Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712 in the Calvinist republic of Geneva, the son of a watchmaker who fled the city after a duel when Jean-Jacques was ten and left him in the care of relatives. His mother had died a week after his birth. He had almost no formal education. At sixteen he walked out of Geneva on a whim, was taken in across the border in Savoy by the Baroness de Warens — a woman in her late twenties who became, in time, both patroness and lover — and spent the next decade in a self-directed program of reading that turned him into one of the most learned autodidacts of the eighteenth century.

He arrived in Paris in 1742 with a new system of musical notation that no one would adopt, a comic opera in his luggage, and an introduction to the circle around Denis Diderot. He contributed articles on music to the Encyclopédie and seemed, for a few years, on the way to becoming one more Enlightenment man of letters. In October 1749, walking from Paris to Vincennes to visit Diderot in prison, he stopped under a tree to read a newspaper announcement of an essay prize from the Academy of Dijon — Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals? — and, by his own later account, was overwhelmed by the conviction that the answer was no. The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750) won the prize and made him famous. The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755) extended the argument: civilization, property, and the comparative gaze of one's neighbors had corrupted a creature originally innocent.

The two books of 1762 were the great ones. The Social Contract opens with "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," and proposes that legitimate political authority can arise only from the general will of a community of equals — a formulation that fed straight into the French Revolution and that political theorists are still arguing about. Emile, or On Education is a treatise framed as a novel about the tutoring of a single boy from infancy to marriage, proposing that children should be allowed to develop according to their own nature rather than broken into the shape of adult society. Its section on natural religion — the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" — got the book condemned and burned by both Catholic France and Calvinist Geneva. Rousseau fled. He spent the rest of his life moving — to Switzerland, to England under Hume's protection until he convinced himself Hume was conspiring against him, back to France under an assumed name — increasingly persuaded that a coordinated international plot was working to destroy him.

The Confessions, written in the 1760s and published posthumously, are the founding document of modern autobiography. In them Rousseau, with extraordinary candor, recorded that he and his common-law wife Thérèse Levasseur had handed all five of their children, one after another, to the Paris foundling hospital — an institution from which most infants did not survive. He had written Emile during the same years. The hypocrisy is not subtle, and Rousseau, who knew it, used the Confessions to insist that the man who could do this was still, in his depths, good. The book invents the modern operation of confessing in order to be loved anyway.

He died in 1778 outside Paris. The Revolution that began eleven years later carried his coffin in triumph to the Panthéon.