ENCYCLOPÉDIE. - In the history of culture, this term is customarily used to designate, without further specification, the E. ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers of Diderot and d'Alembert (Paris 1751-72), on account of the importance it holds in the history of modern thought.
Precedents or forerunners of the undertaking are not lacking: mention should be made of Ramsay, who stirred the idea in Masonic circles; of the Parisian Société des arts of the Count of Clermont; but above all of the proposal made by the Englishman J. Mills in 1745 to the Parisian publisher Le Breton, to translate, together with G. Sellius, the English Encyclopedia of arts and sciences of E. Chambers (2 vols., London 1728). Le Breton quarreled with Mills and in 1746 entrusted the translation to Diderot under the direction of the mathematician Gua de Malves, with d'Alembert supervising the scientific portion. To these two and to Diderot, who took over the direction of the enterprise in 1747, belongs the merit of having given the initiative a far greater importance, persuading the publisher to expand the work and to provide original articles, distributed among various collaborators, "occupés chacun de sa partie et liés seulement par l'intérêt général du genre humain" (Diderot, Oeuvres, XIV, p. 421). Diderot rejected academic enterprises and excluded the direct protection of the powers that be: d'Alembert echoes him, at least in part, in the Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands, etc. (1753). The E. thus transforms itself into a great cultural enterprise, the expression of mature French Enlightenment. The distant model is still constituted by P. Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695-97; 5th ed., 1734), which had initially been conceived as a "register of errors" to teach men to doubt. Now, from Bayle's doubt a new passion and almost a new form of certainty seem to have been born, which tends to become positivist-empirical, yet does not detach itself entirely from Cartesianism, draws on Newton and Leibniz, and at the same time erects Locke's associationism into a dogma.
Among the first collaborators, mention should be made of the abbés Mallet - for the theological entries and for belles-lettres - de Prades, Yvon, Pestre, who succeeded the former in theology alone; the grammarian du Marsais, an atheist and Cartesian, Toussaint, Raynal. The patriarchs of the French Enlightenment (Voltaire, Montesquieu) cautiously drew near later, after 1752. The chancellor d'Aguessau contributed to the success of the enterprise, through his attitude of benevolent tolerance, and still more so Malesherbes, who succeeded him in the direction of the "librairie" after 1750, and until 1763. There is therefore a situation of compromise between the E. and the powers that be: but Diderot is conscious of the separation, by now inevitable, between the Enlightenment thinkers and the monarchs in France. D'Alembert, on the other hand, points to Frederick of Prussia, his protector, as the model of an enlightened sovereign (for example, in the entries Académie, Dictionnaire). The chief adversaries of the E. are, at the outset, the Jesuits who published the Journal de Trévoux: they immediately perceive its dangerous character and help to provoke the first arrêt of condemnation in 1752. The resumption of publication, authorized by the government, is a victory for the currents favorable to the philosophes and hostile to the Jesuits. The latter were soon to succumb to the converging hostilities of the Enlightenment spirit and of the radical Gallicanism of the Parlements. D'Alembert's libel Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France (1765) is a cry of triumph of the philosophe and bears witness to the discredit that the querelles de religion had cast upon the Church (G. Goyau). Public opinion is by now ready to welcome the legend of the great Jesuit conspiracy. In the field of education, d'Alembert can already maintain the thesis of integral secularization (after La Chalotais) and put forward the idea of a lay catechism of morals (Oeuvres, I, p. 231). Having overcome a second crisis in 1758-59 (in '58 Helvétius's De l'Esprit appeared, which brought storms down upon the heads of the philosophes), the E. was completed in 1765 (the date on which the last volumes of the text appeared) and in 1772 (when the last of the plates appeared). The complete original edition comprises 17 volumes of text, 12 of plates, 4 of supplement (1777).
The famous Discours préliminaire of d'Alembert, prefixed to the first volume, contains many of the guiding ideas of the work: mere erudition must be replaced by a philosophical science of principles; one must
"go back to the origin and the generation of our ideas" (and here the Baconian classification of the sciences is employed, which is filled with a new meaning and linked to the characteristic dogmatism of associationist doctrines); it is necessary, on the other hand, to "accumulate facts," that is, to pass through a historical-positive analysis, in order to free the original truth from the erroneous traditions of ignorance and superstition. Thus the faith in experimental observation, éclairée par l'esprit de méthode, is wedded to absolute trust in the universal rationality that acts, immanently, in the laws of the cosmos and in the nature of man (see, for example, the entries Leibniz, Raison by Diderot; in the entry Cosmologie d'Alembert welcomes the Leibnizian idea of universal continuity: Turgot carries it over into the historical field and partly rehabilitates the Middle Ages, radically depreciated by the other encyclopedists). D'Alembert starts from the "regeneration of ideas" of the Renaissance: he extols the fecundity of modern thought against Scholasticism, praises Bacon's method, the negative and critical part of Cartesian thought, Newton's "philosophy," Locke's metaphysics, which he defines as an "experimental physics of the soul." In conclusion he alludes to the polemic opened by Rousseau on the progress of the arts and sciences (Rousseau gave the E. the entries on music, and the entry Economie politique, before breaking with the impious "sect" of the philosophers). In the entry Encyclopédie, Diderot openly opposes to the theocentric vision of the cosmos an anthropocentric vision (Oeuvres, XIV, pp. 452-53, and Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature [1754], ibid., II, p. 53). From Baconian ideas he draws an organic and "transformist" conception of nature: the creative "genius" inserts itself, vitalistically, into this cosmic growth. "Genius" vivifies the pratique aveugle of the mechanical arts, which Diderot revalues even more radically than d'Alembert: in the world of techniques, tout est en action et vivant (entry cited above, and entry Art). Also in the ethico-religious field, the criterion of evaluation must be practical-utilitarian: "l'utile circonscrit tout." The "anti-social" virtues are devalued (Célibat, Macération, Population, etc.); pure contemplation (Malabar); morality founded on Sacred Scripture (Mosaïque et chrétienne, philosophie: nature is the philosopher's book, the Bible the theologian's). In the entry Christianisme, under the appearances of respect, he reduces religion to a social function, and affirms that "one could sometimes measure the degree of truth of a religion by the degree of utility that States derive from it" (Oeuvres, XIV, pp. 143-45). D'Alembert is more reticent: he affirms, however, in the Éléments de philosophie (VII), that morality is born with society, and elsewhere he lets it be understood that the universal element, useful and true at once, of religions consists in moral truths (Oeuvres, pp. 224-34, and Opuscules: Sur la véritable religion, pp. 6-8). In the article Genève, which because of the polemics it aroused helped to make him abandon the encyclopedic enterprise in 1758, d'Alembert extols an ecclesiastical constitution "purely presbyterian," and a Socinian profession of faith: in the entries Hiérarchie, Société, Théocratie, Diderot goes even further. For the idea of tolerance, the greatest master is Locke.
Diderot's naturalism exerted great influence on those abbés, collaborators of the E., who could be defined as Catholic Enlightenment thinkers. In the entry Certitude, de Prades polemicizes against the "historical skepticism" of the deists and of Diderot himself (referring to the Pensées philosophiques of 1746): he arrives at a sort of acoristic experimentalism, shared by the abbé Yvon. The latter, however, emphasizes the creative, anti-systematic effort of reason in the genesis of Christian spiritualism, in the entries Ams and Immaterialisme: the first Christian Fathers showed a déférence trop soumise pour les systèmes reçus: one must wait for Descartes and the moderns to find ce courage de raison qui se cherche une voie même où il ne voit point de trace. A similar Diderotian motif returns in the entry Charité, where an active virtue is exalted against the pure quietist love of Fénelon. Against the most banal eudemonism, however, there rises in the entry Monichisme, with almost romantic touches. In the entry Abbés, finally, the fascination that Bayle exerts on him is evident, even though he combats him. The Enlightenment ideal of Immanité, toward which these uncertain Catholics also tend, is nevertheless so rich in religious and Christian residues as to legitimize certain equivocations: religious is the expectation of an imminent révolution... dans l'esprit des hommes et dans le caractère national (entry Encyclopédie); the rationalistic myth of original innocence and of truth to be "liberated" from historical errors; beneficence and natural sociability that leave Christian virtues, etc. The natural-law motifs, by now entirely secular, do not exclude a religious reformist animus (entry Droit des gens, by de Jaucourt, etc.; Liberté, by Diderot, where J. A. Turretini and Fénelon are cited, etc.). For the natural genesis of religion see the entries Oeconomie politique, by Boulanger (v.); Cirémonies, Polytheisme by Diderot.
Disc.: For d'Alembert cf. Oeuvres compl., 8 vols., Paris 1821-22 and the Oeuvres et corresp. incid., edited by Ch. Henry, ibid. 1887 (cf. Opuscules); compare the correspondence in Oeuvres, 18 vols., ibid. 1802; furthermore the correspondence of Voltaire (v.) and of Rousseau (v.). For Diderot cf. Oeuvres, edited by J. Azezaz and M. Tourneur, 20 vols., ibid. 1875-78; compare Corresp. littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., notices, notes, table gén., edited by M. Tourneur, ibid. 1884; l'éléva sur le liberté de la presse, by M. Lamagnon de Malesberbes, no. 1814; F. Venturi, op. cit. for other opuscules recently published (v. below). There too the bibliography of the abbés encyclopedists. For the problems of the text of the Encyclopédie (sometimes altered by the cautious editor): H. Dieckmann, Le philosophes, tests and interpretation, St. Louis 1945; D. H. Gordon and N. L. Torrey, The reasoning of Diderot's Encyclopédie, New York 1940. For a general bibliography on the Encyclopédie: M. Roustau, Les philosophes et la société française au XVIIIe siècle, Leone 1906; R. Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans l'Encyclopédie, especially part 1, ibid. 1923, chaps. 1 and 4; and part 2, ibid. 1923, chaps. 1-3; id., Rousseau et l'Enc., ibid. 1920; D. Morret, Les origines intellectuelles de la Récol. Française (1713-87), Paris 1933; C. Becker, The heavenly city of the XVIII century philosophers, New Haven 1932; F. Venturi, Jeunesse de Diderot, ibid. 1939; id., Le uricini dell'Enciclopedia, Florence 1946; id., L'antichità recitata e l'idea del progresso in N. A. Boulanger, Bari 1947; P. Hazard, La pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle, III; Notes et références, Paris 1946, pp. 91-94. On d'Alembert: L. Brunel, Les philosophes et l'Académie, Paris 1884; M. Müller, Essai sur la philosophie de J. d'Alembert, ibid. 1925. On the conception of history: K. Löwith, Meaning in history. The theological implication of the philosophy of history, Chicago 1940. On the success of the E. cf. already Voltaire, Questions sur l'Enc., 9 vols., Paris 1771; B. Grothuyse, L'Enciclopédie, in Tableau de la littérature française de Corneille à A. Chénier, ibid. 1939. On the Italian edition: A. Bédarida et P. Hazard, L'influence franç. en Italie au XVIIIe siècle, ibid. 1934. For religious history in general: G. Guyau, Histoire religieuse, in Histoire de la nation française, edited by G. Hanotaux, VI, ibid. 1922. Compare also N. N. Schargo, History in the E., New York 1947.
Ettore Passerin