A Laissez-Faire Encyclopedia?: A Comparative View of Diderot as Editor of the Encyclopédie

The goal of this article is to evaluate Denis Diderot’s work not as the leading contributor to the Encyclopédie (1751–72) but as its editor. Such evaluations have been made regularly in studies of Diderot and the Encyclopédie, but they are often made in passing and outside of any relevant comparative framework. Here, building on previous research, I will compare Diderot to other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editors of encyclopedias as well as to later ones. I will begin by reviewing the duties of an encyclopedia’s editor in Diderot’s time and then examine his work in three different areas: planning; recruiting and managing collaborators; and revising submitted texts to impose homogeneity. In the course of the nineteenth century, these duties were gradually recognized as central responsibilities of an encyclopedia’s editorial staff, but in Diderot’s time, a more important duty for an encyclopedia’s intellectual director was typically to contribute articles. This is the basis on which Diderot’s work for the Encyclopédie is usually judged. Without disparaging his contribution as a researcher, a thinker, and a writer of articles, I argue here that his work as an editor deserves attention as well. Nor is my attention to his editorship in the sense defined above wholly anachronistic. Diderot mentioned all three of the editorial duties examined in this article as desirable in an editor, and each was performed by at least some editors of contemporary encyclopedias. Although a retrospectively established list of editorial duties carries the risk of anachronism, it helps capture the historical specificity of Diderot and the Encyclopédie. In particular, I will show that Diderot’s editing of the Encyclopédie, while in some ways unremarkable for the editor of an encyclopedia, was in other ways unusual, and that these were connected with the distinctiveness of the Encyclopédie relative to other encyclopedias.

The Duties of Encyclopedias’ Editors in Diderot’s Time

The word “editor” and its equivalents in other languages were not much applied to editors of encyclopedias before 1800. Exceptionally, in records maintained by the Encyclopédie’s publishers and in the Encyclopédie itself, the co-editors Diderot and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert were frequently referred to as “éditeurs,” as was their predecessor in the position, Jean-Paul De Gua de Malves.¹ At times, however, they were referred to in other ways, occasionally with alternative nominal forms such as “chefs de l’Encyclopédie”,² but more often with verbal forms indicating their responsibilities. On the title page, for example, the Encyclopédie was said to be “mis en ordre et publié par M. Diderot … et quant à la partie mathématique, par M. D’Alembert.”³ Meanwhile, the intellectual directors of other encyclopedias were more frequently characterized as authors, revisers, or compilers than as editors, though they were usually also identified with verbs specifying their functions. Taking this logic to an extreme, the title page of the final edition (1727) of Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) announced that the work had been “recueilli et compilé premièrement” by Furetière, “corrigé et augmenté” by Henri Basnage de Beauval, and “revu, corrigé, et considérablement augmenté” by Jean-Baptiste Brutel de La Rivière.⁴ As in the case of the Encyclopédie, the century’s preference for such verbal identifications suggests that the concept of editorship had not yet solidified in the context of encyclopedias.

In any event, the term “editor” had different meanings in the eighteenth century from the ones that it has now. Consider the definition proposed by Diderot in his article “Éditeur” in the Encyclopédie: “On donne ce nom à un homme de lettres qui veut bien prendre le soin de publier les ouvrages d’un autre.”⁵ By this definition, Diderot and D’Alembert were indeed editors, at least early on, entrusted as they were with preparing an enlarged version of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728) for the French public. Still, if they or their publishers had realized from the start how far the Encyclopédie would stray from...