The Voice

Thumbing through the first volumes of the big new encyclopedia one evening at the Trianon, France's King Louis XV showed frank bewilderment. His ministers had told him that the work was subversive, and the King had duly ordered its confiscation. But--as Voltaire tells the story--the King read all about the rights of the crown and promptly began to question his own decision. "Upon my word," cried His Majesty to Madame de Pompadour, "I can't tell why they spoke so ill of this book."

There was plenty of reason for the King's ministers to speak ill of the book. It was edited by fiery Philosopher-Dramatist Denis Diderot, and he had made it a good deal more than a compilation of all the knowledge that was available at the middle of the 18th century. To many a Frenchman it became the voice of Reason itself--a major intellectual weapon of the Revolution, one of the brightest ornaments of the Enlightenment, the foundation stone of the new secularism. Though Frenchmen have long since ceased to read it, they have never ceased to revere it. Last week they were expressing their reverence officially.

"Turning Point." To honor the sooth anniversary of the publication of Volume I of Diderot's Encyclopedic, France has embarked on a year-long series of celebrations. The Archives Nationales de France have published an exact reproduction of Diderot's prospectus. The Bibliotheque Nationale has put on a massive exhibition of his original manuscripts and illustrations. Meanwhile,the Sorbonne has commissioned six monographs on various aspects of the work; and the Ministry of

Education is toying with the idea of backing a film based on Diderot's life. The ministry has also decreed that schools must place special emphasis on the encyclopedia in 1952. Cried Minister Andre Marie: "This work, by the spirit in which it was undertaken . . . marks the turning point in ideas which ushered in our modern times."

Intolerance & Anagrams. The ushering began in 1745, when a Paris printer named Andre Franc,ois Le Breton hired the impecunious Diderot to work on a modest two-volume encyclopedia. Diderot soon expanded the project, decided to "assemble the knowledge scattered over the surface of the earth . . ." Before he was through, he had persuaded some of the best brains in Europe to help him.

D'Alembert wrote on mathematics, Turgot on economics, Quesnay on agriculture, Buffon on nature, Rousseau on music, and Montesquieu on taste. Diderot himself wrote on everything from intolerance and Spinoza to anagrams and onomancy--the "science" of telling a man's fortune by the letters in his name. He treated topics that intellectuals had been apt to ignore before. He spent hours studying iron foundries and gunpowder mills at first hand, imported workers from the factories of Lyons to help him with an article on the velvet trade.

In the midst of his work, Diderot and his colleagues began to attack both state and church ("We must put theology to the sword," Diderot once exclaimed). To them, Reason was man's best guide, and even simple word definitions were apt to turn into political harangues. Defining Menace, Diderot lashed out at government by describing the "menace" of administrative stupidity. Under College, the encyclopedia attacked Jesuit control of education. Under Almshouses, it trumpeted some social philosophy: "It would be far more important to work at the prevention of misery than to multiply places of refuge for the miserable."

"We Will Appear." Diderot, never out of trouble for long, was imprisoned, denounced as a cacouac (savage), damned by both Parlement and Pope. He was even secretly censored by his own publisher, and he was well along in the Ss before he angrily discovered that his proofs had been "mutilated, truncated, hacked up and dishonored."

But Diderot went right on, and finally after 25 years ("We will appear, come wind and high water!"), his job was finished. "If one adds to those years of our life which have passed since we first projected this work," he wrote to a friend, "those years which we have given to its execution, you will easily realize that we have lived more than remain yet to live out. But we will have obtained the recompense which we await from our contemporaries and our posterity, if we make them one day say that we have not lived in vain." Last week, 200 years later, Frenchmen were trying to say just that.

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