Julie; or, The New Heloise

The plot, entirely related through letters, turns on the spontaneous love between Julie d'Étanges, an aristocratic Swiss maiden living in Vevey on Lac Léman, and her tutor, a commoner who has no name but is given the pseudo-saint's name of St. Preux by Julie and her principal confidente, her cousin Claire. Although Rousseau wrote the work as a novel, a philosophical theory about virtue and authenticity permeates it. A common interpretation is that Rousseau valued the ethics of authenticity over rational moral principles, as he illustrates the principle that one should do what is imposed upon oneself by society only insofar as it would seem congruent with one's inner principles and feelings, being constituent of one's core identity.

Arthur Schopenhauer cited Julie as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Don Quixote.[1] Julie's eventual husband, the virtuous atheist Baron de Wolmar, is assumed to be based largely on Baron d'Holbach, given his friendship and generous sponsorship of Rousseau.[2]

Julie was perhaps the biggest selling novel of the eighteenth century.[3] Some readers were so overcome that they wrote to Rousseau in droves, creating the first celebrity author. One reader claimed that the novel nearly drove him mad from excess of feeling while another claimed that the violent sobbing he underwent cured his cold. Reader after reader describes their "tears", "sighs", "torments" and "ecstasies" to Rousseau.[4] Diane de Polignac wrote to Marie Madeleine de Brémond d’Ars after finishing the novel:

I dare not tell you the effect it had on me; no, I was past weeping; an intense pain took possession of me, my heart seized up; the dying Julie was no longer someone unknown to me, I became her sister, her friend, her Claire; I was so convulsed that had I not put the book down I would have been as overcome as all those who attended that virtuous woman in her last moments.[5]

Le premier mouvement de la Nature (the first movement of Nature)

Some readers simply could not accept that the book was fiction. Madame Duverger wrote to Rousseau asking:

Many persons who have read your book, to whom I have spoken, have assured me that you thought it all up. This I cannot believe. Could a false reading n sensation comparable to what I felt in reading it? Once more, Monsieur, did Julie exist? Is St Preux still alive? In what part of this earth does he live? Did Claire, that tender Claire, follow her other half? Are M. de Wolmar, Mylord Edward, all those persons, only imaginary, as some try to persuade me? What is then the world where we live, where virtue is but an ideaz? Happy mortal, you alone perhaps know and practice it.[6]

Others identified less with the individual characters and more with the nature of their struggles, seeing in Julie a story of temptation, sin and redemption that resembled their own lives.

Rousseau liked to tell about how one lady ordered her carriage to take her to the Opera, and then picked up Julie only to continue reading it until the next morning. So many women wrote to him offering their love that he speculated there was not a single high society woman with whom he would not have succeeded if he wanted to.[7]

• Public opinion

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse.

• Original text in French from Rousseau online
• English translation by William Kenrick of all volumes (namely: vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3, and vol. 4) are available via Internet Archive