Langres and Paris
Born in Langres to a master cutler, he studied with the Jesuits of his hometown and took a master of arts in Paris in 1732.
Enlightenment · materialism · Encyclopédie · 1713–1784
Denis Diderot
Gather knowledge to change the common way of thinking.
Langres · Paris · St Petersburg
Biography
The thread of a life.
The son of a master cutler from Langres, Denis Diderot became the chief editor of the Encyclopédie, the collective dictionary that set out to gather the sciences, arts and trades and to change the common way of thinking. A materialist and atheist who kept his boldest works in manuscript, he was also a novelist, playwright, art critic and letter writer, and he made dialogue the form of a restless, experimental philosophy.
Translations and a burned book
Married to Anne-Antoinette Champion in 1743, he lived by translating until his Philosophical Thoughts were condemned to be burned in 1746.
The Encyclopédie and Vincennes
Appointed co-editor of the Encyclopédie with d’Alembert in 1747, he was imprisoned at Vincennes in 1749 after his Letter on the Blind.
Volumes against censorship
The first volume appeared in 1751; despite the revocation of the privilege in 1759, the last ten volumes of text came out together in 1765.
The Dream and Russia
He wrote D’Alembert’s Dream in 1769 and stayed in St Petersburg as the guest of Catherine II in 1773 and 1774.
Death in Paris
Five months after Sophie Volland, he died in Paris on 31 July 1784, leaving many of his works unpublished.
Understanding a life in depth
01From Langres to Paris
Born in 1713 in Langres, in Champagne, Denis Diderot was the son of Didier Diderot, a respected master cutler, and was first destined for the Church: after studying with the Jesuits of his hometown he received the tonsure in 1726, at the age of twelve. In Paris he took a master of arts in 1732, then turned down the professions his family had in mind and lived for about ten years as a tutor, hack writer and translator. His versions of Temple Stanyan’s History of Greece, Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue and Robert James’s Medicinal Dictionary trained him in the craft of compiling knowledge. In 1743 he married Anne-Antoinette Champion, a linen seamstress, against his father’s wishes.
02Editing the Encyclopédie
In 1745 the bookseller André Le Breton planned a French translation of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia; by 1747 Diderot and the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert had become its editors and turned it into an original “reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts and trades”. The Letter on the Blind, in which the blind mathematician Saunderson doubts any design in nature, cost Diderot more than three months in the fortress of Vincennes in 1749. The first volume appeared in 1751 with d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse; the work was suspended in 1752, lost its privilege in 1759 after d’Alembert had withdrawn, and was completed in secret, with the last ten volumes of text in 1765 and the plates by 1772. Diderot himself wrote thousands of articles and visited workshops to describe the trades.
03Writing for posterity
From about 1760 Diderot increasingly wrote for a few friends and for posterity rather than for the public. His bourgeois dramas, The Natural Son and The Father of the Family, came with a theory of a theatre of ordinary social conditions, and his Salons, written from 1759 for Grimm’s handwritten Correspondance littéraire, made art criticism a literary genre. Rameau’s Nephew, D’Alembert’s Dream, the Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, Jacques the Fatalist and The Nun circulated in manuscript or in that confidential newsletter and were printed only after his death. In these dialogues, materialism, determinism and a morality without God are tested through voices that contradict one another, and the author rarely keeps the last word.
04Catherine II and the last years
In 1765, when Diderot needed a dowry for his daughter Angélique, Catherine II bought his library, left it in his keeping and paid him a salary as its librarian. He thanked her by travelling to St Petersburg, where from October 1773 to March 1774 he held long conversations with the empress and wrote memoranda on education and reform that she largely ignored. Back in Paris, he contributed anonymously to the History of the Two Indies published under the name of the abbé Raynal, with fierce pages against slavery and colonial conquest, and defended Seneca in his Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero. He died on 31 July 1784, a few months after Sophie Volland; his manuscripts went to St Petersburg with his library, and the copies kept by his daughter later allowed much of his work to be published.
The Encyclopédie became a model of collaborative and critical knowledge that honoured the mechanical arts alongside the sciences, and its editor a symbol of the Enlightenment’s struggle with censorship. Diderot’s posthumous dialogues, admired by Goethe, Hegel and Marx, opened debates on the living organism, the transformation of species, the actor’s craft and the critique of colonial conquest that remain lively today.
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