Encyclopédie

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Encyclopédie, L'. One of the most important publishing ventures of the 18th c., often regarded as the best embodiment of the ideas and values of the French Enlightenment. The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was published in 17 large volumes, augmented by II splendid volumes of plates, between 1751 and 1772. It had originally been conceived by a consortium of booksellers as a translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopedia; under the general editorship of Diderot and Alembert it quickly grew into something much more ambitious: an extensive account of the arts, sciences, and technology of modern Europe written from the critical and reforming standpoint of the philosophes (indeed, encyclopédiste became a synonym for philosophe).

The publishing of the work was fraught with difficulties. It met with fierce hostility from the Jesuits (expressed principally in the Memoires de Trévoux), and after the scandal caused by the publication in 1758 of De l'esprit by Helvétius, further publication was forbidden by the Parlement de Paris. At this stage d'Alembert retired from the enterprise, and Diderot considered continuing publication abroad. Nevertheless, thanks to the protection of the Directeur de la Librairie, Malesherbes, the final 10 volumes of text (which had been surreptitiously censored by the publisher Le Breton) were issued in France in 1765 under a permission tacite.

The Encyclopédie was advertised as the work of a ‘société de gens de lettres’, and its numerous (generally unpaid) contributors included priests, doctors, noblemen, civil servants, scientists, artists, business men, and skilled craftsmen. Most of them were new authors—including the as-yet relatively obscure Quesnay, Turgot, and Rousseau (who wrote on music and political political economy)—but there were some famous names, in particular Voltaire and Montesquieu, both of whom wrote on literary topics. It was Diderot who effectively co-ordinated the whole undertaking and personally wrote a vast number of articles, both large and small. He was greatly aided by the unassuming chevalier de Jaucourt, who relieved him of much of the routine work of compilation.

There is a striking ‘Discours préliminaire’ by d'Alembert, which paints a triumphant picture of the progress of enlightenment in modern Europe, paying tribute to such precursors as Bacon, Locke, and Descartes. It also sets out a scheme of the totality of human knowledge based on the operations of the mind. In theory, this permits a rational ordering of all the material; in reality, despite many cross-references, the alphabetical order adopted means that the work is often disconcertingly disparate. In addition, the scope, tone, and quality of the entries vary greatly.

In the scientific domain, the best and most up-to-date articles are probably those on the higher mathematics (by d'Alembert) and on medicine and natural history (see ‘Animal’ by Diderot). History, law, and politics occupy an important place; the contributors, who include several of the Physiocrats, put forward a reforming line on such matters as administration and taxation. Particularly significant is the attention devoted to useful manual arts; Diderot expounds the approach adopted in ‘Art’, and the various crafts and trades are fully described and beautifully illustrated.

What distinguishes the work, however, is its ‘philosophical’ standpoint; this can be largely attributed to its principal editor, whose aim was to ‘change the general way of thinking’. It finds expression in Diderot's audacious series of articles on the history of philosophy, in the primacy accorded to this-worldly concerns over theology and metaphysics, and, in the subversive tone of such articles as ‘Agnus Scythicus’, an attack on credulity, particularly in matters of religion. Cross-references serve the same purpose; in one famous instance a ‘pompous eulogy’ of the Franciscan order is undermined by a reference to a comic entry on a trivial debate about the shape of the friars' hoods.

Whether because it was useful or because it was entertaining, the Encyclopédie was a huge success. A complete set of the first edition cost close on 1, 000 livres, and there were over 4, 000 subscribers. It made a fortune for its publishers, and was quickly pirated and reprinted in cheaper editions. Subsequently the publisher Panckoucke issued supplements, before transforming and revising the whole work in the Encyclopédie méthodique, which ran to over 200 vols. A similar methodical arrangement was adopted in the Encyclopedia Britannica, first published in Edinburgh in 1771. [See also Dictionnaire Philosophique.]

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• J. Proust, L'Encyclopédie (1965)
• R. Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (1979)

The great 18th-century French enterprise, the Encyclopédie was designed as a synoptic description of the branches of human knowledge. The leading figures behind the enterprise were Diderot and D'Alembert, and contributors included Holbach, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, sometimes known collectively as the encyclopedists. The work is a bible of the Enlightenment, philosophically very much in the tradition of Locke and Bayle. Its anti-clerical, humanistic tone led to its temporary suppression by royal decree in 1759, but publication continued from 1751 to 1777. It required the collaboration of 140 contributors, with nearly the same number of writers and engravers. Eventually the 32 volumes included 21 volumes of text, containing 70,000 articles, and 11 volumes of plates. The work was reprinted five times before 1789.

The encyclopedists' goal was to make available to the greatest number of readers the most complete account possible of all current knowledge. The first volume of the work appeared in Paris in 1751. When the project was completed two decades later, in 1772, the encyclopedists had produced the most massive single reference work in Europe to date. The Encyclopédie ran to seventeen folio volumes containing 71,818 articles, eleven folio volumes of 2,885 plates, and five supplemental volumes, published in 1776 and 1777 under editors other than Diderot. Sold by subscription to a readership in France and throughout Europe that totaled at least 4,500 individuals, the Encyclopédie was the product of more than 150 collaborators who worked under the sole editorship of Diderot after d'Alembert withdrew from the project in 1758. The Encyclopédie met with significant opposition, primarily from the Jesuit order and the antiphilosophe movement. It was placed on the Catholic Church's Index librorum prohibitorum (Index of forbidden books), and on two occasions the crown revoked (but soon restored) the work's privilège or royal authorization to publish. Five subsequent editions, either reprints or revisions, were produced in Switzerland and Italy prior to the French Revolution of 1789, and roughly half of these 25,000 copies went to readers in France.

In philosophical terms, the Encyclopédie reflected the most powerful tenet of the European Enlightenment, the belief in human reason as an individual and innate critical faculty. The world the encyclopedists represented was thoroughly subjected to the rule of reason. It was knowable, able to be ordered and mastered by the rational mind. The Encyclopédie thus contributed to consolidating the reformist values of the Enlightenment by testifying to the belief in the progressive and beneficial results of rational inquiry into all sectors of human activity. In the area of technology, the articles and plates devoted to the "mechanical arts"—including the crafts and trades, anatomy and surgery, the exact, natural, and military sciences—provided a remarkably complete account of eighteenth-century French technology, in a style aimed at a relatively broad readership. In this way the Encyclopédie spurred the development of French industry, which was lagging behind that of Britain.

The work's full title was Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences et des métiers. As an analytic or descriptive dictionary, it was designed to compile and transmit as complete a version as possible of all existing human knowledge; as an encyclopedia, it was to reveal how that knowledge could be rationally ordered and the interrelations of its various parts displayed. Articles were arranged in alphabetical order, and each article was classified according to the category of knowledge to which it belonged. An extensive cross-reference system made explicit the linkages between articles. These cross-references were often employed to produce a subversive critique of established positions through the ironic juxtaposition of apparently unrelated articles, such as religion and mythology. The article "Aius Locutius," for instance, which deals with a minor Roman god of speech, is referred to in another article on casuistry, which itself is linked to articles on certainty (certitude) and moral judgment (cas de conscience). This critique was part of the encyclopedists' overarching aim to have their readers think freely, to become "undeceived," as Diderot put it. For him, this critical thinking involved resisting any authority, whether divine or human. Thus, in the area of religion the encyclopedists tirelessly denounced fanaticism in the name of religious tolerance, attacked Christian doctrine and the Catholic Church and its institutions, and presented other beliefs more favorably. The encyclopedists reorganized the cognitive universe, rejecting the authority of all systems and institutions that claim to deliver up any absolute order of knowledge, and setting in their place more secular, empirical, and arbitrary ones, judged according to the values of technological productivity and social utility.

The best-known major contributors to the project were Diderot himself (with 10,000 articles), Louis de Jaucourt (17,395), d'Alembert (1,600), and Paul Thiry, baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) (425). Other significant contributors included Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788), Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1800), Charles-Marie de La Condamine (1701–1774), Charles-Pinot Duclos (1704–1772), François Quesnay (1694–1774), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781). Parisians, provincials, and foreigners, the encyclopedists were a heterogeneous group. They were not members of a revolutionary Third Estate, one of the three orders or "estates" that, along with that of the nobility and the clergy, reflected the political division of pre-Revolutionary France. Most were bourgeois, if not by source of income, then by lifestyle and by their conception of property and work. Jurists, doctors, professors, engineers, merchants, manufacturers, specialized technicians, upper civil servants, military officers, and philosophes, the encyclopedists played important roles in economic, cultural, and political institutions, from which they derived material benefits and prestige. This situation also allowed them a certain independence, both economic and intellectual, making it possible for them to imagine and promote other ways of thinking. Although the encyclopedists criticized arbitrary state power, they did not question the monarchical system.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences, et des métiers. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert. Paris, 1751–1772.

Secondary Sources

Darnton, Robert. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry. Edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. 2 vols. New York, 1959.

Diderot, Denis. Encyclopedia: Selections by Diderot, D'Alembert, and a Society of Men of Letters. Translated by Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer. Indianapolis, 1965.

Kafker, Frank A. The Encyclopedists as a Group: A Collective Biography of the Authors of the Encyclopédie. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 345. Oxford, 1996.

Kafker, Frank A., and Serena Kafker. The Encyclopedists as Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the Encyclopédie. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 257. Oxford, 1988.

Lough, John. The Encyclopédie. New York, 1971.

Wilson, Arthur M. Diderot. New York, 1972.

—DANIEL BREWER

This article is about the 18th-century French encyclopaedia. For a definition of the word "encyclopédie", see the Wiktionary entry encyclopédie.

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers

The title page of the Encyclopédie
Author	Diderot, D'Alembert
Country	France
Language	French
Subject(s)	General
Genre(s)	Reference encyclopedia
Publisher	{{{publisher}}}
Publication date	1751

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (English: "Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts") was an encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1766, with later supplements and revisions in 1772, 1777 and 1780 and numerous foreign editions and later derivatives.

Its introduction, the Preliminary Discourse, is considered an important exposition of Enlightenment ideals. The Encyclopédie's self-professed aim was "to change the way people think."

Origins

The Encyclopédie was originally meant to be simply a French translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728).^[1] The translation was commissioned by Paris book publisher André Le Breton in 1743 to John Mills, an English resident in France. In May 1745 Le Breton announced the work as available for sale - however to Le Breton's dismay, Mills had not done the work he was commissioned to do; in fact, he could barely read and write French and did not even own a copy of Cyclopaedia. Le Breton had been swindled, and so he physically beat Mills with a cane—Mills sued on assault charges, but Le Breton was acquitted in court as being justified.^[2] Setting out to find a new editor, Le Breton engaged Jean Paul de Gua de Malves. Among those hired by Malves were the young Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot. Within thirteen months in August 1747 Malves was fired due to his rigid methods, and Le Breton hired Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert as the new editors. Diderot would remain editor for the next 25 years seeing the Encyclopedie through to completion.

Fig.2: Extract from the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1772). It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost. The work is laden with symbolism: The figure in the centre represents truth — surrounded by bright light (the central symbol of the enlightenment). Two other figures on the right, reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil from truth. (entire frontispiece)

Publication

The work comprised 35 volumes, with 71,818 articles, and 3,129 illustrations. The first 28 volumes were published between 1751 and 1766 and were edited by Diderot - although some of the later picture-only volumes were not actually printed until 1772. The remaining five volumes were completed by other editors in 1777, along with a two volume index in 1780. Many of the most noted figures of the French enlightenment contributed to the work including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.^[3] The single greatest contributor was Louis de Jaucourt who wrote 17,266 articles, or about 8 per day between 1759 and 1765.

The writers of the encyclopedia saw it as a vehicle to covertly destroy superstitions while overtly providing access to human knowledge. It was a quintessential summary of thought and belief of the Enlightenment. In ancien régime France it caused a storm of controversy, due mostly to its tone of religious tolerance. The encyclopedia praised Protestant thinkers and challenged Catholic dogma, and classified religion as a branch of philosophy, not as the ultimate source of knowledge and moral advice. The entire work was banned by royal decree and officially closed down after the first seven volumes in 1759;^[4] but because it had many highly placed supporters, notably Madame de Pompadour, work continued "in secret". In truth, secular authorities did not want to disrupt the commercial enterprise which employed hundreds of people. To appease the church's enemies of the project, the authorities had officially banned the enterprise, but they turned a blind eye to its continued existence.

It was also a vast compendium of the technologies of the period, describing the traditional craft tools and processes. Much information was taken from the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers.

Fig.3: "Figurative system of human knowledge", the structure that the Encyclopédie organised knowledge into. It had three main branches: memory, reason, and imagination

In 1750 the full title was Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres, mis en ordre par M. Diderot de l'Académie des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Prusse, et quant à la partie mathématique, par M. d'Alembert de l'Académie royale des Sciences de Paris, de celle de Prusse et de la Société royale de Londres. The title-page was amended as d'Alembert acquired more titles.

In 1775, Charles Joseph Panckoucke obtained the rights to reissue the work. He issued five volumes of supplementary material and a two volume index from 1776 to 1780. Some include these seven volumes as part of the first full issue of the Encyclopédie, for a total of 35 volumes, although they were not written or edited by the original famed authors.

From 1782 to 1832, Panckoucke and his successors published an expanded edition of the work in 166 volumes as the Encyclopédie méthodique. That work, enormous for the time, occupied a thousand workers in production and 2,250 contributors.

The Encyclopédie presented a taxonomy of human knowledge (See fig.3) which was inspired by Francis Bacon's Advancement of Knowledge. The three main branches of knowledge are: "Memory"/History, "Reason"/Philosophy, and "Imagination"/Poetry. Notable is the fact that theology is ordered under 'Philosophy'. Robert Darnton argues that this categorisation of religion as being subject to human reason and not a source of knowledge in and of itself, was a significant factor in the controversy surrounding the work. Additionally, notice that 'Knowledge of God' is only a few nodes away from 'Divination' and 'Black Magic'.

Influence

The Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution. "No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion," wrote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. In The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution, a work published in conjunction with a 1989 exhibition of the Encyclopédie at the University of California, Los Angeles, Clarinida Donato writes the following:

The encyclopedians successfully argued and marketed their belief in the potential of reason and unified knowledge to empower human will and thus helped to shape the social issues that the French Revolution would address. Although it is doubtful whether the many artisans, technicians, or laborers whose work and presence and interspersed throughout the Encyclopédie actually read it, the recognition of their work as equal to that of intellectuals, clerics, and rulers prepared the terrain for demands for increased representation. Thus the Encyclopédie served to recognize and galvanize a new power base, ultimately contributing to the destruction of old value and the creation of new ones (12).

But note Frank Kafker, who explains that the Encyclopedists were not a unified group[1]

despite their reputation, [the Encyclopedists] were not a close-knit group of radicals intent on subverting the Old Regime in France. Instead they were a disparate group of men of letters, physicians, scientists, craftsmen and scholars ... Even the small minority who were persecuted for writing articles belittling what they viewed as unreasonable customs—thus weakening the might of the Catholic Church and undermining that of the monarchy—did not envision that their ideas would encourage a revolution.

While it is debatable that the editors intended to have a radical influence on French society, it can hardly be denied that it did. The Encyclopédie denied that the teachings of the Catholic Church could be treated as authoritative in matters of science. The editors also refused to treat the decisions of political powers as definitive in intellectual or artistic questions. Given that Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe at the time and that many European leaders used French as their administrative language, these ideas had the capacity to spread.^[5]

Contributors

Notable contributors to the Encyclopédie including their area of contribution (for a more detailed list, see French Encyclopédistes):

• Jean le Rond d'Alembert — editor; science (esp. mathematics), contemporary affairs, philosophy, religion, among others
• André Le Breton — chief publisher; printer's ink article
• Étienne Bonnot de Condillac — philosophy
• Daubenton — natural history
• Denis Diderot — chief editor; economics, mechanical arts, philosophy, politics, religion, among others
• Baron d'Holbach — science (chemistry, mineralogy), politics, religion, among others
• Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt — economics, literature, medicine, politics, among others
• Montesquieu — part of the "goût" article (English: concept of taste)
• François Quesnay — Farmers and Grains article
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — music, political theory
• Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune — economics, etymology, philosophy, physics
• Voltaire — history, literature, philosophy

Statistics

Approximate size of the Encyclopédie:

• 17 volumes of articles, issued from 1751 to 1765
• 11 volumes of illustrations, issued from 1762 to 1772
• 18,000 pages of text
• 75,000 entries
  • 44,000 main articles
  • 28,000 secondary articles
  • 2,500 illustration indices
• 20,000,000 words in total

Print run: 4,250 copies (note: even single-volume works in the 18th Century seldom had a print run of more than 1,500 copies)

Quotes

• "Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian... Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher, who has the same passions, acts only after reflection; he walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. He does not confuse truth with plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy." (Philosophers article, Dumarsais)

• "If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare." (Wealth article, Diderot)

Literature

• Preliminary discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, translated by Richard N. Schwab, 1995. ISBN 0-226-13476-8
• Jean d'Alembert by Ronald Grimsley. (1963)
• The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 by Robert Darnton (1979) ISBN 0674087852
• The Encyclopedists as individuals: a biographical dictionary of the authors of the Encyclopédie by Frank A. Kafker and Serena L. Kafker. Published 1988 in the Studies of Voltaire and the eighteenth century. ISBN 0-7294-0368-8
• Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Editions Flammarion, 1993. ISBN 2-080704265
• Diderot, the Mechanical Arts, and the Encyclopédie, John R. Pannabecker, 1994. With bibliography.
• L'Encyclopédie de Diderot et d'Alembert, édition DVD, Redon, ASIN: B0000DBA4X -- the complete Encyclopédie on DVD-ROM
• Enlightening the World: Encyclopedie, The Book That Changed the Course of History by Philipp Blom (2005). ISBN 1403968950
• The Encylopédie and the Age of Revolution. Ed. Clorinda Donato and Robert M. Maniquis. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. ISBN 0-8161-0527-8

Facsimiles

Readex Microprint Corporation, NY 1969. 5 vol The full text and images reduced to 4 double-spread pages of the original appearing on one folio-sized page of this printing.

Later released by the Pergamon Press, NY and Paris with ISBN 0080901050

References

1. ^ Bryan Magee. The Story of Philosophy. DK Publishing, Inc., New York: 1998. page 124
2. ^ Philipp Blom (2005). Enlightening the World. pp. 35-37
3. ^ Bryan Magee. The Story of Philosophy. DK Publishing, Inc., New York: 1998. page 124
4. ^ Bryan Magee. The Story of Philosophy. DK Publishing, Inc., New York: 1998. page 125
5. ^ Bryan Magee. The Story of Philosophy. DK Publishing, Inc., New York: 1998. page 125

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers

• On-line version in original French
• On-line version with an English interface and the dates of publication
• Encyclopédie collaborative translation project, currently contains a rather small but growing collection of articles translated into English (476 articles as of September 15, 2007).
• The Encyclopedie, discussion on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, broadcast on 26 October 2006. With Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London, Caroline Warman, Fellow and Tutor in French at Jesus College, Oxford, David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York, and presented by Melvyn Bragg.
• Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers on French Wikisource

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