Conversations between truth and power

Denis Diderot (1713–84) is the least commemorated of the philosophes. Calls for his remains to be moved to the Panthéon on the tricentenary of his birth in 2013 were ignored. He has not taken his place alongside Rousseau and Voltaire in the Parisian vaults of fame, even though he was no less radical or progressive. Instead, his name has been given to a metro stop in the 12th arrondissement: Reuilly-Diderot. Even here, he comes second, tacked on by a hyphen, one of history’s and philosophy’s also-rans.

The injustice done to Diderot can partly be explained by the fact that he was a collaborative writer and thinker. He devoted decades of his life to editing the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie, a gargantuan attempt to compile ‘all the knowledge in the world’, comparable to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration. Between 1751 and 1765, 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of illustrations were published. A young man from an obscure background when he took on the task, Diderot felt old and wrecked as the last volume of the Encyclopédie rolled from the press. He complained to his mistress that the editorship had not made his fortune and had ‘nearly forced me either to flee France or lose my liberty’.

Diderot’s rickety finances were rescued by the patronage of Catherine the Great. After a coup d’état and the murder of her husband Tsar Peter III, Catherine became Empress of Russia in 1762. She read avidly the first volumes of the Encyclopédie and maintained her interest in the philosophes throughout her long reign. In 1765, hearing that Diderot was about to resort to selling his library to provide his daughter with a dowry, she offered to buy the collection herself for 15,000 livres, and proposed leaving it in Diderot’s possession for the rest of his lifetime while paying him an annual retainer to be a librarian of his own books.