How Philidor Helped Rousseau Judge Jean-Jacques: The narrative grammar of chess in Rousseau’s Dialogues

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, chess was the game at which any man of wit would endeavour to be proficient. Among all chess players, François André Danican Philidor was the most prominent figure in France and England. His explanations of various combinations were not only meant for specialists, they were clear enough to be understood and reproduced by any player. In the spirit of the egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment, the pawn, usually considered expendable, turned out to be essential to victory and could even bring down a king. Chess places kings and pawns on the same board. Common people, kings, aristocrats and clerics figuratively come together on the equalizing level of the game. The idea that the well-organized pawns could defeat any king perfectly fits the democratizing drift that pervaded the eighteenth-century French intellectual milieus. Considering the growing popularity of chess, it comes as no surprise that many philosophes took a liking to this form of mental exercise and spent both time and effort improving their skills. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, chess turned out to be much more than a source of pleasure: Chess became not only a means to prove his intellectual capacities but also influenced his writing and discourse. This article aims to show how Rousseau structured his Dialogues with a narrative grammar informed by the game of chess and adapted the formal structure of Philidor's treatise to stage the strategic demise of the conspiracy he blamed for disparaging his reputation and threatening the legacy of his work.