Ιουλία ή Η νέα Ελοΐζα - Β' τόμος

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Έφη Κορομηλά (Translator)

Το δημοφιλέστερο έργο του Ρουσό. Ένα ερωτικό και φιλοσοφικό μυθιστόρημα όπου διατυπώνει νέες για την εποχή του ιδέες σχετικά με την ελευθερία και τις ταξικές διακρίσεις, τις δεισιδαιμονίες και τη μισαλλοδοξία, τον έρωτα και τη φύση.

Η νεαρή Ιουλία, από αριστοκρατική οικογένεια, με βαθιά θρησκευτική πίστη, ερωτεύεται παράφορα τον ταπεινής καταγωγής παιδαγωγό της, τον γοητευτικό Σεν-Πρε. Η μητέρα της, η βαρόνη Ντ’ Ετάνζ, ανακαλύπτει τη σχέση τους και από την ταραχή της πεθαίνει. Ο πατέρας της, οργισμένος, αναγκάζει την Ιουλία να παντρευτεί τον κύριο ντε Βολμάρ, έναν άνθρωπο τίμιο, μεγαλόψυχο, αλλά άθεο.

Η Ιουλία ή Η νέα Ελοΐζα γράφτηκε τη διετία 1756-1758 και όταν εκδόθηκε ο εκδότης δεν προλάβαινε να καλύψει τις πωλήσεις. Έως το τέλος του 18ου αιώνα είχαν γίνει τουλάχιστον εβδομήντα εκδόσεις, περισσότερες από οποιοδήποτε άλλο βιβλίο μέχρι την εποχή εκείνη.

Genres: France

594 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1761

About the author

Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).

This important figure in the history contributed to political and moral psychology and influenced later thinkers. Own firmly negative view saw the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, apologists for various forms of tyranny, as playing a role in the modern alienation from natural impulse of humanity to compassion. The concern to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world of increasingly dependence for the satisfaction of their needs dominates work. This concerns a material dimension and a more important psychological dimensions. Rousseau a fact that in the modern world, humans come to derive their very sense of self from the opinions as corrosive of freedom and destructive of authenticity. In maturity, he principally explores the first political route, aimed at constructing institutions that allow for the co-existence of equal sovereign citizens in a community; the second route to achieving and protecting freedom, a project for child development and education, fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest. Rousseau thinks or the possible co-existence of humans in relations of equality and freedom despite his consistent and overwhelming pessimism that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. In addition to contributions, Rousseau acted as a composer, a music theorist, the pioneer of modern autobiography, a novelist, and a botanist. Appreciation of the wonders of nature and his stress on the importance of emotion made Rousseau an influence on and anticipator of the romantic movement. To a very large extent, the interests and concerns that mark his work also inform these other activities, and contributions of Rousseau in ostensibly other fields often serve to illuminate his commitments and arguments.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like epistolary novels, this is a good one. The core of the book appears to be Letter X in the Fourth Part ( IV.10, quatrième partie, Lettre X) on the household in Clarens, the Country House that serves in the story as what Mumford would later call a “utopia of the modern age” --a kind of idol of the mind, providing both escape from urban civilization and a reconstruction of a culture with an ideal content, a place built for comfort and harmony, closer to nature. (see Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias, 1922, chp.10, passim) Of course, Julie is the tactful hostess, affording her guests not only invitations to sumptuous dining, in the Apollo Room, where the home-made wine flows freely, but also the keys to the garden she has had made, called Elysium, which she opens to select guests. (Letter IV.11 –however, the Larousse edition with which I started reading this has the infelicity of having truncated this key chapter; see instead… Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Eloise, tome II, quatrième partie, in Collection complète des oeuvres, Genève, 1780-1789, vol. 3, in-4°, édition en ligne www.rousseauonline.ch, version du 7 octobre 2012. and English translation, by William Kenrick, vol. 3, available online via Internet Archive). In this Enlightened ideal (“la sage économie qui règne dans la maison de M. de Wolmar”), the lordly family participates in creative activities of the community dependent on the household, although nothing more substantial than wine and hemp are produced from the lands around Clarens, with the addition of a flock of sheep raised in the hills and a herd of cattle somewhere nearby. In this way, “the prudent and humane proprietors...make the cultivation of their lands the instrument of their benevolence, their recreation, their pleasure!” (English translation, vol.4, p.30) Rousseau is at great pains to show what great fun this “rustic business and amusement” in the countryside can be (Letter V.5 on the grape harvest, viz. ‘Ordre et gaieté qui règnent chez M. de Wolmar dans le temps des vendanges”), culminating in the knitting together of reciprocal loyalties between the masters of Clarens and their employees, horizontal affiliations woven together between the leading family of the country estate with their surrounding community, which in turn is not only concerned, but touched by, the householders’ successes, travails, upheavals, and tragedies. It matters little to Rousseau, at least in this novel antedating his Of the Social Contract, that not everyone can aspire to be lords (let alone lords of “a great deal of land” --both a Country Estate at Clarens, surrounded by vineyards, flocks and herds and an old castle at Etange, the latter surrounded by wheat fields); and yet he is holding forth the Wolmar household as something for all to emulate: “people of a middling station in life are most happy, and are persons of the best sense.” (English translation, vol.4, p38 fn) All this is meant to be progressive, in 1761, “to prevent giving rise to envy,” even though Wolmar employs a form of incentive pay to help manage “a great number of day-labourers” in the fields, that he employs only “with overseers, who watch and encourage them,” plus at least a dozen “servants within doors” or “domesticks...who love their master.” (English translation, vol.3, pp.78-81) This is the very stuff that a decade later or so, in 1773-75, would precipitate the serfs working for their landlords in Russia to turn against their masters, in Pugachev's Rebellion (Peasants' War). Pugachev’s proclaimed end to serfdom did not come about for almost another century, not until the 1861 emancipation of the serfs in Russia, but it is funny to think that the fictional M. de Wolmar is a Russian. What else do we know of this Wolmar? He apparently fell from his class or was lowered in his rank or status (likely due to the outcome of a war) and this explains his emigration out of his native country (not specifically stated as the Russian empire).

The essential thing is that Rousseau tells us that Wolmar lost the bulk of his fortune “in the last revolution,” in an apparent allusion to the 1707–1708 Bulavin Rebellion (or Astrakhan Revolt), in the Tsardom of Russia, or perhaps by “revolution” Rousseau alludes to the Great Northern War (1700-1721). The character Wolmar could be from Valmiera (German: Wolmar), in Latvia, a city destroyed and burned by Russian forces in 1702, and that could explain how he lost his fortune :

"M. de Wolmar est un homme dʼune grande naissance, distingué par toutes les qualités qui peuvent la soutenir, qui jouit de la considération publique, & qui la mérite. Je lui dois la vie; vous savez les engagemens que jʼai pris avec lui. Ce quʼil faut vous apprendre encore, cʼest quʼétant allé dans son pays pour mettre ordre à ses affaires, il sʼest trouvé enveloppé dans la derniere révolution, quʼil y a perdu ses biens, quʼil nʼa lui-même échappé à lʼexil en Sibérie que par un bonheur singulier, & quʼil revient avec le triste débris de sa fortune, sur la parole de son ami, qui nʼen manqua jamais à personne." (troisième partie, Lettre XVIII)

It’s not clear why he narrowly escaped being exiled to Siberia. One surmises that he was a public figure, perhaps one who opposed some of the reforms imposed by Peter the Great, and fell from grace. Were Wolmar’s ideas about organic community and fellow-feeling among the classes sufficient to put him on the wrong side of the Tsar’s reforms? Wolmar, the foreigner transplanted to Switzerland for his safety, now the proprietor of Clarens and householder who marries the heroine of the story, is in fact a déclassé Russian, his coming down in the world being something of an anticipation of what would happen to much of the Russian nobility, degraded from their social class over the course of the next century and a half.

“Cʼest en vain, dit M. de Wolmar, quʼon prétend donner aux choses humaines une solidité qui nʼest pas dans leur nature. La raison même veut que nous laissions beaucoup de choses au hazard & si notre vie & notre fortune en dépendent toujours malgré nous, quelle folie de se donner sans cesse un tourment réel pour prévenir des maux douteux & des dangers inévitables!” (cinquième partie, Lettre II)

In sum, his misfortune made Wolmar as wise as he is. From Rousseau’s point of view, class mobility (whether up or down) can be a good thing, and in Wolmar’s case, he compensated by going on to try all things, learning how the universe works, and this gave him the fortitude of mind to try and succeed at making his intentional community at Clarens.

All is not necessarily well in the country estate managed by Wolmar & Julie; their condition as landed proprietors is analogous to that of any other of their class. Anticipating the later arguments Rousseau would make elsewhere, here the missive ostensibly written by Saint-Preux, warns that, in the case of a householder disliked or held in contempt by his servants, there is the danger of them “leaguing together to his prejudice” (English translation, vol.3 p.112), that is, “servants united at the expense of their master” (ibid., p.107) and masters who must “countenance combinations against themselves” (ibid., p.108). Saint-Preux opines, “Servitude is a state so unnatural to mankind, that it cannot subsist without some degree of discontent,” (ibid., p.107) all the while pretending that the “household oeconomy” of the Wolmar household has obviated all such difficulties, with the master resorting, at most, to semi-regular “general sessions” (ibid., p.115) to keep the discontent, murmurings, and grumbling in check, like a medieval lord holding court over his suzerainty. This key letter focuses on the art of “disguising restraint under the veil of pleasure and interest [so] that what [servants] are obliged to do may seem the result of their own inclination.” (ibid. p.95). One is forced to smile at critics who mis-characterize Clarens, such as Slavoj Žižek, who for instance uses this rhapsodic construction: “the social order of Clarens is a proto-totalitarian, hierarchical-pedagogic nightmare, the realisation of the fantasy proper to the despotic pre-revolutionary Enlightenment.” (e-flux journal #34, April 2012) Over the top as that may be, Žižek is likely correct to call Clarens a “pre-revolutionary organic community”; it’s a vision, perhaps, of what could be, more generally. This artful household economy is a utopia, and Wolmar is a mirror for princes, whereas the republican Rousseau peeps out in this sentence of Saint-Preux: “In the commonwealth, citizens are kept in order by virtue and morality.” (English translation, vol.3, ibid.) Therein, in this one sentence that provides a hint about the civic-minded alternative to the domestic economy and organic community of Clarens, an alternative without any need for stratagems and clever policy to keep the rabble in check, is concentrated all the opposition Rousseau will need in order to abandon this art of “disguising restraint” and to move on to a republican solution, one that aims to mitigate the inequalities among the classes, instead of singing praises to the nobility in an encomium to the master/slave dialectic of the Country House. The idealized country estate, with its enlightened landed proprietor managing all the souls in his care, with whatever artifice required, is a step towards what Rousseau appears to be striving for in a “well-ordered Republic” but not the fully-fledged concept.

More on “the new Eloisa” / La nouvelle Héloïse:

“How to renounce your passion: A Hegelian lesson on the ethics of marriage” by Slavoj Žižek, posted 2 Apr 2019. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/zizek-hegelian-lesson-on-the-ethics-of-marriage/10964090 first published April 2012 e-flux Journal #34, under the title “Hegel on Marriage” https://www.e-flux.com/journal/34/68365/hegel-on-marriage/

Julie ou la nouvelle Eloise, tome II, quatrième partie, in Collection complète des oeuvres, Genève, 1780-1789, vol. 3, in-4°, édition en ligne www.rousseauonline.ch> version du 7 octobre 2012. and English translation, by William Kenrick, vol. 3, available online via Internet Archive

[Jonathan Zambrano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non, je ne te quitte pas, je vais t'attendre. La vertu qui nous sépara sur la terre, nous unira dans le séjour éternel. Je meurs dans cette douce attente: trop heureuse d'acheter au prix de ma vie le droit de t'aimer toujours sans crime, et de te le dire encore une fois!