The sharp hostility toward contemporary society already evident in his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750; Discourse on the Sciences and Arts) is more profoundly elaborated in the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755; “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”; Eng. trans. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality). In the latter work he argues that social inequality has come about because men have allowed their God-given right of freedom to be usurped by the growth of competition, specialization and division of labour, and, most of all, by laws that consolidated the inequitable distribution of property. Further, he states that elegant, civilized society is a sham whose reality is endless posturing, hostility, injustice, enslavement, and alienation. The revolutionary implications of these beliefs are spelled out in the Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract), with its examination of the principle of sovereignty, its critique of the divine right of kings, and its formulation of a right of resistance. True liberty and equality can be established, according to Rousseau, only on the hypothesis of a people who have never yet been divided or corrupted by any form of government, through a social pact of all with all, willingly accepted, in which each individual agrees to submit to and defend the volonté générale (“general will”), which alone has sovereignty. This is the ground on which active citizens, and full humans, can be developed. But such self-denial would already require a moral transmutation requiring the prior existence of the higher reasoning and selflessness that it is meant to help create and foster. To break the vicious circle, Rousseau proposes to introduce into his nascent community a Lawgiver, who may use his authority, or the seductions of religion, to persuade people to accept the laws. At the origin of his newly contracted society of truth, sincerity, and respect for others’ rights and freedoms, he must posit an authoritarian and manipulative principle. Commentators have differed widely in their readings of The Social Contract as either a liberal or a totalitarian document. Rousseau saw himself as unambiguously defending freedom from despotism; from 1789 to 1917, revolutionaries throughout the world took him as an icon.
Rousseau’s struggle toward a morality based on transparent honesty and on values authenticated not by any external authority but by his own conscience and feelings, is continued in the Confessions (written 1764–70; Eng. trans. Confessions). Here he suggests that self-knowledge is to be achieved by a growing familiarity with the unconscious, a recognition of the importance of childhood in shaping the adult, and an acceptance of the role of sexuality—an anticipation of modern psychoanalysis. This original exploration of the self, in its dreams, desires, fantasies, obsessions, and, ultimately, delusions, is developed further in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (written 1776–78; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker), which has been seen as foreshadowing even more strongly the Romantic Movement and the literature of introspection of the next century. Laclos and others
The later 18th-century novel, preoccupied with the understanding of the tensions and dangers of a society about to wake up to the Revolution of 1789—the Great Revolution to which the modern French state traces its origins—is dominated by the masterpiece of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances), and its stylish account of erotic psychology and its manipulations. The libertine Valmont and his accomplice and rival, Mme de Merteuil, plot the downfall of their victims in a Parisian society that illustrates Rousseau’s strictures: natural human values have no place in a world of conformist expediency, cynicism, and vicious exploitation. Laclos’s novel is, he claims, didactic, a moral satire of a dangerous, heartless world; yet he also admires the cold, vengeful intelligence that invents and directs that world’s viciousness, which the highly crafted epistolary construction of the work, as well as its elegant, sharp-witted, and subtle language, brilliantly exemplify.
By contrast, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s utopian Paul et Virginie (1788; Paul and Virginia), a rich evocation of exotic nature in the tropical setting of Mauritius, often seems overly sentimental to modern tastes. Another, very different, follower of Rousseauist ideals, the verbose and prolific Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, became the self-proclaimed chronicler and analyst of Parisian society, a representative young man of the generation that had gone from country to city in search of fresh fortune. In his philosophical treatises, novels, and short-story collections, he evoked vividly the manners and morals of men and especially women, in all their social ranks, from the bourgeois mistress of the house to the prostitutes in the street. Along with the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, author of Le Tableau de Paris (1781–89; Panorama of Paris [selections]), his evocations of the life and movement of the burgeoning metropolis prepare the ground for Honoré de Balzac’s analyses of its human, social, and political dramas. A very different response to this time of radical change came from Donatien-Alphonse-François, comte de Sade, generally known as the Marquis de Sade, whose fascination with the connections of power, pain, and pleasure, between individuals and in society’s larger structures, gave rise to the word sadism. In Sade’s philosophy, where the essential operation of Nature is not procreation but destruction, murder is natural and morally acceptable. The true libertine must replace soft sentiment by an energy aspiring to the total freedom of individual desire. The language and thematics of Sade’s fantasies owe much to the Enlightenment, of which his antisocial egoism is, however, only a perverted expression. But in works such as Justine; ou, les malheurs de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue) or the tale of Justine’s sister, Juliette (1797; Eng. trans. Juliette), he made the reader aware as never before that the search for fulfillment in the enjoyment of cruelty forms part of the human psyche. The text he wrote in the Bastille, never published in his lifetime, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (written 1784–85, published 1904; The 120 Days of Sodom, and Other Writings), has, since the studies of the Surrealists and Georges Bataille, become a classic sourcebook for the study of the imaginative forms of the modern unconscious. Haydn T. Mason Jennifer Birkett From 1789 to the mid-19th century Revolution and empire