Rousseau had begun with a deep desire to do justice to the nobility of humanity. He grasped the injustice of the ancien regime, which subordinated the people’s needs in principle to the will of the king and in fact to a hierarchical order serving the interests of a degenerate aristocracy. Seeking to defend each person’s right to dignity, he attacked the social order based on inequality and oppression at its foundations. He grasped the mystification that was the divine right of kings. Long before Proudhon, he claimed that property was theft and that, since humans are essentially social beings, only the mystification of social reality could hold people victims of this oppressive order. His was a rebellion in the service of human ennoblement, rooted in the vision of the primacy of the human order as the source of values. Thus the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people originally meant that final au-thority for morality and legitimacy can only reside in the will of the people. The rest is a mystification, meant to deceive in order to protect and justify exploitation. In short, he submits the king and the ancien regime, and through them God, to the challenge of Justice. He does it not simply on moral grounds, however much that may have been the source of his passion, but on metaphysical grounds.
But, to counter one absolute, another seems required. Is this a matter of logic or psychologic? Camus suggests that a way of thinking is here at stake that practically defines the West. It certainly has helped determine how rebellions have developed over the past 200 years. With Rousseau it emerges as soon as he seeks an unquestioned standpoint from which not only to chal-lenge the ancien regime, but to point the path to a new world. In rejecting the transcendent absolute of the Christian God, he has recourse to the ultimacy and self-sufficiency of the human world. The human world is identified with the natural, which is presented not simply as what is, but as a guide to what ought to be. Here Rousseau is an heir to the tradition of natural law theory, which involves a noncritical acceptance of the natural. Whatever the impor-tance of the role he assigns to sensibility, Rousseau remains a child of his age in identifying the natural with the moral, and both with reason. Of course, these run counter to the mainstream Christian tradition that had sustained the hierarchical order of repression. That tradition had been built on the doctrine of original sin and the untrustworthiness of nature. In a sense, these two traditions were the major alternatives in the West. To challenge the old order, Rousseau
quite naturally had recourse to an alternative tradition, now
being strengthened by the emerging rationalism of science and capitalism, to neither of which was he very sympathetic.
The process of deification can be seen working itself out in Rousseau through this identification of nature and virtue.
If man is naturally good, if nature as expressed in him is identified with reason, he will give expression to reason’s excellence only on condition that he can express himself freely and naturally. We can no longer, therefore, go back on his decision,
which henceforth hovers over him. The general will is primarily the expression of universal reason, which is categorical. The new God is born (R, 116; L’HR, 147—8).
St. Just
Rousseau is “the first man in modern times to institute the profession of civil faith.” He is thus a “harbinger of contemporary forms of society which exclude not only opposition but even neutrality” (R, 116). It is, however, St. Just who “introduced Rousseau’s ideas into history.” Saying that “the spirit in which the King is judged will be the same as the spirit in which the Republic is established,” he attacks the inviolability of the king in the name of the inviolability of the people. He thus proclaims “the transcendence of the general will.” Here is the birth of “a new form of absolutism” which Camus feels “is the turning point of contemporary history.” By its expectations and its consequences, “it symbolizes the desacralization of history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to now, God used Kings to do his work. . . . But His historical representative has been killed. . . . There is no longer anything but a semblance of God relegated to the heaven of principles” (R, 117-20; L’HR, 149-53).
The French Revolution, brilliantly articulated and defended by St. Just, effectively destroys die ancien regime in thought as well as in deed. The rest will be commentary and consequence.
The new era dawns with the definitive judgment of the king, slicing through abstract arguments with the decisiveness of the guillotine. That a French thinker would be transfixed by the French Revolution should not be surprising and may even be appropriate. Hence its importance for Camus. Here is the hinge upon which his position hangs. St. Just incorporates the dynamism of the emerging bourgeoisie, with the rationalism of modern science, and the desacralized moral vision of Rousseau. We thus glimpse the theory and practice of a world in the making. To grasp Camus’s critique of modern revolutions, we would do well to attend carefully to his analysis of St. Just. We should also remember that for a brief time at the end of World War II Camus identified himself with St. Just, an identification he later regretted. This suggests that the legacy of St. Just may well be lurking under the skin of our author and his contemporaries. One might wonder, parenthetically, what happens to the sensibility and thought of a St. Just when he can no longer believe. The answer may point us in the direction of that singularly modern prophet, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, whose story Camus will tell in The Fall.
St. Just affirms “the divinity of the people to the extent to which its will coincides with that of nature and reason.” And what happens when its will does not coincide? But that is abstract.
More practically, how is one to know the will of nature and reason? And who will be the interpreter? Here we reach the center of the pathos of the intellect, the golgotha of the modern mind.
St. Just’s reasoning is exemplary in its contortions. “If the general will freely expresses itself, it can only be the universal expression of reason. If the people are free,” he continues, suggesting the source of a new revelation, “they are infallible. . . . They are the oracle which must be consulted in order to know what the eternal order of the world demands. Vox populi, vox naturae. Eternal principles govern our conduct: Truth, Justice, finally Reason” (R, 121—2; L’HR, 154).
The divinity of the people replaces the divine right of kings, nature replaces the Bible, reason replaces revelation. But there still must be morality and order. Someone must interpret nature and enforce its edicts. Fortunately, however, if evil is but the result of the oppression suffered by the people at the hands of the king, then no force will be needed to govern. The liber-ated people will now freely determine their destiny in accord with the law of virtue, which is that of nature. The morality of our future civic order is thus assured, and the state is free to “wither away.” Only a brief transition is needed, together with a governmental order to administer the general will on a day-to-day basis.5
“This perfect edifice,” observed Camus, “could not exist without virtue. The French Revolution, by claiming to build history on a principle of absolute purity, inaugurates modern times simultaneously with the era of formal morality.” But, asks Camus,
What, in fact, is virtue? For the bourgeois philosopher of this period it is conformity with nature and, in politics, conformity with the law which expresses the general will.
. . All disobedience to the law therefore comes, not from an imperfection of the law, which is presumed to be impossible, but from a lack of virtue in the refractory citizen. . . . Each act of moral corruption is at the same time political corruption, and vice versa. Following from the doctrine itself, a principle of infinite repression thus takes hold (R, 123; L’HR, 156).
There is a tragedy here whose full effects we have yet to witness. It is a tragedy of noble souls who, in the pursuit of justice, lead us down a tortured path strewn with the victims of righteous indignation, to a promised land ringed with barbed wire over which amplifiers broadcast the truth of the revolution. Who better attests to the “implacable logic” by which “the republic of forgiveness leads … to the republic of the guillotine” than St. Just? How is it, wonders Camus, echoing a theme with which he is becoming increasingly preoccupied, that a man can sincerely feel that tormenting the populace is a frightful thing “and yet submit to principles that imply, in the final analysis, the torment of the people?”6