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Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.
—Randall Jarrell
When the great poet, satirist, and philosopher Voltaire died in 1778, at the age of 84, he was buried on the grounds of the Abbey of Sellieres, near Romilly-sur-Seine, France. But this would not be his final resting place. In the fervent early years of the French Revolution, before the sovereignty of Terror, the leading revolutionaries agreed that their "glorious Revolution has been the fruit of his works," and decided to bring his body to Paris, where he could receive the honor so rarely granted him in his lifetime. Some such decision had to be made, for the Abbey (along with much other property of the Church) had been confiscated by a cash-strapped government and was to be auctioned off, and some of the new national leaders quailed at the prospect of the great philosopher's remains becoming private property. The site they chose for the hero's reinterment was the newly designated Pantheon—what had been the unfinished church of St. Genevieve, now finally completed not as a house of God but as a monument to those designated by the revolutionaries as "les Grands Hommes."
Only two dignitaries had thus far assumed their places in the Pantheon: its original inhabitant, the seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes, the patron saint of Reason as conceived by the Enlightenment, followed in April 1791 by the revolutionary leader Mirabeau, whose unexpected death had bestowed upon him an immediate sanctification. Now, on July 11 of the same year, Voltaire would make the third in this company: his remains were carried on what Simon Schama calls "a monumental chariot, as high as a two-story house," leading an enormous imitation-Roman triumphal procession through the streets of Paris. Notable among the many participants in this cortege were "a troupe of men dressed in Roman costume [carrying] as trophies of glory editions of all Voltaire's works."
Strange to say, this bizarre ritual would be repeated three years later, in October 1794—when la grande Terreur had run its course, its instigator and sustainer, Robespierre, having been at the end of July one of the guillotine's last victims—but now the exhumed hero was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Again a procession was organized, this time commencing at Ermeonville, 30 miles from Paris, where Rousseau had died and been buried. (Though 18 years younger than Voltaire, he had outlived him by only a month.) Again emblems of the great man's life and work were displayed for public approval: musicians played Rousseau's compositions, and at the end of this cortege members of the national legislature held aloft copies of the gospel du jour, Rousseau's famous political treatise, The Social Contract.
In one sense, nothing could be more comprehensible than this co-elevation of two of the eighteenth century's most versatile and influential writers. Each man had written in a remarkable variety of genres. Voltaire produced tragedies, an epic, a witty philosophical satire (Candide) that is his most-read work today, many comic tales, and innumerable pamphlets on his time's most controversial subjects. Similarly, in one astonishing nine-year period Rousseau produced a romantic epistolary novel about love and duty (Julie, or the New Heloise), a didactic philosophical tale about the ideal means of educating young men (Emile), an extended polemic on the uses and dangers of theaters in various societies (Letter to d'Alembert), and a compressed yet ambitious treatise on political philosophy (The Social Contract). Such activity left him no time to compose the music which had earlier brought him to the attention of the French. Both Voltaire and Rousseau contributed to the dominant intellectual project of their time, the great ongoing Encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. Both were theoretically hopeful about the human race, but by temperament bitterly pessimistic. Above all, both men understood themselves to be celebrants and defenders of Freedom, and therefore enemies of the hierarchies and institutions of France's ancien regime. Surely a revolution which itself promised freedom from royal absolutism and aristocratic privilege was right to enthrone these two great men?
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