Robert Darnton

The Great Cat Massacre

A son was to come in February, 1780, another one in December, 1782. The Ransons named the first Jean Isaac after his maternal grandfather. They named the second Emile. That gesture represented a significant break with family tradition, for the Ransons and Raboteaus had almost always kept to a limited stock of family names—a few Jeans, Pierres, and Pauls among a profusion of the Old Testament variety favored by Protestants: Abraham, Isaac, Elie, Benjamin, Samuel, and Joachim. Little Emile was to be a living testimony to his parents' faith in Rousseau's doctrine of education, and human nature in general.

As the children arrived, Ranson sent off announcements of their births accompanied with remarks on their nursing and discussions of Rousseau. He was aware of this double obsession: 'I ask your pardon for going on so often and at such length about Jean-Jacques, but I like to tell myself that the enthusiasm he inspires in me, and which is produced entirely by his own enthusiasm for virtue, will excuse me in your eyes and that it will compel you to write to me from time to time about this friend of virtue.' And later, in connection with his daughter: 'How much pleasure I take in watching this young creature grow! And how much happiness I will have if she continues to live and if, by a good education, I can make the most of the goodness of her nature. You are a father, Monsieur, and so you will excuse my dwelling on such details, which would have no interest for a man who isn't one.'

Ranson's approach to fatherhood explains the importance of the pedagogical and children's literature in his orders with the STN. Those books represented a new attitude coward children and a new desire to oversee their education on the part of parents. A century earlier, Charles Perrault had produced his tales of Mother Goose to amuse an audience of salon sophisticates. Ranson's favorite authors, notably Mme de Genlis and Mme Leprince de Beaumont, wrote for the children themselves and did so not merely to amuse them but to develop their virtue. The moralistic emphasis of the new children's books stands out in their titles: Moral playthings, or tales for infants and Reading for children, or a selection of short tales equally suited to amuse them and to make them love virtue. It also dominated the new primers for parents, like Moral education, or a reply to the question: how should one govern the mind and heart of a child in order to make him develop into a happy and useful adult? These books began from the Rousseauistic premise that children were naturally good and went on to develop a pedagogy saturated with Rousseauism. In addition to them, Ranson owned at least two copies of Emile. The remarkable thing, however, is not that he read this or that treatise on children but that he read any treatises at all. He entered into parenthood through reading and relied on books in order to make his offspring into so many Emiles and Emilies.

This behavior expressed a new attitude toward the printed word. Ranson did not read in order to enjoy literature but to cope with life and especially family life, exactly as Rousseau intended. Seen through his letters, Ranson and his wife appear as the perfect image of the readers to whom Jean-Jacques addressed La Nouvelle Heloise: 'I like to imagine two spouses reading this collection together, finding in it fresh encouragement to continue with their daily work and perhaps new ways to make it useful,' Rousseau wrote in the second preface. 'How could they contemplate the picture of a happy household without wanting to imitate such a sweet model?' Ranson modeled his household in just chat way, by reading Rousseau as Rousseau wanted to be read. 'My wife sends you her respects,' he wrote to Ostervald in September, 1780. 'She continues, thank God, to enjoy good health, as does her dear baby, who is doing very well on his mommy's milk. His older sister, a big girl of thirty months, now shows its influence by the best of temperaments. Virtuous Jean-Jacques! It is to thee that I owe this tender obligation.'

The rest of the letters in the dossier have the same tone—earnest, intimate, sentimental, and moralistic—the tone set by Rousseau for readers everywhere, however much they differed in their circumstances. Nothing could be more ordinary, perhaps, but the significance of Ranson's letters consists in their ordinariness. They show how Rousseauism penetrated into the everyday world of an unexceptional bourgeois and how it helped him make sense of the things that mattered most in his existence: love, marriage, parenthood—the big events of a little life and the stuff that life was made of everywhere in France.