Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712 in the Republic of Geneva. At the age of 16, he ran away from the city and the abusive engraver to whom he was apprenticed.

In neighbouring Savoie, he found shelter with a priest, who put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary for an ailing countess.

At the age of 20 or 21, Rousseau returned to Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, Rousseau considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman (“Mummy”), and she him Mon petit (“My little one”).

In those years, Rousseau struggled to establish himself in a career and spent a year travelling. He travelled mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his passion for music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of 27, he took up a position as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.

Paris and Venice

With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of 30, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery but found his system impractical and rejected it.

In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in Italian music but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.

He met a laundry girl called Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority.

Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, which stood at the heart of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.

Rise to fame

In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes. While walking to Vincennes, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” This led to the radical idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality. In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, “Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.” With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the “First Discourse”), he rose into a cause célèbre.

In 1752, he wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining notoriety as “the man who had refused a king’s pension.”

In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva and converted back to Calvinism. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or “religion of the heart,” which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason, progress, and atheism.

In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the “Second Discourse”), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original “state of nature” and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: “No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.”

Sophie d’Houdetot and La Nouvelle Héloïse

The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother.

He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of damaging letters. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron.

His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.

The Social Contract and Emile

After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile.

In the Social Contract, he sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness.

In Emile, he lays out a system of education that might preserve the individual’s innate vigour and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, “to prefect reason by sentiment.”

Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart, Sophie, Rousseau states that women should be “passive and weak” and “put up little resistance.”

Book IV contains the controversial “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” in which the vicar’s argument leads only to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God.

In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile “a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known.”

Years of exile

Both the Social Contract and Emile were banned from France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest.

Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place as his reputation caught up with him. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.

In 1766, Rousseau travelled to England with David Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, James Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, “Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.”

His paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.

Return to France and death

Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name and spent the next three years in relative seclusion. He married Thérèse, practised botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions.

He died in 1778, at the age of 66, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). In 1794, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon and placed next to those of… Voltaire.