Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amans, habitans d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes [Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters from two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps].

A retelling of the legendary love affair between French nun Héloïse d’Argenteuil and theologian Peter Abelard, Rousseau’s groundbreaking novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, became an instant best-seller. Publishers could barely keep up with the high demand for copies of the story, which evoked an unprecedentedly passionate response from readers, particularly high-society women from whom Rousseau is known to have received thousands of love letters. Publishers capitalized on the unequivocally high demand for the novel by renting it to readers at a rate per day and even per hour. Due to its content, the book was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books), deemed lascivious and anti-clerical by the Roman Catholic Church. Although it was presented as a novel, the book exists as a philosophical treaty on autonomy and authenticity as moral values, which Rousseau perhaps argued to be ethically superior to rational and commonly-held moral principles. Arthur Schopenhauer cited Julie, or the New Heloise, as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Historian Robert Darnton has argued that Julie ‘was perhaps the biggest best-seller of the century.’