SOURCE: Cro, Stelia. “The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom.” In The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom, pp. 131-57. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Cro argues that, to Rousseau, the idea of the Noble Savage spoke to the principles of physical and moral freedom.

The Noble Savage as Commonplace

By the middle of the eighteenth century the exoticism of the voyagers, who for over two centuries had proclaimed the natural goodness of the savages of America and the islands of the south seas, not only had inspired authors to write idealized accounts of the discovery and conquest of the New World, such as Marmontel's Les Incas, but it had inspired a radical new philosophy. In the words of Gilbert Chinard:

Ancient times had the Golden Age, the Middle Ages had the Terrestrial Paradise; at the time when the ancient myths were dead, or religion is buried...