"O mother! I said to this dear friend, embracing her and flooding her with tears of tenderness and joy, this stay is one of happiness and innocence. If we don’t find them here with each other, we shouldn’t look for them anywhere.”
I am very pleased to be with you here near Chambéry for the launch of the Rousseau year. I regret not being able to be with you this evening for the creation of Philippe Hersant, with the Choirs and Soloists of Lyon-Bernard Tétu, the Orchestre des Pays de Savoie and the Compagnie Ecuador at the Espace Malraux, which I cannot attend because of a meeting at the Elysée; but I wanted to make this trip to join you in order to express to you all my interest in a national commemoration whose scope goes far beyond our borders and those of our Swiss friends, both the scope of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau has long been part of a heritage with a universal dimension.
Three hundred years ago, a writer, a philosopher, a political theorist, a thinker of equality and education, of music and nature, a musician, a walker, a man of his century. The author of Emile ou de l'Education et du Contrat social, published two hundred and fifty years ago, had by his writings a major influence on the revolutionary adventure. The many facets, grandeur and contradictions of this central figure of the French and European Enlightenment will be explored during the many meetings and events that will take place throughout the year.
I would like to commend the work of all those involved, in France and also in Switzerland, with the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Society, which has been a reference point for Rousseau studies since its founding at the University of Geneva more than a hundred years ago; and, of course, the remarkable involvement of the Rhône-Alpes Region, which is fully committed to this national commemoration, with more than forty events - readings, concerts, symposia, Republican picnics, presentation of short-courses andfilms - which will punctuate this year, starting with tonight’s show inspired by the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire.
We will not have too much of a year to revisit the complex personality of the one who stood as a judge of himself, and to whom historiography with national reflexes will have long assigned a sometimes reductive place: the father of the general will in the face of the thinkers of the glorious Revolution of the British, the instigator of terror in the face of the proponents of measured and traditional reforms… Even though according to Edmund Burke, the author of Réflexions sur la révolution de France, the French Revolution probably also found its sources in an English radicalism of the previous century derived from Locke’s thought. But the easy oppositions have a hard life, and we continue to associate Rousseau’s theories with a form of furia francese that led to excess and political insanity, which took more than a century to stabilize the republican idea. Radically savage, adept of all the razor tables and of voluntary barbarism against the servitudes of property, enemy of civilization, priest of collective fury… Since the time when his books were being burned in Geneva, man has fuelled many misunderstandings and controversies. And evidently, the one who was pantheonized by the Thermidorian Convention was a powerful wake-up call against all the Enlightenment assurances – just as his friend-enemy David Hume was, according to Kant, for dogmatic sleeps.
But here, at the Charmettes, it is also the memory of another Rousseau that we are talking about, that of the Confessions, the ultimate walk of Rêveries shortly before his death, that of a new form of introspection which will give rise to the most beautiful pages of French literature, and of that very particular kind which is autobiography - a genre, in a way, which was born here, which finds these sources within these walls, in the landscapes that surround us, which Rousseau travelled through during the decade he spent in Chambéry and its surroundings, the capital of the Dukes of Savoy, of which I had the pleasure of visiting with you a few moments ago, the castle and its Holy Chapel.
An intimate Rousseau and a return to self whose Semaine de la Langue Française et de la Francophonie in two months' time will echo, led by the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France and sponsored this year by the Comédie-Française, around «dix mots», drawn for this new edition of this French language event and on your proposal, dear Jean-Jack Queyranne, in the Rousseau vocabulary of self-description and confession. Throughout the world, through our cultural network abroad, with the involvement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and French institutes, we will speak the language of Rousseau.
I said, «this other Rousseau»; but it is clear that this thought of the return on oneself, of John James who recalls the times of self-building and the figure of lost love, will have profoundly determined his political thought - he who will become the follower, a few years later, conjectural history, an imaginary return to the origins, in the «second discourse», that on the origin of inequality among men. When we think back to the revolutionary posterity of this text, it is striking to remember that the hills of Chambéry have something to do with it.
It is the spirit of these crosses that I wanted to highlight by launching the label «Maisons des Illustres», last September. A place, a memory, those of artists, writers, great scientists or political figures who are cardinal references of our common memory; a learning of how to look at everyday life and the ultimately secular dimension of what will have been consecrated by time and collective memory, an approach through paths and sometimes the most intimidating thoughts. I clearly felt this feeling when I placed the first plaque of the "Maisons des Illustres" in La Boisserie, the house of General de Gaulle in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises.
Les Charmettes: this villa classified as a historical monument has the particularity of being a place of pilgrimage for a long time. There were many illustrious visitors who, as evidenced by his Golden Book, decided to go to the Charmettes to try to unravel the secret of a genius innovator - beginning with the Englishman Arthur Young, travelling through France at the dawn of the Revolution, then Chateaubriand, Lamartine, George Sand, went in search of the sources of a romanticism that was not yet one.
By settling down at the age of 24 with Madame de Warens in this house, Jean-Jacques was going to live happy years in this “stay of innocence”, which he regretted so much when he was taken to Paris in what he called “the whirlwind of big society.… and] the smoke of the glorious”; years happier than those he went through a quarter of a century later, when he wrote the Confessions Refugee in the region under a false name, exiled from Switzerland, and banned in France. Years that he will always seek to relive in what he called his “rural delusions” in Montmorency – where we find the Montlouis House-Museum, another Rousseauist high place, also the Musée de France and the Maison des Illustres – or, later, in Ermenonville. This «happy orchard», where he began to make his «store of ideas», where he made both his love learning and his truant humanities: the house of the most illustrious of self-taught.
Today, the success of the Charmettes has not been denied to its visitors, who often come from far away to find the memory of Rousseau. By affixing this plaque with you, which will allow to integrate the Charmettes in this network of memory, I hope that this house can be the subject of restoration work respectful of the spirit of the place; and I am convinced that the dialogue between the city of Chambéry and my ministry through the regional cultural affairs directorate will allow us to preserve, as George Sand wrote in the Revue des deux mondes about the Charmettes, “what I don’t know that is not physically carried away, and that alone gives value and life to things carried away”.
Thank you.
Address by Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, on the occasion of the inauguration of the plaque «Maisons des illustres» at the Charmettes (Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s house)
Mr Prefect, dear Christophe Mirmand, Mr Member of Parliament and President of the General Council, dear Hervé Gaymard, Mr President of the Rhône-Alpes Regional Council, dear Jean-Jack Queyranne. Mayor of Chambéry, dear Bernadette Laclais, Regional Director of Cultural Affairs, dear Alain Lombard, Chief Curator, dear Chantal Fernex de Mongex, Chief Curator in charge of the Charmettes, dear Mireille Védrine, Ladies and gentlemen,
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