Confessions, volumes 1 and 2

Description

Rousseau’s Confessions is a lengthy, detailed, courageous and astonishing writing, a self-reflexive account that includes all aspects of life, success just as much as failure. These first two volumes of the multi-volume work discuss Rousseau’s childhood and his adolescence. Though all parts of Rousseau’s Confessions have been criticized for the inaccuracy of the details presented – the order of events often gets mixed up, many events are given an incomplete or inaccurate representation and the dates are unreliable – these volumes are extraordinary because they present a candid, un-embellished account of the experiences that shaped the personality of who was later to become one of the most important thinkers and public figures of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Rousseau’s Confessions are also among the first autobiographies in the modern sense of the word – most memoirs written before Rousseau’s work focused on the religious and public aspects of life, Rousseau being the first to include very personal, often embarrassing events and not being afraid to offer the reader a complex, sometimes very controversial portrait of himself. Transparency is probably the most important quality of Rousseau’s memoirs – he promises right from the beginning that he will not hide any humiliating or shameful event and will not hide his own reactions that are questionable from a moral perspective and he does exactly that by providing a truthful and deeply human account of his own life, the way he saw it and experienced it.The Confessions was published only in 1782, four years after the author’s death and it became an example to follow for many notable writers of the second half of the 18th century. Stendhal, De Quincey, Goethe and Wordsworth soon produced their own autobiographies of a courageous honesty very similar to Rousseau’s, thus contributing to the development of a new trend and a new genre.