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Updated: June 12, 2025
He sees Man just as he is, not Man in himself, an abstract citizen, the philosophic puppet of the Contrat Social, but the real individual, the entire living man, with his profound instincts, his tenacious necessities, which, whether tolerated or not by legislation, still subsist and operate infallibly, and which the legislator must take into consideration if he wants to turn them to account.
This sect derived its origin from the eighteenth century, certain opinions of which it represented. In politics, its symbol was the absolute sovereignty of the Contrat social of J.J. Rousseau, and for creed, it held the deism of la Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard; at a later period it succeeded in realizing these for a moment in the constitution of '93, and the worship of the Supreme Being.
But Buonaparte fiercely accuses the pastor of neither having understood, nor even read, "Le Contrat Social": he hurls at his opponent texts of Scripture which enjoin obedience to the laws: he accuses Christianity of rendering men slaves to an anti-social tyranny, because its priests set up an authority in opposition to civil laws; and as for Protestantism, it propagated discords between its followers, and thereby violated civic unity.
The puzzle increases when we find him omitting all mention of Le Sage, while excusing himself for the omission, from lack of space, of Rousseau! A list of humorous works which should exclude Gil Blas to make room for Émile or Le Contrat Social, might itself, one would think, act as a provocative on the esprit gaulois. These mysteries are not the only ones in Mr.
If we look more closely into the doctrine of the so-called contrat social, which was destined to form the programme of the French Revolution, we again recognise without much difficulty the fundamental ideas of the Millennialists, hardly altered at all.
In the further development of this main idea the believers in the contrat social have been divided.
He had just published Le Contrat Social, "The Gospel,"; says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, "of the theory as to the sovereignty of the state representing the sovereignty of the people." The book had barely begun to appear, when, on the 8th of June, 1762, Rousseau was awakened by a message from la Marchale de Luxembourg: the Parliament had ordered Emile to be burned, and its author arrested.
His Contrat Social might not, perhaps, in the eyes of a committee of philosophical Rhadmanthus's, atone for his occasional admiration of christianity: and thus some crime, either of church or state, disfranchise the whole race of immortals, and their fame scarcely outlast the dispute about their earthly remains.*
Concerning the facts observed and described by the economists, we reason and conjecture: abusive laws, iniquitous customs, respected so long as the obscurity which sustained their life lasted, with difficulty dragged to the daylight, are expiring beneath the general reprobation; it is suspected that the government of society must be learned no longer from an empty ideology, after the fashion of the Contrat social, but, as Montesquieu foresaw, from the RELATION OF THINGS; and already a Left of eminently socialistic tendencies, composed of savants, magistrates, legists, professors, and even capitalists and manufacturers, all born representatives and defenders of privilege, and of a million of adepts, is forming in the nation above and outside of PARLIAMENTARY opinions, and seeking, by an analysis of economic facts, to capture the secrets of the life of societies.
Astonished at the axiom, they took up Rousseau's Contrat Social. Pécuchet went through to the end. Then closing his eyes, and throwing back his head, he made an analysis of it. "A convention is assumed whereby the individual gives up his liberty. "The people at the same time undertook to protect him against the inequalities of nature, and made him owner of the things he had in his possession."
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