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Rousseau (JEAN JACQUES Swiss-French)
JEAN JACQUES, Swiss-French philosopher, one of the most celebrated and influential writers of the 18th century; born in Geneva, Switzerland, June 28, 1712. He was the son of a watchmaker. For the first 35 years of his life the chief authority JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU is his own painfully frank, but perhaps not absolutely accurate "Confessions," first published in 1782 and 1789. After a desultory education he was apprenticed in 1725 to an engraver, from whose real or fancied severity he ran away in 1728.
He now fell under the notice of Madame de Warens, a lady residing at Annecy, who sent him to a Roman Catholic institution at Turin, where he abjured Protestantism. After several fits of eccentric wandering he went to live with Mme. de Warens at Les Charmettes, a country house near Chambéry, where they appear to have lived happily together for nearly three years. From a short absence at Montpellier, however, Rousseau returned to find his place at Les Charmettes occupied by another, whereupon he departed to become a tutor at Lyons. In 1741 he went to Paris, ROUSSEAU and in 1743 obtained the post or secretary to the French ambassador at Venice. This office he resigned, and returned to Paris in 1745, to lead a precarious life, copying music and studying science.
About this time he became intimate with Diderot, Grimm, D'Holbach, Mme.
D'Épinay, etc., and contributed to the "Encyclopédie"; and from this period also dated his connection with Thérèse le Vasseur, with whom, 25 years later, he went through some form of marriage ceremony. In 1750 his essay, in which he adopted the negative side of the question whether civilization has contributed to purify manners, won a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon, and brought him for the first time into gensuccessful operetta (the music by himself), and soon after a celebrated "Letter on French Music." eral notice. In 1752 he brought out a In 1754 he revisited Geneva, where he was readmitted a free citizen on once more embracing Protestantism. Having returned to Paris he wrote a sort of novel, "Julia, or the New Héloïse," which was published in 1760, being followed by "The Social Contract" (Le Contrat Social), a political work, and "Emile, or on Education," another story, in 1762.
The principles expressed in these works stirred up much animosity against their author. The confession of faith of the Savoyard vicar in Emile was declared a dangerous attack on religion, and the book was burned both in Paris and Geneva. Persecution, exaggerated by his own morbid sensibility, forced Rousseau to flee to Neufchâtel, then to the Ile St.
Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, and finally to England, where he was welcomed by Hume, Boswell, and others in 1766. A malicious letter by Horace Walpole unluckily roused his suspicions of his English friends, and in May, 1767, he returned to France, where his presence was now tolerated. He lived in great poverty, supporting himself by copying music and publishing occasional works.
In May, 1778, he retired to Ermenonville near Paris. His celebrated "Confessions" appeared at Geneva in 1782. Rousseau united an enthusiastic passion for love and freedom with an inflexible obstinacy and a strange spirit of paradox. The chief importance of his works lies perhaps in the fact that they contain the germ of the doctrines which were carried out with such ruthless consistency in the French Revolution. He died in Ermenonville, July 2, 1778.