OLL’s October Birthday: Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784)

October’s OLL Birthday Essay is in honor of the French polymath Denis Diderot.  Most famous as the editor and inspiration of the Encyclopédie, Diderot also published works on philosophy and art, as well as novels, and plays, and was crucially important in establishing the intellectual framework for the French Revolution and the subsequent development of Liberalism.  

Diderot was born in the town of Langres, one of five children.  His father, a cutler, sent him to study at the local Jesuit college.  He subsequently studied at various schools in Paris, receiving a Master of Arts degree from University of Paris in 1732.  He briefly practiced law, and seems to have made initial attempts at careers in both the theatre and in the church, but was far more interested in pursuing his many interests in languages, philosophy, and the arts.  His father was so infuriated by what he saw as his son’s feckless inability to settle on a respectable career that he disowned him, leaving Diderot in a precarious financial situation. In the decade between about 1735 and 1745, he eked out a living writing sermons for missionaries, doing translation work, and taking on miscellaneous writing jobs.  He also became a great frequenter of the Paris cafes, meeting Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), with whom he developed a long friendship.  

Also during this period he met and fell in love with Antoinette Champion (1710-1796), who lived with her widowed mother, making a living by sewing and lace making.  Diderot was 29 years old at the time and, according to the law, needed his father’s permission to marry before he turned 30.  His father, perhaps still vexed at his son’s bohemian life style, denied the petition and, for good measure, had Denis locked up in a monastery outside of Paris.  From his confinement, he wrote and smuggled out a passionate love letter to Antoinette, and following a daring escape, made his way to Paris.  Antoinette was at first adamantly refused to marry into a family which was obviously so opposed to her but, perhaps moved by the younger man’s ardor, did not cut him off completely.  They finally ended up getting married on November 3, 1743, one month after Diderot’s thirtieth birthday.  

 They had a turbulent marriage, with frequent fights and quarrels, not helped by Diderot’s persistent money problems or by his frequent love affairs.  Yet, they stayed married till his death and supported each other through many difficult times.  One particularly moving story is of Diderot’s careful and attentive nursing of his wife when she fell gravely ill in 1762 (possibly with dysentery).  They had one surviving daughter (three of their other children died in infancy), whom they both adored and who grew up to be a noted musician (Marie Angélique Diderot [1753-1824]).    

During the 1740s and 1750s Diderot supported himself as best he could through writing.  One of his most important early works was a translation of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1745) which greatly influenced his own Pensées Philosophiques (1746), characterized by anti-Christian themes. He also published a bawdy novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748) which was very popular despite (or because of) the fact that it had to circulate clandestinely.  

Despite his modest success as a writer during this time, his real fame resulted from his work as general editor and major contributor to the great Encyclopédie ou Dictionaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Artes, et des Metiers.  Partially due to the great success of his translation of Shaftesbury, in 1745 a publisher approached him to translate the Cyclopedia of the English scholar Ephraim Chambers, into French.  Diderot accepted the job, along with a co-editor, the mathematician Jean d’Alembert, but under his direction it became an increasingly ambitious project, far exceeding the straightforward translation job he had been offered.  Published between 1751 and 1772, it eventually totaled 28 volumes. Under Diderot’s direction, most of the leading philosophers and scientists of the time contributed to it, including Condillac, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Turgot and others, with Diderot himself writing many of the entries.  The tone of the work as a whole is the epitome of Enlightenment attitudes:  skeptical of religion, superstition, and the supernatural, it was also hostile toward intolerance and persecution, privilege, and abuses of power.  The unstated but barely concealed goal of the project was to use rational inquiry to combat the forces of tyranny and oppression, based as they obviously were on superstitious and irrational nonsense.  Importantly, many of the entries in the Encyclopédie were on the physical sciences, trades, and manufacturing techniques, not only on the Liberal Arts.  While the Encyclopédie was targeted by both the temporal and religious authorities, and its various contributors (especially Diderot himself) periodically harassed, the suppression of the work was always somewhat half-hearted and it remained tremendously popular.  At one point it had four thousand subscribers.  

 During the years Diderot worked on the Encyclopédie, he continued to publish works on a wide range of philosophical and scientific subjects, among the most interesting were his Pensées sur l’interpretation de la Nature (1753) which contained some remarkably prescient ideas about biological sciences, including a theory of natural selection.  His novels and plays of the time are characterized by criticism of the existing socio-political mores and attitudes of the time, but his work on theatre and dramaturgy had extremely important repercussions.  He stressed the importance of dramatic realism, and developed the now common theatrical concept of the “fourth wall;” an invisible wall separating the actors from the audience.  

 With the great project of the Encyclopédie behind him by 1772, Diderot soon once again found himself short of cash.  But help came from an unexpected source.  Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, was a great admirer of Diderot and, learning of his financial troubles, she offered to buy his library, while simultaneously appointing him its chief librarian with a nice salary, 50 years of which she paid in advance.  In gratitude, though he hated traveling, Diderot made a long trip to the imperial court in St. Petersburg in 1773 to thank her in person and remained the guest of the Empress for five months.  They apparently got along very well, despite his misgivings about “Enlightened Despotism,” and upon his return to Paris, Catherine set him up in a beautiful apartment on the Rue de Richelieu, into which he moved in July 1784.  

 Despite his new luxurious surroundings and sudden financial stability, Diderot was by now an old, sick man, most of whose friends had died.  He died just two weeks after moving into his beautiful new suite.  Despite his prominent anti-Chrisitan views, his son-in-law successfully arranged for him to be buried in the Church of Saint Roch in Paris.