Romantic Suicide, Contagion, and Rousseau’s Julie

Abstract

‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. The famous opening sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) has contributed to the writer’s image as one of the most influential defenders of personal liberty in Europe in the long eighteenth century, the text itself being held up as a guidebook to the establishment of democracy in France. In the section called ‘The Right of Life and Death’, where Rousseau writes, ‘The question is often asked how individuals, having no right to dispose of their own lives, can transfer to the Sovereign a right which they do not possess’ (39), Rousseau gestures to the political ramifications of attitudes towards suicide as representative of individual autonomy, dividing the issue from the religious realm, which simply condemned it, and from the emotional implications that denied it as a legitimate subject of rational discussion. Rousseau thus raises the question that is at the basis of the Enlightenment suicide debate: Who owns the individual’s life? Is anyone, in this most basic sense, free? Despite his valuable contribution to this serious debate, though, Rousseau is also responsible for a text that may be said to have undermined it. Julie, Or, The New Heloise (1761) was crucial to the formation of the concept of Romantic suicide — or the Romanticized notion of suicide — in other words, suicide that is perceived as being sentimental, aestheticized, and irresponsible in its portrayal or motivation.1