But the two writers whose works did most to undermine revealed religion in France were Francois Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694-1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). The former of these was born at Paris, received his early education from the Jesuits, and was introduced while still a youth to the salon of Ninon de Lenclos, frequented at this time by the principal literary opponents of religion and morality. His earliest excursions into literature marked him out immediately as a dangerous adversary of the Christian religion. He journeyed in England where he was in close touch with the Deist school of thought, in Germany where he was a welcome guest at the court of Frederick II. of Prussia, and settled finally at Ferney in Switzerland close to the French frontiers. Towards the end of his life (1778) he returned to Paris where he received a popular ovation. Poets, philosophers, actresses, and academicians vied with one another in doing honour to a man who had vowed to crush /L'Infame/, as he termed Christianity, and whose writings had done so much to accomplish that result in the land of his birth. The reception given to Voltaire in Paris affords the most striking proof of the religious and moral corruption of all classes in France at this period. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva and reared as a Calvinist. Later on he embraced the Catholic religion, from which he relapsed once more into Calvinism, if indeed in his later years he was troubled by any dogmatic beliefs. His private life was in perfect harmony with the moral tone of most of his works. He had neither the wit nor the literary genius of Voltaire, but in many respects his works, especially /Le Contrat Social/, exercised a greater influence on the France of his own time and on Europe generally since that time than any other writings of the eighteenth century. His greatest works were /La Nouvelle Heloise/ (1759), a novel depicting the most dangerous of human passions; /Emile/, a philosophical romance dealing with educational ideas and tending directly towards Deism, and /Le Contrat Social/, in which he maintained that all power comes from the people, and may be recalled if those to whom it has been entrusted abuse it. The /Confessions/ which tell the story of his shameless life were not published until after his death.