---
title: "Encyclopédie"
chunk: 6/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopédie"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:33.670090+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Influence ==
By 1789, in its various editions, some 25,000 sets of the Encyclopédie had been sold throughout Europe. Chambers' (and then Abraham Rees's) much smaller Cyclopaedia went through more editions (including translations) and presumably sold in more sets, since at least one of the pressruns was as high as those of the Encyclopédie. Still, the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was almost as large as the Encyclopédie, sold 13,000 sets, half as many as the Encyclopédie, and the only eighteenth-century encyclopedia that was bigger than the Encyclopédie, the Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon (1732–50), seems to have sold only 1,500 sets.
Unlike the Cyclopaedia, the Encyclopédie was never published in a comprehensive translation, though attempts at such a translation were made in English and German. In part, French, unlike Chambers’ English, was understood by elites throughout Europe and elsewhere. More importantly, extracts were published in several languages, including the "Preliminary Discourse." In Russian, at least twenty-nine works were published between 1767 and 1805 based on articles from the Encyclopédie.
In the history of encyclopedias, the Encyclopédie was significant in several respects. It was the first encyclopedia known to have been written by numerous contributors, and it pioneered the practice of making ascriptions of authorship in individual articles. Whereas encyclopedia-like works from before the mid-eighteenth century were typically called dictionaries or lexica, the name encyclopedia was gradually adopted as the generic term for such works in the late eighteenth century, thanks to the prestige of the Cyclopaedia and especially the Encyclopédie.
"No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion," wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1911. In fact, many encyclopedias throughout history have sought to promote their own point of view, from the warring Protestant and Catholic encyclopedias of the early modern period to the famous Nazi edition of Meyer’s encyclopedia in the mid-twentieth century.
In The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution,  Clorinda Donato writes the following:

The encyclopedians successfully argued and marketed their belief in the potential of reason and unified knowledge to empower human will and thus helped to shape the social issues that the French Revolution would address. Although it is doubtful whether the many artisans, technicians, or laborers whose work and presence are interspersed throughout the Encyclopédie actually read it, the recognition of their work as equal to that of intellectuals, clerics, and rulers prepared the terrain for demands for increased representation. Thus the Encyclopédie served to recognize and galvanize a new power base, ultimately contributing to the destruction of old values and the creation of new ones.
Once the French Revolution broke out, certainly, the Encyclopédie became associated with political revolution. The association was easy to make in that enemies of the Enlightenment often used the terms encyclopedist and philosophe as synonyms. In the early United States, enemies of Thomas Jefferson, who was sympathetic to the French Revolution and to revolution in general, criticized him, among other ways, by citing damning passages from the Encyclopédie, which he owned. Likewise, in 1814, a defender of the Spanish empire claimed that the struggle for Peruvian independence was “inspired by the doctrines of the encyclopedists.”

== The Encyclopédie in relation to Wikipedia ==
The historian Dan O'Sullivan compares the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia:

Like Wikipedia, the Encyclopédie was a collaborative effort involving numerous writers and technicians. As do Wikipedians today, Diderot and his colleagues needed to engage with the latest technology in dealing with the problems of designing an up-to-date encyclopedia. These included what kind of information to include, how to set up links between various articles, and how to achieve the maximum readership.

== Statistics ==
Approximate size of the Encyclopédie:

17 volumes of articles, issued from 1751 to 1765
11 volumes of illustrations, issued from 1762 to 1772
18,000 pages of text
75,000 entries
44,000 main articles
28,000 secondary articles
2,500 illustration indices
20,000,000 words in total

== Quotations ==
"Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian...  Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher, who has the same passions, acts only after reflection;  he walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch.  The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations.  He does not confuse truth with plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable.  The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy." (Philosophers, Dumarsais)
"If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth.  When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare." (Wealth, Diderot)

== See also ==
Democratization of knowledge

== References ==

=== Citations ===