Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

PRAISE FOR Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

Curran narrates with verve the story of Diderot’s life, but also his late masterpieces, unknown in their own time and written for posterity.

—SOPHIA ROSENFELD, author of Common Sense

An absorbing sketch of life in eighteenth-century France; it provides dazzling insight into critical issues including the existence of God and freedom of speech.

—THIERRY HOQUET, author of Revisiting the Origin of Species

A thrilling narrative that grants the reader an intimate look at Diderot’s life and intellectual development.

—ELENA RUSSO, author of Styles of Enlightenment

This biography is brimming with life — ideas of life and the life of ideas.

—ÉRIC FASSIN, author of Populism Left and Right

"Compelling…Curran recaptures the radicalism of the monumental Encyclopédie and other texts that are now cornerstones of the Enlightenment canon."

—LAURA AURICCHIO, author of The Marquis

Superbly written and impeccably researched…Analyzing Diderot’s relentless pursuit of freedom in an era of censorship and fanaticism, Curran uncovers the multiple facets of his genius and his relevance for our times.

—OURIDA MOSTEFAI, author of Rousseau and L’Infame

ALSO BY ANDREW S. CURRAN

Sublime Disorder:

Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe

The Anatomy of Blackness:

Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment

Copyright © 2019 Andrew S. Curran

Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Curran, Andrew S., author.

Title: Diderot and the art of thinking freely / Andrew S. Curran.

Description: New York : Other Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018019273 (print) | LCCN 2018046590 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590516720 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590516706 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Diderot, Denis, 1713–1784. | Philosophers — France — Biography.

Classification: LCC B2016 (ebook) | LCC B2016 .C87 2019 (print) | DDC 194 — dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019273

Ebook ISBN 9781590516720

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Contents

Cover

Also by Andrew S. Curran

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PROLOGUE Unburying Diderot

PART ONE: FORBIDDEN FRUITS

I The Abbot from Langres

II Leaving God

III A Philosophe in Prison

IV The Enlightenment Bible

V The Encyclopédie Hair Shirt

PART TWO: LATE HARVEST

VI On Virtue and Vice

VII On Art: Diderot at the Louvre

VIII On the Origin of Species

IX The Sexologist

X On Love

XI A Voyage to Russia: Politics, Philosophy, and Catherine the Great

XII Last Words: Speaking to Despots and American Insurgents

EPILOGUE Walking between Two Eternities

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Cast of Characters

Notes

Works Cited

Illustrations

Index

Prologue

UNBURYING DIDEROT

Sometime during the snowy winter of 1793, under cover of night, a small group of thieves pried open a wooden door leading into the Church of Saint-Roch. Forced entry into the Paris sanctuary was nearly a weekly occurrence during this time of revolution. In the early 1790s, anticlerical vandals had pulled enormous religious paintings off the walls and slashed the canvases. Other trespassers had made off with more portable works of art, including an exquisite statue sculpted by Étienne-Maurice Falconet. On this particular night, however, the intruders came to steal whatever copper, silver, or lead they could find in the crypt located underneath the Chapel of the Virgin. Setting to work in front of the chapel’s altar, the grave robbers used long iron bars to lever aside the mattress-sized marble slab in the center of the floor. Though they surely had no idea who was buried in the vault, the most loutish of the group, assuming he could read, would still have recognized the name of the writer Denis Diderot inscribed on one of the caskets. Dead for nine years, the notorious atheist had been the driving force behind the most controversial book project of the eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie. This massive dictionary had not only dragged sacrilege and freethinking out into the open, but triggered a decades-long scandal that involved the Sorbonne, the Paris Parlement, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the king, and the pope.

None of this old history mattered to the burglars. After removing Diderot’s lead coffin from the vault, the men simply shook his decomposing body onto the church’s marble floor. The following day, Denis Diderot’s remains (along with the other desecrated cadavers from the crypt) were presumably gathered up and transferred without ceremony to a mass grave about a mile to the east.¹ Nobody noticed; nobody reported it in the press. Assuming the church’s few remaining parish priests had realized that Diderot had been buried in the church, they were undoubtedly relieved to be rid of the scandalous unbeliever.

Some twenty years before his remains were carted out of Saint-Roch, Diderot had prophetically remarked that whether you rot beneath marble or under the ground, you still rot.² Yet being discarded and forgotten among a mound of recently guillotined aristocratic corpses would not have been his preference. Atheist or not, Diderot had long expressed a keen interest in being remembered and, if all things worked out, celebrated by future generations. Posterity is to the philosophe, he once stated, as heaven is to the man of religion.³

Diderot’s interest in speaking to future generations from beyond the grave had come about out of necessity. In 1749, shortly after the then thirty-four-year-old writer had published a work of intemperate atheism entitled the Lettre sur les aveugles (Letter on the Blind), two gendarmes showed up at his house, arrested him, and dragged him off to Vincennes prison. Three months later, shortly before he was released, the lieutenant-général de police made a special trip to the prison to warn the writer that any further immoral or irreligious publications would bring about a jail sentence measured in decades, not months.

Diderot took this threat seriously. For the next thirty-three years, he avoided publishing the kind of inflammatory books that he had authored as a young man. Much of the energy that he might have devoted to such endeavors was redirected toward the all-consuming Encyclopédie. When he finally completed the last volume of illustrations, in 1772, the now-elderly writer was well aware that he was a celebrity throughout Europe and even in parts of North America, but he was not really considered a literary great. His fate, as he admitted quite openly, was perhaps to survive long after his reputation as an Encyclopedist had faded, growing ever older and vanishing without leaving a significant work behind.⁴ This, in fact, seemed to be the case when he died in 1784. Although several obituaries credited him for being the leader of the generation of thinkers that had utterly changed the country, they also hinted that he had not lived up to his indisputable genius.⁵ Even his friends reluctantly agreed. Jacques-Henri Meister, who revered the man, wistfully acknowledged that Diderot never produced a book that would have placed him among the first tier of our philosophes or our poets.⁶

Charitable friends blamed the writer’s supposedly limited literary production on the burden of the Encyclopédie. Others privately ascribed this failing to his famously whirligig brain. As was often the case, the sharp-tongued Voltaire, who both admired and distrusted Diderot, came up with the cleverest remark on the subject; he apparently joked that the Encyclopedist’s mind was an oven that burns everything that it cooks.⁷

What Voltaire and virtually everybody else did not know was that Diderot had actually written an astonishing range of improbably modern books and essays for the drawer, as the French like to say. Holed up in his sixth-floor garret office on the rue Taranne for the last third of his life, Diderot produced this cache of writing with the hope that it might one day explode like a bomb. This moment was prepared for carefully. When the author reached his sixties — borrowed time during the eighteenth century — he hired copyists to produce three separate collections of manuscripts. The first and most complete set was entrusted to his daughter, Angélique, whom we know as Madame de Vandeul; a second, less complete group of writings was transferred to his designated literary heir and devotee, Jacques-André Naigeon. And six months after his death, thirty-two bound volumes of manuscripts along with Diderot’s entire library of three thousand books traveled by ship to Catherine the Great in Saint Petersburg.

Diderot’s unedited books, essays, and criticism far surpassed what he had published during his lifetime. Among these writings were two very dissimilar, but equally brilliant novels. The first of these, La religieuse (The Nun), is a gripping pseudo-memoir of a nun who suffers unspeakably cruel abuse after she announces that she wants to leave her convent. The second, Jacques le fataliste, is an open-ended antinovel where Diderot used fiction to take up the problem of free will. But there were also thick notebooks of revolutionary art criticism, a godless science-fiction-like chronicle of the human race, a secret political treatise written for Catherine the Great, a humorous satire on the absurdity of Christian sexual mores set in Tahiti, as well as some of the most moving love letters in the history of French literature. To become familiar with the range of Diderot’s work is to be stupefied: among other things, the philosophe dreamed of natural selection before Darwin, the Oedipus complex before Freud, and genetic manipulation two hundred years before Dolly the Sheep was engineered.

These hidden works did not appear in the months after Diderot died; they trickled out over the course of decades. Several of his lost books were published during the waning years of the French Revolution; others appeared during the course of the Bourbon Restoration (1814–30), while still more of his writing emerged during the Second Empire (1852–70). Perhaps the most significant addition to Diderot’s corpus came in 1890 when a librarian discovered a complete manuscript version of Diderot’s masterpiece, Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), in a bouquiniste’s stand on the banks of the Seine. In this riotous philosophical dialogue, the writer courageously gave life to an unforgettable antihero who extolled the virtues of evil and social parasitism while preaching the right to unbridled pleasure.

To say that the arrival of these lost books had an effect on subsequent generations would be putting it mildly. Diderot’s effusive art criticism inspired Stendhal, Balzac, and Baudelaire. Émile Zola credited Diderot’s vivisections of society as the foundation of the naturalism that characterized his and Balzac’s novels.⁸ Social theorists, too, were spellbound by Diderot’s prescient thought. Karl Marx, who borrowed deeply from Diderot’s musings on class struggle, listed the writer as his favorite author.⁹ And Sigmund Freud credited the ancien régime thinker for recognizing the unconscious psychosexual desires of childhood in Rameau’s Nephew long before he or his fellow psychoanalysts had.¹⁰ If many critics continued to disdain the writer as too atheistic, too paradoxical, and too unrestrained, Diderot was nonetheless becoming the preferred writer of the nineteenth-century avant-garde.¹¹

The full extent of Diderot’s influence was not truly known, however, until a young German-American academic, Herbert Dieckmann, located the final lost cache of Diderot’s writings. Having heard rumors that Diderot’s conservative descendants continued to possess some of the lost manuscripts originally given to the writer’s daughter, the Harvard professor finally obtained permission to visit the family château in Normandy in 1948. After overcoming the postwar suspicions of the caretaker, who was initially put off by his German-accented French, Dieckmann was ultimately directed to some armoires on the château’s second floor. Entering a room that contained several large freestanding closets, he sidled over to the first one and peeled back the door panel. Hoping, perhaps, to find a lost work or two, he was confronted with an enormous stockpile of Diderot’s bound manuscripts. So stunned was Dieckmann that he simply dropped to the floor. Diderot’s final cache, the lost collection of manuscripts he had given to his daughter, had at last been found.

What are now known as the Vandeul archives — labeled as such since they came from Diderot’s daughter — have become the most important source for what we know about Diderot and his works. Most astonishing, perhaps, was the discovery of several manuscripts annotated in his hand that revealed that he had been the primary ghostwriter for abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies), the best-selling critical examination of European colonization. It had been Diderot, as it turned out, who had penned the most influential and best-known anticolonial sections of this multivolume book, including an imagined exchange between an enslaved African who not only claimed the right to be free, but who predicted a day when Caribbean slaves would justifiably put their masters to the sword. Composed in 1779, a decade before the events in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) would prove him right, this is perhaps the most telling example of the writer’s radical politics, not to mention his ability to see into the future.

Some three hundred years after he was born, Diderot has now become the most relevant of Enlightenment philosophers. That he refrained from publishing (or taking credit for) his most forward-looking ideas during his lifetime was not simply a matter of avoiding persecution; he intentionally chose to forgo a conversation with his contemporaries in order to have a more fruitful dialogue with later generations — us, in short. His heartfelt hope was that we, the sympathetic and enlightened interlocutors of the future, might finally be capable of sitting in judgment of his hidden writings, writings that not only question the moral, aesthetic, political, and philosophical conventions of the ancien régime, but our own as well.

PORTRAYING DIDEROT

Despite repeated allusions to the importance of posterity, Diderot has not made life easy for his biographers. A more cooperative subject would have left behind a trail of uninterrupted correspondence, the raw material for a tidy account of the author’s acts, words, and interior world. What Diderot handed down to us, especially from his early years, is a comparative wasteland. Of the hundreds of letters that he presumably sent before the age of thirty, only thirteen remain. This dearth of primary sources is compounded by the philosophe’s relative silence about his youth. In contrast to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who plunged deeply into his earliest memories in a quest to identify his own inner truth, Diderot studiously refused to look back in any substantive way at the years he spent growing up in his small citadel-like hometown of Langres. The writer is similarly unhelpful regarding his later adolescence and young adulthood, sharing precious little information about his studies at the collège d’Harcourt and the Sorbonne, and never detailing the precise reasons why he, an aspiring ecclesiastic, grew into the most prominent atheist of his era.

What we lack in terms of early correspondence is perhaps compensated by the multiple, overlapping descriptions of Diderot provided by his friends and associates. By the 1750s, people began calling him le philosophe (the philosopher as opposed to a philosopher). Some of this had to do with his legendary appetite for learning. The man was a pantophile, according to Voltaire: the type of thinker who falls desperately in love with every subject he studies, be it mathematics, sciences, medicine, philosophy, politics, classical antiquity, drama, literature, musicology, or the fine arts. This passion for learning made him seem like an ancient truth-seeker, a simple and honest soul who was born without ambition.¹² But his friends also dubbed him le philosophe because he had become the greatest advocate for the emancipatory power of philosophy. Far more than Voltaire, Diderot was the face of an increasingly vocal and skeptical opposition to all received ideas: the embodiment of an era that was subjecting religion, politics, contemporary mores, and a whole host of other notions to withering interrogation. His Encyclopédie summed up this mission quite succinctly when it said that the role of the philosophe is to trample underfoot prejudice, tradition, antiquity, shared covenants, authority — in a word, everything that controls the mind of the common herd.¹³

Much of Diderot’s celebrity came from his status as a prominent man of letters. The rest stemmed from his abilities as a conversationalist or, perhaps more accurately, as a man who excelled at the art of talking. Spending time with Diderot — a thinker who not only wrote seven thousand wildly divergent articles for the Encyclopédie, but had an accompanying ability to bring together the most disparate realms of knowledge — was apparently an overwhelming and often exhausting experience. Goethe and Madame de Staël, neither of whom ever met the philosophe, knew that, by reputation, no one’s conversation ever surpassed Diderot’s in liveliness, strength, wit, variety, and grace.¹⁴ Rousseau called him an astonishing, universal, perhaps singular genius.¹⁵ Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Diderot’s most cherished friend and colleague, marveled at the force and violent leaps of his imagination.¹⁶ And the same Jacques-Henri Meister who lamented Diderot’s inability to produce a great stand-alone work of literature, also stood in awe at the way that his friend’s brain worked. Diderot, according to Meister, actually had little influence over his extravagant mind; it was, rather, the philosophe’s own thoughts that led him around without his being able to either stop or control their movement.¹⁷ Once he began chasing his own ideas, Diderot was a man possessed, flitting about rapidly and lightly from one extravagant notion to the next, like a goldfinch in a tree.

The anecdote most illustrative of Diderot’s intellectual exuberance comes from Catherine the Great. In a now-lost letter that apparently circulated in Paris in the 1770s, the Russian monarch recounted that when Diderot came to the Hermitage, she ordered that a table be put between them during their meetings because the philosophe, who often went into fevered monologues, had gotten in the habit of grabbing her knees and slapping her thighs to make a point.¹⁸

Various stories and anecdotes have left us with a complex, mosaiclike image of the philosophe. But we have also inherited the writer’s own comments about how he might best be remembered. Diderot generated most of these autobiographical insights, as it turns out, when he discussed the portraits, drawings, and marble busts that the century’s artists created in his likeness. That he took the time to speak about his personality, psychology, and even physical size while contemplating these artworks is hardly a surprise: on numerous occasions he affirmed that such portraits absolutely needed to be well painted in the interest of posterity.¹⁹ These were the images, he assumed correctly, around which his legacy would crystallize.

DENIS DIDEROT, ENGRAVING BY PIERRE CHENU AFTER GARAND

The most accurate likeness of the writer, in Diderot’s own opinion, was painted in September 1760 by a wandering, virtually unknown artist named Jean-Baptiste Garand, who chanced to meet the philosophe at the Château de la Chevrette, the picturesque country estate outside of Paris belonging to his friend and fellow writer, Louise d’Épinay. The forty-seven-year-old Diderot had been an ideal model for Garand, having been confined to a chair after running into a shin-level metal bar while chasing swans around the château’s fountain.²⁰ Garand’s oil portrait, which is now lost, depicted Diderot serenely holding his head in his right hand. Whoever sees [this] portrait, wrote Diderot, sees me.²¹

Diderot’s most recognized portrait was executed by one of his friends, Louis-Michel van Loo. As one of the better-known portrait painters of Louis XV, van Loo had an indisputable talent for conveying political power, authority, and luxury.²² In many ways, the wigless Diderot, who preferred his well-worn black suit to either silks or velvets, was hardly a worthy subject. Van Loo nonetheless accepted this artistic challenge, and attempted to imbue his friend’s image with the same nobility he attributed to his more stately subjects. Posing the philosophe behind what was presumably a paint-spattered table in his studio in the Louvre, the artist placed a quill in the writer’s right hand, and asked his subject to imagine himself deep in thought.

Diderot came face-to-face with the final version of the canvas in the summer of 1767, when he attended the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture’s biennial Salon, which took place at the Louvre. The portrait, hung at eye level along with the images of dozens of other notables, was received as a triumph of virtuosity. Van Loo’s Diderot sits serenely on a caned chair in front of an inkwell and a small pile of folded manuscripts. In contrast to the timeworn and ink-streaked robe de chambre (dressing gown) that the writer actually wore in his office on the rue Taranne, van Loo painted his friend wearing a luxurious, iridescent blue-gray banyan of shot silk that falls softly over a matching waistcoat. As the philosophe looks off to the right, a gentle light lands softly on his compassionate, heavy-lidded brown eyes and protruding forehead. Van Loo clearly sought not only to capture a moment in the busy workday of the philosophe, but to canonize the man and his career.

DENIS DIDEROT, PAINTING BY LOUIS-MICHEL VAN LOO

When the Salon concluded in September, van Loo very generously gave the portrait to Diderot. He was moved. The writer acknowledged that it certainly looked like him and lost no time hanging it over his daughter Angélique’s harpsichord in the family apartment. Yet the art critic in him was also secretly disappointed that van Loo did not convey his heft, his height, and the fact that, as he wrote elsewhere, he was built like a porter. Working himself into a tizzy as he contemplated the portrait, Diderot declares that van Loo’s static and formulaic composition failed to capture his defining characteristic, his profound mutability. He then cautions his descendants — and us — that he is a difficult subject to grasp. This charming rant culminates with him speaking directly to his own likeness, whom he calls his pretty philosopher:

My pretty philosopher, you will always serve me as precious testimony to the friendship of an artist, an excellent artist, and a more excellent man. But what will my grandchildren say, when they compare my sad works to this smiling, affected, effeminate old flirt? My children, I warn you that this is not me. In the course of a single day I assumed a hundred different expressions, in accordance with the things that affected me. I was serene, sad, pensive, tender, violent, passionate, enthusiastic. But I was never such as you see me here.²³

Throughout his career, Diderot often emphasized how quickly his volatile mood and mind shifted. On one occasion, he famously compared his spirit to a weathercock that moves with the prevailing wind.²⁴ On another, he equated his thoughts with the passing harlots that young rogues might pursue, willy-nilly, through the Palais Royal pleasure gardens.²⁵ This is not evidence of capriciousness or flightiness, as some people have said about Diderot, but his bloodhoundlike eagerness to pursue any idea, wherever it went.

Years of reading, thinking, and writing about this dazzling intellect have convinced me that our era can learn a lot from Diderot. Yet doing justice to a man who might write on ancient Chinese and Greek music first thing in the morning, study the mechanics of a cotton mill until noon, help purchase some paintings for Catherine the Great in the afternoon, and then return home and compose a play and a twenty-page letter to his mistress in the evening, is as challenging as it is enchanting. To render this complex and busy life understandable, particularly for those people who do not know Diderot well, this book begins with a chronicle of the successive stages in the future philosophe’s existence: the aspiring ecclesiastic in the small city of Langres, the student and increasingly skeptical freethinker in Paris, the atheist and prisoner of the state, and, finally, the century’s most famous Encyclopedist. The second half of the book is more thematic, and corresponds more or less to the period in Diderot’s life during which he censored himself, creating a series of unpublished masterpieces (c. 1760–84) that ultimately sowed the seeds for the greatest late harvest of the Enlightenment era. Here I focus on the compelling questions that preoccupied Diderot during his lifetime. What is the incentive to be moral in a world without God? How should we appreciate art? What does it mean to be human, and where do we come from? What is sex? What is love? And how might a writer or philosophe effectively intervene in political affairs? These chapters tend to coincide with some of the many roles that the writer played in life: that of the playwright, the art critic, the science fiction writer, the sexologist, the moralist, the father, the lover, and the political theorist and commentator. They also remind us why Diderot was the most creative and noteworthy thinker of his era, even though he chose primarily to speak to those who came after it.

PART ONE

FORBIDDEN FRUITS

I forbade you from eating this fruit to prevent your ruin. What excuse do you have for being disobedient?

— SAINT JEAN CHRYSOSTOME,

Homelies or Sermons on Genesis, c. 388

If you forbid me to write about religion or the government, I have nothing more to say.

— DIDEROT, The Skeptic’s Walk, 1748

VIEW OF THE CITY OF LANGRES, 1700

I

THE ABBOT FROM LANGRES

Perched between Franche-Comté, Lorraine, and Burgundy, the mile-square city of Langres is concealed by stone ramparts that rise 550 meters from the valley below. For more than two thousand years, pedestrians, horse-drawn coaches, and now cars have reached this fortresslike burg by climbing steep roads toward one of the city’s stone gates. Within minutes of passing through any of these posterns, one arrives at a triangular plaza that used to be called the place Chambeau. It was here that Denis Diderot was born to his parents, Didier and Angélique, on October 5, 1713.

Langres’s central square retains much of the feel of the eighteenth century. Virtually all of the city’s two-, three-, and four-story limestone houses are seemingly unchanged, though now some sag at the beams with age.¹ As is often the case in old French cities, the most noteworthy shifts in this neighborhood have been symbolic. In 1789, the Revolutionary government redubbed the place Chambeau the place de la Révolution, a name it maintained until the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814. The next emblematic change took place seventy years later, on August 3, 1884, when Jean-Ernest Darbot, mayor of Langres, rebaptized the square as the place Diderot in honor of the city’s most famous son.

THE PLACE CHAMBEAU, LANGRES, c. 1840

The ceremony organized in the writer’s honor garnered more international press coverage than Langres has ever received, either before or since. According to numerous reports, Darbot had the city festooned with paper lanterns and streamers.² He and the city council also arranged for gymnastics demonstrations, shooting contests, and a marching band that played throughout the day, its fanfares melding with the din of twenty thousand celebrators.³ The highlight of the day, however, was the unveiling of the bronze statue of Denis Diderot designed by the celebrated creator of the Statue of Liberty, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. The sculptor depicted Diderot in a dressing gown and an insouciantly buttoned waistcoat. Looking out over the square from atop a marble pedestal, Diderot turns his head to his right, as if in the middle of a thought. Like Bartholdi’s massive Lady Liberty, which was under construction at that very moment back in Paris, Diderot clutches a book in his left hand.⁴

Journalists reported that the crush of people on the newly christened place Diderot called out a jubilant "Vive la république!" when they first spied the statue. A smaller group of observant Catholics looked on glumly from the edges of the crowd. What an outrage the whole event had been from their point of view: in addition to the fact that Darbot and the other republican politicians of Langres had scheduled the event on a Sunday, the city’s workers had also positioned the statue so that Diderot was conspicuously turning his back on Langres’s most famous religious icon, the nearby Saint-Mammès Cathedral.

STATUE OF DIDEROT IN LANGRES

Some 135 years after Darbot unveiled Bartholdi’s statue, the city’s atmosphere remains thick with memories of the writer. The place Diderot leads to the rue Diderot, which, in turn, leads to the collège Diderot, the city’s junior high school. Every third or fourth shop within the walled city also seems to display the name of its most famous son. In addition to a beautifully executed new museum dedicated to the philosophe, there is a Diderot café, a Diderot coffee bean shop, a boulangerie Diderot, a Diderot cigarette and cigar store, a Diderot motorcycle dealership, and a Diderot driving school. The town’s Freemasons, according to someone I met at a café in Langres, attend monthly meetings at the Diderot Lodge.

THE HOUSE WHERE DIDEROT WAS BORN

More important, however, are the early-modern buildings, houses, and churches that Diderot knew during his lifetime. Today, one can still stand in front of the chalky, limestone facade of Diderot’s grandparents’ house and look up into the windows of its second floor where he came into this world. On the same square, a hundred feet to the west, stands another landmark, the narrow four-story stone house that Didier Diderot purchased in early 1714 (several months after Denis’s birth) to accommodate what was destined to be a large household.

DIDIER DIDEROT

Angélique and Didier Diderot would ultimately have nine children while living on the place Chambeau, many of whom did not make it through the perilous first years of life. In addition to the baby boy who died before Denis was born, four girls succumbed to various ailments. One died when Denis was two, another when he was five, another when he was six. Yet another perished at an unknown date. The four surviving children, two girls and two boys, had dispositions that split down the middle. The older two siblings, the firstborn Denis and his sister Denise (1715–97) — Diderot once described her as a female Diogenes — had powerful personalities with ironic senses of humor. The younger children grew into far more somber and devout adults. Angélique (1720-c. 1749), about whom we know virtually nothing, insisted on joining the Ursulines’ convent at age nineteen. The youngest child in the family, Didier-Pierre (1722–87), also dedicated his life to God. Nine years younger than his brother, Didier-Pierre seems to have crafted his entire life as a response to his older sibling’s freethinking iconoclasm. He became disciplined where Denis was rebellious, pious where Denis was irreverent, abstemious where Denis was self-indulgent, and a doctrinaire priest where Denis was a skeptic. By the end of his career, Didier-Pierre had not only become a particularly unyielding member of the Langres clergy, but the archdeacon of the Saint-Mammès Cathedral.

Denis and his three younger siblings grew up in a bourgeois milieu where girls would ideally enter into strategic and suitable marriages and boys would become cutlers, tanners, or perhaps priests. Diderot’s mother, née Angélique Vigneron, had come from a family that typically earned its living through the odoriferous trade of tanning and selling animal hides. Denis’s father, Didier Diderot, had also followed long-standing family tradition and embraced the profession of his father and grandfather as a fabricator of knives and surgical tools.⁵ Expanding the business inherited from his father, Didier became known throughout eastern France as the manufacturer of some of the finest surgical instruments in the region — including a type of lancet that he had invented.

KNIFE MADE BY DIDIER DIDEROT, MASTER CUTLER

Life in and around the place Chambeau revolved around the cutlery business. Six days a week, Diderot père came downstairs from his family’s living quarters to the ground floor workshop, where he toiled alongside several workers. The household was constantly filled with the sounds and smells of knife making: the smolder and respiration of the bellows, the incessant pings of the tack hammer, and the screech of the grinding wheel, which was operated by a worker lying on a plank, his nose quite literally to the grindstone.

WORKSHOP OF A CUTLER

Though Diderot ultimately had little affinity for the trade of cutler, he admired his father tremendously. Until his dying day, he praised the civic and moral values associated with Didier Diderot’s patriarchal, bourgeois world, even staging some of these values in his plays. The few written descriptions or anecdotes related to the elder Diderot all portray him as a hard worker, a profoundly religious man, and a devoted subject of the king. Didier Diderot’s granddaughter, Madame de Vandeul, also stresses his fairness and severity, describing him as the type of man who once took the three-year-old Denis to witness the public execution of a criminal outside the city walls. This horrific spectacle, she adds parenthetically, made the small boy violently ill.⁶

At some point during Denis’s childhood, his parents decided that he was not destined to become either a cutler or a tanner. Perhaps witnessing his startling intellect, they began to groom him for the priesthood, which had also been a career choice for a dozen or so blood relatives on both sides of the family. Diderot surely met many of these pious family members, among them the vicar in neighboring Chassigny, the two great-uncles and two second cousins serving as country priests outside the city walls, and another uncle who was a Dominican friar.⁷ The most important and prominent ecclesiastic in his life, however, was his mother’s older brother, Didier Vigneron, who occupied the coveted position of chanoine, or canon, in Langres’s cathedral.

For a number of years, Didier and Angélique Diderot not only hoped that their son would become a priest, but succeed his uncle as canon at the cathedral. Had Diderot replaced the aging Vigneron, he would have become an influential member of the cathedral’s Chapter, the group of clerics who controlled the Langres bishopric.⁸ In addition to garnering immense prestige for the family, the young canon would also have received a generous portion of the revenues — called a prebend — from a diocese whose reach extended to some six hundred parishes and seventeen hundred priests outside the city’s ramparts.⁹ In an era where a typical worker might earn two hundred livres a year, a canon’s basic annual income was a more than respectable one thousand to two thousand livres.

The young Denis took the initial, small step toward becoming a man of the cloth on his seventh birthday. This was seen as the dawn of the age of responsibility for young boys.¹⁰ From this point forward, the Sunday morning clangor of church bells called Denis to a day of worship and study at the neighboring Church of Saint-Martin. For the first few years that he attended church, the Latin liturgy washed over him ineffectually. After mass, however, Denis moved on to catechism, which was offered in French. This weekly obligation, which was conducted simultaneously in hundreds of churches throughout the Langres diocese, consisted of a particularly monotonous routine. Once the children were settled, the local curé or his representative read a series of scripted questions pertaining to matters of faith, religious practice, and God.¹¹ The older children in attendance, who had memorized the answers over the years, responded in unison. The younger ones stammered out the answers as best they could.

In October 1723, at age ten, Diderot was admitted to Langres’s Jesuit collège, which was on the other side of the place Chambeau. Diderot was eligible for such an advanced education because he had the good fortune of being born into a family that could afford tutoring or ad hoc schooling in French and Latin, the languages required for admission. Once he had begun attending the collège, he (and his two hundred classmates) took classes that were largely based on the Ratio Studiorum, the formal plan of education created at the end of the sixteenth century by an international group of Jesuit scholars. In addition to deepening Diderot’s understanding of the foundational aspects of the Catholic faith, this program introduced the young boy to what we would now consider traditional humanities disciplines, such as ancient Greek, Latin, literature, poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric.¹²

As the twelve-year-old Diderot was finishing his third year at the collège, he or his family decided that he should take the next step to joining the priesthood, by becoming an abbé, or abbot. This ceremony, which took place at the nearby Saint-Mammès Cathedral on August 22, 1726, followed a strict script. Diderot was called up from a pew and told to kneel before his diocese’s bishop, the doughy-faced Pierre de Pardaillan de Gondrin. The prelate then began the tonsuring ceremony, cutting several tufts of the boy’s blondish hair from the front, back, sides, and top of his head — forming a cross — and, after taking off his miter, prayed over the young Diderot. In the final part of the ceremony, the prelate helped the newly tonsured abbot don a white surplice, proclaiming that the Lord was reclothing him.¹³

TONSURING OF AN ABBOT

Diderot had entered into the minor orders, but the plan to have