A Brill Calendar: October 5

Diderot's Encyclopédie

Few men embody the spirit of their age as brilliantly as Denis Diderot, born October 5th, 1713 in Langres, a provincial French town.

When he died in Paris aged seventy, he was known, admired and occasionally feared by reactionary forces all over Europe as a wit, man of letters and as a philosopher. The attitude to Diderot presents a rare example of European unity!

This unity was enabled in the main by printing & publishing in the French language, a true ‘lingua franca’ during Diderot’s century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for some fifteen years a close friend, was just one year older. In his turn, Rousseau was one year younger than the British philosopher David Hume. French culture & language reigned supreme in this literate world, cherishing conversation and rational enquiry in an expanding planet & universe.

Publishing in Holland adapted smoothly to the French language as a vehicle for formulating and exchanging ideas. Decentralized, particularistic structures in the ‘quaint’ Republic saw to it that its authorities found themselves confronted – unlike their French equivalents - with meagre means to censure & suppress texts and thoughts effectively.

Denis Diderot, like most of his fellow-travellers no stranger in Holland, is eternalized as Chief Editor of the multi-volume ‘Encyclopédie’ (1751 – ’72), a Holy Grail of the Enlightenment and still a stunning icon of an era in which the European ‘Republic of Letters’ had little patience with national boundaries. Publishing for this unprecedented audience proved a boon to printers and booksellers in Holland, with the Leyden dynasty of Luchtmans as ‘primus inter pares’. It is seldom in European history that commerce and the life of the mind worked so closely together as during the lifetime of Denis Diderot.