All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

F

FABULEUX!

Denis Diderot was born in Langres, north-eastern France, on 5 October 1713, and from this day the world was fated to change just a little.

As with the first Britannica, his story begins with a problematic nose. Denis Diderot had four sisters, the eldest named Denise. Denis sometimes referred to this sister as ‘a female Socrates’, such was her power of thought. Her early years passed without incident, but in her middle years she developed a little spot on her nose. The spot turned into a larger pimple, and the pimple alas grew larger and turned cancerous. The cancer consumed her face, and then her chances of finding a husband. She wore false noses made from wood and glass, and is reported to have remained astonishingly cheerful throughout, drawing strength from her Christian faith. Denis Diderot’s daughter concluded that her aunt ‘possessed the rare secret of finding heaven on earth’.

The way he described his birthplace, Denis Diderot had found a similar haven. Returning there from Paris in middle age, he wrote to his lover Sophie Volland of ‘a charming promenade, consisting of a broad aisle of thickly verdured trees leading to a small grove … I pass hours in this spot, reading, meditating, contemplating nature, and thinking of my love.’ A century later, with his legacy secure, a statue of Diderot was erected in the square facing his childhood home. The sculptor was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the man who designed the Statue of Liberty.

Upon what was this eminence founded? Initially it was a printed advertisement he wrote towards the end of 1750. Diderot offered a new product – new in length and scope, new in rigour and expertise, new in ambition and cost. It was the first encyclopaedia that could lay claim to changing the world.

The prospectus was mouth-watering, but to appreciate it fully we should compare it to another prospectus issued five years before. This one was called a ‘dictionary’, but was actually a modified French translation of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. It was to have five volumes, each of approximately 250 pages. The reader was promised beautiful vignettes, and the text was to be composed and designed ‘by good masters’, not least the principal editorial force behind the project, John Mills, an Englishman with good French, and his German colleague Gottfried Sellius. The volumes were due to be published between 1746 and 1748, at a total cost, when purchased as a set, of 100 livres.

But it didn’t quite happen. Subscriptions trickled in, but Mills claimed he was cheated out of them by the publisher André le Breton, who counter-claimed that Mills’s French wasn’t up to the job after all. The two came to blows, Le Breton beating Mills with a stick, and when the issue came to court a judge found that Le Breton had every right to do so. Other editors were then enlisted, but only when Denis Diderot arrived on the scene did the project take on a new and more exacting shape. Indeed, his own prospectus of 1750 now promised a world far larger than that of Mills and Sellius, for it would eventually come not in ten volumes but seventeen.

It contained a ‘genealogical tree of all the sciences and all the arts’ similar to the ones in Bacon’s treatise and Chambers’s work, and it stressed the interrelationships of knowledge, noting

the connections, both remote and near, of the beings that compose Nature and which have occupied the attention of mankind; of showing, by the interlacing of the roots and branches, the impossibility of knowing well any parts of this whole without ascending or descending to many others; of forming a general picture of the efforts of the human mind in all fields and every century.

*

And the sell worked. The prospectus itself was the subject of approving purrs in the journals; the Edinburgh Review suggested the work would be the most complete in any language of any age, and subscribers couldn’t sign up fast enough. By April 1751, only six months after the prospectus appeared, there were already 1000 purchasers for a work whose cost had risen to 280 livres (approximately £6000 today), with the final number reaching 4000. For that they got an intention, neatly summarised by Diderot’s own definition of the word encyclopaedia:

The goal of an Encyclopédie is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the work of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race.

But it was something more as well. As Diderot’s biographer Arthur M. Wilson recognised, its readers would soon find that what ‘purported to be a book of reference … was in fact a sort of political tract’.

The timing was perfect. In 1957, Arthur Wilson composed a vivid reminder of the cultural scene into which Diderot pitched his work two centuries before. ‘It was the world of wigs, smallclothes and three-cornered hats; of panniers and beauty patches and pancakes of rouge laid on delicate cheeks.’* Wilson found that each subscriber to the Encyclopédie made up a world which included

… the minuet, danced in rooms gleaming with gilt and shimmering with mirrors; the world of the harpsichord, the recorder, and the viola da gamba; of the musket, the frigate, and the balance of power … the time when immense French and British colonial empires were in the making and were providing stakes for great colonial wars … a time when the Church patently expected to continue confining men’s thoughts within a narrow orthodoxy, and privileged classes patently expected to continue to enjoy their privileges. Yet it was also a time when the merchant, banking and professional elements of society were everywhere rising in esteem and wealth.

And beneath it all lay the disruptive rumblings of coal, steam, machine and revolution. The world was moving at an irrepressible speed: at the time of publication George Washington had just turned eighteen; Jacques-François de Menou, the first president of the Jacobin Club, had just been born. If you were an encyclopaedist at this time you were probably encumbered with two emotional states: delight that there was so much remarkable new material to include in every edition, and horror that there was so much remarkable new material to include in every edition.

The first volume of the first edition appeared in Paris in 1751, the seventh volume by 1757, and the complete seventeen-volume letterpress set was for sale by 1765 (with 71,818 articles and 3129 illustrations). Then there were the plate sections and supplementary updates, which ran to another sixteen volumes by 1780. All of which needed a two-volume index. Printers throughout Europe began to share the load, with editions appearing in Geneva, Amsterdam and Lucca. This last printing in 1758 provided a foretaste of what was to come: the Encyclopédie was progressive in its approach to a modern world, and it was inevitable that some would see it as transgressive. A papal condemnation regarded it as a threat to religion and morality, and called for a ban and confiscation. It wouldn’t be the last time that the project was seen as a danger to tradition; the grandes of the Ancien Régime were in no doubt of its power to influence and excite.*

The contents of Encyclopédie are best considered in terms of its writers and editors, the latest erudite souls who put themselves forward to quantify the world. We must start (again) with Denis Diderot, who not only edited the bulk of the volumes, but also wrote and commissioned many of their leading articles.

That he was destined for a life of the mind is best illustrated by an incident from his romantic youth. Living in Paris with friends from Provence, he was aghast when the girl he loved was wooed by his friend’s proficient dancing. He resolved to become as good as he was, so secretly took lessons with a dancing master in the Rue Montmartre. He gave it up soon after, but then returned for another shot. The same thing happened again; infuriated by his lack of progress, he quit but then tried once more. ‘What was lacking in me?’ he asked himself in his memoir, having given up for good. ‘Lightness? I wasn’t heavy on my feet, far from it. Motive? One could scarcely be animated by one more violent. What didn’t I have? Malleability, flexibility, gracefulness – qualities that cannot be had for the asking.’*

But the attainment of broad intelligence? That could be achieved by anyone with application and modest funds. His father was a master cutler, his knives and scissors much in demand. According to one surgeon, his scalpels were ‘very greatly perfected: better in the hand, they cut more cleanly, and the lancets with the mark of the pearl were sought out by all the doctors teaching medicine.’ His father wanted Denis to become a priest, and sent him to a Jesuit school. And Denis took it seriously, at one point (when he wasn’t failing in his dancing) fasting and wearing a hair shirt. At university in Paris he read theology and law, but appeared so unsatisfied with both that his father stopped sending him financial support. He got married, unhappily, to a woman named Anne-Toinette Champion, who was latterly described as ‘beautiful, but shrewish’.* Diderot took up with other women, most passionately with Sophie Volland, and by the early 1740s he had abandoned all religious beliefs and embarked on a literary career, first translating famous works from English to French, and then his own books, one of which, with its promotion of atheism, so scandalised the Church that it led to three months in prison.

His polymathic learning and a good relationship with the publishers of the earlier incarnation of the Encyclopédie brought him to its editorship in 1747. According to the scholars Frank and Serena Kafker, Diderot confounded as many contributors as he inspired, ‘for he could be a tardy correspondent, a slipshod copyreader, and a colleague who sometimes made promises he did not keep.’ In spite of this, Diderot managed to take them with him; they assumed the grand scheme would be worth the personal slights.

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.

FACULTÉ

Our use of the word ‘superior’ derives from the Old French superiour, meaning ‘upper’, and no adjective better describes Diderot’s own impression of himself, nor the moral position he assumed his nation held over others. In his mind, even years before the Revolution would attempt to reinvent the traditional calendar and clock, France stood alone and above. His hauteur turned knowledge to prejudice, and there is no better example than his entry on ‘Human Species’ from 1765, a starkly abstract and almost comically ignorant analysis of the inhabitants of foreign lands.

His survey begins in the north, where Eskimos and other tribes are classed as

degenerate men, of small stature and bizarre shape … most are no taller than four feet, the tallest four and a half. The women are as ugly as the men, their breasts are quite considerable …

All of the homely people are boorish, superstitious and stupid. The Danish Lapps consult a fat black cat. The Swedes call the devil with a drum … They have almost no idea of God or of religion. They offer their wives and daughters to strangers. They live underground; they get light from lamps in their night, which lasts for several months. The women are dressed in reindeer skin in the winter and bird skin in the summer. In the latter, they defend themselves from the stinging of gnats with a thick smoke which they maintain around them. They are rarely sick. Their old people are robust; except that the whiteness of the snow and the smoke weaken their vision, and there are many who are blind.

The Chinese, by contrast, ‘have their limbs well proportioned, are tall and fat, with a large, round face, small eyes, long eyebrows, lifted eyelids, small and flattened noses, sparse and clustered beards … in general these people are soft, peaceful, indolent, obedient, superstitious, slaves, and ceremonial.’

Indian customs are considered ‘bizarre … The Banians eat nothing that has lived. They fear killing an insect. The Nairs of Calicut are on the contrary, all hunters; they can only have one wife, but their wives can take as many husbands as they like. There are men and women among the last who have monstrous legs.’

And so on into Europe, where ‘In general, the Greek women are more beautiful and more lively than the Turkish women … The Spanish are thin and fairly small. They are finely made, have handsome heads, regular traits, beautiful eyes, well-arranged teeth … Men are more chaste in cold lands than in warm ones. They are less amorous in Sweden than in Spain or in Portugal, and therefore the Swedes have fewer children.’

The most detailed, fascinated (and to us horrific) analysis is reserved for Africa, an anthropology that would have enthralled the contemporary reader quite as much as it repels the modern one.

The odor of these Negroes of Senegal is less strong than that of other Negroes. They have black, crinkled hair like curly wool. It is by their hair and their color that they principally differ from other men …

Negresses are very fertile. The Negroes of Gorée and of Cape Verde are also well made and very black. Those of Sierra Leone are not quite as black as those of Senegal. Those of Guinea, although healthy, are short lived. It is a result of corrupt morals.

The inhabitants of St. Thomas Island are Negroes similar to those of the neighbouring continent. Those of the coast of Ouidah and of Arada are less black than those of Senegal and of Guinea. The Negroes of the Congo are more or less black. Those of Angola smell so bad when they become hot that the air of the areas where they pass by remain infected for more than a quarter of an hour.

Although in general Negroes have little intelligence, they do not lack feeling. They are sensitive to good and bad treatment. We have reduced them, I wouldn’t say to the condition of slaves, but to that of beasts of burden; and we are reasonable! And we are Christians!

Elsewhere, the separate entry ‘Negroes’ considered the commodification of humans in a civil manner, while leaving the reader in no doubt of its disapproval.

People try to justify what is odious and contrary to natural law in this trade by saying that normally these slaves find the salvation of their souls in the loss of their liberty; that the instruction in Christianity given them, joined to their indispensability for the cultivation of sugar, tobacco, indigo, etc. mitigates that which seems inhuman in a trade in which men buy and sell others just like beasts for cultivating land.

Published in Volume 11 in 1765, some thirty years before the young Republican parliament partially abolished the slave trade in a few of its colonies (full emancipation only arrived in 1848), the entry describes the merits and costs of slaves as items in a machine catalogue, and suggests they were often willing participants in this bargain.

Some, to avoid famine and poverty, sell themselves, their children and their wives to the most powerful kings among them who have the wherewithal to feed them … one can see sons selling their fathers and fathers their children or even more often those who have no family ties will place each other’s liberty at the price of several bottles of spirits or of some bars of iron …

The best negroes come from Cape Verde, Angola, Senegal, the kingdom of the Wolofs and of those of Galland, of Damel, of the Gambia river, of Majugard, of Bar, etc. In the past, a ‘pièce d’Inde’ [‘India piece’] negro (as they are called) from 17 or 18 to 30 years of age came to [cost] only thirty or thirty-two pounds in the merchandise appropriate for the country, which is spirits, iron, canvas, paper, maces and glass baubles of all colours, cauldrons and copper basins and other similar things that these peoples value a lot. But since Europeans have outbid one another, so to speak, these barbarians have known how to profit from their jealousy and it’s rare that handsome negroes are still traded at 60 pounds and the Compagnie de l’Assiente has bought them at as high as 100 pounds per head.

And what of the lesser celebrated Encyclopédistes themselves? What sort of tribe were they?

They were as varied and intriguing as their scholarship and judgements. The article ‘Negres’, for example, was written by Jean-Baptiste-Pierre le Romain, a cartographer and engineer who specialised in the topography of the West Indies. He wrote almost seventy articles for the Encyclopédie, the majority on the natural histories of plants, animals and minerals of the Caribbean. His productivity aside, he was among the least interesting of Diderot’s cohort.

The Kafkers have assembled a huge personal dossier of these men (women were not yet considered intellectually reliable enough for the task), and they are doubly pertinent in reminding us of the one ingredient the Encyclopédie lacked, the biographies of historical figures.* For with regard to this particular encyclopaedia, it would be hard to imagine a more disparate, maverick or libidinous gathering of specialists.

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.

*

Rousseau’s contributions were principally concerned with the technicalities of music, including entries on tone, rhythm and the chromatic scale. But his major essay for the encyclopaedia concerned political economy, and it has dated well:

It is … one of the most important concerns of government to prevent the extreme inequality of fortunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving men of all the means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by guaranteeing that the citizens will not become poor. The unequal distribution of inhabitants in our country, some crowded together in one place, while other areas are depopulated; the support given to the arts producing luxuries and to the purely industrial arts at the expense of the useful and laborious crafts; the sacrifice of agriculture to commerce … and finally venality pushed to such an extreme that public esteem is reckoned at a low cash value; and even virtue is sold at a market price: these are the most perceptible causes of opulence and poverty, of private interest substituted for public interest, of mutual hatred among citizens.

FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE (a diversion …)

A brief diversion to consider the case of Gustave Flaubert. The novelist appeared to be equally entranced and revolted by the notion of encyclopaedias – their design, their intentions, their overwhelming suppression of wider reading. In Madame Bovary a minor character vainly recommends one as a cure for grief. In Bouvard et Pécuchet the notion of the encyclopaedia appears to overwhelm the entire book.

Flaubert knew Bouvard et Pécuchet was his swansong, and he spent a great many years on it. He claimed to have read 1500 books as background research, but that was just too many books: he died in 1880 with the novel unfinished. The story is simple enough: the eponymous protagonists meet by a canal on a hot day in Paris and start a friendship. They are both copyists (old-fashioned scribes, medieval-style) and in many ways they are copies of each other. They are the same age, and are both vaguely dissatisfied with their lot. Several volumes of Roret’s Encyclopaedia lie scattered around Pécuchet’s Paris apartment, an indication of the narrative to come.*

When one of them inherits they decide to leave Paris and move together to Normandy, where they will better themselves by reading, travelling and learning important skills, an attempt to absorb all human knowledge – philosophical, agricultural, historical, medicinal, geological and theological. They will dismiss almost everything as flawed, contradictory or impossible, and they will alienate those around them. They have become the embodiment of the ‘walking encyclopaedia’, but they have rejected almost all of its elements.

Mais oui, it’s a satire, and an occasionally funny one, and it’s plausible that the person Flaubert was really satirising was himself. In a letter to a friend, Flaubert wrote that he intended his novel to be ‘a kind of encyclopaedia made into a farce … I am planning a thing in which I give vent to my anger … I shall vomit over my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me.’

Julian Barnes has called Flaubert’s novel ‘an encyclopaedia of human endeavour’ and quotes Cyril Connolly’s phrase that it is ‘the Baedeker of futility’. Flaubert himself proclaimed, ‘The book I am working on could have as a sub-title Encyclopaedia of Human Stupidity. The undertaking gets me down and its subject becomes part of me.’ Indeed, the pedantry expressed by Bouvard and Pécuchet is something he shared. Flaubert liked exactitude, although he ‘thundered against’ platitude. He was reclaiming Stendhal’s complaint that ‘an idiot who knows a date can disconcert the wittiest man.’*

The grand sweep of knowledge, Bouvard and Pécuchet concluded, was just too difficult to grasp in its entirety, and was never complete or agreed upon, making any attempt to acquire even the smallest amount quite fatuous. And the same for history in particular. They consult a professor who confirms, ‘It is changing every day. There is a controversy as to the kings of Rome and the journeys of Pythagoras … It is desirable that no more discoveries should be made, and the Institute ought even to lay down a kind of canon prescribing what it is necessary to believe!’

Flaubert’s notes for the unfinished portion of the book, discovered after his death, suggest that his anti-heroes would eventually return to their urban copying duties. In a lovely circle, they may have been obliged to copy the wisdom amassed during their doomed rural experiment, which they may have called a Dictionary of Received Ideas, the name of the volume Flaubert had been composing for years independently of his novel. Inspired by the trite musings of an elderly relative, it was certainly more than a dictionary; it was a battle cry against herd thinking and mediocrity, a collection of corrupted (but funny) aphorisms and other instructions from a world that had rejected original thought in favour of inanities. It wasn’t published until 1911, and if today it strikes readers as coarse and cynical, not to say sacrilegious, then the author has achieved his intention.

A few of Flaubert’s ‘F’s:

FACTORY: Dangerous neighbourhood.

FARM: When visiting a farm, one must eat nothing but wholemeal bread and drink nothing but milk. If eggs are added, exclaim: ‘Heavens, how fresh they are! Not a hope of finding any like these in town!’

FELICITY: Always ‘perfect’. If your cook is named Felicity, then she is perfect.

FEUDALISM: No need to have any clear idea what it was, but thunder against it.

FICTION: Inevitably featuring ‘eponymous protagonists’.

FLAT (BACHELOR): Always in a mess, with feminine garments lying here and there. Smell of cigarettes. If you hunted around, you would find the most extraordinary things.

FOREIGN: Contempt for everything that isn’t French is a sign of patriotism.

FORGERS: Always work in cellars.

FUNERAL: About the deceased, say: ‘To think that I had dinner with him only a week ago.’

FURNITURE: Always fear the worst for your furniture.*

Responding to Flaubert’s list, in 2013 the novelist Teju Cole produced updated entries of his own for the New Yorker.* These included:

PARIS: Romantic, in spite of the rude waiters and Japanese tourists. Don’t simply like it; ‘adore’ it.

GERMANS: When watching football, ‘Never rule out the Germans.’

MAGISTERIAL: Large book, written by a man.

FRANCKENSTEIN’S MONSTER

In Germany in 1731, Jacob August Franckenstein became the first editor of the magisterial Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschafften und Künste, an undertaking of sixty-four volumes published over eighteen years. Each folio was about two inches thick, and ran to some 284,000 entries on 63,000 pages; the estimated word count was 67 million. There were also four later supplemental books, but the authors ran out of alphabetical steam when they reached ‘Caq’.

The work remains one of the largest European encyclopaedias ever produced. Just the title deserves a shelf to itself: The Great Complete Encyclopedia of All Sciences and Arts Which So Far Have Been Invented and Improved by Human Mind and Wit: Including the Geographical and Political Description of the Whole World with All Monarchies, Empires, Kingdoms, Principalities, Republics, Free Sovereignties, Countries, Towns, Sea Harbours, Fortresses, Castles, Areas, Authorities, Monasteries, Mountains, Passes, Woods, Seas, Lakes … and also a Detailed Historical and Genealogical Description of the World’s Brightest and Most Famous Family Lines, the Life and Deeds of the Emperors, Kings, Electors and Princes, Great Heroes, Ministers of State, War Leaders …; Equally about All Policies of State, War and Law and Budgetary Business of the Nobility and the Bourgeois, Merchants, Traders and Arts.*

Unusually for an encyclopaedia, it would carry biographical entries for living people (there were almost fifty entries for the name Wagner). And there would be a spectacular amount of idiosyncrasies and prejudices. Mermaids, for instance, were still a decidedly genuine thing. The Bible was hard fact. The reading of novels was regarded as harmful to the young. The entry on women was entitled Frauenzimmer – a term archaically describing a wench, and later the contents of a woman’s room – explained, with the weight of a news bulletin, that women have achieved remarkable things in the arts and sciences, sometimes equalling the accomplishments of men.

The articles were either surprisingly short or unpredictably long. Leipzig, where the encyclopaedia was based, and where Dr Franckenstein was a law professor, received 155 columns, whereas Berlin got two. Shakespeare received less than a column (there were two columns per page), while J.S. Bach, alive at the time, received no mention at all in the original publication, and got less than a column in a supplemental volume, despite being heralded as a composer of ‘undying fame’. In contrast, the philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) a leading figure of the German Enlightenment, was granted an astonishing 175 pages (while Plato only merited eight). Why the anomaly? One of the editors to succeed Franckenstein, Carl Günther Ludovici, was a leading Wolff scholar, and it may be assumed he just couldn’t help himself.*

We may revel in many other enthusiasms. Ananas, for example, the exotic pineapple, was one of the best things in the world. It was a ‘thoroughly delightful American fruit’, with an ‘excellent taste’ and ‘pleasant smell’; it had medicinal qualities too, boosting fertility and vitality, relieving nausea, ameliorating gout and arthritis, easing the passage of kidney stones. It even helped with ‘insanity’.

The authors Peter E. Carels and Dan Flory have observed that the medical entries were also peculiar in their detail. A surgeon inadequately trained in hand amputation, for example, could consult the encyclopaedia for the right tools for the job, and learn where their assistants should stand in relation to the patient, and discover the precise amount of time of sawing required for the bones of the lower arm (about the same as it takes to read the Lord’s Prayer). The process of conducting a mastectomy was described in a similar step-by-step style. There was also peculiarly naive advice on physical etiquette, including an earnest entry on how to manage the need to urinate or fart during a social gathering (the key was patience and suppression).*

We may recoil from some of the other excesses. ‘Juden’ traces a history of Judaism from biblical days, claiming that God rejected the faith after the crucifixion. The Universal-Lexicon was fearful of anything contradicting the Lutheran church. Jews were deceitful and treacherous, and ‘our sworn enemy’; redemption was only possible through conversion.

If we accept that such a comprehensive storehouse of knowledge and opinion was representative of more than just a succession of opinionated editors – and certainly this is what the Universal-Lexicon became as it claimed its authoritative two yards among the libraries of Europe – then mid-eighteenth century Germany appeared poised between two worlds. It was a relatively peaceful time, a period as yet unshaken by political or industrial revolution. The Age of Enlightenment was an attractive proposition to a cadre of leading writers and philosophers consistently pegged back by the Church and State. Their encyclopaedia provides a fascinating panorama of human comprehension and opinion, and in this alone it shared much with the Encyclopédie.

But we would have to wait almost thirty years, and look once again to Scotland, for the next great step towards the next great encyclopaedia of the modern world.

* As it turned out, the actual text of the Encyclopédie differed substantially from that outlined in its preliminary tree of knowledge. The tree now appears to be more of an idealised vision than a battle plan.

* Diderot (New York, Oxford University Press, 1957). Smallclothes were knee britches.

* While this was an enormous enterprise, weighing in at an estimated 40 tons, it was still only about one-twelfth of the size of the Chinese Yongle Dadian.

* Translated from Denis Diderot Oeuvres Complètes, edited by Jules Assézat and Maurice Turneaux in twenty volumes (Paris, 1875–77).

* The Encyclopedists as Individuals by Frank A. Kafker in collaboration with Serena L. Kafker, Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, 1988. Much of my own summation of the contributors to the Encyclopédie comes from this fascinating book.

* Both D’Alembert and Diderot acknowledged a significant philosophical debt to Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning; specifically, their taxonomy of knowledge ‘tree’ in the preface was directly inspired by the pull-out ‘Analysis’ in that volume. D’Alembert credited Bacon as an inspiration who had ‘silently in the shadows, prepared from afar the light which gradually, by imperceptible degrees, would illuminate the world’. The entry in Encyclopédie by Abbé Jean Pestre entitled ‘Baconisme’ referred to Bacon as a ‘grande génie’.

* The details are vague, but it appears that Le Breton and his fellow publishers sent a conciliatory party to London to halt publication by offering cut-price editions of their own. This would logically suggest advanced levels of French literacy among English readers.

* A very limited number of biographies appeared only as brief mentions within descriptions of a subject’s birthplace.

* A modern searchable translation to English is still under way. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2020). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/

* In one sense, of course, the study of the past is all opinion, and new learning and modern interpretations may counter much of what has gone before. Voltaire acknowledged as much when he claimed in his entry on History that ‘There is the history of opinions, which is hardly other than the collection of human errors.’

* This entry is popularly attributed to Voltaire, though its authorship is unconfirmed.

* Nicolas-Edme Roret’s richly illustrated multi-volume set specialising in natural history was published in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. After his death in 1860, Roret’s name continued to appear on a large range of ‘encyclopaedic manuals’ including watchmaking, chocolate manufacture and dance.

* Quotations taken from the introduction to the English translation of The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Jacques Barzun (New Directions, New York, 1967). See also ‘Flaubert, C’est Moi’ by Julian Barnes, New York Review of Books, 25 May 2006.

* Translated by Jorn Barger, 2002. Barger also compiled a thematic grouping of Flaubert’s dubious advice. Categories included: Things to Make Fun Of, Things to Thunder Against, Things to ‘Wax Indignant’ About, Things to Despise and Things Nobody Knows.

* See New Yorker, 27 August 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/in-place-of-thought

* Commonly, and with some relief, the lavishly titled project soon became known as either Universal-Lexicon or Zedler’s Encyclopedia, after its publisher and principal life-force Johann Heinrich Zedler. Zedler almost went bankrupt producing the encyclopaedia in its early days, and he spent much time in litigation protecting its copyrights.

* Lest this coverage appeared inadequate, Wolff was also mentioned extensively in separate articles on geometry, colour theory, lexicography and medicinal horticulture.

* P.E. Carels and D. Flory, ‘Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Universal Lexicon’ in Studies on Voltaire in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 194, Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 1981.

See also: Jeff Loveland’s comprehensive and illuminating The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2019).