# The 1782 Confessions print Rousseau’s own admission that he sent his children to the Enfants-Trouvés

Date: 1782

## The fact

In 1782 the first part of the Confessions appeared in print, including Rousseau’s own narrative that children born to Thérèse Levasseur were deposited at the Paris foundling hospital. The dated public instrument is that book. It is his admission, not a parish baptism register invented here, and not a later novel.

## Context

Foundling hospitals in eighteenth-century Paris had high mortality. Sending infants there was a documented care-path harm. Later editors print the passage; he wrote the confession. Split clinical crowding onto a health row.

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau](/people/jean-jacques-rousseau) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official library, encyclopedia, or public-domain edition pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — public-domain English (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3913; Project Gutenberg).

## Significance

A printed paternal abandonment admission is a minority-rights and care-path harm with high confidence on the text.

A printed paternal abandonment admission is a minority-rights and care-path harm with high confidence on the text.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: https://factrail.ai/people/jean-jacques-rousseau

## Drivers

- Protection of Minority Rights: https://factrail.ai/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights

## Sources

- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3913

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/jjr-confessions-foundlings-1782