Historiographical heritages: Denis Diderot and the men of the French Revolution
From Firenze University Press Journal: Diciottesimo Secolo
Giuseppina D’Antuono, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”
The aim of this article is to analyze the debate on the most recent historiographical readings that have rekindled the hermeneutic dialectic on the relationship between the political thought and works of Denis Diderot and the spokesmen of the French Revolution. Over time, the literature on Diderot has become stratified and distorted his political vocabulary. Diverse images of Diderot have emerged: inspirer of Danton, idealist philosopher, lawyer of the bourgeoisie, friend/enemy of the people, and even conspirator and master of the terrorists of the year II.
Most recently, the figure of the proto-Jacobin Diderot has enriched the mosaic of representations of the philosopher, but at the same time, it has posed new questions regarding the binomial of Diderot and the French Revolution.From a general point of view, research on the circulation and legacy of Diderot’s political ideas in Europe have mostly been interpreted in terms of analogy or in contrast to the event, ideas, and men of the French Revolution. The image of the father of the nation, as well as that of moderate friend, was associated with Diderot for more than two hundred years. Some believed he was the theorist of the moderatism of Barnave and Brissot, while others took a completely opposite view and saw in Diderot the man who inspired the tyrannicide of the French King.By examining these and similar interpretations, we may state that in Diderot’s writings we can see the story of the ideas of a direct and representative democracy, a general will and universal peace, and a rich corpus of knowledge matured during the Enlightenment, which was subsequently elaborated by the proponents of the Revolution in their speeches.
Therefore, these are the observations that we propose as a synthesis of the first phase of a research on Diderot’s legacy in Italy, which enabled us to confirm the idea of the philosopher as the father of democratic Europe and to whom we may attribute the political culture that created contemporary Western democracies.Even today, the binomial Diderot-French Revolution is still ambivalent, as has been demonstrated by interpretations such as those by Raymond Trousson and Jacques Proust, who highlight the influence of Diderot’s legacy on the protagonists of the late eighteenth century, especially the members of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. In 1967, Jacques Proust argued that the investigation into the success of Diderot and his works could move forward by carrying out research following a genealogical method. By examining the biographical information of Diderot’s students, it would be possible to determine Diderot’s influence on the men of the French Revolution.
In contraposition to Daniel Mornet, who said that «dans l’ordre politique de la Révolution l’influence de Diderot fut nulle», Proust recognized the political role of the philosopher in the Revolution and identified a hermeneutical key in Diderot. The biography of the Constitutionalist Barnave — which Proust urged scholars of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution to study — was in fact paradigmatic of the research path for scholars of Diderot’s legacy in the revolutionary era. In short, it was necessary to work on the biographies of the revolutionaries and their political formation. It took almost thirty years, but Raymond Trousson and later René Tarin highlighted the importance of study-ing the historical binomial Diderot–French Revolution in a specific way.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/ds-11696
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/ds/article/view/11696
