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

La Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Trades) is an encyclopedia published between 1751 and 1772 in France under the direction of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. It is known colloquially as the "Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert". Its purpose was to gather and disseminate, in a clear and accessible text, the fruits of knowledge and knowledge accumulated until then in the light of reason. In this way, he exposes the secular, pragmatic, materialist and bourgeois ideology of the Enlightenment. It contains 72,000 articles from more than 140 collaborators, including Voltaire, Rousseau, the Baron de Holbach or Turgot, to name a few.

It is considered one of the greatest works of the 18th century, not only for being the first French encyclopedia, but also for containing a synthesis of the main knowledge of the time, in a considerable editorial effort for its time.

Because of the knowledge it contains, the effort it represents and the intentions assigned to it by its authors, it became a symbol of the embodiment of the Enlightenment, a political weapon and the object of numerous confrontations between publishers, publishers editors and representatives of the established powers, both secular and ecclesiastical.

The Encyclopedia, or reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts and trades was a central work where enlightened philosophers tried to compile the knowledge of the time.

Background

The idea of publishing an encyclopedia in French arose from the influence and publishing success in England of the Cyclopaedia (Universal Dictionary of Sciences and Arts) (1728) by Ephraim Chambers, as well as the publication of the Trévoux Dictionary (1704-1771) composed by the Jesuits. Although it is also noteworthy the existence of a broad demand from readers for this type of work. Likewise, they took as a basis the works of Pierre Bayle with his publication of the Dictionnaire historique et critique in 1697, and of John Harris, with his Lexicon technologicum or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences in 1704 as previous reference books and foreshadowing of the encyclopedia.

The French publisher André Le Breton, a successful bookseller and specialist in the translation of English works, obtained in 1745 a license to make a French translation of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia. To direct the project, Le Breton initially chose John Mills, an Englishman living in France, and Abbe Jean-Paul de Gua de Malves, but for different reasons, they abandoned the project. In 1747 Le Breton commissioned Diderot and D'Alembert to edit the Encyclopédie.

Development of the publication

The structure in which the encyclopedia organized human knowledge. He had three main branches: memory, reason and imagination.

The incorporation of Diderot and D'Alembert completely transformed the project, going from being a simple translation to the creation of a larger work, with a secular, pragmatic, bourgeois and critical bias, aimed at disseminating knowledge of the time, with unpublished works and numerous illustrations.

For the thematic and structural arrangement of the encyclopedia, Diderot and D'Alembert were inspired by Francis Bacon's tree of human knowledge, set forth in his work Novum organum (1620) and they also took into account Descartes and his Discourse on Method (1637). The terms identified in the knowledge tree are arranged in alphabetical order, hence the name dictionary. In addition, references are added in each entry to the cited or related terms.

Between 1747 and 1750 the work was prepared. In 1750 the so-called Prospectus of the Encyclopedia was published, written by Diderot, which already caused controversy with the Jesuits and finally in 1751 the first volume was presented. This publication provoked strong opposition in some sectors of French society and the work continued amid great controversy. One of these conflicts was the so-called "Affaire Prades". Abbe Jean-Martin de Prades presented his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in 1752, a direct reference to Diderot's Preliminary Discourse. This led to a number of problems for both the author and the project. In the first instance, an atheism was denounced by the cleric, as a consequence of the editorial project. Diderot was arrested and taken to the Vincennes prison where he spent about four months, while Prades went into exile in Berlin.This would cause the project to be sanctioned in its first two volumes as elements of sedition. This incident was used by polemicists such as Charles Palissot and Jacob-Nicolas Moreau —contrary to Enlightenment ideas— to generate discrepancy and discredit the project.

The enormous commotion caused in the Old Regime was mainly due to the tone of religious tolerance of the work, since the Encyclopédie included Protestant thinkers, classified religion as a branch of philosophy and did not as the last resort of knowledge and morality.

From the beginning of its publication, two clearly defined camps formed in French society. On the one hand, the religious power with the Jesuits at the helm and with the support of Delfín del Rey and those close to him and also a part of the intelligentsia, envious of the success achieved by the encyclopedists. On the other side, there was part of the court, headed by Madame de Pompadour —mistress of the king—, the director of the National Library, Guillaume Malesherbes, and a good part of the best writers of the time.

The work was placed by the Catholic Church on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1759, when the first seven volumes had been published. In that same year, the state permits were withdrawn from the printers to continue publishing it and D'Alembert decided to abandon the project. Now without D'Alembert, but consecrating the pact advocated by him, who considered the Encyclopédie a project of national interest, this was able to continue tacitly and closely monitored until completing the seventeen volumes of the work in 1772.

Due to problems with the censorship of the Encyclopédie and other independent writings by its contributors, a conflict arose between Diderot and D'Alembert, on the one hand, and Le Breton, on the other. other.

Supplementary Volumes and Later Editions

In 1775, Charles Joseph Panckoucke obtained the rights to republish the work. This publisher published a total of seven volumes of supplementary materials: in 1776 two volumes of text, in 1777 another two of text and a third of illustrations, and finally a complete index of the work that included two other volumes and was compiled by Pierre Mouchon. (Table analytique et raisonnée de l'Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers). Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet was the editor of these Suppléments.

Some scholars include these seven "extra" as part of the first complete edition of the Encyclopedia, for a total of 35 volumes, even though they were not written or edited by the original authors.

Between 1782 and 1832, Panckoucke and his successors published an expanded edition of the work that eventually numbered 206 volumes organized by subject, the Encyclopédie méthodique. This work, enormous for its time, occupied a thousand workers in production and 2,250 contributors.

This production has been linked to an apocryphal version, Agasse, which was published in 1832.^{[citation required]}

Due to the high price that each volume cost, its reception was limited to the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the army and the clergy. But that did not prevent the rest of the population from consulting the work; the formats in quarters and eighths allowed the existence of a copy in most French libraries, mainly those called cabinet littéraire, book clubs where users could consult the materials for a pound and a half a month.

Elaboration of the Encyclopédie

Printers during the Old Regime

The first volumes were prepared with the participation of Le Breton, as well as various partners: Antoine-Claude Briasson, Michel-Antoine David and Laurent Durand. Likewise, there was also support from supporters of the project. For example Madame D'Epinay, wife of a tax landlord or Helvetius, who had a role not only as a financial sponsor but as one of the members involved in the encyclopedist movement.

A number of 1,625 copies had been calculated as a print run for the first edition, but subscriptions exceeded the expected copies, and there was a demand for more than 4,000 copies, almost triple what was planned.

The first volume was published in 1751. Volume 2 a year later. Approximately every year an additional volume was published, until reaching 7 in 1757. In 1762 the first two volumes of engravings appeared, but without publishing text volumes since 1757. The format of the first 7 volumes was in a text in format of folio and 2 sheets, with an approximate cost of 280 pounds for the subscription. In 1769, Briasson and Diderot had to face legal proceedings initiated by a disgruntled subscriber, Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain, who argued that the price of the work had far exceeded what was announced in the 1750 prospectus. Initially it was only 10 volumes, but it grew to 26 thanks to the publishing enthusiasm of the encyclopedists. As a result, booksellers had to increase the price to £850 instead of the original £280 subscription price. The lengthy process extends to 1778 with a judge ruling in favor of the booksellers, three years after Briasson's death.

The printers that produced the editions of the Encyclopédie were located in Paris; later they went to Geneva, Lucca and Leghorn. In all these cities they were printed in folio format, while in Neuchâtel they began with the elaboration in quarto format; and in Lausanne and Bern, the production was done in eighth grade format.

This generated competition between cities to obtain specialized labor, which is why there was a series of desertions and recruitment, facts that were registered in the Société typographique of Paris and Neuchâtel, cities where the greatest demand for workers was registered.

Post

The original work consists of 28 volumes, with 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations. The first seventeen volumes were published between 1751 and 1765 and the eleven volumes of plates were finished in 1772. Due to its radical content for the time, the Encyclopedia caused much controversy in conservative circles, and at the initiative of the Parliament of Paris, the Government The French suspended the privileges of the Encyclopedia in 1759. Despite the suspension, the work continued 'in secret', with the support of some members of the upper class such as Malesherbes and Madame de Pompadour. The authorities closed their eyes to the continuation of the work, thinking that its official ban was enough to appease the church and other enemies of the project.

During the so-called 'secret' period, Diderot did a fair bit of subterfuge in publication. Thus, volumes 1 to 7, published between 1751 and 1757, before the prohibition, establish Paris as the place of publication, the editions of volumes 8 to 17, which were published in 1765, showed the Swiss town of Neuchâtel as the place of publication, where the official edition of the Encyclopedia was safe from interference by agents of the French state. In particular, opponents of the Encyclopedia could not seize the printing plates of the Encyclopedia in Paris because those existed only in Switzerland. Meanwhile, the actual production of volumes 8 to 17 was shifted to the French periphery, especially Switzerland.

Post Detail

Legend:

• T = text volume
• P = volume of engravings
• S = volume du supplement
• B = table volume

Internal links here lead to the digitized version on Wikisource, while external links lead to the digitized version on Gallica. There are also several digitized versions of the Encyclopédie.

Illustration of Anatomy at Encyclopédie. An example of the quality of the engravings of this encyclopedia.

The spirit of the Encyclopédie

Wieder stated that the Encyclopédie proclaimed "a new concept of life, founded on nature and reason, under the sign of political freedom, religious tolerance and liberation from the fetters of metaphysics". It would be like this, as his Prospectus announced, & # 34; a general picture of the efforts of the human spirit in all orders and over the centuries & # 34;.

Philosophical spirit

In this "enlightenment age", the evolution of thought is linked to that of customs. Travel stories encourage comparisons between different civilizations: morality and customs appear linked to a place and a time. The burghers knock on the door of the nobility, they become the nobility of clothing as opposed to the nobility of the sword. But the logic of hereditary determinism and that of free will are opposed.

New values are imposed: nature, which determines the activity of man, earthly happiness, which becomes an objective, progress, through which each age strives to better achieve collective happiness. The new philosophical spirit that is constituted is based on the love for science, tolerance and material happiness. He opposes restrictions such as absolute monarchy or religion. The essential thing is to be useful to the community by disseminating critical thinking, where the concrete application prevails over theory, and the present over the eternal.

Atheism, which officially begins in this society, is denounced, and even punishable by death.

Scientific spirit

Experimental methods, applied to philosophical questions, lead to empiricism, according to which all knowledge derives directly or indirectly from experience obtained through the senses.

In addition, the scientific spirit is expressed by its encyclopedic character. The eighteenth century does not specialize, it touches all fields: science, philosophy, the arts, politics, religion, etc. The production of dictionaries and literary compilations that characterize this century and of which the Encyclopédie is the most representative work is explained.

We can cite as works related in a certain way to The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu (31 books), the Histoire naturelle by Georges Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon (36 volumes), Condillac's Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (614 articles).

Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle, in Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), already spread this way of thinking based on facts, experience and curiosity for innovations.

Critical Spirit

As for the critical spirit, it is exercised mainly against institutions. Faced with the absolute monarchy, the English model (constitutional monarchy) is preferred. Historical criticism of sacred texts attacks the certainty of faith, the power of the clergy and revealed religions. Philosophers are oriented towards deism which admits the existence of a god without a church. They also criticize the persecution of the Huguenots by the French monarchy.

The positive consequence of this critique is the spirit of reform. The encyclopedists take sides for the development of education, the usefulness of letters, the fight against the Inquisition and slavery, the appreciation of the "mechanical" arts, equality and natural law, the economic development that appears as a source of wealth and comfort.

To defend their ideas, the authors have oscillated between a polemical tone (see the article Prêtres by Paul Henri Dietrich, Baron de Holbach) and self-censorship techniques that consisted of relying on precise historical examples. The scientific examination of the sources allowed them to question the ideas handed down from the past. The abundance of historical notes discouraged a censor in search of subversive ideas. Some encyclopedists have preferred to pass off iconoclastic visions as seemingly innocuous articles. Thus, the article on the hood is the occasion to ridicule the monks.

Even if quantity has sometimes compromised quality, we must underline the singularity of this collective adventure that was the Encyclopédie: for the first time, all noble knowledges are described on an equal footing with other knowledge: bakery, cutlery, boilermaking, leather goods. This importance accorded to the human experience is one of the keys to the thought of the century: reason turns towards the human being, who is from then on its end.

Bourgeois spirit

For an adequate understanding of the texts of the Encyclopédie, it must be taken into account that the Encyclopédie was basically a product of the bourgeoisie, both in its origin and elaboration, since most of the participating writers and philosophers came from this social group. The values proposed and transmitted were also the values of the bourgeoisie, as in their recipients, since the preferred clientele of the work were members of the bourgeoisie.

The article "Refugees" is a perfect example of this, it values work, wealth and industry, thus opposing the traditional values of the nobility, which put "high deeds of arms" first. which meant a rejection of the exercise of commerce and agriculture.

Even though it is clear that the "enlightenment age" made great contributions to human civilization, it was not free. Voltaire had one of the largest fortunes in the kingdom and was one of the first French capitalists. Voltaire, for example, was often very contemptuous of the "little people," which materializes in the fact that his defense of minorities is the defense of the bourgeois minority against the all-powerful nobility.

Pedagogical will

The Encyclopédie was a first-rate educational resource for instructing citizens regardless of traditional teaching that, until then, had been entirely in the hands of the Church. This work constituted the deliberate instrument for the transmission of a "new culture" that broke with that imposed from above by established religion and power. The values that are disclosed, already mentioned, are located within the scope of humanist culture.

Universalist intention

Consistent with the rationalist ambition of the encyclopedists, there is a will to treat all human beings in the same way. This universalism is reflected in several aspects:

• The content, which we have seen is essentially scientific and technical, is not associated with a particular perspective or ideology; that is, it pretends to be objective.
• The form of expression is clear, direct and accessible to everyone, without darkness. This concern is reflected in the profusion of illustrations, drawings and plates, mode of communication more direct than verbal language.
• The target audience is therefore unlimited. This compilation of knowledge, crafts and arts is not only addressed to intellectuals and experts, but to everyone without distinction.

In short, it was about fighting against “knowledge protectionism”: the appropriation of knowledge by an elite or privileged class protected by various prohibitions and esoteric language. The ultimate goal of the encyclopedic company is to put an end to the basic inequality that prevents public criticism and allows the imposition of a pseudo-knowledge. This universal expansion of knowledge that is pursued will facilitate, according to its authors, both scientific and social change and progress.

Composition of the work

Frontispicio de la Encyclopédie (1772). It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost. The theme is loaded with symbolism: the figure of the center represents the truth, surrounded by a bright light (the central symbol of enlightenment); two figures on the right, reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil that covers the truth.

The work comprises: 35 volumes, published from 1751 to 1780. They are subdivided into two parts corresponding to the editing stages directed by LeBreton and Panckoucke respectively.

• 17 volumes of text (First series published between 1751-1757; tomos I al VII. Second series in 1765, volumes VIII to XVII).
• 11 volumes of sheets published between 1762 and 1772.
• Supplement of four volumes of text, one volume of sheets and two volumes of general index, published between 1776-1780. These volumes were edited by Panckoucke.

In total, there are 72,999 articles, which came to cover some 20 million words, and 2,885 illustrations.

In addition, compendiums of articles from the Encyclopédie are prepared. One by the Jesuit Abbe Joseph de La Porte in six volumes containing articles selected by the author was entitled L'Esprit de l'Encyclopédie in 1782.

Collaborators

The Encyclopédie was a collective work not only derived from the work of Diderot and D'Alembert. Their totalizing ambition represented an effort of documentation and synthesis that could not be carried out by just a few isolated individuals. In it, 160 people from the most varied occupations collaborated, such as writers, scientists, artists, magistrates, theologians, nobles and artisans, who were known as les encyclopédies. Diderot in the article Encyclopedia of his own work describes his collaboration in the following way: «each occupied on his part and united only by the general interest of the human race and by a feeling of reciprocal benevolence ».

List of outstanding encyclopedists

• Jean le Rond d'Alembert — Editor; science, mathematics, contemporary affairs, philosophy and religion among others.
• André Le Breton: he was the only one who participated throughout the project.
• Daubenton — Natural History.
• Denis Diderot — Chief Editor; Economy, Mechanical Arts, Philosophy, Politics and Religion among Others.
• Baron D'Holbach — Sciences (Chemistry and Mining), politics and religion among others.
• Louis de Jaucourt — Economics, literature, medicine and politics among others. It was the encyclopaedist who contributed most with 17 266 articles, which means an average of eight articles a day between the years 1759 and 1765.
• Montesquieu — Part of the article "goût" (in Spanish: concept of taste).
• François Quesnay — Articles Farms and Beans.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Music, political theory.
• Turgot — Economy, etymology, philosophy and physics.
• Voltaire — History, Literature and Philosophy.
• Nicolas Antoine Boulanger — Right.
• Charles Marie de La Condamine.
• Jean-François Marmontel.
• Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy.
• Théophile de Bordeu.
• Jean François de Saint-Lambert.
• Théodore Tronchin — Medicine.
• Charles-Georges Fenouillot de Falbaire de Quingey — Review and Correction of Tickets Insensibilité, Salines de Franche-Comté, Salines de Salins and Salines de Montmorot.
• André Morellet — Literary criticism, theology and philosophy.
• Jean-Martin de Prades, abate — Theology. He contributed the article under the motto Certitude which was published in the second volume.
• Claude-Henri Watelet — articles Prints, Engraving e Impression.
• Claude Yvon, abate — Theology. Articles Alma, Atheist and Oh, God.
• Paul Joseph Barthez — Medicine.
• Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d'Argis — Right.
• André-Jean Boucher d'Argis (son of Antoine-Gaspard) — Right.
• Charles de Brosses — Literary criticism, etymology, languages and music.
• Charles Pinot Duclos — Art Criticism, History.
• César Chesneau Dumarsais— Tropos Treaty. Grammar. Elogio about himself, appears at the beginning of Volume VII.