88 Chapter V
Ferney to enjoy the giddy pleasures of the French neoclassic stage. A great con-
troversy thereby began.
One of the distinguished visitors whom Voltaire’s presence drew to Geneva was
the philosopher d’Alembert, coeditor with Diderot of the Encyclopedia then in
process of publication at Paris. Voltaire introduced him to the leading citizens and
the leading ministers of the Reformed Church. D’Alembert was delighted at the
rational and enlightened views that he found in these circles, and reciprocated by
publishing a long article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia. It was obviously launched
as a weapon against the Catholic Church. “Hell,” remarked d’Alembert drily, “a
principal article of belief with us, is not such today for many ministers at Geneva.”
He warmly praised the Protestant clergy at Geneva for their emancipation from
superstition, their broad tolerance, their distaste for fanaticism, their stress on the
humanity of Jesus, their attachment to natural virtue and reasonable religion. He
also urged that so polished and enlightened a community should allow and even
sponsor a theater.
The article caused great consternation by the shores of Lake Leman, especially
among the clergy. Of course they were enlightened men of their day; of course
they thought that Calvin had been too extreme, and Servetus unjustly put to death;
of course they believed that Jesus had been a good man, and that reason and nature
taught the same mild and uplifting truths as revealed religion. But they did not
thank d’Alembert for saying so in the Encyclopedia. They did not like his editori-
alizing their private conversation. Throughout Protestant Europe, and especially in
places less intellectual than Geneva, people might form the impression that the
city of Calvin had been seduced into infidelity, that the old bastion of Protestant-
ism was no longer safe. In such circumstances they could not now change the laws
of Geneva to allow a theater in their midst. The Geneva ministers, or many of
them, had been led by their very real intellectual curiosity and humane sympathies
into an exciting contact with Voltaire. They now saw where such philosophical as-
sociations might lead them. They drew back, and on the question of the theater
became stubborn.
Rousseau rushed to their defense. He published a Lettre à d ’Alembert sur les spec-
tacles, which at the same time consummated his break with the philosophes of the
Voltairean and Encyclopedist schools. The theater (for which in former days he
had written himself ) now signified for Rousseau the aristocratic and artificial soci-
ety which he spurned. It was a false and superficial thing, a mere show, of which a
sound and simple citizenry had no need. Its introduction at Geneva would be a
clear sign of corruption. The question was a moral one, involving the kind of mo-
rality that underlay public life; as Rousseau’s Geneva friend, Moltou, enthusiasti-
cally wrote to him, the letter to d’Alembert was “the rallying signal for all good
citizens, the reproach and terror of the bad.”^5
Rousseau in answering d’Alembert was defending his idealized image of Ge-
neva, but at the same time he had entered into a very real and practical controversy.
The theater at Geneva was in fact a class amusement, and hence became a class
issue. Geneva, it must be remembered, was governed by a few families who coopted
5 Va l let te , op. cit., p. 136.