Conversation of a Father with His Children

A family argument after supper over whether the law must always be obeyed. The father, a plain honest tradesman, insists it must; his sons, one of them plainly Diderot, press him with cases where obeying the law would do an injustice and breaking it would do right. The conversation weighs the written law against private conscience without ever settling which should prevail.

The danger of setting oneself above the law. Even where conscience seems to justify breaking a law, Diderot's subtitle flags the peril: if each person decides for themselves when a law binds, the law binds no one, and order dissolves into a mass of private exceptions. The warning weighs against the clever son and lends the obedient father's position its real force.

The dialogue's sharpest case: a will leaves a fortune to a rich stranger and nothing to the poor relatives who deserve it. Should a decent man burn it, breaking the law to do justice the law will not? The example is designed to make obedience look heartless and conscience look lawless at once, which is exactly why Diderot leaves it unresolved.

Because he thinks both sides hold part of the truth. The reasoning son sees real injustices the law commits; the plain father guards a value, the rule of law itself, that the son's exceptions would corrode. Awarding either a clean victory would falsify the problem. Diderot is honest enough not to hand himself, in the figure of the son, the win his cleverness might seem to earn.

His own father's, in the provincial town of Langres, where Didier Diderot was a master cutler. Diderot stages his real family and wrote the piece after his father's death, so it reads as a settling of accounts: a portrait of ordinary, uncynical virtue set against his own cleverer, more dangerous conscience. The autobiography is what gives the abstract question its weight and tenderness.