Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot spent twenty-five years editing the Encyclopédie and was imprisoned before he started. Born in 1713 at Langres, the son of a master cutler who made surgical instruments, he was intended for the church, took a degree in Paris, and then spent a decade living precariously as a translator, tutor and writer while his father cut him off for marrying without permission. He was jailed at Vincennes for three months in 1749 for the Letter on the Blind, which argued that a person born blind would have no reason to infer a designer from the order of the world. Rousseau walked out to visit him there, and had the revelation that produced his first discourse on the road. The Encyclopédie began as a commission to translate an English reference work and became something else entirely: twenty-eight volumes over twenty-one years, 72,000 articles, 2,500 plates, and some 140 contributors including Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau and d'Alembert, who edited the mathematics and left in 1759 when the pressure became too much. Its method was the argument. Technical processes were described with the same seriousness as theology, the cross-references were used to undermine articles that orthodoxy required, and the whole thing asserted that knowledge is a human construction subject to revision. It was suppressed twice and continued with the tacit protection of officials who disagreed with the censorship. His publisher secretly cut the last volumes without telling him, which he discovered years later. Catherine the Great bought his library and paid him to keep it. Most of his best writing was published after his death in 1784.
- Lived: 1713 CE – 1784 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: philosopher, writer, encyclop_diste, art_critic
