Happy Belated Birthday, Denis!

On October 5 in 1713 Denis Diderot was born in Langres, France. His life's work was his famous Encyclopédie, which was never published in its proper form as the bookseller - fearing the government - had damaged the proof sheets. The Encyclopédie was, in fact, formally banned in France as being dangerously subversive - and, as a work of the Enlightenment which took for granted the justice of religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the value of science and industry, it probably was. (But some things deserve subversion, do they not?)