The first fact about Rousseau is a care admission, not a statue. In the Confessions, as English readers still meet them at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3913 (opens in a new tab) and as Stanford treats the life at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/ (opens in a new tab), he states that children born with Thérèse Levasseur were placed at the Paris foundling hospital. Britannica’s biography at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Jacques-Rousseau (opens in a new tab) does not erase that passage. The dated public carrier used here is the 1782 book. A civil-registry file for each infant is not invented. Assistance Publique–Hôpitaux de Paris public history at https://www.assistancepubliquehopitauxdeparis.fr/ (opens in a new tab) frames the hospital lineage in which those deposits sat: crowding, mortality, infection.
On 9 June 1762 the Parlement of Paris condemned Émile; Geneva burned Émile and Du contrat social the same month (encyclopedia and Geneva library memory at https://www.bge-geneve.ch/en (opens in a new tab)). He suffered those burnings; he did not vote them. The same 1762 Contract, in Cole’s public English at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46333 (opens in a new tab), prints that the refuser of the general will shall be forced to be free, and a civil-religion chapter that can banish or kill. Émile at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5427 (opens in a new tab) educates Sophie to dependence; Wollstonecraft names that injury at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3420 (opens in a new tab). The 1766 Hume quarrel (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/ (opens in a new tab)) polarised philosophic publics. Jacobin speech and the 11 October 1794 Panthéon translation (https://www.paris-pantheon.fr/en/ (opens in a new tab) and https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maximilien-Robespierre (opens in a new tab)) used the name. He died in 1778. He did not sign the Law of Suspects.
The offsets are also documents. The 1750 Dijon discourse (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57843 (opens in a new tab)) and the 1755 inequality discourse (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11136 (opens in a new tab)) made critiques of luxury and rank copyable. Julie (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13789 (opens in a new tab)) glued a European reading public. Émile’s childhood pedagogy is an access path beside Sophie. Popular sovereignty in the Contract is a resilience heading beside ‘forced to be free’. The 1768 Dictionnaire de musique, Gallica at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ (opens in a new tab), BnF at https://www.bnf.fr/en/jean-jacques-rousseau (opens in a new tab), SEP, IEP at https://iep.utm.edu/rousseau/ (opens in a new tab), and the Maison Rousseau at https://www.m-r-l.ch/en/ (opens in a new tab) are later access machines. The Cambridge Companion at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-rousseau/ (opens in a new tab) is independent scholarship, not a shrine.
What the score must not say: that a pedagogy chapter washes the Enfants-Trouvés; that 1793 is his handwriting; that book-burnings make him only a victim and never an author of civic coercion; that Gutenberg HTML is 1762. Complex contribution is the honest type. Confidence is high on 1750–1782 imprints, the 1762 warrants, and the 1794 Panthéon act; medium on unique Terror coefficients and on hospital death coefficients for the named infants.
Related people are Voltaire as rival, Diderot, Hume, Levasseur, Locke and Hobbes as interlocutors, Wollstonecraft as later critic, Robespierre as later user, d’Épinay as patron. Off-family indicator padding is refused.
1755 is not 1762. 1762 is not 1782. 1782 is not 1794. The useful question is not whether he ‘invented democracy’. It is which printed clauses, hospital admissions, and later cults still move rights, classrooms, and emergency law. Keep foundlings, burnings, general will, and later Gutenberg on separate dates.
