30 Montesquieu's view was quite common at this time; see Mostefai, Le citoyen de Genve, 4763. [4], If a theatre is established it will change the maxims and prejudices of Geneva, for better or worse, and the best way to deal with this is simply prevention, Rousseau argues. Rousseau's later quarrel with Voltaire was legendary for its violence. The Confessions used is the Gamier edition (Paris, n.d.). His First Discourse, on the Arts and Sciences, won first prize in a competition run by the Dijon Academy, and he had an opera and a play performed to great acclaim. Ourida Mostefai offers the most current and exhaustive treatment of the letter and its context that we know, while Patrick Coleman presents a highly instructive and provocative textual analysis that explores among other themes the manner in which Rousseau offers himself as an actor and his text as his own public stage; see Ourida Mostefai, Le citoyen de Genve et la Rpublique des Lettres: tude de la controverse autour de La Lettre d'Alembert de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York, NY, 2003); Patrick Coleman, Rousseau's Political Imagination: Rule and Representation in the Lettre d'Alembert (Geneva, 1984). We have corrected the translation here. It greatly deceives itself; it is free only during the election of the members of Parliament. Though a theatre can work to distract the masses of the cities from crime, it is of no use to a smaller city like Geneva, which is relatively innocent. The Scottish philosopher David Hume took him there and secured the offer of a pension from King George III; but once in England, Rousseau became aware that certain British intellectuals were making fun of him, and he suspected Hume of participating in the mockery. Il ne veut pas ressembler aux . Of course, Montesquieu does not broach the specific issue that Rousseau considersthat is, the spread of the theatre in modern times into the small, virtuous mountainside republic. Other scholars, in examining Rousseau's Letter in particular, discern limited indications of Montesquieu's influence. Summary. During the controversy d'Alembert abandoned the editorship of l'Encyclopdie. Letter of M. d'Alembert to M. J. J. Rousseau ; "Response to the anonymous letter written by members of the legal profession" ; Letter from Julien-David Leroy to Rousseau ; From Rousseau to Leroy. Montesquieu on the French Theatre and Sociability in the, 3. [4], Rousseau turns to the topic of love, which, he says, is in the realm of women. 90 Cf. for a customized plan. Christopher Kelly elaborates on a different aspect of Rousseau's critique of the theatre's moral obscurity, noting that whatever theatre does teach us about sympathy or morality towards one another, this emotional identification or fellow feeling is less pleasant once outside the performance hall because it demands that one take the trouble to help. Jean-Jacques Rousseau & Background on Discourse on Inequality, Philosophical Context: Influences on Discourse of Inequality. You'll be billed after your free trial ends. Mchten Sie Encyclopedie: Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1754; Copper engraving from: Diderot & d'Alembert 'Encyc kaufen? 18 Charles-Louis Secondat de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, translated by C. J. Betts (London, 2004, first published in 1979), letter 28, 79 (1:172). By the time his Lettre dAlembert sur les spectacles (1758; Letter to Monsieur dAlembert on the Theatre) appeared in print, Rousseau had already left Paris to pursue a life closer to nature on the country estate of his friend Mme dpinay near Montmorency. Indeed, Montesquieu refers in The Spirit of the Laws both to those who write to proscribe the theatre because of its evoking softening emotions such as pity and tenderness and to one who might endeavour to restrain French women.Footnote90 Not so quixotic as to attempt the latter, Rousseau certainly endeavours the former by opposing most vehemently the establishment of a theatre in Geneva. This is a civil law, Montesquieu proclaims pointedly, that punishes natural defense.Footnote39 After asserting that natural defense demands that the accused be confronted by witnesses in a criminal proceeding, the chapters go on to provide examples of how civil laws can interfere with familial relations. See also Radica, Rousseau, in Dictionnaire lectronique Montesquieu, September 2013 edition, 7. In such a case, theatre is useful [] for covering the ugliness of vice with the polish of forms; in a word, for preventing bad morals from degenerating into brigandage.Footnote88 In speaking somewhat sarcastically about the positive role of theatre in such a corrupt society, Rousseau reveals that he would not recommend the proscription of the theatre in Paris and thus he is not such a one as to venture to constrain its women, make laws to correct their mores, and limit their luxury.Footnote89 Here, Rousseau acknowledges that theatre may, in fact, at least prevent what he sees as the debaucheries of Parisian society. All live together in harmony, and there are only faint echoes of the old affair between Saint-Preux and Julie. $18.74/subscription + tax, Save 25% Second, while Muralt does comment on the debauchery of Englishmen, he does not describe such an asocial and austere climate between men and women as Montesquieu depicts, which Rousseau then adopts. Rousseau continues to say that actors coming to the town of Geneva will be indifferent to the town's morality, and will quickly corrupt it. Rousseau adhered to the belief that restrictions and censorship are often justified to maintain civil order. Thus, theatre serves to extenuate moral lapses. Whereas The Social Contract is concerned with the problems of achieving freedom, mile is concerned with achieving happiness and wisdom. These seemingly fleeting references to this art form should not be overlooked as they clarify and expound upon fundamental aspects of his political theory. After naming these passions in particular, Montesquieu immediately observes: Those who write on morality for us and so strongly proscribe the theaters make us feel sufficiently the power of music on our souls.Footnote16 Thus, Montesquieu here testifies to the power that theatre has over the feelings, and hence the actions, of human beings. Il ne peut pas se taire aprs ce qu'il a dj fait, il faut parler au public. The work is famous for displaying Rousseau's charismatic rhetoric and digressive tendencies, all with his personal experience woven into the text. de Montesquieu rightly calls a fine law the one which excludes from public office the citizens who fail to pay their own debts or those of [their] fathers after their death.Footnote5, What d'Alembert intended as an encomium, Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarded as an outrage.Footnote6 In 1758 Rousseau penned an open letter to d'Alembert expressing his indignation at the essay's claims regarding his beloved birthplace. See also Thomas, Negotiating Taste in Montesquieu, 8182. In October of 1758,Rousseau published theLetter to dAlembertto refuteJean dAlemberts suggestion that Geneva establish a public theater. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 2009 - In Rousseau on Women, Love, and Family. Emphasis added. SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. By focusing on his belief in the natural order and harmony of traditional sex roles and community, Rousseau writes to convince D'Alembert, and the public of Geneva, that a theatre is a threat to an ideal, natural way of life. Spectacles and Sociability: Rousseau's R . 2. -36:18. In 1758 his Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre was published. However, Rousseau was later to write in his autobiography, Confessions, that "in all of Europe [Discourse on Inequality] found only a few readers who understood it, and of these none who wished to talk of it." After formally renouncing his Genevan citizenship in 1763, Rousseau became a fugitive, spending the rest of his life moving from one refuge to another. At the end of The New Eloise, when Julie has made herself ill in an attempt to rescue one of her children from drowning, she comes face-to-face with a truth about herself: that her love for Saint-Preux has never died. In the play, the main character, Alceste, is good and honest in his relationships with men and made to look ridiculous, whereas Philinte, a deceiver and manipulator, is shown as superior. The New Eloise, being a novel, escaped the censorship to which the other two works were subject; indeed, of all his books it proved to be the most widely read and the most universally praised in his lifetime. The little community, dominated by Julie, illustrates one of Rousseaus political principles: that while men should rule the world in public life, women should rule men in private life. He continues that a European spirit of gallantry that one can say was little known to the ancients grew out of this desire to please women. Here is a lecture on Rousseau's Letter to D'Alembert. Rousseau describes them as scandalous, hedonistic, and compares them to jesters, who were more blatantly indecent and obscene. See also Coleman, who discerns the same influence, but who maintains that Rousseau's view of what Montesquieu calls l'esprit general is [] much less accommodating than that of the constitutional jurist; see Coleman, Rousseau's Political Imagination, 4445, note 6. Dufour (Paris, 1924), i, 379-380,384.Further quotations from this work will be cited as "R." and will refer to this edition. Their exchange, collected in volume ten of this. Want 100 or more? Among them, Le Devin du village was the most popular French opera of the eighteenth . [5] To have a prosperous state, Rousseau believed, people needed to work together and harmoniously. Julie succeeds in forgetting her feelings for Saint-Preux and finds happiness as wife, mother, and chatelaine. More importantly, in Discourse on InequalityRousseau is in many ways extremely negative about the progress of reason. Discourse on Inequality was completed in May 1754, and published in 1755. On the relation between the two thinkers, see also Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 86, 96, 175, 223; Christopher Kelly, Rousseau and the Illustrious Montesquieu, in The Challenge of Rousseau, edited by Grace and Kelly, 1933 (2021). Allan Bloom makes the claim that Voltaire persuaded d'Alembert [] to insert a passage (which Rousseau insists Voltaire himself wrote) in an otherwise laudatory presentation suggesting that Geneva should have a theatre; see Allan Bloom, Introduction, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theater, translated by Allan Bloom (New York, NY, 1960), xi-xxxiv (xv). 28 Spirit, 19.8, 311 (2:560). When the hospitality of Mme dpinay proved to entail much the same social round as that of Paris, Rousseau retreated to a nearby cottage, called Montlouis, under the protection of the Marchal de Luxembourg. Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine. Although he debated extensively with critics of his earlier work, First Discourse, Rousseau never mailed his replies to the major critics of Discourse on Inequality, Charles Bonnet (writing as Philopolis) and Charles Le Roy (writing as Buffon). For example, Rousseau elaborates on the moral results of Muralt's claim that theatre perverts the relationship of things. 32 Spirit, 12.2, 188. Sometimes it can end up there. [6] Rousseau's views on the theatre are also thought to echo current concerns with global entertainment, television and Internet taking over local customs and culture. Remarkably, in his Letter to d'Alembert, Rousseau himself transmits this same assessment of the women in England, employing the very adjective that Montesquieu applies to them: English women are gentle and timid [timides].Footnote65 Nevertheless, where Montesquieu perceives this as having lamentable consequences for the English, Rousseau finds admirable results. Down below there is a crowd of people standing up, who make fun of those who are performing above, and they in turn laugh at those below.Footnote18, Eventually everyone goes off to a room where they act a special sort of play: it begins with bows and continues with embraces. The best alternative to theatres is open-air festivals, in nature, to provide a unifying, patriotic spirit. He considered women, by virtue of their nature, to be the primary agents of moral reform, and that the success of the state depends on the harmony within private, domestic life. 63 See Spirit, 28.22, 56162, where Montesquieu declares that men's connection to women is related, in part, to the fact that women are quite enlightened judges of a part of the things that constitute personal merit. Therefore, theatres are of little use. His Government of Poland and Constitutional Project for Corsica offer practical proposals for political reform in his time. 70 Letter, 325 (5: 92). Rousseau considers this play to be a work of genius, but it is, of course, morally backwards. By entering your email address you agree to receive emails from SparkNotes and verify that you are over the age of 13. 66 For example: The English people think it is free. He sought to distance himself philosophically from the views that the universal use of reason, science, uninhibited freedom of thought, and increasing appreciation for the fine arts would make society a better place. for a group? . Montesquieu's description of a gentle and joyful societal existence could very well foster admiration beyond the borders of France, and thus spread the very mores from which Rousseau endeavours to protect Geneva. Rousseau's relationship to the Enlightenment was not a simple one. 83 Spirit, 19.5, 310 (2: 559). It offered a critique of d'Alembert's article on Geneva in the Encyclopdie. 4. Discourse on Inequality was completed in May 1754, and published in 1755. This extension of the empire of women is against natural order. While Montesquieu lavishes distinct praise on a society that permits the formation of taste and promotes the gentleness that comes from commerce, understood both as economic and social exchange, Rousseau resists such influences. He notes that the citizens forbearance in the face of such criticism of the founder of their church reveals their enlightened tolerance.Footnote4 In addition, d'Alembert makes use of Montesquieu's authority when treating Geneva's laws in his essay, adducing the fact that M. He also attached great importance to conscience, the divine voice of the soul in man, opposing this both to the bloodless categories of rationalistic ethics and to the cold tablets of biblical authority. 0:00. As these two leading figures of the Enlightenment argue about censorship, popular versus high culture, and the proper role . 19 Montesquieu, Persian Letters, letter 28, 79. GREAT Rousseau was the least academic of modern philosophers and in many ways was the most influential. From 1742 to 1749, Rousseau lived in Paris, barely earning a living by teaching and by copying music. Baron dtange, Julies father, has indeed promised her to a fellow nobleman named Wolmar. He concludes that as a result of his new reflections, he embraces a conclusion directly opposed to the one I drew from the first, namely, that when the people is corrupted, the theater is good for it, and bad for it when it is itself good.Footnote81 Rousseau reaches this conclusion immediately after he transmits, without naming his source, Montesquieu's description of French society: Rousseau allows the point that in certain places [the theatre] will be useful for attracting foreigners [utiles pour attirer les trangers],Footnote82 just as Montesquieu argues that the politeness of a society attracts foreigners to it [une politesse qui attire chez elle les trangers].Footnote83 Moreover, whereas Montesquieu declares that the society of women spoils mores and forms taste [la socit des femmes gte les murs, et forme le got],Footnote84 Rousseau admits that the theatre, where women are made the preceptors of the public,Footnote85 is useful for maintaining and perfecting taste [pour maintenir et perfectionner le got] when decency is lost.Footnote86 Rousseau yet again deploys Montesquieu's ideas when he says that a theatre can be useful for increasing the circulation of money [pour augmenter la circulation des espces], just as Montesquieu says that the prominent place of women and their tastes in society constantly increases the branches of commerce [on augmente sans cesse les branches de son commerce].Footnote87 Rousseau borrows and transmits all of these points of Montesquieu. For example, Rousseau in his Letter both adopts and adapts salient elements of Montesquieu's juxtaposition of French and English societies in Book 19. Rousseau and D'Alembert managed to maintain their friendship after the response, though somewhat at a distance. As Kelly points out, scholars have noted that Rousseau on several occasions in that work paraphrases without attribution the language of Montesquieu's Spirit; see Kelly, Rousseau and the Illustrious Montesquieu, in The Challenge of Rousseau, edited by Grace and Kelly, 21, notes 8 and 9; Leo Strauss, On the Intention of Rousseau, Social Research, 14 (1947), 45587 (45860); Antoine Adam, De quelques sources de Rousseau dans la littrature philosophique (17001750), in Jean-Jacques Rousseau et son oeuvre, problmes et recherches (Paris, 1964), 12533 (127); Michel Launay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et son temps (Paris, 1969), 93103. Nature, to provide a unifying, patriotic Spirit Confessions used is the Gamier edition ( Paris, earning! 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