Confessions

Summary

Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing. It opens by imagining Rousseau at the Last Judgment holding his book and daring any reader to claim 'I was better than that man'. The twelve books fall into two parts. Part One (Books I–VI, written 1765–67) covers the years to 1740 and is largely a story of wandering and feeling. His birth 'cost my mother her life, and was the first of my misfortunes'. He is raised by a doting watchmaker father who reads novels with him through the night. At the pastor Lambercier's at Bossey, a spanking from Mademoiselle Lambercier awakens a lifelong masochistic sensuality that he confesses with unprecedented frankness. A false accusation of breaking a comb gives him his first experience of injustice. Apprenticed to a brutal engraver, he runs away at fifteen and converts to Catholicism at Turin. In the household of Madame de Vercellis he steals a ribbon and blames the cook Marion, a lie that haunts him for forty years. He finds refuge with Madame de Warens, his 'Maman', who becomes his protector, teacher and eventually lover in a household she shares with her steward Claude Anet. At Les Charmettes near Chambéry he enjoys a brief idyll of reading and country life. He then suffers a sudden attack of pounding arteries and roaring in the ears that leaves him partly deaf and sleepless. Reading anatomy books convinces him he has a polyp of the heart, and he travels to Montpellier to consult physicians, though the journey turns into an affair with Madame de Larnage. On his return he finds himself replaced in Maman's affections. Part Two (Books VII–XII, written 1769–70) is darker. In Paris he tries to make his name with a new musical notation, serves as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, and takes up with the laundress Thérèse Levasseur. Their five children are deposited at the Foundling Hospital, an act he defends and regrets by turns. On the road to Vincennes to visit the imprisoned Diderot in 1749, reading the Dijon Academy's prize question, he has the illumination that produces the first Discourse and makes him famous. Chronic urinary retention, treated with surgeons' bougies and probes, becomes a recurring torment. He retreats to the Hermitage at Montmorency, where his passion for Sophie d'Houdetot inspires Julie and his quarrels with Diderot, Grimm and Madame d'Épinay begin. He describes these as the start of a vast plot. Emile brings a warrant for his arrest in 1762, followed by flight to Switzerland, the stoning of his house at Môtiers, and expulsion from the Île de Saint-Pierre. The narrative breaks off in 1765 as he prepares to leave for England. The final books, saturated with suspicion, have been read both as justified complaint and as evidence of a paranoid disorder, while the whole work invented the modern idea that the self's inner life and childhood explain the adult.

Plot or Argument

• Book I (1712–1728): Geneva, Bossey and the engraver

  Birth and mother's death, novel-reading with his father, the Lambercier household, the punishment that shapes his sexuality, the broken-comb injustice, apprenticeship to a brutal engraver, and flight from Geneva when the city gates are shut.

• Books II–III (1728–1730): Turin, conversion and the stolen ribbon

  Sent to Madame de Warens at Annecy and then to the hospice for converts in Turin; service in aristocratic households; the theft of the ribbon and the false accusation of Marion; return to Maman and attempts at a seminary and music.

• Books IV–V (1730–1737): wanderings and life with Maman

  Walking journeys through Switzerland and France, music teaching at Chambéry, initiation into a sexual relationship with Madame de Warens, the death of Claude Anet, and Rousseau's self-education.

• Book VI (1737–1740): Les Charmettes, illness and Montpellier

  The country idyll; the sudden attack of arterial pounding, tinnitus and insomnia; anatomical reading and the imagined polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and the affair with Madame de Larnage; displacement by a new favourite.

• Book VII (1741–1749): Paris, Venice and Thérèse

  A failed system of musical notation, the salons, secretaryship to the ambassador in Venice and the episode with the courtesan Zulietta, union with Thérèse Levasseur and the first children left at the Foundling Hospital.

• Book VIII (1749–1756): the Vincennes illumination and fame

  Walking to visit Diderot in prison, Rousseau reads the Dijon prize question and is overwhelmed by 'an agitation which approached a delirium'. Fame follows, along with renal colic and chronic retention, the opera Le Devin du village, refusal of a royal pension, reform of his dress and manners, and the second Discourse.

• Books IX–X (1756–1759): the Hermitage and the break with the philosophes

  Retirement to Madame d'Épinay's Hermitage, the passion for Sophie d'Houdetot, composition of Julie, quarrels with Diderot, Grimm and Madame d'Épinay, and the move to Montmorency under the Luxembourgs' protection.

• Books XI–XII (1760–1765): Emile, proscription and flight

  Publication of Julie, Emile and The Social Contract; the Parlement's arrest warrant; flight to Yverdon and Môtiers; stoning by villagers; the brief happiness of the Île de Saint-Pierre and expulsion by Bern, ending as he departs toward England.

Characters

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, narrator and subject

  A self-described man of feeling, proud of his sincerity, ashamed of particular acts, and increasingly convinced of persecution.

• Françoise-Louise de Warens ('Maman'), protector and lover

  Convert and pensioner of the King of Sardinia who takes in the young Rousseau, educates him, and dabbles in chemistry and remedies.

• Thérèse Levasseur, companion, later wife

  Laundress and Rousseau's lifelong partner, mother of five children placed in the Foundling Hospital.

• Isaac Rousseau, father

  Genevan watchmaker who reads romances with his son and leaves Geneva after a quarrel.

• Mademoiselle Lambercier, pastor's sister at Bossey

  Her punishment of the boy becomes the origin of his confessed sexual disposition.

• Marion, falsely accused servant

  The young cook at Madame de Vercellis's whom Rousseau blames for his own theft of a ribbon.

• Denis Diderot, friend turned enemy

  Editor of the Encyclopédie, whose imprisonment at Vincennes occasions the illumination and whose later quarrel Rousseau treats as betrayal.

• Sophie d'Houdetot, beloved

  Madame d'Épinay's sister-in-law, the great unconsummated passion of the Hermitage years.

• Friedrich Melchior Grimm and Louise d'Épinay, perceived persecutors

  Former friends whom Rousseau places at the centre of the plot he believes was formed against him.

Lessons

• Childhood as the key to the adult self

  Rousseau traces his sexuality, his sense of injustice and his love of reverie to specific childhood episodes. In doing so he invented the developmental account of personality that psychoanalysis and modern memoir both inherit.

  • Is Rousseau's explanation of his masochism from a single episode convincing, or a narrative convenience?
  • Which childhood scene in the Confessions most anticipates Freud?

• Sincerity is not the same as truth

  Rousseau promises to tell everything, and does reveal humiliating facts, but his confessions are also defences. The Marion episode and the foundling children show the gap between candid admission and moral accountability.

  • Does Rousseau's analysis of shame in the ribbon episode excuse or deepen his guilt?
  • Why does he defend abandoning his children in one book and lament it in another?
  • What can a reader trust in a self-portrait written to answer enemies?

• Reading yourself ill

  Rousseau's account of studying anatomy and finding every disease's symptoms in himself is a precise description of health anxiety. He also gives a sharp critique of physicians who call what they cannot explain imaginary, and his sufferings were partly real (urinary retention, tinnitus) and partly amplified by fear.

  • How does Rousseau's polyp of the heart compare with modern online self-diagnosis?
  • Is his resolution to 'cure myself or die without the aid of physicians' wisdom or another symptom?

• When grievance becomes a system

  The later books turn real quarrels into an all-encompassing conspiracy. They raise hard questions about how persecution, isolation, chronic pain and genius interact, and about the ethics of diagnosing a writer from his own testimony.

  • Which of Rousseau's complaints were well founded (warrants, stonings, expulsions) and which seem unfounded?
  • What would be lost if the later Confessions were read only as symptoms?

Context

The Confessions belong to the French Enlightenment and to its crisis. Rousseau rose through the salons and the Encyclopédie circle, then turned against their faith in progress, luxury and reason. His works were burned in Paris and Geneva in 1762. The book also inherits the confessional tradition of Augustine and the self-portraiture of Montaigne, and it reflects the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, in which feeling, tears and nervous susceptibility marked refinement as well as illness.

Composition

Rousseau began the Confessions in 1765, wrote Part One largely at Wootton in Staffordshire in 1766–67 during his English exile, and completed Part Two in 1769–70. In 1770–71 he gave readings from it in Paris salons until Madame d'Épinay had the police stop them. Part One was published posthumously in 1782 and Part Two in 1789. Related autobiographical works are the Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker.

Reception

The book scandalised and fascinated. Its sexual candour and its exposure of living people shocked contemporaries, and the abandonment of the children has been held against Rousseau ever since; Voltaire had already publicised it in 1764. The Romantics, from Goethe to Hazlitt and Wordsworth, treated the Confessions as a model of the inward self. Psychiatrists from the nineteenth century onward debated Rousseau's mental state, and the book stands at the origin of modern autobiography and memoir.

Comparisons

• confessions

  Rousseau borrows Augustine's title and confessional frame but reverses its direction: Augustine confesses to God to praise grace, while Rousseau appeals to the reader's judgment and asks to be found no worse than any other person.

• essays-montaigne

  Montaigne had painted himself 'wholly naked' a generation of readers earlier, and Rousseau acknowledges and disparages him. Where Montaigne's self is changeable and essayed in fragments, Rousseau's is a unique nature narrated from birth.

• the-social-contract

  Book XI narrates the publication and condemnation of The Social Contract and Emile. Reading them together exposes the gap between the citizen of the general will and the solitary, persecuted individual of the autobiography.

• the-interpretation-of-dreams

  Freud's self-analysis through his own dreams and childhood memories continues Rousseau's project of explaining the adult through early scenes, now with a theory of the unconscious that Rousseau lacked.

• the-varieties-of-religious-experience

  The Vincennes illumination, with its sudden 'agitation which approached a delirium' and lasting change of character, fits the secular conversion experiences that William James catalogues.

• Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

  Rousseau's last, unfinished work returns to the Île de Saint-Pierre and to botany in a calmer register, showing a mind that has partly made peace with the persecution the Confessions describe.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening of Book I, where Rousseau imagines himself at the Last Judgment holding his book before the Sovereign Judge and challenging every reader to claim to be better. Ask whom this confession is really addressed to.
• The stolen ribbon at Madame de Vercellis's in Book II and Rousseau's accusation of the cook Marion. Watch how much space he gives to explaining his motives compared with what happened to her.
• The broken-comb episode at Bossey in Book I, which Rousseau presents as his first knowledge of injustice and as the end of childhood serenity.
• Book VI at Les Charmettes, where an idyll of reading and country life gives way to illness, anatomy books, and the imagined polyp of the heart.
• The shift in tone from Part One to Part Two, especially Books IX to XII, where former friends Diderot, Grimm, and Madame d'Epinay become, in Rousseau's account, the authors of a plot against him.

Key terms and names

Madame de Warens (Maman)

The convert and pensioner of the King of Sardinia who takes in the runaway Rousseau at Annecy and later Chambery. She is his protector, teacher, and lover, and the household at Les Charmettes is the happiest place in the book.

Marion

The young cook whom Rousseau blames for the ribbon he stole in Book II. He says the lie haunted him for forty years, and it is the test case for whether his confessions are admissions or defences.

Bossey and the Lamberciers

The village and pastor's household where the boy Rousseau is boarded in Book I. Two episodes there, a punishment from Mademoiselle Lambercier and the false charge of breaking a comb, are presented as shaping his whole character.

Les Charmettes

The country house near Chambery where Rousseau lives with Madame de Warens in Book VI. It is his remembered paradise of study and nature, and also where his illness and fear of death begin.

The Vincennes illumination

The moment in 1749, told in Book VIII, when Rousseau reads the Dijon Academy's prize question on the road to visit the imprisoned Diderot and is seized by the ideas that become his first Discourse. He later calls it the source of all his misfortunes.

Foundling Hospital

The Paris institution where Rousseau and Therese Levasseur leave their children, beginning in Book VII. Rousseau defends the decision in some passages and regrets it in others.

Sensibility

The eighteenth-century ideal of a delicate, feeling heart, quick to tears and moved by nature. Rousseau presents himself as its supreme example and treats the purity of his feelings as evidence of his goodness.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does Rousseau promise his readers at the opening of Book I, and what scene does he imagine to make that promise?
2. Comprehension What happens with the ribbon in Book II, and what reason does Rousseau give for accusing Marion?
3. Comprehension How does Rousseau come to believe in Book VI that he has a polyp of the heart, and what happens when he travels to the physicians of Montpellier?
4. Interpretation Rousseau says he feared shame more than punishment. Does this explanation of the ribbon episode make his guilt smaller or larger?
5. Interpretation Rousseau traces his sense of injustice to the broken comb and his sensuality to a childhood punishment. Is he discovering the causes of his character, or choosing a story that explains it?
6. Interpretation How does the voice of the narrator change between the wandering years of Books I to VI and the quarrels of Books IX to XII? Which Rousseau do you trust more?
7. Big Question Is complete sincerity about oneself the same thing as honesty, and can a person confess truthfully while also defending himself?
8. Big Question To whom should a person confess: God, a friend, or the public? What changes depending on the answer?

Faith Connections

• 1 John 1:8-9 (Scripture)

  John writes that those who say they have no sin deceive themselves, and that confession is met by forgiveness and cleansing. Rousseau confesses real sins, but his Book I challenge, daring any reader to claim to be better, asks for acquittal by comparison rather than for forgiveness.

• Psalm 51 (Scripture)

  David's confession after Nathan's rebuke names his sin as against God and asks for a clean heart, not a favourable verdict from men. Its humility is a measure against which Rousseau's appeal to the reader's judgment can be read.

• Augustine, Confessions, Book II (Church Fathers)

  Augustine confesses stealing pears as a boy for no reason but the pleasure of the forbidden act done with companions. Rousseau's stolen ribbon is the obvious echo, but where Augustine probes the mystery of a will that loves evil, Rousseau explains his lie as the work of shame in a good heart.

• Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII (Great Conversation)

  Augustine's conversion in the garden at Milan comes through reading a single passage of Scripture and turns him toward God. Rousseau's illumination on the road to Vincennes in Book VIII also comes through a sudden reading, but it turns him toward his own vision of nature and society, and he calls it the beginning of his misfortunes.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: No one has ever shown a human being exactly as he is, concealing nothing. Rousseau will do so, revealing even his shameful acts and desires. A person who reveals everything cannot be accused of hiding anything, and a reader who sees all of one man's heart will find in his own heart failings no less great. Therefore Rousseau, though guilty of particular faults, is at bottom a good man whose nature was formed and wounded by circumstance, and his enemies' portrait of him is false.

Rhetorical device: apostrophe. At the opening of Book I Rousseau turns away from the reader to address the Sovereign Judge at the Last Judgment, then summons the whole of humanity to hear his confession and dares each to declare, I was better than that man.

Debate: Resolved: Rousseau's Confessions are more an act of self-defence than an act of confession.

Memory Work

I did not fear punishment, but I dreaded shame: I dreaded it more than death, more than the crime, more than all the world

let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, I was better than that man

Writing Prompts

Essay: Rousseau claims to tell the whole truth about himself. Using the ribbon episode in Book II, the defence and regret over the Foundling Hospital, and the account of his former friends in the later books, argue whether the Confessions succeed as an honest self-portrait.

Comparison with Confessions: Rousseau borrowed Augustine's title and his confessional form, but Augustine addresses God and Rousseau addresses the reader. Compare the stolen pears of Augustine's Book II with Rousseau's stolen ribbon in Book II, and argue how the choice of audience changes what each man is able to confess.

Medical Lens

Few eighteenth-century texts record a patient's experience so fully. Rousseau describes congenital urinary retention, later renal colic, and the surgeons Morand and Daran with their probes and bougies. Explanations proposed by later doctors (stricture, hypospadias, prostatic disease) are retrospective. He describes a sudden attack of pounding carotids and four kinds of noise in the ears, followed by permanent hearing loss, tinnitus and insomnia. He gives a classic account of 'the vapours' and of health anxiety intensified by reading anatomy, ending in the imagined polyp of the heart. He criticises physicians who dismiss what they cannot explain and who starve a child under a regimen. He also offers an early psychogenetic explanation of his sexual masochism and a phenomenology of shame. The later books' conviction of a universal conspiracy has led to many retrospective diagnoses of paranoid disorder, but such readings remain interpretive and must be weighed against the real persecution he faced (warrants, book burnings, the stoning at Môtiers).

• Book I

  Born 'in a very weakly and infirm state'; his mother's death after childbirth; his aunt's care; the spanking at Bossey and its lasting effect on his sexuality.

  Childbirth MaternalGriefSexuality MedicalizedPsychology Unconscious
• Book II

  The stolen ribbon and the accusation of Marion, analysed as the work of overwhelming shame.

  Psychology Unconscious
• Book VI

  The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.

  HypochondriaNeurosis AnxietySleep InsomniaHysteriaPhysicians Doctors
• Book VII

  Thérèse's confinements with the midwife and the deposit of the children at the Foundling Hospital.

  Childbirth MaternalMedical Ethics
• Book VIII

  The Vincennes illumination 'approaching a delirium'; congenital bladder defect, nephritic colic, treatment by Morand and Daran, Morand's prognosis of six months to live, and the decision to abandon physicians.

  Altered StatesPainPhysicians Doctors
• Book XI

  The young heir of the Montmorency-Luxembourg family dies of inanition under a physician's severe regimen, against Rousseau's advice.

  Starvation NutritionMedical Ethics
• Books IX–XII

  The growing conviction of a plot by Diderot, Grimm, d'Épinay and others, culminating in the narrative of flight and persecution.

  Madness PsychosisNeurosis Anxiety

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Retell the ribbon episode from Marion's point of view, forty years later, when she reads the Confessions.

• Essay

  Weigh the evidence for and against reading the later Confessions as the record of a paranoid illness, setting Rousseau's real persecution beside his imagined conspiracy and reflecting on the limits of retrospective diagnosis.

• Dialogue

  Write the consultation at Montpellier in 1737 between Rousseau, convinced of his polyp of the heart, and a sceptical physician prescribing waters and whey.

• Classroom

  Have students write a one-page 'confession' of a childhood event that shaped them, then analyse Rousseau's techniques of self-justification in their own drafts.

Further Reading

• Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, Jean Starobinski

• Rousseau: Restless Genius, Leo Damrosch

• Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754, Maurice Cranston

  First of Cranston's three-volume life.

• The Confessions (trans. J. M. Cohen), Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  A widely used modern translation.