Diderot

In his Images de Diderot en France, 1784-1913, Raymond Trousson shows how the philosophe's major texts were appropriated or repudiated between his death and the bicentenary of his birth.¹ A picture gradually emerges of how far Diderot's reputation has been from having a safe or permanent home. Other reception studies include René Tarin's monograph on responses to Diderot in the period from 1789 to the dawn of the First Empire.² A recent special issue of Diderot Studies contains a dossier devoted to the philosophe's reception up to the beginning of the twenty-first century,³ while a two-volume bibliography by David Adams allows researchers to situate shifting responses to Diderot's writing within a complex and sometimes extraordinary publishing history.⁴

The sources mentioned above have appeared since the late 1990s. But all of them, in different ways, are indebted to the renaissance of scholarship on Diderot in the middle of the twentieth century, brought about by Herbert Dieckmann's discovery in 1948 of the deposit of manuscripts and papers known as the fonds Vandeul.⁵ Above all, this inspired the handsome Œuvres complètes still being published by Hermann,⁶ and the Roth-Varloot edition of the correspondence, with its detailed critical apparatus.⁷ Further echoes are to be found in a 1988 volume that addresses the challenges presented by publishing a modern edition of Diderot based on the various sources and manuscripts.⁸ The Œuvres complètes edited by Roger Lewinter benefit from introductions and commentaries by major scholars and thinkers, including Jean Starobinski;⁹ and Garnier has produced excellent volumes of Œuvres, organized thematically.¹⁰ Among more recent reliable editions of selected works is the affordable 'Bouquins' series.¹¹ In 2004 the first of four new Pléiade volumes to be devoted to Diderot appeared; the second followed in 2010.¹² A new edition of the Histoire des deux Indes, on which Diderot collaborated, has also recently begun to appear.¹³

Like his works, Diderot's life has been the object of careful scholarship. Franco Venturi's La Jeunesse de Diderot remains an important biographical study.¹⁴ Subsequently, Arthur M. Wilson brought out Diderot: The Testing Years, which was to be incorporated more than a decade later in his still indispensable Diderot.¹⁵ Also in English is P. N. Furbank's extremely useful Diderot.¹⁶ In French, a clear, detailed, and well-written account is given by Pierre Lepape.¹⁷ More recently, Raymond Trousson has published a magisterial biography of the philosophe, as well as a concise account that is clearly aimed at a wider market,¹⁸ to which is now added Gerhardt Stenger's new biography, published to coincide with the tercentenary of Diderot's birth.¹⁹ As further biographies are written in the future, it is to be hoped that they might bring new emphasis to the interplay of influences ancient and modern that bear on Diderot's thought.²⁰

The 1950s saw the publication of key studies partly or entirely devoted to Diderot's thought by Leo Spitzer, Georges Poulet, Georges May, and Herbert Dieckmann.²¹ In 1963 Jean Fabre edited a special number of Europe, bringing together contributions by a generation of major scholars.²² Roger Lewinter's Diderot, ou, Les mots de l'absence was among the first to offer a radical reassessment informed by philosophy and critical theory.²³ Two important accounts of Diderot's political thought, by Yves Benot and Anthony Strugnell respectively, appeared in the early 1970s.²⁴ Other important analyses of the philosophe's thought were published in the 1980s, including titles by Élisabeth de Fontenay, Geoffrey Bremner, and Jay Caplan.²⁵ For the bicentenary of Diderot's death (1984) Jack Undank and Herbert Josephs brought out a collection that emphasized Diderot's protean tendencies;²⁶ many contributors had clearly taken to heart the philosophe's comparison of himself (in a letter to Sophie Volland of 10 August 1759) to a weathervane, turning with every wind.²⁷ But the following year, a collective volume on the late Diderot exposed 'une vision de cohérence, d'énergie, d'ouverture et de continuit...