Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres (Encyclopedia, or reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts, and craft by a society of a people of letters)

“Que sais-je?”—“What do I know?” asked the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne as he tested the world with a compassionate but pressing skepticism. His intellectual descendant, the philosopher Denis Diderot, expanded this inquiry in his Encyclopédie, asking, “Que savons-nous?”—“What do we know?” What do we know about nature, culture, God, ethics, printing, architecture, medicine?



The answers—including contributions from Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu—eventually ran to 28 volumes, with all human understanding organized under the concepts of “Memory,” “Reasoning,” and “Imagination.” Created during France’s rigid, class-based ancién regime, this signal document of the Enlightenment was initially suppressed by the Crown for its subversive content. Three decades later, Diderot’s championing of reason, knowledge, and natural rights would help shape the intellectual underpinnings of the French Revolution.