---
title: "Encyclopédie"
chunk: 3/8
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"
---

From almost the beginning of the publication of volume i in June 1751, many contemporaries took to calling the collaborators by the term "Encyclopedists" and assumed that they were a cohesive group of religious and political reformers in close-knit association.... But, as we shall see, the Encyclopedists were not a company of obedient soldiers led by a few generals in a campaign to destroy the Old Regime. They were instead a varied collection of men of letters, physicians, scientists, craftsmen, scholars, and others, each frequently following his own bent with little central direction. The Encyclopédie became not a party statement, but a great compendium of knowledge filled with contradictions, a mélange of ideas, some progressive and some conservative.
The Encyclopédie was the first encyclopedia to credit contributors within articles in a systematic way. This it accomplished for regular contributors by appending symbols (sometimes called "signatures") at the ends of articles. An "O" at the end of an article indicated D'Alembert as responsible, for example, just as an "L" did the anatomist Pierre Tarin. The symbols were set forth in the "Preliminary Discourse." From the beginning, however, some articles were anonymous, whether because of oversight or because no one dared to claim credit. The number of anonymous articles increased after 1759.
Many of the most prolific contributors to the Encyclopédie were compensated for their work. At least twenty-nine of the thirty-eight contributors whose articles were identified by a symbol were paid by the publishers, and their pay constituted a significant share of their total income. From 1746 to 1767, Diderot received about 2,800 livres per year for his work as an editor and an author. By contrast, Jaucourt, a wealthy nobleman, seems to have offered his services to the publishers for next to nothing. Irregular contributors, for their part, were  almost never paid for their articles.
Some contributors to the Encyclopédie were volunteers, but most were recruited, whether by one of the co-editors, another contributor, or someone else. Contributors were generally recruited on the basis of their knowledge in a particular domain, which they were expected to contribute on. Claude Bourgelat, the author of two books on horses, thus wrote on manège and farriery; Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, a naturalist and member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, wrote on natural history; and Le Breton, the publisher, wrote on printer's ink. Still, specialties were not as narrowly defined as they would be for later encyclopedias. Notice, for example, the range of topics on which the following contributors wrote:

D'Alembert – science (especially mathematics and physics), contemporary affairs, philosophy, religion
Diderot – natural history, language, economics, mechanical arts, philosophy, politics, religion
d'Holbach – chemistry, mineralogy, politics, religion
Jaucourt – economics, literature, medicine, natural history, politics, geography
Rousseau – music, political theory
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune – economics, etymology, philosophy, physics
Voltaire – history, literature, philosophy

== Compilation and sources ==
Like other dictionaries and encyclopedias, the Encyclopédie was more compiled than written from scratch. Especially since the large-scale digitization of historical texts in the late twentieth century, scholars have paid increasing attention to the ways in which contributors copied, paraphrased, pieced together, and (more generally) used other texts to make their own articles.
Many alphabetical works, specialized and general, served as sources for the Encyclopédie, but the two most important were probably the Cyclopaedia and France’s venerable Jesuit encyclopedia, the Dictionnaire universal françois-latin (1704, nicknamed the Dictionnaire de Trévoux). Numerous articles translated from the Cyclopaedia ended up being published in the Encyclopédie with little change, a fact Diderot later regretted. Likewise, as Marie Leca-Tsiomis has shown, the Dictionnaire de Trévoux was a source for (and foil) for the Encyclopédie. In a sample of articles from “Io” to “Jouissance,” for example, she found nine articles involving unsubtle copying. Beyond simple copying, consider Diderot’s article “Aguaxima”:

AGUAXIMA, (Nat. hist. bot.), a plant from Brazil and the islands of South America. This is all we are told about it; and I would like to know for whom such descriptions are made. It cannot be for the natives of the countries concerned, who are likely to know more about the aguaxima than is contained in this description [….] It is not meant for us either, for what do we care that there is a tree in Brazil named aguaxima, if all we know about it is its name? What is the point of giving the name? It leaves the ignorant just as they were and teaches the rest of us nothing. If I nonetheless mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something silly, than to find no article at all.
To understand Diderot’s frustration and irony here, it helps to know that he was reacting to an article of the same name in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux:

AGUAXIMA. A term in botany. This is a plant found in Brazil and in the isalnds of South America. See QUEUE DE LEZARD. It is a species of this.
Non-alphabetical sources as well were frequently copied or paraphrased into the Encyclopédie, verbatim or paraphrased, often with little or no acknowledgment, among them Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae and George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle.

== Contents and controversies ==