At the end of his Lettre sur la musique française, published in 1753, Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared:

Why on earth was a Frenchman like Rousseau (French-Swiss to be precise) telling the French that they were unmusical? Louis XIV had devoted his long life to establishing the might and glory of France, and French manners in dress and diplomacy were emulated everywhere. But while everyone admired Versailles, not everyone liked the music played there, with its quaint old-fashioned viols and its fussily ornamental style. For all his genius Rameau has never been to everyone's liking. In the early eighteenth century cultivated Frenchmen were painfully aware of the supremacy of Italian music then dominant right across Europe from Madrid to St. Petersburg, and they examined the reasons for their own apparent inferiority in countless pamphlets and tracts, of which Rousseau's Lettre is the most famous.