In the period known to British historians as “the long eighteenth century,” that is, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the word “genius” came to assume its modern meaning. Before this time it had referred either to a nonhuman spirit which acted as an individual's guardian, providing advice or support in the form of superhuman wisdom or strength, or to a universal spirit of generation. During this period it came to be applied to a particular kind of inventive human being whose natural talent (ingenium) made possible the outstanding achievements previously believed to have been brought about by a (or the) genius. The external or universal spirit became an individual with outstanding natural powers.

The modern concept of genius is, therefore, one aspect of that overall change in which the balance between the gods' bounty and human achievement shifted decisively toward the latter. Just as political rule came to be justified not by divine right or historical precedent but rather in terms of (more or less) democratic consent, or as, later, May Day ceased to be a celebration of the earth's fertility and became an assertion of the power of labor, so genius became a wholly human phenomenon, independently productive and deriving its value from itself. The sentiment which gave rise to the democratic imperative of Rousseau's Contrat social was the same as that which informed Blake's statement, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's.”

Editorial preface

The first volume of the Encyclopéedic announced that Diderot was the author of the work's unsigned articles, and the editor of articles marked with an asterisk. The second volume, however, stated that unsigned articles could be by different authors, including persons who did not wish their identity to be known, while Diderot's asterisk was to prove scarce after the publication of volume VIII, and to vanish altogether after volume x. In the absence of surviving manuscript or other evidence, the correct attribution to their authors of Encyclopédic articles has therefore proved difficult and sometimes a matter for conjecture. Diderot seems to have been responsible for over 5,000 articles or editorial additions in all (many of just two or three lines), of which more than 3,000 appeared in the first two volumes alone. Even when their authorship is not in question, the originality of these contributions often remains doubtful, especially with regard to two subjects on which he wrote extensively: synonyms, for which he drew heavily on the work of the abbé Girard; and the history of philosophy, for which he relied largely on Brucker. Sometimes Diderot cited his source, merely adding a few comments of his own; sometimes he so modified the original text as to make a wholly novel point, not least by diverting his readers' attention to a second article, which informs the real sense of the first.

Editorial preface

Diderot drafted his review of Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde in 1771, shortly after the work was published. Although in the Voyage the material on Tahiti occupied just two brief chapters, it was that material which most attracted Diderot's attention; and his treatment of it, together with an amplification of his direct appeal to Bougainville in the review to leave Tahiti as he found it, forms the major part of the first two sections of the Supplément. By October 1772 Diderot had recast and expanded the review as a dialogue within a dialogue which took up themes from two of his short stories that would first be circulated in Grimm's Correspondance littéraire in 1773, and in this new form the Supplément, now described as a ‘Suite des contes de M. Diderot’, was also circulated in successive issues of that manuscript periodical. He thereafter continued to enlarge the work, mainly in the final section, to which some of the additions may even be by his disciple and editor of the 1798 collection of his Œuvres, Jacques-André Naigeon; and he then intercalated the episode devoted to Polly Baker, drawn from the original (1770) edition of Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. The Supplément was first published, from an unknown manuscript, and without the Polly Baker episode, by Bourlet de Vauxcelles, in 1796, in a collection of pieces entitled Opuscules philosophiques et littéraires.

Editorial preface

Catherine's Nakaz was published in Russian in 1767 and in French in 1769. The work was translated into many European languages and was widely read, going through thirty editions in four years. A critical edition by M.D. Chechulin was published in St Petersburg in 1907. An English translation appears in W.F. Reddaway, Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge University Press, 1933).

Diderot began writing his Observations sur le Nakaz on his return journey from Russia in 1774. Another unpublished commentary was written by the physiocrat G.F. Le Trosne, under the title L'Esprit de l'Instruction, which has recently been rediscovered in St Petersburg by Georges Dulac. Diderot must have seen this work in 1775, before it was sent to Catherine, because he cites it and uses it as the basis of his discussion of physiocratic ideas in his Observations. From certain parallels between passages in the Observations and the third edition of the Histoire des Deux Indes, which Diderot was working on between 1777 and 1780, it seems that a final revision of the text must have taken place during those years.

After Diderot's death a copy of the work was sent to Catherine, together with other unpublished material and Diderot's library. Catherine reacted angrily to what she read and may have had the copy destroyed; no version of the work has been found in St Petersburg.

Towards the end of his life, after he had completed his editorial labours for the Encyclopédic, Diderot wrote extensively about politics. Some of his earlier writings on the subject, though influential, were unoriginal; much of his later work was unpublished in his lifetime. Our selection of texts has been formed from those which were the most important when they appeared, or which give the fullest treatment of his political thought. The first category includes his articles for the Encyclopédie and his contributions to the Histoire des Deux Indes, works which were widely circulated and attracted much attention. The second category includes the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, the most speculative of his political writings, and the Observations sur le Nakaz, his most precise, detailed and also broadest discussion of contemporary issues.

Any selection of course entails omission, and ours does scant justice to the range of Diderot's literary styles and skills, for instance the conversational tone of his Mémoires pour Catherine II or the polemical quality of the Apologie de l'abbé Galiani, a defence of Galiani's critiqueof the physiocrats. If Diderot's forceful attack against the despotism of Frederick II in his Pages contre un tyran has its counterpart in the Histoiredes Deux Indes, nothing in our selection can capture the idiosyncratic flavour of his last work, the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1782), largely devoted to Seneca, but interspersed with reflections on the role of the philosophe in times of oppression and a final volley in the protracted quarrel with Rousseau.

The Encyclopédie

The reign of Louis XIV, le roi soleil, may have marked the epitome of absolutist government in Europe, but that achievement did not survive him. Although monarchical power, buttressed by divine right, had become unlimited in theory, it was in practice often ignored and occasionally even defied. The separate regions of France preserved their own traditions and administration, while the legal and tax privileges of the hereditary nobility and Church ensured that some of the most prosperous sections of society retained a vested interest in resisting the dominance of the throne. In the eighteenth century, moreover, new intellectual forces appeared which undermined thes piritual and moral authority of the French state. In their battleagainst superstition and intolerance, and by their call for a rational exercise of power, the philosophes of the Enlightenment challenged the assumptions of absolutism and condemned the brutalities of autocraticrule. Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau each championed liberal principles of toleration against religious bigotry and the despotic tendencies of unrestrained government, and they were rightly perceived by their contemporaries as opponents of the same dark forces of prejudice and injustice which still held sway under the ancien régime. Although they envisaged disparate, even in compatible, programmes of reform, they were united in seeing the prevalent institutions of politics, religion and society as corrupt. Each espousedideals of freedom against the despotisms of their day, and at least to this extent upheld a common cause of enlightenment.

Editorial preface

Among the manuscripts found in the Fonds Vandeul were a number relating to the abbe Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. Diderot's participation in this work had been rumoured during the 1780s and had been evident to scholars since the late nineteenth century, but only with this discovery did a full appraisal of his contribution become possible. It is now clear that Diderot used Raynal's work to publish a great deal of his own material, and this has transformed our knowledge of his thought in the final years of his life.

Two substantial collections of these writings have been published by Gianluigi Goggi: Pensées détachées (Siena, 1976) and Mélanges et morceaux divers (Siena, 1977). Selections have appeared in Roger Lewinter's edition of Œuvres complètes de Diderot (Paris, 1973) and Yves Benot's volume of extracts from Raynal's Histoire (Paris, 1981). A critical edition of Diderot's contributions is being prepared by Goggi for the Hermann edition of the Œuvres complètes. In the meanwhile scholars can consult the invaluable analysis provided by Michèle Duchet in Diderot et l'Histoire des Deux Indes ou l'écriture fragmentaire (see Further reading), which indicates what seem to be all Diderot's contributions, identified by reference either to material from the Fonds Vandeul or to other texts by him. For complex reasons not all the attributions are certain, and, since we know that Diderot allowed Raynal to alter his text at times, we cannot always be sure that the printed version reflects his exact words.