Jean Jacques Rousseau biography

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Jean Rousseau Biography

ROUSSEAU, Jean Jacques (1712–78). One of the greatest French writers of the eighteenth century. He was the son of a watchmaker, Isaac Rousseau, a descendant of a French Huguenot, who had in the seventeenth century emigrated to Geneva to escape religious persecution. Jean Jacques never knew his mother, and was educated first by his father, who made him read mostly sentimental novels, then by an uncle and an aunt, Monsieur and Madame Bernard, who were a little higher than the Rousseaus in the social hierarchy of the Calvinistic city. Family troubles interrupted his education. Jean Jacques became an apprentice to an engraver named Ducommun, by whom he was not well treated, and when 16 he left Geneva to try his fortunes in the Duchy of Savoy. This was Catholic, and its clergy strove to make converts among the children of republican Switzerland. Rousseau was among these converts. His change of religion was effected at the Maison des Catéchumènes of Turin, whither he had been sent on the advice of Madame de Warens, herself a convert, who was soon to exert a decisive influence upon his destiny. Jean Jacques was for two years a servant in Madame de Vercellis’ household, and he acted in a somewhat similar capacity in the Govone family. He also fell in with adventurers of a low type. This led to his return to Annecy, where Madame de Warens resided, and to his admission among her regular companions. She remained the ruling spirit of his life for about 10 years, during which time he was several times engaged in more or less lucrative employments. He left Madame de Warens several times, making trips to Fribourg, Lyons, Paris, and Montpellier. On his return from the last journey he found things so changed in the house, especially owing to the arrival of a newcomer named Wintzenried, that he decided he had better seek his fortunes unaided. The most profitable period of this part of Rousseau’s life, as far as his education was concerned, was spent in a small country house not far from Chambéry, whither Madame de Warens had removed from Annecy. In his Confessions he has left us a fascinating description both of the place, called Les Charmettes, and of the life he led there, which may be called his honeymoon with Madame de Warens. His intellectual powers and acquirements so developed there that he could a little later occupy the position of resident tutor in the family of the Grand Prieur de Mably.

In 1741 Rousseau arrived in Paris, depending for his fortune upon a new and ingenious system of writing music. He laid his plan before the Royal Academy of Sciences, from which he received praise but no indorsement. Though baffled he had by the bringing forward of his musical investigations gained access to the most intellectual circles of Paris. He soon became a kind of secretary in the family of Madame Dupin, wife of one of the wealthy farmers-general, and her stepson, Monsieur de Francueil, and shortly afterward he was engaged in the same capacity by the Count de Montaigu, who had been appointed Minister of the King of France at Venice. For his new position the knowledge of Italian acquired by him in Turin gave Rousseau special fitness. His employer was unable to understand his young secretary’s mental superiority and to avoid inflicting humiliating treatment, Rousseau left him, full of anger, and returned to Paris, where he expected to find justice for himself and punishment for his persecutor, but he soon discovered that for a man of the people to obtain redress for a wrong inflicted by a member of the aristocracy was not possible. This was the first experience that led him to think of the system of social distinctions then in existence and to examine whether any philosophical justification for them existed. He resumed his position near Monsieur de Francueil and mingled more than ever with artists, thinkers, and writers. He wrote for the stage, remodeled for the court of Louis XV, with the consent of the author, Voltaire’s dramatic cantata La Princesse de Navarre, which he renamed Les fêtes de Ramire, and took sides passionately in the conflict then raging in Paris between French and Italian music. He defended the latter in the first of his numerous polemical writings, the Lettre sur la musique française (1748). While in contact not only with refined society, but with thinkers like Diderot, D’Alembert, and Grimm, whom he considered in no way his superiors, Rousseau met Thérèse Levasseur, a young woman not above the condition of a servant, and totally illiterate. Without marriage, he made her his permanent companion. Soon he was saddled not only with Thérèse herself, but with her father and mother and the rest of the family. If we may believe Rousseau’s Confessions, he was fully conscious of the unworthiness of the surroundings thus created by him for himself. He is himself authority for the statement that Thérèse bore him several children and that every one of these children was carried by him immediately after birth to the home for foundlings, though attempts have been made to disprove his disposal of his offspring in this fashion.

Rousseau was now on the eve of celebrity. In 1750 he published a short discourse in answer to the question propounded by the Academy of Dijon, whether the progress of sciences and arts had resulted in making morals purer. He answered negatively with a force of eloquence that won him the prize, and the publication of his paper made him illustrious. An opera, of which he had written both words and music, Le devin du village, was performed with great applause first before the court, at Fontainebleau, then at the Paris Opéra. More and more, however, he moved away from the bright Paris circles. He grew displeased with a social order in which he knew that he could not occupy a position in keeping with his mental superiority. This appeared when in 1754 he published his second important work, again an answer to a question propounded by the Academy of Dijon as to the origin of inequality among men and whether it is justified by the law of nature. Of course again his answer was a negative one; but this time, although in style and argument the Discours sur l’inégalité was vastly superior to the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, the Academy dared not reward him with a prize. Before a society which was a curious blending of autocratic power and aristocratic privileges he had laid the claims of all men to an equal share not only in the government, but in the enjoyment of nature’s blessings.

He was henceforth acknowledged a democrat. He would yield no more to aristocratic prejudices. Ambition, however, had not forsaken him. His eyes turned towards his native state, to which he had dedicated his book. He visited Geneva, was welcomed with the highest honors, gave up Catholicism, and thus was allowed to resume his rights as a citizen; and when he left Geneva to return to Paris everybody understood that it was with the intention of soon coming back for good. Rousseau never returned to Geneva. Voltaire soon settled there himself, and Jean Jacques concluded that both could not live near each other in so small a place. His break with society was soon followed by similar treatment of his friends. Diderot and D’Alembert were then publishing their famous Encyclopédie, to which Rousseau had originally contributed articles on music and also on political economy. But he had ceased to sympathize with a work the chief doctrine of which was that the happiness of mankind was bound up with the progress of enlightenment, and secretly advocated a society freed from the influence of the Church. He first moved away from Paris, not far, to the Hermitage, a small house surrounded by woodlands on the estate of La Chevrette, which belonged to his friend, the wealthy and sprightly Madame d’Epinay (1756). But he soon quarreled with Grimm, Diderot, and Madame d’Epinay herself. In December, 1757, he left the Hermitage, where he had been Madame d’Epinay’s guest, and moved to the village of Montmorency, near by.

Rousseau’s masterpieces were written at the Hermitage and in Montmorency. D’Alembert, acting upon the suggestion of Voltaire, had published in the Encyclopédie the article "Geneva," in which he recommends the establishment of a theatre in that city. In reply Rousseau wrote his famous Lettre à D’Alembert contre les spectacles, in which he condemns the stage as a school of immorality. This new attack against civilization was followed by Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1760), Du contrat social (1762), and his treatise on education, Emile (1762). These three works, so different from each other, coming from. the same pen in such quick succession, raised him to the front rank of the literary men of his time, with only one left that could be considered his rival, Voltaire. La nouvelle Héloïse was mostly written at the Hermitage. Begun simply as an idealized record of his youthful memories, it was suddenly transformed by the ardent and unrewarded passion which he conceived for a sister-in-law of Madame d’Epinay—Madame d’Houdetot. The society of his time was intellectual and spurned sentimentality. Rousseau pleaded for nature, for passion, for love with the energy of a heart ablaze with passion. The success of the book, especially with the feminine public, brought about nothing short of a revolution in the manner of looking upon nature and society. Then came the Contrat social, which presented as the ideal and natural government the direct government of the people and which applied the name of sovereign, not to an hereditary monarch, but to the whole body of citizens. Finally, Emile, which must not be considered a formal treatise on education, but rather a string of interesting ideas and disquisitions on the subject, again said to the world: Trust to nature. All these teachings, helped by Rousseau’s eloquent declamation, told upon society.

Although Monsieur de Malesherbes, the public official in charge of the supervision of new books, had allowed Emile to be printed, the Parlement of Paris condemned it and ordered the arrest of the author. Rousseau took refuge at Yverdun, a village belonging to the Republic of Bern. Bern ordered him out of the territory of the Republic. Geneva acted in the same manner and condemned both Emile and the Contrat social. At last Rousseau found a refuge in the County of Neuchâtel, then belonging to the King of Prussia, and governed in his name by Marshal Keith. There, in the village of Môtiers-Travers, Rousseau spent three peaceful years (1762–65), during which he wrote the letter to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, by whom he had been openly censured, and the eloquent Lettres de la montagne, in which he answered the jurist Tronchin of Geneva, another of his critics.

Another storm came, due to the religious opinions of Rousseau, which were considered too liberal by the powerful clerical authorities of the little Protestant county. Stones were thrown at Rousseau’s house. He believed his life in danger. He was then a prey to the idea that the world was making dark plots against him. After another vain attempt to settle within the boundaries of the Republic of Bern, in the island of. Saint-Pierre, on the Lake of Bienne, he crossed to England, on the invitation of Hume, as he could not stay in France on account of his condemnation for Emile. His sojourn there is marked by his wanton quarrel with Hume and by his writing there a large part of his Confessions. In 1767 he left England, still the unfortunate prey to his fixed idea that his friends persecuted him, wandered then for a few years mostly in the south of France, under the false name of Renon, going from one friend’s residence to another, and finally in 1770 returned to Paris and settled unmolested in a home, in the Rue Plâtrière, now Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where he remained for almost two years, periods of comparative peace alternating with periods of profound dejection. He died July 2, 1778, after a four weeks’ stay in the Château of Ermenonville, a few miles from Paris, belonging to the Marquis de Girardin. Some ascribed his death to suicide, but the idea is not entertained to-day.

His last works, the Dialogues, or Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques, and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, show, one the climax of, and the other the relief from, the mental aberration created in him both by his supersensitive subjectiveness and by the real persecutions that assailed him. There is no good complete edition of Rousseau’s works. The best was published at Paris in 1823–26 by Musset-Pathay, in 23 volumes, but it must be supplemented by a number of later publications, never included in the so-called complete editions, notably by the Œuvres et correspondances inédites (2 vols.) published at Paris in 1861 by Streckeisen-Moulton. The edition Hachette (13 volumes, in very bad print) is the most popular to-day. A Société Jean Jacques Rousseau, founded in Geneva in 1904, one of its chief purposes being to bring out a good edition of his works, is still at work on the manuscripts.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 182-184.