René Louis de Girardin (French pronunciation: [ʁəne lwi də ʒiʁaʁdɛ̃]; 25 February 1735 – 1808), Marquis of Vauvray, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's last pupil.

In 1762 he inherited his title of Marquis of Vauvray and his mother's fortune (she was the daughter of René Hatte, the chief tax collector for Louis XV).

In 1761, he married Cécile Brigitte Adélaide Berthelot, daughter of the maréchal des camps et armées of Lorraine.

Girardin left the Polish court after the king's theater presented a play ridiculing Rousseau's ideas.

[2] In 1762 he settled at Ermenonville and began to design a new garden to illustrate his philosophical and social ideas about the place of man in nature.

He brought one hundred workers from England and a Scottish gardener to help him with the work, and he himself made many drawings of the effects that he wanted.

He stayed in a small cottage with a thatched roof surrounded by rocks, a setting created by Girardin from Rousseau's novel.

Girardin made a tomb for Rousseau designed by Hubert Robert and sculpted by Jacques-Philippe Le Sueur.

The tomb and the garden became a destination of pilgrimage for admirers of Rousseau, including Joseph II of Austria, King Gustav III of Sweden, the future Czar Paul I of Russia, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Danton, Robespierre, Chateaubriand, Queen Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte.

The new edition contributed greatly to spreading Rousseau's ideas throughout France in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

He was disillusioned by the massacre on the Champ de Mars in Paris on July 17, 1791; he left politics and moved to his estate at Ermenonville.

Girardin, disillusioned by the behavior of the villagers of Ermenonville, retired to a house at Vernouillet, where he republished as De la composition des paysages in 1805, and created a small garden.