Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie

Date

1751–1772 (first 17 text vols. + plates)

Category

Culture, arts & philosophy

Region

France

Era

Early Modern

Significance

On 1 July 1751 the first volume of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers appeared in Paris, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert.

Over the following two decades it grew into a vast collaborative work, with seventeen volumes of text completed by 1765 and eleven volumes of engraved plates by 1772, drawing on contributions from Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and many others. The Encyclopédie aimed to gather and systematise human knowledge in a spirit of reason and secular inquiry, dignifying the mechanical arts and quietly challenging clerical and royal authority. Repeatedly censored and twice suppressed, it became the great collective monument of the Enlightenment and a powerful instrument for spreading its ideas.

Empires active in 1751–1772 (first 17 text vols. + plates)

• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Mughal Empire
  1526 CE – 1857 CE
• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE

Related culture, arts & philosophy events

• The Enlightenment (Age of Reason)
  c. 1685–1815
• Locke's Two Treatises and Essay: social contract and empiricism
  1689 (published; dated 1690)
• Rousseau's The Social Contract and Émile
  April–May 1762
• Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques popularises English liberty
  1733 (English) / 1734 (French)
• Thomas Paine's Common Sense popularises the case for independence
  10 January 1776
• Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and 'What Is Enlightenment?'
  1781 (Critique) / 1784 (essay)

Further reading

The Story of Art

The wider story

The Story of Art

E. H. Gombrich

The best-selling art history ever written, from cave paintings to the modern age.

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