Jean-Jacques Rutledge

Contributions

1. Fragments of Harrington translation translator
2. Idées sur l'espèce de gouvernement populaire qui pourrait convenir à un pays de l'étendue et de la population de la France: Essai présenté à la Convention nationale, par un citoyen translation author translator
3. Le Creuset, ouvrage politique et critique author publisher translator

Knows

• Nicolas de Bonneville bookseller freemason journalist linguist translator writer
• Camille Desmoulins freemason journalist jurist politician
• Imprimerie du Creuset publisher
• Théophile Mandar journalist military politician translator writer
• Jean-Paul Marat freemason journalist pamphleteer philosopher physician politician publisher revolutionary scientist translator writer
• Mayer & Compagnie bookseller publisher
• Jacques Necker entrepreneur politician writer

Member of

• Confédération des Amis de la Vérité (Cercle Social) political organisation
• Cordeliers Club political organisation

Notes

Also known as Chevalier Rutledge.

Secretary of the Cordeliers Club in 1791. Had a long-standing interest in the works of the English Commonwealth political thinker, James Harrington, whose ideas he had already explored in his newspaper, Calypso, ou les Babillards (1790), much of which was devoted to Harrington's life and works. Their value, as he told his readers, was that they provided advice as to how to establish stable and successful democratic government, “M. Mably is well placed to feel strongly, and to recognise, that the genius of the unfortunate Harrington was solidly founded with an intrepid hand, and offers the base on which all Philosophical Legislators, from whatever government, can solidly set down and raise the Edifice of the most equal and the most durable democratic constitution.”

In contrast to the approach he had adopted in Calypso, Rutledge did not openly acknowledge his use of Harrington's ideas in Le Creuset. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that they were the major source behind the political theory he presented there. Rutledge adopted Harrington's axiom that political power follows directly from property ownership, and employed it to analyze the origins of the French Revolution. In the fifth issue of Le Creuset, Rutledge embarked on a translation of the first six chapters of Harrington's 'A System of Politics' without acknowledging their source.

In the autumn of 1792, one of Rutledge's friends, Théodore Le Sueur, who was also a member of the Cordeliers Club, submitted a pamphlet to Jérôme Pétion, the former mayor of Paris and one of the deputies to the National Convention, entitled 'Idées sur l’espèce de gouvernement populaire qui pourrait convenir à un pays de l’étendue et de la population présumée de la France'. It took the form of a draft constitution for the new French Republic, and, as the Scandinavian scholar S. B. Liljegren was the first to observe when he came across a copy in the British Museum, it bore a striking resemblance to Harrington's 'Oceana' . The work opened, like 'Oceana', with an order to divide the citizens of the nation according to their location, age, and wealth. Moreover, detailed descriptions of two key Harringtonian features — the agrarian law and an electoral system based on the Venetian model — frame the French work.

For more information on this fascinating character, who was briefly imprisoned in 1790 on Necker's orders for agitating the Bakers' Guild, see Rachel Hammersley, 'French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers Club, 1790–1794' (Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2005).