Philosophers...

There's a good short article here in The Economist book section about the book Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche, by James Miller (FSG).

It contains:

11 biographical sketches of thinkers who tried to tread in Socrates’s footsteps, plus one on Socrates himself

and here's what it says about the French ones.

Rousseau:

preached on education, abandoned his five children by his long-term mistress, and made pathetic excuses for doing so (he was too ill and poor to be a good father, and a foundlings’ home is not such a bad place to grow up, anyway)... at the end of his life, Rousseau acknowledged that it was not nearly so easy as he had assumed to follow the Delphic oracle’s injunction to “Know thyself.” He concluded ruefully that it was “arrogant and rash” to profess virtues that you cannot live up to, and retreated into indolent seclusion.

and of course Montaigne is a:

master of the suggestive non sequitur and the self-contradiction.