Rousseau Revisited

“The LORD knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity.” -Psalm 94:10-12

On our last day in Paris, we were given the gift of one hour to wander the historic left bank and told to meet our bus on the steps of the Pantheon, a majestic building enshrining some of the great heroes of French history. I could not resist. I made for this grand crypt at full speed eagerly anticipating the opportunity to stand before the remains of some of the great names that had gripped my interest a half-world away amid library carols and university debates. Here lay one of my heroes, Victor Hugo, who wrote that grand tale of mercy and truth, justice and love, vengeance and redemption: Les Miserables. I entered the cavernous building with anxious thoughts of the few, fleeting moments I had to discover the tombs of both the saints and sinners housed there, all tucked away in various alcoves posted with signs and directions written in totally incomprehensible French.

I dodged and darted until I could stand in a moment of raw reverence before Hugo’s tomb and pay my respects. But I must confess, it was not Hugo’s tomb that held the greatest fascination for me but rather my arch nemesis, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Being French has to be difficult for when you look to those men who have played such a huge role in shaping the history of that country, it inevitably includes some of the grandest “Moriarities” of the modern age. Such is the case with this Pantheon of heroes. Along with Hugo, Louis Braille, and Marie Curie you find the savage beast of Marat and the seductive, deeply disturbed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

I was drawn as by a magnet to find his resting place, a curious wooden box with a peaked roof. In carved relief, an arm appears from a cracked door on the end holding a small bouquet. Appropriate, I thought. From the bosom of death and decay that was his life, he held forth to all of France a bouquet of cut and soon-to-wilt adolescent ideals presented with a gripping narrative that was his gift. His private life was “a record of almost uninterrupted squalor and misery.” “Every friendship, whether with men or women, concluded with a quarrel.” He imagined enemies everywhere “until, in 1778, he died, paranoid and almost catatonic.”* Yet his writings portrayed life lived in the most exquisite of philosophic and limpid Utopianism. His characters frequently stopped to rhapsodize and sermonize on the human condition giving naïve, adolescent ideas the gravity of apparent truth. The effect was incredibly successful in an age tired of arid rationalism and cynicism. He ravished the soul of his countrymen to the point that much of the high flown rhetoric of the French Revolution was informed by the precepts and ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Robespierre, that devil in a fine suit who presided over the Terror, was a huge fan of Rousseau and absorbed all his writing, travelling to visit him before his death. Rousseau was unique in that his writing appealed to poor and rich alike, seducing them with empty phrases that had a ring of virtue and endearing sentiment. It had the widest imaginable influence upon his countrymen. He was to the French Revolution what Jefferson was to ours, only combined with the simplistic appeal of an Oprah Winfrey and the narrative power of a Stephen King.

The ideals of the French Revolution soon unleashed the horror of the Terror. From the ashes of that came forth Napoleon who ransacked as much of the world as he could both with armies and ideas. Curiously, a man named Vladimir Lenin some years later looked to the tumult of the French Revolution for his inspiration in spreading a new revolution that would enslave half the world in its idealistic chains. I cannot help but link the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam to a chain of events going all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Standing there in front of Rousseau’s tomb, I was seized by a school-boy impulse. I wet the tip of my finger and applied a touch of spittle to the railing surrounding his bones. A contemptuous act, I admit. It should have been a tear for all the suffering that has flowed in his wake. But somehow tears would not come. The momentous gravity of the vanity of it all sapped my more gracious instincts. Perhaps next time.

Mercy and Truth, Mr. Moe *Paris in the Terror, Stanley Loomis, 1964