In spring of 1756, Rousseau was withdrawn far from the city with the house of the Hermitage lent by Madam d' Epinay. It spends its days to be dreamed in full nature. He imagines a great love. He starts to write the letters that a double of itself would exchange with an ideal young girl.
From there will be born Julie or the News Héloïse, “Letters of two lovers, inhabitants of a small town at the bottom of the Alps”. Julie d' Etanges is in love with her young tutor, Saint-Valiant knight.
She is the “Héloïse news” of this modern Abélard. The baron d' Etanges, his father, imbu of” Gothic prejudices “, refuses that his/her daughter marries a commoner. Young people try to resist their passion. They separate one from the other. Saint-valiant knight makes a stay in Paris, from where he denounces the corruption of the big city.
The inevitable one occurs: they give each other one to the other. The inexorable baron being, Julie ends up agreeing to marry the husband whom his father chose to him: Mr. de Wolmar, emigrant Russian, man of experiment and penetrated of philosophical ideas. But here that with the temple, at the time of its marital engagement, Julie the revelation of the holiness of the marriage has. She promises herself with itself to hold her oath of fidelity. Saint-valiant knight, near to despair, embarks for a voyage around the world of which perhaps it will not return.
The Wolmar couple lives in a happy union. According to his principles, the husband organized his field of Clarens like a kind of model company. But here that Saint-Valiant knight returns. Mr. de Wolmar flatters himself that it will find also his place with Clarens like friend and tutor of their children. Actually, the love reappears between Julie and her former lover. At the time of a walk on the lake Léman, they are about to succumb to temptation. Julie will die accidentally. She acknowledges by a posthumous letter which she never ceased liking Saint-Valiant knight. The personality of Julie dominates work: “an at the same time pleasant woman, enlightened and reasonable excessively pious woman”.
This book is also a novel of the friendship: initially between Claire and Julie, inseparable friends, so plain that the death of the one can involve that of the other. Let us note also the friendship of Saint-Valiant knight and of his impetuous friend Edouard, young person philosophizes English.
Rousseau invented in these letters a new style of the feeling, at the same time rhetoric and musicalement suggestive. These qualities at the same time as a virulent satire of the Parisian company, made success, amazing for the time, of this novel. One undoubtedly owes him a widening of the literary assistantship (women, young people) in the last third of the XVIII E century.
First edition: Rey, Amsterdam, 1761.