Encyclopédie

The Encyclopédie, or dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (French for 'Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts'), was a big book filled with knowledge published in France between 1751 and 1772. Many smart people, called the Encyclopédistes, helped write it. Two main editors were Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

This encyclopedia is very important because it showed the ideas of the Enlightenment, a time when people wanted to learn more and think in new ways. Denis Diderot wanted it to help change how people think and share knowledge with everyone. Even though it was very expensive, it aimed to spread learning to many people.

The Encyclopédie was special because it was the first encyclopedia to have many different writers and to describe mechanical arts, like crafts and skills, in detail. The first version had seventeen big books of text and eleven books of pictures. Later, smaller versions were made so more people across Europe could read it.

Origins

The Encyclopédie started as a plan to translate a book called the Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers into French. Chambers had written his Cyclopaedia in English, and it was well-known. A French bookseller named André Le Breton became very interested in translating it.

In 1745, Le Breton and a man named John Mills worked together on the translation, but they had problems. Le Breton decided to bring in new editors for the project. He chose the mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert and the philosopher Denis Diderot to lead the work. Diderot stayed with the project for many years and helped finish the Encyclopédie, even though there were some difficult times along the way.

Publication

The Encyclopédie was a big book with many parts. It had 28 volumes with about 71,818 articles and 2,784 pictures. The first 17 books came out between 1751 and 1765, and the pictures were done by 1772. Many people read it, and it made a lot of money for the people who published it.

Some leaders did not like the Encyclopédie because they thought it had ideas that were too new or different. At one point, the government stopped it for a little while, but people kept working on it in secret. The book was printed in different places to keep it safe.

Later, new versions of the Encyclopédie were made in other countries and in smaller, cheaper books. More parts and a big index were added in the years after the first version was finished.

Contributors

The Encyclopédie needed many writers to share knowledge about many subjects. Over 140 people helped write articles for it. Famous thinkers, called philosophes, like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, wrote for it too. One writer, Louis de Jaucourt, wrote over 17,000 articles by himself!

Writers came together sometimes to talk about their work, but they were not all the same. They had different ideas and wrote about many topics. The Encyclopédie was the first book to show who wrote each article using special symbols. Some writers were paid for their work, while others helped for free. Writers were chosen because they knew a lot about certain subjects, like animals, science, or history.

Compilation and sources

The Encyclopédie was built from many existing books and dictionaries rather than written completely new. Scholars have studied how its writers used and changed other texts.

Two key sources were the Cyclopaedia and France’s old Jesuit encyclopedia called the Dictionnaire universal françois-latin (1704), also known as the _Dictionnaire de Trévoux. Many articles from the Cyclopaedia were copied into the Encyclopédie with little change, which the editor Denis Diderot later wished he had done differently. The Dictionnaire de Trévoux also influenced the Encyclopédie, sometimes being copied directly.

Diderot even wrote about one plant called “Aguaxima,” showing his frustration with descriptions that told readers very little. He felt these kinds of entries didn’t help anyone learn much. Other books, like Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae and George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, were also used in the Encyclopédie, sometimes word-for-word without clear credit.

Contents and controversies

Structure

The Encyclopédie had an important introduction called the “Preliminary Discourse” by D'Alembert. This part talked about important ideas of the Enlightenment, a time when people thought more about reason and knowledge. It showed a way to organize all human knowledge into three main groups: History (what happened), Philosophy (how we think), and Poetry (our imagination).

The Encyclopédie also had many links between its articles, like early versions of today’s web links. These helped readers connect ideas from different parts of the book.

Overall scope

The Encyclopédie focused mainly on science, arts, and crafts. It did not cover history as much as later books would. Over time, it began to include more about people and language.

Religion

Some writers in the Encyclopédie talked about religion in traditional ways, while others used clever phrases to question religious ideas. They sometimes spoke out against parts of the Catholic Church.

Politics and society

The Encyclopédie shared Enlightenment ideas about politics. It said that governments should get agreement from the people, not just from kings or gods. It also talked about fair rights for everyone and opposed slavery. In business, it supported free markets and competition.

Technology

The Encyclopédie was a big collection of knowledge about technology and crafts. It shared ideas from workshops and books, showing what people knew in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

Influence

By 1789, about 25,000 copies of the Encyclopédie had been sold across Europe. Even though other encyclopedias were also popular, the Encyclopédie stood out in many ways. It was the first encyclopedia written by many different writers, and it helped make the word "encyclopedia" common.

The Encyclopédie was important not just for sharing facts, but also for shaping ideas. It encouraged people to think about new ways of doing things, which helped set the stage for big changes, like the French Revolution. Some people even blamed the ideas in the Encyclopédie for supporting revolutions in other places, such as in early United States and South America.

The Encyclopédie in relation to Wikipedia

The historian Dan O'Sullivan compares the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia, the Encyclopédie was a team effort with many writers and helpers. Just like people who work on Wikipedia today, Denis Diderot and his team had to use new tools and ideas. They needed to decide what information to include, how to connect different articles, and how to reach as many readers as possible.

Statistics

The Encyclopédie was a very big book collection. It had 17 volumes with articles, released between 1751 and 1765, and 11 more volumes with pictures, released from 1762 to 1772. All together, it had 18,000 pages, with about 75,000 different topics. There were 44,000 main topics, 28,000 smaller topics, and 2,500 picture lists. In total, the Encyclopédie contained around 20 million words.

Quotations

Here are two interesting quotes from the Encyclopédie:

• "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." (Philosophers, 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, Diderot)