Character Catalog

Rousseau's first major text, awarded a prize by the Académie de Dijon, in which he paradoxically argues that the progress of the arts and sciences has corrupted morals rather than improving them.

A major work in which Rousseau imagines mankind's original state of nature — good by essence — and analyses how property and society gave rise to inequalities.

An enormously successful epistolary novel that champions the virtues of sensibility, sincere love, and rural life against the hypocrisy of Parisian manners.

A foundational treatise of political philosophy in which Rousseau develops the concepts of the general will and popular sovereignty, laying the theoretical groundwork for modern democracy.

A revolutionary pedagogical treatise advocating a natural education that respects the child's spontaneous development, far removed from the artificial constraints of society.

A pioneering autobiography in which Rousseau reveals himself with unprecedented sincerity, inventing a new literary genre and influencing the entire Romantic tradition.

Rousseau's final, unfinished text — ten meditative walks in which he reflects on his solitude, nature, and happiness, a masterpiece of pre-Romantic lyricism.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature; and that man myself.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

Here I am, then, alone on the earth, with no brother, neighbour, friend, or society but myself.

Rousseau's birthplace, whose citizenship he was proud of. His attachment to the Republic of Geneva and its democratic values profoundly influenced his political thought.

The home of Mme de Warens where Rousseau lived a happy period between 1736 and 1742, educating himself as a self-taught learner by reading and reflecting in a pastoral setting he would idealize for the rest of his life.

Rousseau lived there for many years, frequenting Enlightenment salons and collaborating on the Encyclopédie, before falling out with the Parisian philosophical circles he considered corrupt.

Rousseau's refuge in 1765, having been driven out of Môtiers by his opponents. He spent two months of pastoral happiness there, which he considered the most beautiful of his life, recalled with nostalgia in the Reveries.

The estate of the Marquis de Girardin where Rousseau spent the last weeks of his life and died on 2 July 1778. His tomb on the Island of Poplars immediately became a site of revolutionary pilgrimage.

Rousseau wrote his works with a quill pen, often by hand in large notebooks. His autograph manuscripts, preserved at the Geneva Library, bear witness to his many crossings-out and corrections.

Rousseau used a metal box to collect plants and flowers during his walks. Botany was for him a philosophical activity as much as a scientific one, a symbol of the return to nature.

To make ends meet, Rousseau copied musical scores by hand — a humble occupation he considered compatible with his philosophy of independence and rejection of patronage from the powerful.

From 1762 onwards, Rousseau adopted an Armenian caftan and a fur cap, an exotic outfit that allowed him to assert his rejection of French social conventions and to relieve a urinary ailment.

During his stay on the Île Saint-Pierre in 1765, Rousseau would drift alone in a rowboat on Lake Bienne, an experience of reverie and union with nature that he describes in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker.