Jean-Jacques Rousseau didn't actually coin the term 'soulmate'—Plato famously claimed that Zeus had bisected humans so that we would spend our lives searching for our 'other half'—but he did give it legs.
Born in 1712 to a Genevese watchmaker, Rousseau claimed his parents had such 'a natural sympathy of soul' that they were destined for one another.
In his bestseller, Julie, or The New Heloise, Rousseau updated a true story of castrated love from the age of the troubadours to tell of two lovers on Lake Geneva who are kept apart by civilization's conventions.
In modern talk-show parlance, It's like, society's hang-ups mean they can't be true to themselves, y'know?
Tragically, Rousseau had more than a few hang-ups of his own.
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| Rousseau, aged about 54 |
Toward the end of his life, he bared his soul in an autobiography far more introspective than the saucy anecdotes recorded by contemporaries like Casanova.
In his Confessions, Rousseau admitted to indulging in masturbation, exhibitionism, masochism and homosexuality, as well as borderline incest with his surrogate maman.
He also forced his lover to abandon all five of their children to an orphanage.
Nevertheless, he still found time to tell his beloved Genevans where they were going wrong, preaching against the corrosive effects of vice and luxury.
When Geneva banned his writings on religion, Rousseau mocked the city's pastors for having gone soft: 'One knows not what they believe, nor what they do not believe, not even what they pretend to believe.'
James Boswell, who met Rousseau during his Grand Tour, had a similar reaction when he visited Geneva in 1764 and saw men playing cards on a Sunday—with a minister among them:
'O, Calvin,' he wrote, 'where art thou now?'
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