Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean-Jacques Rousseau came into the world barely breathing. "I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me," he later wrote of his arrival in the Republic of Geneva on the 28th of June 1712. Nine days later his mother was dead of fever, a loss he would call "the first of my misfortunes." From that frail start grew one of the most consequential minds of the European Enlightenment. He was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer who died on the 2nd of July 1778. His arguments about private property, the general will, and the education of children rippled outward into the French Revolution and modern political thought. Yet the same man who taught Europe to be tender toward children gave away his own to a foundling hospital. How did a runaway engraver's apprentice become the author of The Social Contract? Why did a king's pension, monasteries, and the protection of Frederick the Great all fail to give him peace? And why did the friendship of David Hume end in a public quarrel that echoed from Geneva to St. Petersburg?

• 2. A Watchmaker's Son

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  Geneva in Rousseau's youth was a Huguenot republic, a Protestant city-state and the seat of Calvinism since 1536. In theory it was governed by its male voting citizens. In practice a handful of wealthy families filled the Council of Two Hundred and delegated power to a 25-member Small Council. When the democratic reformer Pierre Fatio protested in 1707 that "A sovereign that never performs an act of sovereignty is an imaginary being," the Small Council had him shot. Rousseau's grandfather had supported Fatio and was penalized for it.

  Isaac Rousseau, the philosopher's father, followed his family into the watchmaking trade and also taught dance for a while. He was an artisan, but well-educated and a lover of music. "A Genevan watchmaker is a man who can be introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about watches," his son later wrote. Rousseau took pride in belonging to the moyen order, the middle class with voting rights, and through his life he signed his books "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva."

  Reading bound father and son together. Rousseau had no memory of learning to read, but he recalled the nights after supper when the two of them devoured a collection of romances left by his mother, sometimes through until dawn. "Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art," his father would cry on hearing the swallows at the window. Later they turned to the classics, and the boy's favorite became Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which formed in him, he said, "the free and republican spirit."

• 3. Flight And Conversion

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  On the 14th of March 1728, at fifteen, Rousseau returned to Geneva to find the city gates locked for curfew, and he simply ran away. In neighboring Savoy a Roman Catholic priest took him in and introduced him to Francoise-Louise de Warens, a separated noblewoman of twenty-nine paid by the King of Piedmont to bring Protestants to Catholicism. She sent the boy to Turin to complete his conversion, which cost him his Genevan citizenship.

  De Warens became the great figure of his early life. "Madame de Warens took him into her household and mothered him; he called her 'maman' and she called him 'petit,'" noted Maurice Cranston. Disowned by father and uncle, the teenage Rousseau drifted through Italy and France as a servant, secretary, and tutor, among his pupils Stephanie Louise de Bourbon-Conti. He lived on and off with de Warens, who arranged music lessons and once steered him briefly toward a seminary.

  When Rousseau reached twenty, de Warens took him as her lover while also intimate with the steward of her house. The arrangement confused and unsettled him, yet he always considered her the greatest love of his life. Her large library and her circle of educated Catholic clergy opened to him the world of letters and ideas. In his twenties, marked by long bouts of hypochondria, he applied himself in earnest to philosophy, mathematics, and music, and at twenty-five used part of a small inheritance from his mother to repay her support.

• 4. Paris And The Foundling Hospital

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  In 1742 Rousseau arrived in Paris carrying a new system of numbered musical notation that he believed would make his fortune. Built on a single line with numbers for intervals and dots and commas for rhythm, it was rejected by the Academie des Sciences as impractical, though they praised his mastery. That same year he befriended Denis Diderot. From 1743 to 1744 he served as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, a post that gave him a lifelong love of Italian music. "In listening to barcaroles, I found I had not yet known what singing was," he wrote. After eleven months of being paid late and irregularly, he quit with a deep distrust of government bureaucracy.

  Back in Paris, the penniless Rousseau became the lover of Therese Levasseur, a seamstress supporting her mother and many siblings. According to his Confessions, Therese bore him a son and as many as four other children, though there is no independent verification of the number. Rousseau persuaded her to give each newborn to a foundling hospital. "Her mother, who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid," he wrote. In a letter of 1751 he pretended he was too poor to raise them, but in the Confessions he gave a different reason: "The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less" than entrusting them to her family. Ten years later he searched for his son and found no record. When he became famous as a theorist of child-rearing, Voltaire and Edmund Burke used the abandonment against him.

• 5. The Walk To Vincennes

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  In 1749 Rousseau was paying daily visits to Diderot, imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes under a lettre de cachet. On the road there, about three miles from Paris, he read of an essay competition from the Academie de Dijon asking whether the arts and sciences had been morally beneficial. The question struck him like lightning. "The moment I read this announcement I saw another universe and became a different man," he later wrote. He answered that progress in the arts and sciences had only degraded a humanity good by nature, and his 1750 Discourse on the Arts and Sciences won first prize and significant fame.

  Music remained his passion alongside philosophy. He wrote both words and music for his opera Le devin du village, performed for King Louis XV in 1752, and the king was so pleased he offered a lifelong pension. Rousseau, to the exasperation of his friends, refused it, gaining notoriety as "the man who had refused a king's pension." The same year, a visiting Italian troupe's performance of Pergolesi's La serva padrona set off the Querelle des Bouffons, the quarrel between French and Italian music, in which Rousseau championed the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau in his Letter on French Music.

  Returning to Geneva in 1754, Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism and regained his citizenship. The next year he completed the Discourse on Inequality, which argued that private property is the source of inequality. "The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society," he wrote. He also pursued an unconsummated attachment to the twenty-five-year-old Sophie d'Houdetot, which helped inspire his novel Julie. That entanglement fed a bitter three-way quarrel with Madame d'Epinay, the journalist Grimm, and Diderot, who sided against him. Diderot called him "false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked."

• 6. Three Books And A Fugitive Life

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  Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise appeared in 1761, an 800-page novel of sentiment published to immense success. Its rhapsodic descriptions of the Swiss countryside struck a chord and may have helped spark the nineteenth-century craze for Alpine scenery. In April 1762 came Du Contrat Social, which outlined the basis for a legitimate political order, and in May, Emile, or On Education. A section of Emile, "The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," defended religious belief through a humble Catholic vicar, but because it rejected original sin and divine revelation, both Protestant and Catholic authorities took offense. His view that all religions are equally worthy as paths to virtue was read as indifferentism, and his books were banned from France and Geneva, condemned by the Archbishop of Paris, burned, and met with warrants for his arrest.

  Fleeing, Rousseau found that Switzerland too condemned his work. Voltaire offered to take him in at Ferney: "He must come! I shall receive him with open arms." Instead Rousseau settled at Motiers, in the principality of Neuchatel ruled by Frederick the Great. On the 11th of July 1762 he wrote to Frederick seeking protection while admitting he had criticized him and would again. Frederick, still in the Seven Years' War, told the local governor Marischal Keith, "We must succor this poor unfortunate. His only offense is to have strange opinions which he thinks are good ones," and sent a hundred crowns.

  The peace did not last. The Neuchatel Consistory summoned him for blasphemy, and his own pastor, Frederic-Guillaume de Montmollin, denounced him as an Antichrist. Inflamed parishioners pelted him with stones on his walks. Around midnight of the 6th to the 7th of September 1765, stones shattered his windows, and the official Martinet exclaimed, "My God, it's a quarry!" Rousseau fled to the tiny Ile de St.-Pierre, but the Senate of Bern ordered him out within twenty-four hours. He left on the 29th of October 1765 for Strasbourg, and then accepted Hume's invitation to England.

• 7. The Quarrel With Hume

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  On the 13th of January 1766 Rousseau arrived in London with Hume, the merchant De Luze, and his dog Sultan. David Garrick arranged a box at the Drury Lane Theatre on a night the King and Queen attended, and Rousseau grew so excited he nearly fell out of it. "Sir, you have made me shed tears at your tragedy, and smile at your comedy, though I scarce understood a word of your language," he told Garrick. Hume judged him "gentle, modest, affectionate, disinterested, of extreme sensitivity."

  The friendship soured fast. On the 3rd of April 1766 a newspaper printed a hoax letter, written by Horace Walpole and falsely attributed to Frederick the Great, mocking Rousseau, and Hume was believed to have had a hand in its creation. Critical articles followed, some containing details Rousseau thought only Hume could know. He came to believe a conspiracy was being mounted against him, fed by Voltaire's anonymous attacks and by suspicion that Hume was tampering with his mail. After exchanging letters, including an eighteen-page complaint from Rousseau, Hume concluded his friend was losing his mental balance.

  The dispute went public in October 1766, when Hume's version was translated and printed in France, and the next month in England. "The quarrel resounded in Geneva, Amsterdam, Berlin, and St. Petersburg," with pamphlets multiplying and George III following "with intense curiosity." Diderot took a charitable view: "I knew these two philosophers well. I could write a play about them that would make you weep, and it would excuse them both." On the 22nd of May 1767 Rousseau and Therese sailed from Dover back to Calais, and he and Hume never met again.

• 8. Last Walks And The Pantheon

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  On the 24th of October 1776, walking a narrow Paris street, Rousseau was knocked down by a galloping Great Dane flanking a nobleman's carriage. He seems to have suffered a concussion and neurological damage, and his friend Corancez described symptoms suggesting epileptic seizures afterward. By then he had married Therese under his alias "Renou" in a faux civil ceremony in Bourgoin on the 30th of August 1768, taken up botany, and finished the Confessions, the work he called the first modern autobiography. Between December 1770 and May 1771 he gave group readings, one lasting seventeen hours, until Madame d'Epinay asked the police to stop them.

  The last political work came in 1772, the Considerations on the Government of Poland, written when he was invited to propose a constitution for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In Paris he supported himself by copying music and wrote his Letters on the Elements of Botany for Mme Delessert's daughters, work Goethe later praised: "It's a true pedagogical model, and it complements Emile." In 1777 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came to meet him, and in 1777 to 1778 he composed Reveries of a Solitary Walker, left unfinished at his death.

  In the spring of 1778 the Marquis Girardin invited him to a cottage at Ermenonville, where he arrived on the 20th of May. On the 1st of July, when a visitor said "men are wicked," Rousseau answered, "men are wicked, yes, but man is good," and that evening played the Willow Song from Othello on the piano. The next morning he died of cerebral bleeding from an apoplectic stroke. He was buried on the 4th of July 1778 on the Ile des Peupliers, a wooded island that became a place of pilgrimage. On the 11th of October 1794 his remains were moved to the Pantheon, placed near those of Voltaire.