In Our Time - The Encyclopédie

Episode Date: October 26, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French encyclopédie, the European Enlightenment in book form. One of its editors, D’Alembert, described its mission as giving an overview of knowledge, as if gazing down on a vast labyrinth of all the branches of human ideas, observing where they separate or unite and even catching sight of the secret routes between them. It was a project that attracted some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment - Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot - striving to bring together all that was known of the world in one comprehensive encyclopaedia. No subject was too great or too small, so while Voltaire wrote of “fantasie” and “elegance”, Diderot rolled up his sleeves and got to grips with jam-making.The resulting Encyclopédie was a bestseller - running to 28 volumes over more than 20 years, amidst censorship, bans, betrayals and reprieves. It even got them excited on this side of the Channel, with subscribers including Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson and Charles Burney. So what drove these men to such lengths that they were prepared to risk ridicule, prison, even exile? How did the Encyclopédie embody the values of the Enlightenment? And what was its legacy – did it really fuel the French Revolution? With Judith Hawley, Senior Lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London; Caroline Warman, Fellow and Tutor in French at Jesus College, Oxford; David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, this week we discussed the mammoth 18th century undertaking that was the encyclopedia. One of its editors, Dallember, described its mission

as giving an overview of learning, as if gazing down on a vast labyrinth of all the branches of human knowledge, observing where they separate or unite and catching sight of the secret roots between them. It was a project that attracted some of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, striving to bring together all that was known of the world in one comprehensive encyclopedia.

No subject was too great or too small, so while Voltaire wrote of wit, fantasy and elegance, and Russo on the economy and music, Didero got to grips with trades and crafts, even jam-making. The resulting encyclopedia was a bestseller, running to 28 volumes over more than 20 years despite censorship, bans and betrayals. On this side of the channel, subscribers included Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson and Charles Bernie.

What drove these men to such lengths that they're prepared to risk ridiculed prison and even exile for this enterprise? How did the Encyclopedia embody the values of the Enlightenment and what was its legacy? Did it fuel the French Revolution? Joining me to discuss Encyclopedia are David Wooten, Professor of History at York University. Caroline Warman, fellow in French at Jesus College Oxford, and Judith Hawley's senior lecture in English at Royal Holloway, the University of London. Judith Hawley, let's talk first about where the idea from encyclopedia of this sort came from.

Did it come from the English Chambers Cyclopedia from 1728? Is that a starting point? It certainly did. There have been a number of French encyclopedic dictionaries, but the projects to do a proper French encyclopedia containing all knowledge came from a plan to transatlopedia. late Chamber Cycloppedia of 1728. And the plan was proposed by a German man called Gottfried Celius,

and he hired an Englishman called John Mills to do some of the translations. And they secured a publisher, Henri Le Breton, to put it together. And they started work on it, and they put out a prospectus for it. But it turned out very early on that John Mills was really not up to the job. He was totally incompetent. And Le Breton was so furious that this man was wasting. his time and money. They actually beat him up. He punched him in the stomach and hit him over the head with the cane.

That's a publisher-author relationship. Mills took Libretto onto court for being punched up, but actually, LeBretton won, because Mills was totally incompetent. But LeBretto managed to find another young man, a sort of hack writer, a young man called Dennis Didoro, to correct the articles that Mills had so badly translated. And then that led into the project to do a complete overhaul

and not just a translation of chambers, but a whole new, ambitious work to draw all knowledge together. Can you tell us a bit more about Diderot? Because if any one person was the key to this, it is Diderot. And he's put it mildly a very interesting man. So he brought on board this man. What was this man he brought on board?

Who was this man he brought on board? Diderot is... We talk about the 1740s here, yeah. Yes, Diderot is born in 1713. Quite a humble background. His father was a cutler, his mother was the daughter of a tanner. He was very early recognised by his teachers as a very bright man.

So the Jesuits pitied him out for a career in the church, but that wasn't going to do for Diderot. He's a very restless, intellectually restless individual, and he tried his hand at the law, the church, apprenting himself to his father, till eventually he ended up in Paris and threw away all his possible career parts and became that vague thing a writer.

And in the 1740s, he's living a bohemian hand-to-mouth existence, hanging around in cafes in Paris, having long conversations with another similar lowly bohemian, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, playing a lot of chess, doing translation work just to keep himself going. He did translation work, but he also wrote a book of pornography called The Indiscreet Jewels. Yes, that's right.

Have you read that? What's it like? It's rather wonderful. It's sort of a thing narrative. It's about jewels that are passed around to different people and so lots of stories attached to it. Sex is a very philosophical thing in this period. These jaws are the genitalia of court ladies. Yes, that's right.

And they're circulated, so anybody can put this ring on, is the idea. So it's about free living. He has this project to debunk, to topple from their pomposity, anybody in a position of power. But this is all of the piece of Diderot, because you mentioned his translation, his rejection of the church, his belief in free love, his belief in egalitarianism,

but the idea of sexuality was also part of, in the background of this enterprise, wasn't it, free sexuality? That's right, you wrote to his mistress, Sophie, for long, that there's a little bit of testicle at the bottom of all our best ideas. I think that will be, as Olivia would say, that will be remembered. That will be remembered, you. Carolyn Walman. Well, that's a good one.

That's a stopper, isn't it? The big coup, the publishers themselves, they got Diderot. They didn't realize what a seduous and important person he was, I think, for their enterprise. They didn't even realize how big their enterprise is going to be at this stage when they're putting it together in the 1740s. But the man they were very pleased in getting was Jean-Laurent d'Alombard. Why was he so important for the project? He was so important because he was already a very eminent mathematician.

He was the best mathematician in France. He was better than anything that England had, Obviously, they'd had Newton, but they didn't have anybody to replace him. And his treaties of dynamics that came out in 1743 really put him at the very top of European mathematicians. And he was already a member of the Academy Royale de Science in Paris. And then in 1746 of the Berlin one. So he was recognized as eminent. He's an interesting character in himself because he,

He was the son of two aristocrats, one ex-none, Madame de Tons, and somebody called the Chevalier de Toulche, and he was abandoned on the steps of a church, Saint-Jean-Laure. And he took his name from that, and while his mother abandoned him, his father, in fact, made sure he had a good education. And he, like Didro tried out a bit of law. He thought about religion, he thought about medicine,

and then it was maths. So, by the... It's very eminent. It's quite interesting that these two men came up by zigzag roots, didn't they? A foundling and a humble brother, his father, reader as a cutler. And they came to Paris and they dodged around and dodged around before settling on what they did. Yes. It shows a sort of movement.

And what I'm trying to get out is behind this Enlightenment project that the personalities involved were key, because it is the stamp of these two, basically these two men with La Breton, the publisher, encouraging them. And they had been, they were shifting around. they were part of a shifting sands of the 18th century. They didn't come up in a set social block and they didn't obey the set social rules of that block, did they? That's the interesting thing. Yeah, I mean, I think it's because there's such a sort of defined separation

between the path that you might take if you're a bright kid and a bright boy, most specifically, obviously, which is to be a priest. And if you don't want that, then it's a lawyer. And that's it. And so what with sort of general sort of, rebelliousness, which is a sort of part of human nature, people then start moving away from that.

And there are other options which are sort of, much more, as you're sort of saying, sort of shifting, which are the cafe culture, the salon culture, there's writing, there's correspondence, there's all sorts of ways in which people are talking to one another in non-established ways. And the Salon culture is taken over from the court culture at this time. And one of the attractions of Dalaiber, as I understand it,

is that he seems to be politically very sound indeed. He seems to be a neutral political figure, a scholar, without any partisan position in the country at that time. And what impact, therefore, did his appointment have on the salons? Did people take it more seriously this project because he was involved more than they would do just with Diderot? I think, well, he was part. So, Danube was part of the salon culture. So it was one of their own. And the salons really backed the encyclopedia, particularly the salon of Madame Jopran.

but so because they were working together. Because they were working together, they pushed through to these salons. David, can you tell us, David Wooten, can you tell us a bit more about the salons? Yes, I mean, there are extraordinary places in that they bring together people from quite different cultural and social backgrounds united by their interest and ideas. So this is the place where in the Ancian regime in France, there's real intellectual and social mobility. and there are a place particularly dominated by women in terms of the fact that it's women who often determine who's invited,

women who establish the standards of politeness, entertainingness, wittiness, that lead you to thrive in the salon. And Danube is clearly a salon person. And I think the big difference in Danubea and Didero is that if you show Danubea a rule, he'll bend it. If you show Deidreau a rule, he'll break it. And Danabar tries to make the encyclopedia something that bends the rules. Deidreau in the end wants to make it something that breaks the rules.

So we're still, let's say, in the point, we're still trying to get this encyclopedia together. And the salons, and Breton's, so, we'll go for it, and he's got these two men, as it were, and board, and the salons are welcoming. It is the atmosphere very much of, let's do this. Is there a feeling, it's awfully difficult to look at the end of a massive enterprise

and think it began as a massive enterprise, but it didn't. Did it? I mean, how did it begin? Just let's do a couple of volumes and have a go, or was this, let's shake the world with this great thing? They're committed to the enterprise, in the sense they're committed to ten volumes, and that's a big enterprise.

and it's going to be very expensive. But what you have to see, I think, is that this is a magic moment. 1747, 1748, whole new series of books have been published. Montesquess Esprit de Lois, 1748. And the philosoph, the Enlightenment thinkers, think they're about to take over.

They believe the wind is behind them, the tide is flowing their way, and the encyclopedia is going to be their machine for taking over. And when Didera Antenabar brought in, they turn it into an enterprise, which is not just about providing knowledge, it's about providing new ideas, shocking new ideas and getting them into the public domain.

There's a stratum of challenge throughout this activity, challenging the state, challenging the interchurchase. But before it really gets going, we have the incident of the blind and Didoro. Didero publishes an essay on his letter to the blind, which takes its starting point, you tell me, if I'm wrong, Locke's idea of ideas coming from sensations

that our minds is a tabular razzar. And this gets him into so much trouble to get sent to jail for three months. Not a good position from which read it imagine, Psychopedia. It's a brilliant little essay. It's one of the most wonderful things

ever written. It starts with a simple problem which comes from Locke. If a blind man acquired the capacity to see, would he be able to recognize things that he previously felt? Or would he be able to translate

from sensation to sight? Or would he have to go around feeling and seeing at the same time to work out what was what? And Diderot tried to get in on an operation when someone was having their sight resort to see what their immediate responses were.

Then it goes to... Didera actually goes to visit a blind person and talk to them about their life. And the whole point of this encounter for Diderot is the discovery that if you're blind, you understand the world differently. I almost said see the world differently. And of course, you don't see the world. And so, for example, modesty has no meaning if you're blind. And then he ends up with a philosopher called Sanderson, a mathematician, who's blind,

who gives this speech in Diderot's text on his deathbed attacking belief in God. And this speech is entirely made up, although Diderot footnotes it is if it's real. And this is the first great publication in favor of atheism in Aungering in France. and of course he's arrested and thrown in prison. And of course he's trained in a prison. That marks him, as it were, doesn't it, for the rest of his career, almost for the rest of his career, he puts himself in a rather more anonymous mode

because he's been in prison, he's published a book of pornography, he isn't a salon person that the others are. He's never going to get the respect that Dallember had. He was never elected a member of the French Academy, and the authorities were watching him. in Paris had really quite an effective surveillance regime. So a lot of what he did after that was to try to find subversive ways of getting his ideas into the encyclopedia.

And you mark himself out by dressing like an artisan and so on, and by a fairly unbridled private and social life. He was a bohemian. Yes. So it's all gathered together and the first volume comes out in 1751, Caroline Warman. In Dolenberg's preference, he rivers goes back to Sir Francis Bacon.

Can you tell us how he used of Sir Francis Bacon and what he used? Well, I'm not a great expert on Francis Bacon, but I think that Bacon had stated an idea of having a sort of total knowledge, which was a sort of circle. And what Didor did in his table de connoisseurs, this wonderful fold-out map of knowledge, which is in the volume one, is take Bacon's idea. And so not divide up the world in terms of an object

and not according to divine and on the earth, but in terms of what man knows about things and how they know. And so there's memory, there's reason, and there's imagination. And where religion comes in is in reason, reason, science, science of God, then theology revealed, and then religion, and then, perhaps, abuse superstition, excuse me, for doing it in French, but by, so it's religion, and hence, by abuse, superstition.

So you just get religion as a little twig on the end, and I don't think that's what Bacon does, but it's taking this idea that Bacon initially sort of stated and then making it explicit and taking it some steps further. Judith Hawley, can you tell us how they organised it? It came out alphabetically, now that might seem, would seem at first glance for an encyclopedia, You're rather a cumbersome.

Excuse me. Way to go back. It really was. It wasn't the first encyclopedia to be arranged alphabetically by any means. But did it for two reasons. One is that it made knowledge more accessible. You could just look one thing up if you needed to. So it made things easier to find.

It also made it slightly more accessible socially. Now, this wasn't, he didn't have a democratised readership in mind, but it was slightly easier to manage. than treatises. But it led to all sorts of complications, if you were to have an article in the first volume and a letter something beginning with A and it would say C something beginning with D or E

and you could wait five, six, seven years for the cross-reference to come. There are also problems because they translated articles from chambers and often plagiarised them really. And there's one example where the article came up twice. Phantom, phantom, appeared under FF for Fantom and also P. so the same article came up twice later on.

So it led to all sorts of inconveniences and models. David? Well, I think the important model they've got here is Pierre Bale's Dictionary, Historical and Critical, which comes out in 1697. And that's a biographical dictionary, ostensibly, and therefore enormous work of knowledge. But what Bale did was stick into footnotes, shocking ideas. And because it's organized alphabetically,

you can't tell quite where the shocking ideas are going to be. often what Bell did was take an insignificant figure and develop an argument in the footnotes, which was original and provocative. And that's precisely what the encyclopedia does. Because it's organised alphabetically, there are all sorts of entries on any topic all over the place. And so you can have a very orthodox, respectable entry on one subject,

and then somewhere else, they're very unorthodox and unrespectable entry on the same topic, but under a different heading. Before we're talking more detail about the encyclopedia or encyclopedias, I think it'd be easier for me to say throughout this programme. It did meet with a ready, enthusiastic and surprisingly large readership and subscription. We talked subscription. People subscribed it. They paid the money up front for books that they might, or in some cases if they died too young, might not get. It really had a tremendous impact, didn't it? Can we bus bring that into play?

It has an enormous impact from the very beginning. I mean, they plan to originally print, I think, 1,700 copies. They sell out. They arrange then to print 4,000 copies. It's clear they could have printed even more. they have tremendous It's a tremendous success. Enormous success. And in that sense, it does what it's intended to do, it creates a new culture, a new source of reference, a new way of disseminating arguments and ideas.

There's no doubt about the fact that it has a tremendous publishing impact and it becomes the standard reference work. It's almost like as if there's a constituency that are ready to rally around this, Judith. There really is. And they have a provincial readership too. It's not just a Paris elite, but it's across, because people

subscribed and so they signed up for it, you can track people's names and addresses. They weren't working class buyers, but there were notaries, clerks, minor figures in the church, educated gentlemen, right across the whole of France. What was it essentially attracting them?

Obviously the idea of having all knowledge in one book is very attractive, read that, and I know everything that's that done with. That's fine, that's very attractive. But it was the ideas driving through it, wasn't it? Yes. ideas which were subversive, as David is it implied, you tuck them away in footnotes, and when you really look at it, it's going to be very worrying indeed if you're a Jesuit

or if you're at the court and so on. So that was going through. Can you talk a little about that? Yes, there's a sense of the moment that David mentioned earlier, that the time is ripe for a new movement, a sort of a movement of free thinking, which involves religious toleration as well as the free living that you mentioned earlier. and one way in which knowledge was united and tied together as it. So knowledge is fragmented and chopped up according to the alphabet, but then it's united by a system of lian or cross-references,

which tie things together too. And some of these could be quite subversive. And one of the most famous ones is there's an article on anthropophagy, on cannibalism, and the cross-references say, see Eucharist, Communion Table, altar. And so the reason is actually getting pleasure from it. Trans-Substantiations. Well, the Catholics believe in case people that the wine at the altar changed into the blood of Christ

and that the wife at the altar changes into the body of Christ So you're by taking off as a form of cannibalism. That's what the work. So there's a lot of pleasure in reading the encyclopedia because it's full of those sort of witty jokes. And the tone of the articles too is often very discursive. You get the idea of Deidreau as a man thinking things aloud and putting in irrelevances.

You say that as if you're not as if you're not. think that's the best thing in it. Well, it says in a way. It's one of the things that survives. One of the things that survives is the speaking voice of Diderot. The information is sometimes no longer relevant, not surprisingly, but it's got a personality. Just to, so, Caroline, just said, before you do, can somebody just explain quickly?

Well, I'll do it. It wasn't just Deidreau writing with Alunberg, but they brought in other people. In the end, there were about 150 subscribers. Most people doing it for nothing. Most people, experts bringing in, and so that's the enterprise. Caroline, you wanted to say something. Yes, I wanted to. mentioned the fantastic article

which I'm sure you know, Aguizima, which is a perfect example of what Judith is saying in terms of the irrelevances which are wonderful which is, it says Aguizema, it's by Diedel and it says plant from South America and this is, I don't

know anything more about that. The chronicles that write about it don't say anything more about that. What is the point of telling me this? It's not for the natives. It's not for us. What can we do with this piece of knowledge but I'm putting it in? just in case anybody wants to complain that it's not there. And this is a sort of perfect deed or a thing.

It's a joke. But also, I mean, coming back to that question of the completion of knowledge, the completeness of it, it's saying, can we, can we know everything? Of course we can't know everything. And we ought to say what we don't know as well, and that becomes a point. One of the new things about this was the drive to describe in detail

trades and crafts and to illustrate them, as I understand it. I haven't seen anything. illustrate them very meticulously so you could look at that were you as a blacksmith using the right instruments, were you, and so on, even down to jam making and so on. Was this a huge innovation, David?

Yes, I think, I mean there had been in England a couple of dictionaries of trades and crafts so that in that sense such things have existed, but the idea of putting them into a general account of knowledge for the educated and the wealthy, which is what these volumes are for, because they're very expensive. The idea that to be educated, you need to know how to shoe a horse,

so you need to be able to learn about that sort of thing, that you might want to look up how to make a clock. That's the Boconian project, and the idea is that you must bring together the knowledge of the artisan and the skilled craftsmen with the knowledge of the philosopher, and that if you do that, you can transform the world. That's Bacon's belief, and Didera has it, and he's a cutlass son. Bacon's belief being that knowledge should definitely be aimed towards what was practical. Yes.

And for the glory of the nation, because part of the thing is the guilds kept preserve their secrets, these craftsmen kept these things to themselves. And Bacon said, let's have them out in public. Scientists can get to work on them and improve industry and national wealth. And there's a circle here. I mean, the Dunabez's preface to the insectipede says that all knowledge comes from sensation.

And the other thing, of course, is that all knowledge is intended in the end to be practical. And here we come back to Deirdre's materialism. I mean, the whole point about knowledge is that it involves how you relate to the world. And in saying that, you make man the center of knowledge and man's practical activities, the purpose of knowledge, and you leave religion on one side.

And so while in a sense everything's in the encyclopedia, there are a lot of things that aren't there, St Augustine isn't there, St. Jerome isn't there. The Catholic Church is immediately horrified by what's been left out. The articles on Hua and Duke, King and Duke, refer to birds of those names. They don't give you the life cycle of any of the kings. They tell you there's a bird called the king bird.

Yes, and as you said earlier, the tree of knowledge in a preface, theology is related to a twig on the tree and related to superstition now. Yeah, and I mean, there's no doubt, I think, that the section on trades is perhaps the most novel part of the insectipedia, and those wonderful 11 volumes of plates at the end. But the main target is religion. And that's a target that, in a sense, they think they can get a degree of official permission to go for. And so what they want to do is argue in favour of religious toleration. At this point, Protestantism is illegal in France. Protestant pastors are still being executed. What they want to do is attack the power of the church and of the clergy, attack directly both the Jesuits and the Jansansans,

both sides of the great religious quarrels in France. Attack the reliability of knowledge from the Bible, show that the Bible, Deereux writes an article called Sacred Chronology, which sets out to show that the Bible, you can't build history out of the Bible. It's unreliable. So what they want to do is undermine religious faith. And what they suggest all the time is that they're going to propose an alternative, which is respectable deists.

Because the Jesuits being animal mechon bite back and quite very early on in the first or second volume currently on they take on the encyclopedia through someone's thesis which is presented to them who is encyclopedist as it were criticise that very severely

and the encyclopedia is banned and saved by two, by friends in high places. Yes. Yeah, Labille de Prade is the contributor whose thesis was bound and he had to go into exile and was no longer able to contribute and the privilege, the thing that meant

that the whole thing could be published with the backing of the authorities was withdrawn and Madame de Pompadour was the person who stepped in with the... She was the mistress of Louis XIV. She's the mistress of Louis XIV.

And there's that fantastic portrait of her by De La Tour with her beautiful dress and behind her some books and the books are the encyclopaedia and Montesquers de l'esprit de Lois, the spirit of law. So two sort of pioneering sort of enlightenment books. And you could say that these are like her jewels, they're just accessories, but at the same time there's quite a strong statement that she's making there in 1752,

which is the year she's got the privilege put back, so she's allowed the publication to carry on. And also the royal censor seemed to be more inside of the interactive period on the court, didn't he? Yes, Malzab. He was crucial, and I think it's something that's been sort of mentioned before, which is that the government

is not really opposed to the publishing of the encyclopedia. It's the opponents of the government. And so the way in which it can be sort of shepherded through is the important thing. And Malzab is always carefully trying to sort of make it possible

for them to carry on whatever sort of reverses. One of the most... Sorry. One of the, one of the, one of the, One of the very impressive things about this, Judith Hawley, is the people who contributed, of course, and the most perhaps, if one can use this rather sort of vulgar term,

but perhaps the most famous writer in Europe, Voltaire, buckled down and wrote a great number of interests for us, as did Rousseau. What attracted them to spend their time unpaid, writing for this massive project which was stumbling out? Right. I think Rousseau and Vulte had different motives, and their relationship with the encyclopedia went in different ways. Rousseau was a friend of Diderot at the start

and was very keen to elaborate his ideas on economy and political philosophy and also his ideas on music. He then had a big falling out with Diderot and renounced him as he did with absolutely every friend he was impossible to live with. Diderot was keen to have Voltaire because he was the senior philosopher. He was kind of the master. And it was nice to have his support for the project. But Diderot didn't trust Voltaire and I think quite right.

so, he got him to write articles on rather obscure subjects like elegance, falsity, fantasy. So these were not major... This was high up the alphabet, though. Quite, yes, well, it's, they're in the middle as well. I mean, he published a number of things

in the sort of the volume F. He had a series of things in draft for volume H, and he withdrew them when things became dangerous. And he played really, really quite a dangerous game with Diderot and almost got Diderot into a lot of trouble.

How did he do that? In 1757, D'Alombert published an article on the city of Geneva. Now, most of the geographical entries were very short, but the article on Geneva went into a great deal of length about what a bad place Geneva was, how dishonest the pastors were, how they wouldn't even produce plays by this wonderful man called Voltaire. And Voltaire had actually been feeding D'Aul-Ar with some material to put into this article. in a mischievous way.

And the moment the article was published, the people of Geneva rose up as one man and demanded that the encyclopedia become banned. The French clerics, although they didn't like the Genevaan Protestants, the Catholic authorities were only too keen to use this as a weapon

against the encyclopedia. And production of the encyclopedia halted for some time because of this. It was about this time as well that the attempted assassination of the king by someone who had supposed to, well, perhaps when I had read and was being influenced of encyclically also was a factor in almost bringing about its, well, it's being abandoned. Yes. I mean, this is Damien. And this, I mean, if I said that 1747, 1749, a great moment

of hope for the Enlightenment, Damien's attempt to assassinate the king causes a counter-revolution. 1757. 1757. And from that moment on, censorship becomes much time. and it's clear that the encyclopedia is going to be in trouble. And the article from Geneva becomes the sort of lightning, that's where all the lightning concentrates, particularly because Danube says that the pastors in Geneva don't believe in hell and they don't believe in the Trinity and everyone takes it this is what he's advocating,

and that it's a democracy and they take it, he's advocating democracy. And so it's clear from that moment that the encyclopedias in big trouble. And here I think one has to look at the politics of someone like Volta. Voltaire had come in board when the Encyclopedias first attempt. Act in 1752. He stays on board until 1759, and he's behind the attempt to make this legal publication in France of this progressive book. After 1759, the encyclopedia is officially banned. It's banned along with Voltaire's own novel Candide. It's banned along with a famous book by Helvicius called

Del Esprit. No, as Voltaire sees, a good book could be published in France any longer. And so Volta withdraws because he says there's no point in trying to carry on if, in order to carry on, you're going to have to betray your principles. Best go into exile. He's in exile himself already. Come and join me in Geneva and we'll start the enterprise again there. Diderot, Danova himself, backs out at this point, says, I don't want anything more to do with this.

Diderot carries on, believes he can do it without sacrificing his principles and loses many of the most important contributors. Before we go to that, I'd just like to go back to this attempted assassination, Julius Halley, because that does play a part. And this man

was horribly, the man who, Damien who attempted very, very unsuccessfully and extremely ineptly to kill the King was dealt with as a registrarian. He was horribly tortured. And there's a sense in which dealing with him and dealing with the encyclopedia was sort of different sides of the same coin. Yes, if you think of the Enlightenment as a large movement, the encyclopedia is its physical embodiment.

If you think of the Ancien regime as a large movement, Damien is one of its victims. so you can see these two large movements clashing together. And the way the encyclopedia is so all-encompassing, anything is relevant to it. So the death of a misguided assassin or an unsuccessful terrorist is part of the same phenomenon. And, Caroline, Malzab gets them out of that in the end, doesn't it?

The publication continues because he, he helped some again, to get started again. Yes, I mean, when it was banned in 1759, part of the sort of banning order was, and the remaining 72 livres pounds that everybody owes, has to be paid, that the publishers have received has to be paid back. The subscribers have paid, yeah.

And that would have completely bankrupted the publishers. I mean, money, and their money that they were earning from this was a big deal, was a big motive. with what was happening. And Malé Sab is protecting the publishers apart from anything else. And what he said was, okay, well, you don't have to give the money back to the subscribers.

This money will be for the volumes of plates which you haven't yet received. And so in that way, they managed to sort of keep that money and then keep going. Also, the subscribers didn't want their money back. The subscribers supported it, and they offered the chance to have their money back, and they said, no, thanks, we want the book.

And when LeBreton threatened to take the printing of it, out of France, and there are 100 printers involved producing this book, then the government started to think, ah, now this would be a terrible loss to the royal coffers if this is taken elsewhere. Because it was making a phenomenal money. It's employing a lot of people.

Can we come back to that letter, David? Volta leaves, and when Diderow comes back into the picture, he's been slogging away, and he keeps slogging away, for the duration to the very end, on a pittance compared with the money being raked in, albeit in a rollercoaster way by the publishers.

And Volta is an exile and says to Didro come and join me. And Didero refuses in what is quite formidable letter. Could you tell us about that? Well, I mean, Deidreau says that the thing to do if you're under attack from your enemies is stand up to them. I'm not going to run, he says. You know, and there's a sort of... I mean, Voltaire was a great runner, and Voltaire had always run.

And Voltaire had also made himself immensely wealthy. Voltaire, it's Voltaire who tells us how little Dieterow is working for, and you have to take it in a sense with a pinch of salt, because Volta's idea of what little money was, is quite different from most people. But Deidreau is working for a sort of journeyman's wage, and he does so for 20 years. And he's

sacrificing himself to this enterprise, and he believes that he can carry on in France, and they have this little legal technicality, where what's being produced under copyright is now the volumes of plates, well, the actual, the rest of the other, what becomes

10 volumes in the encyclopedia or an illegal book. It comes out under a false foreign imprint. And he carries on working to produce. They don't produce it any more volume by volume for fear that the censors will fall on them and they'll be thrown into prison. They end up producing all 10 volumes at once. And they have to produce it as fast as possible in order to rake in the money.

And so he's working away, working away, trying to get out this enormous book full of, or set of volumes, full of information without having time to check or correct or alt-torts comes out. And can we just go back to that letter? and then I come back to what happens to Diderot in that last, as it were, sprint for the tape. He expresses himself very strongly, not only about his stand-up and fight, but why he can't leave, doesn't he?

I think it's important to come back to the character of this man, who was the spine of the entire enterprise. Yes, yes, I mean, he's not just sort of capricious and whimsical, as we might have, you know, suggested in the previous sort of citations of him. I mean, this is, yes, it's a wonderful, strong crusading statement, and it says, I know very well that my enemies want to bring me down. I know how they want to do it. I know what they're going to do to me. He said, but I have friends here. I have a wife who is aging.

Am I going to take her away from her home? I owe things to the publishers. The publishers, you know, I mean, as we've been talking about, the publishers who've got so much money invested, the subscribers who are supporting it. And he said, and I hope that every, I hope every night when I'm, I go to bed that in the morning I will wake up and that the wicked will have reformed themselves and everything will be okay

and it's just a wonderful reprove and a wonderful statement of heroism frankly. Can we talk about the man who took over the Chevalier Joucaux, who was called a slave to the encyclopedia for the last few years? Can you tell us something about him, Judith Holley?

Yes, he was a really worthy individual too. Because Voltaire left, Russo left, Dallember left, and a lot of people left. And Volta did say, well, what Stedra are doing in these last 10 volumes, his little asterisk which marked his articles, no longer appeared.

In fact, this man called De Jokor probably wrote half of every article, half of the entries in the last 10 volumes. He was a learned man. He devoted his life to scholarship and he'd been collecting together material for a medical dictionary which all was lost at sea.

his career was in ruins and so he sort of in effect he washed up sort of the shipwrecked figure on the encyclopedia and he was rather glad to have this job to go for and he was so determined to get the thing done that he mortgaged his house he had a series of properties I think

and he mortgages to Libretton Libretton picked up the mortgage and in the end Libreton bought him out so de Jocor was pretty much owned by LeBreton and Diderot was very badly his pieces so I read, were censored very heavily without consulting him.

Yes, LeBretton took over the role of censor, because these were now illegal publications officially, there was no official censorship of them. But LeBretton wanted to make sure they didn't get into too much trouble. So he, without telling Deidreau, cut passages he didn't like the look of. He seemed to have done it rather erratically. All sorts of dangerous stuff got through. But Deidreau woke up one day to discover that the text that was appearing in print was not what he'd written.

And he was absolutely horrified. And, you know, as you'd imagine, after all these years of, of sacrificing sufferers principles. The discovery's principles weren't going to appear in print. It was just awful for him. So this rolled through over about 20 years, Judy's Holily. What, after that, what impact was it having on French and, let's call it, European society as well? Because we know it was well, Redding England.

Yes, yes. It certainly had a big impact in terms of the ideas that it was spreading. It made people think it was a subject of discussion in lots of different places. So there are lots of people who bought it, who waited for the cross-reference to turn up in volume 17, this sort of thing. But it led to a climate of debate. It also had a practical impact on the size of books. Encyclopedias before then had been two folio volumes.

And for a period of more than 100 years, encyclopedias became these huge multivolumed works. So it had that impact. But the real question, I wonder this is what we should think about now, is its relationship to the French Revolution. You ask it for me. It's question 19. That's a good right.

I don't mind at all. Anytime you want the job, just ring it. It's a hot policy, in fact. The jury is still out. The jury is still out on whether or not the French Revolution was a good thing. In some ways, you know, in some ways the most we can say is that the encyclopedia created the climate in which the French Revolution became possible. It didn't cause the French Revolution.

The Revolution was more influenced by Russo than by Dider Would you agree with that about creating the climate? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, in terms of a massive project with international collaboration carried on over 25 years defying the authorities and getting through, it's the first time something so massive has been able to get round, you know, monarchy and establishment, basically. So that provides, it provides a sort of rational example

that the revolution can. can then sort of take on. And certainly the first stage, the 1789, stage of the revolution, is the, you know, the manifestation of encyclopedia principles. It has to be. But then when it becomes, when it moves into the terror, when it becomes irrational, what will be called irrational, then I think it moves away from what we could ever call something like the encyclopedia.

Do we have strict evidence that the people who, as it were, took on the revolution, began the revolution, had actually read it and had discussed it. And was a salon culture, did it enter into salon culture? I mean, you go to the salons, and if you hadn't read the latest of which you have a cyclicity, you had got nothing to talk about. Well, I think there's a sense in which that's true. And there's a sense in which Voltaire and Rousseau and Diderot and Diderot and Dallambert are creating the culture for revolution.

But let's turn it around for a moment. Between 1750 and 1757, these ideas are being published legally in France. And there's a political program in that. There's a program in them for progressive. taxation, there's a program in them for abolishing privilege, there's a program in them for moderated monarchy. Now, if that had been successful, if it had been possible to carry on advocating those ideas, one can imagine the revolution would have been unnecessary. So there's a sense in which the revolution grows out of the failure of the encyclopedia,

the fact that it's censored in 1759, means that there is no route open to reform. Well, another way of looking at that, the revolution becomes the answer. Another way of looking at it's not the failure of incisclaturebates. It's the attack on it, psychically. The guys knew what was coming at them and they attacked it. Diderot and Dalymeau would have been horrified by the French Revolution. I don't think they would have supported this at all. I think there were 18

people, 18 surviving... They were horrified by the violence because that was against reason. By the violence. It was against reason. It was anti-intellectual elitism too. There's one man who witnessed, one contributor who witnessed the Robespier's great parade of his eternal goodness. I forget what the precise name is. And this man reportedly had sort of dropped down

dead in horror at what had happened. to enlightenment ideas. It's a sort of anti-mob thing as well. Dallonbert was very worried that the common person might get bad ideas. He was quite an elitist. And also the revolutionaries killed scientists. I mean, Lavoisier was slaughtered and so on. And what takes over after the censorship in the encyclopedia

is a raft of forbidden books that are smuggled into France, which are very much, most of them, of the secret history of the court, which are about who's sleeping with whom, who's corrupted by whom, who's taking bribes from him. And that's what destroys the reputation of the monarchy. That makes it impossible for people to believe anymore in the monarchy in France. And so in a sense, what replaces the serious knowledge of the encyclopedia is this dross which takes over. Well, thank you all very much indeed.

Thank you very much, Judith Hawley, David Wharton and Caroline Warman. Next week we're staying in France. We're going to discuss the great French mathematician Poincaray and his conjecture, over which at the moment I believe the Russians and the Chinese are disputing. Who's cracked it? Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.