Brouille rousseau diderot biography

Biography of Diderot

The arc of Diderot’s long, varied, and eventful life can be summarized by reducing it to four distinct phases:

1. a period of maturation amidst struggle in the 1730s and 40s as the impoverished young Diderot sought to establish himself as a self-sustaining adult in Old Regime Paris through the pursuit of the highly precarious vocation of writing and publishing;
2. a period of intellectual ascent after 1749 as Diderot used the new financial stability and intellectual notoriety acquired through his supervision of the epochal Encyclopédie project to build a base for his mature career as an Enlightenment writer, critic, and philosophe;
3. a period of intellectual celebrity as the new freedom brought about by the final completion of the Encyclopédie project in 1765 allowed Diderot to produce some of his most important, if often unpublished, work;
4. a twilight period begun in 1773 after his financial burdens were fully eliminated through th