M. Diderot and Me

While at the Amon Carter Museum Library yesterday, I was asked to begin the process of cataloging one of the most amazing works in our collection: Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Here is an image of the title page, from Wikipedia:


This is the first of seventeen text volumes, which were published concurrently with eleven volumes of plates. The key distinction of the Encyclopédie is that it shows you how to do things, as well as dissecting complex items. Here is one of those wonderful illustrations:


Just how big is it? Well according to Wikipedia,
▪ 17 volumes of articles, issued from 1751 to 1765
▪ 11 volumes of illustrations, issued from 1762 to 1772
▪ 18,000 pages of text
▪ 75,000 entries
▪ 44,000 main articles
▪ 28,000 secondary articles
▪ 2,500 illustration indices
▪ 20,000,000 words in total
Print run: 4,250 copies (note: even single-volume works in the 18th Century seldom had a print run of more than 1,500 copies)

Ok, so it’s big and it’s old, but why is it so significant? Once again, from Wikipedia:

The Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual ferment leading to the French Revolution. "No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion," wrote the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. In The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution, a work published in conjunction with a 1989 exhibition of the Encyclopédie at the University of California, Los Angeles, Clorinda Donato writes the following:
“The encyclopedians successfully argued and marketed their belief in the potential of reason and unified knowledge to empower human will and thus helped to shape the social issues that the French Revolution would address. Although it is doubtful whether the many artisans, technicians, or laborers whose work and presence and interspersed throughout the Encyclopédie actually read it, the recognition of their work as equal to that of intellectuals, clerics, and rulers prepared the terrain for demands for increased representation. Thus the Encyclopédie served to recognize and galvanize a new power base, ultimately contributing to the destruction of old values and the creation of new ones.”
While many contributors to the Encyclopédie had no interest in radically reforming French society, the Encyclopédie as a whole pointed that way. The Encyclopédie denied that the teachings of the Catholic Church could be treated as authoritative in matters of science. The editors also refused to treat the decisions of political powers as definitive in intellectual or artistic questions. Given that Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe at the time and that many European leaders used French as their administrative language, these ideas had the capacity to spread.

First, please feel free to come by and check it out - it’s wonderful to see. Second, this is a great example of why I became a librarian - so that I could help people and get to see and use cool stuff, like the Encyclopédie!