Author2Author: Leo Damrosch & Roger Pearson, pt. 2

This is the second and final installment of the conversation between the authors of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius and Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom. (Usually I spread these out over four days, but I wanted to have this series finished before the National Book Awards—fingers crossed for Prof. Damrosch!—and, too, there's another A2A that I'll be running Thursday and Friday...)

Roger Pearson: The author of the classic English-language biography of Rousseau, Maurice Cranston, died before he could complete his three-volume biography of his subject, and your own biography is the first to examine the last decade of his life in scholarly detail. How does your view of these years change our traditional view of Rousseau?

Leo Damrosch: Cranston's biography is certainly classic in that it's judicious and comprehensive. However, I was drawn to the daunting project of a Rousseau biography because I felt that Cranston (whose professed model was "Lockean") emphasized factual details and paid too little attention to the ways in which Rousseau's personality and his very unusual life story lie at the heart of his amazing originality. The full-blown paranoia of Rousseau's final years was rooted in anxieties and suspicions that had plagued him from childhood onward, and his deep sense of otherness—of never knowing how to fit in—inspired penetrating insights into aspects of society that most people take for granted.

As for Rousseau's final years, they began with a period of genuine terror during which he was driven from one place of exile to another, due partly to his overreaction to imagined threats (an admirer wrote years later, "He was forever persecuted, whether by envy or by himself"). What surprised me, however, was the peacefulness of Rousseau's final eight years in Paris. He contracted his social life, enjoyed long walks in the countryside, wrote the magnificent Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and achieved something like the tranquil "sentiment de l'existence" that had always been his ideal.

Another question and answer follow the jump...

Roger Pearson: Were—are— people right to condemn Rousseau for placing his newborn children in an orphanage?"

Leo Damrosch: It wasn't an orphanage, but a foundling hospice, intended for the temporary care of infants who would then be sent to nurses in the country; the vast majority of them died. It goes without saying that it's right to condemn Rousseau for this action, repeated five times against the protests of the children's mother (though the facts remain murky and virtually everything we know about it comes from Rousseau himself). His attempts, later on, to rationalize what he had done were hollow and self-serving in the extreme. The best that can be said is that he himself came to regret bitterly what he had done, and that his guilt helped to inspire his groundbreaking treatise on education, Emile. It should be noted, also, that his common-law wife Therese Levasseur remained with Rousseau loyally through all his tribulations, and someone who knew her after his death remembered that "she always said he was a very good man." I would add, too, that although some reviewers have complained that I haven't judged Rousseau sternly enough, I believe the biographer's task is to describe and explain, not to judge.