Thérèse Levasseur

Marie -Thérèse Levasseur, also Le Vasseur, ( baptized on September 22, 1721 in the parish church of Saint -Michel in Orléans, † July 17, 1801 in Le Plessis -Belleville, Oise ) was the registered civil partner of Jean -Jacques Rousseau: " his wife, his mistress, his servant, his daughter " ( J.- JR).

Life

Thérèse was born the fourth child of François Levasseur and Marie Renou, with whom she lived in humble circumstances in Paris in the early 1740s.

Jean -Jacques Rousseau was in 1728 entered the service of Françoise- Louise de Warens 15 years and had between 1732-1738 a relationship with her ​​had. He met Thérèse Levasseur in March 1745 in Paris, where she worked as a domestic help. Levasseur and Rousseau lived henceforth together in free marriage first lived Thérèse still at home. From 1747, when Rousseau's financial situation aufbesserte something, she lived in Paris and Thérèse Rousseau then followed and accompanied to the many stages of his unsteady professional life: to Geneva, Val de Travers in the Prussian exclave Principality of Neuchâtel, to England, whose language they did not speak, and back to the Rue de la Glacière in Paris. In 1754 they had been interviewed in Calvinist Geneva about the nature of their relationship, which she answered with excuses ( answer had to ).

The wedding ceremony of the Catholic and the Protestant Levasseur Rousseau, which they carried out on August 30, 1768 in front of the mayor of Bourgoin, was not a church wedding, but a promise not to let each other to death in the lurch. Thérèse spent a total of 34 years with Rousseau. For Rousseau's friends was the connection to a woman who could barely read, and all the difficult words verhunzte, a mesalliance a judgment which have almost invariably taken over all biographers and historians. Not only his relationship with Mrs de Warens found their grace, but also his relationship with Madame d' Houdetot, as these had a literary expression in the epistolary novel Julie or the New Heloise. Supposedly Levasseur had different relationships with other men, even to common acquaintances, including about 1766 to James Boswell.

Rousseau described Thérèse and his relationship with her ​​in his autobiographical writing confessions and excused their human faults and weaknesses to them at the same time, as well as his first love to idealize.

In Rousseau's death in 1778 she became his sole heir. The Marquis de Girandin paid her in exchange for the secured possession of him Rousseau an annuity. Girandin Rousseau and a few friends took care of from now to the literary estate.

The circumstances of his death Rousseau were discussed in public and Levasseur imputed the blame. Madame de Staël kolportierte years later the suicide of a cuckold, and Lion Feuchtwanger does in his novel fools wisdom or death and transfiguration of Jean -Jacques Rousseau Queen Marie Antoinette occur, which seeks to dispel the demonstrative visit to the tomb of Rousseau in Ermenonville all rumors. Since the contemporary expressions and the traditions of partisan suspicions against the " uneducated ", " greedy " and " bad mother " were based, is not backed up as fact, whether Levasseur has married in November 1779 the valet Montretont and he in her Plessis- Belleville lived, where she lived for the next 23 years.

The French National Assembly granted her at the instigation of Mirabeau in 1791 a pension of 1200 francs a year.

The Mount Levasseur in Alaska is named after her because of its proximity to Rousseau Peak.

Children

Levasseur and Rousseau had 1746-1753 five children. Each of the children was - " economic reasons " - delivered as a baby to the Foundling Hospital. Rousseau was criticized in public, and Levasseur was either the principal amount or at least partially to blame for the separation of children depicted as brutal given by the parents, especially the then life expectancy in the orphanages was low. On the other hand, it is pointed out that a quarter of all baptized children were exposed in Paris in this way in the 18th century.

In the end it had been but not the biological children of Rousseau, but the children of other men, it was suggested later, in 2012 apologetically Dieter Thoma.

Rousseau was his own failure to raise children accused in the reviews of his upbringing writing Émile.