As befits the biography of an author who laboured to make his treatment of ponderous philosophical questions as amusing as possible, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely entertains. Lively in tone and briskly recounting the philosophe's 71 years, it gives a good sense of the man, his tribulations and his labour as the principal force behind the Enlightenment's quintessential work, the Encyclopédie. Curran's book is dotted with black and white reproductions of prints, such as that of the fortified town of Langres, where Denis Diderot was born in 1713, or of the Château de Vincennes, where he was imprisoned for 102 days in 1749, as well as portraits of the period's major intellectual and political personalities. It provides the necessary contexts, be they familial, religious, or political, to make itself accessible to a readership unfamiliar with the age and its famed movement of ideas. More than a biography, it constitutes a stepping stone into the French Enlightenment.
Possibly in hidden homage to Arthur M. Wilson's magisterial two-volume Diderot(1957-72), this biography also divides the life in two: ‘Forbidden Fruits' and ‘Late Harvest'. The former covers what little we know of Diderot's youth, his education at Langres' Collège des Jésuites and later at Paris' Jansenist Collège d'Harcourt, the early publications that landed him in prison and the two decades that cover his editing the Encyclopédie. It presents Diderot as an exceptionally gifted young man, who left the comfort of his provincial family for an uneasy life in Paris. There, he quit the path that would have led to a successful career in the Church, trading it first for the precarious existence of a hack writer, then for the thankless, albeit well-paid, task of an editor forever playing hide and seek with the censors and ultimately pleasing no one, not even himself.
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