Thomas Hollis and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva. Image by Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

On a trip to Switzerland earlier this year I looked forward to visiting the statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the museum dedicated to him in Geneva. What I did not expect to find were references to Rousseau in the Hollis collection at the Universitätsbibliothek in Bern. Yet the material there alerted me to the fact that Thomas Hollis communicated with the notoriously prickly Genevan thinker and defended his cause in 1765. Moreover, the case had profound consequences for Hollis's book dissemination project.

Rousseau published both Du Contrat Social and Emile in May 1762. Both were condemned by the authorities in Catholic France and in Rousseau's Calvinist home town of Geneva. The French ordered Rousseau's arrest causing him to flee from Montmorency (just north of Paris), where he had been living, to Neuchâtel, which was then governed by Prussia. Rousseau renounced his Genevan citizenship and began work on his Confessions. In 1765 he spent the summer on the island of Saint Pierre in Lac de Bienne, which was under the authority of Bern. Rousseau had visited the island a year earlier and had cultivated a desire to live there. He settled on a 'wild and uncultivated island' to the south of the main island and apparently 'detached from it by storms'. Rousseau's description of it in The Confessions conveys his love for it:

its gravelly soil produces nothing but willows and persicaria, but there is in it a high hill well covered with greensward and very pleasant. The form of the lake is an almost regular oval. The banks, less rich than those of the lake of Geneva and Neuchatel, form a beautiful decoration, especially towards the western part, which is well peopled, and edged with vineyards at the foot of a chain of mountains (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions. London, 1903. Project Gutenberg. Book XII).

Isle de Saint Pierre in Lake Biel. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Rousseau claimed that he intended to spend the rest of his life on the island, but his happy stay was cut short after just six weeks when the freemen of Bern ordered his expulsion from their territory. He travelled from Bienne to Strasbourg and from there to Paris arriving in the French capital on 16th December 1765.

‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, by Angelique Allais. National Portrait Gallery. NPG D19002. Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

News of Rousseau's fate spread across Europe. At the end of October Rudolph Vautravers wrote to his friend Hollis in London reporting that the local 'Bigots' had obtained an order from the magistrates at Berne 'to expel poor Rousseau ... from his beautiful Retreat ... in the Lake of Bienne (where he had just settled himself; as he hoped, out of the Reach of his enemies'. Rousseau, Vautravers reported, had moved to the city of Bienne itself and if necessary would escape to Potsdam 'under the immediate Protection of a wise and beneficent Monarch, who hath been pleased constantly and pressingly to offer it to him'. (Vautravers to Hollis, 28 October 1765).  Less than two weeks later Vautravers wrote again to announce that 'poor Rousseau has been expelled from all Switzerland' and was heading for Potsdam, though given his poor health it was uncertain whether he would survive the journey (Vautravers to Hollis, 9 November 1765).

Hollis had known Vautravers since 1759. In November of that year he recorded in his diary that he had taken tea with Vautravers (who was then staying in London) for the first time. Hollis's interest in Switzerland - and in particular in the Canton of Bern - also dated back to that time. He had been preparing a parcel of books for the Library at Bern since April and it was finally sent with Vautravers' assistance in January 1760. Two years later Vautravers settled at Rockhall near Bern.

Vautravers was still living at Rockall when the controversy over Rousseau erupted and hence his letter to Hollis. In response, Hollis sent Vautravers a package for Rousseau which contained an invitation for him to come to England and a copy of John Wallis's grammar (to help him to improve his English language skills). Unfortunately, the package did not reach Rousseau before he left the country. Rousseau did travel to England in 1766, but on the invitation of David Hume rather than Hollis. Yet Hollis did take some action on Rousseau's behalf in London. On 18th November 1765 he went to see Noah Thomas, the director of the St. James' Chronicle, to present him with an extract from Vautravers's letter requesting that it be printed in the paper. It duly appeared the following day. Vautravers's letter announcing Rousseau's expulsion from Switzerland followed on 28th November. The publication of these letters, Hollis hoped, would secure the support of the English public for the exiled Genevan author while also highlighting the precariousness of civil and religious liberty. The following year, Hollis received from Vautravers several sketches depicting Rousseau's 'sufferings' in Switzerland by the artist Samuel Jerom Grim. These he passed on to his close friend Thomas Brand.

One of the beautifully bound books that Thomas Hollis sent to the Library at Bern. Bern, UB Münstergasse, MUE Hollis 67. Image Rachel Hammersley, 2025.

The treatment of Rousseau on the part of the Bern authorities had a huge impact on Hollis. His initial sympathy for the Canton owed much to their protection of the English republican exile Edmund Ludlow in the late seventeenth century. Their less sympathetic treatment of Rousseau one hundred years later soured Hollis's favour. Though he sent the Library more than 200 volumes between 1759 and 1765 - including some that were presented in extremely lavish bindings - he sent nothing after 1765. The treatment of Rousseau by the Bernese authorities indicated that they were not committed to the principles of civil and religious liberty that Hollis held so dear and were not, therefore, worthy recipients of his gifts.

Myths Concerning Republicanism 2: Republican Government has always been Aristocratic

January's blogpost explored the myth that republican government is necessarily anti-monarchical. This month I want to consider another myth: that republican government is inherently aristocratic or élitist in character and therefore unsuited to the democratic nature of twenty-first-century states.

Print of Geneva in 1630. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

There is some justification for this characterisation. In the ancient world republican government was associated with slavery, the exclusion of women from the political sphere, and the restriction of political participation to certain groups. Indeed, the exercise of citizenship depended on the work carried out by non-citizens (including slaves, women, servants, and foreigners), which made it possible for citizens to devote their attention to political matters. Moreover, later republican governments were criticised for descending into oligarchy. Venice's Grand Council was initially composed of all male inhabitants but due to citizenship being restricted to the descendants of those original citizens, by 1581 it was accorded to just over 1% of the population. In the Genevan republic the cost of claiming citizenship became more expensive over time, restricting who could take it up. In addition, power was increasingly moved away from the General Council - comprising all citizens - and towards smaller bodies that were dominated by a few families.

Frontispiece to The Federalist Papers. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of the modern representative republic proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it undercut the need for citizens to be supported by non-citizens by making citizenship a less onerous activity. Yet, at the same time, it created a political élite distinct from the wider citizen body whose role it was to govern. For some thinkers this was a positive move. They saw representation not simply as a necessary evil in the large states of the modern world, but as a good in itself. In The Federalist Papers James Madison insisted that in a representative government 'public views' would be 'refined' and 'enlarge[d]' by being passed through 'the medium of a chosen body of citizens' who would be wiser than the rest and therefore better able to determine the true interest of the nation. He went on: 'Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.' (Publius, The Federalist Papers, X).

Yet, as debates at the time make clear, this was not the only way of organising representative government. Anti-Federalists in America, and various individuals and groups in Europe, proposed representative systems that maintained a closer connection between elected delegates and those they represented. The mechanisms they advocated included short terms and regular rotation of office, powerful local assemblies, binding mandates, and even the popular ratification of laws. The way in which the modern representative republic was organised did serve to create a narrow political élite, but that was a deliberate choice rather than the only option available.

Where the Federalists chose to build on the aristocratic tendency within republican thought, an alternative more democratic strand also existed

Portrait of James Harrington from The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington… ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Some republicans insisted that popular participation (rather than anti-monarchism) was the defining feature of republican government. William Walker argues that the ancient historian Sallust saw the establishment of the tribunate as more important to the Roman Republic than the displacement of the monarch by consuls (William Walker, 'Sallust and Skinner on Civil Liberty', European Journal of Political Theory, 5:3, 2006). Likewise, for James Harrington it was not the presence or absence of a single figurehead at the apex of the system that determined whether or not a regime was a commonwealth, but rather whether or not the people (via their popular assembly) had the final say over which legislation was passed and enacted (Rachel Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography, Oxford, 2019). Similarly, John P. McCormick has argued that Niccolò Machiavelli offered an anti-élitist critique of republican practice. In contrast to Francesco Guicciardini's "senatorial" model of politics, he favoured a "tribunate" model which embraced popular deliberation and employed extra-electoral methods to secure the accountability of those in power (John P. McCormick, 'Machiavelli Against Republicanism On the Cambridge School's "Guicciardinian Moments", Political Theory, 31:5, 2003, 615-43).

Both Machiavelli and Harrington were also advocates of the idea that extremes of wealth and poverty would pose a direct threat to the survival of the republic. Machiavelli famously argued that if the system was well-constituted the public should be rich, but the citizens poor (Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 475). This idea has a modern echo in the notion that we must choose between public luxury for all or private luxury for some. Other thinkers called for balance and moderation. Harrington claimed that: 'There is a mean in things: as exorbitant riches overthrow the balance of a commonwealth, so extreme poverty cannot hold it nor is by any means to be trusted with it.' (James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, 1992, p. 77). A similar view was endorsed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who insisted that in order to secure civil freedom: 'no citizen [can] be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.' (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, 1997, p. 78). The problem with wealth and luxury, Rousseau insisted, was that they exerted a corrupting influence, encouraging the citizens to put their own private interests above those of the republic.

The Leaders of the Knights of Labour with Terence Powderly in the centre. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

It is also evident that even after the emergence of representative republics, the language of republicanism could be used by marginalised or excluded groups against their oppressors. As Alex Gourevitch has demonstrated, this tactic was deployed to great effect by 'The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor', the first labour organisation in the United States of America to admit both white and black workers (Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth. Cambridge, 2015). Its leaders deliberately used republican arguments to criticise wage labour. George McNeill spoke of the 'inevitable and irresistible conflict' between the system of wage labour and republican governance (p. 100). The reason for this, as Terence Powderly explained, was that the wage labour system generated economic inequalities that were translated into political inequalities. Drawing directly on the understanding of liberty as non-dependence, and on arguments that had been used in the seventeenth century to insist that subjects were unfree even under a mild and gentle monarch, the Knights insisted that a worker would be a slave even if employed by 'the gentlest man in the world' 'if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will' (pp. 14-15). The solution, they argued, was to establish cooperatives so that workers could collectively own and manage the factories in which they worked. By applying the conception of liberty as non-dependence to the economic as well as the political sphere, these labour republicans succeeded in making republican arguments applicable not just to independent property owners, but to all workers - white and black, male and female.

While republicanism has taken an aristocratic form in both theory and practice in the past this was often a deliberate strategy rather than a necessity. The history of the republican tradition can provide arguments in favour of popular participation in government, warnings against excessive inequalities among citizens, and evidence of the importance of economic as well as political inequalities (and of the relationship between the two). Rather than dismissing republicanism as inherently aristocratic, then, it might be more profitable to draw on these resources to create a version of republicanism suited to the democratic states of the twenty-first century.