The Self-Made Saint

Hypocrisy Beyond Bounds

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is regarded by many as the patron saint of the French Enlightenment.  To this day he is cited as an authority on human rights, on liberty, on education and schooling, and on justice.  Yet he remains as one of the West's most vainglorious hypocrites.

Rousseau sought all his life to be accepted and honoured by the nobility.  He longed for recognition.  He sought attention constantly.  He was besotted with himself.  Few in the modern world recall, if they ever knew in the first place, that his personal home and family life was appalling.  It was meretricious because of Rousseau himself.

Rousseau never married, but he kept a mistress--or, more accurately, he had a mistress keep him.  Therese was dishonoured by him in public, in front of his guests at dinner, and in his general treatment of a poor and vulnerable woman.
 By him she bore five children.  He forced her to abandon each of them to the hospital--and there they likely died.  Rousseau was flamboyantly open about his irresponsible preoccupation of his needs.  Such was the condition of his day that there is no evidence that his highbrow friends upbraided him for his wastrel behaviour.

One cannot help but wonder, however, whether had had told them of the price in tears he had to exact from Therese every time he got her with child.  Her sufferings form a part of the familiar story that has received strangely little attention, even from his hostile biographers.  The critical emphasis is nearly always on his dereliction of duty as a father, almost to the exclusion of any reference to the heartlessness of his attitude towards his mistress . . . . We have his own word for it that she was no unnatural mother; he had "the greatest difficulty in the world" in persuading her to leave the fruit of their amours to the tender mercies of the over-stocked hospital.  And no wonder; in those days sixty-five our of a hundred of its inmates died in their first year and only five survived into maturity, nearly all to become beggars and vagabonds.  [J. H. Huizinga, Rousseau: The Self-Made Saint (New York: Grossman Publishers/The Viking Press, 1976), p. 164f.]

Here was a man who was celebrated in his own day, let alone our own, as a visionary and profound expert on the way to education and train children.   Rousseau stands as one of the greatest charlatans and most perverse hypocrites of the modern period.