The drafting of the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, several times stopped, occupies their author of 1764-1765 to 1770. They are published in Geneva in two parts, 1782 and 1789, after the death of Rousseau: “If I were the Master of my destiny and that of this writing he would be born only a long time after my death”. This quotation has the merit to stress that it is impossible to summarize the work without pointing out all the episodes of the life of the citizen of Geneva.
In fact, the Confessions found the autobiographical literature, by deeply renewing the kind of the so frequent spiritual accounts in the Protestant tradition. Rousseau suggests moreover which its account reports the stages of a life that he did not manage to control - this is why, specifies it in the same passage his Confessions “are necessarily dependant with those of much of people”. How should this relation be understood?
On the one hand, it is possible to know a man only when one considers it in all his reports: “In research morals (...), I will hasten to examine the man by his relations, and it is from there that I will draw a bunch of luminous truths (...) which would still receive day by comparison”.
In addition, Rousseau opposes to this dispersion of the individual in multiple relations the exceptional permanence of an authentic humanity, of which the Confessions recall us the slow reconquest starting from conversion initiated to the road of Vincennes. The function of the confessions which Rousseau proposes is then to offer a new point of comparison to the other men.