A Clash with Democracy 85
ritan tone of his greatest writings, and even the attitude of ever watchful suspicion
of the people around him, are the authentic acceints of his native place.^1 What is
certain, however, and necessary to an understanding of what followed, is that
Rousseau could never adjust to life in any other country as he found it. How much
of his trouble was of social or psychological origin, and how much it was due to his
physical malady, a urological disturbance that caused him discomfort and embar-
rassment throughout his life, cannot be known.
He had tried to do what a young man making his way in the world was sup-
posed to do. He had had various love affairs. He had given up his ancestral Protes-
tantism and entered the Catholic Church. He had enjoyed the patronage of the
high- born. He had used influence to be appointed secretary to the French embassy
at Venice. He had written operas that were well received. He had been accepted by
Diderot and other intellectual lights of Paris, where he had heard much strong talk
to the effect that reason was about to dispel the fog of prejudice inherited from the
ages of ignorance, that religion was a system invented by the crafty to dominate
the credulous, that moral ideas were produced by social environment, and that the
emancipation of the mind had caused and would cause astounding advances in the
progress of civilization.
In all this Rousseau had taken part. His life, as he approached forty, was not a
failure by worldly standards; yet it gave him no satisfaction. At bottom, he could
accept none of it. He took nothing at face value. Even the friendly advances of his
social superiors gave him a feeling of humiliation. He was afraid that acquain-
tances wished to patronize or exploit him. He thought the whole manner of life in
France of his day artificial. Manners were too elaborate, taste too sophisticated, the
conversation in the salons too clever, people of refinement too hypocritical, the
theater too frivolous, religion too formal, unbelief too glib. He complained that he
was never free to be himself. Even his own private life disgusted him; he lived for
years with the faithful and simple (that is, uneducated) Therese Levasseur, secretly
turning over to an orphanage the five infants that she gave him. Disturbed by his
own awkwardness, social shortcomings, and moral derelictions, he felt a compul-
sion to publicize them to all the world, while at the same time insisting that he was
not at fault, or was no worse than other men, and blaming society for his own
unhappiness and that of others. Most differences of opinion about Rousseau take
their departure from this point. Some, thinking him a rebel against all society and
all restraint, have called him antisocial, misanthropic, anarchic, egotistical, irre-
sponsible, and childishly evasive of all obligations. Others, holding that what he
rebelled against was the specific society of his day as he knew it, have thought that
this society was in fact artificial and shot through with false values, and so have
found in him an authentic human protest against bad conditions. Both can be
true; it is hard to imagine any society in which Jean- Jacques would have been at
ease; but the only society he could rebel against was the one he knew. In any case
no one denies that Rousseau was personally very uncomfortable.
He became the great revolutionary of a revolutionary age. Among contempo-
raries who boldly rewrote human history, arraigned kings, and exploded religion,
1 G. Va l let te , Jean- Jacques Rousseau Genevois (Geneva and Paris, 1911).