Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan philosopher, novelist and composer whose ideas about nature, inequality and the social contract shaped the French Revolution and the Romantic movement. He arrived in Paris as a self-taught music copyist, won fame with a prize essay arguing that the arts corrupt morals, and in 1762 published both The Social Contract and Emile, which were condemned in Paris and Geneva and sent him into years of flight. His novel Julie was the bestseller of its century, and his Confessions, written in self-defense and published after his death, founded modern autobiography. He died at Ermenonville and was reburied in the Panthéon in 1794.