The , better known as the Encyclopédie (), was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, an index, and translations. It had many contributors, known among contemporaries as the Encyclopédistes. It was edited by Denis Diderot and, until 1759, co-edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert.Birn, "Encyclopédie".
The Encyclopédie is most famous for representing the thought of the Enlightenment. According to Diderot in the article "Encyclopédie", the Encyclopédie aim was "to change the way people think" and to allow people to inform themselves.Diderot, as quoted in Hunt, 611. Diderot hoped the Encyclopédie would disseminate a vast amount of knowledge to the present and future generations.Diderot, as quoted in Kramnick, 17. Thus, it is an example of democratization of knowledge, though the high price of the first edition especially (980 livres) prevented it from being bought by much of the middle class.Darnton, 33.
The Encyclopédie was also the first encyclopedia to include contributions from many named contributors, and it was the first general encyclopedia to describe the mechanical arts in much detail. In the first edition, seventeen folio volumes of text were accompanied by eleven volumes of engravings. Later editions were published in smaller formats and with fewer engravings in order to reach a wider audience within Europe.Birn, "Mots".
Origins
The Encyclopédie was originally conceived as a French translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728). Chambers had first published his Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences in two volumes in London in 1728, following in the lineage of a handful of other dictionaries of the arts and sciences published in Europe since the late seventeenth century.Loveland, European Encyclopedia, 20–21. This work became renowned, and four editions were published between 1738 and 1742. An Italian translation appeared between 1747 and 1754. In France, a member of the banking family Lambert had started translating the Cyclopaedia into French,Précis de la vie du citoyen Lambert, Bibliothèque nationale, Ln. 11217, as noted in Shackleton, 130. but it was a translation of the Cyclopaedia undertaken around 1745 by the expatriate Englishman John Mills and the German Gottfried Sellius that attracted the interest of the Parisian bookseller and printer André Le Breton and led to the publication of the Encyclopédie.Lough, 7–14.
Early in 1745 a prospectus for the Encyclopédie was published to attract subscribers to the project. Here, for the first time, the encyclopedia was entitled the Encyclopédie, a variant on the title chosen by Chambers.Lough, 7. The four-page prospectus included a schedule stating that the work would be published in five volumes from June 1746 through the end of 1748.[Mills and Le Breton].
The prospectus was reviewed positively and cited at some length in several journals. The Jesuit-run Mémoires pour l'histoire des sciences et des beaux arts was lavish in its praise.Review in: Mémoires pour l'histoire des sciences et des beaux arts, May 1745, 934–38. In June 1745, the Mercure printed a twenty-five-page article that praised Mills as a translator, equally fluent in French and English.Mercure, June 1745, 87. The Mercure also reported that Mills had recruited several scholars to help, had devoted his fortune to supporting the enterprise, and was the sole owner of the publishing privilege.Mercure, June 1745, 87. In fact, Mills' supposed fortune was probably fictional.Lough, 12–13.
In any event, cooperation between Le Breton and Mills fell apart later on in 1745. Le Breton claimed among other things that Mills's knowledge of French was inadequate, an accusation supported by one contemporary.Lough, 10. In a confrontation with the sword-wielding Englishman, Le Breton assaulted Mills with his cane. Mills took Le Breton to court, but the court decided in Le Breton's favor. Mills returned to England soon afterward.Lough, 7–14. For his new editor, Le Breton settled on the mathematician Jean Paul de Gua de Malves. Among those hired by Gua de Malves were the young philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Denis Diderot. Thirteen months later, in August 1747, Gua de Malves resigned under pressure from Le Breton, having proven an ineffective leader.Kafker and Loveland. Le Breton then formed an alliance with three other booksellers (Antoine Briasson, Laurent Durand, and Michel-Antoine David) and hired Diderot and D'Alembert to be the new editors. D'Alembert left the role in 1758, but Diderot remained editor for the next 25 years, seeing the Encyclopédie through to its completion, though he threatened to resign upon discovering in 1764 that Le Breton, fearful of a crackdown, had been censoring some of his contributions to the Encyclopédie behind his back.Gordon and Torrey.
Publication
The work consisted of 28 volumes, with approximately 71,818 articles and 2,784 plates of illustrations (the exact numbers depend on one's definition of an "article" and a "plate").Schwab, Rex, and Lough, 1: 45, 7: 40. The first seventeen volumes were published between 1751 and 1765; eleven volumes of plates were finished by 1772. The first edition had a pressrun of 4,225 copies, well above the average pressrun for French books at the time, which was around 2000 copies.,Darnton, 37; Dawson, p. 172. and it earned the four publishers profits of more than two million livres.Darnton, 16. Because of its sometimes radical contents, the Encyclopédie stirred up controversy in conservative circles, and after the publication of the second volume, it was briefly suspended by a royal edict of 1752 accusing it of "destroying royal authority, fomenting a spirit of independence and revolt, and ... laying the groundwork for error, for the corruption of morals, and for irreligion and atheism".Lough, 21.
In 1759, following the publication of the seventh volume, on the initiative of the Parlement of Paris, the French government suspended the encyclopedia's privilege.Birn, "Encyclopédie", 406. Nevertheless, work continued "in secret", partially because the project had highly placed supporters, including the minister Malesherbes and the royal mistress Madame de Pompadour.Curran, Diderot, 136–37. French authorities deliberately ignored the continuation of the work, thinking the official ban was sufficient to appease the church and other enemies of the project.
During this period, Diderot and the publishers changed and apparently falsified the encyclopedia's imprint. The title pages of volumes 1 through 7, published between 1751 and 1757, claimed Paris as the place of publication. However, the title pages of volumes 8 through 17, published together in 1765, show Neufchastel as the place of publication. Neuchâtel was safely across the French border in what is now part of Switzerland but which was then an independent principality, where production of the Encyclopédie would have been secure from interference by the French state. Meanwhile, the actual production of volumes 8 through 17 quietly continued, presumably in Paris, but perhaps somewhere else.Weil. To minimize publicity, the French government seems to have stipulated that the final volumes be released at the same time. The volumes were apparently finished in the summer of 1765, allowing delivery to begin by the end of the year.Boussuge.
The Encyclopédie also appeared in other formats and editions.Darnton, 37. Two were published (in French) in the Italian cities of Lucca and Leghorn. Two others were published in the smaller formats of quarto and octavo, which allowed the price of the set to be brought within range of the upper middle class. While too original to count as a re-edition, the so-called Yverdon Encyclopédie (1770–80), published in the Swiss town of Yverdon, was inspired by and borrowed extensively from the Encyclopédie.Birn, "Encyclopédie", 407.
In 1775, the publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke obtained the rights to the work. He issued five volumes of supplementary material and a two-volume index from 1776 to 1780. Some scholars include these seven "extra" 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 authors.
From 1782 to 1832, Panckoucke and his successors published a greatly expanded edition of the work in some 166 volumes as the Encyclopédie méthodique. This enormous work, organized in thematic sub-series, occupied a thousand workers in production and 2,250 contributors.
Contributors Since the objective of the editors of the Encyclopédie was to gather knowledge from myriad specialties, Diderot and D'Alembert knew they would need various contributors to help them with their project.Brewer, "Encyclopédie", 56. In the end, more than 140 people contributed at least one article. (For a detailed list, see Encyclopédistes.) Many of the philosophes (intellectuals of the French Enlightenment) contributed to the Encyclopédie, including Diderot himself, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.Kafker and Kafker. The most prolific contributor was Louis de Jaucourt, who wrote 17,266 articles between 1759 and 1765, or about eight per day, representing a full 25% of the Encyclopédie. Especially after D'Alembert's resignation as co-editor, Jaucourt became a sort of unofficial second editor.Leca-Tsiomis, "Chevalier de Jaucourt".
The publication of the Encyclopédie created opportunities for contributors to share their ideas and interests. In particular, social gatherings at the Parisian home of d'Holbach brought together a minority of contributors on a regular basis.Kafker, Encyclopedists as a Group, 31–34. Still, as Frank Kafker has argued, the contributors were not a unified group:
The Encyclopédie was the first encyclopedia to credit contributors within articles in a systematic way. This it accomplished for regular contributors by appending symbols (sometimes called "signatures") at the ends of articles. An "O" at the end of an article indicated D'Alembert as responsible, for example, just as an "L" did the anatomist Pierre Tarin. The symbols were set forth in the "Preliminary Discourse". From the beginning, however, some articles were anonymous, whether because of oversight or because no one dared to claim credit. The number of anonymous articles increased after 1759.
Many of the most prolific contributors to the Encyclopédie were compensated for their work. At least twenty-nine of the thirty-eight contributors whose articles were identified by a symbol were paid by the publishers, and their pay constituted a significant share of their total income. From 1746 to 1767, Diderot received about 2,800 livres per year for his work as an editor and an author. By contrast, Jaucourt, a wealthy nobleman, seems to have offered his services to the publishers for next to nothing. Irregular contributors, for their part, were almost never paid for their articles.Kafker, Encyclopedists as a Group, 44–50.
Some contributors to the Encyclopédie were volunteers, but most were recruited, whether by one of the co-editors, another contributor, or someone else.Kafker, Encyclopedists as a Group, 40–42. Contributors were generally recruited on the basis of their knowledge in a particular domain, which they were expected to contribute on. Claude Bourgelat, the author of two books on horses, thus wrote on manège and farriery; Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, a naturalist and member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, wrote on natural history; and Le Breton, the publisher, wrote on printer's ink.Kafker and Kafker, 67–71, 88–93, 194–201. Still, specialties were not as narrowly defined as they would be for later encyclopedias. Notice, for example, the range of topics on which the following contributors wrote:
D'Alembert – science (especially mathematics and physics), contemporary affairs, philosophy, religion