Denis Diderot

• 1. Introduction

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  Denis Diderot was born on the 5th of October 1713 in Langres, Champagne, the son of a cutler named Didier Diderot. He died on the 31st of July 1784, having spent more than two decades producing one of the most provocative publishing projects in European history. Yet at the moment of his death, many of his greatest works had never seen print. The questions this documentary will explore are as strange as the man himself: How does a cutler's son, disowned by his father for wanting to become a writer, end up selling his personal library to a Russian empress? How does the editor of a book meant to give all knowledge to all people discover, after twenty years of labor, that his own printer had secretly gutted it? And what does it mean that the man Karl Marx named his favorite prose writer was nearly buried in a mass grave?

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• 2. A Bohemian Beginning

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  Langres gave Diderot his first education at a Jesuit college, and Paris gave him a Master of Arts from its university in 1732. He briefly considered the clergy, then briefly considered law, and then, in the early 1740s, decided to become a writer and translator. His father disowned him for it. For the next ten years, Diderot lived what contemporaries would have recognized immediately as a bohemian existence: irregular income, shifting lodgings, and the company of chess players and coffee drinkers at the Café de la Régence, where in 1742 he met Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  In October 1743, Diderot deepened his estrangement from his father by marrying Antoinette Champion, born in 1710, a devout Catholic his father regarded as unsuitable on every count: low social standing, poor education, no father, no dowry. She was about three years older than Diderot. Their marriage produced one surviving child, a daughter also named Angélique.

  The domestic picture, however, was tangled. Diderot had affairs with several women during these years, and his letters to one of them, Sophie Volland, are regarded as among the literary treasures of the eighteenth century for their candor. His sister Angélique, whom he sometimes called 'a female Socrates,' died in 1749 as a nun in her convent, an event that many scholars believe darkened his view of religion permanently. She is thought to have been the inspiration for his novel about a woman forced into convent life.

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• 3. Early Writing and Imprisonment

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  In 1746, Diderot published his first original work, the Philosophical Thoughts, arguing that reason and feeling must be reconciled: feeling without discipline destroys virtue, but reason without feeling cannot produce sublime art. At the time of writing, he was a deist, and the book defends deism while criticizing Christianity. A year later, he wrote The Skeptic's Walk, a dialogue between a deist, an atheist, and a pantheist, which was suppressed and did not appear in print until 1830.

  In 1748, pressed for money by both his wife's pregnancy and his mistress Madeleine de Puisieux's financial demands, Diderot produced The Indiscreet Jewels in a matter of days, reportedly after his mistress challenged him to prove that writing a novel was not the trivial task he claimed it to be. The book, a ribald story about a magical ring that compels women to confess their sexual histories, could only be sold clandestinely. It remains his most published work.

  His 1749 essay Letter on the Blind brought him to the attention of the authorities in a more dangerous way. The essay used a dying blind mathematician, the historical Nicholas Saunderson, to argue that knowledge derives from the senses and that the argument from design for God's existence is hollow. The work appeared anonymously in Paris in June 1749. Diderot had been under police surveillance since 1747. He was swiftly identified as the author, his manuscripts were confiscated, and on the 24th of July 1749, he was placed in solitary confinement at the Vincennes fortress. He had been permitted to keep one book at the time of his arrest: Milton's Paradise Lost. He annotated it using a toothpick as a pen and ink he made by scraping slate from the walls and mixing it with wine.

  Mme du Chatelet wrote to the governor of Vincennes on Diderot's behalf in August 1749. The governor offered him access to the castle's great halls and the freedom to receive visitors in exchange for a written submission. On the 13th of August, Diderot wrote his confession, calling the Philosophical Thoughts, The Indiscreet Jewels, and the Letter on the Blind 'debaucheries of the mind.' On the 3rd of November 1749, he was released. Within a year, he had published the prospectus for the Encyclopédie.

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• 4. The Encyclopédie's Long War

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  André le Breton, a bookseller and printer, had originally approached Diderot about translating Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia into French. Diderot transformed the proposal into something far larger: a work that would consolidate the entire Republic of Letters and extend, as he put it, to 'each and every branch of human knowledge.' The first volume appeared in 1751, co-edited with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. It was the first encyclopedia to name its contributors individually, and the first to describe the mechanical arts in detail. Diderot spent his days in workshops mastering manufacturing processes, and his nights writing up what he had learned.

  By 1757, the subscriber list had grown from 2,000 to 4,000. That growth alarmed precisely the people who most resented the project. The Encyclopédie's secular tone, its skepticism about Biblical miracles, and its assertion that a nation's government should serve its common people were read by the Catholic Church and the French aristocracy as an organized attack on the social order. The Church banned it in 1758; the French government banned it in 1759. D'Alembert left the project that same year, and other prominent contributors, including Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, withdrew. Diderot was left as sole editor.

  He continued, writing approximately 7,000 articles and damaging his eyesight correcting proofs. Then, in 1764, with the end finally in sight, he discovered what Le Breton had done. Fearing government displeasure, the printer had secretly removed passages from the proof sheets after they had left Diderot's hands, and had destroyed the original manuscripts so the deletions could not be identified or repaired. The final 28 folio volumes were not delivered to subscribers until 1772, twelve years after the first volume was published. When his work on the project ended in 1765, Diderot told friends that the twenty-five years he had spent on it had been wasted.

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• 5. Catherine the Great and Russian Gold

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  Russian Empress Catherine the Great heard of Diderot's financial difficulties in 1766 and made an offer that transformed his circumstances. She bought his personal library, which he had accumulated over his years on the Encyclopédie and which ran to 3,000 volumes, for 15,000 livres. She then appointed him custodian of the library, to keep it at his home for the remainder of his life, and paid him a salary of 1,000 livres per year. She paid fifty years of that salary in advance.

  Diderot hated travel. He nonetheless felt obliged to visit her, and on the 9th of October 1773, he arrived in Saint Petersburg. He met Catherine the following day and saw her almost daily for the five months he remained at her court. Their conversations ranged across philosophy, science, and statecraft. He would sometimes make his points physically; Catherine wrote to Madame Geoffrin that she had been obliged to put a table between herself and Diderot to protect her thighs from his enthusiastic slapping.

  Diderot proposed schemes for transforming Russia into a utopia. Catherine later wrote to the Comte de Ségur that following his advice would have produced chaos in her kingdom. When he left, she gave him 3,000 rubles as reimbursement for his journey, plus an expensive ring and a military escort back to Paris. He wrote a eulogy in her honor upon returning.

  In July 1784, Catherine heard that Diderot was in poor health and arranged for him to move into a luxurious apartment in the Rue de Richelieu. He died there two weeks after moving in, on the 31st of July 1784. Among his final writings were notes on Catherine's own Nakaz, the legal code she had drafted. In those notes, he argued that she should abdicate her throne, destroy anyone who tried to restore the monarchy, and begin a new Russian legal code with the words: 'We the people, and we the sovereign of this people, swear conjointly these laws, by which we are judged equally.' He chose not to send them. After his death, they were delivered to her with his other papers. She called them an incoherent gibberish devoid of prudence, insight, and verisimilitude.

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• 6. Works Published After Death

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  Rameau's Nephew began as a conversation written between 1761 and 1774, which Diderot never published and apparently never even shared with close friends. The narrator encounters the nephew of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau: a man of talent who has sunk into poverty and debauched idleness after his wife's death, shunned by former companions, and yet retaining the intellectual capacity to analyze his own ruin with philosophical detachment. The nephew's creed, as Diderot wrote it, is a frank hedonism: good wine, choice food, attractive women, soft beds. 'Outside of that,' the nephew declares, 'all is vanity.' At the dialogue's end, when Diderot calls him a wastrel and a coward devoid of spiritual values, the nephew replies simply: 'I believe you are right.'

  After Diderot's death, a copy of the manuscript reached Friedrich Schiller, who passed it to Goethe. Goethe translated it into German in 1805. His translation traveled back to France and was retranslated into French in 1821. A second French copy, expurgated by Diderot's daughter, appeared in 1823. The original manuscript was not found until 1891. Goethe called it 'the classical work of an outstanding man.'

  La Religieuse, completed around 1780 and published in 1796, originated as an elaborate practical joke designed to lure the Marquis de Croismare back to Paris. The theatrical essay Paradox of the Actor, written between 1770 and 1778 and published only in 1830, is the source of the French phrase l'esprit de l'escalier: the experience of thinking of the perfect reply only after the conversation is over. Jacques le fataliste, written between 1765 and 1780, appeared in German in 1792 and in French in 1796. D'Alembert's Dream, composed in 1769, was a philosophical dialogue on the ultimate constitution of matter. Diderot's literary reputation during his lifetime rested on his plays and his Encyclopédie contributions. The works now considered most important were all published after he was gone.

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• 7. Legacy and Later Reputation

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  Diderot died of pulmonary thrombosis on the 31st of July 1784 and was buried at the Église Saint-Roch in Paris. In 1793, grave robbers unearthed his remains. His corpse was left on the church floor and then presumably moved to a mass grave by the authorities. He has been denied burial in the Panthéon alongside other French notables on several occasions.

  His heirs sent his library to Catherine II, who deposited it at what is now the National Library of Russia. During the French Revolution, as atheism fell out of fashion, Diderot was vilified as responsible for the excessive persecution of the clergy. In the following century, Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Delacroix, and Schopenhauer all expressed admiration for his work. Historian Michelet called him 'the true Prometheus.' Karl Marx named him his favorite prose writer.

  In the two centuries since, Diderot's influence has kept surfacing in unexpected forms. In 1993, American writer Cathleen Schine published a satire of New York academic life, Rameau's Niece, built around an imagined pornographic parody of his dialogue. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's play Le Libertin, which imagines a single day in Diderot's life, opened at Paris' Théâtre Montparnasse in 1997, with Bernard Giraudeau in the title role. In 2013, three hundred years after his birth, the town of Langres inaugurated the Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot, a museum of the Enlightenment, on the 6th of October, and produced an audio tour of the town that included the remains of the convent where his sister Angélique had taken her vows.

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