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Denis Diderot, 1713-1784
Leading French Enlightenement philosopher.
Denis Diderot (together with d'Alembert) was the editor of the great Encyclopédie project that was the hallmark of the Enlightenment age. In economic matters, Diderot was initially sympathetic to the Physiocrats. However, he soon switched over to Galiani's camp and became a staunch anti-Physiocrat.
Originally from Langres, the son of an artisan, Denis Diderot was educated in a local Jesuit school. Intending a clerical career, he enrolled at the University of Paris, residing in Collège d'Harcourt, a Jansenist stronghold. He abandoned his clerical aspirations and began studying law, but then abandoned those too in 1734 to become a writer. Diderot soon fell in with young early Enlightenement thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau. He earned a side-living translating foreign works, such as Robert James's Dictionnaire de médecine in 1744. One of Diderot's anonymous treatises,
In 1745, the Parisian publisher André Le Breton struck a deal with John Mills, an Englishman living in Paris, to translate Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia or an Universal Dictionary of arts and sciences, which had been published in England in 1728. Mills, however, procastinated, and a furious Le Breton fired Mills (and beat him with a cane). When Le Breton relaunched the project with new partners in 1746, it was adjusted to be not merely a straight translation of Chambers but rather a French "adaptation" of a universal dictionary of crafts and sciences from various sources. Le Breton hired the Abbé Gua de Malves as editor-in-chief, who brought on board several younger assistants, including the technically-gifted Jean le Rond d'Alembert, a very young Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and the experienced translator Denis Diderot. However, when Gua de Malves quit the project in October 1747, Le Breton offered d'Alembert and Diderot to lead the project themselves.
Diderot threw himself into the project, undertaking research in the workshops of Paris, soliciting his friends as writers, purchasing engravings and hiring an illustrator, Groussier, to add more. But Diderot's scrapes with the authorities nearly sunk the project. A free-thinker, one of Diderot's anonymous treatises, Pensées philosophiques, was condemned by the Parlement of Paris in July 1746. In 1749, his essay on blindness was proscribed, and this time Diderot was arrested and thrown into prison in Vincennes for several months. Nonetheless, he was persuaded to continue with the project and in November 1750, Diderot and d'Alembert issued the final prospectus inviting subscriptions to the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des métiers et des arts to be published by Le Breton in Paris. It was originally envisaged as ten volumes with an additional two volumes of plate illustrations. It would attract some 4,000 subscribers over the course of its publication. In the end, the Encyclopédie (28 volumes in all) would cost subscribers some 1,000 livres (or £50 sterling then, or about US$11,000 today), affordable only to the well-to-do. (cheaper version would be later brought out by foreign publishers).
The first volume (A to Azy) of the Encyclopédie came out in June 1751, with a "Discours préliminaire" authored by D'Alembert. The Jesuits, who dominated education in France, took an immediate dislike to the Encyclopédie, and already in 1751, articles appeared in several publications (notably the Journal de Trévoux) accusing the Encyclopédie of plagiarism and attacking it for criticizing Jesuit teaching methods, denigrating saints and kings, encouraging free-thinking and Deism and urging its proscription. Diderot replied acerbically to some of his critics (notably the Jesuit writer Berthier). Voltaire, in a counter-article in the Siècle (December, 1751), rose to the defense and praised the Encyclopédie. The philosophes could not prevent the appointment of a royal censor, but the choice - Malesherbes - turned to be a person sympathetic with the project.
The second volume (B to Ce) came out in February 1752, and this time landed it in hot soup. An article on "Certainty" by Abbé Jean-Martine des Prades caused a maelstorm (it was eventually condemned as heretical by the Sorbonne and the Archbishop of Paris in November). In only a few days, the Jesuits secured a royal order from the Council of State formally suppressing the Encyclopédie. What that meant in practice was not clear. Prades and a few of the radical collaborators were exiled and publication is suspended. But the sympathetic censor Malesherbes and the Madame de Pompadour, the king's powerful mistress, prevented the shut down of their offices and seizure of their papers. They insinuated Diderot and d'Alembert ought to continue working as if nothing had happened.
The third volume (Cha to Cons) came out discretely in November 1753, and contains a series of economic articles by the Neo-Colbertiste economist François Veron de Forbonnais. But d'Alembert's article on schools ("Collège") was highly critical of the Jesuit stranglehold on education, and provoked predictable protests. The fourth volume (Cons to Diz) came out a year later (Oct 1754). The fifth volume (Do to Es), which came out in November 1755, is preceded by an "Éloge a Montesquieu" by d'Alembert and includes the first articles contributed by Voltaire. It also contains the entry "Economie" authored by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau's numerous other articles were confined to music).
The sixth volume ("Et to Fn", Nov 1756) contains the first known contributions of writers who would later become the Physiocrats - two articles by François Quesnay (his first writings), three articles by a very young Jacques Turgot, and an article by the Abbé Morellet. The venerable philosophe Voltaire contributed many articles to this volume, mostly related to literature and grammar.
The Seventh volume (Fo to Gy) appeared in November 1757. It again includes articles by Quesnay, Turgot and Morellet. Once again Voltaire contributes many articles.. Montesquieu makes his first and only contribution to the Encyclopédie here, co-authoring an article with Voltaire on taste ("goût").
The seventh volume was controversial, and turned out to be the last for a while. It was a spark in a tinderbox. A series of articles had already appeared over the summer of 1757 in the Mercure de France by conservative historian Jacob-Nicholas Moreau skewering the Encyclopédie, satirizing the contributors as a little "indian tribe", suggesting the writers are a tight-knit clique conspiring to overthrow morality, religion and even the government. Given the assassination attempt on Louis XV by an unemployed lackey, Francois Damiens in January 1757, this was not an idle comment. Parts of the French press eagerly insinuated an association between "free thinking" encyclopédisme and the attempted regicide. The seventh volume did nothing to calm those fears. One of Voltaire's articles ("Geneva", co-authored with d'Alembert) provoked a vituperative protest from the government of the Geneva Republic A French religious group, led by the Franciscan friar Hayer, read a "Deist" profession of faith in the volume, and began pumping out La Religion Vengée, a series of volumes with detailed criticism of the Encyclopedie. But it also had its supporters. The periodical Journal encyclopédique, founded by Pierre Rousseau in 1756, over the border in Liege, had as its principal function the defense of the Encyclopédie from critics and denunciation of censors.
In May 1758, while the eighth volume was in preparation, the radical hedonistic philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius published his De l'ésprit. It was a widely-read and instantly condemned. Although Helvétius was not a contributor to the Encyclopédie, he was a personal friend of Diderot and other writers, and the authorities did not parse the difference. In the fall of 1758, the Jansenist A.J. Chaumeix launched a long series of detailed attacks on both, conjoining the two. The Parlement of Paris opened a session in January 1759 to examine subversive works, and Helvétius's work was formally banned and burned. The Encyclopédie was also examined, and it only just escaped proscription. But it was clear its days were numbered.
On March 8, 1759 the French crown revoked the publication of privileges of of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, thereby suspending its publication. Begun in 1751, only seven volumes had appeared so far, covering topics from A to G. The suspension may have come about by the intervention of sympathizers, notably Pompadour and Malesherbes, as a means to remove the matter from the legal courts and avoid more serious consequences. Malesherbes made it clear to the editors that the suspension would be enforced - that he would not tolerate its publication abroad. In July, the French government issued a decree ordering the publisher to refund subscribers (but apparently no one took it up). On September 3, 1759 Pope Clement XIII issued the encyclical "Ut Primam" [ch] condemning the Encyclopédie. The polemics having reach their height in 1759, would linger - Hayer's Society, Chaumeix and Abbé Gauchat would continue pumping out anti-philosophe pamphlets, and in May, 1760, Palissot put on a farcical play skewering the philosophes at the Comédie Française.
Having had enough, D'Alembert, resigned from the project in 1759. Turgot, who had only recently proposed to write many articles, also decided to quit (Neymark, p.47). Diderot was left in sole charge. In 1760, with the controversy dying down, Diderot announced that they would begin publication of "plate volumes" for the continuing Encyclopédie subscribers. These consist almost purely of illustrations (with text merely describing the pictures). This was implicitly allowed by the censor Malesherbes. Over the course of the next decade (from 1762 to 1772), Diderot will arrange for the publication of eleven plate volumes in ten installments.
The appearance of the plate volumes was facilitated by the change of mood in France - the prosecution of the Jesuits by the Parlement in 1761 had stoked anti-religious feeling, raising it to a feverish pitch by 1762, and eliminated one of the Encyclopédie's most vocal enemies (the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1763). Hayer, Chaumeix and Gauchat quietly wound up their polemical pamphlets in 1762. The tide had turned. A sober look at the controversy was provided by the Abbé Irailh in 1761 (v.4, p.118) and the volume put out by Abbé Jean Saas in 1762 merely pointed out factual errors and mistakes (Saas's 1764 volume is a little more polemical). As the plate volumes came out, the question of the written volumes resumed. In 1762, the empress Catherine the Great of Russia invited Diderot to St. Petersburg, offering to allow him to continue publication of the text volumes there. Diderot briefly considered it, but eventually turned it down. Joseph of Austria (future Emperor Joseph II from 1765), an avid reader of the Encyclopédie, also tenders an offer.
The break finally came in December 1765, with the death of Louis Ferdinand, Dauphin of France and son and heir of Louis XV. Louis Ferdinand had been the principle supporter of the conservative religious party in the royal court, and an intractable enemy of the the project. Within days of his death, Diderot announced the publication of the remaining ten volumes (volume 8 through volume 17) of the text Encyclopédie. Most appeared rather quickly in early 1766 (although stamped with a December 1765 date). Diderot sidestepped the 1759 suspension (formally still in effect) with a careful rewording of the title, adding "Mis en ordre par M. ***. A Neufchâtel, chez Samuel Fauche et Compagnie, libraires et imprimeurs", insinuating the volumes were being published abroad. The new royal censor Sartine (a friend of Diderot's) turned a blind eye and let it go forward. The only wrinkle in the resumption was when publisher André Le Breton was arrested and briefly imprisoned for having dispatched copies of the remaining volumes to Versailles without permission.
There are few articles of interest written by economists in the remaining volumes. As noted, Turgot, who had planned several, never finished them. Voltaire contributed a bunch to volume 8, and it is sometimes suggested that Charles Dutot wrote the article on salt mines for volume 14.
The journals of the day were largely quiet about the publication of the remaining volumes in 1766. The only real polemical attempt was Maleville's 1766 attack on the "Eclectique" article, but it wasn't followed up. The volumes passed largely unnoticed until Barruel's wider-ranging attack of the 1780s.
Diderot's own contributions to the Encyclopédies included extensive articles on ancient philosophy. Diderot also wrote several novels and plays, and myriad of reviews of literature, art, etc. After Diderot died in 1784, his library was purchased by Catherine the Great of Russia, and transported to the Hermitage palace in St. Petersburg. It included some 34 manuscripts, including six previously unpublished (e.g. a refutation of Helvetius's De L'homme, an original essay on physiology and a detailed plan for a university in Russia)
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