of the people, who denounces on every page
the usurpation, the vices, the worthlessness, the malefactions of the
great and of kings! And I omit the points by which he makes acceptable
to a rigid and laborious bourgeoisie, to the new men that are working
and advancing themselves, his steady earnestness, his harsh and bitter
tone, his eulogy of simple habits, of domestic virtues, of personal
merit, of virile energy, the commoner addressing commoners. It is
not surprising that they should accept him as a guide and welcome
his doctrines with that fervor of faith called enthusiasm, and which
invariably accompanies the newborn idea as well as the first love.

A competent judge, and an eye-witness, Mallet du Pan,[4327] writes in
1799:

"Rousseau had a hundred times more readers among the middle and lower
classes than Voltaire. He alone inoculated the French with the doctrine
of the sovereignty of the people and with its extremist consequences.
It would be difficult to cite a single revolutionary who was not
transported over these anarchical theories, and who did not burn
with ardor to realize them. That Contrat Social, the disintegrator of
societies, was the Koran of the pretentious talkers of 1789, of the
Jacobins of 1790, of the republicans of 1791, and of the most atrocious
of the madmen. . . . I heard Marat in 1788 read and comment on the
Contrat Social in the public streets to the applause of an enthusiastic
auditory."

The same year, in an immense throng filling the great hall of the Palais
de Justice, Lacretelle hears that same book quoted, its dogmas put
forward by the clerks of la Bazoche, "by members of the bar,[4328]
by young lawyers, by the ordinary lettered classes swarming with
new-fledged specialist in public law." Hundreds of details show us that
it is in every hand like a catechism. In 1784[4329] certain magistrates'
sons, on taking their first lesson in jurisprudence of an assistant
professor, M. Saveste, have the "Contrat Social" placed in their hands
as a manual. Those who find this new political geometry too difficult
learn at least its axioms, and if these repel them they discover at
least their palpable consequences, so many handy comparisons, the
trifling common practice in the literature in vogue, whether drama,
history, or romance[4330]. Through the "Eloges" by Thomas, the pastorals
of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, the compilation of Raynal, the comedies of
Beaumarchais and even the "Young Anarcharsis"