![]() Rousseau’s primary claim to fame depends on his ideas about morals, politics and society. The rest of his life’s work was, he claimed, determined for him at that moment. So overcome was he by the flood of ideas that this question aroused in him the realization that he had to break his journey. He read in the newspaper a prize essay question, asking whether advances in the sciences and arts had improved morals. He was on his way to see his then friend Diderot who was imprisoned at Vincennes. The turning point in his life occurred in July 1749. His first love was music and he composed a number of operas in the 1740s with some success. Rousseau always maintained that he regretted taking up a career of letters. He died in 1778 and in 1794 his body was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris. From this obscure beginning he rose to become one of the best known intellectual figures of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, taking his place alongside Diderot, Voltaire and others as one of the emblematic figures of this period, for all that he came to differ violently in view from them. ![]() His mother died a few days after his birth. ![]() ![]() ![]() Rousseau was born in Geneva, the second son of Isaac Rousseau, watchmaker. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |