Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712-1778 |
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a man of many contradictions. His proudest title was that of a citizen of Geneva, but he lost any claim to such citizenship when he turned away from his Protestant faith. He abandoned all of his children to their probable deaths in foundling hospitals, yet later published a book detailing the proper methods for raising and educating children. For almost three-quarters of his life, he was very much a man shaped by rational thought and the Enlightenment, but he is often remembered as one of the founders of the Romantic Movement. His very contradictions are what made and continue to make him so appealing to not only students of philosophy, but also psychologists, historians, and political scientists. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in the then-independent Republic of Geneva to Isaac and Suzanne Bernard Rousseau on 28 June 1712. Nine days after his birth, Suzanne died from childbirth fever, a circumstance that would impact Jean-Jacques’s later work on raising children. He always considered the relations with a mother the most important of all familial relationships and believed that, in any and all arguments, the mother was always correct. Rousseau came to believe that he was responsible for his mother’s death and that, as such, he should have been allowed to die at the same time. He later wrote as much to both his Aunt Suzanne, who helped his father when Jean-Jacques’s was small, and one Jacqueline Faramand, who served as his nursemaid. In 1722, Isaac Rousseau fled Geneva to avoid imprisonment due to his participation in a duel. Jean-Jacques spent the next six years living with a pastor on the outskirts of Geneva. |
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When he was fifteen, Jean-Jacques ran away from Geneva and his work as an apprentice engraver. He soon met up with the Baroness Françoise-Louise de Warens, who, despite the thirteen-year age difference, would become the most important female figure in Jean-Jacques’s life. He called her “Maman” and soon fell desperately and madly in love with her. His love for her was not realized until four years after their initial meeting. For all his love for and devotion to his “Maman”, Jean-Jacques felt that he was committing incest by sleeping with her and would later insist that she only consummated their relationship to prevent him from misdeeds with other women. Eventually, Jean-Jacques turned to the pursuit of knowledge, immersing himself in the study of nature and the lure of books. After ten years with “Maman” and two as the secretary to the French ambassador to Venice, Jean-Jacques found himself in Paris, living with Thérèse Levasseur, a semi-literate seamstress and laundress who would be his companion, lover, and not-quite legal wife until his death thirty-three years later. Thérèse would give Jean-Jacques five children, all of whom were abandoned to the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris. Jean-Jacques would later regret abandoning his children, especially after efforts to find one of them failed, and would include a passage in Émile, his semi-fictitious work on education, about how parents would never be able to forgive themselves if they did as he himself had done. While living in Paris, Jean-Jacques became acquainted with Denis Diderot and contributed several articles, including one on political economy, to Diderot’s Encyclopédie. One day in 1749, as he was walking to visit Diderot, Jean-Jacques read of an essay competition sponsored by the Académie de Dijon concerning whether or not the development of arts and the sciences was morally beneficial to mankind. Jean-Jacques’s response to this, his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, in which he answered in the negative, won him first place in the contest and a fair amount of public fame. In 1755, Jean-Jacques published the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men, an event which signified the beginning of the end of his relationship with Diderot and the other Encyclopedists. After the break with the Encyclopedists, Jean-Jacques enjoyed the patronage of the Duc de Luxembourg during a particularly prolific period of writing prowess. In 1761, Jean-Jacques published the novel Julie, or the New Heloise, whose title refers back to the legendary love between Peter Abelard and his student Heloise in the Middle Ages. The next year, he published Of the Social Contract in April and Émile, or On Education, the next month. It was Émile that Mary Wollstonecraft read while in Ireland as a governess. Wollstonecraft used the first part of chapter five of her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Women to attack Jean-Jacques’s views of the education of women as described in Émile. While Mary Wollstonecraft disapproved of the education Jean-Jacques espoused for girls in Émile, Edmund Burke heartily approved of the limited lessons Jean-Jacques deemed appropriate for young girls. As both Of the Social Contract and Émile were strongly critical of organized religion, Jean-Jacques was forced to flee Paris the same year they were published. He was allowed to return in 1770 under the condition that he not publish any more works. Despite this injunction, Jean-Jacques completed his autobiographical Confessions in 1771 and he began giving public readings from it. These were only stopped after the police intervened. All of Jean-Jacques remaining works, including the Confessions and Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques, were published posthumously. His death in 1778 was due to cerebral hemorrhaging, most likely as a result of several falls including a close encounter with a Great Dane two years previously in Paris. Jean-Jacques Rousseau continues to live on today as his influence is felt in the fields of education, political science, and psychology. -by Courtney Smotherman |
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