Catherine the Great bought Diderot's library and paid him to keep it
By 1766 the chief editor of the Encyclopédie was broke and unrecognised. Russia's empress heard, bought his 3,000 books for 15,000 livres, left them with him as paid custodian and advanced fifty years of salary. Diderot had spent two decades on a banned work that helped prepare the ground for the French Revolution.
Denis Diderot was born in Langres, Champagne, in 1713, son of a master cutler. He idolised his sister Denise, calling her a female Socrates. Educated by Jesuits and awarded a Master of Arts by the University of Paris in 1732, he flirted with the priesthood and law before choosing to write and translate. His father disowned him, and a decade of bohemian poverty followed. Over chess and coffee at the Café de la Régence he befriended Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1742, and in 1743 he angered his father further by marrying Antoinette Champion, a devout Catholic without dowry or status.
In 1751 he and Jean le Rond d'Alembert launched the Encyclopédie. It was the first encyclopedia built from many named contributors and the first to cover the mechanical arts. Its secular voice, including doubts about biblical miracles, brought a Catholic ban in 1758 and a loosely enforced government ban in 1759. Contributors quit, some were jailed, and d'Alembert walked away in 1759, leaving Diderot as sole editor. He wrote about 7,000 articles himself and kept going until 1765, by the end fearing the whole thing had been wasted effort.
Official honours eluded him, including a seat in the Académie française. Catherine's patronage changed that; across 1773 and 1774 he stayed five months with her in Saint Petersburg, writing essays for her and talking with her several times a week.
In his lifetime he was known for plays and the Encyclopédie. Much of what is admired today, such as Rameau's Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist, appeared only after he died in 1784. His novel La Religieuse, about a woman forced into a convent and mistreated there, may have been inspired by his sister Angélique, a nun who died in her convent in 1749, a loss that possibly coloured his view of religion.
Source: Denis Diderot
