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

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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.

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.

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.

Not the usual turgid history book of pre-revolutionary France but instead a very good, readable depiction of the trials and difficulties of creating the Encyclopedie. The prose is fluid and the book almost reads like a novel.

Most of the French Encyclopaedists were men of sparkle and wit, and Philipp Blom's book shares these qualities. We get an excellent account of the historical background, of the contents and subversive nature and outlook of the Encyclopédie, of the immense task of compiling its 17 volumes of texts and 11 of plates over a period of 19 years, of the trials and tribulations it encountered at the hands of the authorities, but above all of the main characters associated with it, especially the lovable Diderot and the less than lovable Rousseau, but also d'Alembert (so much more arrogant than his charming portrait by Quentin de la Tour would suggest), the Chevalier de Jaucourt (three different figures are given on different pages for the number of articles he contributed), Helvétius, and many others.

Like the Encyclopédie itself, this book about it contains many digressions which are only thinly connected with the work itself, but as these are almost all entertaining, one cannot really complain. They are mostly about the lives of men and women who moved in the circle of the Encyclopaedists even if they were not direct contributors to the work. Blom does, however, dedicate no fewer than 12 pages to the story of Damien's attempt in 1757 on the life of Louis XV and the ghoulish details of his torture and execution - all on the specious grounds that, in reaction to this event, the Encyclopaedia was banned two years later: Blom makes it clear that there were far more immediate reasons for the Encyclopaedia being suppressed.

Each chapter has at its beginning one of the plates that illustrated the great work, and there is just the niggle that there is no key to the figures or to the little letters labelling the parts of the images.

The book was first published in 2004 under the title "Encyclopedie". You can google an excellent review by the American specialist Raymond Birn in H-France Review Vol.6, and this points out a rather alarming number of factual inaccuracies. Had I not read this, I would have given the book five stars.

Mr. Blom adroitly tells how an important set of books came about that helped banish darkness at a time of absolute rule, much ignorance, and very limited tolerance. The courage, clear thinking, and simple humanity of the various dedicated authors who worked to create "The Encycopedia" in pre-revolutionary France is inspiring. A book I highly recommend as one fun to read along with "Enlightening the World" is "Voltaire in Exile" by Davidson, which is also out this year. Both deserve readers.

At a time when postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment downplay its significance it is useful to look at the phenomenon beyond abstraction in its particulars and vivid detail. Here the history of Diderot and his Encyclopedia brings the moment to life, and is a reminder of what the philosophes wrought in world still dominated by Church and King. The immense task of the work against the perils of censorship is close to a working miracle, and the tribulations of Diderot from the first lettre du cachet that put him in Vincennes prison are heroic. Diderot's dissatisfaction with his labors seem irrelevant now since this world-historical contribution to the Information Revolution is his great legacy.

This volume is a bit thin as history but an easy read and useful for those who want an easy way to get their head around d'Alembert and Diderot's Encyclopedie project. I like the book but don't consider it "high book" scholarship. With those qualifications, however, I'd recommed for the casual reader. D'Alembert's Preface to the Enclopedie is far "deeper," and provides a better summary. This is a nice book, worth having, but a bit of a coffee table edition, perhaps.

In 1633 Galileo was tried before the Roman Inquisition and found guilty of teaching that the earth went around the sun rather than the sun going around the earth. He was condemned to lifelong imprisonment.

In 1777 a group of people gathered in Paris to prepare an Encyclopedie that would encompass all of human knowledge. It was based on the most current scientific knowledge of the time and generally ignored the thinking and belief system of the church.

At this point in time, only 144 years from the time when Galileo had been convicted, the writers would have been killed if the church had known that they were atheists.

The material that they published was bad enough that the book was banned by the Pope. And during the sixteen years it took to write, compile, and produce all twenty seven volumes the authors were constantly risking jail, exile and censorship. Still they continued.

This book is the story of the people who wrote the Encyclopedie, the Paris they lived in, their lives and the writing. This was a time that was setting the stage for the French Revolution that was soon to follow.

In 1992 Pope John Paul II gave an address in which he admitted that errors had bene made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo.

Phillip Blom has done a yeoman's job of research on this book. He has spent (by looking at the bibliography) copious amounts of time with both the original version of the "Encyclopedie" as well as correspondence of the Encyclopedists, all in the original French. Where this story is lacking is in his scholarship.

For those of us who don't speak French (oh! Mon Dieu!) it would have been nice if more of the French in the book was translated. Yes I am a barbaric American and can't 'parlez-vous', but then does Mr.Blom speak Polish or Russian? If he wanted to enlighten us 'poor souls', instead of treating us like 'peasants', he or his editors would also have explained some of the 'plates' from the original volumes that are sprinkled through the book.

From my point of view, you read a book like this to learn about the subject (or metier) and not to be insulted for one's supposed ignorance. If I knew the subject before hand, I would have read Voltaire or Proust and been made to feel totally academically lacking. It would have been interesting to give a background to the 4000 subscribers to this monumental work and what happened to most of the copies in later years. How many are still extent and has anyone thought of computerizing them so that any scholar who wanted could see for themselves what is there?

This may sound a little like something written by D'Alembert or some Jesuit, but then who can say that it wasn't?

Zeb Kantrowitz