Abstract
DIDEROT AND THE DESPOTS The aim of this research is to pinpoint Diderot's political vocabulary in two important texts written by Diderot on his return from Russia in 1774: Principes de politique des souverains and Observations sur le Nakaz. It stresses the need to establish very carefully the text, before dealing with theoretical questions on the standards of language (most of the articles are « à voix multiples ») and the relationships between a semantic and a metaphorical network. The indexes of the two texts show how the contexts reveal the cooccurrences of the principal lexical forms (loi and nation, peuple, souverain, autorité, liberté and propriété). The importance of the metaphorical network of the body (metaphors of dependence and interdependence) leads us to relativise the idea of Diderot as a « libertarian ». If the writer is (or thinks he is) the master of his thought in its syntagmatic sequence, he is it less in his lexical choices that a paradigmatic or «stratigraphie» reading allows to better emphasize.