Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A Genevan arrives with a scheme

Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, then an independent Protestant city-republic, the son of a watchmaker; his mother died days after the birth. He converted to Catholicism in Turin in April 1728, worked as a servant, trained briefly for the priesthood, and then supported himself as an itinerant musician, music teacher and music copyist — the trade of ruling staves and writing out parts by hand for performers, paid by the page, which he would return to for the rest of his life. Through the 1730s he lived under the protection of Françoise-Louise de Warens, a Swiss baroness who had herself converted to Catholicism, was paid a small pension for bringing others over to it, and took in strays — Rousseau among them — at Chambéry in Savoy, then a duchy on the French side of the Alps.

In 1742 he travelled to Paris carrying his one big idea: a system for writing music using numbers instead of the usual notes on a staff. He presented it to the Academy of Sciences, France's official scientific body, and the Academy turned it down. But in these years he met Denis Diderot, the philosopher and editor who was assembling the Encyclopédie — the multi-volume French dictionary of every art, trade and science, the central publishing project of the European Enlightenment. After a short, unhappy spell as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, Rousseau settled in Paris for good from 1744, still working mainly on music, and from 1747 writing the Encyclopédie's articles on it at Diderot's invitation.

He needed a salary as well as commissions. From 1745 to 1751 he was secretary to the wealthy Dupin family in the house that is now 68 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1st arrondissement — the address carries a plaque saying so — where Madame Dupin held one of the most sought-after literary and scientific salons in Paris, the private drawing-room gatherings at which writers, editors and scientists met and reputations were made. In the same year, 1745, he began his lifelong attachment to Thérèse Levasseur, a barely literate laundry-maid. By his own account in the Confessions — the memoir he wrote in old age — they had five children, and all five were handed over to the Paris foundling hospital, the charitable institution that took in abandoned babies and from which few emerged: a decision his enemies would use against him for the rest of his life, and that he never explained away.

The road to Vincennes, 1749

In the summer of 1749 Diderot was locked up in the fortress at Vincennes, on the eastern edge of Paris, for a book the authorities disliked. Rousseau walked out to visit him, reading a newspaper on the way, and came across an announcement: the Academy of Dijon — one of the provincial learned societies that set annual essay competitions on set questions, with a cash prize and a printed winner — was offering a prize for an essay on whether the progress of the arts and sciences had purified or corrupted morals. He later described what happened next as a conversion — that in that instant he understood that human beings are good by nature and are made bad by society, the single idea he claimed sat under everything he ever wrote.

The instant I read that, I saw another universe and I became another man.

À l'instant de cette lecture, je vis un autre univers et je devins un autre homme.

He wrote the essay — the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, which argued that civilisation's refinements corrode both public virtue and private character — won the Academy of Dijon's prize for 1750, and was in print by 1751. It made him famous, and it made him a target: a run of published replies followed, and answering them became a career of its own. He was thirty-seven, and had published almost nothing before.

The copyist who wrote an opera

Fame did not change how he lived, and he made a point of that. Sick and increasingly solitary, he left his protectors, refused the positions that would have made him comfortable, and set himself up as a copyist of music — writing out scores by hand, at a fixed rate per page, for anyone who paid. It was a deliberate performance of independence as much as a job, and Paris found it either admirable or insufferable.

He also wrote music of his own. Le Devin du village ('The Village Soothsayer'), a short opera about country lovers and the lies of city life, was composed in a few days in 1752, was an immediate hit, and stayed in the repertoire for a century — which alarmed its author considerably more than it pleased him. The following year Paris split into two camps over whether Italian or French music was superior, a quarrel remembered as the querelle des bouffons — 'the quarrel of the comedians', after the visiting Italian comic-opera troupe whose Paris performance of La Serva Padrona ('The Maid as Mistress'), a short comic opera by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, set it off. Rousseau entered it with his Letter on French Music, argued that melody and feeling matter more than harmony and mathematics, and went so far as to declare the French language inherently unmusical — a claim his own successful French opera rather undercut.

In 1755 came the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, again written for a Dijon Academy competition, this time without winning: it argued that the differences between rich and poor are made by history and property, not by nature. With it the distance between Rousseau and the other Encyclopédie writers became plain, and it widened in 1758 when his Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre — addressed to Jean le Rond d'Alembert, the mathematician who co-edited the Encyclopédie with Diderot and had written its article on Geneva — opposed the idea of building a playhouse in Geneva on the grounds that theatre flatters people rather than improving them. He was now arguing publicly against the friends he had come to Paris with.

Montmorency, and the books that got him chased out

He left Paris for the countryside near Montmorency, about ten miles north of the city, first to a cottage called the Ermitage lent by his patron Madame d'Épinay, then — after quarrelling with her circle and falling hopelessly in love with her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot — to a ruined house nearby called Mont-Louis. In 1757 he broke with Diderot, who had published a play arguing that 'the good man lives in society', which Rousseau read as an attack on his own retreat. The Duke of Luxembourg — a marshal of France and one of the greatest noblemen in the kingdom, whose estate at Montmorency Mont-Louis stood on — then rebuilt the house for him comfortably, and in it, in four years, he wrote the three books that define him: Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), a novel told entirely in letters between its characters, about a tutor and his pupil in love across the barrier of rank, which was an immediate popular success; The Social Contract (1762), which argued that no authority is legitimate unless it rests on the will of the people; and Émile, or On Education (1762), a treatise on raising a child by following nature instead of doctrine.

Émile carried a long section on religion that the authorities judged heretical, and it finished him in France. In 1762 the Parlement de Paris — the sovereign court that registered royal law and censored books — condemned Émile to be torn up and burned and ordered Rousseau's arrest. He fled Paris for Switzerland. Geneva condemned Émile and The Social Contract too, and he renounced his Genevan citizenship in May 1763. He took refuge at Môtiers in the principality of Neuchâtel, a Swiss territory then ruled by Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia, who tolerated him, while the rest of Catholic and Calvinist Europe — the Sorbonne, the theology faculty of the University of Paris; the papacy in Rome; the Dutch authorities in Amsterdam — burned his books. Driven out of Môtiers, then out of the island refuge on Lake Bienne he retreated to, he accepted the Scottish philosopher David Hume's invitation and crossed to England in January 1766, spending fourteen months in Staffordshire writing the Confessions — the frank account of his own life, errors and desires that invented modern autobiography — while becoming convinced, wrongly, that Hume was at the centre of a conspiracy against him.

Back in Paris, and the Panthéon

He returned to France in 1767 and wandered for two years under false names before coming back to Paris in 1770. The authorities left him alone on one condition: that he publish nothing more. So he copied music again for a living, wrote songs, wrote letters on botany, drafted a constitution for Poland, finished the Confessions and read them aloud in Paris drawing rooms — until Madame d'Épinay, who appears in them, had the readings stopped. His last Paris address was on the rue Plâtrière, where he lived from 1774 to 1778; the street was renamed rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau after his death, and a plaque at number 52 marks the site of the vanished house. He was also one of the celebrated regulars of the Café de la Régence, founded in 1718 on the place du Palais-Royal and known across Europe for the chess played at its tables — a plaque on the rue Saint-Honoré, where the café later stood, still lists him among them.

The long antagonism with Voltaire, France's other great writer-in-exile, ran underneath all of it. Voltaire mocked Rousseau in print as a cynic and a misanthrope, publicly revealed that he had abandoned his five children to the foundling hospital, and denounced him as seditious — a charge that helped send Rousseau's Letters Written from the Mountain, his 1764 defence of himself against the Geneva authorities, to the bonfire. In 1778 Rousseau, tired of Paris, accepted an invitation from the Marquis de Girardin, a wealthy landowner who had laid out an English-style landscape park at Ermenonville, north of the city, and admired him. He walked, collected plants, worked on the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker — ten meditative essays written on his walks, and the last thing he wrote — and died there on 2 July, having learned barely a month earlier of Voltaire's death on 30 May. He was buried on the Île des Peupliers, the poplar island in Girardin's lake, which immediately became a place of pilgrimage.

The Revolution claimed him. Its leaders took their language from The Social Contract, and the National Convention — the elected assembly that governed France from 1792 to 1795 — voted to move him to the Panthéon — the domed building on the hill of Sainte-Geneviève in the 5th arrondissement, begun as a church by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot and converted in 1791, on the death of the revolutionary orator Mirabeau, into a burial place for the nation's great. Voltaire was carried in that same year, 1791. Rousseau followed in 1794. Neither man lived to see the Revolution that claimed them, and the two who had spent their last twenty years insulting each other now lie in the same crypt.