Rousseau's Tomb

Like Voltaire, Rousseau was one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers of 18th-century France. At the center of the front of his tomb is a hand holding a torch, a symbol of the light of reason and the light of liberty. The light of reason stands for the spirit of the 18th-century Enlightenment; the light of liberty, for the freedom won through the French Revolution. The torch is there because Rousseau, like Voltaire, spread Enlightenment ideas to ordinary people and helped bring about the Revolution.

What ideas of his led people to revolt? Rousseau is remembered for "Return to nature!" and the "social contract." First, he criticized man-made laws and institutions themselves, such as the class system, and argued that humanity should go back to its natural state. By "nature" he didn't mean forests or animals, but the condition before humans created unequal institutions. Before private property and slavery existed, he held, everyone was free and equal; institutions made society unfree and unequal. Rousseau never said all human laws and institutions should vanish. He argued that we should return to the state in which everyone was free and equal.

His answer was the social contract. The idea is that state power can rule individuals legitimately only through a free and equal contract with them, and that such a contract is valid only when individuals consent to it themselves. State power must therefore take in citizens' opinions, freely and equally, through voting. In other words, he argued for popular sovereignty. As soon as Rousseau published a book with these ideas, an arrest warrant was issued against him for its anti-establishment content, and he went into exile. But the French Revolution, set off by people influenced by him, ultimately realized his vision and created a republic based on popular sovereignty.

Now stars in the heavens, Voltaire and Rousseau were in fact bitter rivals. It wasn't always so. Voltaire was 18 years older, and when Rousseau was just starting out, Voltaire was already a famous intellectual, recognized even in other kingdoms, so Rousseau looked up to him. But when Rousseau began to part ways with the earlier Enlightenment thinkers, the two fell out. Those thinkers criticized the upper classes yet mingled with aristocrats and even accepted their patronage. By rejecting privilege, Rousseau exposed the contradiction between their words and their deeds, and in the process his relationship with Voltaire soured.

That said, Rousseau was far from perfect. He is also famous as a thinker who laid the foundation of modern educational theory, having written a book on how parents should raise children. In those days, aristocrats mostly didn't raise their own children. Wet nurses handled feeding, and sons were sent to collèges and daughters to convents for their education. Rousseau told the nobility that rather than sending children off to artificial places and effectively shutting them in, it was a parent's sacred duty to let them grow up freely in nature.

Yet Rousseau himself reportedly didn't practice what he preached. He sent all five of his children to an orphanage. In 1770, eight years before his death, he completed an autobiography in which he confessed this wrong and repented. Laying every fault bare, the book is even called one of the world's three great confessions.