Denis Diderot was born in the countryside of Langres, France in 1713. In his early life he excelled in education, leading him to be placed in the Jesuit College of Louis-Le-Grand in 1726. This was in the interest of his father, who believed Diderot’s educational proclivities could be a prospective value to the church and general social uplift. He won prizes in mathematics and rhetoric while he attended, and even contemplated an ecclesiastical career. However, after nearly reaching full ordination, Diderot decided it was important for him to continue his studies, which led him to Paris to complete a degree from Collège d’Harcourt and continue his study at Sorbonne for three years, focusing on natural philosophy and theology. For a short time he considered a career in Law, but ultimately came to pursue a career in writing.
Diderot’s early career as a writer was financially bleak amidst the constrained market of Parisian publishing at this time. He would live as a completely independent writer, a life characterized by financial inconsistency, artistic expression, and intellectual exploration. He was among the first artists in Paris to lead this kind of life, later identified as Bohemianism: an era that in Paris reached the height of its popularity from ~1830-1930. To make ends meet, Diderot wrote book reviews and periodicals for popular Parisian journals. He gained more traction with his work’s success as a translator in the early 1740’s, but was still financially destitute.
However, it was in the 1740s that Diderot would finally gain traction as a respected author, and leave his financial troubles behind. Through the urbane social network of Paris, Diderot would find a social circle that was conducive to the philosophical and artistic inquiry he needed to develop his ideas. At this time he wrote multiple books, establishing himself finally as a known philosopher. His public acclaim reached one of its peaks in 1746, where Diderot is said to have had correspondence with Voltaire. This acquaintance, although monumental, intensified the French Police’s surveillance of Diderot which started after the controversial publication of Pensées Philosophiques. The later publication of Lettre sur les aveugles, though, led to his three month imprisonment in 1749 for his controversial opinions.
Despite the intense financial and social fluctuations of his career, Diderot, after finishing his sentence in 1749, would finally land onto a 26 year long project that would define and shape his career forever: his work on l’Encyclopédie. Diderot would become an editor who not only framed the Encyclopédie in consideration to his own religiously controversial works, he would frame his writings with regard to the happenings of French enlightenment: an era that questioned religion, traditional authority, art, and believed in change through rational inquiry. The Encyclopédie would go through numerous challenges with the French Government and church. Most notably in January of 1759, the work would be condemned by the French Government, with its text being handed over to the church and government attorneys. In addition to the challenges with the government, there were also the social challenges he faced with the intense controversy the public felt for him. However, even with the background noise of controversy and the seizing of the Encyclopédie’s text, Diderot and his partner in the project D’Alembert would continue writing it, at times in secrecy, finally finishing the Encyclopédie in 1772.
It would be his later life, in the 1760-70s, that Diderot would finally be able to find some repose in financial comfortability and good public standing long after his contemporaries would have found this same repose. It came later in Diderot’s life due to his project of the Encyclopédie, which would not let him fall into the intellectual background of French society until after its publication. It is at this time that he would write plays, novels, literary criticism, and explore more deeply a world of aesthetics that peripherally interested him throughout his long career. His final work would be a fiction piece entitled The Nun, completed four years before his death in 1784, and published twelve years later.