Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva; his mother died days after his birth, and his father, a watchmaker, later left him with relatives. At sixteen he ran away and wandered for years, becoming a Catholic convert and living for a time with a patroness, Madame de Warens. In Paris he worked as a music copyist and wrote an opera. In 1750 he won an essay prize by arguing that the arts and sciences had corrupted morals. His Discourse on Inequality claimed that humans are naturally good but are made unhappy and unequal by society and property. In 1762 he published The Social Contract, which begins by saying that man is born free and everywhere he is in chains, and argues that legitimate government rests on the general will of the people. That year he also published Emile, a novel about education. Both books were condemned and burned in Paris and Geneva, and he fled. With his companion Thérèse Levasseur he had five children, all of whom he placed in a foundling hospital. His Confessions were published after his death in 1778.

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Faith: Left Calvinist Geneva at sixteen and converted to Roman Catholicism in Turin in 1728; his later beliefs were his own. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy