# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/denis-diderot
# Generated: 2026-09-02T01:37:04.294Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/denis-diderot"
name: "Denis Diderot"
slug: "denis-diderot"
description: "He co-founded the Encyclopédie, the first great encyclopedia of the modern world — and for that sin the Church banned it, the government tried to kill it, and his collaborators fled or went to jail. Diderot stayed, writing 7,000 articles himself, broke and convinced it was all a waste."
tagline: "French Enlightenment philosopher writer and encyclopædist (1713–1784)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Denis_Diderot_-_Alix_-_Vanloo.png"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "France"
  isoCode: "FR"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1713-10-05"
deathDate: "1784-07-31"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
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  momentum:             16.24731250790439
  historical:           25.280628
  currentAttention:     75.96428571428571
  sourceConfidence:     70
  profileCompleteness:  80
  trendDirection:       "BREAKOUT"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  38
  category: 46
tags:
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  - name: "Poetry"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Diderot studied philosophy with the Jesuits, flirted with the clergy, then told his father in 1734 he'd be a writer instead — and was promptly disowned. He spent the next decade scraping by, producing fiction and essays in the 1740s, including the novel Les Bijoux indiscrets. In 1751 he and Jean le Rond d'Alembert launched the Encyclopédie, the first encyclopedia to credit contributors by name and chronicle the mechanical arts; its secular skepticism about Biblical miracles enraged the Church, which banned it in 1758, then the French crown a year later. Contributors scattered, some jailed. D'Alembert quit in 1759; Diderot soldiered on alone until 1765, writing around 7,000 entries, increasingly despondent, sure the whole thing was for nothing. He stayed poor and unrecognized — denied a seat in the Académie Française — until 1766, when Catherine the Great of Russia bought his 3,000-volume library for 15,000 livres, paid him 50 years of custodian salary up front, and later hosted him at her court in Saint Petersburg for five months of weekly essays and conversation. His plays and encyclopedia work made him known in life; his best writing — Jacques the Fatalist, Ra