Who Was Rousseau? The Wild Life of a Political Genius
Before we get into Rousseau’s ideas, we need to understand the man. His life reads like a novel with bad decisions, genius moments, paranoia, and burned bridges across Europe.
The Kid Nobody Raised
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. His mother died days after his birth. His father Isaac was a watchmaker and not the most responsible parent. Isaac read Plutarch and the classics with young Jean-Jacques, giving the boy a strange, intense education. But when Rousseau was ten, his father got into a fight with a nobleman and had to skip town. The boy was on his own.
He was sent to a pastor’s family, then apprenticed to an engraver who beat him. At sixteen, he came back from a walk and found the city gates locked. Instead of facing another beating, he just… left Geneva. Never really came back.
Wandering Through Europe
What followed was years of drifting. In Annecy, he met Madame de Warens, a Catholic convert who took him under her wing and sent him to Turin to convert. A kid from Protestant Geneva becoming Catholic. Big deal back then.
He tried being a servant, trained for the priesthood, became a travelling musician. Eventually he returned to de Warens near Chambery and stayed most of the 1730s. They became lovers. He was in his twenties, she was older. It was complicated.
In 1740 he worked as a tutor in Lyon, meeting Enlightenment figures like Condillac and d’Alembert. Then Paris in 1742 with a new system for musical notation. The Academy was not impressed. He briefly worked for the French ambassador in Venice, which taught him about republican government and Italian opera.
Paris, Diderot, and a Dark Secret
Back in Paris by 1744, Rousseau befriended Denis Diderot, the philosopher building the famous Encyclopedie. Rousseau wrote music articles for it. He was approaching middle age with nothing major to show. Just another minor figure in the salons.
Here’s something that’s hard to ignore. Around 1745 he started a relationship with Therese Levasseur, a laundry-maid. They had five children. He abandoned every one of them to a foundling hospital shortly after birth. Most almost certainly died there. This is the same man who would later write Emile, one of the most influential books on education ever. The contradiction is brutal, and Rousseau struggled with it his whole life.
The Moment Everything Changed
In 1749, Rousseau was walking to visit Diderot in prison (Diderot got locked up for pushing religious tolerance too far). On the way, he read about an essay competition in a newspaper. The Academy of Dijon asked: has the development of arts and sciences improved or corrupted public morals?
Rousseau described this as an epiphany. A vision on the road. His answer: humans are naturally good, but society corrupts them. This one idea drove everything he wrote for the rest of his life.
His essay, the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, won the prize and made him famous. He followed it with the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1755, a deeper work about how human society evolved and went wrong. He even reclaimed his Geneva citizenship and converted back to Protestantism.
The Most Productive Years, Then Disaster
Between 1757 and 1762, living at Montmorency outside Paris, Rousseau produced his greatest works. Julie, or the New Heloise was an instant sensation in 1761. Then Emile and Of the Social Contract in 1762. Three major works in two years.
But he broke with almost everyone who mattered. He attacked the Encyclopedists in his Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre. Fell out with Voltaire. Fell out with Diderot. Both Emile and the Social Contract offended Catholics in Paris and Calvinists in Geneva equally. The authorities banned his books and he had to run.
He fled to Switzerland, then England in 1766 at David Hume’s invitation. But here’s the thing: Rousseau had a serious paranoid streak. He became convinced Hume was plotting against him. He wasn’t. Rousseau made enemies out of the few friends he had left.
Geneva’s Political Crisis
Meanwhile, his books caused real trouble in Geneva. On paper, all citizens governed through the Grand Conseil. In practice, a few wealthy families controlled everything through the Petit Conseil. When authorities banned the Social Contract, a faction called the Representants protested, using Rousseau’s ideas to demand more citizen power. The establishment Negatifs pushed back. Rousseau wrote Letters Written from the Mountains to support the reformers. His political theory was no longer just theory.
The Final Years
After fourteen miserable months in England, gripped by paranoia, Rousseau fled back to France where he could technically still be arrested. He spent his remaining years mostly isolated. He finished the Confessions and the Dialogues. In a moment of derangement, he tried to place the Dialogues on the altar at Notre Dame. His final work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, is beautiful and sad, worrying that enemies will publish forgeries under his name.
Rousseau died in 1778. He never saw the French Revolution, but his ideas fueled it. In 1794, the revolutionaries moved his remains to the Pantheon. The abandoned child from Geneva became one of the most influential thinkers in Western history.
And that’s why his ideas, messy and contradictory as they sometimes are, still matter today.
This post is part of a series retelling “Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Penguin Classics, edited by Christopher Bertram, translated by Quintin Hoare).
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