A Great March

ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION by Will and Ariel Durant. 1,091 pages. Simon & Schuster. $15.

After he had written the last line of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a labor that consumed almost 15 years, Edward Gibbon reached a melancholy conclusion: "The life of the historian must be short and precarious." In the final pages of this book, Will Durant, 81, and his wife Ariel, 69, reflect the same thought: "We know that a lifetime is but a moment in history, and that the historian's best is soon washed away."

The best of the Durants deserves to stand a long time against future tides, as a monument to their devotion, spirit and energy. Four decades ago, they set out to record the progress of man across the span of 20 civilizations. In a sense, it was a naive undertaking, but less so than H. G. Wells's attempt to do the same job in his two-volume Outline of History, and closer in spirit to the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment, who figure in the present book. Rousseau and Revolution, the tenth volume of the Durants' Story of Civilization, is the last.* They note wistfully that they would have liked to carry the project into the 20th century, but "we must reconcile ourselves to mortality" and leave the task to "fresher spirits." These will not be easy to find.

As succeeding installments came off the press, the grasp of the collaborators' research grew surer, the language more polished, the pace slower. This lengthy book covers only the 33 years between the Seven Years' War and the storming of the Bastille. Those who speak about the present as a time of unprecedented change might stop to ponder the changes that took place in this period. It led in a few short decades from Pompadour bewigged at Versailles to the Goddess of Reason crowned in Notre Dame. It led from the fleshy nudes of Fragonard to the pain-racked soldiers of Goya. It led from the aristocracy to the middle class, from mercenary forces under gentlemen officers to modern mass armies, from the last vestiges of a supranational order to nationalism in arms.

On Four Paws. Retracing this great march, which was both a recessional and an inaugural, the Durants again demonstrate their immense talent for transmuting tireless research into never tiresome storytelling. They stop where fancy strikes, and theirs is a striking fancy indeed. The Industrial Revolution gets 14 pages, Mozart 27. The book's hero is Jean Jacques Rousseau. Beginning with an extraordinary sentence about that contradictory figure (see box), it is his impact that gives the book its momentum. Perhaps too much so: he is shown launching the Romantic movement almost singlehanded in rebellion against rationalism, and given credit for practically transforming the world. This probably overstates his role. Columbia History Professor Peter Gay, in fact, suggests that in some ways Rousseau was actually "a prophet rather than a nemesis of rationalism," and that the entire Enlightenment was partly a rebellion against the rule of reason. Yet the Durants tell the story in the more traditional pattern, as a civil war within the Enlightenment between mind and feeling, head and heart, Voltaire and Rousseau. And it is difficult not to see it that way when one recalls, for example, Voltaire's reaction to the Discourse on inequality, in which Rousseau denounced civilization and praised the state of nature. "I have received, monsieur, your new book against the human race," wrote Voltaire. "No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work, one is seized with the desire to walk on four paws. However, as it is more than 60 years since I lost that habit, I feel that it is impossible for me to resume it."

Without overestimating Rousseau's influence, one cannot miss the beginnings of much that remains in modern thinking: his proclamation of man's Original Goodness, which led to the sentimentalization of childhood; his condemnation of private property, which makes him sometimes sound like a hippie of the salons. The famous statement, in Social Contract, "Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains," sounds like an anticipatory echo of Karl Marx.

Rousseau was not really a revolutionary; he was more of a liberal devoted to high language and half measures. He did not really hope to abolish the system, only to temper it. Yet his qualifications were ignored and his ideas oversimplified on the guillotine. Moreover, despite his Confessions about his far from blameless private life, he was a prig and railed against the perfumed immorality of his time. (One sometimes gets the impression that the perfume annoyed him more than the immorality.)

Brave Popularizers. Rousseau apart, the brio of the age sings through its people--Gluck and Burke, Goethe and Charles III, Sheridan and Mirabeau, Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great--who occupies a chapter of special delight. The volume is scattershot with fascinating and sometimes trivial notes: Mozart early in his career used to send obscene letters to relatives; in 18th century London, privies were called Jerichos; Boswell went to bed with Rousseau's wife precisely 13 times. The Durants can scarcely resist an anecdote or an aphorism. The borrowed ones are usually the best, as for instance Diderot's Encyclopedie distinction between the words bind and attach: "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." But the authors also do reasonably well on their own, as when they say of Louis XV that he "lacked the art of dying in due time."

The Durants are not original historians in the sense of having a particular slant on history, except for a broad humanistic sympathy. They do not view events through the prism of philosophy or economics or ideology. Their method is sometimes closer to journalism than to formal academic history. Yet in recent years the academic attacks on the Durants have diminished--perhaps partly because in the U.S. the writing of history in general has begun to free itself from the 19th century Germanic mold, in which color was suspect and wit was heresy.

The Durants are sometimes superficial: they are bound to be, considering the scope of their enterprise. But they have also achieved depths and insights lacking in many academic works. The charge that they are popularizers is meaningless. Of course they are popularizers--and great ones. It is apt that in this last volume they write of an age when to be a popularizer was still considered something brave and even glorious. As Will Durant once said: "History is baroque. It smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules." And with the Durants as guides, it also gives uncommon pleasure.

*Mrs. Durant, whose original role was researcher, became full-fledged co-author beginning with Volume 7.

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