Les Confessions Reading Order

Les Confessions (The Confessions, written c.1765-70, published posthumously in two parts: 1782 and 1789) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the founding text of the modern secular autobiography — the first work in Western literature to attempt a complete and honest account of an inner life, including its most shameful, petty, and contradictory elements. Rousseau begins with the famous declaration: 'I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. I wish to show to my kind a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.' The Confessions covers Rousseau's life from his birth in Geneva in 1712 through his break with the philosophes and his flight to England in 1765, including: his relationship with Mme de Warens (who was simultaneously his foster-mother figure and his lover), his years of wandering and employment, his relationship with Thérèse Levasseur (with whom he had five children, all of whom he placed in a foundling hospital), and the great social and intellectual success and catastrophic fall of his Paris years. The work is simultaneously one of the most self-revealing and one of the most self-serving autobiographies ever written: Rousseau is always the victim, always misunderstood, always surrounded by conspirators — and the gap between his protestations of sincerity and his evident self-justification has generated two centuries of critical debate about whether the modern autobiography is necessarily a work of self-construction as much as self-revelation.