Word: diderot
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...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...
...appeared eager to impress on his guests that he was not just a saber rattler. To establish his superior knowledge of French letters, the ex-librarian told his stunned interlocutors that he had read "Diderot and all your Encyclopedists. I've even read that 18th century author who wrote that remarkable book, The Mechanical Man." None of Mao's guests knew what book he was talking about, and they were too polite to ask.* "Above all," Mao said, "I'm an admirer of Napoleon. There isn't one of his works I don't know...
...Young U.S. Living in the times of the French Enlightenment, Houdon became one of the first sculptors to live independent of noble patronage. He did the great intellects: Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, D'Alembert, Buffon. Commissions then brought him to the young U.S. to sculpt Washington in his stolid soldierliness, Franklin in his honest wisdom, Jefferson in his aristocratic brilliance...