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( Rousseau)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 1712 &_160;– Ermenonville, 2 July 1778) was a major Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the Enlightenment, whose political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and the development of liberal, conservative, and socialist theory. With his Confessions, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and other writings, he invented modern autobiography and encouraged a new focus on the building of subjectivity that bore fruit in the work of thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Freud. His novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse was one of the best-selling fictional works of the eighteenth century and of great importance to the development of romanticism.[1] He also made important contributions to music as a theorist and a composer, and was reburied alongside other French national heroes in the Panthéon in Paris, sixteen years after his death, in 1794. Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712 in Geneva, an associated member of the Old Confederation (known today as the Helvetian Confederation of Switzerland) and throughout his life described himself as a citizen of Geneva. Nine days after his birth, his mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, died of birth complications. When he was young, Rousseau's father, a failed watchmaker, got in a quarrel with a French captain, and to avoid imprisonment abandoned Rousseau and left him with an uncle of his in 1722. The uncle, in turn, sent Rousseau to a small village to receive his education, which consisted solely of reading Plutarch's Lives and Calvinist sermons. After several years of apprenticeship to a notary and then an engraver, Rousseau left Geneva at age 16 on 14 March 1728. He then met a French Catholic baroness named Françoise-Louise de Warens. De Warens, who was thirteen years his senior, gave Rousseau work as a secretary and teacher. She was also a key figure in his conversion to Catholicism, which resulted in his having to give up his Geneva citizenship (although he would later revert back to Calvinism in order to regain it). The Baroness provided Rousseau the education of a nobleman by sending him to Catholic school. Apart from studying Aristotle, Rousseau also became familiar with Latin and the dramatic arts. In order to present the Académie des Sciences with a new system of numbered musical notation, he moved to Paris in 1742. His system is based on a single line displaying numbers representing intervals between notes and dots and commas indicating rhythmic values. The system was intended to be compatible with typography. Believing the system was impractical and unoriginal, the Academy rejected it. However, in some parts of the world, a version of the system remains in use.
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