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Rousseau’s Life and Works
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712, at Geneva in Switzerland. He never knew his mother, who died of the effects of childbirth ten days after his arrival. In his own words: “My birth was the first of my misfortunes…. I was born almost dying, they had little hope of saving me. I carried the seed of a disorder that the years have reinforced.” This was how Rousseau viewed his entry into the world: a drama whose potential “disorder” would prove emotional, psychological, and even physical. From the start, his relationship with those around him was unhealthily intense. His father, a watchmaker who had married “above his social class,” was inconsolable at the loss of the woman he had loved since childhood. In Rousseau’s words, “He thought he saw her again in me, but could not forget that I had robbed him of her.” They would both cry when he spoke of her. “He never kissed me without my being aware of his sighs; in his convulsive hugs a bitter grief was mingled with his caresses.” One can all but hear, feel, and smell the closeness and undermining ambivalence.
There appears to have been a streak of impulsive wildness in the family. Rousseau had a brother who was seven years older than him. His father would occasionally beat the brother, and on one occasion Rousseau flung himself between them to save his brother. Rousseau at first describes his brother as a “rascal” but later reveals, “Finally my brother turned so bad that he ran away and disappeared completely.”
At this time Geneva was a small Protestant republic surrounded by Catholic states and dependencies. It was geographically isolated from its neighbours by the ice-capped peaks of the Alps and the picturesque waters of Lake Geneva. The city owed its republicanism and independence to the sixteenth-century religious reformer John Calvin, who had made it a bastion of Protestantism. Its citizens were upright and democratic. Rousseau’s father was intensely proud of his native city, describing it to his son in terms of Sparta and ancient Rome. Rousseau’s mother had left them a small library of books, and his father would read them with his son after supper. Soon they both became so absorbed in this activity that they would continue into the night, taking turns to read. “We could never stop before the end of the book. Sometimes when my father heard the larks at daybreak, he would be ashamed and exclaim, ‘Let’s go to bed. I’m more of a child than you.’”
Young Rousseau found himself the center of attention in an almost exclusively female household, with a nurse, an aunt, and occasional admiring relatives. Sitting at his aunt’s knee as she embroidered, he would listen to her singing her seemingly endless repertoire of traditional songs. Rousseau was fascinated, acquiring a deep interest and understanding of music at an early age. But the element of undermining ambivalence remained. Years later he would describe himself at this stage as having a “heart at once so proud and so tender [with an] effeminate yet indomitable character … vacillating between weakness and courage, self-indulgence and virtue.” He saw himself as a “contradiction with myself.”
Then, suddenly, everything changed. One day Rousseau’s father became involved in a public argument with a local landowner, whom he challenged to a duel. But the landowner contemptuously refused to duel with him because of his lower social origins. Incensed, Rousseau’s father drew his sword and struck the landowner on the cheek, drawing blood. Rousseau’s father disappeared into exile – in Rousseau’s words, “rather than cede a point on which honour and liberty appeared to him compromised” – in fact to avoid a jail sentence. Rousseau’s circumstances changed overnight, and he was farmed out to poor relations: a pastor and his sister who lived in a nearby village. While living there he would be subjected to humiliations and beatings by the pastor’s sister, which provoked in him a “feeling of violence and injustice.” This would have a lasting effect, so that for the rest of his life he could claim that “my blood boils at the spectacle or recital of an unjust act.” But these beatings by the parson’s sister also induced in him a precocious sexual pleasure which would have an equally lasting effect. “Who could have believed that this punishment received at the age of eight from the hand of a woman of thirty, determined my tastes, my desires, my passions, my very self for the rest of my life.” The experience brought to the surface a latent masochism which would characterise his sexuality throughout his life.
At the age of thirteen, Rousseau was apprenticed to an engraver in Geneva. The city may have been a model of righteous democracy, but its Calvinist atmosphere was also puritan and oppressive. This was no place for the likes of Rousseau, who later wrote of himself in these years (indicatively in the third-person present) that “his character derives almost completely from his temperament alone.” He was undoubtedly possessed of an intellect, but his reactions were inspired almost entirely by his emotions. “He is what nature has made him – nature has modified him only little.” In this self-contradiction lies the essence of Rousseau’s thought: even here he is utterly himself. The seeds of the man, his temperament, his entire philosophy lie in this character – which would retain so many of the fervent and unstable qualities of adolescence throughout his life.
Just short of his sixteenth birthday, Rousseau disappeared from Geneva and fled to neighbouring Savoy (now part of France, but then under Sardinian control). Here he was soon taken into the household of Madame de Warens, a local landowner who was separated from her aristocratic husband and had converted to Catholicism. The sixteen-year-old Rousseau and the thirty-year-old Mme. de Warens found an immediate rapport. She would convert him to Catholicism, and he would become her pupil. Significantly, he soon began calling her maman (mummy). The gauche, stammering apprentice, all but devoid of formal education, who arrived on Mme. de Warens’s doorstep was gradually transformed into a presentable young man. Yet this particular ugly duckling would never quite become a swan – beneath the thin social veneer, Rousseau’s volatile temperament would continue to be his guiding force.
And he remained very much an innocent. Not until 1733 did Mme. de Warens finally feel it was her duty to “make a man” of him, seducing her twenty-one-year-old protégé in the little summer house on her estate. For a while Rousseau was installed as a somewhat inept steward to maman’s dwindling estate, but later he took on a number of teaching posts at various places in Savoy. The sexual side of his relationship with maman would peter out – but she would be a lasting influence on him, and they would remain confidants, corresponding for years to come.
In 1742, at the age of thirty, Rousseau set off to seek fame and fortune in Paris. Despite letters of introduction to a number of minor intellectual figures, Rousseau failed to make an impression, let alone a name for himself. Eventually he was fortunate to be appointed temporary secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, and set off to take up his post. The entire episode was to prove a fiasco. The ambassador, the Comte de Montaigu, was an idle, arrogant aristocrat who looked upon Rousseau as an “impudent upstart” possessed of “all the qualities of a very bad servant.” Rousseau, who considered that his diplomatic status entitled him to be treated almost as an equal, responded with typical temperamental vigour. Surprisingly, this situation lasted almost twelve months – until the exasperated ambassador finally threatened to throw his secretary through the window into the canal.
But Rousseau’s time in Venice consisted of more than his involvement in exclusively French diplomatic incidents. This was the Venice painted by Canaletto, the “serene republic” whose sea-trading routes stretched as far as Constantinople and the Levant, a city with a thriving culture, especially in music. By now Rousseau had developed his keen ear for music into a full-fledged talent. He visited the opera frequently and responded with delight to the tuneful enthusiasm and spontaneity of Italian music – which contrasted sharply with the intricate formality of French music of the period. He was also enraptured by the more open temperament and blatant sensuality of the Venetian women he encountered. Most notable of these was a woman of relaxed virtue called Zulietta. Unfortunately Rousseau still had psychological difficulties where women were concerned. When at last he found himself alone with the Zulietta, he exclaimed to himself, “Never was such sweet pleasure offered to the heart and senses of a mortal man.” But when he found himself unable to rise to the occasion, his eye alighted on her “malformed nipple,” whereupon she became transformed in his eyes into “some kind of monster.” Zulietta...
