The controversy about the nature and extent of Rousseau’s influence upon the French Revolution of 1789 began around 17901 and has not yet been settled. I suppose that like most important historical disputes it probably never will be resolved in any conclusive way, largely because a truly satisfactory treatment of the problem unavoidably presupposes our having precise answers to questions which are even more difficult to settle—questions, for instance, about the general causes of revolutions, about the characteristics of an historical influence and about the distinction between the meaning an author imparts to his theory and the significance its professed followers ascribe to it later. Much of the difficulty in this particular case, however, stems quite simply from the fact that the solution to the problem depends fundamentally upon testimony which cannot be found anywhere in Rousseau’s writings. It seems to me surprising, therefore, that scholars with an interest in the subject have devoted so little attention to the only remarks Rousseau himself ever made about the influence of his own ideas upon the course of a revolution in France. For in his Confessions Rousseau observed that he had once actually been responsible for preventing the outbreak of a revolution in his adopted country—clearly not the Revolution of 1789 which came to pass anyway, but rather the French Revolution of 1753 which he claimed would have occurred but for the publication of his Lettre sur la musique françoise in November of that year.2 ‘C’étoit le tems de la grande querelle du Parlement et du Clergé’, Rousseau reflected:
Le Parlement venoit d’être éxilé; la fermentation étoit au comble; tout menaçoit d’un prochain soulévement. La Brochure parut; à l’instant toutes les autres querelles furent oubliées; on ne songea qu’au péril de la musique françoise, et it n’y eut plus de soulévement que contre moi. II fut tel que la Nation n’en est jamais bien revenue. . . . Quand on lira que cette brochure a peut-être empêché une revolution dans l’Etat, on croira rêver. C’est pourtant une vérité bien réelle.3
Now like many passages in the Confessions this statement positively invites our incredulity and must at least be treated with circumspection. But while it undoubtedly exaggerates and perhaps also distorts the significance of the public reaction to Rousseau’s work, it is none the less accompanied by enough corroborating evidence to suggest, in my view, that it contains a very substantial core of truth. For one thing, the Lettre sur la musique françoise elicited more replies in the space of four months than any of Rousseau’s other works were to do throughout the whole of his lifetime; and, in fact, the controversy about this text, though it raged principally in 1753 and 1754, continued into the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s as well.4
For another, the tone and substance of the replies make it perfectly clear that Rousseau’s friends and critics alike promptly recognized the Lettre as a political tract whose author was the leader of a party. Jacques Cazotte, for instance, in his Observations sur la Lettre de Rousseau, condemned the essay as the work of a furious, furtive, fractious and ignorant conspirator,5 while the most verbose of his detractors—a M. de Rochemont—insisted upon calling his reply the Réflexions d’un patriote.6 The Lettre sur la musique françoise is the only one of Rousseau’s writings about which nearly all the leading figures of the French Enlightenment at the time were agreed in their enthusiasm and against which most of the critics of the ‘party of humanity’—the defenders of tradition, authority and religion, as well as of French music—concentrated their attack. No work of the Enlightenment before Helvétius’s De l’esprit of 1758 so quickly aroused such passionate convictions immediately upon its publication, and no other work at all proved quite so controversial. This was an age, it must be remembered, when disputes about culture and taste divided men as much, and often in the same way, as did quarrels about justice and law, an age when Mercier could legitimately claim in his Tableau de Paris that the government of France cherishes opera dearly because theatrical factions always make other quarrels pale into insignificance by contrast.7 And that was precisely what Rousseau in his Confessions maintained had been the effect of his own work.
Then again, while we may prefer to remain sceptical about Rousseau’s contention that the members of the orchestra of the Paris Opéra plotted to murder him after the publication of the Lettre, we do know that they hanged him in effigy and generally treated him badly when he next attended a performance, and we know, too, that the free pass to the Opéra which had been awarded to him for the success of Le Devin du village in 1752 was promptly revoked. We even have some evidence to suggest that a lettre de cachet for Rousseau’s arrest was contemplated, though it was never in fact issued.8 There was, in short, a great public outcry against Rousseau, as d’Argenson wrote in his Mémoires,9 for, as Palissot added, the work brought a swarm of enemies down upon its author.10 The Discours sur les sciences et les arts of 1751 had also elicited many replies, but in that case Rousseau’s text had been treated much more cordially by the great majority of its critics. The anger fomented by the Lettre sur la musique françoise in 1753, on the other hand, was directed as much against his person as against his ideas, and it was from this moment that Rousseau first became acquainted with the public persecution which, in both real and imaginary forms, was to bedevil the whole of his career thereafter.
Now whether that outcry and the collective voice of all those enemies were sufficient to distract the citizens of Paris from the revolutionary activities in which they would otherwise have been engaged is, of course, an exceedingly difficult matter to ascertain—almost as difficult, in fact, as the task of establishing whether the French Revolution of 1789 might still have occurred without Rousseau’s influence. But we have it on the independent testimony of Voltaire, Barbier, d’Argenson and others, that in November 1753 the King’s attempt to dissolve the Grand’Chambre or Central Court of the Paris Parlement—after he had, in any case, already exiled and dispersed the bulk of the magistrates in May—was met with such resistance on the part of the other Paris tribunals that the capital was on the verge of anarchy and, as d’Argenson put it, there were fears of an uprising.11 Of course Rousseau flattered himself in supposing that the appearance of the Lettre sur la musique françoise brought an immediate end to the crisis, since it continued in much the same fashion—and in 1754, indeed, affected many provincial parlements which had not been in conflict with the Crown during the previous year—until, that is, the return of the Paris magistrates in September. Nevertheless, there were at least some weeks of respite in December 1753, and Grimm, in his Correspondance littéraire, offers just a modicum of support for Rousseau’s claim in his observation, made during the crisis, that the whole of the Querelle des Bouffons was far more captivating than the petty squabbles between the Parlement and the Court—a subject in which the public took only a fleeting interest and which failed to capture a fraction of the attention that had been devoted to the revolution in music.12 ‘Il est difficile de prévoir comment cette querelle finira’, he added in another passage,
et le public en est bien plus intrigué que de la Chambre royale et de ses procédures. . . . Il faut attendre que les esprits soient calmés, et qu’on soit revenu de la chaleur et de l’emportement que M. Rousseau a excités par sa Lettre.13
Lady Sydney Morgan later put forward much the same thesis in a slightly embellished paraphrase of some remarks—from Rousseau’s Confessions again—which appeared in her book on France in 1817. ‘Paris [was] divided into two formidable musical factions’, she wrote,
which . . . were not without their political colour. The privileged class cried out against innovation, even in crotchets and quavers; and the noble and the rich, the women and the court, clung to the monotonous discords of Lulli, Rameau, and Mondonville, as belonging to the ancient and established order of things; while the musical connoisseurs and amateurs, the men of talent, genius, and letters, were enthusiastic for nature, taste, and Italian music.14
In the light of all these political features of Rousseau’s work it is hardly surprising that historians of the Querelle des Bouffons have been as impassioned in their reflections about the extent and significance of Rousseau’s rôle in the dispute as historians of the Revolution of 1789 have been about the scope of his influence in those events. Even leaving aside the vitriolic attacks and extravagant praise of the participants themselves—which we should of course have expected—we find that later commentators have hardly ever treated Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise without either unbridled enthusiasm, on the one hand, or unmitigated contempt, on the other.15 We might have imagined that at least in relatively recent periods of political turmoil the attention of musical critics would have been turned to more lofty or topical issues than that of Rousseau’s contribution to a mid-eighteenth-century debate about the relative merits of French and Italian opera. Yet on the contrary modern critics have turned to the subject again especially at times of political unrest, and they have fashioned their appraisals in still more political terms. Thus at roughly the same time during World War II that American sociologists began to uncover what they took to be the totalitarian elements of Rousseau’s social theory,16 Jean Gaudefroy-Demombynes, for instance, in his Jugements allemands sur la musique française au XVIIIe siècle, hailed the Lettre as having inaugurated ‘un communisme idéal’ and ‘la libération de l’égoïsme capitaliste’,17 while Noël Boyer, who dedicated his study of La Guerre des bouffons et la musique française to Rameau and the spirit of French order, denounced the work as alien and decadent anarchic barbarism, concluding with an appeal on behalf of the restoration of French music which, he proclaimed, might well bring in its train further restorations of another sort.18
For all these reasons I think that the subject of Rousseau and Revolution might be re-examined more profitably against the background of the Lettre sur la musique françoise and the uprising which he claimed this work had averted, rather than in the more customary context of the Contrat social and the chain of political events that text may have heralded or initiated. And yet if the Lettre was promptly greeted as a political tract of some kind it was obviously a political tract conceived in an essentially musical frame of reference. It may have aroused political feelings and achieved a political end, but its subject is the nature of music in general and the deficiencies of French opera in particular. I should therefore like to turn my attention next to the central theses of this work and to make two main points about the substance of Rousseau’s argument. The first is that in effect, if not by design, the Lettre constitutes a critique of the musical philosophy of Rameau—a critique which Rameau himself attempted to refute in his own replies to Rousseau’s text. The second is that it was in the course of Rousseau’s formulations of his rejoinders to the counterattacks of Rameau that he came to develop the ideas of the Lettre as a part of his more general social theory—and, indeed, as that part which was to prove the most politically radical in tone and the most revolutionary in its implications.
There are two principal themes of the Lettre sur la musique françoise which I propose to consider here: on the one hand the claim that melody in music must always take precedence over harmony, and on the other the argument that Italian opera is intrinsically superior to French. With regard to the first theme Rousseau’s contention in the Lettre was quite simply that a clear melodic line is musically more important than the harmonic structures built around it, in so far as there is always an inescapably artificial quality produced by the intonation of more than one note, or the expression of more than one vocal line, at a time. For whatever harmony might be produced by an ensemble of voices each singing a fine tune, Rousseau remarked, the splendid effect of these songs vanishes as soon as they are heard all at once. There then follows only a succession of chords which leaves the listener cold because it is no longer animated by melody. It is impossible, in short, for the ear to lend itself to several melodies at a time, since each counteracts the impression of the other and nothing emerges from this mêlée but confusion and noise.19 In contrast with Rameau’s conception of a uniform harmonic structure which underlay all forms of music—a thesis about which I shall say something in a moment—Rousseau therefore put forward in the Lettre his own rule for the unity or singularity of melody which he thought approximated natural song most closely. For a work of music to become interesting, he observed, for it to arouse the sentiments it was intended to excite in the hearts of those who hear it, all its parts together must fortify the expression of its central theme. The harmony should only serve to make that theme more lively; the accompaniment should embellish it, but not leave it suffocated or disfigured; and the bass, by a uniform and simple though imperceptible progression, should guide both the performer and the listener to a full appreciation of the melody:
II faut, en un mot, que le tout ensemble ne porte à la fois qu’une mélodie à l’oreille & qu’une idée à l’esprit. Cette unité de mélodie me paroît une regle indispensable & non moins importante en Musique, que l’unité d’action dans une Tragédie; car elle est fondée sur le même principe, & dirigée vers le même objet.20
In the Lettre, moreover, Rousseau put forward an additional claim about the connection between melodic and harmonic music which he was to elaborate in his subsequent works—a claim to the effect that in so far as the patterns of harmony differed between nations, this difference was attributable to the influence of melody, which in turn expressed the national variations between forms of language:
C’est de la mélodie seulement qu’il faut tirer le caractére particulier d’une Musique Nationnale; d’autant plus que ce caractére étant principalement donné par la langue, le chant proprement dit doit ressentir sa plus grande influence.21
Some languages, Rousseau contended, were more appropriate to music than others, while certain tongues did not have any musical attributes at all. Those languages which were marked, for instance, by a lack of sonorous vowels, on the one hand, or, on the other, by an excess of consonants, or mute and nasal syllables, or imprecisely measured figures of speech, could only be joined to an insipid and monotonous form of musical expression which must be dull when sung slowly and coarse at full speed.22 Since it would be impossible to construct agreeable tunes which might be sung in languages of this kind, composers in nations characterized by such defective speech would be obliged to turn their attention to harmonic arrangements instead, and even then they would often be unable to extract a melodic theme from the strident noise of their accompaniment:
L’impossibilité d’inventer des chants agréables obligeroit les Compositeurs à tourner tous leurs soins du côté de l’harmonie, & faute de beautés réelles, ils y introduiroient des beautés de convention, qui n’auroient presque d’autre mérite que la difficulté vaincue; au lieu d’une bonne Musique, ils imagineroient une Musique sçavante; pour suppléer au chant, ils multiplieroient les accompag[ne]mens. . . . Pour ôter l’insipidité, ils augmenteroient la confusion; ils croiroient faire de la Musique & ils ne feroient que du bruit. . . . Partout où ils verroient des notes ils trouveroient du chant, attendu qu’en effet leur chant ne seroit que des notes. Voces, praetereàque nihil.23
Rousseau’s principal thesis in the Lettre, in fact, was that the French language in particular suffered from just these faults and was therefore insusceptible to a properly musical exposition. The continual bark and bray which was characteristic of French songs could not be suffered by anyone who was unprepared for the ordeal, while the brusque and heavy harmonies of French accompaniment fell upon the ears of listeners as a deluge of tedious notes. The airs of French opera, moreover, were not proper airs at all, and its recitative was misconceived as well.24 Thus, Rousseau concluded, ‘les François n’ont point de Musique & n’en peuvent avoir; ou que si jamais ils en ont une, ce sera tant pis pour eux’.25
Against all the calamities which made French prose so intractable as music Rousseau juxtaposed the virtues of Italian. For the inflexions of the Italian language were more soft and gentle, he argued, its modulations more precise and sonorous, and the tempo of its speech more constant, than their equivalents in French—all these qualities comprising precisely what was required to make possible the expression of a language in song.26
Now the technical elaboration of this argument in the Lettre, and especially those features of the work that are expressly joined to the Querelle des Bouffons which had occasioned its composition by Rousseau, need not be discussed in detail here.27 I have tried to show elsewhere28 that Rousseau substantially modified his views about both the nature of harmony in general and the defects of French opera in particular in the years between 1749, when he compiled his articles on music for the Encyclopédie, and 1753, when he drafted the Lettre sur la musique françoise. In the 1760s, moreover, when he prepared his article ‘Unité de mélodie’ for the Dictionnaire de musique, he was later to argue that his appreciation of the predominance of melody over harmony in music had actually been inspired by the operas which he had heard in Venice29 when he had been secretary to the French ambassador there in 1743–44; so that the principle could not have been established but only confirmed for him by the Paris performances of ‘Les Bouffons’ some ten years later. The Lettre sur la musique françoise, he added, had been designed to elaborate the foundations of that principle just as his opera, Le Devin du village, had constituted his attempt to realize it in practice, though in its theoretical formulation, which is my central concern here, he maintained that it had been put forward as a direct challenge to the views of Rameau:
M. Rameau, pour prouver que l’énergie de la Musique vient toute de l’Harmonie . . . n’a pas vû qu’il prouvoit tout le contraire de ce qu’il vouloit prouver; car dans tous les exemples qu’il donne, l’Accompagnement de la Basse ne sert qu’à déterminer le Chant . . . l’Harmonie n’agit . . . qu’en déterminant la Mélodie à être telle ou telle, & c’est purement comme Mélodie que l’intervalle a différentes expressions selon le lieu du Mode où il est employé.30
In any event, Rameau, who was never to know anything at all about the Dictionnaire de musique, and who in 1753 could not even adduce from the Lettre that Rousseau’s concept of melody had been designed specifically to challenge him, none the less immediately perceived the sense in which the concept of melody elaborated in this work was actually opposed to his own theory. He promptly embarked upon the task of overturning the thesis about the relation between melody and harmony which Rousseau had set forth, and in April 1754, just slightly more than four months after the Lettre appeared, his reply was published under the title Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique. Here, in the text which forms his own main contribution to the Querelle des Bouffons,31 Rameau argued that melody was in fact dependent upon rather than superior to harmony, and that the natural sentiments of musical expression were essentially derived from, and not just adorned by, a harmonic base. In a musical composition, he remarked, the harmony is played before the melody which stems from it, so that the singer may be inspired by the feeling he must display independently of the words, ‘sentiment qui frappera tout homme sans prévention, qui voudra bien se livrer aux purs effets de la Nature’.32 In his Erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie of the following year, moreover, he turned again to Rousseau’s confusion of priorities, exclaiming that ‘pour un Partisan de la Mélodie c’est bien mal prendre sa bisque que de s’inscrire contre la plénitude de l’harmonie en général’.33 And in both works, as I shall try to show, Rameau set out to rebut the principle of melody which he associated mainly with the Lettre sur la musique françoise, even though in the second case at least he appeared to be concentrating his attack upon some of the articles on music in the Encyclopédie in which Rousseau had put forward a conception of harmony that was much more favourably disposed to his own theory.
With regard to Rousseau’s thesis about the distinction between national styles of opera, moreover, we must bear in mind the fact that he did not really decry the faults of French music in any general way until he had first established the deficiencies of the French language; so that his condemnation of the operatic music of France in 1753 was in fact rendered possible only by the development, from 1749 onwards, of his ideas about the central place which language occupies in musical expression.34 It is true that in the Encyclopédie he had already remarked upon the styles of music prevailing in different nations, and especially in his article ‘Accompagnement’ he drew a distinction between the modes of accompaniment that best suited the Italian and French styles in particular.35 But it was only in the Lettre sur la musique françoise that his observations in the Encyclopédie about these differences came to be transformed into an argument that the French language was less suitably adapted to articulation in music. In the concluding section of the Lettre Rousseau indeed commented at some length upon a passage from Lully’s opera Armide which by repute was ‘le modéle le plus parfait du vrai récitatif François’,36 but which, in his view, was marked only by insipid cadences that suited neither the lyrics nor the sense of the theatrical plot. And in 1753, therefore, Rousseau’s attack upon French opera was illustrated principally by an extract from the dominant musical figure of the previous age and not at all by any selections from the works of Rameau.
Despite these qualifications, however, there is no doubt that Rameau was incensed by Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise, since the two main contentions of that work, as he perceived them, were directed either against his own conception of harmony, on the one hand, or against the national style of opera of which he was then the leading exponent, on the other. The man who was both the foremost composer and theorist of France at the time, as well as the most dedicated and outspoken champion of these undeniable facts, must have seen himself as the intended if not explicit victim of the first charge and equally as the successor to the culprit named in the second. In any event, over the twenty months that followed the publication of the Lettre, Rameau produced two works, the Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique and the Erreurs sur la musique, in which he attempted to refute the claims Rousseau had made, both about the relation between melody and harmony and about the distinction between French and Italian music.
The first of these claims was quite clearly treated by Rameau with greater severity than the second, probably because Rousseau’s notion of the primacy of a melodic theme over its harmonic accompaniment was, in his view, nothing less than a sheer inversion of the truth. Melody was not the source but the product of harmony, he retorted,37 and he charged that anyone who supposed the opposite could not pretend to have a sure grasp of the principles of music, since ‘tant qu’on ne considérera que la Mélodie comme principal moteur des effets de Musique, on ne fera pas de grands progrès dans cet Art’.38 The concept of ‘l’unité de mélodie’, which Rousseau in the Lettre had suggested was more central to musical expression than any harmonic rule, was thus decried by Rameau as ‘une chimére . . . dont l’effet n’a que de foibles attraits en Musique sans le secours de l’ harmonie’.39
Already in his earlier works, for instance in the Traité de l’harmonie of 1722 and the Génération harmonique of 1737,40 Rameau had insisted that the melodic phrases of our music were derived invariably from a harmonic base;41 and as he developed his theory of the ‘basse fondamentale’ in the years leading to the publication of the Encyclopédie, he in fact came to believe that other mathematical sciences were also governed by the principles of harmony he had discovered. By 1750, at the age of sixty-six, he felt sufficiently confident about the truth of his belief to proclaim, in his Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie, that the laws of every science were drawn, in the first instance, from the rules applying to the resonance of a ‘corps sonore’:
C’est dans la Musique que la nature semble nous assigner le principe Phisique de ces premieres notions purement Mathématiques sur lesquelles roulent toutes les Sciences, je veux dire, les proportions, Harmonique, Arithmétique & Géométrique, d’où suivent les progressions de même genre, & qui se manifestent au premier instant que résonne un corps sonore.42
Using arguments that owed much to Pythagorean metaphysics,43 Rameau in his later years put forward the claim that musical intervals served as a model for all the relations which prevailed in the world of Nature. Music, he contended, was at once a science and an art, so that acoustics and aesthetics—that is to say, the studies of its physical and artistic material—must ultimately be reduced to the same principles. And by the time that he produced his Observations in 1754 Rameau was quite fixed in his view that the harmonic proportions and progressions of music which he had explained showed that this subject was the mother of all the arts and sciences. ‘Ne l’abandonnons . . . plus’, he exclaimed,
cette mere des Sciences & des Arts, éxaminons-la bien, & tâchons désormais de ne plus nous lais[ser] conduire que par elle. Le principe dont il s’agit, est non-seulement celui de tous les Arts de goût . . . il l’est encore de toutes les Sciences soumises au calcul: ce qu’on ne peut nier, sans nier en même tems que ces Sciences ne soient fondées sur les proportions & progressions, dont la Nature nous fait part dans le Phénoméne du Corps sonore, avec des circonstances si marquées, qu’il est impossible de se refuser à l’évidence: & comment le nier! puisque point de proportions, point de Géométrie.44
The rules that applied to music, therefore, must be identical throughout the world, and, equally, they must be fundamental to all other subjects. For the harmonic laws of Nature were at once musical and cosmic, and to define their principles in a systematic fashion was, according to Rameau, the most important enterprise to which man could devote his talents. ‘Tel est le pouvoir prédominant de la proportion géométrique dans la Musique’, he was later to proclaim in another context, ‘tel il est, dit-on, dans l’Architecture, & tel il doit être, si je ne me trompe, dans bien d’autres Sciences’.45
The second of Rousseau’s principal claims in the Lettre was answered by Rameau in a much more indirect and elusive fashion, one that almost entirely overlooked the crucial points Rousseau had made about the relative musical merits of the French and Italian languages. For though as an operatic composer Rameau was often ingenious in his use of intervals and variations of tempo to express or to add emphasis to the texts of his libretti, as a theorist he never paid much attention to the tonal qualities of speech and in fact often appeared to have little patience for the suggestion that the sentiments expressed in music might be mediated in some respects by the words to which the notes were attached.46 No perspective of songs conceived as poems had any real bearing upon his view of musical form and structure, so that Rousseau’s distinction between national styles of music seems to have stirred him very little, if at all. But in his own fashion Rameau did object to Rousseau’s thesis that Italian music was superior to French, and he set down his reply in two ways.
Firstly, in his Observations, he pointed in detail to several apparent contradictions in Rousseau’s study of Armide,47 noting, too, that a particular chordal shift to the subdominant mode about which Rousseau had complained was in fact perfectly justified in virtue of its ‘basse fondamentale’,48 and commenting that, on the whole, Lully ‘pensoit en Grand’49 and did not commit the petty technical faults which had been ascribed to him. Secondly, he charged, in the Erreurs sur la musique, that Rousseau had been unable to appreciate French music in general, and the French style of recitative in particular, largely because of his naïve view of the place occupied by measure in musical expression. In the Lettre Rousseau had decried French recitative as an ‘extravagante criaillerie’50 because the lyrics it employed were too often swollen up and drawn out so as to suit the artificial pace of the accompaniment; Italian recitative, on the other hand, he had depicted as sung in clearly measured tones which were more appropriate to the tempo of speech and which helped to place due emphasis upon the meaning of the plot.51 But Rameau maintained that, in this distinction, Rousseau had allowed himself to be seduced by a crude notion of measure which took no account of the subtle progressions of harmonic accompaniment, claiming that he really ought to have commended French recitative instead for its greater variety of pace and tempo.52 In any event it was most odd, Rameau observed, that Rousseau should have admired a certain style of accompaniment on the grounds that it does not attract the attention of the listener at all,53 while the praise he had lavished upon the Italian style was inconsistent since, for no good reason, he sometimes preferred a lighter, sometimes a heavier, touch.54
Now Rameau had always reacted sharply to even the mildest criticisms of his theory, but in his later years his impatience with other thinkers assumed the form of a most fierce exasperation whenever he felt that his views had been challenged or opposed. I think it is largely because of this habit of mind that he exaggerated the extent to which the Lettre sur la musique françoise had been designed to challenge his own works. In it Rousseau had, after all, objected specifically to some features of Lully’s opera Armide and not at all to any composition by Rameau. And even if he had mentioned Rameau as an exponent of the French style of tragédie lyrique that he deplored, he would in any case have had to take note of the fact that Rameau was the composer of a successful opéra bouffon too.55 Rousseau was certainly clear in the Lettre that the superiority of Italian over French music was due to a difference between languages rather than the talents of composers, and in that sense at least no French musician was personally at fault for the defects of his work. With regard to Rousseau’s remarks in the Lettre about musical theory, moreover, it must be stressed here that he refers directly to Rameau only three times in that text, twice in order to object merely to his appraisal of Lully56 and once actually to agree with his claim that certain chords evoke particular human sentiments.57 Despite the widening gulf which had developed between their ideas from 1749 to 1753, Rousseau did not, in the Lettre, propound any general critique of Rameau’s theory. Indeed, even after he replied to Rameau’s attacks in 1755, he still often acclaimed the genius of the master and acknowledged the immense debt his own ideas on music owed to those that Rameau had advanced before.58 Nevertheless, whether or not there is sufficient justification for the severity of the replies Rameau made to Rousseau’s work in 1754 and 1755, I hope that I have shown at least some of the more important ways in which he attempted to refute the claims that form the two main themes of the Lettre sur la musique françoise. I should like now to say a few words about Rousseau’s answers to these objections and to elaborate my second point about the politically radical character of his speculations in musical and linguistic theory.
There were two main lines of criticism that Rousseau pursued in his replies, of which one was built essentially around a thesis about the cultural diversity of musical conventions, while the other was constructed upon a premise about the course of their historical evolution. Each of these approaches received its fullest treatment in a separate text, though as we shall see in a moment those texts at one stage actually comprised two sections of a single essay.
Now, according to Rousseau himself, it was still in 1755, and thus only a short while after the appearance of Rameau’s Erreurs sur la musique, that he composed the first draft of his rejoinder.59 In this work, which he eventually entitled the Examen de deux principes avancés par M. Rameau, he recapitulated his ideas in the Lettre about the connection between melody and harmony, and for the first time in any of his published writings he focused his attack directly upon what he took to be the doctrine of Rameau. For in the Examen de deux principes Rousseau claimed that Rameau had been mistaken to suppose that the melodic line in every form of music stemmed from a harmonic root. Melody, he argued, both expressed and excited our natural passions in a tonal language and stood in much the same relation to its accompaniment as did design to colours in painting, so that the conventions of our harmony should serve only to embellish rather than determine the intonations of the human voice:
M. Rameau, pour comparer la mélodie à l’harmonie, commence par dépouiller la premiere de tout ce qui lui étant propre, ne peut convenir à l’autre: il ne considere pas la mélodie comme un chant, mais comme un remplissage; il dit que ce remplissage naît de l’harmonie, & il a raison . . . les accens de la voix passent jusqu’à l’ame; car ils sont l’expression naturelle des passions, & en les peignant, ils les excitent. C’est par eux que la Musique devient oratoire, éloquente, imitative, ils en forment le langage. . . . La mélodie est dans la Musique ce qu’est le dessein dans la Peinture, l’harmonie n’y fait que l’effet des couleurs. C’est par le chant, non par les accords que les sons ont de l’expression, du feu, de la vie; c’est le chant seul qui leur donne les effets moraux qui font toute l’énergie de la Musique.60
Rousseau now contended that the philosophical presuppositions of Rameau’s theory were mistaken, largely because the set of rules figuring in that theory could not, as their author imagined, have universal application. In reply to the thesis that the general laws of harmonic progression must be identical throughout the world, Rousseau maintained that the particular scheme adduced by Rameau was only limited in scope. He allowed that the principles of the ‘basse fondamentale’ and of the chordal structures to which the ‘basse’ gave rise, were—for the most part—technically correct, but that was just with regard to a number of musical forms and not all. These principles elucidate the features which mark the scales of certain modern and Western nations, but they do not explain the music of the ancient Greeks, for instance, whose scales, divided into tetrachords instead of octaves, formed harmonic patterns different from our own. The ‘basse fondamentale’ as it had been conceived in Rameau’s system, he proclaimed, was truly fundamental only to those varieties of music that had come to be adopted by convention, and the convention could only be appreciated by persons who had been trained in the appropriate way. Thus even in our own society most men were quite unable to fathom and enjoy the harmonic configurations which the theory described; and, in any case, Rameau’s ideas, as Rousseau understood them, account neither for the origin of the minor mode nor for the phenomenon of dissonance.61 In the light of these facts it followed for Rousseau that the ‘basse fondamentale’ could not have been derived from Nature:
Si la longue routine de nos successions harmoniques guide l’homme exercé & le Compositeur de profession; quel fut le guide de ces ignorans, qui n’avoient jamais entendu d’harmonie, dans ces chants que la nature a dictés long-tems avant l’invention de l’Art? Avoient-ils donc un sentiment d’harmonie antérieur à l’expérience; & si quelqu’un leur eût fait entendre la Basse-fondamentale de l’air qu’ils avoient composé, pense-t-on qu’aucun d’eux eût reconnu-là son guide, & qu’il eût trouvé le moindre rapport entre cette Basse & cet air? . . . Les Grecs n’ont reconnu pour consonnances que celles que nous appellons consonnances parfaites; ils ont rejetté de ce nombre les tierces & les sixtes. . . . Qu’on pense maintenant quelles notions d’harmonie on peut avoir, & quels modes harmoniques on peut établir, en bannissant les tierces & les sixtes du nombre des consonances!62
On Rousseau’s interpretation, then, the musical philosophy of Rameau was fundamentally misconceived. In his Examen de deux principes he paid some tribute to its subtleties of technical detail, but he did not agree that the laws of music which Rameau had adduced were either fixed, or constant, or everywhere the same. On the contrary those laws, in his view, were manifold, complex and, above all, different from one culture and one period to the next. Together with d’Alembert63 he believed that Rameau had mistaken music for geometry and metaphysics and, as a consequence, had failed to provide an adequate account of what, in fact, were incompatible systems of music devised by men.64 The rules of harmony that Rameau had defined, in short, formed a theory about chords but not about musical expression.
The second of Rousseau’s replies to Rameau—and the last of his writings I wish to consider here—is the Essai sur l’origine des langues. There has been a long and complex historiographical dispute about the dates of composition of this work which need not trouble us now, though it should perhaps be noted that some surviving first-draft fragments of the text—including passages about the musical theory of Rameau—date from the beginning of 1754, at which time they formed a part of the original manuscript of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité. Rousseau must therefore have had it in mind to challenge a number of features in Rameau’s system, probably as they had figured in the Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie of 1750, even before Rameau had come to publish his own objections to the Lettre sur la musique françoise. We know, moreover, that a second draft of what was to prove a substantial part of the Essai was intercalated by Rousseau in the first draft of his Examen de deux principes, and that is why I said a moment ago that the two works once formed sections of a single essay. But leaving aside these problems,65 I should like now to turn to the final version of the Essai sur l’origine des langues, probably assembled around 1760,66 and to offer an explanation of the meaning of those chapters in the work that pertain directly to his controversy with Rameau.
The account of music that Rousseau developed in the Essai was concerned, above all, with its properties as a language. For though it was speech which underlay the fundamental difference between human and animal behaviour, the expression of our sentiments, in his view, must have depended initially upon the intonations of our speech, so that only music could supply those phrases, tones and accents required to bestow some sense or purpose upon the vocal sounds produced by men.67 According to Rousseau, therefore, the first languages must have had a rhythmic and melodic character. They must have been poetic rather than in prose, sung rather than spoken, and the significance that came to be attached to their terms must have depended upon the musical forms in which they were constructed.68 Primitive expressions, that is, must have derived their meaning from the chants which made utterances out of noise.69
Rousseau believed, moreover, that it was the passions of men rather than their practical needs—their love and their hatred, for instance, rather than their hunger and thirst—which must originally have given rise to language. For ‘l’origine des langues’, he wrote,
n’est point düe aux prémiers besoins des hommes; it seroit absurde que de la cause qui les écarte vint le moyen qui les unit. D’où peut donc venir cette origine? Des besoins moraux, des passions. Toutes les passions rapprochent les hommes que la necessité de chercher à vivre force à se fuir. Ce n’est ni la faim ni la soif, mais l’amour la haine la pitié la colére qui leur ont arraché les prémiéres voix.70
Thus before men came to communicate ideas, and before they began to harangue their neighbours in order to secure a personal advantage, they could only have expressed, in an impulsive manner, those sentiments and dispositions they all shared. The vocal gestures they made must have been exuberant and benign,71 and since, in their earliest societies, they had not yet come to recognize their separate interests they must, in short, have been enchanting:
Dans cet âge heureux où rien ne marquoit les heures, rien n’obligeoit à les compter; le tems n’avoit d’autre mesure que l’amusement et l’ennui. . . . Là se firent les prémiéres fêtes, les pieds bondissoient de joye, le geste empressé ne suffisoit plus, la voix l’accompagnoit d’accens passionnés, le plaisir et le desir confondus ensemble se faisoient sentir à la fois. Là fut enfin le vrai berceau des peuples, et du pur cristal des fontaines sortirent les prémiers feux de l’amour.72
It was also Rousseau’s view, however, that while our first languages were formed from a variety of intonations serving as gestures, they could not all have remained musical for long. In the southern regions of the world, where the climate was mild and the land fertile, the needs of men and women were largely satisfied by Nature; and it was only in order to convey their inclinations and desires that they began to sing to one another. Those persons, on the other hand, who were later driven by fortuitous events73 to live in northern areas had always to contend with Nature in order to survive and must, as a consequence, have begun to work even before they had learnt to sing. The effect upon their speech of a harsh climate and poor soil would certainly have been considerable,74 for they were very soon obliged to construct a set of terms with which they could communicate their needs and had hardly any opportunity to devise some means by which they might express or articulate their pleasures.75 While our original languages, then, were born of the musical ebullience of southern peoples whose speech and song expressed their own natural affections, the languages which subsequently arose in the North were produced as a response to the constraints imposed by a Nature that was external to the character of men. In the one case, in bountiful surroundings, our needs were developed from our passions; in the other, in an inclement world, it was our needs which gave rise to our passions. Whereas in the South, therefore, one might have heard—or rather, overheard—the dulcet melodies of love, in the North one would inevitably have been confronted by men who cried out for help. And languages that in the one region were formed of gentle modulations and enlivened by sonorous tones, must, in the other region have become either monotonous, or gruff, or shrill:
Dans les climats méridionaux où la nature est prodigue les besoins naissent des passions, dans les pays froids où elle est avare les passions naissent des besoins, et les langues, tristes filles de la necessité se sentent de leur dure origine . . . dans ces lieux où la terre ne donne rien qu’à force de travail et où la source de la vie semble être plus dans les bras que dans le coeur . . . le prémier mot ne fut pas . . . aimez-moi, mais, aidez-moi. . . . Voila selon mon opinion les causes physiques les plus générales de la différence caracteristique des primitives langues. Celles du midi durent être vives, sonores, accentuées, éloquentes, et souvent obscures à force d’énergie: celles du Nord durent être sourdes, rudes, articulées, criardes, monotones, claires à force de mots plustot que par une bonne construction.76
Now this distinction between the northern and southern cultures of the world is central to Rousseau’s theory. For the historical development of both our language and our music could be attributed directly, in his view, to the manner in which the peoples of the North must have attacked and, in due course, overrun, the settlements of the South. It was, he remarked, the barbarian invasions—in particular of the Roman remnants of the ancient civilizations of the South—that destroyed those languages born of passion and desire, since with the conquest of the Mediterranean world the guttural and staccato speech of northern men must eventually have taken precedence over the rhythmic and melodic intonations which had served for the expression of human sentiments before.77 Our mellifluous languages must thus have been crushed by the clamour of those who either could never sing or no longer had the facility to do so, and as a consequence our music and our speech were set apart. Men began to chatter, while their songs lost all their meaning, and, Rousseau observed, the semantic element of primitive expressions came in this way to be divorced from music:
La mélodie commençant à n’être plus si adherente au discours prit insensiblement une existence à part, et la musique devint plus indépendante des paroles. Alors aussi cessérent peu à peu ces prodiges qu’elle avoit produits lorsqu’elle n’étoit que l’accent et l’harmonie de la pöesie, et qu’elle lui donnoit sur les passions cet empire que la parole n’exerça plus dans la suite que sur la raison.78
According to Rousseau, in fact, it must have been just this division between our melody and diction that produced, on the one hand, harmony and, on the other, prose.
As the communities in which men lived grew larger and their cares and aspirations multiplied, individuals must have called upon each other to perform a constantly increasing number of specific tasks. Sentiments must have come to be supplanted by ideas, impulses of the heart must have been replaced by instructions of the mind, and men began to languish as they employed an idiom of discourse that was more exact but also more exacting, more clear and precise, yet at the same time more hollow and cold.79 With the emergence of prose, in effect, languages became prosaic. Men who followed the same moral rules were equally required to adopt the same conventions in their grammar; and as they grew accustomed to their social obligations their manner of speaking must also have become increasingly monotonous and dull. Rousseau, indeed, believed that the contemporary languages of Central and Northern Europe were still marked very clearly by the influence of barbaric prose.80 Even modern Italian, he claimed, though it remained more amenable to musical constructions than most of the European tongues, had suffered much the same fate—so that on this point in particular he now put forward a thesis strikingly different from that of the Lettre sur la musique françoise.
Les langues modernes de l’Europe sont toutes du plus au moins dans le même cas. Je n’en excepte pas même l’italienne. La langue italienne non plus que la françoise n’est point par elle-même une langue musicale. La différence est seulement que l’une se prête à la musique, et que l’autre ne s’y prête pas.81
The speech of men was thus transformed until its passionate inflexions had been lost, and at the same time the vocal cadences through which our earliest enthusiasms and affections had been enunciated were deprived of their significance. The sentiments that had once given rise to song were stifled, repressed and forgotten as the social relations of men changed under the bondage of barbarian rule and agricultural labour; and primitive melodies were turned into disjointed sounds which must have been as dull and drab to hear as the humdrum reverberations of our newly-acquired prose.82
It was Rousseau’s view, moreover, that the invention of harmonic intervals could only have occurred when this corruption of the earliest form of music was complete. For it was only after men had ceased to give a melodic character to their natural propensities that they began to wonder whether satisfactions of a different kind could be obtained directly from the senseless intonations of the human voice. We must have begun, by chance alone, to focus our attention upon the consonance which marked at least a few of the pitches we employed when emitting our cries and calls, and harmony first came to be fabricated when some individuals discovered that the simultaneous execution of several sounds produced a noise which could be more agreeable than that made by the articulation of the same tones one after the other. Our first chords, that is, must have been devised by accident:
Le chant ainsi dépouillé de toute mélodie et consistant uniquement dans la force et la durée des sons dut suggerer enfin les moyens de le rendre plus sonore encore à l’aide des consonances. Plusieurs voix traînant sans cesse à l’unisson des sons, d’une durée illimitée trouvérent par hazard quelques accords qui renforçant le bruit le leur firent paroitre agréable; et ainsi commença la pratique du discant et du contrepoint.83
Since these manufactured noises were divorced from human sentiment, however, it was clear for Rousseau that the harmonic intervals of Western music were a barbarous and gothic innovation which entirely emasculated all the melodic expressions that had served as our first language.84 And just as the semantic substance of our earliest locutions was lost as poetry gave way to prose, so too our music came to be deprived of all its naturally vivid and spirited qualities when it was rendered speechless and supplanted by the lifeless modes and scales of harmony. For while our original melodies had been inspired by our own moral impetuosity, harmony, he maintained, was governed only by the physical principles of concordant vibrations.85 It was impossible for men to comprehend the new and artificial patterns of their music, Rousseau asserted, unless they were first made acquainted with its rules; so that the laws of resonance which underlay the structure of gothic harmony had to be learnt before the chords derived from them could be appreciated in the proper way. Music which was divorced from the natural impulses that it had once expressed now came to occupy a place in the sphere of intellectual deliberations alone, and each person was obliged to consult a dictionary in order to be certain of the feelings that were supposed to be aroused in him by the arrangements of harmonic chords:
Les plus beaux chants à nôtre gré toucheront toujours médiocrement une oreille qui n’y sera point accoutumée; c’est une langue dont it faut avoir le Dictionnaire.86
Melody had lost its strength, Rousseau remarked, and ‘le calcul des intervalles fut substitué à la finesse des infléxions’.87
With analytical dictionaries and the calculation of intervals the full corruption of both language from speech and music from song had in fact been accomplished. For a mode of discourse and a system of intonations that had each lost their original meaning and passion had also come to be completely abstracted from the human voice which had earlier been the sole medium of expression of language and music together. In the one case our chants had been transformed, through the contrivance of speechless harmonies, into a kind of music that was predominantly instrumental rather than vocal.88 In the second case our speech, reformulated through prose, had come to be delineated in script by alphabetical characters assembled from the decomposition into its elementary parts of an already spoiled language.89 As the art of writing developed it substituted its own exactitude for the expressive force of speech, and it came to be communicated through the medium of the prevailing definitions of words rather than in virtue of the inspired tones adopted by writers. Now it dominates our language to such a great extent that we no longer even speak but only read aloud to one another.90 Hence with the invention of writing and the fabrication of instrumental sounds we had removed the need for any human voice in the production of both language and music and had thereby made our natural means of self-expression almost utterly redundant.
It was in this fashion that Rousseau elaborated his objections to the theory of Rameau. The universal laws of harmony which Rameau had supposed to be prescribed by Nature were, in his view, established only through the degenerate conventions of a barbaric race. These rules of music were thus limited in scope, and they reflected nothing more than the insipid sensibilities of men who had constructed their chords round artificial intervals which rather resembled those manufactured hierarchies that, in society, governed the relations between one person and the next. In civilized society, that is, we had bound ourselves to permanently fixed relations with our neighbours; but we had equally become captive to the prescribed intervals of senseless tones, and the progressively more rigid application of both sets of rules could only have increased the moral degradation of mankind. It was Rousseau’s view, then, that our faculties had been debased by our aesthetic and linguistic, as well as our political, conventions, so that the development of our music was to be linked directly to the history of our morals. The capacity to form artificial languages was a distinctly human trait, and the manner in which we had come to be tied to despotic terms and to dominant tones set us off from all other creatures whose mode of life was prescribed by Nature alone.91
Now this account of the corruption of music and language will of course have a familiar ring to all those readers of Rousseau who are acquainted with his description of the decay of society in the Discours sur l’inégalité. I have already mentioned that some first draft fragments of the Essai sur l’origine des langues once formed a part of the Discours, but even if we had no knowledge of this historical fact about the composition of the two works their remarkable similarity of both style and substance would still be perfectly clear. For what is the ‘calcul des intervalles’ but a musical expression of the ‘relations morales’ by which—according to Rousseau in the Discours—men have become equally enthralled in civilized society? What, in fact, are the moral relations of individuals as Rousseau conceived them but calculations of intervals of another sort? The prevailing social divisions between persons have their counterpoint in the divisions of their octaves, instrumental music is matched by instrumental politics, and the subjugation of peoples is achieved, in part, by their masters’ conjugation of verbs and their manipulation of language in general.
Yet we do not even need to turn to the Discours sur l’inégalité to draw these conceptual parallels, since the relation between our musical and political conventions is in fact discussed by Rousseau in the text of the Essai itself. For in the final chapter of his work, which he entitled ‘Rapport des langues aux gouvernemens’, he maintained that languages which have come to be separated from music are inimical to freedom:
Il y a des langues favorables à la liberté; ce sont les langues sonores, prosodiques, harmonieuses, dont on distingue le discours de fort loin. Les nôtres sont faites pour le bourdonement des Divans. . . . Or je dis que toute langue avec laquelle on ne peut pas se faire entendre au peuple assemblé est une langue servile; it est impossible qu’un peuple demeure libre et qu’il parle cette langue-là.92
A prosaic rhetoric thus inspired servile manners, and speech which was made hollow by its lack of tone and rhythm also made for hollow men. The languages of modern Europe have become suitable only for discourse at close quarters, in the guise of an ineffectual chatter of persons who can now only murmur feebly to one another with voices lacking inflexion, and therefore spirit and passion too. Hence, as our speech has come to be deprived of its musical traits, it has lost all its expressive force and has been transformed into the protracted but faint mutterings of individuals who have no strength of character or purpose. For such men the most appropriate utterances are also the most quiet; their form of discourse—emptied of melody—is almost devoid of sounds altogether, and their unremitting and stifling hum is hardly distinguishable from silence.
But if this is the private aspect of our contemporary languages, their public manifestation, according to Rousseau, is more oppressive still. For men who govern others but have nothing to say themselves can do little else when the people are assembled except shout and preach to them; and their pronouncements, delivered as unmeasured speeches, are at once intemperate and unintelligible. The proclamations of our rulers and the supplications of our priests continually abuse our sensibilities and make us numb; and tortuous harangues and sermons, delivered by both religious and secular charlatans, have become the sole form of popular oratory in the modern world:
Quels discours restent donc à faire au peuple assemblé? Des sermons. Et qu’importe à ceux qui les font de persuader le peuple, puisque ce n’est pas lui qui nomme aux bénéfices? . . . Nos prédicateurs se tourmentent se mettent en sueur dans les Temples, sans qu’on sache rien de ce qu’ils ont dit. Après s’être épuisés à crier pendant une heure, ils sortent de la chaire à demimorts. Assurément ce n’étoit pas la peine de prendre tant de fatigue. . . . Qu’on suppose un homme harangant en françois le peuple de Paris dans la place de Vendosme. Qu’il crie à pleine tête, on entendra qu’il crie, on ne distinguera pas un mot. . . . Si les charlatans des places abondent moins en France qu’en Italie, ce n’est pas qu’en France ils soient moins écoutés, c’est seulement qu’on ne les entend pas si bien.93
The private and public faces of language thus provide an accurate portrait of the utterly degraded state into which our societies have fallen. Conversation has become covert, political discourse has become barren, and we have all succeeded in bringing our original manner of speaking up to date only by becoming the speechless auditors of those who rule by diatribes and recitations from the pulpit. In fact since even these perverted forms of rhetoric are no longer necessary to keep us in our allotted places, the rulers of modern states have correctly come to understand that they can maintain their authority without arranging any popular meetings or assemblies at all. They have only to direct the attention of their subjects to the many things which they might exchange with each other and away from the few thoughts that they might still wish to communicate, so that in their latest form the vocal intonations which once expressed our pleasures have been reconstituted as the terms that denote our trades. Whereas the words ‘aimez-moi’ must in the past have been superseded by ‘aidezmoi’, now all that we say to each other is ‘donnez de l’argent’:
Les societés ont pris leur derniére formes; on n’y change plus rien qu’avec du canon et des écus, et comme on n’a plus rien à dire au peuple sinon, donnez de l’argent, on le dit avec des placards au coin des rües ou des soldats dans les maisons; il ne faut assembler persone pour cela: au contraire, it faut tenir les sujets épars; c’est la prémiére maxime de la politique moderne.94
This, then, is the theme of the final chapter of a work which was initially conceived by Rousseau as a challenge to the musical philosophy of Rameau. Of course like all of Rousseau’s critical writings it launched upon a whole set of questions which his adversaries did not really put to him, even if for Jean-Jacques himself there was never any doubt that one campaign must lead directly to the next. Like most other great thinkers he marched into battle backwards, and the last chapter of the Essai sur l’origine des langues—though it was inspired by his disagreements with Rameau—came to stand among the most passionate, fiery and sweeping attacks upon the institutions of civilized society produced by the figure who was to be more highly esteemed than any other Enlightenment hero of the French Revolution of 1789. I do not wish to argue for a moment that the Essai sur l’origine des langues should be regarded as the manifesto of that Revolution, since even apart from the fact that it does not advocate revolution in any form, the work, which was only published after Rousseau’s death,95 was probably unknown to all but a handful of his revolutionary admirers and detractors alike. And yet the Essai is nevertheless marked by the characteristic venom and fury of the man whom Burke was later to decry as a kind of prophet—as ‘the insane Socrates of the national assembly’.96 Quite a number of distinguished historians have for some years now attempted to show that Rousseau’s influence upon the Revolution was insubstantial, largely because the lofty principles of the Contrat social must have been too abstract to express the visceral contempt and hatred for the ancien régime felt by the Revolutionary leaders.97 For my part, I wonder whether these historians have not looked to the wrong text, and whether they have not posed their problem in too restricted a way. When the most distinguished commentators of an earlier age condemned Rousseau for having helped to bring about the Revolution, it was precisely because they saw his theory as so abstract, as so ‘inapplicable to real life and manners’,98 that they regarded it as dangerous. In the accounts of Burke, de Maistre and Hegel, for instance, the task of connecting Rousseau’s thought with the French Revolution was not really that of tracing his influence, but rather that of assessing the practical implications of his theory, since, however they might be interpreted by their followers, his ideas themselves were revolutionary. I believe it is in this sense that Burke regarded him as a prophet, and I also believe there is still some truth in that suggestion. We must not forget Rousseau’s remark that ‘nous approchons de l’état de crise et du siécle des révolutions’ and that it was impossible ‘que les grandes monarchies de l’Europe aient encore long-tems à durer’.99 Certainly this statement must be counted among his most portentous visions of our destiny, but it was not his only warning. For my principal aim here has been to show that if Rousseau was really a prophet, then perhaps we should look to his critique of Rameau as his Sermon on the Mount.