French Literature · 4 books
Denis Diderot was born on October 5, 1713, in Langres, a provincial town in northeastern France, the son of a master cutler, and died on July 31, 1784, in Paris. He was one of the principal figures of the French Enlightenment, the driving force behind the Encyclopédie — the largest and most ambitious reference work of the eighteenth century — and the author of fiction, plays, philosophical dialogues, and art criticism that were, in many cases, not published during his lifetime and that reached their full audience only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was, in other words, a writer whose actual scope was systematically concealed from his own contemporaries.
He came to Paris from Langres in his late teens to pursue an education, and his father eventually cut off his allowance when Denis refused to follow a conventional career path. He lived precariously for years as a translator and tutor, read widely and across every discipline, and formed the intellectual connections that would eventually make the Encyclopédie possible. He married Anne-Toinette Champion in 1743, a marriage that was difficult and lasted out of convention rather than happiness. The great emotional attachment of his adult life was Sophia Volland, whom he met around 1755 and to whom he wrote a remarkable series of letters that document his intellectual life with exceptional vividness.
The Encyclopédie, or Classified Dictionary of Sciences, Arts, and Trades, was conceived initially as a French translation of an English reference work; Diderot and his co-editor Jean le Rond d’Alembert transformed it into something entirely original. It ran to twenty-eight volumes of text and eleven of illustrations, published between 1751 and 1772. It brought together more than a hundred and fifty contributors, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot, and Montesquieu. Its scope was encyclopedic in the full sense: it covered every domain of human knowledge, from philosophy and theology to the mechanical arts and manufacturing processes. The act of describing the crafts of rope-making, watchmaking, and weaving alongside theology and metaphysics was itself an argument: it implied that human labor had the same dignity as human thought, that workers who made things deserved the same place in an account of civilization as scholars who reflected on it.
The enterprise was persistently under attack. The first two volumes were condemned by the Royal Council in 1752. D’Alembert withdrew after the article on Geneva provoked a controversy in 1758. In 1759 the Encyclopédie’s licence was revoked. Diderot continued, in difficult circumstances and with compromised arrangements, and the complete work eventually appeared. He discovered late in the process that the publisher had been quietly editing entries to remove their more provocative content; the discovery was devastating and shaped his views on censorship and the relationship between authors and commercial publishers.
His fiction is a different matter from the Encyclopédie, and in some ways more remarkable. Rameau’s Nephew, written probably in the 1760s and 1770s and published posthumously, is a philosophical dialogue between the narrator and a disreputable genius — the nephew of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau — who systematically dismantles conventional morality, propriety, and social performance while also enacting the exact failures he describes. It is one of the most innovative prose works of the century, and Goethe translated it into German before it was published in French, recognizing in it a depth of thought that the French literary establishment had not yet had occasion to process. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, also written in the 1760s and 1770s and published posthumously, is a picaresque narrative that systematically subverts its own storytelling conventions, constantly interrupting itself to comment on the nature of fiction and the relationship between narrative, fate, and free will. It anticipates narrative techniques that would not become common in European fiction for more than a century.
He was also a pioneering art critic. His reviews of the Salon exhibitions — the biennial exhibitions of French painting — were written for the Correspondance littéraire, a privately circulated newsletter sent to subscribers across Europe, and were the first sustained examples of serious art criticism in France. His analysis of painters such as Greuze, Chardin, and Vernet established approaches to writing about visual art that influenced subsequent criticism directly.
He traveled once to Russia, in 1773–74, invited by Catherine the Great, who had purchased his library and paid him a stipend as its nominal keeper. He spent several months in St. Petersburg in conversation with the empress, conversations that Catherine described as stimulating and that Diderot apparently treated as an opportunity to press his views on political and social reform on an absolute monarch with mixed results.
He died in Paris on July 31, 1784, apparently suddenly. Voltaire had died six years earlier, Rousseau a month after him in 1778; the generation that had made the Enlightenment was passing. The Revolution that their collective project had in various ways prepared and enabled came five years after Diderot’s death, and he did not live to see it.
His delayed reception — many of his most original works not published until after his death — means that his full influence on European literature and thought is still being traced. Rameau’s Nephew, as Goethe recognized, belongs in a different category from most eighteenth-century prose: it anticipates, in the figure of the disreputable nephew who systematically deconstructs social values while embodying their logic, a mode of literary and philosophical inquiry that would not become standard until the following century. Nietzsche admired it. Hegel analyzed it at length in the Phenomenology of Spirit as an example of a “self-alienated” consciousness. It is the kind of work that looks, from a later vantage point, like it was written by someone who had read books that did not yet exist.
At Classics Retold, we have published new translations of Diderot’s major works — his philosophical dialogues, his fiction, and his criticism — in editions designed for contemporary readers who want to encounter one of the sharpest and most restless minds of the eighteenth century. His writing rewards engagement in proportion to the attention brought to it.
