 This combination of neglect and outright hostility pushed Diderot to the margins of French culture in the nineteenth century, and it would take another century before retrospective interest in his work would be renewed. Too systematically committed to his materialism, too vigorous in his irreligion, and too passionate and principled in his embrace of egalitarianism and universal democracy to be acceptable to anyone with the slightest worry about the rising tides of radical socialism and materialist freethought, Diderot became a pariah for many in nineteenth-century France and Europe. Only after 1870 was interest in his work revived, thanks in part to the new editions of his writings, which made him newly available to scholars and readers, and to the changing cultural and political climate. Soviet Marxists, for example, played a key role in reviving Diderot scholarship after 1900, and contemporary Diderot studies, which is thriving today, is largely a twentieth-century creation. Literary scholars led the way in establishing the contemporary scholarship, but recently scholars attuned to the very different character of philosophy and science in the eighteenth century have begun to return to Diderot’s work, finding in it the complex and sophisticated thinking that was his hallmark.