Marriage Quote by Denis Diderot

Diderot is doing that very Enlightenment trick where a sentence walks in dressed like moral instruction and leaves as social sabotage. The first clause flatters bourgeois anxiety: if divorce is possible, spouses behave better. It’s an argument from incentives, not sanctity. Marriage stops being a sacrament you endure and becomes a contract you maintain. The subtext is almost managerial: accountability improves performance. That alone would have ruffled a church-state order built on permanence, hierarchy, and the convenient captivity of women.

Then he twists the knife with the kicker: divorce “improve[s] morals” and “increase[s] the population.” The provocation is deliberate. He hijacks the era’s favorite justifications - public virtue and demographic strength - to sell a reform that authorities would label decadent. Morals, for Diderot, aren’t preserved by locking people in; they’re improved by giving them exits that discourage cruelty, neglect, and public hypocrisy. Divorce becomes less a celebration of romantic freedom than a pressure valve that keeps domestic life from curdling into resentment and vice.

The population line is classic Diderotian irony with an editor’s eye for the headline. He’s baiting pronatalist politics: if the state cares about births, it should care about marriages worth sustaining. The implication is that miserable unions depress intimacy; humane ones multiply it. In 18th-century France, where Catholic doctrine made divorce effectively unthinkable and separations were unequal and stigmatized, this reads like a neatly sharpened instrument: reform smuggled in as common sense, heresy delivered as civic prudence.