382Chapter 20but faith had remained the Christian standard even af-
ter the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther
had condemned reason as “the Devil’s Harlot.”
Despite such conflicts, the philosophes were gener-
ally confident that the use of human reason to discover
natural laws would produce a better world. Thus, the
glorification of reason led to an optimistic cult of
progress. The French mathematician Jean d’Alembert,
Diderot’s coeditor of the Encyclopédie,thought “it is im-
possible to deny that philosophy has shown progress
among us. Day by day natural science accumulates new
riches.” The greatest champion of the doctrine of
progress was another French mathematician, the mar-
quis Antoine de Condorcet, whose Progress of the Human
Spirit(1795) foresaw nothing less than “the indefinite
perfectibility of the human race”—a passage written
shortly before Condorcet died in a prison of the French
Revolution.
The French Enlightenment and the Encyclopédie
Although skepticism and rationalism attracted the edu-
cated classes of many regions, the home of the Enlight-
enment was in France, where the authority of church
and throne were already weakened and the political
duel between the aristrocracy and the monarchy cre-
ated an environment more favorable to radical thought
than existed in most of Europe. The most famous and
internationally read philosophes were French, as the
universal use of a French word for them suggests.
Voltaire’s famous satiric novel Candide(1759), filled with
witty criticism of the Old Regime, went through eight
editions in the year of its publication alone. Rousseau’s
radical political tract The Social Contract(1762) had thir-
teen French editions in 1762–63. Montesquieu’s The
Spirit of the Laws(1748) saw twenty-two French editions
by 1751 and ten editions in its English translation by
1773; it had appeared in Dutch, Polish, Italian, and
German editions by the 1780s and was so widely read
that it was translated into Latin for the benefit of well-
educated people in regions with less common lan-
guages, such as Hungary.
Nothing characterizes the French leadership of the
Enlightenment better than the publication of the
twenty-eight volumes of the Encyclopédieby Diderot and
d’Alembert between 1751 and 1772. Many of the most
famous writers of the eighteenth century contributed to
what was perhaps the greatest intellectual accomplish-
ment of the Enlightenment. The idea of compiling an
encyclopedia was not new. The word itself came from
the classical Greek encyclios—meaning instruction in the
whole circle of learning—in both the arts and the sci-
ences. Many famous efforts had been made to encom-
pass the entire circle of learning, from Pliny’s Natural
Historyin the first century A.D. through a number of en-
cyclopedic works in the seventeenth century.
Denis Diderot was an unlikely figure to produce
the Encyclopédie. He was the son of a lower-middle class
family—his father was a cutlery maker—in provincial
France. Diderot received his formal education from the
Jesuits, then prepared for a career in the church so de-
voutly that he fasted, slept on straw, and wore a hair
shirt. Further study in Paris, however, changed Diderot
into a Bohemian writer who broke with church and
family alike, angering the former with his writing and
the latter with his behavior. Like many philosophes,
Diderot’s writings earned him poverty and time in a
royal prison. Thus, he eagerly accepted the opportunity
to edit an encyclopedia, which was originally intended
to be merely a translation of an English work.
The resultant Encyclopédiewas a work of uneven
quality and numerous inaccuracies, but it nonetheless
became theencyclopedia. It owed its fame and influence
to two characteristics. First, it was a collaborative enter-
prise, not simply the work of its editors. The contribu-
tors included many of the most influential writers of the
Enlightenment; Condorcet, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
and Voltaire all wrote for the Encyclopédie,with Voltaire
alone contributing more than forty articles. Baron Paul
d’Holbach wrote on the history of religion, including
daring essays on priests and theocracy that made him
one of the most controversial philosophes. Two leading
Physiocrats, François Quesnay and Jacques Turgot,
summarized the economic ideas that dominated con-
temporary thought and would be adopted by many
governments. Such contributors guaranteed the
Encyclopédiea large readership and extended the influ-
ence of the French Enlightenment across Europe.
The second reason for the importance of the Ency-
clopédiewas that the ideas and opinions that it contained
made it notorious. The Encyclopédiedid not merely
record information, it became a forum for the
philosophes. They began in the first volumes by criti-
cizing despotic government and the established church;
subsequent volumes contained direct attacks. As early
as 1752, with only two volumes in print, King Louis
XV of France ordered the Encyclopédie“to be and to re-
main suppressed.” The support of friends in high
places—especially the king’s mistress, Madame de
Pompadour—allowed publication to proceed, but it did
so amidst controversy. In 1759 French courts turned the
work over to a panel of churchmen and scholars to cen-
sor. The government again denounced it, this time for