English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Wolmar, negation of the negation? The new sensibility 1:30 W was a bit tricky to find a word for. I took a fictional character you must know well, who comes from Julie, or the New Heloise. He's Julie's husband. He's Wolmar. So my question is—you must know the New Heloise well too—who is Wolmar, and by extension, who is Julie, because I wonder, deep down, whether Wolmar might not actually be, precisely, the negation of the negation, the one who makes the platonic love between Julie and Saint-Preux possible. Now, I don't know if that's something I'd fully sign on to, but I'd love to hear you on both the New Heloise—so we're talking a bit about love—and then this figure of Wolmar, frankly.
2:41 I'm whetted by the question, so much so that I want to restate it—Wolmar's role, I won't say as a go-between, but you said he acts as the mediator. Let's say Julie marries Wolmar while she's still in love with Saint-Preux, and Wolmar accepts that Saint-Preux come live with them. It's the triangle again, but it's also this situation made possible by Wolmar which allows—maybe not the full continuation of the love between the two—but at least the maintaining of the relationship between them. So Wolmar is maybe—I don't know—isn't he in fact the main character of the New Heloise? I'm delighted by this kind of question. I actually began answering it before you even asked it—I sketched it out earlier when I alluded to the emergence of a new erotic sensibility in the broad sense, which includes sentimental love, physical love, and leaves nothing out.
3:52 But when I alluded to Suzanne in The Marriage of Figaro, it would have been unthinkable, even just one generation earlier, for a soubrette—literally a maid—to have a leading role. Leading roles belonged to princes, princesses, all of Racine, all of classical theater. The others were supporting characters. So why do I start there? Because her partner Figaro is likewise typical of these new middle strata, as we'd say today, on the rise—he's a barber, but also a consultant and advisor to the Count.
4:32 He's not the Greek-style slave barber. And at the same time, as the Count's accomplice, he could go off and make conquests of his own, as we see in The Barber of Seville. Well, Julie is part of this new middle stratum as Rousseau expresses it in the New Heloise, this new sensibility. First, who is Julie? Good question, because it's a mystery. "I have drunk to the dregs the bitter cup of sensibility," she says as she is dying. "I have drunk to the dregs the bitter cup of sensibility, I am dying of feeling." Basically, Julie is Clarens.
Julie is Clarens: the festival after work 5:16 She's the incarnation of a place. And as you're starting to guess—I can't help but repeat, I'm the most antiquated man in Europe—when I say a place, I don't just mean a landscape, a setting, a piece of nature, but a community, one that functions quite differently from the rest of Europe, which would be something like the ideal example of what the ideal community could be for Rousseau. You have to look at the grape-harvest scene, where Julie becomes the queen of hearts. It's a real world. It's a real world, and one that doesn't dodge praxis—Rousseau doesn't dodge that.
5:50 I remember Clouscard, who in '68, when everyone was going on about the festival, the festival, the great leftist value, festivity—now it's become "conviviality"—these aren't detestable notions in themselves, but what irritated Clouscard was the festival after having done nothing. No—the festival is the comfort, the comfort that comes after the effort. You have to know what a real grape harvest is, exhausting as it is. And then the festival has its full meaning afterward. That is to say, it's this dialectic of festival versus, on the other hand, the way work tortures man, to take up the etymology.
6:24 And so he has truly earned it, the one who works the festival. There's no festival for someone who doesn't work. There's a permanent party, la dolce vita, as an emblematic film of an era called it, when the middle classes were suddenly discovering the pleasures the old aristocracy once had—endless parties and all-night revels at Cinecittà. But the real festival, with the magical side of the festival—and it's no accident that when Rousseau condemns the building of a theater to stage Voltaire's plays in Geneva, he says, it's not because I'm a puritan, but on the contrary I'm in favor of spectacles, only I'd rather it be done through the popular festival. So there's the first answer: Julie is Clarens, she's the incarnation of the ideal community sketched out in the third letter to Malesherbes. Thank you—exactly, it's femininity as the incarnation of the ideal community, and in the third letter to Malesherbes, when Rousseau writes to Malesherbes, who had kindly asked him, trying to mediate with the Enlightenment thinkers, "tell us, because you're defending yourself badly, you're making yourself look bad"—he means well, look at Rousseau.
The third letter to Malesherbes and Wolmar's role 7:35 what is it you find, wandering around in nature like that—it's strange, isn't it? We like carpets, beautiful lighting, chandeliers, pretty women, good music, Haydn, Mozart—what's the point, what do you get out of it? And so Rousseau's answer, in the famous third letter which I quote fairly often, is where he shows that when he seeks out a wild place in the forest where nothing bearing the mark of man—he's a misanthrope, how can anyone come up with this kind of socialist scheme?—where nothing bearing the mark of man would announce servitude and domination. It's not society that Rousseau rejects, but this society with its servitude and domination. I won't dwell on that.
8:09 But at the end, at a certain point, he expresses the rapture he felt finding himself like that in the setting: "I would sometimes run about, crying out, 'O great Being, O great Being,' unable to formulate anything more." And then suddenly—it's a turning point in the letter—he says, "yet the nothingness of my fancies came all at once to sadden my soul"—suddenly he sees clearly that these are just reveries, chimerical stuff, that he's a poor destitute man dreaming of paradise. He says, "I wanted to people nature with beings after my own heart"—that's where we arrive at Clarens, we're going to read the prefiguration of Heloise—"and, casting far off opinion and prejudice"—because in a world of opinion and prejudice, a Wolmar could never allow the woman for whom, after his wife, he sighs, to come and take tea at their house, or chocolate, as was fashionable at the time, or coffee.
8:57 I don't know. So, here I formed for myself a golden age to my own fancy. And a society I didn't feel unworthy of. Julie is the incarnation of that world. And since she's the queen of that world, the princess, if you like, she orders it. We see this clearly in the grape-harvest scene, where everyone submits to her charming directiveness. Charming and fair, because she takes into account this one's sweat, and on the other hand keeps an eye on that one's laziness. She's the anti–Emma Bovary. Exactly.
9:27 She's the opposite of Emma Bovary. Well put. Bovary doesn't fit into her husband's praxis. Whereas Julie is tied to the center. And automatically the other characters, starting with Wolmar—you're quite right to make him a front-rank character—fall into line with this logic. Wolmar doesn't belong to the old world, where prejudice would have forbidden this kind of ambiguous triangle, which would have been condemned and which he evokes at that point—he too belongs to these new middle strata on the rise, aristocrat though he may be.
10:00 That's where we see it's not very schematic—fortunately for us and for the reader. The New Heloise is extraordinarily rich. We see it clearly: this Wolmar too embodies an evolution of morals—we'd say today, of "societality"—in a social sense, instead of, as has been done since '68—I sound like I'm condemning '68 every time, I don't make it the source of all evils, I'm not a man of the right, but I do distinguish '68 for which I pay tribute—the Grenelle Accords '68—from the societal '68, that of Cohn-Bendit and so on—or to borrow the latest statement from a communist-affiliated figure, my god, terrible, what's her name, Clémentine Autain—you understand who I mean—Clémentine Autain said, in the middle of a strike, it was over pensions, when there was tension about setting up picket lines in front of the fuel depots facing the CRS, that anyway the only opposition today is gays, immigrants—we're in societalism, provided it isn't the unification of all that in a social sense, when you find the right naturalist identities, the visible minorities, and no, the University of the West—
11:11 it's the exact opposite of all that—Wolmar in fact confirms an evolution of the aristocracy itself, within a world that seems imaginary but that was becoming less and less valid over the course of the coming century.
