Denis Diderot was born on the 5th of October 1713 in the fortified town of Langres, Champagne, to Didier Diderot, a master cutler, and Angélique Vigneron. His early life was defined by a sharp conflict between the expectations of his father and the restless intellect of his son. After studying philosophy at a Jesuit college and briefly considering the clergy, Diderot made a fateful decision in 1734 to become a writer and translator. This choice enraged his father, who disowned him and cut off all financial support. For the next decade, Diderot lived a bohemian existence, surviving on odd jobs and the generosity of friends while navigating the streets of Paris. He abandoned the security of the learned professions to pursue a life of uncertainty, a decision that would define his character as a man who valued intellectual freedom over social standing. His relationship with his sister Denise, whom he called a female Socrates, provided a rare emotional anchor during these turbulent years, but the rupture with his father left him permanently estranged from his family of origin.
The Prisoner of Vincennes
On the 23rd of July 1749, the governor of the Vincennes fortress ordered the police to arrest Denis Diderot and place him in solitary confinement. The charge was his authorship of the Letter on the Blind, a work that argued that knowledge derives from the senses and that mathematics was the only form of knowledge a blind man and a sighted person could agree upon. The authorities, alarmed by his materialist views and the book's challenge to religious dogma, seized his manuscripts and locked him away in the dungeons of the fortress. During his incarceration, Diderot was permitted to keep only one book, Paradise Lost, which he read with annotations written using a toothpick as a pen and ink made by scraping slate from the walls and mixing it with wine. It was during this period of imprisonment that Jean-Jacques Rousseau visited him daily, emerging from the prison a changed man with new ideas about the disadvantages of knowledge and civilization. The experience of confinement did not break Diderot; instead, it sharpened his resolve to challenge the established order, even as the government sought to silence his voice through force.The Encyclopedia of All Knowledge
In 1751, Denis Diderot co-founded the Encyclopédie with Jean le Rond d'Alembert, a project that would become the defining labor of his life. The work was unprecedented in its scope, aiming to consolidate all human knowledge and include the mechanical arts, which had previously been ignored by scholars. Diderot wrote approximately 7,000 articles, spending his days at workshops to master manufacturing processes and his nights writing what he had learned. The project faced relentless opposition; the Catholic Church banned it in 1758, and the French government followed suit in 1759. Despite the ban, the work continued clandestinely, with D'Alembert leaving in 1759 and many other contributors deserting the project due to the dangers involved. Diderot remained the sole editor, working under constant threat of police raids and the destruction of his manuscripts. By 1765, when the last copies of the first volume were issued, he felt that the twenty-five years he had spent on the project might have been a waste, yet the Encyclopédie stood as a monument to the power of reason and a forerunner of the French Revolution.