ABSTRACT
Like religion, history has been kept from Émile until he is fifteen, because he could not handle it properly before that age: he was too immature. Now Rousseau is going to give it a place second only to religious teaching, and linked with it, though he does not expressly say so:
Let him know that man is by nature good, let him feel it, let him judge his neighbour by himself; but let him see how men are depraved and perverted by society; let him find the source of all their vices in their preconceived 115opinions; let him be disposed to respect the individual, but to despise the multitude… to bring the human heart within his reach without risk of spoiling his own, I would show him men from afar, in other times or in other places, so that he may behold the scene but cannot take part in it. This is the time for history; with its help he will read the hearts of men without any lessons in philosophy; with its help he will view them as a mere spectator, dispassionate and without prejudice; he will view them as their judge, not as their accomplice or their accuser.
To know men you must behold their actions. In society we hear them talk; they show their words and hide their deeds. Even their sayings help us to understand them; for comparing what they say and what they do, we see not only what they are but what they would appear; the more they disguise themselves the more thoroughly they stand revealed… The worst historians for a youth are those who give their opinions… To my mind Thucydides is the true model of historians. He relates facts without giving his opinion; but he omits no circumstance adapted to make us judge for ourselves. He puts everything that he relates before his reader; far from interposing himself between the facts and the reader he conceals himself; we seem not to read but to see. Unfortunately he speaks of nothing but war, and in his stories we see only the least instructive part of the world, that is to say, the battles… War only makes manifest events already determined by moral causes, which few historians can perceive…
What then is required for the proper study of men? A great wish to know men, great impartiality of judgment, a heart sufficiently sensitive to understand every human passion and calm enough to be free from passion.
