Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique: querelles, disputes et controverses au siècle des Lumières par by Ourida Mostefai

Abstract

Reviews 243 literature is highly suggestive. However, her shifts between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries can lead to confusion and, as in many books based on French theses, her exhaustive research sometimes overshadows her conclusions. More foregrounding of the basic lines of argument and an expanded conclusion would have been helpful. Nevertheless, this book repays readers’attention, demonstrating that the interactions between book and pulpit can shed new light both on seventeenth-century France and on the larger literary field. Dartmouth College Kathleen Wine Mostefai, Ourida. Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique: querelles, disputes et controverses au siècle des Lumières. Leiden: Brill, 2015. ISBN 978-90-030862-6. Pp. 202. 60 a. Mostefai’s book is a clear and enlightening study of Rousseau’s lifelong career as a polemicist. She analyzes the deliberately polemical nature of Rousseau’s writings and personal life. She uses Kant’s later definition of the categories of polemics: dispute, conflict, and quarrel. The first is a disagreement based on general metaphysical principles, the second is more narrowly ideological, while the third is a more personal confrontation. She emphasizes the idea that in Rousseau’s conflicts with contemporary thinkers and writers, as well as religious and political authorities, it is impossible to separate the different strands of the Kantian categories since they constantly overlap. In her study of Rousseau’s works and the controversies they provoked, she follows a chronological progression from the first Discours to the Confessions. She employs this schema in time as a frame for her studies of Rousseau’s confrontations with Diderot and other former associates among the philosophes, as well as Voltaire, Malesherbes, the Archbishop of Paris, and David Hume. What emerges is an awareness of the brilliant and, to his contemporaries, astounding success of Rousseau’s published works. One masterpiece after another flowed from his pen, and this succession of triumphs aroused a great deal of resentment and jealousy. The often petty and nasty persecutions unleashed by Voltaire against someone he had once looked condescendingly upon as a disciple were largely inspired by such envy toward another writer whose fame was eclipsing his own. Another aspect of Rousseau’s genius that is brought to light is his sagacity in responding to his critics. Mostefai plays down the accusation of paranoia commonly directed against Rousseau. Instead she demonstrates the rational control and logic he consistently displayed, perhaps most eloquently in his published Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, the French prelate who had condemned Émile as a pernicious work of impiety. She also points out Rousseau’s clever restraint in not responding to the public attacks made against him by fellow intellectual Hume. The most perennial criticism against Rousseau was the alleged inconsistency between the philosophy expounded in his works and his personal existence. His critics drew attention to the contradiction they saw between his life in society and his preaching of a return to nature and decrial of the corruption of modern civilization. They accused him of adopting a bogus persona before the public in an insincere attempt to reconcile his life with his ideas. Rousseau’s affirmation of the continuity between his professed ideals and his way of living is a running theme in his self-apologias. In the final two chapters, Mostefai studies the iconography of Rousseau during the eighteenth century and the differing interpretations of his legacy during the French Revolution. She analyzes the dual portraits of Rousseau and Hume painted by the Scottish artist Allan Ramsay. She thinks that the one of Rousseau, in his Armenian costume, slanderously presents him as an antisocial misanthrope while that of Hume portrays him as an optimistic contributor to the progress of human society. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Nollez, Juliette. Rhétorique des Mémoires du duc de Saint-Simon. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3140-1. Pp. 656. 69 a. Saint-Simon’s energetic, idiosyncratic style has long interested literary critics, and thus Nollez explores issues that have been addressed elsewhere, most recently by Delphine de Garidel, Guy Rooryck, and Isabelle Rouffiange-Darotchetche. Equipped with a meticulous array of rhetorical and linguistic terms that occasionally get in the way of clarity, Nollez pursues her study...