Book presentation and round table discussion: Nathalie Ferrand, ‘Inside the writer’s house of paper: a presentation of Dans l’atelier de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’

07/03/2023, 5:00 pm

Organised with the Maison Française d’Oxford

With author Nathalie Ferrand (CNRS/ITEM Paris)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s studio is made up of a succession of symbolic places where, in the course of a life in motion, he sometimes set down his work table: among them his dungeon in Montmorency, his laboratory in Môtiers, this room “which in no way resembled that of a man of letters” on rue Plâtrière in Paris… not to mention the woods and groves of the walks he frequented with notebook and pencil in his pocket. But this workshop is above all the immense paper space made up of his working manuscripts, thousands of autograph pages now scattered throughout the world. It allows us to discover the paths of invention of a writer who was a critical thinker of the Enlightenment, to follow the birth of the Social Contract, the Emile or The New Heloise, and to watch Rousseau annotate Plato, Montaigne or Voltaire in the margins of the books in his library.

This event takes place at the Maison Française d’Oxford.