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rheinsberg2021-02-06 09:27 am
mildred_of_midgard) wrote in rheinsberg2021-02-06 09:27 am
Diderot
The Diderot biography I'm writing up here is Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, by Andrew Curran.
I chose it because it was available on Kindle, cheap, and Amazon recommended it to me. ;) It was not as scholarly as I would have liked, but it was as good a starting point as any.
I haven't finished writing up the most important part, his work on the Encyclopédie, but that requires a little more precision, so I'm still working on it [ETA: I'll get to it someday. ;)]. For now, you can have the rest.
Personal life
Denis Diderot was born in Langres in 1713 to a bourgeois father, a cutler in a region famous for cutlery.
His parents quickly realize their son isn't cut out to be a cutler or anything like it, so they start preparing him for the priesthood. He becomes an abbé/abbot as a 12-year-old, but he has this little problem with authority and is constantly getting in trouble. My favorite story is that he liked tricking his teachers by working really obscure syntax into his Latin and Greek, waiting for them to correct him, then taking great pleasure in proving that he was right and they were wrong.
So he increasingly gets the sense that this isn't the life for him. He ends up in Paris studying philosophy, but scholasticism and orthodoxy also drive him crazy, so he drifts aimlessly for a while, studying but not pursuing a serious career. During this period, he meets and befriends Rousseau.
Meanwhile, Diderot falls in love with a beautiful but pious (?? your life choices, Diderot) woman named Toinette (short for Antoinette), who's the product of a noble family fallen on hard times and currently working as a laundress. He manages to court her by convincing her parents that he's EXTREMELY CHASTE, i.e. on the verge of becoming a priest. In a very similar way, he recently once swindled someone out of a bunch of money by pretending he was about to enter the priesthood.
That's Diderot for you.
He eventually gets permission from her parents to marry her, on the condition that his parents agree. So he leaves Paris and goes home for the first time in 10 years.
Parents most emphatically do not agree. Dad actually has him locked up! Historians think this was in a monastery. Dad then writes to Toinette's parents and says that he'll only agree to release his son if this wretched girl takes a solemn vow never to marry him.
But Diderot escapes through a window and walks halfway to Paris, 120 km, before meeting up with someone who can give him a ride the rest of the way. (If you think that's exciting, his mother once sent a servant to Paris to bring him some money, and the servant apparently walked the entire 230 km in both directions. No, footnotes aren't abounding in this volume, and even when they're there, a major source for Diderot's life is his granddaughter, which we've seen how even children can be woefully uninformed about the details of their parent's lives, so take everything with a grain of salt.)
Anyway! He makes it back to Paris, where he and Toinette get married, secretly, at midnight, in one of the few parishes where people could get married without their parents' permission. And even then, it was only legal after age 30!
The marriage is passionate at first, but Diderot seems to have been a man of great passions of medium length (like a few years), and he eventually moves on. According to some anecdotes, she had a terrible temper and could get physically violent with him and with neighbors, and he was afraid to confront her during later marital disputes (he would apparently hide in his study, write a letter to a mutual friend, and have the friend deliver the message to her) but take this all with a grain of salt.
So he's friends with Rousseau for a while, but like Voltaire and Maupertuis, they have a messy and public falling out. Like theirs, it was triggered by trivial-seeming outward events that exploded. However, in their case, it seems to have been a more drawn-out process, and less catastrophic (possibly because Louis XV wasn't the type to get involved in their pamphlet book wars). One example: they have a big fight over whether Rousseau should accept a pension from Louis. Rousseau says doing so would violate his principles. Diderot says he owes it to his dependents to be financially responsible. Per the author of the bio, they had a lot of these arguments that reflected fundamental differences about how to live in the world and what kind of compromises to make.
Shortly before Rousseau's Confessions was supposed to come out, Diderot has a suspicion they were going to 1) be a bestseller, 2) trash him (both true), so he pre-emptively decides to work in some Rousseau-trashing in his life of Seneca.
Using the Essay to strike before the Confessions appeared in print, he compared Rousseau to Seneca’s detractors, and inserted a series of footnotes into his text that accused his former friend of being derivative, an obfuscator, a hypocrite, and an intellectual thief whose best ideas were borrowed from Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, and Locke. There was, of course, no mention of Diderot’s own role in exacerbating Rousseau’s paranoia by being aloof, by neglecting him, and by often mocking his fears as unwarranted.
Unfortunately for Diderot, Rousseau dies just before the Seneca book appeared (and the Confessions wasn't published until years later), and now Diderot looks petty and mean-natured. Oops! What do you do in a situation like this? You issue a second, expanded edition, now on Claudius and Nero, and you double down on Rousseau by writing at even greater length about how terrible he was, that's what you do.
This new and improved, "Now with more Rousseau-trashing!" edition appears in the same year as the first volumes of the Confessions appear. Says our author Curran:
While both men had hoped to claim the moral high ground in their final public clash, the written accounts of this twenty-five-year-old dispute did little to settle who was at fault. Indeed, more than anything else, the combination of spite and regret that drips from both men’s pens is a poignant testament to what they continued to have in common: the fear of mutual slander and the searing pain of lost companionship.
Diderot himself dies only a couple years later. During his final illness, he has the same problem that Voltaire had with wanting a decent burial and being worried about not getting one. But whereas Voltaire was a big name with powerful friends, and at least still believed in God, built a church, and attended Mass (even if only mockingly) when it served his purposes, Diderot is less protected *and* was a straight-up atheist. And to her credit, his wife Toinette, who is notably pious herself, wants Diderot to be able to get the assurance that he would get the burial he wants without having to convert, if he's dead set on not converting, and does her best to make that happen.
Hilariously, at this time (late 1783/early 1784), Diderot is living in the same parish as Voltaire died in just 6 years earlier, and in an attempt to get him to die a good Catholic, who should the Church send to try to convert him in his final illness but Jean-François Faydit de Terssac, who tag-teamed with the more famous Abbé Gaultier to try to get Voltaire to convert on his deathbed.
Terssac: I failed last time, but now's my chance! Diderot, you should totally publish a last work recanting all your previous works, then you can be on good terms with the Church.
Diderot: Or I could move to a different parish. Byyyeeee!
So Diderot died a few blocks from the church that had agreed to bury Maupertuis, Helvétius, and the like. (We haven't talked about Helvétius, but believe me, if you'd read this book, you'd be very surprised that he managed a Catholic burial. We'll probably cover him at some point.) So Diderot managed to get buried there without much fuss.
Ghost of Voltaire: This is way less exciting than having the King of France authorize the placing of your embalmed, heart-less, and brain-less corpse in a carriage as though it were still living and taken out of Paris to be buried somewhere more sympathetic.
Ghost of Diderot: But way simpler, and therefore strategically superior, omg.
Ghost of Voltaire: Never let it be said that I took the easy route, even in death!
Diderot's death scene, btw, was oddly touching, so I reproduce it here:
The next morning Diderot felt better than he had for months. After spending the morning receiving visits...the philosophe sat down with Toinette to his first proper meal in weeks: soup, boiled mutton, and some chicory. Having eaten well, Diderot then looked at Toinette and asked her to pass him an apricot. Fearing that he had already eaten too much, she tried to dissuade him from continuing the meal. Diderot reportedly replied wistfully: “What the devil type of harm can it do to me now?” Popping some of the forbidden fruit in his mouth, he then rested his head on his hand, reached out for some more stewed cherries, and died. While having anything but a heroic death à la Socrates, Diderot had nonetheless expired in a way that was perfectly compatible with his philosophy: without a priest, with humor, and while attempting to eke out one last bit of pleasure from life.
The Art of Thinking Freely
The art of thinking freely is apparently to publish your stuff anonymously, to ghost-write, and to not publish most of your stuff at all during your lifetime. Diderot was pinning a lot on posterity appreciating him; he even wrote notes in the papers he left behind directly addressing us. "O Posterity, my own times were so oppressive, but I just know you're going to appreciate me, please appreciate me! It's my last chance to believe I accomplished something with all my work."
After seeing what kinds of things he wrote, you begin to understand why secrecy was so important. But before we dive in, a little more personal background.
Diderot was influenced by Voltaire's description of English thinkers, taught himself English (apparently by studying a Latin-English dictionary!), and started to read Locke, Bacon, Newton, and the like himself. He gradually, unlike Voltaire, became an atheist.
Meanwhile, Diderot's younger brother, Didier-Pierre, decides to become as pious as his older, prodigal brother Denis is blasphemous. He actually becomes a priest, and is outspoken in his disapproval of Denis. The disapproval is mutual. During one of their conflicts later in life, Denis will write to his younger priestly brother, telling that he should imagine himself on his deathbed looking back on his life, and “you will see that you are a bad priest, a bad citizen, a bad son, a bad brother, a bad uncle, and an evil man.”
Tell us how you really feel, Diderot.
Oh, and Denis dedicates his first work, a translation of an English freethinker, to his brother, in an amazing act of fraternal passive-aggressiveness that Heinrich would appreciate.
So after publishing some unorthodox works, our Diderot ends up in prison. (Not the Bastille; it was full. The Vincennes, where the Marquis de Sade also did some time, many years later.)
At first, he denies all the charges. Then, after a few weeks, his jailer hints that he could be here for years, and winter is coming.
After an attempt to hold out, Diderot finally confesses and agrees not to do it again. He also promises to dedicate the upcoming Encyclopédie to d'Argenson, the really prominent politician who was the reason he was in prison. He's eventually released, after a few months in prison. Incidentally, the book tells me the governor of the prison was the Marquis du Châtelet. The year? 1749, the year of Émilie's death.
Having learned his lesson, he will be more cautious about what he publishes and attaches his name to, but will write incredibly prolificly (Curren keeps using the word "workhorse") and espouse such popular [irony alert] opinions as:
Theater: Classical French theater, you know, the Racine and Corneille kind that Voltaire is still producing, is overly affected, codified, and unnatural. Instead of stereotypes like "lover" and "domineering father", we need realistic, three-dimensional characters. Also working-class heroes.
During my one and only in-person meeting with Voltaire, shortly before he dies, we will argue about Shakespeare. I will [quoting the biography here] compare Shakespeare to the massive fifteenth-century statue of Saint Christopher that stood just outside the doors leading into Notre Dame Cathedral. While perhaps crude and rustic, this colossus was very much like Shakespeare...because "the greatest men still walk through his legs without the top of their head touching his testicles."
In case it's not clear, that means you and your stupid old-fashioned plays, Voltaire!
This meeting: *remains the only in-person encounter between Voltaire and Diderot, though the correspondence continues to be argumentatively friendly*
Sex: Incest, bestiality, and homosexuality are "natural", not sins. I myself experienced homoerotic attraction on at least one or two occasions, though I evidently never acted on it. No evidence I had any personal affinity for incest and bestiality, but I will definitely write unpublished fanfic where these things are presented positively. Also, free love, free love is cool!
Slavery: Go, future revolting slaves! Rise up and throw off your chains! (It's argued that Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution just a few years after Diderot's death, read the anti-slavery book that Diderot co-authored.)
Regicide: Sometimes called for. Will of the people and all that. Go future French revolutionaries, who will totally disclaim any association with me and treat my memory like shit after my death! [Reason: he was too freethinking even for them, especially the atheism.]
Colonialism: Omg, the LITERAL WORST. All Europe is complicit, not just slave-traders and merchants! STOP IT.
American Revolution: If you guys just left off with the BLATANT HYPOCRISY of espousing freedom while owning massive slave plantations, you'd be the literal best. Wish I weren't too old to travel there! Good luck! Come visit me! (He may have met Franklin in person, we're not sure, but they definitely had a mutual friend and knew of each other.)
Education: Forget Greek and Latin, we need to educate the majority of the population so that they know what their rights are and will defend them against tyranny.
Louis XVI: The French Revolution is coming. Joseph's not the only one who can see the writing on the wall. You [tu] need to fix everything right now, or else you're going to go down in history as a do-nothing tyrant. (Yes, he tu-ed King Louis in an actualfax published work that Louis got to read or at least hear about before banning.)
God: What God? Pure materialism, yeah! I myself will turn down a meeting with Voltaire when he's famous and I'm still an up-and-coming young man, because I feel like he's going to use the opportunity to try to convert me to deism. But we'll definitely argue about the existence of a deity by letter!
Seneca: 18C contemporaries, I know you all think Seneca was the worst, because he was a blatant hypocrite about being a luxury-rejecting Stoic while accumulating a fortune and cozying up to Nero, but here's several hundred pages about how he was the best, and sometimes you have to cozy up to tyrants to get anything done, even though it's questionable that we got anything done with our respective tyrants. (Seneca had more influence initially, but then he had to commit suicide. Diderot had no influence ever, but at least didn't have to commit suicide.)
Yeah, one of these things is not like the others. More on Diderot and tyrants below!
Diderot: Notice how I only got imprisoned for my first couple of works, and I spent my whole subsequent life in France happily churning out prodigious amounts of controversial work without ever getting imprisoned or exiled again. Beat that, Voltaire!
Voltaire: Notice how no one ever accused me of being conflict-averse.
Diderot and Catherine
Catherine the Great and Diderot come to each other's attention in Diderot's middle age, when she ascends the throne. Like Fritz, she tries to get a bunch of foreign intellectuals to join her court. Like Fritz, she's partially successful. Unlike Fritz, she actually pays well.
Diderot and d'Alembert decline her offer, d'Alembert humorously. Some of us have seen this quote before, but I'll repeat it:
D’Alembert quipped that he would have made the trip to Saint Petersburg, but he was too “prone to hemorrhoids, and they are far too dangerous in that country.” This was, of course, a joke made at Catherine’s expense: the Russian government had announced to the world that her late husband had died from complications related to piles, although virtually everybody knew that he had actually been murdered shortly after the coup by Catherine’s lover’s brother.
Wikipedia disagrees that we know that this "actually" happened, but in terms of what d'Alembert believed, certainly.
So Diderot and d'Alembert settle on a compromise of trying to get other famous French intellectuals and artists to go to St. Petersburg without actually going themselves. Do as I say, not as I do.
But one day, Catherine discovers that Diderot is short of money and trying to sell his famous book collection. She agrees to buy it for the asking price, with two additional terms:
1) That the collection remain in Diderot's possession for his lifetime.
2) That he act as her curator of this collection and accordingly accept a stipend from her.
In other words, free gift. Woot!
Catherine: This is how I poach people from Fritz.
But then, the payment gets delayed, and eventually Diderot has to write to Catherine asking what's up with that.
Catherine: Sorry! Incompetent underlings, you know how it goes. But since I don't want this to happen again, how about I pay you for the first fifty years of your curatorship up front? Fifty years from now [Diderot was 52], we can meet again to renegotiate the terms. (Yes, she really wrote that last bit as a joke.)
Diderot: OMG, Catherine is the best! So enlightened, so generous! Maybe I should go to St. Petersburg--just for a visit, mind you--and I can be the intellectual who influences a powerful ruler and gets my ideas put into practice. It'll be just like Socrates and Alcibiades, Seneca and Nero, Voltaire and Fritz!
No, he didn't say the last sentence, but I was reading the previous part thinking, "...Why do I feel like this is going to end badly?"
So Diderot goes to St. Petersburg. On the way, this happens:
Fritz: You should totally stop off in Potsdam on the way! I'd love to meet you in person. *bats eyelashes*
Diderot: I will detour around Potsdam specifically to avoid meeting you. You can't fool me, Old Fritz, it's 1774 and I've heard about you!
Fritz: *writes sour-grapes pamphlet trashing Diderot's literary career*
Fritz: *sends numerous copies to St. Petersburg*
Me when I read that: OMG, of *course* he wrote a pamphlet, it's like a reflex at this point. Also, you're not exactly disproving his point, Fritz.
So then Diderot's in St. Petersburg, and it's all informal fun times with the Empress, who really likes him and spends tons of time with him, and they talk about his liberal ideas, and she's totally on board. (This is 1774, so in between Heinrich visits.)
Until he realizes that nothing is actually changing. She's happy to chat philosophy with him all day, but it remains theoretical.
Diderot: Why are you all talk? You could actually change things.
Catherine: [actual quote] All your grand philosophies, which I understand very well, would do marvelously in books and very badly in practice. In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything...whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive.
So Diderot, who's resented for his royal favor by the court nobles, who are all eagerly reading Fritz's pamphlet by now and making life hard on him, becomes disillusioned.
Diderot: Catherine, you're nothing but a despot masquerading as an enlightened monarch! I'm leaving.
Me: Diderot, it's called "enlightened despot" for a reason.
Diderot: *leaves Russia, detours pointedly around Fritz again*
On his way back, he tells Catherine that he has a copy of her (published, at least) book expressing her political thinking, and he's going over it with a red pen with an eye toward publishing his commentary. She has her people break into his room, go through his things, and filch the copy.
It's like Fritz and Voltaire if both had been sane!
Now totally disillusioned, Diderot starts writing more incendiary stuff, much of which (like the "regicide is totally cool") doesn't get published until after his death. One thing that does get published is a satirical manual on ruling (the "mirror for princes" genre) that's full of advice to monarchs, like "only form alliances in order to sow hatred" and never, ever "raise one’s hand without striking." Curran says this satire was aimed mostly at Fritz, but also partly at Catherine. I immediately want to call it the Anti-Anti-Machiavel.
On the flip side of Fritz being terrible, Diderot's co-author, the one who, unlike Diderot, *did* put his name and picture on one of the most incendiary books, the "slavery is bad, colonialism is bad, Europeans are complicit, btw Louis [tu] the French Revolution is coming for you" book, predictably had to flee the country, and he ended up taking refuge in Prussia in 1781.
Fritz: See? "Enlightened" *and* "despot." Why choose, when you could be both?
I chose it because it was available on Kindle, cheap, and Amazon recommended it to me. ;) It was not as scholarly as I would have liked, but it was as good a starting point as any.
I haven't finished writing up the most important part, his work on the Encyclopédie, but that requires a little more precision, so I'm still working on it [ETA: I'll get to it someday. ;)]. For now, you can have the rest.
Personal life
Denis Diderot was born in Langres in 1713 to a bourgeois father, a cutler in a region famous for cutlery.
His parents quickly realize their son isn't cut out to be a cutler or anything like it, so they start preparing him for the priesthood. He becomes an abbé/abbot as a 12-year-old, but he has this little problem with authority and is constantly getting in trouble. My favorite story is that he liked tricking his teachers by working really obscure syntax into his Latin and Greek, waiting for them to correct him, then taking great pleasure in proving that he was right and they were wrong.
So he increasingly gets the sense that this isn't the life for him. He ends up in Paris studying philosophy, but scholasticism and orthodoxy also drive him crazy, so he drifts aimlessly for a while, studying but not pursuing a serious career. During this period, he meets and befriends Rousseau.
Meanwhile, Diderot falls in love with a beautiful but pious (?? your life choices, Diderot) woman named Toinette (short for Antoinette), who's the product of a noble family fallen on hard times and currently working as a laundress. He manages to court her by convincing her parents that he's EXTREMELY CHASTE, i.e. on the verge of becoming a priest. In a very similar way, he recently once swindled someone out of a bunch of money by pretending he was about to enter the priesthood.
That's Diderot for you.
He eventually gets permission from her parents to marry her, on the condition that his parents agree. So he leaves Paris and goes home for the first time in 10 years.
Parents most emphatically do not agree. Dad actually has him locked up! Historians think this was in a monastery. Dad then writes to Toinette's parents and says that he'll only agree to release his son if this wretched girl takes a solemn vow never to marry him.
But Diderot escapes through a window and walks halfway to Paris, 120 km, before meeting up with someone who can give him a ride the rest of the way. (If you think that's exciting, his mother once sent a servant to Paris to bring him some money, and the servant apparently walked the entire 230 km in both directions. No, footnotes aren't abounding in this volume, and even when they're there, a major source for Diderot's life is his granddaughter, which we've seen how even children can be woefully uninformed about the details of their parent's lives, so take everything with a grain of salt.)
Anyway! He makes it back to Paris, where he and Toinette get married, secretly, at midnight, in one of the few parishes where people could get married without their parents' permission. And even then, it was only legal after age 30!
The marriage is passionate at first, but Diderot seems to have been a man of great passions of medium length (like a few years), and he eventually moves on. According to some anecdotes, she had a terrible temper and could get physically violent with him and with neighbors, and he was afraid to confront her during later marital disputes (he would apparently hide in his study, write a letter to a mutual friend, and have the friend deliver the message to her) but take this all with a grain of salt.
So he's friends with Rousseau for a while, but like Voltaire and Maupertuis, they have a messy and public falling out. Like theirs, it was triggered by trivial-seeming outward events that exploded. However, in their case, it seems to have been a more drawn-out process, and less catastrophic (possibly because Louis XV wasn't the type to get involved in their pamphlet book wars). One example: they have a big fight over whether Rousseau should accept a pension from Louis. Rousseau says doing so would violate his principles. Diderot says he owes it to his dependents to be financially responsible. Per the author of the bio, they had a lot of these arguments that reflected fundamental differences about how to live in the world and what kind of compromises to make.
Shortly before Rousseau's Confessions was supposed to come out, Diderot has a suspicion they were going to 1) be a bestseller, 2) trash him (both true), so he pre-emptively decides to work in some Rousseau-trashing in his life of Seneca.
Using the Essay to strike before the Confessions appeared in print, he compared Rousseau to Seneca’s detractors, and inserted a series of footnotes into his text that accused his former friend of being derivative, an obfuscator, a hypocrite, and an intellectual thief whose best ideas were borrowed from Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, and Locke. There was, of course, no mention of Diderot’s own role in exacerbating Rousseau’s paranoia by being aloof, by neglecting him, and by often mocking his fears as unwarranted.
Unfortunately for Diderot, Rousseau dies just before the Seneca book appeared (and the Confessions wasn't published until years later), and now Diderot looks petty and mean-natured. Oops! What do you do in a situation like this? You issue a second, expanded edition, now on Claudius and Nero, and you double down on Rousseau by writing at even greater length about how terrible he was, that's what you do.
This new and improved, "Now with more Rousseau-trashing!" edition appears in the same year as the first volumes of the Confessions appear. Says our author Curran:
While both men had hoped to claim the moral high ground in their final public clash, the written accounts of this twenty-five-year-old dispute did little to settle who was at fault. Indeed, more than anything else, the combination of spite and regret that drips from both men’s pens is a poignant testament to what they continued to have in common: the fear of mutual slander and the searing pain of lost companionship.
Diderot himself dies only a couple years later. During his final illness, he has the same problem that Voltaire had with wanting a decent burial and being worried about not getting one. But whereas Voltaire was a big name with powerful friends, and at least still believed in God, built a church, and attended Mass (even if only mockingly) when it served his purposes, Diderot is less protected *and* was a straight-up atheist. And to her credit, his wife Toinette, who is notably pious herself, wants Diderot to be able to get the assurance that he would get the burial he wants without having to convert, if he's dead set on not converting, and does her best to make that happen.
Hilariously, at this time (late 1783/early 1784), Diderot is living in the same parish as Voltaire died in just 6 years earlier, and in an attempt to get him to die a good Catholic, who should the Church send to try to convert him in his final illness but Jean-François Faydit de Terssac, who tag-teamed with the more famous Abbé Gaultier to try to get Voltaire to convert on his deathbed.
Terssac: I failed last time, but now's my chance! Diderot, you should totally publish a last work recanting all your previous works, then you can be on good terms with the Church.
Diderot: Or I could move to a different parish. Byyyeeee!
So Diderot died a few blocks from the church that had agreed to bury Maupertuis, Helvétius, and the like. (We haven't talked about Helvétius, but believe me, if you'd read this book, you'd be very surprised that he managed a Catholic burial. We'll probably cover him at some point.) So Diderot managed to get buried there without much fuss.
Ghost of Voltaire: This is way less exciting than having the King of France authorize the placing of your embalmed, heart-less, and brain-less corpse in a carriage as though it were still living and taken out of Paris to be buried somewhere more sympathetic.
Ghost of Diderot: But way simpler, and therefore strategically superior, omg.
Ghost of Voltaire: Never let it be said that I took the easy route, even in death!
Diderot's death scene, btw, was oddly touching, so I reproduce it here:
The next morning Diderot felt better than he had for months. After spending the morning receiving visits...the philosophe sat down with Toinette to his first proper meal in weeks: soup, boiled mutton, and some chicory. Having eaten well, Diderot then looked at Toinette and asked her to pass him an apricot. Fearing that he had already eaten too much, she tried to dissuade him from continuing the meal. Diderot reportedly replied wistfully: “What the devil type of harm can it do to me now?” Popping some of the forbidden fruit in his mouth, he then rested his head on his hand, reached out for some more stewed cherries, and died. While having anything but a heroic death à la Socrates, Diderot had nonetheless expired in a way that was perfectly compatible with his philosophy: without a priest, with humor, and while attempting to eke out one last bit of pleasure from life.
The Art of Thinking Freely
The art of thinking freely is apparently to publish your stuff anonymously, to ghost-write, and to not publish most of your stuff at all during your lifetime. Diderot was pinning a lot on posterity appreciating him; he even wrote notes in the papers he left behind directly addressing us. "O Posterity, my own times were so oppressive, but I just know you're going to appreciate me, please appreciate me! It's my last chance to believe I accomplished something with all my work."
After seeing what kinds of things he wrote, you begin to understand why secrecy was so important. But before we dive in, a little more personal background.
Diderot was influenced by Voltaire's description of English thinkers, taught himself English (apparently by studying a Latin-English dictionary!), and started to read Locke, Bacon, Newton, and the like himself. He gradually, unlike Voltaire, became an atheist.
Meanwhile, Diderot's younger brother, Didier-Pierre, decides to become as pious as his older, prodigal brother Denis is blasphemous. He actually becomes a priest, and is outspoken in his disapproval of Denis. The disapproval is mutual. During one of their conflicts later in life, Denis will write to his younger priestly brother, telling that he should imagine himself on his deathbed looking back on his life, and “you will see that you are a bad priest, a bad citizen, a bad son, a bad brother, a bad uncle, and an evil man.”
Tell us how you really feel, Diderot.
Oh, and Denis dedicates his first work, a translation of an English freethinker, to his brother, in an amazing act of fraternal passive-aggressiveness that Heinrich would appreciate.
So after publishing some unorthodox works, our Diderot ends up in prison. (Not the Bastille; it was full. The Vincennes, where the Marquis de Sade also did some time, many years later.)
At first, he denies all the charges. Then, after a few weeks, his jailer hints that he could be here for years, and winter is coming.
After an attempt to hold out, Diderot finally confesses and agrees not to do it again. He also promises to dedicate the upcoming Encyclopédie to d'Argenson, the really prominent politician who was the reason he was in prison. He's eventually released, after a few months in prison. Incidentally, the book tells me the governor of the prison was the Marquis du Châtelet. The year? 1749, the year of Émilie's death.
Having learned his lesson, he will be more cautious about what he publishes and attaches his name to, but will write incredibly prolificly (Curren keeps using the word "workhorse") and espouse such popular [irony alert] opinions as:
Theater: Classical French theater, you know, the Racine and Corneille kind that Voltaire is still producing, is overly affected, codified, and unnatural. Instead of stereotypes like "lover" and "domineering father", we need realistic, three-dimensional characters. Also working-class heroes.
During my one and only in-person meeting with Voltaire, shortly before he dies, we will argue about Shakespeare. I will [quoting the biography here] compare Shakespeare to the massive fifteenth-century statue of Saint Christopher that stood just outside the doors leading into Notre Dame Cathedral. While perhaps crude and rustic, this colossus was very much like Shakespeare...because "the greatest men still walk through his legs without the top of their head touching his testicles."
In case it's not clear, that means you and your stupid old-fashioned plays, Voltaire!
This meeting: *remains the only in-person encounter between Voltaire and Diderot, though the correspondence continues to be argumentatively friendly*
Sex: Incest, bestiality, and homosexuality are "natural", not sins. I myself experienced homoerotic attraction on at least one or two occasions, though I evidently never acted on it. No evidence I had any personal affinity for incest and bestiality, but I will definitely write unpublished fanfic where these things are presented positively. Also, free love, free love is cool!
Slavery: Go, future revolting slaves! Rise up and throw off your chains! (It's argued that Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution just a few years after Diderot's death, read the anti-slavery book that Diderot co-authored.)
Regicide: Sometimes called for. Will of the people and all that. Go future French revolutionaries, who will totally disclaim any association with me and treat my memory like shit after my death! [Reason: he was too freethinking even for them, especially the atheism.]
Colonialism: Omg, the LITERAL WORST. All Europe is complicit, not just slave-traders and merchants! STOP IT.
American Revolution: If you guys just left off with the BLATANT HYPOCRISY of espousing freedom while owning massive slave plantations, you'd be the literal best. Wish I weren't too old to travel there! Good luck! Come visit me! (He may have met Franklin in person, we're not sure, but they definitely had a mutual friend and knew of each other.)
Education: Forget Greek and Latin, we need to educate the majority of the population so that they know what their rights are and will defend them against tyranny.
Louis XVI: The French Revolution is coming. Joseph's not the only one who can see the writing on the wall. You [tu] need to fix everything right now, or else you're going to go down in history as a do-nothing tyrant. (Yes, he tu-ed King Louis in an actualfax published work that Louis got to read or at least hear about before banning.)
God: What God? Pure materialism, yeah! I myself will turn down a meeting with Voltaire when he's famous and I'm still an up-and-coming young man, because I feel like he's going to use the opportunity to try to convert me to deism. But we'll definitely argue about the existence of a deity by letter!
Seneca: 18C contemporaries, I know you all think Seneca was the worst, because he was a blatant hypocrite about being a luxury-rejecting Stoic while accumulating a fortune and cozying up to Nero, but here's several hundred pages about how he was the best, and sometimes you have to cozy up to tyrants to get anything done, even though it's questionable that we got anything done with our respective tyrants. (Seneca had more influence initially, but then he had to commit suicide. Diderot had no influence ever, but at least didn't have to commit suicide.)
Yeah, one of these things is not like the others. More on Diderot and tyrants below!
Diderot: Notice how I only got imprisoned for my first couple of works, and I spent my whole subsequent life in France happily churning out prodigious amounts of controversial work without ever getting imprisoned or exiled again. Beat that, Voltaire!
Voltaire: Notice how no one ever accused me of being conflict-averse.
Diderot and Catherine
Catherine the Great and Diderot come to each other's attention in Diderot's middle age, when she ascends the throne. Like Fritz, she tries to get a bunch of foreign intellectuals to join her court. Like Fritz, she's partially successful. Unlike Fritz, she actually pays well.
Diderot and d'Alembert decline her offer, d'Alembert humorously. Some of us have seen this quote before, but I'll repeat it:
D’Alembert quipped that he would have made the trip to Saint Petersburg, but he was too “prone to hemorrhoids, and they are far too dangerous in that country.” This was, of course, a joke made at Catherine’s expense: the Russian government had announced to the world that her late husband had died from complications related to piles, although virtually everybody knew that he had actually been murdered shortly after the coup by Catherine’s lover’s brother.
Wikipedia disagrees that we know that this "actually" happened, but in terms of what d'Alembert believed, certainly.
So Diderot and d'Alembert settle on a compromise of trying to get other famous French intellectuals and artists to go to St. Petersburg without actually going themselves. Do as I say, not as I do.
But one day, Catherine discovers that Diderot is short of money and trying to sell his famous book collection. She agrees to buy it for the asking price, with two additional terms:
1) That the collection remain in Diderot's possession for his lifetime.
2) That he act as her curator of this collection and accordingly accept a stipend from her.
In other words, free gift. Woot!
Catherine: This is how I poach people from Fritz.
But then, the payment gets delayed, and eventually Diderot has to write to Catherine asking what's up with that.
Catherine: Sorry! Incompetent underlings, you know how it goes. But since I don't want this to happen again, how about I pay you for the first fifty years of your curatorship up front? Fifty years from now [Diderot was 52], we can meet again to renegotiate the terms. (Yes, she really wrote that last bit as a joke.)
Diderot: OMG, Catherine is the best! So enlightened, so generous! Maybe I should go to St. Petersburg--just for a visit, mind you--and I can be the intellectual who influences a powerful ruler and gets my ideas put into practice. It'll be just like Socrates and Alcibiades, Seneca and Nero, Voltaire and Fritz!
No, he didn't say the last sentence, but I was reading the previous part thinking, "...Why do I feel like this is going to end badly?"
So Diderot goes to St. Petersburg. On the way, this happens:
Fritz: You should totally stop off in Potsdam on the way! I'd love to meet you in person. *bats eyelashes*
Diderot: I will detour around Potsdam specifically to avoid meeting you. You can't fool me, Old Fritz, it's 1774 and I've heard about you!
Fritz: *writes sour-grapes pamphlet trashing Diderot's literary career*
Fritz: *sends numerous copies to St. Petersburg*
Me when I read that: OMG, of *course* he wrote a pamphlet, it's like a reflex at this point. Also, you're not exactly disproving his point, Fritz.
So then Diderot's in St. Petersburg, and it's all informal fun times with the Empress, who really likes him and spends tons of time with him, and they talk about his liberal ideas, and she's totally on board. (This is 1774, so in between Heinrich visits.)
Until he realizes that nothing is actually changing. She's happy to chat philosophy with him all day, but it remains theoretical.
Diderot: Why are you all talk? You could actually change things.
Catherine: [actual quote] All your grand philosophies, which I understand very well, would do marvelously in books and very badly in practice. In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything...whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive.
So Diderot, who's resented for his royal favor by the court nobles, who are all eagerly reading Fritz's pamphlet by now and making life hard on him, becomes disillusioned.
Diderot: Catherine, you're nothing but a despot masquerading as an enlightened monarch! I'm leaving.
Me: Diderot, it's called "enlightened despot" for a reason.
Diderot: *leaves Russia, detours pointedly around Fritz again*
On his way back, he tells Catherine that he has a copy of her (published, at least) book expressing her political thinking, and he's going over it with a red pen with an eye toward publishing his commentary. She has her people break into his room, go through his things, and filch the copy.
It's like Fritz and Voltaire if both had been sane!
Now totally disillusioned, Diderot starts writing more incendiary stuff, much of which (like the "regicide is totally cool") doesn't get published until after his death. One thing that does get published is a satirical manual on ruling (the "mirror for princes" genre) that's full of advice to monarchs, like "only form alliances in order to sow hatred" and never, ever "raise one’s hand without striking." Curran says this satire was aimed mostly at Fritz, but also partly at Catherine. I immediately want to call it the Anti-Anti-Machiavel.
On the flip side of Fritz being terrible, Diderot's co-author, the one who, unlike Diderot, *did* put his name and picture on one of the most incendiary books, the "slavery is bad, colonialism is bad, Europeans are complicit, btw Louis [tu] the French Revolution is coming for you" book, predictably had to flee the country, and he ended up taking refuge in Prussia in 1781.
Fritz: See? "Enlightened" *and* "despot." Why choose, when you could be both?