Concept
Julie or the New Heloise (Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse), originally entitled Lettres de Deux Amans, Habitans d'une petite Ville au pied des Alpes ("Letters from two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps"), is an epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published in 1761 by Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam. The novel's subtitle points to the history of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation. 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. 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. Julie was perhaps the biggest selling novel of the eighteenth century. 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.
