—Simonne Evrard Marat, to the Convention
JEAN PAUL MARAT
The French Revolution traces a lineal descent direct from Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau. These men were contemporaries; they came to the same conclusions, expressing the same thought, each in his own way, absolutely independent of the other. And as genius seldom recognizes genius, neither knew the greatness of the other.
Voltaire was an aristocrat—the friend of kings and courtiers, the brilliant cynic, the pet of the salons and the center of the culture and brains of his time.
Rousseau was a man of the people, plain and unpretentious—a man without ambition—a dreamer. His first writings were mere debating-society monologs, done for his own amusement and the half-dozen or so cronies who cared to listen.
But, as he wrote, things came to him; the significance of his words became to him apparent. Opposition made it necessary to define his position, and threat made it wise to amplify and explain. He grew through exercise, as all men do who grow at all; the spirit of the times acted upon him, and knowledge unrolled as a scroll.
The sum of Rousseau's political philosophy found embodiment in his book, "The Social Contract," and his ideas on education in "Emile." "The Social Contract" became the Bible of the Revolution, and as Emerson says all of our philosophy will be found in Plato, so in a more exact sense can every argument of the men of the Revolution be found in "The Social Contract." But Rousseau did not know what firebrands he was supplying. He was essentially a man of peace—he launched these children of his brain, indifferently, like his children of the flesh, upon the world and left their fate to the god of Chance.