Confession

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is an outstanding thinker and writer of the Enlightenment era, a person woven from contradictions, who remains in history as a bold and unorthodox thinker. In "Confessions," astonishing in its frankness (at least for the 18th century), Rousseau details fifty-three years of his life. This is an attempt to expose the true motives behind a person's actions and—almost always—find justifications for them. Rousseau does not hide the fact that he stole, placed his own children in an orphanage, lived off wealthy women, and shares his most intimate feelings. He writes about how he was enamored with people and how he broke away from them, describing all his grievances and bitter delusions. The characters in his narrative include Diderot, Voltaire, Baron von Grimm, and many women who were kind to him. This work was brought before the public judgment only four years after the author's death, in 1782.