‘Le siècle s'est éclairé’: Philosophes , Phantoms, and Fanaticism

Abstract The quotation in my title and the three subsequent terms are taken from the most famous scene of Diderot's first play, Le Fils naturel , which has long been judged preachy and dramatically incompetent by critics. Judging by the evidence of the surviving eighteenth‐century performance texts, much of it was simply cut. This essay acknowledges the issue but/and contextualizes the scene, reading it as an attempt on the part of the philosophe to manage the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Louis XV in early January, the significance of which was still up for grabs a month or so later when Le Fils naturel was published. Re‐injecting some politics into Diderot's bourgeois domestic drama, whose œdipal dynamics have often been noted, the essay explores Diderot's concern with the national family drama of parricide and his mobilization of a discourse on fanaticism.