The Encyclopédie
The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres was published under the direction of Denis Diderot, with 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772. Contributors included the most prominent philosophes: Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Marmontel, d’Holbach and Turgot, to name only a few. These great minds (and some lesser ones) collaborated in the goal of assembling and disseminating in clear, accessible prose the fruits of accumulated knowledge and learning. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors and filling over 18,000 pages of text, the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, as well as a machine de guerre which served to propagate Enlightened ideas.
Due to problems of censorship, successive volumes of the Encyclopédie appeared at an irregular pace. The first seven volumes were issued, one per year, from 1751 to 1757. Distribution of the ten remaining volumes took place in 1766. The volumes of plates, relatively unaffected by censorship, were released at the rate of roughly one per year from 1761-1772. In its original printing, about 4,000 copies were made — in a day and age when a print of 1,500 counted as large.
The impact of the Encyclopédie was enormous, not only in its original edition, but also in multiple reprintings in smaller formats and in later adaptations. It was hailed, and also persecuted, as the sum of modern knowledge, as the a monument to the progress of reason in the eighteenth century. Through its attempt to classify learning and to open all domains of human activity to its readers, the Encyclopédie gave expression to many of the most important intellectual and social developments of its time.
Image: Illustration for "Histoire Naturelle" (Large Cats)
Image: Illustration for "Histoire Naturelle" (Glaciers, Volcanos)
Image: Illustration for "Architecture"
Image: Illustration for "Musique"
Image: Illustration for "Moulin"
Image: Illustration for "Charpente"
Image: Illustration for "Horlogerie"
Image: Map from the Encyclopédie Atlas
Image: Chart of Human Knowledge in the Encyclopédie
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