Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Two Books Burned in One Year

Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712; his mother died days later. He ran away from an engraver's apprenticeship at sixteen and spent years drifting through jobs and patrons. From the age of thirty-seven he produced, in about thirteen years, the books that broke the century open: the Discourse on Inequality (1755), which argues that private property and civilization created human misery rather than curing it; Julie (1761), the best-selling novel of the century; and in 1762 both Émile, on how to raise a child, and The Social Contract, which begins by saying that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. Both 1762 books were publicly burned and warrants were issued for his arrest in Paris and in Geneva. He spent the rest of his life moving, quarreling — including a famous public rupture with Hume, who had sheltered him — and writing the Confessions, the first modern autobiography, in which he set out to tell the whole truth about himself.

Died Sure Europe Was Against Him

He died at Ermenonville on 2 July 1778, aged sixty-six, of a hemorrhage, in poverty and convinced that most of Europe was conspiring against him. Sixteen years later the French Revolution — which he had done more than anyone to make thinkable — dug him up and carried him into the Panthéon in a torchlit procession, and laid him a few meters from Voltaire; the two had detested each other for decades.