Encyclopedic Liberty. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert

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       Introduction

      “Whoever takes the trouble of combining the several political articles, will find that they form a noble system of civil liberty.” So wrote the English legal expert Owen Ruffhead in 1768, referring to the seventeen-volume Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, whose publication had been completed three years before.¹ One volume per year had rolled off the presses from 1751 until 1757; the remaining ten volumes emerged all at once in 1765. The present anthology brings together as many of the politically themed articles as could comfortably fit within a single volume, so readers may decide for themselves whether a “noble system of civil liberty” or, indeed, any system at all emerges from them.

      The worthiness of the project will be well known to students of the period. The editors described their compendium in terms that made clear their intention not only to provide a uniquely comprehensive reference work, but to “change the way men think,” to supply a “war machine” by which to overcome what they considered the entrenched, institutionalized resistance to new knowledge all around them. In his celebrated Preliminary Discourse, an introduction to the whole compilation, d’Alembert traced an entire history of modern philosophy and science designed to chart the way toward a sweeping Baconian project of improving the world through usable knowledge.²

      And yet, for all the bold-sounding language that accompanied the prospectus and the first volume, the treatment of political subjects was problematic throughout the work’s publishing history. Diderot had already

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      spent some months in prison for his writings in the late 1740s before working on the Encyclopédie and had not enjoyed the experience. But some of the biggest early controversies came from his own political contributions—in substantial articles such as POLITICAL AUTHORITY, CITIZEN, and NATURAL RIGHT, all of them included in this volume. The resulting firestorm, in combination with the plausible threat of further incarceration, evidently led him to delegate most political topics later in the work to other contributors.

      In a more general sense, the tortured character of political coverage in the work was no doubt a function of the sheer fragility of the editors’ rights to publication. At the very time when the second volume was appearing, in 1752, a Sorbonne thesis by an abbé Martin de Prades, who had contributed the entry CERTITUDE to the Encyclopédie, was condemned for unorthodoxy.³ Diderot’s dictionary was briefly suppressed by a royal order in council; there was even talk of putting its editors to death. The dauphin’s Jesuit preceptor, Bishop Jean-François Boyer, received the king’s permission to take action. The royal censor, Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a man generally sympathetic to the enlightenment project who held this important office from 1752 to 1763, devised a compromise whereby the Encyclopédie would continue publication. In exchange, Bishop Boyer was able to choose the censors assigned to its volumes.

      In 1758, after the appearance of volume 7 the previous November, a larger crisis developed. The global war that had begun in 1756 (eventually called the Seven Years’ War) was not going well for France, and wartime censorship was in full operation by 1758. There was also an attempt on the life of King Louis XV by the psychotic Damiens (1757) and a trial that led to his drawing and quartering (1758). The article GENEVA (reproduced here) had in the meantime caused an international incident with the Genevan government’s declaration of orthodoxy in February 1758. For these reasons Diderot came under increasing personal pressure during this time; d’Alembert himself made the decision between December 1757 and February 1758 to discontinue his editorial association with the project.

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      Voltaire was among those urging Diderot to take the enterprise abroad for safety’s sake.

      In the summer of 1758 Rousseau precipitated a long-brewing breach with the encyclopedic party through the publication of his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre, a work containing a personal attack against Diderot. Also that summer (July 1758) Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s materialist treatise De l’Esprit was published. For numerous reasons, including the prefatory dedication by Diderot’s close friend Friedrich-Melchior Grimm, the work quickly became a flashpoint for mounting hostility against the Encyclopédie itself.

      Finally, in November 1758, the archbishop of Paris condemned the book; the pope followed two months later. The Parlement of Paris—the chief judicial body in the realm, which also exercised administrative functions—resolved to launch a full-scale investigation of all scandalous literature and decided upon an immediate ban on the sale of the Encyclopédie itself, a judgment confirmed by the Royal Council in March 1759. The pope enjoined any Roman Catholic who possessed a copy of the work to bring it to a local priest for burning.

      “Where they burn books,” Heinrich Heine once wrote, “they end up burning men.” The ending to this story, though, was less gruesome. Diderot’s files were empty when the police searched his home because Malesherbes, the royal censor, had himself taken them into safe custody. Although the publishing project had seemingly reached a dead end by July of 1759 when the parlement ordered the editors to cease operations and repay subscribers, a confidential and unwritten arrangement allowed Diderot and the chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, a Protestant nobleman who had by now in effect replaced d’Alembert as co-editor, to continue their work in private, with an expectation that the last volumes would appear at an opportune moment. That moment finally arrived in 1765.

      Among the reasons that government officials eventually allowed the enterprise to go forward was the calculation that too much had been invested, by producers and buyers alike, to allow such a lucrative venture to migrate to Prussia or Holland, as would otherwise have been likely. The contrast with Diderot’s Chinese counterpart, Sung Ying-hsing, is stark. That redoubtable late Ming scholar brought out a comparably ambitious and wide-ranging

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      compendium

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