Denis Diderot was the most prominent of the French Encyclopedists. He
was educated by the Jesuits, and, refusing to enter one of the learned
professions, was turned adrift by his father and came to Paris, where
he lived from hand to mouth for a time. Gradually, however, he became
recognized as one of the most powerful writers of the day. His first
independent work was the Essai sur le merite et la vertu (1745). As
one of the editors of the Dictionnaire de medecine (6 vols., Paris,
1746), he gained valuable experience in encyclopedic system. His
Pensees philosophiques (The Hague, 1746), in which he attacked both
atheism and the received Christianity, was burned by order of the
Parliament of Paris.
In the circle of the leaders of the Enlightenment, Diderot's name
became known especially by his Lettre sur les aveugles (London, 1749),
which supported Locke's theory of knowledge. He attacked the
conventional morality of the day, with the result (to which possibly
an allusion to the mistress of a minister contributed) that he was
imprisoned at Vincennes for three months. He was released by the
influence of Voltaire's friend Mme. du Chatelet, and thenceforth was
in close relation with the leaders of revolutionary thought. He had
made very little pecuniary profit out of the Encyclopedie, and Grimm
appealed on his behalf to Catherine of Russia, who in 1765 bought his
library, allowing him the use of the books as long as he lived, and
assigning him a yearly salary which a little later she paid him for
fifty years in advance.
In 1773 she summoned him to St. Petersburg with Grimm to converse with
him in person. On his return he lived until his death in a house
provided by her, in comparative retirement but in unceasing labor on
the undertakings of his party, writing (according to Grimm) two-thirds
of Raynal's famous Histoire philosophique, and contributing some of
the most rhetorical pages to Helvetius's De l'esprit and Holbach's
Systeme de la nature Systeme social, and Alorale universelle. His
numerous writings include the most varied forms of literary effort,
from inept licentious tales and comedies which pointed away from the
stiff classical style of the French drama and strongly influenced
Lessing, to the most daring ethical and metaphysical speculations.
Like his famous contemporary Samuel Johnson, he is said to have been
more effective as a talker than as a writer; and his mental
qualifications were rather those of a stimulating force than of a
reasoned philosopher. His position gradually changed from theism to
deism, then to materialism, and finally rested in a pantheistic
sensualism. In Sainte-Beuve's phrase, he was " the first great writer
who belonged wholly and undividedly to modern democratic society," and
his attacks on the political system of France were among the most
potent causes of the Revolution.
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