; this was

done amid wild confusion in the hall and angry protests in the street. On

May 8 Brienne announced the intention of the government to establish new

courts, headed by a Cour Pleniere which alone would henceforth have the

power of registering royal edicts; the parlements were to be restricted to

purely judicial functions, and the whole structure of French law was to be

reformed. Meanwhile the Paris Parlement was "put on vacation"— in effect

suspended from operation.

It appealed to the nobility, the clergy, and the provincial parlements. All

came to its support. Dukes and peers sent to the King protests against abro-

gating the traditional rights of the Parlement. An assembly of the clergy

(June 15) condemned the new Plenary Court, reduced its "gratuitous gift"

from a past average of twelve million livres to 1,800,000, and refused any

further aid until the Parlement should be restored. 26 One after another the

provincial parlements rose against the King. The Parlement of Pau (capital

of Beam) declared it would register no edicts rejected by the Parlement of

Paris; and when force was threatened against the magistrates the people took

up arms to protect them. The Parlement of Rouen (capital of Normandy)

denounced the ministers of the King as traitors, and outlawed all persons

who should use the new courts. The Parlement of Rennes (capital of Brit-

tany) issued similar decrees; when the government sent soldiers to dismiss it

these were faced by the armed retainers of the local nobility. 27 At Grenoble

(capital of Dauphine), when the military commander proclaimed a royal

edict dissolving the local parlement, the populace of the town, reinforced

by peasants summoned by the tocsin, pelted the reluctant troops with tiles

from the roofs, and compelled the commander, on pain of being hanged

from his chandelier, to withdraw the edict of the King (June 7, 1787, the

"Journee des Tuiles," or Day of Tiles) . The magistrates, however, obeyed

a royal order to go into exile.

The Grenoble community made history by its reaction. Nobles, clergy,

and commonalty resolved to re-establish the old Estates of Dauphine for a

meeting on July 21. Since the Third Estate had led the victory on the "Day

94** ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVIII

of Tiles," it was accorded representation equal to that of the two other

orders combined; and it was agreed that in the new assembly voting should

be by individuals and not by classes; these agreements set precedents that

played a part in the organization of the national States-General. Forbidden

to meet at Grenoble, the Dauphine Estates met at Vizille, a few miles away;

and there, under the leadership of a young lawyer, Jean-Joseph Mounier,

and a young orator, Antoine Barnave, the five hundred deputies drew up

resolutions (August, 1788) upholding the registration rights of the parle-

ments, demanding abolition of lettres de cachet, calling for a States-General,

and pledging itself never to consent to new taxes unless a States-General

sanctioned them. Here was one beginning of the French Revolution: an en-

tire province had defied the King, and had declared, in effect, for a constitu-

tional monarchy.

Overcome by the almost nationwide revolt against the royal authority,

the King surrendered, and decided to summon a States-General. But, as 174

years had passed since the last meeting of this body, and the growth of the

Third Estate made it impossible to use the old forms of procedure, Louis

XVI issued to the people (July 5, 1788) an extraordinary appeal as an order

of the Royal Council:

His Majesty will endeavor to approximate earlier practices; but when these

cannot be determined he wishes to offset the deficiency by ascertaining the

will of his subjects. . . . Accordingly the King has decided to command that

all possible researches concerning the aforementioned matters be made in all

the depositories of each and every province; that the results of such investiga-

tions be transmitted to the provincial estates and assemblies, . . . which in turn

shall apprise his Majesty of their wishes. . . . His Majesty invites all scholars

and educated persons in his kingdom ... to direct to the Keeper of the Seals

all information and memoirs connected with matters contained in the present

decree. 28

On August 8 Louis summoned the three classes of France to send deputies

to a States-General which was to meet at Versailles on May 1, 1789. On the

same day he suspended the Cour Pleniere, which soon faded from history.

On August 16 the government in effect acknowledged its bankruptcy by

announcing that till December 31, 1789, the obligations of the state would

be paid not all in currency but partly in paper, which all citizens should ac-

cept as legal payment. On August 25 Brienne resigned, loaded with favor

and wealth, while the Paris public burned him in effigy. He retired to his

rich see at Sens, and there, in 1 794, he killed himself.

IV. NECKER AGAIN: 1 788-89

Reluctantly the King asked Necker to return to the government (August

25). Now he gave him the title of secretary of state and a seat in the Royal

Council. Everyone, from the Queen and the clergy to the bankers and the

populace, applauded the appointment. A multitude gathered in the court-

yard of the Versailles Palace to welcome him; he came out and told them,

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 949

"Yes, my children, I remain; be comforted." Some fell on their knees and

kissed his hands. 28 He wept, in the manner of the time.

Disorder in the administration, in the streets, in the official and the public

mind had come so close to political disintegration that the best that Necker

could do was to maintain stability until the States-General convened. As a

gesture to restore confidence, he put two million francs of his own into the

treasury, and pledged his personal fortune as partial guarantee of the state's

engagements. 30 He revoked the order of August 16 requiring bondholders

to accept paper instead of money; government bonds rose thirty per cent on

the market. The bankers advanced the treasury sufficient funds to tide over

the crisis for a year.

On Necker's advice the King again recalled the Parlement (September

23). Intoxicated with its triumph, it made the mistake of declaring that the

coming States-General should operate as in 1 6 14— sitting as separate classes

and voting in class units, which would automatically reduce the Third Es-

tate to political impotence. The general public, which had credited the

Parlement's claim to be defending liberty against tyranny, perceived that

the liberty intended was that of the two privileged classes to overrule the

king. The Parlement, by so ranging itself on the side of the feudal regime,

forfeited the support of the powerful middle class, and henceforth ceased to

be a factor in shaping events. The revoke nobiliaire had shown its limits and

run its course; now it gave place to the bourgeois revolution.

Necker's task was made harder by the drought of 1788, which was ended

by hailstorms that ruined the stunted crops. The winter of 1788-89 was one

of the bitterest in the history of France; at Paris the thermometer fell to 18

degrees below zero Fahrenheit; the Seine froze solid from Paris to Le Havre.

Bread rose in price from nine sous in August, 1788, to fourteen in February,

1789. The upper classes did their best to relieve the suffering; some nobles,

like the Due d'Orleans, spent hundreds of thousands of livres feeding and

warming the poor; the Archbishop gave 400,000 livres; one monastery fed

twelve hundred persons daily for six weeks. 31 Necker forbade the export of

grain, and imported seventy million livres' worth; famine was averted. He left

to his successors or to the States-General the task of repaying the loans that

he raised.

Meanwhile he persuaded the King, over the opposite advice of powerful

nobles, to decree (December 27, 1788) that in the coming States-General

the deputies of the Third Estate should equal in number those of the other

states combined. On June 24, 1789, he sent out to all districts an invitation to

vote for representatives. In the Third Estate every Frenchman above the age

of twenty-four who paid any tax was entitled— and even commanded— to

vote; so were all professional men, businessmen, guildsmen; in effect all the

commonalty except paupers and the poorest laborers had the vote. 32 The

successful candidates met as an electoral committee which chose a deputy

for the district. In the First Estate every priest or curate, every monastery or

convent, voted for a representative in the electoral assembly of the district;

archbishops, bishops, and abbots were members of that assembly ex officio;

95° ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVIII

this assembly chose an ecclesiastical deputy to the States-General. In the

Second Estate every nobleman above the age of twenty-four was automati-

cally a member of the electoral assembly which chose a deputy to represent

the nobility of his district. In Paris only those who paid a poll tax of six or

more livres had the vote; there most of the proletariat was left out. 33

Each electoral assembly in each class was invited by the government to

draw up a cahier des plaintes et doleances—a statement of complaints and

grievances— for the guidance of its deputy. The district cahiers were sum-

marized for each class in provincial cahiers, and these, in whole or in synop-

sis, were presented to the King. The cahiers of all classes united in condemn-

ing absolutism, and in demanding a constitutional monarchy in which the

powers of the king and his ministers would be limited by law, and by a na-

tionally elected assembly meeting periodically and alone authorized to vote

new taxes and to sanction new laws. Nearly all deputies were instructed to

vote no funds for the government until such a constitution had been secured.

All classes denounced the financial incompetence of the government, the

evils associated with the indirect taxes, and the excesses of royal power, as

in lettres de cachet. All demanded trial by jury, privacy of the mails, and

reform of the law. All pleaded for liberty, but in their own fashion: the

nobles for the restoration of their pre-Richelieu powers; the clergy and the

bourgeoisie for freedom from all state interference; the peasantry for free-

dom from oppressive taxes and feudal dues. All accepted in principle the

equal taxation of all property. All expressed loyalty to the King, but none

mentioned his "divine right" to rule; 34 that, by common consent, was dead.

The cahiers of the nobility stipulated that in the States-General each of

the classes should meet separately and vote as a united class. The cahiers of

the clergy rejected toleration, and asked that the civil rights recently granted

to Protestants be revoked. Some cahiers called for a greater portion of the

tithe to be left to the parish, and for access of all priests to positions in the

hierarchy. Nearly all the ecclesiastical cahiers deplored the immorality of

the age in art, literature, and the theater; they ascribed this deterioration to

excessive freedom of the press, and called for exclusive control of education

by the Catholic clergy.

The cahiers of the Third Estate voiced chiefly the views of the middle

class and the peasant proprietors. They pleaded for the abolition of feudal

rights and transport tolls. They demanded career open to talent for all classes

to all posts. They condemned the wealth of the Church and the costly idle-

ness of monks. One cahier suggested that to meet the deficit the King should

sell the lands and rents of the clergy; another proposed the confiscation of

all monastic property. 35 Many complained of the devastation of farms by

the animals and hunts of the nobility. They asked for universal free edu-

cation, for the reform of hospitals and prisons, for the complete extinction

of serfdom and the trade in slaves. A typical cahier of the peasants asserted:

"We are the principal prop of the throne, the true support of the armies.

. . . We are the source of riches for others, and we ourselves remain in

poverty." 36

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 95 1

All in all, this election of the States-General was a proud and generous

moment in the history of France. Almost, for a while, Bourbon France be-

came a democracy, with probably a larger proportion of the people voting

than go to the polls in an American election today. It was a fair election, not

as disorderly as might have been expected in so novel an operation; it was

apparently freer from corruption than most of the elections held in the

later democracies of Europe. 37 Never before, so far as we know, had a gov-

ernment issued so broad an invitation to its people to instruct it in modes of

procedure, and to communicate to it their complaints and desires. Taken

altogether, these cahiers gave the government a more complete view of con-

ditions in France than it had ever before possessed. Now, if ever, France

had the materials for statesmanship; now she had freely chosen her best men,

from every class, to meet with a King who had already made brave overtures

to change. All France was filled with hope as these men, from every part of

the country, made their way to Paris and Versailles.

V. ENTER MIRABEAU

One of them was a noble elected by the commonalty of both Aix-en-

Provence and Marseilles. Distinguished by this anomalous and double dignity,

Honore-Gabriel- Victor Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, ugly and fascinating,

became a dominant figure in the Revolution from his arrival in Paris (April,

1 789) till his premature death ( 1 79 1 ) .

We have celebrated his father— Victor Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau— as

physiocrat and "Friend of Man," i.e., of everybody except his wife and chil-

dren. Vauvenargues described this "Ami de l'homme" as "of an ardent, mel-

ancholy temper, prouder and more restless . . . than the sea, with a sov-

ereign insatiability for pleasure, knowledge, and glory." 38 The Marquis

admitted all this, and added that "immorality was for him a second nature."

At twenty-eight he resolved to discover if one woman could be enough; he

asked for the hand of Marie de Vessan, whom he had never seen, but who

was heiress apparent to a sizable fortune. After marrying her he found that

she was a slovenly and incompetent termagant; but she gave him in eleven

years eleven children, of whom five survived infancy. In 1760 the Marquis

was imprisoned in the Chateau de Vincennes for seditious writings, but was

released after a week. In 1762 his wife left him and returned to her mother.

Honore-Gabriel, the eldest son, grew up amid this domestic drama. One

of his grandmothers died insane, one of his sisters and one of his brothers

were subject to occasional insanity; it is a marvel that Gabriel himself, buf-

feting one calamity after another, did not go mad. He had two teeth at birth,

as a warning to the world. At three he suffered an attack of smallpox, which

left his face scarred and pitted like a battlefield. He was an exuberant, quar-

relsome, and willful boy; his father, who was exuberant, quarrelsome, and

willful, beat him frequently, generating filial hate. The Marquis was glad to

get rid of him by sending him, aged fifteen (1764), to a military academy in

95 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVIII

Paris. There Gabriel acquired mathematics, German, and English, and read

eagerly, being consumed with a passion for achievement. He read Voltaire

and lost religion; he read Rousseau and learned to feel for the commonalty.

In the army he stole the mistress of his commanding officer, fought a duel,

took part in the French invasion of Corsica, and won such commendation

for courage that his father momentarily loved him.

At twenty-three he married, frankly for money, fimilie de Marignac,

who expected to inherit 500,000 francs. She bore a son to Gabriel, and took

a lover; he discovered her infidelity, concealed his own, and forgave her. He

quarreled with a M. de Villeneuve, broke an umbrella over his back, and

was accused of intent to kill. To have him escape arrest his father secured a

lettre de cachet by which Gabriel was forcibly confined in the Chateau d'lf ,

on an island off Marseilles. He asked his wife to join him; she refused; they

exchanged letters of rising wrath, until he bade her, "Farewell forever"

(December 14, 1774). Meanwhile he kept warm by sleeping occasionally

with the wife of the chateau's commandant.

In May, 1775, his father had him transferred to laxer custody at the

Chateau de Joux, near Pontarlier and the Swiss border. His jailer, M. de

Saint-Mauris, invited him to a party, where he met Sophie de Ruffey, the

nineteen-year-old wife of the seventy-year-old Marquis de Monnier. She

found Mirabeau more satisfying than her husband; his face was deterring,

his hair was woolly, his nose was massive, but his eyes were on fire, his dis-

position was "sulfurous," and he could seduce any woman with his speech.

Sophie gave herself to him completely. He escaped from Pontarlier, fled

to Thonon in Savoy, and seduced a cousin there. In August, 1776, Sophie

joined him at Verrieres in Switzerland, for, she said, to live apart from him

was "to die a thousand times a day." 39 Now she vowed, "Gabriel or death!"

She proposed to go to work, for Gabriel was penniless.

He went with her to Amsterdam, where Rousseau's publisher, Marc Rey,

hired him as a translator. Sophie served as his amanuensis, and taught Italian.

He wrote several minor works, in one of which he spoke of his father: "He

preaches virtue, beneficence, and frugality, while he is the worst of hus-

bands, and the hardest and most spendthrift of fathers." 40 Mirabeau pere

thought this a breach of etiquette. He united with Sophie's parents in ar-

ranging the extradition of the couple from Holland. They were arrested

(May 14, 1777) and brought to Paris. Sophie, having failed in an attempt at

suicide, was sent to a house of correction; Gabriel, raging, was imprisoned in

the Chateau de Vincennes, following in the footsteps of his father and

Diderot. There he languished for forty-two months. After two years he was

allowed to have books, paper, pen, and ink. To Sophie he sent letters of

passionate devotion. On January 7, 1778, she gave birth to a daughter, pre-

sumably his. In June mother and child were transferred to a convent at Gien,

near Orleans.

Mirabeau appealed to his father to forgive him and have him freed. "Let

me see the sun," he begged; "let me breathe a freer air; let me see the face of

my kind! I see nothing but dark walls. .My father, I shall die from the tortures

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 953

of nephritis!" 41 To alleviate his misery, to make some money for Sophie, and

to keep from going mad, he wrote several books, some erotic. Most impor-

tant was the Lettres de cachet, which described the injustices of arrest with-

out warrant and detention without trial, and demanded reform of prisons

and the law. Published in 1782, the little volume so moved Louis XVI that

in 1 784 he ordered the release of all the prisoners held at Vincennes. 42

Mirabeau's jailers took pity on him, and after November, 1779, he was

allowed to walk in the gardens of the chateau and to meet visitors; in some

of these he found outlets for his overflowing sexual energy. 43 His father

agreed to have him liberated if he would apologize to his wife and resume

cohabitation with her, for the old Marquis was anxious to have a grandson

to carry on the family. Gabriel wrote to his wife asking forgiveness. On

December 1 3, 1780, he was released under custody of his father, who invited

him to the paternal mansion at Le Bignon. He had some liaisons in Paris, and

visited Sophie in her convent; apparently he told her that he intended to

rejoin his wife. Then he went to Le Bignon, and charmed his father. Sophie

received money from her husband, moved to a house near the convent, en-

gaged in works of charity, and agreed to marry an ex-captain of cavalry. He

died before the marriage could take place, and on the next day (September

9, 1789) Sophie killed herself. 44

Mirabeau's wife refused to see him; he sued her for desertion; he lost his

case, but astonished friends and foes with the eloquence of his five-hour

speech pleading his own impossible cause. His father disowned him; he sued

his father, and obtained from him an allowance of three thousand francs a

year. He borrowed money and lived sumptuously. In 1784 he took a new

mistress, Henriette de Nehra. With her he went to England and Germany

(1785-87). En route he had tangential liaisons, which Henriette forgave,

for, she said, "If a woman made him the least advances he took fire at

once." 45 He met Frederick twice, and learned enough about Prussia to com-

pose (from material supplied him by a Prussian major) the book De la

Monarchie prussienne (1788); this he dedicated to his father, who described

it as "the enormous compilation of a frenzied workman." Calonne commis-

sioned him to send some secret dispatches about German affairs; he sent

seventy, which amazed the minister by their keen perception and forceful

style.

Back in Paris, he perceived that public discontent was nearing revolution-

ary ardor. In a letter to the minister Montmorin he warned that unless a

States-General met by 1789, revolution would come. "I ask if you have

reckoned with the convulsive energy of hunger acting on the genius of

despair. I ask who will dare make himself responsible for the safety of all

who surround the throne, nay, of the King himself?" 46 He was caught up in

the agitation, and rushed into the current. He achieved a tenuous reconcilia-

tion with his father (who died in 1789), and offered himself at Aix-en-

Provence as a candidate for the States-General. He invited the nobles of the

district to choose him; they refused; he turned to the Third Estate, which

welcomed him. Now he left his conservative cocoon and took wings as a

954 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION (CHAP. XXXVIII

democrat. "The right of sovereignty rests solely . . . with the people; the

sovereign . . . can be no more than the first magistrate of the people." 47

He wished to keep the monarchy, but only as a protection of the people

against the aristocracy; meanwhile he urged that all male adults should have

the vote. 48 In a discourse to the Estates of Provence he threatened the priv-

ileged classes with a general strike: "Take care; do not disdain this people,

which produces everything; this people, which, to be formidable, need only

be immobile." 49

A bread riot arose in Marseilles (March, 1789); the authorities sent for

Mirabeau to come and calm the people, for they knew his popularity. The

populace gathered in a crowd of 120,000 to acclaim him. 50 He organized a

patrol to prevent violence. In an Avis au peuple marseillais he advised the

commonalty to be patient till the States-General should have time to find a

balance between producers wanting high prices and consumers wanting low.

The rioters obeyed him. By the same persuasiveness he pacified an uprising

at Aix. Both Aix and Marseilles chose him as their deputy; he thanked the

electors, and decided to represent Aix. In April, 1789, he left for Paris and

the States-General.

VI. THE LAST REHEARSAL: 1 789

He passed through a country facing famine and rehearsing revolution. In

several districts, in the spring of 1789, there were repeated revolts against

taxes and the cost of bread. In Lyons the populace invaded the offices of the

tax collector and destroyed his registers. At Agde, near Montpellier, the

people threatened a general pillage unless the prices of commodities were

reduced; they were reduced. Villages fearing a shortage of grain forcibly

prevented the export of grain from their districts. Some peasants talked of

burning all chateaux and killing the seigneurs (May, 1789). 51 At Montlhery

the women, hearing that the price of bread had been raised, led a mob into

the granaries and bakeries, and seized all available bread and flour. Similar

scenes at Bray-sur-Seine, Bagnols, Amiens, almost everywhere in France. In

town after town orators aroused the people by telling them that the King

had postponed all tax payments. 52 A report ran through Provence in March

and April that "the best of kings desires tax equality; that there are to be no

more bishops, nor seigneurs, nor tithes, nor dues, no more titles or distinc-

tions." 53 After April 1, 1789, feudal dues were no longer paid. The "volun-

tary" surrender of these dues by the nobility on August 4 was not an act

of self-sacrifice but the recognition of an accomplished fact.

In Paris the excitement mounted almost daily as the meeting of the States-

General approached. Pamphlets poured from the press, oratory lifted its

voice at the cafes and clubs. The most famous and powerful pamphlet in

all history appeared in January, 1789, written by the freethinking Abbe

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, vicar general of the diocese of Chartres. Cham-

fort had written, "Qtfest-ce que le Tiers etat?—Tout. QtCa-t-iW—Rien?

("What is the Third Estate? Everything. What does it have? Nothing.")

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 955

Sieyes made this explosive epigram into an arresting title, and turned it into

three questions that soon half of France was asking:

What is the Third Estate? Everything.

What has it been, till the present, in the political order? Nothing.

What does it ask? To become something. 54

Of the 26,000,000 souls in France, Sieyes pointed out, at least 25,000,000

belonged to the Third Estate— the untitled laity; in effect the Third Estate

was the nation. If, in the States-General, the other classes should refuse to

sit with it, it would be justified in constituting itself the "Assemblee Na-

tionale." That phrase endured.

Hunger was even more eloquent than words. As relief stations were set

up in Paris by the government, the clergy, and the rich, beggars and crimi-

nals flocked in from the hinterland to eat and to risk their nothing in acts of

desperation. Here and there the populace took matters into its own hands;

it threatened to hang at the nearest lamppost any merchant hiding grain or

charging too much for it; often it stopped and sacked convoys of grain

before these could reach the market; sometimes it mobbed the markets and

took by force, without pay, the grain that peasants had brought in to sell. 55

On April 2 3 Necker issued through the Royal Council a decree empower-

ing judges and police to take inventory of private granaries, and to compel

them, where bread was running short, to send their grain to the market; but

this order was loosely enforced. Such was the picture of Paris in the spring.

In these angry mobs the Due d'Orleans saw a possible instrument for his

ambitions. He was the great-grandson of that Philippe d'Orleans who had

been regent of France (1715-23). Born in 1747, named Due de Chartres at

five, he married at twenty-two Louise-Marie de Bourbon-Penthievre, whose

wealth made him the richest man in France. 58 In 1785 he succeeded to the

title of Due d'Orleans; after 1789, through his advocacy of popular causes,

he was known as Philippe £galite. We have seen him challenging the King

in the Parlement and exiled to Villers-Cotterets. Soon back in Paris, he de-

termined to make himself an idol of the people, hoping that he might be

chosen to succeed his cousin Louis XVI in case the harassed King should

abdicate or be deposed. He gave largesse to the poor, recommended nation-

alization of ecclesiastical property, 57 and threw open to the public the garden

and some rooms of his Palais-Royal in the very heart of Paris. He had the

graces of a generous aristocrat and the morals of his ancestor the Regent.

Mme. de Genlis, governess of his children, served him as liaison with Mira-

beau, Condorcet, Lafayette, Talleyrand, Lavoisier, Volney, Sieyes, Desmou-

lins, Danton. His fellow Freemasons gave him substantial support. 58 The

novelist Choderlos de Laclos, his secretary, acted as his agent in organizing

public demonstrations and revolts. In the gardens, cafes, gambling houses,

and brothels near his palace the pamphleteers exchanged ideas and formed

plans; here thousands of people, of all classes, joined in the agitations of the

hour. The Palais-Royal, as a name for all this complex, became the hub of

the Revolution.

It is alleged and probable, but not certain, that the money of the Duke,

95<* ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVIII

and the activity of Choderlos de Laclos, played a part in organizing the

attack upon the Reveillon factory in the Rue St.-Antoine. Reveillon was

leading a revolution of his own: replacing wall paintings and tapestry with

vellum paper painted by artists in a technique developed by him, and pro-

ducing what an English authority has called "undoubtedly the most beau-

tiful wallpapers that have ever been made." 59 His factory employed three

hundred men, whose minimum wage was twenty-five sous ($1.56?) per

day. 80 At a meeting of the electoral assembly of Ste.-Marguerite a dispute

arose between middle-class electors and workingmen; there was some appre-

hension that wages might be cut, 81 and a false 62 report was spread that Re-

veillon had said, "A workingman with wife and children can live on fifteen

sous a day." On April 27 a crowd gathered before the manufacturer's house

and, unable to find him, burned him in effigy. On the twenty-eighth, rein-

forced and armed, it invaded his home, sacked it, made bonfires of its furni-

ture, drank the liquor from its cellar, and appropriated currency and silver

plate. The rioters moved on to the factory and plundered it. Troops were

sent against them; they defended themselves in a battle that raged for sev-

eral hours; twelve soldiers and over two hundred rioters were killed. Reveil-

lon closed his factory and moved to England.

This was the mood of Paris as the elected deputies and their substitutes

arrived for the States-General at Versailles.

VII. THE STATES-GENERAL: 1 789

On May 4 the deputies moved in a stately procession to hear Mass in the

Church of St. Louis: the Versailles clergy in front, then the representatives

of the Third Estate, dressed in black, then the noble delegates, colorful and

plumed, then the ecclesiastical deputies, then the King and Queen, sur-

rounded by the royal family. The townspeople crowded the streets, the

balconies, and the roofs; they applauded the commoners, the King, and the

Due d'Orleans, and received with silence the nobles, the clergy, and the

Queen. For a day everyone (except the Queen) was happy, for what so

many had hoped for had come to pass. Many, even among the nobles, wept

at the sight of the divided nation apparently made one.

On May 5 the deputies assembled in the immense Salle des Menus Plaisirs

(Hall of Minor Diversions), about four hundred yards from the royal

palace. There were 621 commoners, 308 clergy, 285 nobles (including

twenty of the noblesse de robe). Of the ecclesiastical deputies some two

thirds were of plebeian origin; many of these later threw in their lot with

the commoners. Nearly half the deputies of the Third Estate were lawyers,

five per cent were professional men, thirteen per cent were businessmen,

eight per cent represented the peasantry. 83 Among the clergy was Charles-

Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, bishop of Autun. Mirabeau, anticipating

Napoleon's phrase about "mud in a silk stocking," described Talleyrand as

"a vile, greedy, base, intriguing fellow, whose one desire is mud and money;

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 957

for money he would sell his soul; and he would be right, for he would be

exchanging a dunghill for gold"; 64 which hardly did justice to Talleyrand's

flexible intelligence. Among the nobles were several men who advocated

substantial reforms: Lafayette, Condorcet, Lally-Tollendal, the Vicomte de

Noailles, the Dues d'Orleans, d'Aiguillon, and de La Rochefoucauld-Lian-

court. Most of these joined Sieyes, Mirabeau, and other deputies of the

Third Estate in forming Les Trentes, a "Society of Thirty" which acted as

an organizing group for liberal measures. Prominent in the delegation of the

Third Estate were Mirabeau, Sieyes, Mounier, Barnave, Jean Bailly the as-

tronomer, and Maximilien Robespierre. All in all this was the most distin-

guished political assembly in French annals, perhaps in all modern history.

Generous spirits throughout Europe looked to this gathering to raise a

standard to which the oppressed in every nation might repair.

The King opened the first session with a brief address frankly confessing

the financial distress of his government, ascribing this to "a costly but hon-

orable war," asking for an "augmentation of taxes," and deploring "an ex-

aggerated desire for innovation." Necker followed with a three-hour speech

admitting a deficit of 56,150,000 livres (it was really 150,000,000), and ask-

ing sanction for a loan of 80,000,000 livres. The deputies fidgeted over the

brain-taxing statistics; most of them had expected the liberal minister to

expound a program of reform.

The struggle of the classes began the next day, when the nobles and the

clergy went to separate halls. The general public now forced its way into

the Salle des Menus Plaisirs; soon it was influencing votes by its vigorous—

and usually organized— expression of approval or dissent. The Third Estate

refused to acknowledge itself a separate chamber; it waited resolutely for

the other estates to join it and vote man by man. The nobles replied that

voting by classes— each class one vote— was an unalterable part of the mo-

narchical constitution; to merge the three classes in one and allow individual

voting, in an assembly where the Third Estate was already half the total and

could readily win some support from the lower clergy, would be to sur-

render the intelligence and character of France to mere number and bour-

geois dictation. The clerical delegates, divided between conservatives and

liberals, took no stand, waiting to be guided by events. A month passed.

Meanwhile the price of bread continued to rise despite Necker's attempts

to regulate it, and the danger of public violence increased. The flood of

pamphlets mounted. Arthur Young wrote on June 9:

The business going forward at present in the pamphlet shops of Paris is in-

credible. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published,

and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thir-

teen came out today, sixteen yesterday, ninety-two last week. . . . Nineteen

twentieths of these productions are in favor of liberty, and commonly violent

against the clergy and the nobility. . . . Nothing in reply appears. 65

On June 10 the deputies of the Third Estate sent a committee to the

nobles and the clergy again inviting them to a joint meeting, and declaring

that if the other orders continued to meet separately the Third Estate would

95** ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVIII

proceed without them to legislate for the nation. The break in the contest

of collective wills came on June 14, when nine parish priests came over to

the commoners. On that day the Third Estate elected Bailly its president,

and organized itself for deliberation and legislation. On the fifteenth Sieyes

proposed that since the delegates in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs represented

ninety-six per cent of the nation, they should call themselves the "Assembly

of the Recognized and Verified Representatives of the French Nation."

Mirabeau thought this too broad a term, which the King would surely reject.

Instead of retreating, Sieyes simplified the proposed name to Assemblee

Nationale. It was so voted, 491 to 89. 66 This declaration automatically

changed the absolute monarchy into a limited one, ended the special powers

of the upper classes, and constituted, politically, the beginning of the Revo-

lution.

But would the King accept this demotion? To so incline him the National

Assembly decreed that all existing taxes should be paid as formerly until the

Assembly should be dissolved; that thereafter no taxes should be paid except

those that had been authorized by the Assembly; that the Assembly would

as soon as possible consider the causes and remedies of the bread shortage;

and that after a new constitution had been accepted the Assembly would

assume and honor the debts of the state. One of these measures aimed to

quiet the rioters; another sought the support of the bondholders; all were

cleverly designed to reduce the resistance of the King.

Louis consulted his Council. Necker warned him that unless the privileged

orders yielded, the States-General would collapse, taxes would not be paid,

and the government would be bankrupt and helpless. Other ministers pro-

tested that individual voting would mean dictatorship by the Third Estate,

and the reduction of the nobility to political impotence. Feeling that his

throne depended upon the nobles and the clergy, Louis decided to resist the

National Assembly. He announced that he would address the Estates on

June 23. Necker, defeated, offered to resign; the King, knowing that the

public would resent such a move, prevailed upon him to stay.

For the scheduled seance royale the Salle des Menus Plaisirs had to be

prepared by some new physical arrangements. Orders for this were sent to

the palace artisans, without notification to the Assembly. When the deputies

of the Third Estate tried to enter the hall on June 20 they found its doors

shut and the interior occupied by workingmen. Believing that the King was

planning to dismiss them, the deputies moved to a nearby tennis court (Salle

du Jeu de Paume) , and took an oath that made history:

The National Assembly, considering that it has been summoned to establish

the constitution of the kingdom, to effect the regeneration of public order, and

to maintain the true principles of monarchy, that nothing can prevent it from

continuing its deliberations in whatever place it may be forced to establish

itself, and, finally, that wheresoever its members are assembled, there is the

National Assembly, decrees that all members of this Assembly shall take a

solemn oath not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances may

require, until the condition of the kingdom is established, and consolidated

upon firm foundations; and that, the said oath taken, all members, and each

one of them individually, shall ratify this steadfast resolution by signature. 67

CHAP.XXXVIIl) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 959

All but two of the 557 deputies and twenty alternates who were present

signed; fifty-five more and five priests signed later. When news of these

events reached Paris an angry multitude gathered around the Palais-Royal

and swore to defend the National Assembly at whatever cost. At Versailles

it became dangerous for a nobleman or a prelate to appear in the streets;

several were manhandled, and the Archbishop of Paris saved himself only

by promising to join the Assembly. On June 22 the sworn deputies met in

the Church of St. Louis; there they were joined by a few nobles and 149 of

the 308 ecclesiastical delegates.

On June 23 the three estates met in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs to hear

the King. The hall was surrounded by troops. Necker was conspicuously

absent from the royal retinue. Louis spoke briefly, and then delegated a

secretary of state to read his decision. This rejected as illegal and void the

assumption of the deputies who had declared themselves a National Assem-

bly. It allowed a united meeting of the three orders, and individual voting

on affairs not affecting the class structure of France; but nothing was to be

done to impair "the ancient and constitutional rights ... of property, or

the honorific privileges ... of the first two orders"; and matters concern-

ing religion or the Church must receive the approval of the clergy. The King

conceded to the States-General the right to veto new taxes and loans; he

promised equality of taxation if the privileged orders voted for it; he offered

to receive recommendations for reform, and to establish provincial assemblies

in which voting would be individual. He agreed to end the corvee, lettres

de cachet, tolls on internal trade, and all vestiges of serfdom in France. He

concluded the session with a brief display of authority:

If you abandon me in this great enterprise I will work alone for the welfare

of my people. ... I will consider myself alone their true representative. . . .

None of your plans or proceedings can become law without my express ap-

proval. ... I command you to separate at once, and to proceed tomorrow

morning each to the hall of his own order to renew your deliberations. 68

When the King had gone, most of the nobles and a minority of the clergy

departed. The Marquis de Breze, grandmaster of ceremonies, announced to

those deputies who remained that it was the King's will that all should leave

the hall. Mirabeau made a famous reply: "Monsieur, . . . you have here no

place nor voice nor right to speak. ... If you have been charged to make

us leave this hall, you will have to seek orders to employ force, ... for we

shall not leave our places except by the power of the bayonet." 69 This decla-

ration was seconded by a general cry: "That is the will of the Assembly."

De Breze withdrew. Orders were given to local troops to clear the hall, but

some liberal nobles persuaded them to take no action. Told of the situation,

the King said, "Oh, well, the devil with it; let them stay." 70

On June 24 Young noted in his diary: "The ferment at Paris is beyond

conception; ten thousand people have been all this day in the Palais Royal.

. . . The constant meetings there are carried to a degree of licentiousness,

and fury of liberty, that is scarcely credible." 71 The municipal authorities

were unable to maintain order, for they could not rely upon the local

"French Guards"; many of these had relatives who expounded the popular

9^0 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVIII

cause to them; some of these soldiers fraternized with the throngs around

the Palais-Royal; in one regiment at Paris there was a secret society pledged

to obey no orders hostile to the National Assembly. On June 25 the 407

men who had elected the deputies of the Third Estate for Paris met and

substituted themselves for the royal government of the capital; they chose

a new municipal council, nearly all of the middle class, and the old council

abandoned to them the task of protecting life and property. On that same

day forty-seven nobles, led by the Due d'Orleans, moved over to the Salle

des Menus Plaisirs. The victory of the Assembly seemed secure. Only force

could dislodge it.

On June 26, over Necker's opposition, the conservatives in the King's

ministry informed him that the local troops in Versailles and Paris could no

longer be trusted to obey orders, and they persuaded him to send for six

provincial regiments. On the twenty-seventh, veering to Necker's advice,

Louis bade the noble and ecclesiastical deputations to unite with the rest. They

did, but the nobles refused to take part in the voting, on the ground that the

mandates of their constituents forbade them to vote individually in the States-

General. Most of them, in the next thirty days, retired to their estates.

On July 1 the King summoned to Paris ten regiments, mostly Germans

and Swiss. In the first weeks of July six thousand troops under the Marechal

de Broglie occupied Versailles, and ten thousand men under the Baron de

Besenval took up positions around Paris, chiefly in the Champ de Mars. The

Assembly and the people believed that the King was planning to disperse

or intimidate them. Some deputies were so fearful of arrest that they slept in

the Salle des Menus Plaisirs instead of going to their homes at night. 72

Amid this terror the Assembly appointed a committee to draw up plans

for a new constitution. The committee brought in a preliminary report on

July 9, and from that day the deputies called themselves the "National Con-

stituent Assembly." The dominant sentiment was for a constitutional mon-

archy. Mirabeau argued for "a government more or less like England's,"

in which the Assembly would be the legislature, but he continued, in the two

years left to him, to urge the retention of a king. He praised Louis XVI for

a good heart and generous intentions, occasionally confused by shortsighted

counselors, and he asked:

Have these men studied, in the history of any people, how revolutions com-

mence and how they are carried out? Have they observed by what a fatal chain

of circumstances the wisest men are driven far beyond the limits of moderation,

and by what terrible impulses an enraged people is precipitated into excesses

at the very thought of which they would have shuddered? 73

The Assembly suspected that Mirabeau was being paid by the King or the

Queen to defend the monarchy, but essentially it followed his advice. The

delegates, now predominantly middle class, felt that the populace was be-

coming dangerously unmanageable, and that the only way to prevent a

general disintegration of social order was to maintain, for some time to

come, the present executive structure of the state.

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 96 1

They were not so well disposed toward the Queen. It was known that

she participated actively in support of the conservative faction in the Royal

Council, and was wielding political power far beyond her competence.

During these critical months she had borne a bereavement that may have im-

paired what capacity she might have had for calm and prudent judgment.

Her older son, the Dauphin Louis, suffered so severely from rickets and curva-

ture of the spine that he could not walk without help, 74 and on June 4 he died.

Broken by grief and fear, Marie Antoinette was no longer the captivating

woman who had frolicked through the first years of the reign. Her cheeks

were pale and thin, her hair was turning gray, her smiles were wistful, remem-

bering happier days; and her nights were darkened with consciousness of the

crowds cursing her name in Paris and protecting and frightening the As-

sembly in Versailles.

On July 8 Mirabeau put through a motion asking the King to remove

from Versailles the provincial troops that were making the gardens of Le

Notre an armed camp. Louis answered that no harm was intended to the

Assembly, but on July 1 1 he showed his hand by dismissing Necker and

ordering him to leave Paris at once. "All Paris," Mme. de Stael recalled,

"flocked to visit him in the twenty-four hours allowed him to prepare for

his journey. . . . Public opinion transformed his disgrace into a triumph." 75

He and his family left quietly for the Netherlands. Those who had sup-

ported him in the ministry were discharged at the same time. On July 12, in

complete surrender to the advocates of force, Louis appointed the Queen's

friend, Baron de Breteuil, to replace Necker, and de Broglie was made

secretary for war. The Assembly and its incipient revolution seemed

doomed.

They were saved by the people of Paris.

VIII. TO THE BASTILLE

Many factors were leading the populace to pass from agitation to action.

The price of bread was an irritating issue with housewives, and there was

a widespread suspicion that some wholesalers were keeping their grain from

the market in hopes of still higher prices. 76 The new municipal authorities,

fearing that hunger would take to indiscriminate pillage, sent soldiers to

protect the bakeries. With the men of Paris the burning issue was the knowl-

edge that out-of-town regiments, not yet won to the popular cause, were

threatening the Assembly and the Revolution. The sudden fall of Necker—

the only man in the government whom the people had trusted— brought the

anger and fear of the populace to a point where only a word was needed to

arouse a violent response. On the afternoon of July 1 2 Camille Desmoulins,

a Jesuit graduate but now a radical lawyer, aged twenty-nine, leaped upon a

table outside the Cafe de Foy near the Palais-Royal, denounced the dismissal

of Necker as a betrayal of the people, and cried out, "The Germans [the

troops] in the Champ de Mars will enter Paris tonight to butcher the in-

9^ 2 ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION ( CHAP. XXXVIII

habitants!" Then, flourishing both a pistol and a sword, he called "To

arms!" 77 Part of his audience followed him to the Place Vendome, carrying

busts of Necker and the Due d'Orleans; there some troops put them to

flight. In the evening a crowd gathered in the Tuileries Gardens; a regiment

of German troops charged it, was resisted with bottles and stones, fired upon

it and wounded many. Dispersed, the crowd reassembled at the Hotel de

Ville, forced its way in, and seized all the weapons it could find. Beggars

and criminals joined the rioters, and together they pillaged several homes.

On July 1 3 the crowd gathered again. They entered the Monastery of

St.-Lazare, appropriated its store of grain, and carried this to the market at

Les Halles. Another crowd opened the prison of La Force and liberated the

inmates, mostly debtors. Everywhere the people searched for guns; finding

only a few, they forged fifty thousand pikes. 78 Fearing for their homes and

possessions, the middle classes in Paris formed and armed their own militia;

yet at the same time agents of the rich continued to encourage, finance, and

arm revolutionary crowds, hoping thereby to deter the King from using

force on the Assembly. 79

Early on July 14 a crowd of eight thousand men invaded the Hotel des

Invalides, and captured 32,000 muskets, some powder, and twelve pieces

of artillery. Suddenly someone cried out, "To the Bastille!" Why the Bas-

tille? Not to release its prisoners, who were only seven; and generally, since

17 15, it had been used as a place of genteel confinement for the well-to-do.

But this massive fortress, one hundred feet high, with walls thirty feet thick,

and surrounded by a moat seventy-five feet wide, had long been a symbol

of despotism; it stood in the public mind for a thousand prisons and secret

dungeons; some of the cahters had already demanded its destruction. Prob-

ably what moved the crowd was the knowledge that the Bastille had pointed

some cannon at the Rue and Faubourg St.-Antoine, a quarter seething with

revolutionary sentiment. Perhaps most important of all, the Bastille was said

to contain a great store of arms and ammunition, especially powder, of

which the rebels had little. In the fortress was a garrison of eighty-two

French soldiers and thirty-two Swiss Guards, under the command of the

Marquis de Launay, a man of mild temper 80 but popularly reported to be a

monster of cruelty. 81

While the crowd, composed mainly of shopkeepers and artisans, con-

verged upon the Bastille, a deputation from the municipal council was re-

ceived by de Launay. It asked him to withdraw the threatening cannon from

their positions, and not to take any hostile action against the people; in return

it promised to use its influence to dissuade the crowd from attacking the

fortress. The commandant agreed, and entertained the deputation for lunch.

Another committee, from the besiegers themselves, received de Launay's

pledge that his soldiers would not fire upon the people unless there was an

attempt at forcible entry. This did not satisfy the excited assemblage; it was

resolved to capture the ammunition without which its muskets could not

resist the expected advance of Besenval's foreign troops into the city. Be-

senval was not anxious to move into Paris, for he suspected that his men

CHAP. XXXVIII ) THE POLITICAL DEBACLE 963

would refuse to fire upon the people. He waited for orders from de Broglie;

none came.

About one o'clock in the afternoon eighteen of the rebels climbed the

wall of an adjoining structure, leaped into the forecourt of the Bastille, and

lowered two drawbridges. Hundreds crossed over the moat; two other

drawbridges were lowered; soon the court was filled with an eager and con-

fident crowd. De Launay commanded them to withdraw; they refused; he

ordered his soldiers to fire upon them. The attackers fired back, and set fire

to some wooden structures attached to the stone walls. Toward three o'clock

some members of the radical French Guard joined the besiegers, and began

to bombard the fortress with five of the cannon that had been taken that

morning at the Hotel des Invalides. In four hours of fighting, ninety-eight

of the attackers and one of the defenders were killed. De Launay, seeing the

multitude always increasing with new arrivals, receiving no word of help

from Besenval, and having no supply of food to stand a siege, bade his sol-

diers to cease fire and hoist a white flag. He offered to surrender if his troops

were allowed to march out, with their arms, to safety. The crowd, infuri-

ated by the sight of its dead, refused to consider anything but unconditional

surrender. 82 De Launay proposed to blow up the fortress; his men prevented

him. He sent down to the assailants the key to the main entrance. The crowd

rushed in, disarmed the soldiers, slew six of them, seized de Launay, and

freed the bewildered prisoners.

While many of the victors took what weapons and ammunition they

could find, part of the crowd led de Launay toward the Hotel de Ville,

apparently intending to have him tried for murder. On the way the more

ardent among them knocked him down, beat him to death, and cut off his

head. With this bleeding trophy held aloft on a pike, they marched through

Paris in a triumphal parade.

That afternoon Louis XVI returned to Versailles from a day's hunting,

and entered a note into his diary: "July 14: Nothing." Then the Due de La

Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, arriving from Paris, told him of the successful

attack upon the Bastille. "Why," exclaimed the King, "this is a revolt!"

"No^ Sire," said the Duke, "it is a revolution."

On July 15 the King went humbly to the Assembly and assured it that

the provincial and foreign troops would be sent away from Versailles and

Paris. On July 1 6 he dismissed Breteuil and recalled Necker to a third min-

istry. Breteuil, Artois, de Broglie, and other nobles began the exodus of

emigres from France. Meanwhile the populace, with pickaxes and gun-

powder, demolished the Bastille. On July 17 Louis, escorted by fifty dep-

uties of the Assembly, went to Paris, was received at the Hotel de Ville by

the municipal council and the people, and affixed to his hat the red-white-

and-blue cockade of the Revolution.

Envoi

SO we end our survey, in these last two volumes, of the century whose con-

flicts and achievements are still active in the life of mankind today. We

have seen the Industrial Revolution begin with that Mississippi of inventions

which may, by the year two thousand, realize Aristotle's dream of machines

liberating men from all menial toil. We have recorded the advances of a

dozen sciences toward a better understanding of nature and a more effective

application of her laws. We have welcomed the passage of philosophy from

futile metaphysics to the tentative pursuit of reason in the mundane affairs

of men. We have followed with living concern the attempt to free religion

from superstition, bigotry, and intolerance, and to organize morality with-

out supernatural punishments and rewards. We have been instructed by the

efforts of statesmen and philosophers to evolve a just and competent govern-

ment, and to reconcile democracy with the simplicity and natural inequality

of men. We have enjoyed the diverse creations of beauty in baroque, rococo,

and neoclassical art, and the triumphs of music in Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi,

in Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart. We have witnessed the flowering of literature

in Germany with Schiller and Goethe, in England with the great novelists

and the greatest of historians, in Scotland with Boswell and Burns, in Sweden

with the outburst of song under Gustavus III; and in France we have

wavered between Voltaire defending reason with wit and Rousseau plead-

ing with tears for the rights of feeling. We have heard the applause on which

Garrick and Clairon lived. We have admired the succession of fascinating

women in the salons of France and England, and the brilliant reigns of women

in Austria and Russia. We have watched philosopher kings.

It seems absurd to end our story just when so many historic events were

about to enliven and incarnadine the page. We should have been happy to

advance through the turmoil of the Revolution, to contemplate that volcanic

eruption of energy known as Napoleon, and then feast upon the wealth of

the nineteenth century in literature, science, philosophy, music, art, tech-

nology, and statesmanship. Still more we should have enjoyed coming home

to America, South as well as North, and trying to weave the complex tapes-

try of American life and history into one united and moving picture. But

we must reconcile ourselves to mortality, and leave to fresher spirits the task

and risk of adding experiments in synthesis to the basic researches of his-

torical and scientific specialists.

We have completed, as far as we could go, this Story of Civilization; and

though we have devoted the best part of our lives to the work, we know

that a lifetime is but a moment in history, and that the historian's best is soon

washed away as the stream of knowledge grows. But as we followed our

studies from century to century we felt confirmed in our belief that his-

964

ENVOI 965

toriography has been too departmentalized, and that some of us should try

to write history whole, as it was lived, in all the facets of the complex and

continuing drama.

Forty years of happy association in the pursuit of history have come to

an end. We dreamed of the day when we should write the last word of the

last volume. Now that that day has come we know that we shall miss the

absorbing purpose that gave meaning and direction to our lives.

We thank the reader who has been with us these many years for part or

all of the long journey. We have ever been mindful of his presence. Now

we take our leave and bid him farewell.

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Notes

CHAPTER I 5 o.

5 1

i. Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean- 52,

Jacques Rousseau, I, 22. 53,

2. Ibid., 4. 54-

3. I, 156-57; II, 70, 321. 55.

4. Saintsbury, History of the French Novel, $6,

I, 39'-

5. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen- 57.

tury, I, 174. 58.

6. Lanson, G., Histoire de la litter ature 59.

frangaise, 801. 60,

7. Encyclopaedia Britannica, XIX, 587a.

8. Rousseau, The Confessions, I, 3.

9. Ibid., 8. 61.

10. 9. 62,

12. 13.

13. 9. 63,

14. 16.

15. 22. 64.

16. 41. 6$.

17. 44 : ^ 66.

18. Ibid.; Lemaitre, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, 67.

290; Mann, Thomas, Three Essays, 156.

19. Masson, P. M., La Religion de Rousseau,

I, 51 f. 68.

20. Rousseau, The Confessions, I, 69. 69.

21. Rousseau, Les Confessions, I, 140. 70.

22. The Confessions, I, 11 7- 19. 71.

23. Ibid., 76. 72.

24. 76. 73.

25. 106. 74.

26. 91. 75.

27. 92. 76.

28. 96. 77.

29. 104. 78.

30. 107. 79.

31. 116. 80.

32. 122. 81.

33- '30- 82.

34- 154-

35- 138. 83.

36. 148.

37- l6 <>- 84.

38. 178. 85.

39. Les Confessions, I, 238. 86.

40. Ibid.; The Confessions, I, 178.

41. Ibid., 11^. 87.

42. 195- 88.

43. Josephson, /.-/. Rousseau, in. 89.

44. Ibid., 1 13-14. 90.

45. The Confessions, I, 247, 250. 91.

46. Ibid., 259. 92.

47. 262.

48. 265. 93.

49. Ibid. 94.

983

296.

295.

300.

Josephson, 132.

Ibid., 133.

The Confessions, I, 305.

Letter of Frederick, 1762, in Gooch,

Frederick the Great, 145.

The Confessions, I, 309.

Ibid., 310.

Ibid., II, 139.

Martin, Henri, Histoire de France, XVI,

83; Collins, J. C, Bolingbroke, and Vol-

taire in England, 209.

Josephson, 140.

Morley, John, Rousseau and His Era, I,

127; Hendel, C. W., Citizen of Geneva,

208.

Diderot, Essai sur les regies de Claude et

Neron, Ch. 67.

Marmontel, Memoirs, I, 321.

The Confessions, II, 21.

Ibid., 32.

Rousseau, Discourse on Arts and Sci-

ences, in Social Contract and Discourses,

130.

Ibid., 132.

134.

134.

146.

151.

142.

151.

'35-

139.

'53-

'53-

Rousseau, preface to Narcisse.

Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 371.

Grimm, Correspondance litteraire, IX, 49.

Bayle, Pierre, Reponse aux questions (Tun

provincial.

Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary, Book

VI, pp. 127-32.

The Confessions, II, 21.

Lemaitre, 92.

Letter of July 15, 1756, in Hendel, Citi-

zen of Geneva, 142.

Marmontel, Memoirs, I, 321.

The Confessions, II, 34.

Ibid., 48.

49.

5 1 -

S6\ Goncourt, E. and J. de, Madame de

Pompadour, 143.

Faguet, Rousseau artiste, 192.

Grimm, II, 307.

9 8 4

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

95. Rousseau, Reverie s, in. 149.

96. In Faguet, Rousseau artiste, 193. 150.

97. Musee, St.-Quenrin. 151.

98. Levey, Michael, Painting in i8th-Cen~ 152.

tury Venice, 155.

99. Marmontel, Memoirs, I, 169. 153.

100. fepinay, Mme. d\ Memoirs and Corre- 154.

spondence, II, 52.

10 1. Ibid.; Masson, La Religion de Rousseau, I, 155.

184-85. 156.

102. Preface to Narcisse.

103. Masson, I, 182.

104. Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 428.

105. The Confessions, II, 63. 157.

106. Ibid., 58. 158.

107. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of In- 159.

equality, in Social Contract . . . , 157. 160.

108. Ibid., 159. 161.

109. 160. 162.

no. 239. 163.

in. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1 29.

112. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of In-

equality, loc. ciu, 181.

113. Ibid., 169.

114. 175. 1.

115. 222. 2.

116. Rousseau, Social Contract, Book I, Ch. ii.

117. Second Discourse, in Social Con- 3.

tract . . . , 214.

118. Ibid., 207. 4.

119. 220-22.

120. 238. 5.

121. 242-44. 6.

122. Rousseau juge de Jean- Jacques, in Cas-

sirer, The Question of Rousseau, 54. 7.

123. Second Discourse, loc. cit., 236.

124. End of second Discourse. 8.

125. Mumford, Lewis, The Condition of Man,

275-

1 26. Helvetius, Treatise on Man, II, xx. 9.

127. Duclos, Considerations sur les moeurs, n.

128. Lemaitre, 122. 10.

129. Second Discourse, loc. cit., 175, 246. 11.

130. Voltaire, Works, XXIa, 227-30.

131. Ibid. 12.

132. The Confessions, II, 65. 13.

133. Social Contract, 271. 14.

134. Ibid., 272. 15.

135. 281.

136. 269.

137. 262.

138. 253. 16.

139. 260. 17.

140. 256. 18.

141. The Confessions, II, 40. 19.

142. Ibid.

143. Masson, I, 181. 20.

144. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen- 21.

tury, II, 181. 22.

145. The Confessions, II, 40. 23.

146. Grimm, Correspondance, II, 239. 24.

147. Sainte-Beuve, II, i95n.

148. Ibid., 180. 25.

191.

213.

Morley, Rousseau, I, 272.

, Macdonald, Frederika, Jean Jacques

Rousseau, II, 83.

Source lost.

, Toth, Karl, Woman and Rococo in

France.

Hobbes, De Corpore, Ch. xxv.

Toth, 194; Josephson, 194; Faguet (Vie

de Rousseau, 214) thought Mme.

d'fepinay had been infected by Dupin de

Francueil.

fepinay, II, 85.

Ibid., 130.

Josephson, 149.

The Confessions, II, 81.

Ibid., 66.

Letter to Malesherbes, Jan. 26, 1762.

fepinay, II, 128; Sainte-Beuve, II, 187;

Morley, Rousseau, I, 274.

CHAPTER II

Frederick the Great, Memoires, I, 4.

Frederick the Great, Histoire de la

guerre de Sept Ans, 388.

Dorn, W. L., Competition for Empire,

306.

Mahan, A. T., Influence of Sea Power

upon History, 74.

AJdis, Janet, Madame Geoff rin, 200.

Goodwin, A., The European Nobility in

the 1 8th Century, 113.

Coxe, Wm., History of the House of

Austria, III, 346.

Walpole, H., Memoirs of . . . the Reign

of George the Second, II, 73; Marmontel,

Memoirs, I, 175.

Carlyle, History of Friedrich the Second,

V, 7 2.

Levron, Jacques, Pompadour, 174.

Treitschke, H. von, Life of Frederick the

Great, 149.

Mann, Thos., Three Essays, 163.

Dorn, Competition for Empire, 15.

Treitschke, Frederick, 181.

Carlyle, Friedrich, V, 263-69; Martin, H.,

Histoire de France, XV, 497; Reddaway,

Frederick the Great, 198; Coxe, History

of . . . Austria, III, 370.

Reddaway, 199.

Gooch, G. P., Frederick the Great, 334.

Reddaway, 201.

Dorn, 300; Cambridge Modern History,

VI, 251.

Gooch, Frederick, 334.

CMH, VI, 402.

Coxe, History of . . . Austria, III, 369.

Ibid.

Padover, The Revolutionary Emperor,

33-

Gooch, Frederick, 43.

NOTES

985

26. Coxe, 379. 4.

27. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen- 5.

tury, II, 369; Carlyle, Friedrich, V, 479.

28. Ibid., 523. 6.

29. 527. ^ 7.

30. 534; Sainte-Beuve, II, 373

31. Ibid., I, 219; Brandes, Voltaire, II, 77. 8.

32. Sainte-Beuve, II, 372.

33. Martin, H., France, XV, 522. 9.

34. Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 402. 10.

35. Dorn, 323.

36. Michelet, V, 402. n.

37. Carlyle, VI, 22. 12.

38. /£/</., V, 547. 13.

39. Jahn, Life of Mozart, I, 47. 14.

40. Carlyle, VI, 42; Robinson, J. H., Read- 15.

ings in European History, 395. 16.

41. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Es-

says, II, 173. 17.

42. Acton, Lord, Lectures on Modern His-

tory, zgj. 18.

43. Carlyle, VI, 63.

44. Martin, XV, 527.

45. Ibid., 528. 19-

46. Carlyle, VI, 63. 20.

47. Dorn, 338.

48. Carlyle, VI, 115. 21.

49. CMH, VI, 290. 22.

50. Wilhelmine, Memoirs, vii. 23.

5 1 . Ibid., ix.

52. Frederick, Guerre de Sept Ans, 44.

53. Carlyle, VI, 265. 24.

54. Coxe, History, III, 407. 25.

55. Voltaire and Frederick the Great, Let- 26.

ters, 259. 27.

56. Carlyle, VI, 322, 386. 28.

57. Martin, XV, 533.

58. Dorn, 363. 29.

59. Voltaire and Frederick, Letters, 262; Car- 3°-

lyle, VI, 399.

60. Martin, XV, 565. 3 1 -

61. Voltaire and Frederick, Letters, 271. 3 2 -

62. Coxe, HI, 425. 33-

63. Dec. 25, 1 76 1, by the Russian calendar.

64. Frederick, Guerre de Sept Ans, 229. 34-

6$. Ibid., 227. 35-

66. 295. 36.

67. Gooch, Frederick, 64.

68. Frederick, Guerre de Sept Ans, 305.

69. Macaulay, Essays, II, 185. 37-

70. Voltaire and Frederick, Letters, 245; 38.

Mann, Three Essays, 210.

71. Gooch, Frederick, 64. 39*

72. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen- 4°«

tury, II, 192.

4'-

CHAPTER III

4 2 -

1. Du Hausset, Memoirs of Mme. de Pom- 43*

padour, 97. 44-

2. Goncourts, Madame de Pompadour, 338- 45*

42.

3. Ibid., 200. 4 6 -

Aldis, Madame Geoff rin, 129.

Lewis, D. B. Wyndham, Four Favorites,

4 2 -

Goncourts, Mme. de Pompadour, 317.

Ibid., 319; Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the

1 8th Century, I, 451.

Mitford, Nancy, Madame de Pompadour,

2 34-

Levron, Jacques, Pompadour, 260.

Bancroft, George, Literary and Histori-

cal Miscellanies, 91.

See Stryienski, Eighteenth Century, 189.

Mitford, Pompadour, 234.

Ercole, Lucienne, Gay Court Life, 236.

Mitford, 234-35.

Taine, H., Ancient Regime, 338.

Tocqueville, VAncien Regime, 181-82;

Martin, H., France, XVI, 236.

Barnes, H. E., Economic History of the

Western World, 253.

Nussbaum, F. L., History of the Eco-

nomic Institutions of Modern Europe,

213.

Martin, H., Age of Louis XIV, I, 54.

iMousnier and Labrousse, Le Dix-hui-

tieme Siecle, 135.

Du Hausset, Memoirs, 27.

Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV, 352.

Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise, in Du-

cros, Louis, French Society in the 18th

Century, 193.

Parton, James, Life of Voltaire, II, 329.

Voltaire, Works, Vllb, 56.

Goldoni, Memoirs, 359.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 308.

Cru, R. L., Diderot as a Disciple of Eng-

lish Thought, 61.

Ducros, French Society, 325.

Martin, H., France, XVI, 163; Acton,

Lectures on Modern History, 326.

Higgs, Henry, The Physiocrats, 18.

Say, Leon, Turgot, 47, 67.

Turgot, tloge de Gournai, in Martin,

France, XVI, 165.

Mirabeau pere in Higgs, 21

Higgs, 24.

Wolf, A., History of Science, Technol-

ogy, and Philosophy in the 18th Century,

730.

Higgs, 37.

Warwick, C. F., Mirabeau and the

French Revolution, 146.

Higgs, 68.

In See, Henri, Les Idees politiques en

France au xviii e siecle, 161.

Pomeau, Rene, La Religion de Voltaire,

405.

Hume, letter to Morellet, July 10, 1769.

Voltaire, Works, lb, 247-48, 265.

In Gay, Peter, Voltaire's Politics, i6^n.

Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, Book

IV, Ch. ix.

986

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

47. In Frankel, Charles, The Faith of Reason, 93,

48.

49-

50.

5'-

5 2 -

53-

54-

55-

56.

57-

58.

59-

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

7*-

7 2 -

73-

74-

75-

76.

77-

78.

79-

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

Bury, J. B., The Idea of Progress, 157.

Say, Turgot, 27.

Dakin, Turgot, 10.

Say, 29.

Dakin, 19.

Turgot, Reflections on the Formation

and the Distribution of Wealth, No. 6.

Ibid., No. 68.

See The Age of Voltaire, Ch. xviii, Sec.

in.

Morelly, Code de la nature, in Hearn-

shaw, F. J., ed., Social and Political Ideas

of Some Great French Thinkers of the

Age of Reason, n/\.

In Tocqueville, VAncien Regime, 173.

Martin, H., France, XVI, 147.

In Martin, Kingsley, The Rise of French

Liberal Thought, 254.

Ibid.

256.

Talman, J. L., Origins of Totalitarian

Democracy, 58.

Hazard, Paul, European Thought in the

1 8th Century, 178.

Hearnshaw, 238.

Jaures, Jean, Histoire socialiste de la Re-

volution frangaise, I, 158.

Martin, Kingsley, 247.

Hearnshaw, 243.

Ibid., 244.

Mornet, Daniel, Les Origines intellectu-

elles de la Revolution frangaise, 233.

Hearnshaw, 217.

Marquis d'Argenson in Taine, Ancient

Regime, 82.

Crocker, L. G., The Embattled Philos-

opher, 78.

Ducros, 81.

Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 1 8th Cen-

tury, I, 452.

Loomis, Stanley, Du Barry, 33.

Ibid., 57.

Ercole, 263-66.

Parton, II, 394.

Loomis, Du Barry, 175.

Michelet, Histoire, V, 454.

Diderot, Salons, in Oeuvres completes, II,

357-

Loomis, 89.

Lefebvre, Coining of the French Revolu-

tion, 41.

Stryienski, Eighteenth Century, 162.

Ibid., 163.

Lecky, W. E., History of England in the

1 8th Century, V, 327.

Voltaire, Works, XVIa, 234.

Ibid., 232.

236.

Dorn, 352.

Voltaire, XVIa, 231.

Ibid., 226.

94.

95-

96.

97-

98.

99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

106.

107.

108.

109.

no.

113.

114.

3-

4-

5-

6.

7-

8.

9-

10.

1 1.

12.

*3-

'4-

*5-

16.

*7-

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

2 3-

24.

2 5-

26.

Cobban, A., History of Modern France,

I, 127.

Voltaire, XVIa, 227.

See Age of Voltaire, pp. 765 f.

Martin, H., France, XVI, 243.

Ibid.

Voltaire, letter to Thieriot, Aug. 9, 1769.

Crocker, Embattled Philosopher, 352.

Martin, H., XVI, 281.

Ibid.

283.

Voltaire, letter to Mignot, June 24, 1771.

Crocker, Embattled Philosopher, 352.

Walpole, H., letters of Oct. 19 and 28,

1765.

Collins, J. C, Bolingbroke ... 47; Cum-

ming, Ian, Helvetius, 168.

Grimm, Correspondance, January, 1768.

Loomis, 131.

Ibid., 140.

Du Hausset, Memoirs, 36.

Ibid.

Loomis, 151.

Martin, H., France, XVI, 308.

Loomis, 154.

CHAPTER IV

Funck-Brentano, F. (VAncien Regime,

180), gives another form: "Qui ri>a pas

vecu avant 1789 n'a pas connu la douceur

de vivre."

Wilson, A. M., Diderot: The Testing

Years, 135.

Hazard, European Thought, 256.

Goncourts, Woman of the 18th Century,

112.

Crebillon fils, The Sofa, introduction.

Segur, Julie de Le spinas se, 237.

Goncourts, Woman, 143.

Ibid., 142; Michelet, Histoire, V, 454.

Ellis, Havelock, Sexual Inversion, 207.

Westermarck, Origin and Development

of the Moral Ideas, II, 482.

Rousseau, Emile, 145.

Smollett, Travels through France and

Italy, Letter xv.

Toth, Woman and Rococo, 27 1 .

Casanova, Memoirs, I, 51.

Boehn, Modes and Manners, IV, 196.

Ibid., 211.

Ducros, French Society, 340.

La Fontainerie, French Liberalism and

Education, 63.

Vigee-Lebrun, Mme., Memoirs, 27.

Lang, Music in Western Civilization, yn.

Jahn, Life of Mozart, I, 38.

Rolland, Essays in Music, 194.

Voltaire, Melanges litteraires, in Tiersot,

Jean, Gluck and the Encyclopedists.

Goncourts, Woman, 87.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 154.

Herold, Love in Five Temperaments, 264.

NOTES

987

2 7-

28.

29.

30.

3 1 -

3 2 -

33-

34-

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40.

4i-

4 2 -

43-

44.

45-

46.

47-

48.

49-

50.

5*<

5 2 -

53-

54-

55-

56.

57-

58.

59-

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

7'-

7 2 -

73-

74-

75-

76.

77-

78.

79-

80.

Ibid., 267.

2 77-

Diderot, Paradox of Acting, 15.

Herold, Love in Five Temperaments, 281.

Ibid., p. 288.

326.

Mornet, Origines intellectuelles, 121.

In Aldis, Madame Geoff rin, 223.

Marmontel, Memoirs, I, 102, 120.

Marmontel, Afora/ Ta/w, I, 18.

In Martin, Kingsley, Rise of French Lib-

eral Thought, 101.

Hazard, 63.

Brunetiere, Manual of the History of

French Literature, 371.

Faniel, French Art of the 18th Century,

119D.

Litchfield, Illustrated History of Furni-

ture, 240.

This statue has disappeared.

Letter of May 11, 1770.

Grimm, Correspondance, VII, 23.

Diderot, Salons, I, 370.

Louvre. Another form in Huntington

Art Gallery, San Marino, Calif.

Louvre.

Huntington Art Gallery.

Louvre.

In Muther, History of Modern Painting,

1,98.

Ibid.

Dilke, Lady E., French Architects and

Sculptors of the 18th Century, 36.

Diderot, Dialogues, 163.

Vigee-Lebrun, 160.

Both in the Louvre.

Goncourts, French iBth-Century Paint-

ers, 213.

Ibid., 233.

Prado.

Turin.

Victoria and Albert Museum.

Musee Conde, Chantilly.

National Gallery, Edinburgh.

Goncourts, French Painters, 216.

Louvre.

Louvre.

Wallace Collection.

Louvre.

Diderot, Salons, I, 243.

Louvre.

Goncourts, 224.

Ibid., 228.

239.

£cole des Beaux-Arts, Paris.

Goncourts, 266.

Catalogue of the Fragonard Exhibition,

Bern, 1954, Plate XIII.

Diderot, Salons, I, 544.

Leningrad.

All in the Louvre.

Louvre.

Louvre.

81. Hume in Mossner, Life of David Hume,

449.

82. Aldis, 11.

83. Batiffol, The Great Literary Salons, 155.

84. Ibid., 131.

85. Goncourts, Woman, 321.

86. Musee de Montpellier.

87. Batiffol, 158.

88. Aldis, 198.

89. Toth, 269.

90. Aldis, 287.

91. Ibid., 356.

9 2 - 355-

Ql- 357-

94. Koven, Anna de, Horace Walpole and

Mme. du Deffand, 81; Lespinasse, Julie

de, Letters, introd. by Sainte-Beuve, 25.

95. Segur, Julie de Lespinasse, 129.

96. Bertrand, J., D'Alembert, 101.

97. Ibid., 59-60.

98. 86.

99. Koven, 76.

100. Segur, Lespinasse, 98.

1 01. Ibid., 103.

102. 102.

103. 104.

104. 83.

105. 125.

106. Du Deffand, Marquise, Lettres a Voltaire,

12.

107. Ibid., 26.

108. Segur, Lespinasse, 132.

109. Ibid., 133.

no. 134.

in. In Lespinasse, Letters, 1 .

112. Ibid., 33.

113. Mossner, Life of Hume, 477.

114. Marmontel, Memoirs, I, 259.

115. Miranda in The Tempest.

116. Segur, Lespinasse, 336.

117. Ibid., 293.

118. 296.

119. 295.

120. Lespinasse, 44 (letter of May 15, 1773).

121. Ibid., 45 (May 23, 1773).

122. In Ford, Miriam de, Love Children, 212.

123. Lespinasse, 52.

124. Segur, Lespinasse, 211, 321-22.

125. Ibid., 271.

126. Lespinasse, 204.

127. Segur, 322.

128. Lespinasse, 234 (letter of July 3, 1775).

129. Segur, 387.

130. Lespinasse, 327.

131. Segur, 395.

132. Ibid., 398.

CHAPTER V

1 . Chaponniere, Voltaire chez les calvinistes,

202.

2. Parton, Life of Voltaire, II, 262.

3. Ibid., 263-65.

988

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

5-

6.

7

8.

9-

10.

ii.

12.

■3-

14.

'5-

16.

! 7-

18.

19.

20.

21.

23-

24.

25-

26.

*7-

28.

29.

30.

3 1 -

32-

33-

34-

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40.

4i.

42.

43.

44-

45-

46.

47-

48.

49.

50.

5 1 -

5 2 -

53-

54-

55-

56.

Besterman in Voltaire, Love Letters to

His Niece, 9.

Chaponniere, 203.

Parton, II, 475.

Letter of July 4, 1782, in Desnoiresterres,

Voltaire, VI, 288.

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany

and Switzerland, 283.

Ibid., 293.

302.

Low, D. M., Edward Gibbon, 144.

Desnoiresterres, VI, 290; Chaponniere,

202.

Parton, Life of Voltaire, II, 481.

Ibid.

Desnoiresterres, I, 131.

Noyes, A., Voltaire, 550.

Torrey, N. L., The Spirit of Voltaire,

189.

Desnoiresterres, VII, 335.

Ibid., 335.

Parton, II, 480.

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, art.

"Maladv— Medicine."

Moliere, Le Malade imaginaire.

Chaponniere, 202; Parton, II, 480.

Voltaire, art. "Malady."

Parton, I, 529.

Chaponniere, 202.

Brandes, Voltaire, II, 312.

Parton, II, 263.

Desnoiresterres, V, 324.

Parton, II, 471.

Chaponniere, 202.

Lanson, Voltaire, 197.

Desnoiresterres, VII, 482.

Torrey, Spirit of Voltaire, 201.

Faguet, Literary History of France, 507.

Lanson, Voltaire, 197.

Torrey, 34.

Lanson, 197.

Voltaire, Oeuvres completes, XXXIX,

546.

Works, VHIb, 286.

Philosophical Dictionary, art. "Ancients

and Moderns."

Michelet, Histoire, V, 426.

Parton, II, 489.

Brunetiere, 361.

Torrey, 176.

Letter of Mar. 12, 1766.

Voltaire, Age of Louis XV, II, Ch. xxxix.

Lanfrey, UJSglise et les philosophes, 335.

Letter of Frederick to Voltaire, June 10,

1759-

Letter of July 2, 1759.

Voltaire and Frederick, Letters, 266.

Ibid., 358.

363.

Brandes, II, 241.

Desnoiresterres, VI, 391.

Phil. Diet., art. "Peter the Great."

57

58.

59

60,

61,

62.

63

6 4<

6 5 .

66,

6 7 ,

68.

69.

70.

7'«

72-

73-

74-

75-

76.

77-

78.

79-

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

93-

94.

95-

9$.

97-

98.

99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

106.

Robespierre, speech of 18 Floreal, Year

II, in Hazard, European Thought, 265.

Parton, II, 260.

Chaponniere, 238.

Gibbon, Memoirs, i54n.

Parton, II, 556.

Voltaire, Memoires, in Parton, 1, 141.

Letter to Frederick, January, 1737, in

Voltaire and Frederick, 41.

Phil. Diet., art. "Property."

Ibid.

Ibid.

Letter to Dr. Daquir in Sainte-Beuve,

Portraits of the 18th Century, I, 228.

Phil. Diet., art. "Equality."

Lacroix, Paul, The Eighteenth Century

in France, 47.

Phil. Diet., art. "Country" ("Pays").

Voltaire, UA, B, C, in See, Les Idees po-

litiques, 84.

Phil. Diet., art. "Laws."

Essai sur les moeurs, xii, 161, in Gay,

Voltaire's Politics, 181.

Merope, Act. II, Sc. ii.

Michelet, French Revolution, 47.

In Parton, II, 544.

Desnoiresterres, VI, 240.

Casanova, Memoirs, II, 406-7.

Letter of Oct. 28, 1773.

Phil. Diet., art. "Democracy."

Letter of Sept. 20, 1760.

In Gay, 236.

Phil. Diet., art. "Government," Sec. 3.

Ibid., Sec. 6, slightly transposed.

Phil. Diet., art. "Equality /'

Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV, 415.

Quoted in Black, Art of History, 48.

Phil. Diet., art. "Law, Civil and Ecclesi-

astical."

In Hearnshaw, Social . . . Ideas of Some

Great French Thinkers, 157.

Art. "Execution."

Art. "Torture."

In Gay, 307.

Art. "Wit."

Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen-

tury, II, 146.

Ibid., 228.

Black, 29.

Candide, last chapter.

In Pomeau, 261.

Desnoiresterres, V, 24.

Brandes, Voltaire, I, 118.

Torrey, 10.

Letter of Aug. 28, 1751.

Brandes, Creative Spirits of the 19th

Century, 138.

Ibid., 142; Hoffding, H., Jean Jacques

Rousseau and His Philosophy, 80; Des-

noiresterres, VI, 310.

Ibid.

Mme. de Graffigny in Parton, I, 392.

NOTES

989

107. Hume, letter of Apr. 26, 1764, in Gay, 81.

108. Torrey, 131.

109. Letter to Thieriot, Dec. 10, 1738.

no. Torrey, 131.

in. Ibid.

112. Voltaire, English Notebooks, in Gay, 353.

113. Phil. Diet., art. "Solomon."

114. Desnoiresterres, V, 157; Parton I, 106.

115. See letter of March, 1737, to Moussinot,

in Works, XXIa, 190.

116. Parton, II, 520.

117. Ibid., 1,507.

118. Ibid., 144.

119. Morley, Voltaire, in Voltaire, Works,

XXIb, 96.

1 20. Parton, II, 600.

121. In Noyes, Voltaire, 536.

122. Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV, 61.

123. Pomeau, 462.

124. Desnoiresterres, II, 239.

125. In Torrey, 197.

1 26. Desnoiresterres, VI, 287.

127. Torrey, 91.

CHAPTER VI

1. Rousseau, Smile, p. 371.

2. The Confessions, II, 84.

3. Josephson, 190.

4. Ibid.; The Confessions, II, 84.

5. The Confessions, II, 88.

6. Diderot, Le Fils naturel, Act. IV, Sc. iii.

7. Brock way, W., and Winer, B., Second

Treasury of the Worlds Great Letters,

195.

8. Ibid., 201.

9. The Confessions, II, 107.

10. Ibid., 99.

11. Rousseau, Collection complete des

oeuvres, I, 424.

12. Ibid., I, 428.

13. 431.

14. 438.

15. 442.

16. 449.

! 7- 443.

18. Desnoiresterres, V, 141.

19. The Confessions, II, 105.

20. £pinay, Mme. d\ Memoirs, II, 329.

21.. Ibid., 334.

22. The Confessions, II, 102.

23. Josephson, 213.

24. The Confessions, II, 1 14-15, no.

25. Ibid., 113.

26. 1 14-16.

27. Josephson, 220.

28. The Confessions, II, 118.

29. Ibid., 121.

30. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen-

tury, II, 195.

31. The Confessions, II, 133. Several of Mme.

d'Houdetot's letters to Rousseau survive,

and a few of his to her; see Martin, H.,

France, XVI, 9m.

32. The Confessions,!!, 136.

33. Sainte-Beuve, II, 213.

34. The Confessions, II, 144.

7,5.. Ibid., 146.

36. 147.

37. fepinay, III, 130-32; Josephson, 249.

38. £pinay, III, 140-42.

39. Ibid., 186.

40. The Confessions, II, 154.

41. Josephson, 252.

42. The Confessions, II, 155.

43. Letter of Nov. 26, 1758, in Hendel, Citi-

zen of Geneva, 160.

44. Lemaitre, Rousseau, 174.

45. Josephson, 308.

46. The Confessions, II, 165.

47. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, 7.

48. Ibid., 121.

49. 125-26.

50. The Confessions, II, 165.

51. Torrey, Spirit of Voltaire, 97, 105.

52. Hendel, Citizen of Geneva, 169; Des-

noiresterres, VI, 85.

53. Chaponniere, 169; Josephson, 278.

54. Masson, P. M., La Religion de Rousseau,

III, 33.

55. Josephson, 279.

y6. Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, Part I,

Letter 1.

57. Letter 11.

58. Letter iv.

59. Letter v.

60. Letter xiv.

61. Rousseau juge, p. 139.

62. Ibid., Part IV, Letter xvii.

63. Part V, Letter v.

64. Rousseau juge, p. 186.

6$. Ibid., Part V, Letter x.

66. The Confessions, II, 163.

67. In Hendel, /.-/. Rousseau, Moralist, II, 47.

68. Rousseau juge, Part VI, Letter vi.

69. Part V, Letter v.

70. The Confessions, I, 10 1.

71. Kant, Fragment 618, in Cassirer, Rous-

seau, Kant, and Goethe, 6.

72. Texte, J., Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan

Spirit, 236.

73. Desnoiresterres, VI, 87.

74. Michelet, Histoire, V, 427.

75. Ibid.

76. The Confessions, II, 213.

77. Ibid., 211.

78. Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Des-

cartes, Rotisseau, 119.

79. Taine, Ancient Regime, 271.

CHAPTER VII

1. Hendel, Citizen of Geneva, 179.

2. Ibid., 195.

990 ROUSSEAU

AND REVOLUTION

3. Rousseau, Social Contract, Book I, Ch. v.

58. 53.

4. Ibid,, IV, ii.

59. 58.

5. iv, i.

60. 167.

6. I, vii.

61. 149, 306.

7. I, viii.

62. 160.

8. I, vii.

63. Martin, H., France, XVI, 98.

9. II, iv.

64. Rousseau, £mile, 158.

10. I, viii.

65. Ibid., 220.

11. Vaughn, Political Writings of

Rousseau,

66. 230.

I,8i.

67. 261-62.

12. Social Contract, Book III, Ch. v.

68. 263.

13. HI, iv.

69. 257.

14. Ill, XV.

70. 272.

15. Ill, xviii.

71. 232.

16. Ill, i. *

72. Ibid.

17. I, ix.

73. 238-49.

18. II, xi.

74. 245-47.

19. I, end.

75. Letter of Oct. 5, 1758, in Hendel, Citizen

20. II, i.

of Geneva, 152.

21. Letter to Mme. d'fetang, in

Cobban,

76. tmile, 261.

Rousseau and the Modern State,

193.

77. 223.

2 2 . Cobban, Rousseau, 211.

78. 275.

23. Social Contract, IV, viii.

79. See Robertson, J. M., Short History of

24. II, vii.

Freethought, II, 256.

25. IV, viii.

80. Emile, 272.

26. Ibid.

81. 271-72.

27. Ibid.

82. 179.

28. Ibid.

83. 192.

29. Ibid.

84. 298-99.

30. IV, vi.

85. Letter of Nov. 5, 1758, in Hendel, Citi-

31. In Cobban, Rousseau, 55.

zen, 158.

32. Emile, p. 157.

86. In Faguet, Rousseau penseur, in.

33. Ibid.

87. femile, 351; Hendel, /.-/. Rousseau, II, 23.

34. Cobban, In Search of Humanity,

168.

88. tmile, 330, 370.

35. Voltaire, Works, XXIb, 332.

89. 340.

36. Havens, Voltaire's Marginalia, 68, in

Gay,

90. 341, 371.

Voltaire's Politics, 268.

9i- 337» 350.

37. Cf. Social Contract, II, iv; Talman,

Ori-

92. 350.

gins of Totalitarian Democracy;

Crocker,

93- 349-

Rousseau et la philosophie politique, p.

94. 320.

in.

95- 357-

38. Social Contract, 11, v.

96. 443.

39. Faguet, Rousseau penseur, 397.

97. 444.

40. Ibid.

98. Stael, Mme. de, Germany, I, 125.

41. Emile, preface.

99. Seilliere, /. /. Rousseau, 132, in Maritain,

42. Boyd, Educational Theory

of

Jean

Three Reformers, 125.

Jacques Rousseau, 297.

100. Rousseau, Collection complete des

43. Rousseau, Emile, 13.

oeuvres, IXb, 157.

44. Ibid., 216.

1 01. Plato, Republic, No. 592.

45. 26.

46. 256.

CHAPTER VIII

47. 118.

48. 133.

1. Hendel, Citizen of Geneva, 232.

49. 27.

2. The Confessions, II, 243.

50. 92.

3. Collection complete, IXa, pp. v-x.

51. 50.

4. The Confessions, II, 253.

52. 21-22, 46.

5. Collection, IXb, 4.

53. 56-58.

6. The Confessions, II, 255.

54- 34' •

7. In Torrey, Spirit of Voltaire, 1 10.

55> 253-

8. Masson, P. M., La Religion de Rousseau,

56. 251.

m, 33.

57- 2 54-

9. Voltaire, letter of July 26, 1764.

NOTES

991

10. In Brandes, Voltaire, II, 97. 64,

11. Ibid., 98; Desnoiresterres, VI, 320-23.

12. Hendel, /.-/. Rousseau, II, 252. 6$

13. 77?e Concessions, II, 257.

14. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany 66.

and Switzerland, 226. 67,

15. In Gooch, Frederick the Great, 138.

16. The Confessions, II, 264. 68.

17. Hen del, Citizen of Geneva, 252.

18. The Confessions, II, 265. 69.

19. /£/*/., 259. 70.

20. 270. 71.

21. 165-66. 72.

22. Letter of July 22, 1764, in Masson, P. M., 73.

La Religion, III, 171. 74.

23. In Goncourts, Woman of the 18th Cen- 75.

tury, 287. 76.

24. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen-

tury, II, 138. 77.

25. Masson, III, 73-75.

26. 2 Timothy iii, 1 f. 78.

27. Collection complete, IXa, pp. xi-xiii. 79.

28. Ibid., p. xiii. 80.

29. P. xiv. 81.

30. P. xvi. 82.

31. P. xxxix. 83.

32. P. 1. 84.

33. 2. 85.

34. 4. 86.

35. 7- 87.

36. 8. 88.

37. 26-28. 89.

38. 55. 00.

39. 63. 91.

40. 6$-66. 92.

41. 70-71. 93.

42. 121-22. 94.

43. 8. 95.

44. 15. 96.

45. 42. 97.

46. 44. 98.

47. 47. 99.

48. 50. 100.

49. 83. 101.

50. 86. 102.

51. 87-89. 103.

52. Exodus vii, 9-12.

53. Matthew xxiv, 24. 104.

54. Collection complete, IXa, 201-2. 105.

55. Ibid., 210-12. 106.

56. 244-45. '07-

57. 334- '08.

58. Letter of Mar. 8, 1765, in Masson, P. M M

La Religion, III, 206-7. I0 9-

59. Collection complete, IXa, 184-85. no.

60. Morley, Voltaire, in Voltaire, Works,

XXIb, 97. in.

61. In Faguet, Vie de Rousseau, 318-20.

62. Rousseau juge de J. -J., I, ii-iv.

63. Grimm, Correspondance, May 15, 1763, 112.

Dec. 15, 1763, Jan. 15, 1765; see also Mas-

son, P. M., II, 126-40. r 13.

Boileaux-Despreaux, Nicolas, UArt poe-

tique, lines 37-38.

Goethe, Faust, Part I, Everyman's Li-

brary translation, p. 1 16.

Collection complete, I, i96n.

Horace Walpole, letter of Dec. 31, 1769,

to Horace Mann.

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany

and Switz., 150.

Ibid., 215.

217.

219.

229.

230-31.

254.

258-68.

In Vaughn, Political Writings of Rous-

seau, II, 293.

Macdonald, Frederika, Jean Jacques

Rousseau, II, 118.

Vaughn, II, 369m

Ibid., 350.

338.

Letter of Feb. 26, 1770.

Morley, Rousseau and His Era, II, 94.

Letter of Mar. 10, 1765.

Letter of Mar. 29, 1765.

Macdonald, F., II, 123.

The Confessions, II, 301.

Ibid.

Letter of Oct. 1, 1765.

The Confessions, II, 302.

Ibid.

Rousseau, Reveries, 106.

Ibid., 108; cf. The Confessions, 308.

Morley, Rousseau, II, 117.

The Confessions, II, 312.

Hendel, Citizen of Geneva, 326.

Burton, Life of David Hume, II, 299.

Macdonald, F., II, 166.

Ibid., 213-14.

Walpole, Letter of Jan. 12, 1766.

A4acdonald, II, 168.

Lemaitre, 322; Macdonald, II, 172.

Ibid., II, 171.

Morellet, Memoir es, in Mossner, Life of

Hume, 575.

Ibid., 517.

518.

Faguet, Vie de Rousseau, 332.

In Burton, Hume, II, 304, 309.

Hume, letter to Lord Charlemont, in

Mossner, 523.

Mossner, 519.

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Cor-

sica, France, 279.

But summarized by Col. Robert Isham,

who read them before their destruction

by the executors.

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy . . . ,

277-81.

Mossner, 521.

992

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

114. Ibid., 523.

115. Letter of May 10, 1766, in Hendel, Citi-

zen of Geneva, 336.

1 16. Letter of Apr. 24, 1766, in Hendel.

117. Josephson, 460.

118. Macdonald, F., II, 186-209.

119. Mossner, 529.

120. Macdonald, II, 171.

121. Ibid., 174.

122. Josephson, 464; Morley, Rousseau, II, 133.

123. Josephson, 467.

124. Morley, II, 135.

125. Ibid.

126. Josephson, 471.

127. Faguet, Vie de Rousseau, 361; Segur,

Julie de Lespinasse, 203.

CHAPTER IX

1. Vaussard, La Vie quotidienne en halie

au xviii e siecle, 27.

2. Ibid., 107.

3. 105.

4. 125.

5. Smith, D. E., History of Mathematics, I,

519.

6. Baedeker, Northern Italy, 471.

7. James, E. E., Bologna, 178-80.

8. Casanova, Memoirs, I, 14.

9. Rolland, Romain, Musical Tour through

the Land of the Past, 167.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Realites, November, 1954, p. 45.

13. Lang, Music in Western Civilization, 354.

14. Grout, D. J., Short History of Opera,

196.

15. Kirkpatrick, R., Domenico Scarlatti, 94.

16. Einstein, Alfred, Gluck, 10 1.

17. Lee, Vernon, Studies of the 18th Cen-

tury in Italy, 206.

18. Vaussard, 82.

19. De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature,

II, 825.

20. Vaussard, 83.

21. Ibid., 86.

22. 88.

23. Campbell, T. J., The Jesuits, 424.

24. McCabe, Jos., Candid History of the

Jesuits, 287.

25. Renard and Weulersee, Life and Work

in Modern Europe, 276.

26. Chesterfield, Letters, Feb. 28, 1749.

27. Einstein, Gluck, 15.

28. Gatti-Cazazza Collection, Venice.

29. Private collection, Venice.

30. Ibid.

31. Museo Civico, Bassano.

32. Voltaire, Works, Villa, 5.

33. Molmenti, P., Venice, Part III: The De-

cadence, I, 37.

34. Ibid., 49.

35. Molmenti, The Decadence, II, 17, 146.

36. Ibid., 48.

37- 49»

38. Rousseau, The Confessions, I, 301; Mol-

menti, II, 93.

39. Vaussard, 180.

40. Goldoni, Memoirs, 178.

41. Rousseau, The Confessions, I, 292.

42. Molmenti, I, 169; Vaussard, 195.

43. Grove* s Dictionary of Music, III, 314.

44. Pincherle, Vivaldi, 16.

45. Ibid., 17.

46. Rolland, Musical Tour, 187.

47. Pincherle, 67.

48. E. g., Violin Concerto in E, Concerto

Grosso in D Minor.

49. Pincherle, 61.

50. Ibid., 229-32.

51. Time, Nov. 29, 1963.

52. Lord Walpole Collection.

53. Brera Gallery, Milan.

54. Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Wallace

Collection.

55. National Gallery, London.

56. Wallace Collection.

57. London, Vienna, Geneva.

58. New York.

59. Turin.

60. Louvre.

61. Duke of Devonshire Collection.

62. Levey, Fainting in iSth-Century Venice,

92.

63. Anon., Tiepolo, 34.

64. Ospedaletto, Venice.

6$. E.g., Sftwell, S., Southern Baroque Art,

35-

66. Molmenti, Tiepolo, 19; Venturi, L., Ital-

ian Painting from Caravaggio to Modi-

gliani, 74.

67. Letter of Mar. 13, 1734, in Rolland, Mu-

sical Tour, 149.

67a. Goldoni, Memoirs, 184.

68. Casanova, Memoirs, II, 276.

69. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 29; Vaussard, 193.

70. Goldoni, Memoirs, 1, 4.

71. Ibid., 179.

72. 183.

73. Garnett, R., History of Italian Litera-

ture, 323.

74. Gozzi, Carlo, Memoirs, II, 1 10 f .

75. Molmenti, Venice: Decadence, I, 168.

76. Goldoni, Memoirs, 346.

77. Ibid., introd., xi.

78. Gibbon, Edward, Memoirs, 7.

79. Goldoni, Memoirs, xxi.

80. Sitwell, S., German Baroque Art, 70.

81. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire, VI, 675.

82. Ranke, History of the Popes, III, 472.

83. New Cambridge Modern History, VH,

284.

NOTES

993

84. Funk, F. X., Manual of Church History,

II, 180.

85. Macaulay, Essays, II, 179.

86. De Brosses in McCabe, Jos., Crises in

the History of the Papacy, 354.

87. Correspondance de Benoit XIV, II, 268,

in McCabe, Crises, 354.

88. CMH, VI, 591.

89. Ford, Miriam de, Love Children, 205.

90. Lanfrey, P., Vtglise et les philosophes,

190.

91. Putnam, G. H., Censorship of the Church

of Rome, II, 60.

92. Sime, James, Lessing, 1, 92.

93. Stirling-Maxwell, Annals of the Artists

of Spain, IV, 1393.

94. Gershoy, Leo, From Despotism to Revo-

lution, 146.

95. CMH, VI, 598.

96. Ibid., 599.

97. Robertson, Short History of Freethought;

11,369.

98. Vico, Giambattista, Autobiography, in.

99. Croce, B., Philosophy of Giambattista

Vico, 252.

100. Vico, The New Science, No. 31.

101. Ibid., Nos. 916-18; we have ventured to

improve the translation.

102. Nos. 922-24.

103. 925-27.

104. Vico, Autobiography, 171.

105. The New Science, No. 1104.

106. 1 105.

107. 417-24-

108. 873-80.

109. 361.

no. Autobiography, 173.

in. The New Science, No. 1 1 10.

112. Croce, Philosophy of Vico, 269.

113. Ibid., 274.

114. Croce, Filosofia di G. B. Vico (1911).

115. Grout, Opera, 200.

116. Ibid., 208.

117. Oxford History of Music, IV, 185.

118. Burney, Charles, General History of Mu-

sic, II, 917.

1 19. Grove's Dictionary, II, 785.

120. Ibid.

121. Ibid.

122. Beckford, Wm., Travel Diaries, II, 167.

123. Lee, Vernon, Studies, 194.

124. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 21.

125. Ibid., 32.

126. 33.

127. Introd. to the Victor Album of Scarlatti's

Sonatas.

128. Kirkpatrick, 58.

129. Ibid., 103.

130. Especially delightful: Nos. 13, 23, 25,

104, and 338, in the Longo numbering.

131. Coxe, Wm., Memoirs of the Kings of

Spain, IV, 231.

CHAPTER X

1. Beckford, Travel Diaries, II, 171.

2. Cheke, Marcus, Dictator of Portugal, 4.

3. Day, Clive, History of Commerce, 186;

History Today, November, 1955, p. 730.

4. Frederick the Great, Memoires, I, 28;

Stirling-Maxwell, IV, 1385.

5. New CMH, VII, 289.

6. Stephens, H. M., Story of Portugal, 354.

7. #7Z£.Bn*.,XX,68ib.

8. History Today, November, 1955, p. 731.

9. Campbell, The Jesuits, 431.

10. Cheke, 50.

11. Ibid., in.

12. History Today, November, 1955, p. 733.

13. See The Age of Reason Begins, 249-51.

14. Cheke, 106.

15. McCabe, The Jesuits, 262.

16. Lanfrey, U£glise et les philosophes, 258;

Cheke, 114.

17. Our account follows Cheke, 118 f.

18. Lanfrey, 259.

19. Cheke, 132.

20. Lanfrey, 260.

21. McCabe, Jesuits, 263.

22. Campbell, Jesuits, 462.

23. Gershoy, From Despotism to Revolu-

tion, 152; Cheke, 140.

24. Voltaire, Works, XVTa, 243.

25. Cheke, 155.

26. Ibid., 157.

27. Voltaire, XVIa, 243.

28. Gershoy, 153; Cheke, 204.

29. Gershoy, 154.

30. Stephens, Portugal, 367.

31. Lea, H. C, History of the Inquisition in

Spain, III, 3 ion.

32. Bell, Aubrey, Portuguese Literature, 277.

33. Cheke, 251.

34. Ibid., 268.

35. Ibid.

CHAPTER XI

1. Altamira, R., History of Spain, 482, 466;

Ogg, D., Europe in the iyth Century, 22;

New CMH, Vn, 271.

2. Herr, Richard, The Eighteenth-Century

Revolution in Spain, 106; see also Alta-

mira, 467-68.

3. Herr, 96.

4. Altamira, 460; Stokes, Hugh, Francisco

Goya, 187.

5. Klingender, F. D., Goya in the Demo-

cratic Tradition, q&.

6. Ibid., 4-5; Campbell, Jesuits, 424.

7. Kany, C. E., Life and Manners in Ma-

drid, 1 7 $ 0-1800, 375.

8. Vallentin, A., This I Saw, 26.

9. Lea, Inquisition in Spain, III, 308-10; IV,

5 2 3.

994

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

io. Martin, H., France, XV, 1 14-15.

59. Vallentin, 5.

11. Ticknor, Geo., History of Spanish Lit-

60. Herr, 54.

erature, III, 244.

61. Ibid., 57.

12. Lea, IV, 530.

62. Buckle, Ila, 98.

13. Buckle, H. T., Introd. to the History of

63. Ibid., 94.

Civilization in England, Ila, 61.

64. Herr, 128.

14. CMH, VI, 124.

65. CMH, VI, 383.

15. Voltaire, XlXa, 214.

66. Herr, 148.

16. Burney, Charles, History of Music, II,

67. Ibid., 141-42.

815-16.

68. 150.

17. Kany, 392.

69. Kany, 24; Vallentin, 26.

18. Coxe, Memoirs of the Kings of Spain,

70. Kany, 38.

IV, 141-43-

71. Ibid., 18.

19. Trevor-Roper, Historical Essays, 268.

72. Hume, Martin, Spain, 411.

20. Herr, 75.

73. Stokes, 188; Kany, 214.

21. Letter of cPAlembert to Voltaire, May

74. Laborde, Spain, in Buckle, Ila, 1 14.

! 3» I 773> m Robertson, J. M., Short His-

75. Kany, 24.

tory of Freethought, II, 372.

76. Ibid., 280.

22. Herr, 63.

77. Casanova, II, 348.

23. Ibid., 77.

78. Kirkpatrick, Scarlatti, 132.

24. Segur, Lespinasse, 254.

79. Altamira, History of Spanish Civiliza-

25. Altamira, 508.

tion, 183.

26. Lea, Inquisition, IV, 307.

80. Trevor-Roper, 264.

27. Herr, 210.

81. Kany, 345; Buckle, Ila, 95.

28. Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 439.

82. Ticknor, III, 256; Herr, 165.

29. Stokes, Goya, 147.

83. Ticknor, III, 262.

30. Coxe, Kings of Spain, IV, 235.

84. Ibid., 273.

31. Letters of an English officer, 1788, in

85. Vallentin, 144.

Buckle, Ha, 92.

86. Calvert, A. F., Royal Palaces of Spain, 97.

32. Coxe, IV, 236.

87. Cathedral of Salamanca.

33. Hume, Martin, Spain: Its Greatness and

88. Prado.

Decay, 397.

89. Private collection, Zurich.

34. Coxe, IV, 408.

90. Prado.

35. Gershoy, From Despotism to Revolution,

91. Poore, Charles, Goya, 156.

163.

92. Calvert, Goya, $5.

36. Coxe, IV, 341.

93. Poore, 48.

37. Ibid., 361.

94. One in Frick Collection, New York.

38. Campbell, Jesuits, 511-12.

95. Prado.

39. Ibid.; Lanfrey, USglise et les philosophes,

96. Prado.

280.

97. Vallentin, 93.

40. Coxe, IV, 362.

98. Trevor-Roper, 266.

41. Ibid., 363.

99. Vallentin, in.

42. Lanfrey, 282.

100. Ibid., 112.

43. Campbell, 517-18.

1 01. E.g., Malraux in Goya, Drawings from

44. Ibid., 519; Lanfrey, 281.

the Prado, xiv.

45. Coxe, IV, 368.

102. Lassaigne, J., Spanish Painting: From Ve-

46. Herr, 23.

lazquez to Picasso, 89.

47. Ibid.

103. Vallentin, 112.

48. 205.

104. Ibid., 119.

49. 29.

105. Duke of Alba Collection.

50. 208.

106. Goya, Drawings, Plate 4.

51. Kany, 356-57.

107. Collection of the Hispanic Society, New

52. Buckle, Ila, 86; Robertson, Freethought,

York.

II, 372.

108. Vallentin, 195.

53. Herr, 210; Robertson, 373.

109. Ibid., 203.

54. Herr, 35; Trevor-Roper, 264.

no. Prado.

SS- Coxe, IV, 412-16; Casanova, Memoirs, II,

in. Vallentin, 183.

344-

112. Academy of San Fernando, Madrid.

$6. Altamira, 438.

113. National Gallery, Washington.

57. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, History of Spanish

1 14. Academy of San Fernando, Madrid.

Literature, 357.

115. Klingender, Goya, 92.

58. Rev. Geo. Edmundsen, in CMH, VI, 384.

116. Goya, Drawings, 123.

NOTES

995

117. Ibid., 130.

118. 170.

1 19. Academy of San Fernando.

1 20. Goya, Drawings, 112.

121. Ibid., 89-117.

122. 118.

123. Vallentin, 223.

1 24. Both in the Prado.

125. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

126. In Goya, The Disasters of War, No. 23.

127. Ibid.j'So. 12.

128. No. 44.

129. No. 47.

130. No. 18.

131. These pictures from the Quinta del Sordo

are in the Prado.

132. Lassaigne, Spanish Painting: From Velaz-

quez to Picasso, 106.

CHAPTER XII

1. Goethe, Letters from Italy, Sept. 16, 1786.

2. Ibid., Sept. 12 and 17, 1786.

3. Gozzi, Carlo, Memoirs, II, 7.

4. Ibid., 100-03.

5. Hazlitt, W. C, The Venetian Republic,

11,323.

6. Casanova, Memoirs, II, 1 10.

7. Renard and Weulersee, Life and Work

in Modern Europe, 275.

8. Pearson, Hesketh, Johnson and Bosivell,

171.

9. Goethe, Letters from Italy, Oct. 25, 1786.

10. CMH,Vl,6oi.

11. Winckelmann, J., History of Ancient

Art, I, 48.

12. Goethe, Letters from Italy, Mar. 17, 1787.

13. Vaussard, 74.

14. Friedlander, Ludwig, Life and Manners

under the Early Empire, II, 78.

15. Goethe, Oct. 27, 1786.

16. Vaussard, 84.

17. Ibid., 89.

18. Bury, J. B., History of Freedom of

Thought, 122.

19. McCabe, The Jesuits, 346.

20. E.g., Lanfrey, Histoire politique des

papes, 384; id., Ufiglise et les philosophes,

305.

21. Campbell, Jesuits, 536.

22. McCabe, Jesuits, 346.

23. Ranke, History of the Popes, II, 449-50.

24. Campbell, 538.

25. Ibid., 541.

26. McCabe, 355.

27. Campbell, 563.

28. Mozart, letter of Aug. 4, 1770, in Ander-

son, Emily, Letters of Mozart, I, 227.

29. Jahn, Life of Mozart, I, 151.

30. Blom, Eric, Mozart, 57.

31. Goethe, Letters from Italy, Nov. 24, 1786.

32. Vaussard, 141-43.

33. Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (1766

ed.),p. n.

34. Carlyle, "Count Cagliostro," in Essays

(Works,lll), 187-92.

35. Goethe, Letters, Apr. 13 and 14, 1787.

36. Casanova, I, 13.

37. Ibid., 14.

38. 123.

39. Introd. xx.

40. 210.

41. 211.

42. 219.

43. 287.

44. 330.

45. 406-7.

46. II, 370, 393.

47. Ibid., 340.

48. Gilbert, O. P., The Prince de Ligne, 157.

49. Winckelmann, I, 3.

50. Ibid., 9.

51. 18.

52. 21.

53. Pater, Walter, The Renaissance, 155.

54. In Brandes, Goethe, II, 244.

55. Winckelmann, I, 31.

$6. In Muther, History of Modern Painting,

I,8i.

57. Pater, Renaissance, 148.

58. Winckelmann, I, 46.

59. Ibid., 60.

60. II, 319.

61. 1,64.

61. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

6 5 . I, 70.

66. 287.

67. 77.

68. 76, 84.

69. 86.

70. In Pater, 147.

71. Both in Museo Correr, Venice.

72. Good examples in Morgan Library, New

York, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

73. Levey, Painting in Venice, 103.

74. Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan.

75. Louvre.

76. Altere Pinakothek, Munich.

77. Muther, I, 86.

78. Winckelmann, 1, 407.

79. Prado.

80. Jahn, Mozart, III, 1, 15.

81. Burney, Fanny, Diary, 72-73.

82. Burney, Charles, History of Music, II,

886-91.

83. Einstein, Albert, Gluck, 151.

84. Grove's Dictionary, IV, 174.

85. Ibid., 509.

86. Einstein, Gluck, 149.

87. Grove's, I, 650.

88. Translation by Richard Garnett (His-

tory of Italian Literature, 300) .

996

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

89. In De Sanctis, II, 83 1 .

37. Padover, 89.

90. Alfieri, Vittorio, Autobiography , Epoch

38. Gooch, 6$.

I, Ch. i.

39. Ibid., 66.

91. Ibid., Epoch II, Ch. iv.

40. Padover, 77.

92. Ill, iii.

41. Gooch, 41.

93. Ill, xii.

42. Padover, 90-93.

94. Alfieri, Of Tyranny, 102.

43. Lewis, D. B. Wyndham, Four Favorites,

95. Ibid., Book I, Section 1.

202.

96. II, VII.

44. Gershoy, 89.

97. II, VIII.

45. Riedl, Frederick, History of Hungarian

98. I, IX.

Literature, 77-81.

99. I, VIII.

46. Hazard, European Thought, 109.

100. "Forethought" to Of Tyranny.

47. Padover, 73.

10 1. Autobiography, Epoch IV, Ch. viii.

48. Ibid., 74.

102. Epoch I, Ch. viii.

49. 81.

103. IV, v.

50. Gooch, 70.

104. IV, xx.

51. Martin, France, XVI, 392.

105. IV, xvi.

52. Ibid., 391.

53. Padover, 94; CMH, VI, 628.

CHAPTER XIII

54. Parton, James, Daughters of Genius, 402.

55. Cf. Coxe, History of the House of Aus-

1 . Gilbert, Prince de Ligne, 29, 57.

tria, III, 485-86.

2. Ibid., 135.

$6. Richard, Ernst, History of German Civ-

3. Mowat, R. B., Age of Reason, 96.

ilization, 380.

4. Frederick the Great, Guerre de Sept

57. Padover, 181.

Ans, 386.

58. Ibid., 178.

5. Gooch, G. P., Maria Theresa, 3.

59. 279.

6. Jahn, Mozart, 1, 6$.

60. 281.

7. Voltaire, Works, XVIa, 167.

61. 285; Gershoy, 100.

8. Gershoy, From Despotism to Revolution,

61. Gershoy, 10 1.

89.

63. Padover, 286.

9. Campbell, Jesuits, 433.

64. Coxe, House of Austria, III, 49m.

10. Paulsen, F., German Education, 147-49.

65. Lanfrey, Ufiglise et les philosophes, 356.

11. Schoenfeld, Hermann, Women of the

66. Padover, 212.

Teutonic Nations, 297.

67. Jahn, Mozart, II, 401.

12. Padover, The Revolutionary Emperor,

68. Padover, 214-15.

100.

69. Ibid.

13. Casanova, Memoirs, I, 147.

70. History Today, September, 1955, p. 61 £.

14. Frederick, Guerre de Sept Ans, 387.

71. Padover, 246.

15. Renard and Weulersee, Life and Work

72. Coxe, III, 493.

in Modern Europe, 305.

73. Padover, 243.

16. Padover, 20.

74. Vambery, The Story of Hungary, 385.

17. Stryienski, Eighteenth Century, 64.

75. Padover, 299.

18. Ibid.

76. Ibid., 311.

19. Jahn, I, 67.

77. Coxe, III, 526.

20. Frederick, Guerre de Sept Ans, 387.

78. Padover, 329.

21. Casanova, 1, 148.

79. Ibid., 345.

22. Enc. Brit., XIII, 151b.

80. 373.

23. Padover, 34.

81. 360.

24. Enc. Brit., 1. c.

82. 364.

25. Padover, 34.

83. 383.

26. Ibid., 37.

84. History Today, September, 1955, p. 620.

27. 41.

85. Gilbert, O. P., Prince de Ligne, 193.

28. Gooch, Maria Theresa, 14.

86. Coxe, III, 541.

29. Padover, 47.

87. Carlyle, History of Friedrich the Second,

30. Mann, Thos., Three Essays, 165.

VII, 492.

31. Gooch, 21-29; Padover, 67.

88. Padover, 287.

32. Gooch, 29.

33. Padover, 134.

CHAPTER XIV

34. Ibid., 134, 30.

35. 136.

1. Jahn, Mozart, II, 202.

36. 84; Gooch, 29.

2. Weinstock, Herbert, Handel, 268.

NOTES

997

3. Rolland, Musical Tour, 208.

4. Rolland, Essays in Music, 176.

5. Einstein, Gluck, 59.

6. In Brockway and Weinstock, The Opera,

66.

7. Einstein, Gluck; Grove's Dictionary of

Music, II, 401.

8. Lang, P. H., Music in Western Civiliza-

tion, 659.

9. Faguet, E., Rousseau artiste, 191; Ein-

stein, Gluck, 137.

10. Brockway and Weinstock, Opera, 97.

11. Einstein, 138.

12. Faguet, Rousseau artiste, 191.

13. Grove's, II, 400.

14. Rolland, Essays, 197-98.

15. Kobbe's Complete Opera Book, 42.

16. Rolland, Essays, 179.

17. Einstein, 146.

18. Burney, C, History of Music, II, 973.

19. Einstein, 151.

20. Vigee-Lebrun, Mme., Memoirs, 70.

21. Kobbe's, 52.

22. Grove's, IV, 174.

23. Einstein, 182.

24. Pratt, W. S., History of Music, 362.

25. Clark, Robert, Herder, 108, 429.

26. Grove's, II, $66.

27. Geiringer, Karl, Haydn, 44.

28. Grove's, II, 568.

29. Geiringer, 52-54.

30. Ibid., 55.

31. Grove's, II, 570.

32. Jahn, II, 349.

33. Geiringer, 77.

34. Ibid., 89.

35- 99-

36. Grove's, II, 574.

37. Geiringer, 108.

38. Ibid., no.

39. 121.

40. Jacob, H. E., Joseph Haydn, 222.

41. Ibid., 267.

42. Geiringer, 168.

43. Ibid., 167.

44. McKinney and Anderson, Music in His-

tory, 465.

45. Grove's, II, 582.

CHAPTER XV

1. Jahn, Mozart, II, 437.

2. Ibid., I, 2 in.

3. I, 28.

4- 33-

5. Blom, Mozart, 26.

6. Biancolli, Mozart Handbook, 1 29.

7. Jahn, I, 39.

8. Ibid., 107.

9. 119.

10. 129.

11. 132.

12. 137.

13. Ibid.

14. Wyzewa and Saint-Foix, W. A. Mozart,

I, 470.

15. Ibid., 474.

16. Jahn, I, 149.

17. Ibid., 344.

18. Anderson, E., Letters of Mozart, I, 403.

19. Ibid., 395.

20. Einstein, Mozart, 41.

21. Anderson, II, 686-88.

22. Ibid., 695.

23. 681-83.

24. 700-09.

25. Einstein, Mozart, 30-31.

26. Anderson, II, 925.

27. Blom, 88; Jahn, II, 65-66.

28. Letter of May 6, 1 781, in Einstein, 54.

29. Jahn, II, 171.

30. Ibid., 176.

31. 179.

32. 184.

33. Anderson, II, 1100.

34. Letter of July 25, 1781, in Anderson, II,

1 1 2 1 .

35. Anderson, III, 1166-69.

36. Einstein, 458.

37. Jahn, 11,413.

38. Ibid., 419.

39. 420.

40. 439.

41. 337>4 2 . 2 '

42. Einstein, 238.

43. Letter of Leopold Mozart, Feb. 14, 1785,

in Anderson, III, 1 3 2 1 .

44. Anderson, 1329.

45. Letter of Apr. 10, 1784, in Einstein, 265.

46. Grove's, III, 563.

47. Einstein, 223.

48. Biancolli, 345.

49. Einstein, 214.

50. Biancolli, 355.

51. Ibid., 374.

52. 367-69; Blom, 183.

53. Einstein, 280.

54. Goethe, Poetical Works, 120. In Works.

55. "His Master's Voice" Record C 2736.

$6. Jahn, II, 440; Nettle, Paul, Mozart and

Masonry, 112.

57. Biancolli, 132.

58. Rolland, Essays, 246.

59. Ibid.

60. E.g., in the letter of Nov. 5, 1777: "I wish

you good night, but first shit into your

bed." And on Nov. 13: "Fve been shit-

ting, so 'tis said, nigh twenty-two years

through the same old hole, which is not

yet frayed one bit." (Anderson, II, 525,

546).

61. Letter of Jan. 31, 1778.

62. Letter of Sept. 26, 1777.

63. Nettle, 122.

998

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

64. Jahn, II, 269-71.

65. Ibid.

66. E.g., letters of Apr. 13, 1789, and Sept.

30, 1790.

67. Letter of June 7, 1783.

68. Letter of Feb. 20, 1784.

69. Letter of July 31, 1782.

70. Anderson, II, 826.

71. Nettle, 115; Gheon, In Search of Mozart,

216.

72. Anderson, III, 1450.

73. Jahn, II, 304; Nettle, 120.

74. Einstein, 57.

75. Jahn, II, 295.

76. Ibid.

77. 298.

78. Einstein, 57.

79. Anderson, III, 1253.

80. Ibid., 1296.

81. In Biancolli, 138.

82. Jahn, II, 412.

83. Einstein, 442.

84. Jahn, III, 134.

85. Ibid., 140.

86. Goethe to Schiller, Dec. 30, 1797.

87. Anderson, III, 1360.

88. Blom, 138.

89. Ibid.

90. Letters of Dec. 14, 1789, in Anderson,

III, 1383-85.

91. Brock way and Weinstock, Opera, 91.

92. Anderson, III, 1398-99.

93. Jahn, II, 278-80.

94. Nettle, 116.

95. Biancolli, 421.

96. Jahn, III, 285.

97. Einstein, 363.

98. Grout, Short History of Opera, 294.

99. Biancolli, 554.

100. Nettle, 117.

10 1. Stendhal in Clark, B. H., Great Short

Biographies of the World, 999.

CHAPTER XVI

1. Montagu, Lady Mary W., Letters, I, 372;

cf. Macdonald, Duncan, The Religious

Attitude to Life in Islam, 126.

2. Lane, Edward W., Manners and Cus-

toms of the Modern Egyptians, I, 148;

Macdonald, Duncan, Development of

Muslim Theology, 283; Wherry, E. M.,

Commentary on the Quran, I, 281.

3. Macdonald, D., Religious Attitude, 126.

4. Doughty, Charles M., Travels in Arabia

Deserta, II, 99.

5. Halsband, Robert, Life of Lady Mary

Wortley Montagu, 73.

6. Lane-Poole, Stanley, Story of Turkey,

319.

7. Burton, Sir Richard, Personal Narrative

of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mec-

cah, II, 94.

8. Letter of Apr. 18, 17 17, in Montagu, Let-

ters, I, 318.

9. Letter of Apr. 1, 17 17, in same, 286.

10. Friedlander, L., Roman Life and Man-

ners, II, 201.

11. Frederick, Memoir es, I, 55.

12. Sir Wm. Petty, Political Arithmetic

(1683).

13. Halsband, 74.

14. See The Age of Louis XIV, 425-26.

15. Lane, I, 272.

16. Lane-Poole, Cairo, 180.

17. Lane, I, 98.

18. Ibid., 66.

19. Enc. Brit., I, 61 8a.

20. Ibid., XV, 8i6d.

21. Toynbee, A Study of History, I, 162.

22. Browne, Edward G., Literary History of

Persia, IV, 135.

23. Ibid., 136; Sykes, Sir Percy, History of

Persia, II, 260.

24. Ibid., 267.

25. Enc. Brit., XII, 705b; Pope, Arthur U.,

Survey of Persian Art, IV, 470, 497-506.

26. Sykes, II, 201.

27. Pope, Arthur U., Introduction to Persian

Art, 140.

28. Browne, E. G., IV, 282.

29. Ibid., 292-96.

CHAPTER XVII

1. Frederick the Great, Memoires, I, 207.

2. Lyashchenko, Peter, History of the Na-

tional Economy of Russia, 271-73.

3. Ibid.

4. Reau, Louis, VArt russe, II, 88.

5. Florinsky, M. T., Russia: A History and

an Interpretation, I, 575.

6. Mavor, James, Economic History of Rus-

sia, I, 477.

7. Reau, II, 88.

8. Mavor, I, 498-99.

9. Bernal, J. D., Science in History, 360.

10. Coxe, Wm, Travels in Poland, Russia,

Sweden, and Denmark, I, 281-82.

n. Castera, J., History of Catherine II, 174.

12. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 70.

13. Florinsky, I, 600; Bruckner, A., Literary

History of Russia, 113.

14. Coxe, Travels, I, 322.

15. Masson, Memoirs of Catherine II and

Her Court, 250.

16. Pougin, Arthur, Short History of Rus-

sian Music, 10 f.

17. Reau, II, ^.

18. Bruckner, 78.

19. Waliszewski, K., History of Russian Lit-

erature, I, 57.

NOTES

999

20. Wiener, Leo, Anthology of Russian Lit-

73. Waliszewski, Romance, 166.

erature, I, 224-29.

74. Ibid., 166; Castera, 158.

21. Rambaud, Alfred, History of

Russia, II,

75. Waliszewski, 166.

170.

76. Ibid., 164.

22. Waliszewski, Peter the Great, 2

24.

77. Gooch, Catherine, 16.

23. Waliszewski, Russian Literature, 83.

78. Catherine, 343.

24. Ibid.

79. Ibid.

25. 85.

80. Waliszewski, Romance, 176.

26. Catherine the Great, Memoirs, 60.

27. Waliszewski, Romance of an

Empress,

CHAPTER XVIII

47*

28. Ibid.

1. Letter of Catherine to Potemkin, Aug. 2,

29. 25.

1762, in Catherine, Memoirs, 347.

30. Kluchevsky, V. O., History

of Russia,

2. Kluchevsky, IV, 371.

IV, 354.

3. Catherine, 345.

31. Catherine, Memoirs, 58.

4. Kluchevsky, IV, 371.

32. Gooch, G. P., Catherine the Great, 11.

5. Catherine, 345.

33. CMH, VI, 317.

6. Florinsky, I, 502.

34. Carlyle, History of Frederick the Second,

7. CMH, VI, 663.

V, 294.

8. Waliszewski, Rovtance of an Empress,

35. Waliszewski, Romance of an

Empress,

199.

34-

9. Ibid.

36. Kluchevsky, IV, 358.

10. Catherine, 370.

37. Casanova, Memoirs, I, 33-34.

1 1 . Gershoy, From Despotism to Revolution,

38. CMH, VI, 658.

303.

39. Catherine, Memoirs, 28.

1:. Rambaud, II, 207.

40. Ibid., 44-45.

13. Florinsky, I, 504.

41. 29-30.

14. Brandes, Voltaire, 253.

42. 54.

15. Florinsky, I, 504.

43. 62.

16. Catherine, 263-72.

44. 63.

17. Masson, Memoirs of Catherine II and

45. 65.

Her Court, 97.

46. CMH, VI, 659.

18. Waliszewski, Romance, 383-88; Gooch,

47. Waliszewski, Romance, 78.

Catherine, 38.

48. Ibid.

19. Waliszewski, 4-6.

49. Kluchevsky, IV, 360.

20. Masson, Memoirs, 98.

50. Castera, 122-23.

21. Ibid.

51. Waliszewski, Romance, 91.

11. Catherine, 360.

52. Catherine, Memoirs, 203.

23. Ibid., 20.

53. Castera, 89.

24. Lewis, D. B. W., Four Favorites, 197.

54. Walpole, H., Memoirs of the

Reign of

25. Catherine, 376.

King George III, I, 145.

26. Ibid., 48.

55. Catherine, Memoirs, 208.

27. Gooch, Catherine the Great, 45.

56. Gooch, Catherine, 8.

28. Masson, Memoirs, 116.

57. Catherine, 301.

29. Waliszewski, Romance, 448.

58. /&£</., 240.

30. iMasson, 118.

59. 255 f .

31. Parton, Life of Voltaire, II, 386; Gooch,

60. Waliszewski, Romance, 102;

Crocker,

58.

The Embattled Philosopher,

378.

32. Voltaire, letter of May 18, 1767, in Des-

61. Catherine, 271-74; Waliszewski, Romance,

noiresterres, VI, 380.

119.

33. Parton, II, 388.

62. /&{</., 125.

34. Desnoiresterres, VI, 380.

63. Catherine, 282.

35. Letter of Sept. 7, 1764.

64. Waliszewski, Romance, 145.

36. Crocker, Embattled Philosopher, 373.

65. Ewe. Bri*., XVII, 645b.

37. Diderot, Oeuvres, 28.

66. Castera, 153.

38. In Ellis, Havelock, The New Spirit, 47.

67. Rambaud, II, 175.

39. Morley, John, Diderot, II, 113.

68. Kluchevsky, IV, 366.

40. Ibid., 114.

69. Castera, 147, 157.

41. In Faguet, Dix-huitieme Steele, 141.

70. Ibid., 156; CMH, VI, 328.

42. Crocker, 380.

71. Kluchevsky, IV, 362.

43. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the iSth Cen-

72. Castera, 152.

tury, II, 215.

IOOO

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

44. Padover, Revolutionary Emperor, 161.

45. Sainte-Beuve, II, 216.

46. Catherine, 365.

47. Castera, 226; cf. Waliszewski, Romance,

371-82.

48. Coxe, Travels in Poland, III, 156; Castera,

385.

49. Quoted by Voltaire in Philosophical

Dictionary, II, 102.

50. Florinsky, I, 511; CMH, VI, 686.

5 1 . In Gooch, Catherine, 69.

52. Voltaire to Catherine, Feb. 26, 1769.

53. In Rambaud, II, 206.

54. Voltaire, Phil. Diet., art. "Power."

55. Mavor, Economic History of Russia, I,

241 ; Rambaud, II, 211.

56. Waliszewski, Romance, 365.

57. Garrison, F., History of Medicine, 400.

58. Castera, Catherine, 297; Rambaud, II, 212.

59. Mavor, I, 313-14.

60. Ibid., /yji.

61. CMH, VI, 690.

62. Waliszewski, Romance, 298.

63. Lyashchenko, 273.

64. Mavor, I, 204-08.

6$. Gershoy, 125.

66. Catherine, Memoirs, 385.

67. Gershoy, 123.

68. Florinsky, I, 567-68.

69. Waliszewski, Romance, 321.

70. Ibid.

71. Rambaud, II, 192; Cambridge History of

Poland, II, 103.

72. Gooch, Catherine, 63.

73. Rambaud, II, 192.

74. CMH, VI, 674.

75. Quoted by George Bancroft in Literary

and Historical Miscellanies, 359.

76. Gooch, Catherine, 51.

77. Lewis, Four Favorites, 213.

78. Ibid., 179.

79. 215; Bain, R. N., The Last King of Po-

land, 175.

80. Florinsky, I, 531.

81. Catherine, 15.

82. Gilbert, Prince de Ligne, 139; Waliszew-

ski, Romance, 209.

83. Castera, 575.

84. Gooch, Catherine, 96.

85. Reddaway, Frederick the Great, 340.

86. Waliszewski, Romance, 233, 287.

87. Ibid., 388.

88. Catherine, 377.

89. CMH, VI, 696.

90. Waliszewski, Romance, 237.

91. Wiener, Anthology of Russian Litera-

ture, I, 272-76.

92. Ibid., 385.

93. 390.

94. 381.

95. Waliszewski, History of Russian Litera-

ture, 103.

96. Bruckner, Literary History of Russia,

102.

97. Ibid., 115.

98. 116.

99. 105-07.

100. Waliszewski, Romance of an Empress,

342.

10 1. Reau, UArt russe, II, in.

102. Ibid., 68.

103. Waliszewski, Romance, 349.

104. Enc. Brit., XIX, 747b.

105. Waliszewski, Romance, 346.

106. Reau, II, 76.

107. Ibid.

108. 79.

109. Masson, Memoirs of Catherine II and

Her Court, 93.

no. Gilbert, Prince de Ligne, 143.

in. Bruckner, 112.

112. Morley, John, Diderot, II, 128; Rambaud,

11,245.

113. Ibid., 247.

1 14. Masson, Memoirs, 303-06.

115. Catherine, 20.

116. Masson, 66.

117. Gooch in introd. to Catherine, Memoirs,

10.

1 18. Otto Hotzsch in CMH, VI, 701.

CHAPTER XIX

1 . Gershoy, From Despotism to Revolution,

37-

2. Goodwin, The European Nobility, 161.

3. Waliszewski, Poland the Unknown, 127.

4. Bain, R. Nisbet, The Last King of Po-

land, 22; Friedlander, L., Roman Life and

Manners, II, 162.

5. Bain, 43.

6. Cambridge History of Poland, II, 75.

7. Ibid., 76-77; Coxe, Wm., Travels in Po-

land, II, 125.

8. New CMH, VII, 374; Lewinski-Corwin,

E. H., Political History of Poland, 286.

9. Stael, Mme. de, Germany, I, 73.

10. Bain, Last King of Poland, 100.

11. Ibid., 59.

12. 31-32.

13. See The Age of Louis XIV, 374, 385-87.

14. CHP, II, 24.

15. Lewinski-Corwin, 289.

16. Bain, Last King, 55.

17. Ibid., 56.

18. Aldis, Madame Geoff rin, 248.

19. Florinsky, Russia, I, 517.

20. Aldis, 251.

21. Ibid., 282.

22. CHP, II, 1 16; Bain, 161.

23. Bain, Last King, 121.

24. Rambaud, History of Russia, II, 188.

25. CHP, II, 118.

26. CHP, II, 97-98; Bain, 77-78.

NOTES

IOOI

27. Rambaud, II, 188. 24.

28. Bain, Last King, 78.

29. CHP, II, 120. 25.

30. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, art. 26.

"Superstition," Sec. in.

31. Martin, H., Histoire de France, XVI, 267. 27.

32. CHP, II, 102.

33. Ibid., 103. 28.

34. Ibid.; Bain, 108.

35. Bain, Last King, 108. 29.

36. /&*'</., 2. 30.

37. Eras. Bri*., XVIII, 143d. 31.

38. Treitschke, Life of Frederick the Great, 32.

164.

39. CMH, VI, 670. 33.

40. Lewis, D. B. W., Four Favorites, 202. 34.

41. Gershoy, 180.

42. Alorley, John, Life of Voltaire, in Vol- 35.

taire, Works, XXIb, 346; Florinsky, I, 36.

537- 37-

43. Coxe, Travels in Poland, I, 159.

44. Bain, Last King, 121. 38.

45. CHP, II, 181-82. 39.

46. Bain, 102. 40.

47. CHP, II, 181-83.

48. Ibid., 135.

49. Bain, Last King, 249. 41.

50. Ibid., 278.

51. CHP, II, 155. 42.

43-

CHAPTER XX 44-

45-

1. In Gooch, Frederick the Great, 65.

2. MacLaurin, C, Mere Mortals, 195. 46.

3. Mowat, R. B., The Age of Reason, 61. 47.

4. Gooch, Frederick, 141. 48.

5. Alann, Thos., Three Essays, 213. 49.

6. Sir James Harrison in Gooch, Frederick,

149. 50.

7. In Rolland, Musical Tour, 214.

8. New York Times, Mar. 10, 1929. 51.

9. Frederick, letter of Oct. 30, 1770, in Vol-

taire and Frederick, Letters, 314. 52.

10. Crocker, Lester, Age of Crisis, 133. 53.

11. Gooch, Frederick, 138. 54.

12. Gershov, From Despotism to Revolution, 55.

86.

13. Voltaire and Frederick, Letters, 249. 56.

14. Frederick to Voltaire, July 2, 1759, and

Oct. 31, 1760, in Letters, 256, 270. 57.

15. Bertaut, J., Napoleon in His Own 58.

Words, 463. 59.

16. Treitschke, Life of Frederick, 182.

17. In Hazard, Paul, European Thought in 60.

the 1 8th Century, 333. 61.

18. Saint e-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen- 61.

vary, II, 344. 63.

19. Ibid., 347. 64.

20. In iMovvat, 105. 65.

21. Alorley, in Voltaire, Works, XXIb, 195. 66.

22. Sainte-Beuve, I, 220-21. 67.

23. Voltaire and Frederick, Letters, 282. 68.

Carlyle, History of Friedrich the Second,

IV, i79n.

Frederick to Voltaire, Feb. 10, 1767.

Chesterfield to his son, Letters, June 23,

1752.

Schoenfeld, Women of the Teutonic Na-

tions, 299.

Stael, Mme. de, Germany, I, 106; Ger-

shoy, 75.

Paulsen, German Education, 142.

Gershoy, 284.

Carlyle, Friedrich, VII, 201.

Gershoy, 76; Renard and Weulersee, Life

and Work in Modern Europe, 297.

Ibid., 299.

Bruford, W. H., Germany in the 18th

Century, 186.

CAfH, VI, 7 18.

Gershoy, 84.

Frederick, Testament (1768), in CMH,

VI, 7*3-

Bruford, 22.

Casanova, Memoirs, I, 349.

Burke, Thoughts on French Affairs, in

Reflections on the French Revolution,

296.

Pascal, Roy, The German Sturm und

Drang, 75-76.

Goethe, Truth and Fiction, I, 163.

Sime, James, Lessing, II, 131.

Schiller, Poems, 219-20. In Works.

Eckermann and Soret, Conversations with

Goethe, 79.

Stael, Mme. de, Germany, I, 44.

Bruford, 39.

Enc.Brit.,\X, 132b.

Padover, Revolutionary Emperor, 289;

Campbell, Thos., The Jesuits, 611.

Smith, Preserved, History of Modern

Culture, II, 404.

Smith, N. K., Commentary to Kant's

"Critique of Pure Reason," 6.

Eckermann, introduction.

Stael, Mme. de, Germany, 1, 118.

Ibid., 1 16-17.

Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 251. In

Works.

F. C. Schlosser in Monroe, Paul, Text-

book in the History of Education, 580.

Alorley in Voltaire, Works, XXIb, 153.

Nettle, Mozart and Masonry, 9.

Robertson, J. M., Short History of Free-

thought, II, 318.

Ibid.

33*-

Sime, Lessing, I, 27.

Garland, H. B., Lessing, 154.

Ibid., 118.

Lessing, Laocoon, 190; Ch. xxvi, ad. init.

Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, 22m.

Lessing, Laocoon, 56.

Ibid., 57.

1002

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

69. Sime, II, 4.

70. Ibid., 55.

71. Lessing, Ha?nburgische Dramaturgic, No.

70, in Garland, 64.

72. Lessing, Samtliche Schriften, X, 53, in

Sime, II, 206.

73. Sime, II, 85.

74. Casanova, II, 271.

75. See The Age of Voltaire, 502.

76. Sime, II, 348.

77. Lessing, Education of the Human Race,

No. 74 (Harvard Classics, Vol. XXXII,

212).

78. Ibid., Nos. 85-86.

79. Brandes, Goethe, I, 434; Cassirer, Phi-

losophy of the Enlightenment, 190.

80. Sime, II, 300; Brandes, Goethe, I, 434.

81. Sime, II, 346.

82. Ibid., 330.

83. Klopstock, The Messiah, ad finem.

84. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, I, 79; II, 5.

In Works.

85. Penguin Book of German Verse, 175.

86. Ibid., 178-90.

87. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 350. In

Works.

88. Eckermann, 370 (Feb. 18, 1829).

89. Boehn, Max von, Modes and Manners,

IV, 238.

90. Pascal, Roy, The German Sturm und

Drang, 5.

91. Ibid., 31.

92. Francke, Kuno, History of German Lit-

erature, 312.

93. Ibid., 310.

94. Boehn, 124.

95. Schloss Tiefurt, near Weimar.

96. Schlossmuseum, Weimar.

97. Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam.

98. Winckelmann, II, 36.

99. Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Kiinste.

100. Munich, Neue Pinakothek.

10 1. Dresden Gemaldegalerie.

102. Winterthur, Museum des Kunstvereins.

103. Schlossmuseum, Weimar.

104. Dresden Gemaldegalerie.

105. Weimar Museum.

106. Jahn, Mozart, III, 235.

107. Lang, P. H., Music in Western Civiliza-

tion, 589.

108. Grove's Dictionary of Music, I, 175.

109. Jahn, II, 65.

no. Grove's, I, 145-55, 177-81.

in. Gooch, Frederick, 298.

112. Frederick, Memoir es, I, $6 f.

113. Gooch, 309.

114. Ibid., 305.

115. 319.

116. 323.

1 17. Frederick, Memoires, I, 56.

118. Gooch, Frederick, 319.

119. Ibid., 280.

120.

121.

122.

123.

124.

125.

126.

127.

128.

129.

12.

J 3-

J 4-

*5-

16.

l 7>

18.

19.

21.

22.

2 3-

2 4-

2 5-

26.

2 7<

28.

29.

30.

3 1 -

3 2 -

33-

34-

35'

36.

292.

287.

287.

291.

89.

294.

In Hauser, Arnold, Social History of Art,

II, 602.

Pascal, Roy, Sturm und Drang, 42.

MacLaurin, Mere Mortals, 201.

Gooch, Frederick, no.

CHAPTER XXI

Paulsen, Immanuel Kant, i6n.

Oberweg, F., History of Philosophy, II,

139.

T. M. Greene in introd. to Kant, Reli-

gion within the Limits of Reason Alone,

xxviii.

Ibid., xxx.

Paulsen, Kant, 37.

Wilson, E. C, Immanuel Kant, 3.

Herder, Brief e zur Beforderung der Hu-

manitat, in Paulsen, Kant, 40.

Williams, H. S., History of Science, III,

27-28.

Love joy, Arthur, The Great Chain of

Being, 266.

Harlow Shapley in Wilson, Immanuel

Kant, 51.

Kant, Critique of Judgment, II, 78; Paul-

sen, 272n.

Oberweg, II, 150.

Paulsen, 272^

In Smith, N. K., Comtnentary, xix.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1st ed., 13

(preface).

Critique of Judg?nent, I, 3.

Pure Reason, 1st German ed., 10 (pref-

ace).

Pure Reason, 2d German ed., xliii.

Ibid., xxx, xxxiv.

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphy-

sics, 9 (preface).

In Paulsen, 96.

Pure Reason, 1st Germ, ed., 112.

Ibid., 125; Prolegomena, No. 36.

Pure Reason, 42.

Ibid., 307, 375.

Pure Reason, 2d Germ, ed., 131-33, 136,

i39>i43-

Ibid., 428.

First ed., 622-23.

Ibid., 627.

671-73, 675.

468.

683-92, 698.

700.

Karl Reinhold in Paulsen, 114.

Prolegomena, 13 (preface).

Pure Reason, first ed., 298, 752.

NOTES

IOO3

37. Robertson, J. M., Short History of Free-

thought, II, 337.

38. Pure Reason, 2d ed., xxx, xxxiv.

39. Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Met-

aphysics of Ethics, 35.

40. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 313.

41. Ibid., 248, 259.

42. 142.

43. Fundamental Principles, 68.

44. Ibid., 57.

45. Practical Reason, 108-9, l ¥>-

46. Pure Reason, 2d ed., 571-73.

47. Ibid., xxviii, 566-69, 580-81; Practical Rea-

son, 164 f.

48. /£i</., 259 f.

49. 260.

50. Pure Reason, 1st ed., 819.

51. Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, 25.

52. Heine, H., Religion and Philosophy in

Germany, in Paulsen, 8a.

53. Critique of Judgment, I, 18, 15.

54. Ibid.

55- 46.

56. Critique of Judgment, II, 89.

57. Ibid., 117.

58. Kant, Werke, VI, 129, in Cassirer, Rous-

seau, Kant, and Goethe, 39.

59. Oberweg, II, 141.

60. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Rea-

son Alone, 3.

61. Ibid., 8.

62. 8.

63. 28.

64. 29.

65. Kant, Education, No. 19.

66. Kant, Religion, 35.

67. Kant, "Conjectural Beginning of the His-

tory of Man," in Oberweg, II, 186.

68. Kant, Religion, 51.

69. Ibid., 147, 159-61.

70. 142-43.

71. 91.

72. 63.

73. 117.

74- 57i ! 34-

75. 186.

76. 183-85.

77. 153, 164-65, 168, 112.

78. Ibid., xxxiv.

79. Kant, A Philosophical Treatise on Per-

petual Peace, 10.

80. Ibid., 28.

81. 32.

82. Practical Reason, 34m.

83. Perpetual Peace, 78.

84. Paulsen, 351.

85. Perpetual Peace, 29-30; Smith, N. K.,

Commentary, Ivii.

86. Education, No. 30.

87. Ibid., No. 7.

88. Paulsen, 374.

89. Practical Reason, 326m

90. Ibid., introd. by T. G. Abbott, xliii.

91. Ibid., xliv.

92. Paulsen, 45.

93. Ibid., 47; Klinke, Kant for Everyman,

105.

94. Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, 340-54, in

Robertson, J. M., Freethought, II, 343.

95. Robertson, II, 345.

96. Letter of Apr., 1766, in Religion within

the Limits of Reason Alone, introd.,

xxxvi.

97. Paulsen, 52.

98. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As if,"

313-

99. Ibid., 316-17.

100. Witte, Schiller, 46.

101. Schiller, Poems, 290.

102. Eckermann, 79 (Apr. 14, 1824).

103. Emerson, lecture of 1842 on "The Trans-

cendentalism" in Wilson, E. C, Immanuel

Kant, 23.

CHAPTER XXII

1. Eckermann, 138 (Apr. 27, 1825).

2. Lewisohn, L., Goethe, I, 134.

3. Schiller to Korner, Aug. 8 and Sept. 10,

1787, in Schiller and Korner, Correspond-

ence, I, 140-43.

4. Brandes, Goethe, I, 307.

5. Stael, Mme. de, Germany, I, 101.

6. Francke, History of German Literature,

2 53-

7. Wieland, History of Agathon, I, xxiv.

8. Francke, 255.

9. Agathon, I, 123 (Book in, Ch. ii).

10. Ibid., Book m, Ch. iii.

n. In Francke, 258.

12. Eckermann, 285 (Sept. 26, 1827).

13. Mann, Thos., Three Essays, 8.

14. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, I, 385. In

Works.

15. Ibid., 155 f.

16. 209-30.

17. 178.

18. 175.

19. 233.

20. 318.

21. Goethe, Works, VII, 27.

22. Truth and Fiction, 1, 306. In Works.

23. Ibid., 367.

24. 368.

25. Brandes, Goethe, I, 71.

26. Autobiography of Heinrich Jung-Stilling

in Lewisohn, I, 49.

27. In Ludwig, Emil, Goethe, 31.

28. Truth and Fiction, I, 407.

29. In Ludwig, 42.

30. Eckermann, 291 (Oct. 8, 1827).

31. E.g., Truth and Fiction, II, 43.

32. Ibid., 75.

33. Letter of June, 177 1, in Lewisohn, I, 57.

1004

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

34-

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40.

41.

42.

43-

44-

45-

46.

47-

48.

49.

50.

5 1 -

52.

53-

54-

55-

5 6.

57-

58.

59-

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

6 5 .

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

7 1 -

72-

73-

74-

75-

76.

77-

78.

79-

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

Truth and Fiction, II, 1 20.

Ibid., 143.

Brandes, I, 140.

Ludwig, 57.

Goethe, Gotz von Berlichingen, Act I,

Sc. ii.

Truth, II, 167.

From Kestner's diary, in Lewisohn, I, 71.

Truth, II, 188.

Ibid., 214

214.

Brandes, I, 273.

In Ludwig, 87.

Lewisohn, I, 101.

Truth,\\, 216-17.

Eckermann, 52 (Jan. 2, 1824).

Goethe, Werther, letters of July 19 and

21 and Aug. 30, 1771.

Goethe, letter to Kestner, Nov. 20, 1774,

in Lewisohn, I, 105.

Sime, Lessing, II, 200.

Lewisohn, I, 101.

Kestner, letter to Hennings, Nov. 18,

1772, in Pascal, German Sturm und

Drang, 108.

Truth, Book xn.

In Ludwig, 94.

Lavater's diary, June 28, 1774, in Lewi-

sohn, I, 99.

Goethe's letter of Nov. 12, 1816, in

Lewisohn, II, 262.

Lewisohn, I, 295.

Truth, II, 261, 309.

Translation in Carus, Paul, Goethe, 245-

47-

Truth, II, 318, 327.

Ibid., 366.

Clark, Robert, Herder, 160.

Truth, II, 11.

Ibid., 16.

In Pascal, German Sturm und Drang, 225.

Heiseler, B. von, Schiller, 49.

Schiller, Poems, 7. In Works.

Ibid., 9.

Carlyle, Life of Schiller, 15. In Works.

Schiller, The Robbers, Act I, Sc. ii.

Ibid., II, iii.

Ibid.

V,i.

Heiseler, 47.

Ungar, Frederick, Friedrich Schiller, 34.

Witte, Schiller, 131.

Heiseler, 83.

Schiller, Philosophical Letters, p. 376

(Letter 1) . In Works.

Ibid., 385 (Letter iv) .

Schiller and Korner, Correspondence, I,

12.

Ibid., 13-16.

Heiseler, 85.

Ibid.

Schiller and Korner, Correspondence, I,

30-33-

86. Korner to Schiller, July 8, 1785, in Cor-

respondence, I, 36.

CHAPTER XXIII

1. Einstein, Mozart, 19.

2. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, I, 291. In

Works.

3. Schiller to Korner, July 28 and Aug. 29,

1787.

4. Schiller and Korner, Correspondence, I,

85.

5. Ibid., 90, 168.

6. Wieland, Oberon, introd.

7. Brandes, Goethe, II, 266-69.

8. Lewisohn, II, 209.

9. Schiller and Korner, I, 85.

10. Pascal, German Sturm und Drang, 17.

11. Ibid., 18.

12. 17.

13. Goethe to Jacobi, Nov. 12, 1783.

14. Goethe to Lavater, December, 1783.

15. Schiller and Korner, I, 85.

16. Clark, Herder, 240.

17. Bancroft, Geo., Literary and Historical

Miscellanies, 173.

18. Herder to Hamann, Jan. 13, 1777, in Pas-

cal, 95.

19. Clark, Herder, 2j$-jy.

20. Herder to Jacobi, Feb. 6 and Dec. 30,

1784, in Pascal, 104.

21. Pascal, 104.

22. Clark, 340.

23. Pascal, 106.

24. Clark, 303.

25. Ibid., 322.

26. 357.

27. 368.

28. Lewisohn, I, 133.

29. Ibid.

30. 153.

31. Eckermann, 285 (Sept. 26, 1827).

32. Lewisohn, I, 134.

33. Ibid., 135.

34. 137-40.

35. 141.

36. 146.

37. 150.

38. Goethe to Charlotte von Stein, May 24,

1776.

39. Lewisohn, I, 151.

40. Ibid., 156.

41. 222.

42. Brandes, I, 335.

43. Lewisohn, I, 327.

44. Ibid., 236.

45. 271.

46. 306.

47. Eckermann, 251 (Apr. 25, 1827).

48. Goethe's diary, in Lewisohn, I, 215.

49. Ludwig, 440.

50. Translation by Longfellow.

51. Lewisohn, I, 232.

NOTES

IOO5

52. See The Age of Reason Begins, 259-65.

53. Goethe, Tasso, Act I, Sc. ii.

54. Ibid., II, i.

55 - I "•

56. Ibid.

57. Letter of Apr. 24, 1783, in Lewisohn, I,

266.

58. Ludwig, 155.

59. Lewisohn, I, 309.

60. Ludwig, 217.

61. Letter of Oct. 8, 1786, in Letters from

Italy, 177.

62. Ludwig, 222.

63. Stadelsches Museum, Frankfurt.

64. Lewisohn, I, 320.

6$. Ibid., 322.

66. Eckermann, 133, 201 (Jan. 30, 1825, and

Jan. 18, 1827).

67. Letters from Italy, Dec. 3, 1786, and Feb.

16, 1787.

68. Ibid., Dec. 1 and 3, 1786.

69. Feb. 3, 1787, in Lewisohn, I, 327.

70. In McKinney and Anderson, Music in

History, 511.

71. Eckermann, 213 (Jan. 29, 1827).

72. Taine, Philosophy of Art, in Brandes,

Goethe, I, 457.

73. Letter of Dec. 13, 1786, in Lewisohn, I,

3 2 3-

74. Lewisohn, I, 353.

75. Brandes, I, 469.

76. Lewisohn, 1, 257.

77. Goethe, Poetical Works, 34-42. In Works.

78. Lewisohn, I, 368.

79. Ludwig, 300.

80. Brandes, II, 50.

81. Letter of Jan. 3, 1781, in Lewisohn, I,

229.

82. Examples in Lewisohn, I, 101-2, 186-88,

196-97, 229, 379.

83. Ludwig, 246.

84. Schiller and Korner, Correspondence, I,

112.

85. Ibid., 89 (Aug. 28, 1787).

86. Letters of July 28 and Aug. 18, 1787.

87. Don Carlos, Act III, Sc. x.

88. Schiller to Korner, Apr. 15, 1786.

89. Korner to Schiller, November, 1788.

90. Schiller to Korner, Sept. 12, 1788.

91. Schiller and Korner, Correspondence, II,

330.

92. Letter of May 28, 1789.

93. Carlyle, Life of Schiller, 103. In Works.

94. Letter of Dec. 7, 1787.

95. Heiseler, 114.

96. Letter of Mar. 1, 1790.

97. Heiseler, 119.

98. Schiller to Korner, Feb. 22, 1791.

99. Letter of May 24, 1791.

100. Schiller, Essays, 203. In Works.

101. On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind,

Letters vii and x in Essays, 45, 53.

[02. Letter of May 5, 1792.

03. Ludwig, 326.

04. Schiller, Poems, 272. In Works.

05. Schiller to Goethe, Aug. 17, 1795, in

Schiller and Goethe, Correspondence, I,

88-89.

06. On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.

07. Eckermann, Oct. 7, 1827.

08. Cf. letter to Korner, Aug. 29, 1787.

09. Schiller to Goethe, Aug. 23, 1794.

10. Schiller to Goethe, Aug. 31, 1794.

11. Goethe, "Happy Incident," in Carlyle,

Life of Schiller, 305. In Works.

12. Schiller and Goethe, Correspondence, I,

1.

13. Ibid., 5.

14. 6.

15. Schiller to Korner, Feb. 1, 1796.

16. In Ungar, Schiller, 129.

17. Ibid., 140.

18. Schiller, Essays, 286, 321. In Works.

19. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, I, 324.

20. Schiller to Korner, Dec. 9, 1794, Feb. 22,

1795, June 15, 1795, July 2, 1706.

21. Letters of July 2-9, Oct. 9, and Oct. 23,

1796.

22. Goethe to Schiller, July 7, 1796.

23. Eckermann, Mar. 23, 1829.

24. Ludwig, 385-86.

25. Eckermann, Mar. 22, 1825.

26. Lewes, G. H., Life of Goethe, II, 202.

27. Goethe to Schiller, Jan. 18, 1797.

28. Hermann and Dorothea, 56-57. In Works.

29. Brandes, II, 470.

30. Schiller to Korner, Jan. 5, 1800.

31. Eckermann, July 23, 1827.

32. Heiseler, 143.

33. Ludwig, 386.

34. Schiller to Charlotte Schimmelmann.

35. Goethe to Schiller, Feb. 28, 1801.

36. Eckermann, Oct. 7, 1827.

37. Lewisohn, 1, 61.

38. Letter of Jan. 20, 1801.

39. Heiseler, 170.

40. Stael, Mme. de, Germany, I, 182.

41. Schiller to Goethe, Dec. 21, 1803, in

Lewisohn, II, 92.

42. Ibid.

43. Stael, 23-24.

44. Lewisohn, II, 293.

45. Heiseler, 189.

46. Eckermann, Jan. 18, 1827.

47. Witte. Schiller, 38.

48. Goethe to Zelter, June 1, 1805, m Lewis-

ohn, II, 107.

CHAPTER XXIV

1. Cf. final lines of Faust, Part II.

2. Brandes, Goethe, II, 250.

3. Recollections of Friedrich von Miiller, in

Lewisohn, II, 161.

4. Brandes, 263-64.

5. Ibid.

ioo6

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

6. Eckermann, Alar. 15, 1829.

7. For the historical background of the

Faust legend see The Reformation, 852.

8. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 21-22. In

Works.

9. Lewisohn, I, 123.

10. Ibid.

11. Eckermann, Feb. 10, 1829.

12. Brandes, 305.

13. In the Gesamtausgabe by Breitkopf and

Hartel.

14. Translation by Albert Latham in Every-

man's Library ed. of Faust.

15. Eckermann, Jan. 10, 1825.

16. Latham's translation, p. 52.

17. Ibid., 1 17-19.

18. 116.

19. Brandes, 229.

20. Lewisohn, II, 174.

21. Elective Affinities, English tr., 335. In

Works.

22. Ibid., 180.

23. 218.

24. Ludvvig, 427.

25. Ibid., 429.

26. 453.

27. Lewisohn, II, 202-4.

28. Ludwig, 445.

29. Lewisohn, II, 250.

30. Ibid., 303.

3'- 334-

32. 306-8.

33. Ungar, Frederick, Goethe' 's World View,

9-

34. Magnus, Rudolf, Goethe as a Scientist,

221.

35. Ibid., xvi-xviii, 209.

36. 167.

37. 178.

38. Goethe's letter of May 17, 1787.

39. Magnus, 73.

40. Ibid., 78; Brandes, 462.

41. Ibid., 429.

42. Magnus, 42.

43. Ludwig, 188.

44. Magnus, 136.

45. Eckermann, Apr. 16, 1825.

46. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 31.

47. Ibid., 77.

48. Faust, Part II, line 1754.

49. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 9, 105.

50. Letter of Jan. 6, 1798.

5 1 . Ungar, 99.

52. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 108. In

Works.

53. Quoted in Mann, Three Essays, 49.

54. Truth and Fiction, Part III, Book 11.

55. Ludwig, 3.

56. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 47.

57. Ibid.

58. Truth and Fiction, II, 272-73.

59. Lewisohn, I, 255.

60. Truth and Fiction, Book xiv.

61. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 47.

62. Ibid., 41.

63. 37.

64. 37.

6$. 43-45; Smith, Preserved, Age of the Ref-

ormation, 712.

66. Truth and Fiction, II, 311 f .

67. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 55.

68. Ludwig, 206.

69. Ibid., 457.

70. Recollections of Johann Falk, in Lewis-

ohn, II, 210.

71. Goethe to Zelter, May 11, 1820.

72. Brandes, I, 437.

73. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 81.

74. Ibid., 6.

75. Eckermann, Apr. 2, 1829.

76. Ungar, 167.

77. Ibid., 129.

78. 139.

79. 16.

80. 89.

81. Truth and Fiction, I, 421.

82. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Book VII,

Ch. iii.

83. Ibid., Book V, Ch. iii.

84. Carus, Goethe, 168.

85. Faust, Part II, Act II.

86. Eckermann, Jan. 4, 1824.

87. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 59.

88. Eckermann, Feb. 13, 1829.

89. Ungar, 141.

90. Ibid.

91. 91.

92. Lewisohn, II, 438.

93. Faust, Part II, p. 341.

94. Ibid., 407.

95. Friedrich von Miillcr, in Lewisohn, II,

370.

96. Ibid., 371.

97. 376.

98. 430.

99. Goethe to Zelter, Dec. 14, 1830.

100. Lewisohn, II, 411.

101. Ungar, Goethe's World View, 131.

102. Alann, Three Essays, 63.

103. Truth and Fiction, II, 246.

104. Ludwig, 293.

105. Ibid., 472.

106. In Mann, 47.

107. Lewisohn, II, 254.

108. In Friedell, Egon, Cultural History of

the Modem Age, I, 272.

109. In Mann, 64.

no. We have followed the account given by

K. W. Miillcr in 1832, in Lewisohn, II,

449 f-

in. Eckermann, 572.

CHAPTER XXV

1. In Masson, P. M., La Religion de Rous-

seau, II, 240.

NOTES

IOO7

»3-

'4-

'5-

16.

'7-

18.

19.

:o.

22.

2 3-

2 4-

26.

2 7-

28.

29.

30.

3 [ -

3 2 -

33-

34-

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40.

4»-

42.

43-

44-

See "Sermon of Rabbi Akib," and art.

"Jews" in Philosophical Dictionary.

Ibid., Sec. in.

Sec. iv.

See The Age of Voltaire, Ch. xiii, Sec.

VII.

Cf. Black, J. B., The Art of History, 49-

50.

Graetz, H., History of the Jews, V, 346.

Gay, Voltaire's Politics, 352.

Graetz, V, 347.

Rousseau, £mile, 267-68.

Sombart, W., The Jews and Modern

Capitalism, 56.

Lea, H. C, History of the Inquisition in

Spain, III, 308-11.

Altamira, History of Spain, 462.

Parton, Life of Voltaire, I, 161.

Bell, Aubrey, Portuguese Literature, 280.

Lea, III, 310.

Abbott, G. F., Israel in Europe, 209.

Abrahams, I., Jewish Life in the Middle

Ages, 224.

Ibid.

Pad over, The Revolutionary Emperor,

252.

Jewish Encyclopedia, XII, 434; Padover,

253 f; Graetz, V, 357.

Padover, 257.

Letter of May 17, 17 17, in Montagu,

Lady Mary W., Letters and Works, II,

321.'

Dubnow, S. M., History of the Jews in

Russia and Poland, I, 255-58; Florinsky,

Russia, I, 490.

Dubnow, I, 307.

Ibid., 189.

169-71.

'73-

172-79.

1 79-80.

182-86.

Roth, Cecil, The Jewish Contribution to

Civilization, 28.

Sombart, 23.

Jew. Enc, XIX, 418a.

Ibid., 415-18.

Corti, Egon C, Rise of the House of

Rothschild, I, 19.

George, Al. Dorothy, London Life in the

1 8th Century, 127.

Besant, Sir Walter, London in the 18th

Century, 178.

Roth, 242.

Finkelstein, Louis, ed., The Jews, I, 260.

Besant, 180.

Browne, Lewis, The Wisdom of Israel,

551-

Dubnow, I, 233.

Ibid., 111 f.; Baron, Salo, Social and Reli-

gious History of the Jews, II, 54 f.r

Graetz, V, 374 f; Howe and Greenberg,

Treasury of Yiddish Stories, 15 f.

45. Graetz, V, 294.

46. Hensel, S., The Mendelssohn Family, 4.

47. Sime, Lessing, I, 133.

48. Graetz, V, 298.

49. In Wolf, A., History of Science . . . in

the 1 8th Century, 781.

50. Graetz, V, 309.

51. Ibid., 311.

52. Hensel, 10.

53. Graetz, V, 317.

54. Jew. Enc, VIII, 482d.

^. Graetz, V, 365.

5 6. Ibid., 355.

CHAPTER XXVI

1. Voltaire, Works, ib, 302.

2. In Herold, J., The Swiss without Halos,

106.

3. Oechsli, W., History of Switzerland, 290.

4. Parton, Life of Voltaire, II, 458.

5. Lewisohn, II, 238-39.

6. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 240-46, 252,

375, 398-404. In Works.

7. Holberg, Ludwig, Selected Essays, p. 48

(Epistle 48).

8. Lady Alary Wortley /Montagu, letters of

Aug. 3 and 5, 17 16, in Letters and Works,

II, 226-27.

9. Desnoiresterres, Voltaire et la societe

francaise, I, 237.

10. Boswell in Holland, 288.

1 1 . dimming, Ian, Helvetius, 50.

12. Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, I, 81.

13. Parton, Life of Voltaire, I, 152.

14. Blok, P. J., History of the People of the

Netherlands, Part V, 174 f.; Robertson,

J. Al., Short History of Freethought, II,

353-

15. Blok, V, 183.

16. Ibid., 92.

17. 86.

18. Dillon, Edw., Glass, 295 f.; Sitwell, S.,

The Netherlands, 147.

19. George Dempter to Boswell, Aug. 26,

1763.

20. Boswell in Holland, 93.

21. Ibid., 317.

22. Herold, Mistress to an Age, 143.

23. Ibid., 144.

24. Blok, V, 5 6.

25. Ibid., 108.

26. Horn, F. W., History of the Literature

of the Scandinavian North, 187.

27. Freedlcy and Reeves, History of the

Theatre, 268.

28. Holberg, Seven One-Act Plays, 165-87.

29. Alatthews, Brander, The Chief European

Dramatists, 705.

30. Holberg, Journey of Niels Klim to the

World Underground, 10.

31. Ibid., 18.

32. 32.

ioo8

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

33- k>9-

34- i9i-

35. 109.

36. Translation by Longfellow, in Van

Doren, Mark, Anthology of World Po-

etry, 981.

37. Horn, Scandinavian Literature, 217.

38. Goodwin, A., European Nobility, 136.

39. CMH, VI, 762.

40. Bain, R. N., Gustavus III, I, $6.

41. CMH, VI, 768.

42. Bain, Gustavus III, I, 124.

43. Andersson, Ingvar, History of Sweden,

281.

44. Higgs, The Physiocrats, 87.

45. Bain, Gustavus III, I, 163.

46. CMH, VI, 776.

47. Enc. Brit., XXI, 653d; Smith, Preserved,

History of Modern Culture, II, 460, 108.

48. Gustafson, Alrik, History of Swedish

Literature, 112, 136.

49. Bain, Gustavus III, I, 260; Horn, 355.

50. Bain, II, 239.

51. Horn, 359 f.

52. Gustafson, 139 f.

53. Bain, Gustavus III, II, 286-88; Gustafson,

139 f.

54. Horn, 369.

55. Bain, II, 210.

56. Ibid., I, 38.

57. Ibid., II, 157.

CHAPTER XXVII

1 . Shakespeare, Richard 11, Act II, Sc. i.

2. Nussbaum, History of the Economic In-

stitutions of Modern Europe, 130.

3. Namier, Sir Lewis, Crossroads of Power,

175-

4. Ashton, T. S., Economic History of Eng-

land, 179.

5. Watson, J. S., Reign of George III, 28.

6. Nussbaum, 73.

7. Hammond, J. L. and Barbara, The Vil-

lage Labourer, 17.

8. Usher, A. P., An Introd. to the Indus-

trial History of England, 323.

9. Quennell, M. and C, History of Every-

day Things in England, 79.

10. Mantoux, Paul, The Industrial Revolu-

tion in the 18th Century, 258.

1 1 . Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, in

History Today, April, 1956, 263.

12. Ibid., 263, 265.

13. The Age of Voltaire, 517.

14. Mantoux, 326.

15. Usher, Introd. to Industrial History, 326.

16. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 598.

17. Lipson, E., Growth of English Society,

190.

18. Mantoux, 385; George, London Life, 206-

7-

19. Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, I, 73.

20. Mantoux, 439; Smith, 60.

21. Ashton, 203.

22. Mantoux, 70.

23. Arthur Young in Turberville, Johnson's

England, I, 218.

24. Miiller-Lyer, F., History of Social Devel-

opment, 221.

25. Mantoux, 420.

26. Ibid., 421.

27. Barnes, H. E., Economic History of the

Western World, 313.

28. Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, History of

Trade Unionism, 51.

9. Ashton, 235.

0. Traill, H. D., Social England, V, 336.

1. Mantoux, 411.

2. Ibid., 413.

3. 413.

4. Lecky, History of England, III, 135-36.

5. Smith, Wealth of Nations, I, 59.

6. Rogers, J. E. T., Six Centuries of Work

and Wages, 89.

CHAPTER XXVIII

1. George, M. D., England in Transition,

218 f.

2. Ibid., 219.

3. 218.

4. Namier, Structure of Politics at the Ac-

cession of George III, 80.

5. New CMH, VII, 245.

6. Lecky, History of England, III, 172.

7. Wilson, P. W., William Pitt the Younger,

6.

8. Plumb, J. H., Men and Places, 22.

9. Namier, Structure of Politics, 77-79.

10. Ibid., 150.

11. Lecky, III, 171.

12. Blackstone, Sir W., Commentaries on the

Laws of England, 17 (p. 50 of orig. ed.).

13. Namier, Crossroads of Power, 133.

14. Thackeray, The Four Georges, 62.

15. Cf. Butterfleld, George III and the His-

torians, 175; Morley, John, Burke: a His-

torical Study, 9.

16. Lecky, III, n; Namier in History Today,

September, 1953, p. 615.

17. Watson, J. S., The Reign of George III,

6.

18. Age of Voltaire, Ch. iii, Sec. ix; present

volume, Ch. ii, Sees. 11, iv.

19. Walpole, Horace, Memoirs of the Reign

of George III, II, 331.

20. Burke, Edmund, speech on American

Taxation, in Speeches and Letters on

American Affairs, 28.

21. Burke, Vindication of Natural Society, 9.

22. Ibid.

23. 12-20.

24. 20.

NOTES

25. 22.

73-

26. 44.

27. 21.

74-

28. 48.

29. 50.

75-

30. Morley, John, Burke, 13.

76.

31. Vindication, 4 (preface).

77-

32. Burke, Ow Taste, and On the Sublime

and Beautiful, 45 f .

78.

33. Ibid.

79-

34- 93-

80.

35- 95-

36. Macaulay, Essays, I, 454.

81.

37. Morley, Burke, 30.

82.

38. /fo'i., 104.

83.

39. Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebri-

84.

des, 141.

85.

40. Stephen, Sir Leslie, History of English

86.

Thought in the 18th Century, I, 222.

87.

41. Parliamentary History, XXXVII, 363, in

88.

Buckle, H. T., An Introd. to the History

89.

of Civilization in England, I, 327.

90.

42. Piozzi, Hester Thrale, Anecdotes of the

Late Samuel Johnson, 138.

91.

43. Morley, Burke, 107.

92.

44. In Cambridge History of English Litera-

93-

ture, XI, 9.

94-

45. Enc. Brit., XI, 644c!.

95-

46. Moore, Thomas, Memoirs of the Life of

96.

Sheridan, I, 78.

97-

47. Drinkvvater, John, Charles James Fox, 9,

98.

1 1 .

48. Stael, Mme. de, Germany, I, 277.

99.

49. Thackeray, Four Georges, 87.

100.

50. Enc. Brit., IX, 568b.

IOI.

51. Drinkwater, 195.

102.

52. Walpole, Horace, Letters, Feb. 4, 1778.

103.

53. Lecky, III, 468.

54. Gibbon, Edward, Memoirs, 54.

104.

55. National Gallery, London; Dulwich Col-

lege; National Gallery, Washington.

105.

$6. Moore, Sheridan, I, 17.

106.

57. The Rivals, Act I, Sc. ii.

107.

58. Ibid., Ill, iii.

108.

59. In Taine, H., English Literature, 355.

109.

60. Enc. Brit., XVII, 973b.

no.

61. Wilson, P. W., William Pitt, 58.

III.

62. Dorn, W. L., Competition for Empire,

75-

63. Walpole, letter of Oct. 31, 1760.

113.

64. Laski, Harold, Political Thought in Eng-

114.

land, Locke to Bent ham, 144.

115.

65. Butterfield, George III, 173.

116.

66. Lecky, III, 61.

67. Macaulay, Essays, I, 431.

117.

68. Wilson, William Pitt, 44.

118.

69. Gibbon, Edward, Journal, 145.

119.

70. Enc. Brit., XXIII, 602b.

120.

71. Ibid.

121.

72. Sherwin, A Gentleman of Wit and Fash-

122.

ion: The Life and Times of George Sel-

I23.

™yn,. 47-53-

I24.

1009

Jefferson, D. W., Eighteenth-Century

Prose, 140.

Walpole, Memoirs of Reign of George

III, I, 248.

Enc. Brit., XXIII, 603d.

Walpole, Reign of George 111, I, 263.

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Cor-

sica and France, 5.

Walpole, Reign of George III, III, 239.

Lecky, III, 151.

S. MacCoby, ed., The English Radical

Tradition, 2.

Lecky, III, 175-76.

Ibid., 152.

MacCoby, 2.

Lecky, III, 153.

Junius, Letters, 3-6.

Junius, letter of Nov. 29, 1769.

Letters, pp. 134, 148.

Ibid., p. 29.

Lecky, II, 468.

Walpole, Reign of George III, IV, 78;

Lecky, III, 143.

MacCoby, 31.

Enc. Brit., XXIII, 603d.

CMH, VIII, 714.

Lecky, III, 268.

Ibid., 300.

Watson, Reign of George III, 174.

Ashton, 158; Traill, V, 115.

Hammond, J. L. and Barbara, Rise of

Modern Industry, 32.

Lecky, III, 299.

Drinkwater, 94.

CMH, VIII, 521.

Lecky, III, 331.

Beard, Charles and Mary, Rise of Amer-

ican Civilization, I, 212.

Peterson, Houston, Treasury of the

World's Great Speeches, 102-22.

Lecky, III, 530.

Ibid., 531.

545-

Peterson, 143-46.

CHE, IX, 6.

Sherwin, 205.

Burke, Speeches and Letters on American

Affairs, 84.

Ibid., 1 18-19.

Drinkwater, 145.

Walpole, letter of Sept. 11, 1775.

Lecky, IV, 82.

Churchill, Sir Winston, History of the

English-Speaking Peoples, II, 116.

Lecky, IV, 221.

Namier, Crossroads, 130.

Enc. Brit., V, 833d.

Namier, Crossroads, 164.

Walpole, letter of Mar. 5, 1772.

Lecky, III, 491.

CMH, VI, 570.

Ibid., 572.

IOIO

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

125. 578-80.

126. Walpole, letter of Mar. 2, 1773.

127. Wilson, William Pitt j 171.

128. Morley, Burke, 33; Namier, Crossroads,

165-67.

129. Watson, Reign of George 111, 319.

130. Morley, Burke, 125.

131. G. G. S., Life of R. B. Sheridan, 113.

132. Macaulay, Essays, I, 633.

133. Peterson, Great Speeches, 179.

134. Gibbon, Memoirs, 334.

135. Macaulay, I, 644.

136. Burke, Observations on the State of the

Nation (1769), in Lecky, V, 335n.

137. Burke, speech on "Relief of Protestant

Dissenters" (1773), in Morley, Burke, 69.

138. Wilson, William Pitt, 226.

139. Stephen, English Thought in the 18th

Century, I, 279.

140. Lecky, V, 449; Wilson, 235.

141. Burke, Reflections on the French Revo-

lution, 8.

142. Enc. Brit., IV, 418c.

143. Burke, Reflections, 35.

144. Ibid., 18 f.

145. 36.

146. 73.

147. Enc. Brit., IV, 418c!.

148. CHE, X, 285.

149. Morley, Burke, 179.

150. Ibid., 15.

151. Burke, Reflections, 93.

152. Ibid., 6.

153. CHE, XI, 11.

154. Letter to a Member of the National As-

sembly, in Reflections, 279.

155. Burke, 87.

156. Lecky, III, 218-19; Stephen, English

Thought in the 18th Century, I, 251-52;

Laski, 159, 171.

157. Laski, 147.

158. Sherwin, Selwyn, 275.

159. Taine, English Literature, 416.

160. Wilson, 325.

161. G. G. S., Life of Sheridan, 155.

CHAPTER XXIX

1. Eckermann and Soret, Conversations

with Goethe, Mar. 12, 1827.

2. Lecky, England in the 18th Century, VI,

139.

3. Quennell, Everyday Things, 93.

4. George, London Life, 103.

5. Quennell, 90.

6. George, 26.

7. Boswell, Hebrides, 31.

8. Lecky, VI, 153.

9. Nussbaum, History of Economic Institu-

tions, 128.

10. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1, 781.

1 1 . Sherwin, George Selwyn, 34.

12. Ibid., 125.

13. Drinkwater, Charles James Fox, 13.

14. Lecky, VI, 152.

15. Boswell, Jolmson, 978.

16. Age of Voltaire, Ch. ii, Sec. vi.

17. Wealth of Nations, II, 276.

18. Stephen, English Thought, I, 421.

19. Besant, London, 282-83.

20. Sherwin, 288.

21. Vicar of Wakefield, Ch. xxiv.

22. Boswell, Johnson, 338.

23. Lecky, VI, 268; Drinkwater, 131.

24. Lecky, VI, 269.

25. Boswell, Johnson, 846.

26. Walpole, Mar. 22, 1780.

27. CMH, VI, 187.

28. Buckle, An Introd. to the History . . .

of England, I, 32 m.

29. George, London Life, 135.

30. Botsford, J. B., English Society in the

1 8th Century, 332 f.

31. Blackstone, Commentaries, 128-29.

32. Enc. Brit., XX, 780a.

33. Ibid., 780c!.

34. Fay, Bernard, Franklin, 77.

35. Mowat, Age of Reason, 61.

36. Quennell, 9.

37. Watson, P. B., Some Women of France,

11-

38. Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of

George 111, IV, 158.

39. Boswell, Johnson, 597.

40. Burke, Reflections, 86.

41. Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy . . . ,

184.

42. Robertson, Short History of Freethought,

II, 206.

43. Boswell in Holland, 62.

44. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire, V, 554.

45. Fay, La Franc- Mag onnerie, 273.

46. Age of Voltaire, pp. 528, 580.

47. Cowper, The Task, ii, lines 378-94.

48. Stephen, English Thought, II, 375.

49. Walpole, June 3, 1780.

50. Walpole, June 7, 1780.

51. June 16, 1780.

52. Lecky, V, 189.

53. Sir F. D. McKinnon, in Turberville,

Johnson's England, II, 289.

54. Bentham, Jeremy, A Fragment on Gov-

ernment, 22.

55. Blackstone, Commentaries, Vol. I, p. 3.

$6. Commentaries (orig. ed.), Book I, Ch.

vii.

57. Commentaries (1914 ed.), Vol. II, p. 129.

58. Lecky, VI, 261.

59. Ibid., 255-58; Turberville, I, 17-21; John-

son, The Idler, Jan. 6, 1759.

60. Besant, London, 608.

61. Bentham, Fragment, 10.

62. Ibid.

NOTES

IOI I

63. Ch. iv, No. 20.

64. Bentham, Fragment, 3.

65. Ibid., 56.

66. Age of Voltaire, 139, 149, 529,687.

67. Mack, M. P., ]ere?ny Bentham, 102-5.

68. Bentham, Introduction to Principles of

Morals and Legislation, 189.

69. Clark, G. N., Seventeenth Century, 127.

70. Davidson, W. L., Political Thought in

England: The Utilitarians, 16.

71. Turberville, II, 178.

72. iMantzius, Karl, History of Theatrical

Art, V, 388.

73. Krutch, Samuel Johnson, i-ji.

74. Barton, Margaret, Garrick, 53.

75. Ibid., 59.

76. 50.

77. Burncv, Fanny, Diary, 12.

78. Hawkins, Sir John, Life of Samuel John-

son, 189.

79. Pearson, Hesketh, Johnson and Boswell,

282.

80. Johnson, Samuel, Works, I, 196.

81. Krutch, 37.

82. George, London Life, 288.

83. Boswell: The Ominous Years, 118.

84. Turberville, I, 195.

85. George, London, 171.

86. Ibid., 24.

87. Turberville, I, 171.

88. BoswelTs London Journal, 81.

89. Boswell, Johnson, 733.

CHAPTER XXX

1. Geiringer, Haydn, 95.

2. Ibid., 103.

3. Burnev, Charles, History of Music, II,

868.

4. Walpole, June 23, 1789.

5. National Portrait Gallery, London.

6. Burney, II, 9.

7. Sherwin, Selwyn, no.

8. Lewis, W. S., Horace Walpole, 107.

9. Turberville, II, no.

10. Dillon, Glass, 299.

11. Samuel Smiles in Mantoux, Industrial

Revolution, 385.

12. London, Royal Academy of Arts.

13. Turberville, II, 10.

14. Ibid., 91.

j 5. Wilson, William Pitt, 97.

16. Collection of Lady Ford.

17. Greenwich, Eng., National Maritime Mu-

seum.

18. London, National Gallery. (Unallocated

pictures are in private collections.)

19. National Portrait Gallery.

20. Ibid.

21. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, Portraits, no.

22. National Portrait Gallery.

23. Ibid.

24. San Marino, Calif., Huntington Art Gal-

lery.

25. Waterhouse, Reynolds, no.

26. Ibid., 127.

27. 79.

28. 87.

29. 63.

30. 267.

31. 291; London, National Gallery.

32. Waterhouse, 57.

33. Wallace Collection, London.

34. Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses, 3.

35. Wilenski, R. H., English Painting, 150.

36. Reynolds, Portraits, 167.

37. Boswell, Johnson, 651.

38. National Portrait Gallery.

39. Royal Academy of Arts.

40. Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses, 78 (Dis-

course vi), 8 (1).

41. Ibid., 7 (1).

42. H 00 •

43. Ibid.

44- 30 On).

45. Ibid.

46. 264 (xv).

47. Wilenski, 113.

48. Allan Cunningham in Clark, B. H., Great

Short Biographies, 789.

49. Gillet, Louis, La Peinture, xvii e et xviii e

siecles, 416.

50. Washington, National Gallery.

51. Edinburgh, National Gallery.

52. Millar, Oliver, Thomas Gainsborough, n.

53. Clark, B. H., Biographies, 796.

54. Craven, Thomas, Treasury of Art Mas-

terpieces, 214.

S$. Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses, 230 (xiv).

$6. Waterhouse, Gainsborough, 36.

57. Pijoan, Joseph, History of Art, III, 479.

58. Reynolds, Fifteen Discourses, 227 (xiv).

CHAPTER XXXI

1. Lecky, England in the iSth Century, IV,

3H-

2. New CMH, VIII, 28.

3. Ibid., 714.

4. Lecky, IV, 317.

5. D' Alton, E. A., History of Ireland, IV,

545 ■; Enc. Brit., X, 659d.

6. Fay, La Franc-Magonnerie, 399.

7. Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, I, 70.

8. Johnson, Works, II, 271, 345.

9. Boswell, Hebrides, 135.

10. Enc. Brit., XX, i69d.

11. Snyder, F. B., Life of Robert Burns, 189.

12. Age of Voltaire, 184.

13. Ibid., 507-86.

14. 586-602.

15. 139-61.

16. Reid, Thomas, Works, I, 7, 8 1, 91.

IOI2

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

17-

1 8.

19.

20.

21.

23-

24.

25-

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

3 1 -

32-

33-

34<

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40.

4 1 -

42.

43-

44-

45-

46.

47-

48.

49-

50.

5i-

52.

53.

54.

55-

56.

57.

58.

59-

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

/£/</., 12.

106.

Hume, David, Treatise of Human Na-

ture, I, 254.

Reid, Works, 423.

Boswell's Journal, Sept. 16, 1769 (Bos-

well in Search of a Wife, 293).

London National Portrait Gallery.

Edinburgh National Gallery.

Private Collection.

Carlyle, Schiller, 103.

Walpole, July 11, 1759.

Gibbon, Memoirs, 122.

Stewart, Dugald, Life of Robertson

(1811), 305.

Gibbon, Memoirs, Appendix 22, p. 296.

Black, Art of History, 15.

Brandes, Goethe, I, 84.

See The Age of Faith, 498.

Thomson, Derick, The Gaelic Sources

of Macpherson's "Ossian," 4-5, 80.

Macpherson, James, Poems, 40 (Fingal,

Book I).

Ibid., 49, 52, 54.

415-16.

Johnson, Works, XII, 375; Boswell, Heb-

rides, 163.

Boswell, Johnson, 496.

Thomson, Derick, 16 f.

Buckle, lb, 347.

Smith, Adam, Moral and Political Philos-

ophy, 75.

Ibid., 255.

191.

Laski, Political Thought in England, 99,

1 01, 188; see also Age of Voltaire, 155.

Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, 107.

Ibid., 113.

121.

See Age of Voltaire, 138.

Wealth of Nations, II, 180.

Ibid., I, 26, 29.

I, 119.

129.

129.

42.

75, 2.

73.

72, 345-

Rosebery, Lord, Pitt, 4.

Waterhouse, Reynolds, 329.

Burns's autobiographical letter to John

Moore, in Neilson, W. A., Robert Burns,

1.

In Snyder, Burns, 54.

Ibid., 67.

67.

239.

See "The Ordination."

Witte, Schiller and Burns, 10.

Hill, J. C, Love Songs and Heroines of

Robert Burns, vii-x.

68.

69.

70.

7 1 -

72.

73

74-

75-

76.

77-

78.

79-

80.

81.

82.

83.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

00.

91.

92.

93-

94.

95-

96.

97-

98.

99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

106.

107.

108.

109.

no.

in.

112.

113.

114.

115.

116.

117.

118.

119.

120.

121.

122.

123.

124.

Burns, Robert, Works, I, 85, 75.

Ibid., 10 1.

Witte, Schiller and Burns, 10.

"The Rigs o' Barley."

Burns, Works, I, 85, 77.

Ibid., 50.

Brown, Hilton, There Was a Lad, 23, $0.

Carlyle, Essay on Burns, in Works, XIII,

294-96.

Burns, Works, 1, 162.

Keith, Christina, The Russet Coat, 81.

Burns, Works, I, 141.

Brown, Hilton, 26.

Snyder, 297.

Ibid., 308.

Hill, J. C, 102.

Snyder, 360, 374, 379, 390.

Burns, Robert, and Mrs. Dunlop, Corre-

spondence, 11, viii.

Burns, Works, I, 24.

Currie, James, Life of Robert Burns, in

Burns, Works, II, 58.

Robert Chambers in Snyder, 432.

Snyder, 432-35.

Ibid., 430.

BoswelVs London Journal, 108.

Pearson, 107.

Boswell's London Journal, 66.

Ibid., 93.

66.

93-

J 37-

206-9.

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany

and Switzerland, 44.

Boswell, Johnson, 237-40.

BoswelVs London Journal, 251, 281.

Boswell in Holland, Sept. 18, 1763.

Ibid., 387-00.

46.

157-

259-61.

314.

328.

330.

349-

368.

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany,

134-

Ibid., 117.

164-66.

241.

Boswell in Search of a Wife, 24.

Ibid., 36-37.

76.

207.

240.

Boswell for the Defense, 140.

Boswell: The Ominous Years, 34-48.

Ibid., 304-7.

Macaulay, Essays, II, 539-41.

Boswell: The Ominous Years, 338.

NOTES

IOI3

125. Boswell in Search of a Wife, 40.

126. Boswell: The Ominous Years, Introd., x.

CHAPTER XXXII

10.

11.

12.

'3-

14.

15-

*7>

18.

19.

20.

21.

22,

2 3-

24.

2 5-

26.

2 7-

28.

29.

30.

3i-

3 2 -

33-

34-

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40,

4i-

4 2 -

43-

44-

45-

46.

47-

Johnson, The Idler, No. 40.

Brooke, Henry, The Fool of Quality, 80.

Cross, Wilbur, Life and Times of Lau-

rence Sterne, 99.

Ibid., 179.

Ibid.

183.

Par ton, Life of Voltaire, II, 267.

Mossner, E. C, Life of David Hume, 503.

Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, Book

VIII, Ch. ii.

Ibid., Book IV, Ch. xxxviii.

Cross, 263.

Sterne, Letters to Eliza, x.

Ibid., letter of Apr. 14, 1767.

Sterne, Journal, Apr. 24, 1767.

Moore, Thomas, Life of Lord Byron, in

Taine, English Literature, 477.

Macaulay, Essays, II, $6$.

Burney, Fanny, Diary, 17.

Burney, Fanny, Evelina, 22.

Letter of Mar. 5, 1772.

Walpole, Feb. 28, 1769.

See Age of Voltaire, 95-98.

Lewis, Horace Walpole, i2n; Wharton,

Grace and Philip, Wits and Beaux of So-

ciety, II, 28.

Walpole, "Reminiscences," in Letters, I,

xciii.

Letter of Mar. 2, 1773.

Nicolson, Harold, The Age of Reason,

249.

Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of

George III, II, 154.

Letter of Nov. 24, 1774.

Nicolson, 248.

Ibid., 249.

Letter of July 24, 1756.

Letter of Dec. 2, 1762.

Sherwin, Selwyn, 104.

Letter of Nov. 11, 1766.

Walpole, Memoirs of the Last Ten Years

of the Reign of George the Second, p. xl.

Letter of June 15, 1768.

Oct. 1, 1782.

Nov. 11, 1763.

Lewis, Horace Walpole, 5.

Feb. 7, 1772.

Jan. 12, 1766.

Letter to John Chute, January, 1766.

Lewis, 20.

Wharton, II, 83.

Lewis, 81.

Jan. 18, 1759.

Gibbon, Memoirs, introd. by G. B. Hill,

xxi; Robertson, J. M., Gibbon, 1.

Memoirs, 20.

48. Age of Voltaire, 127.

49. Memoirs, 45.

50. Ibid., 51, 54-

51. 65.

52. 69.

53. 105.

54. 106, 156.

55. Gambier-Parry, M., Madame Necker, 16.

$6. Gibbon, Journal, introd., Ixxii.

57. Memoirs, 107.

58. Ibid., 120.

59. Gibbon, Essai sur V etude de la litterature,

in Miscellaneous Writings, No. 1.

60. Ibid., liii.

61. Memoirs, 143.

62. Journal, 22.

63. Ibid., 136.

64. Memoirs, 153.

65. Robertson, J. M., Gibbon, 117; Memoirs,

158.

66. Ibid., 167.

67. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

final page.

68. Memoirs, Appendix 30.

69. Ibid., 172.

70. 189.

71. 19m.

72. 193.

73. Robertson, Gibbon, 119; Drinkwater,

Charles James Fox, 206.

74. Low, D. M., Edward Gibbon, 282.

75. Memoirs, 190.

76. Ibid., 195.

77. 195.

78. Decline and Fall, I, 316. Renan agreed

with Gibbon about the Antonines; see

his Marc Aurele, 479, Calmann-Levy,

Paris, n.d.

79. Decline and Fall, I, 316.

80. Ibid., 250.

81. 9 and 10 William III, c. 22.

82.. Decline and Fall, II, 72-73.

83. Ibid.

84. 102-5.

85. 182.

86. 244; see Voltaire's view in The Age of

Voltaire, 486.

87. Low, 260.

88. Sainte-Beuve, English Portraits, 152-53.

89. Low, 258.

90. Gibbon, Miscellaneous Writings, 277.

91. Walpole, Jan. 27, 1781.

92. Memoirs, 211.

93. Decline and Fall, 432-33.

94. Memoirs, 213.

95. Ibid., 215.

96. Low, 302.

97. Memoirs, 214.

98. Walpole, June 5, 1788.

99. Decline and Fall, VI, 6$6.

100. Memoirs, 115.

10 1. Ibid., %gn.

1014

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

102. Fuglum, Per, Edward Gibbon, 15.

103. Memoirs, 240.

104. Boswell, Johnson, Mar. 19, 1781.

105. Low, 222-23.

106. Memoirs, 230-31.

107. Low, 320.

108. Memoirs, 228, 234; G. G. S., Life of

Sheridan, 122.

109. Memoirs, Appendix 55.

no. Ibid., 24m.

in. Appendix 66.

112. Sainte-Beuve, English Portraits, 159.

113. Memoirs, Appendix 66.

114. Ibid., 339 and Appendix 62.

115. Gibbon, Correspondence, II, 93, 298, in

Memoirs, 339.

116. Correspondence, II, 255, in Robertson,

Gibbon, 120.

117. Gibbon, Autobiography, Everyman's Li-

brary ed., in Gay, P., Voltaire's Politics,

259.

1 18. Memoirs, introd. by G. B. Hill, xii.

119. Low, 344.

120. Gibbon, letter of Nov. 11, 1793.

121. Decline and Fall, 1776 ed., I, 206.

122. Bury, J. B., in Enc. Brit., X, 33 id.

123. Decline and Fall, ed. J. B. Bury, I, xli.

124. Ibid., xlvii; Robertson, Gibbon, 15; Black,

Art of History, 161.

125. Decline and Fall, IV, 673.

126. Ibid., 99.

127. I, 314.

128. Voltaire, Works, XVIa, 250-51.

1 29. Decline and Fall, III, 97.

130. VI, 337.

131. Cf. Fuglum, 136.

132. Decline and Fall, Ch. lxiv.

*33- V, 237.

134. Ibid., 423.

135. HI, 522.

136. Preface to Milman ed., p. 6.

137. CHE, X, 445.

138. Seebohm, Frederick, The Age of John-

son, 228.

139. Walpole, letter of Nov. 15, 1764; Reign

of George III, II, 25.

140. Nevill, J. C, Thomas Chatterton, 96.

141. Chatterton, Complete Poetical Works,

207.

142. Ibid., 64.

143. Walpole, letters of June 19, 1777, and

July 24, 1778.

144. Irving, Washington, Oliver Goldsmith,

266.

145. Stanza xlv.

146. Cowper, William, Poems, 135.

147. Sainte-Beuve, English Portraits, 173.

148. Cowper, 188.

149. CHE, XI, 89.

150. Sainte-Beuve, English Portraits, 176-77.

151. Cowper, 87.

152. See Age of Voltaire, 331.

153. Cowper, The Task, Book I, line 749.

154. Ibid., line 718.

155. II, lines 1-7.

156. II, 11-28.

157. 206.

158. Cowper, Poems, 172.

159. Enc. Brit., X, 495a (by Macaulay).

160. Boswell, Johnson, 252.

161. Ibid., 305.

162. Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 37, 170.

163. Thackeray, English Humourists, in

Works, 28 m.

164. Irving, 170.

165. Vicar of Wakefield, preface.

166. Boswell, Johnson, 449.

167. Barton, Garrick, 256.

168. E.g., Reynolds, Portraits, 38.

169. Irving, 121.

170. Garnett and Gosse, English Literature,

III, 342; Irving, 320.

171. Boswell for the Defense, 167.

172. Thackeray, English Humourists, 291.

173. Ibid.

174. Goldsmith, Oliver, Select Works, 194.

CHAPTER XXXIII

1. Boswell, Johnson, 17.

2. Boswell, Hebrides, 142.

3. Krutch, Johnson, 12.

4. Pearson, Johnson and Boswell, 6.

5. Krutch, 10.

6. Boswell, Johnson, 564.

7. Enc. Brit., XIII, io9d.

8. Hill, G. Birkbeck, Johnsonian Miscella-

nies, II, 309; Greene, Donald, Politics of

Samuel Johnson, 133.

9. Johnson, London, line 202.

10. Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson, 55-57.

11. Krutch, 49.

12. Ibid.

13. Turberville, Johnson's England, I, 3i8n.

14. Boswell, Johnson, 94.

15. Enc. Brit., XIII, uoa.

16. Boswell, Johnson, 1177.

17. Hawkins, 66.

18. Hume, David, Essays, Literary, Moral,

and Political, 52.

19. Johnson, Works, I, 213.

20. Ibid., 215.

21. 217.

22. Hawkins, 98.

23. Johnson, The Rambler, 257-64.

24. Boswell, Holland Journal, Sept. 23, 1763.

25. Davis, Bertram, Jolmson before Boswell,

72-

26. Hill, G. B., Miscellanies, I, 136.

27. Boswell, Johnson, 165.

28. Ibid., 242.

29. Schuster, M. L., Treasury of the World's

Great Letters, 130.

30. Boswell, Jolmson, 992.

NOTES

3i. Ibid., 157.

86.

32. Boswell for the Defense, 55 (Mar.

23.

87.

J 77 2 )-

88.

33. Johnson's Dictionary, preface; p. 20.

89.

34. Ibid., 284.

90.

35. Boswell, Johnson, 179.

36. Arthur Murphy in Johnson, Works, I,

91.

89.

92.

37. Works, V, 419.

93-

38. Rasselas, Ch. vi.

94-

39. Ibid., Ch. xix.

95-

40. Ch. xxviii.

96.

41. Ch. xli.

97-

42. Boswell, Johnson, 228.

98.

43. Ibid., 260.

44. Wharton, Grace and Philip, Wits

and

99.

Beaux of Society, I, 366.

100.

45. Krutch, 264.

IOI.

46. Pearson, 184.

102.

47. Boswell, Johnson, iji.

103.

48. Bailey, John, Dr. Johnson and His Circle,

j 04.

35.

105.

49. Boswell, 542.

106.

50. Boswell for the Defense, 175.

107.

51. Boswell, Hebrides, 189.

108.

52. Pearson, 195.

109.

53. BosweWs London Journal, 234.

T IO.

54. Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel

Johnson, 190.

III.

55. National Portrait Gallery.

T 12.

56. National Gallery, London.

113.

57. Hawkins, 293.

114.

58. Turberville, I, 384.

115.

59. Boswell, Johnson, 283; Hawkins, 147.

Il6.

60. Boswell, Hebrides, 136.

117.

61. Boswell, Johnson, 49.

Il8.

62. Pearson, 81.

63. Boswell: The Ominous Years, 264.

119.

64. Bailey, 29.

120.

6$. Boswell, Johnson, 955.

121.

66. Ibid., 1 197.

122.

67. 293.

I23.

68. Piozzi, 181.

I24.

69. Hawkins, 122.

I25.

70. Rasselas, Ch. xliii.

126.

71. Hawkins, 132.

I27.

72. Boswell, 586.

128.

73. Turberville, II, 198.

I29.

74. Krutch, 369.

I30.

75. This is Hume's report, in Krutch,

221,

I3I.

and Pearson, 48; the phraseology

was

132.

made more decorous in Boswell.

76. Boswell, Hebrides, 144.

'33-

77. Walpole, May 26, 1791.

'34-

78. Irvine, Goldsmith, 183.

n?.

79. Piozzi, 70.

136.

80. Ibid., 57.

»37-

81. Boswell, Johnson, 11 24.

138.

82. Ibid., 1 1 26.

M9-

83. Bailey, 30.

140.

84. Boswell, 351.

141.

85. Krutch, 166.

142.

1015

Boswell, Hebrides, 200.

Boswell, Johnson, 343.

Boswell: The Ominous Years, 133.

Low, Gibbon, 223.

Love joy, Arthur, Essays in the History

of Ideas, 39.

Walpole, Mar. 28, 1786.

In Gibbon, Memoirs, iion.

Boswell, Hebrides, 11.

Boswell, Johnson, in.

Hebrides, 140.

Johnson, 988.

Pearson, 262.

Greene, Donald, Politics of Samuel John-

son, 270.

Boswell, Johnson, 744.

Ibid., 1025.

807.

362.

Bailey, 104.

Boswell, Johnson, 807.

Ibid., 410.

363.

525-

2 74-

Hawkins, 208.

Boswell, Johnson, 26J, 414, 469, 514, 740;

BosweWs London Journal, 276, 281.

Ibid., 253; Johnson, Works, XII, in.

Boswell, Johnson, 787.

Ibid., 341.

309.

486.

Greene, 161.

Ibid., 167.

Taxation No Tyranny, in Works, XII,

225.

Boswell, Johnson, 508.

Johnson, Works, XII, i98n.

Hawkins, 222.

Boswell, Johnson, 505.

Ibid., 507.

654.

In Greene, 195.

Boswell, Johnson, 33, 105 1; Piozzi, 14.

Boswell, Johnson, 1 102-3.

Ibid., 282.

421; Bailey, 103.

Pearson, 252.

Ibid., 251.

Lives of the English Poets, I, 63 ("Mil-

ton").

Rasselas, Ch. xxxi; Hawkins, 131.

Lives, I, 63.

Pearson, 248.

Boswell, Johnson, 352, 807.

Ibid., 309.

308.

Hopkins, Marv A., Hannah More, 61.

Hawkins, 198.

Johnson, Works, X, 169.

Ibid., 137, 149.

ioi6

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

143. Krutch, 289.

2 3-

144. Boswell, Hebrides, 178.

24.

145. Ibid., 268.

2 5-

146. Works, XII, 413.

26.

147. Pearson, 237.

2 7-

148. Boswell, Johnson, 68511.

28.

149. Lives, 1, 93.

150. Walpole, Feb. 19, 1781.

29.

151. Walpole, Apr. 14, 1781.

30.

152. Piozzi, 186.

3i-

153. Krutch, 522.

3 2 -

154. Ibid., 509.

33-

155. Schuster, Treasury of the World's Great

Letters, 133.

34-

156. Burney, Fanny, Diary, 92.

35-

157. Boswell, Johnson, 1109.

158. Krutch, 547.

36.

159. Boswell, Johnson, 1059.

160. Hawkins, 255.

37-

161. Ibid., 259.

162. Krutch, 551.

38.

163. Boswell, Johnson, 1181.

39-

164. Davis, Bertram, Johnson before Boswell,

vii.

40.

165. CHE, X, 213.

4i-

166. Boswell: The Ominous Years, 103.

4 2 -

167. E.g., Boswell, Note Book, xvii, 1, 23;

43-

Krutch, Johnson, 384.

168. E.g., Boswell: The Ominous Years, in.

44.

169. Boswell, Johnson, x.

45-

170. Hannah More, Letters, 102.

46.

171. CHE,X, 213.

47-

172. Letter of May 26, 1791.

48.

49.

CHAPTER XXXIV

50.

5 2 -

1. Gooch, Maria Theresa, 124.

2. Ibid.,'].

1 8

53-

3. 0.

4. Bearne, Mrs., A Court Fainter, 323.

54-

55-

5. Ercole, Gay Court Life, iyi.

5 6.

6. Castelot, Andre, Queen of France, 20.

57-

7. Zweig, Stefan, Marie Antoinette, 5.

8. Padover, Saul, Life and Death of Louis

58.

XVI, 30.

59-

9. Gooch, Maria Theresa, 122.

60.

10. Padover, 30.

61.

n. Castelot, 37.

62.

12. Ibid., 40.

63.

13. Zweig, 21.

14. Castelot, 64.

64.

65.

15. Ibid., 73; Dakin, Turgot and the Ancien

66.

Regime, 19.

67.

16. Walpole, July 10, 1774.

68.

17. Mathiez, Albert, The French Revolution,

69.

9*

18. Tocqueville, V Ancien Regime, 122.

70.

19. Maine, Sir Henry, Ancient Law, 48.

7i-

20. Cobban, Alfred, History of Modern

7 2 -

France, I, 127.

73-

21. Taine, The Ancient Regime, 95.

74-

22. Ibid., 68-69.

75-

Mathiez, 5.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 118, 98.

Ercole, 370.

Castelot, 85.

Campan, Mme., Memoirs, I, 317.

Mossiker, Frances, The Queen's Neck-

lace, 201.

Ibid., 163.

Castelot, 66, 158.

Lacroix, The Eighteenth Century, 35.

Vigee-Lebrun, Mme., Memoirs, $6.

Desnoiresterres, Voltaire et la societe

frangaise, VIII, 294.

Castelot, 174.

Cobban, Alfred, Historians and the

Causes of the French Revolution, 5, 14.

Mme. Campan gives several examples

{Memoirs, I, 190-94).

Cobban, History of Modern France, I,

115.

Castelot, 123.

Fay, Bernard, Louis XVI, ou La Fin (Tun

monde, 311.

Havens, G. R., The Age of Ideas, 392.

In Mossiker, Queen's Necklace, 160.

Castelot, 119.

Padover, The Revolutionary Emperor,

119, 125.

Ibid., 119.

Castelot, 122.

Ibid., 121.

I24 \

Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 137.

Padover, Louis XVI, 102.

Segur, Marquis de, Marie Antoinette, 104.

Ibid.

Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 491.

"The Good-natured King."

Campan, Mme., Memoirs, 1, 178.

Padover, Louis XVI, 1 18-19.

Funck-Brentano, V Ancien Regime, 545.

Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ed. J. B. Bury,

IV, 529.

Padover, Louis XVI, 23.

Campan, Mme., I, i85n.

Fay, Louis XVI, 8.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 304.

Funck-Brentano, 546.

Campan, I, 180.

Stryienski, Eighteenth Century, 213.

Gooch, Catherine the Great, 230.

Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 350.

Dakin, Turgot, 126.

Say, Leon, Turgot, 10 1.

Robinson, J. H., Readings in European

History, 426.

See Age of Louis XIV, 160.

Voltaire, Works, XXIb, 347.

Parton, Life of Voltaire, II, 535.

Martin, H., Histoire de France, XVI, 340.

Dakin, 187; Padover, Louis XVI, 75.

Say, 12.

NOTES

IOI7

76. Dakin, 152; Tocqueville, 190.

77. Tocqueville, 190.

78. Say, 161-66; Funck-Brentano, 554.

79. Renard, Georges, Guilds in the Middle

Ages, 125.

80. Martin, H., France, XVI, 371.

81. Ibid., 372.

82. Taine, Ancient Regime, 237.

83. Padover, Louis XVI, 92.

84. Dakin, 221.

85. Say, 185-91.

86. Dakin, 263; Martin, H., France, XVI, 379.

87. Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 480.

88. Say, 43.

89. Warwick, Mirabeau and the French

Revolution, 104. On L'Hopital see The

Age of Reason Begins, 337-45.

90. Jaures, Jean, Histoire socialiste de la

Revolution frangaise, I, 159.

91. Martin, H., France, XVI, 387.

92. Taine, Ancient Regime, 302.

93. Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 488.

94. Campan, Mme., 1, 181.

95. Tocqueville, 191.

96. Lecky, History of England in the 18th

Century, V, 39-41.

97. Padover, Louis XVI, 108; Martin, H.,

France, XVI, 416.

98. Becker, Carl, The Heavenly City of the

i8th-Century Philosophers, 77.

99. Lecky, IV, 50.

100. History Today, October, 1957, 659.

101. Martin, H., France, XVI, 428.

102. Morris, R. B., The Peacemakers, 104-7.

103. CMH, VIII, 93.

104. Gooch, Catherine the Great, 97.

105. Martin, H., France, XVI, 500-1.

106. Ibid., 504.

107. Mahan, A. T., Influence of Sea Power

upon History, 337.

108. Morris, Peacemakers, 178-81.

109. Lecky, IV, 256-59.

no. Ibid.

in. Morris, 277.

112. Ibid., 461.

113. Tocqueville, 155.

114. Ibid., 119.

CHAPTER XXXV

1. Par ton, Life of Voltaire, II, 491.

2. Ibid., 496.

3. Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire, 427.

4. Chaponniere, Voltaire chez les calvinistes,

162.

5. Faguet, Literary History of France, 508.

6. Lanson, Gustave, Voltaire, 158.

7. Torrey, N. L., The Spirit of Voltaire, 150.

8. Brandes, Voltaire, II, 317.

9. Wagniere in Parton, II, 564.

10. Ibid.

11. Note to Walpole, Letters, VII, 35.

14.

i5-

16.

i7-

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

2 3-

2 4-

2 5-

26.

2 7-

28.

29.

30.

3 1 -

3 2 -

33-

34-

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40.

4*-

4 2 -

43-

44.

45-

46.

47-

48.

49-

50.

51-

5 2 -

53-

54-

55-

5 6.

57-

58.

59-

60.

61.

62.

Brandes, Voltaire, II, 322; Parton, II, 367.

Desnoiresterres, Voltaire et la societe

frangaise, VIII, 199-200; Campan, I, 323;

Martin, H., Histoire de France, XVI,

393-

Parton, Life of Voltaire, II, 568.

Brandes, II, 324.

Pomeau, 263.

Noyes, Voltaire, 583.

Pomeau, 307.

Desnoiresterres, VIII, 230.

Lanson, Voltaire, 200.

Desnoiresterres, VIII, 232-33.

Ibid., 235.

236.

2 45-

Wiener, Leo, Anthology of Russian Lit-

erature, I, 357.

Noyes, 600.

Brandes, Voltaire, II, 336.

Ibid., 337.

Desnoiresterres, VIII, 283-91.

Vigee-Lebrun, Memoirs, 199.

Ducros, French Society in the 18th Cen-

tury, 121.

Desnoiresterres, VIII, 302.

Ibid., 306; Brandes, Voltaire, II, 340.

Strachey, Lytton, Books and Characters,

12m.

Brandes, II, 341.

Desnoiresterres, VIII, 334, 365.

Pomeau, 447.

Desnoiresterres, VIII, 359.

Ibid., 366; Crequi, Marquise de, Souve-

nirs, 235n.

Brandes, Voltaire, II, 348.

Gooch, Catherine the Great, 70.

In Brandes, Voltaire, II, 94n.; the order

has been slightly changed.

Ibid., 354.

Parton, II, 494.

Voltaire, La Guerre de Geneve, in Jo-

sephson, Rousseau, 479.

Hendel, Charles, Citizen of Geneva, 92.

Josephson, 481.

Hendel, Citizen, 98.

Ibid., 99 (letter of Oct. 10, 1769).

Ibid., 101 (letter of Jan. 17, 1770).

See Age of Voltaire, $6$.

Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 485.

Morley, Rousseau, II, 156.

Josephson, 495.

Rousseau, The Confessions, II, end.

Josephson, 501.

Ibid.

Desnoiresterres, VII, 488;

Vaughn, C. E., Political Writings of

Rousseau, II, 445.

Ibid., 376, 381.

Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean- Jacques,

p. x.

Ibid., 19.

ioi8

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

63.

64.

6 5 .

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

7 1 -

7 2 -

73-

74-

75-

76.

77-

78.

79-

80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

93-

94-

95-

96.

97-

98.

99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

106.

107.

108.

10.9.

64-67.

120, 124.

117-18.

292, 302, 327.

Third Dialogue.

Rousseau juge, 319 f.

Josephson, 508.

Reveries of a Solitary, Ninth Promenade.

Josephson, 518.

Masson, P. M., La Religion de Rousseau,

II, 213-15, 301-2.

Ibid., 246.

Josephson, 502; Faguet, Vie de Rousseau,

399-

Josephson, 527.

Babbitt, Irving, Spanish Character and

Other Essays, 225.

Cassirer, The Question of Rousseau, 39.

Lemaitre, Rousseau, 247.

Lanson, Histoire de la litterature fran-

gaise, 798.

Goethe, Truth and Fiction, II, 236.

Schiller, "Rousseau," in Poe?ns, 25. In

Works.

In Alaritain, Three Reformers, 225.

Collection complete des oeuvres, I, 186.

Cassirer, Question of Rousseau, 39.

Pomeau, 340.

Masson, P. M., La Religioii de Rousseati,

III, 239-44.

Ibid., 74.

In Alorley, Rousseau and His Era, II, 273.

Masson, La Religion, III, 227.

Burke, "Letter to a Member of the Na-

tional Assembly," in Reflections on the

French Revolution, 161.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 317.

Lemaitre, 361.

Lanson, Histoire de la litterature fran-

gaise, 798.

Crocker, The Embattled Philosopher,

310.

Segur, Julie de Lespinasse, 402.

Letter of Feb. 27, 1777, in Hazard, Euro-

pean Thought, 323.

Ford, Aiiriam de, Love Children, 212.

Havens, Age of Ideas, 351.

Crocker, Embattled Philosopher, 400.

Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, "Aver-

tissement," v-vi.

Crocker, Embattled Philosopher, 433.

Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Cen-

tury, 11,213.

Schapiro, J. S., Condor cet, 69.

Russell, Bertrand, History of Western

Philosophy, yn.

Schapiro, Condor cet, 91.

Alartin, H., France, XVI, 525.

Schapiro, 96-97.

So reads the ms. in the Bibliotheque de

1'Institut.

See The Age of Voltaire, 775.

in.

112.

113.

114.

115.

116.

117.

118.

119.

120.

121.

122.

123.

124.

125.

126.

127.

128.

129.

130.

131.

132.

■33

Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Pic-

ture of the Progress of the Mind, p. v.

Ibid., 105.

10.

179.

Aulard, A., The French Revolution, I,

123.

Schapiro, 80, 88.

Condorcet, 193.

Ibid., x-xi, 175.

4-

188.

169.

202.

Schapiro, 107.

Tocqueville, 8.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 317.

Aulard, I, 83.

Robertson, J. M., Short History of Free-

thought, II, 284.

Aulard, I, 83.

Robertson, J. M., Short History, 288.

Tocqueville, 165.

In See, Henri, Economic and Social Con-

ditions in France during the 18th Cen-

tury, 107.

Padover, Louis XVI, 6, 7, 11.

Tocqueville, 156.

Alasson, P. Al., La Religion de Rousseau,

HI, 237-

CHAPTER XXXVI

See, Economic and Social Conditions, 61;

Jaures, Histoire socialists, I, 60; Taine

(The French Revolution, I, 168) esti-

mated the value of church property at

four billion livres.

Herbert, Sydney, The Fall of Feudalisvt

in France, 40.

Alornet, Daniel, Les Origines intellectu-

elles de la Revolution frangaise, 278.

Ibid., 274; See, 66.

Ibid.; Taine, French Revolution, I, 162-63.

See, 66.

Taine, French Revolution, I, 167.

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the

French Revolution, 142.

Sanger, W., History of Prostitution, 131.

See, 23; Alornet, 276.

Vigee-Lebrun, Memoirs, 14.

Lacroix, Paul, The Eighteenth Century

in France, 346.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 291.

M or net, 335.

Lacroix, 265.

Alornet, 331.

Fay, Louis XVI, 280.

Alartin, H., Histoire de France, XVI, 512.

Fay, 280.

Leckv, England in the /8th Century, V,

308. '

NOTES

IOI9

21. Martin, H., France, XVI, 353. 72.

22. A4ornet, 212.

23. Funck-Brentano, UAncien Regime, 554.

24. A4artin, H., France, XVI, 585. 73.

25. Tocqueville, 9. 74.

26. Herbert, S., Fall of Feudalism, 84. 75.

27. See Age of Voltaire, 776-80. 76.

28. In Crocker, Age of Crisis, 392. 77.

29. In Becker, Heavenly City, 80. 78.

30. Carlyle, Essay on Diderot. 79.

31. Restif de La Bretonne, La Vie de mon 80.

pere, 90 f. 81.

32. Taine, Ancient Regime, 380. 82.

33. Laclos, Choderlos de, Les Liaisons dan- 83.

gereuses, Letter lxvi. 84.

34. See Plato, The Republic, Nos. 338-44. 85.

35. De Sade, Comte, Juliette, in Crocker, 86.

Age of Crisis, 15. 87.

36. Guerard, Albert, Life and Death of an 88.

Ideal, 294. 89.

37. Mme. d'Oberkirch in Taine, Ancient Re- 90.

gime, 163. 91.

38. Kohler, Carl, History of Costume, 366. 92.

39. Boehn, Modes and Manners, IV, 215. 93.

40. In Loomis, Du Barry, 169.

41. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 94.

near end of Ch. xix.

42. Gibbon, Correspondence, II, 46, in Me?n- 95.

oirs, 2 2 2n.

43. See Age of Voltaire, 301-2. 96.

44. Walpole, Dec. 2, 1765.

45. Koven, Anna de, Horace Walpole and 97.

Mme. du Deffand, 102, 116.

46. Ibid., 127. 9 8 -

47. Watson, Paul, Some Women of France, 99-

90. 100.

48. Ibid. 10 1.

49. 89; Koven, 157. 102.

50. Ibid., 195. 103.

51. Crocker, Embattled Philosopher, 354. 104.

52. Gambier-Parry, Madame Necker, 78. 105.

53. Ibid., 215. 106.

54. Crequi, Marquise de, Souvenirs, 192-94. 107.

55. Gambier-Parry, 250. 108.

56. Anderson, E., Letters of Mozart, II, 787. 109.

57. Einstein, Mozart, 356.

58. Lespinasse, Letters, 138.

59. Rolland, Romain, Essays in Music, 147. no.

60. Grove's Dictionary of Music, II, 456. 1 1 1.

61. Young, Arthur, Travels in France, 6j. 1 12.

62. Louvre. 113.

63. In the Institute, Paris. 114.

64. Dilke, Lady Emilia, French Architects 115-

and Sculptors, 130. It is now in the £cole

des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

6$. Time magazine, Jan. 31, 1764, p. 44. 1 16.

66. Ibid. 117,

67. All in the Louvre. 1 18.

68. Both in the Louvre. 1 19.

69. Vigee-Lebrun, 42. 120.

70. Louvre.

71. Private collection. 121.

Taine, French Revolution, I, 141; Mor-

net, Origines intellectuelles, 419; La Fon-

tainerie, French Liberalism, 23.

M or net, 443.

Lecky, V, 394.

Mornet, 426.

Enc. Brit., XVI, 349d.

Lecky, V, 425.

Ducros, French Society, 314.

Ibid.

Faguet, Literary History, 539.

Chamfort, Sebastien, Maximes, 25.

Ibid., 27.

6.

7 1 -

67.

69.

62.

87.

89.

26.

539-

Ibid., preface, p. 50.

In Masson, La Religion de Rousseau, III,

137-38.

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et. Vir-

ginie, 15, 34, 58.

In Bury, J. B., The Idea of Progress, 200;

italics ours.

Restif de La Bretonne, La Vie de mon

pere, 75.

Palache, Four Novelists of the Old Re-

gime, 172.

Ibid., 191.

Restif, La Vie de mon pere, 14.

Chadourne, Restif de La Bretonne, 185.

Ibid., 354.

Palache, 246.

Chadourne, 223.

Ibid., 219.

Restif, Les Nuits de Paris, Nos. 109- 114.

Ibid., No. 112.

No. 103.

Young, Arthur, 143.

Beaumarchais, letter of June 16, 1755, in

Lomenie, Beaumarchais and His Times,

55-

Ibid., 78.

94-

Voltaire, letter of Jan. 3, 1774.

Lomenie, Beawnarchais, 263, 269 f.

Havens, Age of Ideas, 368.

Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville, Act

I, in Matthews, Chief European Drama-

tists, 332.

Ibid.

Blom, Eric, Mozart, 1 19m

Lomenie, Beaumarchais, 250.

Ibid., 252.

Le Mariage de Figaro, directions to the

players, in Beaumarchais, Oeuvres, 184.

Ibid., Act II, Sc. ii.

1020

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION

122. V, vii.

123. V, xii.

124. II, xxi.

125. V, iii.

126. Preface, Oeuvres, 172.

127. Lomenie, Beaumarchais, 351.

128. Ibid., 383-84.

129. Havens, 382.

130. Lomenie, 348.

CHAPTER XXXVII

16.

'7-

18.

19.

21.

22.

2 3-

24-

25-

26.

27-

28.

29.

30.

3i-

3 2 -

33-

34-

35-

36.

37-

See, Economic and Social Conditions, 8.

Labrousse, C. E., in Cobban, Historians

and . . . the French Revolution, 35.

Young, Arthur, Travels in France, 70.

Ibid., 19.

Herbert, Fall of Feudalism, 5-10.

Ibid., 12, 15.

Lefebvre, Georges, Coming of the French

Revolution, 121.

See, Economic Conditions, 54.

Jaures, Histoire socialiste, I, 36.

Mornet, Origines intellectuelles de la Re-

volution, 143.

Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 548.

Martin, H., France, XVI, 512m

Tocqueville, 193; Taine, Ancient Regime,

300 f.-, Taine, French Revolution, I, 157.

Goodwin, The European Nobility, 41.

Argenson, Marquis <T, Pensees sur la re-

formation de Vetat, in See, Economic

Conditions, 109.

Young, 24.

Herbert, Fall of Feudalism, 58; See, 5;

Gershoy, From Despotism to Revolution,

310.

Chamfort, Maximes, 90.

Young, 125, 61.

Lefebvre, 116; see also Taine, Ancient

Regime, 335-36.

Lefebvre, 118.

Ibid.

Jaures, I, 76.

New CMH, VII, 237.

Mousnier and Labrousse, he Dix-huiti-

eme Siecle, 137.

Stryienski, Eighteenth Century, 271.

Lefebvre, 87.

Lacroix, Eighteenth Century in France,

340.

French, Sidney, Torch and Crucible: The

Life and Death of Antoine Lavoisier, 87.

Young, 103.

Lefebvre, 97.

Ibid., 21.

See, 183; Renard and Weulersee, Life and

Work in Modern Europe, 198.

Mousnier and Labrousse, 186.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 387.

Ibid., 388.

Jaures, Histoire socialiste, I, 109.

38. Ibid., no.

39. Ibid.

40. Taine, Ancient Regime, 334.

41. Ibid., 361.

42. Lecky, V, 394; Gershoy, 308.

43. Jaures, I, 69.

44. Ibid., 68.

45. See, 148.

46. Cobban, History of Modern France, I,

I23 \

47. Jaures, 1, 62; See, 197-98.

48. Taine, Ancient Regime, 351-52.

49. Lefebvre, 14.

50. Jaures, I, 62.

51. Ibid., 98.

52. Beard, Miriam, History of the Business

Man, 404.

53. Taine, 320.

54. Beard, Miriam, 352.

55. Lecky, V, 484.

$6. See above, Ch. iii, Sec. v.

57. Lichtenberger, Andre, Le Socialisme et

la Revolution frangaise, 35; Martin,

Kingsley, Rise of French Liberal

Thought, 252.

58. Lichtenberger, 447.

59. Ibid., 446-50.

60. Enc. Brit., II, 238b.

61. Lichtenberger, 442 f.

62. Mornet, 360.

63. Ibid., 364; Lefebvre, 43.

64. dimming, Ian, Helvetius, 1 26-28.

6$. Ibid., 119.

66. Fulop-Miller, R., Power and Secret of

the Jesuits, 436.

67. Fay, La Franc-Mac onnerie, 242.

68. Georgel, Memoirs, II, 310, in Buckle, lb,

665.

69. Mornet, 450.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

1. Young, Arthur, Travels in France, 15.

2. Segur, Marie Antoinette, 121; Castelot,

184.

3. Fay, Louis XVI, 293.

4. Gooch, Maria Theresa, 168.

5. Vigee-Lebrun, Memoirs, 57.

6. Mossiker, Queen's Necklace, 36.

7. Ibid., 37, 200. 203.

8. 105.

9. Vie de Jeanne de Valois, by herself, in

Mossiker, 63.

10. Enc. Brit., VII, 321a.

11. Mossiker, 183-84.

12. Ibid., 226.

13. 273.

14. 269.

15. Fay, Louis XVI, 275.

16. Mossiker, ix.

17. Martin, H., France, XVI, 539.

NOTES

I02I

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23-

24.

25-

26.

27-

28.

29.

30.

3 1 -

3 2 -

33-

34-

35-

36.

37-

38.

39-

40.

4i-

42.

43-

44<

45-

46.

47

48,

49

Taine, Ancient Regime, 92.

Martin, H., XVI, 573.

Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, 80.

Stryienski, Eighteenth Century, 286.

Young, Arthur, 92.

Ibid., 97.

Guerard, A., Life and Death of an Ideal,

308.

Martin, H., France, XVI, 597.

Lefebvre, 29; Cobban, History of Modern

France, I, 128.

Martin, H., XVI, 608.

Stewart, J. H., Documentary Survey of

the French Revolution, 27-29; Martin,

H., XVI, 612.

Michelet, The French Revolution, 118.

Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 545.

Fay, Louis XVI, 308; Taine, French Rev-

olution, I, 2.

Aulard, I, 129; Michelet, French Revolu-

tion, 73.

Lichtenberger, 20; Martin, H., XVI, 63on.

Tocqueville, 121.

Herbert, Fall of Feudalism, 76, 87.

Ibid., 76.

CMH, VIII, 128.

Barthou, Louis, Mirabeau, 1 1 .

Ibid., 62.

68.

Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 515.

Crocker, Embattled Philosopher, 436.

Barthou, 91.

Ibid., 97.

118.

138.

162.

163; Martin, H., France, XVI, 624.

Jaures, I, 77.

50.

5"-

52-

53-

54-

55-

56.

57-

58.

59-

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71.

7 2 -

73-

74-

75-

76.

77-

78.

79

80.

81,

82.

Michelet, Histoire de France, V, 554.

Herbert, Fall of Feudalism, 95.

Taine, French Revolution, I, 17.

Taine, Ancient Regime, 378.

Martin, H., France, XVI, 625.

Lefebvre, 94.

Enc. Brit., XVI, 909d.

Fay, Louis XVI, 312.

Ibid., 305.

Enc. Brit., XII, 491b.

Taine, French Revolution, I, 28.

Enc. Brit., XII, 491b.

Taine, I, 28.

CMH, VIII, 133; Cobban, History of

Modern France, I, 140.

Barthou, 171.

Young, Arthur, 153.

Lefebvre, 72.

Young, 176.

Lefebvre, 76.

Young, 176.

Lefebvre, 77.

Young, 177.

Michelet, French Revolution, 137; Le-

febvre, 80-81.

Speech of July 8, 1789, in Barthou, 186.

Mme. Campan, Memoirs, I, 358.

Mme. de Stael, Considerations sur la

Revolution frangaise, in Ducros, French

Society, 316.

Kropotkin, Peter, The Great French

Revolution, 61-63.

Michelet, French Revolution, 133.

Ibid., 141.

Lefebvre, 86.

Taine, French Revolution, I, 42.

Michelet, French Revolution, 150.

Lefebvre, 10 1.

Index

Dates in parentheses following a name are of birth and death except when preceded by r.,

when they indicate duration of reign for popes and rulers of states. A single date preceded

by fl. denotes a floruit. A footnote is indicated by an asterisk. Italicized page numbers indi-

cate principal treatment. All dates are a.d. unless otherwise noted.

Abbas I, Shah of Persia (r. 1 587-1629), 421

Abbas III, Shah of Persia (r. 1732-36), 149, 418

Abbaye, Bearde de F, 454

Abbeville, 932-33

A,B,C,U (Voltaire), 143

Abduction from the Seraglio (Mozart), 367

Abdul-Hamid I, Ottoman Sultan (r. 1774-89),

415,460

Abelard, Pierre (1 070-1 142), 112

Aberdeen, University of, 763

Abhandlung iiber den Ur sprung der Sprache

(Herder), 569

Abington, Frances, nee Barton (1737-1815), 740

Abo, University of, 659

Abrege chronologique de Vhistoire de France

(Henault), 123

Abt, Thomas (fl. 1763), 638

abu'l-Ahahab (fl. 1770,415

academic freedom, 358

Academie de Peinture, 235

Academie des Sciences, 894, 896

Academie Franchise, see French Academy

Academy of Arts, Russian, 432, 466, 468

Academy of Dijon, 19-20, 22, 28

Academy of Mines, Russian, 453

Academy of San Fernando, 297, 299

Accademia della Crusca, 824

Accademia di Pittura e Scultura, Venice, 236

Accademia Filarmonica, 245, 386-87

Accademia Granelleschi, 242

Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour of

That Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli

(Boswell),78 3

Account of the Latest Herculaneum Discover-

ies (Winckelmann), 328

actors, see theater

Adam, James (d. 1794), 747-48, 765

Adam, John, 747-48, 765

Adam, Lambert-Sigisbert (1700-59), 247

Adam, Pcre (fl. 1765), 133

Adam, Robert (1728-92), 699, 747-48, 765

Adam, William (fl. 1770), 694, 732, 747-48, 765

Adams, Mrs. (Rousseau's landlady, 1766), 210

Adams, John (1735-1826), 870

Adams, John Quincy (1 767-1 848), 576

Adams, Samuel (172 2-1 803), 709

Adams, Dr. William ( 1706-89), 838

Addison, Joseph (1672-17 19), 320, 485, 842

Adelaide de France, Madame (1732-1800), 96

Adolphus Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, King

of Sweden (r. 1751-70,655

Adonais (Shelley), 810

adultery, 97, 731

"Advantages that the Establishment of Chris-

tianity Has Conferred Upon the Human

Race, The" (Turgot), 77

Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Find-Out, The

(Krasicki), 485

advertisements, newspaper, 786

Aegean Isles, 41 1

Afghanistan, 417-18

Africa, 356

African Company, 732

African slavery, see slavery and slave trade

Agde, riots in, 954

Agnesi, Maria Gaetana (1718-99), 219

agriculture: in Austria, 345, 356; in England,

670-71, 680, 682; in France, 859, 861, 5)27-5 1;

in Holland, 646; in Italy, 217; in Hungary,

341; in Poland, 472-73; in Spain, 273-74, 287-88

Agrigento, 589

Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius (63-12 B.C.), 1 10

Ahmad Hatif, Sayyid (fl. 1750), Persian poet, 421

Ahmed III, Ottoman Sultan (r. 1703-30), 414-15

Ahmed Khan Durani, Shah of Afghanistan (r.

1 747-73) .420

aides, 936

Aiguillon, Anne-Charlotte de Crussol de Floren-

sac, Duchesse d\ 118

Aiguillon, Armand de Vignerot, Due d' (b.

1750), deputy in States-General, 957

Aiguillon, Emmanuel-Armand de Vignerot,

Due d' (1720-82), French statesman, 89, 92-93,

853

Aims of Jesus and His Disciples, The (Rei-

marus), 513

Aix-en-Provence, riots in, 934

Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of (1748), 38, 40, 58,

279,648

Ajaccio, 312

Alam, see Shah Alam

Alba, Duke of (1508-82), see Alva

Alba, Don Jose de Toledo Osorio, Duke of

(d. 1796), 274, 280, 303

Alba, Teresa Cayetana Maria del Pilar, Duchess

of ( 1 762-1 803), 291,303-4

Albani, Alessandro, Cardinal (1692-1779), 328

Albani, Villa, 249, 331

Albania, 415

Albany, Count of, see Stuart, Charles Edward

Albany, Louise Caroline of Stolberg-Gedern,

Countess of (1 752-1 824), 339-40

1023

1024

INDEX

Alberoni, Giulio, Cardinal (1664-1752), 277-78

Albert (1738-1822), Duke of Saxe-Teschen, 361,

846

Albon, Comtesse Julie d' (fl. 1732), 122

Alcazar, 297

Alceste (Gluck), 369-71, 373

Alembert, Jean Le Rond d' (1717-83), 108, 118,

120, / 25-50, 172, 190, 214, 280, 485, 567, 636,

656, 769, 824, 894, 908, 920; Abarca's intimacy

with, 281; abilities of, 127; Catherine II and,

447, 892; contributions to Encyclopedic, 123,

162; death of, 892; deference to royalty, 176;

Diderot and, 892; Mme. du Deffand and, 123-

25; early life of, 123; on expulsion of Spanish

Jesuits, 284; Frederick II and, 124, 497-98, 892;

French Revolution and, 940; Genevan clergy

and, 198; on German literature, 506; Goldoni

and, 798; Hume and, 892; Julie de Lespinasse

and, 122-28, 130, 892; later years of, 892; on

Louis XVI, 857; nature and, 169; poverty

of, 126; Rousseau and, 163, 191; supporter of

Puccini, 372; Voltaire and, 125, 138, 876-77

Alexander I, Czar of Russia (r. 1801-25), 462,

466, 468

Alexander Palace, Tsarskoe Selo, 468

Alexander the Great, King of Macedon (r. 336—

323 B.C.), 895

Alexis Petrovich, Czarevich ( 1 690-1 713), 429

Alfieri, Benedetto (1700-67), architect, 226

Alfieri, Vittorio, Conte di Cortemilia (1749-

1803), dramatist, 3 10, 336-40

Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara (r. 1559-97),

584-85

Algarotti, Conte Francesco (1712-64), 238, 254,

37°

Algeria, 41 1

Ali Bey (1728-73), 415

\Ali Hazin, Shaykh (1 692-1 767), 421

Allegri, Gregorio (1582-1652), 386

Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des

Himmels (Kant), 533

Allgemeine Preussische Landrecht (1791), 500

Allgemeine Schulordnung ( 1 774) ,352

Almada e Mendonca, Francisco de (d. 1804),

263

Alps, 169

Altham, machine-wrecking at, 679

Altona, Jews in, 635

Alva, Duke and Duchess of (18th cent.), see

Alba

Alva, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of

(1508-82), 592

A Mar ilia (Gonzaga), 269

Amelia, Princess (1782-18 10), dau. of George

m,72 7

America: English colonies in, see American col-

onies, English; French colonies in, see French

America; Portuguese colonies in, 262-63, 269;

Seven Years' War and, 57-58; slave trade and,

see slavery and slave trade; Spanish colonies

in, 80, 83, 262, 288; Voltaire's influence on,

881

"America libera" (Alfieri), 340

American colonies, English, 669; commerce and,

57, 708-9, 732-33; early conflicts with England,

708-11; population of, 708; revolt of, see

American Revolution; slave trade and, 57,

708,732-33

American Indians, 709, 833; accounts of, 31; Jef-

ferson on, 891; Jesuit communists and, 80, 83,

262

American Revolution, 78, 683; aided by Euro-

pean powers, 354, 711, 867-72, 922; battles in,

713-14, 869, 871; Beaumarchais' services to,

867-69, 922; Burke's support to, 693, 711-14;

early predictions of, 708; English reactions to,

689, 693, 704, 711-14, 833; France and, 354, 711,

867-72; French Revolution and, 872; George

III and, 687; German mercenaries and, 504;

Gustavus Ill's fear of, 662; influence of, 520,

872, 899; Johnson's opposition to, 833; Kant's

support for, 548; Lafayette's aid to, 869, 871-72;

outbreak of, 711; peace treaties (1782-83),

871-72; philosophes and, 867-68; Pitt the Elder

and, 689; Rousseau's influence on, 891; Spain

and, 290; surrender at Yorktown (1 781), 761

Ami des hommes, ou Traite de la population, U

(Mirabeau the Elder), 74

Amiens: factories in, 932; Peace of (1802), 726;

riots in, 954; unemployment in, 935

Amigoni, Jacopo (1675-1752), 235, 298

Amleto (Scarlatti), 257

Amsterdam, 361, 646; Jews in, 637; publishing

in, 647

An die Freude (Schiller) , 574-75

An die Freunde Lessings (Mendelssohn), 640

Anabaptists, 646

Anacreon (563-478 b.c), 18

anarchism, 178

anatomy, Goethe's work on, 617

Anaxagoras (5oo?-428? B.C.), 176

Ancre, Marechal d' (Concino Concini; d. 1617),

93

Andalusia, 273

Andrews, Dr. (fl. 1762), 798

Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,

during the Last Twenty Years of His Life

(Thrale),828,840

Anecdotes of Painting in England (Walpole),

794

Anet, Claude (d. 1734), 12-13

Angelucci, Guglielmo (fl. 1773), 922

Anglican Church, 261, 711, 734-35

Anhalt, in League of Princes (1785), 362

Anhalt-Zerbst, Prince of, see Christian August

Anhalt-Zerbst, Princess of, see Johanna Elisa-

beth

Ankarstrom, Jakob (1762-92), 66^-65

Anna Amalie, Dowager Duchess and Regent of

Saxe- Weimar (r. 1758-75), 552, 580, 591, 600

Anna Ivanovna, Empress of Russia, (r. 1730-40),

425; reign of, 429-30

Anna Leopoldovna (1718-46), Regent of Russia

(r. 1740-40,430-31

INDEX

IO25

AnnaPetrovna (d. 1728), 429, 432

Annates politiques (Linguet), 82

Annalia d } Italia (Muratori), 244

Anne, Princess, Regent of Holland (r. 1751-59),

648

Anne, Queen of Great Britain (r. 1702-14), 818

Anne of Saxe-Lauenburg (fl. 1697), 22 ^

Annee litter aire, L', 372

Ansbach, 354; in League of Princes (1785), 362

Ansbach and Bayreuth, Margrave of, see Chris-

tian Friedrich Karl Alexander

anti-Semitism: decline in, 629; Voltaire's, 149-

50, 629-30; see also Jews

Anton Ulrich of Brunswick, Prince (1714-76),

430

Antony, Mark (Marcus Antonius; 83?~3o b.c),

31,238

Antwerp, 342, 361, 364

Anville, Madame d', 118

Anzin firm episode, French Revolution, 932

Aphorisms for Women, by a Shepherdess of the

North (Nordenflycht) , 660

Apology for Suicide (Frederick the Great), 54

Apraksin, Count Stepan (1702-60), 48-49, 432

Aquinas, Saint Thomas (1225-74), 241

Arabia, 411-12, 415

Aranda, Pedro Abarca, Conde de (1718-99),

274, 280-81, 292, 848; background of, 282; con-

flict with Jesuits, 283-84; fall of, 286; as father

of Spanish Enlightenment, 287; foreign policy

of, 290; political diplomacy of, 282; reforms

of, 142, 286

Arblay, Gen. Alexandre d' (d. 1818), 791

Arcadian Academy, 256

Arcangeli, Francesco (d. 1768), 330

Archimedes (287?-2i2 b.c.),672

Archinto, Alberico, Cardinal (1 698-1 758), 326,

328

architecture: baroque, in; classical, no, 747; in

England, 747-48; in France, 1 09-11, 910; in

Germany, 524-25; Industrial Revolution and,

682; in Italy, 247; in Russia, 426, 432, 467-69;

in Scotland, 765; in Spain, 297; in Turkey, 414

Archytas of Tarentum (fl. 400-365 b.c), $$$

Arco, Count, 344

Ardinghello (Heinse), 522

Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'

(1704-70,59

Argenson, Marc-Pierre de Voyer, Comte d'

( 1 696-1 764), 67

Argenson, Marc-Rene d', see Voyer, Marquis de

Argenson, Rene-Louis de Voyer, Marquis d'

(1694- 1 757), 81; dismissal of, 85; on French

nobility, 930; predicts American Revolution,

708; on revolutionary sentiment of Parisians,

91,92

Argental, Charles-Augustin de Ferriol, Comte d'

(1700-88), 875

Argentau, Mercy d\ see Mercy d' Argentau

aristocracy, see nobility

Aristomene (Marmontel), 105

Aristophanes (45o?-385 b.c), 136, 241

Aristotelian unities, 296

Aristotle (384-322 b.c), 163, 294, 511

Arkwright, Sir Richard (1732-92), 673

Arlechino (comic character), 232, 241

Armed Neutrality, Declaration of (1780), 713;

— , League of, 457, 648, 7 1 3

Armenia, 418

Armentieres, Marquis d' (fl. 1758), 161

Armide (Gluck), 372

Arminians, 646

Armour, Jean, see Burns, Jean

Armstead, Elizabeth (b. 1750), 726

Arnaud, Abbe Francois (1721-84), 371, 372-73

Arnim, Bettina von, nee Brentano (1785-1859),

562, 611

Arnim, Henrietta von (fl. 1787), 575

Arnould, Sophie (1 744-1 802), 113, 370-71, 373,

883, 920

Arran, James Hamilton, 2d Earl of (1517?— 75),

779

Artamene, ou he Grand Cyrus (Scudery), 169

Artarin, publisher, 402

Artois, 928

Artois, Comte d', see Charles X

Ascanio in Alba (Mozart), 387

Ashkenazi Jews, 630

Ashraf, Shah of Persia (r. 1725-30), 418

Asia Minor, 41 1 ; see also Islam

Assemblee Nationale, see National Assembly,

French

Assembly of Notables (1787), 75, 944-4$

Astarabad, 419

Astree,V (Urfe), 169

atheism, 734; philosophes and, 183; Rousseau de-

nounces, 183

Athens, ancient, 21, 579, 690

atmospheric engine, 674

Attempt by J. W. Goethe, Privy Councilor of

the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to Explain the

Metamorphosis of Plants, An (Goethe), 617

Auch eine Philosophic der Geschichte (Her-

der), 569

Auchinleck, Laird of, see Boswell, Alexander

Audenaarde, 361

Aufklarung (German Enlightenment), sources

of, 507-8

Aufklarungspartei, 351

Augeard, Jacques-Matthieu (1731-1805), 850

Augereau, Marechal Pierre-Francois-Charles

(1757-18 1 6), Due de Castiglione, 606

Augsburg, Diet of, 176

Augusta of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Princess of

Wales (d. 1772^687

Augustine, Saint (354-430), 4

Augustinian friars, 285, 294

Augustus (Caius Octavius), Emperor of Rome

(r. 27 b.c-a.d. 14), 31, 252

Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland (r.

1 697- 1 704, 1709-33), Elector of Saxony as

Frederick Augustus I (r. 1 694-1733), 475-76,

633

Augustus III, King of Poland (r. 1734-63),

1026

INDEX

Elector of Saxony as Frederick Augustus II

(r. 1733-63), 502; in alliance against Fred-

erick II, 43, 45, 46, 48, 502; Frederick invades

Saxon kingdom of, 44-45, 249, 502; Jews

under, 633; and Mengs, 248, 249; Polish

throne acquired by, 430; promiscuity of, 344,

436

"Auld Lang Syne" (additional passages by

Burns), 777

Aumont, Due Louis-Marie-Augustin d' (1709-

82), 25

Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 791

Austerlitz, battle of (1805), 726

Austin, Lady (fl. 1785), 811

Australia, 669

Austria, 341-408; abolition of torture and capi-

tal punishment in, 352, 356; academic freedom

in, 358; agriculture in, 345, 356; army of, 38-

39, 311, 344, 356; Bavaria and, 353"54» 362;

Catholic Church in, 343, 348, 351-52, 358-60;

censorship in, 343, 348, 358; economy of, 344-

45> 349> 35^-57» 456; education in, 343, 352,

358, 360; empire of, 38, 341-42, 354> 357» 3 6 °"

64; England and, 277-78; Enlightenment in,

343-46, 34H3, 355-6*; feudalism in, 345, 349,

356, 365; France and, 488, 846; as Holy Ro-

man Empire, 341; independence of Nether-

lands from, see Austrian Netherlands; In-

quisition in, 343; in Italy, 217, 227, 228, 249, 279,

311, 312, 313-14; Jansenists in, 359; and Jesuits,

318, 351-52; Jews in, 343, 352, 357, 631-32, 641-

42; Joseph II's reforms in, 348-53, 355-61, 364-

66\ legal reform in, 344, 356; literature in,

345-46; morality in, 344, 348; music in, 36 7-

408; Poland and, 475, 482-83; population of,

357; prostitution in, 344; Protestants in, 343,

352, 357; religious toleration in, 348, 351-52,

357, 361, 641; Revolution of 1848 in, 366;

Russia and, 349, 362-63, 432; social classes in,

344-45, 349, 356-57; Spain and, 277-78; Turkey

and, 61, 363, 365, 411, 414-15, 430; War of the

Spanish Succession and, 273

foreign policy and agreements, 353-54; Con-

vention of St. Petersburg (1757), 45; expan-

sionist diplomacy, 362-63; First Treaty of

Versailles (1756), 42; in League of Armed

Neutrality (1780), 457; in Quadruple Alli-

ance (1718), 278; Second Treaty of Versailles

(i757)» 42

in seven years' war (1756-63): campaign in

Bohemia, 47; campaign in Saxony, 45; coali-

tion against Frederick II, 59-60; diplomacy

leading to, 38-42; end of French subsidies, 61;

peace negotiations, 62; results of conflict, 62-

63

Austrian Netherlands (Belgium), 42, 45, 341, 342,

361-64, 461; declares independence (1790), 364

Austrian Succession, War of the (1740-48), 15,

38, 40, 58, 240, 279, 648

autos-da-fe, 276, 279, 285

automobile, Cugnot's, 70

Auvergne, 928

Avant-Courier, 114

Aviero, Dom Jose de Mascarenhas, Duke of

(1708-59), 272; conflict with Pombal, 263;

philosophes and, 267-68; trial and execution

of, 265

Avignon, 317

Avis au peuple marseillais (Mirabeau fils), 654

Azov, 430, 458

Baal Shem-Tob (Israel ben Eliezer; 1700? -60),

636

Babeuf, Francois-£mile "Gracchus" (1760-97),

938; Morelly's influence on, 80-81; Rousseau's

influence on, 891

Babuti, Gabrielle, 11 2-1 3

Bach, Johann Christian, the "Milan [or London]

Bach" (1735-82), 526-2-], 755; in London, 746;

Mozart and, 384

Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich, the "Biicke-

burg Bach" (1732-95), 526, 568

Bach, Johann Ernst, of Weimar (1722-77), 526

Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685-1750), 221-22, 234,

256, 373, 395; family of, 100, 526-27

Bach, Karl Philipp Emanuel, the "Berlin Bach"

(1714-88), 374, 380, 399, 526; contribution to

music, 528

Bach, Veit (d. 1619), 527

Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann, the "Halle Bach"

(1710-84), 526-27

Bach, Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst (1 750-1 845),

526-27

Bacon, Anthony, ironmaster (fl. 1785), 672

Bacon, Sir Francis (1561-1626), 251, 294, 427,

794

Baden, 362

Baggesen, Jens (1764-1826), 594, 650

Baghavand, battle of (1735), 419

Bagnols, riots in, 954

"Bahabec" (Voltaire), 151

Bahamas, 669

Bahrdt, Karl Friedrich (1764- 18 26), 507

Baia, 327

Bailey, Nathaniel (d. 1742), 820-21

Bailly, Jean-Sylvain (1736-93), 957-58

Bakhchisarai, 430

Baku, 419, 470

balalaikas, 425

Balder's Death (Ewald), 652

Balkh, 417

balloons, airborne, 932

Balsamo, Giuseppe, see Cagliostro

Balzac, Honore de (1 799-1 850), 104, 919

Bamberg, Prince-Bishop of (fl. 1525), 560

Banco di San Carlos, 288

Banco di San Giorgio, 227

Bank of France, Turgot's model for, 860-61

banking: in England, 670; in France, 235, 860-61;

in Holland, 646; in Italy, 227, 288; in Switzer-

land, 643

Baptists, 735, 760

Bar, Confederation of, 481-83

Barbados, 669

INDEX

IO27

Barbarossa, Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor

(r. 1152-90), 239

Barbary States, 417-18

Barbauld, Anna, nee Aikin (1 743-1 825), 787

Barber, Francis (i745?-i8oi), 822

Barber of Seville, The (Beaumarchais), 334, 923

Bar bier e di Siviglia, II (Mozart and Paisiello),

334

Barcelona, 288-89

Barnave, Antoine-Pierre-Joseph (1761-93), 948,

957

Baroccio, Federigo (1 528-161 2), 115

Bar on Munchausen's Travels (Raspe), 534, 568

Baronius, Henriette (fl. 1789), 405

baroque architecture, 1 1 1

Barre, Isaac (1 726-1 802), 704

Barry, Mme. du, see Du Barry, Mme.

Barry, Spranger (171 9-77 ) , 740

Barthe, Nicolas (fl. 1778), 874

Barthelemy, Abbe Jean-Jacques (1716-95), 917

Bas Bleu Society, 730

Basedow, Johann Bernhard (i724?-9o), 506-7,

612,888

Basel, 643; Congress of (1795), 547

Bashkir tribes, 455

Basnage, Jacques (1653-1725), 641

Bassano, 229

Bassenge, Paul, jeweler (fl. 1785), 941-42

Bassi, Laura (171 1-78), Professor at University

of Bologna, 219

Bastille, fall of, 31 1, 364, 580, 934, 962-63

Batavian Republic, formation of, 694; see also

Switzerland

Bath, 740

Bath, Earl of, see Pulteney, William

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1714-62), 532

Bavaria: Austria and, 362; conflict between Jo-

seph II and Frederick II over, 353-54; secret

societies outlawed in, 507; united with Palati-

nate, 354

Baycu y Subias, Francisco (1734-95), 299, 303

Baylc, Pierre (1647- 1706), I0 > l l, J 39» 183, 280,

326, 427, 435, 557; clerical condemnation of,

890

Bayreuth, 354, 525

Bazhenev, Vasili (1737-99), 469

Beatrice of Burgundy (d. 1184), 239

Beauclerk, Lady Diana (1 734-1 808), 841

Beauclerk, Topham (1739-80), 827, 839

Beauharnais, Fanny, Comtesse de (1738-1813),

919; salon of, 907

Beauharnais, Josephine de, nee Mar ie- J osep he-

Rose Tascher de La Pagerie (1 763-1814), 907

Beaumarchais, Pierre- A ugustin Caron de (1732-

99), 149, 852, 920-26, 944; aid to American

Revolution, $67-6% gn; death of, 926; early

life and education of, 920; in French Revolu-

tion, 925-26, 940; jailed for bribery, 921; phi-

losophes and, 920; plays of, 922-25; publishes

Voltaire's collected works, 925; in Spain, 921;

writes The Barber of Seville, 923; writes The

Marriage of Figaro, 403-4, 923-2$

Beaumont, Christophe de (1703-81), Arch-

bishop of Paris, 90-91; Rousseau persecuted

by, 189, 193-97

Beauregard, Captain (fl. 1722), 150

Beauvau, Mme. de, 118

Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana, Marchese di (1738—

94), 312, 320-21, 451; academic career of, 321;

economic theories of, 321; ethics of, 739; in-

fluence of, 145, 336; influence of French En-

lightenment on, 320; legal reforms proposed

by, 320-2

Beckford, William (1760- 1844), author, 255; on

beggars of Portugal, 259

Beckford, William (1709-70), Lord Mayor of

London, 704, 809

Becu, Anne, 86

Bedford, John Russell, 4th Duke of (17 10-71),

62

Bedouins, 411

Beethoven, Ludwig van (1 770-1 827), 334, 528;

Goethe's views on, 613; Haydn and, 378-80;

Mozart compared with, 397-98

Beggars Opera, The (Gay), 696

Beitrage zur Optik (Goethe), 615-16

Belgium, see Austrian Netherlands

Belgrade, 415, 460

Belisaire (Marmontel), 106,463

Belisarius (505? -565), 804

Belisarius (Goldoni), 242

Bellamy, Georgeanne (173 1?— 88), 740

Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal (1542-1621), 177

Bellmann, Karl Mikael (1740-95), 660-61

Belluno, 229

Belsunce, £milie de (fl. 1796), 894

Benda, Georg (1722-95), 342

Bender, 460

Benedict XIII (Pietro Francesco Orsini), Pope

(r. 1724-30), 246, 260

Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini), Pope (r.

1740-58), 225; aid to Jews, 633; death of, 264;

enlightened policies of, 246-47; gentleness of,

319-20; Portuguese Jesuits and, 263-64

Benedictines, 294

Benevento, 244, 317

Bengal, 715-17

Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 320, 738-39; on

Blackstone, 737- Voltaire's influence on, 881

Benucci, Francesco (fl. 1786), 404

Berengar of Tours (998-1088), 513

Berezovsky, Sozonovich (1745?— 77), 425

Berg, Baron Friedrich Reinhold von, 328

Bergamo, 218, 228

Bergen, battle of (1759), 54

Bergman, Torbern Olof (1735-84), 612, 658

Berkeley, George (1685-1753), 183, 531, 759,

764, 834

Berlichingen, Gottfried (Gotz) von (1480-

1562), 561

Berlin, 63, 500, 530; architecture in, 524; fac-

tories in, 501; Jews in, 634; population growth

in, 501 ; in Seven Years' War, 49, ^5, 60, 5 10

Berlioz, Hector (1803-69), 627

1028

INDEX

Bern, 643-44; revolts in, 645; Rousseau expelled

from, 191, 206-7

Bernacchi, Antonio (1685-1756), 222, 232

Bernard, Abraham, cousin of Rousseau, 6

Bernard, Gabriel, uncle of Rousseau, 6

Bernard, Samuel, banker (1651—1739), 16

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Desiree, nee de Pelle-

pou, 917

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Felicite, nee Didot,

9I 7

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri (1737-

1814), 883-84, 886, 889, 904, 916-1-]

Bernhard, Isaac (fl. 1750), 638

Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo (1598-1680), 235,

2 47

Bernis, Francois-Joachim de Pierre, Cardinal de

(1715-94), 41, 67, 317-18

Bernstorff, Count Andreas Peter von (1735-97),

653

Bernstorff, Count Johann Hartwig Ernst von

(1712-72), 517, 652

Berthollet, Claude-Louis (1748-1822), 939

Besenval, Mme. de (fl. 1742), 16

Besenval, Baron Pierre- Victor de (1722-91),

960, 962-63

Bessarabia, 41 1

Bessenyei, Gyorgy ( 1 747-1 810,351

Besterman, Theodore, 138

Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Alexei (1693-1766), 431-32,

442

Betsky, Ivan (1704-95), 453, 466

Bevilacqua, Palazzo, 245

Beyer, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (d. 1806), 345

Bibiena, Alessandro Galli da (1687-1769), 245

Bibiena, Antonio Galli da (1700-44), 245

Bibiena, Ferdinando Galli da (1657-1743), 245

Bibiena, Francesco Galli da (1659-1739), 245

Bibiena, Giuseppe Galli da (1696-1756), 245

Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 219

Biblioteca Magliabechiana, 219

Bibliothek der Schonen Wissenschaften und der

Freien Kunste, 638

Bijoux, Les (Diderot) , 596

Bilderdijk, Willem (1756-183 1 ) , 647

Bill of Rights, American Constitution, 872

"Bill of Rights" of 1689, English, 699

Birmingham: growth of, 681; iron industry in,

672; theater in, 740

Biron, Ernst Johann von, Duke of Kurland

( 1 690-1 72 2), 429-30

Bismarck, Otto von (1815-98), 502

Black, Joseph (1728-99), 674-75, 763-64, 932

Black Hole of Calcutta (1756), 715

Black Plague, 3 1 2

Black Sea, 456-58, 483

Blackstone, Sir William (1723-80), 832, 736-38;

on conversion of Protestants to Catholicism,

797; on English political structure, 686-87

Blagden, Sir Charles ( 1 748-1 820) , 841

Blair, Catherine (fl. 1768), 783

Blair, Hugh (17 18-1800), 767, 768, 776

Blake, William (1757-1827), 658

Blanchard, Francois (175 3-1 809), 932-33

Blenheim Gardens, 748

Blondel, Jacques-Francois (1705-74), no

Blot, Mme. de (fl. 1760), 193

Bobrinsky, Alexis (b. 1762), 437

Bocage, Manuel Maria Barbosa du (1765-1805),

270

Boccaccio, Giovanni (131 3-75 ) , 5 1 5

Boccage, Marie-Anne Fiquet du, nee Le Page

(1710-1802), 799

Boccherini, Luigi (1743-1805), 292, 333, 377

Bodmer, Johann Jakob (1698-1783), $66

Boerhaave, Hermann (1668-1738), 647

Boguslawski, Wojciecz (1760-1829), 486

Bohemia, 354; Austria and, 38, 341, 350, 358, 365-

66; culture in, 342; early history of, 341-42;

Jews in, 631-32, 641; metal industry in, 344;

population of, 342; revolt of serfs in, 350;

Seven Years' War in, 47-48; Thirty Years'

War in, 342

Bohme, Frau Hofrat, 524

Bohmer, Charles, jeweler (fl. 1785), 941-43

Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas (1636— 1711), 136,

169, 201, 528, 889

Boisgelin de Cuce, Raymond de (173 2-1 804),

126

Boisguillebert, Franc, ois de (1 592-1662), 72

Boismont, Nicolas Thyrel de (1715-86), 126

Boissel, Francois (fl. 1789), 938

Boissieu, Jean-Jacques (1736-1810), 116*

Boizot, Louis-Simon (1743-1809), 106

Bokhara, Emir of (1740), 420

bolero, 292

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount (1678-

1750,687

Bologna, 244-45, 310; Goethe in, 587; ratio of

priests to lay population in, 224; university

in, 219

Bolton, machine-wrecking in, 679

Bolzano, 229

Bombay, 58

Bonaparte, Joseph (1768-1844), 296, 334; in

Spain, 296-98

Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon I

Boncerf, Pierre-Francois (1745-94), 9 2 9

Bonnefax, Father (fl. 1789), 901

Bonnot de Condillac, see Condillac

Bonnot de Mably, see Mably

Book of Lismore, The (compiled by James

Magregor), 767

Bordeaux, 107, 932-33

Bordes, Professor (fl. 1740), 14, 23

Bordeu, Theophile de (1722-76), 130

Bordoni, Faustina (1693-1783), 223, 232

Borovikovsky, Vladimir (1 757-1 825), 466

Bortniansky, Dmitri Stephanovich (1751-1825),

426

Boscawen, Mrs., 730

Boscawen, Edward (1711-6O, 57*5**

Bosch, Hieronymus (i45o?-i5i6), 305

Bosnia, 41 1

Bosporus, 458

INDEX

IO29

Bossuet, Jacques Benigne (1627-1704), 569, 796-

97

Boston, 710

Boston Tea Party ( 1 773 ) , 7 1 1

Boswell, Alexander, Laird of Auchinleck (d.

1782), 778, 784, 836

Boswell, Euphemia, Lady Auchinleck, nee Er-

skine (d. 1766), 779,783

Boswell, James (1740-95), 214, 729-31, 744, 753-

54, 763-64, 778-85, 828, 964; bouts with vene-

real disease, 779-80, 782-83, 785; on Burke, 692;

conversion to Catholicism, 779; death of, 842;

death of wife, 842; dependence on alcohol,

784-85, 842; description of, 842; on Dutch

women, 647; early life and education of, 779-

80; in Edinburgh, 783-85; fame as "Corsican

Boswell," 784; family background of, 778-79;

on Gibbon, 805; on Goldsmith, 817; his hon-

esty about himself, 785; on lack of religion in

England, 734; as Laird of Auchinleck, 841;

later years of, 841-42; in London, 745, 779-80,

785, 841-42; love affairs of, 647-48, 779-83, 785;

marries Margaret Montgomerie, 784; meets

English celebrities, 780; on Neuchatel, 191;

Paoli and, 782-83; Rousseau and, 133, 152,

201-4, 210, 782-83; on Soho factory, 675; sup-

ports American Revolution, 833; Therese Le-

vasseur and, 202-4, 783; on towns in Holland,

646; travels abroad, 781-83; Voltaire and, 133-

34, 782; Wilkes and, 703, 782

johnson and, 837; conversations and opinions,

785, 820, 826-35, 839; journey to Litchfield

and Oxford, 839; length of their association,

827; they meet for the first time, 780; tour of

the Hebrides, 785, 835-36, 840; writing of The

Life of Samuel Johnson, 840-41

Boswell, John, brother of James, 779

Boswell, Margaret, nee Montgomerie (1738-89),

784, 842

botany, Goethe's work on, 617

Bouchardon, Edme (1 698-1 762), 107, 120, 247

Boucher, Francois (1703-70), 23, 106, 113, 117,

120, 912; influences on, 235; sensuality of, 97

Boufflers, Duchesse de, see Luxembourg, Mare-

chale de

Boufflers, Marie-Charlotte-Hippolyte de Saujon,

Comtesse de (1725-C.1800), 125, 161, 907, 929;

Rousseau and, 161, 209, 213-14, 882

Boufflers, Marie-Frangoise-Catherine de Beau-

vau-Craon, Marquise de (171 1-87), 161*

Boulton, Matthew (1728-1809), 675, 734

Boulton and Watt, engine company, 675-76

Bourbon, Abbe de (b. 1762), 68

Bourbon, Duchesse de, 929

Bourbon, Due Louis-Henri- Joseph de (1756—

1830), 850

Bourbon monarchs: Hapsburg rivalry with, 273;

restoration in France (1814), 890

bourgeoisie, see middle class

Bourgogne (Burgundy), Louis-Joseph de

France, Due de (1751-61), grandson of Louis

XV, 71, 845

Bourru bienfaisant, he (Goldoni), 244

Bouverie, Mrs. Edward (fl. 1770), 753

Bowles, Miss, 753

Boyd, Mary Ann (fl. 1769), 783-84

Brabant, 342, 361; Estates of, defiance of Joseph

II, 362, 364

Brabantane, Marquis de (fl. 1766), 209

Bracci, Pietro (1700-73), 247

Bragadino, Zuan (fl. 1750), 323

Brahms, Johannes (1833-97), 381, 399

Brandenburg, 54, 484

Brandenburger Tor, 525

Brandywine, battle of (1777), 869

Braschi, Giovanni, see Pius VI

Braut von Messina, Die (Schiller) , 604

Bray-sur-Seine, riots in, 954

Brazil, Jesuits in, 263

breast-feeding, 180

Bremen, duchy of, 653

Brentano, Bettina, see Arnim, Bettina von

Brentano, Maximiliana, nee von La Roche, 61 1

Brentano, Peter (fl. 1773), 611

Breslau, 51-52,60

Breteuil, Louis-Auguste Le Tonnelier, Baron de

(1730-1807): Diamond Necklace Affair and,

943; as emigre, 963; ministry of (1789), 961-

63; on Peter Ill's mistreatment of Catherine,

439

Breton Club, 939

Breze, Marquis Henri-Evrard de (1 766-1 829),

959

"Bride of Corinth, The" (Goethe), 599

Bride of Messina, The (Schiller), 604

Bridgewater, Francis Egerton, 3d Duke of

( 1 736-1 803), 670,672

Brief Observations Concerning Trade and In-

terest (Child), 72

Brief e die neueste Literatur betreffend (issued by

Nikolai), 507, 510

Brief e uber die asthetische Erziehung des Men-

schen (Schiller) , 595

Brief e uber die Empfindungen (Mendelssohn),

638

Brief e zur Beforderung der Humanitat (Her-

der), 580

Brienne, Mme. de, 929

Brienne, Lomenie de, see Lomenie de Brienne,

fetienne

Brighella (comic figure), 241

Brindley, James (1716-72), 672

Brindley-Bridgewater canal, 672

Brion, Friederike (1752-1813), 521, 559-60, 608

Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre (1754-93),

88, 938-39

Bristol, George William Hervey, 2d Earl of

(1721-75), 282

Bristol: growth of, 681; as port city, 669; theater

in, 740; voting population in, 685

Britannicus (Racine), 103

British East India Company: Clive and, 715-16;

corruption in, 716-18; Hastings trial and, 719-

2 1 ; regulation of, 7 19

1030

INDEX

British Museum, 750

Briton, The (periodical), 702

Brody, Jews in, 632

Broglie, Mme. de, 118

Broglie, Marechal Due Victor-Francois de

(17 1 8-1804), 54, 963; defeat at Minden, 55;

as secretary of war, 961; States General and,

960

Brook Farm, 81

Brooke, Henry (1703? -83), 786

Broschi, Carlo, see Farinelli

Brosses, Charles de (1709-77), 149, 218-20, 250

Brown, Agnes, 772

Brown, Lancelot "Capability" (1715-83), 748

Browning, Robert (1812-89), 658

Bruges, 361

Briihl, Count Heinrich von (1700-63), 466

Brummell, George Bryan "Beau" (1 778-1 840),

753

Brummell, William, 753

Brunetiere, Ferdinand (1840-1906), 138

Brunn, university at, 360

Brunswick: in League of Princes (1785), 362;

Seven Years' War in, 60

Brunswick, Duke Ferdinand of, see Ferdinand

of Brunswick

Brunswick, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of,

see Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand

Brunswick-Bevern, August Wilhelm, Duke of

(1715-80,47,51

Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, Prince Ludwig Ernst

of, see Ludwig Ernst

Brussels, 342, 361, 364

Bruto primo (Alfieri), 338

Bruto secondo (Alfieri), 338

Brutus, Lucius Junius (fl. 510 B.C.), 912

Buccleuch, Henry Scott, 3d Duke of (1746-

i8i2),769

Buchanan, George (1506-82), 177

Bucharest, 458

Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821-62), 769

Budapest, 341, 364

Buen Re tiro, 288

Buff, Charlotte, see Kestner, Charlotte

Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de (1707-

88), 73, 99, 147, 353, 636, 908; clerical attacks

on, 902; death of, 893-, on sensuality, 97

Bug River, 430

Biihren, Ernst von, see Biron

Bulgarelli, Marianna (La Romanina; 1686-1734),

240

Bulgaria, 411

bullfights, 291

Bunau, Count Heinrich von (1697-1762), 326

Bunbury, Henry, 817

Buonaparte, Carlo (1746-85), 313

Buonaparte, Napoleone, see Napoleon I

Bureau de Roi, 107

Burger, Gottfried (1747-94), 519-20

Burgoyne, John (1722-92), 713

Burgundy, Duke of, see Bourgogne, Due de

Buring, Johann Gottlieb (1723-C.1789), 524

Burke, Edmund (1720-97), 683, 689-93, 696, 700-1,

121-25, 73<>> 747-48, 754> 759> 7 6l ~ 62 > 828, 832,

839, 897; cultural tastes of, 689; death of, 725;

early life and education of, 689; economic

policies of, 693; election to Parliament, 692;

esthetic views of, 696; on German principali-

ties, 503; Goldsmith and, 817; in Hastings' trial,

719-21; issues Reflections on the French Revo-

lution, ih-it,, 806; Johnson and, 692, 827, 839-

41; on lack of religion in England, 734; later

conservatism of, 690, 692-93, 722-25; love affairs

of, 689; Marie Antoinette and, 722-23; marriage

to June Nugent, 691; in ministry, 714-15;

morality of, 694; opposition to French Revo-

lution, 690, 693, 721-25; opposition to slave

trade, 693, 733; policy toward Catherine II,

689, 736; policy toward Catholics, 689, 736;

on Polish constitution, 487-88; predicts French

Revolution, 721-22; quality as speaker, 692;

rapprochement with George III, 725; refuses

peerage offer, 725; on religion, 725; respect for

French clergy, 900; rising career of, 691-92;

on Rousseau, 891; social, political views of,

692-93; supports American Revolution, 693,

711-14; views on property and state, 724-25;

youthful radicalism of, 690

Burke, June, nee Nugent, 691

Burke, Richard, brother of Edmund, 719

Burke, William (fl. 1780), cousin of Edmund,

Burkersdorf, battle of (1762), 61

Burlcidor de Seville, El (Tirso de Molina) , 404

Burnes, Agnes, nee Brown, 772

Burnes, William (d. 1784), 772

Burney, Charles (1726-1814), 133, 233, 333, 746-

4j y 790, 828; description of Gluck, 368; on

Duke of Brunswick, 50; on Frederick II, 496;

on Gluck-Puccini rivalry, 372; in "the Club,"

827; on Venetian music, 220; on Voltaire's ap-

pearance, 134

Burney, Fanny (1752-1840), 333, 730, 743, 787,

790-91, 839

Burns, Gilbert, brother of Robert, 773

Burns, Jean, nee Armour (d. 1834), 763, 774-77

Burns, Robert (1759-96), 732, 762, 764, 772-78,

964

Burr, Margaret, 755

Burslem, potteries at, 749

Burton, Robert (1 577-1640), 788

Bury, John Bagnell (1 861-1927), 807

Busoni, Ferruccio Benvenuto (1 866-1 924), 243*

Bussy, Mme, de, 118

Bute, John Stuart, 3d Earl of (1713-92), 61, 688,

693; conflicts with Wilkes, 702; ministry of,

698-700, 702; Samuel Johnson and, 826-27;

Seven Years' War and, 62, 699

Bute, Mary, Countess of, nee Montagu (1718-

1794), 688

Buttafuoco, Matteo (1731-1806), 204

Buttal, Jonathan, 756

Byng, John, Admiral (1704-57), 42-43

Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788- 18 24), 340,

INDEX

IO3I

623, 627; Rousseau's influence on, 3; on Sterne,

790; Voltaire's influence on, 880-81

Byzantine Greeks, 312

Cabala, 620, 635, 637

Cabanis, Pierre-Jean (1 757-1 808), 869

Cabarrus, Conde Francisco de (175 2-1 8 10), 288

Cabinet Dictionary (Sheraton), 748

Cadiz, 288-89

Caduta de' giganti, La (Gluck), 368

Caesar, Caius Julius ( 100-44 B « c «) » 48, 529

Caffarelli (Gaetano Majorano; 1703-83), 254

Caff e, II, 320

Caffieri, Jacques (1678-1755), 106-7

Caffieri, Jean-Jacques (1725-92), /op, 911

Cagliostro, "Count" Alessandro di (Giuseppi

Balsamo; 1743-95), 327-22, 645; in Affair of

the Diamond Necklace, 322, 942-43

Cagliostro, "Countess" Seraphina di (Lorenza

Feliciani Balsamo), 321-22

Cagliostro demasque (author not cited), 322

cahiers des plaintes et doleances, 950

Cahusac, Louis de (d. 1759), 33

Cain, Henri-Louis, see Lekain, Henri-Louis

Cairo, 415-16

Calas,Jean (1698- 1762), 90, 146,881

Calas family, 88, 146, 151, 498, 881

Calatrava College at Salamanca, 301

Calcutta: Black Hole of (1756), 715; English

stronghold at, 58

Caldwell, Thomas, bookseller (fl. 1776), 800

Caliste (Charriere) , 648

Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de (1 734-1 802),

943-45, 946

Calvin, John (1509-64), 143, 177, 360, 881

Calvinism: in Holland, 646; Rousseau and, $-6,

17, 177, 185, 192, 195-99; m Scotland, 763

Calzabigi, Raniero da (1715-95), 368-70

Cambis, Mme. de, 118

Camelford, Lord, 685

Cameron, Charles, architect, 468

Camoes, Luiz Vaz de (1524-80), 259, 269

Campan, Jeanne-Louise-Henriette, nee Genet

(1752-1822), 853-57

Campanelli, Cardinal (fl. 1760), 633

Campbell, Mary (d. 1786), 775

Campoformio, Treaty of (1797), 3 1 1

Campomanes, Conde Pedro Rodriguez de

(1723-1802), 283, 286, 25)3, 302

Canada, 89, 698, 709; English conquest of, 57,

62,68

Canaletto (Antonio Canale; 1697-1768), 236,

33 2

Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto (1720-80), 236

canals: in England, 672; in Russia, 456; in Scot-

land, 762

Candide (Voltaire), 34, 155, 825

Cannabich, Christian (1731-98), 525

Canova, Antonio (1 757-1 822), 479, 750; monu-

ment to Alfieri, 340

Cant, Anna, nee Reuter, 53 1

Cant, Johann Georg, 531

Cantemir, Prince (fl. 1758), 120

Cantemir, Prince Antioch (i709?~44), 427

Canterbury, Archbishop of (1737-47), see Pot-

ter, John

Cantillon, Richard (i68o?-i734), 72

Cape Breton Island, 57

Capion, fetienne (fl. 1720), 650

capital punishment: abolition in Austria, 356; —

in England, 733; —in France, 146; —in Russia,

43 1, 45 1 ; Voltaire's opposition to, 145-46

capitalism: in Austria, 356; in England, see In-

dustrial Revolution; in France, 70, 936; in Italy,

218, 230; physiocratic theory and, 71; in Prus-

sia, 501; Adam Smith's attitude toward, 771;

see also middle class

Cappella Giulia, 257

Caps (Swedish party), 654, 6$6-6y

Caraccioli, Marchese Domenico di (1715-89),

3i5

Carinthia, 341, 358

Carli, Conde Giovanni Rinaldo (1720-95), 312

Carlisle, Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of (1748-

1825), 753

Carlisle, Georgiana, Countess of, 753

Carlos, Don (1545-68), son of Philip II, 338

Carlos of Bourbon, Don, see Charles III, King

of Spain

Carlton House, 748

Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 50, 627, 658, 823;

Kant's influence on, 551; on Kaunitz, 41; on

Schiller's The Robbers, 570

Carmelites, 294

Carmer, Johann Heinrich Casimir von (fl.

1780), 500

Carmona, Luis Salvador (1709-67), 298

Carniola, 341, 358

carnivals, 232

Caroline Matilda (1751-75), Queen of Christian

VII of Denmark, 652-53

Caron, Lisette, 92 1

Carpenter, Edward (1844-1929), 891

Carriera, Rosalba (1675-1757), 235, 792

Carstens, Asmus Jakob (1754-98), 524

Cartas eruditas y curiosas (Feijoo), 294

Carter, Elizabeth (17 17-1806), 730

Carthaginians, 312

Cartvvright, Edmund (1 743-1 823), 673

Carvajal, Don Jose de (d. 1754), 279

Carvalho, Paul de, 267

Carvalho, Dona Teresa de, nee Noronha (d.

1745), 261

Calasi-Dugnani, Palazzo, 237

Casanova, Giovanni Jacopo (1725-98), 219, 310,

322-2$; adventures in Italy and France, 323-24;

on commedia delV arte, 241; death of, 325;

early life and education of, 322; joins Free-

masons, 326; on Maria Theresa, 344; occultist

interests of, 324; on Parma, 311-12; returns to

Italy, 325; on Spanish dancing, 292; visit to

Rousseau, 324; —to Voltaire, 133, 138, 143, 324;

on Wolf enbiittel library, 512; writes his Mem-

oirs, 325; on Wurttemberg court, 502-3

1032

INDEX

Casas y Nova, Fernando de (fl. 175 1 ) , 297

Caserta, palace at, 250

Casimir III the Great, King of Poland (r. 1333-

1 37o) . 475

Cassel, 525

Castera, J. H. (fl. 1800), 444; on Catherine II,

461-62; on Elizaveta Vorontsova, 439; on

Peter III, 435-36

Castile, 288

Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 691, 794, 809

castrati in Italy, 222

Castro, Machado de, see Machado de Castro,

Joaquim

Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of

England (Walpole), 794

Catalonia, 288

Catechisme du genre humain (Boissel), 938

Catherine I, Empress of Russia (r. 1725-27),

429

Catherine II the Great, Empress of Russia (r.

1762-96), 121, 334, 337, 342, 353, 425-28 pas-

sim, 657, 749, 880, 885, 897; abilities of, 342,

434-35* 44 2 "43> 45<>-54; absolutism of, 443;

achievements of, 470-71; d'Alembert and, 447,

892; Austria and, 349; Beccaria's influence on,

321; children of, 436-37, 462; conflicts with

Peter III, 435-36, 439; conspiracies against,

443-44, 469; death of, 470; deposes Peter III,

439-40; Diderot and, 446-50, 462-63, 466, 893;

dismemberment of Poland and, 350, 481-85,

487-92; Enlightenment and, 34, 446-50, 452-53,

462-63; early life and education of, 433-34;

early unpopularity of, 441; economic policies

of, 454-56; Elizabeth Petrovna and, 434; esti-

mates of, 471; Falconet and, 109; foreign pol-

icy of, 456-61, 469-70; Frederick II and, 434,

442, 457-58, 462, 484; French Revolution and,

465, 469; Grimm and, 447, 449, 452-53, 463,

466, 894; illnesses of, 433, 435; Joseph II and,

363, 483; journey to Crimea, 459-60; later

years of, 469-70; literary activities of, 463-64;

love affairs of, 436, 442, 444-46; marries Peter

III, 434-35; musical interests of, 334; Necker

and, 870-71; Paul I and, 441; personality of,

461-63; policy toward Jews, 632-33; Poniatow-

ski and, 478; reactionary policies in later life,

469-70; reforms of, 142, 146, 452-53; Rousseau

and, 173; Russian culture and, 463-69; Sweden

and, 6$6, 664; Voltaire and, 135, 139-40, 434,

442, 447-48, 451, 457-58, 462, 469, 873, 879;

withdraws from Seven Years' War, 61

Catholic Church: in Austria, 343, 358-60; basis

of power and influence, 316; Burke and, 689,

736; charitable activities of, 905; conflicts with

Catholic monarchs, 317-18; conservative role

of, 290; in England, 684, 735-36, 762; in France,

142, 900-2; in Germany, 499, 504-5; in Holland,

646-47; Index of, 247, 285, 316, 358; in Ireland,

283, 760-62; in Italy, 225; Jansenism and, see

Jansenists; Jesuits and, see Jesuits; Johnson and,

834; nationalism and, 316; in Poland, 472, 475,

480-81; popular superstitions and, 316; in Por-

tugal, 260, 267-68, 317; Rousseau and, 175, 185;

in Russia, 452; in Scotland, 763; in Spain, 281,

283-86, 290; see also Inquisition; papacy

Catholic relief laws in England, 735-36, 762

Cattaro, 229

Catullus, Caius Valerius (84?~54? B.C.), 21

Caucasus, 422

"Causes of Barometric Fluctuations, The"

(Goethe), 615

Cavalli, Pietro Francesco (1602-76) , 232

Cave, Edward (1691-1754), 819-20, 822

Cavendish, Lord, 726

Cavendish, Henry (1731-1810), 932

Caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubieres,

Comte d (1 692-1 765), no, 120,218,467,749

Cean-Bermudez, Juan Augustin (1 749-1 829),

298

Cecchina, La (Piccini), 333

celibacy, Rousseau's critique of, 168-69

censorship: in Austria, 343, 348, 358; Goethe's

support for, 623; in Italy, 220, 225; in Portu-

gal, 268; in Spain, 285

Cephalonia, 229

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547-1616), 788

Chait Singh, Rajah of Benares (r. 1773-80), 717

Chamberlaine, Frances, see Sheridan, Frances

Chambers, Sir William (1726-96), 747-48

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas de (1741-94),

898, 914, p/j-ztf, 930-31, 939

Chamier, Anthony (1725-80), 827

Champagne, 928

Champ de Mars, 961

Chandernagore, 58

Chapel of the Malta Order, 468

Chapuis, M. (fl. 1755), 31

Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon (1699-1779), 23,

1 12-13, M 7» I2 °, 466

charity, 905

Charles (Charles Augustus Christian), Duke of

Zweibriicken, 354, 362

Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ire-

land (r. 1625-49), 90, 699, 705, 709, 711; Louis

XVI on, 856

Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ire-

land (r. 1660-85), 4 62

Charles II, King of Spain (r. 1665-1700), 273

Charles III (Don Carlos of Bourbon), King of

Spain (r. 1750-88), Duke of Parma and Pia-

cenza (r. 1731-34), King of Naples and Sicily

as Charles IV (r. 173 1-34) , 249-50, 281-90

ACQUIRES PARMA, THEN NAPLES, 228, 278

AS KING OF NAPLES, 249-5O, 254, 258, 315

AS KING OF SPAIN, 28l-<}0, 29 1, 298, 377, 848; ac-

cession of, 258, 281, 315; appearance and char-

acter of, 281, 290, 301; death of, 290, 302; eco-

nomic reforms of, 76, 286-89; foreign policy

of, 89, 290; Goya and, 301, 306; Inquisition and,

285-86; Jesuits expelled by, 281, 283-85; Jews

and, 285, 631; Madrid improved by, 282, 289-

90; Naples and, 315; papacy and, 283, 318; po-

INDEX

IO33

litical reforms of, 281-83; schools established

by, 293; Tiepolo and, 239, 299

Charles IV, King of Naples and Sicily, see

Charles III, King of Spain

Charles IV, King of Spain (r. 1 788-1 808), 292,

302, 304, 306

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1519-56),

and King of Spain (as Charles I) , 297

Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 171 1-40),

2 35> 27 8

Charles VIII, King of France (r. 1483-98), 21

Charles IX (Chenier) , 920

Charles X (Charles-Philippe, Comte d'Artois),

King of France (b. 1757, r. 1824-30), 1 11, 845;

democratic attitudes of, 905; as emigre, 963

Charles XII, King of Sweden (r. 1697-17 18),

433, 821; defeat at Poltawa (1709), 476; Po-

land and, 475

Charles XU (Voltaire), 137

Charles, Jacques- Alexandre (1746- 1823), 932

Charles Alexander of Lorraine, see Charles of

Lorraine

Charles Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, see

Karl August

Charles Emmanuel I, King of Sardinia (r. 1730-

1773), 226, 342,530

Charles Martel (668?-74i), Frankish ruler, 808

Charles of Lorraine, Prince (1712-80), 47, 51-52,

383-84

Charles Theodor, Elector, see Karl Theodor

Charlotte Sophia (1744-18 18), Queen of George

III of England, 384, 698, 795

Charriere, Isabella de ("Zelide"), nee Isabella

van Tuyll (1740- 1805), 647-48

Charriere, Saint-Hyacinthe de, 647

Chartres, Due de (in 1752-85), see Orleans,

Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Due d'

Chastellux, Marquis Francois-Jean de (1734-88),

I2 5- 2 7>878

Chastity Commissioners, Austrian, 344

Chateaubriand, Francois-Rene de (1768-1848),

889-90

Chateauroux, Marie-Anne de Nesle de La

Tournelle, Duchesse de (1714-44), 102

Chatham, Lady, nee Grenville, 698

Chatham, Lord, see Pitt, William, the Elder

Chatillon, Duchesse de (fl. 1764), 125

Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), 809-10

Chaulnes, Marie-Joseph d' Albert d'Ailly, Due

de (1741-93), 921

Chauvelin, Marquis Bernard-Louis de (1716-

1773), i44

Chelsea, potteries at, 748

Chenier, Marie-Joseph (1764-1811), 244, 920

Chenonceaux, Madame de, nee Dupin (fl. 1762),

178

Cheremetyev, Count Boris Petrovich (1652-

i7i9),428

Cheremetyev, Count Peter, 422-23

Cherubini, Salvatore (1760-1842), 312, 380

Chesme, battle of (1770), 458

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl

of (1694-1773), 690, 786, 789; on Frederick

IFs court, 499; Johnson and, 821, 823

Chiari, Abate Pietro (1720-88), 243

Child, Sir Josiah (1630-99), 72

child labor, 671, 678, 682

child rearing: in Egypt, 416; Rousseau's theories

on, 97, 888

China, Jesuits in, 225, 318

"Chinese Letters" (Goldsmith), 814

Chioggia, 229

Chios, battle of (1770), 458

Chippendale, Thomas (1718-79), 748

Chippendale furniture, 523

Chiswick, Rousseau's stay in, 210-1 1

Chiusano, Conte Caissotti di (fl. 1770), 316

chivalry in France, 98

Choderlos de Laclos, see Laclos

Chodowiecki, Daniel Nicholas (1726-1801), 523-

Choglokov, Russian officer (1768), 443-44

Choglokova, Maria (fl. 1750), 436

Choiseul, Cesar de, see Praslin, Due de

Choiseul, Due £tienne-Franc,ois de (1719-85),

57, 67, 87, 92, 137, 447, 846, 882; achievements

of, 88-89; art collection of, 466; dismissal of,

85, 94; Du Barry and, 88; early life of, 88,

exile of, 89, failures of, 89; liberal tendencies

of, 931; peace negotiations in Seven Years'

War, 60, 62; Polish partition and, 482; reforms

of, 142, 144; ultimatum to papacy, 318; Vol-

taire and, 132

Choiseul, Louise-Honorine Crozat, Duchesse de

(1735-1800,98, 118, 125,447,907

Cholmondeley, Lord, 726

Chotek, Johann Rudolf (1749-1824), 344-45

"Christ Is Being Born" (Karpinski) , 486

Christian VI, King of Denmark (r. 1730-46),

652

Christian VII, King of Denmark (r. 1766-1808),

652-63; correspondence with Voltaire, 139

Christian August, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst (d.

1746), 438

Christian Friedrich Karl Alexander, Margrave

of Ansbach and Bayreuth (r. 1757-91), 103, 354

Christianity: Gibbon's critique of, 801-2; Goe-

the's views on, 619-20; Herder's views on,

579; Lessing's views on, 515-16; Reimarus's

views on, 513-14; Schiller's views on, 596;

Voltaire's views on, see Voltaire, religion and

Christina, Queen of Sweden (r. 1632-54), 256

Chubb, Thomas (1 670-1 747), 734

Chubin, Russian sculptor, 467

Church of the Virgin del Pilar, 297

church music: in Germany, 525; in Italy, 332

Church Synod, Russian, 440

Churchill, Charles (1731-64), 699, 702, 8o^-g

Cibber, Colley (1671-1757), 742

Cibber, Susannah Maria, nee Arne (1714-66),

740

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 B.C.), 294, 842

io34

INDEX

Cimarosa, Domenico (i 749-1801), 312, 334-35,

466

Citizen of the World, The (Goldsmith), 814

Clairon, Mile. (Claire-Josephe Leris de La

Tude; 1723-1803), 102-4, 136, 910, 964

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of (1609-

74), 794, 856

Clarendon Press, 786

Clarissa (Richardson), 167, 169-70, 509, 563

classicism, 315; in architecture, no, 747; Italy

and, 325-31; in literature, 588, 593, 627; in

painting, 248-49, 329-30, 524, 910, 911-13; in

sculpture, 329, 510, in social values, 118

Claudius, Matthias (1740-1815), 519

Clavigo y Fajardo, Jose (1 726-1 806), 921

Clement XI (Giovanni Francesco Albani), Pope

(r. 1700-21), 24s, 277, 320

Clement XII (Lorenzo Corsini), Pope (r. 1730-

1740), 220, 246-47, 938

Clement XIII (Carlo della Torre Rezzonico),

Pope (r. 1758-69), 330, 337; bull against

Parma; death of, 317; Jesuits and, 264, 266,

284, 3 17

Clement XIV (Lorenzo Ganganelli), Pope (r.

1769-74), 911; abolishes Jesuit order (1773),

318, 351, 452; conflicts with Catholic mon-

archs, 318; election of, 317; Portugal and, 268

Clement, Abbe (fl. 1768), 280

Clementi, Muzio (1752-1832), 332-33

Clemenza di Tito, La (Mozart), 407

Cleopatra (Cimarosa), 334

Clerici, Felice (1719-74), 226

Clerici, Palazzo, 237

Clerici, Rho (fl. 1755), 226

Clerks of the Holy Cross and Passion of Our

Lord, 226

Clermont, Abbe Comte de (d. 1 771), 53

Cleves, 48

Clive, Kitty, nee Catherine Raftor (171 1-85),

740

Clive, Robert (1725-74), 85, 715-16

clocks, French, 106

Clodion (Claude Michel; 1738-1814), 106, 911

clothing: changing styles in, 889; in France, 905;

in Spain, 282

"Club, the," 817, 827, 840

Club Breton, 939

Clugny de Nuis (d. 1776), 865

Clyde River, 762

coal industry: in England, 671, 675; in France,

93 2

Cobenzl, Count Johann Ludwig Joseph von

(i 75 3-i8o9),459

Cocceji, Baron Samuel von (1 679-1 755), 500

Cochin, Charles-Nicolas (1715-90), 116*, 120

Code de la Nature (Morelly), 80-82

Code Napoleon (1807), 147

coffeehouses, 729

Coimbra, bishop of (fl. 1768), 271

Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619-83), 72, 344, 934

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 551, 658

College of Pharmacy, Moscow, 453

Collegium Fredericianum, at Konigsberg, 531

Collegium Nobilium, Polish, 475

Collier, Jeremy (1650-1726), 163

Collini, secretary to Voltaire, 150

Collins, Anthony (1676-17 29), deist, 507, 734

Collins, William (1721-59), poet, 518, 887

Colloredo, Hieronymus von Paula, Count von

(fl. 1782), Archbishop of Salzburg, 387-89, 393-

95, 5<>4-5

Collot, Marie-Anne (fl. 1768), 467

Colman, George (1732-94), 742, 815

Cologne, 341, 503-5

color, Goethe's work on, 615-16

Columbine (comic character), 232

Comedia nueva (Moratin), 296

Comedie-Fran9aise, 10 1-2, 922

commedia delV arte, 240-41, 923

Commentaire stir le livre des delits et des peines

(Voltaire), 145

Commentaries on Arabic Poetry (Jones), 412

Commentaries on the Laws of England (Black-

stone), 736

Commons, House of, see House of Commons

Commune of Paris in French Revolution, 926

communist theories: in France, 80-84, 2 ^ 2 i 931'

38; of Paraguayan Jesuits, 80, 83, 262

Compagnie des Indes (French East India Com-

pany), 630

Comprehensive Study of Tactics (Guibert), 128

Compte rendu au Roi (Necker's financial ac-

count), 870

Comte, Auguste (1 798-1 857), 254

concerto grosso } 222, 528

Concerts Spirituels, 100

Conde, Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de

(1736-1818), 385,850

Condillac, fetienne Bonnot de (1715-80), 14,

126, 220, 294, 892, 901

Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de

(1743-94), 894-97, 939i 955; on d'Alembert,

892; in antislavery movement, 894, 935; and

Julie de Lespinasse, 126, 131, 895; optimism of,

896-97, 917; in Revolution, 894-95, 897, 940; in

States-General, 957; on Voltaire's death, 879;

as Voltaire editor and biographer, 895, 925

Condorcet, Sophie de Grouchy, Marquise de

( 1 764-1 822), 907

Conegliano, Emmanuele, see Ponte, Lorenzo da

Confederation of Bar, 481-83

Confederation of Targowica, 488-90

Confessions (Rousseau), 18, 214, 336, 887; com-

pletion of, 882; debate over truthfulness of,

5*, on Diderot, 15; on Disc ours sur les arts et

les sciences, 24; influence of, 888; on iniquity

of powerful, 17; on love of nature, n; on

masochistic feelings, 6; publication of, 171;

Rousseau's readings from, 883; Rousseau starts

writing, 193; on theft of ribbons, 9; on Therese

Levasseur, 17-18; uniqueness of, 4; on Vol-

taire's poetry, 154; on Mme. de Warens, 12-13;

INDEX

IO35

on women, 8; on writing of La Nouvelle

Helo'ise, 155

Confucius (551-479 b.c), 507

Congiura dei Pazzi, La (Alfieri), 338

Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, 225

Congress of Basel (1795), 547

Congress of Utrecht ( 1 7 1 3 ) , 547

conscription, military, 62

conseils superieurs, 94

Consejo de Castilla, 277, 282, 286

Conservatorio di San Onofrio, 334

Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto, 334

Considerations of a Good Citizen (Poniatow-

ski), 480

Considerations sur le gouvernement de la Po-

logne (Rousseau), 884-85

Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des

Romains et de leur decadence (Montesquieu),

see Greatness and Decadence of the Romans

Constable, John (1776-1837), 332

Constant, Benjamin (1 767-1 830), 648

Constantine I, Emperor of Rome (r. 306-337),

803

Constantine Pavlovich, Grand Duke (1779—

1830,458

Constantinople, 413-14

Constituent Assembly (France, 1789-91), see

National Assembly

constitutions: American, see United States Con-

stitution; Polish (1791), 487

Contades, Marechal Due Louis-Georges de

(1704-95), 53, 55

Contemporaines, Les (Restif de La Bretonne),

919

Contes vwraux (Marmontel), 102, 105

Conti, Louis-Francois de Bourbon, Prince de

(1717-76), 161, 208, 850, 882, 923

Contrat social, see Social Contract, The

Convention, National (France), see National

Convention

convents, see nunneries

Conversations with Goethe (Eckermann), 555-

561 559* 581, 600, 603, 607, 609, 612, 618, 620,

622, 625-26

Conway, Lord George, 209, 753

Conway, Henry Seymour (1721-95), 208, 793

Cook, Capt. James (1728-79), 669

Copenhagen, Bank of, 652

Corday, Charlotte (1768-93), 137

Corelli, Arcangelo (1653-1713), 254

Corfu, 229

Corneille, Marie (fl. 1770), 136-37, 150

Corneille, Pierre (1606-84), I0 4> I 3 6 ~37» 5 IJ > 88 9

Cornwallis, Charles, 1st Marquis Cornwallis

(1738-1805), 714, 729, 761, 871

Corrado, painter, 298

Coneggio (Antonio Allegri; 1494-1534), 248

Correspondance litter aire, 34-35, 95, 201, 893

Corsica, 207, 284, 313, 885; early history of, 312;

French occupation of (1739-48), 205, 312;

French Revolution and, 313; under Paoli, 313,

782-83; re-occupation by French, (1769), 313;

Rousseau's constitution for, 178, 202; sold to

French by Genoa, 313

Cortona, Pietro da (1596- 1669), 115

corvee, 80, 928, 936; Assembly of Notables and,

944; Turgot ends, 863

Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

(r. 1609-20), 228

Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

(r. 1670-1723), 227-28

cosmetics, 99

Cossacks, 451,455, 633-34

Costa, Bartolomeu da (fl. 1775), 270

Costillares, bullfighter, 291

cotton industry, 672-73

Council of Castille, 277, 282, 286

Council of General Administration, Austrian

Netherlands, 362

Council of State, French, 90-91, 94

Council of Ten, Venetian, 229, 255

Council of Trent, 361

Council of Twenty-five, Genevan, 190, 197-99

Cour Pleniere, 947-48

Courier de Provence, 915

Cour des Aides, French, 92

Cours de philosophic positive (Comte), 254

Courtrai, 361

Coustou, Guillaume II (1716-77), 107

Co vent Garden Theatre, 695, 740, 815

Cowper, Theodora (fl. 1748), 810

Cowper, William (1 731-1800), 735, 810-13; at-

tempts suicide, 810, 812; attitude toward Eng-

land, 812; death of, 813; early life of, 810; lives

with Unwin family, 811-13; opposes slave

trade, 730; religiosity of, 811, 813; retreats to

Huntingdon, 810-11; writes The Task, 811-12

Coxe, William (1747-1828), 472

Cracow: Prussians capture, 491; University of,

485

crafts, 748-50

"Cranes of Ibycus" (Schiller), 599

Crawshay, Richard, ironmaster (fl. 1780), 672

Creation, The (Haydn), 376, 380

Crebillon fils (Claude Prosper Jolyot de Cre-

billon; 1707-77), 97

credit societies, 500

Creech, William (1 745-181 5), 763

Crequi, Renee-Caroline de Froullay, Marquise

de (1714-1803), 189,908

Crespi, Giuseppe Maria "Lo Spagnuolo" (1665-

I 747>. 2 45

Crete, 411, 414

Creutz, Count Gustaf Philip (1731-85), 660

Crewe, Master, 753

Crewe, Frances, nee Greville (fl. 1776), 752

crime: in England, 733; in France, 903; in Italy,

Crimea, 459-60; Russian conquest of, 430, 459,

461 ; Turkish domination of, 41 1

Cristofori, Bartolommeo (1655-173 1), 221

Critic, The (Sheridan), 696

1036

INDEX

Critical Review y The, 786

Critique of Judgment (Kant), 543-44

Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 540-43

Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 531, 535-40,

640, 808; influence of Rousseau on, 518

Croce, Benedetto (1866-1952), 254

Crochallan Fencibles, Scottish club, 776

Crompton, Samuel (175 3- 18 27), 673

Cromp ton's mule, 673

Crosby, Brass, Lord Mayor of London (fl.

1770,707

Crousaz, Madame de, 805

Crozat, Mile., see Choiseul, Duchesse de

Crozat, Pierre (1 661-1740), 235, 466

Crussol, Madame de, 118

Cruz, Ramon Francisco de la (1731-94), 296

Cugnot, Joseph (1725-1804), 70

cuisine, French, 99

Cumae, 327

Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of (1721-

1765^48,50

Cunha, Joao Anastasio da (1744-87), 269

Curchod, Suzanne, see Necker, Suzanne

Curzon, George Nathaniel, 1st Marquis Curzon

of Kedleston (i85o-i925),42o

Ciistrin, 53

Cuvillier, Charles-£tienne (fl. 1780), 53

Cuzzoni, Francesca (1700? -70), 223, 232

Cyrus the Great, King of Persia (r. 550-529

B.C.), 22

Czartoryski, Prince Adam Kazimierz (1734-

1823), 479

Czartoryski, Prince Alexander Augustus (1696-

1782), 473, 479

Czartoryski, Prince Fryderyk Michal (1695?-

"775)i473.479

Czartoryski, Prince Kazimierz (d. 174 1), 473

Czartoryski, Isabella, nee Morstin, 473

Czartoryski, Konstantia, see Poniatowski, Kon-

stantia

Czechs, see Bohemia

Czernichev, General (fl. 1762^61

Czestochowa, oath at (1768), 481-82

Daily Universal Register, The, 786

Dalberg, Johann Friedrich Hugo von (1760-

181 2), 579-80

Dalberg, Wolfgang Heribert von (1 750-1 806),

57 I "7 2

Dalin, Olof von (1708-63), 659

Dalmatia, 411, 415

Damiens, Robert-Franc, ois ( 1 7 1 5-57 ) , 67, 9 1

dancing: in Egypt, 416; in Spain, 291-92; in

Vienna, 345

Dannecker, Johann Heinrich von (1758-18 14),

5 2 3

Dante Alighieri ( 1 265-1 321), 242, 750, 793

Danton, Georges-Jacques (1750-94), 916, 939,

955

Danube River, 356

Danzig, 472, 483-84

Daquin, Pierre-Louis (d. 1797), 147

Daran, Dr. Jacques (1701-84), 152, 200

Darby, Abraham I (fl. 1754), 671

Darby, Abraham II (1750-91), 672

Darmstadt, 518

Darnley, Henry Stuart, Lord (1545-67), 779

Darwin, Charles (1809-92), 880, 889

Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 617, 734

Dashkova, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna (1743—

i8io),439

Dashwood, Sir Francis (1708-81), 702

Daun, Count Leopold von (1705-66), 40, 53, 59;

in battle of Hochkirch (1758), 54; in battle of

Kolin (1757), 47; captures Dresden (1758),

54-56, 60; occupation of Silesia by, 51

Dauphine, Estates of, 948

Davenport, Richard (fl. 1766), 211-12, 214, 882

David, Jacques-Louis (1748-1825), 117, 331, 912-

9*3

Davies, Henry E. (1757-84), 802

Davies, Thomas (1712?— 85), 780, 786

Day of Tiles (1787), 947-48

Dayer, Edmund (1 763-1 804), 750

deaf and dumb: school for, 905; sign language

for, 636

Deane, Silas (1737-89), 867-69, 922

Debussy, Claude (1862-1918), 381

Declaration of Independence (1776), 868; influ-

ence of, 899; Rousseau's influence on, 891

Declaration of Rights, Paris Parlement (1788),

Declaration of Rights, Virginia Assembly

(1776), 872

Declaration of Rights of Man, French National

Assembly, (1789), 642, 872

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The

(Gibbon) , 746, 764, 786, 800-4, 806-8; criticism

of Christianity, 801-2; evaluation of, 806-8;

expanded to cover Byzantine Empire, 803-4;

Gibbon replies to critics of, 802; importance

of, 808; influences on, 801-2; scholarship in,

807; scope of, 807; success of, 800, 805

Deferrari, Palazzo, 227

Derfand, Marquise du, see Du Deffand

Defoe, Daniel (1659?-! 731), 31, 182, 485, 730,

842

Dei Pugni, 320

deism: in England, 734; in Germany, 507, 528

De VAllemagne (Stael), 604

De la Monarchic prussienne sous Frederic le

Grand (Mirabeau fils), 501

De rEsprit (Helvetius), 162, 324

Delft, 646, 749

Delhi, 419

Delille, Abbe Jacques (1738-1813), 121, 878

Delinquente honrado (Jovellanos), 296

Delia tirannide (Alfieri), 337-40

Demetrius (Schiller), 605

democracy: American Revolution and, 872;

Burke's early views on, 690; in England, 681;

Goethe's distrust of, 622-23; Johnson's opposi-

INDEX

IO37

rion to, 833; oligarchy and, 142; Rousseau's

views on, 28, 32, 173-74; Vico's theory of, 252;

Voltaire's views on, 142-45

De Mundis sensibiles et intelligibiles Forma et

principiis (Kant), 534

Denis, Marie-Louise, nee Mignot (1712-90), 98,

132-34, 148, 874, 876-79 passim, 907

Denmark, 438-39, 649-53; clergy and religion in,

649, 653; drama in, 650-51; economy of, 652;

education in, 652; feudalism in, 649, 653;

French subsidies to, 89; Italian opera in, 224;

Jews in, 635; in League of Armed Neutrality,

457, 713; literature in, 649-52; Poland and, 480;

population of, 649; reaction led by Guldberg

in, 653; reforms of Struensee, 652-53; reign of

Christian VI, 652; reign of Christian VII, 652-

53; reign of Frederick V, 652; slave trade

abolished by, 649, 653; social classes in, 649,

653; Sweden and, 654, 663-64; trade treaties

with Russia, 456

Den svenska Argus (periodical), 659

Denys le Tyran (Marmontel), 105

Deputy's Return, The (Niemcewicz) , 486

Derbent, 419; Russian conquest of, 470

Derby, Edward Stanley, 12th Earl of (1752—

1834), 726

Derby, potteries at, 748

De rerum natura (Lucretius), 691

Derwentwater, Sir James Radcliffe, 3d Earl of

(i68o-i7i6),728

Derzhavin, Gavril Romanovich (1743-1816), 464

Descartes, Rene (1 596-1650), 251, 294, 532

Description of Denmark and Norway, A (Hol-

berg),65o

Description of the Torso in the Belvedere

(Winckelmann), 328

Deserted Village, The (Goldsmith), 753, $13-1$

Desfontaines, Pierre-Francois Guyot (1685-

I 745>» 149

Desmoulins, Camille (1760-94), 915, 919; calls

Parisians to arms (1789), 961-62; Due d' Or-

leans and, 955; as Freemason, 939

Desnoiresterres, Gustave (1817-92), 879

De Statu Ecclesiae et legitima Potestate romani

Pontificus (Febronius), 504

Detroit, French forts, 57

Deux Amis, Les (Beaumarchais), 922

development and return, Machiavelli's law of,

2 53

Devin du village, Le (Rousseau), 24-25, 10 1, 164,

852, 883

Devonshire, Lady Georgiana Spencer, Duchess

of 0757- I 8o6),753

Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th Duke of

(i64o-i707),235

Dewey, John (1850-1952), 888

De Witt brothers, 143

Deyverdun, Georges (d. 1789), 803, 805

Dialoghi sul commercio dei grant (Galiani), 75,

2 5i

Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques

(Rousseau), 171,885-86

Diamond Necklace Affair (1785), 941-43

Diario de los literatos de Espana (periodical),

280

Diario de Madrid, 302

Diary (Burney), 333

Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe), 503, 613

Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 738

Dictionary (Johnson), 786, 820, 823-2$

Dictionnaire (French Academy) , 824, 878

Dictionnaire de la musique (Rousseau), 25, 154

Dictionnaire historique et critique (Bayle), 10,

13, 326, 557

Dictionnaire philosophique (Voltaire), 144, 267,

630

Diderot, Denis (1713-84), 18, 24-25, 73, 104, 108,

175, 182, 208, 250, 280, 370, 435, 464, 485, 559,

567, 636, 641, 824, 842, 882, 908, 910, 920;

d'Alembert and, 892; American Revolution

and, 867; on ancient art, no; antimonarchical

views of, 95, 897; atheism of, 183; biological

speculations of, 147; bones stolen from Pan-

theon, 880, 893; Catherine II and, 446-50, 462-

63, 466, 893; Chardin and, 112; on Choiseul,

88-89; death of, 893; defense of parlements,

93-94; deference to royalty, 176, 897; descrip-

tion of, 34; dramatic theories of, 104; eroti-

cism of, 596; ethical views of, 903-4; on Fra-

gonard, 116; French Revolution and, 940;

at Mme. Geoffrin's salon, 120; Gibbon and,

798; Greuze and, n 2-14; Grimm and, 34; on

Index Expurgatorius, 316; influence of, 230;

later years of, 892-93; Lessing's admiration for,

509; love for Babuti, 113; on marriage, 97; as

most German of Frenchmen, 793; musical

theories of, 100-01; nature and, 169; at Mme.

Necker's salon, 908; in Ossian controversy,

768; Pigalle's statue of, 107; plan for university,

892; on Mme. de Pompadour, 69; on reli-

gious burials, 893; Richardson and, 136, 169;

Rousseau and, see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,

Diderot and; Sterne and, 789; trip to Russia,

892; on Vernet, in; Voltaire and, 876, 892;

writings of, 31, 10 1, 103-4

Didone abbandonata (Metastasio), 240, 254

Dieppe, 944

Diet, Polish, 472, 485; dissolves Permanent

Council, 487; factional conflicts in, 479; first

Polish partition and, 484; "Four Years'," 487;

last (1793), 490-91; liberum veto of, 473, 476-

77, 480-81, 484; structure of, 487; yields to

Catherine (1768), 481

Diet, Swedish, 654

Diet of Augsburg, 176

Diniz da Cruz e Silva, Antonio (1731-99), 269

Disadvantages of the Feudal Rights, The (Bon-

cerf), 929

Discalced Carmelites, 294

Discourses (Reynolds), 748

"Discours sur Peconomie politique" (Rousseau),

3 2

Discours sur les arts et les sciences (Rousseau),

20-24, 3 2 > 94> ^8, 171, 177, 179, 887, 891

1038

INDEX

Discours sur Vorigine . . . de Vinegalite (Rous-

seau), 28-32, 80, 94, 171, 174, 177, 887, 891

Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popu-

lar (Campomanes), 287

Discurso sobre la education popular de los arte-

sanos y su fomento (Campomanes), 293

Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-80,725

Dittersdorf, Karl Ditters von (1730-99), 374

"Diverting History of John Gilpin, The" (Cow-

per), 811

divorce in England, 732

Dmitri I (the "false Dmitri"), Czar of Russia

(r. 1605-06), 605

Dnieper River, 430

Dniester River, 430

Dodd, Dr. William (1720-77), 830

Dodington, George Bubb (1691-1762), 702

Dodsley, Robert (1703-64), 786, 794, 814, 819,

821-22

Doge of Venice, 229, 231, 331

Dohm, Christian Wilhelm (1751-1820), 642

Dohna, Count zu (fl. 1758), 53

Doig, Peggy (fl. 1761), 779

Dolgorukaya, Natalia Borisovna ( 17 14-7 1 ) , 428

Dolgoruki, Ivan Mikhailovich (1764-1823), 428-

Dolgoruki, Vasili Lukich (1670-1739), 428-29,

458

Dominicans, 275

Dominus ac Redemptor Noster (Clement XIV),

318

Don Carlos (Schiller), 572-73, 592

Don Giovanni (Mozart), 342, 376, 388, 396-97,

402

Don Giovanni Tenorio (Goldoni), 404

Don River, 430

Don Sylvio von Rosalva (Wieland), 553

Donizetti, Gaetano (1 797-1 848), 245

Donna di garbo, La (Goldoni), 242

Donne, John ( 1573-163 1), 810, 842

Donner, Georg Raphael (1693-1741), 345

Dorat, Claude-Joseph (1734-80), 884

Dos de Mayo (1808), 307

Doughty, Charles Montagu (1843-1926), 412

drama, see theatre

Draper, Elizabeth (fl. 1767), 790

Draper, Sir William (fl. 1769), 706

Dresden: beautification of, 476; Jews in, 639; in

Seven Years' War, 45, 54-56, 60, 502, 552;

Treaty of (1745), 44

Dreux-Breze, Marquis de, see Breze

Drone, The (Novikov) , 464

Drouais, Frangois-Hubert (1727-75), f //, 120

Drury Lane Theatre, 695, 696, 740, 741, 742-43

Dryden, John (1631-1700), 842

Du Barry, Comte Guillaume (fl. 1768), 86-7

Du Barry, Chevalier Jean ( 1723-94), 86

Du Barry, Marie-Jeanne Becu, Comtesse (1743?—

1793), 86-88, 90, 656, 910, 921, 942; d'Aiguillon

and, 93, 853; Choiseul and, 88, 89; Marie An-

toinette and, 88, 848; Pajou and, 109; relations

with Louis XV, 85, 86-88, 95, 845; Voltaire and,

87-88, 875

Dubienka, battle of (1792), 489

Dublin: education in, 759; theater in, 740

du Bocage, du Boccage, see Bocage and Boccage

Dubois, Guillaume, Cardinal (1656-1723), 148

Du Chatelet-Lomont, Gabrielle-femilie Le Ton-

nelier de Breteuil, Marquise (1706-49), 26

Duel os, Charles Pinot (1705-72), 18, 31, 35, 73

Du Deffand, Marquis, 122

Du DefTand, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Mar-

quise (1697-1780), 31, 118, 122-2$, 353,447,656,

875, 906-1, 923; d'Alembert and, 123-25; death

of, 907; description of, 878; Franklin and, 869;

on individuality of English, 733; late years of,

906-7; Julie de Lespinasse and, 122-23; Voltaire

and, 135, 138; Walpole and, 125, 794-95, 906-7

dueling, 732

Duenna, The (Sheridan), 696

Du Hausset, Mme. (b.c. 1720), 95

Dumesnil ( Marie-Franc, ois Marchand; 171 1-

1803), 102

Dumonceux, Monsieur (fl. 1748), 86

Dumouriez, Charles-Frangois (1730-1823), 481

Dunkirk, 361, 944

Dunlop, Frances (1730-18 15), 777

Dunning, John, Baron Ashburton (1731-83), 714

Du Peyrou, printer, 206

Dupin, Mme. (1706-95), 16, 18, 118

Dupin de Francueil, Claude (1715-87), 16, 18,

2 4>35

Dupoirier, Citizen (fl. 1801), 103

Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre-Samuel (1730-

1817), 72, 7 5, 78, 863; on free trade in grain,

859

Dupre, P. (fl. 1759), 97*

Duquesne, Fort, 57

Durante, Francesco (1684-1755), 254, 334

Durao, Salvador (fl. 1758), 264

Durazzo, Count Marcello (fl. 1754), 368

Du Rollet, Marie-Frangois Gand-Leblanc, Mar-

quis (1716-86), 370, 371

Duru, porcelain sculptor, 108

Du Ry, Simon-Louis (1726-99), 525

Dusaulx, Jean-Joseph (1728-99), 883-84

Dutch East India Company, 646

Dutch republic, see Holland

Du Tillot, Guillaume-Leon (171 1-74) ,312

East Prussia, Seven Years' War in, 48, 49, 53

Eberhard, Johann (1 730-1 809), 507

£cho et Narcisse (Gluck), 373

Eckermann, Johann Peter (1792-1854), 505;

Goethe's conversations with, 555-56, 559, 581,

600, 603, 607, 609, 612, 618, 620, 622, 625-26; on

Goethe's corpse, 627-28; as Goethe's secretary,

625-26; women authors, 504

£cole Royale du Chant, 909

£cossaise,V (Voltaire), 136

Edict of Toleration, Austrian (1781), 357, 361-

62

INDEX

IO39

education: in Austria, 343, 352, 358, 360; in Den-

mark, 652; in England, 681; in France, 3, 863,

895, 900, 914; in Germany, 505-6; in Holland,

647; in Ireland, 759; Islamic, 412; in Italy, 219;

Jesuits and, 219; Kant's theories of, 548-49; in

Prussia, 500; Rousseau's theories on, see Rous-

seau, Jean- Jacques, educational theories of;

in Russia, 432, 453; in Scotland, 763; in Spain,

275-76; in Sweden, 657, 659; in Switzerland,

644, 888; see also schools; universities

Edinburgh: anti-Catholic riots in (1779), 735;

Royal Society of, 763; theater in, 740; Univer-

sity of, 763

"Editto sopra gli Ebrei" (Pius VI), 631

Eglinton, Alexander Montgomerie, 10th Earl

of (fl. 1760), 779

Egmont, Comte Casimir d\ 883

Egmont, Prince Pignatelli d\ 883

Egmont, Septimanie de Richelieu, Comtesse d'

(1740-73), 883

Egmont (Goethe), 584, 589, 593

Egremont, Sir Charles Wyndham, 2d Earl of

(1710-63), 685, 702

Egypt, 21,411,4/5-/7

Einstein, Alfred (1 880-1 952), 385*

Eisen, Charles (1720-78), 116*

Ekaterinoslav, 633

El Azhar, mosque of, 416

Elbe River, 356

Electa, Padre Joaquin de, 299

Elective Affinities (Goethe), 612

"Elegy" (Gray), 837

Elementa metaphysicae (Giannone), 250

Elijah ben Solomon of Wilna (1720-97), 636

Eliot, Edward, later Lord Eliot (1 727-1 804), 796

Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern (1715-

97) , Queen of Frederick II of Prussia, 495

Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick- Wolfenbuttel

(1691-1750), Empress, wife of Emperor

Charles VI, 235

Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 342

Elizabeth Farnese, see Farnese, Elizabeth

Elizaveta (Elizabeth) Petrovna, Empress of

Russia (r. 1741-62), 42, 43, 67, 428, 430, 431-32,

466, 530, 654; appearance and habits, 431; death

of, 61, 437; Jews expelled by, 632; reign of, 43 1-

37; selects Peter III for heir, 433; Seven Years'

War and, 39; Sweden and, 654-55 '*> Voltaire

and, 137

Elizabeth of Valois (1545-68), Queen of Philip

II of Spain, 592

tloge de Colbert (Necker), 865-66

tloge de Cre billon (Voltaire), 149

tloge de Richardson (Diderot), 169

Elysee Palace, 68

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82), 551, 658

Smile (Rousseau), 9, 14, 18, 98, 149, 152, 168,

n8~99> 53 1> 644, 881, 887; Archbishop of Paris

and, 194-97; atheism denounced in, 183; atti-

tude toward Bible, 185; banning of, 190;

breast-feeding stressed in, 180; burnings of,

280, 643; clerical attacks on, 185, 189, 192-99,

205; education of girls, 186; emphasis on free-

dom, 179-180; influence of, 179, 181, 881; in-

stincts and, 181; marriage in, 186-87; models

for characters in, 183; moral instruction in,

180; philosophes and, 182-83, 189; physical

training in, 180-81; publication of, 171, 178;

religious instruction in, 182-85; role of nature

in, 180-81; Rousseau's earnings from, 178; uni-

tarian beliefs in, 163

Ems, Punctation of (1786) , 505

Emilia Galotti (Lessing), 513

Empfindsamkeit cult, 518

Encyclopedic y ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sci-

ences, des arts, et des metiers (1751 f.), 20, 67,

102, 104, 155, 250, 453, 464, 655, 824, 858, 903,

925; d'Alembert's contribution to, 123, 132;

attempts to suppress 162-63, 193; Catherine II's

offer to print, 447; Choiseul and, 88; Condor-

cet's contribution to, 894; Mme. GeofTrin's

aid to, 120; influence of, 94, 220, 280-81, 888;

Malsherbes' aid to, 861; on marriage, 97; pub-

lication in Turin, 310; Quesnay's contribution

to, 73; Rousseau and, 3, 25, 33; suppression of,

94, 164; Turgot's contribution to, 78

Encyclopedic des citations (Dupre), 97*

Endymion (Keats), 810

Engels, Friedrich (1820-95), 880

England (Great Britain), 364, 669-842; agricul-

ture in, 670-71, 680, 682, 816; alliance of Euro-

pean powers against (1779-80), 713-14; Amer-

ican Revolution and, see American Revolu-

tion; amusements and sports in, 729-30; archi-

tecture in, 747-48; army in, 686; art in, 750-

58, 888; Austria and, 277-278; banking in, 670;

books and bookshops in, 786-87; Catholics in,

684, 735-36; clergy and religion in, 64, 142,

684, 735-36; crafts and furniture in, 744, 748-

50; Denmark and, 713; economy of, 72, 456,

668-71, 709, 719; education in, 681; France

and, 39, 89, 669, 713, 761; Freemasons in, 938;

free trade in, 670-71; French Revolution and,

683, 721-26; gardens and parks in, 748; guilds

in, 670; health and public sanitation in, 728;

historical writing in, 795-808, 815; Holland and,

277, 648, 669, 714; Industrial Revolution in,

see Industrial Revolution; influences on Ger-

man culture, 507; Ireland and, 671, 759-62;

Jews in, 635, 684; labor unions in, 679-80; land

enclosures in, 670-71; literature in, 518, 786-95,

808-42, 889; lusty vigor of, 733; manners and

morals in, 682, 707, 728-34, 786; music in, 223-

24, 368, 746-47; natural resources of, 671; navy

of, 40, 57, 669; opera in, 223-24; pauperism in,

684; periodicals in, 786; population of, 43, 684;

Portugal and, 259; prisons in, 737-38; prostitu-

tion in, 731-32; radicals in, 704; riots in, 700,

735-36; Romantic movement in, 170; Rousseau

in, 209-14; Russia and, 432, 456, 458, 460-61,

700, 713; salons in, 729; Scotland and, 699,

762; skepticism in, 734; slave trade and, 693,

1040

INDEX

732-33; social classes in, 669-71, 676-82, 684-85,

706, 728, 732, 734, 814-16; Spain and, 273, 277-

78, 390, 669, 713, 761; Sweden and, 713; taxa-

tion in, 686; theater in, 695-96, 739-43; Turkey

and, 363; urbanization of, 670-71, 681; Voltaire

and, 144, 881; War of the Spanish Succession

and, 669; women in, 728, 730-31, 787

empire of: command of the seas and, 669; ex-

pansion of, 57-59, 63, 669; French rivalry, 39,

57-59; see also American colonies; Canada;

India

FOREIGN ALLIANCES AND AGREEMENTS: with

Prussia (1756 f.), 39-40, 46, 53, 60-61, 432; in

Quadruple Alliance (1718), 278; with Russia

d755)» 39

government and politics in: Bute ministry,

698-700, 702-3; conflict of George III with

Parliament, 687-88, 697-701; corruption in,

7°7» 73 3 » 848; democracy in, 681, 706-7; de-

velopment of parliamentary government in,

683-84, 709, 718; Fox-North coalition ministry,

715, 718; Grafton ministry (1768-70), 700, 703,

705-6, 710; Grenville ministry, 700, 709-10;

legal reform in, 736-38; Newcastle ministry,

698; North ministry, 700-1, 706, 710-14, 761;

Pitt the Elder, de facto ministry of, 700; Pitt

the Younger, ministry of, 718-19; political

structure in England, 683-87; Rockingham

ministries, 700, 703, 710, 714, 761; Shelburne

ministry, 714-15; see also names of British

monarchs

seven years' war (1756-63), 798; aid to Fred-

erick II, 50, 53; declares war on France

(1756), 43; diplomacy leading to, 38-44; dis-

missal of Pitt the Younger, 46; England's na-

val growth and, 669; expansion of Empire

and, 57-59, 63 ; naval operations against France,

42-43; peace negotiations, 62; regiments in

Hanover, 47-48, 50; results of conflict, 63-64

English America, see American colonies

English East India Company, see British East

India Company

English Palace at Peterhof, 468

engraving, 750

Enlightenment: American Revolution and, 867;

in Austria, 343-46; in France, see Encyclope-

dic; philosophes; French Revolution and, 898-

99; in Germany, 507-8; Herder's critique of,

569; in Italy, 220, 230, 250-51; Jews and, 637-

42; Kant and, 531; Pope Benedict XIV and,

246-47; in Portugal, 269-70; response of pa-

pacy to, 246-47, 316; in Scotland, 764-78; in

Sweden, 658-62; in Switzerland, 645

Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding

(Hume), 536

Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in

Europe (Goldsmith), 814

Ensenada, Zenon de Somodevilla, Marques de

la (1702-80,279

Entfiihrung aus dem Serail, Die (Mozart), 395

Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes (Fonten-

elle),427

Epaminondas of Thebes (4i8?~362 B.C.), 52

Epee, Abbe Charles-Michel de L' (1712-89), 905

Ephemerides, 78

Epictetus (50?-i2o?),730

Epicurus (342?-27ob.c), 251

fepinay, Denis- Joseph Lalive d', 35

fepinay, Louise-Florence Lalive d', nee Tardieu

d'Esclavelles (1726-83), 55-57, 118, 390, 656,

892; aids Mozart, 392; death of, 893; early

life of, 35; Grimm and, 35-37, 156-57, 159-61,

449; Rousseau and, 4, 5*, 18, 26, 36-37, 153,

156-61, 884; salon of, 907; visit to Geneva,

159-61

Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (Pope), 878

Epitre dBoileau (Voltaire), 136

tpitre au Cardinal Dubois (Voltaire), 148

fepremesnil, Jean-Jacques Duval d' (1746-94),

947.

equalitarianism: Helvetius' belief in, 141; Rous-

seau's support for, 141; Voltaire's opposition

to, 141-42; see also communist theories

Erasmus, Desiderius (i466?-i536), 806

Erfurt, 606

Erivan, 419

Erlach, Fischer von, see Fischer von Erlach, Jo-

hann Bernhard

Ermita de Jesus in Murcia, 298

Ermolov, Alexis (fl. 1785), 446

Ernesti, Johann August (1707-81), 33

Erreurs sur la musique dans VEncyclopedie

(Ranieau), 25

Erskine, John (1695- 1768), 763

Erskine, Thomas (1750-1823), 763

Erziehung der Menschengeschlechts, Die (Les-

sing),5i5

Escorial, 250, 261

espionage, Prussian, 43

Esprit des lois, V, see Spirit of Laws

Essai sur Vapplication de Vanalyse aux proba-

bility (Condorcet), 894

Essai sur les moeurs (Voltaire), 137, 528, 630,

78i,797

Essai sur les regies de Claude et de Neron (Di-

derot), 892

Essai sur V etude de la litter ature (Gibbon), 798

Essay on the History of Civil Society (Fergu-

son), 766

Essay on Man (Pope), 703

Essay on the Nature of Commerce (Cantillon),

72

Essay on the Principle of Population, An (Mal-

thus), 896

Essay on the Whole Art . . . of Painting

(Richardson), 751

Essay on Women (Potter and Wilkes) , 703

Essays (Montaigne), 179

Estates of Brabant, 362, 364

Esterhazy, Count (fl. 1788), 363

Esterhazy, Countess, 344

Esterhazy, Prince Anton (d. 1795), 377-78

Esterhazy, Prince Miklos Jozsef (1714-90), 341,

375-7<5

INDEX

IO4I

Esterhazy, Prince Miklos II, 379

Esterhazy, Prince Pal (1635-1713), 341

Esterhazy, Prince Pal Anton (d. 1762), 375

Esthonia, 422,653

Esthonia, 422, 653

Estrees, Louis-Charles-Cesar Le Tellier, Mare-

chal Due d', 37, 48

fetats Generaux, see States-General, French

Ethics (Spinoza), 565

ethics, theories of: Bentham's, 738-39; Diderot's,

903-4; Hume's, 739; Kant's, 540-43; Adam

Smith's, 769

Etruscans, 312

Etudes de la nature (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre),

916

Eugene of Savoy (166 3- 17 36), 414-15

Eugenie (Beaumarchais) , 922

Euler, Leonhard (1707-83), 532

Euripides (480-406 B.C.), 136, 372, 588

Evelina, or A Young Lady's Entrance into the

World (Burney), 791

"Evening Song" (Karpinski) , 486

Evidences of Christianity (Paley), 735

Ewald, Johannes (1743-80,651-62

Ewige Jude, Der (Goethe), 562

Expose succinct de la contestation qui s'est ele-

vee entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau (Hume),

214

Exposition of the Catholic Doctrine (Bossuet),

796-97

Exposure of the Jewish Ceremonies (Seranmo-

vich), 633

Ex quo singulari (Benedict XTV), 225

Eybenberg, Marianne von (fl. 18 10), 612-13

Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 770

Fables (Iriarte y Oropesa) , 295

Fables and Parables (Krasicki) , 485

Fabricius, Johann Albert (1668-1736), 326

factory system: in England, 676-80, 682, 732; in

France, 932-33; in Spain, 288

Faguet, £mile ( 1 847- 1 9 1 6 ) , 5 *

Falconet, fetienne-Maurice (17 16-91), 106-7,

108-9, 467, 911

family life: Industrial Revolution and, 682; in

Italy, 218-19; Rousseau's influence on, 888

Farinelli (Carlo Broschi; 1705-82), 240, 257;

early life and fame of, 222-23; in Spain, 278-

79, 292, 296

farmers general in France, 935-36

Farnese, Elizabeth (Isabella), Queen of Philip

V of Spain (b. 1692-d. 1766), 276-77, 279,

296-97

Fasch, Karl Friedrich Christian (1736-1800), 527

Faubourg St.-Antoine, 962

Faust (Goethe), 557, 585, 608-11, 620, 622, 626:

Sturm und Drang movement and, 522

Faust, ein Fragment (Goethe), 608

Fausts Leben (Muller), 522

Feast of Reason (1793), 899

Febronius, Justinus, see Hontheim, Johann Nik-

olaus von

Feijoo y Montenegro, Benito Jeronimo (1676-

1764), 294

Fel, Mile. Marie (1713-94), 33, 100

Felipe (Philip), Duke of Parma (r. 1748-65),

Felipe, son of Charles III of Spain, 302

Felipe Quinto, see Philip V, King of Spain

fellaheen, Egyptian, 415

Feltre, 229

Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-

(1651-1715), 179,450,845

Ferdinand, Archduke (b. 1754-d. 1806), Duke

of Modena, 346, 350, 387, 847

Ferdinand III, Duke of Parma (r. 1765-1801),

317,846

Ferdinand IV, King of Naples (r. 1 759-1 806,

1815-25), King of Sicily as Ferdinand III (r.

1806-15), 3/*, 334-35, 377

Ferdinand VI, King of Spain (r. 1746-59), 263,

279-81; accession of, 279; becomes insane, 279-

80; death of, 258; mild policies toward Jews,

276

Ferdinand VII, King of Spain (r. 1808, 1814-

1833), 506-7

Ferdinand of Brunswick, Duke (b. 1721-d. 1792),

50,53,54,60,507

Ferguson, Adam (1723-1816), 764, 765-66, 767,

775

Fermor, Count William of (1704-71), 53, 60,

435

Ferney, Voltaire, see Voltaire at ferney

Ferrara, 641; Goethe in, 587

Ferrara, Duke of (Tasso's patron), Alfonso II

(r. 1550-97), 244-45

Ferreira, Antonio (d. 1759), 265

Fersen, Count Frederik Axel von (1719-94), 664

Fersen, Count Hans Axel von (1755-1810), 664,

941

Fersen, Sophie von, 941

Festes de Ramire, Les (Rameau, Voltaire and

Rousseau), 18

Festin de Pierre, Le (Moliere), 404

Festival of the Supreme Being (1794), 890

feudalism: in Austria, 345; in Denmark, 649, 653;

in France, 849, 861-63, 872, 927-29, 931, 937, 954;

in Prussia, 43, 500-1; in Russia, 424, 451, 454-55;

Adam Smith's critique of, 770

Fiabe (Gozzi), 243, 244

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-18 14), 550-51,

618,620

Fielding, Henry (1707-54), 723, 835, 842

Fielding, Sarah (1710-68), 787

Filangieri, Gaetano (1752-88), 336

Filippo (Alfieri), 338, 340

Filmer, Sir Robert (d. 1653), 177

Fils naturel, Le (Diderot), 153

Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books,

. . . Composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal

(Macpherson), 767-68

Finland, 422, 460; Gustavus Ill's policy toward,

663 ; Russian acquisition of, 654

Finta Fracastana, La (Leo), 255

1042

INDEX

Finta giardiniera, La (Mozart), 388

Firdausi, Persian poet (940?-! 020?), 613

Firmian, Count Karl Joseph von (1716-82), 312;

aids Mozart, 386-87; Parini aided by, 335-36

First Estate: role in States -General, 956-61;

structure of, 949-50

Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard (1656-

J 7 2 3)> 345,4 2 6

Fischerstrom, Johan (1735-96), 660

Fisher, William, 773

Fishers, The (Ewald), 652

Fitzherbert, Alleyn, Baron St. Helens (1758—

1839), 459

Fitzherbert, Maria Ann, nee Smythe (1756—

1870,721

Flachsland, Caroline, see Herder, Caroline

Flanders, 342

Flaubert, Gustave (1821-80), 104

Flaxman, John (1 755-1 826), 750

Fleury, Andre Hercule de, Cardinal (1653—

J 743)>40 a

Fleury, Maitre Omer Joly de, see Joly de

Fleury, Omer

Flood, Henry (1732-91), 761

Florence: Accademia della Crusca of, 824; Free-

masons in, 220; French Revolutionary Army

in (1799), 340; Goethe in, 587, 589; under

Grand Duke Leopold, 310; history and

achievements, 227-28; library in, 219; theaters

in, 220; university in, 219

Florida, 62, 709, 714

Floridablanca, Jose Monina, Conde de (1728-

1808), 286, 281, 302

flying shuttle, 673

Fontaine, Priory of, 928

Fontainebleau, Peace of (1762), 62

Fontenailles, Marquise de, 68

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de (1 657-1 757),

15, 105, 110-20, 139, 427, 894, 903

Fonthill Abbey, 809

Foote, Samuel (1720-77), 740

Forcalquier, Mme. de, 1 18

Force, La, prison of, 962

Fordyce, Lord, 525

Formey, Jean-Louis-Samuel (171 1-97;, 23

Formont, Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas de (d. 1758?),

122

Forth River, 762

Four Ages of Man (Gonzalez), 295

"Four Seasons" (Naruszewicz) , 485

Fourier, Franc.ois-Marie-Charles (1772-1837),

81, 891

Fourmantelle, Catherine (fl. 1759), 787

Fox, Charles James (1 749-1806), 133, 683, 693-

694, 701, 724, 750, 777, 833; and American

colonies, 711, 713-14; appearance and habits of,

694; on Burke, 692; in coalition ministry, 715,

718; death of, 726; duels with Adams, 694, 732;

early life of, 693; and French Revolution, 722,

724, 726; in Hastings trial, 696, 719-20; and In-

dia bills, 718-19; liberal views of, 694; marries

Mrs. Armstead, 726; in Ministry of All the

Talents, 726; opposes slave trade, 726, 732-33;

in Rockingham ministry, 76 1

Fox, George (1624-90,732

Fox, Henry, 1st Baron Holland (1705-74), 364,

693

Frage, ob die Welt veralte, Die (Kant), 532-33

Fragment on Government (Bentham), 738

Fragonard, Jean-Honore (1732-1806), 97, 112,

115-18,911

France, 6-7-408, 845-963; agriculture in, 859, 861,

92-7-31; aid to American Revolution, 354, 711,

842, 86-J--J2; American empire of, see French

America; anti-religious feeling in, 64, 183; ar-

chitecture in, 109-n; army in, 686; art in, 106-

18, 910-14; Austria and, 488, 846; Austrian

Netherlands and, 45; ballet in, 100; banking

in, 861; book publishing in, 71; Breteuil's min-

istry (1789), 961-63; cafes in, 99; capital pun-

ishment in, 146; clergy and religion in, 67, 92,

142, 857, 900-2, 931, 949-50, 956-61; clothing

and grooming in, 99, 889, 90$; commerce and

trade in, 70-77, 80, 709, 859-60, 872, 931-35;

communist theories in, 80-84; Corsica and, 205,

312-13; crime in, 903; cuisine in, 99; drought

of 1788 in, 949; economic inequality in, 936-37;

education in, 3, 863, 895, 900, 914; England

and, 39, 89, 669, 713, 761; on eve of Revolu-

tion, 954-56; famine in, ^954-55; feudalism in,

849, 861-63, 921-29, 931, 937, 954; financial

problems of, 90, 859-61; First Coalition

against, 591; Freemasons in, 94, 938-39; free

trade and, 935; guilds in, 72, 862, 932; Hol-

land and, 648-49; in Holy Roman Empire, 341;

home furnishings in, 106-7; India and 58-59,

715; Industrial Revolution in, 931-34; internal

tolls in, 935; It?aly and, 217; Jansenists in, 85,

91, 193, 246; Jews in, 91, 630, 642; law in, 849,

947-48; libraries in, 914; literature in, 889,

914-19; marriage in, 97; morality and grace

in, 91-100, 902-5; music in, 100-1, 368, 370-73,

909-10, 915; Napoleonic, see Napoleon I;

Napoleonic Wars, 627, 726, 872; navy of, 40,

57; opera in, 26; oratory in, 99; palaces in,

850; papacy and, 317-18; parlements in, see

parlements and Paris, Parlement of; pauper-

ism in, 930-31; periodicals and pamphlets in,

94, 91$; Poland and, 476, 482; political clubs

in, 939; population of, 927; prostitution in,

98, 903; Protestants in, 91, 8$i, 901-2, 950;

Prussia and, 488; ratio of priests to lay popu-

lation, 224; recognizes United States, 713; re-

ligious toleration in, 144; riots in, 98, 934,

954-55, 956, 961; Romantic movement in, 170;

Russia and, 430, 432, 457-58; salons in, 1 18-31,

906-8; Senegal given to, 714; slave trade and,

58, 935; social classes in, 61-82, 84-96, 848-50,

858-59, 861, 863-64, 872, 898-99, 901-4, 914, 927-

3h 934-31, 944-48, 954-6i; Spain and, 277-78,

280, 293, 296, 306-1; tariff policy of, 935; taxa-

tion in, 69, 92, 931, 935-3^, 944» 946, 959; theater

INDEX

IO43

in, wi-6, 920-26; transportation in, 70; women

in, 906-8

FOREIGN ALLIANCES AND AGREEMENTS: alliances

against England, 870-71; alliance with the

United States (1778), 870; First Treaty of

Versailles (1756), 42; Mme. de Pompadour

and, 67; in Quadruple Alliance (1718), 278;

Second Treaty of Versailles (1757), 45; sub-

sidies to foreign countries, 61, 89

government and politics in: administrative

jurisdictions, 849; Assembly of Notables

(1787), 75, 944-4$; authority of royal power,

849-50 {see also Louis XV; Louis XVI; Marie-

Antoinette); Bourbon restoration, 890; Bre-

teuil ministry, 961-63; Brienne ministry, 945-

48; Calonne ministry, 943-45; chaos in gov-

ernmental operations, 848-50; expenses of

court, 84, 850; Maurepas ministry, 85, 97, 104;

Necker ministries, see Necker, Jacques; Nuis

ministry (1776), 865; parlements and, see

parlements and Paris, Parlement of; States-

General and, see States-General, French; Tur-

got ministry, 858-65

in seven years' war, 45-46, 48-64 passim;

diplomacy leading to war, 38-44; European

land operations, 48, 49-50, 51, 53-55 passim, 60;

losses in America and India, 45, 57-5^, 62-63,

68, 709; naval war with England, 42-43, 56,

51S9; peace negotiations, 60-62

France, Anatole (1 844-1 924), 880

France libre, La (Desmoulins),<)i^

Francueil, Dupin de, see Dupin de Francueil,

Claude

Franche-Comte, 928

franchise: in England, 685; in Switzerland, 643-

644

Francis I (Francis of Lorraine), Holy Roman

Emperor (r. 1745-65), 46, 313, 346, 383

Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1792-

1806), Emperor of Austria as Francis I (r.

1804-35), 378, 379

Francis, Sir Philip (1740-1818), 705-6, 717-19,

723 .

Franciscans, 224, 902

Franck, Johann Matthais (fl. 1738), 373-74

Frank, Jacob (Jankiew Leibowicz; 1726-91 ), 636

Frankfurt: fairs in, 556; Jews in, 634, 642; popula-

tion of, 556; social classes in, 556

Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen, 506, 52 1

Frankl, August (1810-94), 613

Franklin, Benjamin (1706-90), 120, 201, 802,

856; on corruption in English Parliament,

733; death of, 872; in England, 868; in France,

868-72; as Freemason, 939; French America

and, 57; French Enlightenment and, 867;

French Revolution and, 84; influence of phi-

losophes on, 899; Turgot and, 865; Voltaire

and, 875

Franks, 3 1 2

Franquet, M. (d. 1756), 920

Franyo, Remigius, 363

Frederick I, King of Sweden (r. 1720-51), 654

Frederick I, Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor

(r. 1152-90), 239

Frederick II the Great, King of Prussia (r.

(1740-86), 42-57, 59-64, 107, 136, 142-43, 249,

337*. 433* 495-502, 528-30, 657, 782, 880, 885, 897;

abilities of 43, 46, 529-30, 849; achievements of,

502; d'Alembert and, 124, 892; appearance and

habits of, 495, 499-500; attitude toward religion,

498-99; attitude toward royalty, 342, 502, 530;

bribes Bestuzhev, 432; Catherine II and, 434,

442, 457-58, 462, 484, condemns Goethe's Gotz

von Berlichingen, 561; curbs freedom of press,

530; death of, 461, 530; death of sister, 47, 54;

deism of, 498-99, 528; economic policies of,

500-1; in first partition of Poland, 350; Free-

masons and, 507, 938; George III and, 60;

Grimm's Correspondance litter aire and, 34-35;

Jesuits and, 319; Jewish bankers aid, 53; on

John V of Portugal, 260; Joseph II and, 349,

353 - 54i 361-62; on Kaunitz, 40; legal reforms

of, 500; literary works of, 44, 49, 54, 528-29;

Louis XV and, 40; on Louis XVI, 857; love for

music, 496, 526; on Maria Theresa, 38-39,

342, 344, 350, 352, 529-30; militarism of, 500,

529; moral probity of, 355; Napoleon on, 530;

national pride in, 506; parsimony of, 499-500;

personality of, 495-96, 530; Peter III of Russia

and, 438, 440; philosophes and, 496-98; Pitt the

Elder's support for, 698; Poland and, 350, 479-

84; prophecies of, 530; reforms of, 142, 321,

500; returns from Seven Years' War, 495;

Rousseau and, 173, 497; social and philosophi-

cal views of, 496-97, 5 28 so; Voltaire and, 108,

139,^5-^,528,873,876,879

in seven years' war, 44-64; appeal to

troops, 51-52; army of, 43; in battle of Leuthen

(' 757)> S l S 2 \ m battle of Rossbach (1757),

50; in battle of Torgau (1760), 60; in battle of

Zorndorf (1758), 53; bombards Dresden, 60,

502; campaign in Bohemia, 47-48; campaigns

in Saxony, 44-45, 49-50, 54, 60, 61 ; campaigns in

Silesia, 51-53, 55, 60-61; coalitions against, 45-

46; contemplates suicide, 54; defeat at Ku-

nersdorf (1759), 55-, diplomacy leading to, 39-

40, 42; espionage system of, 43-44; letters to

Voltaire, 59-60; peace negotiations, 47-48, 63-

64; pessimism over victory, 46-49; poems writ-

ten during, 49-50, 59; prestige of, 63; refuses

French peace feelers, 56-57; strategy of, 44;

in winter of 1759-60, 56, 59

Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel (r.

1760-85), 504, 525

Frederick IV, King of Denmark (r. 1 699-1 730),

235,650

Frederick V, King of Denmark (r. 1746-66), 517,

651,652

Frederick VI, King of Denmark (r. 1 784-1 808 as

regent; 1808-39 as king), 653

Frederick Augustus I, Elector of Saxony, see

Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland

io44

INDEX

Frederick Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, see

Augustus III, King of Poland

Frederick Augustus III, Elector of Saxony (r.

1 768- 1 806), 406, 502

Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (1707-51), 687

Frederick William I, King of Prussia (r. 1713—

1740), 426, 526

Frederick William II, King of Prussia (r. 1786—

97), 333, 377, 405, 461, 540; alliance with Tur-

key (1785), 363; betrays and invades Poland,

489-90; death of, 547; Frederick II's doubts on,

530; Kant threatened by, 545-46

Frederick William III, King of Prussia (r. 1797—

1840), liberal policies of, 547

Frederick William, Great Elector of Branden-

burg, (r. 1640-88), 528

Fredman, Jan (1712-67), 660

Fredmans Epistlar (Bellmann) , 660

Freemasonry, 322, 567; in Austria, 358; Casanova

and, 323; doctrines of, 939; in England, 734,

938; in France, 94, 869, 938-39; in German

states, 507, 938; in Italy, 220; Jesuits and, 939; in

Russia, 465; spread of, 938

free trade: Austria rejects, 344-45; in England,

670-71; France and, 859-60, 935; in Portugal,

269; in Russia, 455; in Sweden, 657; in Tus-

cany, 313

Free Trade Act (1779) for Ireland, 761

free trade doctrines, see Smith, Adam; physio-

crats

Freiberg, Saxony, battle of ( 1762) , 61

Freiburg, university at, 360

Freidenkerlexikon, 507

Freigeist, Der (Lessing) , 508-9

French Academy (Academie Fran^aise, Forty

Immortals), 353, 824, 894; emulation of, 280,

569; Voltaire and, 137, 877, 879

French America, 38-39, 58, 68, 89, 698, 709, 935;

English conquest of, 57-58, 62, 68; Martinique

restored to France, 62

French Guards, 959, 963

French Guiana, 89

French Revolution, 286, 333, 336, 363, 490, 496,

634, 900-63; American Revolution and, 872; art

and, 1 17-18, 912-13; attacks on chateaux in, 931;

basic purpose of, 937; Burke's opposition to,

722-23, 806; Catherine II and, 465, 469, Church

and, 902, 931, 937, 940; city populace and, 899;

communist theorists in, 80, 937-38; Condor-

cet's contribution to, 894-95; Corsica and, 313;

court and, 939-40; Declaration of the Rights

of Man and, 642, 872; defiance of Dauphine

Estates and, 948; economic inequality and,

937; emigres from, 963; England and, 683, 721-

26; eve of, 954-56; feudalism abolished by,

872, 937; fraternization of troops with people

in, 959-60; Freemasons and, 938-39; German

Enlightenment and, 590-91 ; Gibbon's fear of,

805-6; Goethe's opposition to, 622; govern-

ment corruption and, 939; Holland and, 364,

648-49; hunger and, 940; industry and, 931-34;

Italy and, 311; Jews and, 642; Kant's enthusi-

asm for, 548; middle class and, 899, 934-37,

939; nobles and, 899, 927-30; peasants and, 927-

31; phases of, 725, 899; philosophes and, 143,

880, 959-60, 937-38, 940; political clubs and,

939; press censorship and, 940; religious toler-

ance and, 642; Reveillon factory riot and,

956; role of Paris in, 961-63; Rousseau and, 3,

177, 880, 890; socialism and, 938; Sweden and,

662, 664; Switzerland and, 644-45, 805-6; ter-

rorist period of, 725, 899; Voltaire and, 143,

880; wars of, 488, 872; workers and, 933-34

French West Indies, 709

Freron, £lie (1719-76), 108, 136, 149,922

Friederike of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess, 523

Friedrich Christian (1765-1814), Duke of Hol-

stein-Augustenburg, 594

Friesen, Count von (fl. 1750), 33

Friuli, 229

Froebel, Friedrich ( 1782-185 2), 888

Fuga, Ferdinando (1699-1781), 247

Fullerton, duel with Shelburne, 732

Fulton, Robert (1765-18 15), 932

Funeral of Danish Comedy, The (Holberg), 650

Fiirnberg, Karl Joseph von (fl. 1755), 374

furniture: English, 523, 748; French, 106-7, 9 I0 >

German, 523

Furstenbund (League of Princes), 362-63

gabelle, 936

Gabriel, Jacques-Ange (1 698-1 782), 87, in

Gabrielli, Caterina (1730-96), 333

Gaime, Abbe (fl. 1728), 183

Gainsborough, Thomas (1727-88), 740, 755-57;

Bath period, 756; as colorist, 757; death of,

757; early life of, 755; in London, 756-57; mar-

riage to Margaret Burr, 755; nature paintings

of, 756-57; personality of, 755, 757; Reynolds

and, 756-57

Galiani, Abbe Ferdinando (1728-87), 75, 120,

2 5*. 3*7. 333. 587*908

Galicia: Jews in, 632, 641; salt deposits in, 344

Galilei, Alessandro (1691-1736), 247

Galilei, Galileo (1564-1642), 294

Gallatin, Mme. de (fl. 1776), 136

Galuppi, Baldassare (1706-85), 232-33, 333, 426,

466

Galvani, Luigi (1737-98), 310

Gama, Vasco da (1469?-! 5 24), 259, 270

gambling, 230-31, 850, 903

Gandzha, 419

gardens: in England, 748; in France, 99; Rous-

seau's influence on, 889

Garibaldi, Giuseppe (1807-82), 340

Garrick, David (1717-79), 696, 730, 340, 741-43,

747-48, 750, 780, 791, 808, 828, 964; acting at

Drury Lane, 742; appearance and personality

of, 741, 756; death of, 743, 839; early life and

education of, 741; Goldsmith and, 813-17; in-

novations of, 742; Johnson and, 741-42, 818,

822, 830; love affairs and marriage, 742-43;

INDEX

IO45

management of Drury Lane, 742-43; on Paris,

71; popularity as actor, 741-42; Rousseau and,

209, 211

Garrick, Eva Maria, nee Weigel (1724-1822),

743

Garve, Christian (1742-98), 536*

Gassendi, Pierre (1592-1655), 294

Gatchina Palace, 468

Gatier, Abbe (fl. 1729), 9, 183

Gaultier, Abbe (fl. 1778), 876, 879

Gautier, Theophile ( 181 1-72) , 880, 889

Gazette de France, 915

Gazzaniga, Giuseppe ( 1 743- 1 8 1 8 ) , 404

Gebler, Tobias von (1726-86), 355

Gedanken iiber die Nachahmung der griechis-

chen Werke in Mahlerei und Bildhauerkunst

(Winckelmann), 327

Gedanken von der ivahren Schatzung der leben-

digen Krafte (Kant), 532

Geelvinck, Mme. (fl. 1763), 781

Gefiihlsphilosophie (Jacobi),89o

Gelderland, 62

Gelders, 342

Gellert, Christian Furchtegott (1715-69), 782

Geminiani, Francesco (d. 1762), 221, 746

General Dictionary of the English Language

(Sheridan), 695

General History of Music (Burney), 333, 746-

47

General History of the Science and Practise of

Music (Hawkins), 746

general will, Rousseau's concept of, 172

Generallandschulreglement (1763), 500

Geneva, 176, 643; conflict of middle class with

patricians, 143; Rousseau and, 27-28, 163-64,

177, 179, 190; theater in, 163

Genlis, Mme. Stephanie Felicite de (1 746-1 830),

805, 955

Genoa, 205, 312; Austria and, 312; Freemasonry

in, 220, French control of, 217; history and

achievements of, 227; Jesuit colleges in, 219;

sells Corsica to French, 313; theaters in, 220;

universities in, 219

Genovesi, Antonio (1712-69), 250-51

Gentile, Anna, 219

Gentile, Maria, 257

Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director, The

(Chippendale), 748

Gentleman's Magazine, The, 786, 819-20

Geoff rin, Marie-Therese, nee Rodet (1699-

1777), 104-5, 118-12$, 126-27, 131, 208, 251,656;

aid to Encyclopedic, 120; Betsky and, 453;

correspondence of, 121, 447; Diderot and, 120;

early life of, 1 18-19; Gibbon and, 799; hus-

band of, 119; on lack of erudition, 119; piety

of, 121; Poniatowski and, 477-78; salon of,

1 20-2 1 ; visit to Warsaw, 1 2 1

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, fitienne (1772-1844), 617

geology, Goethe's work in, 615

George I (George Louis), King of Great Brit-

ain and Ireland (r. 1714-27) and Elector of

Hanover (r. 1698- 17 27), 699

George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland,

and Elector of Hanover (r. 1727-60), 687,

794; death of, 60, 697; distaste for politics, 697

George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland,

(r. 1 760- 1 8 20), Elector and (from i8i5),King

of Hanover, 214, 384, 656, 687-89, 697-701, 722,

737-38, 750, 791, 794; American Revolution and,

687, 711, 713; appearance of, 698; attempts to

shackle press, 701; Burns's criticism of, 777;

Bute ministry and, 698-700, 702-3; calamity of

reign, 688; conflict with Parliament, 61, 683,

686-88, 697-701; death of, 727; distaste for

Seven Years' War, 698; early life of, 687; fits of

insanity, 700, 721, 726-27; Fox-North coalition

ministry and, 718; Federick II and, 60; French

Revolution and, 687; Gibbon's praise of, 803;

Grafton ministry and, 700; Grenville ministry

and, 700; Junius and, 706; marries Charlotte

Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 698; Napole-

onic Wars and, 687; Newcastle ministry and,

698; North ministry and, 700-01, 706, 710-14;

partition of Poland and, 484; personality of,

687-88; Pitt ministry and, 700, 718-19, 726; pow-

ers of, 686; privy purse of, 686; Rockingham

ministry and, 700, 714, 761; slave trade and,

732; Wilkes and, 702

George IV (George Augustus Frederick, Prince

of Wales), King of Great Britain and Ireland

(r. 181 1-20 as prince regent, 1820-30 as king),

379,721,727,777

George, Henry (1839-97), 76

George, Lake, 58

Georgia, 418

Gerl, Viennese basso (fl. 1791), 408

German courts, morality of, 504

German language, 506-7

Germany (German states) : anti-religious feel-

ing in, 64, 507; architecture in, 524-25; art in,

523-24; books and periodicals in, 506; clergy

and religion in, $02-$, $07-8, 513-14; educa-

tion in, 505-6; Enlightenment in, 505-/7; fam-

ily life in, 503-4; folk music in, 503; Free-

masonry in, 507; Goethe's contempt for, 627;

historical writing in, 578-80; in Holy Roman

Empire, 341; Jews in, 507, 517, 634, 639, 642;

libraries in, $06-22, 553-78, 584-605, 608-11,

623-25, 889; literature in, $09-11, 513-21, $$7-

6$, 584-90, 592, 599-605, 608-n, 623-25; mer-

cenaries in, 504; mildness of governments in,

503; music in, 367, 517-18, 525-28, 552; Napo-

leon remakes (1808), 606; opera in, 223-24,

527-28; philosophy in, $3i-$i, 618-23, 889-90;

poverty in, 503; principalities of, 502-5; Prot-

estantism in, 64, 142; Romantic movement in,

170, 508, $17-20; social classes in, 503-4; theater

in, $09-10, $13-1$, 560-61, 584-85, 588, 592, 601-3,

604-5; unification of, 502; village life in, 503

Gerstenberg, Heinrich von (173 7- 1823), 518

Gerusalemme liber ata (Tasso) , 464

Geschichte der Kunst des Alt ert hums (Winck-

elmann), see History of Ancient Art

Geschichte des Abfalls der Vereinigten Nieder-

1046

INDEX

lande (Schiller), 592

Geschichte des Agathon (Wieland), 553-55

Geschichte des Dreissigjahrigen Krieges (Schil-

ler), 593, 601

Geschichte des Instrumental konzerts (Scher-

ing), 234

Gesprache mit Goethe (Eckermann), see Con-

versations with Goethe

Gessner, Salomon (1730-88), 519-20, 645

Gesuati, Church of, 238

Gewandhaus orchestra, 525

Ghent, 361

Ghislandi, Vittore (1 655-1 743), 228

Gian (Giovan) Gastone de' Medici, Grand

Duke of Tuscany (r. 1723-37), 227-28

Giannone, Pietro (1676-1748), 250

Gibbon, Catherine, 796

Gibbon, Edward (1666-1736), grandfather of

the historian, 796

Gibbon, Edward (1707-70), father of the his-

torian, 796, 798-99

Gibbon, Edward (1737-94), historian, 175, 280,

353» 53°, 594, 694, 720, 729, 746-47, 772, 75^-

800, 842, 856, 908; ancestry of, 796; appearance

of, 804; appetite of, 804-5; attitude toward

Middle Ages, 804; autobiographies of, 795-96;

on Bernese oligarchy, 643; on charm of Rome,

245; as Child of Enlightenment, 807-8; "the

Club," 805, 827; continental tour of, 799-800;

death of, 806; Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire, see Decline and Fall of the Roman

Empire; early aspirations to be a historian,

798, 800; early life and education of, 796-99;

fear of the French Revolution, 805-6; flight

from Switzerland, 806; on Goldoni's Memoirs,

244; he becomes a Catholic, 797; as a historian,

806-8; Hume and, 799-800; influence of

French rationalism on, 797, 880; on intellectual

life of Paris, 906; Samuel Johnson and, 805, 831 ;

meets philosophes, 797-99; opposes American

Revolution, 711; in Parliament, 799-800, 803;

relationship with Suzanne Curchod, 797-99,

865; residence in London, 799, 805-6; residence

in Switzerland, 797-98, 805-6; on Robertson,

766; scholarship of, 807; in Seven Years' War,

798-99; stay in Buriton, 798-99; style as writer,

806; on Voltaire's theater, 134; on Wilkes, 701

Gibbon, Hester (1705-89), 796

Gibraltar, 273, 278, 290

Gideon, Simon (1 699-1 762), 635

Gilan, 419

Gillet, Nicolas-Francois (d. 1790,467

Gillray, James (1757-1815), 729

Giornale dei letter ati d" Italia, 220

Girardin, Marquis Rene de (fl. 1728), 886, 940

Girgenti, Goethe in, 589

Girondins, 895, 915

Glarus, 643

Glasgow: anti-Catholic riots in (1780), 735;

growth of, 762; as port city, 669; University

of, 674, 769

glass industry, 230

Glatz, 48; Prussia retains, 62

Gluck, Christoph Willibald (1714-87), 25, 100,

220, 291, 334, 5*7-75, 374, 395, 846, 875, 883,

909, 964; appearance and personality of, 368,

371; collaboration with Calzabigi, 368-70J

death of, 373; early years and education ofi,

367; "glass harmonica" compositions of, 368;

his Uinnocenza giustificata premiere, 368; his

Orfeo premiere, 369; lieder of, 373; in London,

368; marriage to Marianne Pergia, 368; in

Milan, 227; operatic reforms of, 335, 368-70J

in Paris, 101, 368, 370-73; Piccini rivalry, 333;

371-72, 908; in Vienna, 367-72

"God and the Bayadere, The" (Goethe), 599

Godoy, Manuel de (1 767-1 851), 302, 304-6

Godunov, Boris Feodorovich, Czar of Russia

(r. 1 598-1 605), 425

Godwin, William (1756-1836), 881, 891

Goethe, August von (1 789-1 830), 614, 626

Goethe, Christiane, nee Vulpius (1765-1816),

589-90, 603, 605-6, 61 1 -14

Goethe, Cornelia (1750-77), 556

Goethe, Johann Kaspar (1710-82), 556

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832), 63,

3". 347, 379, 4<>o> 47 1 * 5<«-3> 5 l 9, 53<>> 545, 55°,

55 2 > 555-tl, 580-91, 596-628, 639, 641, 645, 661,

767, 842, 964; appearance and personality, 587;

at battle of Valmy (1792), 591; children of,

589; Christiane Vulpius and, see Goethe, Chris-

tiane; contribution to Romantic movement,

889; on crime in Italy, 319; on English people,

728; esthetic theories of, 588, 593, 627; fascina-

tion with Cagliostro, 322*; as Freemason, 507;

on German village life, 503; Herder and, 559,

561-62, 568-69, 577, 580, 586, 591, 600, 608, 613;

illnesses of, 603; 605; on Lessing, 517; on Louis

XVI, 857; love for Greece, 623-24; love of na-

ture, 584, 619; on Merck, 521; on Mozart, 383,

405, 408; Napoleon and, 623; opposes French

Revolution, 590-91; opposes Pestalozzi's

schools, 644; in Ossian controversy, 768; on

papacy, 316; philosophical views of, 564, 618-

23; poetry of, 557-58, 584-86, 599, 601; Rous-

seau's influence on, 518, 889; satires of, 598-99;

Schiller and, 591, 593, 595-605; scientific work

and theories of, 596-97, 615-18; social views of,

581, 590-91, 622-23; on Tiepolo's frescoes, 239;

version of Lessing's Nathan der Weise, 515; on

The Vicar of Wakefield, 815; views on Euro-

pean unity, 607; views on French culture, 607;

views on religion, 56^-66; Voltaire's influence

on, 880-81; Wieland and, 576-77; Winckel-

mann's influence on, 326*, 331

early years ( 1 749-75): appearance of, 558-60;

description of, 561; family life and education

of, 5 56-5 7 ; in Frankfurt, 556-58, 560-67; he

thinks of suicide, 562; he writes The Sorrows

of Young Werther, 563-64; interest in Jews,

556, 562; Jacobi and, 563-64; leaves Frankfurt

for Weimar, 567; Lessing and, 563-64; literary

tastes of, 557; love affairs of, 556-62, 566; meets

Duke Karl August, 566; minor literary proj-

INDEX

IO47

ects, 562-63; parents of, 556', in Strasbourg,

558-60; in Sturm und Drang movement, 520-

21, 560-61; views on religion, $6/\-66\ writes

drama on Prometheus, 56^-65., writes Gotz

von Berlichingen, 560-61

as councilor ( 1 775-86): acquires status of

noble, 581; appointed to Privy Council, 581;

dramas of, 584-85; love affair with Charlotte

von Stein, see Stein, Charlotte von; love of

nature, 584; poems of, 584-86; Weimar court

life and, 581

in italy (1786-88), 310; architectural studies

in, 587; art work in, 587-88; impressions of

Italy, 232, 313-15; literary activities in, 588;

love affairs, 588; love for Italy, 586; writes

Romische Elegien, 590

mature years of (1805-25): death of wife,

614; deference to nobility, 622; domestic life,

613; Felix Mendelssohn and, 614-15; love af-

fairs of, 611-15; love of Greece, 623-24; mar-

ries Christiane Vulpius, 606, 611; meetings

with Napoleon; social views of, 622-23; views

on Beethoven, 613; views on marriage, 612;

views on religion and morality, 619-22; writes

autobiography, 613; writes Faust, 608-11, 620,

622-26

last years of ( 1 825-32): appearance in death,

628; completes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,

599-601; death of, 627-28; death of Charlotte

von Stein, 626; death of son, 626; international

fame, 627

Goethe, Katharina Elisabeth, nee Textor (1731-

1803), 556,606

Goethe, Ottilie von, nee Pogwisch (1796-1872),

614-15,627

Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (Goe-

the-Brentano) , 611

Goeze, Johann Melchior (1717-86), 514, 563

Goezman, Louis- Valentin (fl. 1770), 921

Goislard de Montsabert, Anne-Louis (1763-

i8i 4 ),94 7

Goldene Spiegel, Der (Wieland), $55

Goldoni, Carlo (1707-93), 237, 239-40, 494, 883;

attitude toward French music, 909; death of,

244; declining years of, 244; early life of, 241;

in Paris, 71, 244; rivalry with Gozzi, 242-43;

theatrical reforms of, 242

Goldsmith, Henry, 813

Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74), 730, 739, 753, 759,

786, 813-1-], 827, 828; appearance and person-

ality of, 817; on Burke's oratory, 692; Chatter-

ton's poems and, 810; death of, 817, 839; defense

of English peasantry, 814-16; early life and

education of, 813-14; early literary works of,

814; fame of, 814-15; Garrick and, 814-17; his-

torical writing of, 815; Samuel Johnson and,

814-17,831,840

Golitsyn, Alexander (fl. 1770), 458

Goncalves Pereira, Dr. Pedro (fl. 1758), 264

Goncourt, Edmond de (1822-96), and Jules de

(1830-70), 342

Gontard, Karl Philipp Christian von (1731-91),

Gonzaga, Tomaz Antonio (1744-1807), 269

Gonzalez, Diego (i734?-o4), 295

Good-Natured Man, The (Goldsmith), 815, 817

Gordon, Lord George (1751-93), 735-36

Gordon Riots (1780), 735-36

Goschen, G. J. (1752-1828), 573

Gospel Triumphant, The (Olavide), 286

Gospels, 629

Gossec, Francois-Joseph (1734-1829), 909

Gossen, Stephen (1554-1624), 163

Gotha, 362

Gott, einige Gesprache (Herder), 578

Gotter Griechenlands, Die (Schiller), 595

"Gottlieb, Das" (Goethe), 619

Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1700-66), 49, 327,

782

Gotz von Berlichingen (Goethe), 506, 521, 560-

61, 588, 627

Gougenot, Abbe (fl. 1755), 112

G ounod, Charles-Francois (181 8-93 ) , 6 1 1

Gournay, Jean-Claude- Vincent de (1712-59),

7 2 -73» 7 8

Gouthiere, Pierre (1740- 1806), 87, 106

Gouveia, Marquis of (d. 1759), 265

Gouvernet, Suzanne de Livry, Marquise de, 877

Goya, Eugracia Lucientes, 300

Goya, Jose (Goya's father), 300

Goya y Lucientes, Camilo, 300

Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746-

1828), 227, 276, 298-99, 300-9; caprichos of,

305; as court painter, 302, 304; deafness of,

303; death of, 297, 309; death of wife, 307; as

director of painting in Academy, 302, 304;

early life and personality of, 300; growth of,

300-2; Joseph Bonaparte and, 297; later years

of, 302, 308; love affairs of, 302-3; majas of,

201 1 3°3"5; marriage to Josef a Bayeu, 300;

nudes of, 305; portraiture of, 305; rationalism

of, 306; social views of, 306-8; in Spanish war

of liberation, 307-8; war paintings of, 307-8

Goya y Lucientes, Javier de (b. 1784), 304, 308

Goya y Lucientes, Josefa, nee Bayeu, 300-3, 307

Goya y Lucientes, Mariano de, 308-9

Gozzi, Bettina, 322

Gozzi, Carlo (1 720-1 806), 239, 242-43, 3 10- 11

Gozzi, Gasparo (1713-86), 242

Gozzi, Padre (fl. 1740), 322

Grabowska, Pani, 479

Gradot cafe, 99

Graff, Anton (1736-1813), 524

Graffigny, Francoise d'Issembourg d'Happon-

court de, 78

Grafton, Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3d Duke of

(1735-1811), 731-32; Junius' attacks on, 705-6;

ministry of, (1760-70), 700, 703, 705-6; 710

Graham, Mrs. (fl. 1777), 756

"Grains" (Quesnay),73

Gramont, Beatrixe de Choiseul, Duchesse de

(1731-94), 007

Gran Consigiio (Great Council) of Venice, 229

1048

INDEX

"Grandes Remontrances" of Paris parlement, 91

Grand Trunk Canal, 672

Granja, La (Palace of San Ildefonso), 297

Grasse, Comte Frangois-Joseph-Paul de (1722-

1788), 117,669,871

Grattan, Henry (1 746-1 820), 759, 760, 761-62

Gravina, Gian Vincenzo (1664-17 18), 240

Gray, Thomas (1716-71), 228, 700, 741-42, 815,

887; Chatterton's poem and, 809; death of,

795; Samuel Johnson's views on, 837; Horace

Walpole and, 792

Graz, university at, 360

Great Lakes, French control of, 57

Great Rebellion of 1688, 735

Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (Mon-

tesquieu), 254, 801

Greco, El (i54i?-i6i4>, 227

Greece, ancient, 21; art of, 510; Goethe's ad-

miration for, 593, 623-24; influence of, 118;

poetry of, 599; Winckelmann's analysis of,

510

Greece, modern, 411; Turkish conquest of

(1715), 415; war of liberation (1821), 623

Greek Orthodox Church, 452, 472, 475, 480

Greeks, Byzantine, 3 1 2

Greenland, 652

Gregoire, Abbe Henri (1750-1831), 642

Greiffenklau, Karl Philipp von, Prince-Bishop

of Wurzburg (fl. 1750), 239

Grenoble, 849, 947-48

Grenville, George (1712-70), 696; ministry of,

700; policies toward American colonies, 709-

710

Gretry, Andre-Ernest-Modeste (1741-1813), 883,

909-10

Greuze, Gabrielle, nee Babuti (b. 1726), 1 12-13

Greuze, Jean-Baptiste (1725-1805), m-15, IIO ~

17, 120, 235, 888, 904, 911; as Freemason, 939;

portrait of Gluck, 371; sensuality of, 116

Grimaldi, Marchese Geronimo de' (1761), 282,

286, 325

Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, later Baron von

Grimm (1723-1807), 18, 27, 104, 108, 6$6 t 882,

892-93, 908, 910; on d'Alembert, 127; attitude

toward French music, 909; on ancient monu-

ments, no; becomes baron, 813; Catherine II

and, 447, 449, 452, 463, 466, 894; death of, 894;

Diderot and, 34; early life of, 33; edits Cor-

respondance litter aire, 34-35; Mme. d'fepinay

and, 55-57, 156-57, 159-61, 449; on French

music, 100; friendship with monarchs, 897;

Mme. Geoffrin and, 120-21; goes to Seven

Years' War, 36; on inevitability of revolu-

tion in France, 95; influence in Germany, 507;

later years of, 893-94; on Lettre sur la musique

frangais, 26; Mozart and, 384-85, 390, 392; per-

sonality of, 35; on Prussia after Seven Years'

War, 63; returns to Germany, 894; Rousseau

and, 3-4, 5*, 18, 23, 153, 159-62, 170, 201, 207-8,

212; skepticism of, 893-94; on Voltaire's visit

to Paris, 877

Gros, Father (fl. 1729), 10

Gross-Jagersdorf, battle of (1757), 432

Gross-Jagersdorf, convention of, 48

Grosskophta, Der (Goethe), 322*

Grote, George ( 1 794- 1 87 1 ) , 7 3 9

Grotius, Hugo (1583-1645), 171, 177, 251, 427

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Kant) ,

540-41

Guadagni, Gaetano (i725?~92), 369

Guadalajara, 288

Guadeloupe, 58, 62, 89, 935

Guardi, Francesco (1712-93), 236, 332

Guardi, Giovanni Antonio (1698-1760), 332

Guarini, Giovanni Battista (1537-1612), 637

Guarneri, Giuseppe Antonio "del Gesu" (1687?-

i745>> *«

Guglielmi, Gregorio (1714-73), painter, 345

Guglielmi, Pietro (1727-1804), composer, 333

Guibert, Alexandrine-Louise Boutinonde de

Courcelles, Comtesse de, 1 30, 1 3 1 *

Guibert, Comte Jacques-Antoine de (1743-90),

128-30, 131*, 892, 906, 908

Guicciardini, Francesco (1483-1540), 766

guilds: in Austria, 344, 356; in England, 676-77;

in France, 72, 862, 932; in Spain, 289

Guilford, Francis North, 1st Earl of (1704-90),

701

Guillard, Nicolas-Francois (fl. 1778), 372

Guillemardet, Ferdinand, 305

guillotine, 899

Guines, Comte de, later Due de (fl. 1776), 392,

864

guitar, 417

Guizot, Francois ( 1 787- 1 874) , 97 *

Guldberg, Ove Hoegh- (1 731- 1808), 653

Gunpowder Plot (1605), 735

Gustaf Adolf Adelmod (Gustavus III), 659

Gustaf Adolf och Ebb a Brake (Gustavus III),

659

Gustaf Vasa (Gustavus III), 659

Gustavus I Vasa, King of Sweden (r. 1523-60),

655

Gustavus II Adolphus, King of Sweden (r.

161 1-32), 655

Gustavus III, King of Sweden (r. 1771-92), 121,

6$ $-66, 883, 897, 941, 964; army mutiny against,

663; assassination of, 66$ ; conflict with nobles,

663-64; correspondence with Voltaire, 139;

coup against Riksdag, 657; diplomacy of, 460;

early popularity of, 6$6\ fear of French Revo-

lution, 662, 664; Freemasons and, 938; influ-

ence of French culture on, 6$$-$6\ Jews pro-

tected by, 635; later reactionary policies of,

662; literary works of, 659; loses confidence of

people, 662; marriage to Princess Sophia Mag-

dalena, 655; personality and education of, 655-

$6-, physiocrats and, 76; reforms of, 657-58;

Swedish Enlightenment and, 658-60; war

against Russia and Denmark, 663-64

Gustavus Adolphus, Prince of Stolberg-Gedern

(fl. 1750), 339

Gutenberg, Johann (i4oo?-68), 895

Gyllenborg, Count Carl (1670- 1746), 654

INDEX

IO49

Gyllenborg, Gustaf Fredrik (173 1-1808) , 660

Gymnnasien, 352

gypsies, 684

Haarlem, 361

Hadik, Andreas, Count Hadik von Futak (1710-

1790), 49

Haffner, Sigismund (fl. 1782), 398

Hafiz (1320-89), Persian poet, 613-14

Hague, The, 361

haidamacks, 633

Haidar Ali (1722-82), Maharajah of Mysore,

7*7

Hainaut, 342

hair styles, 99

Haiti, 935

Hales, Stephen ( 1 677- 1 76 1 ) , 67 1

Halevy, Jehuda (io86?-ii4i?),637

Halifax, George Montagu Dunk, 2d Earl of

(1716-71), 702-3

Haller, Albrecht von (1708-77), n, 169, 645

Hamadan, battle of (1731), 418

Hamann, Johann Georg (1730-88), 518-19, 567

Hamburg: Freemasonry in, 507; Jews in, 634;

opera in, 558

Hamburgische Dramaturgic (Lessing) ,511

Hamilton, Emma, Lady, nee Lyon (1765—18 15),

758

Hamilton, Gavin (fl. 1785), 773

Hamlet (Shakespeare), 511, 742, 842

Hamond, Walter (fl. 1640), 31

Hanbury- Williams, Sir Charles (1708-59), 436,

478

Handel, George Frederick (1685-1759), 100,

222, 234, 256, 334, 368, 396, 517, 742; Com-

memoration Concert (1784), 746; Haydn on,

377

Hanover, 653; England and, 38; French evacu-

ation of, 53; in League of Princes (1785), 362;

Seven Years' War in, 46, 60

Hanoverian dynasty, 699

Hansard, Luke (1752-1828), 707

Hapsburgs, Spanish, last of, 273

Harewood House, 748

Hargreaves, James (d. 1778), 673

harim (harem), 413

Harlequin (comic figure), 241

Harmonies de la nature, Les (Bernardin de

Saint-Pierre), 916

Harrach, Count von (fl. 1792), 378

Harsch, General (fl. 1758), 54

Haschka, Leopold (fl. 1796), 379

Hasenkampf, J. C. (fl. 1774), 564

Hasidism, 636

Haskalah movement, 641-42

Hasse, Johann Adolf (1 699-1 783), 220, 240, 386;

Mozart's rivalry with, 387

Hastenbeck, battle of (1757), 48

Hastings, Warren (173 2-1 8 18), 59, 696, 7 16-1 8,

943; exploitation of India, 717-18; trial of,

719-21,805

Hats (Swedish party), 654, 657

Haugwitz, Count Ludwig (fl. 1753-80), 374;

domestic policies of, 344

Hauptschulen, 352

Haiiy, Valentin (1745- 182 2), 905

Havana, 62

Havre, Le, 944

Hawkins, Sir John (1719-89), 827-28, 840

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-64), 889

Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732-1809), 100, 227, 341,

373-81, 526, 964; Beethoven and, 378-80; con-

tribution to music, 380, 528; death of, 380;

early life and education of, 373; in England,

377-78, 746; with Esterhazy family, 375-77,

379; in Kantorei, 374; marriage, 375; in Melk,

374; Mozart and, 376-78, 397; as music teacher,

373; Napoleon and, 380; personality of, 374;

operas of, 376, 379-80; oratorios of, 377; re-

ligiosity of, 380-81; social context of music,

381; string quartets of, 374, 380; symphonies

of, 376-78, 380-81; in Vienna, 374-77; writes

Schopfung oratorio, 379

Haydn, Johann Michael (1 737-1 806), 374, 385

Haydn, Maria Anna, 375

Heathfield, George Augustus Eliott, Baron

(1717-00), 752

Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell (Sweden-

borg),658

Hebert, Jacques-Rene (1757-94), 890

Hebrews, 578; see also Jews

Hebrides: Johnson-Boswell tour of, 785, 835-38,

840; Macpherson's tour of, 767

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich ( 1770-183 1),

331,551,618

Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856), 543, 880

Heinse, Wilhelm (1749- 1803), 522

Hell-Fire Club, 702

Helmholtz, Hermann von (1821-94), 618

Helvetic Republic, proclaimed (1798), 645; see

also Switzerland

Helvetische Gesellschaft, 643

Helvetius, Anne-Catherine, nee de Ligniville

d'Autricourt (17 19-1800), 869, 915

Helvetius, Claude- A drien (171 5-71), 31, 73,

105, 119, 162, 219, 220, 280, 294, 324, 501, 641,

769; atheism of, 183; death of, 892; equalitarian-

ism of, 141; ethics of, 739; Franklin and,

870; French Revolution and, 84, 940; Gibbon

and, 799; on Index Expurgatorius, 316; influ-

ence of, 230, 320; opposition to monarchy,

897; as tax farmer, 936

Henault, Charles-Jean-Fransois (1685-1770),

123, 125

Henriade (Voltaire), 10, 149, 528, 629, 655

Henry, Patrick (1736-99), 709

Henry II, King of France (r. 1547-99), 942

Henry IV, King of France (r. 1589-16 10), 142,

462

Henry VI, King of England (r. 1422-61, 1470-

7O1698

Henry VIII, King of England (r. 1500-47), 266,

360

1050

[NDEX

Henry of Prussia, Prince (1726-1802), 54-56, 59,

483; attitude toward Frederick II, 495; in

battle of Freiberg, 61; on Louis XVI, 856

Henry the Navigator, Prince (1 394-1460), 142

Hepplewhite, George (d. 1786), 748

Herat, 417-18, 421

Herbert, Lord, 753

Herculaneum, excavations at, no, 248, 910

Herder, Caroline, nee Flachsland (1 750-1 809),

568-69, 577

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744-1803), 503,

506-7, 567-69, 571-8o, 589, 628, 639, 641, 645,

815; death of, 580; description of Kant, 532;

early life of, 567; Enlightenment and, 567, 569;

esthetic theories of, 567-68; Frankfurter gel-

ehrte Anzeigen and, 52, as Freemason, 507; on

Gluck, 373; goes to Weimar, 569; Goethe and,

559, 561-62, 568-69, 577, 580, 591, 600, 608, 613;

hatred of Prussia, 530-, historical theories of,

578-80; historical writings of, 569; Kant and,

549, 567; marriage of, 569; in Ossian contro-

versy, 768; philosophical views of, 580; re-

sponsibilities at Weimar, 577; Rousseau's in-

fluence on, 518, 889; Sturm und Drang and,

522, 569; views on religion, 578-79; visit to

Italy, 579-80; welcomes French Revolution,

590; Winckelmann's influence on, 331; writ-

ings on literature, 567

Hermann und Dorothea (Goethe), 601, 627

Hermitage, Catherine II's, 468

Hermitage, L', Rousseau's stay at, see Rousseau,

Jean-Jacques, at hermitage

Hero of Alexandria (fl. a.d, 200), 673

Heroic Life of St. Anne (Malagrida), 267

Herschel, Sir William (173 8- 1822), 791

Hertford, Lady, 729

Hervey, Carr, Lord (1691-1723), 792

Hervey, Frederick Augustus (1 730-1 803),

bishop of Derry, 761

Hervey, John, Baron Hervey of Ickworth

(i6 9 6-i743),792

Hervey, Mary, Lady, nee Lepell (1700-68), 792

Herz, Henrietta, nee de Lemos (1764- 1847),

640-41

Herz, Marcus ( 1 747-1 803 ) , 640-4 1

Herzlieb, Wilhelmine ( 1 789-1 865 ) , 6 1 1 - 1 2

Hesketh, Harriet, Lady, nee Cowper (1733-

1807), 813

Hesse, Andreas von (fl. 1770), 568

Hesse-Cassel: in League of Princes (1785), 362;

mercenary troops of, 504

Hesse-Cassel, Landgrave of (r. 1760-85), see

Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel

Hesse-Darmstadt, Prince [Ludwig] of (fl. 1773),

34*449

hidalgos, 274

"Highland Mary" (Burns), 775

Hildebrandt, Johann Lukas von (1668-1745),

34i

Hirsch, Abraham (fl. 1750), 509, 630

Histoire de Jenni (Voltaire), 138

Histoire de Juliette (Sade) , 904

Histoire de la guerre de Sept Ans (Frederick

II), 529

Histoire de la Russie sous Pierre le Grand (Vol-

taire), 137,432

Histoire du Parlement de Paris (Voltaire), 92-

93

Histoire generate (Voltaire), see Essai sur les

moeurs

Histoire philosophique des deux Indes (Ray-

nal), 902

Historia del famoso predicador Fray Gerundio

(Isla), 295

Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King

Richard III (Walpole), 794

historiography: in England, 795-808, 815; in

Germany, 578-80; in Scotland, y6$-66

History of Agathon, The (Wieland), S53S5

History of Ancient Art (Winckelmann), no,

329, 332, 588

History of Animated Nature (Goldsmith), 815

History of Denmark, A (Holberg), 650

History of England (Hume), 766

History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, The

(Johnson), 819, 825-26, 829

History of Rome (Niebuhr), 253

History of Russia (Tatishchev) , 427

History of Scotland during the Reigns of

Queen Mary and of James VI (Robertson),

766

History of the Jews, A (Holberg), 650

History of the Protestant Variations (Bossuet),

797

History of the Rebellion (Clarendon) , 856

History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles

V (Hume), 766

History of the Religion of the Jews (Basnage),

641

History of the Russian Empire under Peter the

Great (Voltaire), see Histoire de la Russie

sous Pierre le Grand

History of the Thirty Years' War (Schiller),

see Geschichte des Dreissigjahrigen Krieges

Hobbema, Meindert (163 8-1 709), 647

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 172, 280, 294

Hochkirch, battle of (1758), 54

Hofdemel, Franz (fl. 1789), 405

Hofer, Franz (fl. 1770), 407-8

Hoffmeister, music publisher, 402

Hogarth, William (1697-1764), 524, 724

Hogland, battle of (1788), 663

Hohenberg, Johann Friedrich von (1732-1816),

345

Hohenzollerns, rising power of, 63

Holbach, Baron Paul-Henri-Dietrich d' (1723-

1789), 104, 118, 168, 220, 496, 572, 618-19, 641,

893; atheism of, 183; death of, 893; French

Revolution and, 940; at Mme. Geoffrin's salon,

120; Gibbon and, 799; on Index Expurgatorius,

316; opposition to monarchy, 897; Rousseau

and, 18, 27-28, 153, 209

Holberg, Ludvig von (1684-1754), 645-46, 649-

5*

INDEX

IO51

Holland, 143, 645-49; agriculture in, 646; aid to

Turkey, 363; art in, 647; decline in naval

supremacy, 57; description of, 645-46; econ-

omy of, 646; education jn, 647; England and,

277, 648, 699, 714; France and, 648-49; French

Revolution and, 364, 648-49; India and, 715;

Jews in, 63 5 y 646-47; in League of Armed

Neutrality (1780), 648; literature in, 647; oli-

garchy in, 142; Patriot party in, 648-49; politi-

cal unrest in, 648; prisons in, 738; Protestant-

ism in, 142; in Quadruple Alliance (1718),

278; religious tolerance in, 646-47; Revolu-

tionary War and, 648; in War of the Austrian

Succession ( 1 743 ) , 648

Holland, Caroline, Lady, nee Lennox, 693

Holland, Henry Fox, 1st Baron (1705-74), 364,

693

Holstein-Augustenburg, Duke of, see Friedrich

Christian, Duke

Holstein-Gottorp, Karl Friedrich, Duke of, see

Karl Friedrich

Holstein-Gottorp, Karl Friedrich Ulrich, Duke

of, see Peter III, Czar of Russia

Holstein-Gottorp, Prince of (fi. 1770), 568

"Holy Fair" (Burns), 773

Holy Roman Empire: structure and scope of,

341, 502; see also Austria

"Holy Willie's Prayer" (Burns), 773-74

Homage a Haydn (Debussy), 381

Homberg, Herz (fi. 1778), 639

Home, Henry, see Karnes, Henry Home, Lord

Home, John (172 2-1 808), Scottish playwright,

699, 764

home furnishings, see furniture

Homer (9th cent. B.C.), 253, 485, 519, 528, 599,

750, 837

Homme aux quarante ecus, V (Voltaire), 75-

76, 136, 143

Homme machine, V (La Mettrie), 246-47

Homme personnel, V (Barthe), 874

homosexuality, 73 1

Hontheim, Johann Nikolaus von (Justinus

Febronius; 1701-90), 351, 504-5, 560

Horace {6$ b.c-8 b.c), 528

Horen, Die (periodical), 597

Horn, Count Arvid Bernhard (1664-1742), 654

Horn, Count Karl (d. 1823), 66^-6$

hospitals, 353, 453

Hotel-Dieu, 353

Hotel des Invalides, 962

Hotel Salm, 910

Houasse, Michel-Ange (d. 1730), 298

Houasse, Rene-Antoine (1645-17 10), 298

Houdetot, Comte d', 156

Houdetot, filisabeth-Sophie de Bellegarde, Com-

tesse d' (1730-1813), 118, 152, 156-5$, 162, 164,

167, 869; as model for Julie, 157; salon of, 907

Houdon, Jean-Antoine (1741-1828), 466, 911-

*2> 939

House of Commons, 683, 699; appointive places

in administration, 686; corruption in, 685-86;

enactment of legislation in, 686-87; parties in,

see Tories and Whigs; press freedom and,

707; privileges of, 685; representation in, 685

House of Lords, 703; enactment of legislation

by, 685-86

Houses of Parliament, architecture of, 748; see

also Parliament, English

Howard, Castle, 235

Howard, John (i726?-9o), 737-38

Howe, Sir William, 8th Viscount Howe (1729-

i8i 4 ),86 9

Huber, Ludwig Ferdinand (1764-1804), 572-73

Hubertusburg, armistice of (1763), 62

Hudson, Thomas (1701-79), 751

Hugo, Victor (1802-85), 104, 889

Huguenots, 88

Hulegaard, Arense (fi. 1759), 651

Humbert I, Count of Savoy, see Umberto I

Humboldt, Alexander von (1769- 1859), 273

Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1 767-1 835), 641

Hume, David (171 1—76), 120, 125, 183, 280, 531-

3 2 > 537> 594, 7<* 2 > 7<H, 7^ 773, 794"95, 797',

d'Alembert and, 127, 892; ethics of, 739; Gib-

bon and, 799-800; as an historian, 766; influence

of, 536, 543, 768-69, 889; Samuel Johnson's

attitude toward, 834; in Lespinasse salon, 126;

on physiocrats, 75; Reid and, 764-65; Rousseau

and, 207, 209, 211-14; supports American

colonies, 711; tranquillity in face of death,

838; on Tristram Shandy, 788; on Voltaire, 149

Hummel, Johann Nepomuk (1 778-1 837), 380,

Hungary, 354; agriculture in, 341; Austria and,

341; disorder in, 461; gold mines in, 344; Jews

in, 631; Joseph IPs reforms in, 358; population

of, 341; revolt against Joseph II, 360-61, 363-

64; revolt of nobles in, 357; social classes in,

341; taxation in, 341; Turkey and, 62, 415

Hunter, John (1728-93), 764

Hunter, William (1718-83), 764

Husein, Shah of Persia (r. 1694-1722), 418

Huss, John (Jan Hus; i369?-i4i5), 342

Hutcheson, Francis (1694- 1746), 320, 733, 764

Hutchinson, Thomas (1711-80), 710

Hutton, James (1726-97), 764

Hyde Park, 744

"Hymn to the Sun" (Naruszewicz) , 485

Ibrahim Pasha, Turkish Vizier (d. 1730), 415

Idea of a Patriot King (Bolingbroke) , 687

Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson), 320

Ideen zu einer allemeinen Geschichte (Kant) ,

548

Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der

Menschheit (Herder), 578-80

Iffland, August Wilhelm (1750-1814), 571

Iglesia Metropolitana della Nuestra Seiiora del

Pilar, 300

Ignorant Philosopher, The (Voltaire), 138

lie de St.-Pierre, Rousseau at, 206

Iliad (Homer), 528; Pope's translation of, 837

1052

INDEX

Illuminati, Order of, 507

Imhof,Baron (fi. 1768), 717

Imhof, Marion, Baroness, 717

Imitation of Christ, The (Thomas a Kempis),

886

Imperial Diet, Holy Roman Empire, 502

Impey, Sir Elijah (173 2-1 809), 717

Important Examination of Milord Bolingbroke

(Voltaire), 138

Inchbald, Elizabeth, nee Simpson (1753-1821),

787

Independents (Puritans), 735, 760

Index Expurgatorius (Index Librorum Prohibi-

torum), 247, 285, 316, 358

India, 698; England and, 39, 57-59, 669, 689, 693,

717-18; France and, 38-39, 57-59, 62, 68, 715;

Holland and, 715; Mysore revolt in, 717-18;

Persian invasion of, 419; Seven Years 1 War

and, 57-59

India Reform Bill (1783), 718

Indians, American, see American Indians

Industrial Revolution, 669-79, 842, 964

in England: causes of, 669-71; consequences,

680-82; factory system, 676-80, 682, 732; ma-

chine-wrecking by workers, 679; pauperism

and, 677, 679; science and, 669, 671, 681; social

effects, 670-71, 676-80; technological elements,

671-76; transportation and, 672; wages and,

677

IN FRANCE, 932

IN SCOTLAND, 763

Industrious Bee, The (periodical), 464-65

industry and French Revolution, 931-34

Informe sobre un proyecto de ley agraria (Jo-

vellanos), 287

Ingenu, V (Voltaire), 31, 138

Ingermanland, 653

Innocent XIII (Michelangelo dei Conti), Pope

(r. 1721-24), 245-46, 278

Innocenza giustificata, V (Gluck and Durazzo),

368

Innsbruck, University of, 358, 360

inoculation, see smallpox inoculation

Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles

of Common Sense (Reid), 764

Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the

Wealth of Nations (Smith), see Wealth of

Nations

Inquisition, 253; in Austria, 343; Casanova and,

323; in Italy, 225, 229, 252, 316; Jews and,

630-31, 633; Johnson's support for, 834; in

Portugal, 260, 267-70; in Spain, 275-76, 279-80,

292, 294-95, 302, 306

Institutes (Calvin), 177

Instructions (Catherine the Great), 450-51

internationalism of papacy, 316

Introduction to the Principles of Morals and

Legislation, An (Bentham), 739

inventions: in France, 932; Industrial Revolution

and, 671-76

Iphigenia in Tauris (Guillard), 372

Iphigenie ( Racine ) , 3 70

Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe), 584, 587-88, 601,

627

Iphigenie en Aulide (Gluck), 1 01, 335, 370-71

Iphigenie en Tauride (Gluck), 372

Iphigenie en Tauride (Piccini), 373

Iran, see Persia

Ireland, 759-62; agriculture in, 759-60; Burke's

support for, 693; Catholic Church in, 283, 760-

62; commerce and industry in, 759, 761; cul-

ture in, 759-60; England and, 671, 704, 726,

759-62; marriage in, 759; population of, 759-

60; poverty and crime in, 759; Protestants in,

759-62; rebellion of "Whiteboys" in, 760

Irene (Johnson), 819, 830

Irene (Voltaire), 136,874

Iriarte y Oropesa, Don Tomas de (1750-91), 291

iron industry in England, 671-72

iron law of wages, 79

Irving, Sir Henry (183 8- 1905), 740

Irving, Washington (1783- 1859), 815

Isabella of Parma (d. 1763), 1st wife of Emperor

Joseph II, 347

Isfahan, 419

Isham, Col. Ralph Heyward, 779*

Isla, Jose Francisco de (1703-81), 294-95

Islam, 411-21; adultery in, 413; art in, 414; child-

rearing in, 416; crafts in, 416, 421; education

in, 412; geographic area of, 411; Gibbon's

treatment of, 808; morality in, 416; music in,

416-17; poetry in, 412-13, 421; prostitution in,

416; public baths in, 413; in Russia, 452; sci-

ence in, 412; sects in, 411-12; slavery in, 413-

14, 420; see also Afghanistan; Egypt; Moham-

medanism; Persia; Turkey

Ismailovsky Regiment, 439

Israel ben Eliezer, see Baal Shem-Tob

Istoria civile del regno di Napoli (Giannone),

250

Istria, 229

Italian nationalism and Alfieri, 340

Italy, 19, 310-40; academies and universities in,

218-19; agriculture in, 217; architecture in,

247; aristocracy in, 230; art in, 227, 235-39,

247-48, 331-32; Austria and, 38, 341; capitalism

in, 230; censorship in, 220, 225; comedy in,

239-44; commerce and industry in, 218; crime

in, 319; description of, 217-18; Enlightenment

in, 220, 230; Freemasonry in, 220; French Rev-

olution and, 311; happiness of, 217; heresies in,

220; in Holy Roman Empire, 341; Inquisition

in, 229, 316; intellectual life in, 218-20; Jesuits

and education in, 219; Jews in, 250; legal re-

form in, 320-21; libraries in, 219; literature in,

220, 239-44, 335-36; marriage and family life

in, 218-19, 230; moral laxity of, 225; music in,

220-24, 226-27, 332-35, 373, 367; Napoleon and,

311; neoclassical style and, 325-31; opera

houses in, 223; opera in, 222-24, 254-57, 333~35>

527-38; periodicals in, 220; population of, 217;

poverty in, 217; prostitution in, 218, 225, 230;

religion in, 224-26; singing in, 220, 222-24, 333 ;

social classes in, 218, 230; Spanish ambitions

INDEX

IO53

in, 277-78; theater in, 220, 336-40; wars of

succession in, 217; see also papacy

Iuvara, Filippo (i6j6}-iy$6), 226, 297

Ivan V Alexeevich, Czar of Russia (r. 1682-99),

429

Ivan VI, Czar of Russia (r. 1740-41), 430; mur-

der of, 443, 447

Ivy House Works, 749

Ivy Lane Club, 822, 840

Izmail, battle of (1790), 461

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743-18 19), 516,

562, $6$, 578, 613, 895, 899; Goethe and, 563-

64; philosophy of, 519; Rousseau's influence

on, 890

Jacobins, 939

Jafar, Mir, see Mir Jafar

Jahn, Otto (1813-69), 407

Jamaica, 669

James, William (1842-19 10), 739

James I, King of England (r. 1603-25), King of

Scotland as James VI (r. 1 567-1 625), 779

James II, King of England, Scotland, and Ire-

land (r. 1685-88), 705, 711, 735

James II, King of Scotland (r. 1437-60), 779

"James III," of England, see Stuart, James

Francis Edward

James VI, King of Scotland, see James I, King

of England

Janissaries, 414

Jansen, Cornells ( 1 585-1638), 646

Jansenists: in Austria, 359; in France, 85, 90-91,

193, 246; in Holland, 646; in Italy, 225; Jesuits

and, 246

Jassy, Treaty of (1792), 461, 488

Jaucourt, Chevalier (later Marquis) Louis de

(1704-79), 102,875

Jaures, Jean-Leon (1859-1914), 929

Jay, John (1 745-1 829), 871

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Geneve, a

Christ ophe de Beaumont, Archeveque de

Paris (Rousseau), 195, 197

Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826): on American

Indians, 891; French Enlightenment and, 76,

867,891,899

Jeffries, John (1744-1819), 933

Jehan, Shah, see Shah Jehan

Jena: battle of (1808), 530, 606, 627; Museum of

Mineralogy at, 615; University of, 545, 618

Jeppe of the Hill (Holberg), 650

Jerome of Prague (i36o?-i4i6), 342

Jerusalem, Karl Wilhelm (d. 1772), 561-63

Jerusalem (Mendelssohn), 640

Jesuits, 241, 310, 914; abolition of order by

Clement XIV (1773), 318, 351; accounts of

Indians by, 31; attacks against Rousseau, 185;

in Austria, 351-52; in Brazil, 263; in China,

225, 318; communistic practices in Paraguay,

80, 83, 262; competition with other orders,

285; conflict with kings, 226; in France, 89,

185; Frederick II and, 319; Freemasons and,

939; in Italy, 219, 224-26, 230, 310; Jansenists

and, 246; origin and purposes of, 283; in Para-

guay, 80, 83, 262, 281, 283; popularity of, 284-

85; in Portugal, 260, 262-68, 271-72; in Prussia,

499; reproved by Benedict XIV, 225; restora-

tion by Pius VII, 319; in Russia, 452; in Spain,

281, 283-8$, 293-94; structure of, 507; Voltaire

on, 137

expulsions of: from France, 88, 92, 266; from

Naples, 284, 315; papacy and, 316-18; from

Parma, 284, 317; from Philippines, 284; from

Portugal, 266-67, 3*7; from Spain, 266, 281,

283-8$, 293, 317; from Spanish America, 284

Jesus Christ, loyalty to Judaism, 629

Jews, 252, 629-42; art and literature of, 636-37,

641; in Austria, 343, 352, 357, 631-32, 641-42;

in banking and finance, 630; in Bohemia, 631-

32, 641; castes among, 630; in Denmark, 635;

in England, 635, 684; in France, 91, 630, 642;

French Revolution and, 642; in Galicia, 632,

641; in Germany, 499, 507, 517, 632, 634, 639,

642; Gibbon's discussion of, 802; Goethe's in-

terest in, ^56, 562; Hasidism among, 636; Has-

kalah movement among, 641-42; in Holland,

635, 637, 642, 646-47; in Hungary, 631; influ-

ence of religion on, 629; Inquisition and, 630-

63 h 633 ; intellectual liberation of, 637-42; in

Islam, 632; in Italy, 250, 631, 642; Lessing's

views on, 514-15; massacres by Cossacks, 633-

34; messianism among, 635-37; in Moravia,

632; mystical movements among, 635-37; Na-

poleon and, 631; papacy and, 631, 633; in

Poland, 472, 475, 482, 632-34, 636, 641; in Por-

tugal, 260, 631; in Prussia, 499; ritual-murder

trials against, 633; Rousseau on, 629-30; in

Russia, 452, 632-33, 641; Seven Years' War

and, 53; in Silesia, 632; in Spain, 275-75, 285,

287, 630-31; in Sweden, 635, 657; in Switzer-

land, 639; in Turkey, 632; in United States,

642; Voltaire's attitude toward, 629-30

Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp (1720-

60), Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, 121, 433

John, King of England (r. 1 190-12 16), 683

John III (Jan) Sobieski, King of Poland (r.

1674-96), 256,411

John V, King of Portugal (r. 1706-50), 257,

260-61, 269; appoints Pombal to ministry, 262

Johnson, Elizabeth, nee Porter (1688-1752), 818,

822

Johnson, Michael ( 1656-173 1 ) , 818, 819

Johnson, Samuel (1700-84), 701, 728-30, 740-41,

745> 747> 75°> 7<*2, 791, 810, 818-42; on adul-

tery, 731-32, 745; aid from government, 826-

27; appearance of, 753, 818-19, 828-29; bio-

graphical writings of, 819-20, 836-37, 840-41;

boarding school of, 819; Boswell and, see Bos-

well, James, johnson and; Burke and, 692,

827, 839-41; Cave and, 819-20, 822; on Chatter-

ton, 810; Chesterfield and, 821, 823; on con-

sumption of alcohol, 729; conversational abil-

ity of, 819, 830-31; death of, 839; Dictionary

of, 786; dramatic works of, 819, 822; early

years and education of, 818-19; fear of hell,

io54

INDEX

8 1 8, 838; first marriage of, 81 8, 822; on flying,

825; founds Ivy Lane Club, 822; friendships

of, 827, 839-40; Garrick and, 741-42, 818, 822,

830; George III and, 826, 830, 835; on Gibbon,

805; goes to London, 819; Goldsmith and, 814-

17, 830; household of, 822-23; invents Parlia-

mentary debates, 820; issues edition of Shake-

speare, 835; journalistic writings of, 819, 822,

825; on London, 743; on newspaper advertise-

ments, 786; opposes American Revolution, 711,

833; opposes French Enlightenment, 834-35;

opposes slavery, 733, 832; in Ossian contro-

versy 768; personality of, 818, 839-40; poems of,

819, 821; public honors for, 835; relations with

Anna Williams, 822; religious views of, 834;

Reynolds and, 827; rudeness of, 771; Savage

and, 820; Sheridan's aid to, 694-95; social and

political conservatism of, 692; Mrs. Thrale and,

828, 837-38; views on poets, 836-37; wisdom

of, 839; writes Dictionary, 820, 823-25; writes

Rasselas, 825-26

Johnson, Sarah, nee Ford (1669- 1759), 818

"Jolly Beggars, The" (Burns), 776

Joly de Fleury, Omer (1715-1810), 189

Jommelli, Niccolo (1714-74), 100, 223, 254, 2$$,

333* 335. 3^8

Jones, John Paul (1747-92), 91 1

Jones, Sir William (1746-94), 412

Jonson,Ben (1573?— 1637), 744

Joseph I (Jose Manoel), King of Portugal (r.

1750-77): ascends throne, 261; assassination

attempt against, 264, 283; confirms appoint-

ment of Pombal to cabinet, 261; illness and

death of, 270-71; Jesuits and, 264, 266; mis-

tress of, 263

Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1765-90),

334> 34 2 > 34t-66> 3»7» 453» 457"58, 499> 5<>4* 55^

581, 802, 846, 880, 885; abilities of, 355; absolut-

ist views of, 355; administrative competence of,

849; attitude toward Jesuits, 351-52; capitula-

tion to Hungarian nobles, 364; Catherine II

and, 363, 462, 483; Church and, 358-62; con-

flict with papacy, 318, 350-60; crowned King

of the Romans, 347; death of, 365, 461; early

life and education of, 346-47, 367; educational

policies of, 352; as enlightened despot, 354-60;

failure of, 364-66; foreign policy of, 353;

Frederick II and, 62, 349, 353-54, 361-63; his-

torical importance of, 365-66; influence of En-

lightenment on, 346-47, 351-52, 354-60; Jews

and, 631-32; journey to Russia, 450-60; jurisdic-

tion during coregency, 348; Kaunitz and, 348-

52, 355, 359; League of Princes against (1785),

362-63; Louis XVI and, 353-54; makes Grimm

a baron, 893; Maria Theresa and, 343, 346, 348-

$4; Marie Antoinette and, 352-54, 362, 853-54;

marriage to Isabella of Parma, 347; marriage

to Josepha of Bavaria, 347-48; memorandum on

policies, 348-49; moral probity of, 355; Mora-

vian Protestants and, 353; Mozart and, 404-5;

musical interests of, 334; partition of Poland

and, 483; personality and appearance of, 347;

philosophes ajnd, 353; popular hatred of, 364;

Protestant alliance against, 363; reforms of,

348-53, 355-61, 364-66; regulation of serfdom

by, 350; religious toleration of, 348, 351-52,

357, 361-62; rescinds all reforms, 364; revolt

of Hungary against, 360-61, 363-64; revolt of

Netherlands against, 361-62, 364; supports Leo-

pold's policiesj in Tuscany, 313-14; turns throne

over to Leopold, 365; visit to Paris, 353; visit

to Rousseau, 883, 897; war with Turkey (1788),

363

Josepha of Bavaria (d. 1767), 2d wife of Em-

peror Joseph II, 347-48

Josephine, Empress, see Beauharnais, Josephine

de I

Josephson, Matthew, 5*

Joshagan, 42 1

Jouffroy d' Abbans, Marquis Claude-Francois

de (1751-183^,932

Journal de Paris,, 875, 915

Journal des savants, 280

Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Boswell),

836, 840 j

Journals of the House of Commons, 707

Journee des Tuples (1787), 947-48

Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (Radi-

shchev), 465

Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, A

(Johnson), 768, 836

Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de (1744-1811),

286-87, 293, 302; comedies of, 296; Melendez

and, 295-96; jpoetry of, 295; on Spanish sales

taxes, 288 j

Joyeuse Entree, 361

Judaism, 629; see also Jews

Juden, Die (Lessing) , 509

Juigne, Marquis de (fl. 1771), 883

Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus),

Roman Emperor (r. 361-63), 803

Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise (Rousseau), 27,

113, 128, 149, 165-70, 177-79, 197, 521, 563, 887,

889; Clarissa compared with, 169-70; defects of,

168; educational ideas in, 168; letter form of,

166; models for, 157, 168; philosophes and,

170; plot of, 166-67; popularity of, 168-69;

publication of, 178; Romantic movement and,

169; writing of, 155, 158, 16$

Julli, M. de, 36

Jung, Heinrich (1740-1817), 503

Jungfrau von Orleans, Die (Schiller) , 602

"Junius" (fl. 1768-72), 669, 701, 705-6

Junker, 497

Justine (Sade),oo4

Juvenal (59-C.140), 295

Kabale und Liebe (Schiller), 572

Kabul, 417, 419

Kagul, battle of (1770), 458

Kalb, Charlotte von (1761-1843), 573, 575, 591-

59 2 > 594

Karnes, Henry Home, Lord (1696-1782), 768

INDEX

IO55

Kandahar, 417-19

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804), 183, 531-51; 557,

594, 618, 628, 639, 641, 643, 808; aesthetic phi-

losophy of, 543, 595; appearance of, 549; atti-

tude toward Frederick II, 540; Critique of

Judgment, 543-44, 551; Critique of Practical

Reason, 540-43; Critique of Pure Reason, 517,

535-40, 542-43; early career as teacher, 505,

532; early life and education of, 531-32; Goe-

the's attitude toward, 580; Herder and, 567,

580; on human nature, 545-46; Hume's influ-

ence on, 536; 543; influence of Enlighten-

ment on, 521, 531, 550-51; liberal political

views of, 547-49; moral philosophy of, 540-43;

personality of, 532, 549; physical decline and

death of, 550; posthumous writings of, 550;

professorship in University of Konigsberg,

534; regularity of daily life, 531; Romantic in-

fluences on, 531; Rousseau's influence on, 3,

179, 181, 518, 542-43, 889-90; scientific writings

of, 532-33; threatened by Frederick William

II, 546-47; views on education, 548-49; Vol-

taire's influence on, 542

Kantemir, see Cantemir

Karelia, 460, 653, 663

Karim Khan, Persian ruler (r. 1750-79), 420

Karl Alexander, Duke of Wiirttemberg (r.

Karl August, Duke (later Grand Duke) of

Saxe- Weimar (r. 1 775-1 828), 34, 373, 503, 507,

521, 523, 552-53; death of, 626; French Revolu-

tion and, 590; Goethe and, 545, 552, s^-^7^ 580,

581, 584-85, 586, 589, 590-91, 606, 615, 626;

Herder and, 567, 577, 579, 580; Schiller and,

573, 575, 594, 602, 604, 605; in wars against

French, 580, 591, 606, 607

Karl Eugen, Duke of Wiirttemberg (r. 1737-

I 793), < I 33> 2 55>5<> 2 -3

Karl Friedrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (fl.

1725), 429, 432

Karl Friedrich Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Got-

torp, see Peter III, Czar

Karl Theodor, Elector Palatine (r. 1733-99),

Elector of Bavaria (r. 1778-99), 48, 133, 245,

353-54. 362, 390, 393i5<>7

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand (1735-1806), Prince

and later Duke of Brunswick (r. 1 780-1 806),

512.517

Karnal, battle of (1739), 419

Karolyi, Count (fl. 1788), 363

Karpinski, Franciszek (1741?-! 825), 486

Katt, de (fl. 1758^54

Kauffmann, Angelica (1 741-1807), 580, 587, 644-

45

Kaufmann, Christoph, 520

Kaunitz, Count Wenzel Anton von (171 1-94),

40-42, 61, 120, 330; Joseph II and, 347-52, 355,

359; Seven Years' War and, 40-42, 44-46

Kay, John (fl. 1733-64), 673

Kazan, 455

Kazvin, 418-19

Keats, John (1795-1820,810

Keene, Sir Benjamin (1697-1757), 279

Keith, George, 10th Earl Marischal (1693?-

1778), 191-92, 214

Keith, James Francis Edward, Marshal (1696-

'758), 43

Kellgren, Johan Henrik (1751-95), 659, 661;

Voltaire's influence on, 880

Kemal Ataturk Pasha (1 881-1938), 415

Kemble, John Philip (1 757-1 823), 740

Kemble, Sarah, see Siddons, Sarah

kemengeh, 416

Kepler, Johann (1571-1630), 532

Keppel, Augustus, Viscount (1725-86), 751

Kerch, 458

Kerman, 42 1

Kermanshah, battle of (1726), 418

Keroualle, Louise-Renee de, Duchess of Ports-

mouth (1640- 1 7 34), 693

Kestner, Charlotte ("Lotte"), nee Buff (1753—

1828), 524, 559, 561-63, 613

Kestner, Georg Christian (1741-1800), 561-64

Kew Gardens, 748

Keyserling, Count (fl. 1763), 457

Kherson, Jews in, 633

Khurasan, 418

Khiva, Khan of (fl. 1740), 420

Kiellstrom, Maria (1744-98), 660

Kiev, anti-Semitic massacres in, 634

Kilburun, 415, 458

Kimbolton Castle, 235

kindergartens, establishment of, 888

"King Christian Stood by the Lofty A4ast"

(Ewald), 652

King Lear (Shakespeare), 511

Kirghiz tribes, 455

Klauer, Ludwig (b. 1782), 523

Klauer, Martin (1 742-1 801), 523

Kleist, Ewald von (1715-59), $$

Kleist, Heinrich von (1777-1811), 507

Klettenberg, Susanne von (1723-74), 558

Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian von (175 2-1 831),

521-22,581

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724-1803), 327,

373' 5 7 7> 5 20 » 553. 5 8l » 652, 661; criticism of

Goethe, 267; as Freemason, 507; writes The

Messiah, 517-18

Klopstock, Margareta, nee Moller (d. 1758), 517

Kloster-Zeven, Convention of (1757), 48, 50

Knebel, Karl Ludwig von (1744-1834), 619

Kniaznin, Franciszek Dyonizy (1750-1807), 486

Knox, John (1505-72), 773

Knutzen, Martin (17 13-51), 532

Kochel, Ludwig Alois Friedrich (1800-77), 3 8 5»

396

Kolin, battle of '(1757), 47

Kollontaj, Hugo (1750-1812), 486

Komarczewski, Pan, 474

Komische Erzahlungen (Wieland), 553

Konarski, Stanislas (1700-73), 475

Konig, Eva (d. 1778), 503, 512-13

Konigliche Bibliothek, Berlin, 524-25

Konigsberg, University of, 505, 532

1056

INDEX

Konstantin, Duke of Saxe- Weimar (d. 1758),

55*

Koran, 412

Korff, Ivan (1696- 1766), 429

Korff, Nikolai, 439

Korner, Christian Gottfried (1756-1831), 572-

575; 592

Kosciusko, Thaddeus (1746-18 17), 488789, 491-

492

Koslov, 430

Kozlovsky, M. I. (175 3-1 802), 467

Krasicki, Ignacy (1735-1800,485-86

Krasinski, Adam, bishop of Kamieniec (fl.

1768), 481

Krefeld, battle of (1758), 53

Kremlin, 469

Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Kant), see

Critique of Practical Reason

Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Kant), see Critique

of Pure Reason

Kritik der Urteilskraft (Kant), see Critique of

Judgment

Kritische Walder (Herder), 568

Kronborg, Castle of, 653

Kropotkin, Peter (1 842-1 921), 819

Kuban River, 430

Kuchuk Kainarji, Treaty of (1774), 415, 458

kulaki, qn

Kunersdorf, battle of (1759), $5

Kunstler, Die (Schiller) , 595

Kurakin, Princess Elena, 437

Kurland, 492

La Barre, Chevalier Jean-Frangois Lefebre de

(1747-66), 90

Labat, Pere Jean-Baptiste (1663-1738), 217

La Blache, Comte de, 92 1

labor unions: in England, 679-80; in France, 933

La Bruyere, Jean de (1645-96), 859

Lacat, M., 23

La Chalotais, Louis-Rene de (1701-85), 92

Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de (1741-1803), 903-4,

9'4> 955-56

Lacy, James (d. 1774), 742

Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Gilbert du Mo-

tier, Marquis de (1757-1834), 898; in Ameri-

can Revolution, 869, 871-72; as Freemason, 939;

idealism of, 929; liberalism of, 957; opposition

to slavery, 935; Due d'Orleans and, 955

La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la

Vergne, Comtesse de (1634-93), 169

La Ferte-Imbault, Marquise de, nee Geoffrin

(b. 1715), 121

La Fontaine, Jean de (1621-95), 486

La Force, prison of, 962

Lagos, battle of (1759), 57

La Guepiere, Philippe de (1715-73), 525

Laguerre, Marie- Josephine (d. 1783), 373

Laharpe, Frederic-Cesar de (1754-1838), Swiss

politician, 1 27, 470, 64$

Laharpe, Jean-Francois de (1739-1803), French

poet, 127, 133, 149-50* 37 2 > 8 74> 879

laissez faire policy, defined, 72; see also free

trade

Lalande, Joseph-Jerome Le Franc, ois de (1732-

1807), 254

Laleli-Jamissi, mosque of, 414

La Live de Jully, Ange-Laurent de (1725-75),

112

Lally, Comte Thomas-Arthur de, Baron de Toi-

lendal (1702-66), 59, 957

La Luzerne, Cesar-Guillaume de (1 738-1 821),

bishop of Langres, 902

La Marck, Mme. de, 929

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de

(i744-i829),6i7

Lamartine, Alphonse de (1 790-1 869), 889-90

Lamballe, Prince de (d. 1767), 852

Lamballe, Marie-Therese de Savoie-Carignan,

Princesse de (1749-92), 95, 848, 852

Lamennais, Felicite de (1 782-1 854), 890

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709-51), 220,

246-47,316

La Mothe, Jean-Baptiste Vallin de (1729-1800),

468

La Motte, "Comte" Marc-Antoine-Nicolas de

(1754-1830,942

La Motte, Jeanne de St.-Remy de Valois, Com-

tesse de (1756-91), 942-43

Lampe (servant of Heine) , 543

land enclosures in England, 816

Landeshut, battle of (1760), 60

land reform, 287-88

Lane, Edward William (180 1-8 0,416

Lange, Joseph (fl. 1781), 394

Langhans, Karl Gotthard (173 2-1 808), 525

Langton, Bennet ( 1 737-1 80 0, 827, 839

Lannes, Jean, Marshal of France (1 769-1 809),

606

Lanskoi, Alexis (d. 1784), 444, 446

Lanson, Gustave (1857-1934), 5

Laokoon (Lessing), 510, 557, 691

La Perouse, Jean-Francois de Galaup, Comte de

(1741-1788?), 856

Laplace, Pierre-Simon (1749-1827), 533

La Popeliniere, Alexandre-Joseph de (1692-

1762), 70-71, 102

Larive, Jean Maudit de (1 747-1 827), 878

La Roche, Georg von, 562

La Roche, Maximiliane von (fl. 1772), 562

La Roche, Sophie von, nee Gutermann (1731-

1807), 5^ 2 i 6"ii

La Rochefoucauld, Dominique de, Cardinal

O7i3-i8oo),9i

La Rochefoucauld, Due Francois de (1613-80),

9»5>939

La Rochefoucauld d'Enville, Due Louis-Alexan-

dre de (1743-92), 869

La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Due Fran?ois-

Alexandre de (1 747-1 827), 898, 957, 963

Last Testament (Frederick II), 529-30

La Tour, Mme. de, 191, 214

La Tour, Pere de, 148

INDEX

IO57

La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de (1704-88), 23, 26,

120,135,235

La Tour d'Auvergne, Comte Nicolas de, 323

La Tremoille, Marie-Anne de, Princesse des

Ursins (i642?-i722), 276

Laudon, Baron Gideon Ernst von (1717-90), 55,

59-60, 363, 365

Launay, Marquis Bernard-Rene de (1740-89),

919, 962-63

La Valliere, Mme. de, salonniere, 1 18

Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741-1801), 562-63,

565-67,613,639,^5,888

Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent de (1741-1801), 869,

936, 955

law: Burke's early views on, 690; Vico's theory

of, 252; see also legal reform

Law, John ( 167 1 -17 29), financier, 630

Law, William (1686-1760,796

Laws (Plato), 177

La-Yesharim Tehilla (Luzzatto), 637

Lazienski Palace, 479

League of Princes, German (1785), 362-63

Lebel, valet of Louis XVI (1768), 86

Lebeque, Agnes, 918

Lebon, Philippe (1767- 1804), 676

Le Brun, Charles (1619-90), 913

Lebrun, J.-B.-Pierre (1748-1813), 913

Le Clerc, Jean (1657-1736), 253

Lecouvreur, Adrienne (1692-1730), 102

Lee, Arthur (1740-92), 869

Leeds, 681

legal reform: in Austria, 344; in England, 736-

38; in Prussia, 500; in Russia, 450-52; in

Sweden, 657

Leghorn, 220, 228

Legion d'Honneur, Palais de la, 910

Legislative Assembly, French, see National As-

sembly, French

Legros (Le Gros), Joseph (1730-93), 370-71,

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von (1646-1716),

13,294,531-32,534,536,637

Leibowicz, Jankiew (Jacob Frank; 1726-91), 636

Leiden, 361; University of, 647

Leiden des jungen Werther, Die (Goethe), see

Sorrows of Young Werther

Leilan, battle of (1733), 419

Leipzig; authors in, 506; orchestra in, 525; Uni-

versity of, 557

Leipziger Lie der buck, Das, 557

Leipziger Zeitung, Die, 506

Leitmeritz, Frederick II at, 47

Lekain (Cain), Henri-Louis (1728-78), 101-2,

136,920

Lemaitre, Jules (1853-1914), 5*

Le Maitre, Nicoloz (fl. 1729), 10

Lemberg, university at, 360

Lemercier de la Riviere (1720-94), 74-75, 657

Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste (1704-78), 107

Lengefeld, Caroline von, 594

Lengefeld, Charlotte von (1 766-1 826), 594

Lenin, Nikolai (1870-1924), 891

Lenngren, Anna Maria, nee Malmstedt (1754—

i8i7),662

Lenngren, Karl Peter, 661

Lennox, Caroline, Lady Holland, 693

Lennox, John Stuart, 3d Earl of (d. 1526), 779

"Lenore" (Burger), 519-20

Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold (1751-92), 503,

$21, 562, 581, 612

Leo, Leonardo (1694-1744), 240, 254-55, 333

Leo XIII (Gioacchino Vincenzo Pecci), Pope

(r. 1878-1903), 247

Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1790-92),

Grand Duke of Tuscany as Leopold I (r. 1765-

90): as Grand Duke, 76, 310, 313-14, 346, 354,

363, 846; as Holy Roman Emperor, 314, 334,

365, 406, 407, 664

Leopold, Carl Gustaf af (1 756-1 829), 661

Leopold of Brunswick, Prince, 513

Lepanto, battle of (1571), 229

Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, Louis-Michel

(1760-93), 913

Le Roy, Julien-David (1 724-1 803), no

Lespinasse, Julie de (1732-76), 118, 120, 122-31,

656, 858, 894; d'Alembert and, 122-28, 130, 892;

death of, 130-31; description of, 127; Mme. du

Deffand and, 122-23; early life of, 122; on

Gluck's Orfeo, 909; illness of, 125-26; letters to

Guibert, 128-30, 131*; love for Guibert, 128-30;

love for Mora, 127-28; popularity of, 123, 125;

salon of, 126-27, 9°6

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-81), 331, 507-

8; 557» 567-68, 578, 628, 641, 691; aesthetic

theories of, 510-11; appearance and personality

of, 512; conflicts with theologians, 513-16;

criticism of Goethe, 627; death of, 640; early

life and education of, 508-9; early literary

activities of, 508-9; Eva Konig and, 512-13;

as first German professional writer, 506; as

Freemason, 507; friendship with Elise Rei-

marus, 512; Goethe and, 563-64; influence of,

517, 520; influences on, 510; in Italy, 513; later

years and death of, 517; liberating influence

on literature, 511; as librarian of Prince of

Brunswick, 512-13; as literary critic, 506; mar-

riage and death of wife, 513; Moses Mendels-

sohn and, 509, 515, 637-38, 640; National

Theater and, 511; opposition to aristocratic

privilege, 513; philosophical views of, 516;

plays of, 509-11, 513-15; on Prussian despotism,

530; publishes Reimarus manuscript, 513; on

truth, 512; views on religion, 515-16; Voltaire

and, 509, 512; writes Laokoon, 510; writes

Nathan the Wise, 514-15

Leszczinska, Marie, see Marie Leszczinska

Leszczynski, Stanislas, see Stanislas I

Letter to a Member of the National Assembly

(Burke), 724

Letter to Christophe Beaumont (Rousseau), 195,

197

Letter to Dr. J.- J. Pansophe (Rousseau) ,212.

Lett ere filosofiche (Gentile), 219

1058

INDEX

Letters from the Mountain (Rousseau), see Let-

tres ecrites de la montagne

Letters of an Anonymous Writer to the Presi-

dent of the Diet (Kollontaj), 486

Letters on a Regicide Peace (Burke), 725

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind

(Schiller), 551

Letters on the Antiquity of Herculaneum

(Winckelmann), 328

Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson

(Thrale),84<>

"Letters to Eliza" (Sterne), 790

Letters to His Son (Chesterfield), 283

Lettre a M. tfAlembert sur les spectacles (Rous-

seau), 162-64

Lettre sur la musique frangaise (Rousseau), 372

"Lettre sur la Providence" (Rousseau), 154-55

lettres de cachet, 850, 948, 950

Lettres de cachet (Mirabeau fits), 953

Lettres ecrites de la campagne (Tronchin), 197

Lettres ecrites de la montagne (Rousseau), 184,

188, 197, 199, 205

Lettres provinciales (Pascal), 139, 514

Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (Noverre), 100

Lettres sur La Nouvelle Heloise (Voltaire), 170

Leuthen, battle of (1757), 51-52

Levasseur, Therese (b. 1722), 17-18, 152, 156-57,

161, 178; Boswell and, 202-4, 783; children sent

to foundling asylum, 18, 24, 201; in England,

210-n, 214; Rousseau's final years with in

France, 881-83, 886-87; m Switzerland, 192,

202-7 passim; Voltaire on,. 200

Levellers, 80

Levett, Robert (1705-82), 823

Levetzow, Amalie von, 614

Levetzow, Ulrike von (1804-99), 614

Leviathan (Hobbes), 172

Levitsky, Dmitri (173 5-1 82 2), 466-67

Lezioni di commercio (Genovesi), 250

L'Hopital, Michel de (1507-73), 865

Liaisons danger euses, Les (Laclos), 903, 914

liberum veto of Polish Diet, 473, 476-77, 480-81,

484, 488, 885

libraries: in France, 914; in Italy, 219-20; in

German states, 506

Libya, 411

Lichnowsky, Prince Karl von (fl. 1789), 405

Lidner, Bengt (1758-93), 661-62

Liechtenstein, Joseph Wenzel, Prince of (b.

1696-d. 1772), 38

lieder, 525

Liege, 342

Liegnitz, battle of (1760), 60

Life and Letters of Gray (Mason), 841

Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, The

(Sterne), 787-89

Life of Johnson (Hawkins), 282

Life of Richard Savage, The (Johnson), 820

Life of Samuel Johnson, The (Boswell), 753

840-41

Life of Swift (Sheridan) , 695

Life of Voltaire (Goldsmith), 814

Ligne, Prince Charles- Joseph de (173 5-1 8 14),

101, 133, 342, 365, 459-60, 883; on Catherine II,

11, 461; description of Voltaire, 134; of St.

Petersburg, 469; on Voltaire, 135

Liguori, St. Alfonso de' (1696-1787), 225

Lillo, George (1693-1739), 509

Lima, Ignez Elena de, 261

Limburg, 342

Limoges, Turgot's reforms in, 79-80

Linguet, Simon-Nicolas-Henri (1736-94), 80,

82; French Revolution and, 938, 940

Linley, Thomas (1732-95), 695

Linnaeus, Carolus (Carl von Linne; 1707-78,

206, $6$, 658

Linz, woolen mills in, 344

Lionhard und Gertrude (Pestalozzi), 644

Lippe, Count Wilhelm zu, 568

Lisbon, 259, 260, 267, 270; earthquake of, 261 ,

2 <*3> 533

Lister, Thomas, 752

lit de juseice, 946

Literary Magazine, The, 786

literature: in Austria, 345-46; in Denmark, 649-

$2; in England, 518, 786-840; in France, 104-6,

914-26, {see also Rousseau; Voltaire); in Ger-

many, 507, 509-22, $52-628; in Holland, 647;

in Italy, 220, 239-44, 335-40; of Jews, 636-37; in

Persia, 421; in Poland, 485-86; in Portugal, 260,

269-70; Rousseau's influence on, 3-4, 889; in

Russia, 889; in Scotland, 767-68, 772-85, 841-42;

in Spain, 295-96; in Sweden, 659-62; in United

States, 889

Lithuania, 492

Litta, Conte Cavaliere Agostino (fl. 1754), 527

Little Dorrit (Dickens), 738

Little Theatre, 740

Liverpool: growth of, 681; as port city, 669;

slave market in, 732; theater in, 740

Lives of Eminent Persons (Johnson), 819

Lives of the Poets, The (Johnson), 820, 830,

836-37

Livonia, 39, 422, 653, 663

Lloyd's Evening News, 2 1 2

Lobkowitz, Prince Ferdinand von, 367

Lobositz, battle of (1756), 45

Lobstein, Dr. (fl. 1770), 568

Locandera, La (Goldoni), 242

Locatelli, Pietro (1695-1764), 228

Locke, John (163 2-1 704), 171-72, 177, 179-80,

250, 280, 294-95, 427, 485, 487, 531, 637, 725,

891

Lomenie de Brienne, fetienne-Charles (1724-94),

126, 901, 945-48

Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilievich (171 1-65), 427

London: administration of city, 744; appearance

of, 743-44; brothels in, 744; commerce in,

745; complexity of, 745; Gordon Riots in

(1780), 735-36; Jews in, 635; music in, 368;

population of, 745; as port city, 669; prostitu-

tion in, 744-45; revolutionary spirit of, 705;

Rousseau's flight to, 209-10; slums in, 745;

theater in, 740; voting population in, 685

INDEX

IO59

London (Johnsoh), 819

London Chronicle, The (periodical), 783

London Journal (Boswell), 778*, 780

London Merchant, The (Lillo), 569

London Packet, 817

London Symphonies Nos. 93-104 (Haydn), 378,

3^1

Longhi, Alessandro (1733— 1813), 331

Lorighi, Pietro (1702-85), 236, 331

looms, power, 673

Lords, House of, see House of Lords

Lorrain, Claude (Claude Gellee; 1600-82), 327,

75 1

Lorraine, 928

Losenko, Anton Pavlovich (1737-^3), 466-67

Lotti, Antonio (i667?-i74o), 232-33

Louis, Dauphin of France, see Louis de France,

Dauphin

Louis, Victor (1 731-1800), 101

Louis I King of Spain, see Luis I

Louis XIV, King of France (r. 1 643-171 5), 95,

273, 331; bourgeoisie and, 934; Spain and, 293

Louis XV, King of France (r. 1715-74), 84-96,

116, 235, 278, 664, 911; abolishes tolls, 76; assas-

sination attempt against, 67, 91; Austrian alli-

ance and, 40-42, 45, 347, 846; Beaumarchais

and, 920-22; Choiseul and, 53, 56, 88-89, 94» ^5^'»

conflict with Paris Parlement, 90-9$; death of,

95-96, 352, 454, 848, 904; defense of d'Aiguillon,

93; on execution of Malagrida, 267; extrava-

gance of, 84; Frederick II and, 40-41; grief for

Mme. de Pompadour's death, 69; household

expenditures of, 84; immorality of, 85-86, 344,

429; invites Rousseau for audience, 25; Jansen-

ists and, 85; Louis XVI and, 845-47; Mozart

programs for, 384; personality of, 85; popular

hatred of, 84-85, 96; Protestants and, 901; reign

of, 67-96; religiosity of, 67; Seven Years' War

and, 45, 53, 56-57; Voltaire and, 88, 137

Louis XVI (Louis-Auguste), King of France (r.

1774-92), 353, 802, 845-72; aids parish priests,

901; American Revolution and, 870; appeals

to people (1788), 948; appearance of, 845,

856; authority of, 850; Beaumarchais' services

for, 922; becomes father, 855; bondholders

and, 937; Brienne ministry and, 945-48; Ca-

lonne ministry and, 943-45; charity of, 904-5;

conflicts with parlements (1787-88), 946-48;

conflicts with States-General (1789), 958-61;

democratic attitudes of, 905; Diamond Neck-

lace Affair and, 942; difficulty in consummat-

ing marriage, 847-48, 853-54; diplomatic con-

siderations in marriage, 846; early liberalism

of, 867; execution of, 469, 725, 726, 857, 895;

extravagance of, 944; flight to Varennes, 896;

frees royal serfs, 928; French Revolution and,

896, 900-63 passim; Gustavus Ill's aid to, 664;

issues edict of religious toleration (1787), 902;

Joseph II and, 353-54, 854, 856; kindness of, 851-

52, 856-57; Louis XV and, 845, 847; love for

crafts, 857; love of masses for, 899; Marie

Antoinette and, 436, 847, 851-52; Maurepas'

ministry and, 858; Necker's first ministry

and, 867; Necker's second ministry and, 948;

personality of, 845-46, 856; popularity of, 857;

Protestants and, 902; refuses to have priest

teach Dauphin, 901; religiosity of, 857; sec-

ond dismissal of Necker, 961; simplicity of,

904; summons States-General (1788), 948; trial

before Convention, 895; Turgot's ministry

and, 859-60, 863-65; Voltaire and, 873, 875,

879; weaknesses of will, 856; wedding of, 244

Louis XVII (Louis-Charles de France; b. 1785),

titular King of France (1793-95), 941

Louis XVIII (Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, Comte de

Provence), King of France (r. 1 814-15, 181 5-

1824), 845

Louis-Auguste, Due de Berry, see Louis XVI

Louis-Charles de France (b. 1785), Dauphin, see

Louis XVII

Louis de France ( 1 66 1-1711), "Le Grand

Dauphin," son of Louis XIV, 276

Louis de France (1729-65), Dauphin, son of

Louis XV, 68, 109, 845, 898-99

Louis-Joseph, Due de Bourgogne, see Bour-

gogne, Due de

Louis-Joseph-Xavier de France (1781-89), Dau-

phin, son of Louis XVI, 855, 961

Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, Comte de Provence, see

Louis XVIII

Louisa Ulrika (1720-82), Queen of Adolphus

Frederick of Sweden, 34, 6$5, 658

Louisbourg, British siege of, 57

Louise, Queen of Prussia, see Luise of Mecklen-

burg-Strelitz

Louise-felisabeth de France, Duchess of Felipe

of Parma, 3 1 1

Louise-Marie de France (1737-87), 95

Louisiana, Spain acquires, 62

Louvain, 342, 361, 364

Lou vain, University of, 360, 362

Louveciennes, Chateau of, 87

Louviers, factories in, 93 2

Love of the Three Oranges, The (Prokofiev),

Lowenwolde (lover of Anna Ivanovna) , 429

Lowther, Sir James (1736-1802), 697

Loyola, St. Ignatius of (1491-1556), 267, 283

Lubomirska, Elizabeth, 479

Lucca, 220, 310

Lucio Silla (Mozart), 388

Lucretius (96?^ B.C.), 251, 486, 532, 691

Ludwig, of Wurttemberg, Prince (fl. 1762), 489

Ludwig Ernst of Brunswick-Wolfenbiittel, Re-

gent of Holland (r. 1759-66), 648

Ludwigsburg, 523

Luis I, King of Spain (r. 1724), 283

Luise (Voss), 519, 601

Luise of Hesse-Darmstadt, Duchess of Karl

August of Saxe-Weimar, 552

Luise (Louise) of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1776-

1810), Queen of Frederick William III of

Prussia, 523

Lully, Jean-Baptiste (1632-87), 372

io6o

INDEX

Lumley, Elizabeth, see Sterne, Elizabeth

Lunar Society, 734

Lund, University of, 659

Lutf 'Ali Beg Adar (1711-81), 421

Luther, Martin (1483-1546), 360, 561, 620, 628,

881

Luttrell, Henry ( 1 743-1 82 1 ) , 704

Luxembourg, 342

Luxembourg, Charles-Francois de Montmo-

rency, Marechal Due de (1702-64), 97, 125,

201; Rousseau and, 161-62, 189, 898

Luxembourg, Madeleine-Angelique, Marechale

Duchesse de, earlier Duchesse de Boufflers

(1707-87), 118, 161-62,907,929

Luxeuil, Abbey of, 928

Luzan y Martinez, Jose (1710-85), 300

Luze, Jean-Jacques de (fl. 1765), 209-10

Luzzatto, Moses Chayim (1707-47), 636-37

Lycurgus (7th cent. B.C.), 253

Lyons: industry in, 933; poverty in, 933; prole-

tariat in, 933; riots in, 954; stores in, 936;

strikes in, 933-34; unemployment in, 934;

workers' revolt in, 933-34

Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de (1709-85), 14, 80,

82-84, 220 » 901; death of, 893; French Revolu-

tion and, 84, 938, 940; influence of, 94; in

Lespinasse salon, 126; sees need for popular

religion, 903; writes a constitution for Poland

(1770-70,482

Mably, Jean Bonnot de, grand provost of Lyons

(fl. 1740), 14,82

Mably family, Rousseau as tutor for, 178

Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800-59), 2 4^»

7 2 5> 785. 793

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 740

Macdonald, Frederika, 5*

Macedo, Jose Agostinho de (1761-1831), 269-70

Macgregor, James (fl. 15 12), 767

Machado de Castro, Joachim (1731-1822), 270

Machault d'Arnouville, Jean-Baptiste (1701-94),

850

Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-15 27), 251, 548,

766; influence of, 338; law of development

and return, 253

Maciejowice, battle of (1794), 491-92

Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1830,700

Macklin, Charles (1697?-! 797), 740

M'Lehose, Agnes, nee Craig (1750-18407 776

McLeod, Lady, 831-32

Macpherson, James (1736-96), 559, 567, 764,

767-68, 809; influence in Germany, 518

Madama, Palazzo, 226

Madras: English stronghold at, 58; French siege

of, 59

Madrasa-i-Shah-Husein, 420

Madrid, 293, beautification of, 289-90; cleaning

up of, 282; factories in, 288; growth of, 289;

merchant guilds in, 289; revolt of (1766), 282;

royal palace in, 297; war of liberation in, 307

Mafrei, Francesco Scipione di (1675— 1755), 220,

228-29

Mafra, Convent of, 261

Magellan, Ferdinand (i48o?-i52i), 259

magic, 356

Magic Flute, The (Mozart), 376, 528

Magna Carta (1215), 683, 709

Magnasco, Alessandro (i667?-i749), 227

Magyar nobles, 341

Mahmud, Mir of Afghanistan (r. 1717-25), Shah

of Persia (r. 1722-25), 418

Mahmud I, Sultan of Turkey (r. 1730-54), 415

Maho??iet (Voltaire), 246

Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon; 11 35-1 204),

637, 642

Maine, Sir Henry (1822-88), 849

Maini, Giovanni Battista (1690-175 2), 247

Maintenon, Francoise d'Aubigne, Marquise de

(i635-i7i9),453

Mainz, 505; archbishops of, 504-5; in Holy Ro-

man Empire, 341; Jews in, 642; in League of

Princes (1785), 362

Maistre, Joseph-Marie de ( 1753-182 0, 725, 890

majas and majos, Spanish, 291

Malachowski, Stanislas (1 735-1 809), 490

Malagrida, Father Gabriel (1689-1761): arrest

of, 265; conflict with Pombal, 265, 267-68;

execution of, 267; hatred of, 270; missionary

activities in Brazil, 263

Malesherbes, Chretien-Guillaume de Lamoignon

de (1721-94), 92, 98, 178; aids Encyclopedic,

861; Jews and, 642; as minister of Louis XV's

household, 861; reforms of, 144; Rousseau

and, 189; Turgot and, 861, 865

Malines, 361

Mallet du Pan, Jacques (1 749-1 800), 891

Malmesbury, Sir James Harris, 1st Earl of

(1746-1820), 500

M alone, Edmund (1741-1812), 835

Malongei, Emerich, 363

Malory, Sir Thomas (fl. 1450), 768

Malouin, Dr. Paul-Jacques (1701-78), 200

Malthus, Thomas R. (1 766-1 834), 321, 894

Mamonov, Alexis (fl. 1786), 444, 446, 459

Manassah ben Israel (1604-57), 640

Manchester: growth of, 681; industry in, 672;

theater in, 740

Mandeville, Bernard (i67o?-i733), 770

mandolin, 417

Manger, Heinrich (1728-89), 524

Manila, 62

Manin, Lodovico, Doge of Venice (r. 1780-97),

3 11

Mann, Sir Horace (1701-86), 792

Mannheim, orchestra in, 525

Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie), 790

Manon Lescaut (Prevost), 169

Mansfield, William Murray, 1st Earl of (1705-

93)>73<*

Mantua, 245

Manzuoli, Giovanni (b. 1725), 746

Maragha, 418

Marat, Jean-Paul (1743-93), 891, 916; in Pan-

theon, no

INDEX

I06l

Maratha tribes, 717

Marcello, Alessandro (i684?-i75o?), 233

Marcello, Benedetto (1686-1739), 223, 233, 234,

368

Marchais, Mme. de, 118

Marchionni, Carlo (1702-86), 331

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Emperor of Rome

(r. 161-180), 496, 800-1

Maria I (Maria Francisca), Queen of Portugal

(r. 1777-1816), 270-72

Maria Amalia of Austria (d. 1804), Duchess of

Ferdinand III of Parma, 846

Maria Amalia of Austria (d. 1759), Queen of

Charles III of Spain, 281

Maria Ana Victoria of Spain (b. 17 19), Queen

of Joseph I of Portugal, 270, 278

Maria Antonia, Archduchess, see Marie Antoi-

nette, Queen

Maria Barbara of Portugal (d. 1758), Queen of

Ferdinand VI of Spain, 257, 278

Maria Carolina of Austria (1752-1814), Queen

of Ferdinand IV of Naples, 315, 346, 846

Maria Christina of Austria, Duchess of Saxe-

Teschen (d. 1798), 361-62, 846

Maria Feodorovna, nee Sophia Dorothea Au-

gusta of Wurttemberg, 2d wife of Paul I of

Russia, 377, 462, 468

Mortage de Figaro (Beaumarchais) , 403-4, 852,

923-25

Maria Josefa, Infanta, 305

Maria Josepha, Dauphine of France, see Marie-

Josephe of Saxony

Maria Josepha of Austria, Archduchess (d.

1767), 385-86

Maria Kazimiera (1 641-17 16), Queen of John I

Sobieski of Poland, 256

Maria Luisa Gabriela of Savoy (1688-1714),

Queen of Philip V of Spain, 276

Maria Luisa of Parma (1751-1819), Queen of

Charles IV of Spain, 302

Mariana, Juan de (1536-1624), 177

Maria Stuarda (Alfieri), 338

Maria Theresa, ruler of Austria, Hungary, and

Bohemia (r. 1740-80), 38-48, 51, 235, 330, 342-

54, 942; abilities of, 38-39, 342-43; accession to

Austrian throne, 278; ambitions in Italy, 228;

attitude toward Church, 343; choice of able

ministers, 344; conflicts with Joseph II, 350-54;

co-regency of, 348- $4; death of, 354; delighted

by Mozart, 383; Frederick II and, 38-48, 352;

Frederick II on, 529-30; Hungarian nobles and,

341; Jews and, 631; Joseph II and, 343, 346,

348-54; Marie Antoinette and, 343, 346, 846-47,

855; morality of, 344; papacy and, 318; parti-

tion of Poland and, 483; personality of, 343;

Mme. de Pompadour and, 40-42, 45, ^6\

problems facing, 344-46; reactionary policies

of, 343; relations with Frances of Lorraine,

346; response to Gluck's Orfeo, 369; Seven

Years' War and, 38-48, 56, 61; Turgot's fall

and, 865; upbringing of her children, 346

Marie- Adelaide of France (Marie-Clotilde-

Adelaide-Xavere; 1759-1802), granddaughter

of Louis XV, 1 1 1

Marie-Anne of Bavaria (1660-90), Dauphine of

France, 118

Marie Antoinette (Maria Antonia; 1755-93),

Queen of Louis XVI of France, in, 369, 383,

846-48, 850-56, 887, 910, 922; aid to Chamfort,

915; aid to Gluck, 370-71; appearance of, 846,

854, 941; Burke and, 722-23; Calonne ministry

and, 945; charity of, 904-5, children of, 855,

941; democratic attitudes of, 905; diamond

necklace episode and (1785), 941-43; difficulty

in consummating marriage, 847-48, 853-54;

Du Barry and, 88, 848; early life and educa-

tion, 846; execution of, 270, 469, 725; extrava-

gance of, 850-52, 944; fashions set by, 905;

faults of, 850-52; first pregnancy of, 855; flight

to Varennes, 896; friendships of, 848, 852-53;

gaiety of, 851; Joseph II and 352-54, 362, 853-

54; kindness of Louis XVI to, 851-52; Louis

XVI and, 436, 847, 851-52; Maria Theresa and,

343, 346, 846-47, 855; marriage to Louis XVI,

244, 847; Necker's second ministry and

(1788-89), 948; nicknamed "L'Autrichienne"

and "Madame Deficit," 941; personality of,

846, 848, 850-51, Ssss6; popular hostility to-

ward, 851, 853, 941; pretensions to naturalism,

852; States-General and, 961; theatricals of,

101; Turgot and, 863-65; Voltaire and, 873-75

Marie-Josephe of Saxony (1731-67), Dauphine

of France, 45, 48, 107, 845

Marie Leszczinska (1703-68), Queen of Louis

XV of France, 86, 384

Marignac, £milie de, 952

Marigny, Abel Poisson, Marquis de (1727-81),

brother of Mme. de Pompadour, 105, 114

Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de

(1688-1763), 15, 104

Marmontel, Jean-Francois (1723-99), 24, 27,

102, 104-106, 108, 119-20, 149-50, 353, 371,

463, 6$6, 908; on d'Alembert's poverty, 126;

on Mme. Geoffrin's piety, 121; Julie de Les-

pinasse and, 126-27; on Suzanne Necker, 908;

opposition to Revolution, 898; Rousseau meets,

18; as supporter of Puccini, 372; visits ill Vol-

taire, 875, 876

marriage: in Austria, 348; in England, 731; in

France, 97; in Italy, 218-19, 2 3°; Rousseau's

views on, 152, 186-87; m Spain, 290-91; Vol-

taire's views on, 146-47

Marriage of Figaro, The (Beaumarchais), 403-4,

852, 923-25

Marriage of Figaro, The (Mozart), 376, 388,

403-4

Marseilles: bread riot in, 954; factories in, 70;

proletariat in, 933; shipbuilding in, 932

Marsilius of Padua (i29o?-i343?), 177

Martel, Charles, see Charles Martel

Martin, Samuel (fl. 1763), 703

Martinez, Sebastian (fl. 1792), 302

Martini, Anton von (fl. 1780), 355

1062

INDEX

Martini, Padre Giovanni Battista (1706-84), 220,

2 45i 2 55, 386, 426

Martinique, 58, 89, 935; restored to France, 62

Martin y Solar (later Martini), Vicente (1754—

1806), 292

Martos, Ivan Petrovich (175 2-1 835), 467

Marx, Karl (1818-83), 77 1 ? 880; Rousseau's in-

fluence on, 3, 891

Mary II, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ire-

land (r. 1689-94), 683 i

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (r. 1542-67), 338,

602, 766

Maskelyne, Nevil ( 1732-8 1 ) , 764

Mason, William (1724-97), 809, 841

Massachusetts, conflicts with England, 709

Masson, Frederic (1 847-1 923), 444, 469

Matrimonio segreto, 11 (Cimarosa) ,335

Mattino, 11 (Parini), 335

Maubert, M. (fl. 1790), 117

Maupeou, Rene-Nicolas de (1714-92), 89, 93-94,

858

Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de (1698-

"759). J 39>4 2 7

Maurepas, Jean-Frederic Phelypeaux, Comte de

(1701-81), 858, 864, 925; American Revolution

and, 870; death of, 97; dismissal of, 85; opposi-

tion to Necker, 870-71

Maximes (Chamfort), 914

Maximes morales et politiques tirees de Te-

lemaque (Louis XVI) , 845

Maximilian, Archduke (1 756-1 801), 389

Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1493-

Maximilian III Joseph, Elector of Bavaria (r.

I 745-77>» 353»383, 388, 389

Mazanderan, 419

Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal (1602-61), 119

Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-72), 340

Mazzolini, Signora (d. 1774), 219

Mecca, 415

Mecklenburg, in League of Princes (1785), 362

medical schools, 360

Medici, Anna Maria Ludovica de' (1667-1743),

228

Medici, Cosimo II and Cosimo III de', see Cosimo

II and Cosimo III

Medici, Prince Ferdinand de' (1663-17 15), 227

Medici, Giovan Gastone de', see Gian Gastone

Medici, Giuliano de' (1453-78), 338

Medici, Lorenzo de' (1440-92), 338, 620

Medici family, 228, 313

medicine, 276

Medina, London banker, 630

Medinaceli, Duke of (fl. 1785), 274

Medmenham Abbey, 809

"Mein Glaube" (Schiller) , 595

Meissen, 749

Meissen factories, 523

Meister, Jakob, 893

Melanges (Ligne) , 342

Melendez, Luis (1716-80), 299

Melendez Valdes, Juan (1754-18 17), 295-96

Melzi, Prince Francesco (fl. 1737), 227, 367

Memoir e justificatif (Gibbon), 800

Memoir e sur Vimpot (Turgot) , 865

Memoir es (Brissot) , 88

Memoir es (Gretry),9io

Memoir es d'un pere (Marmontel), 104, 106, 908

Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire de la maison

de Brandebourg (Frederick II), 528

Memoirs (Ali Hazin), 421

Memoirs (Beaumarchais) , 921, 923

Memoirs (Carlo Gozzi), 243

Memoirs (Casanova), 219, 322-23

Memoirs (Catherine II of Russia), 433

Memoirs (Mme. d'£pinay), 26, 159

Memoirs (Gibbon), 766, 795-96, 798, 804

Memoirs (Goldoni), 241, 244

Menander (343?-29i? B.C.), 241

Mendel, Menachem (fl. 1725), 637

Mendelssohn, Abraham (1 776-1 835), 641

Mendelssohn, Dorothea (1764-1839), 641

Mendelssohn, Felix (1809-47), 614-15, 637, 641

Mendelssohn, Fromet, nee Guggenheim, 638

Mendelssohn, Henrietta (1768-183 1), 641

Mendelssohn, Moses (1729-86), 507, 637-41, 645;

children of, 641; death of, 640; early life and

education of, 637; influence of, 640-41; Kant

and, 637; Lavater and, 639; Lessing and, 509,

515, 549, 637-38, 640; loyalty to Judaism, 639;

marriage to Fromet Guggenheim, 638; pes-

simism of, 549; philosophical works of, 638-39;

spreads Enlightment among Jews, 640; writes

Phaidon, 638; writings on Judaism, 640

Mendonca, Francisco de Almada e, see Almada

e Mendonca, Francisco

Mengozzi-Colonna, Girolamo (fl. 1750), 238-39

Mengs, Anton Raphael (1728-79), 248-49, 258,

510, 523, 524, 912; artistic authority of, 332;

death of, 332; revives classical style, 315; in

Spain, 299, 300-1; Winckelmann and, 248-49,

3 2 7> 3 2 9,33i

Mengs, Margarita, nee Guazzi (d. 1778), 248,

33 2

Menshikov, Prince Alexander Danilovich (1672-

1729), 429

mercantilism, 72, 770

mercenary troops, German, 504

Mercier, Louis-Sebastien (1740-1814), 919; on

skepticism of upper classes, 001

Merck, Johann Heinrich (1 741-91), 506, 52/,

612

Mercure de France, 105, 370, 915

Mercure galant, 915

Mercy d'Argentau, Count Florimund (1727-94),

847,851

Merlini, Domenico, 479

Merope (Maffei), 228

Merope (Voltaire), 143, 228-29

Merry Muses of Caledonia, The, 776

Meslier, Jean (1678-1733), 80

Mesmer, Franz Anton (1734-1815), 645

Mesmes, Marquise de (fl. 1771), 883

Messiah (Handel), 742

INDEX

1063

Messiah (Haydn), 377, 379

Messiah, The (Klopstock), 517-J8

Mesta (wool association), 273, 287-88

metal industry, 932

"Metamorphosis of Animals, The" (Goethe),

617

Metamorphosis of Plants, The (Goethe), 596, 617

Metastasio (Pietro Trapassi; 1698-1782), 223,

2^,254,333,368-69,374,407

meteorology, Goethe's contribution to, 615

Methodists, 636, 711, 755, 834

Metternich, Prince Clemens Wenzel von (1773-

1859), 366

Meyerbeer, Giacomo (1791-1864), 525

Mezzogiorno, II (Parini), 335

Michel, Claude, see Clodion

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), 248, 751

Michelet, Jules (1 798-1 874), 137, 143*, 254, 889

Middle Ages, 809, 895

middle class: in art forms, 1 13-14; in Austria,

356; in Austrian Netherlands, 362; drama and,

104; in England, 670, 676-77, 680-81, 706; in

France, 848-49, 902, 914, 956-61; French Revo-

lution and, 899, 934-37, 939; in Geneva, 143;

in Germany, 503; in Italy, 218, 230; love of

music, 367; in Naples, 249; physiocrats and,

77; in Poland, 474, 491; in Prussia, 497; in

Russia, 423, ^55-56; in Scotland, 762; in Spain,

274, 277, 280, 289; Sturm und Drang move-

ment and, 522; in Switzerland, 643

Middleton, Conyers (1683-1750), 792

Mignot, Abbe (nephew of Voltaire), 879

Milan: Austrian control of, 217; Beccaria in,

310; churches in, 224; Goethe in, 589; history

and achievements, 226-27; industry in, 218,

312; Jesuit colleges in, 219; library in, 219;

prostitution in, 218; theaters in, 220; univer-

sity in, 219

Mill, James (1 773-1 836), 739

Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 738-39

Milton, John (1608-74), 177, 518, 773, 837, 842

Mina Lojen (Kellgren), 661

Minden: battle of (1758), 54-55; Frederick II

reoccupies, 53

mining, 932

Ministry of All the Talents, 726

Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing), 511

Minorca, 714; battle of (1756), 42-43, 57; Spain

loses, 273; Spain recaptures, 290

Mirabeau (fils) , Honore-Gabriel- Victor Riqueti,

Comte de (1749-91), 641, 9$i-$4; in Club

Breton, 939; criticism of Prussian economic

controls, 501; domestic problems of, 952-53;

early life and education of, 951-52; edits Cou-

rier de Provence, 915; as Freemason, 939;

French Revolution and, 940; gains support of

Third Estate, 953; in Holland, 952; imprison-

ments of, 952-53; Jews and, 642; literary works

of, 952-54; love affairs of, 952-53; marriage to

£milie de Marignac, 95 2 ; opposition to slavery,

935; Due d'Orleans and, 955; personality of,

951; social policies of, 953-54; in States-Gen-

eral, 957-61 ; travels abroad, 953

Mirabeau (pere), Victor Riqueti, Marquis de

(1715-89), 47, 73-74, 78, 657, 898; appearance

of, 951; economic theories of, 72, 73-74;

Franklin and, 869; as Freemason, 939; French

Revolution and, 940; imprisonment at Vin-

cennes, 951; Jews and, 642; marries Marie de

Vessan, 951; personality of, 951; Rousseau's

stay with, 882

Mirandola, Pico della, see Pico della Mirandola,

Giovanni

Mirepoix, Duchesse de, nee Beauvau (b. 17 17),

118

Mir Jafar (1 691-1765), plot of, 715

Mir Mahmud, see Mahmud, Mir

Mirovich, Vasili (d. 1764^443

Mir Vais, see Vais, Mir

Mirra (Alfieri), 340

Misanthrope, Le (Moliere), 163

Misenum, 327

Mison, Luis (d. 1766), 292

Miss Sara Sampson (Lessing), 509

Mitridate, re di Ponto (Mozart), 387

M'Lehose, Agnes, nee Craig (1 750-1 841), 776

Modena, 217, 244

Moguls, decline of, 58; see also India

Mohammed (570-632), 796, 808

Mohammed II, Ottoman Sultan (r. 1451-81),

804

Mohammedanism: clergy of, 412; mosques of,

416; science and, 412; sects in, 411-12; skep-

ticism toward, 412

Mohammed ibn-Abd-al-Wahab (i703?-9i), 412

Mohammed Shah, Mogul Emperor of India (r.

1451-81), 419-20

Mohocks gang, 261

Moldavia, 411, 483

Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622-73), 104,

136, 163, 244, 295, 296, 404, 650, 923; influence

on Goldoni, 242

Mollwitz, 529

Molmenti, Pompeo Gherardo (1852-1928), 243

Moluccas, 648

Momolo cortesan (Goldoni), 242

Monaco, Mme. de, 99

monarchy: Blackstone on, 737; Burke's defense

of, 723; conflict with Jesuits, 226; Diderot's

opposition to, 95, 897; philosophes and, 897-

898; Voltaire's support for, 142-43

monasteries: in Austria, 343, 358-59; in France,

902; in Italy, 225, 250; regulation in Belgium,

361-62; in Russia, 452; in Spain, 275

Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord (1714-99), 764

Monckton, Mrs. Jane, 730

Mofiina, Jose, see Floridablanca, Conde de

Monitor, The, 786

Monnier, Sophie de Ruffey, Marquise de (1756-

89)>952-53

monopolies: in Austria, 344; in Prussia, 501; in

Russia, 423

Monrepos, Palace of, 525

1064

INDEX

Mons, 361

Monsieur Nicolas (Restif de La Bretonne), 918,

919

Montagnana, Domenico (1700-40), 221

Montagu, Edward (d. 1775)1730

Montagu, Edward Wortley, see Wortley Mon-

tagu, Edward

Montagu, Elizabeth, nee Robinson (1 720-1 800),

730, 787, 841

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1 689-1 762),

228, 730, 793; on appearance of Holland, 646;

on Jews in Turkey, 632; on Mohammedanism,

412

Montaigne, Michel Ey quern de (1533-92), 23,

125, 179

Montaigu, Comte Pierre-Auguste de (fl. 1743),

16-17

Mont Blanc, 645

Montcalm, Marquis Louis-Joseph de (1712-59),

58

Montenegro, 41 1, 414

Montenegro, Benito Jeronimo Feijoo y (1676-

1764), 294

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron

de La Brede et de (1689-1755), 104, 119, 172,

220, 254, 280, 295, 337, 427, 451, 478, 485, 487,

725, 797, 801, 845, 884, 891, 899; Catherine II

and, 435; at Mme. Geoff rin's salon, 120; im-

portance of U Esprit des Lois, 808; influence

on Beccaria, 320; predicts American Revolu-

tion, 708; on Turin, 226

Montessori, Maria (1 870-1952), 888

Monteverdi, Claudio (1 567-1 643), 232

Montgolfier, £tienne (1745-99), 793, 932

Montgolfier, Joseph (1740-1810), 793, 932

Montgomerie, Margaret, see Boswell, Margaret

Montlhery, riots in, 954

Montmorency, Duchesse de (fl. 1758), 161

Montmorin, Comte Armand-Marc de (1745?—

92), 953

Montsauge, Jeanne de (fl. 1772), 128-29

Monumenti antichi inediti (Winckelmann), 330

Moors, 283, 287

Mora, Marques de, see Mora y Gonzaga, Mar-

ques Jose de

Moral Tales (Marmontel), 102, 105

morals: in Austria, 344; of Christians, Gibbon's

interpretation, 801; in England, 682, 730-34;

in France, 19, 97-100, 902-5; Goethe's views

on, 619-22; Industrial Revolution and, 682;

Islamic, 416; in Italy, 225; of popes; 540-43;

Rousseau's views on, 21, 180; in Scotland, 763;

in Spain, 290-91

Morand, Dr. (fl. 1765), 200

Moratin, Leandro Fernandez de (1 760-1 828),

206-97

Moratin, Nicolas Fernandez de (1737-80), 295

Moravia: Protestants in, 353; Seven Years'

War in, 53

Moravian Brethren, 558, 636, 646-47

Mora y Gonzaga, Marques Jose de (1744-74),

127-28, 129, 892

More, Hannah (1745-1833), 730, 743, 787, 795,

835

Morellet, Andre (1727-1819), 80-81, 108, 121,

221, 321, 869, 901, 908; French Revolution and,

940; at Mme. Geoffrin's salon, 120; in Les-

pinasse salon, 126; opposition to revolution,

898

Morelly (socialist, fl. 1755), 80-82, 83-84; French

Revolution and, 938, 940; influence of, 94

Morgan, Thomas (d. 1743), deist, 734

Morgenstunden (Mendelssohn), 640

Moriscos, expulsion from Spain, 287

Morley, John, Viscount Morley of Blackburn

(i838-i923),725

Morning Chronicle, The, 377, 786

Morning Herald, The, 786

"Morning Song" (Karpiriski), 486

Morocco, 411

Mort de Cesar (Voltaire), 607

Morte $ Arthur, Le (Malory), 768

Morzin, Count Maximilian von (fl. 1759), 374-75

Mosaic Code, 629, 636

Moscow: plague in, 458; size and population,

423

Moscow, University of, 453

Moslems, 312; in Corsica, 312; in Spain, 285; see

also Afghanistan; Egypt; Mohammedanism;

Persia; Turkey

mosques, 414

Motiers-Travers, Rousseau at, 161-65, 170

Moultou, Paul (fl. 1760), 164

Mounier, Jean-Joseph (1758-1806), 948, 957

mountain-climbing, 645, 889

Mountstuart, John Stuart, Lord (fl. 1765), 782

Mount Edgcumbe, Emma Gilbert, Countess of,

752

Mousiad (Krasicki), 415

Mozart, Anna Maria, nee Pertl (d. 1778), 382-86,

387, 389-92, 393

Mozart, Constanze, nee Weber (1 763-1 842),

391, 394-95,403,405-8

Mozart, Franz Zaver Wolfgang (1 791 -1844),

407

Mozart, Johann Georg Leopold (1719-87), 397,

403; advice to son, 390-92, 396, 400-1; affection

for son, 382; death of, 404; exploits son, 383,

390; Kapellmeister for Colloredo, 393; opposes

son's marriage, 394-95; on Parisian cosmetics,

99; tours with family, 383-85; on Viennese pub-

lic, 346

Mozart, Karl Thomas (1784- 1858), Wolfgang's

2d son, 403

Mozart, Maria Anna ("Nannerl"; 1 751-1829),

382-87, 389, 390, 391

Mozart, Maria Anna Thekla (1758-1841), 389,

401

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756-91), 100,

220, 222, 227, 255, 33 2 ~34> 342, 358, 367, 373>

376, 380, 3^2-40% 5*5, 5 2 7* 744> 9*0, 9 6 4i. ap-

pearance of, 400; arrogance toward nobility,

393, 401; on K. P. E. Bach, 526; children of,

406-7; Colloredo and, 389, 393-94; concerts in

INDEX

1065

London, 384; concerts in Paris, 384, 392-93;

concerts in Vienna, 385; on crime in Italy,

319; death of mother, 392; dislike of philoso-

phes, 392, 402; in England, 746; foresees his

death, 408; on French music, 909; Grimm and,

384-85, 390, 392; Haydn and, 376-78, 397-98;

illness of, 385-86; Joseph II and, 404-5; lack of

formal education, 402; love affairs of, 390-91,

401; personality of, 400-2; polyphony subor-

dinated to melody, 335; on Wieland, 576

childhood prodigy ( 1 756-66) : concert tours,

383-85; exploitation by father, 383; musical

training, 382-83, 385; parents, 382; precosity

of, 384

adolescence ( 1 766-77) : admitted to Accade-

mia Filarmonica, 385-87; commissions, 388;

concert tours, 385-89; first opera seria per-

formed, 387; rivalry with Hasse, 387

youth (1777-78): love for Maria Anna

Thekla Mozart, 389; in Mannheim, 390; in

Munich, 389; relations with Weber family,

390-92; tours with mother, 389-92

IN SALZBURG AND VIENNA (1779-82): home in

Vienna, 402; marries Constanze Weber, 395;

quits Colloredo's service, 394; stagnation in

Salzburg, 393

success (1782-87): appointed court Kam-

mermusikus, 404; birth of children, 403; in-

creasing income, 402, 404; spendthrift, 403, 405

misfortunes (1788-90): death, 408; grave un-

known, 408; illnesses, 406, 408; lack of work,

406; loans, 405-6; poverty, 405, 407

compositions: abilities to play and compose,

396-97; aristocratic context of music, 400;

Barber of Seville, 923; cantatas, 387; childhood

works, 384; concertos, 389, 392, 399; Don

Giovanni, 396-97, 404-5; Eine kleine Nacht-

musik, 398; inspiration from Italy, 395; in-

fluences, 395-97; Jupiter symphony, 398;

Kochel's catalogue of, 396; Magic Flute, 407;

Marriage of Figaro, 403-4; methods of com-

posing, 396-97; operas, 387-89, 393, 395, 404,

407; orchestral music, 389, 398-99; quintets,

397-98; religious music, 400; Requiem, 407;

songs, 399-400; symphonies, 384, 392, 398, 405

Muette, La (villa), 853

Mulai Ismail, Sultan of Morocco (r. 167 2- 17 27),

Muller, Friedrich "Maler" (1 749-1 825), 522

Muller, Friedrich von (fl. 1808), 606

Muller, Johannes von (175 2-1 809), 642, 645

Munich, poverty in, 503

Munnich, Count Christoff von (1683-1767), 429,

430, 438, 442, 459

Munster, 503

Miinster, Treaty of (1648), 361

Murano, glass industry of, 230

Murat, Joachim (1767-1815), 306, 334

Muratori, Lodovico Antonio (1672-1750), 223,

244

Murcia, 273, 298

Murdock, William (1754-1839), 676

Murray-Pulteney , Sir J ames ( fl. 1 797 ) , 77 2

Musenalmanach, Der, 598

Muses galantes, Les (Rousseau), 18

music: in Austria, 367-408; church, see church

music; in England, 368, 746-47; in France,

100-1, 368, 370-73, 909-10, 915; Frederick IPs

love of, 496, in Germany, 503, 517-18, 525-28,

552; growth of instrumental, 527; Islamic,

416-17; in Italy, 220-24, 226-27, 232-235, 254-

58, 332-35, 373; melody and polyphony in,

335; Romantic movement in, 399; in Russia,

425-26, 466; in Spain, 292; violin, 221

musical instruments, 221

Musset, Alfred de (1810-57), 889

Mustafa III, Ottoman Sultan (r. 1757-74), 415,

458

Mutozilite sect, 411

Mylius, Christlob (1722-54), 508

Myron (5th cent. B.C.), 329

Myslivecek, Josef (1737-81), 227

Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 691

nabobs, 686

Nadir Kuli, Shah of Persia (r. 1736-47), 417-20

Namur, 342, 361

Nancy, 107, 245

Nanine (Voltaire), 136

Nantes: commercial decay of, 58; shipbuilding

in, 932

Naples, 249-51, 256, 290, 310, 315; Austria and,

249; churches in, 224; conflict with papacy,

317-18; cultural life of, 250-51; Enlighten-

ment in, 250-51; expulsion of Jesuits from,

317; Freemasons in, 220; Goethe in, 588-89;

Inquisition in, 252; Jesuit colleges in, 219;

Jesuits expelled from, 315; liveliness of, 315;

music in, 232, 254-57; P a pal concordat with,

246; priesthood in, 224; prostitution in, 218;

social classes in, 249-50; Spain and, 217, 228,

250, 273, 277-78, 315; theaters in, 220; war

against papacy (1768), 317

Naples, University of, 219, 250

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French (r. 1804-14,

1815), 63, 89, 103, 107, 128, 336, 627, 791, 794,

910; on battle of Leuthen, 52; birth of, 313;

bombardment of Vienna (1809) by, 380;

Condorcet's influence on, 895; David and, 913;

defeats Prussians at Jena (1806), 502, 530, 606;

on Diamond Necklace Affair, 943; education

of, 914; educational reforms of, 895; France's

power and, 872; Goethe and, 606-7, 623; Haydn

and, 380; Italy and, 311; Jewish emancipation

and, 631; musical interests of, 334, 380; papacy

and, 319; plot to assassinate, 726; religious pol-

icy of, 890; Rousseau's influence on, 880, 891;

on royal palace in Madrid, 297-98; Spanish pol-

icies of, 306-7; on The Marriage of Figaro,

925; Tuscany and, 314; victory at Austerlitz

(1802), 726; Voltaire's influence on, 880; Wie-

land and, 576

Napoleon III, Emperor of the French (r. 1852-

70,89, 107

io66

INDEX

Narciso (Scarlatti), 257

Narcisse (Rousseau), 15, 27, 164

Nardini, Pietro (1722-93), 332

Naruszewicz, A dam ( 1 73 3-96) , 485-86

Narva, 423

Nascimento, Francisco Manoel do (1734-18 19),

269

Nasrulla (fl. 1739), son of Nadir Kuli, 420

Nathan der Weise (Lessing), 514-15, 640

natifs, Swiss, 643-44

National Assembly, French, 313, 642, 895, 960;

Condorcet in, 895; feudalism abolished by,

937; formation of (1789), 958; honors to Vol-

taire, 879-80; liberal leaders in, 939; middle-

class control of, 930

National Convention, French, 244, 313, 890, 913;

Louis XVTs trial before, 895

nationalism and Catholic Church, 316

National Theater at Hamburg, 5 1 1

Nattier, Jean-Marc (1685-1766), 120

Natur, Die (Goethe), 565-66, 584

nature, 889; Goethe's love of, 584, 619; Rous-

seau's love of, 11, 14, 180-81

Naturliche Tochter, Die (Goethe), 580, 604

Naufrage des ties flottantes (Morelly), 81

navy, English and French compared, 57

Necker, Jacques (173 2-1 804), 98, 865-67, 944,

948-51, 962; Catherine II and, 870-71; critique

of free trade in grains, 860; early banking

career of, 865; literary works of, 860, 865-66,,

marriage to Suzanne Curchod, 265; on power

of press, 915

first ministry of (1777-81), 865-67; American

Revolution and, 869-70; attempts to eliminate

serfdom, 866-67; ^ompte rendu au Roi ( 1781 ) ,

870; financial reforms, 866; Louis XVI and,

867; opponents of, 870-71; penal reforms, 867;

resignation (1781), 871

second ministry of ( 1 788-89), 948-5 1 ; con-

trols over grain export, 949; dismissal of sec-

ond ministry, 961; early enthusiasm for, 948-

49; economic policies of, 949, 955; financial

policies of, 949; pledges personal fortune to

state, 949; policies in States-General, 957-58;

prepares meeting of States^General, 949-5 1

THIRD MINISTRY OF (1789-OO), 963

Necker, Suzanne, nee Curchod (1737-94), 103,

107, 118, 126, 353, 656, 191-9% 875; charity of,

905; Gibbon and, 865; marries Jacques

Necker, 802, 865; personality and appear-

ance of, 908; salon in Paris (1765), 865, 908

Nedim, Ottoman poet, 412-13

Negapatam, 648

Negroes, 732, 935; see also slavery and slave

trade

Nehra, Henriette de (fl. 1784), 95^

Nelson, Horatio, Viscount Nelson (1 758-1 805),

750

Nelson's Festivals and Fasts, 734

Neuchatel, 643; Rousseau's residence near,

191-92.

Neue teutsche Merkur, 576

Neues Palais, Potsdam, 523, 524

Neuf Soeurs Lodge, Freemasons, 869, 939

Neumann, Johann Balthasar (1687-1753), 238,

426

Neveu de Rameau,Le (Diderot), 10 1

Newbery, John (1713-67), 814

Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of

(1693-1768), 691

Newcastle, growth of, 681

Newcomen, Thomas (1663-1729), 674

"New Doctrine of Motion and Rest" (Kant),

533

Newgate Gaol, 739

New Jerusalem Church, 658

New Marshalsea Prison, 738

newspapers: in Austria, 346; in England, 786;

in France, 915

New Testament, 185, 194

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727), 13, 219, 280,

293-94, 53M16

Newton, John (1725-1807), 811

Newton, Lord, 766

New York, anti-British riots in, 710

New Zealand, 669

Ney, Michel, Marechal (1769-1815), 606

Nicholas II, Czar of Russia (r. 1894-1917), 468*

Nicolai Klimii Iter subterranewn (Holberg),

650-51

Niebuhr, Barthold Georg ( 1776-183 1), 253, 808

Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn (1757-1841), 486

Niemetschek, 396

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1 844-1 900), 29*

Nikolai, Christoph Friedrich (1 733-181 1), 507,

510,567,638

Nivernois, Louis-Jules Mancini Mazarini, Due

de (1716-98), 208

Noailles, Marechal Due Adrien-Maurice de

(i678-i766),648

Noailles, Vicomte Louis-Marie de (1 756-1 804),

898, 939

nobility: in Austria, 351; in Austrian Nether-

lands, 362; Burke's defense of, 723; in Den-

mark, 649, 653; in England, 669-70, 684, 732;

in France, 84, 280, 849, 850, 863, 872, 898-99,

903-4, 936, 944-48, 956-61; Frederick IPs views

on, 497; French Revolution and, 899, 921-30;

in Germany, 497, 503, 504; in Hungary, 341;

in Italy, 230, 249-50; love of music, 367; Moz-

art's disdain for, 393, 401; in Poland, 472-74,

476-77, 480-82, 484-85, 491; in Portugal, 263-65,

268; in Prussia, 497; Rousseau attacks, 17; in

Russia, 422, 425, 429-30,, 438, 443, 454-56, 470;

in Spain, 274, 290; Sturm und Drang move-

ment and, 522; in Sweden, 6^-55, 657, 663-64

noble savage, legend of, 3 1

Nollekens, Joseph (1737-1823), 750, 817

Noot, Henri van den (1 750-1 827), 364

Nordenflycht, Hedvig (1718-63), 659-60

Normandy, bread riots in, 934

North, Frederick, Lord, 2d Earl of Guilford

(1732-92), 700-1, 794, 803; American Revolu-

tion and, 711, 713-14; Irish policies of, 761;

INDEX

1067

ministry of, 700-1, 706, 710-14, 761; ministry

with Fox, 715, 718; on parliamentary debates,

701*; policies toward American colonies, 710-

11; policy toward Catholics, 735; policy to-

ward India, 716; resignation from government,

7H

North Briton, The, 702-3, 705, 786

Norway, population of, 649

Notebook (Boswell), 841

Notes on Russian History (Catherine II), 463

Notte, La (Parini), 335

Nottingham, theater in, 740

Nouveaux Essais sur Ventendement humain

(Leibniz), 534

Nouvelle Heloise, La (Rousseau), see Julie, ou

La Nouvelle Heloise

Nouvelles de la republique des lettres, 253-54

Nouvelles litteraires, 34

novel, development of, 842

Noverre, Jean-Georges (1727-1810), 100, 255,

368

Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1744-18 18), 464-

65, 469

Nozze di Figaro, Le (Mozart), 404

Nugent, Dr. Christopher (d. 1775), 827

Nuits de Paris, Les (Restif de La Bretonne),

003,919

Nuncomar (d. 1775), 717

nunneries: in Austria, 343, 358-59; in France,

000; in Russia, 452

Nuri-Osmanieh, mosque of, 414

Nymphenburg, 523

Nystad, Peace of (1721), 653

Oberkirch, Henriette-Louise, Baroness d\ 908

Oberon (Wieland), 576

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and

Sublime (Kant), 534

Observations sur le gouvernement . . . des

ttats-unis d' Amerique (Mably), 903

Ochakov, 415, 430; siege of, 460

Ochs, Peter (fl. 1797), 645

Oehlenschlager, Adam Gottlob (1 770-1 850), 650

"Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale upon

Their Supposed Nuptials" (Boswell), 837

Ode to Joy (Schiller) , 574-75

"Ode to the Duty" (Derghavin), 464

Oder River, 356

Odessa, 459

Odoardo II Farnese, Duke of Parma, 276

Oeben, Jean-Francois (1 685-1 765), 107

Oedipe a Colone (Sacchini), 334

Oedipus (Sophocles) , 604

Oeser, Adam Friedrich (1717-99), 523, 557

Oeuvres du philosophe de Sans-Souci (Freder-

ick the Great) , 59

Ohio River Valley, French control of, 57

O Hiss ope (Cruz e Silva) , 269

Olavide, Pablo (1726-1803), 280, 285-86, 288

Old Believers, 438, 455

Old Pretender, see Stuart, James Francis Ed-

ward

Old Testament: Rousseau and, 185; Voltaire's

attitude toward, 150

Oldenburg, Duke of, 523

Oleg (Catherine II), 463

oligarchies: in Holland, 142; in Switzerland, 142

Olimpiade (Metastasio), 333

Olimpiade, U (Pergolesi), 256

Oliva, "Baronne" d' (fl. 1785), 942-43

"Olney Hymns" (Cowper),8u

"O my hive's like a red, red rose" (Burns), 777

"On Cannibals" (Montaigne), 23

On Ecclesiastical and Civil Tolerance (Tam-

burini), 316

On Grace and Dignity (Schiller) , 594

On Grace in Works of Art (Winckelmann),

328

"On Instructions of Her Imperial Majesty . . .

for the Drawing up of Laws" (Diderot), 448

Only Possible Ground for Proving the Ex-

istence of God, The (Kant), 534

On Mendelssohn and the Political Reform of

the Jews (Mirabeau), 642

On Music (Iriarte y Oropesa), 295

Onslow, Col. George, later 1st Earl of Onslow

(1731-1814), 706-7

Ontario, Lake, French control of, 58

"On the Contest Between the Good and Evil

Principles for the Control of Man" (Kant),

545

"On the Effects of Poetry upon the Customs

and Morals of the Nations" (Herder), 577-78

On the Failure of All Philosophical Attempts

at Theodicy (Kant) , 544

"On the Power of the Mind to Master the

Feeling of Illness by Force of Resolution"

(Kant), 549

"On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry" (Herder),

578

On the Teachings of Spinoza (Jacobi), $6^

O Oriente (Macedo), 269-70

opera, 923; in Austria, 367-73, 376, 379-80; in

England, 223-24, 746; in France, 25-26, 99,

256, 909-10; in Germany, 223-24, 525, 527-28;

Gluck's reforms in, 368-70; influence of

Italian, 224; in Italy, 222-24, 254-56, 333-35;

melody versus action in, 335; origins of, 224;

poetry and, 223; Rousseau's definition of, 26;

in Russia, 425, 466; in Spain, 292

opera buff a, 100, 223, 255, 367

Opera-Comique, establishment of, 100

opera seria, 100, 255, 367

Opie, Amelia (1 760-1 853), 787

opium, 729

Oppenheimer, Joseph (1692?-! 738), 634

Optic ks (Newton), 219, 616

optics, Goethe's work on, 615-16

Opus postumum (Kant) , 549-50

oratory: English, 707; French, 99

orchestras, 525-26

Orfeo ed Euridice, libretto (Calzabigi), 369

Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck), 368-69, 371, 373,

909

io68

INDEX

Orford, Margaret Walpole, Countess of, 328

Origin of Species (Darwin), 889

Orleans, Louis, Due d' (1703-52), 17

Orleans, Louise-Marie de Bourbon-Penthievre,

Duchesse d' (1753-1821), 955

Orleans, Louis-Philippe, Due d' (1725-85), 94,

123, 850

Orleans, Louis-Philippe-Joseph ("Philippe-

ftgalite), Due d' (1747-93), 898, 962; aid to

revolutionaries, 955-56; early life, 955; exiled

by Louis XVI, 946; as Freemason, 939; liberal-

ism of, 957; marriage, 955; in States General,

960

Orleans, Philippe II, Due d', Regent of France

(r. 1715-23), 90, 277, 906, 955

Orleans, factories in, 932

Orlov, Alexei Grigorievich (1737-1809), 439,

458; aids Catherine II coup, 439-40; in death

of Peter III, 442

Orlov, Feodor Grigorievich (1741-90), 439

Orlov, Grigori Grigorievich (1734-83), 437,

457, 468; aids Catherine's coup, 439-40; arrests

Choglokov, 443-44; as Catherine's lover, 442,

445; Catherine's rewards, 442; policies of, 445

Orphan of China (Voltaire), 103

Orpheus, 253

Orry, Jean (1652-1719), 277

Orsini-Rosenberg, Count Franz (1723-96), 395

Os Burros (Macedo), 270

Osorio de Zurliga, Don Manuel, 305

ospedali singers, 232

Ossian, The Works of (Macpherson), 559, 567,

767-68, 809

Ossory, Lord (fl. 1765), 209

Ostend, 361

Ostermann, Count Andrei Ivanovich (1686-

1747), 429-31

Osufia, Duchess of, 291

Osufia, Duke of, 274, 301

Oswego, Fort, capture of (1756), 58

Othello (Shakespeare), 511

Ottoboni, Pietro, Cardinal (fl. 1708), 256

Ottoman Turks, 41 1, 414; see also Turkey

Otway, Thomas (1652-85), 741

Oudh, begums of, 718, 720

Oudh, Nawab of, 718

Oudry, Jean-Baptiste (1689-1755), 120

"Outline and Announcement of a Course of

Lectures on Physical Geography" (Kant), 533

Oxford Symphony (Haydn), 377, 381

Pacassi, Niccolo (1716-90), 345

Pacchierotti, Gasparo (1 744-1 821), 333

Pacte de Famille (1 761), 60, 76, 89

"Pacte de Famine," 76

Padua, 220, 229; theaters in, 220; university in,

219

Paestum, Greek temples of, 248, 327

Paine, Thomas (1 737-1 809), 340, 725; Rousseau's

influence on, 891; Voltaire's influence on, 881

painting: bourgeois, 11 3- 114; in England, 750-58,

888; in France, 911-14; in Germany, 523-24;

in Holland, 647; in Italy, 227, 235-39, 248, 331-

332; neoclassical, 912-13; in Portugal, 261; in

Russia, 466-67; in Scotland, 765; in Spain, 298-

309; in Sweden, 662

Paisiello, Giovanni (1740-1816), 334, 388, 466

Pajou, Augustin (1730-1809), 106, 107, 109, 911

Palais-Bourbon, 91 1

Palais de Justice, 910

Palais-Royal, 91 1, 955

Palatinate, Bavaria united with, 354

Palatine College in Milan, 321

Palermo, 589; university in, 219; witch-burnings

in, 316

Palestine, 411

Paley, William (1 743-1 805), 730, 735

Palissot de Montenoy, Charles (1730-1814), 108,

120

Palladio, Andrea (1518-80), 229, 248, 587, 747

pamphleteering in France, 94, j>/j

Panckoucke, Charles-Joseph (1736-98), 925

Panin, Nikita Ivanovich (1718-83), 439, 457, 483

Panin, Piotr Ivanovich (1721-89), 455

Pannini, Giuseppe (fl. 1762), 247

Pantalone (comic character), 232, 243

pantaloons, 231

Pantheon, 880

Paoli, Pasquale di (1725-1807), 207, 312-13; Bos-

well and, 782-83; conflicts with French, 313;

early life of, 312; French depose, 205; leads

rebellion against Genoa, 3 1 3

papacy, 310; Austria and, 343; basis of power

and influence, 316; conflicts with Catholic

monarchs, 317-18; factional conflicts in, 317;

Germany and, 504-5; Goethe on, 316; interna-

tionalism of, 316; Jesuit expulsions and, 316-

18; Jews and, 631; material interests of, 316;

Napoleon and, 319; nationalism and, 316; Por-

tugal's break with, 267; response to Enlighten-

ment, 316; restoration of Jesuit order by, 319;

Spanish concordat with, 279; Turkey and,

457; under Clement XIII, 317; under Clement

XIV, 317-19; under Pius IV, 319

Papal States, 217; congestion of expelled Jesuits

in, 317; Jesuit colleges in, 219; opera houses

in, 223; popes and, 246-47; size of, 244; see

also papacy; Rome

Papin, Denis (1 647-171 2), 673

Paradise Lost (Milton), 773, 842

Paradox of the Actor, The (Diderot), 103

Paraguay: communistic practices of Jesuits in,

80, 83, 262; Indian revolt in, 262; Jesuits in,

281, 283

Paret y Alcazar, Luis (1746-99), 299

Paride ed Elena (Gluck), 370

Parini, Giuseppe (1729-99), 335-36

Paris: book trade in, 71; Chamfort on, 915; dirt

in, 933; economic activity in, 932-33; great

salons in, 11 8-31; Hotel-Dieu, 353; hunger in,

71, 860, 933, 961; intellectual life in, 906; key

role in French Revolution, 961-63; life in, 15,

71; Louis XVI's aid to, 857; morals of, 19, 903;

music in, 368, 370-73; population of, 71, 933;

INDEX

I069

press in, 915; proletariat in, 933; revolutionary

ferment in, 954-57, 959-62; riots in, 934, 946,

956, 961-6$; stores in, 936; theater audience in,

241; wealth of, 71

Paris, Peace of (1763), 62

Paris, Treaty of (1782-83), 648, 714

Paris, Parlement of, 90-91, 353, 849; alliance

with nobility, 944; banishments of, 91, 946;

burns tmule, 190; conflicts with Brienne, 946-

48; conflicts with Louis XV, 93-94; conflicts

with Turgot, 861-63; "Declaration of Rights"

of (1787), 947; Diamond Necklace Affair and,

943; Diderot's defense of, 93; orders arrest

of Rousseau, 189-90; organization of States

General and, 949; prohibits labor unions, 933;

Voltaire's attack on, 92-93

Paris Conservatoire de Musique, 909

Paris-Duverney, Joseph (1684-1770), 920, 922

Paris-Montmartel, Jean (1690- 1766), 936

Park, Anna (fl. 1790), 777

parks in England, 748

parlements, 89-95, 928, 930; allegiance to nobil-

ity, 949; attack on Cour Pleniere (1787), 947-

948; authority of, 849; conservatism of, 90, 93;

functions of, 90; hatred of Mme. de Pompa-

dour, 67; Louis XV and, 90-95; Louis XVI

and, 858, 946-48; as supporters of nobility, 849;

see also Paris, Parlement of

Parliament, British, 683-707; buying up of seats

in, 670, 685; demands for annual, 704; destruc-

tion of machines and, 679; economic policies

of, 67; electoral districts and, 684-85; forbids

labor unions, 680; George Ill's conflict with,

61, 683, 686-88, 693, 697-701; Irish question in,

760-62; parlements compared with, 90; powers

of, 686, 709-10; rotten boroughs and, 685, 733;

taxation of American colonies and, 709-10;

voting procedures in elections of, 685

Parliament, Irish, 760-61

Parma, duchy of, 228, 239, 278; church lands in,

224; expulsion of Jesuits from, 317; Inquisition

abolished in, 316; social reforms in, 311- 12;

Spanish control of, 217

Parma, Duke of: in 1748-65, see Felipe, Duke

of Parma; in 1 765-1 801, see Ferdinand III

Parsons, Nancy, 731-32

Pascal, Blaise (1623-62), 23, 139, 294, 514, 889,

890

Pasch, Johan (1706-69), 662

Pasch, Lorenz, the Elder (1702-66), 662

Pasch, Lorenz, the Younger (1 773-1 805), 662

Pasch, Ulrica (1735-06), 662

Passek, Lieut. P. B. (fl. 1762), 439

Passer owitz, Treaty of ( 1 7 1 8) , 4 1 5

Passionei, Cardinal (fl. 1754), 326-27

Passionerna (Thorild), 661

Passionist Order, 225

Pater, Walter (1830-94), 326*

Paton, Betty (fl. 1785), 774

Patriarcha (Filmer), 177

particians in Geneva, 143

Patrick, Saint (389?-46i?), 767

Patriot , The (Johnson), 833

Pau, Parlement of, 947

Paul, Lewis (fl. 1738), 673

Paul, Saint (d. 67), 194

Paul I (Grand Duke Paul), Czar of Russia (r.

1796-1801), 441, 462, ^65-66, 468, 492, 908

Paul et Virginie (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre),

904, 917

Paul of the Cross, Saint (Paolo Danei; 1694-

i775)» 225

Pa via, 310; university in, 219

Pavilliard, Pastor (fl. 1753), 797, 804

Pay son perverti, Le (Restif de La Bretonne),

918

Peacock Throne, 419

peasant revolts: in Russia, 423, 455; in Walla-

chia, 361

peasantry, 12; in Austria, 345; in Egypt, 415; in

England, 669-71, 732, 814-16; in France, 859,

861, 902, 954; French Revolution and, 927-31;

in Germany, 501, 503; in Hungary, 341; in

Italy, 217-18, 249; Mirabeau pere's tribute to,

74; in Poland, 472, 474, 487, 491; in Prussia,

501; revolts of, see peasant revolts; Rousseau's

opinion of, 174; in Russia, 142, 422, 451, 454-

56, 469; in Spain, 274, 287; Sturm und Drang

movement and, 522; in Sweden, 65^-$ 5, 657,

663 ; in Switzerland, 27

Pechlin, Baron Karl Fredrik von (fl. 1789), 662,

664

Peder Paars (Holberg), 650

Pedro III, King of Portugal (r. 1777-86), 271

Peel, Robert (1750- 1830), 678-79

Peel, Sir Robert (1788-1850), 678

Pellegrini, Giovanni Antonio (1675-1741), 235

Pembroke, Lord, 745

Pembroke, Elizabeth Spencer, Countess of, 753

Pennsylvania Assembly, 868

Pentateuch, 629, 639

Penthievre, Louis de Bourbon, Due de (1725-

'793)1852

Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), 518, 568, 767, 809,

817

Pereira, Dr. Pedro Goncalves, see Goncalves

Pereira, Pedro

Pereire, Jacob Rodrigue (1715-80), 636

Perekop, 430

Perfektibilisten (secret society), 507

Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista (1710-36), 100, 223,

240, 254, 255-56, 333

Permanent Council, Polish, 485, 487

Persia, 411, 4/7-2/; disorder after Nadir's death,

420; invasion of India (1739), 419; invasion

of Uzbekistan (1740), 420; poetry in, 421;

Safavid dynasty in, 417; taxation in, 420; Tur-

key and, 417-19; war with Russia (1722-23),

419

Persian rugs, 42 1

Pertl, Anna Maria, see Mozart, Anna Maria

Perugia, 244

perversions in France, 98

Peshawar, 419

1070

INDEX

Pest, university at, 360

Pestalozzi Johann Heinrich (1746-1827), 888

Peter I the Great, Czar of Russia (r. 1682-

l l*5), 39> H 2 » 4 2 5" 2 6, 433» 45<*, 632-63; escape

from Turks, 414; nobility and, 438; statue of,

467; war with Persia (1722-23), 419; West-

ernization of Russia, 470-71

Peter II (Piotr Alexeevich), Czar of Russia

(r. 1727-30), 429

Peter HI (Piotr Feodorovich, orig. Karl Fried-

rich Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp) Czar of

Russia (r. 1762), 432-40, 456; aids Frederick II,

438; Catherine deposes, 61, 439-40; conflicts

with Catherine, 435-36, 439; death of, 442;

early life and personality of, 432-33; habits of,

435-36; imprisoned by Catherine, 440-42; love

affairs of, 436; meets and marries Catherine,

434-35; popular sympathy for, 441; Pugachev's

pretensions as, 45; reforms of, 142, 437-39;

reign of, 437-40; unpopularity of, 439

Peter war dein, battle of (17 18), 414

Petit, Abbe (fl. 1750), 27

Petit Trianon, 1 1 1, 852, 910

Petty, Sir William (1 737-1 805), see Shelburne,

2d Earl of

Pezay, Alexandre-Frederic-Jacques Masson,

Marquis de (1741-77), 884

Phaedrus, (1st cent. A.D.), 486

Phaidon (Mendelssohn), 638-39

Phedre (Racine), 169

Philalethie (Basedow) , 507

Philanthropinum of Dessau, 506

Philidor, Francois-Andre Danican- (1726-95),

16, 100

Philip, Duke of Parma, see Felipe, Duke of

Parma

Philip II, King of Spain (r. 1556-98), 279

Philip IV, King of Spain (r. 1621-65), 297, 305

Philip V, King of Spain (r. 1700-46), 273, 276-79,

297, 298, 301; centralization of Spanish state,

277; death of, 279; Farinelli and, 278-79, 296;

he becomes insane, 278-79; international con-

flicts of, 277-78; marriages of, 276-77; per-

sonality of, 276-77; presides over auto-da-fe,

^76

Philip of Orleans, Regent, see Orleans, Philippe

II, Due d'

Philippe-fegalite, see Orleans, Louis-Philippe-

Joseph, Due d'

Philippines, population of, 273

philosophes, 94-95, 280, 286, 487, 536, 549, 867,

889; American Revolution and, 867-68, 872;

Archbishop of Paris and, 193; atheism and,

183; attitudes toward religion and morality,

183, 902-3; Brienne and, 945; Catherine II and

446-50, 452-53; Choiseul and, 88, 89; classical

ancient ideals of, 898; clergy and, 901; deaths

of, 892-97; declining influence of, 170; fear of

revolutionary action, 898; Frederick II and,

496-98; French Revolution and, 890-91, 897-

99y 937S8y 94° i friendships with monarchs,

897-98; Joseph II and, 353; last of 894-97;

Louis XVI and, 867; Mme. de Pompadour's

friendship for, 67; moderate views of, 9$,

897-98; Mozart's dislike of, 392; on music,

100; Paris Parlement and, 90; physiocrats and,

75; Pombal and, 267-68; prudence of, 31;

Robespierre's rejection of, 890-91; Rousseau

and, 162-65, 182-83, 195, 214; Russia and, 140;

Turgot and, 78-79, 858-59, 863, 865; views on

communism, 82; see also names of individual

philosophes

Philosophes, Les (Palissot) , 1 20

Philosophical Dictionary (Voltaire), see Dic-

tionnaire philosophique

Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the

Sublime and Beautiful, A (Burke), 691

Philosophic rurale (Mirabeau pere), 74

Philosophische Brief e (Schiller), 572

Philosophische Gesprache (Mendelssohn), 638

Phocaeans, 3 1 2

physiocrats, 356, 455, 678, 858; influence of,

76-77, 287, 769-71; philosophes and, 75; the-

ories of, 71-77

Physiognomische Fragtnente, 563, 645

Piacenza, 278

piano: importance in musical evolution, 527;

mechanical improvements in, 525

pianoforte: improvement of, 332; invention of,

221

Piazza di Spagna, 247

Piazzetta, Giovanni Battista (1682-1754), 235-36

Piccini, Niccolo (1 728-1 800), 100, 291, 555, 334,

373, 386, 388, 875; death of, 333; personality

of, 333; rivalry with Gluck, 371-72, 908; sym-

pathy for French Revolution, 333; writes

musical score to Metastasio's Olimpiade, 333

Piccolomini, Die (Schiller) ,601-2

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni (1463-94), 620

Pied de Fanchette, Le (Restif de La Bretonne),

918

Piedmont, Jesuit colleges in, 219

Pietism, 465, 531, 636

Pigage, Nikolaus von (1723-96), 525

Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste (1714-85), 106, 107, 280,

908, 91 1

Pilatre de Rozier, Jean-Francois (1756-85), 932

Pinto, Isaac (1715-87), 630

Piozzi, Gabriel Mario (1 740-1 809), 837-38

Piozzi, Hester Lynch, see Thrale, Hester Lynch

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista (1720-78), 248, 479,

747

Pirna, siege of (1756), 45

Pir on, Alexis (1689-1773), 121

Pisa, 312; university in, 219

Pisano, Benedetto, 323

Pisiani library, 219

Pitt, William, the Elder, Earl of Chatham

(1708-78), 342, 683, 725, 741, 794, 812, 842;

accepts peerage as Earl of Chatham, 700;

American Revolution and, 689, 708, 710-12;

basic policies of, 57, 689; de facto ministry of,

700; death of, 713; personality of, 688-89; re-

fuses peerage, 698

INDEX

IO7 I

seven years' war ( i 756-63): 40, 698; de-

nounces convention of Kloster-Zeven, 50; dis-

missal of Pitt (1757), 46, 60-61; refuses French

peace feelers, 60; support for Frederick II,

39, 698-99

Pitt, William, the Younger (1759-1806), 461,

680, 696-97, 718-19, 734, 750: Adam Smith's

influence on, 772; consumption of alcohol, 726;

death of, 726; duel with Tierney, 732; early life

and education of, 696-97; economic policies

of, 719, 726; enters Parliament, 697; establishes

"cabinet government," 718; forms ministry,

718-19; leads war against revolutionary

France, 726; personality of, 697; policies to-

ward India, 719-20; policies toward Ireland,

726; resoluteness of, 697; Samuel Johnson and,

833; support for American colonies, 714

Pittoni, Giambattista (1687-1767), 235

Pittsburgh region, French forts in, 57

Pius VI (Giovanni Angelo Breschi), Pope (r.

1775-99), conflict with Joseph II, 359-60;

Jews and, 631; Ricci imprisoned by, 314

Pius VII (Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonti) , Pope

(r. 1800-23), 319

Plains of Abraham, battle of (1759), 58

Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language

(Johnson), 821

Plan of a University for the Government of

Russia (Diderot) , 892

Planche, John Robinson (1796- 1880), 576

Plassey, battle of (1757), 58, 716-17

Plato (427?-347 B.C.), 171, *77> lg 8, M 1 ^ 2 * 2 94»

435

Platon (Peter Levshin; 1737-1812), 465

Plautus, Titus Maccius (2 54? -184 B.C.), 241, 508,

650

plays, see theater

Pleyel, Camille (1 788-1 855), 380

Pleyel, Ignaz (1757-1831), 380

Plus Beaux Monuments de la Grece, Les (Le

Roy), no

Plutarch (46?-! 20? a.d.),435

pocket boroughs: in England, 685, 755; in Ire-

land, 760

Pococke, George, Admiral (fl. 1758), 58

Podolia, 492, 634

Podstatsky, Count (fl. 1767), 386

Poesie drammatiche (Metastasio), 369

poetry: in Denmark, 652; in England, 518,

808-17; m France, 104, 889; in Germany, 511,

5H-21, 557-58, 564-65, 584-86, 590> 595> 599,

601, 603, 608-1 1, 623-25; Islamic, 412-13, 421;

in Italy, 220, 335-36; Jewish, 641; opera and,

223; in Persia, 421; in Poland, 485-86; in Por-

tugal, 269-70; in Russia, 427-28, 464; in Scot-

land, 767-68; in Spain, 295-96; in Sweden,

659-62

Poetry and Truth (Goethe), 626

Poggio Bracciolini, Giovanni Francesco (1380-

1459), 804

Poisson, Mme. (d. 1745), 86

Poland, 89, 6$6\ agriculture in, 472-73; army in,

485, 487; art in, 479; Austria and, 475, 482-83;

clergy and religion in, 472, 480-81; constitu-

tion adopted for (1791), 487-88; culture in,

475; decay of towns, 474; Denmark and, 480;

Diet of, 475-76, 479-81, 484, 490-91; dress in,

474; education in, 475, 485; England and, 480,

484; Enlightenment in, 484-87; feudalism in,

472-73, 487; final dismemberment of (1794),

491-92; first partition of (1768-72), 350, 481-

85; France and, 476, 482; governmental weak-

ness of, 472-73, 476-77, 480-82, 484-85, 487;

in Holy Roman Empire, 341; industry and

commerce in, 473-74; Jews in, 472, 475, 482,

632-34, 636, 641; last stand against dismember-

ment (1794), 491-92; minorities in, 472, 480,

484; morality in, 474; partriarchalism in, 473;

population of, 485; Prussia and, 474, 479-84,

487-88, 490-92; religious tolerance in, 481, 487;

Rousseau's constitution for, 178; 884.-8$; Rus-

sia and, 430, 456, 470, 474, 479-84i 487-9 2 ;

Saxon kings of (1697-1763), 475-77; second

partition of (1792), 490-91; size of, 472; social

classes in, 472-74, 476-77, 480-82, 484-85, 487,

491; Sweden and, 475-76; trade treaties with

Russia, 456; Treaty of Versailles (1756) and,

42; Turkey and, 415, 458, 475, 482; women in,

474

Polignac, Due Jules-Frangois de (1745-1817),

864-65

Polignac, Yolande de Polastron, Duchesse de

0749?-93), 852-53, 875

Polish Succession, War of the (1733-35), 430,

476, 630

political clubs and French Revolution, 939

political economy, first university chair in, 250

Political Law of the Polish Nation, The (Kol-

lanta j ) , 486

poll tax in France, 936

Poltawa, battle of (1709), 476

Polzelli, Luigia (1 780-1832), 376

Pombal, Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Mello,

Marques de (1 699-1 782), 261-72, 631, 880;

attitude toward religion, 268; conflict with

Jesuits, 262-68; conflict with nobles, 263-65,

268; reforms of, 142, 268-70

Pomerania, 653; promised to Sweden, 45-46;

Seven Years' War in, 48, 54

Pomfret, Henrietta Louisa, Countess of, 228, 793

Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Mar-

quise de (1721-64), 73, 87, 105-7, !II » ! 37>

858, 920; aid to Mirabeau pere, 74; confer-

ence with von Starhemberg, 41-42; death of,

68; Diderot on, 69; Falconet and, 109; friend-

ship for philosophes, 67; Kaunitz and, 41; love

for Louis XV, 85; Maria Theresa and, 40-42,

45, 56; Mozart performs for, 384; physiocrats

and, 71; Pigalle and, 108; popular hatred of,

67-69; reforms of, 144; role in French govern-

ment, 67; Rousseau and, 25; Seven Years' War

and, 40, 41-42, 45, 53, 56; Voltaire on, 69

Pompeii, excavations at (1748-63), no, 248, 328,

589

1072

INDEX

Pondicherry, 58-59

Poniatowski, Prince Jozef Antoni (1 763-1 813),

488-92

Poniatowski, Princess Konstantia, nee Czartory-

ski,473

Poniatowski, Prince Stanislas (1676-1762), 473

Poniatowski, Stanislas II, see Stanislas II Augus-

tus, King of Poland

Pont-de-Veyle, Antoine de Ferriol, Comte de (fl.

1768), 125

Ponte, Lorenzo da (Emmanuele Caneglianos

1749-1838), 403, 404, 406, 408

Pontecorvo, 317

Pontejos, Marquesa de (fl. 1785), 301

Pontenuovo, battle of (1769), 313

Pontoise, riots in, 934

Pontverre, Pere Benoit de (fl. 1728), 7

Poor Richard's Almanac (Franklin), 869

Pope, the: in 1740-58, see Benedict XIV; in

1758-69, see Clement XIII; in 1769-74, see

Clement XIV; in 1775-99, see Pius VI; in

1800-23, see Pius VII

Pope, Alexander (1688- 1744), 13, 269, 703, 741,

786, 810, 813, 839, 878; opposes slave trade,

732; Samuel Johnson's views on, 837

Pope ein Metaphysiker! (Mendelssohn), 638

pornography, 98

Porpora, Niccolo (1686- 1766), 220, 222, 232,

240, 254, 374

Porson, Richard ( 1 759-1 808) , 694

Portugal, 259-72; abolition of slavery in, 269;

American colonies of, 262-63, 269; breaks

relations with Vatican, 267; commerce and

industry of, 259-60, 269; control over Church

in, 268; culture in, 260-61, 269-70; diplomacy

of, 259-60; England and, 259; Enlightenment

in, 269-70; expulsion of Jesuits from, 317; In-

quisition in, 260, 267-68, 269-70; Italian opera

in, 224; Jesuits in, 260, 262-68, 271-72; Jews,

in, 260, 631; in League of Armed Neutrality

(1780), 457; literature in, 260, 269-70; Negro

slavery in, 259; nobles in, 263-65, 268; Old

Christians and New Christians in, 268, papal

concordat with, 246; PombaTs dictatorship

in, see Pombal; poverty in, 259; reasons for

decline of, 259; reform of Pombal in, 268-70;

Seven Years' War and, 62; Spain and, 262-63,

268; wealth of Church in, 260

Potemkin, Grigori Alexandrovich (1730-91),

322, 444-46, 464, 467, 469; as administrator,

459; death of, 461; generalship against Turks,

459-61

Potemkin villages, 459-60

Potocki, Antoni (fl. 1744), 475

Potocki, Count Stanislas Felix (1752-1805), 473,

488, 490

Potsdam, 523-24

Potter, John (d. 1747), Archbishop of Canter-

bury, 703

Potter, Thomas (d. 1759), 703

Pottle, Frederick A., 779*

Poussin, Gaspard (Gaspard Dughet; 1613-75),

248

Poussin, Nicolas (1 594-1665), 327, 466, 750

power looms, 673

Pozzuoli, 327

Prado (Madrid), 289, 200

Praga, 400, 492

Prague, 641; culture in, 342; siege of (1757), 47;

university at, 360

Praslin, Cesar-Gabriel de Choiseul, Due de

(1712-85), 88, 447

Pratt, Sir Charles (1714-94), 703

Prayers and Meditations (Johnson), 734

Precis du siecle de Louis XV (Voltaire), 137

Precis swr M. Rousseau (La Tour), 214

Preobrazhensky Regiment, 440

Pre-Raphaelites, 888

Presbyterians, 735, 760, 763

press, freedom of: in England, 706-7; French

Revolution and, 940; Goethe's opposition to,

623; Voltaire's support for, 146; see also

censorship

Pressburg, 360

Prete Rosso, Ii, see Vivaldi

Preveza, 229

Prevost, Abbe (Antoine-Francois Prevost d'Ex-

iles; 1697-1763), 119, 169, 842, 887

Price, Richard (1723-91), 722-23

Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804), 734; ethics of,

739; on Paris, 933

Prince Khlor (Catherine II), 463, 464

Princesse de Babylone, La (Voltaire), 136

Princesse de Cleves, La (La Fayette), 169

Principi di una scienza nuova . . . (Vico), 251,

254

Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy

(Paley),735

printing press, 266

prisons: in England, 737-38; in France, 867; in

Holland, 738; in Rome, 245

Pritchard, Hannah, nee Vaughn (171 1-68), 740

Privy Council of Weimar, 581, 589

Procope (cafe), 99

Profession de foi d'un theiste (Voltaire), 136

Profession de foi en musique frangaise (Ar-

naud), 372

progressive education, 888

Projet concernant de nouveaux signes pour la

notation music ale (Rousseau), 15

Projet de constitution pour la Corse (Rous-

seau), 204-5

Prokofiev, Sergei (1 891-195 3), 243*

Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysic That

Will Be Able to Appear as Science (Kant),

539-40

Prolegomena to Homer (Wolf), 253

proletariat: in France, 933Sf> in Naples, 249;

Rousseau's opinion of, 173; in Spain, 274; Vol-

taire's opinion of, 174; see also workers

Prometheus (Goethe), 620

property: French Revolution and, 937-38; Rous-

INDEX

IO73

seau's views on, 29-30, 32-34, 174; Voltaire's

views on, 141; see also communist theories

Propriete, c'est le vol, La (Proudhon), 938

Prospectus (Tun tableau historique des progres

de V esprit humain (Condorcet), 895-97

prostitution: in Austria, 344; in England, 731-32,

744-45; in France, 98, 903; in Italy, 218, 225,

230; Romantic Movement and, 888; in Scot-

land, 763

Protestant Association, 735

Protestantism: in Austria, 343, 352, 357; in Eng-

land, 142; in France, 91, 857, 950; in Germany,

64, 142, 502; Goethe's views on, 620; in Hol-

land, 142, 646; in Ireland, 759-62; in Moravia,

353; in Poland, 472, 475, 480; Rousseau and,

yd 26-27, 184-85; in Scotland, 763; in Spain,

285; territory held by, 316

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-65), 174, 938

Provence, 954

Provence, Comte de, see Louis XVIII

Prussia, 356, 364; acquisition of Bayreuth and

Ansbach, 354; agriculture in, 500-1; alliance

with England (1756), 432; alliance with

Turkey (1790), 363; army of, 43, 62, 497, 500,

686; censorship abolished in 547; clergy and

religion in, 499; conscription in, 62; despotism

in, 530, 848; economy of, 43, 500-1; education

in, 500; espionage system of, 43; feudalism in,

43, 500-1; fragmentation of, 43; Jews in, 499;

in League of Armed Neutrality (1780), 457;

in League of Princes (1785), 362; legal reform

in, 500; in Napoleonic wars, 530, 606; Poland

and, 474, 479-84, 487-88, 490-92; population of,

43, 63; reign of Frederick the Great, see

Frederick II the Great; religious tolerance in,

499, 540; Revolutionary France and, 488; Rus-

sia and, 460-61, 484; in Seven Years' War,

see Frederick II the Great, In Seven Years'

War; state monopolies in, 501; social classes

in, 497, 500-1; Sweden and, 653-54, 663; tax-

ation in, 500-1; territorial acquisitions of, 653;

torture abolished in, 321; West, 484

Prynne, William (1600-69), 163

Public Advertiser, The, 705-6, 786

Public Ledger, The, 786, 814

public libraries, 914; see also libraries

public sanitation, 728

Puccini, Giacomo (1 858-1 924), 243*

Puchberg, Michael (fl. 1788), 405-6

Pufendorf, Samuel von (1632-94), 171, 177

Pugachev, Emelyan Ivanovich (1726-75), 455,

464, 469

Pugnani, Gaetano (1731-98), 332-33

Pulaski, Casimir (i748?-79), 481

Pulaski, Jozef (fl. 1750), 481

Pulcinello (comic figure), 241

Pulteney, William, Earl of Bath (1684-1764),

698

Punch, 241

Puritans (Independents), 735, 760

Pushkin, Alexander Sergeevich (1799-1837),

427, 464

Pyrrhonisme de Vhistoire, Le (Voltaire), 136

Pythagoras, 254

quadrille, 292

Quadruple Alliance (17 18), 278

Quakers, 684, 733, 834

Qualtenburg, Franz Kressel von (1720-1801),

355

Quantz, Johann Joachim (1697- 1773), 2 34

Quarenghi, Giacomo (i744~i8i7),468

quartet, 528

Quebec, English conquest of, 58

Quesnay, Francois (1694-1774), 72, 78, 769, aid

to Mirabeau pere, 74; death of, 77; devotion

of disciples to, 74; Genovesi and, 251; influ-

ence on Adam Smith, 769; personality of, 76;

practical program of, 76; theories of, 75-74,

250

Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-etat? (Sieves), 915, 954-

55

Quiberon Bay, battle of (1759), 57

Quinault, Philippe (1635-88), 371

Rabelais, Francois (1495-1553), 788

Rachmaninov (Russian translator of Voltaire),

463

Racine, Jean-Baptiste (1639-99), 103-4, 136, 169,

427,511, 528,588,661, 889

Rid, Swedish, 654

RadclifTe, Ann, nee Ward (1764-1823), 691

Radishchev, Alexander Nikolaevich (1749-

1802), ^6$-66j 469

Radziwill, Helen, 479

Radziwill, Prince Karol (1734-90), 473

Raeburn, Sir Henry (1 756-1 823), 762, 765

Raison par alphabet, La (Voltaire), 138

Rambler, The (Johnson), 786, 822, 825

Rameau, Jean-Philippe (1683-1764), 18, 368, 372,

909

Ramirez, Juan (fl. 1760), 300

Ramsay, Allan (1686-1758), poet, 765

Ramsay, Allan (1713-84), painter, 699, 729, 765

Ranc, Jean 298

Rancon, M. (fl. 1757), 86

Ranelagh, 744

Ranke, Leopold von (1795- 1886), on Pope In-

nocent III, 245-46

Raphael (RafTaello Sanzio; 1483-1520), 248, 327,

466,751

Raskolniki, religious dissenters, 452

Rasmus Montanus (Holberg), 650

Raspe, Rudolph Erich (1737-94), 534, 568

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, History of (John-

son) ,819, 825-26, 829

Rastrelli, Bartolomeo ( 1700-7 1 ) , 426

Rastrelli, Carlo Bartolomeo (d. 1744), 426

Rauber, Die (Schiller), 521, 570-7/, 589

Rauch, Father (fl. 1755), 327

Rautenstrauch, Franz, 343

Ravenna, 244

Ravensburg, 48

Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-Francois (1713-06),

io74

INDEX

34, 108, 220, 280, 361, 798, 901, 908; American

Revolution and, 867; clerical attacks on, 902;

death of 893 ; later life of, 893 ; at Mme. Geof-

f rin's salon, 1 20

Razumovsky, Alexis (fl. 1742), 431

Razumovsky, Kirill, 439

Real Academia Espanola, 280

Reaumur, Rene-Antoine Ferchault de (1683-

1757), 501

Recamier, Jeanne-Fran^oise, nee Bernard (1777-

1849), 118

Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de pro-

priety (Brissot de Warville), 938

Recueil d'antiquites egyptiennes, etrusques,

grecques, romaines, et gauloises (Caylus), no,

749

Redemptionists, 225

Reflections (Pinto), 630

Reflections on the Revolution in France

(Burke), 690, 722-23, 806

Reflexions sur la formation et la distribution des

richesses (Turgot) , 79

Reform Bill (1832; England), 739

Reformation, 504, 620

regaliste faction, 317

Regulated Company, 732

Reichstag of Holy Roman Empire, 502

Reid, Thomas (1710-96), 763, 164-6$

Reimarus, Elise (fl. 1768), 512

Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (1694-1768), 512-

514,578

Reims: factories in, 932; poverty in, 933; riots

in, 934; statues in, 107; stores in, 936

Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1 758-1 823), 539,

55 1 1 594

Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

(Kant), 531, 545

religious toleration: in Austria, 348, 351-52, 357,

641-42; in Austrian Netherlands, 361; in Hol-

land, 646-47; in France, 863, 902; French Rev-

olution and, 642; Jews and, see Jews; in Po-

land, 481, 487; in Prussia, 499, 540; Rousseau

demands, 175-76; in Russia, 438, 451-52; in

Sweden, 657

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Percy),

518,568,676,^

Remarks upon the Architecture of the Ancients

( Winckelmann) , 328

Rembrandt Harmensj von Rijn (1606-69), 466

Remigius Franyo (fl. 1788), 363

Renan, Joseph-Ernest ( 1823-92) , 880

Rennes, 107; Parlement of, 92-93, 849, 947

Renoir, Pierre- A uguste (i84i-i9i9),235

Re pastore (Mozart), 389

Repnin, Nikolai Vasilievich (1734-1801), 480,

481-82

Reprimand to the Queen, A, 853

Requiem, Mozart's, 370, 380, 408

Rerum italicarum scriptores (Muratori), 244

Restif de La Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme (1734—

1806), 918-19; descriptions of Paris, 908; on

reading by workers, 914

Re Teodoro (Paisiello), 334

Re Turandote (Weber, Busoni, and Puccini),

Reutter, Georg (1656-1738), 374

Reveillon factory riot, 956

Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire, Les (Rous-

, seau), 23-24, 26, 171, 206, 886, 887

Rey, Marc-Michel (fl. 1770), 178

Reynolds, Frances (1 729-1 807), 745, 751

Reynolds, Richard (fl. 1763), 671

Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-92), 238, 645, 699,

720, 728-29, 740, 750, 151-54, 77 2 » 7 8 9> 812,

828, 839; description of Boswell by, 842; in

"the Club," 827; on development of artist, 754;

early life of, 751; earnings of, 753; esthetic the-

ories of, 754; fame of, 753-54, 756; Gainsbor-

ough and, 756-57; Goldsmith and, 816-17; ill-

ness and death of, 754-55; Samuel Johnson and,

840-41; paean to Michelangelo, 754; paintings

of women and children of, 752-53; president

of Royal Academy of Arts, 754; scope of por-

traiture of, 751-53; studies in Italy, 751

Ricardo, David ( 1772-182 3), 739

Ricci, Father, 283

Ricci, Lorenzo (1703-75), 267, 311-18; arrest

and death of, 318

Ricci, Marco (1676-1729), 235

Ricci, Scipione dc (1741-1810), bishop of

Pistoia, 313-14

Ricci, Sebastiano (1660-1734), 235

Ricci, Teodora, 243

Richard III (Shakespeare), 741-42

Richardson, Jonathan (1665-1745), 751

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), 136, 167, 169,

509, 518, 563, 661, 790, 793, 814, 825, 842, 887

Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis de, Cardinal

( 1 585-1642), 268,344

Richelieu, Louis-Fran^ois-Armand de Vignerot

de Plessis, Marechal Due de (1696-1788), 42-

43153187,89,133,879

Richelieu, Marie-£lizabeth-Sophie de Guise,

Duchesse de (d. 1740), 98

Richmond, Charles Lennox, 3d Duke of (1735-

1806), 713

Richmond, Mary Bruce, Duchess of, 752

Richter, Jean Paul (1 763-1 825), 611

Riddarhus, Swedish, 654

Riddell, Maria (fl. 1793), 778

Ridolfo, Palazzo, 228

Riesener, Jean-Henri (1734-1806), 107, 523,

910-11

Riga, 423

Righini, Vincente (1756-18 12), 404

Rights of Man, The (Paine), 340, 725

Riksdag, Swedish, 654-57, 662, 664

Rimnik, battle of (1789), 460

Rimsky-Korsakov, Ivan (fl. 1778), 444, 446

Rinaldi, Antonio (1709-90), 468

Rinaldo di Capua (C.1710-C.1780), 254

riots: in England, 735-36; in France, 98, 934,

946, 956, 061

Risorgimento and Alfieri, 340

INDEX

IO75

Rivals, The (Sheridan), 695

Riza Kuli (fl. 1740), son of Nadir, 419-20

Robbers, The (Schiller) , see RJiuber, Die

Robert, Hubert (173 3-1 808), ///, 117, 120, 248

Robertson, William (1721-93), 594, 762-64, 766,

767, 733, 800, 835

Robespierre, Maximilien de (1758-94), 915; in

Club Breton, 939; rejects philosophes, 880,

890; Rousseau's influence on, 890; in States

General, 957

Robinson, Mary (Perdita), nee Darby (1758—

1800), 740

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 182

Robison, Sir James (fl. 1758), 674

Rochambeau, J.-B.-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte

de (i725-i8o7),87i, 872

Rochelle, La, 944

Rockingham, Charles Watson- Wentworth, Mar-

quis of (1730-82), 691, 700, 789; ministries of,

700,703,710,714,761

Rodney, George Brydges, Admiral (1719-92),

669

Rodriguez, Ventura (1754), 297

Roebuck, John (1718-94), 675

Roentgen, David (1 743-1 807), 523, 911

Roguin, Daniel (fl. 1760), 190, 882

Rohan, Cardinal Prince Louis-Rene-fedouard

de (1734-1803), 322, 942-43

Rohikhand war, 717, 719

Roland, Jeanne-Manon, nee Phlipon (1754-93),

937

Roland (Gluck), 371

Roland (Piccini), 371

Roland (Quinault), 371

Rolf Krage (Ewald), 651

Rollin, Charles (1661-1741), 179

Roman Elegies (Goethe), 598

Romania, see Wallachia

Romanina, La, see Bulgaretti, Marianna

Romans, Mile, de (fl. 1761), 68

romantic love, 888

Romantic movement, 768; Alfieri and, 340; defi-

nition of, 887; in England, 809, 813; in

France, 3, 128, 157, 887; in Germany, 508,

5/7-20; Goethe on, 588; influence of Middle

Ages on, 809; Kant and, 531, 551; letters of

Julie de Lespinasse and, 128; in music, 399;

Rousseau and, 3, 157, 887; spread of, 170,

888-89

Rome, ancient, 21, 690; influence of, 118, 315;

philosophes and, 898

Rome, modern, 244-49, 2 5<5» 3 I0 > architecture

in,' 247; cosmopolitanism of, 314-15; cultural

stagnation of, 247; Freemasons in, 220; Goethe

in, 587-88; Jews in, 631, 642; population of,

245; prison reforms in, 245; prostitution in,

218; ratio of priests to lay population, 224;

theaters in, 220; university in, 219; Winckel-

mann in, 327-28

Rmneo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 740

Romero, bullfighter, 291

Romische Elegien (Goethe), 590

Romney, George (1734-1802), 740, 757-58

Rosciad, The (Churchill), 808

Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl

of (i847-i929),772

Rosicrucians, 324, 465

Rossbach, battle of (1757), 50, 67

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio (1 792-1 868), 245,

920; Barber of Seville libretto and, 334; on

Mozart's Don Giovani, 404

Rothschild, Meyer Amschel (1743-1812), 634

Rotrou, Jean de (1609-50), 109

rotten boroughs, 685

Rotterdam, 361

Rouelle, Guillaume-Fran^ois (1695-1762), 813

Rouen: bread riots in, 934; unemployment in,

935; Parlement in, 849, 947

Rousseau, Mme. (foster mother of d'Alembert) ,

126

Rousseau, Isaac (father of Jean-Jacques), 5

Rousseau, Jacques (1733-1801), 910

Rousseau, Jeanette (fl. 1748), 918

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78), 5-57, 99,

104, 113, 128, 136, 152-10, 280, 286, 336-37, 353,

465, 478, 485, 496, 532, 545, 559, 563, 636, 641,

643, 656, 661, 690, 725, 790, 808, 845, 852, 857,

881-92, 895, 910, 916, 919, 952, 964; aid from

nobles, 161, 898; aid to Swiss middle class,

643; d'Alembert and, 163, 191; American Rev-

olution and, 867; appearance of, 26, 202; Ar-

menian costume of, 192, 209; attitude toward

reason, 169, 888; attitude toward women, 8;

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and, 883-84, 886, 916-

17; Boswell and, 133, 152, 782; Catherine II and,

173; Casanova and, 324; Confessions of, see

Confessions; constitutions for Poland and Cor-

sica, 178, 202, 482; critique of celibacy, 168-69;

descriptions of, 207-8, 209-10, 211; trntile of,

see tnnile; Encyclopedic and, 3, 25, 33; ex-

hortations on nursing, 97, 180; Frederick II

and, 173, 191-92, 202, 207-8, 212-13, 497 \

French Revolution and, 84, 899, 940; on

friendship, 153; Geneva and, 163-64, 177, 197;

Gluck and, 368, 370-71, 372; Grimm and, 3-4,

5*, 18, 23, 153, 159-62, 170, 201, 207-8, 212;

hatred of injustice, 6, 12; hatred of Paris, 153,

168; d'Holbach and, 153; Houdon's bust of,

912; Hume and, 207, 209, 211-14; influence of,

3-4, 230, 508, 518, 520-21, 880, 887-92, 898; on

Index Expurgatorius, 316; on Jews, 629-30;

Samuel Johnson's dislike of, 834-35; La Tour's

painting of, 26; literary style of, 169-70; Louis

XVI and, 867; love of nature, 7, 11, 30, 169;

Mme. d'fepinay and, 4, 5*, 18, 26, 36-37, 153,

156-61, 178, 884; Mme. de Warens and, 7, 9-1$;

Mme. d'Houdetot and, 152, 156-58, 162, 164;

Malesherbes and, 189; on marriage, 152; moral-

ity of, 21, 180, 880; musical theories of, 100, 154,

232; music-copying work of, 17-18, 192, 201;

needlework of, 192; Nouvelle Heloise, La, of,

see Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise; in Pantheon,

no; personality of, 6, 26, 152, 208-9; philoso-

phes and, 161-65, 182-83, 195, 214 (see also be-

1076

INDEX

low Rousseau, diderot and; Rousseau, voltaire

and) ; Plato's influence on, 177, 188; popularity

of, 890-91 ; primacy of feeling in, 169; on recep-

tion of Julie, 170, Romantic movement and,

3, 157, 887; Saint-Lambert and, 164; sensitivity

of, 152, 208-9; sexual problems of, 6, 8, 14-15,

16; Social Contract of, see Social Contract;

status as a musical composer, 25; support for

French opera, 372; theories of theater, 163;

timidity of, 6, 26; views on marriage, 186-87;

visit by Joseph II, 897; vows never to write

again, 205; Walpole's hoax on, 208-9, 212-14

EARLY LIFE AND WANDERINGS OF (1712-40):

birth, 5; education and readings, 6-7; early

loves, 6-7, 9-1 1, 13; apprenticeship, 7; rela-

tions with Mme. de Warens, 7, 9-10, 12-14;

conversion to Catholicism, 7; as footman, 8-9;

studies for priesthood, 9; love of nature, 11;

teaches music, 11; passion for walking, 11-12;

exposure to Enlightenment, 13-14; pantheistic

beliefs, 14

IN LYONS, PARIS, AND VENICE (1740-44): tutors

Mably children, 14, 178; offers marriage to

Suzanne Serre, 14; dismissed by Mably, 15;

Narcisse read by Marivaux, 15; meets Diderot

in Paris, 15-16; visits Parisian salons, 16;

secretary to French Embassy in Venice, 16;

dismissal and appeals, 16-17

IN PARIS AND GENEVA ( 1 744-56) I Copies musk

in Paris, 17-18; lives with Therese Levasseur,

17-18; sends children to foundling asylum, 18,

24, 178; revises Les Muses galantes, 18-19;

corresponds with Voltaire, 18-19, 3 I- 3 2 ;

writes Discours sur les arts et les sciences,

20-23, 171; controversy over Discours, 23-24;

success of Le Devin du village, 24-25; refuses

King's invitation, 25; writes for Encyclopedic,

25; writes Dictionnaire de la musique, 25-26;

writes Lettre sur la musique frangaise, 25-26;

Narcisse performed, 27; quarrels with philo-

sophies, 27; visits Geneva (1754), 27; resumes

friendship with philosophes, 27-28; writes

Discours sur Vorigine et les fondements

de inegalite parmi les homines, 28-30; contro-

versy over Discours, 31-32; "Discours sur

l'economie politique" published, 32-33, 171;

friendship with Grimm, 33-36; meets Mme.

d'fepinay, 36; leaves Paris for Hermitage, 36-37

in hermitage ( 1 756-57): Rousseau's arrival,

36-37; family problems, 152; writings, 154-

SS\ love affairs, 156-59; conflicts with friends,

153-55, 158-61; aid from philosophes, 153;

leaves Hermitage, 161

in motiers-travers (1757-62): poverty, 161-

62; relation with Marechal de Luxembourg,

161-62; break with friends, 162-65; conflict

with philosophes, 164-6$, 170

persecution of (1762-67): clerical attacks on

books, 18$, 189, 192-99; philosophes attack

ftmile, 189; arrest ordered by Paris Parlement,

189; flees to Switzerland, 189; tnnile and So-

cial Contract banned, 190; arrest ordered by

Geneva Council of Twenty-five, 190; Vol-

taire's sympathy for Rousseau, 190-91, 199-

200; expelled from Bern, 191, 206-7; appeal to

Frederick the Great, 191-92; residence near

Neuchatel, 191-92; conflict with Archbishop

of Paris, 193-97; conflict with Genevan Cal-

vinists, 197-99; conflict with Voltaire, 200-1;

meetings with Boswell, 201-4; writes constitu-

tion for Corsica, 204-5; leaves Motiers-Travers

for tie de St.-Pierre, 206; leaves lie de St.-

Pierre for Paris, 207-9; leaves Paris for Eng-

land, 209; meets Hume, 207; Boswell brings

Therese to London, 210

in England ( 1 766-67): stay in London, 209-

10; residence in Chiswick and Wootton, 210-

212; dislike for England, 214; return to France,

214

later years of ( 1 767-78): returns to France,

881; wanderings in France, 882; in Paris, 883-

86; readings from Confessions, 883-84; works

on constitution for Poland, 884-85; writes

Dialogues, 885-86; writes Reveries d'un prom-

eneur solitaire, 886; death of, 886; rumors and

attacks against, 887; aftermath of death, 887;

conflicts with philosophes, 882-83, 885; Vol-

taire and, 882, 884, 886; fears and suspicions

of, 882-84; mourns loss of children, 882, 886;

restraints placed on readings, 884; political

conservatism of, 884

DIDEROT AND, 22, 24, 27, 1 53, 201, 212; Conflicts

between them, 3, 4, 5*, 25, 153, 158, 159-60;

Diderot encourages Rousseau to write first

Discours, 20; Diderot reproves Rousseau, 25,

892-93; final rupture in relations, 162-63; fi-

nancial aid to Rousseau, 153; first meeting be-

tween, 15-16; repudiation by Rousseau, 3;

Rousseau on Diderot, 15; suspicions of Rous-

seau against, 4, 5*

educational theories of, 3, 644; in tmile, see

fcmile; emphasis on freedom, 179-80; instruc-

tion of Mably children, 14; moral instruction,

180; physical training, 180-81; rearing of girls,

180; religious instruction, 182-85; role of in-

stincts, 181; role of nature, 180-81; sex educa-

tion, 185-86

religion and, 3, 162-63; accepted by clergy,

890; advice to women on religion, 193; belief

in afterlife, 184; on Biblical miracles, 198; calls

for "civil religion," 175; Calvinism and, $-6,

19, 26, 177, 184-85; Catholicism and, 7; de-

nounces atheism, 26; denunciation of atheism,

183; early pantheism, 13-14; Genevan creed

of, 184-85; religious tolerance, 175-76

social views of: agriculture, 205; attacks no-

bility, 17; attacks social inequality, 17, 28-30;

attitude toward "enlightened despots," 173;

concept of general will, 32-33; 172; in consti-

tution for Corsica, 205; criticism of civiliza-

tion, 19-24; democracy, 173-74, 205; equali-

tarianism, 141; family life, 205; Geneva as

model, 27; ideal type of government, 173,

205; justifies revolution, 30; justifies social

INDEX

IO77

inequality, 32; for limitations on democracy,

28, 32; private property, 29-30, 32, 174, 20$;

radicalism of, 176, 205; republican ideals, 898;

socialism, 174; taxation, 174; views on law,

172-73

VOLTAIRE AND, 108, 149, 151, 203-4, 212, 882, 884,

886; attitude toward Julie and Smile, 149, 182;

both men compared, 172, 175, 201, 518; con-

flicts between them, 163-65, 200-1, 214; cor-

respondence between them, 154-55; Rousseau

on Voltaire's poetry, 154; Voltaire on Rous-

seau's Julie, 170; —on Social Contract, 177

Rousseau, Pierre (1750-c. 1792), 910

Rousseau, Suzanne, nee Bernard (d. 171 2),

mother of Jean-Jacques, 5

Rousseau juge de Jean-Jaques, see Dialogues

Rovigo, 229

Rowlandson, Thomas (1756-1827), 750

Rowley, Thomas, "myth" of, 809

Royal Academy of Arts, London, 645, 750, 751,

Royal Academy of Belles-Lettres, Swedish, 658-

59

Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Swedish, 658

Royal Academy of History, Portuguese, 260

Royal Academy of Sciences, Swedish, 658

Royal Society of Edinburgh, 763

Rozier, Pilatre, de, see PSatre de Rozier, Jean-

Frangois

Rudbeck, Governor-General (fl. 1782), 656

Ruffey, Sophie de, see Monnier, Marquise de

Ruggiero (Hasse), 387

Raines, ou Meditations sur les revolutions des

empires (Volney),9i7

Rukh, Shah, see Shah Rukh

rum, American trade in, 57

Rumiantsev, Piotr Alexandrovich (1725-96),

458, 460

Russia, 89, 353, 422-71; architecture in, 426, 432,

467-6% army in, 432, 438, 441-42, 459» 686;

art in, 426, 432, 466-69; Austria and, 349, 362-63,

432; bureaucratic corruption in, 424; clergy

and religion in, 424-25, 438, 451-52; clothing

and dress in, 425; commerce and industry in,

423, ^55-56; conflicts with Turkey, 140, 411,

414-15, 430, 457-61, 470, 483, 663; Denmark and,

456; Diderot in, 892; education in, 432, 453;

England and, 432, 458, 460-61, 700; Enlighten-

ment in, 426-27, 432, 446-50; expansion of em-

pire, 429-30, 457-61, 470, 653; feudalism in,

424, 451, 454-55; Finland and, 456, 65^-55;

France and, 430, 432, 457-58, 469-70; Free-

masons in, 465; French cultural influence in,

450, 467; government in, 424, 431, 459-60; in-

fluence of Germans in, 429; Italian opera in,

224; Jews in, 452, 632-$$, 641; legal reforms

in, 431, 450-52, 470; literature in, 426-28,

463-66, 889; minorities in, 422, 452; music in,

224, 425-26, 466; palace coups in, 431, 430-40;

philosophes and, 140; Poland and, 430, 456,

470, 474, 479-84, 487-92; Prussia and, 456, 460-

61, 484; public health and medicine in, 453-

54; reign of Anna Ivanovna (1730-40), 429-

30; reign of Catherine I (1725-27), 429; reign

of Catherine II, see Catherine II the Great;

reign of Elizabeth Petrovna (1741-62), 431-

437; reign of Peter II (1727-30), 429; reign of

Peter III (1762), 432-40; religious toleration

in, 438, 451-52; size and geography of, 422,

470; social classes in, 142, 422-25, 429-30, 438,

443, 451, 454-56, 469-70; Sweden and, 456,

458, 460, 653-54; taxation in, 424, 470; torture

abolished in, 321; war with Persia (1722-23),

419; Westernization of, 470-71

IN SEVEN YEARS* WAR (1756-63): 432, 438, 456;

Brandenburg ravaged by, 54; coalition against

Frederick II, 60; difficulties in East Prussia,

49; diplomacy leading to, 39-44; invasions of

East Prussia, 48, 53, $$; occupation of Berlin,

60; results of war, 63; withdraws from war,

61

FOREIGN ALLIANCES AND AGREEMENTS OF, 457-58;

Conventions of St. Petersburg (1757), 45; in

Declaration of Armed Neutrality (1780), 713;

Peace of Jassy (1792), 488; treaty with Eng-

land (1755), 39

Russian Orthodox Church, 422, 424-2 j, 452

Sabbatai Zevi (1626-76) , 635-36

Sacchetti, Giovanni Battista (fl. 1737-64), 297

Sacchini, Antonio (1730-86), 333-34

Sacharissa (Lady Dorothy Sidney; 1617-84), 790

Sade, Comte Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de

(i74o-i8i4),904

Safavid dynasty, 417

St. Andrews University, 763

St.-Antoine, Faubourg, 962

Saint-Aubin, Gabriel de (1724-80), u6*

St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 93

St.-Cloud, Abbey of, 928

St.-Cyr (school), 453

St.-Domingue, 58, 89, 935

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804-69), 5*,

34, 127,648,793,805

Ste.-Genevieve, Church of, 880

Ste .-Marguerite district in Paris, 956

Saint-£vremond, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-

Denis, Seigneur de (d. 1703), 125

St. Gallen, 643

Saint-Germain, Claude-Louis de (1707-78) , 858

Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy, see GeofTroy Saint-

Hilaire, fetienne

St. James Chronicle, 212

St. James's Palace, 745

Saint-Lambert, Marquis Jean-Francois de

(1716-1803), 26, 27, 104, 156-57, 163, 168, 908;

in Mile. Lespinasse's salon, 126; at Mme.

Geoffrin's salon, 120; Rousseau and, 164, 207

St. Lawrence River, French control of, 57

St.-Lazare, Monastery of, 962

1078

INDEX

Saint-Mauris, M. de (fl. 1775), 952

St. Petersburg, 423-24, 469

St. Petersburg, Convention of (1757), 45

Saint-Pierre, Abbe de (Charles-Lrenee Castel;

1658-1743), 153,547,643

St.-Remy de Valois, Comtesse Jeanne de, 942

Saisons, Les (Saint-Lambert), 104

Salamanca, University of, 294

Saldanha, Cardinal de (fl. 1758), patriarch of

Lisbon, 264

Salieri, Antonio (1 750-1 825), 334-35, 466

Salle des Menus Plaisirs, 956-57, 959-60

Salm, Hotel, 190

Salomon, Johann Peter (1745-1815), 377

salons: in England, 729; in France, 103, 118-31,

906-8; in Italy, 219

Saltykov, Count Piotr Semionovich (1698?-

I 77 2 )»54-55»59»435

Saltykov, Sergei (fl. 1751), 436

Salvi, Niccolo (1 697-1 751), 247

Salzburg, 382

Samarra, battle of (1733), 418-19

Sammartini, Giovanni Battista (1701-75), 221,

226-21, 380-81, 386

Sancho Panga (Philidor), 100

Sanctis, Francesco de, 247

Sand, George (Aurore Dupin; 1803-76), 889

Sandby, Paul (1725-1809), 750

Sandwich, Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of (1625-

1672), 730

Sandwich, John Montagu, 4th Earl of (1718-

1 79 2 )»7<>3i7 2 9

San Fernando, 288

San Ildefonso, 288

San Ildefonso, Palace of, 297

San Marino, 217

Sansedoni, Porzia (fl. 1765), 782

Santa Maria del Rosario, 238

Santa Maria Maggiore, 247

Santiago de Compostela, cathedral of, 297

Santissima Trinita dei Monti, 247

Saragossa, 275

Saratoga, battle of (1777), 713, 869

Saratov, 455

Sardinia, 246, 273, 277, 644

Sartine, Gabriel de (1729-1801), 858, 868

Satires (Naruszewicz) , 485

saturnalia, 232

Saudi Arabia, 412

Saul (Alfleri), 340

Saul (Voltaire), 136

Saurau, Count Franz von (1760-c. 1830), 379

Saussure, Horace-Benedict de (1740-99), 645

Savage, Richard (1697?-! 743), 820

Savery, Thomas (i65o?-i7i5),674

Savile, Sir George (1726-84), 735

Savoy, 217, 277; Genoa and, 227; territorial

acquisition from War of the Spanish Succes-

sion, 273

Savoy, house of, 226

Saxe, Marechal Comte Hermann Maurice de

( 1 696-1 750), 99, 107

Saxe-Gotha, Duke of, 893

Saxe-Hildburghausen, Duke of, 49-50

Saxe-Meiningen, Duke of, 594

Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, 503; in League of

Princes (1785), 362; see also Weimar

Saxony, 356, 476, 502-3; in League of Princes

(1785), 362, Seven Years' War in, 44-45, 49-50,

54, 60, 61

Scala di Spagna, 247

Scarlatti, Alessandro (1660-1725), 240, 256

Scarlatti, Domenico (1685-1757), 221, 240, 256-

58, 333; death of, 257; Handel and, 256; instru-

mental works of, 257; marriage of, 257;

operas of, 256-57; in Rome, 256-57; in Spain,

257, 279, 292; in Venice, 256

Scarlatti, Francesco (fl. 17 19), 240

Scarlatti, Pietro (1679-1750), 240

Scarlatti, Tommaso (i67o?-i76o), 240

Scarron, Paul (1610-60), 790, 839

Schack, Mme. (fl. 1791), 408

Schadow, Johann Gottfried (1764-1850), $23,

5*5

Schardt, Charlotte von, see Stein, Charlotte

von, nee Schardt

Schaumburg-Lippe, Count Wilhelm of (1724-

J 777)> 5 2 7»568

Scheele, Karl Wilhelm (1742-86), 658

Scheldt River, 361

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von

(i775-i834),5 5 i,6i8

Schering, Arnold (b. 1877), 2 34

Schikaneder, Johann Emanuel (1751-1812), 407

Schiller, Charlotte, nee von Lengefeld (1766-

1826), 594

Schiller, Johann Christian Friedrich (1759-

1805), 63, 379, 502-3, 517, 545, 569-71, 589,

591-605, 628, 641, 766, 964; appearance of, 596;

contribution to Romantic Movement, 889;

death of, 580, 605; early life and education

of, 569-70; edits Die Horen, 596; esthetic

theories of, 593, 595; estimates of, 602-3; fam-

ily life of, 594; friendship with Christian

Gottfried Kroner, 572-75; friendship with

Wieland, 576; on German family life, 503-4;

goes to Weimar, 575; Goethe and, 591, 593,

595-605; historical writings of, 592-94; ill-

nesses of, 594, 596, 605; in Jena, 593-603;

Kant's influence on, 551; love affairs of, 573,

575; marriage of, 594; meets Duke Karl

August, 573; minor dramatic works of, 571-

72; philosophical writings, 572; poetry of, 599,

603; premiere of Don Carlos, 592; returns to

Weimar, 602; Rousseau's influence on, 3, 518,

889; satires of, 598-99; in Sturm und Drang

movement, 521-22, 570-71, 593; success of,

605; version of Lessing's Nathan der Weise,

515; views on religion, 595; in Weimar, 591-

93; writes Ode to Joy, 574; writes plays on

Wallenstein, 601-2; writes The Robbers, 570-

71; writes William Tell, 604-5

Schimmelmann, Count Ernst von, 594

Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1 767-1 845), 601

INDEX

IO79

Schlegel, Friedrich (1772-1829), 611, 641

Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1 768-1 834), 641, 890

Schleswig, duchy of, 439

Schloss Benrata, 525

Schloss Esterhazy, 341

Schloss of Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, 525

Schliisselberg Fortress, 465

Schmettau, Kurt von, $6

Schobert, Johann (i72o?-67), 525

Schonbrunn Palace, 345

Schonemann, Lili (1758-18 17), $66

Schonkopf, Annette (fl. 1768), 558

School for Blind Children, French, 905

School of Commerce, Russian, 453

School for Scandal, The (Sheridan), 696, 740

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1 788-1 860), 3, 550-51,

616

Schrattenbach, Sigismund von, Prince Arch-

bishop of Salzburg (r. 1753-71), 382-87 passim

Schreiben an den Herrn Diaconus Lavater

(Mendelssohn), 639

Schroder, Friedrich Ludwig (1744-18 16), 511

Schroeter, Johanna (fl. 1791), 378

Schroter, Korona (1 751-1802), 524

Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel (1739-91),

527

Schubert, Franz (1 797-1 828), 399

Schulenburg, Count von der, 344

Schulz, Johann H. (fl. 1784), 507-8

Schulz, Johann Peter (1747-1800), 525

Schumann, Robert (1810-56), 398

"Schutzschrift fur die Vernunftigen Verehrer

Gottes" (Reimarus), 513-14

Schwarzenberg, Prince Karl Philipp von (1771—

1820), 379

Schweidnitz, 51, 53, 60, 61

Schwerin, Count Kurt Christoph von (1684-

»757)i43-44i 47

science: in Germany, 532-33, 596-97, 615-18;

Industrial Revolution and, 669, 671, 680; in

Sweden, 658-59

Scienza della legislazione, La (Filangieri), 336

Scienza nuova (Vico), 251, 254

"Scotia, my dear, my native soil!" (Burns), 775

Scotland, 670, 762-85; agriculture in, 762; anti-

Catholic riots in, 735; architecture in, 765;

art in, 765; Catholics in, 763; England and,

762; Enlightenment in, 764-78; France and,

39; historians in, 765-66; Industrial Revolution

in, 763; morality in, 763; philosophy in, 764-

65; poetry in, 767-68, 772-78; population of,

762; Protestants in, 763; social classes in, 762

Scotland, Church (Kirk) 0^763,766,774,779

"Scots wha' hae wi' Wallace bled" (Burns) , 777

Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 765, 775, 815

Scudery, Madeleine de (1607-1701), 169

sculpture: in England, 750; in France, 106-9,

911; in Germany, 523; in Italy, 247; in Portu-

gal, 270; in Russia, 426, 467; in Spain, 298; in

Sweden, 662

Scuola degli Incurabili, 255

Scuola di San Rocco, 238

Seasons, The (Haydn), 379

Seasons, The (Thompson), 379

Second Estate in States-General, 956-61

Sedaine, Michel-Jean (1719-97), 920

Segeste, 589

Segovia, 288

Segur, Comte Louis-Philippe de (1753-1830),

423, 459-60; on American Revolution, 872;

on Marie Antoinette, 855, 941; on pre-revolu-

tionary skepticism, 898

Sejm, Polish, 472-73

Select Society, 764

Selwyn, George (1718-91), 702, 725?, 730, 734,

747

Seminario Musicale dell' Ospedale della Pieta,

2 33"34

Semir amide (Sacchini), 334

Semler, Johann Salomo (1725-91), 507

Senate: Polish, 487; Russian, 424, 440; Venetian,

229, 231

"Senate of Magna Lilliputa" (Johnson), 819-20

Senegal, 714

Senesino (Francesco Bernardi; i690?-i75o?), 223

sensibility cult in Germany, 518

Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 465

Sentiments des citoyens (Voltaire), 200-1

Sephardic Jews, 630

September Massacres, French Revolution, 496,

7 2 5

Serafinovich (fl. 1716), 633

Serbia, 41 1

serfdom: in Austria, 345, 349-50, 356; in Den-

mark, 649; in France, 928; in Germany, 500-1,

503; in Hungary, 341; Joseph IPs policies to-

ward, 349-50; in Poland, 472-73, 487; in Prus-

sia, 500-1; revolt in Bohemia, 350; Rousseau

on, 885; in Russia, 422-23, 438, 451, 454-55,

470; Voltaire's opposition to, 135

Sergei, Johan Tobias (1740-18 14), 662

Sermon des cinquantes, 199

Sermons of Mr. Yorick (Sterne), 789

Serre, Suzanne (d. 1748?), 14

Serva padrona, La (Pergolesi), 100, 223, 333

Servetus, Michael (151 1-33), 176

Sevastopol, 459

Seven Last Words of Christ, The (Haydn), 380

Seven Years' War (1756-63), 38-64, 290, $5^

646, 698-99, 798; in America and India, 57-59,

709; efficiency of Prussian army, 43; events

leading to, 38-44; George IIFs attitude toward,

698; results of, 62-64, 552; start of, 44; Vol-

taire's views on, 149

diplomacy of, 699; coalition against Fred-

erick, 45-46, 59-60: Convention of St. Peters-

burg (1757), 45 i effects of battle of Rossbach

on, 50; English treaty with Russia (1755), 39;

First Treaty of Versailles (1756), 42; Fred-

erick publishes Saxon documents, 45; Fred-

erick's peace efforts, 47-48; French peace

feelers, 60; German principalities and Fred-

erick, 45; Kaunitz's diplomacy, 40-42; Maria

Theresa's policies, 38, 40-44, 48; "Pacte de

io8o

INDEX

Famille," 60; peace negotiations, 62-64; Pitt's

diplomacy, 39; Russia establishes peace, 61;

Russia withdraws from war, 61, 457; Second

Treaty of Versailles (1757), 45; Spanish al-

liance with France, 60; territorial pledges,

45-46; Treaty of Westminster (1756), 39-40

land campaigns of: battle of Leuthen, 51-52;

battle of Rossbach and, 50; in Bohemia, 47-48;

in East Prussia, 48-49, $$, 59-60; final vic-

tories of Frederick the Great, 61; in India,

57-59; in Moravia, 53; in North America, 57-

58; in Saxony, 44-45, 49-50, 54, 60, 61; in Silesia,

51-53,55,60-61

naval operations of: battle of Lagos (1759),

57; battle of Minorca (1756), 42-43, 57; seige

of Louisbourg, 57-58

Sevigne, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de

(1626-06), 138,792

Seville, 288-89

Sevres, 106, 749

sex education, Rousseau's views on, 185-86

Seydlitz, Friedrich Wilhelm von (1721-73), 43,

53

SganareVs Journey to the Land of the Philoso-

phers (Halberg),65o

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3d Earl

of (1671-1713), 595

Shah Alam, Mogul Emperor (r. 1759-1806),

716-17

Shah Jehan,- Mogul Emperor (r. 1628-58), 419

Shah Rukh, Persian ruler (r. 1748-96), 420

Shakespeare, William (1564-16 16), 464, 486,

5"» 553» 559-6o, 561, 5*5, 599» 659, 661, 794,

842; influence on Germany, 511, 519; revival

of, 739-43; Voltaire's condemnation of, 835

Shakespeare festival, 743

Sharp, Granville (1735-1813), 733

Shaw, George Bernard (1 856-1 950), 748

Shchedrin, F. F. (1 751-1825), 467

She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), 816

Sheffield, 681

Sheffield, John Baker Holroyd, 1st Earl of (fl.

1780), 795

Shelburne, Sir William Petty, 2d Earl of

( 1 737-1 805), 759, 871; duel with Fullerton,

732; ministry of, 714-15

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 810; Rous-

seau's influence on, 3, 891; Voltaire's influence

on, 880, 881

Sheraton, Thomas ( 1 75 1-1 806) , 748

Sheraton furniture, 523

Sherbatov, Princess (fl. 1789), 446

Sheridan, Charles, 695

Sheridan, Elizabeth Ann, nee Linley (1754-92),

695,696,727

Sheridan, Frances, nee Chamberlaine (1724-66),

694, 696

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816), 486,

694-96, 683, 701, 714, 739, 7471 757» 759» 7 6l *»

aid to American colonies, 727; death of, 727;

early life of, 604-95; enters Parliament, 696;

in Hastings' trial, 719-20, 805; on Johnson,

831; liberal views of, 696; literary activities

of, 695; marries Elizabeth Linley, 695; in

ministry, 714-15; partnership in Drury Lane

Theatre, 743; personality and appearance of,

695-96; in "the Club," 827

Sheridan, Thomas, the Elder (1687-17 3 8), 694

Sheridan, Thomas, the Younger (1719-88), 694-

696, 780

Shi*asect,4i2, 419

ships, iron, 672

Shiraz, 420-2 1

Shuvalov, Ivan, 432

Shuvalov, Piotr, Count (d. 1762), 137, 432, 437

Siberia, 422

Sicily, 226, 278; Caraccioli's reforms in, 315;

Jesuit colleges in, 219; Spanish loss of, 273

Siddons, Sarah, nee Kemble (1755-183 1), 720,

740-41

Siddons, William (fl. 1773), 741

Sidney, Algernon (1622-83), 177

Steele de Louis XIV, Le (Voltaire), 528

Sievers, Yakov Efimovich (1731-1808), 489-00

Sieves, Emmanuel- Joseph (1748- 1836), 915; in

Club Breton, 939; Due d'Orleans and, 955; as

Freemason, 939; as spokesman for Third Es-

tate, 954-55; in States-General, 957

Silesia, 48; excused from taxes, 500; Frederick

II regains, 52; mining in, 501; Prussia and,

38, 62; Seven Years' War in, 51-53, 55, 60-61

Silhouette, fetienne de (1709-67), $6

silk industry, 230, 501

Silva, Antonio Jose da (1705-39), 260, 631

Simon, Richard (1638-1712), 641

Simonides of Ceos (6th century b.c), 510

Singspiel, 367, 525, 528

Siraj-ud-daula (i728?~57), 715-16

Sirvens family, 140, 146, 151, 498, 881

skepticism: in England, 734; French Revolu-

tion and, 898

"Sketch of My Life" (Boswell), 203

slavery and slave trade: American colonies and,

57, 708, 732-33; Beaumarchais and, 921; Den-

mark and abolition of, 649, 653; England and,

57, 670, 693, 732-33; France and, 58, 935; in

Moslem countries, 413-14, 420; Portugal and,

abolition of, 259, 269; Wilberforce's opposi-

tion to, 726

smallpox inoculation, 93, 348, 434, 454, 846

Smeaton, John (1724-92), 671, 674

Smith, Adam (1723-90), 214, 321, 719, 764, 766,

768-72, 786, 808, 827; Burke and, 693, 832; on

class conflict, 680; death of, 772; early life and

education of, 768-69; economic theories of,

769-71; ethical theories of, 769; on Gibbon,

805; habits of, 771-72; on Hume, 834; influ-

ence of, 287, 772; influences on, 769-70; in

London, 772; on morality, 730-31; opposes

slave trade, 733; on overwork in factories,

677; philosophes and, 769; physiocrats and, 75-

76, 78, 769; at University of Glasgow, 763, 769,

779; on wealth of Holland, 646; writes Theory

INDEX

I08l

of Moral Sentiments, 769; writes Wealth of

Nations, 769

Smollett, Tobias (1721-71), 699, 702, 820, 824;

on French officers, 98

Smolny Institute, 453

Sobieska, Maria Clementina (1702-35), 247,

320

Sobieski, Jan, see John III Sobieski

Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 27, 33, 171-

78, 191, 268, 465, 808, 884-85, 887, 891, 898;

American Revolution and, 868; attitude to-

ward peasantry in, 174; attitude toward prole-

tariat in, 174; banning of, 190; concept of

general will in, 172; on Corsican indepen-

dence, 204; critics of, 177; democracy and,

173-74, ! 98-99; "enlightened despotism" and,

173; French Revolution and, 880; ideal type

of government in, 173; importance of law

in, 172-73; inconsistencies in, 176-77; influence

of, 177; middle classes in, 174; private prop-

erty and, 174; publication of, 171, 178; radi-

calism of, 176; religion and, 174-76; Rousseau's

earnings from, 178; socialism and, 174; state

of nature in, 172; taxes and, 174

socialism: French Revolution and, 938; Prussia

and, 501; Rousseau and, 174, 891

Sociedades Economicas de los Amigos del Pais,

280, 287

Societe des Amis des Noirs, 935

Societe du Printemps, 797

Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 749

Society of Arts, 750

Society for Commemorating the Revolution (of

1688), 722-23

Society for the Encouragement of Art, Manu-

facture, and Commerce, The, 750

Society of Jesus, see Jesuits

Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights,

7°4» 7"

Society of Thirty, 957

Socinians in Holland, 646

Socrate (Voltaire), 136

Socrates (470.^-399 B.C.), 834, 839

sodomy, legislation against, 98

Sogno diScipione, 11 (Mozart), 388

Soho, 675

Soldaten, Die (Lenz), 521

Soler, Antonio (1720-83), 292

Solimena, Francesco (1657-1747), 115

Soloviev, Sergei Mikhailovich (1820-79), 435

Soltyk, Kajetan (fl. 1766), bishop of Cracow,

480-81

Some Thoughts on Education (Locke), 179

Something More from the Papers of the Anon-

ymous Writer, concerning Revelation (Rei-

marus), 513

Somodevilla, Zenon de, Marques de la Ense-

nada (1702-81), 279

"Song of the Bell" (Schiller), 503-4, 599

Sonnenfels, Joseph von (1732-1817), 355

Sophia ( 1630-17 14), Electoress of Hanover, 683

Sophia Dorothea (1687-1757), Queen of Fred-

erick William I of Prussia, 47

Sophia Magdelena of Denmark, Queen of

Gustavus III of Sweden, 655

Sophia Matilda, Princess (173 3-1 804), 683

Sophie Augusta Frederika, see Catherine II the

Great

Sophists, Greek, 902, 904

Sophocles (496? -406 b.c), 136, 528, 604

Sorau, Marquis de, 1 1 1

Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe),

563-64, 588, 601, 627, 767, 889; influence of,

Soubise, Charles de Rohan, Prince de (1715-87),

48-49, 53, 67; extravagance of, 84; tactics of,

50

Soufflot, Jacques-Germain (1713-80), no, 120

South Africa, 646

South Carolina, 708

Southey, Robert ( 1 774-1 843 ) , 63 1

South Sea "Bubble," 796

South Sea Company, 279

Souvre, General, 95

Spa, 342, 361

Spain, 273-309; agriculture in, 273-74, 287-88;

AlberonFs reforms, 277; alliance against Eng-

land (1779), 871; ambitions in Italy, 277-78;

American colonies of, 273, 288, 871; American

Revolution and, 290, 713; architecture in, 297;

art in, 285-86, 297-309; Austria and, 277-78;

Austrian Netherlands and, 45; Catholic Church

in, 246, 274-76, 279, 281, 283-8$, 290, 292-95, 3<> 2 »

306, 317; censorship in, 285; concordat with

papacy, 246, 279; conflict with papacy, 318;

drama in, 296; dress in, 291; dynastic conflicts

in, 273; education in, 275-76, 287, 293-94; Eng-

land and, 273, 277-78, 290, 669, 713, 761; En-

lightenment in, 280-81; expulsion from Florida,

709; expulsion of Jesuits from, 281, 283-85, 293,

317; Farinelli in, 223, 279, 292; Florence and,

228; Florida returned to (1783), 714; France

and, 277-78, 280, 293, 296-98, 306-7; geography

of, 273; Gibraltar and, 290; guilds in, 289; indi-

vidualism in, 293; industries, commerce, and

natural resources of, 273-74, 286-89; Inquisi-

tion in, 275-76, 279, 280, 292, 294-95, 3 02 » 3°6;

intellectual activity in, 293-97; Italian opera

in, 224, 292; Italy and, 217, 226; Jesuits in, 275,

281, 283-85, 293, 317; Jews in, 275-76, 285,

287, 630-31; Joseph Bonaparte in, 296-98,

306-7; land reform in, 287-88; Liberals in, 306;

literature in, 295-96; Milan and, 226; Mi-

norca returned to (1783), 714; morality and

marriage in, 290-91; Moslems in, 283, 285;

music and dancing in, 224, 291-92; Naples

and, 217, 228, 250, 273, 277-78, 315; national

character of, 290-92; Peace of Versailles (1783)

and, 290; population of, 273; Portugal and,

262-63, 268 » Protestants in, 285; reign of

Charles III, 281-90, 291; reign of Charles IV,

302-4, 306; reign of Ferdinand VI, 279-81 ; reign

of Ferdinand VII, 306-7; reign of Philip V,

io8z

INDEX

276-79; religious orders in, 294, 295; Scarlatti

in, 257, 279, 292; in Seven Years' War, 60, 62,

290; social classes in, 274, 280, 289-90; taxation

in, 288; Treaty of Versailles (1756) and, 42;

Turkey and, 288; war against Moors in, 283;

war against papacy (1768) in, 317; war of liber-

ation in, 296, 306-7; see also Spanish Succession,

War of the

Spanish Academy, 295

Spanish America, 273, 288, 871

Spanish Armada, 842

Spanish Hapsburgs, 273

Spanish Netherlands, 273

Spanish Succession, War of the (1702-13), 42,

273, 297, 630, 646, 669

Sparta, 21, 253; influence on Rousseau, 177;

philosophes and, 898

Spectator, 320

Spencer, Lord Robert, 753

spinning jenny, 673

spinning wheel, 673

Spinoza, Baruch (1632-77), 510, 557, 562, $6$,

578, 619; anti-rationalist reaction to, 519; Les-

sing's views on, 516; Moses Mendelssohn ad-

heres to, 638

Spirit of Laws, The (Montesquieu), 320, 797,

808; Catherine II on, 435

Sprecher (commander of Breslau), 52

Spriiche in Prosa (Goethe), 618

Squillaci, Marchese de' (fl. 1761), 282

Stackelberg, Count Otto von (fl. 1764), 479

Stadion, Count Johann Philipp von (1763-

1824), 553

Stael, Germaine de, nee Necker, Baronne de

Stael-Holstein (1766-1817), 103, 118, 188,

506, 644, 647, 891, 908, 961; on Austria, 345;

on culture in Weimar, 553; death of, 908;

early life of, 908; Gibbon and, 802; on Gui-

bert, 128; on La Nouvelle Heloise, 170; on

morality of German courts, 504; on Rousseau,

887; salon of, 908; on Schiller, 604

Staffordshire, potteries in, 749

Stamitz, Johann (1717-57), 221, 380-81

Stamp Act (1765), 700-1, 709-10, 868

Stanislas I Leszczyriski, King of Poland (r.

1704-9, 1733-35), ruler of Lorraine and Bar

(r. 1737-66), 23, 24, 34, 86, 430, 475-76

Stanislas II Augustus (Stanislas Poniatowski),

King of Poland (r. 1764-95), 120, 473, 477~9°y

aid from Russia, 478-81, 483-84; appearance

and personality of, 477-78, 489-92; attempts to

strengthen monarchy, 476, 480; Catherine II

and, 436-37, 460, 478-81, 487, 489; Confedera-

tion of Bar and, 482-83; conflict with Rus-

sians, 488-89; correspondence with Voltaire,

139; death of, 492; difficulties with nobility,

479; early life of, 477-78; election to kingship,

477; final dismemberment and, 491-92; first

partition of Poland and, 484; foils Frederick

IPs partition plan, 479-81; Mme. Geoffrin and,

121, 477-78; intellectual interest of, 478-79; lit-

erature and, 485-86; love affairs of, 479; pro-

motes Enlightenment in Poland, 485; second

partition and, 488-91 ; succession to, 487

Starhemberg, Count Georg Adam von (fl. 1753),

41-42

Starov, Ivan (1743-1808), 469

State of Prisons in England and Wales, . . .

and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons

(Howard), 738

States-General, French (1789), 84, 938; cahiers

of, 950-51; conflict between classes in, 957-61;

conflicts with King, 958-61; declares itself

National Assembly, 958; demands for, 945-

47; disputes over organization of, 949; early

demands of, 92; electoral arrangements for,

949-51; as feudal institution, 946; national

hopes for, 951; number of deputies in, 956;

opening of (1789), 956; summoning of

(1788), 948

Statute of Popular Schools (1786), Russian, 453

steam engines, 70, 673-76, 932

Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729), 732

Steevens, George (1 736-1 800), 830

Stein, Charlotte von, nee von Schardt (1742-

1827), 521, 588, 589, 590, 600, 603; appearance

of, 582; death of, 626; in Goethe's Tasso, 584-

85; love affair with Goethe, 582-84, 586;

Schiller and, 591

Stein, Fritz von (b. 1773), 583, 588

Stein, Johann Andreas (1728-92), 390

Stein, Baron Josias Gottlob von (1735-93), 582-

83

Sterne, Elizabeth, nee Lumley, 787, 789

Sterne, Laurence (1713-68), 465, 750, 787-90,

791, 793, 842; death of, 790; Diderot and, 789;

domestic difficulties of, 787; early life and

education of, 787; Elizabeth Draper and,

789-90; influence of, 518; love affairs of, 787,

789-90; success as author, 789; tour of France,

789; writes Sentimental Journey, 789-90;

writes Tristram Shandy, 787-89

Sterne, Lydia, 787

Sterne, Richard (1596?— 1683), Archbishop of

York, 787

Stillingfleet, Benjamin (1702-71), 730

Stock, Dorothea (1 760-1832), 572-73

Stock, Minna (1 762-1 843), 572-73

Stockholm, Treaties of (1719-20), 653

Stockholmsposten, 661-62

Stoke-on-Trent, 749

Stolberg, Count Christian zu ( 1748-182 1), $66;

on Weimar court, 552

Stolberg, Count Friedrich Leopold zu (1750-

1819), 566

Stormont, David Murray, Lord (i728?-83), 730

Stosch, Baron Philipp von (1 690-1 757), 328

Stradivari, Antonio (i644?-i737), 221

Strahan, William (1715-85), 212, 786, 800

Stratford-on-Avon, 743

Stravaganze del conte (Cimarosa), 334

Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, 747, 793, 795,

809

Streicher, Andreas, 571-72

INDEX

I083

Streit der Fakultaten, Der (Kant), 547

strikes, labor, 933-34

Strinasacchi, Regina (1764-C.1823), 396-97

Struensee, Johann Friedrich (1737-72), 652-53

Stuart, Charles Edward, Count of Albany, the

Young Pretender (1720-88), 51, 53, 137, 635;

marriage and death of, 339

Stuart, James Francis Edward ("James III"),

the Old Pretender (1688-1766), 247

Stuart dynasty and Tories, 699

Study of Works of Art, The (Winckelmann),

328

Sturm und Drang (Klinger), 521-22

Sturm und Drang movement, 63, 345, 388, 511,

S20-22, 661; aims of, 520, 522; Goethe and,

560-61; Herder and, 569; Kant's influence on,

551; Schiller and, 570-71, 593; social concepts

of, 522; Wieland and, 576

Styria, 341, 358

Suard, Jean-Baptiste (1733-1817), 131, 214,

894

Suard, Mme., nee Panckoucke (1750-1830), 873,

894

Suarez, Francisco (1548-1617), 177

Subterranean Journey of Niels Klim (Holberg),

650-51

Sudbury, sale of votes in, 685

Sumarokov, Alexis Petrovich (1718-77), 427-28

Summa theologiae (St. Thomas Aquinas), 241

Sunni sect, 412, 418-19

superstition and Catholic Church, 316

Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville (Di-

derot) , 3 1

Sur la legislation et la commerce des grains

(Necker),86o, 867

Sur la regeneration physique, morale, et poli-

tique des Juifs (Gregoire), 642

Siissmayr, Franz Xaver (1 766-1 803), 408

Sutherland, Elizabeth Gordon, Countess of, 758

Suvorov, Aleksander Vasilievich (1 729-1 800),

455, 460, 470; in dismemberment of Poland,

491-92; tomb of, 467

Svarez, K. G. (1780), 500

Svea Rikes Historia (Dalin), 659

Svensksund, battle of (1790), 664

Sweden, 653-65; aid to Turkey, 363; army re-

forms in, 657; art in, 662; coup against

Riksdag, 657; Denmark and, 654, 663-64;

drama in, 659; economy of, 657, 662; educa-

tion in, 657, 659; Enlightenment in, 658-62;

France and, 89, 654; free press in, 657; gov-

ernment structure of, 654; growing power of

nobles of, 65^-55; Jews in, 635, 657; in League

of Armed Neutrality (1780), 457, 713; legal re-

forms in, 657; literature in, 659-62; Poland

and, 475-76; Prussia and, 653-54, 663; reign of

Adolphus Frederick, 65 5 ; reign of Charles

XII, 653; reign of Frederick I, 654; reign of

Gustavus III, 655-65; religious tolerance in,

657; Russia and, 458, 460, 65^-56, 663-64;

science in, 658-59; social classes in, 65^-55, 657,

663-64; taxation in, 654; territorial losses of,

653-54; Turkey and, 460; weakening of

monarchy of, 65^-55

in seven years' war: invasion of Pomerania,

54; pledge to Austria, 45-46; Pomerania prom-

ised to Sweden, 45-46, 48; results of conflict,

63

Swedenborg, Emmanuel (1688-1772), 658

Swieten, Gerhard van (1700-72), 343, 355

Swieten, Baron Gottfried van (1 734-1 803), 379,

395-96

Swift, Jonathan (1 667-1 745), 485, 759, 790, 842

Switzerland, 143, 643-4$; a** in, 644-45; banking

in, 643; cantonal confederation in, 643; con-

flict of middle class with patricians, 143; con-

flicts over franchise in, 643-44; education in,

644, 888; Enlightenment in, 645; French Rev-

olution and, 644, 645, 805-6; French subsidies

to, 89; internal divisions in, 643; Jews in, 639;

manufacturing and commerce in, 643; oli-

garchy in, 142; peasants in, 27; population of,

643; Rousseau's flight to, 189

symphonic music: evolution of, 221, 528; rise

of, 526

Syria, 41 1

Sy steme de la nature (Holbach), 572, 618

Szczekociny, battle of (1794), 491

Tableau de Faris (Mercier), 901, 919

Tableau economique (Quesnay), 73-74

Tableau philosophique des progres successifs

de V esprit humain (Turgot), 77

Taboureau de Reau (fl. 1776), 866

Tacitus, Caius Cornelius (55?— 1 20?), 435

Taganrog, 458

Tahmasp II, Shah of Persia (r. 1730-32), 418

Taine, Hippolyte (1828-93), 588, 897

Talavera, 288

Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles-Maurice de ( 1 754—

1838), 606, 644, 875, 955, 957-58

Talma, Francois Joseph (1 763-1 828), 607, 920

Talmont, Mme. de, 118

Talmud, 629, 635

Tambirini, Pietro (1737—18*27), 316

Tambroni, Clotilda (1 758-1 817), 219

Tancrede (Voltaire), 136, 874

Tanucci, Marchese Bernardo di (1 698-1 783),

249, 250, 315, 327; Goethe on, 589; reforms of,

142; seizes papal cities, 317

tapestry, 910

Targowica, Confederation of, 488-90

tariffs: Austrian, 344; French, 935

Tartaglia (comic figure), 241, 243, 452, ^55-56

Tartini, Giuseppe (1 692-1 770), 221, 229

Tartuffe (Moliere), 923

Task, The (Cowper), 811-12

Tasso, Torquato (1544-95), 464

Tatishchev, Vasili Nikitich (1686-1750), 426-27

Taurida, Jews in, 633

Taurida Palace, 469

Tavares de Sequeira, Dr. Eusebio (fl. 1758), 265

1084

INDEX

Tavora, Dom Francisco de Assiz, Marquis of

(d. 1759), 263-65

Tavora, Dona Leonor, Marchioness of (d. 1759),

263

Tavora, Dom Luis Bernardo de Assiz, "Younger

Marquis" of (d. 1759), 263

taxation: in American colonies, 709-10; in Aus-

tria, 356-57; in England, 686; in France, 931,

935-36, 944» 959; in Hungary, 341; in Persia,

420; physiocratic theory of, 73; in Prussia,

500-01; Rousseau's theory of, 174; in Russia,

424, 470; in Spain, 288; in Sweden, 654;

Voltaire's views on, 147

Taxation No Tyranny (Johnson), 833

tax farmers in France, 935-36

Taylor, Dr. John (171 1-88), 822

tea drinking in England, 729

Teatro alia moda y 223, 234

Teatro alia Scala, 3 1 2

Teatro Capranico, 257

Teatro critico (Feijoo y Montenegro), 294

Teatro Filarmonico of Verona, 245

Teatro Reale, 245

Teatro San Carlo of Naples, 250

technology: Industrial Revolution and, 671-76;

machine-wrecking and, 679

Telemaque (Fenelon), 179,450

Telemann, Georg Philipp (1 681 -1767), 526

Teller, Wilhelm Abraham (1734-1804), 507

tenant farmers, 274

Tencin, Claudine-Alexandrine Guerin, Marquise

de (1681-1749), 119, 123

Tencin, Pierre Guerin, Cardinal de (1679-

1758), 47-48, 246

Tennis Court Oath ( 1789) , 958-59

Terence (i84?-i59? b.c), 241,508, 650

Teresapol, battle of (1794), 491

Terray, Abbe Joseph-Marie (1715-78), 89-90

Terror, Reign of, 496, 725

Tersac, Jean de (fl. 1778), 876, 879, 893

Teschen, Treaty of (1779), 354

Tessin, Count Carl Gustaf (1 695-1 770), 654,

658, 662

Tessin, Nicodemus (1 654-1 728), 662

Testa, bishop of Monreale (d. 1773), 316

Test Act (1673), 760, 761

Testament (Messlier), 80, 141

Teutonic Order, 484

teutsche Merkur, Der, 506, 555, 591

textile industry: in England, 672-73, 676, 678;

in France, 932

Textor, Johann Wolfgang, 556

Thames River, 745

theater, 245; in Austria, 346; bourgeoisie and,

104; in Denmark, 650-51; in England, 695-96,

139-43, 815-16; in France, 101-6, 920-26; in

Germany, $09-10, 513-1$, 560-61, 584-85, 588,

592, 601-3, 604-5; in Italy, 220, 232, 239-44,

336-40; in Poland, 486; in Portugal, 260;

Rousseau's theories of, 163; in Russia, 463-65;

in Sweden, 659; Voltaire's contribution to,

136-37

Theatines, 224

Theatre des Italiens, 113, 244

Theatre-Francais, 101, 102, 147, 256,920

Theatre National de l'Odeon, 910

Theophrastus (d. c. 287 b.c), 508

Theorie de Vimpot (Mirabeau pere), 74

Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 769

"Theory of the Weather, The" (Goethe), 615

Theresa, Saint (1515-82), 267

Theresianische Halsgerichts-ordnung, 344

Thetis och Pelee (Gustavus III and Willander),

659

Thicknesse, Philip (i72o?-92), 755

Thierry, Dr. (fl. 1765), 200

Third Estate: cahiers of, 950; composition of,

956; declares itself National Assembly, 958;

growth of, 948; leads Day of Tiles (1787),

947-48; representation in States-General, 949;

Sieves' pamphlet on, 954-55; size in popula-

tion, 955; in States-General, 956-61; tennis

court oath of (1789), 958-59

Third Partition Treaty (1797), 492

Thirty Years' War, 38, 342

Thomas, Ambroise (181 1-96), 600

Thomas, Antoine-Leonard ( 173 2-85 ) , 908

Thomas a Kempis (1 380-1471), 886

Thomasius, Christian (1655-1728), 528

Thomson, James (1700-48), 104, 169, 379, 518,

661, 732, 887

Thoreau, Henry David (1817-62), 206, 551

Thorild, Thomas (1750- 1808), 661

Thorn, 484; confederacy at, 480

Thorwaldsen, Albert Bertel (1770- 1844), 331

Thrale, Henry (1728-81), 837

Thrale (later Piozzi), Hester, nee Lynch (1741-

182 1 ), 791, 841; issues Anecdotes of the Late

Samuel Johnson, LLD., during the Last

Twenty Years of His Life, 828, 840; Johnson

and, 828, 837-38

Thun, Count von (fl. 1783), 403

Thun, Countess von (fl. 1756), 374

Thurlow, Edward, 1st Baron Thurlow (1731-

1806), 736

Ticonderoga, battle of (1775), 58

Tieffen, Franz (fl. 1703), 226

Tiepolo, Domenico (1727-1804), 239, 258, 331-

32

Tiepolo, Giambattista (1696-1770), 235-36, 237-

39, 258, 298-99, 300

Tierney, George (1761-1830), 732

Tiflis, 419

Tillot, Guillaume, du, see Du Tillot, Guillaume

Times, The, 786

Tindal, Matthew (1657-1733), 507

Tingry, Prince de, 161

Tipu Sahib (1751-99), 717

Tiral, 341

Tirso de Molina (1 571-1648), 404

Tischbein, Johann Friedrich August (1750-

1812K523

Tischbein, Johann Heinrich (1722-89), 523

INDEX

1085

Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm (1751—

1829), 523, 587, 588

tithes: in France, 931; in Spain, 274

"To a Louse on Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet

at Church" (Burns), 775

"To All French Who Still Love Justice and

Truth" (Rousseau), 886

"To My Mind" (Kantemir), 427

"To the Liberty and Independence of the

United States" (Nascimento) , 269

"To Mary in Heaven" (Burns), 775

tobacco, 729

Tocqueville, Alexis Clerel de (1805-59), 897;

on French justice, 849; on popular hatred of

Church, 902; on pre-revolutionary skepticism,

898

Toland, John (1670-1722), 507

Toledo, Archbishop of, 285, 298

Toleration Act of 1689, 760

Toleration of Deists, . . . by an Anonymous

Writer (Reimarus), 513

toll roads in England, 672

tolls in France, 935, 944

Tolstoi, Count Lev Nikolaevich (182 3-1 9 10),

3,891

Tom Jones (Fielding), 835

Tom Jones (opera by Philidor), 100

Tome, Narciso (fl. 1721), 298

tonado and tonadillo, 191

Tooke, John Home (1736-1812), 704

Topal Osman (Turkish general), 419

Torgau, battle of (1760), 60

Tories, 692, 711; Stuart dynasty and, 699; sup-

port for George III, 699; Whigs compared

with, 685

Torquato Tasso (Goethe), 584-85, 587, 588, 601

Torrigiani, Cardinal, papal secretary, 284

Torstenson, Lennart (1603-51), 659

torture: abolished in Austria, 352; abolished in

France, 867; abolished in Russia, 146, 321, 431,

451-52; Voltaire's opposition to, 146

Torun (Thorn) , 474

Toscanini, Arturo (1867-1957), 234

Toulouse, Parlement of, 92

Tourney, Voltaire's workshops at, 135

Townsend, Joseph (1740-1815), 274

Townshend, Charles (1725-67), 710

Townshend Acts (1767), 710-12

Traetta, Tommaso (1727-79), 223, 335, 368

tragedy, middle class development of, 104

Traite des qualites d'un grand roi (Morelly),

81

Transcendentalist movement, 551

transportation, 672

Trapassi, Pietro, see Mestastasio, Pietro

Tratado de la regalia de Vamortizacion (Campo-

manes), 282-83

Trattato dei delitti e delle pene (Beccaria), 145^

320

Trattato della moneta (Galiani) ,251

Trauttmansdorff (friend of Tamburini), 316

Traveller, or A Prospect of Society, The

(Goldsmith), 815

Travels in France (Young), 928*

Treatise on Civil Architecture (Chambers}, 747

Treatise on Crimes and Penalties (Beccaria),

320

Treatise on Human Nature (Hume), 756, 769

Treatise on the Capability of the Feeling for

Beauty (Winckelmann) , 328

Treatise on Toleration (Voltaire), 357

Treatise on Toleration (Voltaire), 357

Trembecki, Stanislas (1737?— 1812), 486

Trentes, Les, 957

Trento, 229

Trescho, Sebastian, 567

Trevi, Fontana di, 247

Treviso, 229, 239

Trier, 341, 503

Trier, Archbishop-Elector of (fl. 1788), 504-5

Trieste, 641

Trinity College (in Ireland), 759

Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 787-89

Troisieme Entretien sur Le Fils naturel (Dide-

rot), 101

Tronchin, Francois (author and painter), 212,

2I 3

Tronchin, Jean-Robert ( 1 7 10-93 ) » 1 97

Tronchin, Dr. Theodore (1709-81), 103, 159-60,

875-76; 878; on last hours of Voltaire, 879

Troost, Cornells ( 1697- 1750) » ^47

Trudaine de Montigny, Jean-Charles-Philibert

( I 733-77>»73

Truffaldino (comic figure), 241

Tsarskoe Selo, Palace of, 426, 468

Tschoudi, Baron Jean-Baptiste de (b. 1734), 372

Tubieres, Anne-Claude de, Comte de Caylus

(1692-1765), no, 120, 218, 467, 749

Tucker, Josiah (171 2-99) , 676

Tugenbund, 641

Tuileries Gardens, 107, 962

Tunisia, 411

Turckheim, Bernhard Friedrich von (d. 183 1),

$66

Turenne, Henri de La Tour d' Auvergne, Mare-

chal Vicomte de (161 1-75), 109

Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, Baron de TAulne

(1727-81), 72-73, 98, 125, 143*, 214, 769, 858-

6$, 869, 929; advocates religious toleration,

863; agricultural reforms of, 859; appearance

of, 858; Assembly of Notables and, 944; at-

tack on feudalism, 861-63; attempts to save

monarchy, 898; bread crisis in Paris and, 860;

conflicts with Paris Parlement, 861-63; con-

flicts with privileged classes, 858, 863-64; as

controller general of finance, 858; early life

of, 77-79; early official career of, 79; economic

reforms of, 859-60; fall of, 75; financial re-

forms of, 859-61; French Revolution and, 940;

influence of physiocrats on, 858; later years

and death of, 865; in Lespinasse salon, 126;

Louis XVI and, 859-60, 863-65; love for the

people, 856; Marie Antoinette and, 863-65;

io86

INDEX

ministry of, 858-65; philosophes and, 78-79,

858-59, 863, 865; reforms of, 80, 144, 863; res-

ignation from ministry (1776), 864-65; Swe-

dish economic reform and, 657; theories of,

77-78; tries to help Protestants, 902; Voltaire

and, 874, 875

Turin, 256; churches in, 224; Enlightenment in,

310; history and achievements of, 226; indus-

try in, 218; ratio of priests to lay population

in, 224; theaters in, 220; universities in, 219

Turkey, 356; architecture in, 414; art in, 414;

Austria's conflicts with, 61, 363, 365, 411, 414-

15, 430; cleanliness and sanitation in, 413;

commerce, 456; culture in, 412; Hungary in-

vaded by, 62; Jews in, 632; papacy and, 457;

Peace of Jassy (1792), 488; Persia and, 417-19;

poetry in, 412-13; Poland and, 415, 458, 475,

482; Protestant aid to, 363; repulsed from

Vienna (1683), 411; reign of Abdul-Hamid I,

415; reign of Mahmud I, 415; Russia's con-

flicts with, 140, 414-15, 430, 457-61, 470, 483,

663; slavery in, 413; Spain and, 288; Sultanate

in, 414; Sweden and, 460; Venice's conflict

with, 414; women in, 413

empire of: conquest of Crete and Greece

(1715), 414; decline, 414-15; European, 414-15;

North African, 415-17; size, 41 1

turnpikes in England, 672

Tuscany, 228, 278-79, 312; Austria and, 217, 228;

church lands in, 224; early history of, 313;

Inquisition abolished in, 316; Napoleon I in,

314; reforms of Grand Duke Leopold, 313-14;

triumph of reaction in, 314

Tuscany, Grand Duke of (r. 1765-90), see Leo-

pold II, Emperor

Tuyll, Isabella van, see Charriere, Isabelle de

Vber die biirgerliche Verbesserung der Juden

in Deutschland (Dohn), 642

Vber naive und sentimentalise he Dichtung

(Schiller), 599

Vber die neuere deutsche Liter atur (Herder),

567

Udine, 229

Uffizi Gallery, 228

Uhlfeld, Count von (fl. 1742), 40

Ukraine, 460

Ulrika Eleanora, Queen of Sweden (r. 1719-20),

654

Ulster, 760

Uman, massacres in, 634

Umberto I Biancamano (97o?-io5o?), Count of

Savoy, 226

Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale (Goldoni),

244

Unger, Georg Christian (1 743-181 2), 524

Uniates, 475; see also Greek Orthodox Church,

in Poland

Unigenitus (Pope Benedict XIV), 246

Union of 1707 (Scotland and England), 762

Unitarianism, Rousseau's belief in, 163

United Company of Merchants of England

trading to the East Indies, see British East

India Company

United Provinces, see Holland

United States, 487; French recognition of, 713;

Jews in, 642; literature in, 889; physiocratic

influence in, 77; treaty of alliance with France

(1778), 870

United States Constitution, Bill of Rights of,

872

United States of Belgium, 364

Universal Chronicle, The, 825

Universal Church History (Holberg), 650

Universal Etymological English Dictionary, An

(Bailey), 820-21

universities, 218-19, 276, 294, 301, 358, 360, 362,

453. 505- 6 » 53 2 > 6 47> 6 59, 674, 763, 769

Unwin, Mary (1724-96), 811-13

Unwin, Rev. Morley (d. 1767), 811

Unwin, Susannah, 811

Unwin, William, 811

Upsala, University of, 659

"Urbarian Law" (1774), 350

Urfaust (Goethe), 608

Ursins, Marie-Anne de La Tremoille, Princesse

des (i642?-i722), 276

Usse, Mile. d\ 894

Utilitarianism, 738-39

Utrecht, 361, 647

Utrecht, Treaty of (17 13), 57, 226, 277, 547

Uzbekistan, Persian invasion of (1740), 420

Uzbeks, 417, 418, 420

Vais (d. 1715), Mir of Kandahar, 418

Valdes, Juan Melendez, see Melendez Valdes,

Juan

Valencia, 273; growth of, 289

Valencia, University of, 294

Valentinois, Comtesse de (fl. 1758), 161

Valhynia, anti-Semitic massacres in, 634

Valle, Filippo della (1696-1768), 247

Valley Forge, Americans at, 869

Vallin de La Mothe, Jean-Baptiste (1729-1800),

468

Valmarana, Villa, 239

Valmy, battle of (1792), 580, 591

Vandyck, Sir Anthony (1 599-1641), 466

Vanity of Human Wishes, The (Johnson), 821

Vanl 00, Carle (1705-65), 115, 120

Vanloo, Louis-Michel ( 1 707-7 1 ) , 298

Vanvitelli (Italian painter), 298

Vanvitelli, Luigi (1700-73), 250

Varala, Treaty of (1790), 664

Varicourt, Mile., see Villette, Marquise de

Vasco da Gama, see Gama, Vasco da

Vassilchik, Alexis (fl. 1772), 445

Vathek (Beckford), 809

Vatican School of Painting, 248

Vauban, Sebastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de

(1633-1707), 72

Vaud, revolts in, 645

Vaudreuil, Louis-Philippe de Rigaud, Comte de

(i724-i8o2),853

INDEX

1087

Vaudreuil-Cavagnal, Pierre-Frangois de Rigaud,

Marquis de (1698-1765), 58

Vaughn, C.E., 5*

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de

(1715-47), 150, 915

Vauxhall, 744

"Veilchen, Das" (Goethe), 400

Velazquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y (1599-

1660), 301, 305

Vendome, Louis- Joseph de Bourbon, Due de

0654-i7i2),277

Venezianishche Epigramme (Goethe), 590

Venice, 217, 229, 239, 310, 641; Casanova in, 323,

325; clothing in, 231; daily life and entertain-

ment in, 230-32; decay of (1760-89), 310-11;

economy of, 229-30; French occupation of

(1797), 311; gain by Treaty of Passerowitz

(17 18), 415; Goethe in, 590; government of,

229; instrumental music in, 254; Jesuit col-

leges in, 219; Jews in, 631, 642; libraries in,

219; literature of, 239-44; music in, 220, 232-

SS; painting in, 331-32; population of, 229;

prostitution in, 230; religion in, 230; Scarlatti

in, 256; size of, 229; theaters in, 220, 241; war

with Turkey (17 15), 414; wealth of clergy in,

224

Venice Preserved (Otway), 741

Ventimiglio, Monsignor, bishop of Catania (fl.

1760), 316

Veracini, Francesco Maria (c. i685?-i75o), 228

Verdelin, Mme. de (fl. 1765), 209

Verdi, Giuseppe (1813-1901), 335

Verevkin (translator) , 463-64

Vergara, Francisco, the Younger (17 13-61), 298

Vergennes, Charles Gravier, Comte de ( 1 7 1 7—

87), 656, 858, 864, 922; American Revolution

and, 867-68, 870, 871; Franklin and, 869; pre-

dicts American Revolution, 708

Vermenoux, Marquise de, 865

Vermond, Abbe Matthieu-Jacques de (d. after

1789), 846

Vernes, Jacob or Jacques (1728-91), Swiss pas-

tor, 190, 200

Vernet, Claude-Joseph (1714-89), French

painter, 1 1 1 , 1 20, 466

Vernet, Isaac (fl. 1750), Swiss banker, 865

Vernet, Mme., wife of Claude-Joseph, 895, 897

Verney, Ralph, 2d Earl Verney (fl. 1765), 692,

7*9'

Verona, 228-29, 245

Verona illustrata (Maffei), 229

Veronese, Paolo (1528-88), 238, 239

Verri, Pietro (fl. 1770), 312, 320

Verrieres, Genevieve Rinteau de(b. 1730,35

Verrieres, Marie Rinteau de (1728-75), 35

Versailles: court in, 849-50; palaces at, 85, 250;

riots in, 934; women's march to, 919, 934

Versailles, Peace of (1783), 290

Versailles, Treaty of: first (1756), 42; second

d757)^45

Verschivorung des Fiesko zu Genua, Die (Schil-

ler), 571-72

"Versuch, aus der vergleichenden Knochen-

lehre . . ." (Goethe), 617

Vesey, Elizabeth (1715?— 91), 750, 789

Vespro, II (Parini), 335

Vessan, Marie de, 95 1

Vestris, Gaetan (1729-1808), 370

Vestris or Vestrice, Marie-Rose, nee Gourgaud-

Dugason (1746- 1804), 877

Vesuvius, Goethe climbs, 588-89

Vicar of Wakefield, The (Goldsmith), 814-15

Vicenza, 22% Goethe in, 587; industry in, 218;

theaters in, 220

Vichy, Diane de, nee d'Albon (b. 17 16), 122

Vichy, Gaspard de, 122, 131

Vico, Gennaro, Charles IV's aid to, 254

Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744), 2$i-$4; early

life of, 251; failure to gain attention, 253-54;

philosophy of history, 251-53; rediscovery of,

254; secularism of, his analysis, 253

Vicq-d'Azyr, Felix (1748-94), 617

Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy (r. 1675-

1732), King of Sardinia as Victor Amadeus I

(r. 1720-30), 226

Vie de mon pere, La (Restif de La Bretonne),

918

Vie de Voltaire (Condorcet), 894

Vieira, Francisco (1699-1783), 261

Vielleville, M. de (fl. 1778), 876

Vien, Joseph-Marie (1716-1809), 912

Vienna, 245, 256; beauty of, 345; as capital city,

341; dancing in, 345; industries in, 344; Jews

in, 631-32; music in, 345, 367-72; Napoleon's

bombardment of (1809), 380; newspapers in,

346; theaters in, 346; Turks repulsed from

(1683), 411

Vienna, University of, 343, 352, 360

Vigee-Lebrun, Marie-Anne Elisabeth (1755-

1842), 99, in, 372, 467, 644, 851, 888, 913-14;

on acclamation of Voltaire, 878; celebrates

children and motherhood, 904; on religious

piety, 901

Vigny, Alfred de (1 797-1 863), 889

Viladomat, Antonio (1678— 1755), 298

Villa Albani, 249, 331

Villa Malmarana, 239

Villanueva, Juan de (1739-1811), 289

Villars, Due Honore-Armand de (1702-70),

133

Villeneuve, M. de, 952

Villeroi, Francois de Neufville, Due de (1644-

1730), 161

Villette, Marquis Charles de (1736-93), 874-75

Villette, Reine-Philiberte de Varicourt, Mar-

quise de, 150, 874, 877

Villette, Retaux de (1785), 942-43

Vincennes: Diderot in, 19-20; Mirabeau fits in,

95 2 "53

Vinci, Leonardo (1690-1730), composer, 240,

254

Vindication of the Jews (Manasseh ben Israel),

640

Vindication of Natural Society, or a View of

io88

INDEX

the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind

from Every Species of Artificial Society, A

(Burke), 690-91

Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth

and Sixteenth Chapters of the History of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, A

(Gibbon), 802

vingtieme, 936

violin, popularity of, 332

Viotti, Giovanni Battista (1753-1824), 332-33

Virgil (70-19 b.c.) ,519, 793

Virginia Assembly, 872

Vischer, Luise (fl. 1780), 570

Visin, Denis Ivanovich von (1744-92), 464

Vistula River, 472

Vita di Vittorio Alfieri . . . scritta da esso

(Alfieri), 336

Vitruvius, Goethe in, 587

Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus (1st century b.c), 747

Vivaldi, Antonio (i675?-i74i), 232, 233-34

Vocabolario (Accademia della Crusca of Flor-

ence), 824

Vogler, Abt Georg Josef (1749-18 14), 252

Volga Tartars, 452

Volhynia, 492

Volkschulen, 352

Volkslieder (Herder), 577

Volney, Comte Constantin de (1757-1820), 917-

18, 955

Volta, Alessandro (1745-1827), 310

Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet; 1694-1778),

4<>> 43» 59» 67, 132-51, 156, 207, 220, 246,

269, 280, 286, 295, 336-37, 351, 357, 372, 422,

427» 43 2 > 435> 4^3» 478, 481, 485* 5", 53 !»

55°* 55h 559-6o, 561, 607, 608, 641, 650, 655,

660, 693, 725, 769, 781, 825, 832, 873-81, 889, 894,

895, 915-16, 925, 928, 952, 964; Abarca's visit

to, 281; adulation of, 34; on age of Louis XV,

137-38; d'Alembert and, 123, 125, 138, 876-77;

appearance of, 134, 148; attitude toward activ-

ity, 135; attitude toward rivals, 149; bones

stolen from Pantheon, 880; Boswell and, 133-

34, 204, 782; bourgeois values of, 148; caned by

Beauregard, 150; Casanova's visit to, 138, 143,

324; Catherine II and, 434, 442, 447-48, 451,

457-58, 462, 469, 873; Choiseul and, 88, 132;

Clair on and, 102, 104; collected works pub-

lished, 925; condemnation of Shakespeare,

835; death of Wilhelmine and, 54; deference

to royalty, 176; description of Paris, 933;

Diderot and, 876, 892; Du Barry and, 87-88;

Mme. du Deffand and, 125; energy of,

135; enthusiasm for England, 144; epi-

grammatic style of, 170; Frederick II and,

47> 49, 56, 59-6o, 49*-99> 5*8, 873, 876, 879;

French Academy and, 877, 879; friendship

with monarchs, 897; generosity of, 150;

Gluck's operatic views and, 368; Goldsmith's

biography of, 814; on Gustavus III, 657; on

Histoire du Parlement de Paris, par M. Vabbe

Big, 92; historical writings of, 528; on history,

807*; Houdon's bust of, 911-12; humanity of,

151; imitation of Mattel's Merope, 228-29; on

Index Expurgatorius, 316; influence of, 230,

346-47, 542, 880-8 1 ; Samuel Johnson's dislike

of, 834; Lekain discovered by, 1 01- 102;

Lessing and, 509, 512; lies of, 148-49; Lis-

bon earthquake and, 533; Louis XV and, 88;

Louis XVI and, 857, 867, 875, 879; love of lux-

ury, 141 ; love of money, 148; loyalty to friends,

150; on Marie Theresa, 343; Marie Antoi-

nette and, 873-74, 875; meets Gibbon, 797;

mocks legend of noble savage, 3 1 ; moral cour-

age of, 150-51; Mozart's dislike of, 392, 402;

nature and, 169; on opera, 101; in Pantheon,

no; on Paris, 71; partition of Poland and,

484; personality of, 135, 141, 147-51; physical

cowardice of, 149; Pigalle's statue of, 107-8,

280; on Mme. de Pompadour, 69; praise for

Goldoni, 242; predicts French Revolution, 143;

preface to Beccaria's book, 321; rancor of, 149;

Rousseau and, see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques,

voltaire and; scholarship of, 148; sees need

for popular religion, 003; Seven Years' War

and, 56-57; on Tristram Shandy, 788; trib-

utes to, 108; Turgot and, 78-79, 859, 865; use

of cosmetics, 134; vanity of, 149; views on

drama, 136; wealth of, 140-41 ; Wilkes's visit

to, 703

AT LES DELICES (1755—58), 27, I32

at ferney ( 1 758-78): agricultural activities,

135; daily routine, 134-35; ill health, 134-35;

last years, 873-74; management of estate, 132-

33; moves to, 164; personal habits, 134; rela-

tions with employees, 135-36; theater, 134;

visitors to, 133-34; workshops at, 135

final years of (1774-78) : adopts Reine Phili-

berte de Varicourt, 874; appearance of, 878;

burial and aftermath, 879-80; fame and adula-

tion, 873; final illness and death, 879; goes to

Paris, 774-75; he suggests reforms to Louis

XVI, 873; he writes Irene, 274; illnesses, 876;

last writings, 873-74; performance of Irene,

877; reception in Paris, 875-79; seeks to be

confessed, 876; Turgot and, 874, 875; visits of

clergy to, 875-76

religion and, 646; anticlerical views, 145; at-

tends religious services, 452; Catholic Church

and, 138, 890, 893; defense of Calas, 90, 146,

151, 881; skeptical outlook, 148

POLITICAL VIEWS AND ACTIVITIES ( 1 758-78) I aid

to Swiss natifs, 634-44; on Alberoni's reforms,

277; anti-Semitism of, 140-50; attack on Paris

Parlement, 92-95; Beccaria's influence on, 145;

belief in monarchism, 142-43; contempt for

masses, 147; French Revolution and, 84, 880,

800-91, 899, 940; opposition to equalitarianism,

141-42; opposition to revolutions, 144-45; op-

position to serfdom, 135; predicts French

Revolution, 143; reforms advocated by, 145-

47; support for property, 141; sychophancy

toward royalty, 140, 148; views on democ-

racy, 142-45

writings of (1758-78), 75-76; anti-clerical, 138;

INDEX

I089

correspondence, 138-40; denies authorship of

controversial writings, 149; histories, 137-38;

Italian translation of Voltaire's works, 219;

philosophical works, 138; plays, 101-3, 136-37;

poem on Lisbon earthquake, 154; variety of,

136-37

Volumina legum (Konarski), 475

Volunteers, Irish Protestant, 760-61

Vorontsov, Mikhail Ilarionovich (1714-67), 432

Vorontsova, Elizaveta (fl. 1760), 436-37, 439-40

Voss, Johann Heinrich (1751-1826), 519, 601,

605

Vossische Zeitung, 506

Voyage a Vile de France (Bernardin de Saint-

Pierre), 916

Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece (Bar-

thelemy), 917

Voyer, Marc-Rene d'Argenson, Marquis de

(1722-82), 135

Vulpius, Christiane, see Goethe, Christiane

wages: of English workers, 677, 679; of French

workers, 933

Wagner, Richard (1813-83), 26, 335

Wagniere, Jean-Louis (1739-after 1787), 133;

on Voltaire and clergy, 876; on Voltaire's ap-

pearance and habits, 134-35; on Voltaire's trip

to Paris, 875

Wahabite sect, 412

Wahlverwandtschaften, Die (Goethe), 612

Waldchen (Herder), 568

Waldegrave, James, 2d Earl Waldegrave (1715—

63), 687, 795

Wales, 670

Wales, George Augustus Frederick, Prince of,

see George IV

"Walk, The" (Schiller) , 599

Wallace, Robert (fl. 1750), Scottish clergyman,

763

Wallachia, 411, 483; ceded by Turks to Austria

(17 18), 415; peasant revolt in, 361

Wallensteins Lager (Schiller), 601-2

Wallensteins Tod (Schiller), 601-2

wallpaper, 910, 956

Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford (1676-

1745), 118, 120, 201, 228, 436, 447, 723, 729-30,

736, 740, 742, 746, 748, 785, 786, 791-9S, 809,

824; on Boswell's Life of Johnson, 841; Chat-

terton and, 809-10; death of, 795; Mme. du

Deffand and, 125, 794-95, 906-7; early life

and education of, 792; elected to Parliament,

792-93; family background of, 791; on French

authors, 104; on George III, 698; Gibbon and,

800, 803-4; on historians, 795; hoax on Rous-

seau, 208, 212-14; on individuality of England,

733-34; influence of Burke on, 691; on John-

son, 830, 831; Julie de Lespinasse and, 906-7;

literary tastes of, 793-94; memoirs and letters

of, 795; opposes slave trade, 733; personality of,

793; on philosophes, 95; policies in Parlia-

ment, 793; policy toward India, 716; as pub-

lisher, 793; on Robertson, 766; support for

American colonies, 711, 713; tour of Italy,

792; visit to France, 794-95; wealth of, 795;

writings of, 794

Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl of Orford (1676-

1745), 466, 792, 819

Warburton, William (1698- 1779), 690, 703, 737

Warens, Francoise-Marie de La Tour, Baronne

de (1699-1762), 27, 167; early life of, 7; Rous-

seau and, 7, 9-1 $

"War of the Buffoons," 10 1

Warsaw, 474-75, 490; acquired by Prussia, 492;

last stand against partition, 491-92

Warton, Thomas (1728-90), 824

Washington, George (1732-99), 701, 714, 856;

attack on Fort Duquesne, 57; French En-

lightenment and, 867; Houdon's bust of, 912;

influence of philosophes on, 899; retreat be-

fore Howe, 869; victory at Yorktown (1781),

871

Was ist Aufklarung? (Kant) , 540

Watelet, Claude-Henri (1718-86), 126

water frame, 673

Waterloo, battle of (1815), 627

water power and factories, 673

waterways, trade on, 672

Watson, Charles, Admiral (fl. 1757), 58

Watt, James (1736-1819), 674-76, 734, 763-64

Watteau, Antoine (1684-1721), 116, 235

Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 746, 786, 808;

anticipates Marx's theories, 771; basic con-

cepts of, 769-71; influence of, 772

Weber, Aloysia (1761?— 1839), 390-91, 393, 399

Weber, Constanze, see Mozart, Constanze

Weber, Fridolin (fl. 1778), 390

Weber, Josepha (1758-1819), 390

Weber, Karl Maria von (1786- 18 26), 243*, 380,

525, 57 6

Webster, Noah, 824

Wedgwood, Josiah (1730-95)1 733~34> 749-5°

Weigel, Eva Maria, see Garrick, Eva Maria

Weimar, 581; court life in, SS 2 S3> cultural life

in, 552; Napoleon in, 606-7; population of, 552

Weishaupt, Adam (1 748-1 830), 507

Weisweiler, Adam (d. 1809), 5 2 3

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of (1769-

1852), Madrid liberated by, 307

Werner (Byron), 627

Werner, Abraham (1750-18 17), 615

Werner, Gregor (d. 1766), 375

Werther (Goethe), see Sorrows of Young

Werther, The (Goethe)

Wesel, Prussia retains, 62

Wesley, John (1703-91), 658, 711, 731-32, 749

West Indies, 58, 732

Westminster, Treaty of (1756), 39-40

Westminster, voting population in, 685

Westminster Convention (1689), 683

Westdstlicher Diwan (Goethe), 641

Westphalia, Frederick II occupies, 53

Westphalia, Treaty of (1648), 38, 46

West Prussia, 484

1090

INDEX

"What Is, and to What End Does One Study,

Universal History?" (Schiller), 593

"Whether the Metaphysical Sciences Are Sus-

ceptible of Such Evidence as the Mathemati-

cal" (Mendelssohn), 638

Whigs, 692, 711; Hanoverian dynasty and, 699;

Hastings' trial and, 719; opposition to George

III, 699; Tories compared with, 685

Whiston, William (1667-1752), 507

"Whiteboys," rebellion of (Irish Catholic

bands), 760

White Russia, 484

"Wiegenlied bei Mondenschein zu singen"

(Claudius), 519

Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733-1813), 503,

506, 562, 567, 611, 628, 641, 766; appearance

of, 576; contribution to literature, 555; death

of, 576-77, 580; early life of, 553; as Free-

mason, 507; on Goethe, 580-81; on Herder,

577; literary activities of, 576; philosophy of

life of, S53-55't Sturm und Drang and, 576;

Voltaire's influence on, 880; in Weimar, 552;

welcomes French Revolution, 590

Wiener Zeitung, 346

wigs, 231

Wilberforce, William (1759-1833), 726, 733

Wilhelm of Hanau, ruler of Hesse-Cassel (r.

1 785-1 803) as landgrave, (r. 1803-21) as elec-

tor, 634

Wilhelm Meister (Goethe), 585, 620-21

Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe), 558,

599-601

Wilhelmine, Margravine of Bayreuth (1709-

1758), sister of Frederick II, 47-48, 54, 529

Wilkes, John (1727-97), 699, 700, 701-4, 722,

734, 833; Boswell and, 782; conflict with Bute

ministry, 702; death of, 708; duel with Martin,

703; early life and education of, 701-2; enters

House of Commons, 702; expelled from

House of Commons (1764), 701, 703; flight

to Europe of, 703; Goldsmith and, 817; in

Gordon Riots, 736; imprisonment of, 702, 704;

as leader of parliamentary "radicals," 708; in

Medmenham Abbey, 809; in Naples, 330; per-

sonality of, 701, 703; popular support for,

703-4, 707; release from jail, 707; retains par-

liament seat, 706-7; riots in support of, 704;

second expulsion from House of Commons

(1769), 704; support for American colonies,

711; third expulsion from House of Commons

(1769), 704

Wilkinson, John (1 728-1 808), 672, 675

Willander, Johan (fl. 1782), 659

Wille, Johann Georg (17 15-1807), 113

Willemer, Johann Jakob von (1 760-1 838), 613-

Willemer, Marianne von, nee Jung (1 784-1 860),

613-14

William I, King of the Netherlands (r. 18 15-

40), 649

William III, Stadholder of Holland (r. 1672-

1702), King of England, Scotland, and Ire-

land (r. 1 680-1702), 648, 683

William IV, Stadholder of Holland (r. 1747-

5 i),6 4 8

William V, Stadholder of Holland (r. 1751-95),

648-49

William Frederick, Prince (1776-1834), Duke of

Gloucester, 753

William Henry, Fort, 58

William of Ockham (i3oo?-4o), 177

William Tell (Schiller), 604-5

Williams, Anna (1706-83), 780, 822

Williams (London printer; fl. 1763), 702

Wilna, Elijah, see Elijah ben Solomon

Wilno, 489, 491

Wilson, Richard (1714-82), 750-51

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717-68), 32$-

3h 337i 4^7i 5 2 3i 557» 5^8, 595* 7°3i 747» 782,

910, 912; early life and education of, 325-26;

enters Catholic Church, 326; esthetic theories

of, 328-29; Gluck's operatic views and, 368;

hatred of Prussia, 530; honors given to, 330;

influence of, no, 118, 329-30, 524; Lessing and,

510; limitations of, 330-31; Mengs and, 248-49,

327, 329, 331-32; murder of, 330; on Oeser's

paintings, 523; paganism of, 326*; revives

classical style, 315; in Rome, 314, 327-28;

views on Laocoon statue, 510

Winter Palace, Russia, 426

witchcraft, 276, 316, 356

Woffington, Peg (1714-60), 689, 740, 742

Wolf, Friedrich August (1750-1824), classical

philologist, 253

Wolfe, James (1727-59), 58

Wolfenbiittel: library at, 512; Seven Years' War

in, 60

Wolfenbiittel Fragments (Reimarus), 578

Wolff, Caspar Friedrich (1733-94), biologist,

616*

Wolff, Christian von (1670-1754), as philoso-

pher-mathematician, 294, 507, 532, 536, 538,

567, 637; influence of, 531-32, 889; philosophy

of, 508

Wollner, Johann Christian von (i73o?-i8oo),

547

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97), 881

Wolzogen, Frau Henrietta von (fl. 1782), 572

Wolzogen, Lotte von, 572

women, 896; in England, 678, 682, 728, 730-31,

787; in factories, 671, 678, 682; in France, 97,

99, 906-8; in Germany, 503-4; in Italy, 218-19;

in Moslem countries, 413; in Poland, 474;

Rousseau's views on, 186; in Spain, 290-91;

Sturm und Drang movement and, 522

Woodfall, Henry Sampson (1 730-1 805), 706

Woodward, Henry (1714-77), 741

Wootton, Rousseau's stay in, 211- 12

Wordsworth, William (1770- 1850), 3, 809, 813

workers: in England, 670-71, 673, 676-82; in

France, 914; French Revolution and, 933-34;

in Russia, 423 ; Smith's support for, 77 1

INDEX

IO9I

Works of Ossian, The (Macpherson), 559, 567,

767-68, 809

World as Will and Idea, The (Schopenhauer),

550

Wortley Montagu, Edward (1678-1761), 412,

4i3»73o

Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, The

(Montagu), 730

Wurttemberg, 502-3

Wurttemberg, Duke of: in 1733-37, see Karl

Alexander, Duke; in 1737-93, see Karl Eugen,

Duke

Wurttemberg, Prince of, 246

Wurttemberg, Princess of, 246

Wurzburg-Bamberg, 503

Wiirzburg Residenz, 239

Xenien (Goethe and Schiller), 598-99

Yankovich, Theodor (fi. 1786), 453

"Ye banks an' braes o' bonnie Doon" (Burns),

777

Yenikale, 458

York, theater in, 740

Yorktown, battle of (1781), 714, 761, 871

Young, Arthur (1741-1820), 912, 931; descrip-

tion of Paris, 933; on emerging revolutionary

movement in French, 946; on French agricul-

ture, 928; on manners in France, 905; on

Marie Antoinette, 941; observations of, 933;

on poverty in England, 677; on unrest in

Paris, 957, 959

Young, Edward (1683-1765), 518, 661

Young Pretender, see Stuart, Charles Edward

Ypres, 361

Yverdon, 190

Zaddikim, 636

Zaluski, Jozef Andrzej, bishop of Kiev, 475, 481

Zand dynasty, 420

Zante, 229

Zapater, Goya's friend (fi. 1788), 303

Zarcillo y Alcaraz, Francisco (1707-81), 298

Zavadovsky, Piotr (fi. 1776), 446

Zedlitz, Karl Abraham von (1731-93), 505, 535,

540

zelanti faction, 317

Zelter, Karl Friedrich (1758-1832), 614-15

Zeno, Apostolo (1668-1750), 220, 223, 239

Ziegesar, Silvie von (fi. 18 10), 612-13

Zielence, battle of (1792), 488-89

Ziethen, Johann (Hans) Joachim von (1699-

1786), 60

Zimmermann, Dr. Johann Georg (1728-95), 530,

582, 608

Zoffany, John (1733-1810), 746

Zorich, Simon (fi. 1777), 446

Zorndorf, battle of (1758), 53, 437

Zubov, Platon (b. 1764), 446, 470

Zubov, Valerian (b. 1765), 470

Zullichau, battle of, ^

Zur Farbenlehre (Goethe), 616

Zurich, 643, 645

Zweibriicken, Duke Charles of, see Charles,

Duke of Zweibriicken

About the Authors

WILL DURANT was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 1885. He was

educated in the Catholic parochial schools there and in Kearny, New Jersey,

and thereafter in St. Peter's (Jesuit) College, Jersey City, New Jersey, and

Columbia University, New York. For a summer he served as a cub reporter on

the New York Journal, in 1907, but finding the work too strenuous for his

temperament, he settled down at Seton Hall College, South Orange, New Jersey,

to teach Latin, French, English, and geometry (1 907-11). He entered the sem-

inary at Seton Hall in 1909, but withdrew in 191 1 for reasons which he has

described in his book Transition. He passed from this quiet seminary to the most

radical circles in New York, and became (1911-13) the teacher of the Ferrer

Modern School, an experiment in libertarian education. In 191 2 he toured Europe

at the invitation and expense of Alden Freeman, who had befriended him and

now undertook to broaden his borders.

Returning to the Ferrer School, he fell in love with one of his pupils, resigned

his position, and married her (191 3). For four years he took graduate work at

Columbia University, specializing in biology under Morgan and Calkins and in

philosophy under Woodbridge and Dewey. He received the doctorate in phi-

losophy in 191 7, and taught philosophy at Columbia University for one year. In

1 9 14, in a Presbyterian church in New York, he began those lectures on history,

literature, and philosophy which, continuing twice weekly for thirteen years,

provided the initial material for his later works.

The unexpected success of The Story of Philosophy (1926) enabled him to

retire from teaching in 1927. Thenceforth, except for some incidental essays,

Mr. and Mrs. Durant gave nearly all their working hours (eight to fourteen daily)

to The Story of Civilization. To better prepare themselves they toured Europe

in 1927, went around the world in 1930 to study Egypt, the Near East, India,

China, and Japan, and toured the globe again in 1932 to visit Japan, Manchuria,

Siberia, Russia, and Poland. These travels provided the background for Our

Oriental Heritage (1935) as the first volume in The Story of Civilization. Several

further visits to Europe prepared for Volume II, The Life of Greece (1939) and

Volume III, Caesar and Christ (1944). In 1948, six months in Turkey, Iraq, Iran,

Egypt, and Europe provided perspective for Volume IV, The Age of Faith (1950).

In 1 95 1 Mr. and Mrs. Durant returned to Italy to add to a lifetime of gleanings

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

for Volume V, The Renaissance (1953); and in 1954 further studies in Italy,

Switzerland, Germany, France, and England opened new vistas for Volume VI,

The Reformation (1957).

Mrs. Durant's share in the preparation of these volumes became more and

more substantial with each year, until in the case of Volume VII, The Age of

Reason Begi?is (1961), it was so pervasive that justice required the union of both

names on the title page. The name Ariel was first applied to his wife by Mr.

Durant in his novel Transition (1927) and in his Mansions of Philosophy (1929)

—now reissued as The Pleasures of Philosophy.

With the publication of Volume X, Rousseau and Revolution, the Durants

have concluded over four decades of work.

rws^V

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