The Confessions enumerate disappointments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who did not find among the philosophers the sincere friends that its heart claimed. But these estrangements should not hide us the importance of the relations which the work of Rousseau maintains with the texts Condillac, Diderot or even Jean-Philippe Rameau. And if the Speech on the origin of the inequality among the men criticizes Hobbes or Pufendorf violently, their reading occupies a notable place in the formation of the political ideas of Rousseau.

Let us think especially of Voltaire: the Jean-Jacques young person wants initially to imitate this glorious model. But, as a philosopher, Rousseau will concentrate his criticism of the men of letters on Voltaire.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau also severely does not judge all these contemporaries: Fontenelle liberally accommodates it in Paris, Mister de Malhesherbes sees himself entrusting an outline of the Confessions, at the moment when Rousseau fears to succumb to the disease. The catholic clergy which, in the person of Christophe de Beaumont, is baited to condemn the author of the Emile, presents itself the more pleasant faces of the Gaime abbot and the Gâtier abbot, who inspire the character of the Savoyard Vicar.

But Rousseau is not only one arguer: the attacks of the philosophers meurtrissent a sensitivity which, near Madam de Warens, Sophie d' Houdetot or Therese Levasseur, her devoted and simple partner, tests all the range of human passions: love, friendship, but also shame.

All in all, the Confessions do not propose simply the autobiography to us of a recluse: they provide us an irreplaceable testimony on the intellectual life at the Age of Enlightenment.