Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Geneva

The son of a watchmaker: he proudly styled himself 'citizen of Geneva'.

💡 Did you know? Rousseau was born in the Protestant city-republic of Geneva: all his life he proudly called himself „citizen of Geneva“.

Man is born free and everywhere in chains

The most famous opening line in political philosophy (1762).

💡 Did you know? „Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains“: one of the most famous opening lines in philosophy.

general will

Only what serves the common good is legitimate: these ideas lit the fuse of the French Revolution.

💡 Did you know? The „general will“ is the will of the people as a whole: not the sum of individual interests but the common good.

civilisation

His 1749 epiphany on the road to Vincennes: the prize-winning essay made him famous.

💡 Did you know? The slogan 'back to nature' is not literally his: but it captures the thrust.

Emile

Children should develop according to nature instead of being drilled: a founding book of modern pedagogy.

💡 Did you know? „Emile“ sketches an education in harmony with nature; the book was banned and publicly burned.

bans and an arrest warrant

Rousseau fled across half of Europe, for a time Hume took him in in England.

💡 Did you know? The friendship with Hume shattered on Rousseau's growing sense of persecution.

He gave his children to the foundling hospital

With his companion Thérèse Levasseur: he later justified himself at length in the 'Confessions'.

💡 Did you know? The great thinker on education gave all five of his own children to a foundling home: a contradiction still debated today.

Confessions

An unsparing self-portrait: consciously following Augustine, but radically secular.

💡 Did you know? With his „Confessions“ Rousseau created the modern, unsparingly frank autobiography.

Romanticism

His novel 'Julie' and the 'Reveries of the Solitary Walker' made feeling and nature fit subjects for literature.

💡 Did you know? With his reverence for nature and feeling, Rousseau became a forerunner of Romanticism.

The Village Soothsayer

The pension offered by the king the unbending man refused: he preferred to earn his keep copying music.

💡 Did you know? Rousseau also invented his own system of musical notation: the Academy rejected it.

Diderot

On the road to Vincennes he read the Dijon Academy's prize question and answered: progress corrupts.

💡 Did you know? On his way to his imprisoned friend Diderot, Rousseau was struck by the insight that civilisation corrupts the naturally good human.

the Panthéon

The man who died in 1778 became a saint of the Revolution: his tomb faces Voltaire's.

💡 Did you know? The French Revolution revered Rousseau as its intellectual father and moved his remains to the Panthéon in 1794.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan Enlightenment philosopher whose ideas of popular sovereignty and the state of nature inspired the French Revolution.

💡 Did you know? Though he became famous as a thinker on education, he gave his own five children to a foundling home.