INTRODUCTION
‘Émile’ in the Life of Rousseau
Émile was written between 1757 and 1760, partly at the Hermitage and partly at the Château de Montmorency (both at that time country places among the hills north of Paris), where the author found a welcome when he decided to retire from the contemporary scene. The work was published in 1762, the fiftieth anniversary of Rousseau’s birth. He came to Paris in 1742 at the age of thirty, after an adventurous youth, and spent almost ten years in a vain search for renown as playwright and musical composer. But after 1750 his reputation was established by two treatises, Sur les sciences et les arts and Sur l’inégalité which expounded his fundamental thesis: the natural goodness of man and the social origin of evil. Although French society at that period was in love with itself and its own culture, it hastened nevertheless to hail its indictor. Rousseau, however, far from profiting by his advent to fame, aspired to practise what he preached; and it was in a spirit of genuine renunciation that he withdrew to the Hermitage in 1756, hoping to rediscover in solitude the ‘Natural Man.’
Those years of retirement were among the most fruitful of his creative life; they saw the birth, immediately before Émile, of La Nouvelle Héloïse and Le Control social. Héloïse marks the summit of Rousseau’s reputation. The success of Émile was very nearly as great, but it recoiled on its author and turned his retirement into exile. The fact was that his religious thought, as delineated in the fourth book of the Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard, caused the powers that be to intervene: the book was banned and consigned to the flames, a warrant was issued for the author’s arrest, and he was obliged to flee. For the next eight years Rousseau led the life of a fugitive. The target of bitter animosity on the part of both officialdom and of numerous private enemies, animosity whose effects on him were aggravated by growing persecution-mania, he was hounded from pillar to post through Switzerland and France, and eventually took refuge in England for a few months in 1766. It was during these years of suffering, between 1765 and 1770, that he wrote his Confessions. He returned to Paris in the latter year, and once more found peace of mind. Here he lived for the next eight years in poverty and virtual seclusion, absorbed in the composition of his Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, until death overtook him on 2nd July 1778 at the Chateau d’Ermenonville, where he was enjoying the hospitality of an admirer.
‘Émile’ in Rousseau’s Thought
Rousseau’s work, in which philosophical speculation is closely interwoven with visionary dreams, is remarkably coherent despite its many contradictions. It flows entirely from the propositions enunciated in his first treatise on the goodness of nature and the corrupting influence of society, propositions which are summed up in a celebrated passage at the beginning of Émile: ‘God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.’ Indeed, the rehabilitation of Nature was the constant theme of an age in revolt against the Christian doctrine of original sin and the Fall. Other thinkers at that period generally saw in society and its culture the strongest evidence of natural goodness and of the progress it was destined to achieve. Rousseau, on the other hand, by means of an imaginary reconstruction of primitive man and his subsequent evolution, strove in his early works to distinguish Nature from Society, and condemned the latter for having, as it were, artificially and accidentally perverted humanity. Nevertheless, he was obliged to recognize that with this evolution an accomplished fact, it was no longer possible to consider human nature apart from its natural environment. Thus, in the three major works written after his retirement in 1756, he did his best to reconcile Nature and Society by imagining the circumstances under which human groups might live according to nature and justice. The Nouvelle Héloïse describes in glowing terms a society functioning as a family unit in accordance with the principles of nature and justice. The Contrat social does the same for political society, but in the language of Law. We see, therefore, the exact position of Émile; together with its two neighbouring works it forms a coherent trilogy, which provides an answer to the question, how can the Natural Man be formed?
True, Rousseau’s interest in educational questions was evident long before Émile and preceded even the formulation of his philosophy of Nature. His twofold experience as a schoolmaster, in 1740 and 1743, had led him to compile a first Projet d’éducation. After the two treatises, he often ventured into the field of education; nor is it difficult to find traces in those writings of several theses afterwards put forward in Émile. But it is only with the Nouvelle Héloïse, where Rousseau imagines a family group living according to Nature, that education begins to take first place in his thought. The novel includes a long chapter in which, according to his own assertion, is to be found ‘all that is most daring in Émile.’ This latter work resumes and systematizes in the form of a lengthy treatise the views expressed in Héloïse. Chimerical as it may seem to us in many respects, it can safely be said to be the most realistic of Rousseau’s essays. The educational question is the most concrete of all those which he raises in his endeavour to reconcile Nature and Society; and for the first time, instead of envisaging an imaginary society as a thing of the future or a figment of fiction, he asks himself how to endure the natural man in the actual conditions of existing society.
Originality of ‘Émile’s’ Educational Theory
It has indeed often been doubted whether this man who, on his own admission, was a second-rate teacher and an unworthy father, was qualified to speak on education. Others, more straightforwardly, have condemned the Utopian and artificial character of his work. ‘I have read your romance on the subject of education,’ wrote one female correspondent; and in the Preface Rousseau himself fully expects to be told that ‘this is not so much a treatise on education as the visions of a dreamer with regard to education.’ The obvious reply to this must be that no intelligent person accepts Rousseau’s teaching in its literal sense; it is only necessary to recall his own retort to an admirer who took credit for educating his son on the lines suggested in Émile: ‘Good heavens! so much the worse for you, sir, and so much worse still for your son.’ The fact is that Émile should be read as a speculation on principles, not as a guide to practical methods. Those parts of the book which seem artificial or fantastic are usually no more than the romantic and impassioned rendering of an original theory in Rousseau’s characteristic style.
It is a fact, however, that his passion for truth and hatred of prejudice frequently bordered on an obsession. ‘Take the opposite course to that prescribed by custom,’ he wrote, ‘and you will almost always do right.’ We may doubt whether this blind approach is sound. His opponents are still more doubtful of his confidence in Nature; they question whether his conviction that ‘there is no original perversity in the human heart’ can really be upheld. At all events, it must be borne in mind that this unreasoning assertion is linked, in his doctrine, with an extremely fertile intuition, viz. that the whole duty of education is to discover human nature, particularly as it exists in the child, and be guided by its dictates. ‘We know nothing of childhood,’ he writes in the Preface; and later on: ‘We receive education from nature, from men, or from things… Now of these three modes of education the first depends in no way on ourselves… it is towards this, to which we can contribute nothing, that we must direct the other two.’ This means to say that from the biological as well as from the psychological point of view, the educator must consider the child as a little human animal destined for the spiritual and moral life; and this animal develops according to certain laws whose natural progression must be respected above all. Rousseau would fain liken the pedagogue to a stock-breeder whose first aim must be to keep contact with physiological reality. But he neglected to follow up his thesis with sufficient observation. In particular, the three stages of development mentioned in his treatise—purely physical and sensory up to the age of twelve, intellectual from twelve to fifteen, and moral from fifteen onward—appear to rest on no psychological reality. Nevertheless, his remarkable intuition prepared the way for the subsequent inquiry and experimentation that have achieved so much in the sphere of education. The reader will find that it is responsible for all that is most original and most productive in Émile: maternal feeding, bodily freedom of the baby, physical training of the child, development of the senses, exercise of the judgment through sensory experience and contact with things, the approach to abstract knowledge by way of observation and experience. All these points derive from the initial view that an educator must submit to the development imposed by Nature. But it should not be forgotten that Rousseau considers submission to the natural order not only as a necessity of method, but as implying the very end, the moral accomplishment, of education.
Rousseau undoubtedly owed much to the educational theories of his predecessors, especially Montaigne who, two centuries earlier, had demanded a less intellectual form of education. Montaigne had argued that physical training should accompany that of the mind, that the judgment should be formed through contact with living realities, views that in Montaigne’s case also were part and parcel of a philosophy of Nature. Rousseau was no less indebted to Locke, though he takes him to task several times in the course of his work. He was largely inspired by the treatise On the Education of Children which had been translated into French in 1695; but his debt was at once more general and more profound. Whenever Rousseau affirms the primary role of the senses in the formation of the mind and in the acquisition of knowledge, his doctrine can be traced back to the author of the Essay on Human Understanding, so that he owed an essential part of his teaching to Locke.
Moreover, education had preoccupied men’s thoughts since the beginning of the eighteenth century. There were numerous works on the subject, and it has long been recognized that there is scarcely a detail of Émile which has not some corresponding passage in the writings of his predecessors. None the less, Rousseau’s claim to originality remains unimpaired. His concern with childhood was something quite new, especially his assertion that childhood has a right to happiness, that it is an independent state and not simply an ante-room to maturity. No less original was that ardent passion with which the author presented his case. The publication of Émile caused a considerable sensation, and it is difficult to overestimate its influence right down to our own day. It became a best-seller overnight: throughout Europe many aristocratic mothers began suckling their own babies, while parents brought up their children on the principles of Émile and made Rousseau their educational adviser. Two translations appeared simultaneously in England as early as 1763, and Lady Kildare wished to entrust the Genevan philosopher with the training of her children. Some years later the book was drawn upon by the French Revolutionary legislature in framing its educational laws. Above all, it has been the inspirational source of every great educational reformer since the eighteenth century. Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Madame Montessori are its offspring, and it may safely be said that at the present time there is scarcely an edueational theory or method which cannot in some way be traced to the author of Émile.
Émile to-day
The influence of this work, however, has extended far beyond the confines of education; its effect upon the ideas of several generations has covered a much wider sphere. Rousseau’s work, which, as we said above, possesses an abstract coherence, may also be considered from another standpoint as the personal vindication of a mind in search of happiness; and this is particularly noticeable in Émile. Educationists may consider it lacking in reference to concrete experience, but its fictional character is constantly enlivened by the author’s own experience of life. Here, almost as clearly as in the Confessions, we see Jean-Jacques opposed to a cultural tradition which he regarded as having betrayed mankind; we find him seeking to establish, in the sole light of his conscience, new and truer relations between the senses and the heart; passion and virtue, reason and faith. Émile thus became one of the major text-books of the French Revolution and of European Romanticism, and Mirabeau ranked it among the masterpieces of that age. ‘If one could read no more than five works in the whole of Literature, Émile would be one of them.’ So wrote the young Chateaubriand in 1707. In Germany, before his time, the philosophers and poets of the Sturm und Drang, e.g. Kant and Fichte, Schiller and Goethe, all drew inspiration from it.
There is no doubt that to-day Émile, like the Nouvelle Héloïse, no longer possesses the same power to sway its reader. Rousseau, indeed, continues to exert a lively influence upon present-day ideas; but it is chiefly through the Confessions and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire that he obtains a hearing. There are in his philosophy certain trends that are closely akin to contemporary thought, and those are nowhere more evident than in Émile. It was Rousseau’s aim to restore man to the basic principles of existence and compel him to find all that is really worth while within its somewhat narrow limits that condition would impose. His approach is particularly well illustrated in Émile: even at its most artificial the book represents the blue-print of a conscious ideal based on its elementary impressions and impulses. Accordingly this treatise on education, having inspired both the Revolution and Romanticism, finds a distinct echo in existential philosophies. Thus the author’s originality continues to prove inexhaustible; in the words of Amiel, his fellow countryman, he is ‘a forerunner in everything.’