In the notes below, frequently cited works have been identified by the following abbreviations:
| Corr. | Denis Diderot, Correspondance. Edited by Georges Roth and Jean Varloot. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1955–1970. |
| DPV | Denis Diderot, Œuvres complètes. Paris: Hermann, 1975–. The initials refer to the three original editors, Herman Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot. |
| Enc. | Encyclopédie, ou, dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers. Edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. Paris, 1751–72. |
| HDI | Guillaume Thomas Raynal. Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. Commonly abbreviated as Histoire des deux Indes. 4 vols., Amsterdam, 1770. 8 vols., The Hague, 1774. 10 vols., Geneva, 1780. |
| RDE | Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie. Multiple publishers. |
Bearing in mind that this book was written for an Anglophone audience, I have often cited English-language editions of Diderot’s works so as to encourage the public to read him in translation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of French editions are my own. I have also modernized French and English in both text and notes, although actual titles have been given in their original forms.
1. Dominique Lecourt, Diderot: passions, sexe, raison (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 96.
2. Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew. Le Neveu de Rameau: A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition, ed. Marian Hobson, trans. Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2016), 32.
3. Corr., 6:67.
4. The idea is projected onto his own character in Rameau’s Nephew. See DPV, 4:74.
5. “Mort de M. Diderot,” Année Littéraire 6 (1784): 282.
6. Jacques-Henri Meister, “Aux Mânes de Diderot,” in Œuvres Complètes de Diderot, ed. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875), xii–xix.
7. This pithy citation appears with no proof of its authenticity in Hippolyte Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, 1887), 348.
8. See Martin Turnell, The Rise of the French Novel (New York: New Directions, 1978), 20–21.
9. Karl Marx, The Portable Karl Marx, trans. Eugene Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), 53.
10. Christopher Cordess, “Criminality and Psychoanalysis,” in The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture, ed. Edward Erwin (London: Routledge, 2002), 113.
11. An insightful remark made to me by Catherine Chiabaut.
12. DPV, 10:422. Diderot is here speaking about himself in the third person.
13. Enc., 5:270.
14. Madame (Anne-Louise-Germaine) de Staël, De L’Allemagne (Paris: Firmin, 1845), 128.
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1:1115.
16. Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Denis Diderot, Jacques-Henri Meister, Maurice Tourneux, and Abbé Raynal, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique, et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc. (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878), 5:395.
17. Meister, “Aux Mânes de Diderot,” 18–19.
18. See Maurice Tourneux, Diderot et Catherine II (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1899), 76, for the origin of this apocryphal story.
19. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture: Salons de 1759, 1761, 1763 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 194.
20. Jeanette Geffriaud Rosso, Diderot et le portrait (Pise: Editrice Libreria Goliardica, 1998), 14.
21. Ibid., 20.
22. See Kate Tunstall, “Paradoxe sur le portrait: autoportrait de Diderot en Montaigne,” Diderot Studies 30 (2007): 195–207, for a complete survey of Diderot’s meditations on his portraits.
23. Diderot, Diderot on Art II: The Salon of 1767, ed. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 2:20.
24. Corr., 2:207.
25. The standard English biography of Diderot’s life remains Arthur McCandless Wilson’s exhaustive chronicle of the philosophe’s life, his Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957). P. N. Furbank, who is far more critical about Diderot’s life and actions, provided a second biography in the 1990s: Diderot (New York: Knopf, 1992). There are a number of French biographies as well, many of which celebrate the radical, atheistic precursor and advocate of the secular French state. The most recent is by Gerhardt Stenger, Diderot: le combattant de la liberté (Lonrai, France: Perrin, 2013).
1. Georges Viard, Langres au XVIIIe siècle: tradition et Lumières au pays de Diderot (Langres: Dominique Guénot, 1985), 53.
2. “Célébration du centenaire de Diderot,” La Revue occidentale philosophique, sociale et politique 4 (1884): 263.
3. “Faits Divers,” Courrier de l’Art 32 (1884): 383.
4. Francisco Lafarga, Diderot (Barcelona: University of Barcelona Publications, 1987), 66. The municipal council even received money from Czar Nicholas II of Russia in memory of Catherine II to help finance the event.
5. Viard, Langres au XVIIIe siècle, 12-13.
6. Madame de Vandeul, Diderot, mon père (Strasbourg: Circe, 1992), 7.
7. Ibid., 11.
8. Antoine-Augustin Bruzen de la Martinière, Le Grand Dictionnaire géographique et critique (Venice: Jean-Baptiste Pasquali, 1737), 6:44.
9. According to contemporary estimates, the Saint-Mammès Cathedral’s lands, rents, and various enterprises generated annual revenues of approximately 100,000 livres in 1728. Of this sum, the duke-bishop of Langres, Pierre de Pardaillan de Gondrin, received the colossal salary of approximately 22,000 livres. This income reached 58,000 livres by the time of the Revolution. Other well-compensated ecclesiastics included the cathedral’s treasurer, who received 10,000 livres a year. See Robert de Hesseln, Dictionnaire universel de la France (Paris: chez Desaint, 1771), 3:515.
10. John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, vol. 2: The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2:8.
11. Ibid., 2:246.
12. In their first “mission statement,” issued in the mid-sixteenth century, the Jesuits declared the primary objective of a Jesuit education to be the “progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, and the propagation of the faith.” John O’Malley, Introduction, The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2006), xxiv.
13. Bernard Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde…(Amsterdam: chez J. F. Bernard, 1723), 2:125, 2:127.
14. Abbé Charles Roussel, Le Diocèse de Langres: histoire et statistique (Langres: Librairie de Jules Dallet, 1879), 4:114.
15. Albert Collignon, Diderot: sa vie, ses œuvres, sa correspondance (Paris: Felix Alcan Éditeur, 1895), 8.
16. Vandeul, Diderot, mon père, 8.
17. Could it be that the young abbot and his father chose this Jansenist-leaning school because of an affinity? See Blake T. Hanna, “Denis Diderot: Formation traditionnelle et moderne,” RDE 5, no. 1 (1988): 3–18.
18. Ibid., 382.
19. Henri Louis Alfred Bouquet, L’Ancien collège d’Harcourt et le lycée Saint-Louis (Paris: Delalain frères, 1891), 370.
20. Enc., 8:516.
21. A. M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 26–27. Wilson also posits that Diderot may have switched between the Jansenist collège d’Harcourt and the Jesuit Louis-le-Grand, another collège; this might explain certain acquaintances made during his life, as well as his knowledge of both Jansenist and Jesuit teachings. However, most sources seem to pass over the possibility of a switch. See also Gerhardt Stenger, Diderot: le combattant de la liberté (Lonrai, France: Perrin, 2013), 43–46.
22. Blake T. Hanna, “Diderot théologien,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 1 (1978): 24.
23. This comes from Voltaire’s epic poem, La Henriade. See Œeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968), 2:613.
24. Noël Chomel, Supplément au Dictionnaire œconomique (Paris: chez la Veuve Éstienne, 1740), 1:1227.
25. See Stenger, Diderot, 26–27.
26. Vandeul, Diderot, mon père, 11–12.
27. Ibid., 11–12.
28. Ibid., 15.
29. Wilson, Diderot, 30–32.
30. Ibid., 15.
31. Ibid., 16.
32. Ibid., 18.
33. Ibid., 36.
34. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), 19.
35. Vandeul, Diderot, mon père, 20.
36. See Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 22. His family name was Maleville.
37. See Stenger, Diderot, 37.
38. Vandeul, Diderot, mon père, 22.
39. Wilson, Diderot, 39.
40. Ibid., 18.
41. P. N. Furbank, Diderot (New York: Knopf, 1992), 19.
42. Corr., 1:42.
43. Ibid., 1:43.
44. Ibid., 1:44.
45. Ibid.
46. Diderot, Diderot on Art II: The Salon of 1767, 229.
1. Corr., 1:94.
2. The satire of convent, monastery, and religious life in general had been an integral part of European literature for five hundred years, well before Diderot took up the pen. Petrarch lambasted clerical abuse of worldly power in his sonnets. Erasmus lashed out at the inconsistencies and senselessness of monastic life. And François Rabelais produced a memorable cast of anticlerical characters that became a part of French popular culture.
3. See William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (New York: Saint Martin’s, 2000), for a good summary of this conflict.
4. DPV, 2:51.
5. Ibid., 1:290.
6. Thinkers like Diderot also familiarized themselves with Epicurean philosophy by reading Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. See Lynn S. Joy, “Interpreting Nature: Gassendi Versus Diderot on the Unity of Knowledge,” in Donald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin, eds., The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 123–34.
7. This has also been translated more poetically by A. E. Stallings: “So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.” See The Nature of Things, trans. A. E. Stallings (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), 6.
8. For a comprehensive history of the text’s rediscovery and consequent effect upon the progression of human thought, see Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011).
9. In the decades after the Tractatus was first published, the term “Spinozist,” which was applied somewhat haphazardly, became synonymous with unbeliever or atheist. Spinoza’s Ethics had a great influence on Diderot. For an analysis of three of Diderot’s later texts in relation to Spinoza’s philosophy of ethics, see Louise Crowther, “Diderot, Spinoza, and the Question of Virtue,” in MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (Cambridge, UK: Modern Humanites Research Association, 2007), 2:11–18.
10. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 213.
11. Johann Franz Buddeus, Traité de l’athéisme et de la superstition, trans. Louis Philon (Amsterdam: chez Schreuder and Mortier, 1756), 78.
12. The Testament was only recently translated into its first English edition; see Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier, trans. Michael Shreve (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).
13. Bacon, Voltaire explains, first proposed this type of experimental philosophy. Newton became its champion. See J. B. Shank, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 309.
14. Nicholas Cronk, Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4.
15. Stenger, Diderot, 52.
16. To a large degree, Voltaire’s Lettres sought to encourage shifts that were already taking place in France, chief among them the collapse of Cartesian philosophy. See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2:45.
17. He also annotated Silhouette’s translation of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man sometime after 1736. See Jean Varloot’s introduction in DPV, 1:167–89.
18. Isaac Newton, Principia, The Motion of Bodies, trans. Andrew Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), 1:xviii.
19. Ibid.
20. See The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonsenn, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2:647.
21. Similarly, Locke did not exclude God from the workings of nature — far from it. Although Locke’s philosophical method certainly prompted skeptically minded thinkers to question what they could actually know about the deity, Locke continued to accord Holy Scripture a status that seemingly escaped his own stringent restrictions. Humans were, as he put it, “sent into the world by [God’s] order,” and continue to be “his property.” See his Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 2:9.
22. Isaac Newton, Newton: Philosophical Writings, ed. Andrew Janiak (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111.
23. This is expressed in Romans 1:20.
24. There were earlier thinkers in this line, too, for example Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), whose De veritate is the first early-modern book to put forward a deist understanding of religion. See Deism: An Anthology, ed. Peter Gay (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1969), 30.
25. Ibid., 52.
26. Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1967), 1:68.
27. See The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, ed. Christopher Hitchens (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2007), xxiii.
28. This is a paraphrase of the well-known slogan of the World Union of Deists.
29. To protect himself, Diderot distinguished between deism and theism. In his view, deism was a somewhat indifferent understanding of God, whereas theism admits the existence of the revelation. He treated Shaftesbury as a theist. DPV, 1:297.
30. See, for example, the letter sent by Didier-Pierre to his older brother in January 1763, where he speaks about Diderot’s many failings. Corr., 4:241–45.
31. Corr., 1:52.
32. See Roland Mortier, “Didier Diderot lecteur de Denis: ses Réflexions sur l’Essai sur le mérite et la vertu,” RDE 10, no. 1 (1991): 21–39.
33. DPV, 1:306. Leibniz approached the problem of evil with similar optimism in his book Theodicy. See Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. Austin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952).
34. See Mortier, “Didier Diderot lecteur de Denis,” 30.
35. Pierre Bayle, the famous author of the Dictionnaire historique et critique (Critical and Historical Dictionary, 1697) had famously refuted this idea in his Pensées diverses sur la comète (Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, 1682). See Pierre Bayle, Pensées diverses sur la comète, ed. Joyce and Hubert Bost (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2007).
36. In the absence of any correspondence or telltale manuscripts, scholars continue to hesitate about the authorship of the orientalist short story “Oiseau blanc.” See Nadine Berenguier for an excellent discussion of the reception of Puisieux’s career, Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France (New York: Routledge, 2016).
37. Pascal was, indeed, a favorite of authors including Voltaire, not only for his ironic tone, but for his evisceration of the hypocrisy of the Church and the Jesuits. See Robert Niklaus, “Les Pensées philosophiques de Diderot et les Pensées de Pascal,” Diderot Studies 20 (1981): 201–17.
38. In this apology of Saint Augustine’s Christianity, Pascal contemplates the God-shaped vacuum in one’s heart, the space that “can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: Dutton, 1958), 113.
39. Ibid., 107.
40. Baron Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Œuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, avec biographie et notes (Paris: F. Alcan, 1913–23), 1:87.
41. DPV, 2:19.
42. Paul Valet, Le Diacre Paris et les convulsionnaires de St.-Médard: le jansénisme et Port-Royal. Le masque de Pascal (Paris: Champion, 1900), 22.
43. Brian E. Strayer, Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640–1799 (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 243.
44. Louis-Basile Carré de Montgeron, La vérité des miracles opérés à l’intercession de M. de Paris (1737).
45. Strayer, Suffering Saints, 251.
46. Ibid., 243.
47. Ibid., 256.
48. Ibid., 257.
49. According to one of Diderot’s critics, Jean Henri Samuel Formey, Philosophical Thoughts gives a highly exaggerated account of the convulsionnaires and of other religious sects. Pensées raisonnables opposées aux pensées philosophiques (Berlin: Chrét. Fréd. Voss., 1749), 24.
50. DPV, 2:19–20.
51. Ibid., 2:20.
52. Matérialistes français du XVIIIème siècle: La Mettrie, Helvétius, d’Holbach, ed. Sophie Audidière, Fondements de la politique (Paris: PUF, 2006), vii.
53. DPV., 2:49.
54. Ibid., 2:31.
55. Ibid., 2:51.
56. Ibid., 2:35.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 2:34.
59. Ibid., 2:9–12.
1. Guillotte served as an exempt (military officer) for the provost of Île de France, technically under the authority of the man who would later arrest Diderot, the lieutenant-général de police, Berryer.
2. Wilson, Diderot, 61.
3. Charles Manneville, Une vieille église de Paris: Saint-Médard (Paris: H. Champignon, 1906), 48.
4. The role was established in 1667, according to the Encyclopédie, 9:509.
5. This also included arresting Jansenists, who often went to prison for longer terms than other “offenders.”
6. Corr., 1:54.
7. Paul Bonnefon, “Diderot prisonnier à Vincennes,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 2 (1899): 203.
8. Berryer also received two letters in 1748 from Jean-Louis Bonin, a printer, who identified Diderot as the author of Les bijoux indiscrets and Durand as his printer. See Wilson, Diderot, 86.
9. Anne Elisabeth Sejten, Diderot ou Le défi esthétique. Les écrits de jeunesse, 1746–1751. “Essais d’art et de philosophie” (Paris: Vrin, 1999), 79.
10. Diderot also wrote another unpublished work, De la suffisance de la religion naturelle (On the Sufficiency of Natural Religion), which finally appeared in 1770. This short text urged humankind to free itself from the bigotry and fanaticism created by revealed religion. See Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 789.
11. He also dispatched two other copies. The first was sent to the Marquis d’Argens, who had belittled his translation of Shaftesbury as well as his Philosophical Thoughts. The second went to the famous mathematician and philosopher Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who was then president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences (of which Diderot would soon be a member). See Anne-Marie Chouillet, “Trois lettres inédites de Diderot,” RDE 11, no. 1 (1991): 8–18.
12. Corr., 1:74.
13. Ibid.
14. According to actual reports, Saunderson became delirious before receiving (or allowing himself to receive) last rites. The Royal Society in England, of which Saunderson was a member, never forgave Diderot for his account. The Encyclopedist was voted down for membership because of this fabricated tale. See Anthony Strugnell, “La candidature de Diderot à la Société Royale de Londres,” RDE 4, no. 1 (1988): 37–41.
15. Kate E. Tunstall has cautioned critics of Diderot from conflating Saunderson with the author himself and assuming that the blind man’s speech indicates Diderot’s materialism in 1749. See her Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay (New York: Continuum, 2011), 18–19. To avoid confusion, I will cite this book as Diderot, Letter on the Blind, trans. Tunstall, when referring to Tunstall’s translation.
16. Ibid., 199–200.
17. Ibid., 200.
18. Ibid., 203.
19. Diderot was profoundly affected by Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s radically materialist The Natural History of the Soul, the first in a series of books to ridicule Christianity.
20. See Edward G. Andrew, Patrons of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 137.
21. The peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed in 1748 and ended the war of succession that had divided Austria.
22. The events of 1749 are admirably recounted by Robert Darnton in Poetry and the Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
23. Ibid., 50.
24. Bonnefon, “Diderot prisonnier à Vincennes,” 204.
25. See François Moureau, La plume et le plomb: espaces de l’imprimé et du manuscrit au siècle des Lumières (Paris: PUPS, 2006), 610–11.
26. See Darnton, Poetry and the Police, 7-14.
27. Ibid., 14.
28. Some of this treatment also stemmed from the fact that he escaped three times. See his Mémoires de Henri Masers de Latude (Gand: Dullé, 1841).
29. Ronchères was really Fleurs de Rouvroy. He spent thirty-two years in the prison. Boyer arrived there in 1739 and had been there for ten years when Diderot came. See François de Fossa, Le château historique de Vincennes à travers les âges (Paris: H. Daragon, 1909), 2:116.
30. That Diderot numbered among those deemed worthy of decent treatment also shows up in a letter that the governor of the château, Marquis du Châtelet, dispatched to Berryer; remarkably enough, the prison warden took the time to indicate that someone was coming to drop off linens and a “night cap” for the writer’s stay. See Bonnefon, “Diderot prisonnier à Vincennes,” 203.
31. Fossa, Le château, 2:50.
32. Diderot, Œuvres complètes. Correspondance. Appendices, ed. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877), 20:122–24.
33. Madame de Vandeul, Diderot, mon père, 30–31.
34. Enc., 1:np. The irony of the inscription — honoring the man who countersigned the lettre de cachet that imprisoned Diderot — would not be lost on the philosophe. Decades later, Diderot fantasized about creating a new and better Encyclopédie that, unlike the first one, would honor the great monarch of Russia, Catherine II, and not a “second-rate minister who deprived me of my liberty in order to wring from me a tribute to which he could not lay claim by merit.” Wilson, Diderot, 116.
35. Reflected in Diderot’s “engagement.” See Corr., 1:96.
36. Both of these letters are lost. We can infer their existence from the letters that his father sent in response to them.
37. Corr., 1:92.
38. The priest was presumably the trésorier, the keeper of the treasure and relics, of the prison’s Sainte-Chapelle, the nearby medieval chapel.
39. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), 327.
40. Mercure de France, dédié au Roi (Paris: Cailleau, 1749), 154–55.
41. Rousseau, Confessions, 327–28.
42. For a contemporary translation, see Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett), 1992.
43. Diderot, Œuvres complètes de Diderot (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875), 2:285. Jean-François Marmontel and Diderot’s daughter must have heard a different story: according to their accounts, it was Diderot himself who incited Rousseau to recast humankind as a depraved, miserable, and artificial species who left its best days behind in the state of nature. Madame de Vandeul relates that “my father gave Rousseau the idea for his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, [a work] that [my father] perhaps reread and maybe even corrected.” Diderot, mon père, 56.
44. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique, et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., 5:134.
1. René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, Mémoires et journal inédit du Marquis d’Argenson (Paris: P. Jannet, 1857), 3:282.
2. According to the contract, the entire project was to be completed three years later, by 1748.
3. Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1962), 47.
4. Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts 177 (1745): 937.
5. Wilson, Diderot, 76.
6. This unseemly and very public skirmish prompted one of the most powerful men in France, Henri-François d’Aguesseau — who held the posts of chancellor and overseer of the book trade — to lash out at both parties. D’Aguesseau rapped Le Breton on the knuckles for circumventing various publishing regulations, and withdrew the printer’s privilege to publish the Encyclopédie. But the real loser in this decision was Mills. By declaring the contract null and void, d’Aguesseau effectively absolved Le Breton of any financial or contractual obligation vis-à-vis his English associate.
7. Gua’s contract stipulated that he was to be paid 18,000 livres. From this significant sum, he contracted to pay Diderot and d’Alembert 1,200 livres each for their work. See Wilson, Diderot, 79.
8. See ibid., 78–79; and Frank A. Kafker, “Gua de Malves and the Encyclopédie,” Diderot Studies 19 (1978): 94.
9. During this grace period, the geometer lay the foundation for a reference work that was much more ambitious than what Sellius and Mills had envisioned.
10. Kafker, “Gua de Malves and the Encyclopédie,” 94–96.
11. Laurent Durand, one of the four partners, had published Diderot’s unsanctioned translation of Shaftesbury, and had financed the publication of his Philosophical Thoughts. See Frank A. Kafker and Jeff Loveland, “Diderot et Laurent Durand, son éditeur principal,” RDE 39 (2005): 29–40.
12. Le Breton was an imprimeur ordinaire du roi, which meant that he did not print specific types of books, e.g., on music or Greek. He printed various documents.
13. Well before Le Breton had taken on the infamous Encyclopédie project, the Almanach had been by far the publishing house’s best-known production (and its largest print run at over seven thousand copies). Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam, 1782), 4:5–8.
14. See Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14.
15. Ibid., 14. The definitive study on this question is Marie Leca-Tsiomis’s Écrire l’Encyclopédie: Diderot: de l’usage des dictionnaires à la grammaire philosophique (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999).
16. John Millard and Philip Playstowe, The Gentleman’s Guide in His Tour through France (London: G. Kearsly, 1770), 226.
17. Rousseau, The Confessions, 324.
18. Diderot was so taken by this lucid adaptation and revision of Locke’s theory of cognition that he recommended the manuscript to his editor, Laurent Durand, who printed the essay that same year.
19. Lorne Falkenstein and Giovanni Grandi, “Étienne Bonnot de Condillac,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017).
20. Condillac was, however, far from an atheist or a materialist. He also added to Locke’s understanding of mind by asserting that language itself is the via media between sensation and thought. See John Coffee O’Neal, Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 16; and Pierre Morère, “Signes et langage chez Locke et Condillac,” Société d’études anglo-américaines des 17e et 18e siècles 23 (1986), 16.
21. Enc., “Prospectus,” 1.
22. Ibid., 2.
23. Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie, 30–32.
24. By comparison, d’Alembert’s contributions were limited to only two hundred articles on subjects generally having to do with mathematics or physics.
25. The actual order is from Memory to Imagination to Reason, and is developed in Part II of the “Discourse.”
26. Enc., “Prospectus,” 4.
27. Chambers had offered a similar breakdown, but did not contaminate religion with various other superstitious ideas. Instead, Chambers’s prefatory diagram followed the tradition of many other “commonplace” works that attempted to guide and simplify the reader’s experience. See Richard Yeo, “A Solution to the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) as ‘the Best Book in the Universe,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (January 2003): 66–68.
28. In the “Preliminary Discourse,” d’Alembert mentioned that he and his partner had briefly considered abandoning this method of organization for a more thematic structure. This is precisely what the editors of the (more than two hundred) volumes of the Encyclopédie méthodique chose to do later in the century (1782–1832). For a history of the use of alphabetical ordering in reference works, see Annie Becq, “L’Encyclopédie: le choix de l’ordre alphabétique,” RDE 18, no. 1 (1995): 133–37. Choosing alphabetical order for a dictionary was far from an innovation, of course. All of the Encyclopédie‘s predecessors had made the same choice: Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, 1690; Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1697; John Harris, Lexicon Technicum, 1704; and Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, 1728.
29. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 25.
30. Ibid. The model for this facet of the Encyclopédie was Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique. In addition to using cross-referencing in much the same way that Diderot and d’Alembert would use it sixty years later, Bayle was also adept at criticizing the Church without overtly insulting it.
31. See Gilles Blanchard and Mark Olsen, “Le système de renvois dans l’Encyclopédie: une cartographie des structures de connaissances au XVIIIe siècle,” RDE 31–32 (2002): 45–70.
32. Enc., 5:642.
33. Ibid., 5:643
34. Ibid., 5:642.
35. Ibid., 2:640.
36. Ibid., 1:180.
37. See Diderot: Choix d’articles de l’Encyclopédie, ed. Marie Leca-Tsiomis (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 2001), 48–50; and Michèle Crampe-Casnabet, “Les articles ‘âme’ dans l’Encyclopédie,” RDE 25 (1998): 91–99.
38. Crampe-Casnabet, “Les articles ‘âme,’” 94.
39. Enc., 1:342.
40. Diderot could never have added a cross-reference to make this point explicit. Yet a logical one would have been to his entry “Spinosiste,” where he maintained that spinosists believe that “matter is sensitive,” that it composes the entire universe, and it is all we need to explain “the whole process” of life. (Enc., 15:474).
41. Some of this is vulgarization of both Hobbes and Locke. The idea that no man can give absolute power over himself to another — because he doesn’t have absolute power over himself — is classic social contract theory. So, too, is the idea that no man is born with the right to rule over another. As Hobbes and Locke point out, in an idealized “state of nature,” the strong could dominate the weak — but this would be tyrannical domination that would only benefit the strong. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 1985); and John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The novelty of Diderot’s article comes from the fact that he was espousing these views under the most absolute of European monarchies.
42. Enc., 1:898.
43. Although Chambers had a small collection of images, such a massive collection of illustrations generally did not appear in dictionaries. See Stephen Werner, Blueprint: A Study of Diderot and the Encyclopédie Plates (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1993), 2. See also Wilson, Diderot, 241–43.
44. D’Alembert promised six hundred plates of illustrations over two volumes in the “Preliminary Discourse.”
45. Enc., “Discours Préliminaire des Editeurs,” 1:xxxix
46. Werner, Blueprint, 14. Goussier may have even produced more of the plates than indicated, but some were left unsigned. He also wrote about sixty-five articles.
47. Madeleine Pinault, “Diderot et les illustrateurs de l’Encyclopédie,” Revue de l’art 66, no. 10 (1984): 32. See also Madeleine Pinault, “Sur les planches de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert, in L’Encyclopédisme — Actes du Colloque de Caen 12–16 janvier 1987, ed. Annie Becq (Paris: Éditions aux Amateurs de Livres, 1991), 355–62.
48. The engraving process is detailed in the Encyclopédie‘s fourth installment of plates (published in 1767). See Enc. 22:7:1. For a contemporary account of the engraving process, see Antoine-Joseph Pernety, Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, sculpture, et gravure (Paris: chez Bauche, 1757), 53.
49. See John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 10.
50. Jaucourt’s incendiary article “Traite des nègres” (“Slave Trade”) was much more upfront about its intention. After declaring that African chattel slavery in French colonies violates “religion, morality, natural laws, and all the rights of human nature” (Enc., 16:532), Jaucourt proclaims that he would prefer that the colonies “be destroyed” rather than causing so much suffering in the Caribbean (ibid., 16:553).
1. Corr., 9:30.
2. Berryer was certainly involved, issuing a note of permission to publish the “Prospectus.” See Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 120.
3. James M. Byrne, Religion and the Enlightenment: From Descartes to Kant (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 35.
4. Some scholars even identify the development of humanism under the Jesuit order as a kind of “Catholic enlightenment.” See Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 118.
5. The full title was Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts, plus connus sous le nom de Journal de Trévoux ou Mémoires de Trévoux (1701–67).
6. Enc., 3:635.
7. Jean-François Marmontel, Memoirs of Marmontel, 2 vols. (New York: Merrill and Baker, 1903), 1:217.
8. Madame de Pompadour also encouraged Diderot and d’Alembert to pursue their work in spite of political pressures, and especially while avoiding topics having to do with religion. Later in life, her opinions on Diderot’s enterprise would change: despairing at France’s instability and perceived decay, she expressed her dismay at a work that undermined religion, the monarchy, and the very foundation of the society and state. See Évelyne Lever, Madame de Pompadour (Paris: Éditions académiques Perrin, 2000); and Christine Pevitt-Algrant, Madame de Pompadour: Mistress of France (New York: Grove, 2002).
9. This was actually a new post. The responsibility of supervising the publishing industry had previously been part of the chancellor’s position. Malesherbes’s father was Guillaume de Lamoignon de Blancmesnil.
10. The question itself is a rewording from Genesis 2:7, seemingly suggesting a contemplation of the status of Adam or perhaps a meditation on the intentions of God: “And God formed the man of the dust of the earth and breathed upon his face the breath of life.”
11. Wilson, Diderot, 154.
12. Ibid., 154.
13. Ibid.
14. Parlement de Paris, Recueil de pièces concernant la thèse de M. l’abbé de Prades, soutenue en Sorbonne le 18 Novembre 1751, censurée par la Faculté de Théologie le 27 janvier 1752, & par M. l’Archevêque de Paris le 29 du même mois, divisé en trois parties (1753), 32.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. In 1752, Prades published an apology that was everything but. Though he defended his positions one by one by pointing to their orthodoxy, he also took the time to praise Bayle and other anti-institution writers, and to dismiss Christian champions like Descartes and Malebranche. He remained in Berlin until his death. See John Stephenson Spink, “The abbé de Prades and the Encyclopaedists: Was There a Plot?,” French Studies 24, no. 3 (July 1970): 225–36.
19. Diderot did, in fact, leave Paris on May 20 to visit Langres — the first time he had visited home in ten years. Diderot returned home on June 17 to continue work. See Raymond Trousson, Denis Diderot, ou Le vrai Prométhée (Paris: Tallandier, 2005), 185.
20. Marquis d’Argenson, Mémoires et Journal inédit, 4:77.
21. Diderot also published the Suite de l’Apologie de M. l’abbé de Prades (The Supplement to the Apology of Monsieur abbé de Prades), which he did in the exiled abbot’s name. This was published in October and laid out a case both for the Encyclopédie and against religious intolerance.
22. Jacques Matter, Lettres et pièces rares et inédites (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1846), 386.
23. Wilson, Diderot, 166.
24. See ibid. 164; and Margaret Bald, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds (New York: Facts On File, 2006), 92.
25. Enc., 4: iii.
26. The naturalist supplanted Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, the late archbishop of Sens, while d’Alembert took over the seat previously held by the late Jean-Baptiste Surian, bishop of Vence. D’Alembert praised the bishop in his acceptance speech. See Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset, Discours prononcés dans l’Académie françoise, le jeudi 19 décembre M. DCC. LIV à la réception de M. d’Alembert (Paris: chez Brunet, 1754).
27. Corr., 1:186. Perhaps most significantly, the document solidified Diderot’s position as “editor of all the parts of the Encyclopédie.” See Corr., 1:185; and Wilson, Diderot, 219–20. Diderot’s earnings from the entire project reached 80,000 livres.
28. The Jesuit priest Father Tholomas disparaged d’Alembert personally, insulting the bastard mathematician with a pithy, loose translation of Horace, turning “cui nec pater est, nec res” into “he who has no father, is nothing.” Pierre Grosclaude, Un audacieux message: l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1951), 80.
29. The first article of the first issue lambasted Diderot for his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (On the Interpretation of Nature). See Jean Haechler, L’Encyclopédie: les combats et les hommes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 191–205.
30. See Berthe Thelliez, L’homme qui poignarda Louis XV, Robert François Damiens (Paris: Tallandier, 2002); Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Pierre Rétat, L’Attentat de Damiens: discours sur l’événement au XVIIIe siècle, sous la direction de Pierre Rétat (Paris: Éditions du C.N.R.S / Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1979).
31. Authors who wrote for journals including the relatively moderate Mercure de France fell in line with the long-standing critics who had lambasted the Encyclopédie in the Jesuit Mémoires de Trévoux or the Jansenist Nouvelles écclésiastiques.
32. Wilson, Diderot, 277.
33. Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Nouveau mémoire pour servir à l’histoire des Cacouacs (Amsterdam, 1757), 92. See Gerhardt Stenger, L’affaire des Cacouacs: trois pamphlets contre les philosophes des Lumières, présentation et notes de Gerhardt Stenger (Saint-Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne-Jean Monnet, 2004).
34. Palissot followed up on his Lettres three years later with a much more successful broadside against the Encyclopedists, a play entitled Les philosophes, which the king’s chief minister, Choiseul, forced upon the Comédie-Française. This play, to which we will return, ultimately had a tremendous effect on Diderot.
35. Déclaration du roi (Versailles, 1757).
36. D’Alembert was not the only person to make a strategic mistake at this time. Although much more careful about expressing his own opinions in the Encyclopédie, Diderot translated two Goldoni plays and made a flippant remark in the dedication that cost him one of his last remaining supporters at court, the Duc de Choiseul.
37. Enc., 7:578.
38. Wilson, Diderot, 284.
39. See Yves Laissus, “Une lettre inédite de d’Alembert,” Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 7, no. 1 (1954): 1–5.
40. Rousseau, The Confessions, 355.
41. This had also been the case in 1754, when Rousseau chafed at the way Diderot and his friends had mocked an unsuspecting abbé who had had the audacity to submit an entire tragedy in prose to them for their approval.
42. See Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 264, for an excellent summary of this debate.
43. Louise Florence Pétronille Tardieu d’Esclavelles Épinay, Mémoires et correspondance de Madame d’Épinay (Paris: Volland le jeune, 1818), 2:280.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Rousseau, Confessions, 329. They would both play a very public role, in fact, in the quarrel between partisans of Italian and French opera.
47. This was a pun on “Tirant lo Blanch,” the principal character of the Renaissance-era poem from Catalonia. See Wilson, Diderot, 119.
48. Rousseau, Confessions, 436.
49. DPV, 10:62.
50. Corr., 1:233.
51. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Hachette, 1945), 10:23.
52. It was perhaps with this in mind that, about this time, Diderot indelicately delegated the article “Geneva” to d’Alembert, despite the fact that Rousseau had been born and raised in this city-state.
53. Corr., 1:256.
54. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Lille: Droz, 1948), 9.
55. Denis Diderot, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2010), 1023.
56. This letter was sent from Voltaire to the Count de Tressan on February 13, 1758. See Corr., 2:36.
57. Corr., 2:123.
58. Diderot in particular did not take well to these ideas. In the August 15, 1758, edition of the Correspondance littéraire, he wrote a critical summary of Helvétius’s book, pinpointing four of the treatise’s central propositions as untenable paradoxes. See Gerhardt Stenger, Diderot: le combattant de la liberté, 586; D. W. Smith, Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 157–58, 162; and Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Œuvres complètes d’Helvétius, vol. 1, eds. Gerhardt Stenger and Jonas Steffen (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2016).
59. A frequently retold anecdote. See Bernard Hours, La vertu et le secret. Le dauphin, fils de Louis XV (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 359.
60. Abraham-Joseph de Chaumeix, Préjugés légitimes contre l’Encyclopédie, et essai de réfutation de ce dictionnaire (Paris: Herissant, 1758), xviii.
61. Arrests de la Cour de Parlement, portant condamnation de plusieurs livres & autres ouvrages imprimés (1759), 2.
62. Ibid., 26.
63. Corr., 2:122. The infamous Mémoires pour Abraham Chaumeix contre les prétendus philosophes Diderot et d’Alembert has, since then, been attributed to André Morellet, clergyman, writer, and Encylopedist — he had, among other things, written the article “Faith” for Diderot. See Sylviane Albertan-Coppola, “Les Préjugés légitimes de Chaumeix ou l’Encyclopédie sous la loupe d’un apologiste,” RDE 20, no. 1 (1996): 149–58.
64. Corr., 2:119.
65. For a good summary of Jaucourt’s life, see Le Chevalier de Jaucourt: L’homme aux dix-sept mille articles, ed. Gilles Barroux and François Pépin (Paris: Société Diderot, 2015).
66. Enc., 8:i.
67. Andrew S. Curran, Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 62.
68. Ibid., 63.
69. Ibid., 64.
70. Corr., 2: 126.
71. Wilson, Diderot, 311, 359.
72. See the remarkable research undertaken by Françoise Weil: “L’impression des tomes VIII à XVII de l’Encyclopédie,” RDE 1, no. 1 (1986): 85–93.
73. The Dictionnaire de Trévoux was printed here in 1704 and 1721, and Bayle’s dictionary was reprinted here in 1734.
74. Le Breton could not have known that the Dombes principality would be definitively annexed by France in 1762. Weil speculates that, while this was now a part of France during the printing, bribes would have easily silenced officials here. See Weil, “L’impression des tomes VIII à XVII.”
75. The “Associates” group dwindled in the 1760s. Durand died in 1763, David in 1765.
76. The Jesuits’ expulsion from France fits into the broader history of their banishment and disbandment throughout Europe over the course of a decade and a half, culminating, in 1773, in the dissolution of the Society of Jesus by the pope. See Jean Lacouture, Jésuites: une multibiographie, vol. 1, Les conquérants (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
77. Despite Diderot’s anguish, Le Breton’s attempts at tampering with the Encyclopédie’s subversive content must be put in perspective: oftentimes, his meddling did nothing to erase the overall message of an unorthodox article and, in whole, the so-called eighteenth volume contains only 3 percent of the gargantuan Encyclopédie. As Douglas Gordon and Norman Torrey put it, “the censored passages do not loom very large. They represent at best only the peaks lopped off the heights of Diderot’s audacity.” Douglas Gordon and Norman L. Torrey, The Censoring of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Re-established Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), 41.
78. Enc., 18:664. This “eighteenth” volume was never published. The best place to peruse these articles is in the “ARTFL” project database. Page numbers refer to this volume.
79. Enc., 18:771.
80. Enc., 18:893.
81. Enc., 18:621.
82. Corr., 4:304.
83. Corr., 4:172.
84. The man who most benefited from this enterprise was the French editor and writer Charles-Joseph Panckoucke. This entrepreneurial genius published edition after edition of the Encyclopédie, adding tables of contents, publishing the book in portable, thinner (i.e., truncated) formats, and eventually setting off in 1781 to rewrite, complete, and improve on Diderot’s project by publishing his Encyclopédie méthodique. See Daniel Roche, “Encyclopedias and the Diffusion of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wolker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 172–94.
1. See DPV, 4:111–22.
2. Ibid., 4:43.
3. He had, however, authored the important article “Encyclopédie.” In 1755, his only stand-alone publication was a small treatise explaining the ancient art of painting in wax.
4. See Paul Kuritz, The Making of Theater History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), 172.
5. See DPV, 10:144.
6. Ibid., 10:112. One of the sources for this domestic tragedy is George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731). In 1759, Diderot began work on, but never finished, a domestic tragedy of this type, called Le shérif (The Sheriff).
7. Corr., 3:280. In several letters from the era, Diderot predicted that these plays — and the theoretical writings that he published with them — would herald a revolution in theatrical aesthetics and practice. In many ways, he was not wrong. Beaumarchais’s hugely successful Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro (both main characters of which are working class) drew heavily from Diderot’s writings.
8. DPV, 10:373.
9. Caroline Warman has compellingly argued, perhaps in contrast to what I am writing here, that The Natural Son and its theoretical dialogues are also part of an eighteenth-century pre-Romantic movement. See “Pre-Romantic French Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, ed., Paul Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 17–32.
10. Technically, this was his father’s brother-in-law.
11. Jacques Chouillet, Diderot (Paris: SEDES, 1977), 154.
12. Goldoni, who ultimately saw Diderot’s play, refuted this belief in his memoirs. See Jean Balcou, Fréron contre les philosophes (Geneva: Droz, 1975), 257.
13. For an account of the play’s seven performances, see Jean-François Edmond Barbier, Chronique de la Régence et du règne de Louis XV (1718–1763), ou Journal de Barbier (Paris: Charpentier, 1857), 7:248–50.
14. Henry Carrington Lancaster, The Comédie Française, 1701–1774: Plays, Actors, Spectators, Finances (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1951), 797.
15. The play was based more than loosely on one of Molière’s first plays, Les femmes savantes (1672).
16. English Showalter, “‘Madame a fait un livre’: Madame de Graffigny, Palissot et Les Philosophes,” RDE 23 (1997): 109–25.
17. Charles Palissot de Montenoy, Les philosophes, comédie en trois actes, en vers (Paris: Duchesne, 1760), 54. To add insult to injury, the philosophe found himself accused of writing a violent retort against Palissot and two of his patrons, the very powerful Princess de Robecq and the Countess de La Marck, who was the mistress of the Duc de Choiseul, the head of the government. It was later revealed that it had actually been his friend and fellow Encyclopédie collaborator, the abbé Morellet, who authored the fraudulent Preface to the Comedy of Les Philosophes, or the Vision of Charles Palissot, which sent him (Morellet) to the Bastille.
18. Palissot de Montenoy, Les Philosophes, 74.
19. Corr., 3:190.
20. Ibid., 3:292.
21. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 242.
22. The following year, Rousseau followed up on this stunning achievement with his most important work of political theory, Du contrat social (The Social Contract, 1762). That same year, he published his treatise on education, Émile. By the mid-1760s, the increasingly hermitlike Rousseau had begun not only to have a cult following, but to displace Voltaire as the era’s greatest living literary figurehead.
23. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew — Le Neveu de Rameau: A Multi-Media Bilingual Edition, trans. Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2016), 85.
24. Ibid., 15.
25. This association had begun in 1753, when Rameau helped write a musical vaudeville for the Comédie-Française that targeted Diderot and the Encyclopedists. This was entitled “Les philosophes du siècle,” a so-called “vaudeville antiphilosophique” written by Bertin de Blagny, Palissot, and Rameau. See Rameau le neveu: Textes et documents, ed. André Magnan (Paris: CNRS, 1993), 60–66.
26. Ibid., 43.
27. Ibid., 12.
28. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 2:1447.
29. Rameau le Neveu, 109.
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew — Le neveu de Rameau, 15–16.
32. Ibid., 16.
33. Ibid.
34. As he wrote in the Encyclopédie article on “Natural Law,” Diderot believed until his last breath that “Virtue is so beautiful that even thieves respect its image, even in the darkest parts of their caves” (Enc., 5:131–34).
35. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew — Le neveu de Rameau, 43.
36. Ibid., 115.
37. Ibid., 95.
38. Ibid, 74.
39. Ibid., 82.
40. Ibid., 42.
41. Ibid., 66.
42. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life, trans. John Oxenford (London: G. Bell, 1894), 301.
43. Petr Lom provides an interesting analysis of Rameau’s Nephew in relation to the philosophies of Goethe and, more importantly, Hegel. Petr Lom, The Limits of Doubt: The Moral and Political Implications of Skepticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 65–66.
44. Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805, vol. 2,, trans. L. Dora Schmitz (London: G. Bell, 1879), 493.
45. Ibid., 493.
1. See Annie Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne. De la raison classique à l’imagination créatrice: 1680–1814 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).
2. After 1773, however, Jacques-Henri Meister, Grimm’s secretary, took over as editor of the Correspondence.
3. The Tuileries Palace became the seat of power until it burned in a fire during the Paris Commune in 1871.
4. “Lettres sur l’Académie Royale de Sculpture et de Peinture et sur le Salon de 1777,” reprinted in Revue universelle des arts 19 (Paris: veuve Jules Renouard, 1864): 185–86, cited in Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 4.
5. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age, trans. Chris Miller (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications Program, 2008), 11.
6. A notable exception to this would be that women were denied admission to the Academy itself.
7. The Encyclopédie article “Connoisseur” echoed this. Enc., 3:898.
8. Crow, Painters and Public Life, 10.
9. Ibid., 8.
10. Diderot, Diderot on Art I: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, trans. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1.
11. Ibid., 238.
12. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture: Salons de 1759, 1761, 1763 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 112.
13. For a discussion of this trajectory, see Jacques Proust, “L’initiation artistique de Diderot,” Gazette des beaux-arts 55 (1960): 225–32.
14. Interestingly enough, he asserts here that beauty is a profoundly relative concept that depends on the perception of rapports or links that take place in a given individual’s mind. See Colas Duflo, Diderot philosophe (Paris: Champion, 2013), 103.
15. Diderot, Diderot on Art I, 1.
16. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, 181. The first comprehensive history of art, Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Art in Antiquity), actually appeared the following year, in 1764.
17. Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006), 3.
18. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, 181.
19. Diderot, Diderot on Art I, 158.
20. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, 212.
21. Ibid., 213.
22. Diderot, Diderot on Art II: The Salon of 1767, trans. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1:86.
23. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, 97.
24. Ibid., 220.
25. Ibid.
26. In 1765, after praising the rendering of a “painted and covered china tureen, a lemon, a napkin that’s been unfolded and carelessly flung down, a pâté on a rounded board, and a glass half filled with wine,” he realizes “there are scarcely any objects in nature that are unrewarding [as artistic subjects] and that it’s only a question of rendering them properly.” See Diderot on Art I, 62.
27. Ibid., 97.
28. Diderot, Notes on Painting, ibid., 222.
29. In fact, he is probably alluding to the landscapist Claude-Joseph Vernet, and his remarkable ability to conjure up horrific shipwrecks and storms that threatened the lives of the helpless humans on his canvases.
30. Diderot, Diderot on Art I, 225.
31. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1996), 240.
32. Engraver, ceramicist, and designer of prized tapestries, Boucher had also been designated rector and Professor of History Painting at the Academy, the highest rank.
33. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, 195.
34. Gay, The Enlightenment, 240.
35. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, 197.
36. Diderot, Diderot on Art II, 224.
37. See René Démoris, “Le langage du corps et l’expression des passions de Félibien à Diderot,” Des mots et des couleurs, vol. 2 (Lille: Presses Universitaire de Lille, 1987), 64.
38. Diderot, Pensées détachées sur la peinture, la sculpture, l’architecture et la poésie pour servir de suite aux Salons (Paris: Ligaran, 2015), 10.
39. John Hope Mason makes a similar point in The Irresistible Diderot (London: Quartet Books, 1982), 171.
40. In his review of the Salon of 1781, Diderot would say of Jacques-Louis David, “this man shows great style in his work, he has spirit, the faces of his figures are expressive without affectation, their poses are natural and noble.” Diderot, Héros et martyrs, Salons de 1769, 1771, 1775, 1781 (Paris: Hermann, 1995), 350.
41. An uncommon subject since the Le Nain brothers. See Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
42. Année littéraire, 1761, Lettre 9, 209.
43. Diderot, Essais sur la peinture, 234.
44. Diderot, Diderot on Art I, 97.
45. Ibid., 98.
46. Ibid., 98–99.
47. Ibid., 97–98.
48. Ibid., 99.
49. Ibid., 94.
50. Diderot, Diderot on Art II, 88.
51. Ibid., 88–89.
52. See Eik Kahng, “L’Affaire Greuze and the Sublime of History Painting,” Art Bulletin 86, no. 1 (March 2004): 96–113. Kahng points out that this painting was the “exception and not the rule.” Fragonard went on to paint a series of “unclassifiable” paintings, including scenes of domestic life, fantasy pieces, and erotic boudoir scenes.
53. Ibid., 145–46.
54. See Tom Baldwin for a summary of this idea, “Ekphrasis and Related Issues in Diderot’s Salons,” in New Essays on Diderot, ed. James Fowler (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 236.
55. Ibid., 146.
56. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting and the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 155.
57. See Wilda Anderson, Diderot’s Dream (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1990). See also Andrew Herrick Clark, Diderot’s Part: Aesthetics and Physiology (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008).
58. Theresa M. Kelly, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 88.
59. Scholar Michael Fried has extensively explored the dizzying levels of critical fictionality in Diderot’s art criticism. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1980.
60. Diderot, Diderot on Art I, 141.
61. Plato’s message is that people do not understand the forms of what we call Platonic reality. See Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, 90.
62. Diderot, Diderot on Art I, 141–42.
63. Carol Sherman, Diderot and the Art of Dialogue (Geneva: Droz, 1976), 41.
1. Diderot, Héros et martyrs, Salons de 1769, 1771, 1775, 1781 (Paris: Hermann, 1995), 100–01.
2. Thursday was the day of the “Synagogue.” Sunday was the day where different guests came. Diderot had come to know d’Holbach shortly after he had been released from Vincennes prison, perhaps as early as November 1749. D’Holbach bought the rue Royale building in 1759. See A. C. Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 12.
3. Diderot affectionately described the rue Royale as an intellectual sanctuary filled with the “finest and sharpest people” in Paris: “Titles and erudition aren’t enough to guarantee entry there; one must also be good. There one can count on an exchange of ideas; there history, politics, finance, literature, and philosophy are discussed; there one is held in sufficiently high regard to be contradicted; there one finds the true cosmopolitan.” Diderot, Diderot on Art I: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, trans. John Goodman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 128–29. The guest list was generally limited to fifteen after 1765. Corr., 5:212. See also Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22.
4. To publish such works without suffering the wrath of the director of the book trade, d’Holbach sent his manuscripts to faraway publishers in either Amsterdam or Nancy. To further avoid censure, he also attributed his books to recently deceased authors. By 1770, this ploy had transformed the baron into the most prolific author of blasphemous books of the eighteenth century. See Mladen Kozul, Les Lumières imaginaires: Holbach et la traduction (Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2016).
5. Corr., 9:94–96.
6. Ibid., 9:125.
7. Ibid., 9:126.
8. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1966), 149.
9. Descartes had first explored the issue in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), in which he hoped to demonstrate that the human soul was distinct from the body and did not die with its perishing. He would later assert that the body and the mind are connected in the pineal gland, that ideas represent the outside world without bearing a resemblance to them, and that humans have innate ideas that exist outside of the material world. For a discussion of Descartes’s influence on Diderot, see Aram Vartanian, Descartes and Diderot: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 3.
10. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 149.
11. The statue was commissioned in 1763 for Madame de Pompadour, after which Diderot glowingly reviewed it for the Salon of 1763. It now resides on the ground floor of the Richelieu gallery at the Louvre.
12. See Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 183. See also Marc Buffat, “Diderot, Falconet, et l’amour de la postérité,” RDE 43 (2008), 9–20.
13. Sheriff, Moved by Love, 183.
14. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 151.
15. Ibid., 151–52.
16. Ibid., 152.
17. Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savants de l’Europe. Pour les mois de janvier, février et mars 1730 (Amsterdam: chez les Wetsteins et Smith, 1730), 4:377–91.
18. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 152–53.
19. Rachel Ginnis Fuchs, “Crimes against Children in Nineteenth-Century France: Child Abuse,” Law and Human Behavior 6, nos. 3–4 (1982): 240.
20. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 153.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 166.
23. Ibid., 167.
24. Ibid., 169. Elsewhere in the book, communication among body parts and the brain is compared to a harpsichord with memory and sensation playing itself, or a spider that is connected to a living web, feeling the world through its imperceptible threads.
25. Ibid., 170.
26. Ibid., 171.
27. In the first part of the dream, when the characters Diderot and d’Alembert are discussing d’Alembert’s life, both men agree that preformationism is absurd. Bordeu will also later debunk de l’Espinasse’s version of the same theory. For a discussion of Diderot’s understanding of generation in relation to various theories of the era, e.g. Haller, Bonnet, and Buffon, see Andrew Herrick Clark, Diderot’s Part: Aesthetics and Physiology (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 67–75.
28. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 172.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 173.
31. Ibid.
32. See W. G. Moore, “Lucretius and Montaigne,” Yale French Studies, no. 38 (1967): 109–14; William B. Jensen, “Newton and Lucretius: Some Overlooked Parallels,” in Lucretius: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance, ed. David B. Suits and Timothy J. Madigan (Rochester: RIT Press, 2011), 2.
33. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 173–74.
34. Ibid., 174.
35. Ibid., 174–75.
36. See Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
37. Arthur O. Lovejoy explains this as a general interest in the great chain of being. See The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 183–84.
38. During antiquity, humans had been very much part of the natural chain of beings. Aristotle had classed animals into genera and species and conceived of a ladder with man at the summit.
39. See Thierry Hoquet, Buffon/Linné: eternels rivaux de la biologie? (Paris: Dunod, 2007), 97. For a much larger discussion of the theory of human degeneration and, in particular, its link to slavery and Africans, see Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), especially chapter 3.
40. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 175–76.
41. See Andrew Curran, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Oxford: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2001).
42. Ibid., 190.
43. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 225.
44. See Patrick Graille, “Portrait scientifique et littéraire de l’hybride au siècle des Lumières,” in Eighteenth-Century Life: Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought, ed. Andrew Curran, Robert P. Maccubbin, and David F. Morill (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 21: 2, 70–88.
45. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and d’Alembert’s Dream, 232. When she heard from d’Alembert that Monsieur Diderot had written a series of dialogues with her as one of the characters, she was livid and instructed d’Alembert to insist that Diderot burn the manuscript. Diderot falsely claimed that he had.
46. DPV, 17:27.
1. Corr., 4:120.
2. Corr., 16:64. He even believed that it was linked to childhood experiences that imprint on us. In a letter that he sent to an unknown recipient, Diderot confessed that one of his most formative erotic experiences occurred when he was but a small boy in Langres. “A young girl who was as pretty as a heart bit my hand. Her father, to whom I complained, pulled up her jacket [to spank her] in front of me. That little butt stuck with me and will remain with me for the rest of my life. Who knows what its influence is on my morals?”
3. Corr., 3:216.
4. Adriann Beverland, État de l’homme dans le péché originel (Imprimé dans le monde, 1714), 37–38.
5. See Opuscules divers, contenants un recueil de quelques lettres très instructives pour la conduite des curés et jeunes ecclésiastiques (Langres: Claude Personne, 1719), 60.
6. Ibid., 58.
7. Ibid., 61 and 63.
8. Madame de Vandeul, Diderot, mon père (Strasbourg: Circe, 1992), 56.
9. DPV, 2:18.
10. DPV, 3:233.
11. André-Joseph Panckoucke, L’art de désoppiler [sic] la rate (Gallipoli, 175886 [Paris, 1758]), 148.
12. Jacques-André Naigeon, Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de D. Diderot (Paris: chez J.L.J. Brière, 1886), 37.
13. DPV, 17:412.
14. Diderot, Sur les femmes (Paris: Pichon, 1919), 11.
15. Ibid., 21.
16. Ibid.
17. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, trans. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 97.
18. For an analysis of Rivette’s film in relation to Diderot’s philosophy of theater, as well as a history of the film’s ban (and subsequent release and success), see Mary M. Wiles, Jacques Rivette (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 22–40. Guillaume Nicloux also filmed another version of La religieuse in 2012.
19. This was the preface-annex, the portion of the text that closes the story and reveals its genesis.
20. DPV, 11:70.
21. Ibid., 11:30.
22. Ibid., 11:31.
23. Diderot, The Nun, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 105.
24. Ibid., 26.
25. See Pierre Saint-Amand, The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 53.
26. Ibid., 35.
27. Ibid., 58.
28. Ibid., 123.
29. Ibid., 103.
30. Ibid., 136.
31. DPV, 11:31. See Jean de Booy and Alan Freer, “Jacques le Fataliste” et “La Religieuse” devant la critique révolutionnaire in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965), 33, 157.
32. The review was never published.
33. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde, par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse, et la flûte L’Étoile (Paris: chez Saillant & Nyon, 1772).
34. Ibid., 3:74.
35. Ibid., 3:74–75.
36. Ibid., 3:78–79.
37. Ibid., 3:65.
38. Ibid., 2:44.
39. Ibid., 3:87.
40. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works [inc. Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage] (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001) 187.
41. Ibid., 194.
42. Ibid., 196.
43. Ibid., 198–99.
44. Ibid., 206.
45. Ibid., 204.
46. Ibid., 208.
47. See, for example, the semimonthly Catholic magazine Revue pratique d’apologétique (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1796), 17:231.
48. Code Pénal, ou Recueil des principales ordonnances, édits et déclarations (Paris: chez Desaint et Saillant, 1752), 2: 256.
49. Ibid. See Maurice Lever, Les Bûchers de Sodome (Paris: Fayard, 1985).
50. Enc., 16:617.
51. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Tancock, 170.
52. Ibid., 172.
53. Ibid., 175.
54. Corr., 4:39.
55. Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 522.
56. Diderot, Diderot on Art I, 217.
57. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, 135.
58. Corr., 7:96.
59. Corr., 8:118.
60. Corr., 2:269.
1. Corr., 2:97.
2. Ibid.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1989), 107.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Corr., 1:27–28.
7. Ibid., 1:32.
8. Alice Laborde, Diderot et Madame de Puisieux (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1984), 18.
9. DPV, 1:392.
10. The report is shown in Émile Campardon, Les Prodigalités d’un fermier général: complément aux mémoires de Madame d’Épinay (Paris: Charavay, 1882), 119–20.
11. Denis Diderot, ed. Raymond Trousson (Paris: PUPS, 2005), 60.
12. Ibid., 61.
13. Corr., 1:141.
14. Ibid., 2:124–25.
15. Ibid., 5:69.
16. Meghan K. Roberts, Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 125.
17. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview), 2015.
18. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and d’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Tancock, 5–46.
19. Wilson, Diderot, 229. For a summary of the various places where the Vollands lived, see Laurent Versini, “Diderot piéton de Paris,” in Travaux de littérature 13 (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 177–94.
20. Now the quai de la Tournelle.
21. Corr., 2:168–69.
22. Ibid., 3:68.
23. Ibid., 2:136–37.
24. Ibid., 3:74.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. See Stenger, Diderot, 185; and Michel Delon, Diderot cul par-dessus tête (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013), 259.
28. Corr., 2:193.
29. Ibid., 3:63.
30. Ibid., 3:69.
31. Ibid., 5:35.
32. Ibid., 2:145.
33. Ibid., 7:68.
34. Ibid., 6:155–60.
35. Ibid., 4:52.
36. Auguste Rey, Le Château de la Chevrette et Madame d’Épinay (Paris: Plon, 1904), 121.
37. Ibid.
38. See Versini, “Diderot piéton de Paris,” 185.
39. Corr., 10:97. This is taken from his Voyage à Bourbonne.
40. Corr., 10:142.
41. Corr., 10:154.
42. Corr., 10:155.
43. Corr., 15:77.
44. Corr., 15:254.
45. Lydia Claude Hartman, “Esquisse d’un portrait de Sophie Volland: quelques notes sur la vie privée, les amitiés du philosophe,” Diderot Studies 16 (Geneva: Droz, 1973), 69–89, 71.
46. Corr., 2:284.
47. Ibid.
1. Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (New York: Random House, 2012), 7
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Catherine the Great, The Memoires of Catherine the Great, trans. Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom (New York: Modern Library, 2006), xxvi.
5. Ibid., xxx.
6. Stenger, Diderot, 306.
7. See Inna Gorbatov, Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Grimm (Bethesda, MD: Academic Press, 2006), 77.
8. Catherine the Great, The Memoirs of Catherine the Great, xxvi.
9. Cited in Corr., 7: 354.
10. Ibid., 7:355.
11. Ibid., 7:101.
12. Ibid., 7:67.
13. The paintings had been purchased by his uncle, the wealthy financier and art collector Antoine Crozat, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Diderot was helped in this by François Tronchin, who had the idea to purchase the collection, and by Robert Tronchin, who examined its contents.
14. See Joanna Pitman, The Dragon’s Trail: The Biography of Raphael’s Masterpiece (New York: Touchstone, 2007), for a discussion of the Crozat family. See also Alden Gordon’s inventory of the collection, The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny, Documents for the History of Collecting: French Inventories, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Getty, 2003).
15. Henry Tronchin, Le Conseiller François Tronchin et ses amis: Voltaire, Grimm, Diderot, etc. (Paris: Plon, 1895), 307.
16. Corr., 12:49.
17. J. F. Bosher, “The French Crisis of 1770,” History: Journal of the Historical Association 57, no. 189 (1972): 18.
18. This is the context for Abbé Galiani’s Dialogues sur le commerce des blés, which was heavily edited and prepared for publication by Diderot in 1770. The debate on grain was also the source for Diderot’s Apologie de l’abbé Galiani (Apology of Abbé Galiani), which was composed in 1770 and 1771. This letter was never published and was discovered in the Fonds Vandeul.
19. Bosher, “The French Crisis of 1770,” 24.
20. Corr., 12:49.
21. Anthony Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought After the Encyclopédie, International Archives of the History of Ideas 62 (Heidelberg: Springer Netherlands, 1973), 134. A former president of the Parlement of Paris himself, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, who became chancellor of France in 1768, ultimately oversaw the suspension of the Parlement’s functions.
22. Corr., 12:49. He was speaking specifically of the fact that papal bulls no longer needed to be registered before being disseminated in France.
23. Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics, 108.
24. Corr., 12:49.
25. Ibid., 12:64.
26. Ibid.
27. Diderot had begun making tentative arrangements to marry his daughter into this distinguished family of Langrois industrialists seventeen years prior. See ibid., 1:191. While he veered away from this unofficial arrangement in the mid-1760s — at one point he even briefly considered Grimm as a possible “son-in-law” — Diderot returned to his original idea by 1767. He had also considered the engineer Viallet as her husband. See ibid., 7:181.
28. Ibid., 10:40–41.
29. Ibid., 12:113.
30. Ibid., 12:135.
31. Ibid., 12:136.
32. In a similar note to his sister, he admitted grimly, “I no longer have a child, I am alone, and my solitude is unbearable” (ibid., 12:139). To Grimm, to whom he confessed his doubts about the marriage itself, he angrily complained that Abel wanted to “dress [Angélique] like a doll” and seemingly had no interest in her continuing to play the harpsichord (ibid., 12:179–80).
33. Ibid., 12:126.
34. Diderot, Mémoires pour Catherine II (Paris: Garnier frères, 1966), 266.
35. Corr., 12:232.
36. Ibid.
37. A. V. Naryshkin (1742–1800) had the official court rank of Kammerherr, or chamberlain.
38. The North Sea.
39. Corr., 13:15.
40. Corr., 13:31.
41. Diderot also found time to annotate Helvétius’s De l’homme and Hemsterhuis’s Lettre sur l’homme et ses rapports. He also added new material to Rameau’s Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist.
42. Stenger, Diderot, 617.
43. Laurent Versini, “Note sur le voyage de Diderot en Russie,” in L’influence française en Russie au XVIIIème siècle, ed. Jean-Pierre Poussou, Anne Mézin, and Yves Perret-Gentil (Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 2004), 227.
44. And for an écu…for an écu?
What do I do? Well, I see her cul [butt].
For two écus? What do I do?
I grab her c•••; and I f••• her too.
And for my three écus, deux testons, and one obole,
I had a breast, a butt, the c•••, as well as the vérole [pox or syphilis]
Herbert Dieckmann, Inventaire du fonds Vandeul et inédits de Diderot (Geneva: Droz, 1951), 288.
45. Corr., 13:64.
46. Herbert Dieckmann, “An Unpublished Notice of Diderot on Falconet,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 15 (1952): 257–58.
47. Corr., 12:228.
48. Wilson, Diderot, 631. Diderot must have thought about staying with his only other real friend in Saint Petersburg, Melchior Grimm. Grimm, however, was thoroughly occupied with the wedding of the grand duke, the son of the empress, which was taking place the next day.
49. Inna Gorbatov, “Le voyage de Diderot en Russie,” Études littéraires 38, nos. 2–3 (2007): 215–29.
50. When Diderot was still in Russia (in February 1774), Catherine began the most important relationship of her life with Grigory Potemkin, who possibly became her secret husband and who most certainly became her most trusted deputy and adviser.
51. Massie, Catherine the Great, 524.
52. Ibid., 338.
53. Voltaire, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, éd. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 26:551.
54. Corr., 13:81.
55. Indeed, under pressure Diderot was forced to recant in the “Errata” to volume 3. See the excellent introduction to Diderot, Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xii.
56. David Williams, ed., The Enlightenment: Cambridge Readings in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33.
57. Diderot, Mémoires pour Catherine II, 178.
58. Virginia Cowles, The Romanovs (London: William Collins, 1979), 90. Jacques Necker proposed this in 1789, but the idea was rejected by the nobility.
59. Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, Mémoires ou Souvenirs et anecdotes (Paris: Henri Colburn, 1827), 3:35.
60. State Papers Foreign 91 [Russia], vol. 94, fol. 136, Public Records Office, British Museum.
61. He had also offered d’Alembert a significant pension and the presidency of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
62. D’Holbach’s Essay was published under the name of the late Encyclopedist César Chesneau Dumarsais. See Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics, 132.
63. Diderot, “Introduction” [to Pages contre un tyran], Œuvres politiques (Paris: Garnier, 1963), 129.
64. Ibid., 148.
65. The occasion of the review was the publication of an unauthorized edition of Diderot’s collected works that had recently appeared in Amsterdam; it included mediocre books and essays written by other authors. See Adrienne Hytier, “Le Philosophe et le despote,” Diderot Studies 9 (1964): 74.
66. V. A. Bilbassov, Diderot à Pétersbourg (Saint Petersburg: Skorokhodov, 1884), 173. Grimm indicates that Frederick was behind this plot in a letter sent on February 7, 1774, to Nesselrode. Corr., 13:192.
67. Ibid., 13:208.
68. Ibid., 13:203.
69. Ibid., 13:234.
1. Corr., 14:48.
2. Ibid., 13:223. Riga is twenty-five kilometers from “Mittau,” where Diderot describes being thrown into a boat.
3. Corr., 13:238.
4. He does not specify where they lost the carriage that Catherine had given him.
5. The author was Ivan Ivanovich Betskoy. See Plans et statuts des différents établissements ordonnés par Sa Majesté Impériale Catherine II pour l’éducation de la jeunesse et l’utilité générale de son empire (Amsterdam: M.M. Rey, 1775).
6. Corr., 13:231.
7. According to Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, who reported that Diderot came back “drunk with admiration” for this woman. See Corr., 14:106–08.
8. Diderot, “Introduction” [to Pages contre un tyran], Œuvres politiques (Paris: Garnier, 1963), 179.
9. Ibid., 163.
10. See Corr., 14:73. In December Diderot wrote to ask her to call back her Legislative Commission to forge a new code of laws that would be the foundation for a new Russia.
11. Diderot, “Introduction,” 343.
12. Ibid., 344.
13. Ibid., 345.
14. Florence Boulerie, “Diderot a-t-il inventé une université pour le gouvernement de Russie?” in François Cadilhon, Jean Mondot, and Jacques Verger, eds., Universités et institutions universitaires européennes au XVIIIe siècle: entre modernisation et tradition (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 1999), 131.
15. Diderot, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Le club français du livre, 1971), 11:745.
16. Ibid., 11:745–46. See Michèle Chabanon “Le Plan d’une université: une ouverture à demi-mot,” RDE 35 (2003): 41–60, for a discussion of the link between civilization and the mission to civilize “savages” and education.
17. See Béatrice Didier, “Quand Diderot faisait le plan d’une université,” RDE 18 (1995): 81–91.
18. Diderot, Œuvres complètes (1971), 11:750.
19. The Parlement registered an “Édit de tolerance” on November 29, 1787, that forbid Protestants from being persecuted and allowed them to gain positions in both the government and in the military. As for France’s Jews, their own rehabilitation came with the Revolution, in September 1791.
20. Stenger, Diderot, 653.
21. Corr., 14:218.
22. Ibid., 14:150.
23. Ibid., 14:218.
24. This started as the Plan d’un divertissement domestique (Plan for a Domestic Entertainment), which appeared in the Literary Correspondence.
25. James Fowler, ed., “Introduction,” in New Essays on Diderot (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7.
26. Pierre Frantz, Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? (Paris: Folio, 2012).
27. See Corr., 14:169. See also Thierry Belleguic (dir.), Le Dernier Diderot: autour de l’Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, Diderot Studies, no. 32 (2012). D’Holbach and Naigeon completed this translation after the original translator, abbé La Grange, died before completing it.
28. The eighteenth century believed that he was not a dramatist.
29. DPV, 1:425.
30. Diderot, Essai sur la vie de Sénèque le philosophe, sur ses écrits et sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (Paris: chez les frères De Bure, 1779), 7:11. See also Joanna Stalnaker, “Diderot’s Literary Testament,” Diderot Studies 31 (2009): 45–56.
31. See Elena Russo, “Slander and Glory in the Republic of Letters: Diderot and Seneca Confront Rousseau,” Republics of Letters, no. 1 (May 2009), http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/40.
32. Diderot, Essai sur la vie de Sénèque, 7:11.
33. DPV 15:126–27.
34. Unlike Diderot’s two books on Seneca, the Confessions immediately sold eight thousand copies. See Dorthea E. von Mücke, The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 265.
35. Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des arts 11, March 13, 1782 (Paris: Ruault, 1782), 82.
36. See Michèle Duchet, Diderot et l’Histoire des deux Indes (Paris: A.G. Nizet, 1978), 31.
37. This was entitled École militaire. See Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Manfred Tietz, “Introduction,” in Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Manfred Tietz, eds., Lectures de Raynal: l’“Histoire des deux Indes” en Europe et en Amérique au XVIIIe siècle. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 286 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), 2.
38. Girolamo Imbruglia, “Civilisation and Colonisation: Enlightenment Theories in the Debate between Diderot and Raynal,” History of European Ideas 41, no. 7 (2015): 859. A plantation holder himself on Saint-Domingue, Choiseul probably numbered among the more forward-thinking people calling for a so-called enlightened form of slavery.
39. Lüsebrink and Tietz, eds., Lectures de Raynal, 3.
40. Goggi, “Quelques remarques sur la collaboration de Diderot à la première édition de l’Histoire des deux Indes,” ibid., 17.
41. Diderot, Diderot, Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 171.
42. Ibid., 172.
43. Ibid., 182.
44. Andrew S. Curran, Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 229, n. 41.
45. HDI, 1770, 4:167–68.
46. Diderot, Political Writings, 212.
47. HDI, 1780, 3:280.
48. Ibid., 1780, 4:418.
49. See Guillaume Ansart, “Variations on Montesquieu: Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes and the American Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (3): 399–420.
50. Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 117.
51. Though Diderot’s correspondence from the last years of his life once again leaves big gaps, it is quite probable that he had at least some contact with Franklin. One snippet of proof comes in a letter from A. C. G. Deudon to Benjamin Franklin written on August 10, 1783, where he reminds Franklin that Diderot had arranged for Deudon to see his famous “glass armonica,” which he had invented some twenty years earlier. The letter implies that Diderot had seen the instrument and, presumably, Franklin himself. See Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 40:453.
52. Ibid., 20: 447–48.
53. C. P. Courtney, “Burke, Franklin et Raynal: à propos de deux lettres inédites,” in Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 62, no. 1 (1962): 81.
54. This honor was conferred despite the book’s ridiculous assertions that the “new” continent suffered from endemic degeneration.
55. HDI, 1774, 7:182.
56. This is nicely summed up by Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics, 208–09.
57. HDI, 1780, 4:417.
58. Ibid., 1780, 4:456.
59. Ibid., 1780, 1:398.
60. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., 14:465. See Corr., 14:225.
61. In theory this quote was dedicated to Elisa Drapper, but the title became associated with Raynal himself.
62. Corr., 15:211.
63. Though we do not know for sure, it seems more than likely that Diderot never sent this letter.
64. Corr., 15:213 and 15:226.
65. Ibid., 15:227.
66. Diderot, Political Writings, 214.
1. Corr., 15:19. The two men exchanged twenty-six letters.
2. Ibid., 15:91.
3. Ibid., 15:38. I am quoting the actual analogy he had used while speaking to François Tronchin.
4. Ibid., 15:90.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Rousseau’s death is admirably recounted by Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 488.
8. Corr., 15:132.
9. Ibid., 15:247. See Eric Hazan, The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2010), 20. Louis-Sebastien Mercier described the typical flavors in Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam, 1789), 12:180.
10. DPV, 17:516.
11. I borrow this expression from Charles Wolfe. See Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (Ghent: Springer, 2016), 62.
12. The fatalism evoked in the title of this book is quite different from what is evoked by the term “fatalism” today. In contemporary usage, fatalists bow down before providence or destiny, maintaining that they have no control over the future or themselves. In stark contrast, a fatalist from Diderot’s point of view is someone who believes that one’s entire life is not preordained by fate, but is certainly determined by one’s biological and psychological essence.
13. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, trans. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3.
14. Fatalism and determinism are quite different, philosophically speaking, but they are essentially conflated in Diderot’s system. See Anthony Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought After the Encyclopédie, International Archives of the History of Ideas 62 (Heidelberg: Springer Netherlands, 1973), 45.
15. In 1756, in a letter that he sent to the playwright Paul-Louis Landois, Diderot asserts quite brutally that in a world where all things are determined, human behavior was nothing more than what corresponds to “the general order, our organization [physiology], our education, and the chain of events.” See DPV 9:257.
16. Colas Duflos, Les aventures de Sophie: la philosophie dans le roman au XVIIIème siècle (Paris: CNRS editions, 2013), 253.
17. Socrates had famously written that it was absurd to fear what we do not know. See Plato, Apologie de Socrate, Criton, Phédon, trans. Léon Robin and Joseph Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 43.
18. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, 63.
19. Corr., 15:321.
20. Madame de Vandeul, Diderot, mon père (Strasbourg: Circe, 1992), 48.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 56.
23. Corr., 15:320.
24. Ibid., 15:335.
25. Diderot, Voyage à Bourbonne, à Langres et autres récits (Paris: Aux Amateurs des livres, 1989), 27. Along with his friend, the celebrated Dr. Tronchin, Diderot had long believed that the most effective way to get over a malady was to exercise and avoid purges and bloodletting. This was a radical idea at the time.
26. Vandeul, Diderot, mon père, 48.
27. Ibid., 49.
28. See Roger Pearson’s account of this death in Voltaire Almighty (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), 385–91.
29. Absent his heart and brain, which had been removed, Voltaire’s body remained in Romilly-sur-Seine until its pantheonization in 1791. D’Alembert, who died in 1783, was also threatened with the ignominy of the voirie as well. In his case, however, he received a decent burial thanks to a technicality: as secretary of the Académie française, he was accorded special protected status and granted a resting place within the common grave of the Porcherons cemetery. (See Wilson, Diderot, 711.)
30. L. Petit de Bachaumont et al., Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres en France (London: chez John Adamson, 1784), 23:241.
31. Diderot’s son-in-law, Caroillon de Vandeul, reported that the priest “captivated the esteem of both Monsieur and Madame [Diderot].” Corr., 15:331.
32. Vandeul, Diderot, mon père, 50.
33. Ibid., 51.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 51–52.
36. Ibid., 52.
37. Ibid.
38. Enc., 8:576.
39. Corr., 6:66.
40. Philippe Blom makes a similar point. See A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (Basic Books, 2010), 308.
41. René Tarin, Diderot et la Révolution française: controverses et polémiques autour d’un philosophe (Paris: Champion, 2001), 51–52.
42. Louis-Sébastien Mercier had actually attributed it to Diderot as early as 1791, claiming he heard Diderot say it in the café Procope. The quote is actually a paraphrase from Voltaire’s version of Meslier’s famous Testament, which Diderot knew well. See Pascal Pellerin, “Diderot, Voltaire et le curé Meslier: un sujet tabou,” Diderot Studies 29 (2003), 54.
43. Henceforth, Diderot would be seen as a bloodthirsty proto-sansculottist associated with the proto-communist rabble-rouser François-Noël Babeuf, who was guillotined in 1796. This image was also disseminated by abbé Barruel in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, which treated Diderot as an extremist involved in an anti-Christian conspiracy.
44. F. G. de La Rochefoucauld, Esprit des écrivains du 18ème siècle (Paris: chez Giguet et Michaud, 1809), 29.
45. This is a famous quote from Auguste Comte, Le Livre: revue mensuelle (Paris: A. Quantin, 1884), 114.
46. Raymond Trousson, ed., Denis Diderot, 30.
47. Célébration du centenaire de Diderot au Palais du Trocadéro le dimanche 27 juillet 1884: discours de M. Pierre Laffitte (Paris: au dépôt de la Revue occidentale, 1884), 5.
48. Part of a much larger project that sought to inscribe the Republic’s values onto the city’s topography, Diderot’s image was supposed to join a number of other statues that paid tribute to a series of eighteenth-century heroes, among them Jean-Paul Marat, Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton, and the Marquis de Condorcet. The city of Paris commissioned another statue in 1884. Realized by Leon Aimé Joachim Lecointe, it was erected in the square d’Anvers. It was melted down in 1942.
49. Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151.
50. Ibid.
51. Gautherin had not been able to cast the statue in time for the dedication. Instead, he supplied a ghostlike plaster model of the philosophe that ultimately sat out in the elements for almost two years. See Le Correspondant (Paris: bureaux du Correspondant, 1884) 100: 910.
52. Colas Duflo, “Et pourquoi des dialogues en des temps de systèmes?,” Diderot Studies 28 (2000): 95–109, p. 96.
53. Elisabeth de Fontenay, Diderot ou le matérialisme enchanté (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1981), 14. See also Andrew Curran, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe.
54. Duflo, “Et pourquoi des dialogues?,” 96.