Tea at Trianon: Denis Diderot and the Men of the French Revolution

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 16, 2022

Denis Diderot and the Men of the French Revolution

From Firenze University Press Journal:

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. (Read more.)