Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius

"This is a one-volume biography by Leo Damrosch. It’s quite racily-written, very readable. There are other biographies of Rousseau, some of them very scholarly: for example, Maurice Cranston’s three-volume biography. Rousseau was a biographer of himself, an autobiographer. The most famous of his autobiographical writings is the Confessions, but there’s also Reveries of a Solitary Walker , and the famous Dialogues , where you have a very paranoid Rousseau in conversation with another character, ‘the Frenchman,’ concerning the faults of an alter ego, Jean-Jacques. So Rousseau did tell the story of his own life, but Damrosch tells it very well in English. He also has some reflections on the veracity of Rousseau’s own autobiographical writings, which is an interesting aspect of Damrosch’s book. On the whole, he finds that Rousseau was quite truthful. Of course there are elements of the story Rousseau tells about himself where he is self-deceived, or indeed paranoid, but so far as telling the truth about the facts and external events of his life, he seems to have been quite honest with us. That’s right. Rousseau was born in 1712, but didn’t really come to public attention until the 1750s when he was middle-aged — perhaps even late middle-aged, in 18th century terms. Up until that time, he’d been a servant, an itinerant musician and a music teacher. He’d been secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He’d done all sorts of things, but only became famous as an intellectual later in life. He first came to prominence with the Discourse on the Science and the Arts , which was his response to a competition set by the Academy of Dijon. He became a novelist a bit later. He also composed an opera around the same time. His big achievement as a novelist was Julie, or the New Héloïse , and that came out in 1761. It was a scandalous and compelling novel in the context of the 18th century but reads rather drily today. In 1762, he published Émile and also The Social Contract . Both of those books got him into quite deep water because of his heterodox views on religion. It was less the politics and more the religion that got him into trouble. He had to flee from France, where he was a wanted man. He sought sanctuary in Switzerland, and eventually, under David Hume’s tutelage, he made it to England, eventually to Staffordshire where he spent most of a year. There his mental health started to deteriorate quite significantly. He thought there were serious plots against him, and that David Hume, in particular, was out to get him. This wasn’t the case. However, Damrosch does reveal that it wasn’t entirely irrational for Rousseau to suspect Hume, because people close to Hume, like Horace Walpole, were ridiculing Rousseau in the press. He went back to France. Although he was still, technically, a wanted man, things had calmed down there. Then two things happened. One was that he got into an argument with the civic authorities in Geneva, of which he was a citizen, who condemned his work. That didn’t play out particularly well. Some of the citizenry wanted to come to his support, but by that time he’d lost interest. He expressed opinions in this dispute that were somewhat in tension with the democratic Rousseau we often think about today. Secondly, he wrote various important works in later life, often in response to commissions from people overseas, such as his republican writings about Poland and Corsica. But mainly, in the later stages of his life, he earned his money by music copying. He led a slightly reclusive life. “He’d managed to annoy and alienate the people who were his friends, or had generated various fantasies about them.” The great autobiographical writing at the end of his life is the Reverie of a Solitary Walker . This starts with him saying: ‘Here am I, then, alone upon the earth, having no brother, or neighbour, or friend, or society but myself: the most sociable and loving of human beings.’ That shows a complete lack of self-knowledge. He’d managed to annoy and alienate the people who were his friends, or had generated various fantasies about them. It’s a beautiful book, by the way, perhaps his most elegiac book. But that passage does show this remarkable lack of grasp of who he was. He says, ‘Here I am alone on the earth’ but his companion, Thérèse Levasseur, is there in the background. She was much sneered at by Enlightenment literary circles, because she was not of the right social class, but she was loyal to him to the end. It gives a comprehensive take on Rousseau’s work in one volume, it’s very accessible to the general reader and it’s in English. There are other biographies which are very good and scholarly, but rather dry. If you want a general introduction to Rousseau and his life, a biography that also gives a critical take on his own attempts to write the story of his life, I think this is the best choice."