5
Loneliness of the Celebrity

Rousseau is a case both exemplary and exceptional. The author of La Nouvelle Héloïse was not only one of the best known writers in all of Europe during the Enlightenment, arousing curiosity and sometimes spectacular excitement, but he was also one of the first to comment on his own celebrity. Obsessed by the question of his public persona, Rousseau, in his correspondence and his autobiographical texts, engaged in a fascinating reflection, partly social philosophy and partly paranoid delirium, about the consequences of a celebrity that he judged “disastrous.” His career trajectory is particularly well documented and offers a stunning plunge into the workings of celebrity: it allows us to follow the destiny of a writer who was not really ready to become, from one day to the next, among the most celebrated men of his time for the next twenty years. Far from enjoying it, Rousseau felt this notoriety as a burden, a curse that condemned him to live “more alone in the middle of Paris than Robinson on his island, and sequestered from intercourse with men by the crowd itself, eager to surround him in order to prevent him from allying with anyone.”¹ How is such a paradox to be understood?

“The Celebrity of Misfortune”

Like many after him, Rousseau had the experience of being a sudden celebrity, an event that threw him brutally onto the public stage. Beginning in the 1750s, before the success of his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, he was only one of a number of writers trying to break into the Parisian literary world. At nearly forty years old, ten years after his arrival in the capital, he had only one piece of writing to show, Dissertation on Modern Music, which had had almost no success, and an opera, Les Muses galantes, that had not yet been performed. His system of musical notation, on which he had based all his hopes, was not accepted by the Academy of Sciences, while his talent for composition angered Rameau and raised suspicions, which closed the doors of the court and of patronage to him. Even his experience as embassy secretary in Venice, in 1743–4, ended with a stunning failure. He was lucky to obtain employment as secretary through Mme Dupin, the wife of a Farmer-General, and had gained the confidence of her son-in-law, Dupin de Francueil, the tax collector. Another glimmer of hope was his friend Diderot, who assigned him some articles about music for a vague encyclopedia project. All in all, his path resembled the banal one of a provincial autodidact who had come to Paris in the hope of succeeding but whose reputation had not made it beyond the narrow confines of the literary underground.

Everything changed in 1751 with the impact of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, which won the Académie de Dijon prize. Starting in December 1750, Abbé Raynal published the best sections in the Mercure de France, then the entire text in January 1751, which caused lively controversy. The text was an immediate sensation, far above the usual success of an academic dissertation.² Diderot wrote him that no “example of such a success” existed. Several attempts at a refutation, including that of the former king of Poland, Stanisław Leszczyński, fed general curiosity and gave Rousseau a chance to refine his positions. He soon became a noted writer. Mme de Graffigny, herself a successful novelist, was overjoyed to meet him: “Yesterday, I met this Rousseau who is becoming so very famous for his controversial opinions and his response to your king.”³ A few months later, the Journal de Trévoux invoked the “splash” that his dissertation had made, even across borders. Antoine Court, at that time a theology student in Geneva, attempted to follow “the crush of writings” that appeared in opposition to the Discourse.⁴

From that moment on, Rousseau would never stop making cultural news. The following year, he continued to publish responses to his critics, had a play, Narcisse, performed, then, in spite of its failure, published it with the addition of a very long preface – forty pages – in which he wrote a self-justification which had an unexpected benefit: again it set off the interest he had aroused earlier. His opera Le Devin du village was a triumph at its Fontainebleau performance a few months later. Rousseau fed this incipient celebrity through a series of polemics against French music, against the theater, and then against his old friends the encyclopédistes. Finally, at the start of the 1760s, with the unprecedented success of La Nouvelle Héloïse, a publishing phenomenon, and the scandal provoked by the publication of Émile and the Social Contract, along with his condemnation in 1762 by the Paris parliament, his notoriety reached a zenith.

Threatened with arrest, Rousseau had to flee France immediately. This began a period marked by successive exiles which earned him the “celebrity of misfortune,”⁵ an expression he liked. He became both a successful writer and a public person, his life reported in detail in all the gazettes, his portrait reproduced in every form and avidly sought after by numerous admirers. In the mid-1760s, Rousseau was undoubtedly, along with Voltaire, the most renowned writer of his time. The European press reported the tiniest details of his life. In England, where his writings were translated and commented on, newspapers like the Critical Review, the Monthly Review, and also the London Chronicle or the St James's Chronicle often gave readers news of him.⁶ In 1765, given that the situation in Geneva had made him not only a literary celebrity but also a political one, there were articles about Rousseau every week.⁷ When young people threw stones at his house in Môtiers, the London Chronicle reported, with special emphasis, that the “celebrated John James Rousseau just missed being assassinated by three men.”⁸ A few months later, with his arrival on English soil, the author of Émile aroused a real media frenzy, even more because the English press saw him as a victim of the political and religious intolerance which held sway on the Continent. But it was above all the singularity of his rise to stardom and his personality which caused all the curiosity. “All the world are eager to see this man, who by his singularity, has drawn himself into much difficulty; he appears abroad but seldom, and dresses like an Armenian,” announced the Public Advertiser.⁹ As for David Hume who had persuaded him to come to London and who had not yet cut off ties with him, he did not know whether to be surprised or amazed by the spin that the British press give the tiniest details about Rousseau: “Every circumstance, the most minute that concerns him, is put in the newspapers.”¹⁰ When Rousseau lost his dog, Sultan, the news was announced the next day. When he found it, a new article appeared!¹¹ When he arrived in London in January 1766, Rousseau went to the theater to see Garrick perform, but he was the one who was the veritable attraction that evening. All the newspapers recounted the event, describing the crowd that pushed to get a glimpse of him, emphasizing the curiosity aroused by his presence, and even more so because he was in his Armenian costume and sitting in the first row of the balcony, where he reacted in a very animated and dramatic way.

In February, the London Chronicle published a long biography of Rousseau that emphasized his immoderate taste for publicity. Rousseau, not surprisingly, was one of the most cited people in the Mémoires secrets, appearing more than one hundred and eighty-five times. Of course his writings were announced and commented on, but it was essentially the daily exploits of his life which fed the curiosity and interest of readers. The Mémoires secrets, and its readers, seemed fascinated by the persecutions which assailed Rousseau, by the quarrels which put him in opposition to authorities and his former friends, but above all the endless questions about his character.¹² When he took refuge on Île Saint-Pierre, the Mémoires secrets affirmed that “The persecutions he has experienced have darkened his imagination, and he has become wilder than ever.”¹³ When he returned to Paris in 1770, his appearances were regularly reported in the Mémoires; as soon as he first appeared in the Café de la Régence, they were surprised at the “publicity surrounding the author of Émile,” in spite of the order for his arrest that in theory still threatened his liberty:

J.-J. Rousseau, tired of his obscurity and no longer being in the public eye, came to the city a few days ago and went to the Café de la Régence, where he was soon surrounded by a considerable crowd. Our cynical philosophe accepted this little triumph with great modesty. He did not seem alarmed by all the spectators, and his conversation was amicable, unlike his usual behavior.¹⁴

Rousseau's return to Paris was quite an event.¹⁵ His first appearances drew a crowd of gawkers eager to see the celebrated man. In the Correspondance littéraire, Grimm ironically described this fascination:

He showed up several times at the Café de la Régence in the Palais-Royal, his presence drawing a prodigious crowd, and the populace even gathered around the Place in order to see him pass by. We asked half of the people what they were doing there; they answered that they had come to “to see Jean-Jacques.” We asked them who Jean-Jacques was, and they answered that they had no idea, but he was passing by.¹⁶

“Jean-Jacques” had become an empty word, the rallying cry which announced an odd spectacle, a word the crowd repeated, a publicity slogan disconnected not only from the work of Rousseau, but even from his person. His celebrity was transformed into a pure tautological phenomenon, self-sustaining, where there only existed the excitement of the “populace,” the least enlightened and the least critical, at the idea of seeing a famous man, no matter who it was. Mme du Deffand made ironic comments herself about the “spectacle” that Rousseau made, worthy of street theater, and used the same pejorative term of “populace” to expand the derision to include all those who admired the writer, many from polite society: “Jean-Jacques is here. […] The show that this man puts on is at the level of Nicolet. It is really only the quick-witted among the populace who pay any attention.”¹⁷ Rousseau, however, soon ceased going to cafés at the request of the authorities, who reminded him that his presence in the capital was only just tolerated.¹⁸

In this last period, Rousseau played to the hilt the role of a famous man who hid from view, who sought anonymity in the heart of the capital. “The name of Rousseau is famous throughout Europe, but his life in Paris is murky,” wrote Jean-Baptiste La Harpe to the Grand Duke of Russia.¹⁹ The untold numbers of visitors who wanted to meet him had to outwit and foil his suspicions. The Duc de Croÿ expressed a desire to meet this Rousseau, a writer as difficult to see as he was famous: “For some time, I had wanted to see the famous Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom I had never seen and who, three years ago, had come back to retire near Paris. We knew that Jean-Jacques frequented a certain café: we rushed there to see him, but he no longer went there and it was, it seemed, very difficult to approach him.”²⁰ After hoping to be presented to Rousseau by the Prince de Ligne, he finally decided to go alone to the writer's home, in rue Plâtrière, where he was received without any trouble and spent two hours discussing botany with him.

The public figure of Rousseau was cemented the moment he refused celebrity. He was not only famous, he was famous for not wanting to be famous. He no longer published, claimed he no longer read books, and was satisfied to live frugally copying music. He systematically refused curious visitors or admirers. Many of his visitors competed with each other in finding ways to meet him, some bringing him music to copy, others, like the Prince de Ligne, pretending that they did not recognize him in order to better allay his suspicions. A visit to see Rousseau thus became a veritable literary genre, a necessary phase in narrative accounts of journeys to Paris. Later, in contemporaries' memoirs, all the same issues were almost always mentioned: the simple, austere life of Rousseau, his refusal to talk about books, his mix of friendliness and misanthropy, the quiet presence of Thérèse Levasseur, and, finally, his conviction that he was being persecuted. In most of these narratives, written down a few years later, many after the death of Rousseau and the publication of the Confessions, it is difficult to know what is true and what is fiction.

Thus, when Mme de Genlis describes in her memoirs a meeting with Rousseau in the autumn of 1770, she first of all paints a comic scene in which she mistakes him for an actor playing a role, then she describes the beginning of a friendship and edifying conversations, followed by a sudden rupture, Rousseau accusing her of taking him to the theater to show him off to the public, to be seen with him. This image of a sensitive, good man but one who was unjustly suspicious, who had an almost pathological relationship to his celebrity, corresponds perfectly to the collective portrait that numerous witnesses painted of Rousseau in the last years of his life and one which he himself accommodatingly maintained. The essential lesson of such stories was that a meeting with Rousseau had become a necessary encounter for anyone writing their memoirs. Even the glazier Jacques Louis Ménétra, though living in another social world than that of Mme de Genlis, recounted his lucky encounter with Jean-Jacques, their walks together, and the crowds that the presence of Rousseau excited in a café, with curious passersby climbing up on the marble tables to catch a glimpse of the author of Émile, much to the great distress of the owner of the establishment.²¹ As for Alfieri, who did not wish to meet the “famous Rousseau” during his visit to Paris in 1771, he felt obliged to justify himself when he drafted his memoirs.²²

In spite of the silence in which Rousseau enclosed himself, not publishing and going out little, his celebrity did not seem to diminish. In 1775, his comedy Pygmalion was performed at the Comédie-Française without his permission and with great success, due to the name of the author. The novelist Louis François Mettra was not fooled: “Pygmalion continues to be successful. I repeat, it is the name of Jean-Jacques that gives verve to this sketch, which is not very theatrical.”²³ The least little incident concerning Rousseau was reported in the press, which is shown in one episode that he himself recounted at length in his Reveries, when he was knocked over by a dog running in front of a carriage in Ménilmontant. All the European newspapers reported the event as well as the worry that it caused. One read in the Gazette de Berne, for example:

Paris, Nov. 8: J.J. Rousseau was returning from Ménil le montant a few days ago, near Paris, when a big Danish dog running very fast in front of a carriage with six horses, caused him to take a very bad fall. […] This celebrated man was transported to his home and there is still doubt that he will survive it. Everyone in Paris is very concerned; people constantly go to his place or send someone to find out how he is doing.

The Courrier d'Avignon even announced his death by mistake, which gave Rousseau the doubtful privilege of reading his own obituary.²⁴ When he actually died the following year, the lively rumors concerning the possible publication of his Confessions showed that his celebrity had not dried up. The following years saw the apotheosis of Jean-Jacques, his transformation into a great man, as pilgrimages to Ermenonville show, then the publication of his complete works, and, finally, his induction into the Panthéon in 1794. This history goes beyond his celebrity. It became the history of his posthumous glory, his literary, intellectual, and political fortune. It was already part of the Rousseau mythology.²⁵

Rousseau's celebrity became an aspect of his identity while he was alive. It was normal to associate him with celebrity, although a new concept, either to mock his taste for publicity or, to the contrary, to complain about his destiny. Starting in 1754, a visit by Rousseau to Geneva raised intense curiosity. The account of Jean-Baptiste Tollot, an apothecary and a Genovese man of letters, shows clearly that the interest of the observer was in the phenomenon of celebrity even more than in Rousseau himself, the way a celebrated man was capable of fascinating the public and focusing attention on himself.

I will confine myself to telling the truth about a man of genius, indeed, whose works are famous but who likes obscurity and who, far from wanting to be renowned, would rather that such renown be silenced; in a word, I am talking about the celebrated Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who through his eccentric, paradoxical life, through his energetic style, through the audacity of his pen, has attracted the attention of the public, which sees him as a rare phenomenon meriting its curiosity. […] All of Geneva has seen him, as I have, and from the highest to the lowest, everyone rushes to contemplate the man from Paris who has made a great many enemies, and the hate and jealousy coming from them have only made him more well known. […] It is obvious, of course, that not all the curious are in Paris; everyone wants to see this star, who is sometimes eclipsed, sometimes covered by a cloud.²⁶

If the star metaphor foreshadows the “stars” of the twentieth century, most of the elements that form the basis of Rousseau's celebrity in the following years are already present. The author focuses on the avid curiosity that this singular man aroused, his mania for paradox and his encouragement of controversy: the notoriety of his name induced a desire to see, to contemplate even, this celebrated man. However, this enthusiasm also engendered criticism, which had to do with the excesses of public curiosity, not with the writer himself. Far from being accused of willfully nourishing this fascination, Rousseau is credited with the contrary desire for anonymity.

Tollot was one of the first to describe in specific terms the celebrity of Rousseau, the crowds who pushed and shoved to see him when he walked by, admirers who wrote to him and came to visit while he tried in vain to preserve a quiet, obscure life. He was not the only one. Most of his friends and admirers talked endlessly about the troublesome nature of celebrity, which Rousseau himself fostered whenever it pleased him, as we shall see. So, when he complained to Mme de Chenonceaux about the annoying visits he received, she said: “It is the misfortune of celebrity and in my opinion it is not a small one.”²⁷ During the same period, shocked by reading in the press about Rousseau's misfortunes, his friend Deleyre wrote to him: “When I think, my friend, of all the pain caused by your talent and your virtue, your celebrity makes me tremble. […] How indignant I am to think of all the annoyances you have been subjected to these last six months and which I did not know about until I read of them in the newspaper!”²⁸ As for Bernois Niklaus Anton Kirchberger, he offered him asylum: “My dear and loving friend, come and take refuge in my house, where you can stay as long as you like, and I promise to protect you from your celebrity, at least from that which is tiresome.”²⁹ The same idea appeared in the newspapers: “This famous man, tired of being talked about, seems to want to retire to the countryside and live there in obscurity.”³⁰

What is the basis of such a strong and long-lasting celebrity? At first, particularly in the 1750s, the notoriety of Rousseau rested on his capacity to excite scandal and controversy through the clever use of ambiguous opinions and a consummate sense of intellectual guerrilla warfare. The success of the first Discourse rested in large part on the fact that Rousseau turned the most well-established idea of his time on its head, shared both by Enlightenment philosophers and by most of their enemies, that of the link between progress in the arts and lifestyle. His discourse intrigued and invited refutation. “Isn't this simply a paradox with which he wanted to amuse the public?” asked Stanisław Leszczyński, one of Rousseau's first opponents. Intellectual polemics were followed by quarrels and noisy ruptures with his former friends, d'Alembert and Diderot, as well as a long-distance confrontation with Voltaire.

The romantic image of Rousseau as a solitary walker meditating on the meanness of his contemporaries has overshadowed his talent, although undeniable, as a polemicist. In 1752, he made up for the failure of Narcisse by publishing a provocative and rather arrogant preface in which he affirmed: “Here I am not writing about my play but about me. I must, in spite of my repugnance, speak about myself,” and he took advantage of the occasion to respond to all his critics. Just when all the debates aroused by his Discourse seemed to be exhausted, he started them going again by reaffirming his positions and by attacking his adversaries with new energy, reproaching scholars for defending science as a way to assure their authority the same way ancient pagan priests defended religion.

The following year, his Letter on French Music provoked a scandal. Rousseau was not content to simply defend Italian opera; he unleashed an all-out attack on French music, the violence of which surprised people.³¹ Thus it was hardly surprising to read in the Correspondance littéraire a few weeks later that he “had just set fire to the four corners of Paris.” “Never,” it added, “has one seen a quarrel louder or more intense.”³² The scandal was, indeed, so intense that musicians from the Opera decided to burn Rousseau in effigy. For a writer almost unknown two years before, this was already proof of his remarkable visibility.

Repercussions from the Letter on French Music did not only result from the aesthetic positions defended by Rousseau, but above all from the patriotic scandal aroused by his total rejection of French music. This episode reinforced the image of the paradoxical man which now accompanied him everywhere. How could an author who had just enjoyed such success with Le Devin du village, a French opera whose refrains were on everyone's lips, categorically condemn French music? This astonishment also came from the fact that Rousseau seemed to escape every possible category found in the intellectual field, an impression reinforced by the publication of the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality in 1755, then by his brutal rupture in 1757 with the encyclopédistes. Radical positions, a sense of provocation and polemic, even a taste for scandal, these elements constituted an explosive combination which could only incite the curiosity of the public. In the 1750s, Rousseau seemed in many ways to be a master of self-promotion.

In 1762, when Émile appeared, Rousseau was still this paradoxical author figure putting his eloquence to work writing provocative theses, which the Mémoires secrets invoked in order to explain the expectations raised by the book: “This work, announced & awaited, piques the curiosity of the public because the author combines great genius with a rare talent for writing with as much grace as energy. He is reproached for sustaining paradoxes; in part this has to do with the seductive art he uses and to which perhaps he owes his great celebrity; it is only since he took this path that he has been distinctively singled out.”³³

Ami Jean-Jacques

At this point, however, the celebrity of Rousseau was enriched by another dimension: to the curiosity aroused by the eloquent writer, never short of paradoxes, was added a sentimental aspect found in La Nouvelle Héloïse. The novel's success, published early in 1761, was prodigious. In spite of its often lukewarm, even disdainful, reception by writers and critics, the book was adored by the public. “Never has a work created such an astonishing sensation,” noted Louis Sébastien Mercier, describing the public's fascination. The first editions were immediately sold out and bookstores loaned the book page by page to readers. Even those who did not read the book could not escape the collective enthusiasm. The young Princess Czartoryska, sixteen years old and visiting Paris, got caught up in the latest fashion and ordered miniatures inspired by the book: “I don't read anything and I have never read anything by Rousseau, but they talk endlessly about La Nouvelle Héloïse and every woman wants to be like Julie. I thought I had better join the ranks.” Having managed to obtain a visit with Rousseau at his house, she showed up “with the eagerness one has to see something new, to see a show.”³⁴

Many people, however, had read the novel and received a real emotional shock. “From the first pages, I was delirious. […] Days were not long enough, I read at night, and had one emotional upheaval after another. I reached the last letter from Saint-Preux, no longer crying but screaming, howling like an animal,” General Thiébault remembered in his Mémoires.³⁵ The publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse marked a date in the history of reading, as many readers testified by writing to Rousseau and telling him about their emotions. From that time on, Rousseau seemed to be the master of feelings, a man who spoke the language of virtue and whose works had the power to make his readers better by pulling tears out of them. The young Charles Joseph Panckoucke, at that time a publisher in Rouen, did not hesitate to write Rousseau a passionate letter:

Your divine writings, Monsieur, are a fire which devour, they have pierced my soul, strengthened my heart, enlightened my mind. Having for a long time been given over to the treacherous illusions of impetuous youth, my reason had gone astray in the search for truth. […] A god was needed, a powerful god, to pull me back from the precipice and you are, Monsieur, the god who has worked this miracle. […] Your tender and virtuous Héloïse will always be for me the code for moral sanity, the source of all my ecstasy, all my love and all my desires, and you, Monsieur, will have my most profound veneration and respect. I adore you and your sublime writings, all those lucky enough to read your work will find in you a trusted guide who will lead them to perfection and to love and to the practice of all those virtues that make up the essence of a good man.³⁶

Behind the bombast, very characteristic of the sentimental style of the period, one can perceive the moral and spiritual experience that La Nouvelle Héloïse represented for many readers. Up until that moment, Rousseau had been a censor, denouncing the vices of modern society. He now became a guide, opening up for his readers a path to moral regeneration and happiness. The letter also revealed the transfer of feeling to the author, which authorized, even stimulated, the writing. The bond was no longer simply curiosity or admiration, it was primarily an outpouring of gratitude, of “eternal acknowledgment,” which invited effusion and led the reader, when he began writing, to imitate the hyperbolic style of the novel, sentimental and moral, where tears and pity led to virtue.

It is likely that Panckoucke, a young publisher from the provinces, was not totally disinterested in showing his admiration for a successful writer. But such an effusion went beyond professional flattery and Rousseau received several hundred similar letters in the months following the novel's publication. These letters were so numerous, several hundred in just a few months, that Rousseau talked about a “multitude” and even thought about publishing them.³⁷ Sadly, not all the letters were saved, but those we have demonstrate this same sentimental enthusiasm for the work and for the author. Most notable of all are the large number of ordinary readers, sometimes anonymous. One of them thanked Rousseau for “the only good moments” he had had in the last six years. He found in the novel echoes of his own situation and his impossible love: “I was so carried away that if the immensity of the oceans did not separate me from you as from my Julie, I would not be able to stop myself from giving you a huge hug and thanking you a thousand times with the delicious tears that you pulled out of me. Perhaps one day I will be impelled to meet you, and I will certainly find a way.”³⁸

Some readers, it is true, kept a calmer tone, even a critical one. Thus, Pierre de La Roche, a man from Geneva who was living in London, wrote long letters in which he discussed the work point by point. But even this gesture, although without passionate feeling, was only possible because Rousseau was not simply an author, but a public figure one could talk to. Most of the time, readers wrote to thank him and above all to talk about the change the book had produced in their lives. Jean-Louis Le Cointe, a Protestant from Nîmes, owed Rousseau for his discovery of the “charms of virtue.” When he wrote to Rousseau, he hesitated between the distance which separated him from a great writer and the affective proximity allowed by the novel: “I feel all my temerity and I condemn it; but the more you inspire me with respect, the less my heart can refuse the pleasure of telling you about the feelings you have caused to be born in me.” Then he opened up even more to the person who had given him the means to understand his life differently. “Being sincerely attached to a young wife, you have made it known to the two of us that what seemed a simple attachment through the habit of living together is the most tender love. Father at age twenty-eight of four children, I will follow your lessons in order to make men of them.”³⁹

Not all readers wrote directly to Rousseau, certainly not when they discovered the novel several years after its publication. Manon Phlipon, who would play an important political role during the Revolution under the name of Mme Roland, was only seven years old when La Nouvelle Héloïse appeared, but, in the 1770s, she was enthusiastic about the author, whose books she devoured and whom she dreamed of meeting. “I'm angry that you do not like Rousseau, because I like him more than I can say,” she wrote to her best friend. “Just talking about this excellent Jean-Jacques my soul is moved, animated, warmed: my taste for study is reborn, for the true and the beautiful of every kind.” Openly proselytizing, she insisted on sharing her fascination: “I am so astounded that you are amazed by my enthusiasm for Rousseau: I regard him as a friend of humanity, its benefactor and mine”; and: “I know that I owe to his writings what is best in me. His genius has warmed my soul: I feel it wrapping me in flames, lifting me up and ennobling me.”⁴⁰

The enthusiasm created by the reading of Rousseau's books, La Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile above all, translated into an attachment to his person. This was reinforced by Rousseau's misfortunes, by the stories in the press of his bad luck and his successive exiles. It obviously opened up the theme of a persecuted Rousseau, constrained to live in retirement and in solitude:

The persecutions, the injustices by men, almost gave Rousseau the right not to believe in their sincerity. Tormented in every country, betrayed by those he thought were friends in a manner even more painful because his sensitive soul saw their evil ways without being able to delicately unmask them; persecuted by his ungrateful country, which he had exemplified, enlightened, served; exposed to the traits of envy and meanness, is it any wonder that retirement seemed to him the only desirable asylum.

Rousseau's fans easily went from admiration for his writing to an unconditional defense of the man.

In a seminal essay, Robert Darnton highlighted one of Rousseau's readers, Jean Ranson, a merchant from La Rochelle who kept up a regular correspondence with the director of the typographical company in Neuchâtel. He ordered books, but also took the opportunity to ask after his “Ami Jean-Jacques.” Although he had never met him, Ranson saw in Rousseau a familiar person, a friend of the family to whom he was bound by a long-distance intimacy, thanks to the reading of his books, but also thanks to the news about him found in journals and in his letters. Darnton clearly showed that this attitude was related to a new practice of reading adapted to the Rousseauistic language-of-the-heart rhetoric. Because readers found in the novel, or in other writings by Rousseau, elements that seemed to describe their own lives and clarified their subjectivity, they in turn went further than the text, which was only a pretext for directing their admiration and affection toward the author. “The impact of Rousseauism therefore owed a great deal to Rousseau. He spoke to the most intimate experiences of his readers and encouraged them to see through to the Jean-Jacques behind the texts.”⁴¹ This affective reading was so successful it logically led the reader to entertain a mesmerizing relationship with the person of the author. However, determined to create a history of reading based on an ethnographical approach to the culture of the Ancien Régime and a “mental world that is almost unthinkable today,” Darnton depicted the affective link forged between Rousseau and his readers as the expression of a mysterious attitude, favorable to sentimental effusiveness, that would seem strange to us now: “The Rousseauistic readers of prerevolutionary France threw themselves into texts with a passion that we can barely imagine, that is as alien to us as the lust for plunder among the Norsemen or the fear of demons among the Balinese.”⁴² But is this enthusiastic attachment so completely strange to us today when crowds stood in line for hours at the appearance of a new volume of Harry Potter, or vast numbers of inconsolable fans grouped together to weep at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson?

Reader reactions to Rousseau's work were not so “naïve,” nor so exotic. Far from believing that Julie and Saint-Preux really existed, as one often thought, most had fun with the ambiguity upheld by Rousseau concerning the authenticity of the letters, according to a procedure which was already, at that time, a hackneyed commonplace. A number of readers enjoyed, as readers would do today, imagining keys to an autobiographical reading, persuaded that Rousseau was inspired by his own amorous dalliances in order to imagine the fate of his characters and give them such eloquence. Consequently, interest in and pity for the characters transferred to Rousseau, who had been capable of creating them and who could not have done so, they thought, unless he had himself lived through comparable ordeals. The main principle of the romance novel, to move readers emotionally and to give to virtue a romance form through a process of identification with the moral dilemmas of the characters, strongly encouraged such an affective transfer to the author.⁴³

The enthusiasm expressed by Rousseau's correspondents, their desire to weave an intimate bond with him, both friendly and spiritual, in spite of distance, were not the traits of an old and irrational attitude, but rather the joint effects of a work that lauded romantic effusiveness and of new forms of literary communication. The religious vocabulary, very present in Panckoucke, that of moral and spiritual conversion employed by so many readers, should not be construed as an error. This was not a matter of a “cult” or a quasi-mystical surrender, but a new formulation of the bond that individuals who made up a public had with a contemporary celebrity, one with whom they identified or whom they had chosen as a guide and virtual friend. This relationship, a truly intense one, had strong affective or moral dimensions, especially when the famous person, as was the case with Rousseau, offered through his work or the example of his life means to a “recovery of oneself.”⁴⁴

The relationship that numerous readers wove with Rousseau, through his books, came from this friendly imagined intimacy. This is what clearly appears in the Jean Ranson correspondence. This was not a young reader, passionate and fanatical; he was a rational merchant but one who found in “l'Ami Jean-Jacques” sound moral principles. “Everything that l'Ami Jean-Jacques has written about the duties of husbands and wives, of mothers and fathers, has had a profound effect upon me, and I confess to you that it will serve me as a rule in any of those estates that I should occupy.” This does not arise from an improbable identification, nor from a religion, nor from confusion between fiction and reality. Ranson forged a long-distance friendship with Rousseau, both real and imagined, which served him as a guide. It was under this form of amicable intimacy that he took a “lively interest” in the person of Jean-Jacques, demanding on several different occasions of Jean-Frédéric Ostervald news about “his friend Jean-Jacques's” health. When Rousseau died, Ranson cried out: “So, Monsieur, we have lost the sublime Jean-Jacques. How it pains me never to have seen nor heard him […] Tell me, I pray, what you think of this famous man, whose fate hs always aroused the most tender feelings in me, while Voltaire often provoked my indignation.”⁴⁵

It is clearly this conjunction of Rousseau's celebrity, the emotional and moral power of his books, and the sympathy toward his misfortunes which pushed people to react: readers wrote to this celebrated man, without knowing him, to testify about their feelings and the desire they had to meet him. No one expressed this aspiration more strongly, perhaps, than a nobleman from the south of France who affirmed that his soul felt “the strongest passion” for Jean-Jacques and he would now write to him each week until Rousseau decided to respond to him. “If Rousseau did not exist, I would need nothing. He exists, and I feel that something is missing in me.”⁴⁶ As for the clock-maker Jean Romilly, he ruminated for several months over his letter and admitted openly the place that Rousseau, as an imaginary friend, had in his daily life, to the point of becoming an obsession:

I can no longer defer talking with you, it is almost two years now even three that I have wanted to tell you about all the idealized conversations I have with you because you should know that whether I'm sleeping or walking about, you are always present in my mind and I am only at ease in company when I can talk a little about you, either to those who love you or those who do not love you at all.⁴⁷

The correspondence that Rousseau and Mme de La Tour maintained for ten years shows how the bond starts, sentimental and playful, asymmetric and fragile, between the author and one of his admirers. This admirer, a member of the gentry, separated from her husband and thirty years old when La Nouvelle Héloïse appeared, did not start a correspondence with Rousseau on her own initiative. It was her friend, Mme Bernardoni, who began a correspondence with him, half-flirtatious, half-serious, assuring him that she knew another Julie possessing all the merits of the book's heroine. Taking the role of Claire, she got Rousseau to answer the letters. Thus began a game among them where Mme Bernardoni, who would quickly disappear, played the role of mischievous go-between with her devoted friend Mme de La Tour as the obliging admirer, with both of whom Rousseau, at first, did not mind multiplying allusions to the novel and to the trio that they could, themselves, create. Then developed a long-standing correspondence between Rousseau and Mme de La Tour, which lasted until a rather sudden rupture was imposed by Rousseau ten years later. Mme de La Tour was demanding, endlessly restarting the correspondence over and over again, tirelessly asking news from Rousseau, showing her interest and her worry, reading and rereading his works (“My friend, I must tell you about my enchantment: I am reading La Nouvelle Héloïse for the seventh or eighth time: it moves me more than the first time I read it!”),⁴⁸ always multiplying enthusiastic commentaries and indiscreet questions. Rousseau moved from an amicable tone, even tender (“Dear Marianne, you are hurt, and I am disarmed. I feel nothing but tenderness when I think of your beautiful eyes in tears”),⁴⁹ to much more distant phrases, even long suspicious silences; but all in all, he wrote more than sixty letters to her, turning these long, improvised gallantries into an epistolary friendship.⁵⁰

It was not enough for Mme de La Tour to read and reread the works of Rousseau, dreaming about the loves of Julie and Saint-Preux, and writing to her “dear Jean-Jacques” long letters in which she deplored the fact that he did not answer more assiduously. Her zeal pushed her to take his side when he was attacked. Thus, at the highest point of the quarrel with David Hume, in 1766–7, she published a libelous, anonymous piece meant to justify Rousseau, and then she drafted a second one. When Rousseau died, she took up the pen again to defend his memory, with a series of letters addressed to Élie Fréron's L'Année littéraire, in the form of a volume entitled Jean-Jacques Rousseau vangé [sic] par son amie (Jean-Jacques Rousseau Defended by His Friend).⁵¹ Mme de La Tour was not the first to go from private admiration to public apology. Panckoucke, whose emotions we saw when La Nouvelle Héloïse appeared, took up the pen a few weeks later to reply in the Journal encyclopédique to jokes made by Voltaire.

What is revealed here is the complexity of the reactions aroused by the celebrity of Rousseau, not only a successful author whose paradoxes were intriguing, but also the “champion of sensitive souls,” the author of a great romance novel that certain readers read over and over again, a persecuted writer, forced to flee France, then Geneva, then Switzerland, in search of refuge. Beyond the curiosity fed by the chronicle of his misfortunes and his eccentricities, causing crowds of curiosity seekers to gather wherever he went, there existed a more profound attachment between “Jean-Jacques” and his readers, woven from empathy and a desire for intimacy, from admiration and gratefulness. For readers like Ranson, Panckoucke, Manon Phlipon, or Mme de La Tour, just a few examples among many known and unknown, Rousseau was not only a fashionable person, he was an imaginary friend they were always ready to empathize with and defend. The characteristic paradox of celebrity, and more generally mass culture, was that Rousseau's readers lived their bond with “l'Ami Jean-Jacques” in a particularly personal and singular way, even though the bond was perceived identically by numerous other readers.

The public reaction to the heated quarrel between Rousseau and David Hume in 1766 demonstrates this attachment to the celebrated man. Hume had agreed to the demand of two of Rousseau's friends and protectors in polite Parisian society, Mme de Luxembourg and Mme de Boufflers, to find him asylum in England at the height of the persecution exercised against him in France and in Switzerland. Sadly, the relations between the two men worsened very quickly. Rousseau, convinced that Hume was in league with his enemies, refused the pension offered by George III that Hume had been able to obtain, writing Hume a shocking letter full of insane reproaches. Sickened and worried, Hume hurriedly wrote to Holbach and d'Alembert to show them the tenor of the letter and ask their advice. The move was maladroit and had dreadful consequences. The quarrel between the two men resounded everywhere, first in the closed circles of Parisian salons, where Rousseau's enemies were overjoyed, then in the press. A private dispute between two men became a literary event, a veritable public quarrel, the effects of which were felt by Rousseau for a very long time, alienating him from the support of his powerful protectors.

I have described elsewhere the mechanisms and the social stakes at issue in this quarrel.⁵² But the public dynamic must be emphasized here, the reactions of anonymous readers who wrote in defense of Rousseau. Hume himself was stunned: “I little imagined, that a private story, told to a private gentleman, could run over a whole kingdom in a moment; if the King of England had declared war against the King of France, it could not have more suddenly been the subject of conversation.”⁵³ Hume's strategy and that of his Parisian friends was to keep the grievances against Rousseau private, in order to avoid engaging in a public polemic that might have destroyed Hume's image, a most hazardous outcome. They hoped to keep the situation within the world of the salons and the closed circles of polite society, that area where reputations were made and lost. There, thanks to an intense campaign to denigrate Rousseau, emphasizing the spotless renown of the “good David,” who had been, during his visit to Paris, the darling of polite society, it was a matter of definitively destroying the reputation of Rousseau in the minds of Mme de Luxembourg, Mme de Boufflers, and his other patrons. Moreover, the mission appeared easy because Rousseau had opted to keep silent, not responding to those who asked him for explanations, unless he just told them to mind their own business.

Hume's friends made one mistake: they underestimated the celebrity of Rousseau. He was not only a player in the little literary world of the capital, he was also a public figure. In just a few days, extracts of the letter from Hume to Holbach were widely circulated, much beyond society circles, feeding “public rumors.” Less than a month later, the newspapers seized on the affair, first with an article in Le Courrier d'Avignon, then in the English papers. The St James's Chronicle, for instance, published a series of articles about the quarrel over the course of the summer and into the autumn of 1766.⁵⁴ Confronted with the sudden publicity given his rupture with Rousseau, Hume was forced to change strategies. Convinced he was right and in order to put an end to the rumors, he asked his friends to publish articles, including the long accusing letter written by Rousseau, accompanied by Hume's own commentary. However, contrary to his intentions, far from ending the affair by proving the ingratitude and madness of Rousseau, this started the controversy all over again and engendered numerous reactions. Mme de La Tour, as we saw, took up her pen to defend Jean-Jacques. But her text only strengthened the Justification de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the author of which was anonymous. In the form of pamphlets and letters from readers, there were numerous admirers of Rousseau who took up his defense.

Rousseau's letter to Hume, which the latter thought was a madness, was read conversely by many readers as proof of the author's innocence: unhappy, sincere, and persecuted. The effectiveness of this text was due to the fact that it was drafted in the romantic and hyperbolic style of La Nouvelle Héloïse, certain passages even using the same sentences employed by Saint-Preux.⁵⁵ The identification of Jean-Jacques with Saint-Preux, which had already been used successfully in the 1761 novel, worked again five years later. The conflation was almost total between the individual Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile, and the public figure “Jean-Jacques,” constituting a series of collective representations, certain of which were driven by the press, others kept alive by his writings.

The relative isolation of Rousseau in the Paris literary world, and even his silence, his refusal to respond and to defend himself, worked in his favor because it seemed, for his public, to testify to his sincerity. In the eyes of his admirers, Rousseau was not an author like others, fighting for his reputation, but a reasonable man who was suffering. “I do not live in the world, I do not know what is going on there; I have no reference points, no associates, no intrigues,” he wrote to Hume on July 10.⁵⁶ On the other hand, he had many readers for whom he was “l'Ami Jean-Jacques.” The anonymous author of the Justification de Jean-Jacques Rousseau dans la contestation qui lui est survenue avec M. Hume claims to have seen in Rousseau's letters to Hume “only the traces of a beautiful soul, generous, delicate and too sensitive, just as Rousseau has shown us in his writings and even more by his behavior.”⁵⁷ After having claimed that he did not know Rousseau personally, he concluded:

Who would not admit that Rousseau was forced to conduct himself the way he did in regard to M. Hume, and that on this occasion he showed his soul to be beautiful, delicate, and sensitive, an intrepid soul above adversity? Ah! Who is the virtuous man who could be distanced from the society of Rousseau by this event? And who, to the contrary, would not desire to become the friend of a man so full of candor, so worthy of esteem.⁵⁸

In the same vein, the similarly anonymous author of the Observations sur l'exposé succinct de la contestation qui s'est élevée entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau, in an eighty-eight-page brochure, dissects almost word for word reproaches addressed by Hume to Rousseau and makes a judgment about this quarrel between “two celebrated men” almost entirely in favor of the latter. The thesis he defends is that of a conspiracy plotted by Rousseau's enemies, in Geneva and in Paris, of which Hume was the more or less conscious agent. While claiming twice that he did not know Rousseau “except by his work,” he claims to be among his “friends.” These various pamphlets answer for Rousseau and are a comfort. The author of these observations comments:

As I finish these observations, a pamphlet is being published [it is the Justification de Jean-Jacques. Rousseau] which brings honor to the heart of the person who wrote it: it is wrong in supposing that the friends of M. Rousseau have been beaten: the ones I know are tireless; certain of the probity and sincerity of their friend, they imitate his silence: my decision to break this silence rests on the notion that virtuous men will always recognize each other, and someone who is unknown cannot be accused of bias.

The defenders of Rousseau constituted a sort of elective community, not a claque like the one around Hume, accused of working together secretly to destroy Jean-Jacques, but a group of the writer's friends who often did not know him except through his work but were convinced of his innocence, his sincerity, and the persecutions that hounded him. They made of their anonymity an argument for impartiality and perceived their public commitment in his favor as an act of justice that they would tirelessly uphold.

Hume and his friends, and some historians after them, were surprised by the public support Rousseau received and the turn the quarrel took.⁵⁹ Although they had intended to discreetly destroy the reputation of Rousseau in literary and social circles, they found themselves instead mixed up in a public quarrel that left Hume with a bitter taste. Although there was no doubt in their minds that Rousseau was wrong on all counts regarding the norms of polite society – he had virulently attacked, without proof, a man who was his patron – a large part of the public judged the affair differently. Hume's strategy, along with Holbach and d'Alembert, was based on a series of social conventions (politesse, patronage, etc.) which guaranteed the control of reputations through conversation and within inner circles. The public was held in suspicion. Holbach, as prudent in the salons as he was radical in his writings, wrote to Hume that “the public thinks very badly of quarrels that demand a judgment from it,” while d'Alembert warned him: “It is always disagreeable and often a nuisance to be tried by written word before this stupid animal called the public, which asks nothing better than to speak badly of those whose merit offends it.”⁶⁰ What matters, Holbach resumes, is to retain “the esteem of enlightened and impartial persons, the only people a gallant man desires the approval of.”⁶¹ But this strategy ran up against another principle, a new one, that of celebrity, which immediately nullified their attempt to keep the affair quiet and provided Rousseau with anonymous, albeit widespread, support.

One of the aspects of the quarrel, from the outset, was the pension that Hume had obtained for Rousseau from George III. Rousseau had refused all pensions the previous fifteen years because he wanted above all to be independent, and thus the royal pension bothered him. The affair was complicated; it seems that at first Rousseau accepted the pension on condition that it be accorded in secret; then he changed his mind. Whatever happened, he ended by believing that Hume had only made the request in order to put him in an impossible position, forcing him to contradict himself and be discredited. In the eyes of Rousseau, this was a grave situation that put into question his whole way of life. For Hume and for most of his contemporaries in polite society, this was only a pretext. Turgot assured him: “No one in the world could imagine that you asked for a pension for Rousseau in order to dishonor him. Only he would think that a pension was dishonorable.”⁶² Rousseau's readers, on the other hand, had another opinion: “Rousseau ungrateful! It's been proven that he is nothing of the sort. Rousseau is proud, perhaps. But a pride that is above money, which leads us to live off the fruit of our labors, which protects us from all cowardly compromises, is an estimable pride, and, unfortunately, far too rare among men of Letters!”⁶³ the author of the Justification de Jean-Jacques Rousseau exclaimed again. What was at stake here was Rousseau's singular position in the literary world, his refusal of common norms, his wish to construct an atypical public persona. This attempt to create an exemplary public image was itself a powerful factor in his celebrity.

Eccentricity, Exemplarity, Celebrity

Detractors and flatterers of Rousseau were alike on one point: he did nothing the way others did. His public image was that of an absolutely unique and eccentric man. A mad man, said his enemies; a sensitive man without equal, responded his admirers. He, as we know, made of this singularity, at an existential level, the very heart of his Confessions: “I am not made like any of the [men] I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different.”⁶⁴ But this originality is strongly projected into the public sphere through the persona of “Jean-Jacques.” Rousseau, however, was not content just to be different; he wanted to let it be known.

The element that contributed most to the construction of an eccentric public persona was the famous “personal reform” that Rousseau undertook at the beginning of his notoriety, after the publication of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. It consisted in making his lifestyle conform to his principles, and breaking with traditional forms of patronage and the lifestyle of writers in the Ancien Régime. Rousseau gave up his position as secretary to Dupin de Francueil, renounced habits of dress customary in polite society, refused presents and pensions, and chose to earn his living by copying music. He thus manifested, both publicly and in his own eyes, his independence in regard to the elites.⁶⁵

Before evaluating the consequences of this principle, one needs to take it seriously. The insistence on an exemplary life fulfills several functions. For one, it assures Rousseau of his own authenticity. This decision is part of a long intellectual and moral tradition which goes back to ancient philosophy and was revived in the Renaissance, during which philosophy was not simply a question of doctrine, but also an ethical question, a way of life, a self-exploration to find a more authentic, a truer way of existence.⁶⁶ Rousseau says it again in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker: “I have seen many who philosophized much more learnedly than I, but their philosophy was, so to speak, foreign to them.”⁶⁷ Opposed to philosophy as simply knowledge about the world, an intellectual exercise, Rousseau defended a concept of thought which was much more personal, first of all an exercise in self-knowledge and a means to perfectionism. On the other hand, while publicizing this philosophical and moral exemplarity, Rousseau also meant to guarantee the credibility of his philosophical discourse, and in particular the biting criticism that he addressed to his contemporaries. As he always said, an authentic thinker is the one who is ready to sacrifice everything for the truth. According to a suggested formulation: “If Socrates had died in his bed, people today might suspect that he was nothing more than a clever Sophist.”⁶⁸ Returning to the Confessions concerning this double conversion, at once theoretical and biographical, which marked his sensational entrance into the world of letters, Rousseau wrote: “Moreover, how could the severe principles I had just adopted be harmonized with a station which had so little relationship to them, and would not I, a Cashier of a Receiver General of finances, be preaching disinterestedness and poverty in good grace?”⁶⁹ This formulation draws attention because of its ambiguity: Is it meant to save the credibility of his principles by avoiding ridicule? This ambiguity is at the heart of Rousseau's choices, always worried about the public effect that would be produced, even as he openly fretted about the theoretical and ethical logic of an idea. One can opt for either a comprehensible or a critical reading of these choices. In the first case, one judges that the claims of exemplarity by Rousseau necessarily have two sides. In relationship to oneself, an ethical concern, it is fundamentally a private affair. In terms of a pedagogical argument, meant to balance his works by giving them extra weight, it is necessarily public. In the second case, a less charitable reading might be that this concern about exemplarity was, first of all, a concern about attracting public attention. The result is the same: the claim of authenticity and consistency is not only a personal and intimate experience, a solitary investigation of self; it is, from the beginning, loudly proclaimed by Rousseau through indiscreet acts such as refusing a royal patronage following the success of Devin du village, or adopting an incongruous but practical piece of clothing, a kind of Arab kaftan that he called his “Armenian robe” and which was meant to show his disdain for conventions and inner circles, his choice of a simple life, without luxuries, close to nature. These clothes became a recognizable sign of the “Jean-Jacques” public persona, feeding in his enemies a suspicion of histrionics.⁷⁰

Rousseau's worry about exemplarity illustrates perfectly the public dynamic for him: it was matter of pride to publicly take responsibility for his ideas, to sign all his books with his own name rather than hide behind pseudonyms or a clever anonymous usage. While Holbach, for example, published treatises on atheism under pseudonyms and managed to stay anonymous all his life, and Voltaire endlessly played the game of pseudonyms, even when they were transparent and only served to save face, Rousseau, for his part, refused to play even the most minimal game by pretending not to recognize his writings when they were published without authorization.⁷¹

When Rousseau voluntarily published the Social Contract and Émile, only four years after the scandal provoked by Helvétius's De l'Esprit and condemnation of the Encyclopédie, everyone saw in this a real political provocation. His refusal of anonymity, even the façade of it, particularly irritated the authorities and increased their severity. The decree from the Archbishop of Paris explicitly reproached Rousseau, and the same went for the parliamentary injunction against Émile on June 9, 1762: “That the author of this book, who has not feared to give his own name, should be prosecuted swiftly; that it is important, since he has made himself known, for justice to make an example of him.”⁷² The choice that Rousseau made to sign his works, to publicize his name, appeared to be a major part of the scandal. Voltaire himself did not understand why Rousseau refused to take the most minimal precautions and reproached him for putting the entire philosophical movement in danger. He notes in the margins of his copy of the Letter to Beaumont: “And why did you use your name? poor beggar [pauvre diable],”⁷³ which, for Voltaire, meant a writer trying to live from his pen, “literary riff-raff,” as he sometimes said, opposed to the figure of a gentleman writer who knew how to elegantly stage his public appearances.

For Rousseau, on the other hand, the choice to sign his texts was a fundamental element in taking political responsibility as a writer.⁷⁴ He explains this in his Letter to Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris,⁷⁵ and especially, and at length, in his Letters Written from the Mountain, a polemical text written in response to the public prosecutor Tronchin, in the troubled context of political conflicts in Geneva and following the condemnation of the Social Contract by the Geneva Advisory Council.⁷⁶ Rousseau demanded to be judged in person and developed an argument in which a book signed could not be condemned in the same way an anonymous book could be. The condemnation of a book recognized by its author could not be made against a text alone; it had to necessarily include the intention of the author and implied a proper trial. The argumentation was laid out in two stages. Rousseau first of all delivered an ironic satire on the usual practice of anonymity, denouncing its hypocrisy:

Several are even in the practice of avowing these Books in order to do themselves honor with them, and of disavowing them in order to put themselves under cover; the same man will be or will not be the Author, in front of the same man depending whether they are at a hearing or at a supper. […] In that manner safety costs vanity nothing.⁷⁷

Then he demanded to defend himself. Because he had signed and taken responsibility for his text, he insisted it was not possible to dissociate his writing from his person. It was not the text itself which was condemned, but the act of announcing it and the intention of the author.

But when a clumsy Author, that is to say, an Author who knows his duty, who wants to fulfill it, believes himself obliged to say nothing to the public without avowing it, without naming himself, without showing himself in order to respond, then equity, which ought not to punish the clumsiness of a man of honor as a crime, wants one to proceed with him in another manner. It wants one not to separate the trial of the Book from that of the man, since by putting his name on it he declares that he does not want them separated. It wants one not to judge the work, which cannot respond, until after having heard the Author who responds for it.⁷⁸

This theory about the author's intellectual responsibility and criminal liability rested on the impossibility of distinguishing the book from the writer. But it is clear that a statement like this implies transforming the author into a public figure since, as soon as the book is published, he “is known and ready to answer for it.”

Here again, claiming responsibility is accompanied by a desire for recognition. In Letters Written from the Mountain, the vocabulary of honor is omnipresent. Rousseau strongly reproached the Advisory Council for having “destroyed his honor,” and for having “stigmatized [him] by the hand of the Hangman.”⁷⁹ The entire text thematically works by contrasting the honorable man, who insists on signing the books he publishes (one could say he makes it a point of honor), and the infamy which touches him by the condemnation of his book: “When one burns a Book, what does the Hangman do? Does he dishonor the pages of the Book? Who ever heard it said that a Book had any honor?”⁸⁰The honor associated with a work of literature sometimes expressed itself in the form of proud claims of authorship, as when Rousseau wrote to his printer Marc Michel Rey concerning the publication of the Letter to d'Alembert: “Not only can you name me; but my name will be there and it will even be in the title.”⁸¹ It is difficult not to see here a publicity strategy as well, one based on an acute awareness of the scandal that the book will provoke and the notoriety of its author.

This willingness to put his name on his books, when it was traditional to hide names, by prudence or out of respect for the values of the elite, was made clear by Rousseau in his preface to the second edition of La Nouvelle Héloïse:

R.	Own it Monsieur? Does an honorable man hide when he addresses the Public? Does he dare to print what he would not dare acknowledge? I am the Editor of this book, and I shall name myself as Editor.
N.	You will name yourself? You?
R.	Myself.
N.	What! You will put your name on it?
R.	Yes, Monsieur.
N.	Your real name? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in full?
R.	Jean-Jacques Rousseau in full.82

And indeed, the cover of the book carried the name of Rousseau starting with its first edition, a rare practice with novels. Behind his justification of sincerity and transparency, Rousseau burst with pride, even jubilation, at repeating and almost trumpeting his name; this authorial gesture showed an ostentatious break with standards of literary seemliness, provocation being part of the challenge. This attitude was logical given his refusal to imitate the aristocratic or fashionable figure of the writer. Writing was neither a job nor a hobby, but a vocation, even a mission, complete with social and public usefulness. This emphatic affirmation, often repeated by Rousseau,⁸³ was here treated in a rather ironic way. It contributed to associating the name of Rousseau with his works. The attachment Rousseau had to his family name, his refusal of pseudonyms, was not only a principled stance; it was inseparable from an affirmation of self by way of a proud announcement of his identity, social, personal, and authorial, where the name was the mark of credibility. Even during those periods when he was threatened by the authorities, Rousseau generally refused to travel under an assumed name. He wrote to his friend Daniel Roguin, for example, who wanted to invite him to Yverdon after the condemnation of Émile, that “in regard to going incognito, I cannot bring myself to take someone's name, nor to change it. […] Therefore Rousseau I am, and Rousseau I want to remain, whatever the risk.”⁸⁴

These different elements (the refusal of pensions and presents, avowed suspicion of the manners of polite society, the choice of unusual clothing, the declaration of his name) all went together: they created the Jean-Jacques persona, not only a talented polemicist or romance novelist, but also an eccentric person who did not seem to conform to any of the ways of the literary world at the time. This individuality nourished Rousseau's discourse in an obsessive way: Was he sincere and authentic, or was it only a pose, a way to attract public attention – a publicity gimmick, in other words? On this point, Grimm for once outdid Fréron. The latter denounced Rousseau, as early as 1754, for “his frantic need to be talked about in society”; the former described Rousseau, a few years later, as “this writer famous for his eloquence and his singularity,” and sarcastically added: “The role of eccentric always succeeds for those who have the courage and the patience to carry it off.”⁸⁵

Others went even further, denouncing in Rousseau a pathological desire for celebrity, even more obvious because all such desire was ostentatiously denied. The Duchesse de Choiseul wrote to Mme du Deffand: “He is mad, and I would not be surprised if he expressly committed crimes which did not simply debase him but led to the gallows, if he thought it would augment his celebrity.”⁸⁶ Even Rousseau's refusal in the last years of his life to appear in public could excite this kind of reader. The Prince de Ligne accordingly said of his interview with Rousseau when he visited him in rue Plâtière: “I will allow myself a few truths here, a bit severe, about the way he understands celebrity. I remember telling him: M. Rousseau, the more you hide, the more you are seen: the more untamed you are, the more public you become.”⁸⁷ In contrast with the earlier quotes, these words were written a few years before, probably during the Revolution, and Ligne attributes to himself a certain retrospective lucidity. Nevertheless, this text, along with others, reveals the point to which celebrity had become the subject of study at the end of the eighteenth century. It also shows that the phenomenon which for us seems linked to contemporary excesses in the media sphere was already noticeable at that time: at a certain level of celebrity, manifestly refusing all publicity could become an excellent way to stir up public interest.

The Burden of Celebrity

Rousseau did not leave it to his contemporaries to reflect on his celebrity. He made it one of the themes of his autobiographical writings. This is hardly surprising in a writer obsessed by the theme of social recognition and given to introspection about his own destiny. However, though he was one of the first authors to meditate so explicitly on the changes in public recognition implied by celebrity, this aspect of his work has not greatly interested critics, probably because it was not immediately apparent, hidden behind themes of conspiracy and persecution. Nevertheless, as we shall see, when he opened himself to the public as a whole and when he aimed, above all, to project a public figure, that of “Jean-Jacques,” totally different from the real Rousseau, conspiracy became the inverse twin of his celebrity. Using the hallucinatory aspect of nightmare, he described the mechanism of alienation experienced by the famous man: the dispossession of his own being.

Rousseau had aspired to celebrity for a long time, something which seemed to him highly desirable. When he wrote the Confessions, and when it now seemed to him to be a burden, he admitted this aspiration of his youth and realized that when he arrived in Paris he used every means possible to become a celebrity. Above all he was looking for a way to achieve social success and prosperity, hoping that his system of musical notation would help him attain this success: “I persisted in wanting to make a revolution in that art with it, and in that way to arrive at a celebrity which in the fine arts is always joined with fortune in Paris.”⁸⁸ When he finally became a celebrity, ten years later, the public success of his Discourse at first seemed to him like a happy confirmation of his personal worth:

This favor of the public, in no way courted and for an unknown Author, gave me the first genuine assurance of my talent which I had always doubted until then in spite of the internal feeling. I understood all the advantage I could take from it for the decision I was ready to reach, and I judged that a copyist of some celebrity in letters would not be likely to lack work.⁸⁹

One sees the apparent paradox in this formulation: Rousseau decided to become a music copyist to live from manual labor, abandoning the literary life but hoping that his literary celebrity would draw customers to him. The contradiction is even more striking when he once again takes up his work as a copyist during the 1770s, at the moment he officially renounced all literary activity and spurned the mechanisms of celebrity. Most of his customers followed him in the hopes of getting close to the wild and famous man.

The contradiction only appears to be so. When he decided to break with the accepted salon model of the man of letters, the one that powerful aristocrats supported, Rousseau built on his celebrity in order to escape the constraints of society life. In contrast with these social constraints, which built reputations and assured the careers of authors, he counted on the support of the public. As we saw from the quarrel with Hume, it was not an inconsequential choice. Rousseau very rarely explicitly admitted his desire for celebrity. However, in an unpublished text, evidently written at the beginning of the 1760s, he wrote: “I prefer for less good to be said about me and that I be spoken about more.”⁹⁰ What Rousseau designated as “another turn of self-love” (amour-propre) testified above all to a remarkable lucidity in terms of strategic publicity. What difference did it make what they said about him; he just had to be talked about and talked about a lot. Whether they said good or bad things, the essential thing was that his singularity be emphasized: “I would prefer to be forgotten by the whole human race than regarded as an ordinary man.”⁹¹ Self-love entails here less a demand for esteem than a desire to be distinguished, to be the center of all public discussions, which is exactly the definition of celebrity. And this, Rousseau adds in a burst of lucidity, needs to be nourished. “Now if I let the public, which has spoken so much about me, act, it would be much to be feared that soon it would no longer speak about me.”⁹² Soon, however, he became aware of the dangers of celebrity, capable of perverting the most innocent human relations, making every authentic relationship impossible, and he continued: “But as soon as I had a name I no longer had any friends.”⁹³ Celebrity separated him from his friends, brought on jealousies and persecutions. It imposed false human relations because the public persona he had become came fatally between him and others. Therefore, the visits his admirers made to see him became a recurrent motif among Rousseau's complaints. He complained while in Môtiers of receiving too many visits:

Those who had come to see me up to then were people who, since they had some talents, tastes, maxims in common with me, alleged them as the cause of their visits, and immediately introduced matters about which I could converse with them. At Môtiers that was no longer true, above all with regard to France. It was officers or other people who had no taste for literature, who even for the most part had never read my writings, and who did not fail, according to what they said, to have traveled thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred leagues to come to see and admire the famous, celebrated, very celebrated man, the great man etc.⁹⁴

Empty talk, hypocritical flattery, these visits, which might have been a comfort, were odious. What made them importunate was that they were not based on elective affinities nor on true esteem linked to real interest in his work, but on an unhealthy curiosity which, in the eyes of Rousseau, seemed more or less like spying: “One feels that this did not make for very interesting conversations for me, although they might have been so for them, depending on what they wanted to know: for since I was not mistrustful I expressed myself without reserve about all the questions they judged it appropriate to ask me.”⁹⁵

While Voltaire, a few kilometers away, welcomed visitors from all over Europe with jubilation, knowing they would recount in their letters and over dinner their visit to the great writer, Rousseau was suspicious of it all, seeing such visitors at worst as perfidious spies, at best as curious people come to see a show. He created an inextricable knot between the consequences of his celebrity and the feeling of persecution that was beginning to consume him, even more painful because in those years he was forced to flee from one refuge to another. Interpreting every show of interest as a menace or a debasement, he rudely spurned visitors. To the Comtesse de La Rodde de Saint-Haon, who ardently wished to visit him, he replied: “I am sorry not to please Madame countess, but I cannot do the honor of the man she is curious to see and she has never stayed with me.” When she insisted, he reproached her concerning the “hyperbolic and outrageous praise with which your letters are filled,” which “seem to be the hallmark of my most ardent persecutors.” Then, refusing to be turned into the showman: “Those who only want to see the Rhinoceros should go to the fair and not to my home. And all the banter with which this insulting curiosity is peppered is but one more outrage which requires no greater deference on my part.”⁹⁶

The end of this refusal, expressed with such brutal and almost insulting frankness, which he readily adopted when he felt threatened, showed the two themes used by Rousseau to interpret his admirers' desire to see him: that of conspiracy and that of unjustified curiosity. If the first came from a Rousseauistic idiosyncrasy, often called paranoia, the second touched the heart of celebrity mechanisms, which tended to reify the famous person by transforming him or her into a circus act. The rhinoceros comparison, which foreshadows in a striking way the nineteenth-century development of spectacles where all sorts of human monsters and exotic specimens were exposed to public curiosity, thus becoming, as it were, “freak shows,” was less comic than it seemed. This was a reference to the famous Clara the Rhinoceros, who came from Rotterdam in 1741 and was exhibited for almost twenty years throughout Europe from Berlin to Vienna, from Paris to Naples, from Kraców to London, becoming a true international star, the object of books, of paintings and engravings, making her owner enormous sums of money. The memory of Clara, who was shown at the Saint-Germain fair in 1749 and which Rousseau perhaps visited briefly at that time, was no doubt brought to mind again by the arrival in Versailles in 1770 of a new rhinoceros in the king's circus, which also caused a sensation. This obsessive fear of visitors who came to see him as they would to see a circus act – if not to spy on him, then to trick him or make fun of him – became a leitmotif in Rousseau's texts for the last ten years of his life. The testimony of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who was very close to him, merits quotation:

Men came from everywhere to visit him, and more than once I witnessed the brisk way in which he dismissed some of them. I told him: Without knowing it, am I not as importunate as these people are? “There is a great difference between them and you! These people come out of curiosity, to say they have seen me, to find out how I live, and to make fun of me.” I told him they came because of his celebrity. He repeated, greatly irritated: Celebrity! Celebrity! The word infuriated him: the celebrated man had made the sensitive man very unhappy.⁹⁷

It is difficult to know if the anecdote is authentic, but it is, at least, perfectly credible, since it corresponds to the avowed reactions of Rousseau in those years. It is striking that Bernardin insisted on the word “celebrity,” which, as we have seen, was a rather recent usage and one Rousseau himself used at different times. The expression “the celebrated man had made the sensitive man very unhappy” subtly suggests that the person who experiences celebrity has a certain capacity to laugh at the human comedy, to agree to play a role while at the same time keeping a distance from others. Rousseau was completely devoid of this aptitude. The sensitive man, to the contrary, lives each human relationship intensely, expects from every contact that he be recognized in his singularity and his authenticity, that he fully invests himself in an affective exchange.

Rousseau's experience of celebrity corresponded to the painful discovery of a public sphere that had become entirely controlled by the media, where one could never be known directly. In contrast with romantic interpretations which only saw in his work a desire for solitude, a condemnation of vanity and happiness found in self-love, it must be remembered that Rousseau was always driven by a powerful desire to be recognized. One can find psychological or sociological causes for this, but there is little doubt that this need was a great motivational force in his life and one of the great themes of his philosophical work.⁹⁸ One important part of his moral and political philosophy can be read as a search for forms of recognition allowing for harmonious and just social relationships, far from the narcissistic competition found in self-love and the endless struggle for prestige.

The desire for recognition which motivated Rousseau took two forms, closely linked, that one must separate. The first manifested as a demand for social recognition, pushing him, for instance, as the son of a self-taught watch-maker, to avidly seek the esteem and friendship of Parisian aristocrats, to convince them that he would be absolutely dishonored to eat in the same room as the servants. Sure of his intellectual worth, Rousseau recounted in the Confessions, with a certain delight, several scenes of little social triumphs where he stood out by reason of his mind and his talent among those more powerful than himself.⁹⁹ This aspiration fed a suspicion of hypocrisy: How could this sworn opponent of aristocratic privilege and the pretentious life of polite society appreciate the friendship of the Maréchal de Luxembourg, the Prince de Conti, and the Comtesse de Boufflers, before ending his life on the property of the Marquis de Girardin? Was Rousseau secretly a snob? In reality, this demand for recognition was very different from that of the classic social climber who aspired to be known as an actual member of the dominant class, and of whom the bourgeois gentleman was the perfect archetype. Rousseau was not seeking status; he did not demand to be admitted to a social group, whether it be the nobility, polite society, or that of “men of letters.” His aspirations were effectively linked to a second form of recognition, intimate and personal, which concerned less his intellectual, artistic, or social worth than his goodness and his innocence. It was less social than moral. And it resulted not so much in a desire for admiration and esteem than in a need to be loved and pitied.

This two-sided desire for recognition that motivated Rousseau explains the apparent contradictions in his character and his attitude, a particular mix of pride and sentimentality, a way of narrowly linking the language of honor and emotion, a taste for scandal, and a desire to be loved. Out of this also came the modern desire for recognition that he expressed. From social elites who always held a monopoly on prestige and social esteem, he demanded to be recognized not as one of them, but as different. Whereas most of the writers of his time aspired to be accepted by polite society through showing their perfect understanding of the social codes, by behaving as perfect gentlemen according to the Voltaire principle – “one must be a man of the world before being a man of letters” – Rousseau wanted to force the esteem of this same society by demonstrating his difference and his singularity, even his contempt for this way of life. Most of the scenes of social triumph in the Confessions are based on this dynamic: Rousseau imposed his own rules and gained recognition both for his talent and for his indomitable singularity, a recognition as much affective and sentimental as social. Take the most striking case, that of the performance of Devin du village in Fontainebleau. The story in the Confessions links the two elements: the opera was a success and garnered admiration and applause for him, while he himself refused to bow to the usual courtly dress code, appearing in casual dress, with “a big beard and a badly combed wig.” So his success was not a simple artistic or social success, and it did not rest solely on his talent as a composer but on his authenticity as well, which allowed him to both move the audience by his music and at the same time remain faithful to himself in every way. “To be always myself wherever I am I must not blush at being dressed in accordance with the station I have chosen.”¹⁰⁰

One can see the difficulty that such a desire for recognition posed when it was associated with traditional forms of social recognition in an unequal society where esteem came essentially from the position one occupied, and then mixing it with a new form based on the affirmation of an eccentric self, a unique subjectivity. The first level was collective, rising out of a form of co-option in which members of the elite recognized the new arrival as one of themselves, receiving him into their salons, treating him with consideration, according him exterior marks of social respect. These were the mechanisms which permitted tacit ennoblement by lifestyle in the sixteenth century, or integration into polite society in the eighteenth century. The second level, intimate recognition, was almost, by necessity, personal, and ideally played out between two individuals, if possible in direct interaction. The ideal model for this was the love relationship and, even better, tender friendship, love and compassion fused. La Nouvelle Héloïse can be read as a series of variations on this theme, from close friendship, almost like that of twins, which links the cousins Julie and Claire, through a combination of esteem, love, and tenderness, which characterizes the bond between Julie and Saint-Preux, once they have given up one another. This is why the happy scenes of recognition in the Confessions are always described as moments when the habitual social mechanisms are suspended and give way to emotional effusions in which women play an essential role. Mme Beauzenwal's guests who wanted Rousseau to eat in the servant quarters could not hold back tears when Rousseau read them a poem, and the daughter, Mme de Broglie, imagined seeing in him a “man of good fortune.”¹⁰¹ The female spectators of Devin du village let themselves be carried away by a sweet and touching “drunkenness” while the author, moved to tears, burned with “the desire to collect with my lips the delicious tears which I was causing to flow.”¹⁰² But these are fictitious scenes, moments of imagined happiness, or at least excessively rare and fleeting, because the rules of the social world made this fusion of the collective and the sentimental highly improbable.

The place for this ideal recognition, both social and intimate, collective and individual, is literature, which places the author in the gaze of an infinity of readers, each in their individuality. Rousseau developed a theory about reading which could be qualified as sentimental and moral.¹⁰³ For him, reading permitted an honest and immediate access by the reader to the sensibility of the author, and thanks to which the author was both recognized as a talented writer and loved as a sensitive human being. What allowed for this passage from reading to recognition was the moral transformation that reading induced in the reader. By observing his or her own emotions, the reader could judge the author's soul. This created a tautological circle: because Rousseau's books made his readers good and sensitive, touching them through the spectacle of virtue, they prove his authentic goodness, but, inversely, it is because he is sincere that his books produce these effects. It is a point that he will never cease making, in particular in Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: one must not read his books looking for problems or logical contradictions, but as a way to judge by one's own emotions the sensibility and the morality of the author. This concept of reading is not entirely Rousseau's own. As we have seen, it is part of the context of the romance novel. But Rousseau gives it a particular twist by going from the epistolary novel to autobiographical writing. To the sentimental concept of reading, which up until then concerned only fiction, he added the authenticity of self.¹⁰⁴ Because this kind of reading put the author and the reader in direct contact, Rousseau thought it allowed an escape from all traditional societal forms, in which the relationship with others was founded on the socialization of esteem: the game of reputation. Reading was the ideal way to get intimate recognition. In a salon, one judged others on appearances, on their mastery of certain worldly accomplishments, on the art of repartee, witticism, elegant compliments, or even what others said about them. One's value depended on the image one offered and what others thought. Because Rousseau had a doubly sensitive nature, or he was late to be socialized, he never mastered the codes of worldly interaction, he lacked quickness and flexibility. “I would love society as much as anyone else if I was not sure of showing myself, not only to my disadvantage there, but completely different from the way I am.”¹⁰⁵ In society life, where everyone watched oneself being watched and in turn watched others, there was an immense distance between awareness of self and the image projected. Let us just say that Rousseau made a bad impression. But he immediately added: “The decision I have made to write and hide myself is precisely the one that suits me. If I had been present, no one would ever have known what I am worth, they would not even have suspected it.”¹⁰⁶ To be recognized, he had to hide. But how was one to prove one's worth, the person one was, without showing it? He had to write. He had to trust in books to reveal the real Jean-Jacques.

It is understandable then that the ideal situation for this kind of social and intimate recognition, for the sentimental fusion between Rousseau and his readers, would be when a woman of high standing read one of his books. For example, the episode in Confessions when the Princesse de Talmont declines to go to the ball because she has begun to read La Nouvelle Héloïse; she prefers to stay in bed and spend the night reading. Rousseau, to whom this is reported, is moved because “I have always believed that one could not take so lively an interest in the Héloïse, without having that sixth sense, that moral sense with which so few hearts are endowed, and without which no one can understand my own.”¹⁰⁷ And it is better still when he reads his own writings out loud because he does not have to hide from himself: reading has the capacity to suspend the weight of social constraints. Although the wife of the Maréchal de Luxembourg, the indisputable authority in polite society, intimidates him to such a degree that he feels incapable of speaking in her presence, he manages every morning to read to her, face-to-face, La Nouvelle Héloïse, with unhoped-for success:

Mme de Luxembourg was crazy about Julie and its Author; she talked about nothing but me, was interested in nothing but me, said sweet things to me all day long, kissed me ten times a day. She always wanted me to have my place at table beside her, and when some Lords wanted to take that place, she told them it was mine and had them put elsewhere.¹⁰⁸

It is difficult not to see in this passage an ideal scenario of the effects of reading: Rousseau obtains pre-eminence over the nobility by literally seducing the wife of the Maréchal de Luxembourg, by arousing an affective fascination which goes directly from the book to the author and allows him, for a moment, to reign at the table of honor, in spite of his clumsiness and conversational ineptitude. Social recognition and sentimental recognition are joined thanks to the charm of reading.

This reading model underlies the project of the Confessions, where it is not so much a matter of Rousseau justifying himself, convincing readers that he is right to act as he does, but rather of arousing an emotional recognition, in the present, woven of compassion and empathy. It is very much in this sense that one should read the famous opening, with its inimitable mix of pride and humility. Rousseau's project was to have “unveiled his interior,” to tell us not only what he had done but above all what he had thought and felt (“I feel my heart”), and thus this statement:

Eternal Being, assemble around me the countless host of my fellows: let them listen to my confessions, let them shudder at my unworthiness, let them blush at my woes. Let each of them in his turn uncover his heart at the foot of Thy throne with the same sincerity; and let a single one say to Thee, if he dares: “I was better than that man.”¹⁰⁹

Rousseau did not claim to be better than others. He thought instead that if each person made an effort to be sincere, to open him- or herself, the question of comparison would lose all pertinence. No one would dare say: “I am the best,” because that would have no sense. There would be only individuals, equal and unique, adamantly incomparable, capable of being mutually moved emotionally. Competition for esteem would be replaced by empathy (“they blush”) and compassion (“they groan”).

It is not the time to critique this idea, which rests not only on the myth of an authentic “self” (moi), accessible through introspection and intimate feelings, but also on the idea that it is possible to share this self with others, if they agree to overlook social appearances and abdicate their obsession with judging. Rousseau was the first to explicitly secularize the Christian theme of the transparency of souls in the eyes of God, in order to elaborate the romantic theme of the transparency of hearts in the eyes of men and women. But one must first of all focus on the immediate relationship that reading was meant to allow. What threatened the permanence of such a relationship, to the contrary, were all sorts of intermediary elements (writers, journalists, the curious, the gossips, society people) that came between Rousseau and those from whom he was seeking recognition. As soon as the intermediaries multiplied, it was no longer a situation of recognition; the gaze no longer carried an attestation of authenticity, but transformed the object of the gaze into a spectacle. “Appearances” overwhelmed the “feeling of intimacy.”¹¹⁰ It is understandable that the drama of celebrity, for Rousseau, was based on the multiplication of images and talk that proliferated in the public sphere, that which made up his public persona and created a barrier between him and others. The public could no longer see him because they looked at him through this persona that they took him to be, but in which he could not recognize himself. How could one know if the admiration, the affection, the compassion, expressed were being addressed really to him, or if these feelings were aroused by this imaginary figure made up of all the images that were being circulated, benevolent or malevolent, written or figurative, oral or visual (rumors, press articles, engravings)? Everybody talked about him and nobody listened to him. Everyone looked at him and nobody saw him. Everyone knew him and nobody knew him. And this is exactly the definition that Chamfort proposed for celebrity, one may recall.

In 1764, Rousseau had already written a draft for the preamble that would become the Confessions: “Among my contemporaries, there are few men whose names are more known in Europe and whose person is more unknown. […] Each drew me according to his whim, without fear that the original might come to give him the lie. There was a Rousseau in high society, and another in retirement who bore no resemblance to him.”¹¹¹ This fundamental text describes perfectly the inevitable tension between the mechanisms of celebrity based on name notoriety, on the proliferation of images, and on the romantic myth of the individual completely conscious of who he is. The success of the first Discourse seemed like a confirmation to Rousseau of his ability for expressing his feelings, based on public delight in his talent. In these first moments of celebrity, there seemed to be a match between his public persona and his awareness of self. But very soon, he discovered that the proliferation of images and discourse allowed each person to have his own Rousseau “fantasy figure,” and there was no longer a correspondence between persona and self-image but instead a growing gap, until there was a total disjunction between himself and the public image: “another […] who bore no resemblance to him.” One could certainly read in this text an expression of pride which manifested itself in two forms at once, contradictory and complementary: a celebrated person throughout an entire continent, but with a uniqueness so great it escaped the observation of many people. This is a penetrating description, although largely intuitive, of effects directly linked to a media-based society, Rousseau being one of the first to experience it. Not only could one be both known and unknown, but it was probable that celebrity could, to the contrary, reinforce the feeling of not being understood.¹¹² This impression that famous people had of not being recognized for who they were, as though a multitude of “figures” came between them and the world and condemned them to solitude, would later become a commonplace aspect of celebrity in the twentieth century: “I'm a rich man and my name is everywhere but all I want is love,” as Johnny Halliday, the French rock star, used to sing in the 1960s.¹¹³

Rousseau rarely chose his words haphazardly. When he wrote: “Each drew me according to his whim, without fear that the original might come to give him the lie,” the term “original” was especially important.¹¹⁴ Of course he was contrasting the source (the original) with the copies that were circulating, according to his ideas of authentic and false. But he emphasized the uniqueness of the true Rousseau (this “original” being), who was irreducible to the images of himself that others had formed. He also contrasted the word “retirement” with “high society,” as distinct from the public. The imaginary and false images still remained implicitly attached to the construction of reputation in society, in the heart of the elite. Later, in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, he would refer to the same opposition, in a more radical form: “If my face and my features were as perfectly unknown to men as my character and natural temperament are, I would still live in the midst of them without difficulty.”¹¹⁵ It was celebrity which condemned him to solitude, because it did not allow him to aspire to any authentic human relationship. It was no longer polite society which was targeted here; it was all men and women. In the meantime, Rousseau had to give up the struggle, through his writings, against the effects of celebrity. Confessions was a failure, a cruel deception. The readings that Rousseau gave in small select circles did not produce the desired effect. “I completed my reading this way and everyone was silent. Mme d'Egmont was the only one who appeared moved; she visibly trembled; but she very quickly recovered and kept silent as did the whole company.”¹¹⁶ No tears, no ostensible manifestation of compassion for the misfortunes of Jean-Jacques. Rousseau drew the conclusion that his project was illusory. He would never write the rest of it.

Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques

At the beginning of 1770, Rousseau renounced any further work on the Confessions. But he did not abandon the idea of fighting against the persecution and calumny of which he believed he was a victim. He dedicated considerable energy to drafting a complex and fascinating text that was ignored for many years by the critics: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. Published after his death, between 1780 and 1782, the text disconcerted even his admirers and was considered by others as evidence of his madness.¹¹⁷ Certainly, the text has dark, strange, sometimes offputting aspects in which Rousseau's deliriums of persecution seem to be unleashed. The form, however, is quite astonishing, made up of three dialogues between a person named “Rousseau,” who is the speaker for the author but who is not his double, and “the Frenchman,” an individual who shows none of the normal characteristics of psychological or biographical depth. Their exchanges are about a third person, “J.J.,” identified as the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse, of Émile, the Discourse, and so forth. The Frenchman, persuaded like all his compatriots that this J.J. is a mean, depraved man, candidly exposes the plot that has been hatched to ruin his reputation, never explaining it to him: everything happens as if J.J. has been declared guilty, without specifying his faults or allowing him to defend himself. The conspiracy is presented as a given, known by everyone, and a legitimate undertaking by a salubrious public. It is an aberrant situation, constructed as such, but presented by the Frenchman as perfectly normal. Rousseau then defends Jean-Jacques, whom he goes to meet. This leads the Frenchman to doubt the basis of the conspiracy and convinces him he must read Jean-Jacques's works, which he evidently had never read, not even one line. This is the decisive element, which successfully persuades him of Jean-Jacques's innocence. “I feel and assert just as you do: the moment he is the Author of the writings that bear his name, he can only have the heart of a good man.”¹¹⁸ But this revelation – and it is a surprise – does not lead to a campaign to rehabilitate his public image. The two men decide to keep the secret of Jean-Jacques's innocence to themselves, aware that it will do no good to oppose unanimous hostility. They settle for going to live with Jean-Jacques in order to comfort him.

This brief resumé does not do justice to such a complex text, to its rich sinuosity, which rests both on a very rigorous architecture and on a series of repetitions, digressions, and developments that are sometimes tedious, intercut with moments of great eloquence. The most unbelievable hypotheses are laid out with such logic and precision that the reader is sometimes stunned before this seemingly “reasonable madness.” The system of dialogues allows the author increased scope to make comments, even in the notes, not counting the two texts framing the work, and to comment in the first person. This system also allows the Frenchman to describe the conspiracy and the numerous maneuvers put into place to isolate and destroy Jean-Jacques, without ever telling him what he is reproached with. In this way, the general persecution is presented not as a supposition, nor as an hypothesis, nor even in the form of an accusation, but simply as a fact. The question is to find out whether or not the persecution is justified. The aim of the text is to discover logical reasons for that which has no credibility, the “unanimous agreement” of “a whole generation” aimed at outlawing Jean-Jacques.¹¹⁹

Given all this, the text is dominated by themes of imprisonment, obscurity, surveillance, and trickery. This persecution plunges Jean-Jacques into a universal silence and deprives him of any means of action. In this way, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques describes at length, almost endlessly, the solitude of a Jean-Jacques who has become the play-thing of his enemies and the victim of a universal conspiracy manipulated by the “Gentlemen.” One finds in the text the author's most sinister obsessions, the impenetrable shadows, the labyrinth in which he is lost, the distortion of every sign: “They have discovered the art of making a solitude for him in Paris more awful than caverns or the woods, so that in the midst of men he finds neither communication, consolation, nor counsel, nor enlightenment.”¹²⁰ It was a darkness that always seemed to stem from a universal plot, referring not only to his enemies but now to people in general. In the Afterword, entitled “History of the Preceding Writing,” Rousseau used his own name and reinforced the paranoia surrounding the work by recounting the impossibility of distributing the text. He had tried to give the manuscript to a few people he still trusted, but they all betrayed him: “Could I be unaware that for a long time no one approached me who wasn't sent expressly, and that putting my trust in the people around me is throwing myself to my enemies?”¹²¹ Desperate, he resolved to place the writing on the altar at Notre Dame, but the gate was locked; with his head spinning, he abandoned all hope of having the work recognized, but not without muttering a murmur of indignation: “I was seeing Heaven itself collaborate in the iniquitous work of men.”¹²² There could be no better symbol for this persecution delirium – God as part of the plot! – and the absolute impossibility of breaking out of such a psychological trap.¹²³

The Dialogues again pick up the apologetic thread found in the Confessions, but they do so in a totally different way, to the point that Michel Foucault, the first to have seized on the importance of the text, talked about them as “anti-Confessions.”¹²⁴ The first-person narration allows for a dialogue and facilitates a burst of enunciations. Rousseau no longer tries to say what he is feeling inside but, to the contrary, attempts to see himself from the outside, imagining the motivations of his enemies, unbelievable as they appear to him, and creating an image of himself that a totally impartial observer or a benevolent reader might have. “I had necessarily to say how, if I were someone else, how I would view a man such as myself.”¹²⁵ An obviously illusory project, but for Rousseau it was no longer a question of intimate feelings, nor of justifying himself by affirming the lucidity of a clear conscience, but to understand the way the judgment of others was constructed. The complex and perverse mechanisms of public opinion were invested with extremely negative meaning. It seemed to be the result of a general manipulation orchestrated by those in power, intermediaries, opinion makers. As usual, Rousseau criticized the role of social mechanisms in creating reputation, but it went much further: it was no longer the judgment of polite society that was at fault, but the unanimous opinion of the public: “Public opinion” was not an impartial tribunal that men of letters could set against the arbitrary and the despotic, as some contemporary authors thought, but rather a sort of hegemonic device which allowed small organized groups to universally impose false judgments and persecute the innocent. The conspiracy against Jean-Jacques also included “Nobles, Authors, doctors (that wasn't hard), all the powerful men, all the courtesans, all the official bodies, all those who control the administration, all those who govern public opinions.”¹²⁶

A list of the powerful counted less than the effect of the whole. The Frenchman tried in vain to remind Rousseau that the majority was against him: “Don't you give any weight to the tally of voices when you are the only one to see things differently from everyone?” To which he replied by criticizing the effects of imitation and intimidation which easily allowed the public to be tricked: “To what extent could the public be deceived if all those who lead it, either by force, or authority, or opinion, made an agreement to delude it by hidden dealings whose secret it would be incapable of finding out?”¹²⁷ Public opinion here is not a directly political idea – it is, moreover, never political with Rousseau, because it is a question of mores – it refers not to the result of a critical deliberation about public affairs, but to a state of unanimity concerning the reputation of an individual.¹²⁸ Rousseau used the term in way that was very close to the way Duclos used it – one of the rare authors with whom he stayed friends and admired for a long time, up until the beginning of the 1770s – when he reflected on the uncontrollable reach of reputation under the new mechanisms of celebrity. “Public opinion” meant precisely the image the public had of him – this undifferentiated mass of individuals who did not know Rousseau directly, but had an opinion about him, about what could be called his persona. This persona, in his eyes, was so totally perverted that it radically reversed all values and portrayed an innocent person as a guilty person. “One could see Socrates, Aristides, one could see an angel, one could see God himself with eyes thus fascinated and still believe one were seeing an infernal monster,” Rousseau did not hesitate to write, in a proudly sublime comparison.¹²⁹

The eyes of the public were “fascinated,” that is, mesmerized, as if under a magic spell. The term, based in magic, means, first of all, trickery, an illusion, and it is in this sense that it is usually employed in the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the modern sense, the one which refers more to seduction than to magic, already existed, and its connotations implied that the public was not only tricked by the false image that was presented, it was seduced and subjugated; it could not break the spell and took a certain confused pleasure in contemplating it. This ambiguity (was the public tricked or was it complicit in mocking the imitations that were offered? was it wrong in good faith or out of meanness?) was one of the mainsprings of the Dialogues and something new in Rousseau's thinking. Up until then, and notably in the Confessions, he had denounced the conspiracy of his enemies, but he counted on the public, on readers of good faith. The success of his books at least had the advantage of assuring him that he was talented and convincing him that a large part of his readership had direct access to his thoughts. In Letters Written from the Mountain, he affirmed optimistically that “the public uses reason” and he accepted its verdicts.¹³⁰ At the beginning of 1761, in fragments which announced Confessions but which he did not publish, he wrote this rather astounding sentence in regard to the rest of his work: “From the manner in which I am known in the world I have less to gain than to lose in showing myself as I am.”¹³¹ How could the future author of the Confessions and the Dialogues write this? In fact, he was convinced that as a celebrity he projected a flattering figure and that public opinion of him was favorable: “I pass for so singular a man that, since everyone takes pleasure in amplifying, I have only to rest myself upon the public voice; it will serve me better than my own praises. Thus, consulting nothing but my own interest, it would be more clever to let others speak about me than to speak about me myself.”¹³² When he wrote these words, Rousseau detected in the “public voice” a tendency to amplify every positive aspect about the eccentric persona that had been created.

By contrast, in the Dialogues, the public image is entirely reversed. Not only is the public no longer favorable to Jean-Jacques, but it has become the driving force behind a universal plot. To understand the unbelievable unanimity of hatred that surrounded him, Rousseau introduced the hypothesis of bad faith readers, those who read the books of Jean-Jacques with the sole aim of finding contradictions and faulting him for them. This hypothesis had disastrous consequences. As long as the conspiracy was an action created by little groups of identifiable enemies (philosophers, those in power, society people), it was still possible to call on readers to break with these inner circles, demanding justice be brought against high society's verdicts. This was the very project of Confessions. But by throwing suspicion on the readers, Rousseau denied himself all hope, all exteriority, as seen in the Notre Dame episode. The text deepened criticism of public opinion, which was not only manipulated but also wanted to be. Added to the denunciation of the mechanisms of opinion was this cynical statement by the Frenchman: “The public is deceived; I see it, I know it. But it likes being deceived, and would not want to be disabused.”¹³³

This theme of the public's gullibility, spellbound and happy to be so, finding a strange and perverse satisfaction in the profusion of fake personas, becomes central for Rousseau, and it is hard not to see in it a description of the mechanisms of celebrity. When it is a matter of celebrities, the public, “which asks nothing other than to believe everything,”¹³⁴ happily welcomes the most unbelievable rumors. The publicity which surrounds famous people is the non-critical face of the public. Rousseau here foresees in a remarkable way the criticism of media-manipulated public opinion, which would become a recurrent theme of social criticism in the second half of the twentieth century, but he did it, obviously, in his own fashion, by making the description unique and personalizing it to the extreme:

As soon as it is a question of J.J., there is no need to put either good sense or plausibility in the things that are uttered about him, the more absurd and ridiculous they are, the more eager people are not to doubt them. If d'Alembert and Diderot took it upon themselves today to affirm that he has two heads, everyone who saw him pass in the street tomorrow would see his two heads very distinctly, and everyone would be very surprised that they hadn't perceived this monstrosity sooner.¹³⁵

This apparent comedy should be taken seriously for its image of a credulous and malleable public opinion lost to all critical sense when it came to celebrities. What is clearly apparent through this image of a universal conspiracy denounced by Rousseau is celebrity itself, the growing distance between the man he knew himself to be and the various representations of himself that the public delighted in believing were true. In several different places, the Dialogues explicitly associate the “celebrity” of Jean-Jacques and the persecutions that hound him. “He believes, for example, that all the disasters of his destiny since his fatal fame are the fruits of a long-standing plot.”¹³⁶ He lamented the fate of J.J., who, instead of advantages, found only insults, misery, contempt, and defamation attached to celebrity.¹³⁷

Of course, by describing celebrity as a form of persecution, Rousseau outrageously blackened his public image. Every form of curiosity and admiration was transformed into hostility. “Admiration is above all a word which signals a traitor. It is like the politeness of tigers who seem to be smiling at you the moment they are coming to tear you apart,” he wrote to the Comte de Saint-Germain, in a letter laying out all aspects of the conspiracy.¹³⁸ It is the nature of delirium to push an admired and popular writer to think that he is unanimously detested. But once the core problem has been identified, the proliferation of public representations, discourse, texts, and images associated with his name, which he does not control and in which he does not recognize himself, it matters very little, in the end, whether or not these images are favorable or unfavorable. They are painful because they imply that “Jean-Jacques” has become an autonomous public person, creating a kind of shield between Rousseau and his contemporaries. Paranoid delirium makes the description of celebrity particularly sinister, because it transforms curiosity, even admiration, into hate and contempt. But above all, there is a striking contradiction between the prestige associated with the public proliferation of a name and the impossibility of private recognition. Being too well known makes one unknown and blocks every authentic affective relationship. Bernardin was not wrong: “the celebrated man had made the sensitive man very unhappy.”

The Dialogues are preceded by a Foreword, “On the Subject and Form of this Writing,” that leaves no doubt what is at issue in the book, the hostile entity to which Rousseau attributes his misfortunes: “the public.” In just a few pages, the term appears six times, always in an operative position, as the main cause of defamation, not simply the passive recipient of calumnies. Immediately, in the first lines of the text, Rousseau invokes “the public, […] perfectly sure” of its rights, a pretension he later contrasts with “the incredible blindness of the public.” Jean-Jacques is “the person the public delights in disfiguring and slandering.” The objective in the Dialogues is to closely “examine the conduct of the public in relation to [him].” Later, other terms take the place of the word “public,” to show that Rousseau, from this point on, is denouncing less the conspiracy of a small number of adversaries and focusing more on the hostile unanimity of “all Paris, all France, all Europe,” of “a whole generation” or even his “contemporaries.” This last expression, present from the first sentence onward, shows the temporality of celebrity, acquired while a writer is still living. Rousseau was never really interested in the question of posterity, even if this did appear to be a recourse when confronted with the injustice of his peers. Faced with reports of a public in bad faith, fascinated by false images and rumors, lost to reason, he only weakly called for a future rehabilitation. Instead, he turned in on himself: “Did I know the vanity of opinion only to place myself under its yoke at the expense of my peace of soul and my heart's repose? What does it matter to me if men want to see me other than as I am? Is the essence of my being in their looks?”¹³⁹ This demand for an unalterable authenticity, for an autonomous self, insensitive to others looking at him, will be examined in the Reveries, the basis for a philosophy of the soul.¹⁴⁰ But this comes after a reaction to the increase in media outlets which characterize new forms of publicity. It rests on an untenable distinction between the individual who knows himself through self-awareness, and the images that others forge of him, a distinction between Rousseau and Jean-Jacques: “They make a J.J. that suits them in vain; Rousseau will remain the same always despite them.”¹⁴¹

The Disfiguration

In the Foreword to the Dialogues, Rousseau justified his choice of “Rousseau” and “Jean-Jacques” in this way: “In these conversations I took the liberty of resuming my family name, which the public judged it appropriate to take from me, and following its example, I refer to myself in the third person, using my Christian name to which the public chose to reduce me.”¹⁴² The fault of the public then was to have “reduced” Rousseau to nothing more than a first name, almost a nickname, which he himself reduced to a double initial, “J.J.,” designating an imaginary person. To counter this reduction, which is a reification, Rousseau meant to take back his family name, both a social identity and the authorial name he had always claimed. It was obviously significant that his first name became the “public” name of Rousseau, associated with his media figure, and even though it was the most personal, that of an irreplaceable individual, not the member of a lineage. This use of the first name to designate a celebrity with which the public had an empathetic, affective relationship was to have a promising future (Marilyn, Elvis…). It underlined, of course, the publicizing of that which was private, the very heart, as we have seen, of the celebrity culture. “Jean-Jacques,” in fact, was the preferred name used by friends and admirers of Rousseau, not by his enemies, and used also by literary historians who wanted to show their attachment not only to the author but also to the man. Jean Ranson, the merchant from La Rochelle, asked warmly for news about “Ami Jean-Jacques.” This way of designating a contemporary whom one had never met by his first name came from a desire for long-distance intimacy, from the familiarity which established itself between a celebrity and his fans.

Once again, it was Rousseau's own editorial and publicity strategies which turned against him the moment he had reached a certain degree of celebrity. If the first name “Jean-Jacques” became progressively the rule in the press and with his readers, it was in large part because he himself had promoted it to distinguish himself from the other Rousseaus. Several people testified that he was preoccupied, after his initial success, with not being confused with other Rousseaus, and in particular with the poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, “a famous man with the same name as you,” he noted in the Confessions.¹⁴³ And elsewhere he wrote with bravado: “During my life some authors wore themselves out calling the Poet Rousseau the great Rousseau. When I am dead the great Rousseau will be a great Poet. But he will no longer be the great Rousseau.”¹⁴⁴ It is true that at the moment Rousseau became famous, beginning in the 1750s, the memory of Jean-Baptiste, who died in 1741, was still very strong: not only was he considered to be one of the greatest French poets, but his tumultuous life, a good part of it lived in exile, aroused great interest. When the Mémoires pour server à l'histoire du célèbre Rousseau appeared in 1753 in Liège, it was about Jean-Baptiste. Other Rousseaus added to the confusion. In 1750, when he was awarded the Academy of Dijon prize and became famous, and Raynal, editor of the Mercure, wrote to him asking if he would “open his portfolio,” Rousseau complained that he mistook him for a poet, confusing him with someone of the same name (Pierre Rousseau, probably):

It is strange that having published one work only and certainly not Poetry, today I am considered a Poet in spite of myself. Every day they compliment me on the Comedies and other pieces of verse that I never wrote and that I would not be capable of writing. It is a mix-up in the Author's name which brings me all these honors.¹⁴⁵

A little later, by using his first name, he was able to refuse the title of “Monsieur,” which he detested, markedly contrasting himself with his adversaries, who were identified by their titles and functions, while he added nothing to his first name, all the better to show his simplicity, his independence, and his uniqueness. Think, for example, of the title page of the Letter to d'Alembert, which we have already mentioned: “Letter by J.-J. Rousseau to M. d'Alembert of the Académie Française” Later, in the Confessions, he sometimes referred to himself in the third person as “Jean-Jacques.” Thus, the fact that Rousseau was the first writer uniquely designated by his first name, far from being a desire by the public to deprive him of his name, was a result of his own editorial practices, even publicity strategies, and the mechanisms of affective attachment on which his celebrity was based.

To be dispossessed of his surname, in Rousseau's eyes, did not simply mean being reduced to the public persona of “Jean-Jacques.” It was the entire authorial image he had patiently constructed that was threatened. One form that persecution takes in the Dialogues is the publication without his consent of pirated and falsified editions of his work and even works bearing his name that he had never written a word of. His own books became unrecognizable: “But do you know how much they can be disfigured[?] […] Unable to annihilate them, and their most malicious interpretations not yet sufficing to discredit them at their whim, they began the process of falsifying them, and this enterprise, which seemed almost impossible at first, has become extremely easy to carry out through the connivance of the public.”¹⁴⁶ It is easy to see behind these horrified descriptions the current practice of eighteenth-century booksellers, who readily published illegal editions of popular works and did not hesitate to use the name of a successful author to sell mediocre works. It was celebrity blackmail, as Rousseau ironically wrote to Madame de Chenonceaux, telling her that they had published in Paris a letter from him to the Archbishop of Auch, which he deemed wrong: “It is an honor granted to celebrities – an honor that you have not yet had.”¹⁴⁷ Rousseau was a victim of his success, but, in the Dialogues, these mechanisms are interpreted in the guise of a conspiracy: they falsify his texts, render them unrecognizable (they are “disfigured”), they attempt to destroy him by adding scandalous statements. So he will not write anymore. His enemies, Rousseau states, “make him scribble books endlessly and take great care to have these books – very worthy of the pens that write them – dishonor the name they make them carry.”¹⁴⁸ Rousseau's authorial strategy, aimed at making his name prominent, linking forever his person and his writings, turned against him. His responsibility and his honor were trampled on by such usages of his name.

The contradictions of celebrity closed around him like a trap. A person's last name is what makes an individual unique; it is his or her personal identity, but also that which is the most public, the basis for notoriety, in terms of one's renown. Rousseau's willingness to link his authorial name and his person, as if the texts he published came directly out of his subjectivity, contradicted the existence of numerous intermediaries, editors, copyeditors, booksellers, critics, the whole world of books where business strategies mixed with intellectual issues. Confronted with this growing number of intermediaries between him and his readers, Rousseau found an extreme solution, the disavowal of all texts bearing his name. In 1774 he went as far as to circulate a handwritten letter in which he “declared all books, old and new, now printed under his name, no matter where, either false or altered, mutilated or falsified with the most cruel malignity, disavowed, some for no longer being his work, others for being falsely attributed to him.”¹⁴⁹ The handwritten signature which guaranteed the author's name, in place of the name on the cover of the book, had become suspect. One sees the difficulty Rousseau was up against, looking for an impossible authenticity.¹⁵⁰ This statement itself was printed without his authorization¹⁵¹ and doubtless he feared that it had been falsified. Every piece of writing was disfigured, “and no matter how positively something presented itself to his mind, something to do or to say, he had to realize that the minute he was allowed to execute it, aspects of the work would be turned against him, rendering it a disaster.” Out of this fear came the permanent idea of being caught in nets which grew ever tighter around the author when he tried to defend himself, an apt metaphor for the condition of the famous man losing control over the way his words and his actions were talked about and interpreted. To justify oneself, to refute what was said about him, played into the hands of the opinion makers. The only thing left for him was to be silent and not move, “not to act at all; to agree to nothing that is proposed to him under any pretext whatsoever.”¹⁵²

When he talked about the falsification of his books, the language of disfiguration came spontaneously to Rousseau. What was at stake, in fact, was the control of his “figure” in the larger sense we have discussed, all the representations which circulated under his name. Obviously, figure in the narrower sense, the physical appearance of his face, was a touchy subject. Rousseau did not escape this development of the visual culture of celebrity. From the start of his notoriety, a few months after the success of the first Discourse, his portrait in pastel, drawn by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, was exhibited at the 1753 Salon. But although he liked the portrait very much, Rousseau for a long time refused to allow prints made of the engraved copies. It was not until 1762 that he agreed, pressured by his editor and his friends. From then on, numerous engraved portraits of Rousseau were reproduced and put up for sale. He tried to keep control of his public image, suggesting to Duchesne, for example, publisher of La Nouvelle Héloïse, to have a portrait made of him in his Armenian outfit. But soon, he noticed that it did not make any difference, and he began to worry about the proliferation of portraits, the sales of which were announced in newspapers, including very large print runs. People he did not know wrote asking him for copied images, like a certain Lalliaud, from Nimes, who sent him three engravings asking which was the best likeness because he wanted to have a marble bust of Rousseau made for his library. He was at first seduced because he thought Lalliaud's “soul was in the same key as mine,” but he rapidly reneged and reproached Lalliaud for having “a hideous portrait engraved, which did not fail to circulate under my name, as if it bore some resemblance to me.”¹⁵³

This concern about the multiplication of his image did not cease and reached a peak in Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques when he focused on the portrait painted by Allan Ramsay in 1766 and on the engravings copied from it. The portrait was made during Rousseau's visit to England, at Hume's request and before their rupture. Ramsay, one of the best portraitists of his time, made a diptych, composed of the portraits of Hume and Rousseau. Most admirers of Rousseau sincerely liked the painting because it showed him as they imagined him, dressed in his Armenian outfit, a fur cap on his head, with a serious and worried look. It offered a striking contrast with the portrait of Hume, painted in all the beatific splendor of a successful man of the world.¹⁵⁴ One can speculate about Ramsay's real intent and any possible irony, but there is little doubt that the painting caught certain characteristic traits of Rousseau and that this painting corresponded to the image that many of his contemporaries had of the author of Émile, a sensitive man but one who was worried and suspicious, having renounced the rituals of polite society.¹⁵⁵ The success of the numerous engravings made from this painting attest to its mastery and the desire of the public to own pictures of Rousseau. One large engraving, made in England and then widely distributed on the continent, which included the motto vitam impendere vero (devote life to truth), was acclaimed by Rousseau's admirers, who found it a good likeness.¹⁵⁶

Figure 15:  Allan Ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Vitam impendere vero. From an original Picture by Mr. Ramsay, in the Possession of David Hume, engraving, 1766.

This was not the opinion of the principal person involved, who profoundly detested this portrait, and even more the engraving, which accentuated the somber, worried aspect. In 1770 he had a visit from M. and Mme Bret. He learned that Mme Bret owned an engraving of him in his Armenian outfit. “‘Get out of here,’ Rousseau said furiously. I never want to see a woman who can look at this portrait and like it, who can keep this monument to my shame, a portrait made to dishonor me, to vilify me; I would rather die than have dinner with her.”¹⁵⁷ A few months later, his friend Mme de La Tour wrote to him that she had hung his engraved portrait done by Ramsay above her writing table, “just like a place of devotion above a shrine, an image of the saint to whom she was most fervently devoted.”¹⁵⁸ Furious, he did not answer her for a year. The misunderstanding was obvious. On the one hand, sincere admirers of Rousseau were thrilled to have his portrait and preciously conserved an image which nourished their feelings of intimacy with him, even if they knew how to keep an amused distance concerning how they used the image. (In order to show that the image of the devoted was both sincere and ironic, Mme de La Tour added: “Alas, I do not receive more inspiration because of it.”) On the other hand, Rousseau himself only saw in the portrait a way to dishonor him and he reacted either by erupting in violence or taking refuge in silence. The Dialogues spend a lot of time on this portrait, from the pose itself, described as almost a torture scene, up to its success. For Rousseau, it was surely the fruit of a machination aimed at spreading an image which showed him having the traits of “a dreadful Cyclops.”

By dint of importunities, he extracts J.J.'s consent. J.J. is made to wear a very black hat, a very brown coat, and he is positioned in a very somber place; and there, in order to paint him seated, he is kept standing, bent over, leaning with one hand on a very low table, in a posture where his tightly tensed muscles modify his facial features. The result of all these precautions had to be a most unflattering portrait if even it were faithful. You saw this terrible portrait. You will judge the resemblance if you ever see the original. During J.J.'s sojourn in England, this portrait was engraved, published, sold everywhere without it being possible for him to see the engraving. He returns to France and learns there that his portrait from England is announced, famous, touted as a masterpiece of painting, of engraving, and above all of likeness. He is finally able, not without difficulty, to see it. He trembles, and says what he thinks of it. Everyone ridicules him.¹⁵⁹

No one, in fact, wanted to believe that this portrait was the result of a conspiracy, for good reason: his interlocutors liked the work very much. This for Rousseau was the real puzzle, almost incomprehensible: How could his contemporaries so appreciate a portrait which he thought disfigured and dishonored him? The very idea of these portraits he had no control over and that circulated unbeknownst to him was obviously an ordeal for Rousseau: it was the objectification of his public figure not only on the level of physical resemblance, but also the whole series of psychological traits that were associated with it. Although he perceived himself to be a sensitive being, soft-hearted, and quick to show tenderness, the portrait by Ramsay projected the image of an austere man with a tormented psyche. Other writers found it difficult to recognize themselves in their portraits. Diderot reproached Jean-Baptiste Van Loo for having made him the look like an “old coquette,” and not a philosopher.¹⁶⁰ For Rousseau this ordeal was even more brutal because copies of his image were widely circulated and he had developed an exacerbated and acute sensitivity to the question of public representations of himself. Above all, since this portrait was linked to his quarrel with Hume, he saw it as part of the conspiracy and detected behind the mechanisms of celebrity a conscious desire to “disfigure” him, to replace his true physical traits with false images that did not resemble him at all. The connection between celebrity and conspiracy is then explicitly invoked:

The Frenchman

But aren't you attributing too much importance to trivia? That a portrait is deformed or bears little resemblance is the least extraordinary thing in the world. Famous men are engraved, distorted, disfigured every day, without anyone concluding from these vulgar engravings anything like that you conclude.

Rousseau

I agree. But these disfigured copies are the work of bad workmen who are greedy, and not the products of distinguished Artists, nor the fruits of zeal and friendship. They are not loudly extolled all over Europe, they are not announced in public papers, they are not displayed in residences, adorned with glass and frames. They are left to rot on the quays, or to decorate the rooms in cabarets and the shops of barbers.¹⁶¹

In this passage, Rousseau outlines a description of the social uses of engraved portraits, sold on the quays for pennies, hung in barbershops. He was not ignorant of the emerging market for celebrity images. Nevertheless, he excluded himself in a way that was not very convincing, confusing his celebrity with the alleged conspiracy. One of his arguments rested on the publicity that was created in the press for his portraits, announced very pompously in newspapers and in magazines, which is true, but for reasons that had to do with the advertising demands of the market and with the interest of specialized dealers. For Rousseau, what mattered was the loss of his image, the transformation of his face – this visible translation from a unique personality offered to the gaze of close friends – into a public image, open to the regard of everyone and over which he had no control. The mask was not the mask one wore to hide one's face, the composed impassive face, as in society rituals, but the mask that others forced you to wear so they did not have to look at you. Once again, through this commodification, the media image contrasted with the ideal portrait which only Rousseau himself was able to draw, thanks to an intimate knowledge of the model: “Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth, that exists and that will probably ever exist,” he wrote as he began his Confessions.¹⁶²

It is significant that the portrait of Rousseau painted by Ramsay, where he is shown with a somber air and in his Armenian costume, was the focus for so much of his resentment. What he discovered was that taking a critical stand against the portrait, like the one he held and defended, was full of traps laid out by the mechanisms of celebrity. His entire criticism, as we have seen, was linked to the exigencies of authenticity. The imperative of exemplarity meant a discourse was not simply a discourse, as strident as it might be, but rather a matter of “devoting one's life to the truth” (vitam impendere vero), according to the motto that Rousseau had chosen. This concept of critical engagement echoed the tradition of parrhēsia, the courage of truth, of speaking the truth, the issues that Michel Foucault investigated.¹⁶³ One of the most spectacular forms of parrhēsia in Antiquity was that of the Cynics, most notably Diogenes, the philosopher whose doctrine was entirely contained in his acts, a direct and brutal way to explode scandalous truths by denouncing the superficial character of social conventions. A whole series of well-known anecdotes, recounted notably by Diogenes Laertius, made of Diogenes, living in his barrel, masturbating in public and responding insolently to Alexander the Great, an eccentric philosophical figure, living on the edge of madness, where even the philosopher's life took on the form of activism and critical discourse. By displaying an ethical dissidence in the heart of the city, Diogenes sought to condemn the excesses of civility.

It is not surprising that Rousseau was so often compared to Diogenes by his peers, either by his enemies or by his admirers.¹⁶⁴ Without ever explicitly identifying himself with the Cynic, Rousseau did not hesitate to refer to him implicitly, most notably by using his famous formula “I'm looking for a man,” which Diogenes pronounced while carrying a lantern to show that his contemporaries, as he saw it, had lost all dignity.¹⁶⁵ But the level of celebrity reached by Rousseau opened some doubt about his sincerity, and when he was compared to Diogenes, it was often to suspect him of being an imitator, a false Diogenes: “Diogenes' monkey, how you do condemn yourself!” Voltaire raged in the margin of his edition of Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality, facing the passage where the author criticized the “ardor to be talked about” and the “furor to distinguish oneself.”¹⁶⁶

Confronted with this criticism, often repeated by those who suspected him of being cynical, of playing a role, Rousseau found himself obliged to exculpate himself. He protested that his decision to copy music was not “an affectation of simplicity or poverty to copy an Epictetus or Diogenes as your Gentlemen claim.”¹⁶⁷ But he was well aware of the ambiguity of his position. He discovered that parrhēsia, a public exhibition of his authenticity and his sincerity, was ambivalent in the already media-hyped world of the eighteenth century. His eccentricity fed the curiosity and even the fascination of the public, but it seemed like a threat, because it transformed Jean-Jacques into a person he did not recognize. No matter what he did, the logic of his celebrity was too powerful: “I felt then that it is not always as easy as one imagines to be poor and independent. I wanted to live from my profession; the public did not want me to do so.”¹⁶⁸ Rousseau could not escape being a toy for adults or the showpiece of a public hungry for entertainment. If public exhibition of an exemplary life was no longer a weapon used for social criticism, but a publicity stunt, an object of curiosity, how could an authentic philosopher revolted by injustices be distinguished from an opportunist looking for fame? We can then understand the strange paradox of an admired writer, beloved, even passionately so, who would continually lock himself away convinced that he was universally hated. The odd nature of Rousseauism was not so much in the emotional community that formed between readers and the author, but in the fact that Rousseau, who so much desired such a community, ultimately rejected it. More than a psychological pathology, we can read in his behavior the angst of becoming a curiosity, a spectacle. Rousseau constantly reaffirming his authenticity, multiplying conflictual gestures.

Not every celebrity becomes paranoid, certainly. In fact, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques or similar pages in his correspondence and the Reveries would not have been seen as representative of anything if it had not been for the excessive nature of Rousseau, which bordered on delirium, or his way of pushing to the extreme the distance between intimate recognition and public recognition. In the first case, we would read his texts as many did, in order to document the pathological psyche of Rousseau, his “paranoia”; in the second instance, we would read them as philosophical fiction. In both cases, we would find an exteme singularity, either that of a man with a deep persecution complex leading him to see his most sincere admirers as fearful spies, or that of a brilliant writer, the precursor of both Kafka and Debord.

Is any of this useful to the historian? I hope I have shown to what extent the writings and the life of Rousseau reflect, though much more radically, the experience of celebrity that his contemporaries were beginning to describe and analyze. Think back to Duclos, who imagined how painful it must have been for a man who heard himself discussed without being able to reveal his identity, “as if he were listening to people talk about a third person, someone other than himself.” Think of Sarah Siddons, trapped by curious and importunate admirers who shamelessly gawked at her and kept her from returning home. Think of Chamfort, who saw in celebrity a “punishment” and decided to withdraw from the literary world. And above all think of the text by Samuel Johnson in which success and celebrity drove a young writer to paranoia. Seen in this context, Rousseau's obsessions no longer seem strange. Of course, in order to better show the violence which celebrity represented for those who were the object of it, he transformed it into persecution and defamation. He made it both unrecognizable, since it is not easy to identify admirers of Rousseau in this “entire generation [that] would, by a unanimous agreement, find delight in burying [him] alive,”¹⁶⁹ and perfectly recognizable, because the mechanisms were so minutely described. This wild description, crazed even, is not crazy: it is like an extreme stylization that reveals the essential substance, celebrity experienced as a burden, an alienation, a disfigurement. What difference did it make what was said about him, good or bad, whether he was loved or detested, if everything said about him was felt as a violation? The nightmare that Rousseau describes happened because an individual, losing control of the image others had of him, became the disempowered spectator of the show that he had become.

At the time of Rousseau's death, rumors of suicide were everywhere, as if this were the obvious consequence of his chaos and solitude. The hypothesis, probably false, was not absurd. Numerous stars in the twentieth century committed suicide, testifying in this way that celebrity, which in our day appears to be an enviable condition, even a criterion for social success, sometimes brings with it great psychological and existential suffering. Rousseau, no doubt thanks to his capacity for transforming his suffering into writing, escaped the tragic destiny of so many stars after him, from Marilyn Monroe to Kurt Cobain. He is like them, however, even at a distance of two centuries, in his solitude amidst a noisy crowd of admirers, fighting, as if robbed of himself, against self-dissolution in a maelstrom of innumerable representations of Jean-Jacques.

Notes

    1    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 1, eds Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH/London: University Press of New England, [1782] 1990, pp. 128–9.

    2    Jeremy Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France (1670–1794) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

    3    Letter from Mme Graffigny to Devaux, October 29, 1751, Correspondance de Mme de Graffigny, ed. J.-A. Dainard (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), Vol. XII, p. 151.

    4    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Correspondance complète (CC), ed. R. A. Leigh (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1965–98), 52 vols, Vol. II, p. 136.

    5    “If I do not have the celebrity of rank and birth, I do have another one which is more my own and which I purchased more dearly; I have the celebrity of misfortune” (draft of the Confessions, Œuvres complètes [OC] [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], Vol. I, p. 1151).

    6    Sean Goodlett, “The Origins of Celebrity: The Eigtheenth-Century Anglo-French Press Reception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (PhD, University of Oregon, 2000).

    7    The condemnation of the Contrat Social took place in the framwork of a ferocious political confrontation between the Advisory Council and the representatives, ending in a quasi-revolutionary climate in which Rousseau was both an actor and the subject. See notably Richard Whatmore, “Rousseau and the Representants: The Politics of the Lettres écrites de la montagne,” Modern Intellectual History, 3:3 (2006), pp. 385–413.

    8    Quoted in Goodlett, “The Origins of Celebrity,” p. 127.

    9    The Public Advertiser, January 13, 1766, CC, Vol. XXIX, p. 295.

  10    Letter of Hume to the Marquise de Barbentane, February 16, 1766, CC, Vol. XXVII, p. 309.

  11    On Rousseau's visit to England, see Claire Brock, The Feminization of Fame, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 28ff.

  12    Raymond Birn, “Fashioning an Icon: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Mémoires secrets,” in Popkin and Fort (eds), The Mémoires secrets, pp. 93–105.

  13    Mémoires secrets, Vol. II, p. 253.

  14    Mémoires secrets, Vol. V, p. 162.

  15    Elizabeth A. Foster, Le Dernier Séjour de J.-J. Rousseau à Paris, 1770–1778 (Northampton/Paris: H. Champion, 1921); Jacques Berchtold and Michel Porret (eds), Rousseau visité, Rousseau visiteur: Les dernières années (1770–1778), actes du colloque de Genève (1996), Annales de la société Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva: Droz, 1999).

  16    Correspondance littéraire, July 1770, Vol. IX, p. 229.

  17    Letter from Mme du Deffand to Horace Walpole, July 15, 1770, Horace Walpole's Correspondence, Vol. IV, p. 434.

  18    Les Mémoires secrets proposed an even less favorable explanation, but which pointed out to what extent the question of Rousseau's relationship to his own celebrity had become an obsessive issue: “Monsieur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, after sometimes being seen at the Café de la Régence, where his vanity was flattered by proving that he still caused a sensation as before and that his renown continued to attract crowds that followed him, wrapped himself in his modesty; he returned to his obscurity, satisfied by this momentary burst, until another event gives him more celebrity” (p. 167).

  19    Jean-Baptiste La Harpe, Correspondance littéraire adressée à son altesse impériale Mgr le grand-duc, aujourd'hui empereur de Russie, et à M. le comte Schowalow (Paris: Migneret, 1804), Vol. I, p. 204.

  20    Journal inédit du duc de Croÿ (Paris: Flammarion, 1906–21), Vol. III, p. 12.

  21    Jacques Louis Ménétra, Journal de ma vie, ed. D. Roche (Paris: Montalba, 1982), p. 222. Ménétra also wrote a letter to Rousseau that showed he knew the titles of his principal works and that he had no doubt read them.

  22    Vittorio Alfieri, Ma vie, ed. M. Traversier (Paris: Mercure de France, [1803] 2012), p. 175.

  23    Quoted in CC, Vol. I, pp. 30–1.

  24    Gazette de Berne, November 13, 1776, CC, Vol. XL, p. 104; Courrier d'Avignon, December 20, 1776: M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has died from the after-effects of his fall. […] There is every reason to believe that the public will not be deprived of his life story and that even the name of the dog who killed him will be found” (quoted in OC, Vol. I, p. 1778).

  25    Bronislaw Baczko, Job, mon ami (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 177–254; Raymond Birn, Forging Rousseau: Print, Commerce and Cultural Manipulation in the Late Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001); Roger Barny, Prélude idéologique à la Révolution: Le rousseauisme avant 1789 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985); Barny, Rousseau dans la Révolution: Le personnage de Jean-Jacques et les débuts du culte révolutionnaire, 1787–1791 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1986); Carla Hesse, “Lire Rousseau pendant la Révolution française,” in Céline Spector (ed.), “Modernités de Rousseau,” Lumières, 15 (2011), pp. 17–32.

  26    Journal helvétique, July 1757, CC, Vol. III, pp. 334–5.

  27    Louise Alexandrine Julie Dupin de Chenonceaux to Rousseau, CC, Vol. XXIII, p. 108.

  28    Alexandre Deleyre to Rousseau, August 6, 1765, CC, Vol. XXVI, pp. 149–53.

  29    Niklaus Anton Kirchberger to Rousseau, CC, Vol. XX, pp. 115–17.

  30    Mémoires secrets, Vol. II, p. 288.

  31    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter on French Music,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 7, ed. John Scott (Hanover, NH/London: University of New England Press, 1990), pp. 141–74. Here is a sample: “I believe I have shown that there is neither meter nor melody in French Music, because the language is not susceptible to them; that French song is but a continual barking, unbearable to any ear not prepared for it; that its harmony is crude, expressionless, and uniquely feels its Schoolboy padding; that French arias are not at all arias; that the French recitative is not at all recitative. From which I conclude that the French do not at all have a Music and cannot have any; or that if they ever have any, it will be so much the worse for them” (p. 174).

  32    Correspondance littéraire, January 1, 1754, Vol. I, p. 312.

  33    Mémoires secrets, Vol. 1, p. 92.

  34    Memoirs of Princess Czartoryska, quoted by François Rosset, “D'une princesse fantasque aux Considérations: faits et reflets,” in Berchtold and Porret (eds), Rousseau visité, Rousseau visiteur, p. 22.

  35    Paul Charles Thiébault, Mémoires (Paris: Plon, 1893), Vol. I, p. 136, quoted by Raymond Trousson, Lettres à Jean-Jacques Rousseau sur La Nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), p. 30. For an overall view of the reception of La Nouvelle Héloïse, see Yannick Seité, Du livre au lire: La Nouvelle Héloïse, roman des Lumières (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002).

  36    Letter from Charles Joseph Panckoucke of February 10, 1761, CC, Vol. VIII, p. 77–9.

  37    Rousseau's correspondence inspired several works: Daniel Roche, “Les primitifs du Rousseauisme: une analyse sociologique et quantitative de la correspondance de J.-J. Rousseau,” Annales ESC, 26:1 (1971), pp. 151–72; Claude Labrosse, Lire au XVIIIe siècle: “La Nouvelle Héloïse” et ses lecteurs (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985); Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau.”

  38    Letter from a stranger, April 6, 1761, CC, Vol. VIII, pp. 296–7.

  39    Letter from Jean-Louis Le Cointe, March 27, 1761, ibid., pp. 292–5.

  40    Letters from Manon Phlipon to Marie Sophie Caroline Cannet, respectively November 4, 1777, November 17, 1777, and March 21, 1776, in Lettres de Mme Roland (Paris: Government Printing Office, 1902), pp. 145, 165, and 46–7.

  41    Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” p. 234.

  42    Ibid., pp. 252 and 251.

  43    In his “Éloge de Richardson,” Diderot exclaims: “Who has not read the words of Richardson without wanting to know this man, to have him for a brother or a friend? […] Richardson is no more. What a loss for humanity. This loss has moved me as if he had been my brother. He is in my heart though I never saw him; I knew him only through his works” (pp. 1063 and 1069).

  44    Jean Staborinski, Accuser et séduire: Essais sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), p. 20, who clearly understands the experience of intimacy created by the work and the person of Rousseau, but classically interprets it as a form of religious or political conversion.

  45    Quoted in Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” pp. 236 and 237.

  46    Letter from Baron de Bormes, March 27, 1761, CC, Vol. VIII, pp. 280–2.

  47    Letter from Jean Romilly, May 23, 1763, CC, Vol. XVI, pp. 222–36.

  48    Letter of September 16, 1762, p. 138, and letter of July 25, 1770, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mme de La Tour, Correspondance, ed. G. May (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), p. 295.

  49    Letter of August 11, 1765, ibid., p. 255.

  50    In spite of repeated requests from Mme de La Tour, Rousseau did not really want to meet her. They saw each other only two or three times and never alone.

  51    Lettre à l'auteur de la Justification de J.-J. Rousseau dans la contestation qui lui est survenue avec M. Hume (1762); “Réflexions sur ce qui s'est passé au sujet de la rupture de J.-J. Rousseau et de M. Hume”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau vangé par son amie, ou Morale pratico-philosophico-encyclopédique du coryphée de la secte (Au temple de la vérité, 1779).

  52    Lilti, The World of the Salons, pp. 178–91.

  53    Letter from David Hume to the Countess of Boufflers, August 12, 1766, in The Letters of David Hume, Vol. II: 1766–1776, ed. J.Y.T. Greig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 77.

  54    See the files compiled by the publisher of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau: CC, Vol. XXX, pp. 401ff., and Vol. XXXI, pp. 336ff.

  55    Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obfuscation, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1971] 1988), pp. 134–7.

  56    CC, Vol. XXX, p. 29.

  57    Justification de Jean-Jacques Rousseau dans la contestation qui lui est survenue avec M. Hume (London, 1766), p. 2.

  58    Ibid., pp. 25–6.

  59    Dena Goodman, “The Hume–Rousseau Affair: From Private Querelle to Public Procès,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 25:2 (1991–2), pp. 171–201.

  60    Letter from d'Alembert to David Hume, July 21, 1766, CC, Vol. XXX, p. 130.

  61    Letter from Holbach to Hume, July 7, 1766, ibid., pp. 20–1.

  62    Letter from Turgot to Hume, July 23, 1766, ibid., p. 149.

  63    Justification, p. 23.

  64    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, including the Letters to Malesherbes: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 5, trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH/ London: University Press of New England, 1995), p. 5.

  65    Benoît Mély, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, un intellectuel en rupture (Paris: Minerve, 1985); Jérôme Meizoz, Le Guex philosophe (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2003); Lilti, The World of the Salons.

  66    Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981); Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Julius Domaszi, La Philosophie, théorie ou manière de vivre? Les controverses de l'Antiquité à la Renaissance (Paris: PUF, 1996).

  67    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 8, ed. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH/London: University Press of New England, 2000), p. 18.

  68    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 4, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH/London: University Press of New England, 1994), p. 10.

  69    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 303.

  70    Yves Citton, “Retour sur la misérable querelle Rousseau–Diderot: position, conséquence, spectacle et sphère publique,” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, 36 (2004), pp. 57–94.

  71    Antoine Lilti, “Reconnaissance et célébrité: Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la politique du nom propre,” Orages: Littérature et culture, 9 (March 2010), pp. 77–94. On Holbach, see Alain Sandrier, Le Style philosophique du baron d'Holbach (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004). On Voltaire, see Olivier Ferret, “Vade mecum. Vade Retro. Le recours au pseudonyme dans la démarche pamphlétaire voltairienne,” La Lettre clandestine, 8 (1999), pp. 65–82.

  72    Quoted by Ourida Mostefai, Le Citoyen de Genève et la République des lettres: Étude de la controverse autour de la Lettre à d'Alembert de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 115.

  73    Ibid., p. 114.

  74    See Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as an Author: Consecrating One's Life to the Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

  75    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to Beaumont,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 9, eds Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Hanover, NH/London: University Press of New England, 2001), pp. 17–101, here at p. 23.

  76    On the political and theoretical issues in this long-underestimated text by Rousseau the critic, see Bruno Bernardi, Florent Guénard, and Gabriella Silvestrini, Religion, liberté, justice: Sur les Lettres écrites de la montagne de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris: J. Vrin, 2005) and Whatmore, “Rousseau and the Representants.”

  77    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 9, pp. 131–306, here at p. 219.

  78    Ibid.

  79    Ibid., p. 218.

  80    Ibid.

  81    Letter of April 15, 1758, CC, Vol. V, pp. 70–1.

  82    Julie, Or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps: Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 6, eds Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, NH/London: University Press of New England, 1997), p. 19.

  83    Rousseau for example wrote to his publisher in 1762: “Let the crazies and the mean-spirited burn my books as much as they want, it won't stop the fact that they are alive and dear to all good people. When they are no longer printed, they will nonetheless be there for posterity and will bless the memory of the only Author who has ever written solely for the good of society and for the true happiness of men” (letter of October 8, 1762 to Marc Michel Rey, CC, Vol. XIII, pp. 182–4).

  84    Letter from Rousseau to Daniel Roguin, December 12, 1761, CC, Vol. IX, pp. 309–11. In the end, Rousseau resigned himself to traveling under the name Dudding.

  85    L'Année littéraire, 1754, Vol. I, pp. 242–4; Correspondance littéraire, June 15, 1762, Vol. V, p. 100.

  86    Letter from Mme du Deffand to the Duchesse de Choiseul, July 22, 1766, in Correspondance complète de Mme du Deffand avec la duchesse de Choiseul, ed. M. de Sainte-Aulaire (Paris: Michel Levy, 1866), Vol. I, p. 59.

  87    Lettres et Pensées du prince de Ligne, ed. Raymond Trousson (Paris: Tallandier, 1989), p. 289.

  88    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 240.

  89    Ibid., pp. 304–5.

  90    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “My Portrait,” in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 12, ed. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH/London: University of New England Press, 2006), pp. 36–44, here at p. 39.

  91    Ibid.

  92    Ibid. Rousseau here adds a curious note: “That is plausible, but I do not feel it clearly.” Is this vanity (amour-propre) once again from someone who thinks that the public will never grow tired of talking about such a singular and interesting person? Or is it intuition about an idea which Rousseau will eventually develop, that celebrity is a trap no one can escape once caught in it?

  93    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 304.

  94    Ibid., p. 511.

  95    Ibid., p. 512.

  96    Letters from Rousseau to Mme Thérèse Guillemette Périé, Comtesse de La Rodde de Saint-Haon, CC, Vol. XL, pp. 63–71.

  97    Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, La Vie et les Ouvrages de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Raymond Trousson (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009), p. 319.

  98    Barbara Carnevali, Romantisme et reconnaissance: Figures de la conscience chez Rousseau (Geneva: Droz, 2012).

  99    Ibid.

100    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 317.

101    Ibid., p. 290.

102    Ibid., p. 318.

103    Nicolas Paige, “Rousseau's Readers Revisited,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42:1 (2008), pp. 131–54; James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

104    Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity: A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

105    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, pp. 97–8.

106    Ibid., p. 98.

107    Ibid., p. 458.

108    Ibid., p. 438.

109    Ibid., p. 5.

110    Contrast between the two terms is frequent with Rousseau. See, for example, Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 11.

111    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 587.

112    Also, think about the episode of the young beggar in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, who called him “Monsieur Rousseau” to show that he knew him, showing, in fact, that he did not known him (otherwise he would have known that Rousseau did not like to be called “Monsieur”).

113    Johnny Halliday, “L'idole des jeunes,” 1962.

114    Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Originalité et expression de soi: Éléments pour une généalogie de la figure moderne de l'artiste,” Commu­nications, 64 (1997), pp. 89–115.

115    Rousseau, “Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” p. 54.

116    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 550.

117    On the critical reception of the text, see James F. Jones, Dialogues: An Interpretative Essay (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Anne F. Garetta, “Les Dialogues de Rousseau: paradoxes d'une réception critique,” in Lorraine Clark and Guy Lafrance (eds), Rousseau et la critique (Ottawa: Association nord-américaine des études Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1995), pp. 5–98; Jean-François Perrin, Politique du renonçant: Le dernier Rousseau des dialogues aux rêveries (Paris: Kimé, 2011), pp. 280–9.

118    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 218.

119    Ibid., p. 3.

120    Ibid, pp. 41–2.

121    Ibid., p. 251.

122    Ibid., p. 248.

123    On the paradoxes in the paranoid writing of Rousseau and the puzzling text that theorized and depicted its difficult reception, see Antoine Lilti, “The Writing of Paranoia: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Paradoxes of Celebrity,” Representations, 103 (2008), pp. 53–83.

124    Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), pp. vii–xxiv.

125    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 6.

126    Ibid., p. 92. See Yves Citton, “Fabrique de l'opinion et folie de la dissidence: le ‘complot’ dans Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques,” in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: Études sur les Dialogues (Ottawa: Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa, 1998), pp. 101–14.

127    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, pp. 30 and 83.

128    “Among the peculiarities that distinguish our century from all others is the methodical and consistent spirit that has guided public opinions for twenty years. […] Ever since the philosophic sect organized itself into a body with leaders, these leaders – who have become the arbiters of public opinion through the art of intrigue to which they have applied themselves – are through that the arbiters of the reputation, and even the destiny of individuals and through them of that of the State” (ibid., pp. 236–7). On the idea of public opinion about Rousseau and his link with the political theory of general will, see Bruno Bernardi, “Rousseau et la généalogie du concept d'opinion Publique,” in Michel O'Dea (ed.), Jean-Jacques Rousseau en 2012 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012).

129    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 181.

130    Rousseau, “Letters Written from the Mountain,” p. 138: “No one can escape from this Judge, and for myself, I do not make any appeal from it.”

131    Rousseau, “My Portrait,” p. 38.

132    Ibid., pp. 38–9.

133    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 217.

134    Ibid., p. 232.

135    Ibid., p. 233.

136    Ibid., p. 92.

137    Ibid., p. 252.

138    Letter from Rousseau to the Comte de Saint-Germain, February 26, 1770, CC, Vol. XXXVII, pp. 248–71.

139    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 252.

140    Paul Audi, Rousseau, une philosophie de l'âme (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2008).

141    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 252.

142    Ibid., p. 5.

143    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 132.

144    Rousseau, “My Portrait,” p. 44.

145    Letter from Rousseau to Abbé Raynal, July 25, 1750, CC, Vol. II, pp. 132–6, here p. 133.

146    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, pp. 231–2.

147    Letter from Rousseau to Louise Alexandrine Julie Dupin de Chenonceaux, CC, Vol. XX, pp. 112–14.

148    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 197.

149    “Déclaration de Rousseau relative à l'impression de ses écrits,” January 23, 1774, CC, Vol. XXXIX, p. 305.

150    Geoffrey Benington, Dudding: Des noms de Rousseau (Paris: Galilée, 1991).

151    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 234.

152    Ibid.

153    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 513.

154    Douglas Fordham, “Allan Ramsay's Enlightenment or Hume and the Patronizing Portrait,” Art Bulletin, 88:3 (2006), pp. 508–24.

155    To the contrary, Diderot criticized a pastel of Rousseau by Quentin de La Tour, in 1753, because it made him look too worldly. “I was looking for the letter censor, the Caton and the Brutus of our age; I expected to see Epictetus shabbily dressed, wig all helter-skelter, his severe look frightening writers, great men and society people: I only see the author of Devin du village, well dressed, hair carefully combed, well powdered and ridiculously seated on a straw chair”(Essai sur la peinture, Œuvres [Paris: Gallimard, 1951], p. 1134).

156    See, for example, the judgment by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, in Essai sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes (Lequien, 1831), Vol. XI, p. 286.

157    Letter from Mme Riccoboni to Garrick, October 1, 1770, quoted by Angelica Goodden, Rousseau's Hand: The Crafting of a Writer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 146.

158    Letter from Mme de La Tour, in Rousseau and La Tour, Correspondance, p. 280.

159    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 91.

160    Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1767,” in Salons, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 252.

161    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 92.

162    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 3.

163    Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, [2008] 2011).

164    Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salons (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 94–104; David Mazella, The Making of Modern Cynicism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 110.

165    Jacques Berchtold, “L'identification nourrie par l'iconographie? Rousseau et le Diogène à la lanterne,” in Frédéric Eigeldinger, Rousseau et les arts visuels: Actes du colloque de Neuchâtel 2001, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vol. XLV (2003), pp. 567–82.

166    George Remington Heavens, Voltaire's Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1933), p. 21. See also Henri Gouhier, Rousseau et Voltaire: portraits dans un miroir (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), p. 58.

167    Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, p. 132.

168    Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, p. 308.

169    Rousseau, “Reveries of the Solitary Walker,” p. 3.