ABSTRACT
Throughout his life, Rousseau preached the sweetness of the ‘simple life’ amid rustic scenes. The People alone, he tells us in the Lettre a d’Alembert, are governed by nature, for they are exempt from the vices of their social betters: and, by the People, he means the peasantry, not the urban rabble. To study a people, one must go to the backward provinces, ‘Where the inhabitants yet have their natural inclinations’, and ‘the simple customs of earliest times’. The countryfolk come ‘almost directly from the hands of nature’; their lives are spent in close communion with her, for ‘the natural condition of man is to cultivate the soil and to live by its fruits’. The garlands of flowers which Rousseau wove through all his romances captivated a whole society; few of the fashionable pondered over the underlying message, fewer still took it seriously.
