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46. The entrance to the park, anonymous engraving in Girardin, Promenade

ited by faithful lovers," and proceeded to "a forest where the immense silence and solitude seizes one so that one advances with terror into the depths of the wood." Surprised by the sudden appearance of a little temple consecrated to Nature, one emerged onto a plain where another monument to Philosophy stood, and thence to a "wilderness" planted only with pines, cedars and junipers, with craggy outcrops and cascades. From there one could walk to a lake beside which was a stone engraved with verses from both Petrarch and Julie of the Nouvelle Heloise. After that might come some suggestion of the presence of man, but only at his most artisanally virtuous: the water mill and the wine press. A pre-ruined Gothic tower, streams full of fat fish, and a "Dutch" meadow stocked with fat cattle gave on to a space which on special days Girardin would fill with rustics, trained to look jolly, disporting themselves in innocent pastimes and musical games.

The Holy Grail of the pilgrimage was of course Rousseau's tomb, set on the Isle of Poplars in the middle of the lake. There on a bench expressly provided for mothers to nurse their infants while other children played contentedly, they could contemplate the modest monument erected by Girardin. Its epitaph read

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Among these poplars, beneath their peaceful shade Rests Jean-]acques Rousseau Mothers, old men, children, true hearts and feeling souls Your friend sleeps in this tomb

At this point, crying was obligatory. "Let your tears flow freely," wrote Girardin, an authorial arm about the shoulder of the pilgrim. "Never will you have spilled such delicious or such well-merited teardrops."

Some of the most ardent disciples went even further in search of the ghost of the solitary genius. Louis-Sebastien Mercier traveled through Switzerland with his friend the Genevan Etienne Claviere, visiting places and people of importance in Rousseau's life. Manon Philipon, who as a girl had identified passionately with Julie, took her husband, the future Giron-din Minister Roland, on a similar tour and managed to track down the mayor who had witnessed Rousseau's marriage to Therese. Not content with her own private obsession she cast her husband in the role of Wolmar, the older, rather austere but devoted figure whom Julie dutifully marries in preference to the besotted young tutor Saint-Preux. Writing to Roland,

47. The Isle of Poplars, anonymous engraving in Girardin, Promenade

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she made this identification quite plain: "I have just devoured Julie as if it were not the fourth or fifth time ... it seems to me that we would have lived very well with all those personages and that they would have found us as much to their taste as they are to ours."

The publication of the Confessions in 1782, with its introductory promise to "display a portrait in every way true to nature," only reinforced the intensely personal bond that Rousseau's countless disciples felt with him. In his lifetime, as Robert Darnton has shown, they wrote to his publisher Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam inquiring after his personal welfare and health as though he were an intimate friend. Nothing in the Confessions— not the bald admission of the abandonment of his children, of his various addictions to masturbation and masochism, his share in a menage a trois with Mme de Warens and her herbalist—nothing could shake their faith in his essential moral purity. The breathtaking candor of his admissions of vice as well as virtue strengthened their view that he was the greatest honnete homme of their century. Rousseau's paranoid conviction that he was persecuted by jealous philosophes such as his erstwhile friend Diderot as well

anonymous engraving in Girardin,

Promenade

as Voltaire and Melchior Grimm, fed the alienation felt by many writers who believed themselves unappreciated by the literary establishment in Paris. They too attributed this lack of recognition to a conspiracy of the mediocre. They also shared much of Rousseau's ambivalence about the necessary dependence on aristocratic patrons and his scorn for corrupt fashion and the atrophied rule of Reason.

Rousseau, then, became the Divinity (apostrophized as such) of the literary underclass. Spurned, mistreated and nomadic, he was at once their consolation and their prophet. And they took as their gospel his commitments to Nature, Virtue and Truth.

Historians have long been concerned to judge Rousseau's influence on the revolutionary generation by gauging that generation's familiarity or unfamiliarity with the formal works of political theory, in particular The Social Contract. While there is growing evidence that this work was in fact read and understood before the Revolution, it is undoubtedly true that it never reached the huge and adoring readership of his educational "biography" Emile and the Nouvelle Heloise. But to assume that those works had little influence on political allegiance is to adopt a much too narrow definition of the word political. As much as his writings dealing with sovereignty and the rights of man, Rousseau's works dealing with personal virtue and the morality of social relations sharpened distaste for the status quo and defined a new allegiance. He created, in fact, a community of young believers. Their faith was in the possibility of a collective moral and political rebirth in which the innocence of childhood might be preserved into adulthood and through which virtue and freedom would be mutually sustained.

Just how this was to be accomplished was, in all of Rousseau's writings, notoriously obscure. In his lifetime he had shown himself circumspect about, if not downright hostile to, any suggestion of revolt. What he invented was not a road map to revolution, but the idiom in which its

discontents would be voiced and its goals articulated. And most of all he provided a way in which the torments of the ego—an increasingly popular pastime in the late eighteenth century—could be assuaged by membership in a society of friends. In place of an irreconcilable opposition between the individual, with his freedom intact, and a government eager to abridge it, Rousseau substituted a sovereignty in which liberty was not alienated but, as it were, placed in trust. The surrender of individual rights to the General Will was itself conditional on that entity preserving them, so that the citizen could truly claim (so the theory ran) that for the first time he governed himself.

The impossibly paradoxical nature oi this bargain was to be revealed all

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too brutally during the Revolution itself. Km for Rousseau's acolytes in the 1780S, visions opened up of possible societies that might be capable of integrating the imperious "I" within the comradely "We." That, at least, was the comforting vision offered by a two-act spectacle, The Assembly on the Elysian Fields, which represented Rousseau's reception among the immortals. In attendance were, naturally, Julie with her afflicted lover Saint- Preux holding a bunch of roses; Emile attacked in the deep woods by a Monster of Fanaticism and rescued by Truth; and a scene where a nursing mother, a suckling child and a wet nurse extolled the virtues of the maternal breast. One feature of the spectacle, however, remained incongruous. Throughout the action Rousseau himself remained uncharacteristically silent, detached from his own creations. But it was only when his

sentiments broadcast themselves through the power of public eloquence that they became the speech of revolution.

iii PROJECTING THE VOICE:

THE ECHO OF ANTIQUITY

On an August afternoon in 1785 a correspondent for the Journal de Paris saw a young man in his mid-twenties addressing a crowd on a platform in front of the Chatelet. As a newly appointed advocate-general of the Parle-ment, Herault de Sechelles was for the first time exercising his right to speak in this manner and he warmed to his subject. It was one calculated to wring the hearts of les coeurs sensibles. A self-made man who came from a poor family, it seems, had wished to express his gratitude for his good fortune by making a donation to the poor of the parish of Saint- Sulpice. Inadvertently, he had departed from the prescribed official forms in which such donations could be made and the tribunal of the Chatelet as a result had declared them invalid. Herault had taken on the task of pressing the donor's claims and harangued the crowd on the absurdity of the annulment. But the subject of his speech was less important than its spoken form. For it was apparent to the journalist, as to the crowd, that this was an exhibition of public oratory in which the young speaker was testing his powers to affect a spontaneously gathered audience.

According to this same account, published in the newspaper, Herault's debut as a public speaker was a triumph, all the more impressive for avoiding the flashy excesses of the stage (though in fact this future Jacobin was

already taking lessons from the actress Mlle Clairon):

The speech of the young Magistrate had no pretensions to eloquence; his style was calm and tranquil like that of the law itself: he had something of the control of the passions so necessary to the intelligence if it is to discover the truth. Conviction and enlightenment emerged gently and by degrees from his words . . . with none of those syllogisms that have nothing to do with reason ... all those who heard this young Magistrate speak could appreciate the wisdom with which the tone of his speech advanced the nature of his cause.

Even if Herault's chosen manner was that of the grave man of the law, the entire performance was no less theatrically calculated for that. When he had finished, loud applause broke out among the crowd, to which he responded with self-deprecation, waving the acclaim on to the senior magistrates who had preceded him. This was stagecraft of a very high order and for which Herault would become justly famous in the Convention and even, at last, on the scaffold before his beheading with his comrade Danton. In 1785 he seemed, even to the hard-boiled reporter from the Journal, to ooze sincerity. "Never has talent shown so much graciousness as when he [Herault] effaced himself so as to turn his own renown to other[s'] talents." One thinks of Pilatre in the theater of Lyon, taking the laurels from his brow and placing them on the crown of Montgolfier: the new, Roman heroics.

After austerity and modesty came Sensibility. Descending from the dais, Herault was embraced by his senior colleagues of the robe, including the famous orator Gerbier, whom he publicly addressed as his professional "Father." "Never," said the writer, had his soul "been so moved as by this scene."

Although he shrewdly affected the air of a novice in the art of legal oratory, Herault was, at the age of twenty-six, already something of a master. With so many of the most eloquent and ambitious radicals of this period he shared an aristocratic background. Like Lafayette he was an orphan of the Battle of Minden, where his father, a cavalry colonel, had charged the British lines in the futile gesture that had cut down the flower of the French military aristocracy, then died of his wounds at Cassel, in the year of Herault's birth. His grandfather had been a schoolfellow of Voltaire's and a lieutenant of police in Paris, where he endeavored to suppress public bull-baiting and organize ordure removal from the city's filthy streets. From this tradition of patriotism and public service the young Herault de Sechelles, blessed with precocious talent, decided, self-consciously, "to embrace the toga rather than the sword." Educated by the Oratorians and promoted by his relatives he was appointed avocat du roi in the Parlement at the astonishing age of

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nineteen, Learning perhaps from one of the new standard works on legal rhetoric—Pierre-Louis Gin's The Eloquence of the Bar (1768), for example— he made a reputation by specializing in the defense of those who could plausibly be represented as "victims of oppression." His cases, for example, included the defense of a wife, separated from her husband, whom the Parlement of Rennes had condemned to the cloister at the husband's request, and that of an illegitimate girl whose father wanted to seize property bequeathed by her mother.

In 1779 Herault extended his rhetorical range by writing for a competition of the Academy, a eulogy of the Abbe Suger, the great twelfth-century creator of Saint-Denis. Still in his early twenties, in his intellectual enthusiasm he rebounded from Rousseau (predictably) and, less predictably, the natural historian Buffon. In 1783 he embarked on a journey of homage to Zurich with his aristocratic friend Michel Lepeletier (from another of the great Parlementaire clans) to see the great man. Sources close to Buffon insist that, stricken with acute pain from gallstones, the scientist was unable to see Herault and Lepeletier. But this did not prevent the former from putting about, indeed publishing, a detailed account of their meeting. In this version Buffon was cast as the venerable sage, in whom the simplicity of nature had been preserved, conferring his benediction on the ardent young acolyte. Dressed in a yellow robe with white stripes and blue flowers:

He came to greet me majestically, opening his two arms . . . and said, "I regard you as an old friend since you have desired to see me." I looked upon a fine countenance, noble and calm. Despite his seventy-eight years, one would have said he was but sixty and what was more singular was that, having just endured sixteen nights without shutting his eyes and in unconscionable suffering which still persisted, he was still fresh as a child and tranquil as though in perfect health.

Skilled at self-promotion, Herault was a powerful (and strikingly handsome) young orator, and his reputation as such reached the Queen. He was, after all, officially one of the "King's men" (appointed by the government) in the Parlement. She received him at court and was evidently so smitten by his dashing self-confidence that she had a scarf especially embroidered as a present. Herault relished showing off this favor and was said to wear it throughout his years as a militant Jacobin right up to the day when the

guillotine struck off his own head. In 1786, a year after the

performance at the Chatelet, he was given the honor oi opening the so called "harangues"

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following the Parlement of Paris's return for the new session. This was a greal public occasion, and in the Gazette des Tribuneaux a fellow lawyer reported that "his speech was awaited with great impatience by the numerous audience. It was filled with the forms and the beauty that

distinguished the orators of the ancient Republics ... he was interrupted by frequent bursts of applause and it was noticeable that the advocates especially were seized with the enthusiasm that can arouse men and through which they discover their own strengths and the secret of their power."

1 lerault's spectacular early career, then, may have been helped on its way by birth, education and connections. But it was largely made by the system-atic exploitation of eloquence, as his Reflections on Declamation acknowledged. He was able to use his oratorical skills to climb within the career ladder of the old regime and yet strike out as a public figure with a reputa-tion for integrity and independence. The idea of using the bar as a kind of generalized public tribune, though, had limits-, which when severely tested could expel, rather than absorb, the radical. Much depended on the line taken by the orator. Herault and his colleague Target, who would become a revolutionary and one of the authors of the constitution of 1791, could be depended on to take the side of the Parlements in most disputes with the crown. It was not until late 1788 that they parted company

with the court over the form and composition of the Estates-General. But the man who in the 1760s had done more than anyone else to invent the concept and practice of a bar designed to appeal directly to the public—Simon Lin-guet—had done so as part of a campaign against the

Parlements.

Linguet was nothing short of a phenomenon in the public life of the old regime. A thorn in the side of virtually all its governing institutions, he developed a manner of speech and writing that exactly anticipated the revolutionary manner of waspish incrimination and passionate anger. Until fairly recently Linguet has been written off as, at best, an eccentric curiosity, too quirky to have had any serious influence on the direction of old- regime politics. A splendid biography by Darline Gay Levy has done the most to rescue him from this obscurity and it is becoming rapidly apparent that there were almost no corners of the political world of France in this period that were untouched by his talent and reputation. As a precocious trial lawyer in the 1760s he won fame and notoriety for embracing a series of spectacular causes celebres, including the case of the Chevalier de La Barre, accused of mutilating a crucifix and condemned to have his tongue cut out, head struck off and body and head burned separately at the stake. Disbarred for systematically using the bar to wage war a

gainst the courts and magistrates, Linguet turned to

journalism, where his gifts for stinging and powerful attack were quite as impressive as in

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his speech. Two aspects of his writing, however, anticipated revolutionary discourse more directly than anything else: his concern with confronting the rhetoric of "Liberty" with issues of hunger, property and subsistence; and the angry Memoirs of the Bastille, written in 1783 after a two-year sentence that resulted from a lettre de cachet. In huge demand, Linguet's Memoirs did more than anything to create a mythic symbol of old-regime despotism that concentrated in itself all the rage, spleen and desperation accumulating in the late 1780s.

Linguet was really the inventor of the lawyer as public advocate, and so it was he who made it possible for a subsequent generation to slide easily from courtroom harangues to political debates. His History of . . . the Century of Alexander, published in 1762, had already looked back to ancient Greece for the ideal of the lawyer-orator able to articulate for the public "the springs of the human heart." By contrast, modern states had deprived the public tribune of any important role in judicial proceedings, enclosing them either in secrecy or trapping them within formalistic legal

conventions. It was for the gifted orator to uncloak these mystifications by exposing them directly to the censure of the people.

And Linguet proceeded in his trial cases to do just that, using the crowds of spectators who came to hear him speak in the Grand' Chambre of the