5 October — Denis Diderot was born — a French writer, Enlightenment philosopher, and playwright who founded the Encyclopedia, or Explanatory Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. A foreign honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Together with Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, d’Alembert, and other encyclopedists, Diderot was an ideologist of the Third Estate and a creator of the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment that prepared minds for the French Revolution.
When Diderot arrived in St. Petersburg in 1773 at the invitation of Catherine II, she welcomed the thinker and spoke with him for hours, but viewed his proposals skeptically: abolishing luxury at court, directing the freed funds to the needs of the people, and providing universal free education. The famous philosopher almost received from Catherine a large sum of money for his library (however, while the payments were still being made, the thinker died); the library was left at his disposal, and Diderot was paid a certain salary for managing it.