Extremism

This chapter identifies Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the overwhelming cause of the polarisation of Genevan politics. It was claimed at Geneva and across Europe that Rousseau wanted to replace Christianity with a new religion, purged of the corruption and fakery that he perceived all around him. As one aghast correspondent told Rousseau around 1762, he should either respect ‘the errors of the peoples among whom you live’ or ‘raise the standard of Reformation, and become an Apostle’. The term ‘combustible’ cropped up all the time in discussions of Rousseau, and was applied to his ideas about politics as well as to his view of religion. Rousseau was increasingly accused of seeking to foment a war between aristocrats and democrats. This was widely held to be the end point of his political theory, the necessary prelude to the reformation of commercial societies that he imagined, through the defeat of luxury and the establishment of the sovereignty of the people, as the vital principle of political legitimacy, and as the foundation of a prosperous household economy within an agrarian republic.