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ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES. (1712-1778). Swiss philosopher, writer, and political theorist whose works inspired the leaders of the French Revolution and artists of the Romantic Movement. AMs. Unsigned. ½p. 4to. N.p., N.d. A fragment from a larger work copied or dictated under the direction of French Enlightenment author and salon host Madame Dupin (Louise-Marie-Madeleine Guillaume De Fontaine, 1706-1799). Rousseau has neatly summarized Madame Dupin’s thoughts in a column on the right hand portion of a page, leaving space for Dupin’s additional emendations in the left column. In French with translation. “We do not do to m[en] in general, nor to any particular class of them, the wrong or the honor of having formed a System of abasement for w[omen]. We see the revolutions that concern them as the other revolutions in which chance often plays a large part. In general, one thing leads to another, we sometimes go further than we think, and we never go as far as when we do not know where we are going.” After devoting himself to a musical career, Denis Diderot asked Rousseau to contribute to his famous Encyclopédie and, in 1750, he penned his first major work, A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. Twelve years later he produced his most influential and enduring book, The Social Contract, which sought to explain social inequality by proposing that humankind was at first equal, but that society’s formation generated competition, which inevitably led to class differences and conflict. Rousseau’s writings earned him the condemnation of France’s Parliament, prompting him to seek refuge in England with David Hume before returning to France in 1767 to work on his Confessions. Married to a wealthy tax collector, Dupin was renowned for her beauty and her salon at her iconic Loire valley Château de Chenonceau, which hosted European royalty and Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. In 1745, Dupin briefly engaged Rousseau to tutor her son and thereafter employed him until 1751 as a secretary and research assistant for her Ouvrage sur les Femmes. Together the pair generated research notes, drafts and fair copies, which were sold at auction between 1951 and 1958. The content of our manuscript includes text found in article 8 of De la discipline de l’èglise (On the Discipline of the Church), a draft manuscript of which is in the collections of the Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Montmorency, France. In his Confessions, Rousseau names Dupin “as pivotal to his entrance into Parisian society, and as a brief love interest,” and he notes that during their working relationship Dupin “never used me except to write under her dictation, or in research of pure erudition,” (“The Unfinished Work on Louise Marie-Madeleine Dupin’s Unfinished Ouvrage sur les femmes,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Hunter). The still unpublished drafts of Dupin’s “Ouvrage provide an important analysis of the physical and social experiences of women and of their historical subjugation. Dupin also addresses many of the important philosophical issues of the eighteenth century—justice, rights, nature—and locates her critiques in contexts that are still of concern in feminist theory today… Dupin also focuses on local gender-based regulations in various periods of Western history, such as laws concerning adultery,” and prostitution as suggested in our manuscript, (ibid.). Our section is likely an unpublished fragment that would be associated with one of Madame Dupin’s articles on women (Cf. Senechal, Article 43). In excellent condition. Our special thanks to Associate Professor Angela Hunter, from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, for her invaluable assistance. Rare.