DENIS
DIDEROT
Diderot
was born in Langres on October 5, 1713, and educated by Jesuits. He went to
Paris in 1734 and spent ten years as an ill-paid tutor and hack writer. His
first serious work, published anonymously, was Pensées philosophiques
(1746), which stated his deist philosophy. In 1747 he was invited to edit a
French translation of the English Cyclopaedia by Ephraim
Chambers.
Diderot,
collaborating with the mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, converted the
project into a vast, new, and controversial 35-volume work,
Encyclopédie
ou
dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des
metiers,
which is usually known as the Encyclopédie.
Aided
by the most celebrated writers of the day, including Voltaire and Montesquieu,
the
skeptical,
rationalist Diderot used the Encyclopédie as a powerful propaganda weapon
against Ecclesiastical authority and the superstition, conservatism,
and
semi feudal
social forms of the time. Consequently, Diderot and his associates became the
objects of clerical and royal antagonism. In 1759 the Conseil du Roi formally
suppressed the first ten volumes (published from 1751 onward) and forbade
further publication. Nevertheless, Diderot continued work on the remaining
volumes and had them secretly printed. The 17 volumes of text were completed in
1765, with plates and supplements added until 1780.
Diderot's
voluminous writings include the novels La religieuse (The Nun, written
1760, published 1796), an attack on convent life; Le neveu de Rameau
(written 1761-1774, published 1805; translated as Rameau's Nephew,
1964), a social satire; and Jacques le fataliste (1796), which
explored the psychology of free will and determinism. Lettre sur les
aveugles (1749), about the way the blind learn, and the dramatic
philosophical dialogue Le rêve d'Alembert (1830) contain his materialist
theories. A pioneer in aesthetic criticism, he founded (1759) Les Salons,
a journal for which he wrote criticism of the annual Paris art exhibitions. His
correspondence was unexcelled in an age of famous letter writers. Diderot won
the patronage of the enlightened monarch Catherine the Great of Russia and
greatly influenced other Enlightenment thinkers in Europe. He died in Paris on
July 30, 1784.