The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau makes his own character the subject of inquiry in The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Covering the first fifty-three years of his life, through 1765, the autobiography traces experiences that shaped his personality and ideas instead of organizing his story around a religious conversion.

The work consists of twelve books written in two groups of six. Rousseau completed the first part between 1765 and 1767 and the second in 1769-1770; they appeared posthumously in 1782 and 1789. He had already read portions aloud in salons and other gatherings. Education, desire, shame, ambition, and self-justification all enter the portrait. Episodes include his attempt to blame a young servant for his theft of a ribbon and his account of placing the five children he had with Therese Levasseur in a foundling hospital. Connections between his life and Emile also show personal experience feeding his philosophy of education.

Candor does not make the narrative a neutral record. Dates are often wrong, events may be displaced, and Rousseau shapes the meaning of what he recounts. That tension between disclosure and self-fashioning is central to the book's literary importance. By treating worldly experience and private feeling as material for a major autobiography, he helped establish a form later developed by writers including Goethe, Wordsworth, and De Quincey.