In a more general sense, the tortured character of political coverage in the work was no doubt a function of the sheer fragility of the editors’ rights to publication. At the very time when the second volume was appearing, in 1752, a Sorbonne thesis by an abbé Martin de Prades, who had contributed the entry CERTITUDE to the Encyclopédie, was condemned for unorthodoxy.3 Diderot’s dictionary was briefly suppressed by a royal order in council; there was even talk of putting its editors to death. The dauphin’s Jesuit preceptor, Bishop Jean-François Boyer, received the king’s permission to take action. The royal censor, Chrétien-Guillaume Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a man generally sympathetic to the enlightenment project who held this important office from 1752 to 1763, devised a compromise whereby the Encyclopédie would continue publication. In exchange, Bishop Boyer was able to choose the censors assigned to its volumes.
In 1758, after the appearance of volume 7 the previous November, a larger crisis developed. The global war that had begun in 1756 (eventually called the Seven Years’ War) was not going well for France, and wartime censorship was in full operation by 1758. There was also an attempt on the life of King Louis XV by the psychotic Damiens (1757) and a trial that led to his drawing and quartering (1758). The article GENEVA (reproduced here) had in the meantime caused an international incident with the Genevan government’s declaration of orthodoxy in February 1758. For these reasons Diderot came under increasing personal pressure during this time; d’Alembert himself made the decision between December 1757 and February 1758 to discontinue his editorial association with the project.
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Voltaire was among those urging Diderot to take the enterprise abroad for safety’s sake.
In the summer of 1758 Rousseau precipitated a long-brewing breach with the encyclopedic party through the publication of his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre, a work containing a personal attack against Diderot. Also that summer (July 1758) Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s materialist treatise De l’Esprit was published. For numerous reasons, including the prefatory dedication by Diderot’s close friend Friedrich-Melchior Grimm, the work quickly became a flashpoint for mounting hostility against the Encyclopédie itself.
Finally, in November 1758, the archbishop of Paris condemned the book; the pope followed two months later. The Parlement of Paris—the chief judicial body in the realm, which also exercised administrative functions—resolved to launch a full-scale investigation of all scandalous literature and decided upon an immediate ban on the sale of the Encyclopédie itself, a judgment confirmed by the Royal Council in March 1759. The pope enjoined any Roman Catholic who possessed a copy of the work to bring it to a local priest for burning.
“Where they burn books,” Heinrich Heine once wrote, “they end up burning men.” The ending to this story, though, was less gruesome. Diderot’s files were empty when the police searched his home because Malesherbes, the royal censor, had himself taken them into safe custody. Although the publishing project had seemingly reached a dead end by July of 1759 when the parlement ordered the editors to cease operations and repay subscribers, a confidential and unwritten arrangement allowed Diderot and the chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, a Protestant nobleman who had by now in effect replaced d’Alembert as co-editor, to continue their work in private, with an expectation that the last volumes would appear at an opportune moment. That moment finally arrived in 1765.
Among the reasons that government officials eventually allowed the enterprise to go forward was the calculation that too much had been invested, by producers and buyers alike, to allow such a lucrative venture to migrate to Prussia or Holland, as would otherwise have been likely. The contrast with Diderot’s Chinese counterpart, Sung Ying-hsing, is stark. That redoubtable late Ming scholar brought out a comparably ambitious and wide-ranging
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compendium of practical knowledge, The Making and Wonders of the Works of Nature, in 1637; but despite an enthusiastic reception by its readers, the work had all but disappeared from circulation within a few years—victim of a remarkably successful government suppression—only to be fitfully reconstructed from rare surviving copies centuries later.4 The eventual publication of the last ten volumes of Diderot’s work may accordingly be seen as a triumph of (partially) free expression, political pluralism, and commercial enterprise.
Properly speaking, neither Diderot nor his fellow contributors of political articles would have been recognized as political philosophers. But Diderot’s dictionary was not meant to be a collection of original essays. “Woe betide such a vast work,” the editors wrote, “if we wanted to make the whole thing a work of invention!”5 It was designed as a general reference work, and modern research has established how extraordinarily successful it was in this ambition.6
It was also designed, however, as a dynamically interactive, aggressively cross-referenced compendium of the new knowledge and new ways of thinking in all fields of study. Both the prospectus and d’Alembert’s “Preliminary Discourse,” as well as Diderot’s important article ENCYCLOPÉDIE itself, emphasized the intention to propagate this new approach to a larger audience. The question that would have hovered over the political articles, therefore, was: what do the new learning and the new ways of reasoning that the editors wished to disseminate have to say about the origins, nature, and ends of political order? Although some of the articles featured here are indeed distinguished for their originality, a contributor’s main task would have been skillful synthesis of recognized authorities. The problem was that the selection and citation of such authorities was fraught with controversy,
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as we have seen, which furnishes a not insignificant part of the interest of this volume.
Contributors resorted to a gamut of strategies in finessing this problem. They could lift material from an author without acknowledgment (see Jaucourt’s use of Bolingbroke in PATRIOT, for example); they could quote material without identifying either author or work (see Jaucourt’s use of Addison’s Cato at the beginning of the same entry); they could refer to an author obliquely (“a talented English author”) without naming him; they could mention a work or author once while drawing on him more often throughout the entry; or they could summarize their general reliance upon a source by mentioning it at the beginning or end of an entry. There is some reason to believe there was at least a loose correlation between citation practice and publication status: that is, in the complexly graded system of publishing permissions available under the French monarchy—everything from a full royal privilege to a complete ban, with other options in between—the more officially respectable a work’s publication status was, the more overt the citation might be. Montesquieu’s political work was more likely to be cited explicitly than Locke’s or Bolingbroke’s, Bossuet’s than Montesquieu’s. Different contributors, of course, had different risk thresholds, and the perceived riskiness of a work could change over time.7
Although no full-scale critical study has yet been attempted of the sources used in the political articles of the Encyclopédie,8 it is clear enough that the main modern authorities utilized and cited for the entries presented in this volume would include the following: Hobbes; Grotius, Pufendorf, and the recently published Jean Burlamaqui (1747) for the natural-law tradition; Locke and Sidney for the English, as well as Mandeville, Shaftesbury, Addison, Bolingbroke, Gordon, and Hume; Voltaire—especially his Letters on the English (known today as the Philosophical Letters) and his Essai sur l’histoire universelle (more commonly known since the mid-twentieth century
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as Essai sur les mœurs [Essay on manners]); and, above all, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. That last polyglot masterpiece, which had just appeared in 1748, possessed an authority in the political articles that would be difficult to exaggerate. Jaucourt relied on it almost exclusively for many of his entries. But even authors