in the city and
republic of Geneva.[161] And at length he broke forth against his
Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long
but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his
enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If any
one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the
treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities
of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible
letters. The second part of them may interest the student of political
history by its account of the working of the institutions of the
little republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of a
Greek city; the growth of a wealthy class in face of an increasing
number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair
proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative
and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the
oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic
ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by
metabole or overthrow of the established constitution, ending in
foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated
any Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as
sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social
Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.

Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of
burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal
right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that
the laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed
itself of an equally legal right, its _droit negatif_, and declined to
entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.
Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new
vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation
and burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the
Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the
same faggot served for that and for Voltaire's Philosophical
Dictionary (April 1765).[162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan.
22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at
Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclopaedists and
their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of
the magistrates in motion.