His revelations inspired the likes of Proust, Goethe and Tolstoy among others. In The Confessions he remembers his adventurous life, his achievements and the persecution he suffered from opponents. In his last 10 years, Rousseau wrote his 'Confessions'. This novel scandalised the French authorities who ordered Rousseau's arrest. He also wrote 'Èmile', a treatise on education and 'The New Eloise' (1761). This political treatise earned him exile from his home city of Geneva and arguably inspired the French Revolution (his ashes were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris in 1794). In 1755, he published 'Discourse on the Origin of Inequality' and in 'The Social Contract' (1762) he argued, 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains'.

In 1750 he published his first important work 'A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts' (1750) where he argued that man had become corrupted by society and civilisation. He was a writer and political theorist of the Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712.

He translated Machiavelli’s The Prince for Vintage Classics. Peter Constantine's honors include the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, and Greece’s Translators of Literature Prize. Depicting a life of adventure, persecution, paranoia, and brilliant achievement, The Confessions is a landmark work by one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, which was a direct influence upon the work of Proust, Goethe and Tolstoy among others. In his Confessions he relives the first fifty-three years of his radical life with vivid immediacy - from his earliest years, where we can see the source of his belief in the innocence of childhood, through the development of his philosophical and political ideas, his struggle against the French authorities and exile from France following the publication of Émile. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) argued passionately against the inequality he believed to be intrinsic to civilized society. Widely regarded as the first modern autobiography, The Confessions is an astonishing work of acute psychological insight. Rousseau's autobiography, giving a unique insight into the mind and life of one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment

Confessions jj rousseau