fiercely disputed at the time. Not only did Rousseau lose the Academy’s competition for 1754, his new discourse also earned the undying enmity of Voltaire, the most powerful and prominent representative of the French Enlightenment.
A generation older than Rousseau and Diderot, Voltaire (1694–1776) had first become famous as an outspoken critic of superstition and Christian bigotry in the Philosophical Letters he published in 1734. Born François-Marie Arouet, he had given himself a new name after becoming independently wealthy through shrewd investments. In the years that followed, Voltaire wrote poetry, plays, fiction, histories, and innumerable essays on philosophical, scientific, and political topics, glorying in his status as a tribune of enlightened justice, marshaling public opinion in polemical broadsides that commanded a wide readership. In 1755, he settled in Switzerland, first in Geneva and then just outside the city limits at a lavish estate where he could stage his plays for his friends and admirers.
In his First Discourse, Rousseau had obliquely criticized Voltaire, taunting him with his real name: “Tell us, celebrated Arouet, how many strong and masculine beauties you have sacrificed to our false delicacy, and how many great things the spirit of gallantry, so fertile in little things, has cost you!” Yet he continued to profess his admiration for Voltaire’s talent and sent him a copy of his Second Discourse—which provoked a famous response: “I have received, Sir, your new book against the human race … Never has so much intelligence been used in seeking to make us stupid.”
A testy correspondence ensued. Rousseau insisted that his discourse had been in earnest, despite the paradoxes ridiculed by Voltaire: “If I had pursued my first vocation and had neither read nor written, I would doubtless have been happier. However, if letters were abolished now, I would be deprived of the only pleasure remaining to me.” A year later, Rousseau followed up with a long letter in which he defended his idiosyncratic belief in divine providence and made plain his own conviction that a good society would never tolerate intolerance, including those “intolerant unbelievers”—such as Voltaire—“who wished to force the people to believe nothing.”
The points of disagreement were manifold. Rousseau insisted on publishing his books under his own name, while Arouet had donned the mask of Voltaire. Irony was Voltaire’s forte, while Rousseau was painfully earnest. A bon vivant at home in high society, Voltaire could not comprehend Rousseau’s taste for solitude and his modest way of life. Rousseau upheld the claims of faith even as he undermined the claims of common sense and reason. And to top it all off, Rousseau was indiscreet, even reckless in expressing his political views: as Voltaire tartly put it, he had “judged kings and republics without being asked to.” That fame and popular influence in Voltaire’s adopted hometown of Geneva should be one of Rousseau’s rewards for his pious eccentricity was the last straw.
Geneva and its political prospects increasingly preoccupied Rousseau. Ever since he had published the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts in 1750, he had identified himself publicly as “a citizen of Geneva”—even though he had been stripped of his citizenship years before, as a result of converting to Catholicism. After he completed his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1754, Rousseau decided to compose a dedicatory preface, hymning the virtues of Geneva, which he depicted as the democratic homeland of his dreams. Shortly afterward, he returned to Geneva, abjured Catholicism, and became again a real citizen of Geneva.
His homeland was as polarized as ever. On one side stood the established ruling class, committed to preserving its aristocratic privileges and keen to savor the urbane theatrical fare on offer at Voltaire’s château; on the other side stood a popular party consisting of clergymen and artisans, adamant that ordinary citizens play a more robust role in the city’s government and aghast at the elite’s conspicuous consumption of French entertainments.
Rousseau was warmly welcomed in some quarters, more coolly in others. To some magistrates and members of the ruling elite, he was automatically suspect for being a man of the lower classes, and a religious traitor as well. But professors and pastors flocked to his side, and he became a hero to the watchmakers of the faubourg de Saint-Gervais, the artisan district where his father had worked and lived.
After this brief homecoming, Rousseau retired again to France. In practice, he preferred a philosopher’s leisure to the responsibilities of active citizenship. By choosing exile on the outskirts of Paris, he remained free to think for himself