
In fact, rather than being run by vote of the "citizens", the city was ruled by a small number of wealthy families that made up the " Council of Two Hundred" these delegated their power to a 25-member executive group from among them called the "Little Council". The citizens were a minority of the population when compared to the immigrants, referred to as "inhabitants", whose descendants were called "natives" and continued to lack suffrage.

Geneva, in theory, was governed "democratically" by its male voting "citizens". Throughout his life, he generally signed his books "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva". Rousseau was proud that his family, of the moyen order (or middle-class), had voting rights in the city. The house where Rousseau was born at number 40, Grand-Rue, Geneva Five generations before Rousseau, his ancestor Didier, a bookseller who may have published Protestant tracts, had escaped persecution from French Catholics by fleeing to Geneva in 1549, where he became a wine merchant. Since 1536, Geneva had been a Huguenot republic and the seat of Calvinism. Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy (now a canton of Switzerland). He was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophers among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau befriended fellow philosopher Denis Diderot in 1742, and would later write about Diderot's romantic troubles in his Confessions. Rousseau's autobiographical writings-the posthumously published Confessions (composed in 1769), which initiated the modern autobiography, and the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker (composed 1776–1778)-exemplified the late 18th-century " Age of Sensibility", and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing. His Emile, or On Education (1762) is an educational treatise on the place of the individual in society. Rousseau's sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was important to the development of preromanticism and romanticism in fiction.
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His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( UK: / ˈ r uː s oʊ/, US: / r uː ˈ s oʊ/ French: 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. Kant, French Revolution, American Revolution, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hume, Gibbon, Paine, Smith, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Hegel, Proudhon, Malaka, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Derrida, de Sade, Strauss, Bloom, Montessori, Goethe, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Dewey, Kitsikis, Madame de Staël, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Rawls, Kemal Atatürk
