There was Alexandre Deleyre, a clergyman who lost his faith and deserted his Jesuit church, and then edited and translated a collection of works by Francis Bacon. He wrote only two signed entries for the Encyclopédie, one a bold warning about the pitfalls of religious fanaticism, and the other an astonishing four-page article entitled Epingle, which concerned itself with the eighteen-step manufacture of straight pins. Though we may now regard this as slightly excessive, twenty-five years later it was used as an important example of the division of labour in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Deleyre was a champion of the Revolution, although his radicalism and pin obsession won him few friends at home. According to the Kafkers, his wife and daughter ‘found him almost impossible to live with – often sullen, given to fits of rage, behaving like a tyrant while hating tyranny in others’.
There was Antoine Louis, the principal contributor on medicine. Louis wrote almost 500 articles, while still finding time to practise both medicine and law. His time at the autopsy table placed him in great demand as a witness in murder trials, and until the Revolution robbed him of his savings, he was one of the wealthiest surgeons in Paris. But the Revolution also saved him, as he played an important role in designing a new decapitating apparatus intended as more humane and less painful than its predecessors. Cleaner too. The machine, which was built by a harpsichord maker, initially bore his name: it was known as the Petite Louison or Louisette, although it swiftly adopted the name of Louis’s sponsor, the legislator Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
Then there was Jean-Joseph Menuret de Chambaud, who also wrote for the Encyclopédie on medical affairs, and was ahead of his time on many issues. He lived in Hamburg and disclosed how environmental conditions could have a direct result on a population’s health. He was a champion of the ‘vitalist’ school of Montpellier, believing that exposure to the moon and the sun both had an effect on health and longevity, and he became (by buying the title) Consulting Physician-in-ordinary to Louis XVI. One of the things he taught the king was his text in the Encyclopédie entitled Manstrupation, which advised that masturbation was effectively self-rape, and the harm caused would lead to (unnamed) diminishing powers.
We should consider the fate of the majestically named Louis Necker de Germany, who probably never let anyone down in the cad department. At around the time he was writing an influential article for the Encyclopédie on friction in mechanics (entitled Frottement), Monsieur Necker was also engaging in friction with the wife of the Genevese clergyman Pierre Vernes. Vernes discovered their love letters and asked Necker to dinner, during which he shot him in the thigh.
Neither should we forget the entries on mechanics and economics made by Jean-David Perronet, who championed Newcomen’s first steam engines in print at a time when most failed to recognise their significance. Perronet also wrote incisively about bridge construction (his entry entitled ‘Pieux, Pilots ou Pilotis’, a description of deep-pile foundations in water, was the excitement of all France), but he built many bridges himself, including several over the Seine and Oise, and his great showpiece, Pont Louis XVI. He also found time to construct many relationships with married women, one of whom was the society favourite Madame Le Gendre, the younger sister of Diderot’s mistress Sophie Volland, which made his relationship with his editor complicated.
The Encyclopédie boasted a couple of father–son teams, and none were more objectionable than the Barthez clan. Guillaume Barthez de Marmorières wrote on sheep rearing and beekeeping: his ‘Mouche-à-Miel & Miel’ apparently drew much acclaim, as did his summary of shepherds as ignorant and lazy. But his son Paul-Joseph Barthez was the really foul one. He wrote twenty-two articles on such varied subjects as fainting, evil spells, the relative strength of man and animals, anatomy and the problematic topic (to him) of women. Who were these strange creatures? They were ‘The female of man.’ His entry surveys the literature: ‘Hippocrates stated positively that a woman cannot become ambidextrous. Galen confirms this and adds that this is because of her natural weakness … The Anatomists are not the only ones who have considered woman to be, in some manner, a failed man; platonic philosophers have a similar idea.’ Barthez Jr then quotes Livy, who has suggested the female ‘is an animal both powerless and indomitable’, and criticises both the Christian and Jewish religion for their subjugation of women, and notes what a rough deal they receive in the East, where the ‘domestic servitude of wives … has made them contemptible.’ But then he emerges, seemingly, as something of a female champion: ‘We have so severely neglected the education of women among all of the refined peoples, that it is surprising that we can identify so many whose erudition and written works have made them renowned.’*
Alas, his own life suggests a less respectful attitude. ‘Not only was Barthez ugly,’ the Kafkers attest, as if such an attribute may infect his intellectual prowess, ‘he was also hot-tempered and belligerent.’ His qualities as a physician were dubious, he made enemies of many, and ‘he was rumoured to be a materialist, a cynic, a scoundrel and a lecher.’ In 1783 he was accused of raping an underage girl, and he is thought to have paid off the victim’s father. You may be relieved to learn that Barthez did not fare well in the Revolution. His house was stoned, he lost most of his income, and he was forced to flee. But it did not all end badly. Towards the end of his life his honour and professorship was restored by Napoleon, who may have recognised a kindred spirit.
And finally, but most famously, are the contributions to the Encyclopédie made by the writer-philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, rivals in literature but both equally eager to promote the dissemination of new ideas. Voltaire wrote more than forty largely uncontroversial articles on literary theory and grammatical definitions, but he also offered his thoughts on Elegance, History and Taste, which had something to offend everyone.
On Elegance he asserted that ‘There are languages in Europe in which nothing is rarer than an elegant speech. Rough endings, numerous consonants, auxiliary verbs needlessly repeated in a single sentence offend the ear.’ On History he regretted that so much writing about the past was based on fable to the exclusion of truth (‘hence the origins of all peoples are absurd’), and he found it equally absurd that during the time of Ancient Egypt the sun changed where it rose and set ‘four times’.
Throughout, Voltaire was his didactic, blustery self. But it was a particular feature of the Encyclopédie – and something that consistently distinguished it from its predecessors – that opinions were freely expressed as philosophical and moral truths. In this way, opinion replaced the superstition and myth of earlier encyclopaedias, and the promulgation of progressive ideas enabled its subscribers to feel they were part of a movement rather than just a readership.*
Voltaire seemed to be writing with sore experience when he tackled the question of French Taste:
A depraved taste in food consists in choosing those dishes which disgust other men; it is a kind of sickness. A depraved taste in the arts consists in enjoying subjects that are revolting to men of good judgment. Such taste leads us to prefer the burlesque to what is noble, and to prefer what is precious and affected to simple and natural beauty: this is a sickness of the mind.
And on the question of Happiness – the attainment of which was a key concern of the French Enlightenment in particular – Voltaire observed:
What we call happiness is an abstract idea, comprising a few ideas of pleasure; as he who has only a moment’s pleasure is not a happy man; just as a moment of sorrow does not make an unhappy man. Pleasure is more rapid-moving than happiness, and happiness more fleeting than felicity. When we say I am happy in this moment, we are abusing the word, and this only means that I am pleased [j’ai du plaisir]: when we have a bit of repeated pleasures, we can in this space of time, say that we are happy, and when this happiness endures a little longer, it’s a state of felicity; sometimes one is very far from being happy in prosperity, just as a person sick with nausea eats nothing of a large feast prepared for him.