Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Encyclopédie
Seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates (1751–1772), edited by Diderot and, until 1758, d’Alembert: the knowledge of the age ordered by reason, including the crafts – banned in 1759 and finished anyway.
Introduction
The project began in 1745 when the Paris publisher André Le Breton planned a French version of Ephraim Chambers’s English Cyclopaedia; under Diderot and the mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert it grew into an original work with some 72,000 articles by well over a hundred contributors, among them Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Louis de Jaucourt, who wrote about a quarter of them. D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse (1751) arranged knowledge after Francis Bacon by memory, reason and imagination, with no privileged place for theology. D’Alembert withdrew as editor in 1758; after the ban, Diderot finished the remaining text volumes largely in secret, and in 1764 discovered that Le Breton had cut passages without telling him. Cross-references were used to slip criticism past the censors.
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More works by Denis Diderot
- c. 1762Rameau’s Nephew
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