Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778 2 entries
Biography
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher and writer whose ideas helped to shape the French Revolution and Romanticism. He was born in Geneva in 1712; his mother died days after his birth, and at sixteen he left the city and began a wandering life. In Paris he befriended Diderot and wrote articles on music for the Encyclopédie, and he was also a composer, whose opera The Village Soothsayer was performed before King Louis XV.
He became famous in 1750 with an essay arguing that the progress of the sciences and the arts had corrupted morals, and in 1755 he traced inequality among people back to the rise of property. In 1762 he published The Social Contract, whose first chapter opens with the words “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, and Émile, a treatise on education; both books were condemned and burned, and he had to flee. His novel Julie, or the New Heloise, was one of the great successes of the century, and his Confessions opened the way to modern autobiography. He died at Ermenonville in 1778, and during the Revolution his remains were moved to the Panthéon.
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