The Encyclopedists

The Encyclopedists

In 1751 in France, the first part of a new encyclopedia was published – subjects that started with the letter A. The two men most responsible for the work were the writers' Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert (pronounced zhan dah-lemBEAR), the latter a respected scientist and mathematician. The two men believed that knowledge would bring people more happiness, and they wished to combat what they believed was the ignorance, myth, dogma, and superstition inherited from the Middle Ages. Some of their writing on subjects beginning with the letter "A" offended both government and Church authorities. The government banned the book, and the Church placed the book on its index of forbidden books and threatened ex-communication on all who read or bought it.

In 1765 the encyclopedia was completed. It was twenty-eight volumes with hundreds of thousands of articles by leading scientists and famous writers, among them the Marquis de Condorcet, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. And it included an article by Diderot against slavery and the slave trade.

In the 1770s, Diderot wrote an article on the Tahitians, drawing from a description written by the French explorer Louis Bougainville, who had visited Tahiti for ten days. Bougainville's comments about the Tahitians living together freely provided Diderot with an opportunity to criticize the institution of marriage. Diderot looked with disdain upon the morality of France's elite. He called the marriage he saw around him in France as immoral because it reduced women to the status of possessions or objects. Diderot complained of marriage as having created two unnecessary conditions: the plight of the fallen woman and the plight of the illegitimate child.

Despite the ban on the encyclopedia it was widely read and became an influence through much of Western Europe.