Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784) was a French philosopher, novelist, playwright and art critic, and the principal editor of the Encyclopédie, the most ambitious reference project of the Enlightenment. [1] He was also a pioneering materialist thinker and an innovative writer of fiction and criticism, though much of his boldest work circulated privately and appeared only after his death. [2]
Early life and education
Diderot was born on 5 October 1713 at Langres in the Champagne region of France, the son of a cutler. [1] He was educated by the Jesuits and then in Paris at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the University of Paris, taking a master of arts degree in 1732. He abandoned plans for a career in the church or the law and spent his twenties in Paris living precariously as a tutor, translator and writer.
His translations from English, including a medical dictionary and works of moral philosophy, gave him both an income and a working method that fed directly into his later editorial career.
The Encyclopédie
In 1747 Diderot and the mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert were engaged to produce a French version of an English encyclopaedia. The project grew into something far larger: the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, issued in seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates between 1751 and 1772. [3]
Diderot carried the work for a quarter of a century, writing and editing large numbers of articles himself, particularly on crafts, trades and the mechanical arts, which the volumes documented in unprecedented detail. Contributors included Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Turgot. The enterprise was twice suspended by the authorities and placed on the Church's index of forbidden books, and Diderot continued it under censorship and constant threat of suppression. [2]
Philosophy and writings
Diderot's early Pensées philosophiques (1746) was condemned and burned, and his Lettre sur les aveugles ("Letter on the Blind", 1749), which drew sceptical conclusions from the experience of blind people, led to his imprisonment for several months at Vincennes. [1] He moved steadily from deism toward a thoroughgoing materialism, developed most fully in Le Rêve de d'Alembert ("D'Alembert's Dream"), which imagined matter as inherently active and living forms as products of change over time.
His fiction broke sharply with convention. Le Neveu de Rameau ("Rameau's Nephew") is a satirical dialogue on hypocrisy and genius, Jacques le fataliste plays openly with the machinery of storytelling, and La Religieuse ("The Nun") attacks forced monastic vows. Most of these appeared only posthumously. [4]
Diderot also effectively founded modern art criticism through the Salons, his reviews of the biennial Paris exhibitions written for Friedrich Melchior Grimm's private newsletter, and he wrote for the theatre and on dramatic theory.
Later life
In 1765 Catherine II of Russia bought Diderot's library, appointing him its librarian for life and paying his salary in advance, an arrangement that secured his finances. He travelled to Saint Petersburg in 1773 and spent several months in conversation with the empress. [1]
He returned to Paris and continued writing until his death there on 31 July 1784. His reputation rose steadily in the following century as his unpublished manuscripts came to light, and he is now regarded as one of the central figures of the French Enlightenment. [2]
