Note: This biographical essay is based on a recent rereading
of The Confessions (English and French editions read together). I’ve used it in
several reading/writing skills classes to give the students a break from the
abstruse textbook. Unfortunately however they still found this too too
difficult again. Originally I’d planned to discuss Rousseau’s political
theories and relate them to the Arab Spring, but another big (disastrous move)
has engulfed my time and depleted my energies.
The life of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the famous French Enlightenment philosopher, is actually a
fascinating & contemporary topic. Rousseau led a turbulent and multifaceted life during a dramatic period in French and European history– the 18 Century
Enlightenment.
Rousseau was an important thinker and participant in that lively
century, producing important works of philosophy, literature and autobiography that
had a strong influence on his contemporaries and are still regarded as relevant
and interesting by scholars and readers today. In this essay I will summarize
the main periods of Rousseau’s life, his childhood & youth, education,
early career and mature career.
Rousseau’s childhood & youth were interesting but not
remarkable. The basic facts: Rousseau was born in Geneva, in the country we
know today as Switzerland, June 28, 1712; Rousseau always said that he came
from Geneva, & that he was a Genevan. The fact that he lived most of his
life in France means that he is also considered French; in any case he was a
French speaker as were his parents, Isaac Rousseau and Suzanne Bernard.
What sort of people were his parents? His father was a
watchmaker–that is to say, a craftsman–in other words someone who had to work
for a living. In any case he was not a rich man but was still respectable. Rousseau’s
mother came from a “good family” in Geneva, but Rousseau never knew her because
she died shortly after his birth. One may imagine that having to grow up
without a mother might have been difficult for the young Jean-Jacques; he did
in fact have a pretty confused childhood but yet never actually suffered
greatly because the various relatives he lived with seemed to be decent people
and treated him well. His father taught him to read at an early age by reading
adventure stories to him late at night.
This brings us to the topic of Rousseau’s education. He did
not have much formal education but did attend a primary and middle school
taught by a kindly aunt where he seems to have done well. When he was old
enough, his father put him in an apprenticeship with an engraver, but disagreements
with the master eventually caused the 15-year-old Rousseau to flee his job and
Geneva and run off one night to a nearby town in France. Here various people
known to Rousseau’s family – and some religious people–tried to help him find a
situation. Rousseau was eventually taken in by a Catholic woman Mme. De Warens,
a well-off, aristocratic do-gooder. She and Rousseau got along well from the
start; they maintained a close relationship during their whole lives together.
She also gave Rousseau most of his formal education, arranging for tutors in
various subjects including music. She also gave the young Jean-Jacques some
essential informal education (here a merry wink to anyone who can understand). Rousseau
was, however, mainly an autodidact, self-taught.
Now for the question of Rousseau’s long early career and how
his mature one as thinker & writer got started. It would be delightful to
discover that Rousseau came to Paris as a young, ambitious man, astounded
everyone with his brilliance and became a celebrity overnight. In fact nothing
is further from the truth. When he made his first trip to Paris in 1842,
Rousseau was already 30 years old, and his main interest was music not
literature or writing. He spent nearly eight years in Paris working as musician,
composer and music teacher, while having children out of wedlock; he also did a
great deal of social climbing that resulted in getting to know the famous philosophes such as Denis Diderot and wangling
diplomatic work as assistant to the French ambassador to Venice.
His writing career began in 1750 when, encouraged by
Diderot, he entered a competition in essay writing on the subject of “progress
in the arts and sciences,” a topic then of great interest to Enlightenment minded
France. Rousseau won first prize; his essay was published, sold very well and
made Rousseau famous. He’d finally found his true vocation and never stopped
writing after that.
Rousseau’s career as thinker and writer was marked by the
production of a huge number of important works in a variety of fields. He
participated in and was an important member of the renowned group of philosophers
and writers who created the Enlightenment, one of the greatest cultural
movements of all time, and which deeply influenced not only the people of that
time but ours as well--politically and culturally.
Rousseau was a unique member of this group of philosophers,
because although he subscribed to its main ideals (such as reason, equality,
and liberty), he also argued in favor of the role of emotion and sentiment in
human life – and wrote several works that could be considered highly romantic.
He was also religious in a mystical sentimental way that shocked Voltaire.
Let’s take a brief glance at Rousseau’s major achievements.
First in literature, Rousseau contributed several key masterpieces to the world
canon. Perhaps most famous in his time was a sentimental love novel called Julie: The New Heloise, which was the story of his life long love with Madame
de Warens (and one other noble woman). Perhaps his greatest literary achievement
however is his autobiography The Confessions,
in which Rousseau retold his life with an amazing honesty that (posthumously) shocked
readers of his day and makes for lively reading even today. Rousseau was also
interested in education and in his fictional treatise entitled Emile, he described a complete system of
education based on sensitivity and developmental psychology. Perhaps Rousseau’s
most important works however were in the field of political philosophy. His
treatise The Social Contract was the
first formal theory of democracy intended to empower the lower and middle classes
and overthrow the upper class. This powerful work is generally considered to
bear some responsibility for two revolutions–the American Revolution of 1775–83
and the French Revolution of 1789–1799. As you can imagine, such a
controversial work got Rousseau into considerable trouble.
Speaking of trouble, Rousseau was no stranger to that
experience. First, although Rousseau published and sold many works, he rarely
earned much money from his efforts, due to lack of copyright protection at that
time. Anybody’s works could be copied and printed by anybody else without paying
a penny to the original author. A more severe problem was the political
persecution his works caused when governments and churches, offended by
Rousseau’s radical and liberal ideas, censored his work as well as threatened
the author with imprisonment. As a result Rousseau had to constantly fight
poverty and could only survive by relying on the help of high-ranking patrons
who were usually rich aristocrats. Finally a very special problem in the case
of Rousseau was his psychological disorders; Rousseau had to struggle all his
life against neuroses that turned him into a near paranoid and disrupted his
relations with friends and colleagues. In spite of these difficulties, however,
Rousseau still managed to produce a lot of valuable work.
Finally we can say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau born 300 years
ago this year was not only a highly significant thinker producing works in several
fields that are still of interest to us today--he was also an utterly unique
individual who was aware of his differences from the “norm” but made these
differences a part of his identity. In this, and in accepting the complexities
of his own human nature, Rousseau is perhaps the first modern man. Happy 300th
Jean-Jacques!
Appendix from The
Confessions (placed in an exam copy for the male students—for their titillated "enlightenment," but alas, none seemed to have noticed it!).
(recalling an incident from his teenage years when he was
afraid of young women...)
Such
was my naïveté that, although this young lady was not unattractive, not only
was I not tempted to press my attentions on her, but this idea never even
entered my head the whole of the journey, and even if it had, I was too stupid
to know how to act on it. I could not imagine how a girl and a boy ever reached
the point of sleeping together; I thought that centuries were needed to prepare
for so terrifying an arrangement.
From book 4 of The
Confessions, p. 140-41
