You Could Look It Up (33 page)

The two guiding lights were Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot. D’Alembert, the illegitimate son of an aristocratic soldier and a renegade nun turned salonnière, was a scientific and mathematical prodigy.
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When just twenty-six, he published a pathbreaking work on Newtonian mechanics, and he became a member of three of Europe’s leading learned societies: the Académie des Sciences, the Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Royal Society. His partner seems, at least at first, as different from him as can be. Diderot is famous as one of the greatest conversationalists of all time, owing to a uniquely powerful mind. He dabbled in “philosophical writing” when “philosophical” was a euphemism for anything that threatened the power of the state. The range of his interests has rarely been matched: he wrote poetry, novels, plays, literary criticism, philosophy, music criticism, scientific works, translations, and more. Unlike d’Alembert, whose mathematical writings attracted little notice from the authorities, Diderot was arrested in 1749 for his writings.

The publishers’ original plan for
L’Encyclopédie
was simply a French translation of Chambers’s
Cyclopædia
. Diderot and d’Alembert were hired to supervise the translation, and d’Alembert in particular thought he was being invited only as an editor for the mathematical entries. “Borrowing” other nations’ reference books was common; Diderot himself had just finished translating and adapting Robert James’s medical dictionary. Once Diderot and d’Alembert got their hands on the project, though, they radically reconceived it. They were probably without revolutionary intentions at first—no one imagined an encyclopedia becoming the center of an intellectual firestorm. Eventually, though, they proposed a wholly new kind of book, “nothing less than the basic facts and the basic principles of all knowledge; it was to be a war machine of the thought and opinion of the Enlightenment.”
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Two works lay out the principles: Diderot’s
Proposals
, published separately before the rest of the book, and d’Alembert’s
Preliminary Discourse
, published at the beginning of volume 1. Diderot grandly said the book would “serve all the purposes of a library for a professional man on any subject apart from his own,”
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and d’Alembert justified the project as a whole. The
Preliminary Discourse
in particular is a manifesto—not merely for a reference book, but for the whole of the intellectual enterprise known as the Enlightenment. It is a discourse on method, “an adjustment of the rationalist spirit of Descartes to the empiricism of Locke and Newton—a fusion of traditions which lies at the foundation of the
Encyclopedia
.”
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The
Preliminary Discourse
opens with humanity’s instincts for self-preservation and natural desire for knowledge. D’Alembert distinguished the things we can know with certainty from the things we can know with probability, the things that must be true from the things that happen to be true. He then turned to what he called an “art”—“any system of knowledge which can be reduced to positive and invariable rules independent of caprice or opinion”
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—and distinguished the
“liberal” from the “mechanical” arts—those that can be performed by the mind and those that are performed by hand.

Having laid out the first principles on which the arts were founded, the encyclopedists began their survey of all of human knowledge. The
Encyclopédie
’s seventy thousand articles were written by the leading figures of the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and d’Holbach were all among the
encyclopédistes
. “The encyclopedic arrangement of our knowledge,” they wrote, “consists of collecting knowledge into the smallest area possible and of placing the philosopher at a vantage point … high above the vast labyrinth, whence he can perceive the principal sciences and the arts simultaneously.”
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The first two volumes appeared together in 1751, and the production was messy. Different sizes of capital letters are used for headwords, apparently without rhyme or reason. “In the typographical tangle of the
Encyclopédie
,” wrote one critic, “titles occasionally appear italicized in upper case, italicized and in lower case, or in a combination of words in capital letters and lower case words, either italicized or not italicized.” Some articles are signed with the names of their contributors, but many were not, and while it was once assumed that Diderot was responsible for all the unsigned articles, it now appears that there was nothing systematic about the practice.
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At first glance, there is nothing especially revolutionary about the articles. In volume 8, for instance, published in 1765, there are entries on the
hypotenuse
(“the longest side of a right triangle … The
word
is Greek, from
πὸ
, under, and
τε
νω
, extend”),
Janéiro
(“South American river on the coast of Brazil”),
Iliad
(“name of an epic poem, the first and most perfect of those that Homer wrote. See E
PIC
”),
imitation
(“It is the artistic representation of an object. Blind nature imitates nothing; it is art that imitates”),
immeubles
(“These are fixed goods that have a known location, and that cannot be transported to another place”), and so on. The very long entry
imprimerie
‘printing press’ is typical of the focus on the skilled trades. It opens with a definition of printing before moving into a long discussion of the history of printing with movable type, an account of technical aspects such as justification, the roles of the compositor and proofreader, an account of the differences in printing folio, quarto, octavo, and duodecimo, and so on.

And yet a more careful look at that same volume reveals content that made the authorities nervous: as John Lough notes, “passages reflecting the outlook of the Enlightenment are hidden away in the most unlikely places.”
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The articles on
ignorance
and
illusion
, for instance, are illuminating glances into Enlightenment ideas about the source of knowledge. While a less heterodox work might explain ignorance and illusion in religious terms—becoming enlightened means approaching biblical truth—the
encyclopédistes
had a strictly secular conception of these matters. And it gets more explicit still. That same volume includes an article for
Jésuite
, and although it opens with a declaration that there is no original research here—“We say nothing here ourselves. This article is just a brief and faithful summary of accounts given in court”—in fact it is a devastating portrait of fanatical and bloodthirsty zealots. The entry on
Jésus-Christ
is less direct; the encyclopédistes could not blaspheme the Savior. They could, however, get in more subtle digs: “Jesus Christ, founder of the Christian religion. We can call this religion
the best philosophy
”—not that it
is
the best, only that we can
call
it that. The early Christians come across as narrow-minded: “I don’t know why the early disciples of
Jesus
criticized Platonism … Doesn’t every system of philosophy have some truths?” The Church Fathers were also “sometimes embarrassed by logical fallacies, and their arguments were unsound”—and of course “They have contempt for reason and science.”

The book’s revolutionary project was noticed, and conservatives, especially in the Church, were alarmed. The authors went through the motions of disavowing heresy. D’Alembert’s
Preliminary Discourse
, for instance, flirts with danger in speaking of “however absurd a religion might be”—but then tries to dodge responsibility with the parenthetical qualification “(a reproach which only impiety can make of ours).”
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And while they insisted that priests should be telling us nothing about this world—that is the business of humanity—they were careful to acknowledge the existence of a creator, to avoid problems with the Church.

No one was fooled. Friends in high places staved off prosecution for a while, but when that protection was exhausted, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities were out for blood, and they took action against not only the contributors but the book itself. The police organized burnings of the manuscripts, and subscribers were ordered to surrender their
copies to the nearest post office. Copies of the book were locked in the Bastille as if they were themselves criminals.
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Nevertheless, the contributors continued working clandestinely. In fact, the scandal attracted kindred souls as contributors to the later volumes. But the whole project became much riskier. D’Alembert largely withdrew, remaining involved only on uncontroversial entries on mathematical subjects.

More than one critic has summarized the influence of the
Encyclopédie
on French thought. It promoted skepticism about traditional claims, willingness to question the authority of both the Church and the state, discontent with the status quo, and determination to make the world better through the application of reason. And soon these very qualities would shake the foundations of the French nation. Though it would be foolish to offer any monocausal explanation for an epochal event in world history, it is hard to overstate the significance of the
Encyclopédie
in turning society upside down in 1789. Entries such as
peuple
‘people’,
droit naturel
‘natural right’, and
autorité politique
‘political authority’ offered new ways to think about statecraft. “Seventeen years after completion of publication,” wrote Koning, “and as an unmistakable sequel, came the French Revolution.”
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A work much less interesting in its first incarnation became the more successful franchise. The
Encyclopædia Britannica
(1768–71) was Britain’s answer to the
Encyclopédie
.