Sunshine Recorder

The Encyclopedists

An author assesses the importance of the landmark Encyclopédie and the three men who created it.

The eighteenth century has bequeathed to us one work which embodies in itself the spirit of the century,—that is the Encyclopédie. There are, of course, other works of that epoch more perfect, or nearer that perfection which was always the aim of its great authors. These are, however, the works of individual authors, and they give us only the labors of each author separately, while the Encyclopédie gives us the picture of an age which was one of the most important in the history of the world. With the subsidence of the bitter quarrels that characterized the publication of the Encyclopédie, not a little of the popular interest in the work has ceased. It remains, however, the intellectual fortress of its epoch, and although its defenders and its besiegers have lost much of their heat and ardor, it is not because the world of letters is grown more just or more peaceful, but because there are new fields of battle on which the warlike intellects of our own day find plenty to try their mettle. The Encyclopédie may well be read to-day, not for the interest of novelty which it once possessed, but for its importance in the history of literature and philosophy.

There is no recent summary of the lives of the Encyclopédistes; for the most part they are obscure men; and without going as far as Lebas (Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de la France, forming part of Didot’s Univers Pittoresque) in depreciating them, or as far as Lord Brougham in extolling them, it is doubtful whether there is any-where an exact account of all of them. Indeed, many of the numerous contributors wrote only an article or two; the Biographie Universelle probably contains all that is worth knowing of the principal writers, and Grimm’s corre-spondence tells a thousand stories and anecdotes about these. D’Alembert and Voltaire are treated especially by Brougham in his “Men of Letters and Science,” but it is in a merely popular way. It is not easy anywhere to obtain satisfactory and direct reference to authorities on the subject; but perhaps the lives of the three great chiefs, Voltaire, D’Alembert, and Diderot, cover all the necessary grounds of knowledge with regard to their followers.

Two new works of interest, if not of authority, have appeared within this year, and each in its way is worth attention, and is sure to command it, as showing the hold which the Encyclopédistes still have on art and letters. Fichel, the cleverest painter in the newest school of French genre, has lately given us a capital picture, Les Encyclopédistes,—a group of the famous men of that large family,—in a library with the furniture, dress, and appointments of the period. Some of the faces are familiar to us even here,—Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Rousseau, Buffon,—and the others have also the sharp lines and speaking features of truthful portraits. A desire to find out the unnamed persons in the painting first caused the inquiry into the subject, which now takes this shape. Almost at the same time that Fichel’s picture was given to the world, the Librairie Internationale in Paris published Les Encyclopédistes, leurs Travaux, leurs Doctrines, et leur Influence, par Pascal Duprat,—a readable and attractive volume of nearly two hundred pages. It tells the story of the Encyclopédie, the political and moral state of France when it began, the incidents of its publication, and, sketching the authors who took part in its composition, explains its object and plan, its general spirit, its philosophical doctrine, its politics, its political economy, its influence on the eighteenth century, and the French Revolution, its opponents then and its value now. All this is done briefly, clearly, and well by one of the lesser lights of French letters, who, however, reflects fairly enough the influence, good and bad, which the Encyclopedists continue to exert.