Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva on 28 June 1712, the son of a watchmaker; his mother died a few days after his birth. Brought up by his father on Plutarch and novels, then apprenticed to an engraver, he left the city at fifteen and wandered for years through Savoy, Piedmont and France. At Annecy and Chambéry he lived with Madame de Warens, who became his protector, and there, largely self-taught, he read philosophy, history and the sciences and studied music.

In 1742 he went to Paris with a new system of musical notation. He befriended Diderot, wrote the articles on music for the Encyclopédie and, in 1750, won the prize of the Academy of Dijon with his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, which argued that the progress of civilization had corrupted morals. Fame came at once. His opera The Village Soothsayer was performed before the king in 1752, and in 1755 his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men traced the passage from the state of nature to a society founded on property and domination.

Withdrawing from Paris, he wrote at Montmorency the works that made him the most widely read author of his age: the Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre (1758), the novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), and in 1762 both The Social Contract and Émile, or On Education. The two books of 1762 were condemned in Paris and burned in Geneva, and Rousseau, threatened with arrest, began years of flight — to Yverdon, to Môtiers in the principality of Neuchâtel, to the island of Saint-Pierre, and to England at the invitation of David Hume.

Back in France from 1767, he lived poorly in Paris by copying music and wrote the works of his last years: the Confessions, the dialogues Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as well as Considerations on the Government of Poland. He died at Ermenonville, near Paris, on 2 July 1778. In 1794 the French Republic transferred his remains to the Panthéon.

Few writers have changed so many fields at once. Rousseau's political thought inspired the revolutions of the following generation and the modern idea of popular sovereignty; his Émile transformed thinking about childhood and education; his Confessions created the modern autobiography; and his sense of nature and inner feeling opened the way to Romanticism. Kant kept his portrait above his desk, and Hegel, Marx and countless others measured their thought against his.