Encyclopédie, or the French Encyclopedia, is a famous and controversial work of reference embodying much of what the French Enlightenment liked to call "philosophy."

Purpose, History, and Influence

Begun simply as a commercial undertaking to translate and adapt Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728), the Encyclopédie was first entrusted to the Englishman John Mills and the German Godefroy Sellius, and then to the Abbé Gua de Malves of the French Academy of Sciences. Denis Diderot became chief editor in 1747 and, with Jean Le Rond d'Alembert as his principal colleague, greatly expanded the scope of the enterprise. Diderot's prospectus (1750) promised, as a principal and novel feature, a description of the arts and especially the crafts in France, with numerous illustrative engravings, and was accompanied by an elaborate "Chart of the Branches of Human Knowledge," which Diderot referred to as "the Genealogical Tree of All...