The Confessions

Young Rousseau was a product of the Enlightenment, which ushered in an age of faith in reason. He quickly became disillusioned with it, however, and became estranged from the other major philosophers in the Salon of Paris. He professed that when humans abandoned their natural state and their participation in small, isolated communities to engage with broader civilization, they lost important parts of themselves and human morality. Through this idea, Rousseau became a major influence on Romanticism, a movement that emphasized a skepticism of reason and a return to the natural. Rousseau perceived everything in the world around him as artifice. When he worked as a secretary, he hated his offices that were filled with people and smoke, the opposite of the beauty of nature in which he found the most joy. He viewed an adherence to reason as an abandonment of the self, as seen when, as a teenager, he first fell in love.

Rousseau claims in Confessions that this love as a child was with his head, not his heart, and it caused him to lose himself. His love for Warens was different, and he repented that she could not love him with the same abandonment of reason. For Warens, sex was about duty and obligation; he suggested that this adherence to rationalism was her greatest flaw: “Instead of listening to her heart, which always guided her aright, she listened to her reason, which guided her wrongly” (211). These notions formed the foundation of Rousseau’s ideas about the Enlightenment and rationalism: Reason would always lead humanity astray, and redemption and salvation could be found in nature.

Rousseau’s first encounters with romantic principles appear during his travels. He recognizes that he is happiest while walking through the countryside, observing nature. He feels disgusted and repelled by city landscapes; when he traveled to Paris—a place known for its beautiful architecture and charm—he found it gross and unappealing. When he leaves Paris, he describes the countryside as giving him “a kind of ecstasy” (180). Rousseau’s time with Warens in a small house in the woods fulfilled his romantic fantasies. The connection with nature he found in that space caused him to feel that he was living for the first time, despite suffering from illness. His connection to nature and his philosophies emphasizing the return of humanity to its natural state separated him from his philosophical contemporaries and severed him from French high society.

From the beginning, Rousseau asserts that he will tell the truth. His obsession with hypocrisy and the deceit of society likens him to Holden Caulfield’s character in The Catcher in the Rye. He is quick to recognize hypocrisy and deceit in others and considers them inexcusable offenses. Meanwhile, he exhibits these qualities himself. While Confessions gives the appearance of verisimilitude, Rousseau establishes his own unreliability as a narrative voice throughout the book. On the first page in Book I, Rousseau establishes that everything he writes is true and that it would hold up in judgment from God. At the same time, he admits that the book’s version of events may be exaggerated.

Rousseau’s distaste for civilization included a hatred of politeness and hypocrisy that he believed were integral to the workings of major societies. Yet, he repeatedly exposes his own acts of deception. He explains that a desire to steal plagued him throughout his life, and the theft of a ribbon from a dying patron led to the dismissal and destruction of the reputation of an innocent servant. While traveling to find a cure for his illness, Rousseau encounters a woman and gives her a false name before entering an affair with her. He never reveals his identity and continues corresponding with her, using this false identity, long after they part ways. Although he professes to value honesty and truth, his life is punctuated by falsehoods.

Thus, he positions himself as an unreliable narrator in a book that purports to present an unequivocal truth. Rousseau explains that his “obstinate nature is unable to bow to facts” (183). Rousseau is so committed to a love for the aesthetic, evidenced even in his views of women, that he cannot help but exaggerate the beauty of something; he confesses this in Book IV. His need for escape means that his brain forever occupies a space of falsity, reveling in false details that make everything seem more fantastic than it is. He claims that Confessions is not an attempt to provide justification for his actions, but he devotes much of the book to validating his choices. He repeatedly contradicts himself, and his perceived mistreatment by French philosophical and fashionable society highlights his failure to apply self-awareness and objectivity.

At the end of Confessions, Rousseau challenges his readers to find a shred of falsehood in his accounts. He asserts that everything he has written is factual. The reception of the book, however, revealed several inaccuracies in his writing, as his contemporaries disputed his depiction of events.