Diderot wrote (or contributed to) more than 6000 entries, tackling almost every subject (although many of these were translations from Chambers and other sources, not least specialist medical textbooks). In the first ‘A’ volume alone he composed articles on giving birth (Accouchement), steel (Acier), agriculture, a boring machine for the manufacture of cannons (Alésoir), the Arabs, silver (Argent) and Aristotle. There exists hardly any record of his day-to-day notes or correspondence with his editors or writers, but certainly we know he did not edit alone. From 1747 to 1758 he was partnered by Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, the illegitimate offspring of aristocratic parents (he was abandoned in a wooden box on the steps of the Parisian church Saint-Jean-le-Rond). Like Diderot, D’Alembert was another one of those men whose agile mind found it impossible to settle on a single profession.
A revolution in style: Diderot and D’Alembert glimpse the future
Trained as a barrister and doctor, D’Alembert was also a skilful musician and mathematician; he was clearly suited to the breadth of learning required to edit a tremendous reference work. And perhaps he felt he had something to prove: Frank and Serena Kafker have observed that while he had a sharp wit and a talent for mimicry, he also had ‘a high-pitched voice, a tiny build and rather plain features’. The relationship of the two editors was productive but fiery. The Kafkers defined their characters as equally ‘touchy, self-righteous, given to emotional outbursts, and convinced of his intellectual excellence’.
D’Alembert wrote daringly on mathematics, physics, music and astronomy, and his professional connections resulted in the commissioning of many fruitful entries. He was keen to use the Encyclopédie to advance contemporary and original thought. Indeed he saw it as a weapon, and his most controversial article almost brought down the whole enterprise.*
The entry entitled Genève contained rather more than just a brief history of that city state; its length alone suggested there was mischief to come. The whole of England was afforded three-fifths of a column, Denmark merely seventeen lines; but for Geneva, D’Alembert wrote four double-columned pages. His tone was admonishing. He criticised the city’s legislators for refusing to allow the staging of plays for ‘the fear of the taste for display, dissipation and libertinage that companies of actors communicate to the youth’. In Geneva, D’Alembert argued, freedom of expression and loose morals were suppressed lest a whole generation grow up to sweep away their opposite. He had learnt of this suppression when visiting Voltaire, and the philosopher and playwright certainly influenced the complaint. For good measure, D’Alembert also accused Calvinist ministers of hypocrisy and deception, and criticised what he saw as tuneless singing at church services.
His opinion of the city wasn’t all bad – he approved, for instance, of certain Genevese penal leniencies (the refusal to put criminals on the rack among them), but he must have known that his article would cause offence. The local elders banned the Encyclopédie in the city, and an angry meeting called by the Council of Geneva stopped just short of an official protest to the French government for fear of reprisals. The controversy hastened the breakdown of D’Alembert’s relationship with Diderot, whose imprisonment a few years before left him in no doubt how swiftly the old regime – the unenlightened anti-intellectual elite – could censor and punish when threatened.
And there was still one more strong-willed individual in the mix, the Encyclopédie’s stick-wielding chief publisher André-François le Breton. Le Breton was born in Paris and entered the book trade by chance at the age of seventeen. A disputed inheritance landed him with the responsibility of publishing his grandfather’s important Almanach Royal, a who’s who of European nobility. This was a cash cow, and demonstrated to Le Breton how a successful reference work could set one up for life. He greatly expanded the Almanach’s coverage and sales, and he began looking around for other big projects.
We have seen how his plan to translate Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia fell apart when he clashed with his editors, and it was a precursor of things to come. He then teamed up with three other publishers and appointed a new editor, Abbé Jean-Paul de Gua de Malves, but once again he quarrelled over money and the quality of the work. Malves was dismissed, clearing the way for Diderot and D’Alembert to take on their decisive roles.
The new prospectus created a rush of subscriptions and doubled the editors’ ambitions. The original plan to complete the new encyclopaedia in three and a half years swiftly began to look unfeasible, as did the initial print run. The order of 1625 copies of Volume I in 1750 had increased to 4225 by Volume 4 in 1754, and Le Breton and his colleagues were getting rich. But the money – some half a million livres in receipts in the first four years – inevitably encouraged piracy, and the publishers fought hard to restrict unauthorised editions throughout Europe. Those in charge of the libraries at universities and other institutions abroad, alongside the wealthy educated elite, had recognised the emergence of something both fabuleux and incroyable, and the publishers of pirated copies, such as the one widely available in London within a year of the original, claimed a moral and economic obligation for their actions: one syndicate found ‘a view to serve their country by encouraging arts, manufactures and trades, and keeping large sums at home that would otherwise be sent abroad.’ Their set cost half that of the French edition.*
Le Breton faced another problem. The popularity of his encyclopaedia was partly down to its boldness, and yet this also threatened its very existence. Church and State were nervous of its broad-minded acceptance of religions other than Catholicism, and wary of political views that veered from conservative norms. The most vituperative disapproval arrived from the Bishop of Montauban a year after publication. ‘Up until now,’ he wrote, ‘Hell has vomited its venom drop by drop. Today there are torrents of errors and impieties which tend towards nothing less than the submerging of Faith, Religion, Virtues, the Church, Subordination, the Laws, and Reason.’
Such orthodox opposition increased each year, with the encyclopaedia condemned by eleven general assemblies at the Sorbonne. D’Alembert’s article on Geneva had sounded the loudest alarm for the editors in 1757, and two years later the progressive views in other volumes caused the Parliament of Paris to ban publication entirely and demand the recall of existing volumes. Further, it demanded that Le Breton refund all its subscribers. Faced with financial ruin and political embarrassment, the publishers canvassed influential royals, and after a brief interval managed to resume printing and distribution in secret. At the publication of the final volumes in 1772, the set was selling for 980 livres, more than four times its asking price when it appeared twenty-one years before. And such was the demand that people were willing to pay even more.
But Le Breton had struck what Denis Diderot regarded as a deal with the devil. Behind the editors’ and contributors’ backs he toned down the contents of about forty controversial articles just as they went to press. According to the Kafkers, Diderot ‘flew into a justifiable rage, never forgave Le Breton, and afterwards treated him with contempt’. He found him ‘miserly, touchy and boring’, and his wife was ‘a bundle of contradictions’. The Parisian police weren’t delighted with Le Breton either, imprisoning him for a week for disregarding instructions not to publish. If Le Breton ever cared that he would henceforth be regarded as one of the century’s great cultural villains he didn’t show it, and indeed he laughed all the way to la banque. He died one of the wealthiest publishers in Paris, with net profits from the encyclopaedia estimated at more than 2 million livres (approximately £65m). And he left an educational legacy of sorts: if anyone doubted the potential rewards from producing a studious but daring multi-volume reference work, the succès de scandale of the Encyclopédie would have set them right. It remains the pre-eminent storehouse of mid-eighteenth-century knowledge, and a remarkable glimpse of the enlightened world at the dawn of revolutions cultural, mechanical and political. That it itself partly facilitated this advance there can be no doubt.