Confessions
Rousseau more or less invented the modern autobiography: raw, confessional, set on showing the whole person including the embarrassing parts.
Read this if you…
- want a guy talking about his insane sexual kinks and love triangles
- want the first modern autobiography
- want to read an important writer/philosopher who was a horrible person
Skip this if you…
- don't want to read about a narcissistic freak (i liked reading about a narcissistic freak)
- don't find autobiographies interesting
Why It Matters
Rousseau more or less invented the modern autobiography: raw, confessional, set on showing the whole person including the embarrassing parts. His willingness to be honest about desire, shame, and self-justification gave every memoir since a template to work from. It also helped kick off Romanticism by insisting that personal feeling was the most honest kind of truth.
The 
Take
The man is a freak and paranoid and just insane, but well written and very interesting
Where to go next
- Confessions by Augustine of Hippo. Confessions built on it. - Rousseau took the title on purpose — this is a point-by-point reply to Augustine, not an homage - Augustine's *Confessions* sets up everything Rousseau is fighting: original sin, grace, the wretched self redeemed only from above - Read Augustine first and Rousseau's whole project sharpens — his "man according to nature," good until society spoils him, is a deliberate refusal of Augustine's born sinner
- The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne. Confessions built on it. - Rousseau is writing in Montaigne's shadow — and wants you to know he's surpassing it - He calls out the *Essays* by name, accusing Montaigne of only "feigning" to confess his faults while flattering himself; the *Confessions* promises the unflattering version - Read Montaigne first and you see what Rousseau is reacting against: the genteel self-portrait he's trying to blow open into total self-exposure
- Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch. Confessions built on it. - Rousseau hands you the source himself: in the *Confessions* he credits boyhood reading of Plutarch's *Lives* with shaping his "free and republican spirit" - "I became the man whose life I read," he writes — the ancient biographies became a template for his own selfhood - Read Plutarch first and you meet the heroes Rousseau measured himself against, the noble-Roman ideal that runs under his whole self-portrait
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Confessions built on it. - Rousseau frames his own life through Defoe's — calling himself "another Robinson Crusoe" as he settles into quarantine in the lazaretto - He prized *Robinson Crusoe* above all books in *Emile*, the one fit reading for a natural education; in the *Confessions* he simply becomes its hero - Read Crusoe's solitude first and you see the self-image Rousseau is borrowing to dramatize his own
- The Red and the Black by Stendhal. Confessions shaped it. - Stendhal makes Rousseau's *Confessions* the secret bible of Julien Sorel — "the only book by whose help his imagination endeavoured to construct the world" - Julien's class resentment and his "horror of eating with the servants" are borrowed straight from Rousseau, named in the novel itself - The *Confessions* taught a generation of ambitious provincials to read their own lives as drama — Julien is what that reading does to a sharp, poor young man
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Confessions shaped it. - Dostoevsky first announced *Notes from Underground* under the title "A Confession" — it is Rousseau's project turned inside out - Where Rousseau offers earnest self-revelation, the Underground Man parodies it, charging that Rousseau lied about himself out of vanity - Even Rousseau's "l'homme de la nature et de la vérité" survives — distorted into a sneer in the spiteful mouth of a man who knows he is anything but natural or true
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Confessions shaped it. - Tolstoy didn't just read Rousseau — he wore a Rousseau medallion where a cross should hang and called himself "a Rousseauist" - He said he read "the whole of Rousseau, all twenty volumes" and "worshipped him" — the *Confessions*' cult of the natural, uncorrupted man runs straight into *War and Peace* - Pierre's groping toward authenticity and the peasant Karataev's untaught wisdom are Rousseau's natural man given flesh
Depicted in Art
Rousseau in three-quarter view, head turned toward the viewer, in the pastel that fixed his public likeness during his lifetime.
Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 1753
Half-length oil portrait of Rousseau in dark coat, painted from life in the 1760s.
François Guérin
Young Rousseau, hat in hand, presented to Madame de Warens in a garden at Annecy.
Charles de Steuben
Rousseau in a carriage with Madame de Larnage during the journey south from Lyon — the seduction he later confesses.
Paul Gavarni
Episode from Book I — Rousseau's Geneva childhood under his aunt and the apprentice years.
Maurice Leloir, 1889
Recommended Editions
J.M. Cohen
Penguin Classics · 1953
J.M. Cohen's 1953 Penguin has been the English Rousseau for generations. The prose reads like a long, intimate, occasionally infuriating letter, which is exactly what the book is.
Please support us by purchasing through these links, at no extra cost to you!
Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I dare say I am like no one in the whole world.”
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”