The Académie des Sciences, the royal scientific academy in Paris, had praised a young Genevan's scheme for a simpler musical notation, and declined it. Its author, a watchmaker's son, was in Paris, one of the contributors writing the articles on music for the Encyclopédie — the work being assembled volume by volume to show what educated Europe had come to believe about itself: that knowledge accumulates, manners soften, and people improve as both advance.
In October 1749 Rousseau walked out to the fortress of Vincennes to visit Diderot, the Encyclopédie's editor, locked up for an essay on the blind, and read on the way that the Academy of Dijon, a provincial learned society, was offering a prize for the best answer to a question: had the revival of the arts and sciences improved morals? He answered no. The Academy gave him the prize in 1750, and he spent the next twenty years working out why he had been right.
Everything else grows from one claim, and it fits in a line: people are decent by nature and are made cruel by the arrangements they live under — by civilisation itself, the whole apparatus of politeness, property, reputation and refinement that his friends were cataloguing as progress. He was attacking the Enlightenment from inside it, in its own journals, with its own tools.
The Discourse on Inequality of 1755 supplied the mechanism. Almost nothing that separates a rich man from a poor one is natural; it is manufactured, and it began, he argued, with the first man who fenced a piece of ground and found people willing to believe him. What drives it is one of two impulses he took care to tell apart. The plain instinct that keeps a creature alive and fed is one thing; the restless need to be ranked well in other people's eyes is another, and only the second is learned. It produces vanity, servility and the comparison that makes a comfortable society miserable — and it is also, he insisted, what makes any society possible at all. He never proposed abolishing it, and he never proposed going back to the woods.
He proposed something harder, in 1762, in two books published a month apart. Du contrat social argued that no ruler, election or tradition makes a law legitimate: a people is free only when it obeys rules it has genuinely given itself, and a citizen compelled to keep those rules is not enslaved but held to his own word. Émile asked how a child might be raised to be capable of that, and it included a country priest's statement of a religion drawn from conscience and the visible world rather than from the church.
That priest cost him everything. The Parlement of Paris, the kingdom's chief law court, condemned Émile and had it burned; Geneva burned both books and issued a warrant. He had printed "Citizen of Geneva" on his own title pages for a decade, and in May 1763 he renounced the citizenship. In 1764 an anonymous pamphlet, written by Voltaire, told the public that the author of a celebrated book on education had left all five of his children at the Paris foundling hospital, where most infants died. It was true. In September 1765, in Môtiers, the Swiss village where he had taken refuge, villagers threw stones at his house.
His answer was to invent a form: the Confessions, published in 1782, four years after his death, set out to give a life from the inside — the shabbiness included — as no autobiography before it had. By the time he wrote it he had come back to Paris, and was copying music by the page for money.
In 1794 the Revolution moved his remains to the Panthéon, the Paris mausoleum for national heroes. Romanticism took his moods and left his politics, and scholars still divide over the politics itself. Read one way, the general will — the rules a people gives itself — is self-government; read another, it is a majority's licence to tell a dissenter what he really wants. Mary Wollstonecraft, the English writer, had already noticed, in 1792, that his free citizens were all men, and that the education he designed for girls contradicted everything else he had written.