Word: diderot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...career used to send obscene letters to relatives; in 18th century London, privies were called Jerichos; Boswell went to bed with Rousseau's wife precisely 13 times. The Durants can scarcely resist an anecdote or an aphorism. The borrowed ones are usually the best, as for instance Diderot's Encyclopédie distinction between the words bind and attach: "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." But the authors also do reasonably well on their own, as when they say of Louis XV that he "lacked the art of dying...
...come about that a man born poor, losing his mother at birth and soon deserted by his father, afflicted with a painful and humiliating disease, left to wander for twelve years among alien cities and conflicting faiths, repudiated by society and civilization, repudiating Voltaire, Diderot, the Encyclopédi and the Age of Reason, driven from place to place as a dangerous rebel, suspected of crime and insanity, and seeing, in his last months, the apotheosis of his greatest enemy-how did it come about that this man, after his death, triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education, elevated...
...molested by a monk? A lesbian mother superior? A suicidal sister? Shocking material indeed, even if it is only on film. The movie is a new French production called Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Diderot, and last week it was the center of a bitter controversy that has once more put the government of Charles de Gaulle under a withering verbal cannonade. Reason: it is the first film in French history whose showing has been banned by the government both in France and abroad...
...controversial film is an adaptation of Diderot's 18th century novel of an illegitimate girl forced into a convent life. In the Encyclopedist's book, Suzanne threatens suicide after one mother superior tries to seduce her, a monk tries to rape her and various other unconventional happenings deprive her of both vocation and bodily peace. Diderot meant his book less as an anticlerical attack than an attack on the corrupt society of the 18th century, which frequently forced illegitimates into the church. Recognizing it as such, Rome never placed it on the Index of forbidden reading for Catholics...
...anti-Christian philosophers were ready to defend this paradise. The Encyclopedist Diderot warned that Europeans would despoil the Tahitians' Eden with "dagger and crucifix." The Rousseauian enthusiasts overlooked a few things: the Tahitians waged war and practiced human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism; they even had priests, an unamiable group who killed all their own offspring, apparently on trade-union principles...