In the Library
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1782
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 20 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 12
- Length
- Length 271k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Confessions
Saint Augustine
Augustine does the same thing thirteen centuries earlier, confessing his failings to God rather than to the reading public, but the same hunger to be fully known runs through both.
£1.99
History of My Life
Giacomo Casanova
Casanova does the same thing in the same century, laying out a scandalous life in exhaustive detail, though he preens where Rousseau flinches.
£1.99
About the book
A ribbon goes missing from a dying woman's house, and when the household is questioned, the young manservant who stole it points to someone else, Marion, the cook, with nothing to defend herself but her own good name. She is dismissed in disgrace. He is believed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was that servant, and decades later, in the book he wrote to be read only after his death, he confesses it exactly as it happened, unable to explain even now why he did it, unable to stop himself from doing it again on the page: telling not the version that flatters him but the one that doesn't. This is the promise the Confessions keeps, and no book before it had dared to: a self portrayed whole, vanity and cruelty included, offered up not for absolution but for the record. Rousseau invented a way of writing the inside of a life, ashamed and self-justifying in the same breath, and every diary and memoir since has been arguing with him. Read one page and you will recognize, uncomfortably, your own private mind.