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Having entertained Voltaire for a year, Frederick the Great shot this winged arrow, "If I had a province to punish, I would give it to a philosopher to govern."
Rousseau is flowery and often over-sentimental. But it can be assumed that he himself always knew what he meant. Yet he has given rise to much loose thinking. His references to the "Book of Nature," for instance, were worked overtime by zealous converts. It will be recalled how Chief Justice Marshall paralyzed a poetic attorney in mid-flight, who referred to the "Book of Nature," by looking over his glasses and saying, "One moment, please, while I take down the page and paragraph of that passage in the volume to which counsel has just kindly referred us."
It is the penalty of all original thinking that it inspires fools to unseemliness as well as wise men to action.
Napoleon Bonaparte said, "Had there been no Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution."
And George Sand said, "To blame the 'Social Contract' for the
Revolution is like blaming the Gospels for the massacre of Saint
Bartholomew."
George Sand is literary, but wrong, since Marat, Mirabeau, Robespierre, got their arguments directly from Rousseau, and no one I have ever heard made an appeal to Scripture as a defense for murdering thirty thousand men, women and children. Mirabeau quotes this from Rousseau in self-defense: "No true believer can be a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law inflicted death on an atheist, I should begin to put it into execution by burning the first man who should accuse or persecute another."
Jefferson and Franklin both read the "Social Contract" in the original French, and quoted from it in giving reasons why it was not only right, but the duty, of the Colonies to separate from Great Britain. Rousseau fired the heart and inspired the brain of Thomas Paine to write the pamphlet, "Common-sense," which, more than any other one influence, brought about the American Revolution.
Jefferson especially was fascinated by Rousseau, and in his library was a well-thumbed copy of the "Social Contract." marked and re- marked on page and margin. Paine and Jefferson were the only men connected with the strenuous times of Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six who had a distinct literary style—who worked epigram and antithesis. And the style of each is identical with the other. That Paine wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence needs no argument for the literary connoisseur—he simply says, "Read it." But while we know that both Paine and Jefferson fed on Rousseau for ten years, it is not so clear that they collaborated. They got their information from the same source—one in England and the other in America—and met with minds mature.
As Victor Hugo gave the key to the modern American stylists, so did
the stylists—and precious few there were—of Seventeen Hundred
Seventy-six trace to Jean Jacques. The man who wrote the "Junius
Letters" had only one model.