---
title: "Encyclopédie"
chunk: 4/8
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"
---

=== Structure ===
 The introduction to the Encyclopédie, D'Alembert's "Preliminary Discourse", is considered an important exposition of Enlightenment ideals. Among other things, it presents a taxonomy of human knowledge (see Fig. 3). The idea of presenting a taxonomy of knowledge in the introduction to an alphabetical encyclopedia arose with the Cyclopaedia. More specific inspiration for the one in the Encyclopédie came from Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning. The three main branches of knowledge were: "Memory"/History, "Reason"/Philosophy, and "Imagination"/Poetry. In this taxonomy and elsewhere, D'Alembert's "Preliminary Discourse" made human reason, and not religious or other authority, the measure of knowledge.
According to the “Preliminary Discourse,” the purpose of the tree of knowledge was to allow users of the Encyclopédie to relate articles they consulted to the entirety of knowledge. Accordingly, the first article in the Encyclopédie, on the letter “A,” began, following the headword, with a parenthetical indication of its place in the tree of knowledge. Notice the abbreviations in italics, which correspond to levels in the tree of knowledge:

A, a & a s.m. (ordre Encyclopéd. Entend. Science de l'homme, Logique, Art de communiquer, Gramm.) caractere ou figure de la premiere lettre de l'Alphabet, en latin, en françois, & en presque toutes les Langues de l'Europe.
Such indications are often called rubrics in English (“désignants” in French). They had already been used in previous encyclopedias, but the Cyclopaedia was the first to relate them to an introductory overview of knowledge. In theory, rubrics in the Encyclopédie were supposed to match keywords in the tree of knowledge, but the correspondence was already breaking down in the opening pages of volume 1. Some articles had no rubrics. More seriously, new rubrics were invented that had nothing to do with the tree of knowledge, and neither co-editor did much to impose any standardization. As the volumes progressed, the tree of knowledge seems to have faded from the awareness of Diderot and the other contributors. Tellingly, when D’Alembert reprinted materials from the Encyclopédie in his Mélanges, he left out the tree of knowledge. Nor, when proposing ideas for an encyclopedia later in life, did Diderot suggest including a tree of knowledge.
However disillusioned the co-editors may have been with their tree of knowledge, the idea became somewhat fashionable after the time of the Encyclopédie before largely disappearing from the world of encyclopedias in the mid-nineteenth century.
One much-discussed structural feature of the Encyclopédie is the cross-reference, a kind of precursor to the hyper-link. Cross-references had long been familiar to scholars, and they had been used in dictionaries and encyclopedias well before the time of the Encyclopédie. The Cyclopaedia was the first encyclopedia to use a large number of cross-references in a systematic way. Chambers’ general goal was to counter the fragmenting effects of alphabetical order by establishing links. Having begun its existence as an expanded translation, the Encyclopédie inherited its favor for cross-references from the Cyclopaedia. At times, it even inherited the specific cross-references used in the Cyclopaedia in the midst of translated articles. Unlike the Cyclopaedia, however, the Encyclopédie was written by numerous collaborators, all of whom had their own ideas about how to use cross-references. The editors seem to have done little to impose uniformity.
In the article “Encyclopédie,” Diderot reviewed his work on the Encyclopédie and mused about the role of cross-references in an encyclopedia. Among other things, he noted the possibility of using satirical cross-references to subvert authority, though he cautioned against using them frequently and did not suggest that the Encyclopédie contained any such cross-references. Still, since at least 1759, people have claimed that the Encyclopédie featured a “system” of such cross-references. One of the examples most commonly cited can be found at the end of the article “Cannibals” (in French, “Anthropophages”):

The pagans accused the first Christians of cannibalism; they permitted, it was said, the crime of Oedipus, and they renewed the scene of Thyestes. It seems, from Tatian’s works, from the eighth chapter of Tertullian’s apology for the Christians, and from Salvian’s fourth book of Providence, that it was the secret celebration of our mysteries that gave rise to these calumnies. They kill a child, the pagans added, and eat its flesh; accusations that were based only on vague notions of the Eucharist and the communion which they had drawn from the words of the poorly educated. See EUCHARIST, COMMUNION, ALTAR, &c. (G)
Yet, as Marie Leca-Tsiomis has pointed out, the very same article, with the same cross-references, had already appeared in English in the Cyclopaedia, an encyclopedia never considered a hotbed of subversive cross-references. Furthermore, as the “G” at the end of the article shows, the translation from the Cyclopaedia was signed (and thus apparently approved) by Mallet, an orthodox clergyman. If he had considered the article disrespectful toward Christianity, he would surely have reacted when the article was published. More generally, Leca-Tsiomis concludes, there is simply no evidence of a system of ironic cross-references in the Encyclopédie.
Entries in the Encyclopédie were of widely varying lengths, some just a line long, others extending to dozens of pages. Some of the longest can be found under “Fourneau” (88 columns on chemists’ furnaces), “Verrerie” (80 columns on glass-making), “Venerie” (73 columns on hunting),  “Soie” (71 columns on silk-making), and “Parlement” (70 columns on the Parlement of Paris). Here, once again, we see the emphasis the Encyclopédie placed on the mechanical arts.