[200] Economie Politique, pp. 41, 53, etc.

CHAPTER VI.

PARIS.

I.

By what subtle process did Rousseau, whose ideal had been a summer life among all the softnesses of sweet gardens and dappled orchards, turn into panegyrist of the harsh austerity of old Cato and grim Brutus’s civic devotion?  The amiability of eighteenth century France—­and France was amiable in spite of the atrocities of White Penitents at Toulouse, and black Jansenists at Paris, and the men and women who dealt in lettres-de-cachet at Versailles—­was revolted by the name of the cruel patriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline.[201] How came Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the height of these unlovely rigours?

The answer is that he was a citizen of Geneva transplanted.  He had been bred in puritan and republican tradition, with love of God and love of law and freedom and love of country all penetrating it, and then he had been accidentally removed to a strange city that was in active ferment with ideas that were the direct abnegation of all these.  In Paris the idea of a God was either repudiated along with many other ancestral conceptions, or else it was fatally entangled with the worst superstition and not seldom with the vilest cruelties.  The idea of freedom was unknown, and the idea of law was benumbed by abuses and exceptions.  The idea of country was enfeebled in some and displaced in others by a growing passion for the captivating something styled citizenship of the world.  If Rousseau could have ended his days among the tranquil lakes and hills of Savoy, Geneva might possibly never have come back to him.  For it depends on circumstance, which of the chances that slumber within us shall awake, and which shall fall unroused with us into the darkness.  The fact of Rousseau ranking among the greatest of the writers of the French language, and the yet more important fact that his ideas found their most ardent disciples and exploded in their most violent form in France, constantly make us forget that he was not a Frenchman, but a Genevese deeply imbued with the spirit of his native city.  He was thirty years old before he began even temporarily to live in France:  he had only lived there some five or six years when he wrote his first famous piece, so un-French in all its spirit; and the ideas of the Social Contract were in germ before he settled in France at all.

There have been two great religious reactions, and the name of Geneva has a fundamental association with each of them.  The first was that against the paganised Catholicism of the renaissance, and of this Calvin was a prime leader; the second was that against the materialism of the eighteenth century, of which the prime leader was Rousseau.  The diplomatist was right who called Geneva the fifth part of the world.