The extraordinary life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century literary genius who changed the course of history, traced with novelistic verve.

Motherless child, failed apprentice, autodidact, impossibly odd lover, Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst unexpectedly onto the eighteenth-century scene as a literary provocateur whose works electrified readers from the start. Rousseau’s impact on American social and political thought remains deep, wide, and, to some, even infuriating.

Leo Damrosch beautifully mines Rousseau’s books--The Social Contract, one of the greatest works on political theory and a direct influence on the French and American revolutions; Emile, a groundbreaking treatise on education; and the Confessions, which created the genre of introspective autobiography--as works still uncannily alive and provocative to us today.

Damrosch’s triumph is to integrate the story of Rousseau’s extraordinarily original writings with the tumultuous life that produced them. Rousseau’s own words and those of people who knew him help create an accessible, vivid portrait of a questing man whose strangeness--as punishing and punished lover, difficult friend, and father who famously consigned his infant children to a foundling home--still fascinates. This, the first single-volume biography of Rousseau in English, is as masterfully written as it is definitive.

Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He has written widely on eighteenth-century writers.

Praise for Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Leo Damrosch's vivid biography enables us to plunge deeply into Rousseau's singular life, conjure up its crucial encounters, retrace its twisting paths, and supplement Rousseau's own claims about himself with the detailed, often contradictory testimony of the contemporaries he so unsettled and inspired." — Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

"These pages bring to life the Europe of the ancien regime, a desiccated, sybaritic, superstitious, oppressive world about to be terribly and fatally convulsed. And they also bring to astonishing life a great agent of that convulsion, an impossible man whose books helped to make modern life possible. Leo Damrosch not only helps us understand Rousseau, his loves and his hates, his genius and his foolishness. He makes us see Rousseau. And, as he shows again and again in this immensely enjoyable and fast-paced story, that is Rousseau’s special and permanent fascination--because when we see him, we are seeing ourselves."-- Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club and American Studies

"Considering Rousseau's prominence and historical importance, it is surprising to discover that (according to the publisher) this is the first single-volume biography in English. Damrosch, a professor of literature at Harvard University, has succeeded in presenting an incisive, accessible and sensitive portrait of this unpleasant, infuriating 'restless genius.'Sometimes, indeed, perhaps a little too sensitive: Damrosch's admiration can prevent his strongly condemning where condemnation is due. Rousseau (1712 — 1778) was the man, we should recall, who consigned his own infants to a foundling home, who sent a miserably small sum of money to his ailing former patroness and who bought an adolescent girl for nefarious purposes. Where Damrosch truly excels is in not only masterfully explaining the originality and meaning of mile, The Social Contract and the Confessions, but in relating those works to their author's conflicted, contradictory psyche. As Rousseau himself admitted, 'I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.'Also, in vividly delineating the sage's final decade for the first time, Damrosch has performed a signal service: Maurice Cranston, who was writing a three-volume biography, died before completing the last part — thereby leaving readers in the dark as to Rousseau's fate. No longer. 43 b&w illus. Agent, Tina Bennett." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Damrosch (literature, Harvard U.) offers a biography of Rousseau (1712-78), drawing on the many autobiographical sources that the French political philosopher produced to inform his readers precisely how his ideas emerged from his life experiences. And those experiences were indeed crucial, Damrosch points out, because Rousseau was a teen-age runaway who spend 20 years bumming through low-level jobs before he began writing, and never went to a day of school. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

'\"These pages...bring to astonishing life...an impossible man whose books made modern life possible....Immensely enjoyable and fast-paced.\" --Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club and American Studies'

'\"An incisive, accessible, and sensitive portrait . . . Damrosch has performed a signal service.\"'

LEO DAMROSCH was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, among other honors. Currently the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of literature at Harvard University, he has written widely on eighteenth-century writers. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction 1

1. The Loneliness of a Gifted Child 7

2. The End of Innocence 25

3. "I Desired a Happiness of Which I Had No Idea" 43

4. Rousseau Finds a Mother 69

5. A Year of Wandering 88

6. In Maman's House 104

7. The Idyll of Les Charmettes 125

8. Broadening Horizons: Lyon and Paris 149

9. The Masks of Venice 168

10. A Life Partner and a Guilty Secret 184

11. A Writer's Apprenticeship 196

12. The Beginnings of Fame 211

13. Rousseau's Originality 234

14. Lionized in Geneva, Alienated in Paris 244

15. An Affair of the Heart 256

16. The Break with the Enlightenment 284

17. Peace at Last and the Triumph of Julie 306

18. Rousseau the Controversialist: Émile and The Social Contract 331

19. Exile in the Mountains 362

20. Another Expulsion 388

21. In a Strange Land 403

22. The Past Relived 434

23. Into the Self-Made Labyrinth 447

24. The Final Years in Paris 464

Timeline of Rousseau's Life 495

Notes 499

Index 550