Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This article is about the philosopher. For the post-impressionist

painter, see Henri Rousseau. For other uses, see Rousseau
(disambiguation).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.

His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism^[1] and romanticism in fiction.^[2] Rousseau's autobiographical writings — his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker — exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his On the Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought and make a strong^{[citation needed]} case for democratic government and social empowerment.

Rousseau was a successful composer of music, besides. He wrote seven
operas as well as music in other forms, and he made contributions to
music as a theorist.

During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. He was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.
Biography






Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Rousseau was proud that his family, of the moyen order (or middle-class), had voting rights in the city. Throughout his life, he described himself as a citizen of Geneva.^{[citation needed]}

In theory, Geneva was governed democratically by its male voting
citizens, a minority of the population. In fact, the city was ruled by a
secretive executive committee, called the "Little Council", which was made up of 25 members of its wealthiest families. In 1707, a patriot called Pierre Fatio
protested at this situation, and the Little Council had him shot.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's father Isaac was not in the city at this time,
but Jean-Jacques's grandfather supported Fatio and was penalized for it.^[3]









Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau, was a watchmaker who,
notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of
music. "A Genevan watchmaker," Rousseau wrote, "is a man who can be
introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about
watches."^[4]

Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, the daughter of a Calvinist preacher, died of puerperal fever
nine days after his birth. He and his older brother François were
brought up by their father and a paternal aunt, also named Suzanne.

Rousseau had no recollection of learning to read, but he remembered
how when he was 5 or 6 his father encouraged his love of reading:

“	Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of romances [i.e., adventure stories], which had been my mother's. My father's design was only to improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately read whole nights together and could not bear to give over until at the conclusion of a volume. Sometimes, in the morning, on hearing the swallows at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry, "Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art."	”
	— Confessions, Book 1

Not long afterward, Rousseau abandoned his taste for escapist stories in favor of the antiquity of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which he would read to his father while he made watches.

When Rousseau was 10, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal
quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught
trespassing. To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to
Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him.
He remarried, and from that point Jean-Jacques saw little of him.^[5]
Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along
with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a
Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva. Here the boys picked up
the elements of mathematics and drawing. Rousseau, who was always deeply
moved by religious services, for a time even dreamed of becoming a
Protestant minister.








Virtually, all our information about Rousseau's youth has come from his posthumously published Confessions,
in which the chronology is somewhat confused, though recent scholars
have combed the archives for confirming evidence to fill in the blanks.
At age 13, Rousseau was apprenticed first to a notary
and then to an engraver who beat him. At 15, he ran away from Geneva
(on 14 March 1728) after returning to the city and finding the city
gates locked due to the curfew. In adjoining Savoy he took shelter with a Roman Catholic priest, who introduced him to Françoise-Louise de Warens,
age 29. She was a noblewoman of Protestant background who was separated
from her husband. As professional lay proselytizer, she was paid by the
King of Piedmont to help bring Protestants to Catholicism. They sent the boy to Turin,
the capital of Savoy (which included Piedmont, in what is now Italy),
to complete his conversion. This resulted in his having to give up his
Genevan citizenship, although he would later revert to Calvinism in
order to regain it.

In converting to Catholicism, both De Warens and Rousseau were likely reacting to the severity of Calvinism's insistence on the total depravity
of man. Leo Damrosch writes, "an eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy
still required believers to declare ‘that we are miserable sinners, born
in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing
good'."^[6] De Warens, a deist by inclination, was attracted to Catholicism's doctrine of forgiveness of sins.

[edit] Independence


Finding himself on his own, since his father and uncle had more or
less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau supported himself for a time as a
servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy (Piedmont and Savoy)
and France. During this time, he lived on and off with De Warens, whom
he idolized and called his "maman". Flattered by his devotion, De
Warens tried to get him started in a profession, and arranged formal
music lessons for him. At one point, he briefly attended a seminary with
the idea of becoming a priest. When Rousseau reached 20, De Warens took
him as her lover, while intimate also with the steward of her house.
The sexual aspect of their relationship (in fact a ménage à trois)
confused Rousseau and made him uncomfortable, but he always considered
De Warens the greatest love of his life. A rather profligate spender,
she had a large library and loved to entertain and listen to music. She
and her circle, comprising educated members of the Catholic clergy,
introduced Rousseau to the world of letters and ideas. Rousseau had been
an indifferent student, but during his 20s, which were marked by long
bouts of hypochondria,
he applied himself in earnest to the study of philosophy, mathematics,
and music. At 25, he came into a small inheritance from his mother and
used a portion of it to repay De Warens for her financial support of
him. At 27, he took a job as a tutor in Lyon.

In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris in order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation he believed would make his fortune. His system, intended to be compatible with typography, is based on a single line, displaying numbers representing intervals
between notes and dots and commas indicating rhythmic values. Believing
the system was impractical, the Academy rejected it, though they
praised his mastery of the subject, and urged him to try again.








From 1743 to 1744, Rousseau had an honorable but ill-paying post as a
secretary to the Comte de Montaigue, the French ambassador to Venice. This awoke in him a lifelong love for Italian music, particularly opera:

I had brought with me from Paris the prejudice of that city against
Italian music; but I had also received from nature a sensibility and
niceness of distinction which prejudice cannot withstand. I soon
contracted that passion for Italian music with which it inspires all
those who are capable of feeling its excellence. In listening to
barcaroles, I found I had not yet known what singing was... —Confessions

Rousseau's employer routinely received his stipend as much as a year late and paid his staff irregularly.^[7] After 11 months, Rousseau quit, taking from the experience a profound distrust of government bureaucracy.

Returning to Paris, the penniless Rousseau befriended and became the lover of Thérèse Levasseur,
a seamstress who was the sole support of her termagant mother and
numerous ne'er-do-well siblings. At first, they did not live together,
though later Rousseau took Thérèse and her mother in to live with him as
his servants, and himself assumed the burden of supporting her large
family. According to his Confessions, before she moved in with
him, Thérèse bore him a son and as many as four other children (there is
no independent verification for this number^[8]).
Rousseau wrote that he persuaded Thérèse to give each of the newborns
up to a foundling hospital, for the sake of her "honor". "Her mother,
who feared the inconvenience of a brat, came to my aid, and she
[Thérèse] allowed herself to be overcome" (Confessions). In his
letter to Madame de Francueil in 1751, he first pretended that he wasn't
rich enough to raise his children but in book IX of the confessions, he
gave the true reasons of his choice : " I trembled at the thought of
intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated.
The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less."

Ten years later, Rousseau made inquiries about the fate of his son,
but no record could be found. When Rousseau subsequently became
celebrated as a theorist of education and child-rearing, his abandonment
of his children was used by his critics, including Voltaire and Edmund Burke, as the basis for ad hominem
attacks. In an irony of fate, Rousseau's later injunction to women to
breastfeed their own babies (as had previously been recommended by the
French natural scientist Buffon), probably saved the lives of thousands of infants.

While in Paris, Rousseau became a close friend of French philosopher Diderot and, beginning with some articles on music in 1749,^[9] contributed numerous articles to Diderot and D'Alembert's great Encyclopédie, the most famous of which was an article on political economy written in 1755.

Rousseau's ideas were the result of an almost obsessive dialogue with
writers of the past, filtered in many cases through conversations with
Diderot. His genius lay in his strikingly original way of putting things
rather than in the originality, per se, of his thinking. In 1749, Rousseau was paying daily visits to Diderot, who had been thrown into the fortress of Vincennes under a lettre de cachet for opinions in his "Lettre sur les aveugles," that hinted at materialism, a belief in atoms, and natural selection. Rousseau had read about an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon to be published in the Mercure de France
on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had
been morally beneficial. He wrote that while walking to Vincennes (about
three miles from Paris), he had a revelation that the arts and sciences
were responsible for the moral degeneration of mankind, who were
basically good by nature. According to Diderot, writing much later,
Rousseau had originally intended to answer this in the conventional way,
but his discussions with Diderot convinced him to propose the
paradoxical negative answer that catapulted him into the public eye.
Rousseau's 1750 "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences" was awarded the first prize and gained him significant fame.

Rousseau continued his interest in music. He wrote both the words and music of his opera Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), which was performed for King Louis XV
in 1752. The king was so pleased by the work that he offered Rousseau a
lifelong pension. To the exasperation of his friends, Rousseau turned
down the great honor, bringing him notoriety as "the man who had refused
a king's pension." He also turned down several other advantageous
offers, sometimes with a brusqueness bordering on truculence that gave
offense and caused him problems. The same year, the visit of a troupe of
Italian musicians to Paris, and their performance of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona, prompted the Querelle des Bouffons,
which pitted protagonists of French music against supporters of the
Italian style. Rousseau as noted above, was an enthusiastic supporter of
the Italians against Jean-Philippe Rameau and others, making an important contribution with his Letter on French Music.

On returning to Geneva in 1754, Rousseau reconverted to Calvinism and regained his official Genevan citizenship. In 1755, Rousseau completed his second major work, the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (the Discourse on Inequality), which elaborated on the arguments of the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

He also pursued an unconsummated romantic attachment with the 25-year-old Sophie d'Houdetot, which partly inspired his epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse
(also based on memories of his idyllic youthful relationship with Mme
de Warens). Sophie was the cousin and houseguest of Rousseau's patroness
and landlady Madame d'Epinay,
whom he treated rather highhandedly. He resented being at Mme
d'Epinay's beck and call and detested the insincere conversation and
shallow atheism of the Encyclopedistes whom he met at her table.
Wounded feelings gave rise to a bitter three-way quarrel between
Rousseau and Madame d'Epinay; her lover, the philologist Grimm;
and their mutual friend, Diderot, who took their side against Rousseau.
Diderot later described Rousseau as being, "false, vain as Satan,
ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and wicked ... He sucked ideas from me,
used them himself, and then affected to despise me".^[10]








Rousseau's break with the Encyclopedistes coincided with the
composition of his three major works, in all of which he emphasized his
fervent belief in a spiritual origin of man's soul and the universe, in
contradistinction to the materialism of Diderot, La Mettrie, and d'Holbach. During this period Rousseau enjoyed the support and patronage of the Duc de Luxembourg, and the Prince de Conti,
two of the richest and most powerful nobles in France. These men truly
liked Rousseau and enjoyed his ability to converse on any subject, but
they also used him as a way of getting back at Louis XV and the political faction surrounding his mistress, Mme de Pompadour. Even with them, however, Rousseau went too far, courting rejection when he criticized the practice of tax farming, in which some of them engaged.^[11]

Rousseau's 800-page novel of sentiment, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse,
was published in 1761 to immense success. The book's rhapsodic
descriptions of the natural beauty of the Swiss countryside struck a
chord in the public and may have helped spark the subsequent nineteenth
century craze for Alpine scenery. In 1762, Rousseau published Du Contrat Social, Principes du droit politique (in English, literally Of the Social Contract, Principles of Political Right) in April. Even his friend Antoine-Jacques Roustan felt impelled to write a polite rebuttal of the chapter on Civil Religion in the Social Contract, which implied that the concept of a Christian Republic
was paradoxical since Christianity taught submission rather than
participation in public affairs. Rousseau even helped Roustan find a
publisher for the rebuttal.^[12]

Rousseau published Emile: or, On Education in May. The final section of Émile,
"The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," was intended to be a
defense of religious belief. Rousseau's choice of a Catholic vicar of
humble peasant background (plausibly based on a kindly prelate he had
met as a teenager) as a spokesman for the defense of religion was in
itself a daring innovation for the time. The vicar's creed was that of Socinianism (or Unitarianism as it is called today). Because it rejected original sin and divine Revelation,
both Protestant and Catholic authorities took offense. Moreover,
Rousseau advocated the opinion that, insofar as they lead people to
virtue, all religions are equally worthy, and that people should
therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up.
This religious indifferentism
caused Rousseau and his books to be banned from France and Geneva. He
was condemned from the pulpit by the Archbishop of Paris, his books were
burned, and warrants were issued for his arrest.^[13] Former friends such as Jacob Vernes of Geneva could not accept his views, and wrote violent rebuttals.^[14]

A sympathetic observer, British philosopher David Hume,
"professed no surprise when he learned that Rousseau's books were
banned in Geneva and elsewhere." Rousseau, he wrote, "has not had the
precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and, as he scorns to
dissemble his contempt for established opinions, he could not wonder
that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press
is not so secured in any country ... as not to render such an open
attack on popular prejudice somewhat dangerous.'"^[15]
Rousseau, who thought he had been defending religion, was crushed.
Forced to flee arrest he made his way, with the help of the Duc of
Luxembourg and Prince de Conti, to Neuchâtel, a Canton of the Swiss Confederation that was a protectorate of the Prussian
crown. His powerful protectors discreetly assisted him in his flight
and they helped to get his banned books (published in Holland by Marc-Michel Rey) distributed in France disguised as other works using false covers and title pages. In the town of Môtiers, he sought and found protection under Lord Keith, who was the local representative of the free-thinking Frederick the Great of Prussia. While in Môtiers, Rousseau wrote the Constitutional Project for Corsica (Projet de Constitution pour la Corse, 1765).

After his house in Môtiers was stoned on the night of 6 September
1765, Rousseau took refuge in Great Britain with Hume, who found
lodgings for him at a friend's country estate in Wootton
in Staffordshire. Neither Thérèse nor Rousseau was able to learn
English or make friends. Isolated, Rousseau, never emotionally very
stable, suffered a serious decline in his mental health and began to
experience paranoid fantasies about plots against him involving Hume and
others. “He is plainly mad, after having long been maddish”, Hume wrote
to a friend.^[16]
Rousseau's letter to Hume, in which he articulates the perceived
misconduct, sparked an exchange which was published in Paris and
received with great interest at the time.








Although officially barred from entering France before 1770, Rousseau
returned in 1767 under a false name. In 1768 he went through a marriage
of sorts to Thérèse (marriages between Catholics and Protestants were
illegal), whom he had always hitherto referred to as his "housekeeper".
Though she was illiterate, she had become a remarkably good cook, a
hobby her husband shared. In 1770 they were allowed to return to Paris.
As a condition of his return he was not allowed to publish any books,
but after completing his Confessions, Rousseau began private
readings in 1771. At the request of Madame d'Epinay, who was anxious to
protect her privacy, however, the police ordered him to stop, and the Confessions was only partially published in 1782, four years after his death. All his subsequent works were to appear posthumously.








In 1772, Rousseau was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, which was to be his last major political work. In 1776, he completed Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and began work on the Reveries of the Solitary Walker. In order to support himself, he returned to copying music, spending his leisure time in the study of botany.

Although a celebrity, Rousseau's mental health did not permit him to
enjoy his fame. His final years were largely spent in deliberate
withdrawal. However, he did respond favorably to an approach from the
composer Gluck, whom he met in 1774. Gluck admired Rousseau as "a pioneer of the expressive natural style" in music.^[17] By One of Rousseau's last pieces of writing was a critical yet enthusiastic analysis of Gluck's opera Alceste. While taking a morning walk on the estate of the marquis René Louis de Girardin at Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris), Rousseau suffered a hemorrhage and died, aged 66.


Île Rousseau, Geneva





Rousseau was initially buried at Ermenonville on the Ile des
Peupliers, which became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers.
Sixteen years after his death, his remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1794, where they are located directly across from those of his contemporary, Voltaire. His tomb, in the shape of a rustic temple, on which, in bas relief
an arm reaches out, bearing the torch of liberty, evokes Rousseau's
deep love of nature and of classical antiquity. In 1834, the Genevan
government somewhat reluctantly erected a statue in his honor on the
tiny Île Rousseau in Lake Geneva. Today he is proudly claimed as their most celebrated native son. In 2002, the Espace