Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that man is born free and everywhere is in chains, and put his own five children in a foundling hospital. Born in Geneva in 1712, his mother died days later and his father abandoned him at ten. He was apprenticed to an engraver, ran away at sixteen, and was taken in by Madame de Warens, a Catholic convert thirteen years his senior who became his patron and lover. He arrived in Paris in 1742 with a new system of musical notation, failed to sell it, and worked as a copyist and as a contributor on music to the Encyclopédie. His career began at thirty-seven, when he saw an essay competition advertised and answered it with the argument that the arts and sciences had corrupted rather than improved morals. It won. The Discourse on Inequality followed, arguing that people are naturally good and are made competitive, vain and unequal by society, and that private property is the origin of it. The Social Contract of 1762 proposed that legitimate authority comes only from the general will of the people, and it became a founding text of the French Revolution and of modern democratic theory. Émile, published the same year, argued for an education following the child's nature rather than drilling; it was burned in Paris and Geneva for its religious chapter, and he fled, spending years in exile including a period in England that ended in a public quarrel with Hume. The Confessions invented the modern autobiography by including what its author was ashamed of — except, he claimed, nothing. He died in 1778 and was moved to the Panthéon in 1794.

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