Denis Diderot

Father of Enlightenment

EARLY YEARS

Denis Diderot was born on the 5th of October 1713, in the city of Langres in the Champagne province of France, best known today, obviously, for the sparkling white wine of its namesake. His mother was Angélique Vigneron, and his father was Didier Diderot, an artisan cutler, specializing most in the creation of surgical knives. Didier was well regarded and held in high repute, given the apparent notoriety of his work, even in Langres where the profession of cutlery was common.

Denis' had five siblings, though only three made it to adulthood, and even less made it to old age. The eldest of his sisters, Denise Diderot, was held with immense fondness for her brother, who described her as a "female Socrates" for her apparently many excellent qualities, and as a woman who, despite her own struggles, had found "heaven on Earth."

Diderot's education began in a similar sense to Giordano Bruno's, insomuch that he began his studies within a clerical Christian order; specifically the Jesuits, known mostly for their propensity for missionary work and willingness to live in abject poverty, chastity and extreme, self-damaging environments and circumstances if it means they have any chance at converting others.

Similarly to Benjamin Franklin, Diderot quickly realized the clerical life was not for him, and abandoned any notion of becoming a Christian priest. For a time thereafter, he studied law, opting instead to become a writer. His relationship with his father became strained as a result, given the family's apparent social standing, there seemed an expectation for Denis to study one of the "learned" professions, that being clergy, medicine or law.

Having now been disowned, Denis' next ten years were entirely his own, coming to live a somewhat bohemian lifestyle in Paris (fittingly, this is about the period of time the phrase bohemian was coined), becoming one of the simple living creatives of the era. The lifestyle suited for a time, particularly as Diderot regarded himself as a rather passionate lover of women and reminisced about his numerous encounters fondly.

THE FRAYED UNION

This ultimately culminated in his infatuation with one Anne-Antoinette Champion, whom he had lived with (alongside her single mother) during his free spirited years. Anne-Antoinette and her mother were, for all intents and purposes, barely getting by, supporting themselves only by laundry and sewing. All the same, Denis' loved her deeply enough that he sought his father's permission to take her hand, even though zero dowry would be involved from her side owing to their low social standing.

Diderot Senior did not approve of the union, and the relationship between father and son only frayed further. His father, using his influence, sought a royal injunction, having Denis imprisoned within the Carmelite Monastery, hoping he would engage in self-reflection and, in his mind, come to his senses.

Denis however, did not. Having written at length to Anne-Antoinette about the poor quality of his incarceration and the wickedness of the monks, he quite literally jumped out a window in the dead of night, finding a stage coach with what little money he had squirreled away on his person.

Denis Diderot had taken a massive journey on foot, in the cold and rain, to the point he had even lost weight. After a time, he finally reached Paris, declaring the entire rest of his life was dependent on whether Anne-Antoinette would take his hand or not. Initially, she rebuffed him, declaring she had no urge to join into a family which had no desire to welcome her, and that he should cease contacting her.

A single month later, Anne-Antoinette changed her mind, and the two were married after dark in secret, at one of the few Churches which officiated marriage without parental approve. Didier Diderot only discovered his son's marriage six years later.

Diderot's marriage to Anne-Antoinette lasted his lifetime, though was, as one might guess, not without fault, given his aforementioned propensities. These infidelities lead to apparent household tensions over the years, and Anne-Antoinette was, as one would expect of a woman scorned, described as quarrelsome. Even still, it was Anne-Antoinette who, for her part, offered Diderot a domestic existence in an otherwise chaotic life, settling him down just enough that he had room to undertake his many great works.

Despite their issues, the marriage proved resilient. Even during his second bout of incarceration (which will be touched on at length), Anne-Antoinette never abandoned him. Similarly, during her own battle with sickness, Diderot looked after her dutifully and defended her honor against any outward criticism.

The longest living child born of their union was Angélique. Named after Diderot's other sister, she was undoubtedly the inspiration of his later work, The Nun, which was a direct attack on Nunneries and the Catholic Church as a whole. Angélique, after all, had died at the relatively young age of 28, having been overworked and apparently driven mad by her abuse at the hands of the convent. Without a doubt, the death of his sister played a strong role in Diderot's own distaste towards Christianity, which play a central role in not just his works, but many of the defining battles of his life.

EARLY WORKS AND ANTAGONISM

After his initial foray of translating notable foreign works into French, Diderot began his writing career proper with Philosophical Thoughts.

Here, Diderot argues in defense of Deism, which, if you have read the articles of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, you will have noted as a common perspective of thinkers of the time. In the minds of a Deist, a God most certainly existed. But this Godhead was a rational assumption based on observations of nature. This Godhead was ascendant, exclusively logical and without cruelty, a stark contrast to the tyrannical and superstitious qualities of the Judeo-Christian God worshiped by society at large at the time.

Deism for its part, had more in common with the Ancient Greek schools of philosophy, than it ever did Abrahamism on the whole, which is an obvious given, seeing as it was shared among the most notable Masons of the era. This was an age where Paganism was still punishable by death (as we have seen in Giordano Bruno). Deism, for its part, was often a cloak for far more occult ideas, or at the very least, empirical reasoning and science, which in this time, was enough to defy and anger the Church. One must understand in full, that it was only an embrace of the Classics that brought a wave of science with it into Europe once more.

It is common for Diderot to be painted as an Atheist in retrospect, but Philosophical Thoughts makes it apparent Diderot was not, and specified so himself, even going as far as to criticize it (though notably still putting it on a pedestal above Christianity, which is entirely reasonable).

This is a highly insightful work, of which several excerpts will be offered, to articulate upon Diderot's perspective and criticism of Christian superstition, particularly elements which encouraged self-torture or beguiled peasant crowds with phony miracles.

"I am aware that the sombre ideas of superstition are more generally approved of than accepted, that there are pietists who do not think it necessary to hate themselves in order to love God, or to live as desperate wretches, in order to be religious, their devotion is a smiling one, their wisdom very human, but whence comes this difference in sentiment between people who prostrate themselves before the same altars? Can piety thus be subject to the law of temperament? Alas! It must be so. Its influence is only too apparent in the same devotee: he sees, in accordance with its variations, a jealous or a merciful God, and hell or heaven opening before him; he trembles with fear or burns with love, it is a fever with its hot and cold fits."

"A suburb resounds with outcries: the ashes of one of the elect perform more prodigies there than Jesus Christ performed in the whole of his life. People run, or are carried to the spot, and I follow the crowd. I have no sooner arrived than I hear people exclaiming "Miracle!" I approach, I look, and I see a little lame boy walking with the help of three or four charitable onlookers; and the crowd, awe-struck, cry "Miracle! Miracle!" Where is the miracle, then, you fools? Cannot you see that the rogue has done no more than change one pair of crutches for another?..Would a God full of goodwill find pleasure in bathing in tears? Would such terrors not be a reflection on his clemency? If criminals had to appease the fury of a tyrant, what more could be expected of them than this?"

"People begin to speak to us of God too soon, and another mistake is that his presence is not sufficiently insisted upon. Men have banished God from their company and have hidden him in a sanctuary; the walls of a temple shut him in, he has no existence beyond. Fools that you are, break down these limitations that hamper your ideas; set God free; see him everywhere, as he is everywhere, or say that he is non-existent. If I had a child to bring up, I would make his God his companion in such a real sense that he would perhaps find it less difficult to become an atheist, than to escape his presence. Instead of confronting him with a fellow-man (whom maybe he knows to be worse than himself) I would say outright: "God hears you and you are lying." Young people are influenced by their senses. I would multiply about him symbols indicating the divine presence. If there were a gathering at my house, I would leave a place for God, and I would accustom him to say: "We were four-God, my friend, my tutor, and myself."

Unsurprisingly, the Parliament of Paris banned the book the year of its release, and subsequently ordered public burnings. Given the rebellious spirit France has seemingly always maintained, however, this only increased the book's popularity. At this time, Diderot maintained a wise obscurity, choosing not to commonly reveal himself as the work's author. Even Diderot's own acquaintances, unaware of their cohorts apparent writing skill, found themselves assuming it must have been a great work by Voltaire or some other established, notable figure.

Diderot's second major work, The Skeptic's Promenade, was ultimately to be published posthumously. Local police had been informed of another apparently imminent attack on Christianity, and Diderot was, as such, under surveillance, the work being taken as contraband. The work was apparently lost altogether, until appearing some time after his death.

Again, Diderot attacks the Church head on, but also takes aim at the Jews and their Judaism. He regards the finality of Moses' story with him telling the Jews "give no quarter to your enemies and become great usurers," their fictional flight from Egypt portrayed as a seditious and pludersome. Within the dialogue presented in this novel, the superiority of Greco-Roman philosophy over the Abrahamic is flaunted, and Diderot, quite comedically, pegs Moses' founding mythos as merely occurring within the 45,317th year of Chinese history and as such, being a worthless blip on the overall radar of history despite how insistent society had become in its claim the world was not merely even 6000 years old, just as the Jews have claimed.

Diderot's most popular novel, however, was to be The Indiscreet Jewels. Though the topic of this novel seems particularly vulgar (given the "jewels" in question here refer to women's private parts), one must interpret the work as a comedic commentary on society at the time. It's generally well known that, despite the apparent strict moral standards imposed by the Church of the era, the aristocracy (particularly of Romance Europe) could be particularly lascivious. By his own confession, Diderot was no stranger to such.

Beneath the social propriety of the time, was often an underbelly of debauchery. Oftentimes, even scandalous degrees of such. Part of the commentary here lies in the question as to whether there would be less chaos if certain aspects of humanity were not hidden at the behest of artificial virtues (like that of the Church's) and were rather embraced for what they were. This was not a particularly uncommon view of Enlightenment era thinkers, given there was a shift in art back towards the beauty of the human form, in line with the classical Greco-Roman style.

The book was, for its own part, directly inspired by Diderot's romantic affiliations with one Madeleine de Puisieux, a very early voice of the women's equality movement. It's of course, worth contrasting here that a novel about women's sexuality was not only published, but popular in 18th century France, whereas in the Muslim world, the topic is still treated as a taboo to this very day.

Though Diderot wrote on science for the better part of his life (with one of his most defining works yet to come), his first major attempt at such was perhaps Memoirs on Different Subjects of Mathematics. From the outset, it became apparent Diderot had a mind for the sciences, and was already widely applauded for his thinking. Many of the ideas he came to present, even in his earlier works, were not only remarkable for the time, but holding actual truth unknown to other minds at the time.

"Without the idea of the whole, philosophy is no more - In one and the same man, everything is in perpetual vicissitude… It is only by means of memory that we are the same individual to others and to ourselves. At my age, there may not be a single molecule in my body that I brought into the world at my birth. Everything changes, everything passes … only the Whole remains."

It wasn't until the 19th century that cell theory as it's known today was being suggested to any great extent, and even later in the same century was it proposed that cells arise from other cells.

Diderot maintained an air of dubiousness over his writings until this point. Though many were aware of him as the author, his works were, for the most part, still being published anonymously. By the time of Letter on the Blind, however, other great thinkers had begun to be openly aware of him. One such was, quite fittingly, Voltaire himself (as Diderot's writings had been previously mistaken for his), who wrote to Diderot directly, praising his work.

Here, the relation of reasoning in regards to the perception of the five senses is explored through the lens of a blind philosopher on his deathbed, engaged in a discussion with a clergyman attempting and failing to sell him on his idea of God in his final hours.

Though part of the story is an exploration of how the lacking of a sense does not necessarily mean one's ability to understand and interact with reality is entirely limited, part of it also explored the limitations of the human experience as it is, and offered a critique on the idea of reason fitting an objective and universal standard in all contexts. This was, at the time, a secular view on morality enough that it seemed the Church and its lackeys in the royal court had finally had enough. Two years of being under police surveillance, Diderot was placed under arrest, and had his manuscripts confiscated. On the 23rd of July, 1749, Diderot was incarcerated and placed within solitary confinement at the Vincennes Fortress of Paris.

There was, of course, a larger context to his arrest. Diderot's works questioning the dogma of the Church may have been more than enough in earlier times, but the French government was already feeling a growing sense of unrest building in the population (a sense that would eventually culminate in the French Revolution a few short decades later). The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which aimed to end the War of Austrian Secession, was seen publicly as a hollow victory for the French, with Louis XV particularly being seen as a panicky leader who accepted a mediocre deal after significant French costs.

Diderot was allowed to keep only one book during his stay, that being the one he had on his person at the time of his arrest, which was none other, and quite fittingly, Milton's Paradise Lost. Voltaire himself had read the work, and was quick to hail Satan as the true hero of the story. Given that Voltaire was in affectionate contact with Diderot at the time of his arrest, it seems apparent the recommendation may have even come from him.

Incarceration was not enough to stop Diderot from being himself. He made ink by scraping slate from the fortress walls of his cells and mixing it with wine, a toothpick serving as his pen, as he spent his days annotating the work exhaustively.

The next month, Voltaire, in seeming consideration of his newfound friend, pulled some strings in order for Diderot to be lodged more comfortably during his stay, including access to the greater halls of the fortress, and to receive books from his acquaintances. It's said his good friend, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a fellow thinker of the French Enlightenment (who, alongside Diderot, is credited with contributing to the overall sentiment of the French Revolution), visited him almost every single day.

Diderot was ultimately released in November of that year. Despite Diderot suggesting to the governor of Vincennes that he was unlikely to create more works that would upset the establishment, his most controversial, and most life-defining work was still yet to come.

ENCYCLOPEDIE

Several years prior to his arrest, Diderot was approached with a new prospect, a French version of the Cyclopedia by Englishman Ephraim Chambers. Initially the projected started out as a translation, the bulk of the work performed by academics John Mills and Gottfried Sellius, who themselves were not French natives, with Diderot serving more-or-less as an editor on the work.

In 1945, an early preview of the work was shown publicly as to attract financial backing, and was well received. However, the publisher and John Mills quickly ran into irreconcilable differences, and after a brief period of adjustments and trials, Diderot and French mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert were placed in charge as the project's primary editors. Under Diderot specifically, the project would change from a simple translation, to something far grander in scale.

As he himself put it:

"The goal of an encyclopedia is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, and to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race."

Until this point, a full encyclopedia that went beyond the sciences and attempted to cover all branches of human knowledge had not been attempted in earnest, as the work load and expertise required made the idea seem simply unfeasible. Nonetheless, by 1950, a new public preview of Diderot's Encyclopedia project was released, with the first volume arriving in 1951.

During its initial run, the Encyclopedia's contributors were an all-star team of France's most notable intellectual brass. Given the project's desire to accumulate as much of human knowledge as possible, nothing less would suffice. In all, over 150 individuals contributed. By Diderot's confession, some articles were more masterful than others, a reflection of just how many names were willing to contribute to such an enterprise. Unsurprisingly, Voltaire himself contributed, as did Montesquieu, Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, and Baron d'Holbach, just to name a few of the more notable individuals. Louis de Jaucourt in particular penned 17,288 articles alone, with the total sum being 71,818 articles in all. To touch on the key topics, Diderot's Encyclopedia covered philosophy, science and mathematics, arts and craft, history and geography, technology and engineering, and social sciences, just to name the most major.

As one might imagine, the creation of such a work was long as it was arduous, and came at great personal cost to Diderot and others. The Catholic Church in 1758 ordered the works ban, citing the work as a challenge of the Church's authority and dogma. A year later, the French government, pressured not only by the Church, but some of the sentiments within the Encylopedia (which suggested a transition of authority from the "divinity" of the Catholic Church to the people - something that would be all too relevant in decades to come), announced its own ban.

Diderot was again detained, and his house searched. Thankfully, no manuscripts in his home could be found, and Diderot was able to continue on the project courtesy of a ban that was hardly being enforced to any great degree, owing to several high profile backers of the project.

Jean le Rond d'Alembert, once Diderot's partner editor and a massive contributor to the project himself, ceased further accessory to the Encyclopedia, as did many others, some of which had been outright arrested by authorities for it.

Over the course of 25 years, Diderot continued the project in a clandestine manner, constantly facing the threat of police raids, not to mention the desertion of many of the people who were his friends, fleeing the project either due to the threat upon their lives or to avoid the ill repute that came with it.

The worst tragedy, however, was still yet to come. Diderot's publisher, who had backed the project all this time, went about a great censoring of the Encyclopedia, striking out much of the work he deemed would be too much of a risk to publish. The ultimate version of the work that would be received by the long term subscribers of the project would be heavily defaced. After having sacrificed a quarter of a century, having worked so hard that he damaged his eyesight, and having lost so many friends along the way, Diderot had the natural fear that his sacrifices would be for little.

However, the Encyclopedia still played a crucial role in helping form the early culture of the French Revolution, and the crimes against the work itself at the hands of the Church and the government were not to be soon forgotten.

As Encyclopedia Britannica (which was directly inspired by Diderot's work) put it:

"No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century."

It should of course be noted, that without Diderot's work and sacrifice, much of what we take for granted today in immediately accessible information would likely have not to come to pass. It can be reasonably suggested that without Diderot, there would be no Wikipedia, or any such project.

As Diderot himself put it within the very same work: "We are what we are, but we are also what we will become."

Despite all the efforts of the powers that be, Diderot's Encyclopedia would have a far greater fate in shaping what was to come than perhaps even he could have anticipated.

LATER LIFE

Aside from penning the aforementioned The Nun, Diderot's post-Encyclopedia years were replete with various contributions across multiple forms of media. It seemed that, unshackled from over two decades of workload, Diderot was once again free to experiment in art and philosophy.

Undoubtedly, he contributed to Baron d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature, another great work which contributed to Revolution era thinking. Aside from several new novels, he also took part in writing commentaries on art for La Correspondance, which fast became its most popular feature.

For those familiar with literary tropes and devices, it should also be worth noting that Diderot (having during the 1750s written plays himself) is responsible for the concept known as the "fourth wall," that is, the hypothetical barrier between characters in media and the audience.

Despite all this, and likely owing to the oppression he faced during the writing of Encyclopedia, Diderot was struggling financially, to the extent he intended to sell his library. However, he would go on to inherit an extremely notable foreign patron who had been following his works for some time; Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia.

It is of little surprise that Catherine held Diderot in high esteem, not only for her seeming fondness for the aesthetics of France itself, but her own intent on bringing the Enlightenment to Russia. Upon hearing of his financial woes, she not only bought his library, but maintained him as the caretaker of it, a role which would earn him 1,000 livres (that is, the French currency of the time) on top of 50 years of salary. At long last, Diderot was set to live the rest of his life a wealthy man.

Though Diderot did not much enjoy traveling outside of France, he felt he simply had to visit her for all she did for him. Over the five months he spent in her court, the two talked at length almost every day. Humorously, it seems Diderot's affection of women and disregard of propriety had no changed, and Catherine remarked in jest how he would punctuate his points by slapping her thighs, to the point she eventually had to put a table between them.

Catherine's patronage of Diderot continued until the very end, even after his return to France. In July of 1784, Diderot took to poor health, upon which Catherine arranged a stay for him at a luxury suite in the Rue de Richelieu street of Paris. Two weeks later, Diderot passed away.

Diderot's heirs sent his vast library to Catherine, who subsequently deposited it into the National Library of Russia.

Though he contributed greatly to the overall culture of the early Revolution, the later Revolution, in its eventual corruption and redirection of anger away from the Church, tried to forget Diderot, as his hatred for Christianity made him a particularly loathed memory by those who wished France harm. Compared to many of the great thinkers of the era, there seemed to be a harsh attempt to cast him to the fringes of memory, though one that would ultimately be unsuccessful.

Much of Diderot's work found either appreciation or influence in later eras. Jules Michelet, the writer of the History of France and the man who first coined the term Renaissance in the first place, regarded Diderot as a Prometheus like figure. That is, one who brought the fire of enlightenment to mankind.