Prospectus et mémoires de l'Encyclopédie méthodique, I: Prospectus général, précédé de la 'Préface' au 'Grand Vocabulaire François' (review)

Conceived by the publishing magnate Charles-Joseph Panckoucke as a revision of the Diderot-D'Alembert Encyclopédie and its Supplément, the innovation of the Encyclopédie méthodique was a new format of individual subject dictionaries, each edited by a specialist. By the time the Méthodique was completed in 1832, fifty years after its inception, it had more than tripled in size, to some two hundred volumes including plates, and had recorded significant transitions in many areas of knowledge, particularly in the sciences. Scholarship has tended to concentrate on individual subjects in the Méthodique, such as the collection of twenty-eight essays in Claude Blanckaert and Michel Porret's L'Encyclopédie 'méthodique' (1782-1832): des Lumières au positivisme (Geneva: Droz, 2006). The title of the present volume suggests that it is concerned with the publishing history of the Méthodique, and indeed it is a compendium of useful texts, chiefly the 1782 prospectus of the Méthodique and various communications with subscribers over the first six years of the project. Thanks to this publication, we now have a convenient, annotated, and more readable version of these key documents, which were formerly widely available only in digital images of the originals. But Martine Groult has a much broader purpose than providing scholars with useful documentation: her focus is on the encyclopedic project as a whole. What were the theoretical underpinnings of the Méthodique? How did it go about classifying knowledge and parcelling it out among various subject areas? How did it finally plan to transform these separate dictionaries into an encyclopedia? The prospectus and related communications are illuminated in this respect by the seemingly unrelated or random pieces that accompany them, the preface to the Grand Vocabulaire François, a thirty-volume dictionary published by Panckoucke (1767-74), and by the preface to a single Méthodique series, Manufactures, edited by Jean Marie Roland de la Platière. The process of recreating coherence in a large collection of subject dictionaries required, first, assembling nomenclature across disciplines (whose expansion during this period is also discussed in the Introduction) and creating a 'Vocabulaire universel' meant to bring together all the terms from across the Méthodique, hence the above-mentioned preface of the earlier Grand Vocabulaire François. (This part of the Méthodique plan proved abortive, since the 'Vocabulaire' was never published.) In addition, each dictionary was to include a preliminary discourse giving an overview of the subject, as well as a table breaking it down into its various elements, all of which would be treated in articles in the dictionary. By means of the table, the reader could reconstruct a full treatise on the subject — as Roland demonstrates very clearly in his preface, hence Groult's choice of that particular preface for inclusion. A second volume will cover additional communications with subscribers and carry the story of Panckoucke's grand encyclopedic project into the 1790s.