When, in 1759, Voltaire published his Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme (Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759), Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecur was already planning to cultivate his garden hewn out of the Pennsylvania frontier. Like Voltaire’s naïve hero, Crèvecur had seen too much of the horrors of the civilized world and was more than ready to retire to his bucolic paradise, where for nineteen years he lived in peace and happiness until the civilized world intruded on him and his family with the outbreak of the American Revolution. The twelve essays that make up his Letters from an American Farmer are, ostensibly at least, the product of a hand unfamiliar with the pen. The opening letter presents the central theme quite clearly: The decadence of European civilization makes the American frontier one of the great hopes for a regeneration of humanity. Crèvecur wonders why people travel to Italy to “amuse themselves in viewing the ruins of temples . . . . half-ruined amphitheatres and the putrid fevers of the Campania must fill the mind with most melancholy reflections.” By contrast, Crèvecur delights in the humble rudiments of societies spreading everywhere in the colonies, people converting large forests into pleasing fields and creating thirteen provinces of easy subsistence and political harmony. He has his interlocutor say of him, “Your mind is . . . a Tabula rasa where spontaneous and strong impressions are delineated with felicity.” Similarly, he sees the American continent as a clean slate on which people can inscribe a new society and the good life. It may be said that Crèvecur is a Lockean gone romantic, but retaining just enough practical good sense to see that reality is not rosy. The book is the crude, occasionally eloquent, testimony of a man trying desperately to convince himself and his readers that it is possible to live the idealized life advocated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With a becoming modesty, appropriate to a man who learned English at age sixteen, Crèvecur begins with a confession of his literary inadequacy and the announcement of his decision simply to write down what he would say. His style, however, is not smoothly colloquial. Except in a few passages in which conviction generates enthusiasm, one senses the strain of the unlettered man writing with feeling but not cunning. Thus in these reasons, Enthusiastic as this description is, it is not as extravagant as it might seem. He describes Colonial America as a "a new continent; a modern society ", "united by the silken bands of mild government " where eveyone abides by the law " without dreading their power, because they -Americans- are equitable". To his mind, America is a place where "the rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe" (Letter III) In contrast, Europe seems to him a land "of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing" where its citizens "withered, and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war" as well as exposed to "nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments"(Letter III). He lightheartedly embraces the nickname "farmer of feelings" his admired English correspondant gives him (letter II) as he explains with emotional rhethoric how it feels living in America; a place where "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world"(letter III)
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