Abstract

Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise is the most influential novel ever written. It shares with the Social Contract the honor of inspiring the French Revolution and, to a lesser extent, German idealism, but it stands alone as the fountainhead of Romanticism. It is a celebration and critical examination of love and family. ;Like the movements it inspired, La Nouvelle Heloise must be understood in opposition to the authoritative ideas and beliefs it is meant to rival. Rousseau's romantic novel is, above all, a challenge to the Enlightenment. Rousseau's dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment is a consequence of his understanding of the conflict between nature and society. The Enlightenment resolution of the conflict is contained in the bourgeois, a human contradiction, which evokes Rousseau's laughter and indignation, as well as his thought. The bourgeois lives only to satisfy his own desires, but his opinion of himself depends on what others think of him. Furthermore, he is a materialist, who believes in the primacy of pleasure and health, but who does not recognize the necessity of his own death. ;The contradictions inherent to the bourgeois are a consequence of the application of modern science to society. The materialism of modern science makes it impossible for the bourgeois to believe in the possibility of community and immortality; yet, he relies on the opinions of others for one of himself, and he is too attached to others and himself to think that life is mere body on its way to oblivion. His passions and sentiments do not accord with his thought, and his thought does not accord with his passions and sentiments. He is in so much contradiction with himself that he can not even form an opinion about what he is. His life is senseless; he is literally nothing. ;Romanticism is the attempt to make humans whole by connecting their sexual and procreative nature to other human beings and to eternity. The romantic solution must not be understood as a reactionary response to science and democracy, for it is also opposed to Christian piety, aristocratic honor, patriarchal authority, classical philosophy, and pagan heroism. Love and family replace God, honour, reverence, knowledge, and glory as the highest aspirations of man. Rousseau gives the sexual and reproductive aspects of human nature a place that was denied to them by his predecessors. He believes that nature is body and, therefore, attempts to accommodate it, while civilizing it. Romanticism is, above all else, the project to create a whole from its fundamental elements. Reason, nature, and God are reformed to meet the requirements of love and family