Last reviewed: June 2018
French encyclopedist, philosopher, novelist, and dramatist
October 5, 1713
Langres, France
July 31, 1784
Paris, France
Like so many of his famous contemporaries, Denis Diderot (deed-uh-roh) was of respectable, even humble origin, and lived the life of a public controversialist. He early rebelled against his Jesuit background and, refusing to go into the solid professions of law or medicine, became a bookseller’s hack, married a woman with whom he could not live, and led a bohemian existence. His conversation, always his great talent, attracted the notice of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and even that of Catherine the Great, who once saved the great encyclopedist from penury by buying his library and then making him her librarian. His aesthetic, philosophic, and literary judgments made such an impression that he was commissioned to translate Ephraim Chambers’s famous Cyclopaedia (1728), but in the process he so enlarged the original plan that the monumental Encyclopédie resulted. In fact, although Diderot is one of the major novelists of the eighteenth century, it is as the editor of the Encyclopédie that he is best remembered. For twenty years, he fought to keep the volumes coming off the press but everywhere met with objections, accusations, and all manner of persecution. Diderot’s enlightened views on science and religion drew rejection and scorn to his work. Worn out and destitute, he himself wrote and read proofs on the last parts, only to have the printer mutilate the copy with his censorship. He died in Paris on July 30, 1784. Denis Diderot
Diderot’s collected works, the majority of which were published posthumously, range from a farce-comedy to tragedy, poetry, philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, politics, and religion. He undertook many translations. He was above all else, however, a philosophe, one of the great eighteenth-century Enlightenment figures. He was not a great writer, but his works inspired all his French contemporaries, as well as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany. He was not the atheist his detractors claimed, but believed in religious tolerance and speculative freedom. His philosophy was a simple sort of casuistry, somewhat didactic though sympathetic. As a critic of art, literature, and drama, he repays reading, for none of his contemporaries presents similarly balanced judgment. He founded no school, however, nor was he widely emulated, but many have praised his faithfulness to the subjects he discussed.