The Invincible Loner

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU by Jean Guehenno. Two volumes, 460 & 316 pages. Columbia. $17.50.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first modern man. This tremendous two-volume biography, written in 1962 by French Academician Jean Guehenno and now translated into English for the first time, succeeds expertly in establishing Rousseau's tortured assertion of individualism as well as his complicated genius. Rousseau raised his own character to the status of dogma and almost to an object of veneration. "He believed he was unique," writes Guehenno, "and for this reason answerable only to his own jurisdiction."

If this does not seem revolutionary today, it is because 20th century man has already shown himself itching with the Rousseauean complaint that civilizing institutions have suborned man's true nature. But in the ceremonious, hierarchical, class-structured France of the 18th century, romantic individualism and moral egocentricity were new, sensational and heady stuff.

Chart to the Heart. Sensational and heady stuff indeed was Rousseau's masterpiece, Confessions, the chart with which Guehenno painstakingly navigates to the heart of the man. Rousseau's own resolution was to "put his life to the test of truth," and he did it by recording in Confessions every real and fancied failure, every agonizing triumph, every abrasive sand grain of guilt. He himself was in no doubt about the splendor and uniqueness of his autobiography. "It is without precedent," he boasted, "and will find no imitator --the only existing portrait of a man drawn from life and in all truthfulness, and probably the only one there ever will be."

A Swiss from the puritan, theocratic city of Geneva, Rousseau had a checkered childhood. His mother died when he was born (in 1712), his father either spoiled him or neglected him. In his youth, he successively became an apprentice lawyer, an engraver and a vagrant. He wandered into the entourage of Mme. de Warens, a sprightly young matron and Catholic convert who was easily able to induce her young lover to accept the old faith. Later, when Rousseau wanted to resume the hereditary rights of a citizen of Geneva, he had to forswear his conversion. The road to and from Rome was equally painless; he was his own religion.

Genius v. Vanity. After a stretch as a seminarian and a valet, Rousseau moved to Paris, where he lived as a music copyist. Somewhere along the line, tramping the road to Vincennes, he underwent a sort of religious experience, and concluded that revealing the truth about himself would reveal the truth to all other men. It cannot be said that he was very good at it, though the poetic cloud with which he haloed his life story is luminous to this day.

He wrote the Social Contract, which posed the then astounding notion that government must be by consent of the governed. Yet he hung around the salons of aristocrats until mutual disillusionment set in. It was his unamiable habit not only to bite the hand that fed him but to bitch about the quality of the chow. He could neither resist seeking the rewards that came from the great as tribute to his genius nor, when it came to the point, resist making a gesture of rejection out of deference to his own vanity. Thus he snubbed two kings--Louis XV and George III--who would have been good for pensions. Voltaire could have made it three. Frederick the Great, who tried to make Voltaire a house pet, made overtures to Jean-Jacques; they were rejected. This is easily forgiven, but this uncompromising man failed to notice the friends who, with his consent, were compromised by their efforts in his behalf.

Skinless. Thus it was with the celebrated case of the stolen ribbon. When he was a footman, Rousseau had stolen a piece of silk and let another servant take the blame; confessing this later, he received great kudos for candor. Yet when, as a prosperous householder, a jar of butter intended for him was consumed by an aristocratic neighbor, he wrote of this tiny offense with an outraged eloquence suitable to the sack of Rome by barbarians. A sense of humor might have helped him, but Rousseau had no more humor than a harpooned sea cow. He was, said David Hume (who had befriended him only to be rejected later in a mindless fit of pique), "born without a skin."

More serious is the charge that concerns a matter central to both his life and teaching. He had argued and exhorted for recognition of childhood as more full of natural grace than maturity, of natural man uncorrupted by the crippling ceremonies of civilization, and of domestic felicity against the cynical frivolities of polite society. Yet, his mistress Therese Le Vasseur bore him five children and, one after the other, Rousseau had each of them sent to a hospital for foundlings. When questioned about this during his life, Rousseau lied. He recorded the truth of the shabby business, but only to be read posthumously --and in code at that.

The cult of the loner, and of man noble and solitary amid nature, may well have begun with Rousseau and lasted through 200 years of romanticism. He was a radical in the root sense of the word. His descendants among radicals today are those who at best attack institutions in the name of sincerity, if not always reason. But sincerity, alas, is a dubious virtue. It is, as Guehenno writes, a closed system. "A sincere man is invincible. You can never succeed in convincing him that he is not." Genius though he was, Rousseau's life is less than the crystal monument to truth he believed it to be, but is, instead, the record of a man swamped by trivia, ambiguity, vanity and loneliness.

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