Pour et contre Diderot

For and Against Diderot

Charles Péguy

The Petite République dated Tuesday, July 31 gave the text of the speech delivered the day before at the Salle Wagram by Anatole France for the celebration of Diderot:

DIDEROT, FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE

Citizens,

Masters who are our friends will come here to speak to us of Diderot the philosopher and of Diderot the scientist. It is not for me, it is for Duclaux, to show you in Diderot the precursor of Lamarck and Darwin; it is for Ferdinand Buisson, it is for Gabriel Séailles, to speak to you of the philosopher who preferred the useful examination of facts to the vain search for causes, and taught that one must ask of nature not: Why this? as children do, but: How this? in the manner of the chemist and the physicist.

For my part, I have but one word to say. I would like to show you Diderot as friend of the people.

He was an excellent man, the son of the cutler of Langres. A contemporary of Voltaire and Rousseau, he was the best of men in the best of centuries. He had a passion for mathematics, physics, arts and crafts. To know in order to love was the effort of his entire life. He loved men and the peaceful works of men. He formed the grand design of honoring the manual trades debased by military, civil, and religious aristocracies. The Encyclopédie, whose plan he conceived with genius and whose execution he pursued so courageously, the Encyclopédie is the first great inventory of the labor furnished by the proletariat to society. And this inventory, with what zeal, what ardor, what conscience Diderot and his collaborators took care to draw it up, is what the prospectus of the Encyclopédie reveals to us.

“One applied,” it states, “to the most skilled workers of Paris and of the kingdom; one took the trouble to go into their workshops, to question them, to write at their dictation, to develop their thoughts, to draw from them the terms proper to their professions, to draw up tables and define them, to converse with those from whom one had obtained memoirs, and (a nearly indispensable precaution) to rectify in long and frequent conversations with some what others had imperfectly, obscurely, and sometimes unfaithfully expressed.”

And Diderot adds:

“One will send draftsmen into the workshops; one will sketch the machines and tools; one will omit nothing of what can show them distinctly to the eye.”

Citizens,

At the hour when the allied enemies of science, peace, and liberty are arming against the Republic and threatening to stifle democracy beneath the weight of all that does not think or thinks only against thought, you were well inspired in recalling, in order to honor it, the memory of this philosopher who taught men happiness through work, science, and love, and who, turned entirely toward the future, announced the new era, the advent of the proletariat in the pacified and consoled world.

His penetrating gaze discerned our present struggles and our future successes. Thus Diderot, enthusiastic and methodical, gathered the titles of artisans to place them above the titles of nobles or of the great. And it is not possible to mistake his intentions, so extraordinary for the time. “It is fitting,” he said, “that the liberal arts, which have sung their own praises enough, henceforth employ their voice to celebrate the mechanical arts and to draw them out of the degradation in which prejudice has held them for so long.”

There we have, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the trades honored — a strange, new, marvelous thing. The artisans remain humbly bent beneath traditional disdain. And Diderot cries to them: Rise up. You believe yourselves contemptible only because you have been held in contempt. But upon your fate depends the fate of all humanity. Diderot inserted into the Encyclopédie the following definition of the manual worker, the day laborer:

“Day laborer, a worker who works with his hands and who is paid by the day. This class of men forms the largest part of a nation; it is their lot that a good government must have principally in view. If the day laborer is wretched, the nation is wretched.”

Is it saying too much after that, that Diderot, whose memory we celebrate today, Diderot dead for a hundred and sixteen years, touches us very closely, that he is one of ours, a great servant of the people, a defender of the proletariat — I shall dare say, taking the word in a broad sense, a socialist?

The victory of the proletariat is certain. It is less the disorderly efforts of our adversaries than our own divisions and the indecisions of our method that could delay it. It is certain because the very nature of things and the conditions of life ordain and prepare it. It will be methodical, reasoned, harmonious. It is already taking shape upon the world with the inflexible rigor of a geometrical construction.

ANATOLE FRANCE

Le Socialiste of August 5 published in its weekly column the following commentary:

The “socialist” newspapers have done the honors of their columns for the panegyric of Diderot delivered by the “socialist” Anatole France.

The speech is pretty. There is a fine citation in it, where the author of the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville defines the “day laborer” of his time, the one who was soon to become the “proletarian.”

Not only do we see no objection to the French bourgeoisie celebrating the memory of its great men, but we are ready to commemorate them with them.

What is simply unbearable is to transform the admirable workman of the Encyclopédie, one of the most powerful artisans of the bourgeois revolution, into a “defender of the proletariat.”

When it is precisely the rise of industry, due to the taking of political power by the Third Estate, that completed the emergence from the economic milieu of the type of “free worker,” entirely separated from the means of production and living exclusively by the labor of his hands.

To confuse with the “socialist” movement the preparation of the victory of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, which alone gave rise to the conditions in which socialism could later develop, is something that truly is not permitted even to members of the Académie Française.

The prospectus dates from November 1750.

We read from d’Alembert in the Preliminary Discourse of the editors to the Encyclopédie:

— Everything therefore determined us to have recourse to the workers.

But there are trades so singular and operations so delicate, that unless one works at them oneself, moves a machine with one’s own hands, and sees the work take shape before one’s own eyes, it is difficult to speak of them with precision. It was therefore necessary several times to procure the machines, to construct them, to put one’s hand to the work; to make oneself, so to speak, an apprentice, and to make bad works oneself in order to teach others how to make good ones.

Further:

Draftsmen were sent into the workshops. Sketches of machines and tools were made; nothing was omitted that could show them distinctly to the eye.

Further:

But this work — that of d’Alembert himself — considerable as it is, is much less so than that of Mr. Diderot, my colleague. He is the author of the part of this Encyclopédie that is the most extensive, the most important, the most desired by the public, and, I dare say, the most difficult to accomplish: the description of the arts. Mr. Diderot accomplished it from memoirs furnished to him by workers or by amateurs, whose names will soon be read, or from the knowledge he went to draw from the workers themselves, or, finally, from trades he took the trouble to go see, and of which he sometimes had models constructed to study them more at his ease. To this detail, which is immense, and which he accomplished with great care, he joined another no less so —

Finally the names of these amateurs and workers:

Mr. Le Romain, chief engineer of the island of Grenada, gave all the necessary information on sugars and on several other machines he had occasion to see and examine in his voyages, as a philosopher and attentive observer.

Mr. Venelle, very versed in physics and chemistry, on which he presented to the Academy of Sciences excellent memoirs, furnished useful and important clarifications on mineralogy.

Mr. Goussier, already named on the subject of stone-cutting, and who joins the practice of drawing to much knowledge of mechanics, gave Mr. Diderot the illustration of several instruments and their explanation. But he was particularly occupied with the illustrations of the Encyclopédie, all of which he reviewed and nearly all drew; with string instrument making in general, and with the construction of the organ, an immense machine that he detailed on the memoirs of Mr. Thomas, his associate in this work.

Mr. Rogeau, a skilled professor of mathematics, furnished materials on coinage, and several illustrations that he drew himself or supervised.

One may well judge that in what concerns printing and bookselling, the associated booksellers gave us by themselves all the assistance we could desire.

Mr. Prevost, inspector of glassworks, gave information on this important art.

The entry on brewing was done on a memoir by Mr. Longchamp, from whom a considerable fortune and much aptitude for letters had not detached from the profession of his fathers.

Mr. Buisson, manufacturer of Lyon, and formerly inspector of manufactures, gave memoirs on dyeing, on cloth-making, on the manufacture of rich fabrics, on silk-working, its drawing, twisting, winding, etc., and observations on the arts related to the preceding, such as those of gilding ingots, beating gold and silver, drawing them, spinning them, etc.

Mr. La Bassée furnished the articles on trimmings, the detail of which is well known only to those who have particularly occupied themselves with it.

Mr. Douet lent himself to everything that could instruct on the art of the gauze-maker, which he practices.

Mr. Barrat, an excellent worker in his kind, assembled and disassembled several times, in the presence of Mr. Diderot, the stocking frame, an admirable machine.

Mr. Pichard, a merchant hosiery manufacturer, gave information on hosiery.

Messrs. Bonnet and Laurent, silk workers, assembled and operated, under the eyes of Mr. Diderot, a velvet loom, etc., and another in brocaded fabric: the detail will be seen at the article Velvet.

Mr. Papillon, celebrated wood engraver, furnished a memoir on the history and practice of his art.

Mr. Fournier, a very skilled caster of printing typefaces, did the same for the casting of typefaces.

Mr. Favre gave memoirs on locksmithing, edge-tool making, cannon casting, etc., of which he is well informed.

Mr. Mallet, pewterer, at Melun, left nothing to be desired on the knowledge of his art.

Mr. Hill, English by nation, communicated an English glassworks executed in relief and all its instruments, with the necessary explanations.

Mesdames de Puisieux, Charpentier, Mabile, and de Vienne helped Mr. Diderot in the description of several arts. Mr. Eidous did in their entirety the articles on farriery and horsemanship, and Mr. Arnauld, of Senlis, those concerning fishing and hunting.

Finally, a great number of other well-intentioned persons instructed Mr. Diderot on the manufacture of slates, forges, foundry work, slitting, wire-drawing, etc.

The Manager: CHARLES PEGUY

This cahier was composed by unionized workers.