ABSTRACT
The confrontation between the “natural” individual and “artificial” society preoccupied Rousseau and many of his contemporaries. The naturalization of morality was such a pervasive phenomenon in the late eighteenth century that Tissot was unable to see that his condemnation of Onania as merely “theological and moral trivialities” could just as well be said of his own Onanisme. In drawing attention to children, the anti-onanism literature was part of a broader trend in the reification of childhood. Schools were perhaps even more nefarious than women. Rousseau repeatedly complained of the corrupting effects of current education: “It is from the very first years that a senseless education decorates our mind and corrupts our judgment. The French Enlightenment, which saw the rise of the middle class and of literacy rates, witnessed an associated explosion in the publication of “licentious literature” often colored with political and anti-clerical overtones.
