Many famous and well known people have unexpected – and sometimes downright weird – traits that are not so well known, and are usually hidden. Often, for a good reason. Take the famed philosopher and thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The man’s writings inspired many and literally revolutionized the world. Less known about him is that he used to pull down his trousers in public, and chase women-around, butt first, in the hopes that they would spank him. Below are twenty things about that and other lesser known and unexpected facts about famous historic figures.
20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Revolutionary Thinker – and His Unexpected Spanking Fetishist
Swiss philosopher, writer, and composer – and, as seen below, spanking fetishist – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) was one of modern history’s most transformative thinkers. His treatises and novels influenced leaders of the French Revolution and the Romantic Movement, and helped bring the Age of Enlightenment and its rigid rationality to an end. A devoted champion of liberty, Rousseau pretty much shaped our modern understanding of the term. He advocated for reforms that revolutionized not only politics, but also popular tastes in music, the arts, education, an admiration for the beauty of nature, and various other aspects of everyday life. Rousseau was a dreamer who inspired others to dream about a better world – and to do something about it, to transform those dreams into reality. Sometimes, the dreams went off track and got nightmarish, as with the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution inspired largely by Rousseau’s thoughts.
All in all, though, the world is a better place because of Rousseau, whose dreamer nature was a case of the apple not falling far from the tree. His father had also been, in the context of his era, a dreamer who believed his birth place of Geneva to be as glorious a republic as classical Sparta and ancient Rome. He also had a glorious image of his own importance – a trait inherited by Jean-Jacques. The senior Rousseau, a watchmaker, married above his modest station, and contemporaries thought the match got to his head, and convinced him that he was entitled to the pretensions of the upper class. So he brandished a sword – something he was not entitled to carry – and got in trouble with the law. Faced with the prospect of prison, he was forced to flee Geneva. That got the ball rolling on how Rousseau became a spank-aholic.
