Guided tour: Rousseau-Geneva : a passionate relationship

Let’s follow Rousseau’s footsteps across Geneva. On the way from the Old Town, where he was born, to Coutance, where he lived in the watchmaker’s workshop of his father, we shall walk by the Treille promenade, the Saint-Germain Church and the French residence. We shall stop at the Saint-Gervais square, where the night festival related in the Letter to d’Alembert took place, the rue des Etuves, where Jean-Jacques became an engraver’s apprentice, the Rousseau island, object of both love and hatred in Geneva, the Perron, where a bloody civil conflict deeply impressed Rousseau, the Saint-Pierre cathedral and the Hotel-de-Ville, where the patrician governement condemned and publicly burned both Emile and the Social Contract. Everywhere we shall encounter the literary and philosophical giant’s shadow. He was in love with his native town and presented it to the world as a model ; it disappointed him and he disowned it twice. Yet he deeply felt its influence and he in turn exerted a lasting influence on Geneva, which for a long time was called the city of Rousseau as well as of Calvin…