Encyclopedias have been composed in France from the High Middle Ages on. The earliest examples were in Latin, in particular the Speculum majus of Vincent of Beauvais, which enjoyed great success even beyond the invention of printing, the last edition being produced in 1624. Early French encyclopedic writings include the poems of Philippe de Thaon [see Anglo-norman Literature], the versified Ymage du monde (1247) of Gautier de Metz, and in particular the prose Li Livres dou trésor of Brunetto Latini. Brunetto, like his counterparts who write in Latin, arranges his material by subject-matter, but sometimes uses alphabetical order within sections.
There is something of a lull in French encyclopedic production at the time of the Renaissance, although one can point to such compilations as those of Belon du Mans and Binet. The latter's Essai des merveilles shows the way an encyclopedia can be used as a source-book by writers and orators. Rabelais was the first French writer to use the term ‘encyclopédie’, though his attitude to encyclopedic learning is not without an element of mockery.
In the 17th c. the modern encyclopedia begins to emerge in France (following the lead given by Bacon in England and Comenius in Holland). Moreri's Grand dictionnaire historique (1674) long remained a much-used work of reference for history, geography, and biography; it was criticized and corrected in that influential monument of encyclopedism, Bayle's Dictionnaire. At about the same time, Furetière in his dictionary often goes beyond the mere definition of words—the ‘dictionnaire de mots’ was at first not clearly distinguished from the ‘dictionnaire de choses’, and even in more recent times the line between the two is far from sharp [see Dictionaries].
In 1694 appeared Thomas Corneille's Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences, the scientific pendant to the dictionary of the Académie Française. The interest in technology was carried further, not without some plagiarism, in the greatest French encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie (1750-72) of Diderot and d' Alembert, which aimed both to provide an account of the current state of knowledge (excluding the kind of historical material covered by Moreri) and to ‘change the general way of thinking’. The alphabetically ordered material of the Encyclopédie was subsequently rearranged and augmented (but without the excitement of the original) in the immense Encyclopédie méthodique master-minded by Panckoucke.
The second great French encyclopedia, Larousse's Grand dictionnaire universel (1865-90), sets itself deliberately in the tradition of Diderot and d'Alembert. It is a splendidly combative, often idiosyncratic compendium of progressive views of the time and a work of massive proportions which combines the historical information of Moreri with the scientific and philosophical interests of the Encyclopédie. It is also the first of the great family of Larousse dictionaries and encyclopedias which occupy a central place in modern French culture, though none of them has the originality of their ancestor. They are mainly exhaustive encyclopedias with many short entries (the latest in the line being the Grand Larousse universel of 1985, 2nd edn. 1992); Larousse's La Grande Encyclopédie (1971-6), on the other hand, is composed of more substantial articles. A particular place is occupied by the Petit Larousse illustré, an endlessly republished and revised dictionary-encyclopedia with a section for proper names and the famous ‘pages roses’ of quotations, a refuge for France's Latin culture.
Of the many other general encyclopedias of the 20th c., four deserve special mention. The 31-vol. alphabetical Grande Encyclopédie (1885-1901), directed by Marcellin Berthelot, is something like a French equivalent of contemporary versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 21-vol. Encyclopédie française, directed by Lucien Febvre, began publication in 1934 and was finished in 1966; it is arranged non-alphabetically, the material being ordered according to an original conception of the map of knowledge. The Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (1956- ), whose first general editor was Raymond Queneau, is an open-ended collection, with separate volumes for particular subjects; it conforms more closely to traditional academic disciplines and contains material of a very high standard. And finally the Encyclopedia Universalis (1st edn., 1968-75) is the major encyclopedic venture of the last third of the 20th c.; it combines a 4-vol. ‘Thesaurus-Index’ of short entries with a 23-vol. ‘Corpus’ which contains many original, often controversial, essays by important authors, but it is not so complete as the Larousse volumes.
Innumerable encyclopedias are devoted to particular branches of knowledge. In the literary field, technical terms are interestingly treated in H. Morier's Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique (1961; 2nd edn., 1989) and B. Dupriez's Gradus: les procédés littéraires (1984). The Dictionnaire des lettres françaises (7 vols., 1951-72), under the general direction of Cardinal G. Grente, contains a vast amount of information about writers from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th c. (the medieval volume was reissued in a completely revised form in 1992). It has, however, been partly superseded by the Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française (3 vols., 1984; 2nd edn., 4 vols., 1987), edited by J.-P. Beaumarchais, D. Couty, and A. Rey. This covers francophone and regional literatures well; many articles are very substantial, and as a result the number of authors treated is more limited than in the Grente volumes. In English, apart from the present volume and its Oxford predecessor, the second volume of the Guide to French Literature of A. Levi (1992) offers detailed accounts of the lives and works of approximately 200 major authors since 1789; a similar volume for the pre-1789 period appeared in 1994. [See also Bibliographies].
[Peter France]
Bibliography
- A. Rey, Dictionnaires et encyclopédies (1982)
- H. Meschonnic, Des mots et des mondes: dictionaires, encyclopédies, grammaires, nomenclatures (1991)
