Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby coat, counted himself happy when his rich and brilliant friend, the Baron D’Holbach, invited him to a square meal once a week, and who was more than satisfied when four thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived at the same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot and Helvétius and Volney and Condorcet and a score of others, all of whom gained a much greater personal renown than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good people would never have been able to exercise the influence they did. It was more than a book, it was a social and economic program. It told what the leading minds of the day were actually thinking. It contained a concrete statement of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the human race. France had reached a point where those who had eyes to see and ears to hear knew that something drastic must be done to avoid an immediate catastrophe, while those who had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused to use them, maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement of a set of antiquated laws that belonged to the era of the Merovingians. For the moment, those two parties were so evenly balanced that everything remained as it had always been and this led to strange complications. The same France which on one side of the ocean played such a conspicuous rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom and addressed the most affectionate letters to Monsieur Georges Washington (who was a Free Mason) and arranged delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre, Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used to call a “sceptic” and what we call a plain atheist, this country on the other side of the broad Atlantic stood revealed as the most vindictive enemy of all forms of spiritual progress and only showed her sense of democracy in the complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher and peasant to a life of drudgery and privation. Eventually all this was changed. But it was changed in a way which no one had been able to foresee. For the struggle that was to remove the spiritual and social handicaps of all those who were born outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves themselves. It was the work of a small group of disinterested citizens whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated quite as bitterly as their Catholic oppressors and who could count upon no other reward than that which is said to await all honest men in Heaven.