Confessions
Where it ranks
Influence70th pct
Popularity38th pct
Enlightenment
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
The 
Take
The man is a freak and paranoid and just insane, but well written and very interesting
Connections
The lineage through Confessions
- 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
Gallery
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
Editions
Recommended Editions
#1Top Pick$14.00$13.05
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.
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Notable Quotes
I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I dare say I am like no one in the whole world.
AcclaimPraised by 6 notable voices
- Immanuel Kant, German philosopher, 1724–1804: "Rousseau has set me right... I learn to honour human beings."
- George Eliot, English novelist, 1819–1880: "Rousseau's genius has sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame."
- Lord Byron, English Romantic poet, 1788–1824: "The self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, the apostle of Affliction... yet he knew how to make Madness beautiful."
- Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist, 1828–1910: "I have read the whole of Rousseau... I admired him with more than enthusiasm, I worshiped him."
- Art Garfunkel, musician, 1941–: Began his famous 45-year reading log in 1968 with Rousseau's Confessions — the book that invented the genre.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet & novelist, 1749–1832: With Voltaire an old world comes to an end; with Rousseau a new world begins.