style="font-size:15px;"> PAUL-HENRI THIRY, BARON D’HOLBACH, 1723–89 (414 articles). Born Paul Heinrich Dietrich, d’Holbach moved from his native Palatinate, a region close to Lorraine and influenced by French culture, to Paris at the age of twelve. In the 1740s, he studied law in Leiden, returning to Paris to become a lawyer (avocat) and a naturalized French subject in 1749. He received family property in 1750, was conferred the title of baron of the Holy Roman Empire in 1753 upon the death of his uncle, and bought a nobility-conferring office, secrétaire du roi, in 1755; he also had real estate in France and Holland. By the end of the 1750s, he was a wealthy man.
In the middle of that decade, he began to host his salon, one of the most brilliant and sought-after in Paris, which met every Thursday and Sunday. Regulars included Diderot, Grimm, Morellet, Saint-Lambert, Chastellux, Galiani, Helvétius, and Raynal. Less-regular participants included d’Alembert, Boulanger, Damilaville, Jaucourt, Rousseau, Turgot, and many others.
His intellectual interests were complex and wide-ranging. His translations of German chemical work into French helped prepare the way for Lavoisier’s breakthroughs in the 1770s. Probably recruited by his friend Diderot into the Encyclopédie, he wrote voluminously, though often anonymously, for it, accelerating his production after the government crackdown of March 1759. At first he wrote on science and German culture, then increasingly on political and religious matters. From 1766 until 1776, he poured out a number of anonymous or pseudonymous works on these controversial topics: Le Christianisme dévoilé [Christianity unmasked] (1766); Théologie portative [Portable theology] (1767); La Contagion sacrée
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[The Sacred contagion] (1768); Système de la nature (1769); La Politique naturelle (1773); Système sociale (1773); Ethocratie, ou le gouvernement fondé sur la morale [Ethocracy: or Government founded on morality] (1776), and La Morale universelle [Universal morality] (1776). These works, on which he received help from Naigeon and perhaps others, marked him as a man of bold, indeed even atheistic views and wide-ranging criticism of current political regimes, leavened by a certain conservative skepticism about the alternatives. His article REPRESENTATIVES, included in this volume, is one of the most important sustained statements of political theory in our compendium.
His writing stopped in 1776; it is not clear what he thought of the American Revolution or the French pre-Revolution. He died just months before the French Revolution began in earnest.
LOUIS, CHEVALIER DE JAUCOURT, 1704–80 (17,288 articles). Author of no fewer than forty-three of the eighty-one articles translated here, Louis de Jaucourt was born in Paris on September 26, 1704, into a family of traditional sword nobility of Huguenot (Calvinist) background. Jaucourt’s father had officially reconverted to Catholicism but secretly raised his family in the old faith. Though there is some disagreement about how active the family’s Protestant professions were by the eighteenth century, there is little doubt that the Jaucourts were well connected in international Protestant circles and that Louis’s education profited from these connections. At the age of eight, he was sent to Geneva, where he stayed with an aunt and a Protestant uncle and received an education at the Academy of Geneva (1719) and at the University of Geneva. By this time, he could speak several modern European languages.
In 1727 he went to London, where his sister had married John Carmichael, a Scottish gentleman. It seems that he briefly entertained the prospect of becoming a Calvinist pastor, but his parents counseled strongly against it, and his religious fervor seems to have waned precipitously while in the eclectic and skeptical ambience of his English friends. Most of the rest of his life he appears to have spent as a kind of deist. One of his best friends from Geneva, Theodore Tronchin, joined him both in abandoning plans for a pastoral vocation and in deciding to study medicine
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instead, a profession almost as disappointing to the Jaucourt family as the ministry.
To pursue this education he went to Holland, studying in Leiden under the great Hermann Boerhaave, whom he praised in some of his Encyclopédie articles. While there, he also fell in with some of the remarkable community of émigré Protestant scholars of the period. When the Bibliothèque raisonnée was founded in 1728, he collaborated on it with Jean Barbeyrac, the editor and translator of the natural-law classics of Pufendorf and Grotius, and remained associated with the project until 1740. In 1734, under his assumed academic name L. de Neufville, he appended a well-regarded biography of Leibniz to his edition of Essais de Théodicée [Essays on Theodicy]. He was already on cordial terms with Voltaire in the 1730s and was elected to the Academy of Bordeaux in 1747, thanks partly to Montesquieu’s influence as well as to his own scientific experiments. By the end of his travels through Geneva, England, and Holland, he returned to France with a worldview not of a nobleman from Catholic France but of a Protestant, middle-class burgher with an indelible sympathy for the cause of civil and political liberty that each of these places had in its own way featured.
His great ambition in this pre-Encyclopedic phase was to make an international name as the leading expert on medical science in Europe. Toward this end, he worked for the better part of ten years, starting around 1740, on the compilation of a six-volume lexicon medicum universale. In June 1750 he concluded the arrangements with his Amsterdam publisher. But when he sent the only copy of the manuscript to the publisher by boat, sometime in late 1750 or early 1751, the boat capsized and the manuscript was lost forever.
Looking for alternatives after losing a decade of labor, he noticed the advertisement for contributors to the new project of Diderot and d’Alembert, sent in a few sample articles to Le Breton, the publisher, and the collaboration, announced in the third volume (1753), was begun. Although he began with topics close to his specialties in botany and natural history, he gradually expanded his range, using his Dutch gazetteer experience to turn out competent if not sparkling entries on every kind of topic.
A respected scholar with elections to the royal academies of Bordeaux, Sweden, and Berlin, and to London’s Royal Society, Jaucourt was viewed
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by some as a mere compiler. Others, such as Voltaire, admired his work, and it is doubtful that the Encyclopédie had a more stalwart friend or defender. Jaucourt sold his house (to the publisher) to pay for his small staff of secretaries. In a letter to Sophie Volland, Diderot wrote of Jaucourt that “this man has for six or seven years been in the middle of four or five secretaries—reading, dictating, working thirteen to fourteen hours a day, and that situation has not yet bored him.”5 When Diderot announced to him the impending conclusion of the work, Jaucourt is reported to have responded with a long face of dismay. It is at least clear that he wrote nothing after the completion of the project in 1765 until his death, in 1780, after having turned out nearly a quarter of all the articles—most of them signed, and totaling nearly five million words—in Diderot’s dictionary.
ABBÉ EDME-FRANÇOIS MALLET, 1713–55 (1,925 articles). Born in Melun to a family of pewterers, Mallet received early instruction from a local priest before being sent to a Barnabite secondary school in Montargis. He then pursued his studies in Paris, completing his doctorate in theology in 1742. There followed stints as a tutor (1742–44) and as a parish priest in a small church near Melun. During this period, he wrote two works, Principes pour la lecture des poëtes [Principles for reading the poets] (1745) and Essai sur l’étude des belles-lettres [Essay on the study of literature] (1747), which promote classical French aesthetic theory and express skepticism about Locke’s sensationalist philosophy of knowledge as well as about the influence of English letters more generally.
In 1751 he was appointed to a chair of theology at the University of Paris, where he wrote two works on oratory, a work on Dutch diplomacy under Louis XIV and a translation of an Italian work on the French religious wars—in which he defended the assassination of the Duke of Guise but condemned the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
