'Tis Folly to Be Wise

This is an intimate story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the exalted, visionary, often ridiculous, little man whose heights of philosophical grandeur were equaled only by the degrading absurdity of his private life. It is also the story of his effortlessly adulterous wife; of the frivolous nobles in France who made it fashionable to read him; and of the heroes, villains and fools who built the French Revolution and its resulting in the days of the Terror largely on his words. This is the story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life as he lived it and as he described it in his celebrated "Confessions." It tells of the good and evil that came to the world largely because a cuckolded husband, who happened to be a greatly misunderstood philosopher, was murdered by his wife's paramour.