84 Chapter V
their citizen guards, nervously sensitive to the outside world yet conscious of isola-
tion from it, and filled with a self- righteous, Calvinist, or Puritan sense of superi-
ority over their neighbors.
The city was a nursery of talents, and its chief export was its own men. It was es-
timated that a fifth of those who held its citizenship were habitually absent. Though
it was the home of the naturalists Charles Bonnet and J. A. de Luc, men of some
note in eighteenth- century science, it produced most especially men who excelled in
the two fields (not unrelated, perhaps especially for Calvinists) of public finance and
the philosophy of public affairs. It was the birthplace of Jacques Necker, Minister of
Finance under Louis XVI of France; of Etienne Clavière, Minister of Finance in
the French Republic in 1792; and of Albert Gallatin who held a similar office in the
United States under President Jefferson. Burlamaqui, the esteemed writer on con-
stitutional law, was a Genevese; as were Delolme, the expositor of the British consti-
tution; Etienne Dumont, the discoverer and translator of Bentham; and Sismondi,
the historian and economist. There were also Mallet du Pan and Sir Francis
D’Ivernois, who in their youth supported the revolutionary party at Geneva, and in
their mature years, in refuge in England, became well known as opponents of the
revolution in France. And there was Jean- Jacques Rousseau.
Events at Geneva are of significance at various levels. Obviously nothing that
happened in this tiny place could, in a crude or mechanical way, influence the world
outside. But significance is not a matter of numbers only, as, indeed, had been proved
by the Geneva of Calvin two centuries before. The first occasion, within the time
span of this book, when a movement of modern democratic type made a positive
impression on institutions of government was at Geneva in 1768. In the roles played
by upper, middle, and lower classes, in the conflict between political and economic
demands, and in the interplay between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary
pressures, this “revolution” at Geneva even prefigured or symbolized the greater
revolution that was to come in France. It was, moreover, a revolution precipitated by
the presence in the neighborhood of Rousseau. It was here that the Social Contract
produced its first explosion. Near at hand, at the same time, lived another worthy of
more than local repute, namely Voltaire, on his estates at Ferney, on the French side
of the Genevese frontier, but only four miles from Calvin’s church. The embroilment
of Rousseau and Voltaire in the politics of Geneva meant the blowing of two anti-
thetical views of the world into a teapot tempest; or, rather, the agitations at Geneva,
which in themselves were significant enough, were brought to the level of world
history by the involvement of these two difficult geniuses.
ROUSSEAU, VOLTAIRE, AND GENEVA TO 1762Rousseau had been born at Geneva in 1712, but he never lived there after 1728,
when, coming home one evening, he found the city gates locked, and took, at the
age of sixteen, to what proved to be a wandering and unsettled life. His father was
a journeyman watchmaker, in moderate circumstances, though a citizen by birth.
Possibly Rousseau’s Genevese boyhood helped to shape the works of his maturity;
it has been persuasively shown that the republican, Protestant, and sometimes Pu-