When we call a pronouncement a profession of faith we can mean two radically different things: we might mean that we are dealing with an individual’s proclamation of her or his innermost beliefs regardless of their conformity with any particular official dogma or we might simply be indicating the speech genre of an individual speaker’s proclamation of his or her adherence to an official religious creed. In either case a profession of faith demands to be respected in its integrity, to be taken as utterly sincere. Moreover, the content or object of belief is not to be disputed. Its truth claims are based, in the latter case, on both the officially authorized version of what are to be considered the core doctrines of a specific religion and on the sincerity of the individual speaker. In the former case, however, they are exclusively supported by the purity and force of the individual speaker’s conviction. Thus today the profession of faith—if understood apart from its official religious context as the sincere expression of an individual’s set of beliefs—appears in the immediate vicinity of, if not entirely exchangeable with, the genre of the confession. It is from the confession that it seems to have borrowed a certain valorization of an individualized, hidden self that reveals itself.
Indeed, modern subjectivity has been described in terms of a compulsion to confess, to proclaim publicly the most intimate, private thoughts and sentiments in a radically truthful, sincere manner.1 Rousseau’s Confessions represents one of the most prominent milestones in a cultural transformation that, beginning with the seventeenth-century critique of the kind of self-discipline, stoicism, and dissimulation required by courtly behavior, began to articulate itself in the affirmation of a private, possibly transgressive self, different from the public persona. The history of this aspect of modern subjectivity can be described as the transformation, secularization, and psychologization of the genres of the conversion narrative and the spiritual autobiography, and it can be situated in the context of the history of the declaration of love and the codification of intimacy.2 What have been less studied, however, are the kinds of communicative situations and pragmatic contexts from which the proclamation of one’s most intimate thoughts acquired its force, its monolithic status as an untouchable truth that not only cannot be subjugated to further inquiry or critique but also promises to be a socially redemptive act.
In what follows I shall show that Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” represents an exemplary text that both inaugurates this new speech of the self’s revelation in all its authenticity and sincerity and reflects on the generic conventions and transformations that are involved in producing this new speech genre in which the profession and confession become interchangeable. In more general terms, this one specific example shall provide me with the occasion to ask the question: What is entailed in the transposition of a distinctly nonliterary genre into the discourse of literature? How does the importing of a nonliterary genre define and transform the domain of literature, and what would be the effects of such a literary innovation on extraliterary forms of communication?
A principal feature of the heterogeneous multitude of nonliterary genres is their relatively fixed set of ties to specific institutional, pragmatic, and contextual situations. Nonliterary genres, such as the prayer, the business letter, the legal contract, the insurance claim, the obituary, or the scientific article are firmly embedded in the context of a specific discursive domain, clearly defined in view of their pragmatic status and function and regulated with regard to what can be said, how it is said, and who can occupy the position of the speaker and the addressee. By contrast, literary genres appear to be rather open with regard to any one specific pragmatic determination. Moreover, the individual text pertaining to a literary genre invokes not so much a concrete pragmatic situation but rather distinguishes itself in terms of its agreements with, and departures from, the generic conventions it invokes. Thus literary innovation frequently takes recourse to the nonliterary domain by appropriating and transforming nonliterary genres. One such example would be the emergence of the epistolary novel out of the handbook on familiar letter writing.3
Michael Bakhtin, interested in the pragmatic dimension of literature, defines the unifying feature of the literary text in terms of its unit as an utterance:
The vast majority of literary genres are secondary, complex genres composed of various transformed primary genres (the rejoinder in dialogue, everyday stories, letters, diaries, minutes, and so forth). As a rule, these secondary genres of complex cultural communication play out various forms of primary speech communication. Here is also the source of all literary/conventional characters of authors, narrators, and addressees. But the most complex and ultra-composite work of a secondary genre as a whole (viewed as a whole) is a single integrated real utterance that has a real author and real addressees whom this author perceives and imagines.4
Bakhtin’s contention that the “secondary genres of complex cultural communication play out various forms of primary speech communication” distinguishes the literary domain as a discursive realm in which ordinary, everyday communication is relieved of its immediate, concrete pragmatic force and consequences. The concept of “playing out” suggests that the pragmatic dimension of ordinary speech genres within a literary work is not fully actualized but instead highlighted only in its pragmatic potential. Within the thus virtualized sphere of speech, the combination of different illocutionary genres allows for experimentation and innovation as well as recodification and conventionalization. The literary work then participates in the extraliterary sphere by way of modeling a text/recipient relationship as a form of communication.
Bakhtin’s characterization of literature with regard to its modeling function of communicative situations is especially suggestive with regard to Rousseau’s framing of the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” Indeed, in what follows I shall show that the manner in which the “Profession” is integrated into the Émile contributes decisively to the immensely provocative character of the text, allowing for a reflection on the transformation of discursive options that are ushered in by this fusion of the genres of confession and profession. Finally, I will show how this text demarcates the cultural work that can be performed by literature as it also assigns a specific function to aesthetic contemplation.
The “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard” appeared in 1762 as part of the fourth volume of Rousseau’s Émile, ou de l’éducation. The reaction to its publication was vehement and violent, not only on the part of the Roman Catholic archbishop Christophe de Beaumont in Paris but also from the Calvinist authorities in Geneva. The book was publicly burned in both cities, and an order of arrest was issued against its author. Fortunately Rousseau had been warned by friends and thus was able to flee in time to the then Prussian territory of Neuchâtel.5 Especially today, one might wonder what made this text so terribly offensive to the church authorities, for at first glance it seems much less provocative than the writings on religion by the French philosophes or by David Hume. After all, the Savoyard vicar advocates an attitude of respect toward the official creed and its rituals and insists on the satisfaction, joy, and pride he takes in being a vicar of the Roman Catholic Church whose only wish is to have a parish of his own. Furthermore, he advises his young interlocutor, Émile’s tutor, to return to the Calvinist religion, the creed of his country and his father. To the extent that this text argues against the miserable uncertainty of the skeptic and promotes a belief in God as something that must precede all rational inquiry, one might indeed wonder why it should have caused the furious reaction against it.
Beginning with the Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont and still today, “The Profession of Faith” has been primarily discussed as if it were a separate publication titled “My Beliefs and Position Toward Official Religion” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Certainly, Rousseau contributed to this reception in his own letter to Beaumont when he pointed out that the Savoyard vicar does not argue anything that he, Rousseau, had not argued before, be it in the Discours sur l ’inégalité, his Lettre à M. d ’Alembert, or Julie.6 And even much later, in the third Promenade of the Rêveries, when Rousseau reflects on how he came to write the “Profession de foi” he portrays this text as if its main purpose and function had been to set down for himself, once and for all, the rules of his faith, the regula fidei.7 Thus in 1914 Jean-Pierre Masson published a critical edition of the “Profession de foi” to be followed by his three-volume study of Rousseau’s position toward religion. Similarly, Pierre Burgelin, in his introductory essay to the Pléiade edition of the Émile discusses the “Profession” as a relatively separate text and concludes that, though not terribly original in its critique of revealed religion and advocacy of natural religion, the text shows that Rousseau argues for a fundamentally humanist version of Christianity, one that does not leave much room for the Christian doctrine of revelation and redemption. Moreover, Burgelin wonders about the function of this text within the educational project of the Émile.8
Indeed, Émile’s education is characteristically devoid of religious instruction. The text of the “Profession” is inserted toward the end of the fourth book, which concludes the young man’s education, just before the tutor inspires him with love for the idea of the ideal woman. Especially if we read the Émile as an educational novel, the topic of religion is not further integrated within its diegetic universe, but remains marginal. Only from a systematic point of view does it seem an important aspect for an educational treatise to address. Thus it seems to be perfectly understandable that even Martin Rang’s carefully researched study of “The Profession” (part of a magisterial work on the Émile) reads the text as if it were a separate discourse on religion in which Rousseau works out various polemical positions vis-à-vis the philosophes, rewrites Descartes in the section on natural religion, and might be perceived as offending the Catholic Church with his critique of revealed religion and his comparison of Jesus to Socrates, but ultimately does not stray too far from the then acceptable positions of the Genevan authorities.9 Rang and Burgelin agree that Rousseau’s position in the “Profession,” with its emphasis on human perfectibility and rejection of the doctrine of original sin, culminates in some form of humanism. Rang, however, also emphasizes Rousseau’s desire to affirm his adherence to Calvinism and concludes that the “Profession” can be considered ultimately as expressing a fundamentally Christian position, in congruence with Rousseau’s explicit statement in his letter to Christophe de Beaumont.10 In brief, whatever their specific perspectives on Rousseau’s position toward the Christian religion, critics have tended to read the “Profession of Faith” as if it had been an isolated, separate text.
And yet, although the “Profession” is not very well integrated into the systematic aspect of Rousseau’s treatise on education, it is nevertheless carefully situated within its fiction, or rather, hypothetical discourse. Introduced and fleshed out as a character who was a crucial mentor figure to Émile’s tutor, the Savoyard vicar belongs to that aspect of the Émile that makes the book something different from a mere pedagogical treatise—that might not quite justify calling the Émile an educational novel but that consists in Rousseau’s strategy to provide his reader with concrete examples and hypothetical experiments, which have the status of simulations of lived experience rather than merely dry theory.11 It is in this sense that the manner in which Rousseau introduces the “Profession de foi” belongs to the field of fiction and literature. For this introduction to the “Profession,” the carefully motivated speech situations that frame the vicar’s speech and his dialogue with Émile’s tutor—which in Bakhtin’s words could be said to “play out various forms of primary speech communication”—provides a reflection on a specific potential of fictional discourse, namely its experimental aspect with regard to the pragmatic dimension of speech. In what follows I shall pay particular attention to the ten or so pages that precede the subtitle “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard,” pages that have been generally neglected in the discussion of the “Profession de foi,” as if they were merely superfluous paraphernalia. Yet it is in these pages that Rousseau performs and reflects on the decisive generic transformation to be ushered in with regard to the role of religion in the life of the individual person.
Just preceding the passages in question, the narrator/author tells the reader that so far Émile has had no contact with religion and that to a certain extent he wishes it were possible to keep the young away from religious instruction altogether, since they cannot understand it in any case. Yet religious institutions and religious instruction are to be found everywhere in the real world and represent great risks of breeding fanaticism and prejudice. Moreover, the religion one is exposed to and is brought up in seems entirely a question of historical and geographical chance. Hence, he argues, just as the goal of Émile’s education must be to provide him with a critical stance from which he can judge for himself how to approach any particular religion, he, as educator and teacher, will likewise abstain from preaching to his reader about religious choices, but leave his reader to make up his own mind, to judge for himself what he thinks about the religious ideas of a third person that he is going to transcribe: “Instead of telling you what I think myself, I will tell you the thoughts of one whose opinions carry more weight than mine. I guarantee the truth of the facts I am about to relate; they actually happened to the author whose writings I am about to transcribe; it is for you to judge whether we can draw from them any considerations bearing on the matter in hand. I do not offer you my own idea or another’s as your rule; I merely present them for your examination” (E 223; OC IV 558). Thus the “Profession de foi” is announced in lieu of an authorial statement about Rousseau’s own position towards religion. Clearly this cannot just be understood as a clumsy strategy to divert the censors; moreover, this was exactly the one thing it did not achieve. Rather, it is to introduce a character endowed with more authority on account of his being more worthy than the author (“un homme qui valait mieux que moi”). And it is with the aid of this other personality that the contours of a specific communicative situation—the dialogue between the vicar and the author—which is to model the dialogue between text and reader, are outlined.
As if to amplify this framing of the text as an utterance, before “quoting” the vicar’s profession of faith, the text breaks into a detailed narrative about the narrator and the Savoyard vicar: how the narrator met him, how the Savoyard vicar became his mentor and friend and finally entrusted him with his profession of faith. The function of this transitional narrative, then, is to prepare, frame, and set apart the “Profession de foi” as an utterance and to reflect on the pragmatic dimension and implications of this kind of speech. Whereas this transitional passage begins as a third-person narrative, it switches midway into a first-person account, where Rousseau, the author of the Émile, reveals himself as that young man who thirty years ago was rescued by the Savoyard vicar, when he, after having left his native country and Calvinist religion for Italy, found himself in bad company, totally impoverished and destitute: “I am weary of speaking in the third person, and the precaution is unnecessary; for you are well aware, my dear friend, that I myself was this unhappy fugitive; I think I am so far removed from the disorders of my youth that I may venture to confess them, and the hand which rescued me well deserves that I should at least do honour to its goodness at the cost of some slight shame” (E 226; OC IV 563). The reader is led to wonder about the function of this detour. Why not introduce the vicar from the beginning within the frame of an autobiographical account? What is achieved by this switch of pronouns?
First of all, the explicit transition from a third-person to a first-person narrative ushers in another switch, the one from a “hypothetical discourse” to a “factual discourse.” Furthermore, by calling attention to the shift in voice, the text calls attention to its illocutionary dimension and changes its status from a mere story to a personal confession witnessed by the reader. Indeed, the manner in which it dramatizes the act of confession interpellates the reader as an understanding confidant and intimate friend and characterizes the act of confession as an homage or tribute to the memory of the old vicar.
The act of confession is portrayed as a gift to the extent that it involves some cost, the shame of the speaker, and that it is freely and voluntarily given. Indeed, the gift-economic aspect of the confession has been prepared in the narrative leading up to the switch of pronouns, a narrative that focuses much on the act of confession without actually indicating what it is that is being confessed. Whereas we learn almost nothing about the actual transgressions of the young man except in the blandest and most general terms, we learn much more about the priest’s relationship to him, the manner in which he gained his confidence and was able to teach him, almost imperceptibly:
He began to win [gagner] the confidence of the proselyte by not asking any price for his kindness [en ne lui vendant point ses bienfaits], by not intruding himself upon him, by not preaching at him, by always coming down to his level, and treating him as an equal. It was, so I think, a touching sight to see a serious person becoming the comrade of a young scamp, and virtue putting up with the speech of licence in order to triumph over it more completely. When the young fool came to him with his silly confidences and opened his heart to him, the priest listened and set him at his ease; without giving his approval to what was bad, he took an interest in everything; no tactless reproof checked his chatter or closed his heart; the pleasure which he thought was given by his conversation increased his pleasure in telling everything; thus he made his general confession [sa confession générale] without knowing he was confessing anything.
(E 225; OC IV 561–62)
What is striking about this characterization of the vicar’s relationship to the young man is that the vicar apparently works with a radically secularized model of the confession. Instead of the codified examination of conscience that one might expect would provide the template for a Roman Catholic vicar’s approach to the genre, this vicar reveals himself as a forerunner of a psychotherapist/friend who elicits the “general confession” by virtue of his generosity and nonjudgmental way of listening. Though very different from the mature author’s confession to the reader, the young man’s confession is captured as well in a gift-economic register. Apparently the “general confession,” the young man’s perfectly open, unselfconscious manner of revealing his innermost self, is understood as an extension of his trust in the vicar, which the vicar receives in return for being kind without asking for any compensation. Finally, the text emphasizes that the priest, by listening in a receptive, nonjudgmental way, sets up a relationship of reciprocity that will eventually become one of equality. Again, in this last aspect, the priest’s handling of the speech genre of the confession appears to be not at all directed by the Roman Catholic ritual of the confession but instead by the more recent literary tradition of the confession of love that breaks with decorum but intensifies friendship and intimacy.12
The third-person account culminates and ends in an anecdote that shows how the priest gains his influence on the young man without attempting to impose his authority and without appearing to want to teach him anything:
The priest was so well known for his uprightness and his discretion, that many people preferred to entrust their alms to him, rather than to the wealthy clergy of the town. One day some one had given him some money to distribute among the poor, and the young man was mean enough to ask for some of it on the score of poverty. “No,” said he, “we are brothers, you belong to me [vous m’appartenez] and I must not touch the money entrusted to me.” Then he gave him the sum he had asked for out of his own pocket.
(E 266; OC IV 562)
This anecdote illustrates not only Rousseau’s pedagogical valorization of concrete deeds and lived experience over lofty theories, his ideal of teaching through a highly engaged personal relationship, but also comments on the priest’s relationship toward his official position and authority. Just as the priest did not react to the young man’s “confessions” by assuming his sacerdotal role and authority, so also, in this instance, he exempts the young man from the group of the poor parishioners who would be eligible for charity, making him instead a “brother” and hence an equal with whom he shares his private goods. Indeed, the way the priest’s rationalization of his refusal to touch the alms is phrased, namely that touching the alms in this case would mean their misappropriation for his own (“we are brothers, you belong to me”), suggests an intensified relationship of equality, one based on an identification with the other in which the exchange of gifts gives way to the sharing of a common good.
After the shift in voice, the focus of the narrative is no longer the misguided young man and the great skill by which the vicar manages to gain his confidence, but the young man’s description of the priest’s character, which is captured in terms of his sincerity and authenticity: “What struck me most was to see in the private life of my worthy master, virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech always plain and straightforward, and conduct in accordance with this speech” (E 226; OC IV 563). Significantly, this sentence follows immediately after the narrator has revealed himself as the young man about whom he had been writing. Thus the priest’s authenticity and sincerity are celebrated just after the narrator has proven his own commitment to these virtues.
At this point, it is possible to summarize what is accomplished with the shift in voice from third- to first-person narrative within the context of preparing for the vicar’s “profession of faith.”
1. The switch from an anonymous biographical to an autobiographical narrative introduces the fact/fiction distinction by drawing attention to the narrator’s position as an authentic witness whose sincerity has to be trusted and celebrated as a virtue.
2. By calling attention to this shift in voice, the text brings into relief its work with generic conventions, especially the genre of the confession. The manner in which the author dramatizes his own “confession” vis-à-vis the reader, and the motives he has for it, characterizes the pragmatic dimension of the confession, the way it can be conceived of in secular terms as a gift, and the manner in which it can be used to bring about a relationship of equality and reciprocity that is based on solidarity and opposed to hierarchical distinctions.
3. The direct address of the reader and the switch to the first-person account activate a dialogical dimension of the text and a shift from the narrative past, or the atemporal present tense of pedagogical theory, to the here and now of the interaction between the author and reader and the priest and the young author. The medial status of the text has shifted to one that invokes immediacy and orality, which indeed is followed by the passages written in direct speech.
The labor undertaken by these transitional pages that prepare the “Profession de foi” could also be characterized in terms of a reworking of the pragmatic implications of the various generic conventions involved: the use of the fact/fiction distinction and the highlighting of autobiographical authenticity as a means of creating a continuity with the reader’s discursive presence as opposed to the narrative past and the characterization of the confession in gift-economic terms project the ensuing text into a set of specific expectations as to the redemptive power of that particular form of communication and communion—a staging of the “Profession de foi” such that it achieves both a secularization of the profession of faith qua official credo and a sacralization of the intimate, confessional dialogue.
In this respect it is extremely significant that Rousseau chose to set off the actual discourse on religion with the title “Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard.”13 For, whereas the use of the speech genre of the confession has been radically secularized with regard to its highly codified form in Catholic ritual, the text also makes use of the nonliterary generic conventions associated with the confession and the profession of faith. For instance, it is noteworthy that Rousseau did not entitle the vicar’s discourse “Reflections on Natural Religion Followed by a Conversation About Revealed Religion.” If he had chosen that title, and maybe even replaced the character of the vicar with that of a friendly farmer or school-teacher, the relationship of this text to Christian dogma, ritual, and liturgy would have been decisively weakened. By contrast, the chosen title calls attention to the extraliterary genre of the profession of faith and, by specifying the speaker’s identity as an official of the Roman Catholic Church, leads the reader to expect one very specific discourse, namely the credo used in Roman Catholic liturgy, which until the French Revolution would generally take the form of the Nicene Creed:
I believe in one God, the almighty Father, maker of heaven and earth, maker of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before time began; God from God, light from light, true God from true God; begotten, not made, one in essence with the Father, and through whom all things were made. For us men, and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, took flesh of the Virgin Mary by the action of the Holy Spirit, and was made man, for our sake, too, under Pontius Pilate, he was crucified, suffered death, and was buried. And the third day he rose from the dead, as the scriptures had foretold. And he ascended to heaven, where he sits at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead; and his reign will have no end. I believe too in the Holy Spirit, Lord and life-giver, who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who together with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified; who spoke through the prophets. And I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. I acknowledge only one baptism for the remission of sins. And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.14
This should be the profession of faith of a Roman Catholic vicar, since it is this that constitutes the core of Christian belief: what is taught in preparation for confirmation, what is pronounced and professed publicly during key church rituals such as the administration of the sacraments of baptism or the communion. There is nothing personal about it; the credo is formulaic and fixed.
If one holds the Savoyard vicar’s profession of faith against the Nicene Creed that it replaces, its provocative potential becomes much clearer: except for the vicar’s belief in God, there is nothing that it shares with the Christian credo. Indeed, if the main part of the credo dwells on the necessity and possibility of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, the vicar’s credo rejects this core Christian mystery by taking up the heretical position of the Pelagians, arguing that the human being is fundamentally good, that is, not marked by original sin, free, and capable of perfection, a free creature of self-fashioning rather than a fallen creature in need of divine grace and redemption. And, indeed, this was one of the key issues at which Christophe de Beaumont took offense.15
Within the context of a pedagogical scenario of a wise old priest and a young man who has been led astray, who has lost any orientation with regard to religious issues, one would expect some form of religious instruction that would take its cues from the catechism, the codified, didacticized introduction to, and explication of, basic doctrinal issues. The catechism could even be understood as a didactic dialogue based on the credo. Now it is exactly this form of instruction, with its rigidly prefabricated questions and answers, that Rousseau has explicitly rejected and condemned as utterly useless when he introduces the topic of religious instruction.16 By choosing the “profession of faith” rather than the catechism as the occasion for a dialogue on religion, the formulaic, depersonalized nature of the official religious instruction does not follow some external institutional set of rules but is ushered in as a very personal, highly individualized response to the request by the young man. The occasion for that request comes as a result of the narrator’s bewilderment over the vicar’s strangely contented disposition, the ease with which he executes his duties as an official of the Catholic Church and his apparent happiness in spite of his poverty and lowly position:
“You happy! So little favoured by fortune, so poor, an exile and persecuted, you are happy! How have you contrived to be happy?” “My child,” he answered, “I will gladly tell you.” Thereupon he explained that, having heard my confession, he would confess to me [qu’après avoir receu mes confessions, il vouloit me faire les siennes]. “I will open my whole heart to yours,” he said, embracing me. “You will see me, if not as I am, at least as I seem to myself. When you have heard my whole confession of faith [profession de foi], when you really know the condition of my heart, you will know why I think myself happy, and if you think as I do, you will know how to be happy too. But these explanations [ces aveux] are not the affair of a moment, it will take time to show you all my ideas about the lot of man and the true value of life; let us choose a fitting time and place where we may continue this conversation without interruption.”
(E 228; OC IV 565)
The vicar’s profession of faith as a gift given in exchange for the young man’s confession of his sins thus stands in two paradigmatic classes: it stands in for the intimate, autobiographical confession of the vicar and it stands in for the credo of the vicar, the official belief. The two speech genres of the confession and profession are actually joined.17
The vicar very deliberately chooses the time and site of instruction in which he will present to the young man the gift of his profession of faith: his exemplary confession of the state of his heart. The intimate conversation takes place just after sunrise on a hill, overlooking the landscape. Thus stage and backdrop for the “Profession” are richly resonant with cultural history. Whereas Augustine, alluding to the dying Moses gazing toward the Holy Land, uses the view from the mountain as a simile for his own pseudo-conversion, Petrarch describes his ascent of Mont Ventoux as culminating in an insight into the futility of worldly desire. Upon reading a randomly selected passage from book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions, Petrarch repudiates the expansive domain of nature opened to his panoramic view: “‘Men go to admire the high mountain ranges and the great flood of seas and the wide-rolling rivers and the ring of the Ocean and the movements of the stars; and they abandon themselves.’… I was angry with myself for admiring the things of this world, when I should have learned long since from the pagan philosophers nothing is admirable except the soul, besides the greatness of which nothing is great.”18
Rousseau’s description of the setting for the “Profession de foi” displays an altogether different attitude toward nature:
It was summer time; we rose at daybreak. He took me out of the town on to a high hill above the river Po, whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks; in the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of the Alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains and cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and houses, enriched with a thousand gleams of light the fairest picture [le plus beau tableau] which the human eye can see. You would have thought that nature was displaying all her splendour before our eyes to furnish a text for our conversation. After contemplating this scene for a space in silence, the man of peace spoke to me.
(E 228; OC IV 565)
In contrast to Petrarch, we are not presented with the juxtaposition of a written text and a landscape, a tension between a landscape evocative of worldly longings and a text that recalls the otherworldly concerns with the true nature of the soul, but, quite to the contrary, the landscape is likened to a tableau, a beautiful picture to be enjoyed, and to a text, the text of Nature that backs up the intimate conversation. In other words, nature is an object of aesthetic contemplation, but not a temptress, not worldly distraction but affirmed in its secular status, and nature provides an authoritative text that supports the conversing that is to take place. Not a book, not a learned authority, nor the written tablets of the divine law, certainly no writing and reading, but rather, a beautiful natural landscape provides the setting and background to the oral, intimate conversation between friends. Finally, the setting of this scene is not a high mountain but merely a hill; the two friends are not on those lofty mountain peaks where traditionally one would seek the contact with the divine or the sacred but remain immersed within the sight of the cultivated landscape. This nature, consciously contemplated in silence, replaces an authoritative or sacred text. To the extent that the “Profession de foi” is meant to show the young author, and by extension the reader, an exemplary attitude or ethos that is the condition of the possibility of happiness and morality, this very ethos is grounded in the aesthetic experience of nature.
To a certain extent I have characterized the general thrust of the importing of the nonliterary genre of the profession of faith and its fusion with the confession in terms of a process of secularization. However, this is only part of the story. For one can just as well trace a certain sacralization of what would otherwise be a perfectly mundane and profane activity, namely the instructional dialogue between two people. The scenario of the communication on the hillside is marked as an exceptional occasion requiring a particular time and setting that sets it apart from everyday speech and endows it with a solemn and festive character. The vicar chooses this special site and time of day to reveal to the young man the narrative of his spiritual quest, laying bare to him the state of his heart in response to the question as to how he arrived at a disposition that allowed him to be so happy and contented with his state. To the extent that through the vicar’s profession of faith the young man is to receive the key to inner-worldly happiness, the scene on the hillside holds the promise of a revelation and a redemption. By way of this pragmatic determination as well as in its recall of the liturgical genres of the credo and the confession, the discourse on the hill asks to be contrasted with the Christian ritual of the communion. For our scene of gift giving, where the first gift, the confession of the personal failure and sins of the young man, generates the gift of the vicar’s creed that is to reveal how to live a life of peace and happiness, can be read in contrast to the sequence of liturgical genres that constitute the core Christian church ritual of the communion. Thus in the Calvinist ritual we have the following sequence: after the sermon there is an appeal to self-examination, then the confession of sins, then the creed, then the words of institution to be concluded by the actual communion through the consumption of the host, which represents the acceptance of Christ’s sacrificial death. Clearly the whole sacrificial aspect of the Christian ritual has been abolished, instead we have the “redemption” through the “profession of faith,” which represents a key to this-worldly happiness, not otherworldly redemption.19 On the site of the hill the contact with the divine has been replaced by the gift of the confession and the panoramic view of beautiful nature. The careful staging of the scene highlights its inaugural character, it frames the “profession” as an event that is to usher in a new era for the organization of Enlightenment culture. And this cultural work that is being performed by the form of the “profession,” both its site and its generic innovation, is the displacement of religion in favor of the domain that by the end of the eighteenth century will become the autonomous sphere of art and aesthetics.
Rousseau’s text reframes the domain of belief in a secular manner such that it can address the question of “what we can hope” in a secular fashion. The “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar” secularizes the domain of teleology and relates it to an individualizable personal experience that nevertheless has a universalist note attached to it. The very particular sunrise on the hilltop has its unique beauty, however it inaugurates an aesthetic disposition toward nature that can be actualized by anybody. The vicar’s creed has nothing in common with the formulas of an official dogma but has grown out of his own life experience, as it is also ultimately rooted in his heart and sentiment, which he lays bear to his interlocutor. Nevertheless, this autobiographical specificity of the vicar’s discourse is not such that it would appear unique and exclusive, but instead asks to be actualized and confirmed by the reader’s own individuality.
Analyzing the integration of the confession of sins and the profession of faith within a hypothetical narrative of education, I have characterized the importing of these nonliterary genres into the domain of literature primarily in terms of a secularization of these liturgical forms culminating in the transformation of the ritual of communion into an intimate dialogical exchange between individuals. Yet, to the extent that the speech situation in its uniquely beautiful natural setting stands in lieu of the church, it sets the personalized dialogical exchange apart from a merely mundane form of conversation and endows it with the soteriological promise of the sacrament. However, it would be misleading to end this analysis on the note of a certain trend of resacralization. For, ultimately, when the text is considered in terms of its pragmatic dimension as an offering, as an author’s/writer’s address to a reader, it is the literary, fictional, or virtual dimension that prevails. Clearly, the external addressee of this text is neither in church nor on a hilltop overlooking the Po, nor is he or she involved in any actual dialogue but reading a text that does not require any specific response or action, although the “staging” of the text together with its “framing” models a particular relationship to its discourse, which the reader is free to accept or reject. Likening the natural setting to a beautiful painting (tableau) appeals to a contemplative, theoretical freedom exercised by the beholder that could also be characterized by the Kantian term disinterested interest, whereas the vicar’s autobiographical narration and dialogical exchange with his interlocutor appeals to the reader to compare and contrast, to test and validate what she or he reads in light of her or his own lived experience.
Nevertheless, the section entitled “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” did not protect Rousseau from being prosecuted for having published a position deemed hostile to the official creed both in the eyes of Roman Catholic and Calvinist authorities. It has been read all along as Rousseau’s position on the role of religion, albeit through the mouthpiece of another person, a vicar he had met as a young man on his travels through northern Italy. And yet what it also managed to accomplish through this form was the assertion of another realm, the realm of imaginative literature apart from the realm of official institutions: a realm of potential reality, one that would allow for the examination, testing, and transformation of existing speech genres.
It also accomplished something more specific, something extending to the actual speech genre of the confession as well as the profession of faith: it fused them, it made them the equivalent by putting a supreme value on authenticity and the subjective experience of the concrete individual rather than the formulaic creed or the confession according to a prefabricated format. This latter achievement, an achievement of lasting consequences, went along with another generic move, the move toward a new secular autobiography. In the pages leading up to the “Profession of Faith,” in the framing of this conversation, the narrator, so to speak, breaks through the fourth wall when he switches from the third to the first person, calling the reader’s attention to the fact that the young man who had met this memorable Savoyard vicar was not actually an anonymous young man but he, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Through this move, the text as a whole becomes the unit of utterance and the external reader is also interpellated as the confidant of an intimate confession, the witness of authentic speech. The pedagogical treatise with its fictional pupil Émile becomes part of a piece of autobiographical writing where the text appears as the authentic utterance of its external composer. What remains constant, however, is the imaginative component of intimacy and direct, unembellished, authentic communication, a situation of an engaged solitary reader’s absorption in the text. To a certain extent, this is also the framing condition of Rousseau’s autobiographical writing in his autobiographical Confessions. Moreover, this latter work brings into play other audiences, which are far more problematic than this solitary, absorbed reader. It is this attention to different kinds of audiences vis-à-vis his work and his concept of authorship that will be at the center of the following section on his Confessions.
Rousseau was very critical of his publics, especially when it came to the power play, networking, and trade in intimacy that informed the role of the philosophes and hommes de lettres of salon culture.20 And, indeed, his Confessions can be read as the narrative of how he became an author who increasingly avoided contact with his contemporary publics in favor of the virtual and ideal audience of posthumous print publications. Yet he was also proud of his celebrity status, of being known among an anonymous crowd of people. In fact, he even relied on it in the hope it would provide him with more work as a copyist and thereby secure his financial autonomy, providing him with a stable alternative to dependence on gifts and patronage.21 Moreover, to the extent that Rousseau conceived of himself as the producer not only of verbal but also of musical texts, he was intensely aware of the importance of a real as opposed to a virtual audience. For a composer of an opera to be able to enjoy his own work, the work has to be performed, which in most cases means before a live audience. When Rousseau points this out in book 8 of the Confessions, the center of his autobiographical reflections on authorship, he adds that when it came to the performance of his opera he wished to have it performed exclusively for him alone. Indeed, Rousseau’s self-portrait as a writer, composer, copyist, and author, his narrative of how he came to inhabit different positions toward authorship, ranging from the one of the impostor, who falsely claims to be able to provide valuable musical entertainment, to the censored and persecuted writer of an educational treatise, and the recluse who defers the publication of his Confessions to a posthumous date, is centered on his relationship to different kinds of contemporaneous audiences, be they the exclusive circles of the salons, the larger and partially anonymous group of readers and critics involved in scholarly polemics and debates, the coffee house publics, or the theater and opera audiences at court and in the city. How Rousseau developed his concept of authorship with regard to these different audiences, implying different media of publication and dissemination, will be the focus of this discussion of the Confessions.
According to his Confessions, Rousseau becomes a famous author all of a sudden. At one moment he is an unknown individual among the anonymous crowd of the print audience of the Mercure, an ordinary reader encountering the question of the essay competition, seized by excitement, feeling he has an important insight, jotting it down. A year later, suddenly and unexpectedly, he wins the first prize of the Dijon Academy and becomes a public figure. Although he mentions that it was Diderot who encouraged him to finish the piece and who eventually found a publisher for it, and although he also acknowledges that Raynal, the editor of the Mercure, was a good friend to him, he does not elaborate on Raynal’s role. Instead, he presents the case as if he had become an instant celebrity by winning the Academy prize. Rousseau does not mention that he did not attend the award ceremony but sent a proxy and was not present when the piece was read aloud to the members of the Dijon Academy. Moreover, his essay was not published then, but first made available to a print audience through Raynal’s summary. According to Cranston, Raynal devoted an entire year’s publications of the Mercure primarily to calling attention to Rousseau’s piece.22 Both Rousseau’s actual account together with these significant omissions make it clear that Rousseau is highly invested in attributing his status as a publicly known author exclusively to the quality of his writing and the originality of his thinking, not to personal connections and the publicity generated by reviews and scholarly debate. This is why he has to present himself as an author who emerges all of a sudden out of the anonymous audience of a printed journal.
Whereas Rousseau downplays the importance of the salons and the republic of letters, he does acknowledge the importance of anonymous crowds for his role as an author. There are, however, two exceptions among those publics when it comes to the issue of anonymity: King Stanislas of Poland is the most prominent audience member of the print audience of his first discourse, and King Louis XV of the live audience of his opera Le Devin du village. Both kings become crucial reference points for how he portrays himself as an author. As opposed to two other critics whom he merely mentions in passing as minor figures of whom he made short shrift, King Stanislas’s status provides Rousseau with an addressee to whom he can offer an exemplary response:
Up to the present, this piece, which somehow or other has made less commotion than my other writings, is a unique work in its type. In it I seized the occasion I was offered to teach the public how a private man could defend the cause of truth even against a sovereign. It is difficult to take a more proud and at the same time more respectful tone than the one I took to answer him. I had the good fortune to be dealing with an adversary for whom my heart was full of esteem and therefore could bear witness of it to him without adulation; that is what I did successfully enough, but always with dignity. Being frightened for me, my friends already believed they saw me in the Bastille. I did not fear that for a single moment, and I was right. After having seen my answer this good Prince said, “That is enough for me, I will not have anything more to do with it.” Since then I have received several marks of esteem and benevolence from him some of which I will be citing, and my writing circulated tranquilly around France and Europe without anyone finding anything to blame in it.
(C 307; OC I 366)
According to this account, the exchange with King Stanislas provides Rousseau with the opportunity of showing himself exclusively subject to the pursuit of truth, not beholden to anything or anybody else. His fearless but respectful behavior provides him with a mantle of authority that sets him apart from his concerned philosopher friends and makes him into the equivalent of an enlightened king. It becomes a template for his model of an author’s relationship toward his public. It does not, however, present an example of how any individual (particulier), regardless of rank and power, should be able to speak up in pursuit of truth and engage in a public debate. Note that nowhere in all of the Confessions does Rousseau give credit to dialogue or debate as a means of arriving at an insight. Truth is obtained solely by way of an epiphany, such as the one he had on his way to Vincennes, when reading the Mercure or by reflection and authentic experience, not discursively through a spirited exchange.23 In other words, when he engages in this public exchange with the Polish king he fearlessly defends his position, but he does not publicly engage in a process of truth finding.
Towards the conclusion of book 8, just before Rousseau announces to his reader his decision to publish the Confessions posthumously, i.e., to avoid contact with his contemporary audience altogether, he returns to his relationship vis-à-vis Stanislas.24 In that context he narrates how he drew on his personal connection with the king in order to save an impudent playwright from being expulsed from the academy. Pallisot, member of the Academy of Nancy, had one of his plays performed before Stanislas at Lunéville, which showed
a man who had dared to pit himself against the King pen in hand. Stanislas, who was generous, and who did not like satire, was indignant that someone dared to make personal attacks in his presence in this way. M. the Comte de Tressan wrote to d’Alembert and me by the order of this Prince to inform me that His Majesty’s intention was that the said Palissot be expelled from his Academy. My answer was a lively prayer to M. de Tressan to intercede with the King of Poland to obtain clemency for the Said Palissot. The clemency was granted, and when he notified me of it in the King’s name, M. de Tressan added that this fact would be inscribed in the records of the Academy. I replied that this was less granting clemency than perpetuating a punishment. At last as a result of solicitations I obtained the promise that there would be no mention of anything in the records and that there would remain no public trace of this affair.
(C 335; OC I 399)
Rousseau characterizes the offense of Pallisot’s performance as showing “un homme qui avoit osé se mesurer avec le Roi la plume à la main” (“a man who dared to pit himself against the King pen in hand”), i.e., he uses a phrase that could describe his own response to Stanislas in the debate about his Discours sur les sciences et les arts. And yet he does not express his solidarity with the fictional character or the playwright, although he intercedes for him with the king. Ultimately, it is exclusively from his pen then that the final record of events is to issue. He even calls his reader’s attention to the contradiction in his opposition to the recording of the Pallisot affair by the Academy Annals and his subsequent narration in his own autobiography. For this allows him again to assert his uniqueness, consisting in his utter truthfulness. Moreover, he adds at the conclusion of this book, being the victim of relentless persecution and slander, his narrative is necessary to guarantee the survival of his name, albeit posthumously.25
The narratives about the composition and performance of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village provide a counterpoint to the episodes that deal with the composition and the publication of the Discours sur les sciences et les arts. In the case of a musical composition as opposed to a verbal text, the author tends to be far more dependent on its actual performance by musicians. Already, if he wants to have a clear idea of his own work, merely reading it and imagining the sound and sight will not so easily suffice. Moreover, if a musical composition is not actually performed, it is very unlikely that the print medium would be able to conjure up a significant audience for it. Whereas the author of verbal texts can rely on the print medium as the guarantee of the ultimate validity and endurance of his work in its appeal to an ideal, virtual audience, the author of musical texts, by contrast, depends to a much greater extent on the concrete production and performance of his works for live audiences. Isolated, individual readers do not allow for the survival of musical texts and their composer.
Just as the first discourse was the product of “a calling,” depicted as the almost feverish composition of Rousseau’s thoughts upon reading the Mercure, the composition of his second opera is also depicted as the result of an almost accidental, but fateful, encounter. Rousseau tells how he spent some days in the country at the home of his dear friend and compatriot, the shell-collecting Mussard, who shared his love of Italian opera. After one of their animated evening conversations about opera: “I began to dream about how one could write songs to give the idea of a Drama of this type in France”(C 314; OC I 374). In this narrative Rousseau presents himself as dreaming about intervening in the taste of the French nation, though he needs the encouragement of his host to carry out the actual composition.26 Considering himself above the taste of his contemporaries, he wants the piece performed not to please others but for his very own enjoyment:
Being excited by the composition of this work, I had a great passion to hear it, and I would have given the whole world to see it performed at my whim, behind closed doors, as it is said Lully had Armide played one time for himself alone. Since I could not have this pleasure except along with the public, in order to enjoy my Piece I necessarily had to get it accepted by the Opera. Unfortunately it was in an absolutely new genre to which ears were not at all accustomed, and moreover the poor success of The Gallant Muses made me foresee that of the Soothsayer if I presented it under my name. Duclos extricated me from the difficulty and took it upon himself to get the work tried while leaving the Author unknown. So as not to reveal myself I was not present at that rehearsal, and the little Violins who directed it themselves did not know who its Author was until after a general acclaim had attested the goodness of the work.
(C 315; OC I 375)
Many details of how he composed his opera betray a great anxiety when it comes to coming into contact with actual audiences. However, apart from hiding from live audiences, there is the added option of being above them, controlling them, while being untouchable by them. Through the reference to Jean-Baptiste de Lully (1632–1687), the most powerful musician, ballet and opera composer at the court of the Sun King, Rousseau reactivates the alignment of the author with a figure of sovereignty. However, instead of a public dialogue between two autonomous partners, as in the case of King Stanislas, here we have a powerful composer/author who, in the manner in which he can exclusively enjoy the fruits of his labor, projects an image of autonomy that would be associated with his patron Louis XIV, but in this instance actually allows him to usurp the latter’s place. But there are also essential differences between the model of authorship associated with Lully and the one Rousseau proposes. Most importantly, Rousseau is opposed to any form of patronage. The king has no influence on the nature of the work, and the author is decidedly not a courtier. Already when he insists that he made sure nobody would know about his authorship when his friend Duclos let some musicians perform it in order to decide whether the piece would be worthy of a whole-scale production, Rousseau clearly creates a parallel to the essay competition of the Dijon Academy, which also based its decision on an anonymous submission process. He is not subject to pleasing an audience, but merely wants to enjoy his work by himself.
Yet, for Rousseau to be able to inhabit successfully the role of the sovereign author, he must undergo an internal transformation, which consists in overcoming a terrible bashfulness, one of his most distinct personal handicaps. Furthermore, he raises the stakes. Whereas the public exchange of letters with King Stanislas was conducted in a relationship of reciprocity and mutual respect, in the case of Le Devin du village Rousseau is exposed to the audience of the court of Louis XV, a situation where his ultimate reference point is not just the exiled king of Poland (who did not publicly reveal his identity in his critique of Rousseau, although Rousseau was aware of it and most conscious of it in his public response), but the ruling monarch of France.27
As in all of his narratives about the performance of his pieces, his focus is almost exclusively on the relationship between the author and the audience. The singers, musicians, and virtuosi are entirely eclipsed. Rousseau does not trace the fate of his piece in terms of the evolution of its production. Instead, he narrates how the day after the dress rehearsal he witnesses the lengthy narrative of an older man, an officer, who claims to have attended the rehearsal, to have seen and heard the author’s comments. Entirely unaware, the officer speaks about this in the very presence of the one about whom he is speaking:
He appealed to me in spite of his impudence and in spite of me: while he was retailing his lies, I blushed, I lowered my eyes, I was on thorns; several times I sought within myself for some way to believe he was in error and good faith. Finally trembling that someone might recognize me and insult him with it, I hastened to finish my chocolate without saying anything, and lowering my head while passing in front of him, I left as early as I could, while the people present perorated about his report. In the street I noticed that I was in a sweat, and I am sure that if someone had recognized me and named me before my exit, they would have seen the shame and embarrassment of a guilty man, from the sole feeling of the pain that this poor man would have to suffer if his lie was recognized.
(C 316; OC I 377)
With this scenario Rousseau demonstrates his social handicap, to look guilty and to act bashful without any actual reason for it; in fact, by being only too good, too empathetic, he is led into this demeaning position and behavior. In that aspect this narrative sets up a clear goal. Rousseau has to overcome this fear of anticipated feelings of shame if he wants to be accepted as the person he is—namely the author of the opera—within the audience attending his piece. In other words, what this narrative about the dress rehearsal’s discussion in the café has accomplished is that it has entirely reframed what will be at stake during the premiere of the opera: the premiere will be about the author/composer being accepted by the audience attending the performance, rather than about the successful production of the piece.
And, indeed, exactly as if to take up Rousseau’s narrative about the discussion of the dress rehearsal in the café, the narrative about the actual premiere of Le Devin du village at court initially focuses on his self-conscious realization that he looked like a total misfit in the audience, which he then managed to overcome. The narrative then turns to the audience’s and Rousseau’s own reaction, until finally the various reactions to the opera flow together into one of oceanic bliss. Although the narrative focuses on the anticipation of the king’s arrival, the actual entrance of the king and his entourage are not narrated, nor are any of the king’s reactions or his appearance part of the record.28 The spotlight is exclusively on Rousseau in his box and on the surrounding ladies:
When it was lit up, I began to be ill at ease seeing myself in this outfit in the midst of people who were all excessively adorned: I asked myself whether I was in my place, whether I was suitably dressed? and after several minutes of anxiety, I answered myself, yes, with an intrepidity that perhaps came more from the impossibility of withdrawing than from the strength of my reasons. I told myself, “I am in my place, since I am seeing my piece played, since I was invited, since that is the only reason I composed it, and since after all no one has more right than myself to enjoy the fruit of my labor and my talents. I am dressed in my ordinary way, neither better nor worse. If I begin to be enslaved to opinion in something, I will soon be enslaved to it in everything all over again. To always be myself wherever I am I must not blush at being dressed in accordance with the station I have chosen … I ought to be able to endure ridicule and blame as long as they are not deserved. … but from either the effect of the presence of the master, or the natural inclination of hearts, I noticed nothing except what was obliging and decent in the curiosity of which I was the object. … I was armed against their raillery; but their caressing air, which I had not expected, subjugated me so much that I was trembling like a child when the performance began.
(C 317; OC I 377–378)
Rousseau gathers himself at this moment of embarrassment by asserting his right to listen to the music he has composed, to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Only in a second step does he assure himself that his physical appearance must not give him reason to be embarrassed. The initial critical remark of the first-person narrator is recalibrated: as the composer, he is not just anybody in the audience, but he holds an absolutely unique position. The main source of confidence lies in his authorship of the piece; it overrides both issues of rank and issues of decorum.
What makes it possible for him to regain his self-confidence, however, is not alone the question of what is rightfully due to him, as based on an insight, but the actual reaction of the audience to seeing him, providing him with an actual physical sensation. Yet both the audience’s and his own intense enjoyment of the piece would not have been possible had it not been performed at court and in the king’s presence:
One does not clap in front of the King; this made it so that everything was heard; the piece and the author gained from it. Around me I heard a whispering of women who seemed as beautiful as angels to me, and who said to each other in a whisper, “That is charming, that is ravishing; there is not a sound in it that does not speak to the heart.” The pleasure of giving some emotion to so many lovable persons moved me to the point of tears, and I could not hold them back at the first duo, while noticing that I was not alone in crying … Nevertheless, I am sure that at this moment the pleasure of sex entered into it much more than an author’s vanity, and surely if there had only been men there, I would not have been devoured, as I was ceaselessly, with the desire to collect with my lips the delicious tears I was causing to flow. I have seen Pieces excite more lively outbursts of admiration, but never as full, as sweet, as touching an intoxication reign during a whole spectacle, and above all at the court on the day of the first performance. Those who saw this one ought to remember it; for the effect was unique.
(C 318; OC I 378–379)
The presence of the king, which guarantees that the audience abstains from applause, prevents the tribute to the performers. Moreover, it creates an audience, which does not display loudly and openly its own judgment about the piece by clapping, booing, or hissing. Instead, the audience members are subdued in their expressions and thus can pay attention to their own sentiments, which allows Rousseau to focus exclusively on the nuanced reactions among individualized audience members, the emotional reactions of beautiful ladies moved to tears sharing their sentiments with each other and by way of contiguity also with him. He sees himself, from his perspective in the front row of the director’s box, as almost the only male audience member. In this observation he also eclipses the king. The experience is portrayed as one of synesthetic pleasure, arousal, and oral gratification and thus more resembles sexual gratification than the enjoyment of one’s glory.
The indulgence of glory is interestingly contained and managed in the narrative presentation. It is addressed through the memory of the terrible performance before M. de Treitorens, when Rousseau had agreed to present a musical entertainment composed by him while he was in fact barely capable of reading music.29 “This reminiscence had the effect of the slave who held the crown on the head of the triumphant generals, but it was short, and I am sure that at this moment the pleasure of sex entered into it much more than an author’s vanity, and surely if there had only been men there, I would not have been devoured, as I was ceaselessly, with the desire to collect with my lips the delicious tears I was causing to flow” (C 318; OC I 379).
Yet, whereas at the concert of M. de Treitorens Rousseau was exposed as a shameless impostor who did not know music, and hence could not produce any pleasing entertainment for his audience, now, by way of contrast, he is the true master of the operatic performance. The comparison with the Roman ritual of the triumph, the grand honoring of exceptionally victorious military leaders as godlike or kinglike creatures, not only brings out the contrast between public stature and the human, mortal body, but it also aligns him further with the figure of the absolute sovereign, a figure he ultimately usurps and eclipses in blissful sexual union with the tears he is eager to drink, his own and those his piece produces in the reactions of the angelic, deeply moved ladies surrounding him. Furthermore, by way of this comparison he manages to transform his impostrous behavior into a common feature of human mortality.
The narrative about the performance of Le Devin du Village at court provides a model of an author who asserts his power over his audience by speaking directly to each individual’s heart and emotion, who enjoys this power in terms of a sentimental union with his audience, and who does not allow for any expression of criticism or applause that arrogates to itself a position of superiority. Though not distinguished in terms of social rank, power, or influence, nor in terms of external displays of luxury, this author must not be confused with any particular individual from his audience, for he is unique as the sole and original creator of his works.30 In that respect the sovereign author is absolutely different from a common audience member, like the mendacious officer who claims to have attended the dress rehearsal as well as all the squabbling scholars and philosophers of the republic of letters. The author has an intimate relationship with his audience, but not one where any mere audience member could presume to respond from the position of an equal.
The performance of Le Devin du village at court is presented in stark contrast with the performances of the same piece in the City Opera as concerns the depiction of the public’s relationship to the figure of the author. Whereas the court performance lets the composer inhabit the role of a sovereign ruler over the audience’s nuanced emotional responses, the audience of the City Opera is portrayed in a string of narratives, which focuses on the fickleness of the Parisian crowds as part of a factionalized political landscape. Immediately preceding the narrative about the performance of Le Devin du village in the City Opera, Rousseau provides a strangely dense and somewhat obscure account of how he became the focus of insults, even the victim of a planned assassination attempt. The public’s abuse of him, however, comes to a sudden halt when it becomes known that the opera guild had withdrawn the author’s customary privilege of free admission: “In this proceeding there was such a combination of iniquity and brutality, that the public—at that time in its greatest animosity against me—did not fail to be unanimously shocked by it, and the next day those who had insulted me the day before shouted loudly in the room that it was shameful to deprive an Author of his free admission in this way when he had deserved it so much and could even lay claim to two of them. So accurate is the Italian proverb that ogn’un ama la giustizia in casa d ’altrui” (C 323; OC I 385). The fact that the opera audience ultimately comes to his aid, defending his right of free access to the performances of his own work, does not produce for Rousseau any confidence in the general goodwill and fairness of the public. He is certain that the public will always be fickle and entertain a vicarious, spectacular relationship to the execution of justice.
Beyond his general distrust in the fairness of the public, Rousseau is actually proud of the public’s animosity toward him, for this animosity is the effect of his intervention in the Querelle des Bouffons, where, according to his rather outlandish-sounding statement, the publication of his Lettre sur la musique françoise managed to prevent a revolution:
The letter on music was taken seriously, and raised against me the whole Nation, which believed itself offended in its music. The description of the unbelievable effect of this pamphlet would be worthy of the pen of Tacitus. It was the time of the great quarrel of the Parlement and the Clergy. The Parlement had just been exiled; the fermentation was at its peak; everything threatened an approaching uprising. The Pamphlet appeared; instantly all the other quarrels were forgotten; only the peril of French music was thought of, and there was no longer any uprising except against me. At the Court they wavered only between the Bastille and exile, and the letter de cachet was going to be expedited, if M. de Voyer had not felt how ridiculous it was. When you read that this pamphlet perhaps prevented a revolution in the State, you will believe you are dreaming. Nevertheless, it is a very real truth which all of Paris can still attest, since today is only fifteen years since this peculiar anecdote.
(C 322; OC I 384)
According to this account, the Lettre sur la musique françoise prevented a revolution by distracting from the engagement in factionalized battles such as the one that was about to cause an uprising, the conflict between the clergy and the Parliament.31 As opposed to real, live publics that interact in face-to-face communication, the nation transcends those temporal and spatial limitations. Rousseau claims to have replaced factionalism with national unity. Instead of the battle where the party of the “Corner of the King” is opposed to the party of the “Corner of the Queen,”32 and the clergy against the Parliament, neither spatial limitations, nor institutional affiliations and interests divide the people, who are suddenly gathered in the virtual, imagined community of the nation. And yet when Rousseau attributes some kind of agency to this imagined community, he transposes it into the live audience of the City Opera, of which he claims there had been a group of people that attempted to have him assassinated, a mob that did not carry out its intent, and a crowd that was swayed to take his side once they learned that his authorial right to free entry had been abrogated.
Book 8 of Rousseau’s Confessions provides a detailed, engaged, and politically telling portrait of how he conceived of himself as an author. On the one hand, he portrays himself as an author who owes his celebrity status merely to the quality and novelty of his work, not to the power of influential friends or the sponsorship of a patron. On the other hand, and here his concept of authorship is fundamentally different from the one supported by many of his contemporaries, especially the philosophes but also the larger community of scholars and critics, academy members and attendees of Parisian salons, he has no interest in open, public debate, he dreads polemics, and rejects any form of factionalism. The authorial status he occupies cannot be taken up by just anybody among the general public of a print audience, or of the clients, discussing current events and the arts in publicly accessible cafés. In that respect he portrays himself as an exception, as unique, as the equivalent of the king, whether the exiled king of Poland or Louis XV. It is in the presence of the latter that he gets to realize and sensually enjoy the emotional influence of his work over his audience. This audience expresses sentiment in a nuanced and individualized manner, neither as a group nor as factions that would pass judgment. This model is ultimately crucial not only for Rousseau’s approach to live audiences but also to the virtual audience of a reading public, which has the crucial advantage of not needing the disciplining presence of a king.
When Rousseau published Narcisse, a comedy he had written much earlier, but which he had performed on the Parisian stage only right after the success of his opera, he curiously reminds his reader of the court performance and the possibility of the sovereign’s presence, when he adumbrates the title page of the printed version of his play as follows: “Narcisse ou l’Amant de lui-même, comédie par J.-J. Rousseau, représenté par les comédiens du roi, le 18 Décembre 1752” (Narcissus or the Lover of Himself, a comedy by J.-J. Rousseau, performed by the king’s comedians, December 18, 1752). Through this not altogether unconventional reference to an actual performance the readers of the play are invited to imagine themselves at the performance of the piece at court. The creation of a virtual audience of sympathetic readers trumps the actual gathering of live publics. In that sense, Rousseau’s depiction of the lady who had been too absorbed in the fiction of his epistolary novel Julie to attend the ball she had been invited to, a lady though he somehow wished to have known but nevertheless chose not to meet in person, is the perfect embodiment of his ideal readership.33 As concerns actual live audiences and their collective affects, rather than individualized, nuanced emotions, there too, as we have seen with regard to Rousseau’s depiction of the effect of his Lettre sur la musique françoise, the virtual audience of print trumps everything else. It is only the print medium that can transcend the spatialized, temporalized limitations that allow for the imagined community of readers—united, in this case, in hatred against its author who dared to defile the reputation of French music.
In contrast to those audiences, the audiences who hated, persecuted, and harassed Rousseau, Rousseau himself, as he claims at the conclusion of the penultimate book of the Confessions, was only too ready to forget the evils done to him. Though he might be moved to anger, he was constitutionally incapable of bearing grudges and plotting revenge. He illustrates his forgiving nature by telling his readers that at the time of the worst treatment by his audiences and the political authorities, when he had to flee Montmorency, he occupied himself with rewriting one of the most horrifically violent stories of revenge, the story of the Levite of Ephraim from Judges, in the manner of his compatriot Salomon Gessner’s idylls. This most gruesome narrative of gang rape, murder, and collective revenge and warfare, a story about the concerted collaboration of the Israelite tribes, which often has been taken as the most powerful illustration of the generation of a united front by way of the Levite’s distribution of the severed body parts of his concubine to the various allies, becomes for Rousseau, according to his Confessions, the occasion to demonstrate his forgiving nature to his reader. What at first might appear as an utterly outrageous claim, actually reveals an additional and important aspect of Rousseau’s concept of authorship vis-à-vis his audiences and vis-à-vis his oeuvre by calling attention to the textual model that is operative in his account of himself as an author.
When he claims that the persecutions are aimed at him as a person, not at him as an author, he supports that claim by pointing out that both his second Discours and Julie were well received. The “Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard” from the Émile and certain passages from the Contrat social, however, got him into trouble with the censorship authorities. To the extent that Julie’s deathbed speech already contained everything that was seen as offensive in the “Profession de foi” and the second Discours already contained everything that was considered too daring in the Contrat social, the sudden clamping down of censorship must mean that it is not the author, the mind behind an oeuvre, who is being persecuted, but instead the biographical persona producing a series of works for different audiences, in different times and contexts.34 The autobiographical Confessions are dedicated to doing justice to that person and the survival of his name.
In the passages about Le Lévite d ’Ephraïm, Rousseau writes about the person, not the author, to the extent that he focuses not at all on the content of the piece, nor on his thoughts, political aims, or intended effects on a given audience. Instead, as in the narration involving his other texts treated in the Confessions, he depicts the concrete context of the composition of the piece, the pragmatic situation that gave rise to this particular text, which then finds its way into the genre, characterizing the speech situation, namely the rewriting and transformation of a gruesome tale of violence from Judges into an idyll in the mode of Gessner. It is in this sense that the specific text can then be read as a document and expression of the writer’s psychic disposition at the time of composition.35 In other words, the biographical persona of the writer dreams up, invents, and creates a series of speech situations and pragmatic contexts into which he embeds specific utterances; this biographical persona is the subject of the autobiography. The author, by contrast, is the figure who creates and controls an oeuvre that is made available to the audience of print, a virtual audience, bound by neither space nor time. Ultimately, it is this distinction that defines Rousseau’s concept of and approach to authorship.