The Enlightenment in France by Frederick B. Artz

Author:Frederick B. Artz [Artz, Frederick B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, France, Modern, 18th Century
ISBN: 9780873380324
Google: HM78bCE1vxYC
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Published: 1968-01-15T00:39:03+00:00

5

DIDEROT

1. His Life and Work

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was the most versatile of the Philosophes. He wrote on philosophy, science, technology, theology, and education, and he also wrote plays, novels, essays, and art and dramatic criticism. He was the typical Philosophe who rejected all authority and tradition that interfered with free inquiry and violated the natural rights of man. He believed that religious intolerance was the greatest enemy of progress, and he pleaded passionately for toleration and intellectual freedom. Sainte-Beuve called Diderot “the Spokesman of the Century.”

Diderot’s life was a hard one, an affair of ups and downs. When he was in his early years as a writer, he was sometimes on the verge of starvation, and though he became a famous author and was an indefatigable worker, he never had more than a modest income, and he was never elected to the French Academy. Also he spent a term in prison. If on the one hand, he sometimes did not know where his next meal was coming from, on the other, he was later for a time a favorite at the court of Catharine the Great of Russia. Diderot’s head was always full of all sorts of ideas, plans, projects, and dreams. Never was there a richer or more receptive personality. He was so all-embracing in his outlook that he always kept a soft spot in his heart for ideas that his reason told him to abandon. Though an atheist, he, at times, praised the Catholic religion. So there were various Diderots within a single body.

Diderot was born in Eastern France, in Champagne, at Langres. His father was a skilled craftsman, a cutler, who had invented a number of surgical instruments. For over two hundred years, the family had been in the cutlery craft at Langres. Diderot’s father was a good, solid, bourgeois who did not understand his son, and often quarreled with him. His father was much respected in Langres by his neighbors and friends, but he had no experience that enabled him to understand his gifted son. Diderot, though he did not always get on with his father, greatly respected him, and twice made him the central character of an important literary work. The father wrote to the young Diderot, “My son, an excellent pillow is that of reason, but I find that my head rests even more softly on that of religion and the laws.” The father eventually learned to accept his rebellious son with good-humored tolerance.

The young Diderot was educated by the Jesuits in whose school at Langres he won many prizes. Then his father took him to Paris for further training. His father hoped he would enter the Church, and, failing that, would study law. After leaving the secondary school in Paris, Diderot studied a while at the University of Paris. After Diderot left school, he read law for a time, but found he was not interested. Then he tried tutoring wealthy youths, but he hated that. And finally he found work as a free-lance author taking such miserably paid positions as he could find.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.