Enlightening the World: Encyclopedia, The Book That Changed the Course of History [Hardcover]

Philipp Blom (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 2005

In 1777 several of the world's greatest men gathered together to create a book that would champion rationalism, free thinking, and secularism--the Encyclopédie. Such leading minds as Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire conceived of a work that would tear down the social order dominated by the Crown and Church, a brave act at a time when heresy could still be punished by death. During the years it took to produce all twenty-seven volumes, the writers faced exile, jail, and censorship. But when they were done, they had created a book that would provide the foundation for the Enlightenment and change the world forever. Novelist and historian Philipp Blom presents the story behind the sixteen-year struggle to create the Encyclopédie, the men who wrote it, the powerful forces that tried to suppress it, and the tremendous impact it had on the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the dark corners of Paris's bohemian cafes, salons and theaters, some of the greatest European thinkers of the 18th century congregated, and it was here that the Encyclopédie was born. The most enormous publishing effort of the day, the Encyclopédie would be neither the first of its kind nor ultimately the largest. But in this meticulously researched historical narrative, journalist and historian Blom (To Have and to Hold) argues that the Encyclopédie represents a turning point in the tide of intellectual history and is the last veritable record of Europe's ideas, traditions, politics, economics, tools and restrictions before the French Revolution. The bulk of Blom's narrative is driven by the drama that occurred among the work's many contributors and between them and the society in which they lived. The writers, many of whom stood for free thought and secularism, struggled with censorship, exile and even prison. And, as is revealed here through epistolary exchanges, on a personal level, the famed band of philosophes-including Diderot, D'Alembert, Voltaire, Grimm and Rousseau-were divided by mistresses, money, manipulation and, most of all, ego. Blom takes the reader through these events and through the Encyclopédie itself in a thorough and engaging way, and he makes a strong case for the work's importance in shaping philosophy and political thought for years to come. This book is a welcome read for European historians and for those interested in learning about one of the foremost works of the Enlightenment.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Late in this absorbing history of the most notorious European publication of the eighteenth century, Blom says that the Encyclopedie marks the end more than the beginning of an era. Intended in part to describe, and thereby honor, the shop crafts on which urbanizing Europe relied for the material base of civilization (apparel, foodstuffs, building materials, utensils and tools, etc.), the 28-volume work, 25 years in the making, became the largest resource on preindustrial means of production. In mid-eighteenth-century Paris, the church and the monarchy saw (accurately) in the Encyclopedie the uprising of materialism, atheism, and republicanism against them. Many Encyclopedie contributors were harassed, imprisoned, and/or exiled by Louis XV's government, spurred on by Jesuits and Jansenists, who, otherwise at each other's throats, united against the godless Encyclopedie. In the end, the new age of venture capitalism won out. The Encyclopedie's bookseller-financiers were too heavily invested to let it die. They made out like bandits, too, while the intellectuals who wrote it had to settle for fame (the principal writer of the last several volumes didn't even get a complimentary set). The sympathetic hero of the whole endeavor was Denis Diderot, leading editor throughout, who was legally obliged, for the sake of the Encyclopedie, to suppress his now-classic novels and essays during his lifetime. The Encyclopedie's story is both epic and epochal, and Blom tells it intelligently, gracefully, and stylishly. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st US edition (April 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403968950
• ISBN-13: 978-1403968951
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #672,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Encyclopedie, December 16, 2006

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Stephen Balbach (Ashton, MD United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enlightening the World: Encyclopedia, The Book That Changed the Course of History (Hardcover)

Philipp Blom is a delightful writer and this is a fascinating and highly entertaining history of the great French Encyclopedie created over the course of 25 turbulent years in the mid-1700s. Despite the title, this is really a book about people, with the encyclopedie as thread to tie the stories together. I have very little background in 18th C European/French history Blom makes it entirely accessible for novice and expert alike (although I suspect many of the stories here are well worn, but new to me, and well told). Probably the greatest compliment is I want to learn more about those involved, probably starting with a biography of Rousseau. This book easily sits besides Simon Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything" and Henry Hitchings "Defining the World". As another reviewer mentioned, anyone with an interest in Wikipedia will find it fascinating.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating view of both the personalities and the project they undertook, April 6, 2009

By 

S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enlightening the World: Encyclopedia, The Book That Changed the Course of History (Hardcover)

This is the kind of book that even such dedicated encyclopedistes as Diderot, the Chevalier de Jaucourt and d'Alembert would have found hard to classify. Yes, it's history -- but is it political history? social history? biography? philosophy?

In fact, Blom's work is a masterful combination of all these, making it as unique and intriguing as the original Encyclopedie must have seemed to its 18th century readers, confronted as they were with a world where the amount of knowledge available (theoretically) to them grew exponentially by the day. How to keep pace with this? How could they maintain an understanding of the world and their place in it? That, as described by Blom, was one of the catalysts for the creation of the Encyclopedie, but the goals of its contributors and chief architects, especially Denis Diderot, were quite different. Rather than reinforce the existing social order and its underpinnings -- theological dogma as conveyed by the Catholic Church and absolute monarchy, represented in the person of Louis XV -- they embarked on a mission to portray an alternative world, one in which reason prevailed and where an artisan's talents and knowledge were valued as much as those of a pleasure-loving monarch. Often, this could only be accomplished indirectly -- as Blom shows by pointing out how thoughtful readers could fill in the gaps between the lines in the entries on drone bees, who served only as courtiers to the queen bee and didn't work for a living but lived off the efforts of the worker bees.

Blom effortlessly weaves together the political and social background against which Diderot and his collaborators toiled for 16 years to assemble what became a 28-volume opus with the details of their lives and experiences, from Diderot's incarceration in the Chateau de Vincennes (to obtain his liberty, he had to forego a career as a professional philosophe -- devastating to him on one level, but something that forced him into his lifelong work on the Encylopedie) to the likely impact of Rousseau's hereditary incontinence problem on his anti-social behavior and ultimate rupture with the cosmopolitan encyclopedistes who had previously been his closest friends. Especially intriguing are the glimpses of other personalities, less familiar to history, such as de Jaucourt and the Baron Holbach.

When Diderot embarked on his life work -- reluctantly enough -- he was not a member of any prestigious Academy and, in Blom's words, "was known only to his friends and to the police." Today, he is widely known -- but ironically, to many, it is because of his endless travails on the Encyclopedie, a project that often felt like a millstone around his neck. As for the encyclopedie itself, while it did serve as an intellectual precursor to the Revolutionary-era thinkers who would follow the encyclopedistes, the work itself was as much a mark of the end of the world that Diderot and his companions knew. It would serve to preserve the traditional artisanal crafts that would shortly give way to industrialized processes. Meanwhile, the creation of the book itself -- with even censors tacitly acknowledging the importance of the project to the French economy -- served, as Blom points out, as a sign that the age of capitalism had arrived. "Questions of true religion, of dogma, of respect for authority, even of royal power, could be subjugated to the higher interests of economic wellbeing if this was judged necessary."

I can't comment from a scholarly perspective on the nuances of Blom's portrayal of Diderot and his collaborators, but the book is a lively and compelling introduction to the era and the subject that anyone interested in the topics it concerns -- political philosophy, the rise of a civil society, the history of ideas, censorship, etc. -- will find compelling. And Blom does justice to his subject, making each character, from the best known (Rousseau, Voltaire) to the most obscure (Diderot's mysterious mistress, 'Sophie' Vallon) remarkably vivid.

There are two few books of this kind - accessible, well-written, thoughtful, well-researched and broad in scope -- and Blom has added yet another to his own personal canon within the genre. (Interestingly, his previous book, To Have and To Hold was a history of collecting objects; this book focuses instead on the collecting but also the dissemination of ideas and concepts and information.) It's a lively history of the times -- you'll almost feel the famous Parisian mud pulling your shoes off as you read about Paris in the middle of the 18th century -- but also a group biography and the history of an endeavor and its legacy.

If you find this book intriguing, you might also be interested in another book about literary ventures and misadventures in 18th century France. As Blom mentions throughout this history, many French writers published in Amsterdam to avoid the royal censors -- their works were later smuggled back into Paris inside barrels of salted herring, among other things -- a form of 18th century samizdat. A good survey of the literary underworld of Diderot's era can be found in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The real importance of the Encyclopedie comes to life in this history of its controversies, December 3, 2005

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enlightening the World: Encyclopedia, The Book That Changed the Course of History (Hardcover)

What was the real significance of the 'Encyclopedie' by Diderot and d'Alembert? Many will say its size and date of appearance marked it as special: Philipp Blom reveals its significance lie in its blend of politics, honesty and ideas which went against the Church and Crown alike in its effort to provide unbiased truth. Its publication was to underwrite the values of two centuries to come, with philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and medical scientist Louis de Jaucourt living through arrest, imprisonment, attacks and more for their achievement. The real importance of the Encyclopedie comes to life in this history of its controversies.