Reading Order
La Nouvelle HéloïseJulie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse Reading Order
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most influential French novel of the eighteenth century and one of the founding texts of European Romanticism — an epistolary novel about the love between Julie d'Étange, a Swiss noblewoman, and Saint-Preux, her tutor of lower social standing, who must renounce their love for the duties of family and virtue. The novel was the greatest bestseller of eighteenth-century France, going through more than seventy editions before 1800; it was read with an intensity that readers reported as physically overwhelming — Rousseau received letters from readers who described weeping, fainting, and feeling their lives transformed. La Nouvelle Héloïse established several templates that would define the Romantic novel for a century: the letter form as a vehicle for emotional intensity; the natural landscape (specifically the landscape around the Lake of Geneva and the vineyards of the Vaud canton) as an emotional and moral agent; the love that must be renounced for a higher duty; and the virtuous community (the extended household of Clarens) as a model of the good social life. The direct source of its title and frame is the historical love affair between the medieval philosopher Peter Abélard and his student Héloïse d'Argenteuil — Rousseau presents Julie and Saint-Preux as a modern Héloïse and Abélard, with the same impossible social gap and the same forced renunciation.
Where to start
La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) — the novel is very long (six parts, about 800 pages) and the longest of Rousseau's works; an abridged edition is available but the full text is essential for the Clarens section (Part Four) and the lake scene (Part Six). The GF-Flammarion edition in two volumes is the standard French text; the Philip Stewart translation for Dartmouth College Press is the most complete English version. Start with the first two parts (the love letters) and do not stop before Part Four (the establishment of the virtuous household at Clarens).
Complete La Nouvelle Héloïse Book List
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Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
Jean-Jacques Rousseau·1761·Published January 1761 in Paris. The subtitle alludes to Héloïse d'Argenteuil, the twelfth-century nun whose love letters to Peter Abélard were rediscovered in the sixteenth century and remained one of the most famous medieval love stories in European culture.
La Nouvelle Héloïse — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the relationship between La Nouvelle Héloïse and Romanticism?
La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) is usually identified as one of the founding texts of European Romanticism, despite predating the Romantic period by about forty years. Its contributions to Romanticism are several: it established the emotional intensity of the letter form as a vehicle for the analysis of personal feeling in a way that influenced Goethe's Werther (1774), which directly inherits the epistolary form and the theme of impossible love; it introduced the Swiss Alpine landscape as an emotional agent in ways that would define Alpine Romanticism from Rousseau to Byron and Shelley; it established the conflict between authentic feeling and social obligation (the love of Julie and Saint-Preux, separated by class) as the central Romantic plot; and it imagined the virtuous small community (the Clarens household) as the alternative to both the corruption of Paris society and the isolation of the individual romantic hero. The novel also established the Rousseauist aesthetic of nature as the source of authentic feeling and civilization as its corruption — the premise that would underlie nearly all of French and English Romantic literature. Chateaubriand, who called Rousseau his 'master,' begins his Romantic landscapes directly from La Nouvelle Héloïse; Sand's Berry pastoral world is a democratic version of the same Rousseauist idyll; and Hugo's argument for the authenticity of the popular against the aristocratic is descended from Rousseau's argument for the tutor's love against the baron's social privilege.
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