On July 10, 1750, the Academy of Dijon in France announced the winner of an international essay contest. He was a hitherto unknown musician from Switzerland who had submitted a composition entitled “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts.” His name was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).
Rousseau was thirty-eight years old at the time he submitted the winning entry, and the essay catapulted him to fame across Europe. For the next three decades, he would be regarded as one of his nation’s most influential—and inflammatory—philosophers.
Rousseau was born in the Protestant enclave of Geneva. His mother died a few days after his birth, and his father, a clock maker, abandoned him at a young age. Rousseau moved to France in 1728, where he converted to Roman Catholicism, wrote operas, and met his future wife, a maid named Thérèse Levasseur (1721–1801).
The question that Rousseau had answered in his prizewinning essay was “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?” Rousseau argued that it had not: Indeed, he wrote, progress had corrupted mankind’s natural goodness.
Rousseau’s philosophy posed implicit criticisms of both the religious and political establishments in France. His belief in human goodness contradicted Roman Catholic doctrine, which held that humans were born carrying the evil of original sin. And his belief in political equality challenged the absolutist French monarchy.
He published a second treatise, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, in 1755 and a successful novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, in 1761. The Social Contract, perhaps his best-known book, was published in 1762. By elevating the rights of individuals and extolling nature, Rousseau’s writings helped shape the Romantic movement and the ideals of the French Revolution.
Rousseau’s personal life, however, grew increasingly tempestuous. He conducted numerous affairs and was reputedly a sexual exhibitionist and masochist. After his books were banned in Paris for offending the religious authorities, Rousseau returned to Switzerland and reconverted to Calvinism. He then returned to France under a fake name; he later won permission to stay on the condition that he stop publishing, and he spent the last years of his life earning a living by copying sheet music.
Rousseau died in Ermenonville, just outside of Paris, at age sixty-six. After the French Revolution, his remains were moved to the Panthéon, France’s highest honor, in recognition of his influence on the revolutionaries.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- After the publication of The Social Contract, which criticized organized religion, Rousseau’s house in Switzerland was stoned by an angry mob. He left the country shortly thereafter.
- In addition to his political and philosophical writing, Rousseau penned a successful opera, Le devin du village (The Village Soothsayer), which debuted before King Louis XV (1710–1774) in 1753.
