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SIX The Drama of Inheritance and the Question of Revolution A Conversation of a Father with His Children What is the relation between literature and the question of inheritance? And what does this have to do with the questions of history and of revolution? These will be the questions at the center of my reading of a rather enigmatic philosophical story by Diderot, A Conversation of a Father with his Children: Or, The Danger of Setting Oneself Above the Law. The story, which I will read as a philosophical parable or as an allegory for several vast questions associated with the relation between the thinking of the enlightenment and the French revolution, is written in the form of a dramatic conversation between a father and his children. Diderot, still seeming to hear his late father’s voice, begins the story by reflecting back on an evening he and his two siblings spent conversing with their father. On this occasion, the father tells his children of an incident occurring years before, which might have caused them to lose their inheritance and be left destitute. “I still shudder when I think of it,” he tells them. “Would you believe it, my children: There was a moment when I was on the point of ruining you all—yes, ruining you utterly” (127).1 The incident transpired as follows: Being well respected in the region for his fairness of judgment and righteous ways, Diderot’s father was summoned by the extremely poor relatives of a rich old priest to take charge of the dead priest’s effects and to supervise the distribution of his inheritance. Meticulously going through the priest’s letters, the father finds, in an almost forgotten, dusty box, among many irrelevant papers, a very old will, which designates as heirs to the priest’s fortune some rich Parisian booksellers, 151 152 DRAMATIC EXPERIMENTS who are not the priest’s relatives and whose letters sent to him over the years he did not even seem to bother opening. Appalled by the apparent injustice of a will that would deprive the desperate poor relatives of their rightful inheritance, Diderot’s father finds himself torn between two options: should he burn the will and distribute the money to those he perceives as the just heirs, or should he uphold the law, no matter how unjust, and follow the will of the dead priest? Long hesitating, holding the will over the fire without being sure what to do, not even certain—as he sees in his mind’s eye the misery and pain of the poor—whether the voice of justice that he seems to hear, beyond the will’s stipulation, is not rather a voice of pity and commiseration, the father decides, at the last moment just before burning the will, that it would be best for him to seek advice and not to decide on his own what to do. Asking for the counsel of a highly regarded, wise religious man for advice, Diderot’s father is told the following: Who has given you authority to interfere with the will of the dead? No matter how you view the situation, the will cannot be broken; no one has the authority to do so. If you would like the poor to have the inheritance, you should give out of your own resources the equivalent amount to the booksellers, the legal heirs. Taking the wise man’s word as a final judgment, he decides to follow the priest’s will to the letter, and is horrified at the consequences that might have followed had he burned the will. For surely, he tells his children, I would have felt obliged to make restitution to the booksellers; I would have given them the money out of my own pocket, and you would have lost your inheritance, remaining impoverished. Upon hearing their father’s story, the children split in their responses, entering into a dramatic conflict. Diderot’s brother, himself a priest, sides without ambivalence with the wise man who advised his father. A will is a will, the law is the law; there is nothing more to say. For Diderot, on the other hand, and equally without ambivalence, the father’s decision to uphold the will was practically a crime and a sin; the law hides an injustice, the will is not the last word: “I think,” he says, “that if ever you did a bad action in your life, it was then; and that if, after...

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