Emile

Contents

1. Author’s Preface 8 min 7

   Rousseau explains that the book began as advice to a thoughtful mother and grew into a treatise. Others have attacked the established methods of education, but no one, not even Locke, has proposed a better. The fundamental error is that we know nothing of childhood: writers look for the man in the child. He expects to be called a dreamer, but he gives his reasons so readers can judge, and refuses to offer half-measures. A scheme must be good in itself; its application to particular countries and classes lies outside his subject.

2. I Book I 1 h 59 min 39

   Book I covers infancy. Nature is good and society corrupts; one must choose between educating a man and a citizen, and since modern states have no true citizens, Rousseau will educate a man. He attacks swaddling, wet-nursing and the coddling of rich children, calling on mothers to nurse their own babies and fathers to educate their own sons. He introduces his imaginary pupil Emile, a healthy rich orphan, and his tutor, then describes the infant's diet, bathing, early sensations, cries and first words, warning against teaching the child to command adults.

3. II Book II 2 h 48 min 42

   Book II covers childhood up to about twelve. Happiness lies in balancing desires and powers; freedom means wanting only what one can do. The child must depend on things, not men: no commands, no reasoning, no moral lessons, only necessity. Education should be negative, and time should be lost, not saved. Through the bean garden Emile learns property; through the broken windows, promises. Rousseau rejects book learning, languages, history and La Fontaine's fables, and urges exercise of the body and senses, with the tutor secretly controlling everything the child experiences.

4. II Book II (continued) 2 h 9 min 25

   The second half of Book II trains the body and the senses of a child under twelve. Rousseau prescribes loose plain clothes, bare heads and feet, cold water, hard beds, swimming and games in the dark, recalling his own terror in the church at Bossey. Touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell are each exercised and checked against one another; geometry is learned by drawing and superposition, distance by races for cakes. A plain, mostly vegetable diet keeps natural tastes, with Plutarch's attack on meat-eating quoted at length. The book closes with a portrait of the “grown child”: free, judicious, ignorant of books and subject only to necessity.

5. III Book III 2 h 29 min 38

   Book III covers the years from twelve to fifteen, when strength exceeds need and the surplus goes into useful knowledge. Emile learns cosmography from sunrise, physics from a magnetic duck and a humiliating conjuror, and geography by getting lost in the forest of Montmorency; “What is the use of that?” becomes the test of all study. Books are banned except Robinson Crusoe. The division of labour, exchange and money are introduced through things, not morals. Because fortune and revolutions can ruin any rich man and every idler is a thief, Emile learns a trade, carpentry, and ends the book a worker and thinker, still free of amour-propre.

6. IV Book IV 1 h 34 min 20

   Puberty is a “second birth” that makes Emile a social and moral being. Rousseau distinguishes natural self-love, which seeks only what we need, from “selfishness” (amour-propre), which compares and wants to be preferred, and argues that education should delay the passions and prevent this comparison. Curiosity about sex is to be answered plainly or not aroused. The first social feeling should be pity, governed by three maxims: we pity those worse off, those whose ills we may share, and those we think can feel. Emile must learn that “the people are mankind” and see men as they are, without hating them.

7. IV Book IV (continued) 1 h 20 min 22

   To show Emile men without corrupting him, the tutor turns to history, read as a spectator. Rousseau criticises historians for inventing causes and dwelling on catastrophes, prefers Thucydides and above all Plutarch's lives, and draws lessons from Pyrrhus and Augustus. Emile must be cured of vanity by experience, learn from fables without their morals, and practise active kindness on behalf of the poor. Self-love extended to others becomes justice. The book then turns to religion: children cannot understand God, belief taught by rote is idolatry or a matter of geography, and Emile must choose his faith by reason, introducing the Vicar.

8. IV The Creed of a Savoyard Priest 1 h 58 min 26

   Rousseau tells how, as a young convert in Italy, he was rescued by a poor Savoyard priest, who then sets out his creed on a hill above the Po. Starting from doubt and the failure of the philosophers, the Vicar argues that the mind is active in judgment, that a will moves the universe, that this will is intelligent, and that man is free and has an immaterial soul. Evil is man's own work; the soul's survival justifies Providence. Conscience, an innate feeling of justice, is the sure guide to conduct, and the Vicar worships God without asking anything of him.

9. IV The Creed of a Savoyard Priest (concluded) 1 h 3 min 25

   The Vicar turns from natural religion to revelation. He argues that revelations reach us only through human testimony, books and translations; that miracles and doctrine prove each other in a circle; that most of mankind could never examine the rival claims of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and that a God who damned people for their birthplace would be unjust. He settles in a “reverent doubt”: he honours the gospel’s morality, treats each religion as a legitimate local form of worship, continues to say Mass, and advises his young listener to return to the religion of his fathers and to shun the dogmatic atheism of the philosophers.

10. IV Book IV (concluded) 2 h 26 min 32

    Rousseau presents the Profession as an example, not a creed, and returns to Emile at puberty. The tutor now speaks openly about sex, gives up command for a contract of trust, and uses hunting, vivid signs and an imagined bride, Sophy, to guide Emile’s awakening desire. Emile enters Paris society as a simple, kind young man, immune to mockery and fashion, and studies taste in literature, the ancients and the theatre. A long digression, “if I were rich,” imagines a life of natural pleasures without luxury, servants or game preserves. The two then leave Paris to seek Sophy.

11. V Book V 2 h 1 min 41

    Book V turns to Emile's future wife. Rousseau derives the education of women from sexual difference: man is to be strong and active, woman weak, modest and made to please, dependent on men's desires, judgement and opinion, so that reputation matters to her as much as virtue. Girls are to love finery and dolls, learn needlework before reading, be trained early to restraint, docility and a natural cunning, take their religion on the authority of mother and husband, and study men rather than abstract truths. A nurse's dialogue replaces the catechism, a minimal creed of moral dogmas replaces theology, and conscience and reason are set above public opinion.

12. V Sophy, or Woman (continued) 1 h 0 min 16

    Rousseau describes Sophy: well born but poor, pleasing rather than beautiful, simply dressed, skilled in needlework and housekeeping, temperate, gentle, pious by example and devoted to virtue. Her father explains that he married for rank and wealth, lost both and found happiness in natural suitability, and leaves Sophy free to choose her husband with her parents' approval. A supposedly true story follows of a girl like Sophy who, in love with Fénelon's Telemachus, refused every suitor and died. Rousseau then argues that inequality between classes makes good marriages hard, advises marrying beneath rather than above, rejects both uneducated and learned wives, and prefers charm to beauty.

13. V Sophy, or Woman (concluded) 2 h 25 min 22

    Leaving Paris, tutor and pupil travel on foot in search of a wife. Lost in the hills, they are taken in by an impoverished gentleman's family whose daughter is named Sophy, and Emile falls in love at once. The courtship follows: Sophy's pride over the difference in their fortunes, music and drawing lessons, quarrels and reconciliations, a digression on the natural and social origins of jealousy, Emile at work in a joiner's shop, and his rescue of an injured peasant, which wins Sophy's hand. The tutor then teaches that virtue is strength to master one's passions and orders Emile to leave Sophy for two years of travel.

14. V Of Travel 1 h 44 min 33

    Rousseau asks whether travel is useful and answers that it is, for those able to observe men rather than monuments, in the provinces rather than the capitals. Emile must study government before choosing where to live, and the tutor sets out the principles of political right, a condensed version of the Social Contract: the compact, the general will, law, government and its forms,. Two years of travel teach Emile that freedom lies in the heart, not in property or institutions. He returns to marry Sophy; the tutor advises them on love within marriage, hands his authority to Sophy, and Emile announces that he will soon be a father.