Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Based on Wikipedia: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Orphan Who Blamed Civilization
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's mother died nine days after giving birth to him. He would later write that this was "the first of my misfortunes"—a phrase that captures something essential about the man who would become one of history's most influential and controversial thinkers. Rousseau saw himself as perpetually wronged, perpetually misunderstood, and yet perpetually right about the fundamental corruption of the world around him.
Born in Geneva in 1712, Rousseau would go on to argue that private property is the root of human inequality, that children should be educated according to nature rather than society's conventions, and that legitimate government can only arise from a "social contract" among free citizens. These ideas helped spark the French Revolution and continue to shape debates about education, politics, and human nature more than two centuries later.
But here's the uncomfortable truth that Rousseau's critics loved to point out: the great theorist of child-rearing abandoned all five of his own children to foundling hospitals, where most such infants died.
A Genevan Childhood
Geneva in 1712 was not part of Switzerland as we know it today. It was an independent city-state, a Protestant republic that had been the seat of Calvinism since the Reformation. The city styled itself as democratic—male citizens could vote—but in practice, a small oligarchy of wealthy families ran everything through something called the Small Council.
This tension between democratic ideals and oligarchic reality would haunt Rousseau's political thinking for his entire life.
His family occupied a peculiar position in Genevan society. They belonged to the "moyen order"—the middle class—which meant they had voting rights, unlike the majority of Geneva's population who were either immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Rousseau was proud of this status. Throughout his life, he signed his books "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva."
His father, Isaac, was a watchmaker who also taught dance and loved music. Rousseau later observed with characteristic pride that "a Genevan watchmaker is a man who can be introduced anywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk about watches." Isaac was also hot-tempered and prone to trouble. He once got into a quarrel with visiting English officers who drew their swords on him, and Geneva—concerned about maintaining good relations with foreign powers—punished Isaac rather than the officers.
Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard, came from a more refined background but had her own scandals. Before her marriage, the Genevan Consistory—the city's religious court—ordered her to stop interacting with a married man she had been seen gazing upon at a street theatre, where she had disguised herself as a peasant woman to avoid detection.
The young Jean-Jacques was told an entirely fabricated story about his parents' courtship, a romantic tale of young love triumphing over a disapproving patriarch. He never learned the messier truth.
Raised on Stories
With his mother dead and his older brother François as his only sibling, Rousseau was raised by his father and an aunt. When he was five, Isaac sold the family home—supposedly to provide an inheritance for his sons, though in reality he pocketed most of the proceeds. The family moved from an upper-class neighborhood to an apartment among craftsmen: silversmiths, engravers, and other watchmakers.
This environment shaped Rousseau profoundly. He grew up watching artisans agitate against the privileged classes, absorbing class resentment along with the skills of his neighbors. Later, he would write favorably of craftsmen compared to artists, claiming that "those important persons who are called artists rather than artisans work solely for the idle and rich."
But books shaped him even more than his surroundings.
Rousseau claimed he couldn't remember learning to read. His earliest clear memory was of staying up all night with his father, the two of them reading adventure novels that had belonged to his mother. They would read entire volumes without stopping, until the morning swallows at the window reminded them they'd forgotten to sleep. "Come, come, let us go to bed," his father would say, embarrassed. "I am more a child than thou art."
These escapist romances, Rousseau later admitted, "gave me bizarre and romantic notions of human life, which experience and reflection have never been able to cure me of." This is a remarkably self-aware admission from a man not known for self-awareness. He understood that he had been shaped by fiction, that his expectations of life had been calibrated by stories rather than reality.
After exhausting the novels, father and son moved on to the classics, particularly Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Rousseau would read aloud while his father made watches, and afterward he would act out the heroic deeds of the ancient Greeks and Romans. He came to see Plutarch as simply another kind of novel—one featuring noble heroes rather than romantic lovers.
This reading, Rousseau wrote, "formed in me the free and republican spirit."
The Runaway
When Rousseau was ten, his father's temper destroyed the family. Isaac was caught trespassing on a wealthy landowner's property while hunting, and rather than face certain defeat in court, he fled to another territory entirely. He took Rousseau's aunt with him, remarried, and largely abandoned his son.
Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who sent him and a cousin to board with a Calvinist minister outside Geneva. The boys learned mathematics and drawing. For a time, Rousseau even dreamed of becoming a Protestant minister himself, moved by religious services in a way that would persist throughout his complicated spiritual life.
At thirteen, he was apprenticed first to a notary, then to an engraver who beat him. At fifteen, he ran away.
The circumstances were almost comically mundane. He had returned to Geneva after a day in the countryside and found the city gates locked for curfew. Rather than face punishment for being out late, he simply never went back.
Conversion and Contradiction
In neighboring Savoy, Rousseau encountered a Roman Catholic priest who introduced him to Françoise-Louise de Warens, a twenty-nine-year-old noblewoman who had separated from her husband. She was a professional converter of Protestants—the King of Piedmont paid her to bring souls to Catholicism.
Rousseau was sent to Turin to complete his conversion, which meant giving up his Genevan citizenship. Years later, he would convert back to Calvinism to regain it.
Why would a young man abandon the faith of his fathers so readily? Rousseau and de Warens may both have been reacting against Calvinism's doctrine of total depravity—the belief that humans are fundamentally corrupt and incapable of good without divine intervention. An eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy required believers to declare "that we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good."
Catholicism, with its doctrine of forgiveness, offered a more optimistic view of human nature. This would become central to Rousseau's philosophy: the belief that humans are naturally good, corrupted only by society.
De Warens became the most important figure in Rousseau's young life. He called her "maman"; she called him "petit." She took him into her household, tried to help him find a profession, arranged music lessons for him. For a time, he even briefly attended seminary, considering the priesthood.
When Rousseau turned twenty, their relationship became sexual—though she was also intimate with her house steward, creating what Rousseau later described as a ménage à trois that confused and discomforted him. Despite this complication, he would always consider de Warens the greatest love of his life.
More importantly for his intellectual development, de Warens had a large library and loved ideas. Through her circle of educated Catholic clergy, Rousseau was introduced to the world of letters. During his twenties—years marked by bouts of hypochondria—he applied himself seriously to philosophy, mathematics, and music.
The Failed Inventor
In 1742, at age thirty, Rousseau moved to Paris with what he believed would be his ticket to fortune: a new system of musical notation using numbers instead of traditional notes. The system was meant to be compatible with typography, which would make it easier to print music. A single line would display numbers representing intervals between notes, with dots and commas indicating rhythm.
The Académie des Sciences rejected it as impractical, though they praised his understanding of music and encouraged him to try again.
This failure launched a pattern that would define Rousseau's life: genuine innovation mixed with impracticality, followed by a sense of persecution when the world failed to recognize his genius.
That same year, he befriended Denis Diderot, who would later become the driving force behind the Encyclopédie—the great Enlightenment project to compile all human knowledge. The two men connected over their shared literary ambitions, and their friendship would prove fateful for both.
Venice and Disillusionment
From 1743 to 1744, Rousseau served as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. The job paid poorly, and his employer routinely received his own stipend a year late, paying staff irregularly if at all. After eleven months, Rousseau quit.
But the experience gave him two things that would shape his later work.
First, he fell in love with Italian music, particularly opera. He had arrived with Parisian prejudices against Italian music, but found himself conquered by it. Listening to barcaroles—the songs of Venetian gondoliers—he later wrote, "I found I had not yet known what singing was."
Second, he developed a profound distrust of government bureaucracy. The inefficiency and corruption he witnessed in Venice would inform his later political philosophy, his conviction that existing institutions were fundamentally rotten.
Thérèse and the Children
Back in Paris and penniless, Rousseau met Thérèse Levasseur, a seamstress who supported her mother and several worthless siblings. She became his lover and eventually his common-law wife, though their relationship remained unconventional by any standard.
According to Rousseau's Confessions, Thérèse bore him five children. He persuaded her to give each one to a foundling hospital—an institution where mortality rates were staggeringly high. Most infants left at foundling hospitals died.
His justifications shifted over time. At first, he claimed poverty. Later, in his Confessions, he admitted the real reason: "I trembled at the thought of intrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated. The risk of the education of the foundling hospital was much less."
In other words, he believed a foundling hospital would do a better job raising children than Thérèse's family would. Given the mortality rates, this was less an educational philosophy than a death sentence.
Ten years later, Rousseau tried to find out what had happened to his son. No record could be found.
This abandonment would haunt Rousseau's reputation forever. When he became famous as a theorist of education and child-rearing—when he published Émile, his treatise on how children should be raised according to nature—his critics had obvious ammunition. Voltaire and Edmund Burke both used the abandoned children against him.
The contradiction is stark. Here was a man arguing passionately that children should be raised naturally, allowed to develop according to their own instincts, protected from the corrupting influence of society—and he had handed his own children over to institutions where they almost certainly died.
Ideas That Changed the World
Despite his personal failures, Rousseau's ideas proved extraordinarily influential. His Discourse on Inequality argued that private property was the source of human inequality—"the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society." From property came inequality, from inequality came conflict, from conflict came the need for governments that invariably served the rich at the expense of the poor.
His Social Contract outlined how legitimate government could exist: only through a contract among free citizens who agreed to be governed for the common good. The famous opening line—"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"—captured his conviction that civilization had corrupted humanity's natural goodness.
His novel Julie, or the New Heloise became a sensation, helping to create the romantic movement in literature. His Émile transformed educational theory, arguing that children should learn through experience rather than rote instruction, that education should follow the natural development of the child rather than imposing adult expectations.
And his autobiographical Confessions essentially invented the modern memoir. No one before Rousseau had written with such attention to their own subjectivity, their inner life, their development as a person. The very idea that an ordinary individual's psychological development was worth examining in detail—this was Rousseau's innovation.
The Paradox
How do we reconcile Rousseau the thinker with Rousseau the man? How do we take seriously the educational theories of someone who abandoned his children to near-certain death?
One answer is that we don't have to. Ideas can be evaluated independently of their authors. The Social Contract doesn't become false because Rousseau was a hypocrite; Émile doesn't become useless because its author failed to apply its principles to his own family.
Another answer is that Rousseau's failures illuminate his ideas. His conviction that society corrupts natural goodness may have been, in part, a rationalization for his own bad behavior. His belief that children should be raised naturally, away from society's corrupting influence, may have been a fantasy that allowed him to imagine his abandoned children better off than they were.
Perhaps the most honest answer is that Rousseau was deeply, sometimes destructively human. He was capable of genuine insight and genuine cruelty, of brilliant philosophy and terrible parenting, of understanding human nature and failing utterly to understand himself.
He died in 1778, having spent his final years increasingly paranoid, convinced that former friends were conspiring against him. He was working on his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, an unfinished meditation on solitude and self-knowledge.
The orphan who blamed civilization for humanity's ills had become, in the end, profoundly alone.