Jean-Jacques Rousseau

About this figure

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 to a family of French Protestant descent; his mother died days after his birth, and he was raised largely by his father, a watchmaker, until age ten. He left Geneva as a teenager, converted to Catholicism, and spent years in itinerant and often precarious circumstances before settling for a time near Chambéry with Françoise-Louise de Warens, who became both patron and lover. He eventually moved to Paris, where he contributed articles on music to Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and won public recognition in 1750 with a prize-winning essay arguing that the arts and sciences had corrupted rather than improved human morals.

His major political and educational works appeared within months of each other in 1762. The Social Contract opens with the famous line "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," and argues that legitimate political authority rests on a social contract expressing the "general will" of the people rather than on the authority of kings. Emile, or On Education, presented Rousseau's theory of natural, stage-appropriate child-rearing through the fictional account of a boy's upbringing, and included a lengthy section, "The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," that argued for a natural religion independent of church dogma. Both books were condemned by authorities in France and Geneva and publicly burned; Rousseau fled into exile, spending time in Switzerland, England, and various parts of France under an assumed name.

He later wrote The Confessions, an unusually candid autobiography acknowledging his failures alongside his convictions, including his decision to place his five children in a foundling hospital; it was published only after his death. His last years were marked by increasing isolation and suspicion of conspiracy against him. He died in 1778 at Ermenonville, outside Paris. His ideas about popular sovereignty and natural rights strongly influenced the leaders of the French Revolution, which began eleven years after his death.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.