Hugh Trevor-Roper was known for his biting polemical style. In a youthful essay he described Rousseau’s Confessions this way:
“a lucid journal of a life so utterly degraded that it has been a bestseller in France ever since.“[1]
Of course, Confessions has also sold well in the English-speaking world (I see at least eight editions available at Amazon), as well as in other languages. Even so, one must admire a good two-birds-one-stone zinger.
Source: [1] Quoted in Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography, Axios Press, 2012, p. 370.
Related: Rousseau’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy in Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism and the episode on Rousseau’s philosophy of education in the Philosophers, Explained series.