ENCYCLOPÉDIE. — In the history of culture, this term, without further specification, usually designates the E. ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences,
des arts et des métiers, by Diderot and d’Alembert (Paris 1751–72), because of its importance in the history of modern thought.
There were, however, precedents and anticipations of the undertaking: one should recall Ramsay, who broached the idea in Masonic circles; the Parisian Société des arts of the Comte de Clermont; but above all the proposal made by the Englishman J. Mills in 1745 to the Parisian publisher Le Breton, to translate, with G. Sellius, the English encyclopedia of the arts and sciences by E. Chambers (2 vols., London 1728). Le Breton clashed with Mills and in 1746 entrusted the translation to Diderot, under the direction of the mathematician Gua de Malves, with d’Alembert’s supervision of the scientific section. To these men, and to Diderot, who assumed direction of the undertaking in 1747, belongs the merit of having given the initiative an entirely different importance, persuading the publisher to expand the work and to include original articles, assigning them among various collaborators, 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 political power; d’Alembert echoed him, at least in part, in the Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des grands, etc. (1753). The E. thus became a great cultural enterprise, an expression of the mature French Enlightenment. Its distant model was still P. Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97; 5ᵉ ed., 1734), which had initially been conceived as a “register of errors” intended to teach people to doubt. Now, from Bayle’s doubt, a new passion and almost a new form of certainty seems to have arisen, tending to become positive and empirical, yet not entirely separating itself from Cartesianism; it drew upon Newton and Leibniz, while at the same time raising Locke’s associationism to the status of dogma.
Among the earliest collaborators one should recall the abbés Mallet—for the theological entries and belles-lettres—de Prades, Yvon, and Pestre, who succeeded the first in the area of theology alone; the grammarian du Marsais, an atheist and Cartesian; Toussaint; and Raynal. The patriarchs of the French Enlightenment (Voltaire and Montesquieu) cautiously joined the undertaking later, after 1752. The chancellor d’Aguesseau, and especially Malesherbes, who succeeded him as director of the “book trade” after 1750 and remained in that position until 1763, contributed to the success of the enterprise through their attitude of benevolent tolerance. There was thus a compromise between the E. and political power; but Diderot was conscious of the separation, by then inevitable in France, between the philosophes and the monarchs. D’Alembert, on the other hand, pointed to Frederick of Prussia, the undertaking’s protector, as a model of an enlightened sovereign (for example, in the entries Académie and Dictionnaire). The principal opponents of the E. at the outset were the Jesuits who published the Journal de Trévoux: they immediately perceived its dangerous character and helped provoke the first arrêt of condemnation in 1752. The resumption of publication, authorized by the government, was a victory for the currents favorable to the philosophes and hostile to the Jesuits. The latter were soon to succumb to the converging hostility of the Enlightenment spirit and the radical Gallicanism of the Parlements. D’Alembert’s pamphlet Sur la destruction des fénautes en France (1765) is a cry of triumph by the philosophe and testifies to the discredit that the quinelles de religion had brought upon the Church (G. Goyau). Public opinion was by then ready to accept the legend of the great Jesuit conspiracy. In the field of education, d’Alembert could already defend the thesis of integral secularization (following La Chalotais) and advance the idea of a secular catechism of morality (Oeuvres, I, p. 231). After overcoming a second crisis in 1758–59 (in 1758 Helvétius’s De l’Esprit appeared, gathering the storms over the heads of the philosophes), the E. was completed in 1765, when the final volumes of the text appeared, and in 1772, when the final volumes of the plates were published. The complete original edition comprises 17 volumes of text, 12 of plates, and 4 of supplement (1777).
D’Alembert’s famous Discours préliminaire, prefixed to the first volume, contains many of the work’s guiding ideas: simple erudition must be replaced by a philosophical science of principles; one must
“ascend to the origin and generation of our ideas” (here use is made of the Baconian classification of the sciences, which is filled with a new meaning and linked to the characteristic dogmatism of associationist doctrines); on the other hand, it is necessary to “accumulate facts,” that is, to proceed through a historical and positive analysis in order to liberate the original truth from the erroneous traditions of ignorance and superstition. Thus faith in experimental observation, éclairée par l'esprit de méthode, is joined to absolute confidence in the universal rationality that operates immanently in the laws of the cosmos and in human nature (v. DIDEROT, DENIS; in the entry Cosmologie, d’Alembert adopts the Leibnizian idea of universal continuity: Turgot transfers it to the historical sphere and partly reassesses the Middle Ages, which the other encyclopedists had radically disparaged). D’Alembert begins with the “regeneration of ideas” during the Renaissance: he exalts the fecundity of modern thought over scholasticism, praises Bacon’s method, the negative and critical aspect of Cartesian thought, Newton’s “philosophy,” and Locke’s metaphysics, which he defines as an “experimental physics of the soul.” In conclusion, he alludes to the controversy opened by Rousseau concerning the progress of the arts and sciences (Rousseau contributed the entries on music and the entry Economie politique to the E., before breaking with the impious “sect” of philosophers). In the entry Encyclopédie, Diderot openly contrasts a theocentric vision of the cosmos with an anthropocentric one (Oeuvres, XIV, pp. 452–53 and Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature [1754], ibid., II, p. 53). From Baconian ideas he derived an organic and “transformist” conception of nature: the creative “genius” inserts itself, in vitalistic fashion, into this cosmic growth. “Genius” vivifies the pratique aveugle of the mechanical arts, which Diderot reassesses even more radically than d’Alembert: in the world of techniques, tout est en action et vivant (the entry cited above, and the entry Art). In the ethical and religious sphere as well, the criterion of evaluation must be practical and utilitarian: “utility circumscribes everything.” The “antisocial” virtues are devalued (Célibat, Macération, Population, etc.); pure contemplation (Malabar); and morality founded on Holy Scripture (Masaique et chrétienne, philosophie: nature is the philosopher’s book, the Bible the theologian’s). In the entry Christianisme, beneath an appearance of respect, religion is reduced to a social function, and it is asserted that “one might 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; nevertheless, in the Éléments de philosophie (VII), he states that morality arises with society, and elsewhere suggests that the universal element—at once useful and true—in 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 controversies it provoked, contributed to his abandoning the encyclopedic enterprise in 1758, d’Alembert praises a “purely Presbyterian” ecclesiastical constitution and a Socinian profession of faith; in the entries Hiérarchie, Société, and Théocratie, Diderot goes even further. On the idea of toleration, the greatest teacher is Locke.
The Diderotian naturalism exerted a great influence on those abbés, collaborators of the E., who might be defined as Catholic Enlightenment thinkers. In the entry Certitude, de Prades polemicizes against the “historical skepticism” of the deists and of Diderot himself (with reference to the Pensées philosophiques of 1746): he arrives at a sort of acosmistic experimentalism, shared by the abbé Yvon. The latter nevertheless emphasizes the creative, anti-antithetical effort of reason in the genesis of Christian spiritualism, in the entries Ams and Immaterialisme: the first Christian Fathers displayed une déférence trop soumise pour les systèmes reçus: one must await 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 recurs in the entry Charité, where an active virtue is exalted against Fénelon’s pure quietist love. In the entry Monichisme, however, he rises against the most banal eudemonism, with almost Romantic elements. Finally, in the entry Abbés, the fascination exerted upon him by Bayle, whom he nevertheless combats, is evident. 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 the original innocence and truth to be “liberated” from historical errors; beneficence and natural sociability, which retain Christian virtues, etc. The natural-law motifs, by now wholly 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, Boulanger (v.); Cirémonies, Polytheisme by Diderot.
Disc.: On 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; Voltaire (v.) Rousseau (v.). On 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 recently published pamphlets (v. below). It also contains the bibliography of the encyclopedist abbés. On 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, Lyon 1906; R. Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans l'Encyclopédie, especially part I, 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 and 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. Also compare N. N. Schargo, History in the E., New York 1947.