fascinating for the man of the Third-Estate?  Not only is this theory in vogue, and encountered by him at the decisive moment when, for the first time, he turns his attention to general principles, but again it provides him with arms against social inequality and political absolutism, and much sharper than he needs.  To people disposed to put restraints on power and to abolish privileges, what guide is more sympathetic than the writer of genius, the powerful logician, the impassioned orator, who establishes natural law, who repudiates historic law, who proclaims the equality of men, who contends for the sovereignty 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,[27] 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,[28] 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[29] 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[30].  Through the “Eloges” by Thomas, the pastorals of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre,