The Encyclopédie, Salons, and the Republic of Letters

Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert directed the "Encyclopédie, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts" from 1751 onward. Published in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772 amid serious and repeated censorship difficulties, it drew on the contributions of more than 150 collaborators, including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, and aimed to systematize and disseminate all human knowledge according to rational, critical standards, an ambition laid out programmatically in d'Alembert's "Preliminary Discourse." Many of its articles carried veiled criticism of absolutism, the Church, and traditional institutions, and its technical entries on trades and mechanical arts dignified manual labor and craft technique alongside purely speculative learning, a genuinely novel emphasis for the time.