The Generation of Enlightenment: Philosophes, Fatherhood, and the Practice of Pedagogy

Although philosophes of the early Enlightenment such as Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Rousseau invoked classical and medieval arguments for why they should abstain from marriage and fatherhood, philosophes of the later Enlightenment espoused the ideals of sentimentalism and actively sought loving marriages and devoted themselves to raising their children.  Savants’ embrace of domestic life opened new avenues for experimentation with and adaptation of knowledge.  Much Enlightenment thought addressed questions of education and family life and, buoyed by the prevalence of empiricism and experimentation, thinkers tested their theories about education and human relationships on their own families. These exercises offered philosophes a means to translate their social hypotheses into practice and loaned empirical authority to their theoretical writings.
     This paper focuses on the domestic experiences of Denis Diderot and his daughter Angélique.  Diderot – a vehement critic of Catholicism and convent education– hired a female tutor to provide anatomy lessons to Angélique so that she, unlike girls enclosed in convents, would have a better understanding of sexual relations and childbirth.  He then used this experience, which he claimed had made Angélique more knowledgeable but also more virtuous, to encourage Catherine II to found a new system of secular, science-based anatomy courses in Russia.  For Diderot, the experience of raising his daughter according to his ideals not only benefited himself and his daughter: it also provided the means for him to advocate for the adoption of his ideas on a much broader scale.