Denis Diderot 1713 – 1784

Denis Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, novelist, and art critic, and the chief editor of the Encyclopedie, a vast collaborative work that aimed to gather and propagate the rational knowledge of the age. Over more than twenty years, in the face of censorship and the temporary loss of his collaborators, he saw the project through to completion. His own writings range from the materialist metaphysics of D'Alembert's Dream to the satirical dialogue Rameau's Nephew and the novels Jacques the Fatalist and The Nun. He spent the last years of his life in the patronage of Catherine the Great.

Denis Diderot was born in 1713 in Langres, the son of a prosperous master cutler; his Jesuit education there left him ambitious for letters but unwilling to take orders. After Paris and a precarious bohemian decade as translator and tutor, he was imprisoned at Vincennes in 1749 for the materialist Letter on the Blind, an experience that shaped the political prudence of the work to come.

From 1751 to 1772 Diderot edited, with Jean d'Alembert as co-editor for the early volumes, the Encyclopedie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, the central monument of the French Enlightenment. Around this labor he produced the philosophical dialogues D'Alembert's Dream and Rameau's Nephew, the novel Jacques the Fatalist, the proto-novel The Nun, the aesthetic treatises and Salon criticism, and the Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville. Catherine the Great purchased his library in 1765 and received him in St Petersburg in 1773-1774.

Diderot's materialism, his fascination with the historical becoming of nature and of the human animal, and his inventive mixing of literary forms made him one of the boldest minds of his century, even if many of his most radical works were circulated only in manuscript and published long after his death. He died at Paris in July 1784.