1713–1784 · French Enlightenment philosopher, editor of the Encyclopédie
Denis Diderot spent twenty-five years editing the Encyclopédie under censorship, was jailed once for his writing, and kept his most incendiary work unpublished in his lifetime — Rameau’s Nephew, D’Alembert’s Dream and this poem all reached print after he died. That habit is exactly why quotations attach to him so easily: much of the corpus circulated in manuscript before it was fixed in type, so wordings drifted, and a man with a genuine reputation for anticlerical fury is a plausible home for any anticlerical line going spare.