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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• Book II

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

• 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.

• Book VII

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

• 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.

• Book XI

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

• Books IX–XII

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