Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher and writer. Born in Langres, Champagne, France in 1713, he was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and was the editor-in-chief of the famous Encyclopédie.

Encyclopédie

Main article: Encyclopédie

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The bookseller and printer André Le Breton had applied to Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation into French of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, undertaken in the first instance by the Englishman John Mills, and the German, Gottfried Sellius. Diderot accepted the proposal, but in his busy and pregnant intelligence the scheme became transformed. Instead of a mere reproduction of the Cyclopaedia, he persuaded Le Breton to enter upon a new work, which should collect under one roof all the active writers, all the new ideas, all the new knowledge, that were then moving the cultivated class of the Republic of Letters to its depths, but still were comparatively ineffectual by reason of their dispersion.

Related Topics:
André Le Breton - Ephraim Chambers - Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences - John Mills - Gottfried Sellius - Republic of Letters

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His enthusiasm infected the publishers; they collected a sufficient capital for a vaster enterprise than they had at first planned; Jean le Rond d'Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot's colleague; the requisite permission was procured from the government; in 1750 an elaborate prospectus announced the project to a delighted public; and in 1751 the first volume was given to the world. The last of the letterpress was issued in 1765, but it was 1772 before the subscribers received the final volumes of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.

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These twenty years were to Diderot years not merely of incessant drudgery, but of harassing persecution, and of injury from the desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical party detested the Encyclopédie, in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophic enemies. By 1757 they could endure the sight no longer. The subscribers had grown from 2,000 to 4,000, and this was a right measure of the growth of the work in popular influence and power. The Encyclopédie was threatening to the governing social classes of France (aristocracy) because it takes for granted the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought and the value of science and industry. It asserts the democratic doctrine that it is the common people in a nation whose lot ought to be the main concern of the nation's government.

Related Topics:
Ecclesiastical - Social class - Aristocracy - Religious tolerance - Freedom of thought - Science - Democratic

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There was a contemporary belief that the Encyclopédie was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held were now made truly formidable by their open publication. In 1759 the Encyclopédie was formally suppressed. The decree, however, did not arrest the continuance of the work, which went on, but with its difficulties increased by the necessity of being clandestine.

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D'Alembert withdrew from the enterprise and other powerful colleagues, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, among them, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired an evil fame. Diderot was left to bring the task to an end as he best could. He wrote several hundred articles, some of them very slight, but many of them most laborious, comprehensive and ample. He wore out his eyesight in correcting proofs, and in bringing the manuscript of less competent contributors into decent shape. He spent his days in the workshops, mastering the processes of manufacturing, and his nights in reproducing on paper what he had learnt during the day. And he was incessantly harassed all the time by alarms of a descent from the police.

Related Topics:
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune - Proof - Manuscript - Police

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At the last moment, when his immense work was just drawing to an end, he encountered one last and crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, fearing the displeasure of the government, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he chose to think too dangerous. The monument to which Diderot had given the labour of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced.

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