Denis Diderot

(1713 - 1784)

Assisted by the mathematician Jean d’Alembert beginning in the mid-1740s, Denis Diderot edited the Encyclopédie—a dictionary of the sciences, arts, and trades—to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baron d’Holbach, and Voltaire all contributed. In the following two decades, he also distinguished himself as a playwright and an art critic. Diderot’s fictional works The Nun, Jacques the Fatalist, and Rameau’s Nephew were all published after he died at the age of seventy in 1784.