Modern Rebellion before the Terror: Reading Diderot after Camus

The chapter begins (Part i) by recalling some key features of Camus’s pensée de midi and his own two- sided identity, spanning ancient mesure and modern rebellion. Its major work (Part ii) is to look through a Camusian lens at an enigmatic, vital 18th century figure: the leading philosophe and Encyclopaedist Denis Diderot. Diderot, the paper argues, represents one modern figure to
whom Camus might have appealed, in due measure, in his own search for antecedents to his neoclassical “midday thought” and its appeal to rebellion (as against revolution) as révélatrice of orienting, inalienable values.