“It is raining bombs in the house of the Lord,” Diderot wrote to Sophie in 1768;
I am in fear and trembling lest one of the intrepid bombers should be hurt by the recoil. We have had the Philosophical Letters, translated or supposedly translated from the English of Toland, the Letter to Eugénie, The Sacred Contagion, The Life of David, or the Man After God’s Own Heart; it is like a thousand devils running riot. Ah! Madame de Blacy [Sophie’s moral younger sister], I very much fear the Son of God is at the door, the coming of Elijah is nigh, and the reign of the Anti-Christ is upon us. Every morning when I get up I look out of my window to see if the great whore of Babylon is walking the streets with her cup in her hand and whether there are signs in the sky. What are you doing at Isle [her family’s country château in Isle-sur-Marne]? Hurry back here, so that we can be present together at the general resurrection of the dead. If you wait for the sun to be extinguished, how will you get back to Paris? It is impossible to travel when you can’t see the back of your hand.
Diderot was making his own bomb. During the arrests and the trials and d’Holbach’s full-on assault on the establishment and on the Church, during the long, hot, late summer of 1769, he was incubating his most heretical book yet, the extraordinary D’Alembert’s Dream. He was virtually alone in Paris. Nanette and Angélique, now aged fifteen and the apple of her father’s eye, were away at Sèvres, staying at the country house of a family friend; Sophie and her sisters were at their country estate; Grimm was traveling in Germany; d’Holbach was in a temper at Grandval. Diderot was shackled to his desk, in sole editorial charge of the journal Literary Correspondence in his coeditor Grimm’s absence and preparing two volumes of illustrations for the Encyclopedia at once. “So you can see me,” he wrote to Sophie, “surrounded by engravings from head to foot.” He added, “I do not believe I have worked so hard in my life.”
For twenty-five years or so Diderot had been keeping up with scientific advances in anatomy, microscopy, physiology, and the natural sciences, speculating about the nature of life itself, and the origins of time and of species. The previous summer he had agreed to help the tutor of d’Holbach’s children, Nicolas La Grange, with his translation of Lucretius, and now Lucretius’ ideas about atoms were echoing in his head, too, alongside ideas drawn from Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Toland, Buffon, Réaumur, Trembley, Robinet, Bonnet, Needham, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. The challenge now was to choreograph and synthesize his own vision of nature, whereby “everything is bound up with everything else.”
He had tried out his new ideas on the company at Grandval earlier that summer. Diderot had declared that not only species but also planets can become extinguished. When asked what would happen to life, Diderot told the company with absolute certainty that though everything would disappear, the whole cycle of life would begin again just as if the sun had reignited. Would man also reappear? someone asked. Yes, he answered, man, “but not as he is. At first I don’t know what; and then at the end of several hundreds of millions of years and of I-don’t-know-whats, the biped animal who carries the name man.”
Diderot’s ideas were always formed in conversation, in dialogue with himself and with men and women living and dead. When he came to put his vision of nature’s complex interconnectedness into words, it came in the shape of a play for voices in three acts, a book written at white-hot heat in a few days in that sweltering summer. It was an expression of the complexity and multivoicedness of his own inner world and the world of d’Holbach’s salon. It also resembled the looping and digressive philosophical conversations that characterized Laurence Sterne’s anarchic Tristram Shandy, a book that Diderot had read and greatly admired a few years earlier.
D’Alembert’s Dream was a rehearsal space for the improvising philosopher. He gathered the speakers he needed from his immediate circle: Jean le Rond d’Alembert, the mathematician and philosopher who had been his collaborator for many years; d’Alembert’s younger mistress, the brilliant and articulate Julie de l’Espinasse, who ran a salon in the rue de Bellechasse that had come to rival d’Holbach’s; and Théophile de Bordeu, a distinguished doctor with a special interest in natural philosophy who was a collaborator on the Encyclopedia.
In August 1769, Diderot wrote to Sophie to tell her about the new work. “It is the height of extravagance,” he wrote, “but at the same time it is the most profound philosophy. It is quite cunning to have put my ideas into the mouth of a dreamer. You often have to dress up wisdom as folly to gain admittance for it. I had rather they said ‘But this isn’t as mad as you might think,’ than ‘Listen, here are some great truths.’ ”
Through the sleeping d’Alembert, Diderot described a self-sufficient, perpetually renewing and reorganizing universe in which “the whole is constantly changing.… All creatures are involved in the lives of others, consequently every species … [and] all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal.… There is nothing clearly defined in nature.” All living forms have developed from earlier different forms: “If the question of the priority of the egg over the chicken or of the chicken over the egg embarrasses you,” declares d’Alembert, “it is because you suppose that animals were at first what they are now. What madness! We no more know what they were than what they will become. The imperceptible earthworm that wriggles in the mud is perhaps on his way to becoming a large animal.”
Details from a plate illustrating the variations in birds’ beaks from volume 6 of the Encyclopedia.
Every living thing on earth is made up of germ cells organized in different ways, d’Alembert explains. Just as individual organs are submerged in the life of the body to which they belong, so are organisms submerged in the life of the collective. Nothing stays the same. Forms change not in response to a changing environment, but through an internal dynamism:
Let us assume a long succession of armless generations, and at the same time unremitting efforts, and you would see the two members of these pincers get longer and longer, cross each other at the back and come round to the front again, possibly develop fingers at the extremities and so make new arms and hands. The original shape of a creature degenerates or perfects itself through necessity and habitual functioning. We walk so little, work so little but think so much that I wouldn’t rule out that man might end by being nothing but a head.
Diderot’s vision of universal weblike connectedness was reflected in the organization of his encyclopedia, in which he arranged knowledge in branched patterns rather than distinct categories. It also gave him an organic explanation for the relationship he believed existed between the individual and the people. “Stop thinking about individuals and answer me this,” d’Alembert continues in his dream.
Is there in nature any one atom similar to another? No … Don’t you agree that in nature everything is bound up with everything else and that there cannot be a gap in the chain? Then what are you talking about with your individuals? There is no such thing; no, no such thing. There is but one great individual, and that is the whole. In this whole, as in any machine or animal, there is a part which you may call such and such, and when you apply the term individual to this part of a whole you are employing as false a concept as though you applied the term individual to a bird’s wing or to a single feather of that wing. You poor philosophers, and you talk about essences! Drop your idea of essences.
The webs in D’Alembert’s Dream differ from those Jahiz imagined in the deserts of the Abbasid Empire. These were not communities of interdependent organisms particular to the desert or to the mountain or the city, but living webs of connectedness in which every organism was joined to, and part of, everything else. D’Alembert illustrates his point by asking Julie to imagine trying to cut a swarm of bees apart from one another with a pair of scissors. He even suggests that polyplike humans might exist on other planets, splitting and regenerating constantly like Trembley’s tiny pond creatures. Imagine, d’A
lembert tells her: in such a world, no one would be reluctant to die. In the Dream, flux is at the heart of d’Alembert’s vision: “Tout est en un flux perpetual,” he declares. “If everything is in general flux, as the spectacle of the universe shows me everywhere, what wouldn’t the duration and vicissitudes of a few million centuries bring about?” Even Diderot’s prose reflects his vision of nature in a permanent state of flux, spilling out and over its own edges, with conversations ebbing and flowing from idea to idea.
When Grimm returned to Paris in mid-October 1769, Diderot read the dialogues to him. The two agreed that, not only because of the deeply heretical nature of the material but also because it had been put into the mouths of d’Alembert, Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse, and Bordeu, publication was out of the question for the moment. Nonetheless Grimm took the manuscript to get it copied. The dialogues were read aloud in small circles in Paris, to gasps and applause. Certainly d’Holbach would have seen them or heard them “performed.” When the secret inevitably leaked out, Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse was horrified, both on her own behalf and on behalf of her lover. D’Alembert insisted that the manuscript be destroyed. Diderot claimed later that he had indeed destroyed it, but at least one copy had already been made and was now in Grimm’s house, safely locked away.
Angélique was now sixteen and in love. This was not the time for her father to be throwing bombs among his friends; there must be no scandal. Vexed by the problem of finding a dowry for Angélique and wanting to involve his family in the negotiations, he tried to engineer a reconciliation with his brother, the Abbé Diderot, who had many years before washed his hands of his reprobate younger brother. Diderot traveled to Langres in the late spring of that year, but though he waited there six weeks, his brother still refused to see him. He would meet with his heretic brother, the abbé told family members, only if the heretic promised to write no more against religion. Diderot refused. The negotiation, Angélique later recorded, thus went to the devil.
Then, just a few months after the engagement had been agreed between the two lovers and their families, d’Holbach, increasingly politicized by new atheist friends such as the philosopher Jacques-André Naigeon, set off his own incendiary device, the ticking bomb that had been sitting on his desk in the rue Royale for several years, an atheist tract called A System of Nature: or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World (Système de la nature, ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral), which he had smuggled across the border into Amsterdam to be published. The baron had shown a draft of the work to Diderot, who complained privately that there was no wit, no shadow, no nuance, no multisidedness, no art, no pleasure or erotic play to be found in its pages. It denied God, arguing that all religions were created out of fear, ignorance, and anthropomorphism; that the mind was no more than the workings of the brain; that souls did not outlive the body; that the world was determined by strict laws. The baron underscored his case with references to the new sciences, but his real interest was in destroying the power of religion, not in exploring science and metaphysics. Worst of all, Diderot admitted to friends, the baron had made atheism dull. His book was an act of war, not of argumentation. It would set back the cause rather than advance it. But Diderot kept his own counsel. He was loyal to his old friend despite the differences of their temperament and their methods. They were, he reminded himself, on the same side.
Diderot, knowing that the authorship of the anonymous book would be attributed to him, left Paris on August 10, 1770, in case a warrant was issued against him. On the eighteenth, System of Nature was condemned to be burned along with Voltaire’s God and Men and d’Holbach’s Discourse on Miracles, The Sacred Contagion, and Christianity Unveiled. D’Hémery and his men meanwhile moved against the colporteurs and the middlemen of the trade and spent little time investigating the identities of the authors of such books. They wanted to contain the scandal and silence the books, not make martyrs out of famous intellectuals. When Diderot returned to Paris in October, he kept to himself, excusing himself with poor health, the weight of work, and his daughter’s illness. “[I have] acquired a taste for solitude which makes me shun company,” he wrote to Sophie in November. “I live here in my study, working, dreaming, and writing, not happy, but happier than I should be elsewhere it seems, since I don’t have to take off my dressing-gown.”
D’Holbach’s book caused a great stir among the Paris savants, effectively dividing the deists from the atheists. Voltaire, committed to deism and long impatient with d’Holbach’s declamatory ways, called it “a chaos, a great moral sickness, a work of darkness, a sin against nature, a system of folly and ignorance.” He wrote to the philosopher Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales: “I think that nothing has debased our century more than this enormous stupidity.”
Time passed. The scandal died down. Angélique married. Diderot fell in love again. In 1773, he traveled to Russia to meet with his great patron Catherine II and to The Hague, where he met the now very aged Bentinck brothers, who had employed the great Abraham Trembley. “With their solemn manner and their serious, austere way of speaking, I really felt as if I were with a Fabius and a Regulus,” he wrote, referring to two distinguished Roman politicians. And he often went back to gaze at the North Sea to listen to its rise and fall, thinking perhaps of Maillet’s description of “this fame Flux and Reflux” of time and motion and thinking, too, about his own impending death. He was an old man now. “I hardly ever go out,” he wrote. “When I do, I always go to the sea, which I have not yet seen either calm or rough. The vast monotonous expanse and the murmuring noise make you dream; I have good dreams there.”
Buffon was aging, too, and prepared to take more risks. For thirty years he had been philosophically guarded in return for protection from the members of the Sorbonne’s Paris Faculty of Theology, and for the continuation of his important public position at the Jardin du Roi. For his efforts he had achieved public acclaim, power, and royal patronage. Now he was seventy-nine years old. What had he to lose by breaking his contract? In 1778 he published his most controversial book yet, The Epochs of Nature (Époques de la nature). The book was seriously at odds with the beliefs of the Church and with Genesis. Buffon discussed the origins of the solar system; he proposed that the planets had been created by comets colliding with the sun and that the earth was much older than the Church claimed, having been in existence for seventy-five thousand years (he calculated the planet’s age in a series of experiments with cooling iron balls); he declared that Noah’s flood had never occurred; he also argued that some animals retained parts that were vestigial and no longer useful, which implied that they had evolved rather than been created. He described scenes from the beginning of time: torrents of molten matter pouring from the sun to form planets, a barely cooled earth teeming from the waters that rained from its atmosphere and quickly boiled away in thick vapors, volcanoes erupting, and gigantic earthquakes caused by the collapse of underground caverns. Although Buffon had consistently rejected evolutionary conclusions, through his bestselling and widely influential volumes of Natural History, he brought the idea of species mutability into public discussion along with a much expanded conception of the earth’s longevity. “My old age does not leave me the time to examine sufficiently to draw the conclusions that I glimpse,” he wrote. “Others will come after me.… They will weigh.… They will see.”
Buffon’s Epochs of Nature was immediately attacked by leading religious figures, and the Sorbonne had no choice but to denounce the book. Buffon offered a new retraction, very similar to the one he had signed in 1750. He promised to print it in the next edition, but when the time came he refused to do so. “The people need a religion,” he wrote scornfully to the young magistrate Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1785. “When the Sorbonne picked petty quarrels with me, I had no difficulty giving it all the satisfaction that it could desire: it was only a mockery, but men were foolish enough to be contented with it.”
In 1782, Grimm’s successor at Literary Correspondenc
e suggested to Diderot that the three dialogues of D’Alembert’s Dream be copied and circulated to subscribers. Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse had died in 1777 at the age of forty-four. D’Alembert, grieving, had retired into isolation. There were few people left to offend. Diderot, himself old and tired, gave permission, and a version of the text appeared in a limited edition of four successive numbers from August to November 1782. The full manuscript would not be printed until 1831, and then only in England.
When Diderot died in 1784 with no deathbed conversion, his body was buried in the Church of Saint-Roch, where Maupertuis was also buried, only a few streets away from the Hotel of the Philosophers, his coffin accompanied by fifty priests hired by his daughter. He had long intended this, explaining to d’Hémery forty years earlier that when he died he would allow the usual religious rituals to take place for the sake of his family but that he would refuse the sacraments. He was not the only man to compromise his beliefs. A year later, Buffon told Hérault de Séchelles, who visited him in Montbard, “When I become ill and feel my end approaching, I will not hesitate to send for the sacraments. One owes it to the public cult.” Diderot’s funeral rites, wrote the Mercure, “were of a splendour rarely accorded to power, opulence, dignity. A numerous gathering of distinguished people, academicians, and men of letters accompanied the funeral procession … such was the influence of his name that twenty thousand spectators waited in this sad procession, in the streets, in the windows, and almost on the rooftops, with the curiosity that the people reserve for princes.”
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