Rousseau - Biography

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in the independent Calvinist city-state of Geneva in 1712.  Rousseau’s mother died nine days after his birth and Rousseau was raised and educated by his father until the age of ten.  Isaac Rousseau was one of the small minority of Geneva’s residents who enjoyed the rank of citizen of Geneva, a status which Jean-Jacques was to inherit.  On his father’s exile from the city to avoid arrest, Jean-Jacques was put in the care of a pastor and subsequently apprenticed to an engraver.

Rousseau left Geneva at the age of sixteen and came under the influence of a Roman Catholic convert noblewoman, Francoise-Louise de la Tour, Baronne de Warens.  She arranged for Rousseau to travel to Turin, where he converted to Roman Catholicism in April 1728.  Rousseau spent some time working as a domestic servant in a noble household in Turin.

In 1731 he returned to Mme de Warens at Chambéry and later briefly became her lover and household manager.  Rousseau remained with Mme de Warens through the rest of the 1730s, moving to Lyon in 1740 to take a position as a tutor.  This appointment brought him within the orbit of both Condillac and d’Alembert and was his first contact with major figures of the French Enlightenment.  In 1742 he traveled to Paris where he met Denis Diderot and moved there in 1744 where he continued to work mainly on music and began to write contributions to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.

In 1745 Rousseau met Thérèse Levasseur, a barely literate laundry-maid who became his lover and, later, his wife.  According to Rousseau’s own account, Thérèse bore him five children, all of whom were deposited at the foundling hospital shortly after birth.  Rousseau’s abandonment of his children was later to be used against him by Voltaire.

In 1749, while walking to Vincennes to visit the briefly-imprisoned Diderot, Rousseau saw a newspaper announcement of an essay competition organized by the Academy of Dijon.  The Academy sought submissions on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had improved or corrupted public morals.

Rousseau later claimed that he experienced an epiphany which included the thought, central to his world view, that humankind is good by nature but is corrupted by society (an important theme in his later works).  Rousseau entered his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (conventionally known as the First Discourse) for the competition and won first prize with his contrarian thesis that social development, including of the arts and sciences, is corrosive of both civic virtue and individual moral character.  The First Discourse was published in 1750.  It made Rousseau famous and provoked a series of responses to which he in turn replied.  

Music remained Rousseau’s primary interest in this period, and the years 1752 and 1753 saw his most important contributions to the field. The first of these was his opera Le Devin du Village (The Village Soothsayer), which was an immediate success (and stayed in the repertoire for a century).  The second was his participation in the “querelle des bouffons”, a controversy which pitted the partisans of Italian music against those of the French style.  Rousseau’s emphasis on the importance of melody and the communication of emotion as central to the function of music was in opposition to the views of Jean-Philippe Rameau, who stressed harmony and the relationship between music, mathematics, and physics.  

Rousseau’s conversion to Catholicism had rendered him ineligible for his hereditary status as Citizen of Geneva.  In 1754 he regained this citizenship by reconverting to Calvinism.  In the following year he published his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, again in response to an essay competition from the Academy of Dijon.  Though he did not win the prize this time, his Second Discourse is a far more accomplished work, and in it Rousseau begins to develop his theories of human social development and moral psychology.  With the Second Discourse, the distance between Rousseau and the Encyclopédiste mainstream of the French Enlightenment thought became clear.  This rift was cemented with his 1758 publication of the Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater, in which he denounced the idea that his native city would benefit from the construction of a theater.  In Rousseau’s view theater, far from improving the population, tends to weaken their attachment to the life of the polis.

The years following the publication of the Second Discourse in 1755 were the most productive and important of Rousseau’s career.  He withdrew from Paris and worked on a novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, (1761) and then on Emile and The Social Contract (both published in 1762).  Julie was an immediate success.  The work is an important supplementary source for the interpretation of Rousseau’s social philosophy, containing, as it does, such elements as a vision of rural community.   

Unfortunately for Rousseau, the publication of these works led to personal catastrophe.  Emile was condemned in Paris and both Emile and The Social Contract were condemned in Geneva on grounds of religious heterodoxy.  Partly in response to this, Rousseau renounced his Genevan citizenship in May 1763.  Rousseau was forced to flee to escape arrest, eventually to England, at the invitation of David Hume.

Rousseau’s stay in England was marked by increasing mental instability and he became wrongly convinced that Hume was at the center of a plot against him.  There he worked on his autobiographical Confessions, which also contains evidence of his paranoia in its treatment of figures like Diderot and the German author Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm.  He returned to France in 1767 and then spent much of the rest of his life completing the Confessions and also composing the Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker.  He also completed his Considerations on the Government of Poland in this period.  In later life he further developed his interest in botany  and in music.  Rousseau died in 1778.  In 1794 the French revolutionaries transferred his remains to the Panthéon in Paris.